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68 PEACOCK
her carriage and got down to kiss the winsome
little boy.
From Peacock's youth and early writings
(he was born in 1785 and published " Palmyra"
in 1806) we can gather some idea of his
character. The obvious thing about him is
his cleverness. The question is, What will he
make of it ? He tries business for a short
time ; the sea for an even shorter ; and then
he settles down in the country to a life of
study and composition
: he will be a man of
letters. His poems are what we should expect
a clever lad to write. Had they been written
at the end of the nineteenth century doubt-
less they would have been as fashionably
decadent as, written at the beginning, they
are fashionably pompous. It was clear
from the first that Peacock would not be a
poet ; he lacked the essential quality the
power of feeling deeply. Before he was
it twenty must have been clear that he
possessed a remarkable head and an ordinary
heart. He had wits enough for anything
and sufficient feeling and imagination to write
a good song ; but in these early days his
intellect served chiefly to save him from
sentimentality and the grosser kinds of
rhetoric. It gained him a friend too, and
that friend was Shelley.
To think of Peacock's youth is to think of