Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock (best classic books TXT) 📗

Dr. Faustus’s devils, who come in the last act for a soul. It is difficult to conceive where this heterogeneous mythological company could have originally met, except at a table d’hôte, like the six kings in Candide. ↩

“Pension. Pay given to a slave of state for treason to his country.” —⁠Johnson’s Dictionary ↩

See Denys Montfort: Histoire Naturelle des Mollusques; Vues Générales, pp. 37, 38. (P.) The second half of this speech by Mr. Asterias and the opening sentence of his previous speech are a paraphrase from Montfort, pp. 37⁠–⁠9. ↩

There must be some mistake in this, for the whole honourable band of gentlemen-pensioners has resolved unanimously, that Mr. Burke was a very sublime person, particularly after he had prostituted his own soul, and betrayed his country and mankind, for £1,200 a year: yet he does not appear to have been a very terrible personage, and certainly went off with a very small portion of human respect, though he contrived to excite, in a great degree, the astonishment of all honest men. Our immaculate laureate (who gives us to understand that, if he had not been purified by holy matrimony into a mystical type, he would have died a virgin), is another sublime gentleman of the same genus: he very much astonished some persons when he sold his birthright for a pot of sack; but not even his Sosia has a grain of respect for him, though, doubtless, he thinks his name very terrible to the enemy, when he flourishes his criticopoeticopolitical tomahawk, and sets up his Indian yell for the blood of his old friends: but, at best, he is a mere political scarecrow, a man of straw, ridiculous to all who know of what materials he is made; and to none more so, than to those who have stuffed him, and set him up, as the Priapus of the garden of the golden apples of corruption. ↩

Childe Harold, canto 4. cxxiv. cxxvi. ↩

Childe Harold, canto 4. cxxiii. ↩

Childe Harold, canto 3. lxxi. ↩

Childe Harold, canto 4. cxxi. cxxxvi. ↩

Childe Harold, canto 4. cxxii. ↩

Sits, and will sit for ever. ↩

See The Sorrows of Werther, Letter 93. ↩

Colophon

Nightmare Abbey
was published in 1818 by
Thomas Love Peacock.

This ebook was produced for
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The cover page is adapted from
Vanitas Still Life,
a painting completed in 1670 by
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May you do good and not evil.
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