gave another interesting example. The directors of the
East India Company offered him a clerkship because he was a clever
novelist and a good Greek scholar. He retained his place ("a precious
good place too," as Thackeray with good-humoured envy says of it in "The
Hoggarty Diamond") with due promotion for thirty-seven years, and
retired from it in 1856 with a large pension. He had married Miss
Griffith very shortly after his appointment; in 1822 _Maid Marian_
appeared, and in 1823 Peacock took a cottage, which became after a time
his chief and latterly his only residence, at Halliford, near his
beloved river. For some years he published nothing, but 1829 and 1831
saw the production of perhaps his two best books, _The Misfortunes of
Elphin_ and _Crotchet Castle_. After _Crotchet Castle_, official duties
and perhaps domestic troubles (for his wife was a helpless invalid)
interrupted his literary work for more than twenty years, an almost
unexampled break in the literary activity of a man so fond of letters.
In 1852 he began to write again as a contributor to _Fraser's Magazine_.
It is rather unfortunate that no complete republication, nor even any
complete list of these articles, has been made. The papers on Shelley
and the charming story of _Gryll Grange_ were the chief of them. The
author was an old man when he wrote this last, but he survived it six
years, and died on 23d January 1866, having latterly lived very much
alone. Indeed, after Shelley's death he seems never to have had any very
intimate friend except Lord Broughton, with whose papers most of
Peacock's correspondence is for the present locked up.

There is a passage in Shelley's "Letter to Maria Gisborne" which has
been often quoted before, but which must necessarily be quoted again
whenever Peacock's life and literary character are discussed:--

And there
Is English P----, with his mountain Fair
Turned into a flamingo, that shy bird
That gleams i' the Indian air. Have you not heard
When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo,
His best friends hear no more of him? But you
Will see him, and will like him too, I hope,
With his milk-white Snowdonian Antelope
Matched with his Camelopard. _His fine wit
Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it;_
A strain too learned for a shallow age,
Too wise for selfish bigots; let his page
Which charms the chosen spirits of his time,
Fold