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 doubtless 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 twenty it
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 his relations with Shelley.
He seems to have given more than he received: his nature was not
receptive. He made the poet read Greek, and persuaded him that he was
not infected with elephantiasis by quoting Lucretius "to the effect that
the disease was known to exist on the banks of the Nile, _neque praeterea
usquam_." These words were "the greatest comfort to Shelley." The two
young men did a vast amount of walking, arguing, and miscellaneous
reading together, in which Peacock, partly from conviction and partly
from affectation, seems to have been pretty consistent in performing the
office of a wet blanket. Testing his intellect on other people's
enthusiasms, falling sedately and whimsically in love with various
ladies, amongst them his future wife, but keeping such feelings as he
had for the most part to himself, Peacock slipped through all the
critical stages of youth till in 1816 he published "Headlong Hall."
Brains will not make a poet, but they made a superb satirist.

There is nothing to puzzle us in Peacock's accepting a post under the
East India Company. An unusually strong inclination toward Miss Jane
Gryffydh, his "milk-white Snowdonian Antelope" as Shelley calls her,
whom he had not seen for more than eight years, and to whom he became
engaged without further inspection, may possibly have counted for
something in h