Scythrop did not despair. ‘Seven copies,’ he thought, ‘have been sold. Seven is a mystical number, and the omen is good. Let me find the seven purchasers of my seven copies, and they shall be the seven golden candle-sticks with which I will illuminate the world.’
Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey [Amazon, Bookshop, Local Library, Internet Archive]
There are various ways of getting at secrets. The most approved methods, as recommended both theoretically and practically in philosophical novels, are eavesdropping at key-holes, picking the locks of chests and desks, peeping into letters, steaming wafers, and insinuating hot wire under sealing wax; none of which methods I hold it lawful to practise.
Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey [Amazon, Bookshop, Local Library, Internet Archive]
it is the fashion to be unhappy. To have a reason for being so would be exceedingly common-place: to be so without any is the province of genius: the art of being miserable for misery’s sake, has been brought to great perfection in our days
Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey [Amazon, Bookshop, Local Library, Internet Archive]
Evil, and mischief, and misery, and confusion, and vanity, and vexation of spirit, and death, and disease, and assassination, and war, and poverty, and pestilence, and famine, and avarice, and selfishness, and rancour, and jealousy, and spleen, and malevolence, and the disappointments of philanthropy, and the faithlessness of friendship, and the crosses of love—all prove the accuracy of your views, and the truth of your system; and it is not impossible that the infernal interruption of this fall downstairs may throw a colour of evil on the whole of my future existence.
Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey [Amazon, Bookshop, Local Library, Internet Archive]
He slept with Horrid Mysteries under his pillow, and dreamed of venerable eleutherarchs and ghastly confederates holding midnight conventions in subterranean caves.
Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey [Amazon, Bookshop, Local Library], Internet Archive]
He built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret tribunals, and bands of illuminati, who were always the imaginary instruments of his projected regeneration of the human species.
Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey [Amazon, Bookshop, Local Library, Internet Archive]
If we go on in this way, we shall have a new art of poetry, of which one of the first rules will be: To remember to forget that there are any such things as sunshine and music in the world.
Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey [Amazon, Bookshop, Internet Archive]
Did our ancestors go peeping about with dark lanterns, and do we walk at our ease in broad sunshine? Where is the manifestation of our light? By what symptoms do you recognise it? What are its signs, its tokens, its symptoms, its symbols, its categories, its conditions? What is it, and why? How, where, when is it to be seen, felt, and understood? What do we see by it which our ancestors saw not, and which at the same time is worth seeing?
Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey [Amazon, Internet Archive]
Riches she possessed, but that which enriches them, the participation of affection, was wanting. All that they could purchase for her became indifferent to her, because that which they could not purchase, and which was more valuable than themselves, she had, for their sake, thrown away. She discovered, when it was too late, that she had mistaken the means for the end—that riches, rightly used, are instruments of happiness, but are not in themselves happiness.
Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey
Disappointed both in love and in friendship, and looking upon human learning as vanity, he had come to a conclusion that there was but one good thing in the world, videlicet, a good dinner
Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey
