Headlong Hall

Headlong Hall

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Headlong Hall, by Thomas Love
Peacock This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and
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Title: Headlong Hall
Author: Thomas Love Peacock
Release Date: July 2, 2004 [EBook #12803]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
HEADLONG HALL ***

Produced by Harrison Ainsworth

HEADLONG HALL
by
Thomas Love Peacock

Contents
Preface
I. The Mail II. The Squire--The Breakfast III. The Arrivals IV. The
Grounds V. The Dinner VI. The Evening VII. The Walk VIII. The
Tower IX. The Sexton X. The Skull XI. The Anniversary XII. The
Lecture XIII. The Ball XIV. The Proposals XV. The Conclusion

All philosophers, who find Some favourite system to their mind, In
every point to make it fit, Will force all nature to submit.

P R E F A C E
to
"Headlong Hall" and the three novels published along with it in 1837.
--------
All these little publications appeared originally without prefaces. I left
them to speak for themselves; and I thought I might very fitly preserve
my own impersonality, having never intruded on the personality of
others, nor taken any liberties but with public conduct and public
opinions. But an old friend assures me, that to publish a book without a
preface is like entering a drawing-room without making a bow. In
deference to this opinion, though I am not quite clear of its soundness, I
make my prefatory bow at this eleventh hour.
"Headlong Hall" was written in 1815; "Nightmare Abbey" in 1817;
"Maid Marian", with the exception of the last three chapters, in 1818;
"Crotchet Castle" in 1830. I am desirous to note the intervals, because,
at each of those periods, things were true, in great matters and in small,
which are true no longer. "Headlong Hall" begins with the Holyhead
Mail, and "Crotchet Castle" ends with a rotten borough. The Holyhead

mail no longer keeps the same hours, nor stops at the Capel Cerig Inn,
which the progress of improvement has thrown out of the road; and the
rotten boroughs of 1830 have ceased to exist, though there are some
very pretty pocket properties, which are their worthy successors. But
the classes of tastes, feelings, and opinions, which were successively
brought into play in these little tales, remain substantially the same.
Perfectibilians, deteriorationists, statu-quo-ites, phrenologists,
transcendentalists, political economists, theorists in all sciences,
projectors in all arts, morbid visionaries, romantic enthusiasts, lovers of
music, lovers of the picturesque, and lovers of good dinners, march,
and will march for ever, pari passu with the march of mechanics,
which some facetiously call the march of the intellect. The fastidious in
old wine are a race that does not decay. Literary violators of the
confidences of private life still gain a disreputable livelihood and an
unenviable notoriety. Match-makers from interest, and the disappointed
in love and in friendship, are varieties of which specimens are extant.
The great principle of the Right of Might is as flourishing now as in the
days of Maid Marian: the array of false pretensions, moral, political,
and literary, is as imposing as ever: the rulers of the world still feel
things in their effects, and never foresee them in their causes: and
political mountebanks continue, and will continue, to puff nostrums
and practise legerdemain under the eyes of the multitude: following,
like the "learned friend" of Crotchet Castle, a course as tortuous as that
of a river, but in a reverse process; beginning by being dark and deep,
and ending by being transparent.
The Author of "Headlong Hall".
March 4, 1837.

H E A D L O N G H A L L
---*---
CHAPTER I

The Mail
The ambiguous light of a December morning, peeping through the
windows of the Holyhead mail, dispelled the soft visions of the four
insides, who had slept, or seemed to sleep, through the first seventy
miles of the road, with as much comfort as may be supposed consistent
with the jolting of the vehicle, and an occasional admonition to
_remember the coachman_, thundered through the open door,
accompanied by the gentle breath of Boreas, into the ears of the drowsy
traveller.
A lively remark, that the day was none of the finest, having elicited a
repartee of quite the contrary, the various knotty points of meteorology,
which usually form the exordium of an English conversation, were
successively discussed and exhausted; and, the ice being thus broken,
the colloquy rambled to other topics, in the course of which it appeared,
to the surprise of every one, that all four, though perfect