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By
Thomas Love Peacock
NOTES TO Nightmare Abbey
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There's a dark lantern of the spirit,
Which none see by but those who bear it,
That makes them in the dark see visions
And hag themselves with apparitions,
Find racks for their own minds, and vaunt
Of their own misery and want.
BUTLER.
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1818.
MATTHEW. Oh! it's your only fine humour, sir. Your true melancholybreeds your perfect fine wit, sir. I am melancholy myself, diverstimes, sir; and then do I no more but take pen and paper presently,and overflow you half a score or a dozen of sonnets at a sitting.
STEPHEN. Truly, sir, and I love such things out of measure.
MATTHEW. Why, I pray you, sir, make use of my study: it's at yourservice.
STEPHEN. I thank you, sir, I shall be bold, I warrant you. Have you astool there, to be melancholy upon?
BEN JONSON, Every Man in his Humour, Act 3, Sc. I
Ay esleu gazouiller et siffler oye, comme dit le commun proverbe, entre les cygnes, plutoust que d'estre entre tant de gentils poëtes et faconds orateurs mut du tout estimé.
RABELAIS, Prol. L. 5
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Nightmare Abbey, a venerable family-mansion, in a highly picturesquestate of semi-dilapidation, pleasantly situated on a strip of dry landbetween the sea and the fens, at the verge of the county of Lincoln,had the honour to be the seat of Christopher Glowry, Esquire. Thisgentleman was naturally of an atrabilarious temperament, and muchtroubled with those phantoms of indigestion which are commonly calledblue devils. He had been deceived in an early friendship: he hadbeen crossed in love; and had offered his hand, from pique, to a lady,who accepted it from interest, and who, in so doing, violently toreasunder the bonds of a tried and youthful attachment. Her vanity wasgratified by being the mistress of a very extensive, if not verylively, establishment; but all the springs of her sympathies werefrozen. Riches she possessed, but that which enriches them, theparticipation of affection, was wanting. All that they could purchasefor her became indifferent to her, because that which they could notpurchase, and which was more valuable than themselves, she had, fortheir sake, thrown away. She discovered, when it was too late, thatshe had mistaken the means for the end—that riches, rightly used, areinstruments of happiness, but are not in themselves happiness. In thiswilful blight of her affections, she found them valueless as means:they had been the end to which she had immolated all her affections,and were now the only end that remained to her. She did not confessthis to herself as a principle of action, but it operated through themedium of unconscious self-deception, and terminated in inveterateavarice. She laid on external things the bl