Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. In the two stories which this volume contains, but especially in the first, the reader will find Peacocks peculiar art and style in a more rudimentary condition than in either of the pieces which preceded them – in a condition, indeed, which may seem almost impossibly rudimentary when they are compared with Crotchet Castle. But there is nothing surprising in this, and in that historic view which adds even more to the enjoyment than it does to the education of reading, it is a positive gain. When Peacock wrote Crotchet Castle he was a man of forty-five, who had for the last ten years seen a great deal of affairs, and something – about as much as he ever cared to see – of society. When fourteen years earlier he wrote Headlong Hall, though he was not an exceedingly young man, he had lived a very retired life, had had few of the usual advantages of education, and had latterly consorted with a society in which talent was indeed abundant, and genius not rare, but which included hardly any but such as Mr. Pope, fresh from my ‘St. John, ‘ and Lady Mary, was good enough to designate as ‘poetical men.’
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