Nightmare Abbey

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Nightmare Abbey

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Title: Nightmare Abbey
Author: Thomas Love Peacock

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NIGHTMARE ABBEY
By
Thomas Love Peacock
CONTENTS
NIGHTMARE ABBEY
NOTES TO Nightmare Abbey

NIGHTMARE ABBEY:
BY
THE AUTHOR OF HEADLONG HALL.
* * * * *

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.
* * * * *
LONDON:
1818.
MATTHEW. Oh! it's your only fine humour, sir. Your true melancholy
breeds your perfect fine wit, sir. I am melancholy myself, divers times,
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 your
service.
STEPHEN. I thank you, sir, I shall be bold, I warrant you. Have you a
stool 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
* * * * *
CHAPTER I
Nightmare Abbey, a venerable family-mansion, in a highly picturesque
state of semi-dilapidation, pleasantly situated on a strip of dry land
between the sea and the fens, at the verge of the county of Lincoln, had

the honour to be the seat of Christopher Glowry, Esquire. This
gentleman was naturally of an atrabilarious temperament, and much
troubled with those phantoms of indigestion which are commonly
called blue devils. He had been deceived in an early friendship: he had
been crossed in love; and had offered his hand, from pique, to a lady,
who accepted it from interest, and who, in so doing, violently tore
asunder the bonds of a tried and youthful attachment. Her vanity was
gratified by being the mistress of a very extensive, if not very lively,
establishment; but all the springs of her sympathies were frozen. 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. In this
wilful 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 confess this to
herself as a principle of action, but it operated through the medium of
unconscious self-deception, and terminated in inveterate avarice. She
laid on external things the blame of her mind's internal disorder, and
thus became by degrees an accomplished scold. She often went her
daily rounds through a series of deserted apartments, every creature in
the house vanishing at the creak of her shoe, much more at the sound of
her voice, to which the nature of things affords no