Word: peacocking
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...PLEASURES OF PEACOCK (458 pp.) -Edited by Ben Ray Redman-Farrar Straus...
Time: 1865. Scene: the library of a country house in Lower Halliford (among the books: seven prankish novels to be reissued in 1947 as The Pleasures of Peacock). Cries of "Fire!" A tall, handsome, irascible old man hurries in, followed by a curate who implores him to leave. "By the immortal gods," shouts the old man, looking at his beloved books, "I will not move." Several weeks later, he died of shock. Death had paid Novelist Thomas Love Peacock the compliment of imitating his style...
...young man, Peacock, the son of a defunct London glass merchant, had become so disgusted with formal schooling that he elected to educate himself. He forthwith concentrated on the Greek, Latin, French, German and Italian classics-and was still at it when the fire broke out at Lower Halliford 60 years later...
From 1812 to 1818, Peacock gyrated in the circles of vegetarians, astrologists, freethinkers and other cranks who trailed his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley. Laughing uproariously at their disputes over how to reform the world, he got the notion of putting them into a novel. The result, Headlong Hall (1816), permanently settled the question of Peacock's proper pursuit...
...centuries of Indian history empire after empire had risen in a glorious blaze of peacock plumes and glinting spears only to founder in dark blood and ignominy. Last week British rule in India was ending; surprised applause followed its dinner jacket out the door...