THE WORLD'S GREATEST BOOKS JOINT EDITORS ARTHUR MEE Editor and Founder of the Book of Knowledge J.A. HAMMERTON Editor of Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopaedia VOL. VII FICTION MCMX _Table of Contents_ PEACOCK, THOMAS LOVE Headlong Hall Nightmare Abbey PORTER, JANE Scottish Chiefs PUSHKIN The Captain's Daughter RABELAIS Gargantua and Pantagruel READE, CHARLES Hard Cash Never Too Late to Mend The Cloister and the Hearth RICHARDSON, SAMUEL Pamela Clarissa Harlowe Sir Charles Grandison RICHTER, JEAN PAUL Hesperus Titan ROSEGGER, PETER Papers of the Forest Schoolmaster ROUSSEAU, JEAN JACQUES New Heloise SAINT PIERRE, BERNARDIN DE Paul and Virginia SAND, GEORGE Consuelo Mauprat SCOTT, MICHAEL Tom Cringle's Log SCOTT, SIR WALTER Antiquary Guy Mannering Heart of Midlothian Ivanhoe Kenilworth Old Mortality Peveril of the Peak (SCOTT: _Continued in Vol. VIII_.) Complete Index of THE WORLD'S GREATEST BOOKS will be found at the end of Volume XX * * * * * THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK Headlong Hall The novels of Thomas Love Peacock still find admirers among cultured readers, but his extravagant satire and a certain bookish awkwardness will never appeal to the great novel-reading public. The son of a London glass merchant, Peacock was born at Weymouth on October 18, 1785. Early in life he was engaged in some mercantile occupation, which, however, he did not follow up for long. Then came a period of study, and he became an excellent classical scholar. His first ambition was to become a poet, and between 1804 and 1806 he published two slender volumes of verse, which attracted little or no attention. Yet Peacock was a poet of considerable merit, his best work in this direction being scattered at random throughout his novels. In 1812 he contracted a friendship with Shelley, whose executor he became with Lord Byron. Peacock's first novel, "Headlong Hall," appeared in 1816, and is interesting not so much as a story pure and simple, but as a study of the author's own temperament. His personalities are seldom real live characters; they are, rather, mouthpieces created for the purposes of discussion. Peacock died on January 23, 1866. _I.--The Philosophers_ 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.