Calidore by Thomas Love Peacock

CALIDORE, finding the talismans of Figginbotham sufficiently efficacious, proceeded to establish himself in a magnificent house, engaged numerous servants, purchased an equipage, and lived like an ambassador. He suffered so much of his object to be known as might facilitate its accomplishment; and it was soon buzzed about the town, and significantly told in dashes by the Morning Post, that a stranger of great consequence was arrived from Terra Incognita, whither he would shortly return, and take with him from England a wife and a philosopher; which would be a very good speculation for any unmarried lady and literary gentleman, as on their arrival in the stranger's country, the former would receive a most splendid allowance of pin- money, and the latter would sit down for life as an Honorable Gentleman Pensioner, with such a pension in his single person as in this more economical nation would keep in pay two whole gangs of Legitimate Reviewers. This intelligence threw into a state of complete fermentation all the disinterested beauty and liberal talent of the metropolis, and all the seats of the Carlisle mails were engaged every night for a week in bringing up shoals of embryo laureats and poetical philosophers from Cumberland.

Calidore persuading hiniself that he had already made up his mind in the choice of a wife, prosecuted with great assiduity his search for a philosopher, and made diligent enquiry of several eminent booksellers, and among the rest of the fashionable Mr Macquire.