John Kendrick Bangs

“ Up to a certain point notoriety is like a woman, and a man is apt to love it; but when it becomes exacting, demanding instead of permitting itself to be courted, it loses its charm.”
“That is Socratic in its wisdom,” smiled Portia.
“But Xanthippic in its origin,” returned Xanthippe. “No man ever gave me my ideas.”
As Xanthippe spoke, Lucretia Borgia burst into the room.
“Hurry and save yourselves!” she cried. “The boat has broken loose from her moorings, and is floating down the stream. If we don’t hurry up and do something, we’ll drift out to sea!” ”

“ You are out of date. People don’t go to the theatres to hear you, they go to see the people who do you."
"That is true," said Ward. "And they do do you, my beloved William. It’s a wonder to me you are not dizzy turning over in your grave the way they do you."
"Can it be that I can ever be out of date?" asked Shakespeare. "I know, of course, that I have to be adapted at times; but to be wholly out of date strikes me as a hard fate."
"You’re not out of date," interposed Carlyle; "the date is out of you. There is a great demand for Shakespeare in these days, but there isn’t any stuff." ”

“ Brief, dryly—"I don't see but that what you ought to devote your time to, my dear Idiot, is the invention of an intelligent cook."
"Humph!" laughed the Idiot. "I may be an idiot, Mr. Brief, but I'm not an ass. There are some things that man may reasonably hope to accomplish—such as setting fire to the Hudson River, or growing butternuts on the summit of Mont Blanc—but as for trying to invent an intelligent cook who would stay in the country for more than two weeks for less than ten thousand dollars a year, that, sir, is beyond all the conceptions of the human mind." ”

“ At any rate the little animal instead of running away and jumping from crag to crag at the Unwiseman's approach, as most chamois would do, came inquiringly up to him and stuck out its soft velvety nose to be scratched, and permitted the Unwiseman to inspect its horns and silky chestnut-brown coat as if it recognized in the little old man a true and tried friend of long standing.
"Why you little beauty you!" cried the Unwiseman, as he sat on the fence and stroked the beautiful creature's neck. "So you're what they call a shammy, eh?" ”

“ Here even the words froze on the water ghost's lips and the clock struck one. There was a momentary tremor throughout the ice-bound form, and the moon, coming out from behind a cloud, shone down on the rigid figure of a beautiful woman sculptured in clear, transparent ice. There stood the ghost of Harrowby Hall, conquered by the cold, a prisoner for all time.
The heir of Harrowby had won at last, and to-day in a large storage house in London stands the frigid form of one who will never again flood the house of Oglethorpe with woe and sea-water. ”

“ These men you criticise, and whose heads you wish to sculp with a baseball-bat, have done more for you than you ever did for them. Every statue of you these men have made is a standing advertisement of your books, and it hasn’t cost you a penny. There isn’t a doubt in my mind that if it were not for those statues countless people would go to their graves supposing that the great Scottish Burns were little rivulets, and not a poet. What difference does it make to you if they haven’t made an Adonis of you? You never set them an example by making one of yourself. ”

“ It is my opinion, my dear Emperor Joseph, that grape-shot is the only proper medicine for a mob. Some people prefer to turn the hose on them, but none of that for me. They fear water as they do death, but they get over water. Death is more permanent. I've seen many a rioter, made respectable by a good soaking, return to the fray after he had dried out, but in all my experience I have never known a man who was once punctured by a discharge of grape-shot who took any further interest in rioting. ”

“ Only I should think you'd want to have somebody believe in you."
"Oh, you can believe in me all you want," returned the major. "I'm one of the finest fellows in the world, and worthy of anybody's friendship—and if anybody ought to know, Jimmieboy, I'm the one, for I know myself intimately. I've known myself ever since I was a little bit of a boy, and I can tell you if there's any man in the world who has a noble character and a good conscience and a heart in the right place, I'm him. ”

“ You are the only man I know in the financial world who is known to have the enterprise and the courage to go into a little gamble that other people would laugh at. You have that prime quality of success, Colonel Midas, that is known to mankind as nerve. You are always willing to sit in any kind of a game that shows a glimmer of profit in the perspective, and that is why I bring this matter to you instead of to my friend Rockernegie, a man utterly without imagination and blind to many a sure thing because he can't understand it. ”

“ For my part, I don’t believe you did write it, and I do believe that Shakespeare did. I can tell that by the spelling in the original edition."
"Shakespeare was my stenographer, gentlemen," said Lord Bacon. "If you want to know the whole truth, he did write Hamlet, literally. But it was at my dictation."
"I deny it," said Shakespeare. "I admit you gave me a suggestion now and then so as to keep it dull and heavy in spots, so that it would seem more like a real tragedy than a comedy punctuated with deaths, but beyond that you had nothing to do with it." ”