“ These festivals, wisely retained by England after the Reformation, were distasteful to the Puritan fathers of New England, from their pagan origin, as enjoined by prelatical authority, and because, according to their austere conception, mirth was unseemly and displeasing to heaven! Henoe these semi -ancestors interdicted the festivals of their ancestral land, as heathenish and papistical; and consequently, between the influence of a dark Manichean creed and legislative enactments, cheerfulness was dissociated from religion and the daily life of men ”

“ This exterminated many of the noblest impulses, and the imaginative love of beauty, branded as ungodly by the Puritans, was now regarded as unprofitable in a pecuniary light, and recreations were condemned wholesale as entailing loss of time. ”

“ The later Evangel of Poor Richard, whereof the philosopher Franklin was the apostle, being enunciated, the pursuit of gain was consecrated as the prime object of life to an immortal being, and the sordid maxims of a penurious huxter were engrafted on the public policy of a great nation. ”

“ He is a sensible man, and a good officer; and will, I have no doubt, conduct himself in a manner to merit your approbation. ” The Marquis Wellesley, in a letter addressed to the late John Wilson Croker, and which was privately printed, details an account of his last interview with Pitt, then dying at Putney Hill, in which Pitt said of his brother Arthur, “I never met any military officer with whom it was so satisfactory to converse. ”