Various

“ And the man who says, ‘I see truth in my own way, and I do not care to serve her cause;’ who, when Nature herself, ever moving, ever active, exhorts him to bestir himself for the truth he surveys, and to animate that truth with his own life and deed, shrugs his shoulder, and cries ‘Cui bono?’—that man, my dear Tracey, may talk very finely about despising renown, but in reality he shuffles off duty. ”

“ If we accept the other alternative, can we, on a review of the last ten years, imagine a deeper depth of degradation than that to which Liberalism and its chiefs have now sunk? for while Liberalism has proved itself a perilous absurdity, its chiefs have not only endorsed that judgment, but have gleefully repudiated their old professions for the sake of postponing their fall from office.
In truth, the greatest retarding obstacle to the triumph of the Conservative party is the completeness of the triumph achieved by their opinions. ”

“ Across this calm and soft perspective—from which the young priest, palpitating with all the impulses of youth and genius, looked forth with hopes that seem Utopian, and warm ideal conceptions of good and glory yet to be attained—a light more brilliant suddenly streams. This path of life, as yet so humble, enveloped in profound personal obscurity, unknown to man, is suddenly crossed by a dazzling meteoric radiance, and thrown into strong illumination before the world. ”

“ Lacordaire, always prompt and clear-sighted, with a native vein of good sense and practical wisdom running through all the fiery impulses of his genius, was the first to perceive how great a mistake they had made. He remained more than two months in Rome endeavouring to reconcile Lamennais to the failure of their mission, and, for his own part, refreshing his soul in that wonderful shrine of all memories and thoughts. ”

“ There are thousands of little secrets confided to the diary of a physician; thousands of fees to his pocket, for little occurrences which, like the fees, go no further than himself.
By the highest he is treated almost as an equal; by the wisest he is respected as a man of science and of power. If not profoundly versed in our constitution, he knows us in our moments of weakness, and that knowledge alone makes him the master of most of us. ”

“ We have our uses, my friend, little as you seem disposed to own it.”
“My dear Tracey, the question is not whether a ship should carry ballast, but whether you are of the proper material for ballast. And when I wonder why a man of great intellect and knowledge should not make his intellect and knowledge more largely useful, it is a poor answer to tell me that he is as useful as—a bag of stones.”
“A motive power is as necessary to impel a man, whatever his intellect or knowledge, towards ambitious action, as it is to lift a stone from the hold of a vessel into the arch of a palace. ”

“ After three years at the seminary of St Sulpice he became a priest, at a time when priests had little honour and no popularity in France. The young advocate, glowing with all the inspirations of undeveloped eloquence—a man destined to play so notable a part in his generation, and no doubt aware in his heart of the genius which nobody else as yet suspected—fell, in the flush of his youth, into obscure priestly offices, such as doubtless demonstrated to him a “something” in the Christian faith enough to exercise and employ all the helpful energies of man. ”

“ Tender as her heart was, Miss Owenson had something else to do than to indulge its weaknesses. She determined, as soon as she became acquainted with the real state of her father’s affairs, to earn her own livelihood; and however ridiculous her vanity may be, however gross her many breaches of truth and common propriety, we are bound to acknowledge, and we do it with hearty goodwill, that she went gallantly through with that purpose. Her first impulse was to turn authoress; her next and wiser, to go out as a governess or companion, if any lady, young or old, would have her. ”

“ Although the Liberals are in office, they know that their creed is now an absurdity—that the measures which they have so long vaunted and ventilated would now be scoffed out of the House, and held up to public ridicule in ‘Punch’ and the ‘Times.’ They feel that it is vain to contend against the Conservative feeling of the nation, and therefore they fall in with it. Their best defence, their best plea for being allowed to retain office, is based on the very fact that the triumph of their rivals’ principles is now too complete to be gainsaid. ”

“ We use the word Liberalism, of course, in its accepted sense, as equivalent to the opinions and measures of the party which has called itself “Liberal,” though with no special claim to the title—in fact, with less real claim than the Conservatives have; for the liberalism of the Liberals has been all in the air, and is now (happily for the country) nowhere; whereas the liberalism of the Conservatives, if of a more homely, is of a more genuine and practical kind, which pervades the whole scope alike of their measures and of their policy. ”

“ Take a patrician of £60,000 a year, who only spends £6000: give him tastes so cultivated that he has in himself all resources; diet him on philosophy till he says, with the Greek sage, ‘Man is made to contemplate, and to gaze on the stars,’ and it seems an infantine credulity to expect that this elegant Looker-on will condescend to take part with the actors on the world’s stage. Yet without the actors, the world would be only a drop-scene for the Lookers-on. Yours, I repeat, is an exceptional case. And those who admire your mind, must regret that it has been robbed of fame by your fortune. ”

“ No State, during the long war with France, received so many deadly blows as Austria; yet all those blows were firmly sustained, and those reverses nobly retrieved, by the steady and gallant loyalty of its subjects. It was the practical freedom and good government enjoyed by the Austria peoples which prevented the sundering of an empire above all others most liable to be split up under the effects of great reverses, and which rallied the noble races of the Tyrol and Hungary around the throne of their sovereign in the gloomiest hours of the empire. ”

“ For three years past the condition of Germany has been growing more and more distracted. In the search for unity it is becoming divided; and nowhere does dissension show itself so much as in the very Power which was looked to as the natural head and rallying-point of the work of union. We deeply lament the troubles of Prussia, and not less deeply do we lament the injurious influence which they exercise upon the general condition and prospects of the Fatherland. There is no State in Europe which more tries the temper of the British public than Prussia. As a people we desire to think well of her ”

“ Thaïs has a grammar of her own, a syntax, and a prosody—winged words and winged actions. Lucretia may study the accidence, she can never master the rhetoric. Lucretia may unveil her ankle, Thaïs blushes not if her garter be exposed. Think you Lord Tom Noddy will marry Lucretia if she shows him her garter? Thaïs dresses expensively. Thousands will not pay her milliner’s bills. But at the end of six months or a year Lord Tom Noddy leaves her, and she retrenches.
But if Lucretia rivals Thaïs in her dress, Lord Tom Noddy knows that, if he marries her, six months will not see the end of it. ”

“ Every sensible man in this country now acknowledges—what nearly all sensible men for some years past felt, but lacked the courage to say—that we have already gone as far towards democracy as it is safe to go, and that another step like that proposed by Lord Russell would have carried us irretrievably over the precipice. This is the great moral benefit which we have derived from the events in America. The vast superiority of our mixed Constitution is now so demonstrated, that every man may now say what he thinks publicly and without reserve. ”

“ Only a very limited number can or do hear a great speaker in any other kind, compared with those who think it indispensable to hear the notable preacher of their day; and multitudes who have the most visionary conception of their rulers and statesmen, and all other public notabilities, have a certain personal knowledge of the orator whose sphere is the pulpit, which makes them as eager to hear his life as if their own history were somehow involved in it. ”

“ That is why I call your case exceptional.”
“Still,” answered Tracey, “I say that I am but a very commonplace type of educated men who belong neither to the House of Lords nor the House of Commons, and who, in this country, despise ambition, yet in some mysterious latent way serve to influence opinion. Motive power—motive power! how is it formed? why is it so capricious? why sometimes strongest in the rich and weakest in the poor? why does knowledge sometimes impart, and sometimes destroy it? ”

“ Henry thought himself entitled not only to a chance of fighting, but to the dignity of Major. All this, by little and little, though in her own artless words, and in wifelike admiration of Henry’s military genius as well as ardour, I extracted from Clara, who (all women being more or less, though often unconsciously, artful in the confidences with which they voluntarily honour our sex) had her own reason for frankness; she had seen Sir Percival since breakfast, and he had sought to convince her that it would be wise to let Henry have his own way. ”

“ Lady Clark often told of the Kilkenny days, when she, an unformed lump of a girl, whose greatest delight was to go rambling about the fields, armed with a big stick and followed by a dog, once returned from her rambles covered with mud, and her frock torn from scrambling over hedges and ditches, her hair all blown over her face (she had the loveliest long golden hair that ever was seen) , and found her sister Sydney and these two young officers sitting in the parlour, talking high sentiment, and all three shedding tears. ”

“ For it is no picturesque lay figure which rises in the white Dominican tunic before our unaccustomed eyes, but a modern Frenchman, acute, brilliant, unimpassioned—full of sound sense and inexorable logic—a politician, a liberal, a man of his day, no less than a great preacher and a pious Catholic. The story of his life is without private events, for he was a priest, and debarred from any private life save that which makes a passion of friendship and finds an outlet there ”

“ The small citizens, doubtless charmed to be able to rebel so soon against law and government, immediately gave their shrill suffrage in his favour. “We shall remain,” cried the little rebels, with one voice. The result, of course, was, that scholars and teachers had equally to succumb to the power of the law, and that once more there ensued a trial, and brilliant appearance of the eloquent Abbé, which this time was before the Chamber of Peers, the most illustrious assemblage in France, one of the culprits, M. de Montalembert himself, being a member of that august body. ”

“ I should have been as busy in completing my own mind, and as reluctant to force that mind into the squabbles of that mob which you call the world: in fact, I am but a type—somewhat exaggerated by accidental circumstances, which make me more prominent than others to your friendly if critical eye—of a very common and a very numerous class in a civilisation so cultivated as that of our age. ”

“ Born to fight and to love, he already bore the seal of the double royalty of the soul and talent. He appeared to me charming and terrible, as a type of the enthusiasm for good—virtue armed for the support of truth. I saw in him one of the elect, predestined to all that youth adores and desires the most—genius and glory. ”

“ The effect was as beneficial as if several thousand square miles of productive land had been gradually added to the narrow area of the British Isles—affording remunerative employment to hundreds of thousands of our people who must otherwise have emigrated, and proportionately adding to the power of the country and the resources of the State. But any thoughtful man, as he viewed the annually increasing growth of that great industry, must have trembled for its permanence; and now that the blow has fallen, every one must recognise the improvidence exhibited by the great chiefs of that industry. ”

“ Ignorance is the mother of apathy and disunion. When each city, or district, or class knew little of the character and concerns of the other parts of the country or classes of the community, it was vain to expect the ready sympathy and general co-operation on behalf of a suffering locality, such as, we rejoice to say, has become common now. Moreover, wealth has increased enormously in this country since the beginning of the century—and it is only the surplus wealth of a community that is available for the relief of distress. ”

“ Well, after all, a life most in harmony with a man’s character is that in which he is probably not only the happiest, but the best man. Ambition is but noble in proportion as it makes men useful. But, from your own account, Tracey’s private life is useful already, though its uses are not obtrusive. And for public life, three parts of the accomplishments, and perhaps of the virtues, which make his private life beautiful, would not be needed. ”

“ The attempt to coerce little Denmark is ignoble—the proposals which it is desired to enforce are absurd in their form, and most impolitic in their object. We wait to hear what the British Parliament will say to a policy in which folly and meanness are combined in equal proportions.
Strangely enough, the Continental Power which is foremost in demanding these “reforms” in the internal Government of Denmark, is itself exhibiting a melancholy spectacle of a government at feud with its own subjects. ”