Various

“ On the contrary, the life of the institution lies in a quick circulation and frequent turning over of a moderate capital amongst a multitude of traders of good credit. The capital of an English joint-stock bank too often is an African river losing itself in sands: that of a Scotch bank is a river dispersed in a thousand channels of irrigation, to reappear in its entire form, and with increased volume, after it has done its work. We do not believe, after all, that there is any great witchcraft about banking in Scotland. ”

“ In due course the Muhajuns, the jewellers, and birds of song arrive, but nothing of the rajah is to be found; and smoke-stained walls, and filth, and litter about the rooms, alone betray that revelry had been there! The jewellers and Muhajuns turn in wrath upon Lalla Umbeka Sahaee, and tax him with having aided to cheat them. They proceed first to abuse, and then to beat him. In vain the poor man shows the huge key, and laments his thousand rupees lost for ever. ”

“ I had seen some of the few and scattered markings of the same kind which exist on the surface of my own country, but was nevertheless unprepared for the all but universal grinding to which Sweden has been subjected. In Scotland one has to seek for the appearances in nooks of the country; but here they are met at every step. Very often farm establishments, and the inns at which the traveller stops, are placed on smoothed plateaux of rock, the place thus acquiring from nature all the benefit of a paved courtyard, as well as of a perfectly firm and dry foundation. ”

“ One circumstance connected with the arrival of the young stranger does strike the privileged set with inexpressible astonishment. If, as is asserted, she came in a private carriage, and that carriage the veritable property of her friends, and not a 'trumpery glass-coach'—how, then, could she be going to sleep in the room over the kitchen?—that chamber of Blue-Beard reputation, strongly suspected of harbouring mice, and convicted, beyond question, of being subject to a very disagreeable odour! ”

“ I felt affected at seeing such a multitude of people engaged in a labour so uneconomical, and which must consequently remunerate them so ill; for of course where a man or woman give a day of their own time, along with a horse's labour, to the business of selling a single pig or lamb, a few chickens and eggs, or some such trifling merchandise, the remuneration must be of the most miserable kind. ”

“ Even though the poors' funds were more available than they are, the honest workman who wishes to maintain his self-respect can never complacently place his trust in them; for though it is not uncommon to hear individuals in humble life proclaiming that they have a right to them, the fact really is, that these funds are only a product of the humanity and economy of the country, designed to insure that there shall be no class left to misery and the barbarism attending it, but not to interpose between any one and his obligation to gain his own subsistence if possible. ”

“ But a Sacred Authority has assured us that though sorrow may endure for a night, joy cometh in the morning; and the experience even of a half-boarder demonstrates that a patient continuance in welldoing is not without its reward. By degrees the lot of our heroine is considerably ameliorated: the prejudice against her begins to wear away; and even the English teacher, who has held out the longest, having a character for consistency to maintain, is constrained to admit that Miss Armstrong is an estimable and well-conducted young person. ”

“ The very best lesson that we could teach a poor man, with a view to improving his fortunes, would be that which led him, as far as possible, to extend his usefulness, to substitute economical for uneconomical labour, and to concentrate and divide employments. I beheld, with interest, in this exhibition of the Swedish peasantry, the first aspect of an economy out of which it has been the business of the last hundred years to reform the farming population of my own country. ”

“ The prudence shown there is no more than what might be expected of rational men. The failures in England are to be accounted for not by their want of some extraordinary gift which chances to have been vouchsafed to their northern neighbours, but by the fact, that England is full of people hastening over-much to be rich, and in whose circumstances there are of course great vicissitudes. If ever England shall cool a little in Mammon-worship, and pursue business objects with the moderation of the Scottish mind, it may succeed in joint-stock banking to as great an extent as Scotland has done. ”

“ In plain truth, he who accepts parochial relief sells away some of his very best rights as a citizen, as well as his dignity as a man; and any one who wishes to exalt either the social or political position of the labouring-class, should desire nothing so much as to see them in the first place superior to all but a remote chance of coming to this wretched expedient. ”

“ The governess, though an exacting, is not an unjust taskmistress. If she requires much during school-hours, she allows the unusual luxuries of fire and lights when school duty is over; and furthermore advances the interests of her pupil by a statement, under her own hand, to the benefactress of the half-boarder, that she promises to do honour to that lady's patronage no less than to her own establishment. ”

“ The poor too often struggle on in this manner, always busy, as they allege, often working very hard, and wondering that, with all their exertions, they make so little, when the plain truth is, that their labour is so ill-directed, or is so uneconomically conducted, and in the result of their labours they consequently do so little for their fellow-creatures, that their little gains are exactly what is to be expected, and what is strictly their due. ”

“ The visitors have only time to look around them, and select two chairs upon which they can sit with a good conscience, before the mistress of the house presents herself in the person of a very upright, ladylike woman, attired in black silk of glossy freshness, and leading by the hand a beautiful little girl, the pride of the school. The child (who is exquisitely dressed for exhibition) has been committed to her charge by its doting parents the day before they sailed for India, and she cannot, therefore, persuade herself to lose sight of her for an instant. ”

“ The oppressions of France pretty nearly brought down all ranks into one common mass of distress and poverty. To meet the cruel exactions of Napoleon, families gave up every article of value to the state. For their gold they received tokens in iron; and these acknowledgments are still treasured by families, as lasting memorials of an adversity which took away almost everything but life. Amidst these national sufferings and humiliations, Carl Gottlob Zumpt received such an education as could then be procured. ”

“ The champion in our profession, like in that of Christianity, must be ever progressing. A fall from an eminence is always perilous—in the medical sphere, fatal to fame. The world, in respect to our calling, may be esteemed as a school; the boy who has obtained head place must labour assiduously to retain that position against his less fortunate competitors. ”

“ Europe flings itself upon Asia, and Western knowledge ferments in the inert mass of Eastern ignorance. We are numerically few, however, though intellectually powerful; and it is of the utmost consequence that we should comprehend clearly what we are about, so that our efforts towards the advancement of those we have taken forcibly under our tutelage should proceed in the right direction. ”

“ It would only be a fair and proper part of a social system in which the highest behests of a true civilisation were worked out. How soon it may come about will depend on the rapidity with which the education of the masses of the people shall proceed. If, from any narrow views of whatever kind, a member of the middle or upper classes in this country finds himself thwarting the movements towards universal and improved education, let him understand what he pays for the gratification he thus obtains. ”

“ Why do we love plain women, and admire ill-constructed books? Because there is an innate power in the irregular features to excite our sympathies, and a quality in authors, called Genius, to command them. No man, we will venture to say, possessing common sensibility, can read 'Cola Monti,' [14] although it is of the class of books for young people, without a thoughtful brow and a glistening eye ”

“ Old abuses thus remain unchecked, and vast multitudes of hereditary scoundrels combine to cheat their superiors and oppress the people. The police, in fact, are the objects of universal dread; and numberless crimes escape unpunished, and even unexposed, because their victims will rather suffer than invoke such fatal assistance.
At present, however, our business is more with the criminal than the policeman; and the rough pictures of our Orderly show that the peculiarity of Indian crime is its resemblance to the crime of old and modern Europe at the same time. ”

“ Having in our own early days experienced the dreary heaviness of ordinary school classics, unrelieved by the slightest explanations in English touching the subject or the authors, we were glad to be instrumental in putting into the hands of youth a series which they could peruse with some degree of pleasure, or at all events not with absolute weariness and disgust. ”

“ We stopped for the night at Moss, a town on the Christiania Fiord, where my servant and I had each an evening and morning meal, with lodging, at a charge of about six shillings. Yet this was a good large house, very tolerably furnished. A small silver coin (value about 5d.) laid in the hardened palm of the blithesome lass who served as an attendant in all capacities made her the happiest of the happy. As a serving-girl in Denmark, Sweden, or Norway, only gets about 30s. a year of wages, it may readily be imagined that even so small a gratuity as this is a great prize to her. ”

“ A rustling sound, accompanied by the shuffling of many feet, is heard in the distance; the little girl safely pilots her companion to the parlour door, leaving her to make her entrée alone, and then skips off to join her companions in the refectory. The young novice waits a few moments to gather both breath and courage, and then gently taps at the door; a voice from within desires her to enter, and she stands before half-a-dozen smart ladies at tea. ”

“ How few write or speak Latin with elegance or purity? How few ever saw any more recondite exemplars of Roman literature than elementary school-books—the copy of a copy? In Germany, where no sort of painstaking seems to be grudged, scholarship has gone, and still goes on, immeasurably farther. ”

“ Persons who have only read descriptions of the appearances may think them explainable upon an aqueous theory; but if they visit Sweden, and look at the surface with their own eyes, they must, if open to conviction at all, see that no such agent could have produced such effects. Only some agent applying forcibly, pressingly, and with an equable, continuous motion—like a plane going over a deal, or a plough in a furrow—could have so dressed the original surface. Such an agent is ICE. The identity of the loose matter with the moraines of existing glaciers points to the same conclusion. ”

“ It is true that at first it is painful to stand up with the little class—herself a giant among pigmies; to be conscious of a sneering smile on the part of the teacher as she draws a parallel between her bodily height and her dwarfish information. ”

“ As a proof of the great extension of the system, we find that throughout Scotland there is a bank for every 7500 of the population—in some districts for every 5000. In London, the proportion is stated to be only 1 for every 32,894; in some parts of England 1 for every 16,000. The rapid progress in wealth and civilisation which has been made by a country naturally so poor and sterile, has been attributed by many sagacious observers to the multiplication of its banks, and to the facilities afforded by them. ”

“ The cottages of her farm-overseer and servants are close at hand, and remind one of a respectable farming establishment in the old country. On my first visit to Geelong, I found a respectable young man, who had been three sessions at the university of Glasgow, as an intending candidate for the Christian ministry, but who had subsequently abandoned his studies, and gone out as a bounty emigrant to Port Philip, acting in the humble capacity of tutor to the children of Miss Drysdale's overseer, a respectable Scotch farmer, with a large family. ”

“ COLA MONTI.
The conceptions of female beauty which men form for themselves are frequently, if not always, overturned by some plain face, in which they find the mystic influence they had supposed to belong only to features of a particular and more perfect mould. In like manner our theories touching certain departments of literature are liable to be damaged now and then by the appearance of a work which fulfils not one of the conditions we had laid down as absolute necessities. ”

“ After rising early, and lying down late, and eating the bread of carefulness, she finds that even the rigid performance of her own duties, and the neglected work of half-a-dozen people besides, meets at first with but little encouragement from the mistress of the house, who receives it purely as a matter of course, while it does not fail to awaken the distrust and jealousy of her subordinates. ”

“ The robust, bulky frame of honest Quist generally made these people appear like dwarfs by his side. As we drove rapidly along the swampy plain surrounding Gottenburg, we met an immense number of small market-carts, driven by peasant men or women, or both, generally very lightly laden, and going at a trot, the people being usually seated on a sort of chair, perched on elastic beams passing back at an angle from the beams of the vehicle, so as to give somewhat the effect of springs. ”