Various

“ But he’ll find that it’s better for him, better for him in every way, to stick to his old friends. It will be better for his peace of mind, better for his character as a clergyman, better for his pocket, better for his children and for you,—and better for his eternal welfare. The duke is not such a companion as he should seek;—nor if he is sought, should he allow himself to be led away.”
And then Lady Lufton ceased, and Fanny Robarts kneeling at her feet sobbed, with her face hidden on her friend’s knees. ”

“ Mary, of sister Margaret who died last year, or of John who was lost at sea, say first and last—“There the sea rolls, ever as ever; and rages and smiles, and surges and sighs just the same; and were you and I and the whole world to be drowned to-day, and all the brave ships to go down with standing sails, to-morrow there would not be a drop the more in the ocean, nor on its surface a smile the less. Doesn’t the rain rain upon my baby’s grave, and the sun shine upon it, as indifferent as if there were neither babies nor mothers in the world?” ”

“ No music was ever conceived within the walls of a city so profoundly touching as that which Irish pipers and British harpers made before an arch was built in England. Now this bears out our supposition; for the savage with the tom-tom, the piper with his pipe,254 the harper with his harp, lived always in sight of nature. Their little fussy lives and noisy works were ever in contrast with its silence and permanence; change and decay with the constant seasons and the everlasting hills. ”

“ The little life therein—not more than a quart pot full—knows the presence of the great ocean from which it was taken, and yearns. It stirs in its earthen vessel; you feel it moving in your very fingers; you may almost hear your right hand calling to the left, “I live! I live!” Silence proclaimed, thanksgiving begins. There is a sensation of the sound of ten thousand voices, and the swinging of ten thousand censers; besides the audible singing of birds, the humming of beetles, and the noise of small things which praise the Lord by rubbing their legs together. ”

“ He is always in a storm of revolt and indignation against wrong, craft, tyranny. How he cheers heroic resistance; how he backs and applauds freedom struggling for its own; how he hates scoundrels, ever so victorious and successful; how he recognizes genius, though selfish villains possess it! The critic who says Macaulay had no heart, might say that Johnson had none: and two men more generous, and more loving, and more hating, and more partial, and more noble, do not live in our history. ”

“ The day is bright with a late autumn sun; the sky is clear with a keen autumn wind, which lashes our blood into a canter as we press against it, and the cantering blood sets the thoughts into hurrying excitement. Wimbledon Common is not far off; its five thousand acres of undulating heather, furze, and fern tempt us across it, health streaming in at every step as we snuff the keen breeze. We are tempted also to bring net and wide-mouthed jar, to ransack its many ponds for visible and invisible wonders. ”

“ And there is nothing viler than the desire to know great people—people of great rank I should say; nothing worse than the hunting of titles and worshipping of wealth. We all know this, and say it every day of our lives. But presuming that a way into the society of Park Lane was open to us, and a way also into that of Bedford Row, how many of us are there who would prefer Bedford Row because it is so vile to worship wealth and title? ”

“ He was a Whig, he was a bachelor, he was a gambler, he was immoral in every way, he was a man of no church principle, a corrupter of youth, a sworn foe of young wives, a swallower up of small men’s patrimonies; a man whom mothers feared for their sons, and sisters for their brothers; and worse again, whom fathers had cause to fear for their daughters, and brothers for their sisters;—a man who, with his belongings, dwelt, and must dwell, poles asunder from Lady Lufton and her belongings! ”

“ I, who could mention a hundred reasons why I thought Glorvina well disposed to me, was told she regarded me as an uncle! Were her letters such as nieces write? Whoever heard of an uncle walking round Merrion Square for hours of a rainy night, and looking up to a bedroom window, because his niece, forsooth, was behind it? I had set my whole heart on the cast, and this was the return I got for it. For months she cajoles me—her eyes follow me, her cursed smiles welcome and fascinate me, and at a moment, at the beck of another—she laughs at me and leaves me! ”

“ Let there be found some Professor of Time and Eternity, skilled to show how the world goes—and is going: who should exhibit, as in a wizard’s glass, the unending procession of human life. The Roman in his pride, a hundred million Romans in their pride—all perished; millions of elegant Greeks, with their elegant wives and mistresses, all perished; Attila’s thundering hosts riding off the scene—vanished: the clatter of their spears, the fury of their eyes, the tossing of their shaggy hair, the cloud of thoughts that moved upon their faces—they and all that belonged to them. ”

“ The wind and the sea rose together, and the cutter had to sheer off lest she should be wrecked. The men on the rock clung, as best they might, to the half-fastened shaft, and a desperate struggle ensued between brute nature and that passive fortitude which is greater than brute nature,—all through the night into the morning, all through the day into the night again, until the third day, when the storm abated and they were saved. ”

“ Was Irving not good, and, of his works, was not his life the best part? In his family, gentle, generous, good-humoured, affectionate, self-denying: in society, a delightful example of complete gentlemanhood; quite unspoiled by prosperity; never obsequious to the great (or, worse still, to the base and mean, as some public men are forced to be in his and other countries) ; eager to acknowledge every contemporary’s merit; always kind and affable with the young members of his calling ”

“ The duke had sent a special message to say how peculiarly glad he, the duke, would be to make acquaintance with him, the parson! How much of this message had been of Mr. Fothergill’s own manufacture, that Mark Robarts did not consider.
He had obtained a living at an age when other young clergymen are beginning to think of a curacy, and he had obtained such a living as middle-aged parsons in their dreams regard as a possible Paradise for their old years. ”

“ A man must choose for himself, but he can’t live with two different sets of people; at least, not if I belong to one and the Duke of Omnium to the other. The bishop going indeed! If there be anything that I hate it is hypocrisy.”
“There is no hypocrisy in that, Lady Lufton.”
“But I say there is, Fanny. Very strange, indeed! ‘Put off his defence!’ Why should a man need any defence to his wife if he acts in a straightforward way. His own language condemns him: ‘Wrong to stand out!’ Now, will either of you tell me that Mr. Robarts would really have thought it wrong to refuse that invitation? ”

“ Party wars are perpetually raging there, and are carried on by the press with a rancour and fierceness against individuals which exceed British, almost Irish, virulence. It seemed to me, during a year’s travel in the country, as if no one ever aimed a blow at Irving. All men held their hand from that harmless, friendly peacemaker. I had the good fortune to see him at New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington,2 and remarked how in every place he was honoured and welcome. Every large city has its “Irving House.” The country takes pride in the fame of its men of letters. ”

“ As we emerge upon the common, and tread its springy heather, what a wild wind dashes the hair into our eyes, and the blood into our cheeks! and what a fine sweep of horizon lies before us! The lingering splendours and the beautiful decays of autumn vary the scene, and touch it with a certain pensive charm. The ferns mingle harmoniously their rich browns with the dark green of the furze, now robbed of its golden summer-glory, but still pleasant to the eye, and exquisite to memory. ”

“ By a bountiful provision, the human mind is capable of immediate and fruitful alliance with a bough, a brook, a cloud—all that the eye may see or the ear echo. It may be observed, too, that just as Sir Cassian Creme strengthens the blood of his ancient and delicate house by an alliance with his dairy-woman, so a cultivated mind may produce more vigorous progeny by intimacy with an atom than with any long-descended speculation on the Soul, say. ”

“ When did it occur to any ordinary person walking Bond Street, that once there had been turf there, and a running about of beetles? On the other hand, what man of any kind looks over the little Fleet valley to where Holborn Hill rises on the other side, without wondering how the houses came there—without feeling that they are only another sort of tents, pitched upon the earth for a time? ”

“ With a gentle movement the lady with the roses complied with the other’s request, and we went to a great window, looking down on the forest, in which I had lost my way. The tops of the far-spreading and leafy trees lay motionless beneath us in that pale, wan light, which shows objects almost as distinct in form, though not in colour, as by day. ”

“ Ah! well may the mind with the sweet insistance of sadness linger on those scenes of the irrecoverable past, and try, by lingering there, to feel that it is not wholly lost, wholly irrecoverable, vanished for ever from the Life which, as these decays of autumn and these changing trees too feelingly remind us, is gliding away, leaving our cherished ambitions still unfulfilled, and our deeper affections still but half expressed. The vanishing visions of elapsing life bring with them thoughts which lie too deep for tears ”

“ I think we ought to be filled with as much gratitude for our own planetary being as astonishment at the spectacle of any Milky Way whatever. And I only wish that we, the human race, shone in the eyes of heaven with the light of virtue like another Milky Way. ”

“ They are lost in the deeper shadow cast by the vicious bonfire that Charles’s roués and beauties lighted up—a shadow shortly to be dispelled by the purer radiance of an Augustan era of literature. Pepys and Evelyn are so minute, so lifelike, that between their word-paintings, and those of the Spectator and Tatler, there seems a great black blank.
No seven-league boots are necessary for me to stride back to my subject,188 and to the time when my little-boy-hero is forming his earliest acquaintance with the Old Bailey stones. ”

“ Lady Lufton took it, and read it, and her face grew blacker and blacker. Her mind was set against the writer before she began it, and every word in it tended to make her feel more estranged from him. “Oh, he is going to the palace, is he—well; he must choose his own friends. Harold Smith one of his party! It’s a pity, my dear, he did not see Miss Proudie before he met you, he might have lived to be the bishop’s chaplain. Gatherum Castle! You don’t mean to tell me that he is going there? Then I tell you fairly, Fanny, that I have done with him.” ”

“ Pancras’s well-preserved tibia, I am equally unenthusiastic about Pope’s nightcap, I don’t care a fig for Queen Anne’s farthings, and I would not go round the corner to behold the site of the Chelsea bunhouse. There is little, after all, in bricks, bones, and the coffins of men; but a glimpse into the lives of men, or into the eyes of nature—that is another thing.
The one may always be had in London, the other never could be had, were it not for Holborn Hill. Circumstances permitting, every city ought to be built on a hill ”

“ We cannot see each grain of sand here on Brighton beach, we cannot see the separate stars of the Milky Way, nor its suns and great planets, with all our appliances; and yet each of those orbs has its path, rolling along on its own business—a world. ”

“ The chief point to be determined is its power over fogs. That any light will penetrate through some fogs is out of the question. The Sun himself can’t do it. But the artificial light that can hold out longest and pierce the farthest is clearly the light at all costs for the turning points in the great ocean highways.
A success of this kind would create something of a revolution in a branch of lighthouse art on which a vast amount of ingenuity and even genius has been expended; that is, the apparatus by which the light should be exhibited. ”

“ There, I land you at Temple Bar, on whose gory spikes are the heads of the last conspirators against William the Dutchman’s life. “Forsitan et nobis,” whispered Goldsmith slyly to Johnson as they gazed up at the heads which, late in the reign of George III., yet rotted on those fatal spikes. We will not linger at Temple Bar now. Little boy Hogarth, years hence, will take us backwards and forwards through it hundreds of times. The three last years of century seventeen glide away from me. Plumed hats, ye are henceforth to be cocked. Swords, ye shall be worn diagonally, not horizontally. ”

“ It must ever remain a humiliating reflection upon the power and lustre of the British arms that so pitiful a detachment as that of 1,100 French infantry should, in a kingdom in which there was an armed force of above 150,000 men, have not only put to rout a select army of 6,000 men prepared to receive the invaders, but also provided themselves with ordnance and ammunition from our stores, taken several of our towns, marched 122 Irish (above 150 English) miles through the country, and kept arms in their victorious hands for seventeen days in the heart of an armed kingdom. ”

“ Friends are not to be picked up on the road-side every day; nor are they to be thrown away lightly. And now sit down, my love, and let us have a little talk. There, I must take my bonnet off. You have pulled the strings so that you have almost choked me.” And Lady Lufton deposited her bonnet on the table and seated herself comfortably in the corner of the sofa.
“My dear,” she said, “there is no duty which any woman owes to any other human being at all equal to that which she owes to her husband, and, therefore, you were quite right to stand up for Mr. Robarts this morning.” ”

“ Kingsley has remarked, among others; for when he wrote, “Is it not a grand thought, the silence and permanence of nature amid the perpetual noise and flux of human life!—a grand thought, that one generation goeth and another cometh, and the earth abideth for ever?” he also meant, “Isn’t it a melancholy thought?” For my part, I believe this reflection to be the fount of all that melancholy which is in man. I speak in the broadest sense, meaning that whereas whenever you find a man you find a melancholy animal, this is the secret of his melancholy. The thought is so common and so old ”

“ Sowerby was one of those men who are always mixing up business with pleasure, and who have usually some scheme in their mind which requires forwarding. Men of this class have, as a rule, no daily work, no regular routine of labour; but it may be doubted whether they do not toil much more incessantly than those who have.
“Lufton is so dilatory,” Mr. Sowerby said. “Why did he not arrange this at once, when he promised it? And then he is so afraid of that old woman at Framley Court. Well, my dear fellow, say what you will; she is an old woman and she’ll never be younger. ”

“ Savages who run wild in woods are not less liable to its influence than we who walk in civilized Pall Mall. On the contrary, a savage of any brains at all is the most melancholy creature in the world. Not Donizetti, nor Mendelssohn, nor Beethoven himself ever composed such sad songs as are drummed on tom-toms, or piped through reeds, or chanted on the prairies and lagoons of savage land. ”