Various

“ Titles are abolished; and the American Republic swarms with men claiming and bearing them. You have the French soldier cheered and happy in his dying agony, and kissing with frantic joy the chief’s hand who lays the little cross on the bleeding bosom. At home you have the dukes and earls jobbing and intriguing for the Garter; the military knights grumbling at the civil knights of the Bath; the little ribbon eager for the collar; the soldiers and seamen from India and the Crimea marching in procession before the queen, and receiving from her hands the cross bearing her royal name. ”

“ It was observed that a hind-shoe of the horse was loose and broken. Whether this had been the cause of his fall, could not be told; but ever when he races, as race he will, till the day of doom, along that mountain side, his gallop is mingled with the clank of the loose and broken shoe. For the punishment is awful like the sin: he shall carry about for ages the phantom-body of the girl, knowing that her soul is away, sitting with the soul of his brother, down in the deep ravine, or scaling with his the topmost crags of the towering mountain-peaks. ”

“ In this age have been found critics stupid and malevolent enough to accuse every author who writes with a purpose, and who endeavours to draw attention to social vices, of imposture and of hypocrisy. He should be content, these critics hold, to describe the things he sees; he is a humbug if he moralize upon them. It is not unlikely that the vicious Fribbles of Hogarth’s time held similar opinions, and took Hogarth to be a reckless painter of riotous scenes, and who just infused sufficient morality into them “to make the thing go off.” ”

“ It had been a weary life and a fearful struggle, made up of duties ill requited and not always satisfactorily performed, of love and poverty, of increasing cares, of sickness, debt, and death. For Mr. Crawley had married almost as soon as he was ordained, and children had been born to him in that chill, comfortless Cornish cottage. He had married a lady well educated and softly nurtured, but not dowered with worldly wealth. They two had gone forth determined to fight bravely together; to disregard the world and the world’s ways, looking only to God and to each other for their comfort. ”

“ How many more are there (and, for the honour of England, may there be many like him!) —gallant, accomplished, high-spirited, enterprising masters of their noble profession! Can our Fountain of Honour not be brought to such men? It plays upon captains and colonels in seemly profusion. It pours forth not illiberal rewards upon doctors and judges. It sprinkles mayors and aldermen. It bedews a painter now and again. It has spirted a baronetcy upon two, and bestowed a coronet upon one noble man of letters. ”

“ The infant-schools do not make part of the Bell Lane Establishment, though they are connected with it, and the children, as they grow up, and are infants no longer, draft off into the great free-school.
The infant-school is a light new building close by, with arcaded playgrounds, and plenty of light, and air, and freshness, though it stands in this dreary, grimy region. As we come into the schoolrooms we find, piled up on steps at either end, great living heaps of little infants, swaying, kicking, shouting for their dinner, beating aimlessly about with little legs and arms. ”

“ And so thou, too, art fever-caught, my poor physician! What a fascination this girl has. Here’s the butler: here’s the medical man: here am I: here is the captain has been smitten—smitten on the nose. Has the gardener been smitten too, and is the page gnawing his buttons off for jealousy, and is Mons. Bulkeley equally in love with her? I take up a review, and think over this, as I glance through its pages.
As I am lounging and reading, Mons. Bulkeley himself makes his appearance, bearing in cloaks and packages belonging to his lady. ”

“ They are generally blind as bats to all living, breathing life; and the only character they pick up is a bad one for themselves. I apprehend that Hogarth just took life as it came; only the Light was in him to see and to comprehend. A right moral feeling, an intuitive hatred of all wicked and cruel things, guided and strengthened him. Amid the loose life of a loose age the orgies at Moll King’s and Mother Douglass’s might have been frolics at the time to him, and only frolics. ”

“ Lady Lufton had been greatly rejoiced at that good deed which her son did in giving up his Leicestershire hunting, and coming to reside for the winter at Framley. It was proper, and becoming, and comfortable in the extreme. An English nobleman ought to hunt in the county where he himself owns the fields over which he rides; he ought to receive the respect and honour due to him from his own tenants; he ought to sleep under a roof of his own, and he ought also—so Lady Lufton thought—to fall in love with a young embryo bride of his own mother’s choosing. ”

“ No one supposes that there exists any whiteness apart from white things, or strength apart from strong things; yet the naturalists who maintain the fixity of Species, constantly talk as if Species existed independently of the individual animals. Instead of saying that by the word Species is indicated a certain group of characters, and that whenever we meet with this group we say, here is an animal of the same Species; they explicitly declare, or tacitly imply, that although an individual dog may vary, there is something above all individuals—the Species—and that cannot vary. ”

“ The ship on fire—the captain in the gale slinging himself in a bowline to stop the leak—the Frenchman in the hour of danger coming to his British comrade’s rescue—the brigantine, almost a wreck, working up to the barque with the signal of distress flying, and taking off her crew of thirteen men: “We then proceeded on our course, the crew of the abandoned vessel assisting all they could to keep my ship afloat.” What noble, simple words! What courage, devotedness, brotherly love! Do they not cause the heart to beat, and the eyes to fill?
This is what seamen do daily, and for one another. ”

“ Meantime a canvas village is rapidly springing up all round the joss-house; arms are piled, sentries posted, camp-fires blaze, kettles bubble, corks pop, and the contents of hampers are strewn upon the ground; a Babel of tongues rises above the clatter of dinner preparations, as Hindustani and French, Chinese and English, mingle in discordant tumult. Here a group of our Gallican allies are clustered eagerly over a salad; in close proximity a party of sepoys are scouring brass cooking vessels, carefully guarding them from the defiling touch of the infidel. ”

“ They say, likewise, that the lady’s hair is still growing; for, every time they see her, it is longer than before; and that now, such is its length and the headlong speed of the horse, it floats and streams out behind like one of those curved clouds that lie like a comet’s tail far up in the sky; only the cloud is white, and the hair dark as night. ”

“ And then, in the course of eighteen months, this poor piece of preferment fell in the dean’s way, this incumbency of Hogglestock with its stipend reaching one hundred and thirty pounds a year. Even that was worth double the Cornish curacy, and there was, moreover, a house attached to it. Poor Mrs. Crawley, when she heard of it, thought that their struggles of poverty were now well nigh over. What might not be done with a hundred and thirty pounds by people who had lived for ten years on seventy? ”

“ Drencher? There now, you turn as red as my ribbon! Ah! Bessy is a good girl, and so fond of my dear children. ‘Ah, dear Mrs. Bonnington,’ she says to me—but of course you won’t tell Lady B.: it would make Lady B. perfectly furious. ‘Ah!’ says Miss P. to me, ‘I wish, ma’am, that my little charges were like their dear little nephews and nieces—so exquisitely brought up!’ Pop again wished to beat his uncle. I wish—I wish Frederick would send that child to school! Miss P. owns that he is too much for her. Come, children, it is time to go to dinner. ”

“ Yet Hogarth the engraver seemed in 1730 to change with pantomimic rapidity into Hogarth the painter. The matter of his pictures may often be questionable: the manner leaves scarcely anything for exceptional criticism. His colour is deliciously pure and fresh; he never loads, never spatters paint about with his palette knife; never lays tint over tint till a figure has as many vests as the gravedigger in Hamlet. ”

“ As it is possible some readers may protest that no respectable authority in modern times ever held the opinion here imputed to a school, I will quote the very explicit language of one of Cuvier’s disciples—the last editor of Buffon—who, no later than 1856, could declare that “Species are the primitive forms of Nature. Individuals are nothing but the representatives—the copies of these forms: Les espèces sont les formes primitives de la Nature. Les individus n’en sont que des représentations, des copies.” ”

“ Under the white velvet glove of that cool hand are there bones of cold steel?
“So, Drencher has again been here, Elizabeth?” I say.
She shrugs her shoulders. “To see that wretched Captain Baker. The horrid little man will die! He was not actually sober just now when he—when I—when you saw him. How I wish you had come sooner—to prevent that horrible, tipsy, disreputable quarrel. It makes me very, very thoughtful, Mr. Batchelor. He will speak to his mother—to Mr. Lovel. I shall have to go away. I know I must.” ”

“ Fanny might be deceived. Being his wife, it might be her duty not to see her husband’s iniquities. But Lady Lufton could not be deceived. She knew very well in what part of the county Cobbold’s Ashes lay. It was not in Framley parish, nor in the next parish to it. It was half-way across to Chaldicotes—in the western division; and she had heard of that run in which two horses had been killed, and in which parson Robarts had won such immortal glory among West Barsetshire sportsmen. It was not easy to keep Lady Lufton in the dark as to matters occurring in her own county. ”

“ Crawley.
“It would show that he was not strongly imbued with a taste which I cannot but regard as vicious in a clergyman.”
“It must be vicious in all men,” said Mr. Crawley. “It is in itself cruel, and leads to idleness and profligacy.”
Again Lady Lufton made a gulp. She had called Mr. Crawley thither to her aid, and felt that it would be inexpedient to quarrel with him. But she did not like to be told that her son’s amusement was idle and profligate. She had always regarded hunting as a proper pursuit for a country gentleman. ”

“ I dwelt persistently in the preceding section of these essays upon the scenes and characters, the vices and follies, the humours and eccentricities, the beauties and uglinesses, that Hogarth must have seen in his young [567] manhood, and asked and thought about, and which must have sunk into his mind and taken root there. Satirists can owe but little to inspiration. They can move the world with the lever of wit, but they must have a fulcrum of fact. Their philosophy is properly of the inductive order. Without facts, facts to reason upon, their arguments would be tedious and pointless. ”

“ And the men of the French line at Fontenoy, who told Messieurs de la Garde to fire first, were smirking French dancing-masters; and the Black Prince, waiting upon his royal prisoner, was acting an inane masquerade; and Chivalry is naught; and Honour is humbug; and Gentlemanhood is an extinct folly; and Ambition is madness; and desire of distinction is criminal vanity; and glory is bosh; and fair fame is idleness; and nothing is true but two and two; and the colour of all the world is drab; and all men are equal; and one man is as tall as another ”

“ On the death of my mother, which took place almost immediately after my birth, she took the entire charge of me, and brought me up, though with difficulty; for she used to tell me I should never be either folk or fairy. For some years she had lived alone in a cottage, which lay at the bottom of a deep green circular hollow, upon which one came with a sudden surprise in walking over a heathy table-land. I was her frequent visitor. She was a tall, thin, aged woman, with eager eyes, and well-defined, clear-cut features. ”