Great Throughts Treasury

"Death comes to all. His cold and sapless hand waves o?er the world, and beckons us away. Who shall resist the summons?"

"Elphin answered, "We thank you: we are but two." "Two or four," said Seithenyn, "all is one. You are welcome all. When a stranger enters, the custom in other places is to begin by washing his feet. My custom is, to begin by washing his throat. Seithenyn ap Seithyn Saidi bids you welcome.""

"Elphin was desirous to protract the conversation, and this very desire took from him the power of speaking to the purpose. He paused for a moment to collect his ideas, and Angharad stood still, in apparent expectation that he would show symptoms of following, in compliance with her invitation. In this interval of silence, he heard the loud dashing of the sea, and the blustering of the wind through the apertures of the walls. This supplied him with what has been, since Britain was Britain, the alpha and omega of British conversation. He said, "It seems a stormy night.""

"Folly and mischief, said Mr. Fax, "are very nearly allied; and nowhere more conspicuously than in the forms of the law."

"He bore a simple wild-flower wreath: Narcissus, and the sweet brier rose; Vervain, and flexile thyme, that breathe rich fragrance; modest heath, that glows with purple bells; the amaranth bright, that no decay, nor fading knows, like true love?s holiest, rarest light; and every purest flower, that blows in that sweet time, which Love most blesses, when spring on summer?s confines presses."

"He was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him"

"Elphin and Teithrin stood some time on the floor of the hall before they attracted the attention of Seithenyn, who, during the chorus, was tossing and flourishing his golden goblet. The chorus had scarcely ended when he noticed them, and immediately roared aloud, "You are welcome all four.""

"Doctor Opimian's tastes, in fact, were four: a good library, a good dinner, a pleasant garden, and rural walks."

"Dreams, which, beneath the hov?ring shades of night, sport with the ever-restless minds of men, descend not from the gods. Each busy brain creates its own."

"Education! Well, sir, I have no doubt schools for all are just as fit for the species salmo salar as for the genus homo. But you must allow, that the specimen before us has finished his education in a manner that does honor to his college. However, I doubt that the salmo salar is only one species, that is to say, precisely alike in all localities. I hold that every river has its own breed, with essential differences; in flavour especially. And as for the human mind, I deny that it is the same in all men. I hold that there is every variety of natural capacity from the idiot to Newton and Shakspere; the mass of mankind, midway between these extremes, being blockheads of different degrees; education leaving them pretty nearly as it found them, with this single difference, that it gives a fixed direction to their stupidity, a sort of incurable wry neck to the thing they call their understanding. So one nose points always east, and another always west, and each is ready to swear that it points due north."

"I am not for forcing my tastes or no-tastes on other people. Let every man enjoy himself in his own way, while he does not annoy others. I would not deprive you of your enjoyment of a brilliant symphony, and I hope you would not deprive me of my enjoyment of a glass of old wine."

"I contrive to get through my day by sinking the morning in bed, and killing the evening in company; dressing and dining in the intermediate space, and stopping the chinks and crevices of the few vacant moments that remain with a little easy reading. And that amiable discontent and anti-sociality which you reprobate in our present drawing-room-table literature, I find, I do assure you, a very fine mental tonic, which reconciles me to my favorite pursuit of doing nothing, by showing me that nobody is worth doing anything for."

"How troublesome is day! It calls us from our sleep away; it bids us from our pleasant dreams awake, and sends us forth to keep or break our promises to pay. How troublesome is day!"

"I have been at college. I contrive to get through my day by sinking the morning in bed, and killing the evening in company; dressing and dining in the intermediate space, and stopping the chinks and crevices of the few vacant moments that remain with a little easy reading. And that amiable discontent and anti-sociality which you reprobate in our present drawing-room-table literature, I find, I do assure you, a very fine mental tonic, which reconciles me to my favorite pursuit of doing nothing, by showing me that nobody is worth doing anything for."

"Ideal beauty is not the mind's creation: it is real beauty, refined and purified in the mind's alembic, from the alloy which always more or less accompanies it in our mixed and imperfect nature. But still the gold exists in a very ample degree. To expect too much is a disease in the expectant, for which human nature is not responsible; and, in the common name of humanity, I protest against these false and mischievous ravings. To rail against humanity for not being abstract perfection, and against human love for not realizing all the splendid visions of the poets of chivalry, is to rail at the summer for not being all sunshine, and at the rose for not being always in bloom."? "But to make ideal beauty the shadow in the water, and, like the dog in the fable, to throw away the substance in catching at the shadow, is scarcely the characteristic of wisdom, whatever it may be of genius.""

"I will say, too, that the highest wisdom and the highest genius have been invariably accompanied with cheerfulness. We have sufficient proofs on record that Shakespeare and Socrates were the most festive of companions. But now the little wisdom and genius we have seem to be entering into a conspiracy against cheerfulness.""

"If all the nonsense which, in the last quarter of a century, has been talked on all other subjects, were thrown into one scale, and all that has been talked on the subject of education alone were thrown into the other, I think the latter would preponderate."

"If we go on in this way, we shall have a new art of poetry, of which one of the first rules will be: To remember to forget that there are any such things as sunshine and music in the world."

"I am afraid we live in a world of misnomers? In my experience I have found that a gang of swindling bankers is a respectable old firm; that men who sell their votes to the highest bidder, and want only 'the protection of the ballot' to sell the promise of them to both parties, are a free and happy constituency; that a man who successively betrays everybody that trusts him, and abandons every principle he ever professed, is a great statesman, and a Conservative, forsooth, a nil conservando; that schemes for breeding pestilence are sanitary improvements; that the test of intellectual capacity is in swallow, and not in digestion; that the art of teaching everything, except what will be of use to the recipient, is national education; and that a change for the worse is reform."

"If, in any form of human society, any one human being dies of hunger, while another wastes or consumes in the wantonness of vanity as much as would have preserved his existence, I hold that second man guilty of the death of the first. Yet what is human society but one great family? What is moral duty, but that precise line of conduct which tends to promote the greatest degree of general happiness? And is not this duty most flagrantly violated, when one man appropriates to himself the subsistence of twelve; while, perhaps in his immediate neighborhood, eleven of his fellow beings are dying of hunger? I have seen such a man walk with a demure face into church, as regularly as if the Sunday bell had been a portion of his corporeal mechanism, to hear a bloated and beneficed sensualist hold forth on the text of Do as ye would be done by, or Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me: whereas, if he had wished his theory to coincide with his practice he would have chosen for his text, Behold a man gluttonous, and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners: and when the duty of words was over, the auditor and his ghostly advisor, issuing forth together, have committed poor Lazarus to the care of Providence, and proceeded to feast in the lordly mansions, like Dives that lived in purple."

"In a bowl to sea went wise men three, on a brilliant night in June: they carried a net, and their hearts were set on fishing up the moon."

"In short, said [Mr. Foster], everything we look on attests the progress of mankind in all the arts of life, and demonstrates their gradual advancement towards a state of unlimited perfection."

"In his last binn Sir Peter lies? He kept at true humor's mark the social flow of pleasure's tide: he never made a brow look dark, nor caused a tear, but when he died."

"It is fitting that there should be rules in science, because they are the collected and concentrated experience of ages; but they are not to be converted into pedantic fetters to bind genius through all future time."

"It is one thing to follow the high road through a country, with every principally remarkable object carefully noted down in a book, taking, as therein directed, a guide, at particular points, to the more recondite sights: it is another to sit down on one chosen spot, especially when the choice is unpremeditated, and from thence, by a series of explorations, to come day by day on unanticipated scenes. The latter process has many advantages over the former; it is free from the disappointment which attends excited expectation, when imagination has outstripped reality, and from the accidents that mar the scheme of the tourist's single day, when the valleys may be drenched with rain, or the mountains shrouded with mist."

"Like to dine well, and withal to dine quietly, and to have quiet friends at his table with whom he could discuss questions which might afford ample room for pleasant conversation, and none for acrimonious dispute."

"Love is such a capricious thing, that to be the subject of it is no proof of superior merit. There are inexplicable affinities of sympathy, that make up an irresistible attraction, heaven know how."

"It is the only antidote to the great wrath of the devil. MR. HILARY (filling): It is the only symbol of perfect life. The inscription 'HIC NON BIBITUR' will suit nothing but a tombstone."

"It is very certain, and much to be rejoiced at, that our literature is hag-ridden. Tea has shattered our nerves; late dinners make us slaves of indigestion; the French Revolution has made us shrink from the name of philosophy, and has destroyed, in the more refined part of the community (of which number I am one), all enthusiasm for political liberty. That part of the reading public which shuns the solid food of reason for the light diet of fiction, requires a perpetual adhibition of sauce piquante to the palate of its depraved imagination. It lived upon ghosts, goblins, and skeletons (I and my friend Mr. Sackbut served up a few of the best), till even the devil himself, though magnified to the size of Mount Athos, became too base, common, and popular, for its surfeited appetite. The ghosts have therefore been laid, and the devil has been cast into outer darkness, and now the delight of our spirits is to dwell on all the vices and blackest passions of our nature, tricked out in a masquerade dress of heroism and disappointed benevolence; the whole secret of which lies in forming combinations that contradict all our experience, and affixing the purple shred of some particular virtue to that precise character, in which we should be most certain not to find it in the living world; and making this single virtue not only redeem all the real and manifest vices of the character, but make them actually pass for necessary adjuncts, and indispensable accompaniments and characteristics of the said virtue."

"Misanthropy is sometimes the product of disappointed benevolence; but it is more frequently the offspring of overweening and mortified vanity, quarrelling with the world for not being better treated than it deserves."

"MR. ASTERIAS: A gloomy brow and a tragical voice seem to have been of late the characteristics of fashionable manners: and a morbid, withering, deadly, antisocial sirocco, loaded with moral and political despair, breathes through all the groves and valleys of the modern Parnassus; while science moves on in the calm dignity of its course, affording to youth delights equally pure and vivid to maturity, calm and grateful occupation--to old age, the most pleasing recollections and inexhaustible materials of agreeable and salutary reflection; and, while its votary enjoys the disinterested pleasure of enlarging the intellect and increasing the comforts of society, he is himself independent of the caprices of human intercourse and the accidents of human fortune. Nature is his great and inexhaustible treasure. His days are always too short for his enjoyment: ennui is a stranger to his door. At peace with the world and with his own mind, he suffices to himself, makes all around him happy, and the close of his pleasing and beneficial existence is the evening of a beautiful day. THE HONORABLE MR. LISTLESS: Really I should like very well to lead such a life myself, but the exertion would be too much for me. Besides, I have been at college. I contrive to get through my day by sinking the morning in bed, and killing the evening in company; dressing and dining in the intermediate space, and stopping the chinks and crevices of the few vacant moments that remain with a little easy reading. And that amiable discontent and anti-sociality which you reprobate in our present drawing-room-table literature, I find, I do assure you, a very fine mental tonic, which reconciles me to my favorite pursuit of doing nothing, by showing me that nobody is worth doing anything for."

"Modern literature is a north-east wind--a blight of the human soul. I take credit to myself for having helped to make it so. The way to produce fine fruit is to blight the flower. You call this a paradox. Marry, so be it."

"Man yields to death; and man?s sublimest works must yield at length to Time."

"Mr. Cranium now walked up to Mr. Panscope, to condole with him on the disappointment of their mutual hopes. Mr. Panscope begged him not to distress himself on the subject, observing, that the monotonous system of female education brought every individual of the sex to so remarkable an approximation of similarity, that no wise man would suffer himself to be annoyed by a loss so easily repaired; and that there was much truth, though not much elegance, in a remark which he had heard made on a similar occasion by a post-captain of his acquaintance, "that there was never a fish taken out of the sea, but left another as good behind."

"Mr. Crotchet could not become, like a true-born English squire, part and parcel of the barley-giving earth; he could not find in game-bagging, poacher-shooting, trespasser pounding, footpath-stopping, common-enclosing, rack-renting, and all the other liberal pursuits and pastimes which make a country gentleman an ornament to the world, and a blessing to the poor; he could not find in these valuable and amiable occupations, and in a corresponding range of ideas, nearly commensurate with that of the great King Nebuchadnezzar, when he was turned out to grass; he could not find in this great variety of useful action, and vast field of comprehensive thought, modes of filling up his time that accorded with his Caledonian instinct.""

"Mr. Escot immediately pointed all the artillery of his eloquence, declaring the use of animal food, conjointly with that of fire, to be one of the principal causes of the present degeneracy of mankind. "The natural and original man," said he, "lived in the woods: the roots and fruits of the earth supplied his simple nutriment: he had few desires, and no diseases. But, when he began to sacrifice victims on the altar of superstition, to pursue the goat and the deer, and, by the pernicious invention of fire, to pervert their flesh into food, luxury, disease, and premature death were let loose upon the world. Such is clearly the correct interpretation of the fable of Prometheus, which is a symbolical portraiture of that disastrous epoch, when man first applied fire to culinary purposes, and thereby surrendered his liver to the vulture of disease. From that period the stature of mankind has been in a state of gradual diminution, and I have not the least doubt that it will continue to grow small by degrees, and lamentably less, till the whole race will vanish imperceptibly from the face of the earth." "I cannot agree," said Mr. Foster, "in the consequences being so very disastrous. I admit, that in some respects the use of animal food retards, though it cannot materially inhibit, the perfectibility of the species. But the use of fire was indispensably necessary, as Aeschylus and Virgil expressly assert, to give being to the various arts of life, which, in their rapid and interminable progress, will finally conduct every individual of the race to the philosophic pinnacle of pure and perfect felicity." "In the controversy concerning animal and vegetable food," said Mr. Jenkison, "there is much to be said on both sides; and, the question being in equipoise, I content myself with a mixed diet, and make a point of eating whatever is placed before me, provided it be good in its kind." In this opinion his two brother philosophers practicaIly coincided, though they both ran down the theory as highly detrimental to the best interests of man."

"Mr. Falconer thought that, even in the midst of love's most dire perplexities, dry clothes and a good fire are better than a hole in the snow."

"MR. FALCONER: I presume, Doctor, from the complacency with which you speak of Love, you have no cause to complain of him. REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN: Quite the contrary. I have been an exception to the rule that "The course of true love never did run smooth." Nothing could run more smooth than mine. I was in love. I proposed. I was accepted. No crossings before. No bickering after. I drew a prize in the lottery of marriage.. FALCONER: It strikes me, Doctor, that the lady may say as much. REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN: I have made it my study to give her cause to say so. And I have found my reward."

"Mr. Flosky suddenly stopped: he found himself unintentionally trespassing within the limits of common sense."

"MR. GLOWRY: You are leaving England, Mr. Cypress. There is a delightful melancholy in saying farewell to an old acquaintance, when the chances are twenty to one against ever meeting again. A smiling bumper to a sad parting, and let us all be unhappy together.. CYPRESS (filling a bumper):"

"MR. MACQUEDY: As to your poetry of the twelfth century, it is not good for much. MR. CHAINMAIL: It has, at any rate, what ours wants, truth to nature, and simplicity of diction. The poetry, which was addressed to the people of the dark ages, pleased in proportion to the truth with which it depicted familiar images, and to their natural connection with the time and place to which they were assigned. In the poetry of our enlightened times, the characteristics of all seasons, soils, and climates, may be blended together, with much benefit to the author's fame as an original genius. The cowslip of a civic poet is always in blossom, his fern is always in full feather; he gathers the celandine, the primrose, the heath-flower, the jasmine, and the chrysanthemum, all on the same day, and from the same spot: his nightingale sings all the year round, his moon is always full, his cygnet is as white as his swan, his cedar is as tremulous as his aspen, and his poplar as embowering as his beech. Thus all nature marches with the march of mind; but, among barbarians, instead of mead and wine, and the best seat by the fire, the reward of such a genius would have been, to be summarily turned out of doors in the snow, to meditate on the difference between day and night, and between December and July. It is an age of liberality, indeed, when not to know an oak from a burdock is no disqualification for sylvan minstrelsy. I am for truth and simplicity."

"MR. FLOSKY: This rage for novelty is the bane of literature. Except my works and those of my particular friends, nothing is good that is not as old as Jeremy Taylor: and, entre nous, the best parts of my friends' books were either written or suggested by myself. HONORABLE MR. LISTLESS: Sir, I reverence you. But I must say, modern books are very consolatory and congenial to my feelings. There is, as it were, a delightful north-east wind, an intellectual blight breathing through them; a delicious misanthropy and discontent, that demonstrates the nullity of virtue and energy, and puts me in good humor with myself and my sofa.. FLOSKY: Very true, sir. Modern literature is a north-east wind---a blight of the human soul. I take credit to myself for having helped to make it so. The way to produce fine fruit is to blight the flower. You call this a paradox. Marry, so be it. Ponder thereon."

"MR. MACQUEDY: I say, cutting off idiots, who have no minds at all, all minds are by nature alike. Education (which begins from their birth) makes them what they are. REVEREND DOCTOR FOLLIOTT: No, sir, it makes their tendencies, not their power. C‘sar would have been the first wrestler on the village common. Education might have made him a Nadir Shah; it might also have made him a Washington; it could not have made him a merry-andrew, for our newspapers to extol as a model of eloquence."

"MR. PANSCOPE. 'Death, Sir, do you question my understanding? MR. ESCOT. I only question, Sir, where I expect a reply, which from what manifestly has no existence, I am not visionary enough to anticipate. MR. PANSCOPE. I beg leave to observe, sir, that my language was perfectly perspicuous, and etymologically correct; and, I conceive, I have demonstrated what I shall now take the liberty to say in plain terms, that all your opinions are extremely absurd. MR. ESCOT. I should be sorry, sir, to advance any opinion that you would not think absurd. MR. PANSCOPE. Death and fury, Sir! MR. ESCOT. Say no more, Sir - that apology is quite sufficient. MR. PANSCOPE. Apology, Sir? MR. ESCOT. Even so, Sir. You have lost your temper, which I consider equivalent to a confession that you have the worst of the argument. MR. PANSCOPE. Lightnings and devils!"

"MR. SARCASTIC: Nothing, you well know, is so rare as the coincidence of theory and practice. A man who "will go through fire and water to serve a friend" in words, will not give five guineas to save him from famine. A poet will write Odes to Independence, and become the obsequious parasite of any great man who will hire him. A burgess will hold up one hand for purity of election, while the price of his own vote is slily dropped into the other. I need not accumulate instances. MR. FORESTER: You would find it difficult, I fear, to adduce many to the contrary.. SARCASTIC: This then is my system. I ascertain the practice of those I talk to, and present it to them as from myself, in the shape of theory: the consequence of which is, that I am universally stigmatized as a promulgator of rascally doctrines. Thus I said to Sir Oliver Oilcake, "When I get into Parliament I intend to make the sale of my vote as notorious as the sun at noonday. I will have no rule of right, but my own pocket. I will support every measure of every administration, even if they ruin half the nation for the purpose of restoring the Great Lama, or of subjecting twenty millions of people to be hanged, drawn and quartered at the pleasure of the man-milliner of Mahomet's mother. I will have ship-loads of turtle and rivers of Madeira for myself, if I send the whole swinish multitude to draff and husks." Sir Oliver flew into a rage, and swore he would hold no further intercourse with a man who maintained such infamous principles.. HIPPY: Pleasant enough to show a man his own picture, and make him damn the ugly rascal.. SARCASTIC: I said to Miss Pennylove, whom I knew to be laying herself out for a good match, "When my daughter becomes of marriageable age, I shall commission Christie to put her up to auction, 'the highest bidder to be the buyer; and if any dispute arise between two or more bidders, the lot to be put up again and resold'" Miss Pennylove professed herself utterly amazed and indignant, that any man, and a father especially, should imagine a scheme so outrageous to the dignity and delicacy of the female mind. HONORABLE MRS PINMONEY, AND MISS DANARETTA: A most horrid idea, certainly.. SARCASTIC: The fact, my dear ladies, the fact: how stands the fact? Miss Pennylove afterwards married a man old enough to be her grandfather, for no other reason, but because he was rich; and broke the heart of a very worthy friend of mine, to whom she had been previously engaged, who had no fault but the folly of loving her, and she was quite rich enough for all purposes of matrimonial happiness. How the dignity and delicacy of such a person could have been affected, if the preliminary negotiation with her hobbling Strephon had been conducted through the instrumentality of honest Chritie's hammer, I cannot possibly say.. HIPPY: Nor I, I must say. All the difference is in the form, and not in the fact. It is a pity the form does not come into fashion: it would save a world of trouble.. SARCASTIC: I irreparably offended the Reverend Doctor Vorax by telling him, that having a nephew, whom I wished to shine in the church, I was on the look-out for a luminous butler, and a cook of solid capacity, under whose joint tuition he might graduate. "Who knows," said I, "but he may immortalize himself at the University, by giving his name to a pudding?" I lost the acquaintance of Mrs Cullender, by saying to her, when she had told me a piece of gossip as a very particular secret, that there was nothing so agreeable to me as to be in possession of a secret, for I made a point of telling it to all my acquaintance; Intrusted under solemn vows, of Mum, and Silence, and the Rose, to be retailed again in whispers, for the easy credulous to disperse. Mrs. Cullender left me in great wrath, protesting she would never again throw away her confidence in so leaky a vessel."

"MR. MACQUEDY: Next, you must all learn political economy, which I will teach you, very compendiously, in lectures over the bottle. REVEREND DOCTOR FOLLIOTT: I hate lectures over the bottle. But pray, sir, what is political economy?. MACQUEDY: Political economy is to the state what domestic economy is to the family. REVEREND DOCTOR FOLLIOTT: No such thing, sir. In the family there is a paterfamilias, who regulates the distribution, and takes care that there shall be no such thing in the household as one dying of hunger, while another dies of surfeit. In the state it is all hunger at one end, and all surfeit at the other. Matchless claret, Mr. Crotchet. MR. CROTCHET: Vintage of fifteen, doctor.. MACQUEDY: The family consumes, and so does the state. THE REVEREND DOCTOR FOLLIOTT: Consumes, sir! Yes: but the mode, the proportions; there is the essential difference between the state and the family. Sir, I hate false analogies."

"MR. PANSCOPE. (suddenly emerging from a deep reverie.) I have heard, with the most profound attention, everything which the gentleman on the other side of the table has thought proper to advance on the subject of human deterioration; and I must take the liberty to remark, that it augurs a very considerable degree of presumption in any individual, to set himself up against the authority of so many great men, as may be marshalled in metaphysical phalanx under the opposite banners of the controversy; such as Aristotle, Plato, the scholiast on Aristophanes, St Chrysostom, St Jerome, St Athanasius, Orpheus, Pindar, Simonides, Gronovius, Hemsterhusius, Longinus, Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Paine, Doctor Paley, the King of Prussia, the King of Poland, Cicero, Monsieur Gautier, Hippocrates, Machiavelli, Milton, Colley Cibber, Bojardo, Gregory Nazianzenus, Locke, D'Alembert, Boccaccio, Daniel Defoe, Erasmus, Doctor Smollett, Zimmermann, Solomon, Confucius, Zoroaster, and Thomas-a-Kempis. MR. ESCOT. I presume, sir, you are one of those who value an authority more than a reason. MR. PANSCOPE. The authority, sir, of all these great men, whose works, as well as the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the entire series of the Monthly Review, the complete set of the Variorum Classics, and the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions, I have read through from beginning to end, deposes, with irrefragable refutation, against your ratiocinative speculations, wherein you seem desirous, by the futile process of analytical dialectics, to subvert the pyramidal structure of synthetically deduced opinions, which have withstood the secular revolutions of physiological disquisition, and which I maintain to be transcendentally self-evident, categorically certain, and syllogistically demonstrable. SQUIRE HEADLONG. Bravo! Pass the bottle. The very best speech that ever was made. MR. ESCOT. It has only the slight disadvantage of being unintelligible. MR. PANSCOPE. I am not obliged, Sir, as Dr Johnson remarked on a similar occasion, to furnish you with an understanding. MR. ESCOT. I fear, Sir, you would have some difficulty in furnishing me with such an article from your own stock."

"My quarrel with him is, that his works contain nothing worth quoting; and a book that furnishes no quotations, is, me judice [in my opinion], no book - it is a plaything."

"My steps have pressed the flowers, that to the Muses' bowers the eternal dews of Helicon have given: and trod the mountain height, where Science, young and bright, scans with poetic gaze the midnight-heaven. Yet have I found no power to vie with thine, severe necessity!"

"My thoughts by night are often filled with visions false as fair: for in the past alone, I build my castles in the air."