An impudent fellow may counterfeit modesty, but I’ll be hanged if a modest man can ever counterfeit impudence.

Reason is a faculty which is sufficient for its own purposes. Its operations originate from itself, and proceed directly to the end proposed; whence those actions, which are directed by this faculty of reason, are called right actions, as expressive of that rectitude and simplicity with which they are performed.

Here and to the southward the neighbourhood became better, flowering at last into a marvellous group of early mansions; but still the little ancient lanes led off down the precipice to the west, spectral in their many-gabled archaism and dipping to a riot of iridescent decay where the wicked old water-front recalls its proud East India days amidst polyglot vice and squalor, rotting wharves, and blear-eyed ship-chandleries, with such surviving alley names as Packet, Bullion, Gold, Silver, Coin, Doubloon, Sovereign, Guilder, Dollar, Dime, and Cent.

A square peg forced into a round hole, he had felt like a daily outrage that long-established smooth roundness into which a man of less sharply angular shape would have fitted himself, with voluptuous acquiescence, after a shrug or two.