If that severe doom of Synesius be true, “It is a greater offense to steal men’s labours than their clothes,” what shall become of most writers?

Thou may’st be searched for polish’d words and verse
By flippant spouter, emptiest of praters:
Tell him to seek them in some mawkish verse:
My periods are all rough as nutmeg graters.

Mr. Gammon marked the progress of the Earl’s feelings with the greatest interest, perceiving the increasing extent to which respect for him—Gammon—was mingling with his lordship’s sublime self-satisfaction; and, watching his opportunity, struck a spark into the dry tinder of his vain imagination, blew it gently—and saw that it caught, and spread.

…those visitors to forlorn houses, about whom you may not be familiar, who make “strange noises in the night, howl sometimes pitifully, and then laugh again, cause great flame and sudden lights, fling stones, rattle chains,” and if you wake to find your beard shaved and your chin smooth, they will be the impish cause.

At these mysteriously significant symbols, however, Mr. Titmouse, though quite ready to believe that they indicated some just cause or other of family pride, had looked with the same appreciating intelligence which you may fancy you see a chicken displaying, while hesitatingly clapping its foot upon, and quaintly cocking its eye at, a slip of paper lying in a yard, covered over with algebraic characters and calculations.

But he had long been secretly fired with the glory of Hercules, whom he held in the highest esteem, listening with great attention to such as related his achievements, particularly to those that had seen him, conversed with him, and had been witnesses to his prowess. He was affected in the same manner as Themistocles afterwards was, when he declared that the trophies of Miltiades would not suffer him to sleep.

Yet man dies not while the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains. His name is forgotten, indeed, but the breath he breathed yet stirs the pine-tops on the mountains, the sound of the words he spoke yet echoes on through space; the thoughts his brain gave birth to we have inherited to-day; his passions are our cause of life; the joys and sorrows that he felt are our familiar friends — the end from which he fled aghast will surely overtake us also.

Truly the universe is full of ghosts; not sheeted, church-yard spectres, but the inextinguishable and immortal elements of life, which, having once been, can never die, though they blend and change and change again forever.

The dense, unvisited woods on those inaccessible slopes seemed to harbour alien and incredible things, and I felt that the very outline of the hills themselves held some strange and aeon-forgotten meaning, as if they were vast hieroglyphs left by a rumoured titan race whose glories live only in rare, deep dreams…

Time had lost itself in the labyrinths behind, and around us stretched only the flowering waves of faery and the recaptured loveliness of vanished centuries — the hoary groves, the untainted pastures edged with gay autumnal blossoms, and at vast intervals the small brown farmsteads nestling amidst huge trees beneath vertical precipices of fragrant brier and meadow-grass. Even the sunlight assumed a supernal glamour, as if some special atmosphere or exhalation mantled the whole region. I had seen nothing like it before save in the magic vistas that sometimes form the backgrounds of Italian primitives. Sodoma and Leonardo conceived such expanses, but only in the distance, and through the vaultings of Renaissance arcades. We were now burrowing bodily through the midst of the picture, and I seemed to find in its necromancy a thing I had innately known or inherited and for which I had always been vainly searching.

It crept on all fours, but when it reached the place where the king sat it rose upon its feet, and, throwing the furry covering off its face, revealed a most extraordinary and weird countenance. It was (apparently) that of a woman of great age, so shrunken that in size it was no larger than that of a year-old child, and was made up of a collection of deep, yellow wrinkles. Set in the wrinkles was a sunken slit that represented a mouth, beneath which the chin curved outward to a point. There was no nose to speak of; indeed, the whole countenance might have been taken for that of a sun-dried corpse had it not been for a pair of large black eyes, still full of fire and intelligence, which gleamed and played under the snow-white eyebrows and the projecting parchment-colored skull, like jewels in a charnel-house. As for the skull itself, it was perfectly bare, and yellow in hue, while its wrinkled scalp moved and contracted like the hood of a cobra.

Listen! what is life? It is a feather; it is the seed of the grass, blown hither and thither, sometimes multiplying itself and dying in the act, sometimes carried away into the heavens. But if the seed be good and heavy it may perchance travel a little way on the road it will. It is well to try and journey one’s road and to fight with the air. Man must die. At the worst he can but die a little sooner.

Socrates: Let us begin, then, with a picture of our citizens’ manner of life, with the provision we have made for them. They will be producing corn and wine, and making clothes and shoes. When they have built their houses, they will mostly work without their coats or shoes in summer, and in winter will be well shod and clothed. For their food, they will prepare flour and barley-meal for kneading and baking, and set out a grand spread of loaves and cakes on rushes or fresh leaves. Then they will lie on beds of myrtle-boughs and bryony and make merry with their children, drinking their wine after the feast with garlands on their heads and singing the praises of the gods. So they will live pleasantly together; and a prudent fear of poverty or war will keep them from begetting children beyond their means.

Glaucon: You seem to expect your citizens to feast on dry bread.

Socrates: True, I said; I forgot that they will have something to give it a relish, salt, no doubt, and olives, and cheese, and country stews of roots and vegetables. And for desert we will give them figs and peas and beans; and they shall roast myrtle-berries and acorns at the fire, while they sip their wine. Leading such a healthy life in peace, they will naturally come to a good old age, and leave their children to live after them in the same manner.

By the time our “scherm” was finished the moon was coming up, and our dinner of giraffe steaks and roasted marrow-bones was ready. How we enjoyed those marrow-bones, though it was rather a job to crack them! I know no greater luxury than giraffe marrow, unless it is elephant’s heart, and we had that on the morrow.

The floor of the cloister itself was covered with thousands of identical, horn-shaped, nine-sided tiles that had been joined together with machine-tool precision into a nonrepeating double-spiral pattern that was giving me motion sickness just looking at it. I turned my back on this and looked at a loaf of bread that was resting on the table. This was so fresh that steam was gushing out of the end — Arsibalt, an infamous heel-filcher, had already got to it. The loaf had been made by braiding several ropes of dough together in a nontrivial pattern that, I feared, had deep knot-theoretical significance and was named after some Elkhazgian Saunt.

Demme, sir!” exclaimed Titmouse, starting aside with an offended air— “d’ye think I don’t know how to manage a sword? By all that’s tremendous"— and plucking the taper weapon out of its scabbard, he waved it over his head; and throwing himself into the first position — he had latterly paid a good deal of attention to fencing — and with rather an excited air, he went through several of the preliminary movements. ‘Twas a subject for a painter, and exhibited a very striking spectacle — as an instance of power silently concentrated, and ready to be put forth upon an adequate occasion. The tailor and the valet, who stood separate from each other and at a safe and respectful distance from Mr. Titmouse, gazed with silent admiration at him.

His self-conceit was so intense, that it consumed every vestige of sense he had about him. He stood in solitary grandeur upon the lofty pillar of his pride, inaccessible to ridicule, and insensible indeed of its approach, like vanity “on a monument smiling at” scorn. Indeed,

“His soul was like a star, and dwelt apart.”

In the progress of society we have dropped the physical part of the business; and instead of punching, scratching, kicking, biting, and knocking down one another, still true to the original principles of our nature, we are all endeavoring to circumvent one another; everybody is trying to take everybody in; the moment that one of us has got together a thing or two, he is pounced on by his neighbor, who in his turn falls a prey to another, and so on in endless succession. We cannot effectually help ourselves, though we are splitting our heads trying to discover devices, by way of laws, to restrain this propensity of our nature: it will not do; we are all overreaching, cheating, swindling, robbing one another, and if necessary, are ready to maim and murder one another in the prosecution of our designs. So it is with nations as with individuals. Truly, truly, we are a precious set.

Thus were thy arms suddenly held back from behind, just as they were encircling a pretty, plump a pigeon as ever nestled in them with pert and playful confidence, to be plucked! Alas, alas! And didst thou behold the danger to which it was exposed, as it fluttered upward unconsciously into the region where thine affectionate eye detected the keen hawk in deadly poise?

Mr. Gammon conceived a fearful, a shuddering loathing and disgust for the miscreant leader into these enormities; and, but for certain consequences, would have dispatched him with as much indifference as he would have laid arsenic in the way of a bold voracious rat, or killed a snake.

“Pray, sir, be silent!” exclaimed Mr. Aubrey, in a tone that electrified Gammon, who started from his chair. Mr. Aubrey’s face was whitened; his eye glanced lightning at his companion. Dagon-like, Gammon had put forth his hand and touched the ark of Aubrey’s honor. Gammon lost his color, and for, perhaps, the first time in his life, quailed before the majesty of man; ‘twas also the majesty of suffering; for he had been torturing a noble nature.

Placed in a situation which may, I think, be described as entirely without parallel, what is the first proceeding to which I resort? Do I seclude myself from all human society? Do I set my mind to analyze the abominable impossibility which, nevertheless, confronts me as an undeniable fact? Do I hurry back to London by the first train to consult the highest authorities, and to set a searching inquiry on foot immediately? No. I accept the shelter of a house which I had resolved never to degrade myself by entering again; and I sit, tippling spirits and water in the company of an old servant, at ten o’clock in the morning.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines.

Before another word could be said by any body a thundering knock at the street-door startled us all. I looked through the window and saw the World, the Flesh, and the Devil waiting before the house—as typified in a carriage and horses, a powdered footman, and three of the most audaciously dressed women I ever beheld in my life.

I am (thank God!) constitutionally superior to reason. This enabled me to hold firm to my lady’s view, which was my view also. This roused my spirit, and made me put a bold face on it before Sergeant Cuff. Profit, good friends, I beseech you, by my example. It will save you from many troubles of the vexing sort. Cultivate a superiority to reason, and see how you pare the claws of all the sensible people when they try to scratch you for your own good!

The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.