Forget we now our state and lofty birth;
Not titles here, but works, must prove our worth.
To labour is the lot of man below;
And when Jove gave us life, he gave us woe.

What eye has witness’d, or what ear believed,
In one great day, by one great arm achieved,
Such wondrous deeds as Hector’s hand has done,
And we beheld, the last revolving sun?
What honours the beloved of Jove adorn!
Sprung from no god, and of no goddess born;
Yet such his acts, as Greeks unborn shall tell,
And curse the battle where their fathers fell.

I poured out whatever came into my mind, out of a confused company of notes, and writ with as small deliberation as I do ordinarily speak, without all affectation of big words, fustian phrases, jingling terms, tropes, strong lines, that like Acestes’ arrows caught fire as they flew, strains of wit, brave heats, elogies, hyperbolical exornations, elegancies, etc. which many so much affect.

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

His face was certainly overcast with anxiety, but his soul was calm and resolute. Having lit his fire, he placed his candle on the table, and, leaning back for a moment in his chair, while the flickering increasing light of his crackling fire and candle revealed to him, with a sense of snugness, his shelves crammed with books, and the windows covered with an ample crimson curtain, effectually excluding the chill morning air — he reflected with a heavy sigh upon the precarious tenure by which he held the little comforts that were left to him. Oh! — thought he — if heaven were but to relieve me from the frightful pressure of liability under which i am bound to the earth, what labor, what privation would I repine at! What gladness would not spring up in my heart!

For these men devoted to writing, the library was at once the celestial Jerusalem and an underground world on the border between terra incognita and Hades. They were dominated by the library, by its promises and by its prohibitions. They lived with it, for it, and perhaps against it, sinfully hoping one day to violate all its secrets.

To see men wholly led by affection, admired and censured out of opinion without judgment: an inconsiderate multitude, like so many dogs in a village, if one bark, all bark without a cause: as fortune’s fan turns, if one man be in favour, or commended by some great one, all the world applauds him; if in disgrace, in an instant all hate him, and as at the sun when he is eclipsed, that erstwhile took no notice, now gaze and state upon him.

They are universally considered to be the finest ever bred in England, and are now in a most thriving condition.

The receding depths of time and space, though they can indeed be haltingly conceived even by primitive minds, cannot be imagined save by beings of a more ample nature. A panorama of mountains appears to naive vision almost as a flat picture, and the starry void is a roof pricked with light. Yet in reality, while the immediate terrain could be spanned in an hour’s walking, the sky-line of peaks holds within it plain beyond plain. Similarly with time. While the near past and the near future display within them depth beyond depth, time’s remote immensities are foreshortened into flatness. It is almost inconceivable to simple minds that man’s whole history should be but a moment in the life of the stars, and that remote events should embrace within themselves aeon upon aeon.