Amongst fowl, peacocks and pigeons, all fenny fowl are forbidden, as ducks, geese, swans, herons, cranes, coots, didappers, waterhens, with all those teals, curs, sheldrakes, and peckled fowls, that come hither in winter out of Scandia, Muscovy, Greenland, Friezland, which half the year are covered all over with snow, and frozen up. Though these be fair in feathers, pleasant in taste, and have a good outside, like hypocrites, white in plumes, aud soft, their flesh is hard, black, unwholesome, dangerous, melancholy meat; Gravant et putrefaciunt stomachum, saith Isaac, part. 5, de vol.; their young ones are more tolerable, but young pigeons he quite disapproves.

None sleep so profoundly as those who are determined not to wake.

Of passions strong, of hasty nature,
Of graceless form and dwarfish stature;
By few approved, and few approving;
Extreme in hating and in loving;
Abhorring all whom I dislike,
Adoring who my fancy strike;
In forming judgments never long,
And for the most part judging wrong;
In friendship firm, but still believing
Others are treacherous and deceiving,
And thinking in the present æra
That friendship is a pure chimæra:
More passionate no creature living,
Proud, obstinate, and unforgiving,
But yet for those who kindness show,
Ready through fire and smoke to go.

A nun did eat a lettuce without grace or signing it with the sign of the cross, and was instantly possessed. Durand, lib. 6 Rational. cap. 86, num. 8, relates that he saw a wench possessed in Bononia with two devils, by eating an unhallowed pomegranate.

Cornelius Gemma, lib. 2 de nat. mirac. cap. 4, related of a young maid, called Katherine Gualter, a cooper’s daughter, anno 1571, that had such strange passions and convulsions, three men could not sometimes hold her; she purged a live eel, which he saw, a foot and a half long, and touched himself; but the eel afterwards vanished; she vomited some twenty-four pounds of fulsome stuff of all colours, twice a day for fourteen days; and after that she voided great balls of hair, pieces of wood, pigeon’s dung, parchment, goose dung, coals; and after them two pound of pure blood, and then again colas and stones, of which some had inscriptions, bigger than a walnut, some of them pieces of glass, brass, etc., besides paroxysms of laughing, weeping and ecstasies, etc. Et hoc (inquit) cum horrore vidi, “this I saw with horror.” They could do no good on her by physic, but left her to the clergy.

The more fool you,“ Gerard replied, "If you continue this madness, you’ll never amount to anything, and do nothing but moon and fritter away your time. Your life will wither like green grass in a hot furnace, and you’ll be your own murderer, without ever having known any pleasure.

Here were grounds for abundance of savage elation. But there was also the deep-seated hatred of half a life of mutual and persistent aggression and revilings; and Handsome Charlie was capable of nursing a grudge, and enjoying a revenge with his whole heart.

I have trouted, when the brook was so low, and the sky so hot, that I might as well have thrown my fly upon the turnpike; and I have hunted hare at noon, and woodcock in snowtime—never despairing, scarce doubting; but for a poor hunter of his kind, without traps or snares, or any aid of police or constabulary, to traverse the world, where are swarming, on a moderate computation, some three hundred and odd millions of unmarried women, for a single capture—irremediable, unchangeable—and yet a capture which by strange metonymy, not laid down in the books, is very apt to turn captor into captive and make game of hunter—all this, surely, surely may make a man shrug with doubt!

She had a cousin in the Life Guards, with such long legs that he looked like the afternoon shadow of somebody else.

But those were times when, to forget an evil world, grammarians took pleasure in abstruse questions. I was told that in that period, for fifteen days and fifteen nights, the rhetoricians Gabundus and Terentius argued on the vocative of ‘ego,’ and in the end they attacked each other, with weapons.

At all events it quite satisfied what he called his conscience.

Perhaps it’s a good thing, Traddles,“ said I, "to have an unsound hobby ridden hard; for it’s the sooner ridden to death.

It is the moment,” Jorge was now saying, “when everything will fall into lawlessness, sons will raise their hands against fathers, wives will plot against husbands, husbands will bring wives to law, masters will be inhuman to servants and servants will disobey their masters, there will be no more respect for the old, the young will demand to rule, work will seem a useless chore to all, everywhere songs will rise praising license, vice, dissolute liberty of behavior. And after that, rape, adultery, perjury, sins against nature will follow in a great wave, and disease, and soothsaying, and spells, and flying bodies will appear in the heavens, in the midst of the good Christians false prophets will rise, false apostles, corrupters, impostors, wizards, rapists, usurers, perjurers and falsifiers; the shepherds will turn into wolves, priests will lie, monks will desire things of this world, the poor will not hasten to the aid of their lords, the powerful will be without mercy, the just will bear witness to injustice. All cities will be shaken by earthquakes, there will be pestilence in every land, storm winds will uproot the earth, the fields will be contaminated, the sea will secrete black humors, new and strange wonders will take place upon the moon, the stars will abandon their courses, other stars—unknown—will furrow the sky, it will snow in summer, and in the winter the heat will be intense. And the times of the end will have come, and the end of time…

But is the unicorn a falsehood? It’s the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Christ, and for chastity; it can be captured only by setting a virgin in the forest, so that the animal, catching her most chaste odor, will go and lay its head in her lap, offering itself as prey to the hunter’s snares.

Hearing, a most excellent outward sense, “by which we learn and get knowledge.” His object is sound, or that which is heard; the medium, air; organ, the ear. To the sound, which is a collision of the air, three things are required: a body to strike, as the hand of a musician, the body strucken, which must be solid and able to resist, as a bell, lute-string, not wool, or sponge; the medium, the air, which is inward or outward; the outward, being struck or collided by a solid body, still strikes the next air, until it come to that inward natural air, which as an exquisite organ is contained in a little skin formed like a drum-head, and struck upon by certain small instruments like drum-sticks, conveys the sound by a pair of nerves, appropriated to that use, to the common sense, as to a judge of sounds. There is a great variety and much delight in them; for the knowledge of which consult with Boethius and other musicians.

I asked him what he was doing with a basilisk and he said that was his business.

And I could not help murmuring: “Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair. Thy hair is as a flock of goats that lie along the side of Mount Gilead; thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate, thy neck is like the tower of David whereon there hang a thousand bucklers.” And I asked myself, frightened and rapt, who was she who rose before me like the dawn, beautiful as the moon, radiant as the sun, terribilis ut castorum acies ordinata.

Really, as far at least as outward appearance and behavior went, there seemed scarcely fifty gentlemen among them; and those appeared ashamed and afraid of their position. ‘Twas, indeed, as though the scum that had risen to the simmering surface of the cauldron placed over the fierce fires of revolutionary ardor had been ladled off and flung on the floor of the House of Commons.

What is difficulty? Only a word indicating the degree of strength requisite for accomplishing particular objects; a mere notice of the necessity for exertion; a bugbear to children and fools; only a mere stimulus to men.

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.