and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves as one, but every child was conducting itself like forty.

Captain Cuttle, like all mankind, little knew how much hope had survived within him under discouragement, until he felt its death-shock.

All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else's manufacture, is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make, as good money!

It's over, and can't be helped, and that's one consolation, as they always say in Turkey, when they cut the wrong man's head off.

Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.

…a lady of what is commonly called an uncertain temper --a phrase which being interpreted signifies a temper tolerably certain to make everybody more or less uncomfortable.

A dangerous quality, if real; and a not less dangerous one, if feigned.