A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game.

What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dullness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the old sundials! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished? If its business-use be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance.

Summer, as my friend Coleridge waggishly writes, has set in with its usual severity.

We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been.

A man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple dumplings.

I never knew an enemy to puns who was not an ill-natured man.

Dr Parr...asked him, how he had acquired his power of smoking at such a rate? Lamb replied, 'I toiled after it, sir, as some men toil after virtue.'