The laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between king and cobbler, manager and call-boy; and, if haply your dates of life were conterminant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by cheek (O ignoble levelling of Death) with the shade of some recently departed candle-snuffer.

Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates; but they are unwholesome companions for grown people.

We do not go to the theatre like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm our experience of it.

I toiled after it, sir, as some men toil after virtue.

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

Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door.

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!