Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Faerie Queen for a stopgap, or a volume of Bishop Andrews's Sermons?

Clap an extinguisher upon your irony if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it.

How I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked!

Satire does not look pretty upon a tombstone.

A presentation copy, reader,-if haply you are yet innocent of such favours-is a copy of a book which does not sell, sent you by the author.

Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it.

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.'