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.

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 If its business-use be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance.

What have I gained by health? Intolerable dullness. What by mode meals? A total blank.

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.

Judge not man by his outward manifestation of faith; for some there are who tremblingly reach out shaking hands to the guidance of faith; others who stoutly venture in the dark their human confidence, their leader, which they mistake for faith; some whose hope totters upon crutches; others who stalk into futurity upon stilts. The difference is chiefly constitutional with them.

And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls, Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.

A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of non pertinent correspondence, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of our prosperity.