Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.

It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.

I wish always to be quoted as George Eliot.

Shall we, because we walk on our hind feet, assume to ourselves only the privilege of imperishability?

It's all one web, sir. The prosperity of the country is one web.

There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.