Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

The hardest thing to attain... is the appreciation of difference without insisting on superiority.

But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time.

One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.

I do not think anything serious should be done after dinner, as nothing should be before breakfast.

But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do.