The hardest thing to attain... is the appreciation of difference without insisting on superiority.
George SaintsburyBut 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.
George SaintsburyOne 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.
George SaintsburyNothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.
George Saintsbury