It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.

She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.

One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.

The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.

..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.

She is written in a foreign tongue.

In a play, certainly, the subject is of more importance than in any other work of art. Infelicity, triviality, vagueness of subject, may be outweighed in a poem, a novel, or a picture, by charm of manner, by ingenuity of execution; but in a drama the subject is of the essence of the work-it is the work. If it is feeble, the work can have no force; if it is shapeless, the work must be amorphous.