There is nothing in England that exercises a more delightful spell over my imagination than the lingerings of the holiday customs and rural games of former times. They recall the pictures my fancy used to draw in the May morning of life, when as yet I only knew the world through books, and believed it to be all that poets had painted it; and they bring with them the flavour of those honest days of yore, in which, perhaps with equal fallacy, I am apt to think the world was more home-bred, social, and joyous than at present.

Young lawyers attend the courts, not because they have business there, but because they have no business.

Poetry had breathed over and sanctified the land.

Small minds are subdued by misfortunes, greater minds overcome them.

Men are always doomed to be duped, not so much by the arts of the other as by their own imagination. They are always wooing goddesses, and marrying mere mortals.

The Englishman is too apt to neglect the present good in preparing against the possible evil.

A father may turn his back on his child, … . but a mother's love endures through all.