animal food
analytical v. synthetical reasoning: see the connection of ideas
authority
ideal beauty
brotherhood
cant
cheerfulness & wisdom
community wealth
the connection of ideas
conversation
a country gentleman's liberal pursuits and pastimes
dancing: see killing time
death and dead men
decay
decency & respectability
dining well
comparative disadvantage of Ancient Britons; see also progress
disappointment
discontent and antisociality
drinking
duty to one's country
education; see also science
education for females; see also love (and marriage)
fashionable readers & the arch enemy Time
folly & mischief
hunger
killing time see also fashionable readers
laughter
a good lawyer
gothic and modern literature (modern here equals early nineteenth century)
love (and marriage)
man
man & the world as it is
marriage as a lottery: see love (and marriage)
a happy marriage
might & right
misanthropy
misfortune & imprudence
misnomers
moral duty
supposition of motives
poetical audience
political oeconomy
practice v. theory
precedents & innovation
progress
readers of poetry
reading
rules in science
science
subtleties
taste and tastes
tea, late dinners and the French revolution: see connection of ideas and gothic literature
Time the arch enemy of fashionable readers
Time in Moore's Epicurean
Time killed by dancing
tourism
truth to nature
weather; see also conversation
a "wise and good man")

animals as food
. . . Mr Escot immediately pointed all the artillery of his eloquence, declaring the use of animal food, conjointly with that of fire, to be one of the principal causes of the present degeneracy of mankind. "The natural and original man," said he, "lived in the woods: the roots and fruits of the earth supplied his simple nutriment: he had few desires, and no diseases. But, when he began to sacrifice victims on the altar of superstition, to pursue the goat and the deer, and, by the pernicious invention of fire, to pervert their flesh into food, luxury, disease, and premature death were let loose upon the world. Such is clearly the correct interpretation of the fable of Prometheus, which is a symbolical portraiture of that disastrous epoch, when man first applied fire to culinary purposes, and thereby surrendered his liver to the vulture of disease. From that period the stature of mankind has been in a state of gradual diminution, and I have not the least doubt that it will continue to grow small by degrees, and lamentably less, till the whole race will vanish imperceptibly from the face of the earth."
  "I cannot agree," said Mr Foster, "in the consequences being so very disastrous. I admit, that in some respects the use of animal food retards, though it cannot materially inhibit, the perfectibility of the species. But the use of fire was indispensably necessary, as Aeschylus and Virgil expressly assert, to give being to the various arts of life, which, in their rapid and interminable progress, will finally conduct every individual of the race to the philosophic pinnacle of pure and perfect felicity."
  "In the controversy concerning animal and vegetable food," said Mr Jenkison, "there is much to be said on both sides; and, the question being in equipoise, I content myself with a mixed diet, and make a point of eating whatever is placed before me, provided it be good in its kind."
  In this opinion his two brother philosophers practicaIly coincided, though they both ran down the theory as highly detrimental to the best interests of man.
---Headlong Hall, Chap. II

authority
              THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN:
. . . On the whole, I agree in opinion with Theseus, that there is more good than evil in the world.

              MRS OPIMIAN:
I think, Doctor, you would not maintain any opinion if you had not an authority two thousand years old for it.

              THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN:
Well, my dear, I think most opinions worth maintaining have an authority of about that age.
---Gryll Grange, Chap. VII.

ideal beauty
". . . . Ideal beauty is not the mind's creation: it is real beauty, refined and purified in the mind's alembic, from the alloy which always more or less accompanies it in our mixed and imperfect nature. But still the gold exists in a very ample degree. To expect too much is a disease in the expectant, for which human nature is not responsible; and, in the common name of humanity, I protest against these false and mischievous ravings. To rail against humanity for not being abstract perfection, and against human love for not realising all the splendid visions of the poets of chivalry, is to rail at the summer for not being all sunshine, and at the rose for not being always in bloom." . . . .
"But to make ideal beauty the shadow in the water, and, like the dog in the fable, to throw away the substance in catching at the shadow, is scarcely the characteristic of wisdom, whatever it may be of genius."
---Mr Hilary, in Nightmare Abbey, Chap. XI.

brotherhood
              THE REVEREND DOCTOR FOLLIOTT:
Sir, we are all brethren.

              MR CROTCHET:
Yes, sir, as the hangman is of the thief; the 'squire of the poacher; the judge of the libeller; the lawyer of his client; the statesman of his colleague; the bubble-blower of the bubble-buyer; the slave-driver of the negro: as these are brethren, so am I and the worthies in question.

              THE REVEREND DOCTOR FOLLIOTT:
To be sure, sir, in these instances, and in many others, the term brother must be taken in its utmost latitude of interpretation: we are all brothers, nevertheless. . . .
---Crotchet Castle, Chap. VII.

cant
"Sir, ancient sculpture is the true school of modesty. But where the Greeks had modesty, we have cant; where they had poetry, we have cant; where they had patriotism, we have cant; where they had any thing that exalts, delights, or adorns humanity, we have nothing but cant, cant, cant. And, sir, to show my contempt for cant in all its shapes, I have adorned my house with the Greek Venus, in all her shapes, and am ready to fight her battle against all the societies that ever were instituted for the suppression of truth and beauty."
---Mr Crotchet, in Crotchet Castle, Chap. VII.

cheerfulness & wisdom
". . . . I will say, too, that the highest wisdom and the highest genius have been invariably accompanied with cheerfulness. We have sufficient proofs on record that Shakspeare and Socrates were the most festive of companions. But now the little wisdom and genius we have seem to be entering into a conspiracy against cheerfulness."
---Mr Hilary, in Nightmare Abbey, Chap. XI.

community wealth
". . . riches are not the object for a community to aim at. I say, the nation is best off, in relation to other nations, which has the greatest quantity of the common necessaries of life distributed among the greatest number of persons; which has the greatest number of honest hearts and stout arms united in a common interest, willing to offend no one, but ready to fight in defence of their own community against all the rest of the world, because they have something in it worth fighting for. The moment you admit that one class of things, without any reference to what they respectively cost, is better worth having than another; that a smaller commercial value, with one mode of distribution, is better than a greater commercial value, with another mode of distribution; the whole of that curious fabric of postulates and dogmas, which you call the science of political economy, and which I call politicæ oeconomiæ inscientia, tumbles to pieces."
---The Rev. Dr Folliott, in Crotchet Castle, Chap. X.

the connection of ideas
              THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS:
Tea, late dinners, and the French Revolution. I cannot exactly see the connection of ideas.

              MR FLOSKY:
I should be sorry if you could; I pity the man who can see the connection of his own ideas. Still more do I pity him, the connection of whose ideas any other person can see. Sir, the great evil is, that there is too much commonplace light in our moral and political literature; and light is a great enemy to mystery, and mystery is a great friend to enthusiasm. Now the enthusiasm for abstract truth is an exceedingly fine thing, as long as the truth, which is the object of the enthusiasm, is so completely abstract as to be altogether out of the reach of the human faculties; and, in that sense, I have myself an enthusiasm for truth, but in no other, for the pleasure of metaphysical investigation lies in the means, not in the end; and if the end could be found, the pleasure of the means would cease. The mind, to be kept in health, must be kept in exercise. The proper exercise of the mind is elaborate reasoning. Analytical reasoning is a base and mechanical process, which takes to pieces and examines, bit by bit, the rude material of knowledge, and extracts therefrom a few hard and obstinate things called facts, every thing in the shape of which I cordially hate. But synthetical reasoning, setting up as its goal some unattainable abstraction, like an imaginary quantity in algebra, and commencing its course with taking for granted some two assertions which cannot be proved, from the union of these two assumed truths produces a third assumption, and so on in infinite series, to the unspeakable benefit of the human intellect. The beauty of this process is, that at every step it strikes out into two branches, in a compound ratio of ramification; so that you are perfectly sure of losing your way, and keeping your mind in perfect health, by the perpetual exercise of an interminable quest; and for these reasons I have christened my eldest son Emanuel Kant Flosky.
---Nightmare Abbey, Chap. VI.

conversation
  Elphin was desirous to protract the conversation, and this very desire took from him the power of speaking to the purpose. He paused for a moment to collect his ideas, and Angharad stood still, in apparent expectation that he would show symptoms of following, in compliance with her invitation.
  In this interval of silence, he heard the loud dashing of the sea, and the blustering of the wind through the apertures of the walls.
  This supplied him with what has been, since Britain was Britain, the alpha and omega of British conversation. He said, "It seems a stormy night."
---The Misfortunes of Elphin, Chap. III.

a country gentleman's liberal pursuits and pastimes
[Mr Crotchet] could not become, like a true-born English squire, part and parcel of the barley-giving earth; he could not find in game-bagging, poacher-shooting, trespasser pounding, footpath-stopping, common-enclosing, rack-renting, and all the other liberal pursuits and pastimes which make a country gentleman an ornament to the world, and a blessing to the poor; he could not find in these valuable and amiable occupations, and in a corresponding range of ideas, nearly commensurate with that of the great King Nebuchadnezzar, when he was turned out to grass; he could not find in this great variety of useful action, and vast field of comprehensive thought, modes of filling up his time that accorded with his Caledonian instinct."
---Crotchet Castle, Chap. I.

death and dead men
  "Seithenyn," said Taliesin, "has slept twenty years under the waters of the western sea, as King Gwythno's Lamentations have made known to all Britain."
  "They have not made it know to me," said Seithenyn, "for the best of all reasons, that one can only know the truth; for, if that which we think we know is not truth, it is something which we do not know. A man cannot know his own death; for, while he knows any thing, he is alive; at least, I never heard of a dead man who knew any thing, or pretended to know any thing: if he had so pretended, I should have told him to his face he was no dead man."
  "Your mode of reasoning," said Taliesin, "unquestionably corresponds with what I have heard of Seithenyn's: but how is it possible Seithenyn can be living?"
  "Every thing that is, is possible, says Catog the Wise; "answered Seithenyn, with a look of great sapience. "I will give you proof that I am not a dead man; for, they say, dead men tell no tales: now I will tell you a tale, and a very interesting one it is. . . .
---The Misfortunes of Elphin, Chap. XI.

decay
  "Prince Seithenyn," said Elphin, "I have visited you on a subject of deep moment. Reports have been brought to me, that the embankment, which has been so long intrusted to your care, is in a state of dangerous decay."
  "Decay," said Seithenyn, "is one thing, and danger is another. Every thing that is old must decay. That the embankment is old, I am free to confess; that it is somewhat rotten in parts, I will not altogether deny; that it is any the worse for that, I do most sturdily gainsay. It does its business well: it works well: it keeps out the water from the land, and it lets in the wine upon the High Commission of Embankment. Cupbearer, fill. Our ancestors were wiser than we: they built it in their wisdom; and, if we should be so rash as to try to mend it, we should only mar it."
  "The stonework," said Teithrin, "is sapped and mined: the piles are rotten, broken, and dislocated: the floodgates and sluices are leaky and creaky."
  "That is the beauty of it," said Seithenyn. "Some parts of it are rotten, and some parts of it are sound."
  "It is well," said Elphin, "that some parts are sound: it were better that all were so."
  "So I have heard some people say before," said Seithenyn; "perverse people, blind to venerable antiquity: that very unamiable sort of people, who are in the habit of indulging their reason. But I say, the parts that are rotten give elasticity to those that are sound: they give them elasticity, elasticity, elasticity. If it were all sound, it would break by its own obstinate stiffness: the soundness is checked by the rottenness, and the stiffness is balanced by the elasticity. There is nothing so dangerous as innovation. See the waves in the equinoctial storms, dashing and clashing, roaring and pouring, spattering and battering, rattling and battling against it. I would not be so presumptuous as to say, I could build any thing that would stand against them half an hour; and here this immortal old work, which God forbid the finger of modern mason should bring into jeopardy, this immortal work has stood for centuries, and will stand for centuries more, if we let it alone. It is well: it works well: let well alone. Cupbearer, fill. It was half rotten when I was born, and that is a conclusive reason why it should be three parts rotten when I die."
---The Misfortunes of Elphin, Chap. II.

decency & respectability
              THE HONOURABLE MRS PINMONEY:
Who is that very bright-eyed wild-looking young man?

              SIR TELEGRAPH PAXARETT:
That is my old acquaintance and fellow-collegian, Sylvan Forester, now of Redrose Abbey, in this county.

              THE HONOURABLE MRS PINMONEY:
Is he respectable?

              SIR TELEGRAPH PAXARETT:
He has a good estate, if you mean that.

              THE HONOURABLE MRS PINMONEY:
To be sure I mean that. . . .
---Melincourt. Chap. XV

              THE STRANGER:
Good and respectable, sir, I take it, mean rich?

              THE REVEREND DOCTOR FOLLIOTT:
That is their meaning, sir.
---Crotchet Castle, Chap. III.

              CAPTAIN FITZCHROME:
Many decent families are maintained on smaller means.

              LADY CLARINDA:
Decent families: aye, decent is the distinction from respectable. Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent. And then your decent family always lives in a snug little place: I hate a little place; I like large rooms and large looking-glasses, and large parties, and a fine large butler, with a tinge of smooth red in his face; an outward and visible sign that the family he serves is respectable; if not noble, highly respectable.
---ibid.

dining well
[Mr Gryll] like to dine well, and withal to dine quietly, and to have quiet friends at his table with whom he could discuss questions which might afford ample room for pleasant conversation, and none for acrimonious dispute.
---Gryll Grange, Chap. II.

comparative disadvantage of Ancient Britons
. . . The [ancient Britons] lived in darkness and vassalage. They were lost in the grossness of beef and ale. They had no pamphleteering societies to demonstrate that reading and writing are better than meat and drink; and they were utterly destitute of the blessings of those "schools for all," the house of correction, and the treadmill, wherein the autochthonal justice of our agrestic kakistocracy now castigates the heinous sins which were then committed with impunity, of treading on old foot-paths, picking up dead wood, and moving on the face of the earth within sound of the whirr of a partridge..
---The Misfortunes of Elphin, Chap. VI.

disappointment
"We are all born to disappointment. It is as well to be prospective. Our happiness is not in what is, but in what is to be. We may be disappointed in our everyday realities, and if not, we may make an ideality of the unattainable, and quarrel with Nature for not giving what she has not to give. It is unreasonable to be so disappointed, but it is disappointment not the less."
---Mr Falconer in Gryll Grange, Chap. IV.

discontent and antisociality
              MR ASTERIAS:
. . . A gloomy brow and a tragical voice seem to have been of late the characteristics of fashionable manners: and a morbid, withering, deadly, antisocial sirocco, loaded with moral and political despair, breathes through all the groves and valleys of the modern Parnassus; while science moves on in the calm dignity of its course, affording to youth delights equally pure and vivid to maturity, calm and grateful occupation--to old age, the most pleasing recollections and inexhaustible materials of agreeable and salutary reflection; and, while its votary enjoys the disinterested pleasure of enlarging the intellect and increasing the comforts of society, he is himself independent of the caprices of human intercourse and the accidents of human fortune. Nature is his great and inexhaustible treasure. His days are always too short for his enjoyment: ennui is a stranger to his door. At peace with the world and with his own mind, he suffices to himself, makes all around him happy, and the close of his pleasing and beneficial existence is the evening of a beautiful day.

              THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS:
Really I should like very well to lead such a life myself, but the exertion would be too much for me. Besides, I have been at college. I contrive to get through my day by sinking the morning in bed, and killing the evening in company; dressing and dining in the intermediate space, and stopping the chinks and crevices of the few vacant moments that remain with a little easy reading. And that amiable discontent and antisociality which you reprobate in our present drawing-room-table literature, I find, I do assure you, a very fine mental tonic, which reconciles me to my favourite pursuit of doing nothing, by showing me that nobody is worth doing any thing for.
---Nightmare Abbey, Chap. VII.

drinking
"When I open the bottle, I shut the book of Numbers. There are two reasons for drinking: one is, when you are thirsty, to cure it; the other, when you are not thirsty, to prevent it. The first is obvious, mechanical, and plebeian; the second is most refined, abstract, prospicient, and canonical. I drink by anticipation of thirst that may be. Prevention is better than cure. Wine is the elixir of life. 'The soul,' says St. Augustine, 'cannot live in drought.' What is death? Dust and Ashes. There is nothing so dry. What is life? Spirit. What is spirit? Wine. "
---The Reverend Mr Portpipe in Melincourt, Chap. XVI.

              MR GLOWRY:
You are leaving England, Mr Cypress. There is a delightful melancholy in saying farewell to an old acquaintance, when the chances are twenty to one against ever meeting again. A smiling bumper to a sad parting, and let us all be unhappy together.

              MR CYPRESS (filling a bumper):
This is the only social habit that the disappointed spirit never unlearns.

              THE REVEREND MR LARYNX (filling):
It is the only piece of academical learning that the finished educatee retains.

              MR FLOSKY (filling):
It is the only objective fact which the sceptic can realise.

              SCYTHROP (filling):
It is the only styptic for a bleeding heart.

              THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS (filling):
It is the only trouble that is very well worth taking.

              MR ASTERIAS (filling):
It is the only key of conversational truth.

              MR TOOBAD (filling):
It is the only antidote to the great wrath of the devil.

              MR HILARY (filling):
It is the only symbol of perfect life. The inscription 'HIC NON BIBITUR' will suit nothing but a tombstone.
---Nightmare Abbey, Chap. XI.

  Elphin and Teithrin stood some time on the floor of the hall before they attracted the attention of Seithenyn, who, during the chorus, was tossing and flourishing his golden goblet. The chorus had scarcely ended when he noticed them, and immediately roared aloud, "You are welcome all four."
  Elphin answered, "We thank you: we are but two."
  "Two or four," said Seithenyn, "all is one. You are welcome all. When a stranger enters, the custom in other places is to begin by washing his feet. My custom is, to begin by washing his throat. Seithenyn ap Seithyn Saidi bids you welcome."
---The Misfortunes of Elphin, Chap. II.

          Not drunk is he who from the floor
          Can rise alone and still drink more,
          But drunk is he who prostrate lies
          Without the power to drink or rise.
---ibid., Chap. III.

. . . the stranger approached [Taliesin] with a golden goblet, which he had just replenished with the choicest wine of the vaults of Dinas Vawr, and pronounced the oracular monosyllable, "Drink!" to which he subjoined emphatically "GWIN O EUR: Wine from gold. That is my taste. Ale is well; mead is better; wine is best. Horn is well; silver is better; gold is best."
  Taliesin, who had been very abstemious during the evening, took the golden goblet, and drank to please the inviter; in the hope that he would become communicative, and satisfy the curiosity his appearance had raised.
  The stranger sat down near him, evidently in that amiable state of semi-intoxication which inflates the head, warms the heart, lifts up the veil of the inward man, and sets the tongue flying, or rather tripping, in the double sense of nimbleness and titubancy.
---ibid., Chap. XI.

duty to one's country
"Sir, I have quarrelled with my wife; and a man who has quarrelled with his wife is absolved from all duty to his country. I have written an ode to tell the people as much, and they may take it as they list.."
---Mr Cypress, in Nightmare Abbey, Chap. XI.

education
"Education! Well, sir, I have no doubt schools for all are just as fit for the species salmo salar as for the genus homo. But you must allow, that the specimen before us has finished his education in a manner that does honour to his college. However, I doubt that the salmo salar is only one species, that is to say, precisely alike in all localities. I hold that every river has its own breed, with essential differences; in flavour especially. And as for the human mind, I deny that it is the same in all men. I hold that there is every variety of natural capacity from the idiot to Newton and Shakspere; the mass of mankind, midway between these extremes, being blockheads of different degrees; education leaving them pretty nearly as it found them, with this single difference, that it gives a fixed direction to their stupidity, a sort of incurable wry neck to the thing they call their understanding. So one nose points always east, and another always west, and each is ready to swear that it points due north."
---The Reverend Dr Folliott in Crotchet Castle, Chap. IV.

              MR MACQUEDY:
. . . I say, cutting off idiots, who have no minds at all, all minds are by nature alike. Education (which begins from their birth) makes them what they are.

              THE REVEREND DOCTOR FOLLIOTT:
No, sir, it makes their tendencies, not their power. Cæsar would have been the first wrestler on the village common. Education might have made him a Nadir Shah; it might also have made him a Washington; it could not have made him a merry-andrew, for our newspapers to extol as a model of eloquence.
---ibid.

"If all the nonsense which, in the last quarter of a century, has been talked on all other subjects, were thrown into one scale, and all that has been talked on the subject of education alone were thrown into the other, I think the latter would preponderate"
---The Reverend Dr Opimian in Gryll Grange, Chap. XIX.

education for females
Mr Cranium now walked up to Mr Panscope, to condole with him on the disappointment of their mutual hopes. Mr Panscope begged him not to distress himself on the subject, observing, that the monotonous system of female education brought every individual of the sex to so remarkable an approximation of similarity, that no wise man would suffer himself to be annoyed by a loss so easily repaired; and that there was much truth, though not much elegance, in a remark which he had heard made on a similar occasion by a post-captain of his acquaintance, "that there was never a fish taken out of the sea, but left another as good behind."
---Headlong Hall, Chap. XIV.

[Anthelia's ] father, Sir Henry Melincourt, a man of great acquirements, and of a retired disposition, devoted himself in solitude to the cultivation of his daughter's understanding; for he was one of those who maintained the heretical notion that women are, or at least may be, rational beings; though, from the great pains usually taken in what is called education to make them otherwise, there are unfortunately very few examples to warrant the truth of the theory.
---Melincourt, Chap. I.

"The conduct of men, in this respect, is very much like that of a gardener who should plant a plot of ground with merely ornamental flowers, and then pass sentence on the soil for not bearing substantial fruit. If women are treated only as pretty dolls, and dressed in all the fripperies of irrational education; if the vanity of personal adornment and superficial accomplishments be made from their earliest years to suppress all mental aspirations, and to supersede all thoughts of intellectual beauty, is it to be inferred that they are incapable of better things? But such is the usual logic of tyranny, which first places its exstinguisher on the flame, and then argues that it cannot burn.
---Mr Forester in ibid., Chap. XV.

fashionable readers & the arch enemy Time
The fashionable metropolitan winter, which begins in spring and ends in autumn, is the season of happy reunion to those ornamental varieties of the human species who live to be amused for the benefit of social order. It is the period of the general muster, the levy en masse of gentlemen in stays and ladies in short petticoats against their arch enemy Time. It is the season of operas and exhibitions, of routs and concerts, of dinners at midnight and suppers at sunrise. But these are the arms with which they assail the enemy in battalion: there are others with which in moments of morning solitude they are compelled to encounter him single-handed: and one of these weapons is the reading of light and easy books which command attention without the labour of application, and amuse the idleness of fancy without disturbing the sleep of understanding.
  This species of literature, which aims only to amuse and must be very careful not to instruct, had never so many purveyors as at present: for there never was any state of society in which there were so many idle persons as there are at present in England, and it happens that these idle persons are for the most part so circumstanced that they can do nothing if they would, and in the next place that they are united in the links of a common interest which, being based in delusion, makes them even more averse than the well-dressed vulgar always are from the free exercise of reason and the bold investigation of truth.
---the unfinished "Essay on Fashionable Literature."

folly & mischief
"Folly and mischief," said Mr Fax, "are very nearly allied; and no where more conspicuously than in the forms of the law."
---Melincourt, Chap. XV.

hunger
"Very well," said King Arthur; "and for the present, illuminate Bedevere with your art, to assist him in procuring us a supper, for none of us has eaten anything since we were killed."
---Calidore, Chap. III.

killing time
". . . The Indian dances to prepare himself for killing his enemy: but while the beaux and belles of our assemblies dance, they are in the very act of killing theirs--TIME!--a more inveterate and formidable foe than any the Indian has to contend with; for, however completely and ingeniously killed, he is sure to rise again, 'with twenty mortal murders on his crown,'* leading his army of blue devils, with ennui in the van, and vapours in the rear."
---Mr Jenkison in Headlong Hall, Chap. XIII.

laughter
". . . you are welcome to laugh if it so please you. None shall laugh in my company, though it be at my expense, but I will have my share of the merriment. The world is a stage, and life is a farce, and he that laughs most has most profit of the performance. The worst thing is good enough to be laughed at, though it be good for nothing else; and the best thing, though it be good for something else, is good for nothing better."
---Brother Michael in Maid Marian, Chap. XVI.

a good lawyer
"The lawyer who employed me had chosen his profession very injudiciously, for he was an honest and benevolent man."
---Desmond in Melincourt, Chap. XVI.

literature, gothic and modern
"It is very certain, and much to be rejoiced at, that our literature is hag-ridden. Tea has shattered our nerves; late dinners make us slaves of indigestion; the French Revolution has made us shrink from the name of philosophy, and has destroyed, in the more refined part of the community (of which number I am one), all enthusiasm for political liberty. That part of the reading public which shuns the solid food of reason for the light diet of fiction, requires a perpetual adhibition of sauce piquante to the palate of its depraved imagination. It lived upon ghosts, goblins, and skeletons (I and my friend Mr Sackbut served up a few of the best), till even the devil himself, though magnified to the size of Mount Athos, became too base, common, and popular, for its surfeited appetite. The ghosts have therefore been laid, and the devil has been cast into outer darkness, and now the delight of our spirits is to dwell on all the vices and blackest passions of our nature, tricked out in a masquerade dress of heroism and disappointed benevolence; the whole secret of which lies in forming combinations that contradict all our experience, and affixing the purple shred of some particular virtue to that precise character, in which we should be most certain not to find it in the living world; and making this single virtue not only redeem all the real and manifest vices of the character, but make them actually pass for necessary adjuncts, and indispensable accompaniments and characteristics of the said virtue."
---Mr Flosky in Nightmare Abbey, Chap. VI.

              MR FLOSKY:
This rage for novelty is the bane of literature. Except my works and those of my particular friends, nothing is good that is not as old as Jeremy Taylor: and, entre nous, the best parts of my friends' books were either written or suggested by myself.

              THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS:
Sir, I reverence you. But I must say, modern books are very consolatory and congenial to my feelings. There is, as it were, a delightful north-east wind, an intellectual blight breathing through them; a delicious misanthropy and discontent, that demonstrates the nullity of virtue and energy, and puts me in good humour with myself and my sofa.

              MR FLOSKY:
Very true, sir. Modern literature is a north-east wind---a blight of the human soul. I take credit to myself for having helped to make it so. The way to produce fine fruit is to blight the flower. You call this a paradox. Marry, so be it. Ponder thereon.
---ibid., Chap. V.

love (and marriage)
At the house of Mr Hilary, Scythrop first saw the beautiful Miss Emily Girouette. He fell in love; which is nothing new. He was favourably received; which is nothing strange. Mr Glowry and Mr Girouette had a meeting on the occasion, and quarrelled about the terms of the bargain; which is neither new nor strange. The lovers were torn asunder, weeping and vowing everlasting constancy; and, in three weeks after this tragical event, the lady was led a smiling bride to the altar, by the Honourable Mr Lackwit; which is neither strange nor new.
---Nightmare Abbey, Chap. I.

. . . [Scythrop's] father, to comfort him, read him a Commentary on Ecclesiastes, which he had himself composed, and which demonstrated incontrovertibly that all is vanity. He insisted particularly on the text, "One man among a thousand have I found, but a woman amongst all those have I not found."
  "How could he expect it," said Scythrop, "when the whole thousand were locked up in his seraglio? His experience is no precedent for a free state of society like that in which we live."
  "Locked up or at large," said Mr Glowry, "the result is the same: their minds are always locked up, and vanity and interest keep the key. I speak feelingly, Scythrop."
  "I am sorry for it, sir," said Scythrop. "But how is it that their minds are locked up? The fault is in their artificial education, which studiously models them into mere musical dolls, to be set out for sale in the great toy-shop of society."
  "To be sure," said Mr Glowry, "their education is not so well finished as yours has been; and your idea of a musical doll is good. I bought one myself, but it was confoundedly out of tune; but, whatever be the cause, Scythrop, the effect is certainly this, that one is pretty nearly as good as another, as far as any judgment can be formed of them before marriage. It is only after marriage that they show their true qualities, as I know by bitter experience. Marriage is, therefore, a lottery, and the less choice and selection a man bestows on his ticket the better; for, if he has incurred considerable pains and expense to obtain a lucky number, and his lucky number proves a blank, he experiences not a simple, but a complicated disappointment; the loss of labour and money being superadded to the disappointment of drawing a blank, which, constituting simply and entirely the grievance of him who has chosen his ticket at random, is, from its simplicity, the more endurable." This very excellent reasoning was thrown away upon Scythrop, who retired to his tower as dismal and disconsolate as before.
---ibid..

[Mr. Falconer thought] that, even in the midst of love's most dire perplexities, dry clothes and a good fire are better than a hole in the snow.
---Gryll Grange., Chap. XXX.

". . . love is such a capricious thing, that to be the subject of it is no proof of superior merit. There are inexplicable affinities of sympathy, that make up an irresistible attraction, heaven know how."
---Miss Niphet, in ibid., Chap. XXX.

man
". . . philosophers in all ages have found it a task of infinite difficulty to give him a definition. Hence one has defined him to be a featherless biped, a definition which is equally applicable to an unfledged fowl: another to be an animal which forms opinions, than which nothing can be more inaccurate, for a very small number of the species form opinions, and the remainder take them upon trust, without investigation or inquiry.
  "Again man has been defined to be an animal that carries a stick: an attribute which undoubtedly belongs to man only, but not to all men always; though it uniformly characterises some of the graver and more imposing varieties, such as physicians, oran-outangs, and lords in waiting.
  "We cannot define man to be a reasoning animal, for we do not dispute that idiots are men; to say nothing of that very numerous description of persons who consider themselves reasoning animals, and are so denominated by the ironical courtesy of the world, who labour, nevertheless, under a very gross delusion in that essential particular.
  "It appears to me, that man may be correctly defined an animal, which, without any peculiar or distinguishing faculty of its own, is, as it were, a bundle or compound of faculties of other animals, by a distinct enumeration of which any individual of the species may be satisfactorily described. This is manifest, even in the ordinary language of conversation, when, in summing up, for example, the qualities of an accomplished courtier, we say he has the vanity of a peacock, the cunning of a fox, the treachery of an hyæna, the cold-heartedness of a cat, and the servility of a jackal. That this is perfectly consentaneous to scientific truth, will appear in the further progress of these observations."
---Mr Cranium in Headlong Hall, Chap. XII.

man & the world as it is
"To reconcile man as he is to the world as it is, to preserve and improve all that is good, and destroy or alleviate all that is evil, in physical and moral nature--have been the hope and aim of the greatest teachers and ornaments of our species."
---Mr Hilary, in Nightmare Abbey, Chap. XI.

a happy marriage
              MR FALCONER:
I presume, Doctor, from the complacency with which you speak of Love, you have no cause to complain of him.

              THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN:
Quite the contrary. I have been an exception to the rule that "The course of true love never did run smooth." Nothing could run more smooth than mine. I was in love. I proposed. I was accepted. No crossings before. No bickering after. I drew a prize in the lottery of marriage.

              MR FALCONER:
It strikes me, Doctor, that the lady may say as much.

              THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN:
I have made it my study to give her cause to say so. And I have found my reward.
---Gryll Grange, Chap. XII

might & right
              THE ABBOT:
. . . how shall [Arthur's] arms prosper against the common enemy, if he be forced to turn them on the children of his own land for the recovery of his own wife?

              MELVAS:
What do you mean by his own? That which he has, is his own: but that which I have, is mine. I have the wife in question, and some of the land. Therefore they are mine.

              THE ABBOT:
Not so. The land is yours under fealty to him.

              MELVAS:
As much fealty as I please, or he can force me, to give him.

              THE ABBOT:
His wife, at least, is most lawfully his.

              MELVAS:
The winner makes the law, and his law is always against the loser. I am so far the winner; and, by my own law, she is lawfully mine.

              THE ABBOT:
There is a law above all human law, by which she is his.

              MELVAS:
From that it is for you to absolve me; and I dispense my bounty according to your indulgence.

              THE ABBOT:
There are limits we must not pass.

              MELVAS:
You set up your landmark, and I set up mine. They are both moveable.

              THE ABBOT:
The Church has not been niggardly in its indulgences to King Melvas.

              MELVAS:
Nor King Melvas in his gifts to the Church.

              THE ABBOT:
But, setting aside this consideration, I would treat it as a question of policy.

              SEITHENYN:
Now you talk sense. Right without might is the lees of an old barrel, without a drop of the original liquor.

              THE ABBOT:
I would appeal to you, King Melvas, by your love to your common country, by your love of the name of Britain, by your hatred of the infidel Saxons, by your respect of the character of Arthur; will you let your passion for a woman, even though she be a second Helen, frustrate, or even impede, the great cause, of driving these spoilers from a land in which they have no right even to breathe?

              MELVAS:
They have a right to do all they do, and to have all they have. If we can drive them out, they will then have no right here. Have not you and I a right to this good wine, which seems to trip very merrily over your ghostly palate? I got it by seizing a good ship, and throwing the crew overboard, just to remove them out of the way, because they were troublesome. They disputed my right, but I taught them better. I taught them a great moral lesson, though they had not much time to profit by it. If they had had the might to throw me overboard, I should not have troubled myself about their right, any more, or, at any rate, any longer, than they did about mine.
---The Misfortunes of Elphin, Chap. XIV.

misanthropy
Misanthropy is sometimes the product of disappointed benevolence; but it is more frequently the offspring of overweening and mortified vanity, quarrelling with the world for not being better treated than it deserves.
---Mr Hilary in Nightmare Abbey, Chap. VII.

misfortune & imprudence
[Mr Forester said:] "To assert that the unfortunate must necessarily have been imprudent, is to furnish an excuse to the cold-hearted and illiberal selfishness of a state of society, which needs no motive superadded to its own miserable marrow-mindedness, to produce the almost total extinction of benevolence and sympathy. Good and evil fortune depend so much on the combinations of external circumstances, that the utmost skill and industry cannot command success; neither is the result of the most imprudent actions always fatal:

     Our indiscretions sometimes serve us well,
     When our deep plots do pall. {Hamlet., V. ii.]."
---Melincourt, Chap. XII.

misnomers
"I am afraid we live in a world of misnomers . . . . In my experience I have found that a gang of swindling bankers is a respectable old firm; that men who sell their votes to the highest bidder, and want only 'the protection of the ballot' to sell the promise of them to both parties, are a free and happy constituency; that a man who successively betrays everybody that trusts him, and abandons every principle he ever professed, is a great statesman, and a Conservative, forsooth, a nil conservando; that schemes for breeding pestilence are sanitary improvements; that the test of intellectual capacity is in swallow, and not in digestion; that the art of teaching everything, except what will be of use to the recipient, is national eduction; and that a change for the worse is reform."
---Mr Gryll in Gryll Grange, Chap. I.

moral duty
"If, in any form of human society, any one human being dies of hunger, while another wastes or consumes in the wantonness of vanity as much as would have preserved his existence, I hold that second man guilty of the death of the first."

"Yet what is human society but one great family? What is moral duty, but that precise line of conduct which tends to promote the greatest degree of general happiness? And is not this duty most flagrantly violated, when one man appropriates to himself the subsistence of twelve; while, perhaps in his immediate neighbourhood, eleven of his fellow beings are dying of hunger? I have seen such a man walk with a demure face into church, as regularly as if the Sunday bell had been a portion of his corporeal mechanism, to hear a bloated and beneficed sensualist hold forth on the text of Do as ye would be done by, or Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me: whereas, if he had wished his theory to coincide with his practice he would have chosen for his text, Behold a man gluttonous, and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners: and when the duty of words was over, the auditor and his ghostly advisor, issuing forth together, have committed poor Lazarus to the care of Providence, and proceeded to feast in the lordly mansions, like Dives that lived in purple."
---Mr Forester in Melicourt, Chap. XXIV

supposition of motives
              THE REVEREND DOCTOR OPIMIAN:
. . . The world is not over charitable.

              MR FALCONER:
The world will never suppose a good motive where it can suppose a bad one. I would not willingly offend any of its prejudices. I would not affect eccentricity. At the same time, I do not feel disposed to be put out of my way because it is not the way of the world . . . .
---Gryll Grange, Chap. IV

poetical audience
The truth, I am convinced, is that there is no longer a poetical audience among the higher class of minds, that moral, political, and physical science have entirely withdrawn from poetry the attention of all whose attention is worth having; and that the poetical reading public being composed of the mere dregs of the intellectual community, the most sufficing passport to their favour must rest on the mixture of a little easily-intelligible portion of mawkish sentiment with an absolute negation of reason and knowledge.
---letter to Shelley, 4 December, 1820.

political oeconomy
              MR MACQUEDY:
Next, you must all learn political economy, which I will teach you, very compendiously, in lectures over the bottle.

              THE REVEREND DOCTOR FOLLIOTT:
I hate lectures over the bottle. But pray, sir, what is political economy?

              MR MACQUEDY:
Political economy is to the state what domestic economy is to the family.

              THE REVEREND DOCTOR FOLLIOTT:
No such thing, sir. In the family there is a paterfamilias, who regulates the distribution, and takes care that there shall be no such thing in the household as one dying of hunger, while another dies of surfeit. In the state it is all hunger at one end, and all surfeit at the other. Matchless claret, Mr Crotchet.

              MR CROTCHET:
Vintage of fifteen, doctor.

              MR MACQUEDY:
The family consumes, and so does the state.
              THE REVEREND DOCTOR FOLLIOTT:
Consumes, sir! Yes: but the mode, the proportions; there is the essential difference between the state and the family. Sir, I hate false analogies.
---Crotchet Castle, Chap. VI.

practice v. theory
              MR SARCASTIC:
Nothing, you well know, is so rare as the coincidence of theory and practice. A man who "will go through fire and water to serve a friend" in words, will not give five guineas to save him from famine. A poet will write Odes to Independence, and become the obsequious parasite of any great man who will hire him. A burgess will hold up one hand for purity of election, while the price of his own vote is slily dropped into the other. I need not accumulate instances.

              MR FORESTER:
You would find it difficult, I fear, to adduce many to the contrary.

              MR SARCASTIC:
This then is my system. I ascertain the practice of those I talk to, and present it to them as from myself, in the shape of theory: the consequence of which is, that I am universally stigmatized as a promulgator of rascally doctrines. Thus I said to Sir Oliver Oilcake, "When I get into Parliament I intend to make the sale of my vote as notorious as the sun at noonday. I will have no rule of right, but my own pocket. I will support every measure of every administration, even if they ruin half the nation for the purpose of restoring the Great Lama, or of subjecting twenty millions of people to be hanged, drawn and quartered at the pleasure of the man-milliner of Mahomet's mother. I will have ship-loads of turtle and rivers of Madeira for myself, if I send the whole swinish multitude to draff and husks." Sir Oliver flew into a rage, and swore he would hold no further intercourse with a man who maintained such infamous principles.

              MR HIPPY:
Pleasant enough to show a man his own picture, and make him damn the ugly rascal.

              MR SARCASTIC:
I said to Miss Pennylove, whom I knew to be laying herself out for a good match, "When my daughter becomes of marriageable age, I shall commission Christie to put her up to auction, 'the highest bidder to be the buyer; and if any dispute arise between two or more bidders, the lot to be put up again and resold'" Miss Pennylove professed herself utterly amazed and indignant, that any man, and a father especially, should imagine a scheme so outrageous to the dignity and delicacy of the female mind.

              THE HONOURABLE MRS PINMONEY, AND MISS DANARETTA:
A most horrid idea, certainly.

              MR SARCASTIC:
The fact, my dear ladies, the fact: how stands the fact? Miss Pennylove afterwards married a man old enough to be her grandfather, for no other reason, but because he was rich; and broke the heart of a very worthy friend of mine, to whom she had been previously engaged, who had no fault but the folly of loving her, and she was quite rich enough for all purposes of matrimonial happiness. How the dignity and delicacy of such a person could have been affected, if the preliminary negotiation with her hobbling Strephon had been conducted through the instrumentality of honest Chritie's hammer, I cannot possibly say.

              MR HIPPY:
Nor I, I must say. All the difference is in the form, and not in the fact. It is a pity the form does not come into fashion: it would save a world of trouble.

              MR SARCASTIC:
I irreparably offended the Reverend Doctor Vorax by telling him, that having a nephew, whom I wished to shine in the church, I was on the look-out for a luminous butler, and a cook of solid capacity, under whose joint tuition he might graduate. "Who knows," said I, "but he may immortalize himself at the University, by giving his name to a pudding?" I lost the acquaintance of Mrs Cullender, by saying to her, when she had told me a piece of gossip as a very particular secret, that there was nothing so agreeable to me as to be in possession of a secret, for I made a point of telling it to all my acquaintance;

     Intrusted under solemn vows,
     Of Mum, and Silence, and the Rose,
     To be retailed again in whispers,
     For the easy credulous to disperse.

Mrs Cullender left me in great wrath, protesting she would never again throw away her confidence in so leaky a vessel.
---Melicourt, Chap. XXI.

precedents & innovation
". . . the progress of reason is slow, but the ground which it has once gained it never abandons. The interest of rulers, and the prejudices of the people, are equally hostile to every thing that comes in the shape of innovation; but all that now wears the strongest sanction of antiquity was once received with reluctance under the semblance of novelty: and that reason, which in the present day can scarcely obtain a footing from the want of precedents, will grow with the growth of years, and become a precedent in its turn."*
---Mr Fax in Melincourt, Chap. XII.

progress--pro & con.
"In short," said [Mr Foster], "everything we look on attests the progress of mankind in all the arts of life, and demonstrates their gradual advancement towards a state of unlimited perfection."
[Mr Escot said:] "these improvements, as you call them, appear to me only so many links in the great chain of corruption, which will soon fetter the whole human race in irreparable slavery and incurable wretchedness: your improvements proceed in a simple ratio, while the factitious wants and unnatural appetites they engender proceed in a compound one; and thus one generation acquires fifty wants, and fifty means of supplying them are invented, which each in its turn engenders two new ones; so that the next generation has a hundred, the next two hundred, the next four hundred, till every human being becomes such a helpless compound of perverted inclinations, that he is altogether at the mercy of external circumstances, loses all independence and singleness of character, and degenerates so rapidly from the primitive dignity of his sylvan origin, that it is scarcely possible to indulge in any other expectation, than that the whole species must at length be exterminated by its own infinite imbecility and vileness."
---Headlong Hall, Chap. I.

[The ancient Britons] lacked, it must be confessed, some of our light, and also some of our prisons. They lacked some of our light, to enable them to perceive that the act of coming, in great multitudes, with fire and sword, to the remote dwellings of peaceable men, with the premeditated design of cutting their throats, ravishing their wives and daughters, killing their children, and appropriating their worldly goods, belongs, not to the department of murder and robbery, but to that of legitimate war, of which all the practitioners are gentlemen, and entitled to be treated like gentlemen. They lacked some of our prisons, in which our philanthropy has provided accoommodation for so large a portion of our own people, wherein, if they had left their prisoners alive, they could have kept them from returning to their countrymen, and being at their old tricks again immediately. They would also, perhaps, have found some difficulty in feeding them, from the lack of the county rates, by which the most sensible and amiable part of our nation, the country squires, contrive to coop up, and feed, at the public charge, all who meddle with the wild animals of which they have given themselves the monopoly. But as the Druids could neither lock up their captives, nor trust them at large, the darkness of their intellect could suggest no alternative to the process they adopted, of putting them out of the way, which they did with all the sanctions of religion and law. If one of these old Druids could have slept, like the seven sleepers of Ephesus, and awaked, in the nineteenth century, some fine morning near Newgate, the exhibition of some half-dozen funipendulous forgers might have shocked the tender bowels of his humanity, as much as one of his wicker baskets of captives in the flames shocked those of Cæsar; and it would, perhaps, have been difficult to convince him that paper credit was not an idol, and one of a more sanguinary character than his Andraste. The Druids had their view of these matters, and we have ours; and it does not comport with the steam-engine speed of our march of mind to look at more than one side of a question.
---The Misfortunes of Elphin, Chap. VI.

readers of poetry
Now when we consider that it is not the thinking and studious, and scientific and philosophical part of the community, not to those whose minds are bent on the pursuit and promotion of permanently useful ends and aims, that poets must address their minstrelry, but to that much larger portion of the reading public, whose minds are not awakened to the desire of valuable knowledge, and who are indifferent to any thing beyond being charmed, moved, excited, affected, and exalted: charmed by harmony, moved by sentiment, excited by passion, affected by pathos, and exalted by sublimity: harmony, which is language on the rack of Procrustes; sentiment, which is canting egotism in the mask of refined feeling; passion, which is the commotion of a weak and selfish mind; pathos, which is the whining of an unmanly spirit; and sublimity, which is the inflation of an empty head: when we consider that the great and permanent interests of human society become more and more the main spring of intellectual pursuit; that in proportion as they become so, the subordinacy of the ornamental to the useful will be more and more seen and acknowledged; and that therefore the progress of useful art and science, and of moral and political knowledge, will continue more and more to withdraw attention from frivolous and unconducive, to solid and conducive studies: that therefore the poetical audience will not only continually diminish in the proportion of its number to that of the rest of the reading public, but will also sink lower and lower in the comparison of intellectual acquirement: when we consider that the poet must still please his audience, and must therefore continue to sink to their level, while the rest of the community is rising above it: we may easily conceive that the day is not distant, when the degraded state of every species of poetry will be as generally recognized as that of dramatic poetry has long been: and this not from any decrease either of intellectual power, or intellectual acquisition, but because intellectual power and intellectual acquisition have turned themselves into other and better channels, and have abandoned the cultivation and the fate of poetry to the degenerate fry of modern rhymesters, and their olympic judges, the magazine critics, who continue to debate and promulgate oracles about poetry, as if it were still what it was in the Homeric age, the all-in-all of intellectual progression, and as if there were no such things in existence as mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, moralists, metaphysicians, historians, politicians, and political economists, who have built into the upper air of intelligence a pyramid, from the summit of which they see the modern Parnassus far beneath them, and, knowing how small a place it occupies in the comprehensiveness of their prospect, smile at the little ambition and the circumscribed perceptions with which the drivellers and mountebanks upon it are contending for the poetical palm and the critical chair.
---The Four Ages of Poetry---the concluding sentence.

reading
[Scythrop] had some taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of reading in all its shapes; and the cure would have been radical, if disappointment in love, and total solitude, had not conspired to bring on a relapse.
---Nightmare Abbey, Chap. II.

". . . I have been at college. I contrive to get through my day by sinking the morning in bed, and killing the evening in company; dressing and dining in the intermediate space, and stopping the chinks and crevices of the few vacant moments that remain with a little easy reading. And that amiable discontent and antisociality which you reprobate in our present drawing-room-table literature, I find, I do assure you, a very fine mental tonic, which reconciles me to my favourite pursuit of doing nothing, by showing me that nobody is worth doing any thing for."
---The Honourable Mr Listless in ibid., Chap. VI.

rules of science
  It is fitting that there should be rules in science, because they are the collected and concentrated experience of ages; but they are not to be converted into pedantic fetters to bind genius through all future time.
---"Bellini," The Westminster Review Jan., 1836.

science
  Taliesin grew up, Gwythno instructed him in all knowledge of the age, which was of course not much, in comparison with ours. The science of political economy was sleeping in the womb of time. The advantage of growing rich by getting into debt and paying interest was altogether unknown: the safe and economical currency, which is produced by a man writing his name on a bit of paper, for which other men give him their property, and which he is always ready to exchange for another bit of paper, of an equally safe and economical manufacture, being also equally ready to render his own person, at a moment's notice, as impalpable as the metal which he promises to pay, is a stretch of wisdom to which the people of those days had nothing to compare. They had no steam-engines, with fires as eternal as those of the nether world, wherein the squalid many, from infancy to age, might be turned into component portions of machinery for the benefit of the purple-faced few. They could neither poison the air with gas, nor the waters with its dregs: in short, they made their money of metal, and breathed pure air, and drank pure water, like unscientific barbarians.
  Of moral science they had little; but morals, without science, they had about the same as we have. They had a number of fine precepts, partly from their religion, partly from their bards, which they remembered in their liquor, and forgot in their business.
  Political science they had none. The blessings of virtual representation were not even dreamed of; so that, when any of their barbarous metallic currency got into their pockets or coffers, it had a chance to remain there, subjecting them to the inconvenience of unemployed capital. Still they went to work politically much as we do. The powerful took all they could get from their subjects and neighbours; and called something or other sacred and glorious, when they wanted the people to fight for them. They represented disaffection by force, when it showed itself in an overt act; but they encouraged freedom of speech, when it was, like Hamlet's reading, "words, words, words."
---The Misfortunes of Elphin, Chap. VI.

"Science is one thing, and wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers. If you look at the results which science has brought in its train, you will find them to consist almost entirely in elements of mischief. See how much belongs to the word Explosion alone, of which the ancients knew nothing. Explosions of powder-mills and powder-magazines; of coal-gas in mines and in houses; of high-pressure engines in ships and boats and factories. See the complications and refinements of modes of destruction, in revolvers and rifles and shells and rockets and cannon. See collisions and wrecks and every mode of disaster by land and by sea, resulting chiefly from the insanity for speed, in those who for the most part have nothing to do at the end of the race, which they run as if they were so many Mercuries speeding with messages from Jupiter. Look at the scientific drainage, which turns refuse into poison. Look at the subsoil of London, whenever it is turned up to the air, converted by gas leakage into one mass of pestilent blackness, in which no vegetation can flourish, and above which, with the rapid growth of the ever-growing nuisance, no living thing will breathe with impunity. Look at our scientific machinery, which has destroyed domestic manufacture, which has substituted rottenness for strength in the thing made, and physical degradation in crowded towns for the healthy and comfortable country life in the makers. The day would fail, if I should attempt to enumerate the evils which science has inflicted on mankind. I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to exterminate the human race."
---The Reverend Dr Opimian in Gryll Grange, Chap. XIX.

subtleties
"Subtleties! my dear Miss O'Carroll. I am sorry to find you participating in the vulgar error of the reading public, to whom an unusual collocation of words, involving a juxtaposition of antiperistatical ideas, immediately suggests the notion of hyperoxysophistical paradoxology."
---Mr Flosky in Nightmare Abbey, Chap. VIII.

taste and tastes
You are a man of taste, Mr Crotchet. A man of taste is seen at once in the array of his breakfast-table. It is the foot of Hercules, the far-shining face of the great work, according to Pindar's doctrine: archomenou ergou, prosópon chré themen telauges. The breakfast is the prosópon of the great work of the day. Chocolate, coffee, tea, cream, eggs, ham, tongue, cold fowl,--all these are good, and bespeak good knowledge in him who sets them forth: but the touchstone is fish: anchovy is the first step, prawns and shrimps the second; and I laud him who reaches even to these: potted char and lampreys are the third, and a fine stretch of progression; but lobster is, indeed, matter for a May morning, and demands a rare combination of knowledge and virtue in him who sets it forth.
---The Reverend Doctor Folliott in Crotchet Castle, Chap. II.

[Doctor Opimian's] tastes, in fact, were four: a good library, a good dinner, a pleasant garden, and rural walks.
---Gryll Grange, Chap. III.

"You are a man of taste, Mr Gryll. That [large sirloin of beef] is a handsomer ornament of a dinner-table than clusters of nosegays, and all sorts of uneatable decorations."
---Mr MacBorrowdale in ibid., Chap. XIII.

". . . I am not for forcing my tastes or no-tastes on other people. Let every man enjoy himself in his own way, while he does not annoy others. I would not deprive you of your enjoyment of a brilliant symphony, and I hope you would not deprive me of my enjoyment of a glass of old wine."
---Mr MacBorrowdale in ibid., Chap. XIV.

Time in Moore's Epicurean
  At Memphis [the hero of the novel] begins as usual, by amusing himself with the lions, and indulges himself in a number of conceits, of which the following are specimens:---

  I stood before the Pyramids of Memphis, and saw them towering aloft, like the watch-towers of Time, from whose summit when he expires he will look his last.---p. 37.

  This is a very infelicitous conceit. The peak of a pyramid must be an uncomfortable dying-bed even for Time. If we attempt to make a picture of this figure, we must imagine the old gentleman dying on tip-toe, and finishing his terrestrial career by rolling down the side of the Pyramid into the sand.

  The sun half sunk beneath the horizon, was taking calmly and gloriously his leave of the Pyramids, as he had done evening after evening for ages, till they had become familiar to him as the earth itself. On the side turned to his ray they now presented a front of dazzling whiteness, while on the other, their great shadows, lengthening to the eastward, looked like the first steps of night, hastening to envelope the hills of Araby in their shade.---p. 40.

  Here we have night in the novel attitude of stepping from west to east, a most extraordinary image to present itself either to a philosopher or a mythologist.
  In another place we have the Libyan desert like a sea, and Time standing by it like a tide-waiter.

  Memphis, still grand, though no longer the unrivalled Memphis, that had borne away from Thebes the crown of supremacy, and worn it undisputed through so many centuries, now softened by the moonlight that harmonised with her decline, shone forth among her lakes, her pyramids, and her shrines, like a dream of glory that was soon to pass away. Ruin even now, was but too visible around her. The sands of the Libyan desert gained upon her like a sea; and, among solitary columns and sphinxes, already half sunk from sight, Time seemed to stand waiting, till all, that now flourished around, should fall beneath his desolating hand like the rest.---p. 42

  The sands of the Libyan desert gaining like a sea, is an impressive though not original image, but the picture is spoiled by the figure of Time standing waiting. Has Mr. Moore forgotten that time and tide wait neither for men nor sands? The very essence of Time is steady, interminable progression. If he has any business in the place, it is as an agent, himself silently impelling the progress of desolation, not waiting till the sands have done their work, in order to begin his. And as Memphis was still a flourishing city at least four centuries later than our very curious specimen of an Epicurean, Time must have stood waiting for no inconsiderable portion of himself.
---from Peacock's review of The Epicurean by Thomas Moore, in The Westminster Review, Oct., 1827.

tourism
  The sentimental tourist, (who, perching himself on an old wall, works himself up into a soliloquy of philosophical pathos, on the vicissitudes of empire and the mutability of all sublunary things, interrupted only by an occasional peep at his watch, to ensure his not overstaying the minute at which his fowl, comfortably roasting at the nearest inn, has been promised to be ready,) has, no doubt, many fine thoughts well worth recording in a dapper volume . . . .
---The Misfortunes of Elphin, Chap. XII.

  It is one thing to follow the high road through a country, with every principally remarkable object carefully noted down in a book, taking, as therein directed, a guide, at particular points, to the more recondite sights: it is another to sit down on one chosen spot, especially when the choice is unpremeditated, and from thence, by a series of explorations, to come day by day on unanticipated scenes. The latter process has many advantages over the former; it is free from the disappointment which attends excited expectation, when imagination has outstripped reality, and from the accidents that mar the scheme of the tourist's single day, when the valleys may be drenched with rain, or the mountains shrouded with mist.
---Crotchet Castle, Chap. XII.

truth to nature
              MR MACQUEDY:
. . . as to your poetry of the twelfth century, it is not good for much.

              MR CHAINMAIL:
It has, at any rate, what ours wants, truth to nature, and simplicity of diction. The poetry, which was addressed to the people of the dark ages, pleased in proportion to the truth with which it depicted familiar images, and to their natural connection with the time and place to which they were assigned. In the poetry of our enlightened times, the characteristics of all seasons, soils, and climates, may be blended together, with much benefit to the author's fame as an original genius. The cowslip of a civic poet is always in blossom, his fern is always in full feather; he gathers the celandine, the primrose, the heath-flower, the jasmine, and the chrysanthemum, all on the same day, and from the same spot: his nightingale sings all the year round, his moon is always full, his cygnet is as white as his swan, his cedar is as tremulous as his aspen, and his poplar as embowering as his beech. Thus all nature marches with the march of mind; but, among barbarians, instead of mead and wine, and the best seat by the fire, the reward of such a genius would have been, to be summarily turned out of doors in the snow, to meditate on the difference between day and night, and between December and July. It is an age of liberality, indeed, when not to know an oak from a burdock is no disqualification for sylvan minstrelsy. I am for truth and simplicity.
---Mr Chainmail, in Crotchet Castle, Chap. X.

". . . Truth to nature is essential to poetry. Few may perceive an inaccuracy: but to those who do, it causes a great diminuition, if not a total destruction, of pleasure in perusal. Shakspeare never makes a flower blossom out of season. Wordworth, Coleridge, and Southey are true to nature in this and all other respects: even in their wildest imaginings."
---Miss Ilex, in Gryll Grange, Chap. XXIII.

"The old Greek poetry is always true to nature, and will bear any degree of critical analysis. I must say, I take no pleasure in poetry that will not."
---The Reverend Doctor Opimian, in loc. cit.

weather
. . . the various knotty points of meteorology, which usually form the exordium of an English conversation, were successively discussed and exhausted; and, the ice being thus broken, the colloquy rambled to other topics . . . .
---Headlong Hall, Chap. I.

a "wise and good man"
"A wise man is he who looks after the one thing needful; and a good man is he who has it. The acme of wisdom and goodness in conjunction consists in appropriating as much as possible of the public money; and saying to those from whose pockets it is taken, 'I am perfectly satisfied with things as they are. Let well alone.'"
---Mr Anyside Antijack in Melincourt, Chap. XXXIX.

* cf.: 'Denis apologized [for his "bad habit of quoting" to Anne]: "It's the fault of one's education. Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made phrase about them. And then there are lots of lovely names and words--Monophysite, Iamblichus, Pomponazzi; you bring them out triumphantly, and feel you've clinched the argument with the mere magical sound of them. That's what comes of higher education."'
---Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow, London: Chatto & Windus (1974), p. 23

* [Peacock's note:] "Omnia, quae nunc vetustissima creduntur, nova fuere. Inveterascet hoc quoque: et, quod hodie exemplis tuemur, inter exempla erit" [All, which we consider now as most ancient, was new once. This also will grow old: and, what today we defend with precedents, will be among precedents.]
---Tacitus, Ann. XI. 24.

* Macbeth, III. 4.