I saw it all but now.  The grin
    That gnarled old Gardener Sandy’s features;
  My father, scholar-like and thin,
    Unroused, the tenderest of creatures;
  I saw—­ah me !—­I saw again
    My dear and deprecating mother;
  And then, remembering the cane,
    Regretted—­that I’d left the other.

MACAULAY’S WIT
[Sidenote:  Macaulay]

I have not the Chancellor’s encyclopedic mind.  He is indeed a kind of semi-Solomon.  He half knows everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.

The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little.

There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles II.  But the seamen were not gentlemen, and the gentlemen were not seamen.

His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich.  It enabled him to run, though not to soar.

...  Lady Millar, who kept a vase wherein fools were wont to put bad verses, and Jerningham, who wrote verses fit to be put into the vase of Lady Millar.

From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness, a system in which the two great commandments were to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour’s wife.

CRANFORD
[Sidenote:  Mrs. Gaskell]

In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women.  If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a railroad.  In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford.  What could they do if they were there?  The surgeon has his round of thirty miles, and sleeps at Cranford; but every man cannot be a surgeon.  For keeping the trim gardens full of choice flowers without a weed to speck them; for frightening away little boys who look wistfully at the said flowers through the railings; for rushing at the geese that occasionally venture into the gardens if the gates are left open; for deciding all questions of literature and politics without troubling themselves with unnecessary reasons or arguments; for obtaining clear and correct knowledge of everybody’s affairs in the parish; for keeping their neat maid-servants in admirable order; for kindness (somewhat dictatorial) to the poor, and real tender good offices to each other whenever they are in distress, the ladies of Cranford are quite sufficient.  “A man,” as one of them observed to me once, “is so in the way in the house!” Although the ladies of Cranford know all each other’s proceedings, they are exceedingly indifferent to each other’s opinions.  Indeed, as each has her own individuality, not to say eccentricity, pretty strongly developed, nothing is so easy as verbal retaliation; but, somehow, good-will reigns among them to a considerable degree.