“Each age has deemed the new-born yearThe fittest time for festal cheer.”

“Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!”

“To all the sensual world proclaim, One crowded hour of glorious life, Is worth an age without a name.”

“Lucy Ashton, in short, was involved in those mazes of the imagination which are most dangerous to the young and the sensitive. Time, it is true, absence, change of place and of face, might probably have destroyed the illusion in her instance as it has done in many others.”

“He that climbs the tall tree has won right to the fruit, He that leaps the wide gulf should prevail in his suit.”

“You will, I trust, resemble a forest plant, which has indeed, by some accident, been brought up in the greenhouse, and thus rendered delicate and effeminate, but which regains its native firmness and tenacity, when exposed for a season to the winter air.”

“Once upon a time there lived an old woman, called Janet Gellatley, who was suspected to be a witch, on the infallible grounds that she was very old, very ugly, very poor, and had two sons, one of whom was a poet, and the other a fool, which visitation, all the neighbourhood agreed, had come upon her for the sin of witchcraft.”