Come and look for Peterkin, poor little Peterkin. No one would believe us if we told them what we know, Or they wouldn't grieve for Peterkin, merry l… - Alfred Noyes

...if he could only break away from this pseudo-modernity, and pseudo-intellectualism; if he could just once defy his own age, instead of defying the dead Victorians; if he could only shock the vicar (who reads Proust) by quoting Longfellow (one doesn't put him on the mountaintops, of course, but there's better stuff than Proust ever dreamed of in the sonnets on Dante); I should feel that he was really his own self, instead of a variation on a current theme. It seems to me that if you really like a person, you want him above everything to be his own self
...
One does get so sick of the notion of the present moment — that, because its conventions aren't those of the last century, it has no conventions of its own. The conventionalists of today all seem to forget that the conventions of yesterday were equally different from those of the day before yesterday.

And captains that we thought were dead, And dreamers that we thought were dumb, And voices that we thought were fled, Arise, and call us, and we come; And "search in thine own soul," they cry; "For there, too, lurks thine enemy." Search for the foe in thine own soul, The sloth, the intellectual pride; The trivial jest that veils the goal For which our fathers lived and died; The lawless dreams, the cynic Art, That rend thy nobler self apart.

Oh, grown-ups cannot understand,
And grown-ups never will,
How short the way to fairyland
Across the purple hill.