Mr. Montagu was fourteen when Dr. Johnson, whom he knew, died; he was the intimate associate of Godwin, Coleridge, Wordsworth; he watched by Mary Wol… - Charles Kegan Paul

Literature has had little to say of the labourer; and this, not that his class is lacking in interest, in poetry, in romance, but simply because those sections of society to which writers belong know nothing about him.

I read Tennyson for myself, learning by heart the greater part of the original volumes and thinking, as I still think, that for subtle workmanship no one had at all approached the same perfection since Milton. I did not then recognise how little thought is contained in that pomp and melody of verse, still less how very little of what thought there is, is the poet's own. For instance, a very large number of people are apparently unaware that Tennyson's idyll "Dora" is simply a story in Miss Mitford's Our Village broken up into blank verse with poetic touches added, and in later life his "Idylls of the King" are whole chapters of Malory's Morte d'Arthur and Lady Charlotte Guest's Mabinogion treated in the same way.

George Eliot's Salon on Sundays was a stately reception, in which her talk was always well worth hearing: she raised conversation on whatever subject she touched to a higher level. Miss Anna Swanwick is the only other person I know with the same immediate power of raising the conversation with apparent continuity and without seeming to force it.