There is something very dry in family history, because no one cares for other people's relations. - Thomas Gordon Hake

I remember well the time when no gentleman was supposed to smoke; the habit was fit only for the vulgarian.

If one looks back, one perceives that the majority of our poetic authors owed their success to patrons who made their works a fashion. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, had noble or royal patrons; Milton there was no one to patronize, whence the market value of "Paradise Lost" rose only to ten pounds. Dryden belonged to the upper class, so he had a patron in himself; Pope was made a fashion through patronization: Bolingbroke alone would have sufficed to lift him up into fame.

I thought no one ever could paint a woman's eyes like Rossetti. There was a softness, a delicacy, a life, a soul in them, never seen elsewhere, but in living beings, and that how rarely!