The true Londoner cares no straw for sanitation. He thrives on ill conditions. - E. V. Lucas

Fixed customs must be surrendered, lateness must become punctuality, cigarette ends must not burn the mantelpiece, one misses one's own China tea. The bathroom is too far and other people use it. There is no hook for the strop. In short, to be a really good guest and at ease under alien roofs it is necessary, I suspect, to have no home ties of one's own ; certainly to have no very tyrannical habits.

He was born in 1770, in what he thought the best of all lands— Ireland; and he came home from the sea in 1802, but he did not take his pen in hand until 1836, during which time his memory had purged itself of inessentials. He wrote them not for the cold eye of a publisher's reader but (like a gentleman) for his own family's entertainment.

I had thought of a second-hand bookshop as being off the main stream of human frailty and temptation; and behold it was the resort of the most abandoned! Is there no natural honesty? I wished that Mr. Bemerton would return and liberate me to walk upstairs out of life again and get on with my make-believe.