I should like to know what well-constituted mind, merely because it is transitory, dislikes roast beef? - William Makepeace Thackeray

When one man has been under very remarkable obligations to another, with whom he subsequently quarrels, a common sense of decency, as it were, makes of the former a much severer enemy than a mere stranger would be. To account for your own hard-heartedness and ingratitude in such a case, you are bound to prove the other party's crime. It is not that you are selfish, brutal, and angry at the failure of a speculation — no, no — it is that your partner has led you into it by the basest treachery and with the most sinister motives. From a mere sense of consistency, a persecutor is bound to show that the fallen man is a villain — otherwise he, the persecutor, is a wretch himself.

I never knew whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses.

Perhaps in Vanity Fair there are no better satires than letters. Take a bundle of your dear friend’s of ten years back — your dear friend whom you hate now. Look at a file of your sister’s! How you clung to each other till you quarreled about the twenty-pound legacy! Get down the round-hand scrawls of your son who has half broken your heart with selfish undutifulness since; or a parcel of your own, breathing endless ardour and love eternal, which were sent back by your mistress when she married the Nabob — your mistress for whom you now care no more than for Queen Elizabeth. Vows, love, promises, confidences, gratitude; how queerly they read after a while! There ought to be a law in Vanity Fair ordering the destruction of every written document (except receipted tradesmen’s bills) after a certain brief and proper interval. Those quacks and misanthropes who advertise indelible Japan ink should be made to perish along with their wicked discoveries. The best ink for Vanity Fair use would be one that faded utterly in a couple of days, and left the paper clean and blank, so that you might write on it to somebody else