... Wells has many affinities with Dickens. He does not possess Dickens's glorious humour. He has never been able to realise that even in mean street… - Sidney Dark

... During the Renaissance Luther and Calvin played their great rôles, and it saw Loyola and the little understood . At the beginning, Columbus and Da Gama make their voyages, and its later years were made romantic by the hazardous adventures of and Drake. It was the age of the , an age of adventure, an age of criticism, an age of laughter, an age of reaction and rejection, of destruction and reconstruction, of glory for princes and of suffering for the common people.

... The had its . The had its . ... He drank prodigiously, even for the seventeenth century. He was subject to violent bursts of passion, and he had absolutely no self-control. He was the supreme bully. His greatest joy in life was to denounce, to jeer, and to hurt. And nature had eminently fitted him for the rôle that he had chosen. Jeffreys's one passion was a genuine hatred of and ...

, so Shakespeare relates, was often at the in , and there was the wonderful meetings of poets—Beaumont, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare himself—at the famous on the south side of .