In those days, too, we used to lunch at places which seem entirely to have disappeared. The is not so frequently met with as it was thirty years ago.… - Edmund Yates

... No one succeeds better than Mr. Thackeray in cutting his coat according to his cloth. Here he flattered the aristocracy; but when he crossed the Atlantic, George Washington became the idol of his worship, the "" the object of his bitterest attacks. These last-named lectures have been dead failures in England, though as literary compositions they are most excellent.

... in collaboration with Harrington I wrote an entertainment for Mr. George Case, a well-known musical man and player of the concertina, who retired from the orchestra on his marriage with a Miss Grace Egerton, a pretty and uncommonly sprightly and clever little actress, who ought to have done better things.
In buying a pair of horses from a dealer, the experienced purchaser is generally aware that he will become the owner of a good animal and a bad one, and the writer of entertainments for a married couple is very often in an analogous position.

Gone is , with its very wide open pens and cattle-hutches; and gone with it is a good deal of the scandal of driving the wretched beasts through the streets, and whacking and torturing them in the most dreadful fashion. Enormous hordes of cattle for Smithfield Monday market, then—not as now, sent up by rail, bur driven long tedious journeys—used to arrive at on the Saturday, and pass the Sunday in the fields let out for the purpose.