Let us be very gentle with our neighbours' failings; and forgive our friends their debts, as we hope ourselves to be forgiven. - William Makepeace Thackeray

But my kind reader will please to remember that this history has “Vanity Fair” for a title, and that Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions.

If there is no love more in yonder heart, it is but a corpse unburied.

'Tis hard with respect to Beauty, that its possessor should not have even a life-enjoyment of it, but be compelled to resign it after, at the most, some forty years' lease.