Virtue we still consider the best goal for others: but for ourselves, success. Success is the new god, and will be, I suppose, for some time yet, so … - E. V. Lucas

It was Henri Taine, I think, who said that there was no volume he could not compress into a chapter, and no chapter that would not go into a sentence. Dr. Giles has carried out Taine's thrasonical brag. There is no Chinese lifetime, however crowded and illustrious, that he cannot pack into a paragraph or a page.

In France he would have been, I think, a sad bore, for there he would have discovered so many points of superiority to the English: but not even so keen a censor of his own country and countrymen as Mr. Dabney could find aught in Venice, except such forgivable and inimitable advantages as crumbling and picturesque architecture and clear skies, to hold up as a model for home adoption.

The trouble is that really wanting things is so rare. It's a lukewarm world!