What else, indeed, should mediocrity be but widespread, anywhere? - Alice Meynell

This great immorality, centring in the irreproachable days of the Exhibition of 1851 or thereabouts—the pleasure in this particular form of human disgrace—has passed, leaving one trace only: the habit by which some men reproach a silly woman though her sex, whereas a silly man is not reproached through his sex.

Compassion in the highest degree is the divinest form of religion.

For you knew not it was I,
And I knew not it was you.
We have learnt, as days went by.
But a flower struck root and grew
Underground, and no one knew.