... in condemning it should be remembered that the statesmanship of intrigue of which she was a mistress has survived from her time to ours, and was … - Sidney Dark

... 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 streets life may have its thrills, but he belongs essentially, as Dickens belonged, to the English lower middle class. Wells is an articulate man of the people. And this is the fact that gives him his peculiar importance in the modern world.

Lawyers have never been popular. It will be remembered that although there is at least one lawyer in most of the Dickens novels, few of them are drawn as attractive personalities.

... 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 ...