g as you
need them, as long as your children require a nurse to love them, and
then to blight and thwart and destroy them, whenever your own use for
them is at an end.

*****

We had needs invent heaven if it had not been revealed to us; there are
some things that fall so bitterly ill on this side time!

*****

To write with authority about another man, we must have fellow-feeling
and some common ground of experience with our subject. We may praise
or blame according as we find him related to us by the best or worst in
ourselves; but it is only in virtue of some relationship that we can
be his judges, even to condemn. Feelings which we share and understand
enter for us into the tissue of the man's character; those to which we
are strangers in our own experience we are inclined to regard as blots,
exceptions, inconsistencies, and excursions of the diabolic; we conceive
them with repugnance, explain them with difficulty, and raise our hands
to heaven in wonder when we find them in conjunction with talents that
we respect or virtues that we admire.

*****

To the best of my belief, Mr. Shandy is the first who fairly pointed
out the incalculable influence of nomenclature upon the whole life--who
seems first to have recognised the one child, happy in an heroic
appellation, soaring upwards on the wings of fortune, and the other,
like the dead sailor in his shotted hammock, haled down by sheer weight
of name into the abysses of social failure.

*****

It would be well if nations and races could communicate their qualities;
but in practice when they look upon each other, they have an eye to
nothing but defects.

*****

Many a man's destiny has been settled by nothing apparently more grave
than a pretty face on the opposite side of the street and a couple of
bad companions round the corner.

*****

So kindly is the world arranged, such great profit may arise from a
small degree of human reliance on oneself, and such, in particular, is
the happy star of this trade of writing, that it should combine pleasure
and profit to both parties, and be at once agreeable, like fiddling, and
useful, like good preaching.

*****

In all garrison towns, guard-calls, and reveilles, and such like, make a
fine, romantic interlude in civic business. Bugles, and drums, and fifes
are of themselves most excellent things in nature, and when they carry
the mind to marching armies and the picturesque vicissitudes of war they
stir up