A London smoke prevents healthy vegetation, as do London morals and influences prevent healthy spiritual life and vigour.
A loan office is a social whirlpool that has shipwrecked thousands of honest families, and as the little ones have gone down they have cried for help, but there has been none to deliver.
The man to gauge your pocket correctly is a lawyer, for he can tell what filthy lucre you have in it with his eyes shut.
A lawyer’s office is coated with birdlime, strong enough to fetch the clothes off your back and keep you riveted to the spot; and then the lawyer, with a laugh upon his face like Solomon’s leeches, cries out for more.
As rusty old nails put into pickle produce poison for the body, so do rusty, deceitful old sinners put into social and religious societies produce moral poison.
In the darkest heart, riven with anguish and despair, there lies embedded in the human breast a spiritual vein that only requires one touch of the match of heavenly sympathy to cause it to shed seraphic lustre upon hellish actions, at once transforming them into Divine.
A dandy is fashion’s painted sparrow, whose wings will be sure to be clipped, and who will find a final resting-place in the gutter.
A gin-shop is the devil’s headquarters, with the landlord as his recruiting serjeant, and rags as the standard colours of his army.
In all societies the devil has his “gad-flies,” whose only mission in the world seems to be to sting and annoy.
Slanderers and backbiters are the cats of hell, with eyes of fire, poison-steeped claws, and tails of blood, running wild, and woe be to those who come in their way.