I would walk ten miles to miss it.”
“The author of the ‘Pleasures of Memory,’” remarks William Howitt, “has never met with that species of Mohawk criticism, that scalping and scarifying literary assault and battery, which so many of his contemporaries have had to undergo.” Nevertheless, it would be hard to find in the wide range of Satanic literature a scarification as intense and as sweeping as that in the lines above quoted.
Junius on the Duke of Bedford
“My lord, you are so little accustomed to receive any marks of respect or esteem from the public, that if in the following lines a compliment or expression of applause should escape me, I fear you would consider it as a mockery of your established character, and perhaps an insult to your understanding. You have nice feelings if we may judge from your resentments. Cautious, therefore, of giving offence where you have so little deserved it, I shall leave the illustration of your virtues to other hands. Your friends have a privilege to play upon the easiness of your temper, or probably they are better acquainted with your good qualities than I am. You have done good by stealth. The rest is upon record. You have still ample room for speculation when panegyric is exhausted....
“Let us consider you, then, as arrived at the summit of worldly greatness; let us suppose that all your plans of avarice and ambition are accomplished, and your most sanguine wishes gratified in the fear as well as the hatred of the people. Can age itself forget that you are now in the last act of life? Can gray hairs make folly venerable? Is there no period to be reserved for meditation and retirement? For shame, my lord! Let it not be recorded of you that the latest moments of your life were dedicated to the same unworthy pursuits, the same busy agitations, in which your youth and manhood were exhausted. Consider that though you cannot disgrace your former life, you are violating the character of age and exposing the impotent imbecility, after you have lost the vigor of the passions.
“Your friends will ask, perhaps, Whither shall this unhappy old man retire? Can he remain in the metropolis where his life has been so often threatened, and his palace so often attacked? If he returns to Woburn, scorn and mockery await him; he must create a solitude round his estate if he would avoid the face of reproach and derision. At Plymouth his destruction would be more than probable; at Exeter, inevitable. No honest Englishman will ever forget his attachment, nor any honest Scotchman forget his treachery, to Lord Bute. At every town he enters he must change his liveries and name. Whichever way he flies, the hue and cry of the country pursues him.
“In another kingdom, indeed, the blessings of his administration have been more sensibly felt, his virtues understood; or, at worst, they will not for him alone forget their hospitality. As well might Verres have returned to Sicily. You have twice escaped, my lord; beware of a third experiment. The indignation of a whole people, plundered, insulted, and oppressed as they have been, will not always be disappointed.
“It is in vain, therefore, to shift the scene; you can no more fly from your enemies than from yourself. Persecuted abroad, you look into your own heart for consolation, and find nothing but reproaches and despair. But, my lord, you may quit the field of business, though not the field of danger; and though you cannot be safe, you may cease to be ridiculous. I fear you have listened too long to the advice of those pernicious friends with whose interests you have sordidly united your own, and for whom you have sacrificed every thing that ought to be dear to a man of honor. They are still base enough to encourage the follies of your age, as they once did the vices of your youth. As little acquainted with the rules of decorum as with the laws of morality, they will not suffer you to profit by experience, nor even to consult the propriety of a bad character. Even now they tell you that life is no more than a dramatic scene, in which the hero should preserve his consistency to the last; and that as you lived without virtue, you should die without repentance.”
Ruskin on the Bicycle
This is what John Ruskin thought of the bicycle: “Some time since I put myself on record as an antagonist of the devil’s own toy, the bicycle. I want to reiterate, with all the emphasis of strong language, that I condemn all manner of bi-, tri-, and 4–, 5–, 6–, or 7–cycles. Any contrivance or invention intended to supersede the use of human feet on God’s own ground is damnable. Walking, running, leaping, and dancing are legitimate and natural joys of the body, and every attempt to stride on stilts, dangle on ropes, or wiggle on wheels is an affront to the Almighty. You can’t improve on God’s appointed way of walking by substituting an improved cart-wheel.”