W. M. Praed.
A canon of my own in judging verses is that no man has a right to put into metre what he can as well say out of metre. To which I may add, as a corollary, that a fortiore he has no right to put into metre what he can better say out of metre.
W. S. Lilly (Essay on George Eliot).
Aujourd’hui, ce qui ne vaut pas la peine d’être dit, on le chante.
(Now-a-days when a thing is not worth saying they sing it—i.e. put it in a song.)
Beaumarchais (Le Barbier de Séville, Act I. Sc. I.)
I do not know whether I gave you at any time the details of my work here, or the principles upon which I have been proceeding.... Some of the work set down includes Ancient Ethics—which is almost entirely grossly wrong and great rubbish also. This part I have persistently refused to get up, not because I disliked it, but because it is decidedly injurious to warp and twist the brain by impressing it with wrong thoughts and systems—just as it would be insane in the polisher of a mirror to think it would reflect the external world more truly, if he gave it a dint here, a scratch there, a bulge in another place, and so forth. It would take me too long to describe the details. Suffice it to say that one of the examiners in Mental Philosophy and in Moral and Political Philosophy is an old, blind (literally) man of the old school, who gave a very abnormally large amount of questions relating to Ancient Ethics, and an abnormally large amount to the early part of English Ethics—leaving hardly any marks to be scored by thorough understanding and ability to use the principles of the subjects.