It is surely one of the strangest of our propensities to mark out those we love best for the worst usage yet we do, all of us. We can take any freedom with a friend we stand on no ceremony with a friend.

When a story has gone the grand circuit, and travels back to us uncontradicted, we may reasonably begin to relax in our belief of it. If nobody questions it, it is manifestly a fiction if it passes current, it is almost sure to be a counterfeit. The course of truth never yet ran smooth.

The scarcity of truth is atoned for by the abundance of affidavits if a rumor be impugned, its veracity is easily strengthened by additional emphasis of affirmation, until at last everybody says so, and then it is undeniable.

What if two negatives make an affirmative ...does it follow that two nobodies shall be some body?

Of all the many and (thanks to a free press) the ever-multiplying blessings attendant upon the glorious constitution of literature, not the least precious and profitable to a modern cultivator of systems and syllables, in pamphlets, magazines, and folios, is the right of Quotation.

Give me to live with Love alone And let the world go dine and dress For Love hath lowly haunts... If life's a flower, I choose my own 'T is love in Idleness.

Everybody's word is worth Nobody's taking.

For the author there is nothing but his pen, till that and life are worn to the stump: and then, with good fortune, perhaps on his death-bed he receives a pension and equals, it may be, for a few months, the income of a retired butler!

Man will take anything you like, except warning.

Shall we not rejoice then and revel in the glorious liberty of extract, and quote to the thousandth line? Shall we not have pages like the Pyramids?

We feel bound to be punctual and conscientious with those we are indifferent about while we can afford at any time, on the frostiest night, to be an hour after our appointment with the single gentleman who occupies an apartment in our heart's core.