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There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen and the gentlemen were not seamen.

Thomas B. Macaulay

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Thomas B. Macaulay
Seamen
Charles
Gentlemen
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Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve!
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In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.
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We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.
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This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.
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