Ouida Quotes

Intensely selfish people are always very decided as to what they wish. They do not waste their energies in considering the good of others.

I do not wish to be a coward like the father of mankind and throw the blame upon a woman.

Woman's fatal weakness is to desire sympathy and comprehension. --"Wanda

I only care for the subjective life; I am very German, you see: The woods interest me, and the world does not.

One must pray first, but afterwards one must help oneself. God does not care for cowards. --"Wanda

What we love once, we love forever. Shall there be joy in heaven over those who repent, yet no forgiveness for them upon earth? --"Wanda

To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey.

He mistook, as the cleverest men often do mistake, in underrating the cruelty of women.

There's a deal of goodness that the world never sees," said Tussler in conclusion, "as there's a deal of viciousness it never guesses.

I have know a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.

Experience is an excellent spyglass; but it has this drawback, that Prejudice very often clouds the lens.

Her life had been altogether artificial; she had always been a great garden lily in a hot-house, she had never known what it was to be blown by a fresh breeze on a sun-swept moorland like a heather flower. The hot-house shelters from all chills and is full of perfume, but you can see no horizon from it; that alone is the joy of the moorland.

The world never leaves one in ignorance or in peace.

Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty but kind to ugliness.

No doubt the shortness of your memories is a very convenient thing for you; for without it I really don't know how you could have the conscience to repudiate your debts, swear in your witness boxes, take your marriage vows, traverse your divorce petitions, or do half the things that you do do. But, owing to the perfection of our remembrance, I can recall every trifle of the life that I then enjoyed with him.

There are wrongs for which religion makes no provision, and of which it has no comprehension. --"Wanda

He crept up, and touched the face of the boy. "Didst thou dream that I should be faithless and forsake thee? I— a dog?" said that mute caress.

Is there a more pitiable spectacle than that of a wife contending with others for that charm in her husband's sight which no philters and no prayers can renew when once it has fled forever? Women are so unwise. Love is like a bird's song beautiful and eloquent when heard in forest freedom, harsh and worthless in repetition when sung from behind prison bars. You cannot secure love by vigilance, by environment, by captivity. What use is it to keep the person of a man beside you if his soul be truant from you?

In the violent scorn of her revolted pride, of her indignant honor, had she forgotten a lowlier yet harder duty left undone? In her contempt and dread of yielding to mere amorous weakness had she stifled and denied the cry of pity, the cry of conscience? To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite. To forgive wrongs darker than death or night. To defy power which seems omnipotent. To love and live to hope till hope creates from it's own wreck the thing it contemplates. Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent. This had been the higher, diviner way which she had missed, this obligation from the passion of the past which she had left unfulfilled, unaccepted. Now the misgiving arose in her whether she had mistaken arrogance for duty; whether, cleaving so closely to honor she had forgotten the obligation of mercy.

She was like a queen who beholds the virgin soil of her kingdom invaded and wasted by a traitor. Any other thing she would have pardoned: infidelity, indifference, cruelty, any sins of manhood's caprice or passion, but who should pardon this? The sin was not alone against herself; it was against every law of decency and truth that ever she had been taught to hold sacred; it was against all those great dead, who lay with the cross on their breasts and their swords by their side, from whom she had received and treasured the traditions of honor and purity of race. It was those dead knights whom he had smote upon the mouth and mocked, crying to them: 'Lo! your place is mine; my sons will reign in your stead. I have tainted your race forever; for every my blood flows with yours!' The greatness of a race is a thing far higher than mere pride. Its instincts are noble and supreme. Its obligations are no less than its privileges; it is a great light which streams backward through the darkness of the ages, and if by that light you guide not your footsteps, then are you thrice accursed, holding as you do that lamp of honor in your hands. So she had always thought, and now he had dashed the lamp in the dust. --"Wanda

After a little time they all began to smoke, the Pearl included, though she threw away much more of her cigar than she consumed

Men object to the surveillance of a wife, and most justly; but they seem to forget that it is nothing compared to the unscrupulous espionage of a courtesan.

My little brain was teeming with a myriad of visions—dogs have very vivid fancies, as you may tell by the excitement of our dreams.

Pearl's temper absolutely unbearable, and caused her to break her ivory hair-brush upon her maid's shoulders.

And I knew that she said truly; for indeed to live only to know the pains, the needs, the agonies, and the travails that lie in living, is a hard fate, though it be the fate of millions.

So we, in thoughtless play, twist the first gleaming and silky threads of the fatal cord which will cling about our necks, fastened beyond hope of release, as long as our lives shall last!

An hour drifted by. The church clock on the cliffs had struck four times; a deep-toned, weary bell, that tolled for every quarter, and must often have been heard, at dead of night, by dying men, drowning unshriven and unhouseled.

Then it might interest you to know,” said Mrs. Encombe, “that when I was in Florence last Easter I was introduced to Ouida.” “That’s quite another matter,” returned Mrs. Hayforth. “I can’t believe that any lady would read a book by Ouida.

Than to suppose that they like what is human and real, he means," said Beltran. "They don't care the least about that; they like a little broad farce, a little rough murder, and a little rosewater sentiment: anything more bothers them. They can't understand it.

Even the sheep think, I do believe, though they look so stupid. Everything in creation thinks, that's my idea. Look at a little beetle, how clever it is, how cunning in defense, how patient in labor, how full of disquiet;—but you cannot understand, you are only a nursling.

What? A character almost as awful as Phaedre, and quite as desolate as Antigone, represented by a graceful coquette in point lace and pearls, who will take poison as sweetly as if it were a cup of coffee, and will die with elaborate care not to tumble her train? Preposterous!

Trust was right, as, looking back on that time, I know now, in thinking that Ben had some touch in him of the poet. Not of the poet's utterance, surely; I do not think he could have strung a line of words together to save his existence; but of the poet's temperament, of the poet's feeling.

Nello and Patrasche were left all alone in the world. They were friends in a friendship closer than brotherhood. Nello was a little Ardennois—Patrasche was a big Fleming. They were both of the same age by length of years, yet one was still young, and the other was already old. They had dwelt together almost all their days: both were orphaned and destitute, and owed their lives to the same hand. It had been the beginning of the tie between them, their first bond of sympathy; and it had strengthened day by day, and had grown with their growth, firm and indissoluble, until they loved one another very greatly.

This was thoroughly irrational in me, of course. The happiness of our very early years is quite unconscious, and derives its peace from that very unconsciousness. If a child, or a puppy, knew he were happy, he would be analytical; and with the first moment of self-analysis the first shadow of discomfort would fall.

As a postscript, it is interesting to note that on a visit to London in 1886, Ouida did meet Oscar Wilde and indeed published four articles in his magazine Woman’s World between 1888 and 1889; her experience of knowing Wilde, who described her as “the last romantic”, did influence her later works, however superficially.

close to the objects of her attachment, the little lovely yellow chickens, surely the prettiest of all new-born things; humiliatingly pretty beside the rough ugliness of new-born man, who piques himself on being lord of all created creatures; God knows why, except that he is slowest in development, and quickest in evil!

Whatever good I have kept in me—and in the world it is very hard to keep any—I owe it to Ben on those still Sunday mornings in those deep, old, quiet, green woods.

Beautiful she was by the morning light; with her fair, rich color, and her gleaming eyes, and her crown of halfbright, half-dusky hair, like the bronze in which there much mixture of gold. But I thought I never saw anything of so much greed, or so intensely selfish. There was a vivid animal pleasure in the sight of what were dainties to her senses ; but there was no sort of gratitude or feeling at the generous and thoughtful affection which had been thus tender of her in her absence. She ate all there was on the table; seeming to like to draw the pleasure out to its longest span; when ended, she washed the things and set them away, and did a little house-work, all in a very idle, slovenly manner—like one whose heart was not at all in her occupation.

The old man was silent: the truth suggested itself to him with the boy's innocent answer. He was tied to a bed of dried leaves in the corner of a wattle hut, but he had not wholly forgotten what the ways of the world were like.

Then he went straightway to the presence-chamber; and he spoke in the speech of men; and he told his lord of that frail wife's dishonor, and said, 'Arise I cast her off, and be strong as thou ever hast been.' But the king, mad with rage, would not hearken; he leaped down from his ivory throne, and drew bis dagger out from his girdle, and thrust it into the heart of Ilderiui. 'So serve I the foes of my angel!' he cried; and Ilderim fell at his feet. 'I forgive,' he said simply,—and died.

There was no sort of change from dawn to sunset. My heart was heavy for all those whom I had lost. It seemed to me that life was but a sequence of tender ties, formed only to be ruptured, and leave the torn heart aching. I missed, moreover, the glad, sweet, summer season in the open air; the freedom of the old fruit gardens and flower-covered ways; the homely, happy sounds of all the stirring bees and chirming birds, of the ducks in the dark cool pond, and the lowing cattle in the poplarbelted meadows.

We believe in the innocent demoiselles, who look so naïve, and such sweet English rosebuds at morning fêtes, and do not dream those glossy braids cover empty, but world-shrewd little heads, ever plotting how to eclipse dearest Cecilia, or win old Hautton’s coronet; we accept their mamma’s invitations, and think how kindly they are given, not knowing that we are only asked because we bring Shako of the Guards with us, who is our bosom chum, and has fifteen thousand a year, and that, Shako fairly hooked, we, being younger sons, shall be gently dropped.

I often wondered, by the way, why men, who had their own admirable cooks, and their own elegant abodes, and their own choice, selected wines, were so addicted to coming out to dinner at the Star and Garter, or Ship, or any suburban place, that it was fashionable to dine at in this manner. I often wondered what peculiar attraction existed for them in spending about five times as much on their dinner as it would have cost at home, only for the sake of getting in return a questionable cuisine, lumpy sauces, cold soups, and fifth-rate champagnes at exorbitant prjces.

I remembered Ben's words when I also entered that abomination of desolation—the eastern half of the city of labor. In the little cottage in the pine wood, even in the dreariness of winter and under the drag of poverty, there had been beauty—beauty in the white, smooth, glittering enow;

if the truth were always in our minds, or the future always plain before us, should we make the fifty false steps that the wisest man amongst us is certain to rue before half his sands are run? If they knew that before night was down the sea-foam would be whirling high, and the curlews screaming in human fear, and the gay little boat lying keel upwards on the salt ocean surf, would the pleasure-party set out so fearlessly in the morning sunshine, with champagne flowing and bright eyes glancing, and joyous laughter ringing over the golden sands and up to the fleecy heavens?

everybody has' disappeared' who isn't starring and staring before the world's footlights. We are uncommonly fond of our celebrities,—oh, yes,—we buy their photographs and steal their characters with the greatest ardor imaginable. We are always flinging flowers before them, and throwing stones after them, with the most affectionate energy possible. But it's only while they're in the range of our eyesight. If they retire, or pause, or only get sick for a little, we've done with them. Your statesman may have overworked his brain in your service; your painter may have paralysis; your author may have gone to his ' otium cum dignitate,' and your actress may have married or be a dying;—it's all the same; they have disappeared; and the world thinks no more about them.

In the austere pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes he carefully explained to his readers that d'Annunzio's lewdness must not be confused with the obscenities of Zola, whereat Ouida protested that they were alike in their complacent preoccupation with mere filth. The Frenchman is the sounder critic, it must be said, for while d'Annunzio frequently parallels some of the most unclean—in the literal, not the moral sense—scenes and incidents in Zola, his attitude about sex is as unlike Zola's as that of the late W. D. Howells. Only in "Nana" did Zola describe the life and emotions of a woman whose whole life is given up to love, and then, as we know, he chose a singularly crude and professional person, using her career as a symbol of the Second Empire. D'Annunzio has never described women with any other reason for existence but love, yet none of his heroines has poor Nana's uninspiring motives.

Four piles of dead were heaped together like broken meat on a butcher’s stall — not a whit more tenderly — and cleared out of the way like carrion; the ground was broken up into great pools of blood, black and noisome; troops of flies were swarming like mimic vultures on bodies still warm, on men still conscious, crowding over the festering wounds (for these men had lain there since Saturday at noon!), buzzing their death-rattle in ears already maddened with torture. That was what we saw in the Malakoff, what we saw a little later in the Great Redan, where among cookhouses, brimful of human blood, English and Russian lay clasped together in a fell embrace, petrified by death; where the British lay in heaps, mangled beyond recognition by their dearest friends, or scorched and blackened by the recent explosions; and where — how strange they looked there! — there stood outside the entrance of one of the houses, a vase of flowers, and a little canary!

I liked my new owner, as I have said, very quickly; and I liked all his friends and companions the "swells" as your snobs will call them; the men with the pale, handsome faces, borne by crusaders and cavaliers before them; the men with the gentle, quiet ways, and the contemptuous ring in their voices, and the easy indolent insolence to all forms of pretension ; and the frank, kindly, generous hearts for those that know them well; and the manner that is so natural to them,

I who write have I not been purchased by their money and made captive to their power? And is there any crucial test to tell you a man of breeding like the manner in which he will treat a thing that lies in his power? Well— I, who thus have opportunity of examination and judgment passiug the common rule, do affirm that in all which makes a man loyal, brave, patient, and of high honor, frank of speech, honest of thought, faithful in word to friend or foe, without self-consciousness in distinction, and without complaint or self-pity in adversity, I have never known the equal of your English gentlemen.

Dogs never have any difficulty in remembering the slightest event or the lightest word that has ever occurred or was ever spoken in their presence. Our power of memory is something marvelous

But her eyes would blaze like stars when Harold read poetry to her, and I fancy myself that she thought over-much for her years; that she had—what do they call it ?—genius; and that it was only because she was silent that people fancied her simple. It was odd: those two children led such simple, ordinary lives: rising with the sun; eating food of the plainest; always in the open air; rained on by summer showers; blown on by autumn winds; seeing nothing except the animals and the birds on the farms, and having no books except their Bible and their 'Pilgrim's Progress,' and the plays of a man they called Shakspeare:—and yet there was something noble and uncommon about them; and they seemed always to be hearing such

But you see," Gladys murmured, with a strange sad tender smile upon her face, "I have had all my summer in my spring; it is all over now. There are nothing but the night and the winter. While you—you have had the "cold and the darkness first; your sun has yet to dawn.

I never knew quite whether I liked her—how can you with those women of the world? She was kind and insincere; she was gentle and she was cruel; she was generous and ungenerous; she was true as steel and she was false as Judas—what would you?—she was a woman of the world, with several sweet natural impulses, and all a coquette's diplomacies. She tended me with the greatest solicitude one day that autumn, when I had run a thorn into my foot: and the very next day, when I was well again, she laughed to see me worried on the lawn by a bull-terrier. If you have not met a woman like that, I wonder where you have lived.

There are, in our race, natural and nomadic instincts that no education or captivity can eradicate; an inborn passion for freedom and enjoyment; this, in man, is damned with texts by your priests, and in dogs, is chastised with stripes by your keepers. But, as a rule, being of itself innocent, and desirable, and even noble, it is too strong always for either priests or keepers; and under the damnation, or the dogwhip, will turn the man criminal, and the dog mad. This instinct awaking in me, and I, being a little foolish, guileless thing, deprived by my mode of life of many of my proper qualities of self-preservation and of foresight, and rendered helpless and dependent against my very will, was vaguely moved by it, and, knowing no better, moved to my own destruction.

Paris around, doubtless, was awakening to its utmost gayety, its wildest whirl of pleasure; but here we knew nothing of it—we only knew that bread would be dearer, and that the very aged and the very young would soon perish of cold, and that wood would be scarce for the stove, and that in the little chamber under the roof there lay a woman dying. Ah! that is all the poor ever do know of what there is on earth. That there is pain, and there is cold, and there is death. With other things they have no part nor portion.

When those poor devils of novelists jumble a lot of impossible coincidences all pell-mell together without building plan, or sequence, or any sort of sense, they are all wrong as to Art, clearly, but they are awfully true to Life.

The man's horrible curses; the howls of the dogs in the cellar; the wailing of the puppies in cages ; the sight of the blood and the torture; the shrieks of the animal that he kicked or beat, or forced into some wretched hole too small for it to turn in; the sad filmy eyes of the poor birds sitting moping with their feathers all in disarray; the piteous terrors of the woman every time her husband's savage glance lit on her, as though with every look she feared a blow,—all this was more dreadful to me than I can ever describe.

Nay—when will you do so much as remember that the coward who tortures an animal would murder a human being if he were not afraid of the gallows? When will you see that to teach the hand of a child to stretch out and smother the butterfly, is to teach that hand, when a man's, to steal out and strangle an enemy?

On Sunday mornings there used to be grand spectacles of rat-slaughter. And there were numbers of young men, very gentleman-like men, some of them, who would pay half a guinea for admission, and a seat, to see the rats being killed, and the rat-dogs torn and worried in the conflict; and the prices ranged as high as a sovereign a seat when, in addition to its ennobling sport, there was one of the badgers brought out from the cupboard to be drawn. "Jacobs's Church" was a by-word amongst a certain sporting community; and I have seen men whom I subsequently saw in the House of Commons, and at the celebrated Clubs, come thither on a Sunday morn after a late breakfast, to assist at the precious spectacle of dogs and rats fighting, tearing, and slaughtering one another till the pit was red with blood.

They do good by stealth and blush to find it known—" or rather swear impatiently to find it known, as their manner is. I do not say that this masking of all their better acts and thoughts is of itself commendable; but I think, in view of the innumerable creatures who crow out aloud their own charities, and of the abundant hypocrites who only fold their robes to hide their vice and avarice, such exceptions as his are refreshing, and not to be condemned. If you have not known men like him, men of this order and of this habit of speech and act, you will not be likely to comprehend the character of this master of mine.

Politics you should banish absolutely—if people are not of one mind about them they are sure to quarrel over them; if they are of one mind no subject can be drearier.

Soon after that he drank some soda-water, and went to bed: I did so too, and, I shame to confess, slept soundly, unhaunted by so much as a dream of the poor patient Bronze, whom we had left in the chilly bleak dawn, alone with his hunger and sorrow. We hear a very great chatter of "sympathy" in this world: is there aught of it, I wonder, that is anything beyond fellow-feeling?

Keep close to me," whispered Fanfreluchc. "Close!— or else you'll get stolen." As we descended, the glow of the countless gas-lamps, the pressure of the waiting crowds, the huge letters on the glaring posters, the noise and the confusion, and the glitter of the cross-lights, so dazed and terrified me that I was in danger of forgetting her injunction, and being trampled to death in the street. However, by some miracle I escaped destruction, and followed my patroness through what appeared to me the most hideous dark passages I had ever beheld.

I was surrounded by devils, imps, fairies, butterflies, peasants in white muslin, shepherds with ribboned crooksj woolly lambs standing on two legs and sucking their thumbs; green and white water-lilies, with their arms akimbo, and their tongues thrust in their cheeks at a joke; a winged sylph drinking from a pot of porter, and a goldenhaired wood-elf smoking a cigarette;—in a word, I was in that mystic region commonly known as "behind tho scenes." My first impression was that it was a pandemonium amidst an earthquake of canvas and timber; my second, that it was extraordinarily commonplace with all its bizarrerie, and intensely vulgar and dreary with all its glitter.

Will you take me home with you ?" I ventured to ask, emboldened by his honest kind eyes. "I have no home," ho said mournfully, "otherwise I would. I sleep under bridge-arches, or doorways, or anywhere I can; where I am not hunted away" "But that must be very miserable?" "Yes, it is miserable. But there are tens of thousands of human creatures that do*the same. I must not complain.

But if the world only toss you a cake, only keep you well fed and well fattened, what a good and a fair world it is, how full of all sweetness and light, how true in its vision, how pure in its excellence;

Take the dog to him, but do not bring mo back any money; I am not a thief, to take payment for honesty." "What I but he's offered the five sovs. for the dog; you've a right to it,—where is the harm?" "There may be no harm, but I would not take it. My father would have never let me accept a reward fordoing such a little simple thing, so plainly right as that.

It was passing strange, I thought, that these two grave strong men should be so gentle over a creature who never cared how she wounded, mocked, flouted, or harmed either of them, to please her sport or charm her vanity

For I had no sort of doubt or hope left in me; I knew that she was going to sell " tha pup," as well as though I had heard her proclaim aloud her wicked intent.

He was rough too, and hurt me in handling, but he did not starve me. He chained me, indeed, by my light collar to the log of a chair, and kept me prisoner in his little sitting-room upstairs that looked out on the market-place; but he was out a great deal, and I was left chiefly alone. I might be there but a day, I might be there for n week; I cannot recollect. I only know I was miserable. The first thing that recalled me to consciousness was the sharp sting of a whip across my back. I shrieked with the pain ; in Ben's house even A vice had never dared to beat me. The only response to my cry was a sharper blow than the first;—and this was repeated, till I was literally blind and stupefied, and was quiet because numbed with anguish.

Once again alone, my grief was unrestrained; so much so that the woman of the house came and hammered at the door and swore at me for a "dratted yelping beast," which only made my cries the louder. As several hours went on, however, and my solitude remained unbroken, I cried myself so hoarse that I was unable to emit any sort of sound at last; and thought I might as well vary my imprisonment by looking out of the casement.

The only great actress is a woman whom you utterly forget in the impersonation that she chooses you to see. The actresses we are blessed with are always making us think—how well A looks to-night, how intricate B's coiffure is, how becoming that tawny satin is to C, and how resplendent are D's diamonds!

she was very liberal in her range of literature. All languages being equally intelligible to us (though we can never comprehend why you have not all one and the same, as we superior animals have), I derived considerable entertainment from hearing the innumerable works, in various tongues, which her companion read aloud to her almost from morning to night.

Jack loudly protested against such literal interpretation of his figurative language, and a very pretty bout with fisticuffs was the result,—the innocent kettle ultimately being battered to pieces in the fray. Such is men's justice; in all their quarrels there is always some poor luckless kettle which, sinless itself, gets the blows from each side

I wonder now that I did not die; but if everything died that is full of wretchedness, your world would soon have but a sparse peopling.

I only know that a man who has the strength of the lion very often has also the tender touch of the dove.

Bless the baby !" she cried, as though she bad been a matron and a mastiff at the least. "What an ignoramus it is! Why, my dear, she will sell you as soon as she shall have had you a month or two. She sells us all; and the more we are worth the quicker we go :—provided she can do it decently. They don't know that, you sec. Oh, no!—we arc always 'stolen' or 'lost,' she tells them. And they are such out-and-out fools—they believe it! And then they send her others to replace us; and the game goes on again; and altogether she makes a very pretty annual perquisite out of her 'pets

I need not say that in this place I had never ceased to passionately regret my dear old master in the noble pine woods of the Peak. Indeed, I had sometimes lamented for him aloud in a grief that brought on me angry words and even angry strokes; so little sympathy have men or women ever with our woes, although for theirs we feel so keenly and fret ourselves so ceaselessly. Twenty times at least had I endeavored to run away, with the full intent of trying to find my road back alone

HE CHOSE DEATH RATHER THAN UNFAITHFULNESS. HE KNEW NO BETTER. HE WAS A DOG.

IT is strange how the outer world surrounds yet never touches the inner; how the gay and lighter threads of life intervene yet never mingle with those that are darkest and sternest, as the parasite clings to the forest tree, united yet ever dissimilar!

A little farther on, in the old playing-field, there were the wickets, and the bats, and the jumping poles, and four or five boys, in their shirt sleeves and their straw hats, enjoying their half-holiday, as we had done before them. So life goes on; when one is bowled out, another is ready to step into his shoes, and, no matter how many the ball of death may knock over, the cricket of life is kept up the same, and players are never wanting!

Ouida’s first novel was published in three volumes in 1863, though it had previously been released in serial form as Granville de Vigne in The New Monthly magazine from January 1861 to June 1863, as was the common practice at the time. The author was only twenty-four years old at the time, but was later to claim that this was not her first attempt at writing and that her 1867 novel Idalia was written when she was just sixteen.

Ouida is not afraid to play with gender roles and her explorations of femininity in men and masculinity in women, were considered avant-garde

Where grave philosophers have watched the setting sun die out of the sky, as the glories of their own youth have died away unvalued, till lost for ever. Where ascetic reading-men have mooned along its banks blind to all the loveliness of the water-lily below, or the clouds above, as they took their constitutional and pondered their prize essay.

That fellow De Vigne’s dreaming away in comfort, while we’re dragged out by the heels, for a lot of confounded humbug and form,” lamented Curly to me as we entered; while the readers hurried the prayers over, in that singsong recitative in favour with collegemen — a cross between the drone of a gnat, and the whine of a Suffolk peasant. We dozed comfortably, sitting down, and getting up, at the right times, by sheer force of habit; or read Dumas, or Balzac, under cover of our prayer-books.

There was every type of the genus sporting man; stout, square farmers, with honest bull-dog physique, characteristic of John Bull plebeian; wild young Cantabs, mounted showily from livery-stables, with the fair, fearless, delicate features characteristic of John Bull patrician; steady old whippers-in, very suspicious of brandy; wrinkled feeders, with stentorian voices that the wildest puppy had learned to know and dread; the courteous, cordial aristocratic M.F.H., with the men of his class, the county gentry; rough, ill-looking cads, awkward at all things save crossing country; no end of pedestrians, nearly run over themselves, and falling into everybody’s way; and last, but in our eyes not least, the ladies who had come to see the hounds throw off.

Why? For this reason — that nobody does. Hollingsworth and he were cornets together; yet Hollingsworth is as much a stranger to the real man as you or I. There are some fellows, you know, who don’t wear their hearts on their sleeves; he is one, I am another. Men are like snowballs: to begin with, it’s a piece of snow, soft and pure and malleable, and easily enough melted; but the snowball soon gets kicked about and mixed up with other snow, and knocked against stones and angles, and hurried, and shoved, and pushed along till, in sheer selfdefence, it hardens itself into a solid, impenetrable, immovable block of ice!

How pleasant they were, those jolly college days! As I think of them, many kindly faces and joyous voices rise before me! Where are they all? Some lying with the colours on their breast beside the Euxine Sea, and along the line of the Pacific; some struck down by the assassin’s knife in the temples at Cawnpore; some sleeping beneath the sighing of the Delhi palms, or of the sad Atlantic waves; some wasting classic eloquence on country hinds, in moss-grown village churches; some fighting the great fight, between science and death, in the crowded hospital-wards of London; some wearing honour, and honesty, and truth from their hearts, in the breathless, up-hill press of the great world; — all of them, living or dead, scattered far away over the earth, since those old days, in the shadow of the academic walls!

the love of Francesca and Paolo, often essayed by artists, yet never rendered, even by Ary Scheffer, as Dante would have had it, and as it was rendered here. There were no vulgarities of a fabled Hell; there were the two, alone in that true torture — Ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria —  yet happy, because together. Her face and form were in full light, his in shadow. Heart beating against heart, their arms round each other, they looked down into each other’s eyes. On his face were the fierce passions, against which he had had no strength, mingled with deep and yearning regret for the fate he had drawn in with his own. On hers, lifted up to him, was all the love at sight of which he who beheld it “swooned even as unto death;” the love — — placer si forte, Che come vedi ancor non m’abbandona — the love which made hell, paradise; and torture together, dearer than heaven alone.

Who upholds that the good is oft interred with our bones. ’Tisn’t true though it is Shakspeare who says it; if you leave your family or your pet hospital a good many thousands, you will get the cardinal virtues, and a trifle more, in letters of gold on your tomb; though if you have lived up to your income, or forgotten to insure, any penny-alining La Monnoye will do to scribble your epitaph, and break off with “C’est trop mentir pour cinq écus!

swept gently in till the air was full of the dreamy and voluptuous fragrance which lulls the senses and woos the heart to those softer moments which, could they but last, would make men never need to dream of heaven. Such hours are rare; what wonder if, to win them, we risk all, if in them we cry with the Lotus Eaters, “Let us alone. What is it that will last? All things sûre taken from us and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past. Let us alone. What pleasure can we have To war with evil? Is there any peace In ever climbing up the climbing wave? All things have rest and ripen toward the grave In silence; ripen, fall, and cease. Give us long rest or death; dark death or dreamful ease.

we medical men, my dear lady, have no time to stop for conventionalities when life is in the balance. If Major de Vigne were anywhere in this country I would make him come and quiet my patient by a sight of him; all she does is to sob quietly, and murmur that man’s name to herself, and if we cannot get at the mind we cannot work miracles with the body. Any shock would be better than this dreamy lethargy; there is no knowing to what mischief it may not lead. I shall tell her he is gone to the Crimea!

Montressor saw that without the freedom of air, to which she was accustomed, she would never be better. Miss Russel’s rector, like many another rector, since he “knew nothing of the young person,” would not have thought of wasting one of his spare beds on a stranger “of no connexions,” and “you know, my dear, for anything we can tell, perhaps of no very pure moral character,” as he remarked to his wife, previous to rustling into church in his stiff and majestic surplice, and giving for his text the story of Mary Magdalene.

Poor child! you are much fit for a nurse! What do you know of wounds, of sickness, of death? What qualification have you to induce them to give you such an office? Do you think they would take such a fair face as yours among the sick wards? No, no, that is impracticable. You must wait: the lesson hardest of all to learn — one, I dare say, you have never had to learn at al!

the amateurs, who had come out to see what was doing in the Crimea, as they went other years to Norwegian fishing or Baden roulette, were scattered about in yachting costume, and stirred to a little excitement as the Russian shells began to burst among us, and the bombs to fall with thuds loud enough to startle the strongest nerves.

Sell yourself?” repeated the peeress. Fine ladies are not often fond of hearing things called by their proper names, “Yes, sell myself,” repeated Violet, bitterly, leaning against the mantelpiece, with a painful smile upon her lips. “Would you not put me up to auction, knock me down to the highest bidder? Marriage is the mart, mothers the auctioneers, and he who bids the highest wins. Women are like racers, brought up only to run for Cups, and win handicaps for their owners.” “Nonsense!” said her mother, impatiently. “You have lost your senses, I think. There is no question of ‘selling,’ as you term it. Marriage is a social compact, of course, where alliances suitable in position, birth, and wealth, are studied. Why should you pretend to be wiser than all the rest of the world? Most amiable and excellent women have married without thinking love a necessary ingredient Why should you object to a good alliance if it be a mariage de convenance?

which might have touched into sympathy, even the coldest nature. But (I do not think one can blame my Lady Molyneux; if she was born without feelings, perhaps she was hardly more responsible for the non-possession of them, than the idiot for the total absence of brain) her mother was not even silenced.

pale, but resolute as Eponina’s or Gertrude von der Wart’s — and I think the martyrdom of endurance is worse than the martyrdom of action!