A breakfast, merits; ever giving / Cheerful notice we are living / Another day refreshed by sleep, / When its festival we keep.

No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left.

Anger in its time and place / May assume a kind of grace. / It must have some reason in it / And not last beyond a minute.

I have had playmates, I have had companions, / In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days,— / All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth and to have it found out by accident.

I always arrive late at the office but I make up for it by leaving early.

We are ashamed at the sight of a monkey. Somehow as we are shy of poor relations.

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.

Did I hear the church-clock a few minutes ago, I was asked, and I answered, I hardly did know,but I thought that I heard it strike three.

Ceremony is an invention to take off the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow creature than some other person is. It endeavours to make up, by superior attentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater.