a_ than the indignity of a bill for
printing! Better to accept a country-house as a gift than to be in debt
to one's landlady! On the whole, the patron was an excellent
institution, if not for poetry at least for the poets; . . . every poet
longs for a Maecenas.

The two things the Greeks valued most in actors were grace of gesture and
music of voice. Indeed, to gain these virtues their actors used to
subject themselves to a regular course of gymnastics and a particular
regime of diet, health being to the Greeks not merely a quality of art,
but a condition of its production.

One should not be too severe on English novels: they are the only
relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.

Most modern novels are more remarkable for their crime than for their
culture.

Not that a tramp's mode of life is at all unsuited to the development of
the poetic faculty. Far from it! He, if any one, should possess that
freedom of mood which is so essential to the artist, for he has no taxes
to pay and no relations to worry him. The man who possesses a permanent
address, and whose name is to be found in the Directory, is necessarily
limited and localized. Only the tramp has absolute liberty of living.
Was not Homer himself a vagrant, and did not Thespis go about in a
caravan?

In art as in life the law of heredity holds good. _On est toujours fils
de quelqu'un_.

He has succeeded in studying a fine poet without stealing from him--a
very difficult thing to do.

Morocco is a sort of paradox among countries, for though it lies westward
of Piccadilly, yet it is purely Oriental in character, and though it is
but three hours' sail from Europe, yet it makes you feel (to use the
forcible expression of an American writer) as if you had been taken up by
the scruff of the neck and set down in the Old Testament.

As children themselves are the perfect flowers of life, so a collection
of the best poems written on children should be the most perfect of all
anthologies.

No English poet has written of children with more love and grace and
delicacy [than Herrick]. His _Ode on the Birth of Our Saviour_, his poem
_To His Saviour_, _A Child_: _A Present by a Child_, his _Graces for
Children_, and his many lovely epitaphs on children are all of them
exquisite works of art, simple, sweet and sincere.

As the cross-benches form a refuge for those who have no minds to make
up, so those who cannot make up their minds always take to Homeri