Sybil quotes

“Yes; why were not you there?”

“I never go anywhere,” replied the melancholy Cupid, “everything bores me so.”

“Well, will you go to Epsom with us tomorrow, Alfred?” said Lord Fitzheron. “I take Berners and Charles Egremont, and with you our party will be perfect.”

“Well, for my part,” said Mr. Berners. “I do not like your suburban dinners. You always get something you can’t eat, and cursed bad wine.”

“I rather like bad wine,” said Mr. Mountchesney; “one gets so bored with good wine.”

“Do you want the odds against Hybiscus, Berners?” said a guardsman looking up from his book, which he had been very intently studying.

… a year his successful exploits, had a weakness for the aristocracy, who knowing his graceful infirmity patronized him with condescending dexterity, acknowledged his existence in Pall Mall as well as at Tattersalls, and thus occasionally got a point more than the betting out of him.

Hump Chippendale had none of these gentle failings; he was a democratic leg, who loved to fleece a noble, and thought all men were born equal⁠—a consoling creed that was a hedge for his hump.

“Seven to four against the favourite; seven to two against Caravan; eleven to two against Mango. What about Benedict? Will anyone do anything about Pocket Hercules? Thirty to one against Dardanelles.”

none of those toilsome patricians whose assiduity in affairs had convinced their unprivileged fellow-subjects that government was a science, and administration an art, which demanded the devotion of a peculiar class in the state for their fulfilment and pursuit.

The Egremonts had never said anything that was remembered, or done anything that could be recalled.

It was decided by the Great Revolution families, that they should not be dukes. Infinite was the indignation of the lay Abbot of Marney. He counted his boroughs, consulted his cousins, and muttered revenge. The opportunity soon offered for the gratification of his passion.

One could almost tell upon one’s fingers the happy families who could do anything, and might have everything. A schoolboy’s ideas of the Church then were fat-livings, and of the State, rotten-boroughs.

To do nothing and get something, formed a boy’s ideal of a manly career.

There was nothing in the lot, little in the temperament, of Charles Egremont, to make him an exception to the multitude. Gaily and securely he floated on the brilliant stream.

awakened curiosity led him to investigate and to read; he discovered that, when he imagined his education was completed, it had in fact not commenced; and that, although he had been at a public school and a university, he in fact knew nothing.

To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge.

Before an emancipated intellect and an expanding intelligence, the great system of exclusive manners and exclusive feelings in which he had been born and nurtured, began to tremble;

Perhaps they may get that in time; at present they go away growling with a gaugership; or, having with desperate dexterity at length contrived to transform a tidewaiter into a landwaiter.

But there is nothing like asking⁠—except refusing.

Hark! it tolls! All is over. The great bell of the metropolitan cathedral announces the death of the last son of George the Third who probably will ever reign in England. He was a good man: with feelings and sympathies;

… sarcasm, Indeed he had no inconsiderable acquaintance with the doctrines of the economists, and was rather inclined to carry them into practice in every instance, except that of the landed proprietary, which he clearly proved “stood upon different grounds” to that of any other “interest.”

There was nothing he hated so much as a poacher, except a lease;

though perhaps in the catalogue of his aversions, we ought to give the preference to his anti-ecclesiastical prejudice: this amounted even to acrimony.

there was some talk of an evening lecture, the schools were to be remodelled, certain tracts were actually distributed. But Lord Marney soon stopped all this.

“No priestcraft at Marney,” said this gentle proprietor of abbey lands.

“I wanted very much to come and canvass for you,” said Lady Marney to Egremont, “but George did not like it.”

… clear and lively stream, surrounded by meadows and gardens, and backed by lofty hills, undulating and richly wooded, the traveller on the opposite heights of the dale would often stop to admire the merry prospect, that recalled to him the traditional epithet of his country.

Beautiful illusion! For behind that laughing landscape, penury and disease fed upon the vitals of a miserable population!

The contrast between the interior of the town and its external aspect, was as striking as it was full of pain.

“Well, Snigford,” said his lordship, in a peremptory tone, “this is a pretty business; I’ll have this stopped directly.”

Fortunate man if he succeed in doing so!

The torch of the incendiary had for the first time been introduced into the parish of Marney; and last night the primest stacks of the Abbey farm had blazed a beacon to the agitated neighbourhood.

“They would hardly have forfeited their resting-place had they deserved to retain it,” said Egremont.

“They were rich. I thought it was poverty that was a crime,” replied the stranger in a tone of simplicity.

“But they had committed other crimes.”

Their tenants too might renew their term before their tenure ran out: so they were men of spirit and property. There were yeomen then, sir: the country was not divided into two classes, masters and slaves; there was some resting-place between luxury and misery.

Comfort was an English habit then, not merely an English word.

”

In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of cooperation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the rest they are careless of neighbours.

Christianity teaches us to love our neighbour as ourself; modern society acknowledges no neighbour.

”

… we live in strange times,” said Egremont, struck by the observation of his companion, and relieving a perplexed spirit by an ordinary exclamation, which often denotes that the mind is more stirring than it cares to acknowledge, or at the moment is capable to express.

“When the infant begins to walk, it also thinks that it lives in strange times,” said his companion.

“That society, still in its infancy, is beginning to feel its way.”

Always, if you possibly can, keep square. And if by any chance you do find yourself in a scrape, come to me. There is nothing under those circumstances like the advice of a cool-headed friend.”

“As valuable as the assistance of a cold-hearted one,” thought Egremont, who did not fancy too much the tone of this conversation.

“But there is one thing of which you must particularly beware,” continued Lord Marney, “there is one thing worse even than getting into difficulties—patching them up. The patching-up system is fatal; it is sure to break down; you never get clear.

She yielded without a struggle to the arbitrary will and unreasonable caprice of a husband, who was scarcely her equal in intellect, and far her inferior in all the genial qualities of our nature, but who governed her by his iron selfishness.

Lady Marney absolutely had no will of her own.

A hard, exact, literal, bustling, acute being environed her existence; directed, planned, settled everything. Her life was a series of petty sacrifices and baulked enjoyments. If her carriage were at the door, she was never certain that she would not have to send it away;

“We have cause to bless it,” said Gerard. “I thought it then something to serve a gentleman; and as for my daughter, she, by their goodness, was brought up in holy walls, which have made her what she is.”

“Nature made her what she is,” said Stephen in a low voice, and speaking not without emotion.

Then he continued, in a louder and brisker tone, “But this Hatton—you know nothing of his whereabouts?”

There are infants that will defy even starvation and poison, unnatural mothers and demon nurses. Such was the nameless one of whom we speak.

We cannot say he thrived; but he would not die.

So at two years of age, his mother being lost sight of, and the weekly payment having ceased, he was sent out in the street to “play,” in order to be run over. Even this expedient failed.

The expense is not great: laudanum and treacle, administered in the shape of some popular elixir, affords these innocents a brief taste of the sweets of existence, and keeping them quiet, prepares them for the silence of their impending grave.

Infanticide is practised as extensively and as legally in England, as it is on the banks of the Ganges;

a circumstance which apparently has not yet engaged the attention of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.

Wouldn’t I fire a broadside into their ‘double deckers?’ The battle of Navarino at Mowbray fair with fourteen squibs from the admiral’s ship going off at the same time, should be nothing to it.”

“Labour may be weak, but Capital is weaker,” said Devilsdust. “Their capital is all paper.”

“I tell you what,” said Mick, with a knowing look, and in a lowered tone, “The only thing, my hearties, that can save this here nation, is—a—good strike.”

“I tell you what,” said Mick, with a knowing look, and in a lowered tone,

“The only thing, my hearties, that can save this here nation, is⁠—a⁠—good strike.”

Two of the swell mob, sent to town for picking a pocket at Shrewsbury races.”

“A countess and a felon! So much for public conveyances,” said Lord Mowbray.

“But Lady Vanilla is one of those who will talk with everybody.”

the Norman tempered by the Saxon; the fire of conquest softened by integrity; and a serene, though inflexible habit of mind. The chains of convention, an external life grown out of all proportion with that of the heart and mind, have destroyed this dignified beauty.

There is no longer in fact an aristocracy in England, for the superiority of the animal man is an essential quality of aristocracy.

But that it once existed, any collection of portraits from the sixteenth century will show.

Lord Marney looked up at Mr. St. Lys, with a stare of high-bred impertinence, and then carelessly observed, without directing his words to him,

“They may say what they like, but it is all an affair of population.”

“I would rather believe that it is an affair of resources,” said Mr. St. Lys; “not what is the amount of our population, but what is the amount of our resources for their maintenance.”

“I cannot sell my loom,” he continued, “at the price of old firewood, and it cost me gold. It is not vice that has brought me to this, nor indolence, nor imprudence. I was born to labour, and I was ready to labour.

I loved my loom and my loom loved me.

It gave me a cottage in my native village, surrounded by a garden of whose claims on my solicitude it was not jealous. There was time for both. It gave me for a wife the maiden that I had ever loved;

Who cares for us? Yet we have lost our estates. Who raises a voice for us? Yet we are at least as innocent as the nobility of France. We sink among no sighs except our own. And if they give us sympathy—what then?

Sympathy is the solace of the poor; but for the rich, there is compensation.

”

“Why—my father was a gentleman—” said Egremont in a hesitating tone, “and I was a younger son.”

“Ah!” said Gerard, “that is as bad as being a woman.”

“I had no patrimony,” continued Egremont, “and I was obliged to work; I had no head I believe for the law; the church was not exactly in my way; and as for the army, how was I to advance without money or connections!

“It is the principle of association,” said the stranger; “the want of the age.”

“Sir,” said Mr. Nixon, “this here age wants a great deal, but what it principally wants is to have its wages paid in the current coin of the realm.”

Soon after this there were symptoms of empty mugs and exhausted pipes, and the party began to stir. The stranger addressing Nixon, enquired of him what was their present distance from Wodgate.

“Why not?” asked Egremont fiercely. “Who and what are you to dare to address me thus?”

“I am your elder brother, sir, whose relationship to you is your only claim to the consideration of society.”

“A curse on the society that has fashioned such claims,” said Egremont in an heightened tone—“claims founded in selfishness, cruelty, and fraud, and leading to demoralization, misery, and crime.”

… and really unconscious of their degradation and unusual sufferings, or whether they are supported by the belief that their day to be masters and oppressors will surely arrive, the aristocracy of Wodgate is by no means so unpopular as the aristocracy of most other places.

In the first place it is a real aristocracy; it is privileged, but it does something for its privileges.

It is distinguished from the main body not merely by name. It is the most knowing class at Wodgate; it possesses indeed in its way complete knowledge; and it imparts in its manner a certain quantity of it to those whom it guides.

even babes, who should be at the breast; for they are drammed with Godfrey’s cordial. Here is relaxation, excitement; if less vice otherwise than might be at first anticipated, we must remember that excesses are checked by poverty of blood and constant exhaustion.

Scanty food and hard labour are in their way, if not exactly moralists, a tolerably good police.

There are no others at Wodgate to preach or to control. It is not that the people are immoral, for immorality implies some forethought; or ignorant, for ignorance is relative; but they are animals; unconscious; their minds a blank;

Sybil rose, and letting her book drop gently on the table, received Egremont with composure and native grace.

It is civilization that makes us awkward, for it gives us an uncertain position.

Perplexed, we take refuge in pretence; and embarrassed, we seek a resource in affectation. The Bedouin and the Red Indian never lose their presence of mind;

It is civilization that makes us awkward, for it gives us an uncertain position. Perplexed, we take refuge in pretence; and embarrassed, we seek a resource in affectation.

The Bedouin and the Red Indian never lose their presence of mind; and the wife of a peasant, when you enter her cottage, often greets you with a propriety of mien which favourably contrasts with your reception by some grand dame in some grand assembly

, meeting her guests alternately with a caricature of courtesy or an exaggeration of supercilious self-control.

“He believes that God will help those who help themselves,” said Gerard.

“And I believe,” said Sybil, “that those only can help themselves whom God helps.”

All this time Egremont was sitting at the table, with the book in his hand, gazing fitfully and occasionally with an air of absence on its title-page, whereon was written the name of its owner. Suddenly he said “Sybil.”

… which, though distinct, was mitigated in all its features—the distant woods, the clumps of tall trees that rose about the old grey bridge, the cottage chimneys that sent their smoke into the blue still air, amid their clustering orchards and garden of flowers and herbs.

Ah! what is there so fresh and joyous as a summer morn!

That spring time of the day, when the brain is bright, and the heart is brave; the season of daring and of hope; the renovating hour!

“You speak of Mr. Morley—”

“Oh! we don’t call him ‘Mr.,’ ” said Sybil slightly laughing.

“I mean Stephen Morley,” said Egremont recalling his position, “whom I met in Marney Abbey. He is very clever, is he not?”

“Is not she? I know exactly what you feel. But really you shall not be the least embarrassed. It may feel strange at first, to be sure, but then I shall be there; and do you know I look upon you quite as my protégé.”

“Protégé,” said Sybil. “I live with my father.”

“What a dear!” said Lady Maud looking round to Lord Milford. “Is not she naive?”

In the present state of civilization and with the scientific means of happiness at our command, the notion of home should be obsolete. Home is a barbarous idea; the method of a rude age; home is isolation; therefore antisocial. What we want is community.”

“It is all very fine,” said Gerard, “and I dare say you are right, Stephen; but I like stretching my feet on my own hearth.”

Every person, every incident, every feeling, touches and stirs the imagination. The restless mind creates and observes at the same time.

Indeed there is scarcely any popular tenet more erroneous than that which holds that when time is slow, life is dull.

It is very often and very much the reverse. If we look back on those passages of our life which dwell most upon the memory, they are brief periods full of action and novel sensation.

Notwithstanding the animating draught, the heart of Mick Radley trembled.

There are some moments when the nervous system defies even brandy.

Mick was on the eve of a great and solemn incident, round which for years his imagination had gathered and brooded. Often in that imagination he had conceived the scene, and successfully confronted its perils or its trials.

“Ah! you want to get at our estates,” said Lord Valentine smiling; “but the effort on your part may resolve society into its original elements, and the old sources of distinction may again develop themselves.”

“Tall barons will not stand against Paixhans rockets,” said the delegate. “Modern science has vindicated the natural equality of man.”

“And I must say I am very sorry for it,” said the other delegate; “for human strength always seems to me the natural process of settling affairs.”

It is much to be deplored that our sacred buildings are generally closed except at the stated periods of public resort.

It is still more to be regretted that when with difficulty entered, there is so much in their arrangements to offend the taste and outrage the feelings.

“Do you think—” said the diplomatist, and he looked up in the face of Lord Deloraine.

“I think that in the long run everything will have an end,” said Lord Deloraine.

“Bah!” said Lord Deloraine as he walked away with Mr. Ormsby. “I remember that fellow—a sort of equivocal attaché at Paris, when we were there with Monmouth at the peace: and now he is a quasi ambassador, and ribboned and starred to the chin.”

“Bah!” said Lord Deloraine as he walked away with Mr. Ormsby. “I remember that fellow—a sort of equivocal attaché at Paris, when we were there with Monmouth at the peace: and now he is a quasi ambassador, and ribboned and starred to the chin.”

“The only stars I have got,” said Mr. Ormsby demurely, “are four stars in India stock.”

Lady Firebrace and Lady Maud Fitz-Warene were announced: they had just come from the Commons; a dame and damsel full of political enthusiasm. Lady Firebrace gave critical reports and disseminated many contradictory estimates of the result;

“Is it quite true?” said a great Whig dame to Mr. Egerton, one of her own party.

“I can endure anything except Lady St. Julian’s glance of triumph,” said the Whig dame.

“I really think if it were only to ease her Majesty from such an infliction, they ought to have held on.”

Nor when it finally yielded to the iron progress of oligarchical supremacy, was its catastrophe inglorious. Its genius was vindicated in golden sentences and with fervent arguments of impassioned logic by St. John; and breathed in the intrepid eloquence and patriot soul of William Wyndham.

Even now it is not dead, but sleepeth;

and in an age of political materialism, of confused purposes and perplexed intelligence, that aspires only to wealth because it has faith in no other accomplishment, as men rifle cargoes on the verge of shipwreck, Toryism will yet rise from the tomb over which Bolingbroke …

he dwelt with passionate eloquence on his abounding love. But with a solemn sweetness, and as it were a tender inflexibility, the tears trickling down her beautiful cheek, and pressing his hand in both of hers, she subdued and put aside all his efforts.

“Believe me,” she said, “the gulf is impassable.”

Beautiful children, fresh and sweet as the newborn rose, glanced about with the gestures and sometimes the voices of Paradise. And in the distance rose the sacred towers of the great Western Minster.

How fair is a garden amid the toils and passions of existence!

A curse upon those who vulgarize and desecrate these holy haunts; breaking the hearts of nursery maids, and smoking tobacco in the palace of the rose!

It will be a produce hostile to the oligarchical system. The future principle of English politics will not be a levelling principle; not a principle adverse to privileges, but favourable to their extension.

It will seek to ensure equality, not by levelling the Few but by elevating the Many.

”

Her eye was fixed in lustrous contemplation, the flush on her cheek was a messenger from her heart, the movement of her mouth would have in an instant become a smile, when the clock of St. John’s struck four, and Sybil started from her reverie.

The clock of St. John’s struck four, and Sybil became anxious; the clock of St. John’s struck five, and Sybil became disquieted;

restless and perturbed, she was walking up and down the chamber, her books long since thrown aside, when the clock of St. John’s struck six.

“All right,” said the cabman, as Sybil entered the illumined door.

“Poor young thing! she’s wery anxious about summut.”

Sybil at once stepped into a rather capacious room, fitted up in the old-fashioned style of coffee-rooms, with mahogany boxes, in several of which were men drinking coffee and reading newspapers by a painful glare of gas.

“Yes,” said Lady St. Julians. “

I think those men who breakfast out or who give breakfasts are generally dangerous characters; at least, I would not trust them.

The Whigs are very fond of that sort of thing. If Mr. Egremont joins them, I really do not see what shadow of a claim Lady Deloraine can urge to have anything.”

he was really a melancholy man. The change in his demeanour was observed by all; his mother and his sister-in-law were the only persons who endeavoured to penetrate its cause, and sighed over the failure of their sagacity.

Quit the world and the world forgets you;

and Egremont would have soon been a name no longer mentioned in those brilliant saloons which he once adorned, had not occasionally a sensation, produced by an effective speech in the House of Commons, recalled his name to his old associates, who then remembered the …

“I only copied them out of Mina Blake’s album: but I sent them in my own handwriting.”

Baffled sympathy was the cause of Egremont’s gloom. It is the secret spring of most melancholy.

He loved and loved in vain. The conviction that his passion, though hopeless, was not looked upon with disfavour, only made him the more wretched, for the disappointment is more acute in proportion as the chance is better.

“

I have seen a many things in my time Mrs. Trotman,

” said Chaffing Jack as he took the pipe from his mouth in the silent bar room of the Cat and Fiddle; “but I never see any like this.

“

That my visions were of the world, and brought me to the cloister, and that yours were of the cloister and have brought you to the world.

”

“Is the greatest of human blessings to be obtained as a matter of course; to be plucked like fruit, or seized like a running stream? No, no: we must suffer, but we are wiser than of yore—we will not conspire.

Conspiracies are for aristocrats, not for nations.

”

“Well,” said Gerard, “the wages have been dropping ever since. The people exist, but you can scarcely say they live. But they are cowed I fancy.

An empty belly is sometimes as apt to dull the heart as inflame the courage.

And then they have lost their leaders, for I was away you see, and have been quiet enough since I came out; and Warner is broken: he has suffered more from his time than I did; which is strange, for he had his pursuits;

“We will have no more gardens in England; everything shall be open,” said the Liberator, “and baths shall only be used to drown the enemies of the People.

I was always against washing; it takes the marrow out of a man.

”

This proposition was received with one of those wild shouts of approbation which indicate the orator has exactly hit his audience between wind and water. The fact is the public mind at this instant wanted to be led, and in Dandy Mick a leader appeared.

A leader to be successful should embody in his system the necessities of his followers; express what every one feels, but no one has had the ability or the courage to pronounce.

The courage and adroitness, the influence of Gerard, had reconciled the people to the relinquishment of the great end for which they had congregated; but neither man nor multitude like to make preparations without obtaining a result.