Charles Kegan Paul

“George Eliot's Salon on Sundays was a stately reception, in which her talk was always well worth hearing: she raised conversation on whatever subject she touched to a higher level. Miss Anna Swanwick is the only other person I know with the same immediate power of raising the conversation with apparent continuity and without seeming to force it.”

“Mr. Montagu was fourteen when Dr. Johnson, whom he knew, died; he was the intimate associate of Godwin, Coleridge, Wordsworth; he watched by Mary Wollstonecraft's deathbed; Sir James Mackintosh helped to steady those liberal principles which were growing somewhat wild under Godwin's influence; his home was the haunt not only of Londoners like Charles Lamb, but of young men from the country before they grew famous, if only they had promise in them, like Edward Irving and Carlyle.”

“With perhaps the exception of Dr. Johnson and Lord Tennyson, it is difficult to name any men who, writing really good works, lived by those works and by the pensions conferred upon them on account of those works. With those exceptions, I can think of no one whose books have lived and are likely to live, who have not either had an independent fortune or a profession quite apart from literature, by which they gained at least a modest living.”

“It is by books that mind speaks to mind, by books the world’s intelligence grows, books are the tree of knowledge, which has grown into and twined its branches with those of the tree of life, and of their common fruit men eat and become as gods knowing good and evil.”

“Literature has had little to say of the labourer; and this, not that his class is lacking in interest, in poetry, in romance, but simply because those sections of society to which writers belong know nothing about him.”