Edmund Yates

“{{cite journal|title=Yates, Edmund|author={{w|Thomas Seccombe|Seccombe, Thomas}}|journal=Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1900|volume=vol. 53|url=https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900/Yates,_Edmund}}”

“{{commons category-inline}}”

“I have heard Dickens described by those who knew him as aggressive, imperious, and intolerant, and I can comprehend the accusation; but to me his temper was always of the sweetest and kindest. He would, I doubt not, have been easily bored, and would not have scrupled to show it; but he never ran the risk. He was imperious in the sense that his life was conducted on the sic vole sic jubeo principle, and that everything gave way before him.”

“... in collaboration with Harrington I wrote an entertainment for Mr. George Case, a well-known musical man and player of the concertina, who retired from the orchestra on his marriage with a Miss Grace Egerton, a pretty and uncommonly sprightly and clever little actress, who ought to have done better things.In buying a pair of horses from a dealer, the experienced purchaser is generally aware that he will become the owner of a good animal and a bad one, and the writer of entertainments for a married couple is very often in an analogous position.”

“... No one succeeds better than Mr. Thackeray in cutting his coat according to his cloth. Here he flattered the aristocracy; but when he crossed the Atlantic, George Washington became the idol of his worship, the "{{w|List of British monarchs|Four Georges}}" the object of his bitterest attacks. These last-named lectures have been dead failures in England, though as literary compositions they are most excellent.”

“In those days, too, we used to lunch at places which seem entirely to have disappeared. The {{w|Aleister Crowley#Early life|"Crowley's Alton Alehouse"}} is not so frequently met with as it was thirty years ago. The "alehouses" were, in fact, small shops fitted with a {{w|Beer engine|beer-engine}} and a counter; they had been established by Mr. Crowley, a brewer of {{w|Alton, Hampshire|Alton}}, on finding the difficulty of procuring ordinary public-houses for the sake of his beer; and at them was sold nothing but beer, {{w|ham sandwich}}es, bread and cheese, but all of the very best.”

“I look back to the six years which I passed at the {{w|Highgate School#History|Highgate School}} with very little pleasure. The headmaster, Dr. Dyne was a capable pedagogue enough, not more than usually narrow-minded, priggish, and conventional. He was a type of the old-fashioned pedantic school, which looked upon Oxford as the "hub of the universe," thought the study of Latin and {{w|Greek language|Greek}} the primary object of our creation, despised modern languages and foreign countries, and believed thoroughly in the virtues of corporal punishment.”

“Gone is {{w|Smithfield, London#Smithfield area|Smithfield}}, with its very wide open pens and cattle-hutches; and gone with it is a good deal of the scandal of driving the wretched beasts through the streets, and whacking and torturing them in the most dreadful fashion. Enormous hordes of cattle for Smithfield Monday market, then—not as now, sent up by rail, bur driven long tedious journeys—used to arrive at {{w|Highgate}} on the Saturday, and pass the Sunday in the fields let out for the purpose.”

“Seriously, Frank Churchill, it's time you began to look after a wife. In our profession, especially, it's the greatest blessing to have some one to care for and to be petted by in the intervals of business-strife. There used to be a notion that a literary man required to be perpetually 'seeing life,' which meant 'getting drunk, and never going home;' but that's exploded, and I believe that our best character-painters owe half their powers of delineation to their wives' suggestions. Women,—by Jove sir!—women read character wonderfully.”