Barchester Towers

by Anthony Trollope

How much kinder is God to us than we are willing to be to ourselves! At the loss of every dear face, at the last going of every well-beloved one, we all doom ourselves to an eternity of sorrow, and look to waste ourselves away in an ever-running fountain of tears. How seldom does such grief endure! how blessed is the goodness which forbids it to do so! ‘Let me ever remember my living friends, but forget them as soon as dead,’ was the prayer of a wise man who understood the mercy of God.

There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilized and free countries, than the necessity of listening to sermons.

Let a professor of law or physic find his place in a lecture-room, and there pour forth jejune words and useless empty phrases, and he will pour them forth to empty benches. Let a barrister attempt to talk without talking well, and he will talk but seldom. A judge’s charge need be listened to perforce by none but the jury, prisoner, and gaoler. A member of Parliament can be coughed down or counted out. Town-councillors can be tabooed. But no one can rid himself of the preaching clergyman.

Her virtues were too numerous to describe, and not sufficiently interesting to deserve description.

But for real true love – love at first sight, love to devotion, love that robs a man of his sleep, love that ‘will gaze an eagle blind’, love that ‘will hear the lowest sound when the suspicious tread of theft is stopped’, love that is ‘like a Hercules, still climbing trees in the Hesperides’ – we believe the best age is from forty-five to seventy; up to that men are generally given to mere flirting.

We may say that she regarded him somewhat as a sportsman does a pheasant. The bird is so easily shot, that he would not be worth the shooting were it not for the very respectable appearance that he makes in a larder.

Till we can become divine, we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for a change we sink to something lower.