George Saintsbury (1845 – 1933)
Prolific and popular English historian and literary scholar.
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In the sect – fairly large and yet unusually choice – of Austenians or Janites, there would probably be found partisans of the claim to primacy of almost every one of the novels.
The Book of History is the Bible of Irony.
Let us also once more rejoice in, and thank God for, the fact that we know nothing about Homer, and practically nothing about Shakespeare.
We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire.
Majorities are generally wrong, if only in their reasons for being right.
I wish that I could save myself constant repetition by printing across the dog's-ear place of these pages the warning, "Never judge a critic by your agreement with his likes and dislikes.”
Criticism is the endeavour to find, to know, to love, to recommend, not only the best, but all the good, that has been known and thought and written in the world.
When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.
But dinner is dinner, a meal at which not so much to eat — it becomes difficult to eat much at it as you grow older — as to drink, to talk, to flirt, to discuss, to rejoice "at the closing of the day". I do not think anything serious should be done after it, as nothing should before breakfast.
Historians may lie, but History cannot.
Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage.
Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.
[It] is the unbroken testimony of all history that alcoholic liquors have been used by the strongest, wisest, handsomest, and in every way best races of all times.
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