Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804 – 1845)
English poet, essayist and journalist.
Everybody is seldom to be believed. "They say" is not proof that they know. On dit is French for a fib.
Everybody's word is worth Nobody's taking.
Shall we not rejoice then and revel in the glorious liberty of extract, and quote to the thousandth line? Shall we not have pages like the Pyramids? Who ever skipped a quotation, though it made against the interest of the story? Besides, how many books might be numbered that are valuable only in a solitary quotation!—as the oyster is esteemed for the pearl it may sometimes contain.
So, in our wisdom and fair justice we go on—"Giving to dust that is a little gilt, More laud than gold e'er dusted;" proclaiming the merits of the bad wine, and making it, by every token, as enticing as we can; and blessing our stars that the good will be found out by its flavor "without our stir." As it is inestimable, we seek not to win esteem for it; as it is beyond all praise, we bestow no praises upon it.
Pope abounds in quotable things, chiefly from his habit of making every line rest on its own merits—a circumstance that accounts, in its turn, for the strong resemblance his couplets bear to each other.
It is an odd mode of diminishing one's own weakness to ask a friend to lend us the equal force of his.
Two hats, we grant, may be better than one; yet is one enough at a time. It is so with the head. It should be sole and self-relying. We like to wear ours in single blessedness on our own shoulders, and not let it hanker after a place on other people's.
When the error is universal, it is supposed to end. The adoption of the foundling establishes its consanguinity.
Social and political life is a Society for the Diffusion of Mendacity.
I must stop to lament, that we cannot evince an admiring gratitude towards other excellent things by a like readiness of quotation: that we cannot, for instance, quote a star that we have been watching; or a hue of sunset; or a friend's voice, and his shake of the hand (I had almost said heart); or a beautiful picture—a Claude or Titian, for example.
Sooth't were a pleasant life to lead,
With nothing in the world to do
But just to blow a shepherd's reed,
The silent season thro'
And just to drive a flock to feed,—
Sheep—quiet, fond and few!
Credulity lives next door to Gossip.
No prime-minister in the parliament of letters has, at any time, ventured to introduce a bill for the apprehension of all vagrant inverted commas that may be found trespassing in the sunny places of argument; and to restrain the poaching propensities of authors in general, who are apt to stroll without a license into the manors of other men's genius.
What if two negatives make an affirmative ...does it follow that two nobodies shall be some body?
It is in the world of words, amid the dull but perhaps necessary detail of every-day events—that quotations come with a warmth and a welcome upon memory, and like Milton's fish, "Show to the sun their wav'd coats dropt with gold." ...In the dry and laboring essay, amid the windings of many words and the accumulation of antecedents, we hail their sudden and familiar appearances as patches of Nature's green to repose on by the way; their "dulcet and harmonious breath" animates a train of associations that dwell in the most sylvan haunts of emotion and sentiment; to their fountains of "loosened silver" we turn for a refreshing and a pleasant abstraction.
As with the tender juvenile, who sets light to his frock, so with the sweet senior, who sets his fortunes on fire. Even in his maturer time, in his state of cinderhood, he still craves to be further consumed.
When a story has gone the grand circuit, and travels back to us uncontradicted, we may reasonably begin to relax in our belief of it. If nobody questions it, it is manifestly a fiction; if it passes current, it is almost sure to be a counterfeit. The course of truth never yet ran smooth.
Of Shakespeare, not a line but has been repeatedly, and will continue to be cited, as a commentary on the great and various volume of human nature.
Forewarned, forearmed, is sheer nonsense. Who is so indefatigable a scribbler as your abundantly damned author? Which of our orators speak so long and so often as he whom nobody listens to? What actors are so constantly before the public as those whom the town will not go to see? Who so easy to deceive as the dupe who has been taken in all his days? The gamester is a legitimate child of that frail couple, Flesh and Blood; he loses a fourth of what he is worth at the first throw—esteems himself lucky if he loses less today than he did yesterday—goes on staking and forfeiting hour by hour—and parts with his last guinea by exactly the same turn of the dice which lost him his first. Experience leaves fools as foolish as ever.
For the author there is nothing but his pen, till that and life are worn to the stump: and then, with good fortune, perhaps on his death-bed he receives a pension—and equals, it may be, for a few months, the income of a retired butler!