"I am a man who can be very patient, or very impatient, as occasion serves."

"The English are, so far as I know, the hardest worked people on whom the sun shines. Be content if in their wretched intervals of leisure they read for amusement and do no worse."

"He was a man of a ponderous and solemn aspect; a man who might have been a bishop, or a judge, or a prime minister, or anything else that was grave and dignified."

"It is a most extraordinary, and at the same time a most natural, thing, that a man should be able to look back upon his life and see it as a whole."

"The town was a place of great resort, and much business was done there."