John Morley

Her determination in this case as in others, not inwardly to “sell the truth” (this is Robert Pollok) overbears all prepossessions and longings, strong as they are, on the German side, and enables her spontaneously to hold the balance, it…

How can I who drink good wine and bitter beer every day of my life, in a comfortable room and among friends, coolly stand up and advise hardworking fellow-creatures to take “the pledge”?

Every one knew him to be good, but I had no idea of the extent and height of his goodness, and his boundless power and thirst not for giving only but for loving.

I fully believe that England will not go to war, and I am sure she ought not.

I do not think our political annals record such a removal of a generation of statesmen before its time as we have witnessed in the last four years.

He was a high and strong character, very true, very noble, and, I think, intelligible, which (as you know) I think rare in politicians.

Death of itself produces a certain tendency to view more warmly what was before admired, and more slightly anything that was not.

And by stirring the thought of the nation through the press it commonly throws lights upon the subject either new in themselves or new in their combination.

These churches are really the best champions of the men who built them.

The best will be a severe struggle and the issue is likely to be unfavourable.

I believe there is no danger to-morrow, but what next week may do is another matter.

He is firm and resigned, not stoically, but with trust in God.

I am very sad at the thought of losing this very true, trusty, hearty friend.

I have lost in her from view the warmest and dearest friend, surely, that ever man had.

Why this noble and tender spirit should have had such bounty for me and should have so freshened my advancing years, my absorbed and divided mind, I cannot tell.

But I feel, strange as it might sound, ten years the older for her death.

May the rest and light and peace of God be with her ever more until that day.

Aristocracy, democracy, are not vain doctrines for us to dispute about; they are powers; you neither exalt them nor depress them by praise or by blame; before we talk of them, they exist or they do not exist.

The necessity of passing a Reform bill through an anti-reform parliament thus produced a situation of unsurpassed perplexity.

Reform, however, was the fighting question, and fighting questions absorb a legislature.

He did not forget that “the limbo of abortive creations was peopled with the skeletons of reform bills”; and it was his cue in a House so constituted as the one before him, to use the language and arguments of moderation and safety.

Franchise was the real question at stake, and to that branch of reform the bill was limited.

The other question of redistributing seats he likened to fighting in a wood, where there may be any number of partial encounters, but hardly a great and deciding issue.

The only point on which there was a vital difference was the figure of the borough franchise.

Disraeli invented a quackish phrase about lateral extension and vertical extension, and offered votes to various classes who mainly had them already, without extending downwards; but whatever else his plan might do, it opened no door for…