Don't you think you and I should be apt to do just so, if we were in the critical line?
I am sure I couldn't resist the softening influences of hospitality.

I don't like to dine out, you know,--I dine so well at our own table, [our landlady looked radiant,] and the company is so pleasant [a rustling movement of satisfaction among the boarders]; but if I did partake of a man's salt, with such additions as that article of food requires to make it palatable, I could never abuse him, and if I had to speak of him, I suppose I should hang my set of jingling epithets round him like a string of sleigh-bells.

Good feeling helps society to make liars of most of us,--not absolute liars, but such careless handlers of truth that its sharp corners get terribly rounded.

I love truth as chiefest among the virtues; I trust it runs in my blood; but I would never be a critic, because I know I could not always tell it.

I might write a criticism of a book that happened to please me; that is another matter.
-- Listen, Benjamin Franklin! This is for you, and such others of tender age as you may tell it to.
When we are as yet small children, long before the time when those two grown ladies offer us the choice of Hercules, there comes up to us a youthful angel, holding in his right hand cubes like dice, and in his left spheres like marbles.