I don't find it at merry supper-tables, where half a dozen ugly men with pomatumed heads are rapidly growing uglier still with heat and wine; not when I come away and walk through these squalid black streets, and go out into the Forum and see a few old battered stone posts standing there like gnawed bones stuck into the earth.

Everything is mean and dusky and shabby, and the men and women who make up this so-called brilliant society are the meanest and shabbiest of all.

They have no real spontaneity; they are all cowards and popinjays.

They have no more dignity than so many grasshoppers.

Nothing is good but one!" And he jumped up and stood looking at one of his statues, which shone vaguely across the room in the dim lamplight.
"Yes, do tell us," said Rowland, "what to hold on by!" "Those things of mine were tolerably good," he answered.