"No trifles and syllabubs for me--froth above and sweetness and jam beneath.

Every one writes essays nowadays, and tries to stir with his little Gulliver pen the yeasty foam raised by a Carlyle or an Emerson.

One might as well watch the effort of a small hairy caterpillar to follow in the wake of a sea-serpent.

Oh ye gods and little fishes, could anything be more grotesque!" "But the book ?" growled Amias, with a surreptitious glance at his pipe.
"Oh, the book," returned Malcolm loftily, "it is a sudden inspiration, but I feel the grip of my Frankenstein already; I have not yet let go the mantle of my guardian genius.

It will be autobiographical, expansive, and deep as human nature itself, and I shall call it 'The Record of an Impotent Genius.'" "Good lack!" observed Amias in a disgusted tone, "what a drivelling title! Why impotent, in the name of all that is rational ?" "My dear old Philistine," returned his friend in a measured voice, "I use the word impotent in the meaning attached to it in Holy Writ, and as my beloved and well-thumbed Thesaurus uses it: impotent, powerless, unarmed, weaponless, paralytic, crippled, inoperative, ineffectual, inadequate.