When the doubtful battle flagged, he by his art would instantly restore it.

When, for instance, Tom's repulsed battalions of rhetoric fled from his mamma's fire, a few words of apt sneer or encouragement on Wood's part would bring the fight round again; or when Mr.Hayes's fainting squadrons of abuse broke upon the stubborn squares of Tom's bristling obstinacy, it was Wood's delight to rally the former, and bring him once more to the charge.

A great share had this man in making those bad people worse.
Many fierce words and bad passions, many falsehoods and knaveries on Tom's part, much bitterness, scorn, and jealousy on the part of Hayes and Catherine, might be attributed to this hoary old tempter, whose joy and occupation it was to raise and direct the domestic storms and whirlwinds of the family of which he was a member.

And do not let us be accused of an undue propensity to use sounding words, because we compare three scoundrels in the Tyburn Road to so many armies, and Mr.Wood to a mighty field-marshal.

My dear sir, when you have well studied the world--how supremely great the meanest thing in this world is, and how infinitely mean the greatest--I am mistaken if you do not make a strange and proper jumble of the sublime and the ridiculous, the lofty and the low.