Thomas Gordon Hake

"Doth Nature know our dream, or is the mind A passing breath her beauty leaves behind?"

"There is something very dry in family history, because no one cares for other people's relations."

"Nothing that has been and has died out, will be revived. The skeleton, an osseous Apollo, will remain, and that is all."

"In those days, and long after, an English clergyman dressed like a gentleman; he now wears a black livery, and he looks like a bishop's footman, in mourning, with his master, for some dead archbishop."

"... Mr. Nussey, the king's apothecary, ... whom I knew very intimately later in life, told me that the king confided to him all his secrets, and the knowledge, if written down, would set all England in a blaze. He was with the royal patient to the last, the king never letting go of his hand for twenty-four hours, which gave him an agony of cramp all but insupportable."

"Dr. Thomas Young, the illustrious inventor of the Undulatory Theory of Light, was then a physician at St. George's. I used to go round the wards with him. He was thought to be very undecided in his opinions of a case; the fact is, medicine is so uncertain a science, it was not good enough for such an intellect as his to work on."

"It may be boasted that free-trade in physic came before free-trade in corn, and from that time medical science began to flourish in this country."

"If one looks back, one perceives that the majority of our poetic authors owed their success to patrons who made their works a fashion. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, had noble or royal patrons; Milton there was no one to patronize, whence the market value of "Paradise Lost" rose only to ten pounds. Dryden belonged to the upper class, so he had a patron in himself; Pope was made a fashion through patronization: Bolingbroke alone would have sufficed to lift him up into fame."

"I remember well the time when no gentleman was supposed to smoke; the habit was fit only for the vulgarian."

"It is my purpose in writing these Memoirs to adhere rigidly to truth, at least in its essence. Should I succeed in this, my work would be a very remarkable one, almost unique."

"The more a writer deviates from simplicity, the less sincere he appears."

"I thought no one ever could paint a woman's eyes like Rossetti. There was a softness, a delicacy, a life, a soul in them, never seen elsewhere, but in living beings, and that how rarely!"

"A poem, of whatever length, should start vividly, so as to wind up the ear and set the mind ticking."