Editors From England

"The division between faith and reason is a half-measure, till it is frankly admitted that faith has to do with fiction, and reason with fact."

"The study of Constitutional History is essentially a tracing of causes and consequences, the examination of a distinct growth from a well-defined germ to full maturity: a growth, the particular direction and shaping of which are due to a diversity of causes, but whose life and developing power lies deep in the very nature of the people. It is not then the collection of a multitude of facts and views, but the piecing of the links of a perfect chain."

"Acts and Monuments made Foxe England's first literary celebrity."

"To say that Foxe's Acts and Monuments of the Christian Church (to give the Book of Martyrs its official title) was hugely influential on English thought during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would be a gross understatement of the case. Only the Bible was read more frequently and more avidly."

"Nor is it any longer profitable to debate whether certain episodes in the Book of Martyrs were Foxe's own invention, or accepted by him as factual in such a casual fashion as to bring his credibility into general question. It was natural that readers should have doubted the facts of the bizarre episode in Guernsey, when a woman reportedly gave birth in the fire and the newly born infant was tossed back into the flames to share the mother's grisly fate. The circumstances stretch credulity. But it appears from other documents that this obscenity indeed happened very much as Foxe reported it. If there were any remaining doubts about Foxe's fundamental honesty in such respects, they were removed by J. F. Mozley's scholarly albeit overly defensive study published in 1940, John Foxe and his Book. Acts and Monuments is stuffed with as many detailed and minor errors as we should expect of a history written on this scale and in great haste, in Foxe's words "so hastily raked up...in such shortness of time". There are mistakes of both person and place, mistakes of dates in plenty, faults of transcription and in proof-reading. But the only elements of pure invention (and not primarily Foxe's own invention) occur in the recounting of sundry extraordinary "providences" and other acts of divine judgment visited upon those responsible for the deaths of the martyrs: fragments in the manner of the De mortibus persecutorum of Lactantius."

"Second only to the Bible in its influence, Foxe's work frequently stood beside the Bible on pulpits and in libraries."

"Then brought they a fagot kindled with fire, and layd the same downe at D. Ridleys feete. To whome Maister Latymer spake in this maner: Be of good comfort maister Ridley, and play the man: wee shall this day light such a candle by Gods grace in England, as (I trust) shall neuer be put out."

"Afterward she opened the matter more plainly to M. Rise and Mistres Clarentius (if it be true that they tolde me, whiche hearde it of M. Rise himselfe) who then being most familiar with her, & most bold about her, tolde her that they feared she took thought for king Philips departing from her. Not that onely (sayde she) but when I am dead & opened, you shall find Calice lying in my hart."

"No one would now argue, as a certain Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries once did, that the vanished register of Bishop Longland of Lincoln on which Foxe drew for his account of the Lollards of the Chiltern Hills of Buckinghamshire and their trials (the fullest and most valuable of all records of early Tudor Lollardy) never existed but was forged by Foxe to give his narrative a spurious "appearance of veracity". A. G. Dickens has observed that Foxe lacked the intent, the incentive and the diabolical erudition to forget his voluminous and highly specific mass of evidence. The missing Lincoln act book is not now likely to be rediscovered. Foxe seems to have used a transcript of it together with other Lollard trial records at Lambeth Palace, where it no longer exists. But other "registers" in similar form have been found by modern research (notably the record of the Coventry trials of 1511) and comparison of these sources with the passages in Foxe which are based on them suggest that the martyrologist worked only a little more carelessly and a few shades more partially than would be tolerable in a modern doctoral thesis, but with essentially the same methods."

"There is no keeping down of veritie, but it wil spring and come out of dust and ashes, as appeared right well in this man. For though they digged vp his body, burnt his bones, & drowned his ashes, yet þe word of God and truth of his doctrine with the fruit & successe therof they could not burne."

"M. Tyndall hearing thys, ful of godly zeale, and not bearing that blasphemous saying, replied againe & sayde: I defie the Pope and all his lawes: and further added, that if God spared hym life, ere many yeares he would cause a boy that driueth the plough to know more of the Scripture, then he did."

"At last, after muche reasoning, when no reason woulde serue, although he deserued no death, he was…brought forth to the place of execution, was there tied to þe stake, and then strangled first by the hangman, and afterward with fire consumed in the morning at the towne of Filford, an. 1536. crieng thus at the stake with a feruente zeale, and a loud voyce: Lord open the King of Englands eyes."

"Mr. Surtees, a well-known country gentleman, who was passionately devoted to the healthy sport of fox-hunting, and gifted with a keen spirit of manly humour of a Rabelaisian tinge."

"I am reading Ask Mamma by Surtees... Despite my hatred of blood sports, I find him highly amusing (and he always lets the hares escape, have you noticed?)."

"The recent volume of Siegfried Sassoon's Diaries finds him making a doomed effort to convert his fellow-guests at Garsington: but he tells us elsewhere how ‘when I mentioned him to Arnold Bennett, he merely enquired “Can he ... really be perused?” Whereupon I went straight to a bookseller's near the Reform Club and ordered Sponge and Romford to be sent to him. A few days later I received a postcard. “Many thanks for putting me right on Surtees. Romford is the real thing.”’"

"On the one hand, Surtees was a man of the eighteenth century—hence Thackeray's understanding of him; on the other, he was an amateur who dealt almost entirely with background figures, the great Jorrocks excepted. He was deeply knowing about English sporting life, the squirearchy and the law, but he did not construct the melodramas and elaborate plots of the other Victorian novelists, nor did he issue their moralisings. He often excelled them in the recording of ordinary speech and day-to-day incident. He is fresher than the masters, but he is artless. A good deal of his humour is the humour of shrewd sayings which, later on, we find in Kipling. His original contribution is in the field of invective. Surtees has a truly Elizabethan power of denunciation."

"At last he was driven to paw over a few score books in a panelled room called the library... He opened and thrust them back, one after another, till crude coloured illustrations of men on horses held his eye. He began at random and read a little, moved into the drawing-room with the volume, and settled down by the fire still reading. It was a foul world into which he peeped for the first time—a heavy-eating, hard-drinking hell of horse-copers, swindlers, matchmaking mothers, economically dependent virgins selling themselves blushingly for cash and lands: Jews, tradesmen, and an ill-considered spawn of Dickens-and-horsedung characters (I give Midmore's own criticism), but he read on, fascinated."

"It is best to let the horse go his way, and pretend it is yours. There is no secret so close as that between a rider and his horse."

"No man rides harder than my Lord Scamperdale – always goes as if he had a spare neck in his pocket."

"When at length they rose to go to bed, it struck each man as he followed his neighbour upstairs that the one before him walked very crookedly."

"He was a gentleman who was generally spoken of as having nothing a-year, paid quarterly."

"It is an inwariable rule with the dealers to praise the bad points and let the good 'uns speak for themselves."

"Thus attired, with smiles assumed at the door, the young ladies entered the drawing-room in the full fervour of sisterly animosity."

"What is remarkable is the portrait not only of Sponge, but of the whole society in which he moves. It is an extraordinarily tough society, without any of that self-consciousness which belongs to Hemingway's heroes. The men are tough as a matter of course... Probably Surtees owes this success to that observant eye and candour of speech which is his chief force as a writer. He has no cant of any kind; he is sucking up to nobody and no class. He has his moral standards, but he is not trying to preach them; there is none of that sense that we have, even in Trollope, of the moralizer... He writes of what he sees and knows, with a reckless sincerity especially refreshing in these self-conscious times."

"Women never look so well as when one comes in wet and dirty from hunting."

"Better be killed than frightened to death."

"Life would be very pleasant if it were not for its enjoyments."

"I am a sportsman all over, and to the back-bone – 'Unting is all that's worth living for – all time is lost wot is not spent in 'unting – it is like the hair we breathe – if we have it not we die – it's the sport of kings, the image of war without its guilt, and only five-and-twenty per cent of its danger."

"The supply of good fellows is by no means in excess of the demand. A man has only to hoist the flag of hospitality to insure a very considerable amount of custom."

"Surtees was himself a country squire from the deep North... He had all the prejudices of his kind. He hated the fashionable places and people and smart society, he was suspicious of any kind of cleverness. He was prickly and hard, he had little compassion except for dogs and horses... Surtees prefers crooks to fools, because they are hard, because, as he thinks, they have no illusions... He has no self-consciousness, as man or writer. He is not afraid of anybody and rolls no logs. To read him is to escape for an hour or two from eye-wash and cant into an atmosphere as brisk as one of his hunting mornings, sharp and raw, highly unflattering to everything in sight, faces, hedges, trees, nibbled pasture and greasy plough, but thoroughly bracing."

"The only infallible rule we know is, that the man who is always talking about being a gentleman never is one."

"There may be said to be three sorts of lawyers, able, unable, and lamentable."

"'Untin' fills my thoughts by day, and many a good run I have in my sleep. Many a dig in the ribs I gives Mrs. J. when I think they're runnin' into the warmint…No man is fit to be called a sportsman wot doesn't kick his wife out of bed on a haverage once in three weeks!"

"Mr. Jorrocks then called upon the company in succession for a toast, a song, or a sentiment. Nimrod gave, "The Royal Staghounds"; Crane gave, "Champagne to our real friends, and real pain to our sham friends.""

"More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice."

"How often those of us for whom Surtees, in blue or in red, is an old and often visited friend have seen a film of obstinate resistance cross the faces of people to whom we sought to introduce him! "Hm, Facey Romford and all that interminably tedious ‘huntin’' stuff"—so, in their wicked innocence, they say. Here and there, brave, curious spirits among them have been persuaded to go picknicking on the seaside downs in the sweltering summer of the year of the Comet and to attend Mr. O'Dicey's little dinner in Plain or Ringlets. They have travelled in a real coach (with no Dickensian romantic nonsense about it) through the opening chapter of Ask Mamma. With Mr. Sponge they have watched now vanished sights from the Jermyn Street of the cigar divans to Lord Scamperdale's lair. And they have been amused, in the company of Mr. Jorrocks, by more things than fox-hunting."

"Sun-blistered ships on opal seas, Pacific stars split round the skies, What have I now to do with these Who know the wonder of your eyes?"

"And elm-trees, massed like ostrich feather plumes, Are streaked and shot with fire."

"Forth we went, a gallant band— Youth, Love, Gold and Pleasure."

"Oh would I were a boy again, When life seemed formed of sunny years, And all the heart then knew of pain Was wept away in transient tears! When every tale Hope whispered then, My fancy deemed was only truth. Oh, would that I could know again, The happy visions of my youth."

"Cupid has offered his arrows for Jesus to try; He has offered his bow for the game. But Jesus went weeping away, and left him there wondering why."

"The children eat and wriggle and laugh, The two old ladies stroke their silk; But the cat is grown small and thin with desire, Transformed to a creeping lust for milk."

"His poetry, as a whole, is more nearly the real right thing than any of the poetry of a somewhat older generation than mine except Mr. Yeats's."

"O cool glad pasture; living tree, tall corn, Great cliff, or languid sloping sand, cold sea, Waves: river curving; you, eternal flowers, Give me content, while I can think of you: Give me your living breath! Back to your rampart, Death!"

"Over the mountains, And over the waves, Over the fountains, And under the graves; Over the floods that are deepest, Which do Neptune obey; Over the rocks that are steepest, Love will find out the way."

"I told him, that I heard Dr. Percy was writing the history of the wolf in Great-Britain. . 'The wolf, Sir! why the wolf? Why does he not write of the bear, which we had formerly? Nay, it is said we had the beaver. Or why does he not write of the grey rat, the Hanover rat, as it is called, because it is said to have come into this country about the time that the family of Hanover came? I should like to see The History of the Grey Rat, by Thomas Percy, D.D., Chaplain in Ordinary to His Majesty,' (laughing immoderately). . 'I am afraid a court chaplain could not decently write of the grey rat.' . 'Sir, he need not give it the name of the Hanover rat.' Thus could he indulge a luxuriant sportive imagination, when talking of a friend whom he loved and esteemed."

"None but himself can be his parallel."

"On what strange stuff Ambition feeds."

"I love it, I love it; and who shall dare To chide me for loving that old arm-chair?"

"How cruelly sweet are the echoes that start When Memory plays an old tune on the heart."