Gerald Middleton was a man of mildly but persistently depressive temperament. Such men are not at their best at breakfast, nor is the week before Christmas their happiest time.

'Youth is the time for loving, so poets always say.

You have a perfect right to consign us all to hell, rector, but you must allow us the choice of how we get

Envy has the ugliness of a trapped rat that has gnawed its own foot in its effort to escape.