Sublime

Fable is, generally speaking, far more accurate than fact, for fable describes a man as he was to his own age, fact describes him as he is to a handful of inconsiderable antiquarians many centuries after.

Emerson implies that it is hubris to believe that our little selves can have any real effect, when, as Chaucer put it, destiny is the “minister-general” that actually decides the course of war and peace, hate and love.

The destruction of sound money was pivotal in turning the former citizens of the Roman Empire into serfs under the mercy of their local feudal lords.

Well, in truth he was very unlikely to be prosecuted. A few people were: Richard Bett, for example, a tailor from Essex, was convicted in 1565 for the size of his hose; and in the same year Richard Walweyn, who worked as a servant in London, was arrested for wearing ‘a very monstrous and outraygeous great payre of hose’, a charge that closely follo

This is the only final greatness of a man; that he does for all the world what all the world cannot do for itself. Dickens, I believe, did it.

According to Thomas Platter, a Swiss gentleman who was in London in 1599, ‘The actors are most expensively and elaborately costumed; for it is the English usage for eminent lords or Knights at their decease to bequeath and leave almost the best of their clothes to their serving men, which it is unseemly for the latter to wear, so that they offer th

The Doom (or the Gift) of Men is mortality, freedom from the circles of the world. Since the point of view of the whole cycle is the Elvish, mortality is not explained mythically: it is a mystery of God of which no more is known than that ‘what God has purposed for Men is hidden’: a grief and an envy to the immortal Elves.

Ogre that he was, he spoke like an epicure.