TABLE-TALK.
Reading edition
If the age of women were known by their teeth, they would not be so fond of showing them.
What is an Irishman but a mere machine for converting potatoes into human nature?
The smiles of a pretty woman are glimpses of Paradise.
Military men never blush; it is not in the articles of war.
We look with pleasure even on our shadows.
It is particularly inconvenient to have a long nose—especially if you are in company with Irishmen after dinner.
Weak-minded men are obstinate; those of a robust intellect are firm.
Bear-baiting has gone down very much of late. The best exhibitions of that manly and rational amusement take place nightly in the House of Commons.
When you are invited to a drinking-party you do not treat your host well if you do not eat at least six salt herrings before you sit down to his table. I have never known this to fail in ensuring a pleasant evening.
Butchers and doctors are with great propriety excluded from being jurymen.
Few men have the moral courage not to fight a duel.
It is a saying of the excellent Tom Brown, “No poet ever went to a church when he had money to go to a tavern.” This may be looked on as an indisputable axiom; there is no truer proposition in Euclid. Indeed, the very name of poet is derived from potare—to drink; and it is not by mere accident that the same word signifies Bacchus and a book.
The most ferocious monsters in existence are authors who insist on reading their MSS to their friends and visitors.
A friend of mine, one of the wittiest and most learned men of the day, once recommended a Frenchman, who expressed an anxiety to possess the autographs of literary men, to cash their bills. “And, believe me,” says he, “if you do, you will get the handwriting of the best of the tribe.”
Tailors call Adam and Eve the first founders of their noble art; they have them depicted on their banners and escutcheons. But they would be nearer the truth if they called the devil the first master-tailor; as only for him a coat and breeches would be unnecessary and useless. This would be giving the devil his due.
A very acute man used to say, “Tell me your second reason; I do not want your first. The second is the true motive of your actions.”
Youth and old age seem to be mutual spies on each other—blind, each, to its own imperfections, but extremely quick-sighted to those of its opposite.
Hints to Men of Business.—Whenever you are in a hurry engage a drunken cabman; he will drive you at double the speed of a sober one. Also, be sure not to engage a cabman who owns the horse he drives; he will spare his quadruped, and carry you at a funeral pace. Both these maxims are as good as any in Rochefoucault.
Man is a twofold creature; one half he exhibits to the world, and the other to himself.
Edward V. H. Kenealy, LL.D. (1819–1880).