To take Macaulay out of literature and society and put him in the House of Commons, is like taking the chief physician out of London during a pestilence.
If you choose to represent the various parts in life by holes upon a table, of different shapes,—some circular, some triangular, some square, some oblong,—and the persons acting these parts by bits of wood of similar shapes, we shall generally find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular, and a square person has squeezed himself into the round hole. The officer and the office, the doer and the thing done, seldom fit so exactly that we can say they were almost made for each other.3
Sketches of Moral Philosophy.
Note 1. Lord Wharncliffe says, “The well-known sentence, almost a proverb, that ‘this world consists of men, women, and Herveys,’ was originally Lady Montagu’s.”—Montagu Letters, vol. i. p. 64. [back]
