From my earliest days I hankered after the literary life, and I have never ceased to love letters or cultivate them with ardour, if only with moderate success. A man's career is never entirely of his own choosing, but he may do something to guide and direct it. Although the force of circumstances made me first a soldier (nothing loath), and threw me next into criminal administration, I ever followed my own strong bent and bias toward literary pursuits.

Nothing is more interesting than to watch the magic of style springing out unexpectedly from the utterances of great men of action, bringing an alien sweetness into the hard world of fact, and wonderfully lending to the expressions of business or of duty the glamour of passion and romance.

The representative men among the statesmen, its soldiers and sailors, its lawyers, its merchants – all those, in short, who carry on the business of Empire from day to day – will be active patrons of arts and literature; its men of imagination, far from retiring into a monastic pleasure-house of their own devising, will seek inspiration from the living interests of their country. We may fairly make it our boast that this desirable state of things prevailed from the time she became a protagonist in the cause of European liberty. What may be called the patriotism of culture perhaps cumulated in the epoch succeeding the Revolution of 1688 … The tradition, initiated in that period, has been maintained into our own day, and perhaps all active professions, it has been most brightly illustrated in the history and character of the English Bar.