Quotes from Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's books, and about them
The Gilded Age on The Princess: “O lift your natures up: Embrace our aims: work out your freedom. Girls, Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed; Drink deep until the habits of the slave, The sins of emptiness, gossip and spite And slander, die. The Princess.”
The Gilded Age on The Faerie Queene: “She, the gracious lady, yet no paines did spare To doe him ease, or doe him remedy: Many restoratives of vertues rare And costly cordialles she did apply, To mitigate his stubborne malady. Spenser's Faerie Queens.”
The Gilded Age on Notes on England: “A dapper clerk of perhaps nineteen or twenty years, with hair accurately parted and surprisingly slick, came bustling up and leaned over with a pretty smile and an affable-- “Can I--was there any particular book you wished to see?” “Have you Taine's England?” “Beg pardon?” “Taine's Notes on England.””
The Gilded Age on The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table: “Then she asked the clerk for the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table--and was pained to see the admiration her beauty had inspired in him fade out of his face.”
The Gilded Age on Venetian Life: “Presently, while she was holding a copy of “Venetian Life” in her hand and running over a familiar passage here and there, the clerk said, briskly, snatching up a paper-covered volume and striking the counter a smart blow with it to dislodge the dust: “Now here is a work that we've sold a lot of.”