George Saintsbury

To pass to the deluge, and beyond it, and to come to close quarters with our proper division, the origin of Romance…

— George Saintsbury

One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature…

— George Saintsbury

The transition state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for this affected the process at both ends, giving…

— George Saintsbury

The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet…

— George Saintsbury

But dinner is dinner, a meal at which not so much to eat - it becomes difficult to eat much at it…

— George Saintsbury

But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction…

— George Saintsbury

The hardest thing to attain... is the appreciation of difference without insisting on superiority.

— George Saintsbury

I do not think anything serious should be done after dinner, as nothing should be before breakfast.

— George Saintsbury

But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began…

— George Saintsbury

Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage.

— George Saintsbury

“Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that humor excites in those who lack it.”

— George Saintsbury

Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

— George Saintsbury

The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad,…

— George Saintsbury

Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.

— George Saintsbury

The Book of History is the Bible of Irony.

— George Saintsbury

When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.

— George Saintsbury

Alcoholic drinks, rightly used, are good for body and soul alike, but as a restorative of both there is nothing like brandy.

— George Saintsbury

When [wines] were good they pleased my sense, cheered my spirits, improved my moral and intellectual powers, besides enabling me to confer…

— George Saintsbury

We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to…

— George Saintsbury

Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by…

— George Saintsbury

Majorities are generally wrong, if only in their reasons for being right.

— George Saintsbury

But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.

— George Saintsbury

Criticism is the endeavour to find, to know, to love, to recommend, not only the best, but all the good, that has…

— George Saintsbury

So, then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus, and Coleridge.

— George Saintsbury

Let us also once more rejoice in, and thank God for, the fact that we know nothing about Homer, and practically nothing…

— George Saintsbury