Saying Grace

I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, those spiritual repasts—a grace before Milton—a grace before Shakespeare—a devotional exercise—proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen?

-Charles Lamb, "Grace Before Meat," Essays of Elia and Last Essays

This Whiffling Century

Rather than follow in the train of this insatiable monster of modern reading, I would forswear my spectacles, play at put, mend pens, kill fleas, stand on one leg, shell peas, or do whatsoever ignoble diversion you shall put me to. Alas! I am hurried on in the vortex. I die of new books, or the everlasting talk about them...I will go and relieve myself with a page of honest John Bunyan, or Tom Brown. Tom anybody will do, as long as they are not of this whiffling century.

-Charles Lamb, quoted by Anne Fadiman in At Large and At Small