Word: selfing
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...every Sunday evening to the servants in her father's family. 'Let me see such a woman' cried I; and accordingly I am to see her. She has refused young and fine gentlemen. 'Bravo' cried I, 'we see then what her taste is'. Here then I am my flattering self." A few months later he writes, "you must know I have had several matrimonial schemes of late...
...these quotations that I have made from his letters, I think Boswell's real self can be seen. He was fickle and impetuous: he was careless of others: he was vain beyond measure. But he was so open in his likes and dislikes, so frank in thought, and at times so generous, that we must see a certain amount of good in him after all. Boswell is a queer compound of openness, foolishness, and immorality. His whole life may be summed up in the single phrase he used when telling why he was a sceptic: "My scepticism," he wrote...
...Dreams seem in some way to be measures of men's mental capacities. They are the sincerest things about us. They reveal the idiosyncrasies of our natures, whether we like it or no. If we will not stop during our waking hours for a season of introspection and of self-interrogation, we nevertheless must submit to having all this done for us in our sleep. Yet, it must be confessed, dreams greatly magnify our good and bad qualities. For our visions are usually too wonderful, or too grand, or too horrible, or too noble, or too poetical, for us ever...
...seemed to my self to be wakened from a deep sleep. A being not of this world stood by my bedside. "Come," he said, "I am to show you all classes and conditions of men tonight." I followed him and he kept his word; but the knowledge of only one class remains fixed indelibly upon my memory, and this alone I can describe. We were in the vicinity of a great university. We entered an old-fashioned hedge-surrounded house and found ourselves in an apparently well-stocked library. A large open fire-place yawned at its opposite...
...along a path which is difficult to their unaccustomed feet, to repeat again and again with kind insistence the doctrines which are so easy to the more enlightened mind, never forgetting that consideration which is due to a blood relation,-this is a duty calling into play all the self-assurance and confident superiority which even a careful training of four years can bestow...