"Three Men in a Boat", "Dukes Prefer Blondes"

It's interesting that as an audiobook, it kept me alert during some long drives; as an e-book, Jerome K. Jerome's mellifluous prose can be soporific.

• After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s knee.
• some half-forgotten nook, hidden away by the fairies, out of reach of the noisy world – some quaint-perched eyrie on the cliffs of Time, from whence the surging waves of the nineteenth century would sound far-off and faint.
• From the dim woods on either bank, Night’s ghostly army, the grey shadows, creep out with noiseless tread to chase away the lingering rearguard of the light, and pass, with noiseless, unseen feet, above the waving river-grass, and through the sighing rushes; and Night, upon her sombre throne, folds her black wings above the darkening world, and, from her phantom palace, lit by the pale stars, reigns in stillness.
• You lay down the mallet and start to go round and tell him what you think about the whole business, and, at the same time, he starts round in the same direction to come and explain his views to you. And you follow each other round and round, swearing at one another, until the tent tumbles down in a heap, and leaves you looking at each other across its ruins,
• heaviest, maddest lumber of all! – the dread of what will my neighbour think, with luxuries that only cloy, with pleasures that bore, with empty show that, like the criminal’s iron crown of yore, makes to bleed and swoon the aching head that wears it!
• but there, everything has its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came down upon him for the funeral expenses.
• they pick out all the three-cornered stones; and put them on the top, and they sharpen up the rocks and cover the points over with a bit of sand so that I can’t see them, and they take the sea and put it two miles out, so that I have to huddle myself up in my arms and hop, shivering, through six inches of water. And when I do get to the sea, it is rough and quite insulting.
• And we other boys, who would have sacrificed ten terms of our school life for the sake of being ill for a day, and had no desire whatever to give our parents any excuse for being stuck-up about us, couldn’t catch so much as a stiff neck.
• Will the prized treasures of today always be the cheap trifles of the day before?
• life; spread your white wings of quivering thought, and soar, a god-like spirit, over the whirling world beneath you, up through long lanes of flaming stars to the gates of eternity!’
• your friend, John Edward, is at the other end of the room with his whole soul held in thrall by photographs of other people’s relatives.
• I don’t know how many worlds there may be in the universe, but anyone who had brought me a spoonful of mustard at that precise moment could have had them all. I grow reckless like that when I want a thing and can’t get it.
• We beat (the tin) out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry – but we could not make a hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat round it on the grass and looked at it.
• But there! this world is only a probation, and man was born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.
• Then we cleaned up, and put everything straight (a continual labour, which was beginning to afford me a pretty clear insight into a question that had often posed me – namely, how a woman with the work of only one house on her hands, manages to pass away her time),
• original ones that we had invented for ourselves, including a really quite likely story, founded, to a certain extent, on an all but true episode, which had actually happened in a modified degree some years ago to friends of ours – a story that a mere child could have believed without injuring itself much.
• The impression on the mind of the sail seemed to be that we were playing at funerals, and that I was the corpse and itself was the winding sheet. When it found that this was not the idea, it hit me over the head with the boom, and refused to do anything.
• Thus she had sinned in all things – sinned in living and in dying. God help her! and all other sinners, if any more there be.
• It would not be a good place for the heroine of a modern novel to stay at. The heroine of a modern novel is always ‘divinely tall’, and she is ever ‘drawing herself up to her full height’.
• The mildest-tempered people, when on land, become violent and bloodthirsty when in a boat.
• To settle the dispute, we appealed to the boy. We told him not to be afraid, but to speak the plain truth: Was it the fossil of a pre-Adamite whale, or was it an early Roman coffin? The boy said it was The Pride of the Thames.
• The river – with the sunlight flashing from its dancing wavelets, gilding gold the grey-green beech-trunks, glinting through the dark, cool wood paths, chasing shadows o’er the shallows, flinging diamonds from the mill-wheels, throwing kisses to the lilies, wantoning with the weirs’ white waters, silvering moss-grown walls and bridges, brightening every tiny townlet, making sweet each lane and meadow, lying tangled in the rushes, peeping, laughing, from each inlet, gleaming gay on many a far sail, making soft the air with glory – is a golden fairy stream.
• Sunlight is the life-blood of Nature.
• Wilkes: John Wilkes (1727–97) was the best kind of English radical. Outlawed for his attacks on Lord Bute in his paper The North Briton and subsequently imprisoned, he was four times elected MP for Middlesex, but each time the House of Commons refused to admit him. Cross-eyed and hideously ugly, he boasted that he could ‘talk away his face in half an hour’.

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Loretta Chase The eventual duke in question is a lawyer. The trial before his prospective in-laws was maybe the most inventive part of the story.