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At the moment of my departure, I find within myself only a smile of careless mockery for the swarming crowd of this Lilliputian curtseying people laborious, industrious, greedy of gain, tainted with a constitutional affectation, hereditary insignificance, and incurable monkeyishness. Poor cousin Number 415! how right I was to have held him in good esteem!

I felt also, in this vast congregation of my fellow-creatures, the exhilarating sense of my own insignificance. Of what value were my own opinions, hopes, or programmes in this huge concourse and confusion of opinion? Who cared what one human brain chanced to think, where so many million brains were thinking? I was swept on like a bubble in the stream, and I forgot my own individuality.

"After those who write letters in performance of a disagreeable duty, and almost side by side with them in point of insignificance, I should put those who write in a manner wholly external, wholly superficial, devoted only to flattery, lavishing praise like gold, without counting it; and those also who weigh every word, who reply formally and pompously, with a view to fine phrases and effects.

Before such a reflection as this, all other considerations were at once reduced to proportions of the most absolute insignificance. But was the death of the adventurers so very certain after all? Hope is hard to kill. Consciousness had brought reflection, reflection doubt, and doubt had resuscitated hope.

The ignorance of his colleagues, the weakness and insignificance of his opponents, the frankness of his falsehoods, and the dazzling and self-confident limitations of this man raise him to the head of the army. The brilliant qualities of the soldiers of the army sent to Italy, his opponents' reluctance to fight, and his own childish audacity and self-confidence secure him military fame.

These "Giants" were none other than the Goncourts, whose insignificance approached at times imbecility, and in addition, Alphonse Daudet, with the air of a cheap comedian and an armful of mediocre books a truly French diet, feeble, but well seasoned.

Distraction in councils, personal rivalries, the well-known incapacity of a people to govern itself, commercial greediness, provincial hatreds, envies and jealousies, would soon reduce that jumble of cities and villages, which aped the airs of sovereignty, into insignificance and confusion. Adroit management would easily re-assert afterwards the sovereignty of the Lord's anointed.

If the aesthetic significance or insignificance of works of art does, indeed, bear witness to a spiritual state, then he who can appreciate that significance should be in a position to form some opinion concerning the spiritual state of the men who produced those works and of those who appreciated them.

A strange, irresponsible happiness possessed her, so new, so subtly sweet, that the heavy burden she had borne for so long seemed almost to have shrunk into insignificance.

In the face of all that a college education will mean to this girl our personal comfort rather pales into insignificance." "Who are we that we should revel in the fleshpots of Overton while the stranger knocks at our gates?" supplemented Emma. "Now which is it to be? Shall we say, 'good-bye beloved sitting-room, ne'er shall we behold thy like again, or shall we bid fond adieu to the bedroom?