Seventeenth-century poet and statesman Edmund Waller reflects on the benefits of advancing years.

Vice is a fact of life, wrote Pope, and God can even bring good out of it; but vice is never a virtue and in tackling vice together we make our society stronger.

Though Arthur Clough had discovered that to be your own man was a long and toilsome path, it was not a path without hope.

Shylock is savouring revenge on Antonio for years of disgusting mistreatment, but the judge warns him to temper his demands.

William Wordsworth looks back on a life of disappointments and regrets, and finds in them reasons to be thankful.

We turn to books seeking an author’s sympathy and fellowship, but William Cowper’s verse is unusual: he turns to us for ours.