Everything that Mr. Smallweed's grandfather ever put away in his mind was a grub at first, and is a grub at last. In all his life, he has never bred a single butterfly.
Bleak House -- Charles Dickens.

I'm a big Dickens fan. Dickens gets a bad rap, because, for some reason, people seem to be aware only of his dark and gloomy works, like Tale of Two Cities, and, even then, they have not read them, and so have missed the humor that is all throughout it.

One of the things that Dickens excels at is insulting his characters, and, by proxy, the people in society that he has built them around, in round-about ways like this. Rather than saying that Mr. Smallweed's grandfather had no imagination, or that he was a dullard, he makes it a wordplay. I have quite a collection of these insults, and they never cease to amuse me.

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