The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

The greatest pleasure I know, is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by
accident.
‘Table Talk by the late Elia’ in ‘The Athenaeum’ 4 January 1834
For thy sake, Tobacco, I
Would do any thing but die.
‘A Farewell to Tobacco’ l. 122
Gone before
To that unknown and silent shore.
‘Hester’ (1803) st. 7
I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days,—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
‘The Old Familiar Faces’
A child’s a plaything for an hour.
‘Parental Recollections’ (1809); often attributed to Lamb’s sister Mary
If ever I marry a wife,
I’ll marry a landlord’s daughter,
For then I may sit in the bar,
And drink cold brandy and water.
‘Written in a copy of Coelebs in Search of a Wife’
If dirt were trumps, what hands you would hold!
In Leigh Hunt ‘Lord Byron and his Contemporaries’ (1828) p. 299
I do not [know the lady]; but damn her at a venture.
In E. V. Lucas ‘Charles Lamb’ (1905) vol. 1, p. 320 n.
The last breath he drew in he wished might be through a pipe and exhaled in a pun.
‘The Diaries of William Charles Macready 1833-1851’ (ed. W. Toynbee, 1912) 9 January 1834
I toiled after it, sir, as some men toil after virtue.
On being asked ‘how he had acquired his power of smoking at such a rate’, in Thomas Noon Talfourd
‘Memoirs of Charles Lamb’ (1892) p. 262
12.12 Constant Lambert 1905-51
The whole trouble with a folk song is that once you have played it through there is nothing
much you can do except play it over again and play it rather louder.
‘Music Ho!’ (1934) ch. 3
The average English critic is a don manquè, hopelessly parochial when not exaggeratedly
teutonophile, over whose desk must surely hang the motto (presumably in Gothic lettering)
‘Above all no enthusiasm’.
‘Opera’ December 1950
12.13 John George Lambton (first Earl of Durham) 1792-1840