"He wrote with great care, and with a sharpness, vivacity, and variety of epithet that give immediate and continuing pleasure, but he was not in any serious sense a novelist or even a writer of fiction. His emotionally injured self is the sole character of his fictions, with everybody else seen through the haze of his paranoia, like figures in a fun-fair mirror."
Frederick William Rolfe, better known as Baron Corvo, and also calling himself Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe, was an English writer, artist, photographer and eccentric. He is known for the novel Hadrian the Seventh (1904).
"Its all nonsense to say that the Fifteenth Century cant possibly speak to the Twentieth, because it is the Fifteenth and not the Twentieth, and because those two Centuries havent got a Common Denominator. They have. Its Human Nature."
Frederick Rolfe"Brisk and prompt to war, soft and not in the least able to resist calamity, fickle in catching at schemes, and always striving after novelties – French characteristics remained unaltered twenty centuries after Julius Caesar made a note of them for all time."
Frederick Rolfe"He took the imperial hand and shook it in the glad-to-see-you-but-keep-off English fashion."
Frederick Rolfe"Pray for the repose of His soul. He was so tired."
Frederick Rolfe"An appeal to a goodness which is not in him is, to a vain and sensitive soul, a stinging insult."
Frederick Rolfe"That cold white candent voice which was more caustic than silver nitrate and more thrilling than a scream."
Frederick Rolfe