I actually found something quite cool today

See above. Strangely enough, it was from Middlemarch, which is laden with unnecessary quotes at the beginning of every chapter, some in French (which is not too bad) and Latin (which is worse) without translation, and also insists on capitalising words like Love and going off on long rants about the randomness of fate or self-absorbed young people *cough cough Dorothea*. The sad thing is, this would be excusable if it had no actual plot and was uniformly boring and badly-written. Instead, there are passages where I just keep turning and turning the pages followed by passages where I want to bash my head against the wall because of stilted dialogue and flowery prose.

Apologies for having done the very thing I was ranting against, but anyway, here's the quote. (It's actually a poem called The Character of a Happy Life by Sir Henry Wotton.)

How happy is he born and taught
That serveth not another's will;
Whose armour is his honest thought,
And simple truth his utmost skill!
Whose passions not his masters are;
Whose soul is still prepared for death,
Untied unto the world by care
Of public fame or private breath;
Who envies none that chance doth raise,
Nor vice; who never understood
How deepest wounds are given by praise;
Nor rules of state, but rules of good;
Who hath his life from rumours freed;
Whose conscience is his strong retreat;
Whose state can neither flatterers feed,
Nor ruin make oppressors great;
Who God doth late and early pray
More of His grace than gifts to lend;
And entertains the harmless day
With a religious book or friend;
—This man is freed from servile bands
Of hope to rise or fear to fall:
Lord of himself, though not of lands,
And having nothing, yet hath all. (Ye pedants who wish to point out that only the first and last stanzas are in Middlemarch, I hear ye and reply that I already worked that out for myself, choosing to print the full poem because it's cooler.)