W. S. Gilbert
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"Sir William Schwenck Gilbert" was an English dramatist, libretto/librettist, poet and illustrator best known for the fourteen comic operas

Gilbert also wrote the Bab Ballads, an extensive collection of light verse accompanied by his own comical drawings. His creative output included over 75 plays and libretto/libretti, numerous stories, poems, lyrics and various other comic and serious pieces. His plays and realism (arts)/realistic style of stage direction inspired other dramatists, including Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. According to The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Gilbert's "lyrical facility and his mastery of metre raised the poetical quality of comic opera to a position that it had never reached before and has not reached since".

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More W. S. Gilbert on Wikipedia.

If you wish in this world to advance, your merits you're bound to enhance; You must stir it and stump it, and blow your own trumpet, or trust me, you haven't a chance.

Things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream.

My object all sublime I shall achieve in time...

When everyone is somebody, then no one's anybody.

Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

No one can have a higher opinion of him than I have, and I think he's a dirty little beast.