If authors sneer, it is the critic’s business to sneer at them for sneering. He must pretend to be their superior, or who would care about his opinion. Besides, he is right sometimes; and the stories he reads, and the characters drawn in them, are old, sure enough. What stories are new?
[…]
There may be nothing new under and including the sun; but it looks fresh every morning, and we rise with it to toil, hope, scheme, laugh, struggle, love, suffer, until the night comes and quiet. And then it will wake Morrow and the eyes that look on it; and so da copa.

– from the first chapter of THE NEWCOMES, (entitled “The Overture”) by W.M. Thackeray