Histories used often to be stories: the fashion now is to leave out the story. Our histories are stall-fed: the facts are absorbed by the reflexions, as the meat is sometimes by the fat.

The thoughtful excitement of lonely rambles, of gardening, and of other like occupations, where the mind has leisure to must during the healthful activity of the body, with the fresh and wakeful breezes blowing round it.

Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else.

How idle it is to call certain things God-sends! as if there was anything else in the world.

Books, as Dryden has aptly termed them, are spectacles to read nature. Aeschylus and Aristotle, Shakespeare and Bacon, are priests who preach and expound the mysteries of man and the universe. They teach us to understand and feel what we see, to decipher and syllable the hieroglyphics of the senses.

If Painting be Poetry's sister, she can only be a sister Anne, who will see nothing but a flock of sheep, while the other bodies forth a troop of dragoons with drawn sabres and white-plumed helmets.

I could hardly feel much confidence in a man who had never been imposed upon.