All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise. Lord Burleigh is not the only statesman who has thought one hundred pounds too much for a song, though sung by Spenser; although Oliver Goldsmith is the only poet who ever considered himself to have been overpaid.

It is adverse to talent to be consorted and trained up with inferior minds and inferior companions, however high they may rank. The foal of the racer neither finds out his speed nor calls out his powers if pastured out with the common herd, that are destined for the collar and the yoke.

All adverse and depressing influences can be overcome, not by fighting, by by rising above them.

The head of dullness, unlike the tail of the torpedo, loses nothing of the benumbing and lethargizing influence by reiterated discharges.

Most men know what they hate, few what they love.

That is true beauty which has not only a substance, but a spirit; a beauty that we must intimately know, justly to appreciate.

The science of legislation is like that of medicine in one respect: that it is far more easy to point out what will do harm than what will do good.