The awkwardness and embarrassment which all feel on beginning to write, when they themselves are the theme, ought to serve as a hint to author's that self is a subject they ought very rarely to descant upon.

When you have nothing to say, say nothing.

There are three difficulties in authorship;-to write any thing worth the publishing-to find honest men to publish it -and to get sensible men to read it. Literature has now become a game; in which the Booksellers are the Kings; The Critics the Knaves; the Public, the Pack; and the poor Author, the mere table, or the Thing played upon.

No one knows where he who invented the plow was born, nor where he died; yet he has done more for humanity than the whole race of heroes who have drenched the earth with blood and whose deeds have been handed down with a precision proportionate only to the mischief they wrought.

That extremes beget extremes is an apothegm built on the most profound observation of the human mind.

Nobility of birth does not always insure a corresponding unity of mind; if it did, it would always act as a stimulus to noble actions; but it sometimes acts as a clog rather than a spur.

Idleness is the grand Pacific Ocean of life, and in that stagnant abyss the most salutary things produce no good, the most noxious no evil. Vice, indeed, abstractedly considered, may be, and often is engendered in idleness; but the moment it becomes efficiently vice, it must quit its cradle and cease to be idle.