I never knew an enemy to puns who was not an ill-natured man.

Summer, as my friend Coleridge waggishly writes, has set in with its usual severity.

A garden was the primitive prison, till man with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it.

We gain nothing by being with such as ourselves. We encourage one another in mediocrity. I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself.

Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!

I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early.

I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, these spiritual repasts-a grace before Milton-a grace before Shakespeare-a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading The Fairie Queene?