What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians were reposing here as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of the sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.

Clap an extinguisher upon your irony if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it.

This is the magnanimity of authorship, when a writer having a topic presented to him, fruitful of beauties for common minds, waives his privilege, and trusts to the judicious few for understanding the reason of his abstinence.

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

I have had playmates, I have had companions; In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days - All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I conceive disgust at these impertinent and misbecoming familiarities inscribed upon your ordinary tombstone.

In every thing that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world.