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.

Oh, breathe not his name! let it sleep in the shade, Where cold and unhonour'd his relics are laid

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

A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.

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

Brandy and water spoils two good things.

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