Among the innumerable monuments of architecture constructed by the Romans, how many have escaped the notice of history, how few have resisted the ravages of time and barbarism! And yet even the majestic ruins that are still scattered over Italy and the provinces, would be sufficient to prove that those countries were once the seat of a polite and powerful empire.

The primitive Christians perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary events

The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.

There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.

[But] the man who dares not expose his life in the defence of his children and his property, has lost in society the first and most active energies of nature.

In a distant age and climate, the tragic scene of the death of Hosein will awaken the sympathy of the coldest reader.

It was the fashion of the times to attribute every remarkable event to the particular will of the Deity; the alterations of nature were connected, by an invisible chain, with the moral and metaphysical opinions of the human mind; and the most sagacious divines could distinguish, according to the colour of their respective prejudices, that the establishment of heresy tended to produce an earthquake, or that a deluge was the inevitable consequence of the progress of sin and error.