Wit implies hatred or contempt of folly and crime, produces its effects by brisk shocks of surprise, uses the whip of scorpions and the branding-iron, stabs, stings, pinches, tortures, goads, teases, corrodes, undermines.

Do we, mad as we all are after riches, hear often enough from the pulpit the spirit of those words in which Dean Swift, in his epitaph on the affluent and profligate Colonel Chartres, announces the small esteem of wealth in the eyes of God, from the fact of His thus lavishing it upon the meanest and basest of His creatures?

Cervantes shrewdly advises to lay a bridge of silver for a flying enemy.

The familiar writer is apt to be his own satirist. Out of his own mouth is he judged.

A thought embodied and embrained in fit words walks the earth a living being.

There is a natural disposition with us to judge an author's personal character by the character of his works. We find it difficult to understand the common antithesis of a good writer and a bad man.

We like the fine extravagance of that philosopher who declared that no man was as rich as all men ought to be.