Literary friendship is a sympathy not of manners, but of feelings.

It is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellent lies before us.

Those who do not read criticism will rarely merit to be criticised.

A great work always leaves us in a state of musing.

If the golden gate of preferment is not usually opened to men of real merit, persons of no worth have entered it in a most extraordinary manner.

All this is labour which never meets the eye.... But too open and generous a revelation of the chapter and the page of the original quoted, has often proved detrimental to the legitimate honours of the quoter. They are unfairly appropriated by the next comer; the quoter is never quoted, but the authority he has afforded is produced by his successor with the air of an original research.

Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, produces nothing on the side of genius. When education ends, genius often begins.