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.

A well-read writer, with good taste, is one who has the command of the wit of other men; he searches where knowledge is to be found; and though he may not himself excel in invention, his ingenuity may compose one of those agreeable books, the deliciæ of literature, that will out-last the fading meteors of his day.

There is an art of reading, an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

A learned historian declared to me of a contemporary, that the latter had appropriated his researches; he might, indeed, and he had a right to refer to the same originals; but if his predecessor had opened the sources for him, gratitude is not a silent virtue.

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

The poet must be alike polished by an intercourse with the world as with the studies of taste; one to whom labour is negligence, refinement a science, and art a nature.

The act of contemplation then creates the thing created.