Our chief comforts often produce our greatest anxieties, and the increase in our possessions is but an inlet to new disquietudes.

Wit generally succeeds more from being happily addressed than from its native poignancy. A jest, calculated to spread at a gaming-table, may be received with, perfect indifference should it happen to drop in a mackerel-boat.

Even children follow'd with endearing wile, And pluck'd his gown, to share the good man's smile.

A French woman is a perfect architect in dress: she never, with Gothic ignorance, mixes the orders; she never tricks out a snobby Doric shape with Corinthian finery; or, to speak without metaphor, she conforms to general fashion only when it happens not to be repugnant to private beauty.

The pregnant quarry teem'd with human form.

If frugality were established in the state, and if our expenses were laid out to meet needs rather than superfluities of life, there might be fewer wants, and even fewer pleasures, but infinitely more happiness.

Of all kinds of ambition, that which pursues poetical fame is the wildest