Gaiety is to good-humor as animal perfumes to vegetable fragrance. The one overpowers weak spirits, the other recreates and revives them. Gaiety seldom fails to give some pain; good-humor boasts no faculties which every one does not believe in his own power, and pleases principally by not offending.

While an author is yet living, we estimate his powers by his worst performance; and when he is dead, we rate him by his best.

The life of a conscientious clergyman is not easy. I have always considered a clergyman as the father of a larger family than he is able to maintain. I would rather have chancery suits upon my hands than the cure of souls.

Scarcely any degree of judgment is sufficient to restrain the imagination from magnifying that on which it is long detained

Every man has a lurking wish to appear considerable in his native place.

Few moments are more pleasing than those in which the mind is concerting measures for a new undertaking.

People have now a-days got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do as much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken.