Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, slow rises worth by poverty depressed.

My diseases are an asthma and a dropsy and, what is less curable, seventy-five.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

An epithet or metaphor drawn from nature ennobles art; an epithet or metaphor drawn from art degrades nature.

How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?

No man likes to live under the eye of perpetual disapprobation.