I would have any one, who really and truly has leisure and ability, make verses. I think it a more refining and happy-making occupation than any other pastime accomplishment.

When I read or hear of the mutual injuries of England and Ireland, I fancy it would have been a blessed thing had the sea never flowed between the two countries. Had they been all in one, surely there would have been more unity between them of interests and of feelings. But let us hope that days of peace and general enlightenment will arrive by ways past man's finding out.

Puns are often unacceptable to the feelings; they come like a spoonful of ice-cream in the midst of a comfortable smoking-hot steak, or as a peppery morsel when your palate was in expectation of a mild pudding.

It is remarkable what fine hands men of genius write, even when they are as awkward in all other uses of the hand as a cow with a musket.

bubbles of false opinion will last whole ages, and deceive whole generations, till they are broken by some powerful breath, and even then how often they reunite, and again shine in the eyes of men, who hold them solid as cannon-balls!

there is nothing so uncertain and slippery as fact.

I don't pretend to any exemption from the general lot of parental delusion-I mean that like most other parents I see my child through an atmosphere which illuminates, magnifies, and at the same time refines the object to a degree that amounts to a delusion.