Queen Mary had a way of interrupting tattle about elopements, duels, and play debts, by asking the tattlers, very quietly yet significantly, whether they had ever read her favorite sermon--Dr. Tillotson on Evil Speaking.

A system in which the two great commandments are to hate your neighbor and to love your neighbor's wife.

Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors.

The opinion of the great body of the reading public is very materially influenced even by the unsupported assertions of those who assume a right to criticize.

What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!

A beggarly people, A church and no steeple.

In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.