Boswell is the first of biographers.

We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.

Even the law of gravitation would be brought into dispute were there a pecuniary interest involved.

The upper current of society presents no pertain criterion by which we can judge of the direction in which the under current flows.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

Parent of sweetest sounds, yet mute forever.

This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.