To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

In employing fiction to make truth clear and goodness attractive, we are only following the example which every Christian ought to propose to himself.

We never could clearly understand how it is that egotism, so unpopular in conversation, should be so popular in writing.

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.

The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.

That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.

In the infancy of civilization, when our island was as savage as New Guinea, when letters and arts were still unknown to Athens, when scarcely a thatched roofed hut stood on what was later the site of Rome, this contemned people had their fenced cities and cedar palaces, their splendid Temple, their fleets of merchant ships, their schools of sacred learning, their great statesmen and soldiers, their natural philosophers, their historians and their poets.