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!

We deplore the outrages which accompany revolutions. But the more violent the outrages, the more assured we feel that a revolution was necessary.

Office of itself does much to equalize politicians. It by no means brings all characters to a level; but it does bring high characters down and low characters up towards a common standard.

The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets. Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second.

Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.

A kind of semi-Solomon, half-knowing everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.

Even Holland and Spain have been positively, though not relatively, advancing.