The real object of the drama is the exhibition of human character.

Grief, which disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits more restless.

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.

The Orientals have another word for accident; it is "kismet,"--fate.

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.

A dominant religion is never ascetic.

He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.