Those who seem to load the public taste are, in general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing.

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

There was, it is said, a criminal in Italy who was suffered to make his choice between Guicciardini and the galleys. He chose the history. But the war of Pisa was too much for him; he changed his mind, and went to the oars.

Every sect clamors for toleration when it is down.

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

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.

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