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

The Spartan, smiting and spurning the wretched Helot, moves our disgust. But the same Spartan, calmly dressing his hair, and uttering his concise jests, on what the well knows to be his last day, in the pass of Thermopylae, is not to be contemplated without admiration.

The passages in which Milton has alluded to his own circumstances are perhaps read more frequently, and with more interest, than any other lines in his poems.

A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts.

Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.

Every generation enjoys the use of a vast hoard bequeathed to it by antiquity, and transmits that hoard, augmented by fresh acquisitions, to future ages.

I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both.