Byron owed the vast influence which he exercised over his contemporaries at least as much to his gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry.

The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.

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

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

In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.

We are free, we are civilised, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilisation.

It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.