In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.

There is no country in Europe which is so easy to over-run as Spain; there is no country which it is more difficult to conquer.

This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.

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

Even the law of gravitation would be brought into dispute were there a pecuniary interest involved.

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history.

To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.