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 effective strength of sects is not to be ascertained merely by counting heads.

The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onward, constitutions stand still.

Parent of sweetest sounds, yet mute forever.

By poetry we mean the art of employing of words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination; the art of doing by means of words, what the painter does by means of colors.

Boswell is the first of biographers.

Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.