He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.

Such night in England ne'er had been, nor ne'er again shall be.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

Complete self-devotion is woman's part.

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.

Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors.

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