Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.

There is something nobly simple and pure in a taste for the cultivation of forest trees. It argues, I think, a sweet and generous nature to have his strong relish for the beauties of vegetation, and this friendship for the hardy and glorious sons of the forest. He who plants a tree looks forward to future ages, and plants for posterity. Nothing could be less selfish than this.

Young lawyers attend the courts, not because they have business there, but because they have no business.

Washington, in fact, had very little private life, but was eminently a public character.

A father may turn his back on his child, … . but a mother's love endures through all.

The literary world is made up of little confederacies, each looking upon its own members as the lights of the universe; and considering all others as mere transient meteors, doomed to soon fall and be forgotten, while its own luminaries are to shine steadily into immortality.

Rising genius always shoots forth its rays from among clouds and vapours, but these will gradually roll away and disappear, as it ascends to its steady and meridian lustre.