The youthful freshness of a blameless heart.

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

I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories.

They who drink beer will think beer.

There is a remembrance of the dead to which we turn even from the charms of the living.

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.

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.