The amiable is the voluptuous in expression or manner. The sense of pleasure in ourselves is that which excites it in others; or, the art of pleasing is to seem pleased.

To be happy, we must be true to nature and carry our age along with us.

A felon could plead "benefit of clergy" and be saved by [reading aloud] what was aptly enough termed the "neck verse", which was very usually the Miserere mei of Psalm 51.

He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.

Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.

Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood.

No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.