Consider, Sir, how insignificant this will appear a twelvemonth hence.

[ After being absent from a tutorial at Oxford because he had been “sliding in Christ Church meadow” :] JOHNSON: I had no notion that I was wrong or irreverent to my tutor. BOSWELL: That, Sir, was great fortitude of mind. JOHNSON: No, Sir; stark insensibility.

[ To a woman who asked him why he had defined pastern in his Dictionary of the English Language as a horse’s knee :] Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.

[ Of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock:] New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.

[ Referring to his fits of melancholia :] The black dog I hope always to resist, and in time to drive. . . . When I rise my breakfast is solitary, the black dog waits to share it, from breakfast to dinner he continues barking. . . . Night comes at last, and some hours of restlessness and confusion bring me again to a day of solitude. What shall exclude the black dog from a habitation like this?

The want of human interest is always felt. Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.

In the character of his [Thomas Gray’s] Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices . . . must be finally decided all claim to poetical honors.

About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets .

Words being arbitrary must owe their power to association, and have the influence, and that only, which custom has given them. Language is the dress of thought.

Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.