I destroyed it four years ago.

Reading the dedications of poets cured me of the love for poetry.

What a pity that the Divine Inspiration should have for its oracles such mean souls!" "Yes, and how industrious the good gentlemen are in debasing themselves! Their ingenuity is never half so much shown in a simile as in a compliment; I know nothing in nature more melancholy than the discovery of any meanness in a great man.

There is so little to redeem the dry mass of follies and errors from which the materials of this life are composed, that anything to love or to reverence becomes, as it were, the sabbath for the mind.

It is better to feel, as we grow older, how the respite is abridged, and how the few objects left to our admiration are abased.