It is impossible to look without amazement on a mind so fertile in combinations, yet so barren of images.

His amatory poetry is wholly made up of a very few topics, disposed in so many orders, and exhibited in so many lights, that it reminds us of those arithmetical problems about permutations, which so much astonish the unlearned.

The French cook, who boasted that he could make fifteen different dishes out of a nettle-top, was not a greater master of his art.

The mind of Petrarch was a kaleidoscope.

At every turn it presents us with new forms, always fantastic, occasionally beautiful; and we can scarcely believe that all these varieties have been produced by the same worthless fragments of glass.