ON LIVING TO ONE’S-SELF[1] Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,Or by the lazy Scheldt or wandering Po. I never was in a better place or humour than I am at present for writing on this subject. I have a partridge getting ready for my supper, my fire is blazing on the hearth, the air is mild for […]

Coming forward and seating himself on the ground in his white dress and tightened turban, the chief of the Indian Jugglers begins with tossing up two brass balls, which is what any of us could do, and concludes with keeping up four at the same time, which is what none of us could do to […]

For the more languages a man can speak,His talent has but sprung the greater leak:And, for the industry he has spent upon’t,Must full as much some other way discount.The Hebrew, Chaldee, and the SyriacDo, like their letters, set men’s reason back,And turn their wits that strive to understand It(Like those that write the characters) left-handed.Yet […]

There are people who have but one idea: at least, if they have more, they keep it a secret, for they never talk but of one subject. There is Major Cartwright: he has but one idea or subject of discourse, Parliamentary Reform. Now Parliamentary Reform is (as far as I know) a very good subject […]

People have about as substantial an idea of Cobbett as they have of Cribb. His blows are as hard, and he himself is as impenetrable. One has no notion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns his readers, and he ‘fillips the ear of the public […]

I have been sometimes accused of a fondness for paradoxes, but I cannot in my own mind plead guilty to the charge. I do not indeed swear by an opinion because it is old; but neither do I fall in love with every extravagance at first sight because it is new. I conceive that a […]

The two chief points which Sir Joshua aims at in his Discourses are to show that excellence in the Fine Arts is the result of pains and study rather than of genius, and that all beauty, grace, and grandeur are to be found, not in actual nature, but in an idea existing in the mind. […]

Few things show the human character in a more ridiculous light than the circumstance of will-making. It is the latest opportunity we have of exercising the natural perversity of the disposition, and we take care to make a good use of it. We husband it with jealousy, put it off as long as we can, […]

Those persons who are much accustomed to abstract contemplation are generally unfitted for active pursuits, and vice versa. I myself am sufficiently decided and dogmatical in my opinions, and yet in action I am as imbecile as a woman or a child. I cannot set about the most indifferent thing without twenty efforts, and had […]

Few subjects are more nearly allied than these two–vulgarity and affectation. It may be said of them truly that ‘thin partitions do their bounds divide.’ There cannot be a surer proof of a low origin or of an innate meanness of disposition than to be always talking and thinking of being genteel. One must feel […]