It is natural to believe in great men. If the companions of our childhood should turn out to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not surprise us. All mythology opens with demigods, and the ...

Among books, Plato only is entitled to Omar’s fanatical compliment to the Koran, when he said, “Burn the libraries; for, their value is in this book.” These sentences contain the culture of nations; t...

The publication, in Mr. Bohn’s “Serial Library,” of the excellent translations of Plato, which we esteem one of the chief benefits the cheap press has yielded, gives us an occasion to take hastily a f...

Among eminent persons, those who are most dear to men are not the class which the economists call producers; they have nothing in their hands; they have not cultivated corn, nor made bread; they have ...

Every fact is related on one side to sensation and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other; given the upper, to find the under ...

Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving, like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and ...

Among the eminent persons of the nineteenth century, Bonaparte is far the best known, and the most powerful; and owes his predominance to the fidelity with which he expresses the tone of thought and b...

I find a provision in the constitution of the world for the writer or secretary, who is to report the doings of the miraculous spirit of life that everywhere throbs and works. His office is a receptio...

Lib. I 835. ↩ As I quote at secondhand, and cannot procure Seruzier, I dare not adopt the high figure I find. ↩...