His opinion of 'the historian"s' style—that it combined, at the same time, the excellencies of Gibbon, and Hume—was one of the most exquisite specimens of irony that, I think, I ever met with: it was worthy of former days. I was just going to give up the Edinburgh, when I read that sentence, and I continued it in consequence."
"We certainly want a master-spirit to set us right. Grey. Scott, our second Shakspeare, we, of course, cannot expect to step forward to direct the public mind. He is too much engaged in delighting it. Besides, he is not the man for it. He is not a litterateur. We want Byron."
"Ah! there was the man! And that such a man should be lost to us, at the very moment that he had begun to discover why it had pleased the Omnipotent to have endowed him with such powers!""
"If one thing was more characteristic of
