Lord Macaulay Thomas Babington

How well Horatius kept the bridge In the brave days of old.

In that temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, in the great Abbey which has during many ages afforded a quiet resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the contentions of the Great Hall.

Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality.

Nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand.

We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.

The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little.

A man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who in that department succeeded pre-eminently.

The English Bible,-a book which if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.

His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.