Obiter Dicta: Second Series

Pope was a great adept at working upon other men's stuff. There is hardly anything in which men differ more enormously than in the degree in which they possess this faculty of u...

There are men whose charm is in their entirety. Their words occasionally utter what their looks invariably express. We read their thoughts by the light of their smiles. Not to s...

From 1700 to 1715, that is, from his fourteenth to his twenty-ninth year, he lived with his father and mother at Binfield, on the borders of Windsor Forest, which he made the su...

We here part company with Johnson, bidding him a most affectionate farewell, and leaving him in undisturbed possession of both place and power. His character will bear investiga...

The Rockingham Ministry deserves well of the historian, and on the whole has received its deserts. Lord Rockingham, the Duke of Richmond, Lord John Cavendish, Mr. Dowdeswell, an...

If either of these great men has been guilty of intellectual excesses, those of Burke may be attributed to his dread of anarchy, those of Newman to his dread of atheism. Neither...

Johnson the author is not always fairly treated. Phrases are convenient things to hand about, and it is as little the custom to inquire into their truth as it is to read the let...

That many people appear to like a drab-coloured world hung round with dusky shreds of philosophy is sufficiently obvious. These persons find any relaxation they may require from...

Borrow is provoking, and has his full share of faults, and, though the owner of a style, is capable of excruciating offences. His habitual use of the odious word 'individual' as...

In the summer of 1643 he took a sudden journey into the country, and returned home to his boys with a wife, the daughter of an Oxfordshire Cavalier. Poor Mary Powell was but sev...

In 1664 _Paradise Lost_ was finished, but as in 1665 came the Great Plague, and after the Great Plague the Great Fire, it was long before the MS. found its way into the hands of...

I am sorry not to have been able to persuade my old friend, George Radford, who wrote the paper on 'Falstaff' in the former volume, to contribute anything to the second series o...

Pope had small notion, though there is just a whiff of Wordsworth in an observation he once hazarded, that a tree is a more poetical object than a prince in his coronation robes...

Mr. Gladstone was, of course, referring to second-hand bookshops. Neither he nor any other sensible man puts himself out about new books. When a new book is published, read an o...