I wish I loved the human Race, I wish I loved its silly face, I wish I liked the way it walks, I wish I liked the way it talks, And when I'm introduc… - Walter Raleigh

Almost all men are less humorous than Shakespeare; but most men are more humorous than Milton, and these, it is to be feared, having suffered themselves to be dragooned by the critics into professing a distant admiration for Paradise Lost, have paid their last and utmost tribute to the genius of its author.

The Dictionary, great work though it be, might have been successfully carried through by a merely mechanical genius.

The topics of The Rambler are many, but the great majority of them are drawn from the graver aspects of life, and it is when he treats of fundamental duties and inevitable sorrows, bereavement, and disease, and death, that Johnson rises to his full stature.