Sooth't were a pleasant life to lead, With nothing in the world to do But just to blow a shepherd's reed, The silent season thro' And just to drive a… - Samuel Laman Blanchard

The ancient gentleman who has seen the world, who is profoundly experienced, and much too deep to be the dupe of an age so shallow as this, is to be won by an admiring glance at the brilliancy of his knee-buckle; praise his very pigtail, and you may lead him by it.

It is in the world of words, amid the dull but perhaps necessary detail of every-day events—that quotations come with a warmth and a welcome upon memory, and like Milton's fish, "Show to the sun their wav'd coats dropt with gold." …In the dry and laboring essay, amid the windings of many words and the accumulation of antecedents, we hail their sudden and familiar appearances as patches of Nature's green to repose on by the way; their "dulcet and harmonious breath" animates a train of associations that dwell in the most sylvan haunts of emotion and sentiment; to their fountains of "loosened silver" we turn for a refreshing and a pleasant abstraction.

Of all the many and (thanks to a free press) the ever-multiplying blessings attendant upon the "glorious constitution" of literature, not the least precious and profitable to a modern cultivator of systems and syllables, in pamphlets, magazines, and folios, is the right of Quotation.