I prefer an ounce of fact to a ton of imagination. - John Wilson Croker

My memory and observation of public affairs are about coeval with that event [the French Revolution<nowiki>]</nowiki>. I was in my ninth year when the Bastille was taken; it naturally made a great impression on me, and the bloody scenes that so rapidly followed rendered that impression unfavourable. Such also was the feeling of my wise and excellent parents, and an alliance between our family and that of Mr. Burke helped to confirm us in that great man's prophetic opinions, which every event from that day to this appears to me to have wonderfully illustrated and fulfilled.

We despise and abominate the details of partizan warfare, but we now are, as we always have been, decidedly and conscientiously attached to what is called the Tory, and which might with more propriety be called the Conservative, party; a party which we believe to compose by far the largest, wealthiest, and most intelligent and respectable portion of the population of this country, and without whose support any administration that can be formed will be found deficient both in character and stability.

There is nothing for which one—at least I—should so much envy as Sir W. Scott as the bold facility with which he seized a subject and by the first glance determined all its properties. He was perpetually wrong in his details, but always right, luminous, and I had almost said exact, in his general view—but I am not of that power. I do nothing at all approaching to well but what I understand in its details. Would I could.