“A knowledge of men and of books is also to be desired; for it is a writer's best reason of being, and without it he does well to hold his tongue.”

Insisting that writing should be grounded in reading and human understanding · Essay, Essays and Essayists

• Art
• Truth

“He does well to have humour, for humour makes men brothers, and is perhaps more influential in an essay than in most places else.”

Treating humour as a source of fellowship between writer and reader · Essay, Essays and Essayists

• Art
• Friendship
• Joy

“There are times and seasons when a good laugh makes more for edification than whole folios of good counsel.”

Arguing that laughter can teach more effectively than solemn instruction · Essay, Labiche

• Hope
• Joy

“Time and chance have gone demented, fate has turned comic poet, society has become its own parody, everybody is the irrepressible caricature of himself.”

Evoking comedy as a world where ordinary logic joyfully collapses · Essay, Labiche

• Art
• Joy
• Time

“The flowers are maids to him, and the maids are flowers.”

Capturing Herrick's fusion of human beauty and the natural world · Essay, Herrick

• Beauty
• Love
• Nature

“The more clearly he sees a thing the better he sings it; and provided that he do see it nothing is beneath the caress of his muse.”

Connecting poetic beauty with clarity of observation · Essay, Herrick

• Beauty
• Poetry
• Truth

“The words in which he unpacked his heart are vitalised with passion.”

Linking the life of language directly to emotional intensity · Essay, Tourneur

• Art
• Love

“Shakespeare and Rembrandt have in common the faculty of quickening speculation and compelling the minds of men to combat and discussion.”

Presenting great art as a force that provokes thought and debate · Essay, Shakespeare

• Art
• Truth

“He remains in the front of time as when he lived and wrote.”

Affirming the continuing vitality of a writer across centuries · Essay, Rabelais

• Art
• Fame
• Time

“Few have had so much genius, and in none else has genius been so curiously featured.”

Recognising an extraordinary talent inseparable from an extraordinary temperament · Essay, Rabelais

• Art
• Fame

“Men were not afraid of life nor ashamed of death; and you could be heroic without a dread of clever editors, and hospitable without fear of rogues, and dutiful for no hope of illuminated scrolls.”

Contrasting heroic simplicity with modern self-consciousness · Essay, Homer and Theocritus

• Death
• Hope
• Truth

“Every one should read his book, for it will bring him face to face with a very prince among poets and with a very summer among centuries.”

Celebrating a translation that opens a radiant poetic world · Essay, Homer and Theocritus

• Beauty
• Joy
• Poetry

“His society is like old d'Artagnan's: it invigorates, renews, inspires.”

Describing Odysseus as a companion whose example strengthens the reader · Essay, Homer and Theocritus

• Art
• Friendship
• Hope

“In other words, he selects: from his matter whatever is impertinent is eliminated and only what is vital is permitted to remain.”

Defining artistic discipline as the removal of everything inessential · Essay, Matthew Arnold

• Art
• Truth

“Matthew Arnold alone says only what is worth saying.”

Praising severe selection and economy of expression · Essay, Matthew Arnold

• Poetry
• Truth

“For him the essentials are dignity of thought and sentiment and distinction of manner and utterance.”

Identifying restraint, dignity, and distinction as central poetic virtues · Essay, Matthew Arnold

• Art
• Poetry

“In every page of Arnold the poet there is something to return upon and to admire.”

Describing poetry whose details reward repeated reading · Essay, Matthew Arnold

• Beauty
• Memory
• Poetry

“Artificial he is, but he has the wonderful quality of never seeming artificial.”

Praising artifice so accomplished that it appears natural · Essay, Heine

• Art
• Nature

“The movement of Heine's rhythms, simple as they seem, is not spontaneous; it is an effect of art: the poet laboured at his cadences as at his meanings.”

Revealing the disciplined craft beneath an appearance of effortless music · Essay, Heine

• Art
• Music
• Poetry

“To give an adequate idea of an artist's work a man must be himself an artist of equal force and versatility with his original.”

Setting a demanding standard for literary translation · Essay, Heine

• Art
• Truth

“Once read as it deserves, it becomes one of the loveliest of our spiritual acquisitions.”

Suggesting that deeply received poetry becomes part of one's inner life · Essay, Heine

• Beauty
• Memory
• Poetry

“His verse has only violent lovers or violent foes; indifference is impossible.”

Describing poetry whose intensity permits no neutral response · Essay, Heine

• Love
• Poetry

“His sense of verbal colour and verbal music is beyond criticism; his rhythmical capacity is something prodigious.”

Celebrating language as colour, music, and rhythm · Essay, Hugo

• Art
• Music
• Poetry

“Thus, for breadth and brilliance of conception, for energy and sweep of imagination, for the power of dealing as a master with the greater forces of nature, he is unsurpassed among modern men.”

Praising the scale, energy, and elemental force of Hugo's imagination · Essay, Hugo

• Art
• Nature