Walter Raleigh (professor)

"These Lives are the maturest and strongest of Johnson's work. It ought be a comfort to men past middle life to find Johnson, like Dryden, wrote his best prose in his latest years."

"The sense of liberty and power, and of belief in the capacity and destiny of man, which was quickened by the new discoveries, distinguishes the literature of the Elizabethan age from the great backwar…"

"... these men, though there was little of saintliness in their character, had a religion, and fought and suffered for it. It was a religion not wholly unlike that of the later Orangeman, a Protestant …"

"God's most candid critics are those of his children whom he has made poets."

"The measure of an author's power would be best found in the book which he should sit down to write the day after his library was burnt to the ground."

"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 reporter remembers what he understands, and sets down what his readers will appreciate. The genius of Boswell appears not least in this, that that he was willing, on occasion, to record Johnson's mo…"

"Of all the notable Elizabethans, Sir Walter Raleigh is perhaps the most difficult to understand. He has the insolent imagination of Marlowe, and the profound melancholy of Donne."