“Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.”
Samuel Johnson. Life of Addison.
“Children learn to speak by watching the lips and catching the words of those who know how already; and poets learn in the same way from their elders.”
James Russell Lowell. Essay on Chaucer.
“Grammars of rhetoric and grammars of logic are among the most useless furniture of a shelf. Give a boy Robinson Crusoe. That is worth all the grammars of rhetoric and logic in the world.... Who ever reasoned better for having been taught the difference between a syllogism and an enthymeme? Who ever composed with greater spirit and elegance because he could define an oxymoron or an aposiopesis?”
Thomas Babington Macaulay. Trevelyan’s Life of Lord Macaulay. ChapterVI.
