The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies.

The most familiar quotations are the most likely to be misquoted. Some misquotations are still variable, some have settled down to false versions that have obscured the true ones. They have passed over from literature into speech.

Familiar life, tending to sordidness, had been succeeded by remote life, generally idealized historical detail had been brought in to teach readers who were being entertained.

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel.

IT is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom's Cabin was passing through its serial stage, and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction.