His most insistent prejudices foreshadow in their essential sanity and justness those of that great master of life, Dr.Johnson.He could not endure over-politeness, a vice which must have been very oppressive in society of his day.

He savagely resented and condemned a display of affection--particularly marital affection--in public.

In an age when it was the normal social system of settling quarrels, he condemned duelling; and he said some very wise things--things that might still be said--on modern education.

In economics he was as right-hearted as Ruskin and as wrong-headed.

Carlyle, who was in so many respects an echo of him, found in a passage in his works a "dim anticipation" of his philosophy of clothes.
The leading literary invention of the period--after that of the heroic couplet for verse--was the prose periodical essay.