Essays, Critical and Miscellaneous

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Phillips, Sampson, 1856 - English essays - 744 pages

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Page 249 - There happened in my time one noble speaker who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language, where he could spare or pass by a jest, was nobly censorious. No man ever spoke more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough or look aside from him without loss. He commanded where he spoke, and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion.
Page 286 - Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not.
Page 16 - He had been wrested by no common deliverer from the grasp of no common foe. He had been ransomed by the sweat of no vulgar agony, by the blood of no * earthly sacrifice.
Page 16 - The intensity of their feelings on one subject made them tranquil on every other. One overpowering sentiment had subjected to itself pity and hatred, ambition and fear. Death had lost its terrors and pleasure its charms.
Page 139 - Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakspeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.
Page 113 - Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price, industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by defending property, by diminishing the price of law, and by observing strict economy in every department of the state. Let the Government do this : the People will assuredly do...
Page 38 - Partridge, with a contemptuous sneer, Why, I could act as well as he myself. I am sure, if I had seen a ghost, I should have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did.
Page 13 - The blaze of truth and liberty may at first dazzle and bewilder nations which have become half blind in the house of bondage, but let them gaze on, and they will soon be able to bear it.
Page 12 - Oliver Cromwell, his bitterest enemies themselves being judges, destitute of private virtues ? And what, after all, are the virtues ascribed to Charles ? A religious zeal, not more sincere than that of his son, and fully as weak and narrow-minded, and a few of the ordinary household decencies which half the tombstones in England claim for those who lie beneath them. A good father ! A good husband ! Ample apologies indeed for fifteen years of persecution, tyranny, and falsehood...
Page 326 - ... him. Then the prisoners went mad with despair. They trampled each other down, fought for the places at the windows — fought for the pittance of water with which the cruel mercy of the murderers mocked their agonies — raved, prayed, blasphemed, implored the guards to fire among them.

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