Biographical and Historical Sketches

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Page 325 - Who is on my side? who?" And there looked out to him two or three eunuchs. And he said, "Throw her down." So they threw her down: and some of her blood was sprinkled on the wall, and on the horses : and he trode her under foot.
Page 323 - ... the smallpox was always present, filling the churchyards with corpses, tormenting with constant fears all whom it had not yet stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover.
Page 323 - The havoc of the plague had been far more rapid : but the plague had visited our shores only once or twice within living memory; and the smallpox was always present, filling the churchyards with corpses, tormenting with constant fears all whom it had not yet stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks...
Page 230 - An Epistolary Discourse proving from Scripture and the First Fathers that the Soul is naturally Mortal, but Immortalized actually by the Pleasure of God to Punishment or to Reward, by its Union with the Divine Baptismal Spirit, wherein is proved that none have the Power of giving this Divine Immortalizing Spirit since the Apostles but only the Bishops.
Page 73 - A kind of strange oblivion has overspread me, so that I know not what has become of the last year ; and perceive that incidents and intelligence pass over me, without leaving any impression.
Page 83 - But Johnson took no notice of the challenge. He had learned, both from his own observation and from literary history, in which he was deeply read, that the place of books in the public estimation is fixed, not by what is written about them, but by what is written in them ; and that an author whose works are likely to live is very unwise if he stoops to wrangle with detractors whose works are certain to die.
Page 61 - I saved appearances tolerably well; but I took care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it.
Page 76 - ... in a day, or to condemn the sheets to the service of the trunk-maker and the pastry-cook. Nor shall we think this strange when we consider what great and various talents and acquirements met in the little fraternity. Goldsmith was the representative of poetry and light literature, Reynolds of the arts, Burke of political eloquence and political philosophy. There, too, were Gibbon, the greatest historian, and Jones, the greatest linguist, of the age. Garrick brought to the meetings his inexhaustible...
Page 59 - He was a vicious man, but very kind to me. If you call a dog HERVEY, I shall love him.
Page 58 - Parliament, a lord of the treasury, an ambassador, a secretary of state. It would be easy, on the other hand, to name several writers of the nineteenth century of whom the least successful has received forty thousand pounds from the booksellers. But Johnson entered on his vocation in the most dreary part of the dreary interval which separated two ages of prosperity. Literature had ceased to flourish under the patronage of the great, and had not begun to nourish under the patronage of the public.

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