Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript: Ballads and Romances, Volume 2

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N. Trübner & Company, 1868 - Ballads, English - 609 pages

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Page 248 - When lovely woman stoops to folly. And finds, too late, that men betray. What charm can soothe her melancholy, What art can wash her guilt away? The only art her guilt to cover. To hide her shame from every eye, To give repentance to her lover, And wring his bosom, — is to die.
Page 323 - How absolute the knave is ! we must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us. By the Lord, Horatio, these three years I have taken note of it ; the age is grown so picked that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe.— How long hast thou been a grave-maker?
Page 402 - ... a' came ever in the rearward of the fashion; and sung those tunes to the overscutch'd huswives that he heard the carmen whistle, and sware they were his Fancies or his Good-nights.
Page xxxii - The summer day sped onwards so fast that, notwithstanding the sharp appetite of thirteen, I forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and was still found entranced in my intellectual banquet. To read and to remember was in this instance the same thing, and henceforth I overwhelmed my schoolfellows and all who would hearken to me with tragical recitations from the ballads of Bishop Percy. The first time too I could scrape a few shillings...
Page xi - I passed; for it is impossible that anything should be universally tasted and approved by a multitude, though they are only the rabble of a nation, which hath not in it some peculiar aptness to please and gratify the mind of man.
Page xxi - Fingal, an ancient Epic poem, in six books, together with several other poems composed by Ossian, the son of Fingal, translated from the Gaelic language by James Macpherson.
Page vii - ... more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in their philosophy ; they consigned this hapless nonconformist to profound neglect.
Page xxv - Soon as his well-known ship she spied, She cast her weeds away, And to the palmy shore she hied, All in her best array. In sea-green silk so neatly clad, She there impatient stood ; The crew with wonder saw the lad Repel the foaming flood.
Page 522 - Scotch borders ; the bloodiest fight, say authors, that ever this island saw : to describe which the Saxon annalist, wont to be sober and succinct, whether the same or another writer, now labouring under the weight of his argument, and overcharged, runs on a sudden into such extravagant fancies and metaphors, as bear him quite beside the scope of being understood.
Page xii - There is even a despicable simplicity in the verse ; and yet, because the sentiments appear genuine and unaffected, they are able to move the mind of the most polite reader with inward meltings of humanity and compassion.

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