English Essays: Materials & Models for Composition from the Great Essayists

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John Henry Fowler
Macmillan and Company, Limited, 1908 - 106 pages
 

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Page 57 - Him that you term'd, sir, the good old lord, Gonzalo : His tears run down his beard, like winter's drops From eaves of reeds. Your charm so strongly works 'em That if you now beheld them, your affections Would become tender.
Page 44 - And having dropped the expected bag, pass on. He whistles as he goes, light-hearted wretch, • Cold and yet cheerful ; messenger of grief Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some ; To him indifferent whether grief or joy. Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks...
Page 21 - Those relations are therefore commonly of most value in which the writer tells his own story. He that recounts the life of another, commonly dwells most upon conspicuous events, lessens the familiarity of his tale to increase its dignity, shews his favourite at a distance, decorated and magnified like the ancient actors in their tragick dress, and endeavours to hide the man that he may produce a hero.
Page 63 - The greatness of wit, by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be understood, manifests itself in the admirable balance of all the faculties. Madness is the disproportionate straining or excess of any one of them.
Page 25 - There may perhaps be too great an indulgence, as well as too great a restraint of imagination; and if the one produces incoherent monsters, the other produces what is full as bad, lifeless insipidity. An intimate knowledge of the passions, and good sense, but not common sense, must at last determine its limits.
Page 4 - The coachmen took care to meet, jostle, and threaten each other for way, and be entangled at the end of Newport-street and 20 Long-acre.
Page 17 - These screech-owls seem to be settled in an opinion that the great business of life is to complain, and that they were born for no other purpose than to disturb the happiness of others, to lessen the little comforts, and shorten the short pleasures of our condition, by painful remembrances of the past, or melancholy prognostics of the future ; their only care is to crush the rising hope, to damp the kindling transport, and allay the golden hours of gaiety with the hateful dross of grief and suspicion.
Page 32 - Patri, is now split into as many quavers as an Italian air. For this purpose, there is in every county an itinerant band of vocal musicians, who make it their business to go round to all the churches in their turns, and, after a prelude with the pitchpipe, astonish the audience with hymns set to the 'new Winchester measure, and anthems of their own composing.
Page 28 - ... from the oracle of some coffeehouse, which oracle has himself gathered them the night before from a beau at a gaming-table, who has pillaged his knowledge from a great man's porter, who has had his information from the great man's gentleman, who has invented the whole story for his own amusement the night preceding.
Page 24 - Poetry: this imitation being merely mechanical, in which the slowest intellect is always sure ( to succeed best; for the Painter of genius cannot stoop to drudgery, in which the understanding has no part; and what pretence has the Art to claim kindred with Poetry, but by its power over the imagination?

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