Six Essays on Johnson

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Clarendon Press, 1910 - 184 pages
 

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Page 153 - The busy day, the peaceful night, Unfelt, uncounted, glided by; His frame was firm — his powers were bright, Though now his eightieth year was nigh. Then with no fiery throbbing pain, No cold gradations of decay, Death broke at once the vital chain, And freed his soul the nearest way.
Page 133 - If by a more noble and more adequate conception that be considered as wit which is at once natural and new, that which, though not obvious, is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just...
Page 77 - I shall print no list of subscribers ;' said Johnson, with great abruptness : but almost immediately recollecting himself, added, very complacently, ' Sir, I have two very cogent reasons for not printing any list of subscribers ; — one, that I have lost all the names, — the other, that I have spent all the money.
Page 136 - But why then publish * Granville the polite, And knowing Walsh, would tell me I could write...
Page 48 - No, sir, let it alone. It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance — it lasts so short a time.
Page 67 - But love is only one of many passions; and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet, who caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw before him. He knew, that any other passion, as it was regular or exorbitant, was a cause of happiness or calamity.
Page 162 - God. 2 Life, death, and hell, and worlds unknown, Hang on His firm decree; He sits on no precarious throne, Nor borrows leave, TO BE. 3 Chained to His throne a volume lies, With all the fates of men; With every angel's form and size, Drawn by th
Page 81 - There are two things which I am confident I can do very well : one is an introduction to any literary work, stating what it is to contain, and how it should be executed in the most perfect manner ; the other is a conclusion, showing from various causes why the execution has not been equal to what the author promised to himself and to the public.
Page 78 - Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure, all take their turns of retardation ; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time has an antagonist not subject to casualties.
Page 85 - This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirror of life; that he who has mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him, may here be cured of his delirious ecstasies, by reading human sentiments in human language, by scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions.

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