The British Essayists: Rambler

Front Cover
C. and J. Rivington, 1823
 

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 315 - But biography has often been allotted to writers, who seem very little acquainted with the nature of their task, or very negligent about the performance. They rarely afford any other account than might be collected from...
Page 5 - Many writers, for the sake of following nature, so mingle good and bad qualities in their principal personages that they are both equally conspicuous...
Page xliv - He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next best: there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.
Page 19 - Tis thine alone to calm the pious breast With silent confidence and holy rest: From thee, great God, we spring, to thee we tend, Path, motive, guide, original, and end.
Page 313 - I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful.
Page 215 - Happy the man - and happy he alone He who can call today his own, He who, secure within, can say 'Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today: Be fair or foul or rain or shine, The joys I have possessed in spite of Fate are mine: Not Heaven itself upon the Past has power, But what has been has been, and I have had my hour.
Page 225 - All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance : it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united with canals.
Page 215 - There is certainly no greater happiness, than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence, by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow. Life, in which nothing has been done or suffered to distinguish one day from another, is to him that has passed it, as if it had never been, except that he is conscious how ill he has husbanded the great deposit of his Creator.
Page 143 - Yet it seems that enemies have been always found by experience the most faithful monitors ; for adversity has ever been considered as the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, and this effect it must produce by withdrawing flatterers, whose business it is to hide our weaknesses from us, or by giving loose to malice, and licence to reproach ; or at least by cutting off those pleasures which...
Page 199 - There is one reason seldom remarked which makes riches less desirable. Too much wealth is very frequently the occasion of poverty. He whom the wantonness of abundance has once softened, easily sinks into neglect of his affairs ; and he that thinks he can afford to be negligent, is not far from being poor.

Bibliographic information