Century Readings in the English Essay

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Louis Wann
Century Company, 1926 - 529 pages
 

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Page 194 - ... little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, — in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.
Page 195 - Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone...
Page 195 - It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
Page 487 - Reading maketh a full man ; conference a ready man ; and writing an exact man; and, therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory ; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend...
Page 18 - All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment shall be under the article of White's Chocolate-house; poetry, under that of Will's Coffee-house; learning, under the title of (\. ' Grecian; foreign and domestic news you will have from St. James's Coffee-house; and what else I shall on any other subject offer, shall be dated from my own apartment.
Page 10 - I do now publish my Essays; which of all my other works, have been most current ; for that, as it seems, they come home to men's business and bosoms.
Page 487 - To spend too much time in studies, is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar...
Page 30 - I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...
Page 487 - Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly and with diligence and attention.
Page 116 - Nor by me e'er shall you, You of all names the sweetest, and the best, You Muses, books, and liberty, and rest; You gardens, fields, and woods forsaken be, As long as life itself forsakes not me.

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