Ethica: Or, Characteristics of Men, Manners, and Books

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Smith, Elder and Company, 1860 - 404 pages
 

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Page 372 - His hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss. He commanded where he spoke ; and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion. No man had their affections more in his power, The fear of every man that heard him was, lest he should make an end.
Page 98 - I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for not without dust and heat.
Page 371 - Yet there happened in my time one noble speaker who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language (where he could spare or pass by a jest) was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough or look aside from him without loss. He commanded where he spoke, and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion.
Page 98 - That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure...
Page 98 - I am sometimes ashamed to think that I could not secure myself from vice, but by retiring from the exercise of virtue, and begin to suspect that I was rather impelled by resentment, than led by devotion, into solitude.
Page 157 - Till at the last, his time for fury found, He shoots with sudden vengeance from the ground ; The prostrate vulgar passes o'er and spares, But with a lordly rage his hunters tears.
Page 391 - Nay, I will say more — flattered and encouraged by the Right Honourable Gentleman's panegyric on my talents, if ever I again engage in the compositions he alludes to, I may be tempted to an act of presumption — to attempt an improvement on one of Ben Jonson's best characters, the character of the Angry Boy in the Alchemist.
Page 274 - Dubius is such a scrupulous good man ! Yes, you may catch him tripping if you can. He would not with a peremptory tone Assert the nose upon his face his own ; With hesitation admirably slow He humbly hopes, presumes, it may be so.
Page 384 - A breach has been made in the constitution — the battlements are dismantled — the citadel is open to the first invader — the walls totter — the constitution is not tenable. What remains then, but for us to stand foremost in the breach, to repair it, or perish in it...
Page 96 - ... we do injuriously in thinking to taste better the pure evangelic manna, by seasoning our mouths with the tainted scraps and fragments of an unknown table ; and searching among the verminous and polluted rags dropped overworn from the toiling shoulders of time, with these deformedly to quilt and interlace the entire, the spotless, and undecaying robe of truth, the daughter not of time, but of Heaven, only bred up here below in Christian hearts, between two grave and holy nurses, the doctrine and...

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