A Century of English Essays: An Anthology Ranging from Caxton to R.L. Stevenson, & the Writers of Our Own Time

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Ernest Rhys, Lloyd Vaughan
J.M. Dent & Sons, Limited, 1920 - 474 pages
 

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Page 11 - And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them ; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too; though, in the meantime, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.
Page 180 - I behold like a Spanish great galleon, and an English man-of-war ; Master Coleridge, like the former, was built far higher in learning, solid, but slow in his performances. CVL, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention.
Page 12 - Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament, adversity is the blessing of the New, which carrieth the greater benediction and the clearer revelation of God's favour.
Page 10 - Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor : suit the action to the word, the word to the action ; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature : for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 't were, the mirror up to nature ; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
Page 17 - GOD ALMIGHTY first planted a garden. And, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures ; it is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man, without which buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks.
Page 12 - We see in needleworks and embroideries, it is more pleasing to have a lively work upon a sad and solemn ground, than to have a dark and melancholy work upon a lightsome ground : judge, therefore, of the pleasure of the heart by the pleasure of the eye. - Certainly virtue is like precious odours, most fragrant where they are incensed or crushed : for prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.
Page 205 - MANKIND, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, where he designates a kind of golden age by the term Cho-fang, literally the Cooks
Page 208 - People built slighter and slighter every day, until it was feared that the very science of architecture would in no long time be lost to the world.
Page 28 - ... forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness, and to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it bowed the head, and broke its stalk; and at night, having lost some of its leaves, and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and out-worn faces.
Page 312 - among them that wrought the work * of the tabernacle made ten curtains of fine twined linen, and blue, and purple, and scarlet : with cherubims of cunning work made he them.

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