The Great Conversers: And Other Essays

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S.C. Griggs, 1876 - 304 sider

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Side 96 - 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.
Side 64 - Even as those bees of Trebizond, — Which from the sunniest flowers that glad With their pure smile the gardens round, Draw venom forth that drives men mad...
Side 24 - 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.
Side 32 - He always made the best pun and the best remark in the course of the evening. His serious conversation, like his serious writing, is his best. No one ever stammered out such fine, piquant, deep eloquent things in half a dozen half-sentences as he does. His jests scald like tears, and he probes a question with a play upon words.
Side 12 - Addison was the most timorous and awkward man that he ever saw." And Addison, speaking of his own deficience in conversation, used to say of himself, that, with respect to intellectual "wealth, he could draw bills for a thousand pounds, though he had not a guinea in his pocket.
Side 158 - These are deep questions, where great names militate against each other ; where reason is perplexed ; and an appeal to authorities only thickens the confusion. For high and reverend authorities lift up their heads on both sides ; and there is no sure footing in the middle. This point is the great Serbonian bog, Betwixt Damiata and Mount Casius old, Where armies whole have sunk.
Side 4 - THERE are a hundred faults in this thing, and a hundred things might be said to prove them beauties. But it is needless. A book may be amusing with numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single absurdity.
Side 40 - He sings rather than talks. He pours upon you a kind of satirical, heroical, critical poem, with regular cadences, and generally catching up near the beginning some singular epithet, which serves as a refrain when his song is full, or with which as with a knitting-needle he catches up the stitches if he has chanced now and then to let fall a row.
Side 66 - Ward has no heart, they say; but I deny it ; He has a heart, and gets his speeches by it.
Side 61 - While Butler, needy wretch ! was yet alive, No generous patron would a dinner give. See him, when starved to death, and turned to dust, Presented with a monumental bust. The poet's fate is here in emblem shown — He asked for bread, and he received a stone.

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