The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.

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F.C. and J. Rivington, 1823
 

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Side 170 - The style of Dryden is capricious and varied, that of Pope is cautious and uniform; Dryden obeys the motions of his own mind, Pope constrains his mind to his own rules of composition. Dryden is sometimes vehement and rapid; Pope is always smooth, uniform, and gentle. Dryden's page is a natural field, rising into inequalities, and diversified by the varied exuberance of abundant vegetation; Pope's is a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe, and levelled by the roller.
Side 246 - ... dawn of reason through its gradations of advance in the morning of life. Every man acquainted with the common principles of human action will look with veneration on the writer who is at one time combating Locke, and at another making a catechism for children in their fourth year. A voluntary descent from the dignity of science is perhaps the hardest lesson that humility can teach.
Side 27 - Travels ;" a production so new and strange, that it filled the reader with a mingled emotion of merriment and amazement. It was received with such avidity, that the price of the first edition was raised before the second could be made ; it was read by the high and the low, the learned and illiterate. Criticism was for a while lost in wonder ; no rules of judgment were applied to a book written in open defiance of truth and regularity.
Side 166 - If conversation offered any thing that could be improved, he committed it to paper ; if a thought, or perhaps an expression more happy than was common, rose to his mind, he was careful to write it ; an independent distich was preserved for an opportunity of insertion ; and some little fragments have been found containing lines, or parts of lines, to be wrought upon at some other time.
Side 194 - Invention, by which new trains of events are formed, and new scenes of imagery displayed, as in the Rape of the Lock; and by which extrinsick and adventitious embellishments and illustrations are connected with a known subject, as in the Essay on Criticism...
Side 270 - Oriental fictions and allegorical imagery ; and, perhaps, while he was intent upon description, he did not sufficiently cultivate sentiment. His poems are the productions of a mind not deficient in fire, nor unfurnished with knowledge either of books or life, but somewhat obstructed in its progress by deviation in quest of mistaken beauties.
Side 133 - Arbuthnot was a man of great comprehension, skilful in his profession, versed in the sciences, acquainted with ancient literature, and able to animate his mass of knowledge by a bright and active imagination ; a scholar with great brilliance of wit ; a wit, who, in the crowd of life, retained and discovered a noble ardour of religious zeal.
Side 208 - No arts essay'd, but not to be admired. Passion and pride were to her soul unknown, Convinced that Virtue only is our own. So unaffected, so composed a mind, So firm, yet soft, so strong, yet so...
Side 373 - ... fourthly, they will believe any thing at all, provided they are under no obligation to believe it ; fifthly, they love to take a new road, even when that road leads no where ; sixthly, he was reckoned a fine writer, and seems always to mean more than he said. Would you have any more reasons f An interval of above forty years has pretty well destroyed the charm. A dead lord ranks with commoners ; vanity is no longer interested in the matter ; for a new road has become an old one.
Side 379 - To select a singular event, and swell it to a giant's bulk by fabulous appendages of spectres and predictions, has little difficulty ; for he that forsakes the probable may always find the marvellous. And it has little use ; we are affected only as we believe ; we are improved only as we find something to be imitated or declined. I do not see that " The " Bard" promotes any truth, moral or political.

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