The Works of the English Poets: With Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, Volumen 19

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Samuel Johnson
C. Bathurst, 1779

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Página 109 - For great contemporaries whet and cultivate each other ; and mutual borrowing, and commerce, makes the common riches of learning, as it does of the civil government.
Página 275 - Look round the habitable world, how few Know their own good, or knowing it pursue.
Página 193 - How easy it is to call rogue and villain, and that wittily! but how hard to make a man appear a fool, a blockhead, or a knave, without using any of those opprobrious terms!
Página 195 - I avoided the mention of great crimes, and applied myself to the representing of blindsides, and little extravagancies; to which, the wittier a man is, he is generally the more obnoxious. It succeeded as I wished; the jest went round, and he was laughed at in his turn who began the frolic.
Página 282 - Form'd in the forge, the pliant brass is laid ^ On anvils ; and of head and limbs are made, > Pans, cans, and piss-pots, a whole kitchen trade.
Página 289 - Intrust thy fortune to the powers above ; Leave them to manage for thee, and to grant What their unerring wisdom sees thee want : * In goodness, as in greatness, they excel ; Ah, that we loved ourselves but half so well...
Página 114 - ... words may then be laudably revived, when either they are more sounding or more significant than those in practice ; and when their obscurity is taken away, by joining other words to them which clear the sense, according to the rule of Horace, for the admission of new words.
Página 194 - The character of Zimri in my Absalom is, in my opinion, worth the whole poem: it is not bloody, but it is ridiculous enough; and he, for whom it was intended, was too witty to resent it as an injury.
Página 280 - Beset with thieves, and never mends his pace. Of all the vows, the first and chief request Of each, is to be richer than the rest; And yet no doubts the poor man's draught control, He dreads no poison in his homely bowl, Then fear the deadly drug, when gems divine Enchase the cup, and sparkle in the wine.
Página 213 - I consulted a greater genius (without offence to the manes of that noble author) I mean Milton; but as he endeavours every where to express Homer, whose age had not arrived to that fineness, I found in him a true sublimity, lofty thoughts which were clothed with admirable Grecisms, and ancient words, which he had been digging from the mines of Chaucer and Spenser, and which, with all their rusticity, had somewhat...

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