Biography, exemplary and instructive

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W.&R. Chambers, 1873 - Biography - 304 pages

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Page 233 - Thackeray, one of his masters, was wont to say of him, that he was a boy of so active a mind, that if he were left naked and friendless on Salisbury Plain, he would, nevertheless, find the road to fame and riches.
Page 96 - I was in my working dress, my best clothes being to come round by sea. I was dirty from my journey ; my pockets were stuffed out with shirts and stockings, and I knew no soul, nor where to look for lodging. I...
Page 295 - He helped in the building of the new structure of Lincoln's Inn, when, having a trowel in his hand, he had a book in his pocket.
Page 89 - I devoted to them. I found besides a work of De Foe's, entitled ' An Essay on Projects,' from which, perhaps, I derived impressions that have since influenced some of the principal events of my life.
Page 152 - About ten o'clock I bade adieu to Mount Vernon, to private life, and to domestic felicity ; and with a mind oppressed with more anxious and painful sensations than I have words to express, set out for New York with the best disposition to render service to my country in obedience to its call, but with less hope of answering its expectations.
Page 187 - He was impatient of whatever interfered with his favourite pursuits ; and the fact is too strikingly characteristic not to be mentioned, that he separated from his wife not many years after their marriage, because she, convinced that he would starve his family by scheming when he should have been shaving, broke some of his experimental models of machinery.
Page 118 - My original habits of frugality continuing, and my father having, among his instructions to me when a boy, frequently repeated a proverb of Solomon, " Seest thou a man diligent in his calling, he shall stand before kings, he shall not stand before mean men...
Page 92 - ... for the rhyme would have laid me under a constant necessity of searching for variety, and also have tended to fix that variety in my mind, and make me master of it. Therefore I took some of the tales in the Spectator...
Page 153 - a complete and generous education, which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both public and private, of peace and war.
Page 52 - ... so certainly if a man meditate much upon the universal frame of nature, the earth with men upon it (the divineness of souls except) will not seem much other than an ant-hill, whereas some ants carry corn, and some carry their young, and some go empty, and all to and fro a little heap of dust.

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