Miscellaneous and Fugitive Pieces, Volume 1

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T. Davies, in Russel-Street, Convent-Garden, Bookseller to the Royal Academy, 1774 - English literature - 375 pages
 

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Page 23 - The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it...
Page 21 - As we drown whelps and kittens, they amuse themselves now and then with sinking a ship, and stand round the fields of Blenheim or the walls of Prague, as we encircle a cockpit. As we shoot a bird flying, they take a man in the midst of his business or pleasure and knock him down with an apoplexy. Some of them perhaps are virtuosi and delight in the operations of an asthma, as a human philosopher in the effects of the air-pump.
Page 261 - But his innovations are sometimes pleasing, and his temerities happy : he has many verba ardentia, forcible expressions, which he would never have found, but by venturing to the utmost verge of propriety; and flights which would never have been reached, but by one who had very little fear of the shame of falling.
Page 36 - ... finite, the matter on the outside of this space would by its gravity tend towards all the matter on the inside and by consequence fall down into the middle of the whole space and there compose one great spherical mass.
Page 260 - His style is, indeed, a tissue of many languages ; a mixture of heterogeneous words, brought together from distant regions, with terms originally appropriated to one art, and drawn by violence into the service of another.
Page 21 - Many a merry bout have these frolic beings at the vicissitudes of an ague, and good sport it is to see a man tumble with an epilepsy, and revive and tumble again, and all this he knows not why.
Page 12 - To entail irreversible poverty upon generation after generation, only because the ancestor happened to be poor, is in itself cruel, if not unjust, and is wholly contrary to the maxims of a commercial nation, which always suppose and promote a rotation of property, and offer every individual a chance of mending his condition by his diligence.
Page 244 - In the prosecution of this sport of fancy, he considers every production of art and nature in which he could find any decussation or approaches to the form of a quincunx ; and as a man once resolved upon ideal discoveries seldom searches long in vain, he finds his favourite figure in almost every thing...
Page 18 - But was it an evil ever so great, it could not be remedied but by one much greater, which is by living for ever ; by which means our...
Page 258 - any doubts in my way, I do forget them; or at leaft " defer them, till my better fettled judgment, and " more manly reafon, be able to refolve them : for I " perceive, every man's reafon is his beft Oedipus, " and will, upon a reafonable truce, find a way to " loofe thofe bonds, wherewith the fubtilties of er" ror have enchained our more flexible and tender "judgments.

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