Recollections of Curran, and Some of His Contemporaries

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W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1822 - 403 pages
 

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Page 178 - guage his doom may have been pronounced; no matter what complexion incompatible with freedom, an Indian or an African sun may have burnt 'upon him ; no matter in what disastrous battle his liberty may have been cloven down ; no matter with what solemnities he may have been devoted upon the altar of slavery; the first moment he touches the sacred soil of Britain, the altar and the God sink together in the dust...
Page 249 - OH! BREATHE NOT HIS NAME. OH ! breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade, Where cold and unhonour'd his relics are laid : Sad, silent, and dark, be the tears that we shed, As the night-dew that falls on the grass o'er his head. But the night-dew that falls, though in silence it weeps, Shall brighten with verdure the grave where he sleeps ; And the tear that we shed, though in secret it...
Page 130 - Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
Page 183 - Scotland — a nation cast in the happy medium between the spiritless acquiescence of submissive poverty, and the sturdy credulity of pampered wealth — cool and ardent — adventurous and persevering — winging her eagle flight against the blaze of every science, with an eye that never winks, and a wing that never tires...
Page 213 - For they that led us away captive, required of us then a song, and melody in our heaviness : Sing us one of the songs of Sion. 4 How shall we sing the LORD'S song in a strange land?
Page 206 - I had almost said, of ordinary habitation ; you may see him flying by the conflagrations of his own dwelling; or you may find his bones bleaching on the green fields of his country ; or he may be found tossing upon the surface of the ocean, and mingling his groans with those tempests less savage than his persecutors that drift him to a returnless distance from his family and his home.
Page 209 - Have you not marked how the human heart bowed to the supremacy of his power, in the undissembled homage of deferential horror ? How his glance, like the lightning of heaven, seemed to rive the body of the accused, and mark it for the grave, while his voice warned the devoted wretch of woe and...
Page 48 - We spent them not in toys, or lust, or wine, But search of deep philosophy, Wit, eloquence, and poesy ; Arts which I loved ; for they, my friend, were thine.
Page 374 - Gentlemen, what horrid alternative in the treatment of wives would such reasoning recommend ? Are they to be immured by worse than eastern barbarity? Are their principles to be depraved, their passions sublimated, every finer motive of action extinguished by the inevitable consequences of thus treating them like slaves ? Or is a liberal and generous confidence in them to be the passport of the adulterer, and the justification of his crimes ? Honourably, but fatally for his own repose, he was neither...
Page 181 - ... to carry into effect those fatal conspiracies of the few against the many, when the devoted benches of public justice were filled by some of those foundlings of fortune, who, overwhelmed in the torrent of corruption at an early period, lay at the bottom like drowned bodies, while soundness or sanity remained in them ; but at length becoming buoyant by putrefaction, they rose as they rotted, and floated to the surface of the polluted stream, where they were drifted along, the objects of terror,...

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