The Works of ... Edmund Burke, Volume 8

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F. & C. Rivington, 1803

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Page 49 - British monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of the state, shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers, as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land — so long the mounds and dykes of the low, fat, Bedford level* will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France.
Page 35 - he lies floating many a rood' he is still a creature. His ribs, his fins, his whalebone, his blubber, the very spiracles through which he spouts a torrent of brine against his origin, and covers me all over with the spray, everything of him and about him is from the throne.
Page 54 - Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty and passion of a man.
Page 50 - ... rights; the joint and several securities, each in its place and order, for every kind and every quality of property and of dignity...
Page 272 - And turn the' unwilling steeds another way; Benighted wanderers, the forest o'er, Curse the saved candle and unopening door; While the gaunt mastiff, growling at the gate, Affrights the beggar whom he longs to eat...
Page 40 - ... municipal country in which I was born, and for all descriptions and denominations in it. Mine was to support with unrelaxing vigilance every right, every privilege, every franchise, in this my adopted, my dearer, and more comprehensive country...
Page 46 - ... every disproportion. It would not have been for that successor to resort to any stagnant wasting reservoir of merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient, living spring, of generous and manly action. Every day he lived he would have re-purchased the bounty of the crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he had received.
Page 47 - But we are all of us made to shun disgrace, as we are made to shrink from pain, and poverty, and disease. It is an instinct ; and under the direction of reason, instinct is always in the right.
Page 21 - France, sprung from night and hell, or from that chaotic anarchy, which generates equivocally " all monstrous, all prodigious things," cuckoo-like, adulterously lay their eggs, and brood over, and hatch them in the nest of every neighbouring state. These obscene harpies, who deck themselves, in I know not what divine attributes, but who in reality are foul and ravenous birds of prey, both mothers and daughters, flutter over our heads, and souse down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled,...
Page 35 - I know not how it has happened, but it really seems that, whilst his Grace was meditating his well-considered censure upon me, he fell into a sort of sleep. Homer nods, and the Duke of Bedford may dream ; and as dreams (even his golden dreams) are apt to be ill-pieced and incongruously put together, his Grace preserved his idea of reproach to me, but took the subject-matter from the crown grants to his own family. This is "the stuff of which his dreams are made.

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