Curiosities of Literature, Volume 1J. Murray, 1823 - 1560 pages |
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Popular passages
Page 156 - It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter,* that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
Page 61 - Full little knowest thou, that hast not tried, What hell it is in suing long to bide: To lose good days, that might be better spent; To waste long nights in pensive discontent; To speed today, to be put back tomorrow; To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow; To have thy prince's grace, yet want her peers...
Page 48 - For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and to the next age.
Page 16 - Of such a collector,' says he, * as soon as I enter his house, I am ready to faint on the staircase, from a strong smell of Morocco leather : in vain he shows me fine editions, gold leaves, Etruscan bindings, &c., naming them one after another, as if he were showing a gallery of pictures!
Page 96 - Tower, and to settle the nation on a new foundation; so he took this province to himself, to show the madness of this proposition, the injustice of it, and the mischiefs that would follow on it, and did it with such clearness and strength of reason as not only satisfied all sober persons, for it may be supposed that was soon done, but...
Page 168 - When the emperor Decius persecuted the Christians, seven noble youths of Ephesus concealed themselves in a spacious cavern in the side of an adjacent mountain ; where they were doomed to perish by the tyrant, who gave orders that the entrance should be firmly secured with a pile of huge stones. They immediately fell into a deep slumber, which was miraculously prolonged, without injuring the powers of life, during a period...
Page 276 - From this difference of Music in SPEECH, we may conjecture that of TEMPERS. We know, the Doric mood sounds gravity and sobriety ; the Lydian, buxomness and freedom...
Page 208 - Lausanne ; and on the approach of Spring, I withdrew without reluctance from the noisy and extensive scene of crowds without company, and dissipation without pleasure.
Page 232 - For the LORD thy God hath blessed thee in all the works of thy hand : he knoweth thy walking through this great wilderness : these forty years the LORD thy God hath been with thee; thou hast lacked nothing.
Page 156 - ... forgotten, produce that particular designation of mind, and propensity for some certain science or employment, which is commonly called genius. The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great painter of the present age, had the first fondness for his art excited by the perusal of Richardson's treatise.