Specimens of English Prose Writers: From the Earliest Times to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, with Sketches, Biographical and Literary ...

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Page 156 - ... cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well enchanting skill of music ; and with a tale, forsooth, he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner...
Page 332 - ... as if there were sought in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit, or a terrace for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect, or a tower of state for a proud mind to raise itself upon, or a fort or commanding ground for strife and contention, or a shop for profit and sale ; and not a rich store-house for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate.
Page 484 - Equity is a roguish thing ; for law we have a measure, know what to trust to ; equity is according to the conscience of him that is Chancellor, and as that is larger or narrower, so is equity. 'Tis all one as if they should make the standard for the measure we call a foot...
Page 292 - My lord, when I lost the freedom of my cell, which was my college, yet I found some degree of it in my quiet country parsonage ; but I am weary of the noise and oppositions of this place, and indeed God and nature did not intend me for contentions, but for study and quietness.
Page 422 - For the mind and memory are more sharply exercised in comprehending another man's things than our own; and such as accustom themselves and are familiar with the best authors shall ever and anon find somewhat of them in themselves, and in the expression of their minds, even when they feel it not, be able to utter something like theirs, which hath an authority above their own.
Page 230 - Neither, by my consent, shalt thou train them up in wars; for he that sets up his rest to live by that profession, can hardly be an honest man or a good Christian...
Page 422 - Custom is the most certain mistress of language, as the public stamp makes the current money. But we must not be too frequent with the mint, every day coining. Nor fetch words from the extreme and utmost ages ; since the chief virtue of a style is perspicuity, and nothing so vicious in it as to need an interpreter.
Page 463 - A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, etc.
Page 461 - M libraries as ever he had) a scholar, and would be therefore loth, either by living as a drone, to be an unprofitable or unworthy member of so learned and noble a society, or to write that which should be any way dishonourable to such a royal and ample foundation.
Page 420 - For a man to — write well, there are required three necessaries — to read the best authors, observe the best speakers, and much exercise of his own style.

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