The Critical Review, Or, Annals of Literature, Volume 47

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Tobias Smollett
W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1779 - English literature
Each number includes a classified "Monthly catalogue."

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Page 95 - Therefore is the name of it called Babel ; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth : and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
Page 360 - From poetry the reader justly expects, and from good poetry always obtains, the enlargement of his comprehension and elevation of his fancy ; but this is rarely to be hoped by christians from metrical devotion.
Page 369 - And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air...
Page 358 - The good and evil of Eternity are too ponderous for the wings of wit; the mind sinks under them in passive helplessness, content with calm belief and humble adoration.
Page 356 - Milton's delight was to sport in the wide regions of possibility; reality was a scene too narrow for his mind. He sent his faculties out upon discovery into worlds where only imagination can travel, and delighted to form new modes of existence and furnish sentiment and action to superior beings, to trace the counsels of hell or accompany the choirs of heaven.
Page 358 - But these truths are too important to be new; they have been taught to our infancy; they have mingled with our solitary thoughts and familiar conversation, and are habitually interwoven with the whole texture of life. Being therefore not new, they raise no unaccustomed emotion in the mind ; what we knew before we cannot learn; what is not unexpected cannot surprise.
Page 359 - Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man admitted to implore the mercy of" his Creator, and plead the merits of his Redeemer, is already in a higher state than poetry can confer.
Page 450 - Perhaps no nation ever produced a writer that enriched his language with such variety of models. To him we owe the improvement, perhaps the completion of our metre, the refinement of our language, and much of the correctness of our sentiments.
Page 359 - The essence of poetry is invention ; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights. The topics of devotion are few, and being few are universally known ; but, few as they are, they can be made no more ; they can receive no grace from novelty of sentiment, and very little from novelty of expression.
Page 359 - The subject of the disputation is not piety, but the motives to piety; that of the description is not God, but the works of God. Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical.

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