The Works of Samuel Johnson: Lives of the poets

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W. Pickering, London; and Talboys and Wheeler, Oxford, 1825 - English literature

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Page 324 - From harmony, from heavenly harmony This universal frame began: From harmony to harmony Through all the compass of the notes it ran, The diapason closing full in Man.
Page 80 - The danger of such unbounded liberty, and the danger of bounding it, have produced a problem in the science of government, which human understanding seems hitherto unable to solve. If nothing may be published but what civil authority shall have previously approved, power must always be the standard of truth...
Page 467 - What he attempted, he performed ; he is never feeble, and he did not wish to be energetic ; he is never rapid, and he never stagnates. His sentences have neither studied amplitude, nor affected brevity ; his periods, though not diligently rounded, are voluble and easy. Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.
Page 357 - I come to town. I remember the counsel you give me in your letter; but dissembling, though lawful in some cases, is not my talent ; yet, for your sake, I will struggle with the plain openness of my nature, and keep in my just resentments against that degenerate order.
Page 298 - Those weights took off that on his planet hung, Will gloriously the new-laid works succeed. He has, elsewhere, shown his attention to the planetary powers ; and, in the preface to his Fables, has endeavoured obliquely to justify his superstition, by attributing the same to some of the ancients.
Page 328 - As only buzz to heaven with evening wings; Strike in the dark, offending but by chance, Such are the blindfold blows of ignorance. They know not beings, and but hate a name; To them the Hind and Panther are the same.
Page 73 - Let not our veneration for Milton forbid us to look with some degree of merriment on great promises and small performance, on the man who hastens home, because his countrymen are contending for their liberty, and, when he reaches the scene of action, vapours away his patriotism in a private boarding-school.
Page 59 - Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer; Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike, Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike; Alike...
Page 318 - Or searcloth masts with strong tarpauling coats : To try new shrouds one mounts into the wind, And one, below, their ease or stiffness notes. 149 Our careful monarch stands in person by, His new-cast cannons' firmness to explore: The strength of big-corn'd powder loves to try, And ball and cartridge sorts for every bore.
Page 305 - Dryden derives only his accidental and secondary praise ; the veneration with which his name is pronounced by every cultivator of English literature, is paid to him as he refined the language, improved the sentiments, and tuned the numbers of English poetry.

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