The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: With An Essay on His Life and Genius, Volume 7

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Luke Hansard & Sons, 1810

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Page 329 - I was led into the subject of this letter by endeavouring to fix the original cause of this conduct of the Italian masters. If it can be proved that by this choice they selected the...
Page 319 - There may perhaps be too great an indulgence, as well as too great a restraint of imagination; and if the one produces incoherent monsters, the other produces what is full as bad, lifeless insipidity. An intimate knowledge of the passions, and good sense, but not common sense, must at last determine its limits. It has been thought, and...
Page 118 - But this censure will be mitigated when it is seriously considered that money and time are the heaviest burdens of life, and that the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use.
Page 306 - ... middle to have been on higher ground, or the figures at the extremities stooping or lying, which would not only have formed the group into the shape of a pyramid, but likewise contrasted the standing figures. Indeed...
Page 402 - ... passed, will store my mind with images, which I shall be busy, through the rest of my life, in combining and comparing. I shall revel in inexhaustible accumulations of intellectual riches ; I shall find new pleasures for every moment, and shall never more be weary of myself.
Page 44 - This distinction of seasons is produced only by imagination operating on luxury. To temperance, every day is bright ; and every hour is propitious to diligence. He that shall resolutely excite his faculties, or exert his virtues, will soon make himself superiour to the seasons ; and may set at defiance the morning mist and the evening damp, the blasts of the east, and the clouds of the south.
Page 280 - That some of them have been adopted by him unnecessarily, may perhaps be allowed ; but in general they are evidently an advantage, for without them his stately ideas would be confined and cramped. "He that thinks with more extent than another, will want words of larger meaning.
Page 174 - The traveller visits in age those countries through which he rambled in his youth, and hopes for merriment at the old place. The man of business, wearied with unsatisfactory prosperity, retires to the town of his nativity, and expects to play away the last years with the companions of his childhood, and recover youth in the fields where he once was young.
Page 252 - June 30, 1/59HPHE natural progress of the works of men is from rudeness to convenience, from convenience to elegance, and from elegance to nicety.
Page 143 - ... and it can seldom happen but he that understands himself, might convey his notions to another, if, content to be understood, he did not seek to be admired; but when once he begins to contrive how his sentiments may be received, not with most ease to his reader, but with most advantage to himself, he then transfers his consideration from words to sounds, from sentences to periods, and, as he grows more elegant, becomes less intelligible.

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