The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius, Volume 1

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A. V. Blake, 1843

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Page xiv - Dictionary is recommended to the public, were written by your Lordship. To be so distinguished is an honour which, being very little accustomed to favours from the great, I know not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge.
Page xiv - Seven years, my Lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward rooms or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain and have brought it at last to the verge of publication without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favor. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a Patron before.
Page x - Memory and her siren daughters ; but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar to touch and purify the lips of whom He pleases.
Page xiv - Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help...
Page 309 - I have laboured to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations. Something, perhaps, I have added to the elegance of its construction, and something to the harmony of its cadence.
Page 218 - So much I feel my genial spirits droop, My hopes all flat, nature within me seems In all her functions weary of herself ; My race of glory run, and race of shame, And I shall shortly be with them that rest.
Page 109 - By degrees we let fall the remembrance of our original intention, and quit the only adequate object of rational desire. We entangle ourselves in business, immerge ourselves in luxury, and rove through the labyrinths of inconstancy, till the darkness of old age begins to invade us, and disease and Anxiety obstruct our way.
Page 101 - ... occurrences. Thus Sallust, the great master of nature, has not forgot, in his account of Catiline, to remark that " his walk was now quick, and again slow," as an indication of a mind revolving something with violent commotion.
Page iii - He appears, by his modest and unaffected narration, to have described things as he saw them, to have copied nature from the life, and to have consulted his senses, not his imagination. He meets with no basilisks that destroy with their eyes; his crocodiles devour their prey without tears; and his cataracts fall from the rock without deafening the neighbouring inhabitants.
Page 102 - ... till interest and envy are at an end, we may hope for impartiality, but must expect little intelligence; for the incidents which give excellence to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are rarely transmitted by tradition. We know how few can...

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