The Unconscious Humourist, and Other Essays

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E. Mathews, 1897 - 244 páginas

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Página 96 - ... no receipt openeth the heart but a true friend, to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession.
Página 152 - Sir, a man has no more right to say an uncivil thing, than to act one ; no more right to say a rude thing to another than to knock him down.
Página 219 - O unwearied feet, travelling ye know not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness ; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.
Página 207 - Spenser, the poets' poet, but other men have also their rights. Even the Philistine is a man and a brother, and is entirely right so far as he sees. To demand more of him is to be unreasonable. ( And he sees, among other things, that a man who undertakes to write should first have a meaning perfectly...
Página 152 - And once, when Johnson was ill, and unable to exert himself as much as usual without fatigue, Mr. Burke having been mentioned, he said " That fellow calls forth all my powers. Were I to see Burke now it would kill me.
Página 207 - In ripeness of mind and bluff heartiness of expression, he takes rank with the best. His phrase is always a short-cut to his sense, for his estate was too spacious for him to need that trick of winding the path of his thought about, and planting it out with clumps of epithet, by which the landscape-gardeners of literature give to a paltry half-acre the air of a park.
Página 11 - ... intended. Your humourist, some would say, with his sly insinuations and hidden apologues, is a standing menace to Church and State. There is far too much uncertainty about him. He may attack some day by implication more than he dreams of, and his shafts of ridicule (pretty fireworks though they may be) are not precisely the things we like to see shooting about near this great powdermagazine of Society. For which reason, it may be, neither Jonathan Swift nor Sydney Smith attained the Episcopate....
Página 12 - ... itself, irreconcilable with the infectious jest. A sly suggestion of humour is often effectual where serious reasoning, even of the most potent, only adds fuel to the fire of his wrath. But it is noticeable that to this end your humour must be of the infectious order. It is of no avail, or seldom, that you employ satire or sarcasm. It is not polished wit that you want, but something common enough and ready to the hand, so it have a certain mirthprovoking incongruousness. Even if you succeed only...

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