The lives of the most eminent English poets (concluded). Miscellaneous lives

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J. Buckland, J. Rivington and Sons, T. Payne and Sons, L. Davis, B. White and Son ... [and 36 others in London], 1787

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Página 91 - His legs were so slender, that he enlarged their bulk with three pair of stockings, which were drawn on and off by the maid; for he was not able to dress or undress himself, and neither went to bed nor rose without help.
Página 109 - Dryden knew more of man in his general nature, and Pope in his local manners.
Página 308 - Yet even these bones," are to me original: I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here persuades himself that he has always felt them.
Página 206 - He had employed his mind chiefly upon works of fiction, and subjects of fancy; and, by indulging some peculiar habits of thought, was eminently delighted with those flights of imagination which pass the bounds of nature, and to which the mind is reconciled only by a passive acquiescence in popular traditions. He loved fairies, genii, giants, and monsters ; he delighted to rove through the meanders of enchantment, to gaze on the magnificence of golden palaces, to repose by the water-falls of Elysian...
Página 309 - The verses cant of shepherds and flocks, and crooks dressed with flowers ; and the letters have something of that indistinct and headstrong ardour for liberty which a man of genius always catches when he enters the world and always suffers to cool as he passes forward.
Página 109 - Pope had only a little, because Dryden had more ; for every other writer since Milton must give place to Pope ; and even of Dryden it must be said, that, if he has brighter paragraphs, he has not better poems.
Página 45 - A grotto is not often the wish or pleasure of an Englishman, who has more frequent need to solicit than exclude the sun ; but Pope's excavation was requisite as an entrance to his garden, and, as some men try to be proud of their defects, he extracted an ornament from an inconvenience, and vanity produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage.
Página 80 - Man, of which he has given this account to Dr. Swift. 'March 25, 1736. 'If ever I write any more Epistles in verse, one of them shall be addressed to you. I have long concerted it, and begun it; but I would make what bears your name as finished as my last work ought to be, that is to say, more finished than any of the rest. The subject is large, and will divide into four Epistles, which naturally follow the Essay on Man, viz.
Página 110 - If the flights of Dryden therefore are higher, Pope continues longer on the wing. If of Dryden's fire the blaze is brighter, of Pope's the heat is more regular and constant.
Página 154 - A poet, blest beyond the poet's fate, Whom Heaven kept sacred from the proud and great: Foe to loud praise, and friend to learned ease, Content with science in the vale of peace. Calmly he look'd on either life, and here Saw nothing to regret, or there to fear; From nature's temperate feast rose satisfied, Thank'd Heaven that he had lived, and that he died.

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