PITY see Charity, Compassion, Mercy.
How sometimes nature will betray its folly,
Its tenderness, and make itself a pastime
To harder bosoms!
3832

Shaks.: Wint. Tale. Act i. Sc. 2
Thou know'st no law of God nor man:
No beast so fierce, but knows some touch of pity.
3833

Shaks.: Richard III. Act i Sc 2

Soft pity never leaves the gentle breast
Where love has been received a welcome guest.
3837

Sheridan: Duenna. Act ii. Sc. 3.

A woman's pity sometimes makes her mad. 3838 Mrs. Browning: Aurora Leigh. Bk. ix. Line 628 Pity speaks to grief

More sweetly than a band of instruments.

3839

Barry Cornwall: The Florentine Party

O thou, the friend of man, assign'd
With balmy hands his wounds to bind,
And charin his frantic woe:

When first Distress, with dagger keen,
Broke forth to waste his destined scene,
His wild unsated foe!

3840

PLAGIARISM see Authors.

The world's as full of curious wit
Which those, that father, never writ,
As 'tis of bastards, which the sot
And cuckold owns, that ne'er begot.

3841

Collins: Ode To Pity

Butler: Sat. on Plagiaries. Line 51

Next, o'er his books his eyes began to roll,

In pleasing memory of all he stole,

How here he sipp'd, how there he plunder'd snug,

And suck'd all o'er, like an industrious bug.

3842

Pope: Dunciad. Bk. i. Line 127

PLEASURE - see Extremes, Holidays, Home.
All delights are vain; and that most vain,
Which, with pain purchas'd, doth inherit pain.
3843

Shaks.: Love's L. Lost. Act i. Sc. 1.
Pleasure, and revenge,

Have ears more deaf than adders, to the voice
Of any true decision.

3844

Shaks.: Troil. and Cress. Act ii. Sc. 2.

I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house,
Wherein at ease for aye to dwell.

3845

Tennyson: Palace of Art.

Approach his awful throne by just degrees;
And, if thou would'st be happy, learn to please.
3846
Pleasure, or wrong or rightly understood,
Our greatest evil, or our greatest good.

Prior: Solomon. Bk. ii. Line 266.

3847 Pope: Essay on Man. Epis. ii. Line 91. Unmoved though witlings sneer, and rivals rail; Studious to please, yet not ashamed to fail. 3848

Dr. Johnson: Irene. Prologue. Line 29.

But not e'en pleasure to excess is good:

What most elates, then sinks the soul as low:

When spring-tide joy pours in with copious flood,
The higher still the exulting billows flow,

The further back again they flagging go,

And leave us grovelling on the dreary shore.

3849.

Thomson: Castle of Indolence. Canto i. St. 63 Death treads in pleasure's footsteps round the world, When pleasure treads the paths which reason shuns. 3850 Young: Night Thoughts. Night v. Line 864.

A man of pleasure is a man of pains.

3851

Young: Night Thoughts. Night viii. Line 800.

God made all pleasures innocent.

3852

Mrs. Norton: Lady of La Garaye. Pt. i. Though sages may pour out their wisdom's treasure, There is no sterner moralist than pleasure.

3853

Byron: Don Juan. Canto iii. St. 65

The evaporation of a joyous day,

Is like the last glass of champagne, without
The foam which made its virgin bumper gay;
Or like a system coupled with a doubt;
Or like a soda bottle, when its spray
Has sparkled and let half its spirit out;
Or like a billow, left by storms behind,
Without the animation of the wind.

3854

Byron: Don Juan. Canto xvi. St. 9

But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white - then melts forever.
3855
Pleasure that comes unlook'd for is thrice welcome.
3856

Burns: Tam O'Shanter. Line 58

Rogers: Italy (Interview). Line 1

Pleasure's delight it is

That holdeth man from heaven's delightful bliss.

3857 Pleasure must succeed to pleasure, else past pleasure turns

Robert Greene: A Maiden's Dream

to pain.

3858

"LOUGH.

Robert Browning: La Saisiaz. Line 170.

In ancient times, the sacred plough employed
The kings, and awful fathers of mankind:

And some, with whom compared your insect tribes
Are but the beings of a summer's day,

Have held the scale of empire, ruled the storm

Of mighty war; then, with victorious hand,
Disdaining little delicacies, seized

The plough, and greatly independent scorned
All the vile stores corruption can bestow.
3859

Thomson: Seasons. Spring. Line 58

POET LAUREATE - see Poetry.

In twice five years the "greatest living poet,"
Like to the champion in the fisty ring,

Is called on to support his claim, or show it,
Although 'tis an imaginary thing.

3860 Even I

Byron: Don Juan. Canto xi. St. 55

albeit I'm sure I did not know it,
Nor sought of foolscap subjects to be king –
Was reckoned, a considerable time,
The grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme.

3861

He lied with such a fervor of intention

Byron: Don Juan. Canto xi. St. 55

Byron: Don Juan. Cauto iii. St. 80

There was no doubt he earn'd his laureate pension.

3862

O thou, whate'er thy name, thy trade, thy art,
Who from obscurity art doom'd to start,
Call'd, by the royal mandate, to proclaim
To distant realms a monarch's feeble fame-
For fame of kings, like cripples in the gout,
Demands a crutch to move about—.

3863
Peter Pindar: Ode to the Future Laureave
Laureates should boast a bushel of invention,
Or yield up all poetical pretension.

3864

Peter Pindar: Ode to the Future Laureate.

POETRY, POETS --see Imagination, Metre, Milton, Poet Laureate, Shakespeare.

I would the gods had made thee poetical.

3865

Shaks.: As You Like It. Act iii. Sc. 3

I had rather be a kitten, and cry mew,

Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers;

I had rather hear a brazen canstick turn'd,
Or a dry wheel grate on the axle-tree;

And that would set my teeth nothing on edge,
Nothing so much as mincing poetry;

'Tis like the forc'd gait of a shuffling nag.

3866

Shaks.: 1 Henry IV. Act iii. Sc. 1

Those that write in rhyme still make

The one verse for the other's sake;
For one for sense, and one for rhyme,

I think's sufficient at one time.

3867

Butler: Hudibras. Pt. ii. Canto i. Line 27

For rhyme the rudder is of verses,

With which, like ships, they steer their courses. 3868

Butler: Hudibras. Pt. i. Canto i. Line 463.

It is not poetry that makes men poor;

For few do write that were not so before;

And those that have writ best, had they been rich,
Had ne'er been clapp'd with a poetic itch;

lad lov'd their ease too well to take the pains

To undergo that drudgery of brains;

But being for all other trades unfit,
Only t' avoid being idle set up wit.

3869

Butler: Misc. Thoughts. Line 441

As wine that with its own weight runs is best,
And counted much more noble than the prest;
So is that poetry whose gen'rous strains
Flow without servile study, art, or pains.

3870

Butler: Misc. Thoughts. Line 425.

Poets lose half the praise they should have got,
Could it be known what they discreetly blot.

3871 Waller: Upon Roscommon's Trans. of Horace, De [Arte Poetica.

Thespis, the first professor of our art,
At country wakes, sung ballads from a cart.

5872
Rash author, 'tis a vain, presumptuous crime,
To undertake the sacred art of rhyme;
If at thy birth the stars that ruled thy sense
Shone not with a poetic influence;

Dryden Prol. to Lee's Sophonisba

In thy strait genius thou wilt still be bound,
Find Phoebus deaf, and Pegasus unsound.

3873

Dryden: Art of Poetry. Canto i. Line!

Whate'er you write of pleasant or sublime,
Always let sense accompany your rhyme :
Falsely they seem each other to oppose;
Rhyme must be made with reason's laws to close.
Dryden: Art of Poetry. Canto i. Line 2

3874

Poor slaves in metre, dull and addle-pated,

Who rhyme below even David's Psalms translated.

3875 Dryden Absalom and Achitophel. Pt. ii. Line 402 Though Heaven made him poor, (with reverence speeking,; He never was a poet of God's making;

The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull

With this prophetic blessing - Be thou dull!

Drink, swear, and roar, forbear no lewd delight,

Fit for thy bulk; do anything but write.

3876 Dryden: Absalom and Achitophel. Pt. ii. Line 474 Fame from science, not from fortune, draws.

So poetry, which is in Oxford made

An art, in London only is a trade.

There haughty dunces, whose unlearned pen

Could ne'er spell grammar, would be reading men.

Such build their poems the Lucretian way;

So many huddled atoms make a play;

And if they hit in order by some chance,

They call that nature, which is ignorance.

3877 Dryden: Prol. to the University of Oxford. Line 27.

A verse may find him who a sermon flies,

And turn delight into a sacrifice.

3878

Herbert: Temple. Church Porch. St. 1.

Pegasus, a nearer way to take,

May boldly deviate from the common track.

From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part, And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art. 3879

Pope: E. on Criticism. Pt. i. Line 150 True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence, The sound must seem an echo to the sense. Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows, And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows; But when loud surges lash the sounding shore, The hoarse rough verse should like the torrent roar: When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw, The line too labors, and the words move slow: Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main. 3880 Pope: E. on Criticism. Pt. ii. Line 162