Satires and Epistles

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Clarendon Press, 1872 - English poetry - 164 pages

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Page 30 - Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer ; Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike, Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike...
Page 23 - tis past a doubt, All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out: Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand, They rave, recite, and madden round the land. What walls can guard me, or what shades can hide? They pierce my thickets, through my grot they glide, By land, by water, they renew the charge, They stop the chariot, and they board the barge.
Page 30 - Who but must laugh, if such a man there be? Who would not weep, if Atticus were he ? What though my name stood rubric on the walls Or plaster'd posts, with claps, in capitals ? Or smoking forth, a hundred hawkers...
Page 33 - Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad, In puns, or politics, or tales, or lies, Or spite, or smut, or rhymes, or blasphemies. His wit all see-saw, between that and this, « Now high, now low, now master .up, now miss, And he himself one vile Antithesis.
Page 33 - That Fop, whose pride affects a patron's name, Yet absent, wounds an author's honest fame: Who can your merit selfishly approve, And show the sense of it without the love...
Page 145 - I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, "Would he ' had blotted a thousand," which they thought a malevolent speech.
Page 27 - Say, for my comfort, languishing in bed, 'Just so immortal Maro held his head'; And, when I die, be sure you let me know Great Homer died three thousand years ago. Why did I write? what sin to me unknown Dipp'd me in ink, my parents', or my own?
Page 33 - Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys, Yet wit ne'er tastes, and beauty ne'er enjoys: So well-bred spaniels civilly delight In mumbling of the game they dare not bite. Eternal smiles his emptiness betray, As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.
Page 119 - London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called Grub-street" — , " lexicographer, a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.
Page 144 - whispers through the trees": If crystal streams "with pleasing murmurs creep," The reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with "sleep": Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

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