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should as much avoid deceit, or sinester meanings in discourse, as we would puns, bad language, or false gram

mar.

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CHAP. VII.

DEFERENCE is the most complicate, the most indirect, and the most elegant of all compliments.

He that lies in bed all a summer's morning,loses the chief pleasure of the day he that gives up his youth to indolence, undergoes a loss of the same kind..

Shining characters are not always the most agreeable

ones.

The mild radiance of an emerald, is by no means less pleasing than the glare of the ruby.

To be at once a rake, and to glory in the character, discovers at the same time a bad disposition, and a bad taste..

How is it possible to expect that mankind will take advice, when they will not so much as take warning?

Although men are accused for not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps as few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.

Fine sense and exalted sense are not half so valuable as common sense. There are forty men of wit for one man of sense; and he that will carry nothing about him but gold will be every day at a loss for want of ready change.

Learning is like mercury, one of the most powerful and excellent things in the world in skilful bands; in unskil ful, most mischievous.

A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong; which is but saying in other words, that he is wiser to-day than he was yesterday.

Wherever I find a great deal of gratitude in a poor man, I take it for granted there would be as much generosity if he were a rich man.

Flowers of rhetoric in sermons of serious discourses, are like the blue and red flowers in corn, pleasing to those who come only for amusement, but prejudicial to him who would reap the profit.

It often hapens that those are the best people, whose characters have been most injured by slanderers: as we usually find that to be the sweetest fruit which the birds have been pecking at.

The eye of a critic is often like a microscope, made so very fine and nice that it discovers the atoms, grains, and minutest articles, without ever comprehending the whole, comparing the parts, or seeing all at once the harmony.

Men's zeal for religion is much of the same kind as that which they shew for a foot-ball: whenever it is contested for, every one is ready to venture their lives and limbs in the dispute; but when that is once at an end, it is no more thought on but sleeps in oblivion, buried in rubish, which no one thinks it worth his pains to rake into, much less to remove.

Honour is but a fictitious kind of honesty; a mean, but a necessary substitute for it, in societies who have none; it is a sort of paper-credit, with which men are obliged to trade, who are deficient in the sterling cash of true morality and religion.

Persons of great delicacy should know the certainty of the following truth: there are abundance of cases which occasion suspense, in which whatever they determine they will repent of the determination; and this through a propensity of human nature to fancy happiness in those schemes which it does not pursue.

The chief advantage that ancient writers can boast over modern ones seems owing to simplicity. Every noble truth and sentiment was expressed by the former in a natural manner, in word and phrase simple, perspicuous, and incapable of improvement. What then remained for later writers, but affectation, witticism, and conceit ?

CHAP, VIII.

WHAT a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in fuculties! in form and moving how ex press and admirable! in aetion how like an angel! in ap prehension how like a God!

If to do,were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces. He is a good divine who follows his own instructions: I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than to be one of the twenty to follow my own teaching.

Men's evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water.

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together; our virtues would be proud, if our faults whip

ped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they w not cherished by our virtues.

The sense of death is most in apprehension;
And the poor beetle that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance feels a pang as great,
As when a giant dies.

How far the little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

-Love all, trust a few,

Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than in use keep thy friend
Under thy own life's key: be check'd for silence,
But never task'd for speech.

The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherits shall dissolve;
And, like the baseless fabrick of a vision,
Leave not a wreck behind! we are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep..

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well, When our deep plots do fail; and that should teach us,. There's a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will.

The Poet's eyes, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven
And as imagination bodies forth...

The form of things unknown, the Poet's pen
Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves: for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike

As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touch'd,
But to fine issues: nor nature never lends
The smallest scruple of her excellence,
But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines
Herself the glory of a creditor,

Both thanks and use.

What stronger breast-plate than a heart untainted? Thrice is he arm'd that hath his quarrel just :

And be but naked (tho' lock'd up in steel).
Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted.

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OH, world, thy slippery turns! Friends now fast sworn,
Whose double bosoms seem to wear one heart,
Whose hours, whose bed, whose meal and exercise
Are still together; who twine (as 'twere) in love
Inseperable; shall within this hour,

On a dissention of a doit, break out
To bitterest enmity. So fellest foes,

Whose passions and whose plots have broke their sleep
To take the one the other, by some chance,

Some trick not worth an egg, shall grow dear friends, And interjoin thier issues.

-So it falls out,

That what we have we prize not to the worth,
While we enjoy it; but being lacked and lost,
Why then we wreak the value then we find

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