LESSON II.—PROSE.
"To censure works, not men, is the just prerogative of criticism, and accordingly all personal censure is here avoided, unless where necessary to illustrate some general proposition."—Kames, El. of Crit., Introduction, p. 27.
"There remains to show by examples the manner of treating subjects, so as to give them a ridiculous appearance."—Ib., Vol. i, p. 303.
"The making of poetry, like any other handicraft, may be learned by industry."—Macpherson's Preface to Ossian, p. xiv.
"Whatever is found more strange or beautiful than was expected, is judged to be more strange or beautiful than it is in reality."—Kames, El. of Crit., Vol. i, p. 243.
"Thus the body of an animal, and of a plant, are composed of certain great vessels; these[,] of smaller; and these again[,] of still smaller, without end, as far as we can discover."—Id., ib., p. 270.
"This cause of beauty, is too extensive to be handled as a branch of any other subject: for to ascertain with accuracy even the proper meaning of words, not to talk of their figurative power, would require a large volume; an useful work indeed, but not to be attempted without a large stock of time, study, and reflection."—Id., Vol. ii, p. 16.
"O the hourly dangers that we here walk in! Every sense, and member, is a snare; every creature, and every duty, is a snare to us."—Baxter, Saints's Rest.
"For a man to give his opinion of what he sees but in part, is an unjustifiable piece of rashness and folly."—Addison.
"That the sentiments thus prevalent among the early Jews respecting the divine authority of the Old Testament were correct, appears from the testimony of Jesus Christ and his apostles."—Gurney's Essays, p. 69.
"So in Society we are not our own, but Christ's, and the church's, to good works and services, yet all in love."—Barclay's Works, Vol. i, p. 84.
"He [Dr. Johnson] sat up in his bed, clapped his hands, and cried, 'O brave we!'—a peculiar exclamation of his when he rejoices."— Boswell's Life of Johnson, Vol. iii, p. 56.
"Single, double, and treble emphasis are nothing but examples of antithesis."—Knowles's Elocutionist, p. xxviii.
"The curious thing, and what, I would almost say, settles the point, is, that we do Horace no service, even according to our view of the matter, by rejecting the scholiast's explanation. No two eggs can be more like each other than Horace's Malthinus and Seneca's Mecenas."— Philological Museum, Vol. i, p. 477. "Acting, conduct, behaviour, abstracted from all regard to what is, in fact and event, the consequence of it, is itself the natural object of this moral discernment, as speculative truth and [say or] falsehood is of speculative reason."—Butler's Analogy, p. 277.
"To do what is right, with unperverted faculties, is ten times easier than to undo what is wrong."—Porter's Analysis, p. 37.
"Some natures the more pains a man takes to reclaim them, the worse they are."—L'ESTRANGE: Johnson's Dict., w. Pains.
"Says John Milton, in that impassioned speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, where every word leaps with intellectual life, 'Who kills a man, kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden upon the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose for a life beyond life!'"—Louisville Examiner, June, 1850.