The Dramatick Works of William Shakespeare: Printed Complete, with D. Samuel Johnson's Preface and Notes. To which is Prefixed the Life of the Author ...

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Munroe & Frances, 1802

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Page 37 - The flowers do fade, and wanton fields To wayward Winter reckoning yields ; A honey tongue, a heart of gall, Is fancy's Spring, but sorrow's Fall.
Page 13 - Alas ! alas ! Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once; And He that might the vantage best have took, Found out the remedy: how would you be, If He, which is the top of judgment, should But judge you as you are ? O, think on that ; And mercy then will breathe within your lips, Like man new made.
Page 31 - This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirror of life; that he who has mazed his imagination, in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him, may here be cured of his delirious ecstasies, by reading human sentiments in human language, by scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions.
Page 13 - Well believe this, No ceremony that to great ones 'longs, Not the king's crown, nor the deputed sword, The marshal's truncheon, nor the judge's robe, Become them with one half so good a grace As mercy does.
Page 27 - Antiquity, like every other quality that attracts the notice of mankind, has undoubtedly votaries that reverence it, not from reason, but from prejudice.
Page 17 - And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress
Page 55 - twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault Set roaring war : to the dread rattling thunder Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak With his own bolt : the strong-bas'd promontory Have I made shake ; and by the spurs pluck'd up The pine and cedar : graves, at my command, Have waked their sleepers; oped, and let them forth By my so potent art...
Page 36 - He carries his persons indifferently through right and wrong, and at the close dismisses them without further care, and leaves their examples to operate by chance. This fault the barbarity of his age cannot extenuate, for it is always a writer's duty to make the world better, and justice is a virtue independent on time or place.
Page 40 - Medea could, in so short a time, have transported him; he knows with certainty that he has not changed his place, and he knows that place cannot change itself; that what was a house cannot become a plain; that what was Thebes can never be Persepolis.
Page 50 - ... whether from all his successors more maxims of theoretical knowledge, or more rules of practical prudence, can be collected, than he alone has given to his country.

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