Miscellaneous Works of Edw. Gibbon: With Memoirs of His Life and Writings, Composed by Himself, Volumen7

Portada

Dentro del libro

Páginas seleccionadas

Términos y frases comunes

Pasajes populares

Página 18 - ... him in the night. The maxim that every thing in great men is interesting, applies only to their minds, and ought not to be extended to their bodies. What unworthy objects for the attention of Horace, when the face of the country and the manners of its inhabitants in vain offered to him a field of instruction and pleasure! Perhaps this journey, which our poet made in company with...
Página 207 - They fee with great clearnefs whatever is too remote to be difcovered by the reft of mankind, but are totally blind to all that lies immediately before them, They difcover in every...
Página 114 - I conceive, however, that the Study of Literature, the habit of becoming by turns, a Greek, a Roman, the difciple of Zeno and of Epicurus, is extremelyproper to exercife its powers and difplay its merit.
Página 201 - ... praeterea cui non animus formidine divum contrahitur, cui non correpunt membra pavore, fulminis horribili cum plaga torrida tellus contremit et magnum percurrunt murmura caelum...
Página 136 - Love, an amiable, voluptuous goddefs, all charm and caprice : fubtlety and low cunning diftinguifhed the God of Trade; and the cries of the unhappy were fuppofed to pleafe the ear of the inexorable tyrant o'er the dead, the gloomy Monarch of the infernal fhades. LXXV. A God, the Father of man- Thefedei-: ties rekind, is equally fo to every individual offpecters ofperfonse the fpecies.
Página 161 - That respectable body, of which I have the honour of being a member, affords every evening a sight truly English. Twenty or thirty, perhaps, of the first men in the kingdom in point of fashion and fortune, supping at little tables covered with a napkin, in the middle of a coffeeroom, upon a bit of cold meat, or a sandwich, and drinking a glass of punch. At present we are full of king's counsellors and lords of the bed-chamber, who, having jumped into the ministry, make a very singular medley of their...
Página 135 - ... so generalized and personated, had only a metaphysical existence, too occult for the generality of mankind. It became necessary, therefore, to incorporate them with the physical deities; in doing which, allegory has imagined a thousand fantastical relations; for the mind always requires at least the appearance of truth. It was natural enough for the God of the sea to be also that of the sailors. The figurative expression of the eye, that sees every thing at one view; of those rays, which dart...
Página 134 - The latter notion might be suggested to the minds of a people little removed from a primitive state. Little instructed in the movements of so complicated a machine, they saw with admiration the great virtues, the atrocious crimes, the useful inventions of a few...
Página 135 - ... planet Venus be the mother and goddess of love? Why must she take her rise out of the foam of the ocean? But we must leave these enigmas to such as may be able to interpret them. No sooner were these moral deities assigned their several departments, than, it is natural to conceive, they engrossed the homage of mankind. They had to do immediately with the heart and the passions, whereas the physical divinities, to whom no moral attributes had been given, fell insensibly into contempt and oblivion....
Página 88 - ... sublimest flights become puerile on such a subject. The almighty Fiat of Moses strikes us with admiration; but reason cannot comprehend, nor imagination describe, the operations of a deity, at whose command alone millions of worlds are made to tremble: nor can we read with any satisfactory pleasure of the devil, in Milton, warring for two whole days in heaven against the armies of the Omnipotent.^ * The golden compasses, with which the Creator, in Milton, measure!

Información bibliográfica