Poets From England

"Example is always more efficacious than precept."

"But it is evident, that these bursts of universal distress are more dreaded than felt; thousands and ten thousands flourish in youth, and wither in age, without the knowledge of any other than domestic evils, and share the same pleasures and vexa­tions, whether their kings are mild or cruel, whether the armies of their country pursue their enemies or retreat before them."

"The first years of man must make provision for the last."

"Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance."

"Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures."

"I live in the crowd of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself."

"The Prince soon found that this was one of the sages whom he should understand less as he heard him longer. He therefore bowed and was silent; and the philosopher, supposing him satisfied and the rest vanquished, rose up and departed with the air of a man that had co-operated with the present system."

"Perpetual levity must end in ignorance; and intemperance, though it may fire the spirits for an hour, will make life short or miserable. Let us consider that youth is of no long duration, and that in maturer age, when the enchantments of fancy shall cease, and phantoms of delight dance no more about us, we shall have no comforts but the esteem of wise men, and the means of doing good. Let us, therefore, stop, while to stop is in our power: let us live as men who are sometime to grow old, and to whom it will be the most dreadful of all evils not to count their past years but by follies, and to be reminded of their former luxuriance of health only by the maladies which riot has produced."

"Their mirth was without images, their laughter without motive; their pleasures were gross and sensual, in which the mind had no part; their conduct was at once wild and mean; they laughed at order and at law, but the frown of power dejected, and the eye of wisdom abashed them. The prince soon concluded, that he should never be happy in a course of life of which he was ashamed. He thought it unsuitable to a reasonable being to act without a plan, and to be sad or chearful only by chance. “Happiness, said he, must be something solid and permanent, without fear and without uncertainty.”"

"Very few live by choice. Every man is placed in his present condition by causes which acted without his foresight and with which he did not always willingly cooperate."

"The causes of good and evil are so various and uncertain, so often entangled with each other, so diversified by various relations, and so much subject to accidents which cannot be foreseen, that he who would fix his condition upon incontestable reasons of preference must live and die inquiring and deliberating."

"In the assembly, where you passed the last night, there appeared such spriteliness of air, and volatility of fancy, as might have suited beings of an higher order, formed to inhabit serener regions inaccessible to care or sorrow. Yet, believe me, there was not one who did not dread the moment when solitude should deliver him to the tyranny of reflection."

"Knowledge is more than equivalent to force. The master of mechanicks laughs at strength."

"Few things are impossible to diligence and skill."

"A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected."

"Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed."

"The poet must write as the interpreter of nature and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations, as a being superior to time and place."

"To a poet nothing can be useless."

"Nothing ... will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome."

"I fly from pleasure," said the prince, "because pleasure has ceased to please; I am lonely because I am miserable, and am unwilling to cloud with my presence the happiness of others."

"This singularity of his humour made him much observed."

"Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia."

"We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know, because they have never deceived us."

"The act of writing itself distracts the thoughts, and what is read twice is commonly better remembered than what is transcribed."

"He that thinks with more extent than another will want words of larger meaning; he that thinks with more subtilty will seek for terms of more nice discrimination; and where is the wonder, since words are but the images of things, that he who never knew the original should not know the copies? Yet vanity inclines us to find faults any where rather than in ourselves. He that reads and grows no wiser, seldom suspects his own deficiency; but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood?"

"It is seldom that we find either men or places such as we expect them. ... Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction."

"Merriment is always the effect of a sudden impression. The jest which is expected is already destroyed."

"Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks. The flowers which scatter their odours from time to time in the paths of life, grow up without culture from seeds scattered by chance. Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment."

"He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty."

"Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is, therefore, become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetick. Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement."

"The joy of life is variety; the tenderest love requires to be renewed by intervals of absence."

"I know not whether more is to be dreaded from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lies."

"A frame of adamant, a soul of fire, No dangers fright him, and no labors tire."

"Conviviality, even "buffoonery", were one side of Johnson; neurotic dread and melancholia were another; the strong, rapid play of a masterly intelligence was a third. But none of these quite explains the reverence in which he was held. As Johnson lay dying, Fanny Burney sat for hours in tears on the stairs leading up to his room, hoping that she might be called in to receive his blessing. No mere John Bull, intellectual or otherwise, inspires that kind of devotion. Johnson had a greatness of mind, a tragic and heroic stature, that we can feel across two hundred and fifty years."

"As writer and critic, then, he is still interesting. Nevertheless, it is true that Johnson's chief hold over our minds is as a moral hero, a great personal example. With all his faults and foibles, he lived a brave and unselfish life. Starting with every handicap—bad sight, poor health, no money, an uncouth appearance and uncontrollable nervous habits—he fought his way up to recognition as one of the great men of his time. Once there, he made no effort to turn his reputation to worldly advantage in pursuit of money or power; he gave away most of what he earned, keeping back only enough to supply his basic needs, and filled his house with a crowd of peevish old creatures who could not look after themselves. All this was visible to the world. But the real heroism of Johnson's life lay in his unceasing struggle against the darkness within his own mind. Physically he never knew fear, but on another level he was haunted by neurotic guilt and the dread of eternal punishment."

"It used to be the fashion to decry Johnson's powers as a writer and claim that he was important solely as a character. In fact, by any objective standard he was one of the best writers of the eighteenth century; whether or not he was what people now understand by the word "poet", he could write movingly and memorably in verse; if "The Vanity of Human Wishes" is not a poem, it is hard to know what else to call it. And Johnson's prose, grave, sonorous, heavily charged with meaning, gives the lie to the slander of "Johnsonese", by which the Victorians meant an emptily inflated style. This prose is heavy because it is densely packed."

"Johnson's high tory principles in church and state were well known... Johnson...was one of the few Nonjurors that were left, and it was supposed he would never bow the knee to the Baal of Whiggism."

"I called on Dr. Johnson one morning, when Mrs. Williams, the blind lady, was conversing with him. She was telling him where she had dined the day before. "There were several gentlemen there," said she, "and when some of them came to the tea-table, I found that there had been a good deal of hard drinking." She closed this observation with a common and trite moral reflection; which, indeed, is very ill-founded, and does great injustice to animals—"I wonder what pleasure men can take in making beasts of themselves." "I wonder, Madam," replied the Doctor, "that you have not penetration to see the strong inducement to this excess; for he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.""

"Dr. Johnson was observed by a musical friend of his to be extremely inattentive at a concert, whilst a celebrated solo player was running up and down the divisions and subdivisions of notes upon his violin. His friend, to induce him to take greater notice of what was going on, told him how extremely difficult it was. 'Difficult, do you call it, Sir?' replied the Doctor; 'I wish it were impossible.'"

"Severity towards the poor was, in Dr. Johnson's opinion (as is visible in his Life of Addison particularly), an undoubted and constant attendant or consequence upon whiggism; and he was not contented with giving them relief, he wished to added also indulgence. He loved the poor as I never yet saw any one else do, with an earnest desire to make them happy.—What signifies, says some one, giving halfpence to common beggars? they only lay it out in gin or tobacco. "And why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence (says Johnson)? it is surely very savage to refuse them every possible avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our own acceptance. Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer, and are not ashamed to shew even visible displeasure, if ever the bitter taste is taken from their mouths." In consequence of these principles he nursed whole nests of people in his house, where the lame, the blind, the sick, and the sorrowful found a sure retreat from all the evils whence his little income could secure them."

"Most of the great critics of English poetry have also been poets: Sir Philip Sidney, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Shelley, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, to name a few."

"Johnson I admire and I pity. I love him one moment, and almost hate him the next. He must indeed have been a great man, as his minutest actions and expressions are very well worth the relation. His mind was powerfully strong. His intellectual view was most acute and distinct. Yet his mind was clouded with many prejudices. He was intolerant of any opposition to his own orthodox opinions in [sic] Church and State. I do not assent that his opinions were strictly conformable to the doctrines of the Church of England. On the contrary, he fostered notions received by the Church of Rome, such as praying for the dead."

"He [James Boswell] says that he differed with Dr. Johnson on the right of the British Parliament to tax the colonies. The affirmative was argued with vehemence by the Doctor in some pamphlets. Dr. Johnson said if he was a country gentleman he would punish any tenant of his who voted for any but the candidate of his master's choice. Johnson hated the name of a Whig. He complained that our Government was too weak; that the King had too little power!"

"Dr Johnson is the only conversationalist who triumphs over time."

"As a man, then, Johnson had a masculine understanding, clouded on important subjects by prejudice, a conscience pure beyond the ordinary measure of human virtue, a heart full of rugged benevolence, and a disregard only for those feelings in controversy or in conversation, of which he had not learnt the force, or which he thought himself obliged to wound. As a writer, he is memorable as one of those who effect a change in the general style of a nation, and have vigour enough to leave the stamp of their own peculiarities upon their language."

"He was distinguished by vigorous understanding and inflexible integrity... He was conscientious, sincere, determined; and his pride was no more than a steady consciousness of superiority in the most valuable qualities of human nature; his friendships were not only firm, but generous, and tender beneath a rugged exterior; he wounded none of those feelings which the habits of his life enabled him to estimate; but he had become too hardened by serious distress not to contract some disregard for those minor delicacies, which become so keenly susceptible in a calm and prosperous fortune. He was a Tory, not without some propensities towards Jacobitism, and a high Churchman, with more attachment to ecclesiastical authority and a splendid worship than is quite consistent with the spirit of Protestantism."

""Patriotism, sir, is the last resort of scoundrels," said Dr. Samuel Johnson. Leo Tolstoy, the greatest anti-patriot of our time, defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment in the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities as shoes, clothing, and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the honest workingman."

"When, by the kindness of Sir R. Chambers, I lived in the house belonging to him as Principal at New Inn Hall at Oxford, and was his deputy reading his Vinerian lectures, he, Dr. Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and, as well as I can remember, one or two other persons came from London to Oxford. Walking in the garden at New Inn Hall, Sir R. Chambers threw some snails over his garden wall. "Sir," said Johnson, "what you are doing is very unmannerly to your neighbour." Sir Robert said, jocosely, "Why, Dr., he is not a Churchman," or "he is a Dissenter"—I cannot at this distance of time be quite positive as to the words. "Oh," says the Doctor, laughing, "why then, throw away as hard as you can.""

"These are the gentry who are today wrapped up in the American flag, who shout their claim from the housetops that they are the only patriots, and who have their magnifying glasses in hand, scanning the country for evidence of disloyalty, eager to apply the brand of treason to the men who dare to even whisper their opposition to Junker rule in the United States. No wonder Sam Johnson declared that "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." He must have had this Wall Street gentry in mind, or at least their prototypes, for in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people."

"Johnson...was not merely a learned classicist among other classicists; he was the last great English man of letters able to write Latin verse to a high standard of technical and literary excellence, the last whose cultural inheritance was more a classical than a vernacular literature. His stature as a writer and a scholar of the Latin language had profound implications for his writings in English and for their social purpose."