Like following life through creatures you dissect, You lose it in the moment you detect.
The life of a wit is a warfare upon earth.
Authors are partial to their wit, ’tis true, But are not critics to their judgment, too?
What dire offence from am’rous causes springs, What mighty contests rise from trivial things,...
Wholesome solitude, the nurse of sense!
No craving void left aching in the soul.
And empty heads console with empty sound.
Who taught that heaven-directed spire to rise?
There is no study that is not capable of delighting us after a little application to it.
Never elated while one man’s oppress’d; Never dejected while another’s blessed.
Talk what you will of taste, my friend, you’ll find two of a face as soon as of a mind.
Taste, that eternal wanderer, which flies From head to ears, and now from ears to eyes.
Though triumphs were to generals only due, crowns were reserved to grace the soldiers too.
Sleep and death, two twins of winged race, Of matchless swiftness, but of silent pace.
Some to conceit alone their taste confine, And glittering thoughts struck out at ev’ry line; Pleas’d with a work where nothing’s just or fit; One glaring chaos and wild heap of wit.
Our grandsire, Adam, ere of Eve possesst, Alone, and e’en in Paradise unblest, With mournful looks the blissful scenes survey’d, And wander’d in the solitary shade. The Maker say, took pity, and bestow’d Woman, the last, the best reserv’d of God.
A youth of frolic, an old age of cards.
Manners with fortunes, humors turn with climes, tenets with books, and principles with times.
Heaven gave to woman the peculiar grace To spin, to weep, and cully human race.
Ambition first sprung from your blest abodes: the glorious fault of angels and of gods.