What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.
In Waverley the reader is introduced to one of the great ideas of the modern novel: that reading has the power to mediate and deflect experience. Six.
But the whole circumstances of time, place, and incident, combined at once to awaken his imagination, and to call upon him for a manly and decisive tone of conduct, leaving to fate to dispose of the issue. Should.
Now I protest to thee, gentle reader, that I entirely dissent from Francisco de Ubeda in this matter, and hold it the most useful quality of my pen, that it can speedily change from grave to gay, and from description and dialogue to narrative and character. So that if my quill displays no other properties of its mother-goose than her mutability, truly I shall be well pleased; and I conceive that you, my worthy friend, will have no occasion for discontent. From.
It was a reign of minority, when the strongest had the best right, and when acts of usurpation were frequent amongst those who had much power and little conscience.
It is the pest of our profession that we seldom see the best side of human nature.
All my life long I have been more melted by the distress under which a strong, proud, and powerful mind is compelled to give way, than by the more easily excited sorrows of softer dispositions.
Volume I Chapter I Introductory.
The sights and sentiments that attend civil conflict, are of a kind to reconcile the human heart, however generous and humane by nature, to severe language and cruel actions.
But I would have vengeance to fall on the head, not on the hand; on the tyrannical and oppressive government which designed and directed these premeditated and reiterated insults, not on the tools of office which they employed in the execution of the injuries they designed you.
It is wonderful how people’s judgment is blinded by their passions, and how apt we are to find plausible and even satisfactory reasons, for doing what our interest, or that of the party we have embraced, strongly recommends.
The honest heart that’s free frae a’ Intended fraud or guile, However Fortune kick the ba’, Has aye some cause to smile. BURNS.
That which is neither ill nor well. That which belongs not to Heaven nor to hell, A wreath of the mist, a bubble of the stream, ‘Twixt a waking thought and a sleeping dream; A form that men spy With the half-shut eye. In the beams of the setting sun, am I.
I am about to recount occurred during the last years of the 14th century, when the Scottish sceptre was swayed by the gentle but feeble hand of John, who, on being called to the throne, assumed the title of Robert the Third.
Ambition, policy, bravery, all far beyond their sphere, here learned the fate of mortals.
Her clear blue eye, which sat enshrined beneath a graceful eyebrow of brown sufficiently marked to give expression to the forehead, seemed capable to kindle as well as melt, to command as well as to beseech.
There goes a true-bred Campbell,” said Montrose, as the envoy departed, “for they are ever fair and false.
Upon subjects which interested him, and when quite at ease, he possessed that flow of natural, and somewhat florid eloquence, which has been supposed as powerful as figure, fashion, fame, or fortune, in winning the female heart. There.
Clan Quhele, at.
He was, besides, the child of a doting grandmother, whose too solicitous attention to him soon taught him a sort of diffidence in himself, with a disposition to overrate his own importance, which is one of the very worst consequences that children deduce from over-indulgence.
Prior Aymer, who pushed his mule betwixt his companion and.