United States or Jersey ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He was continually forming plans and resolutions, but to the day of his death they remained resolutions and plans. He was always just going to do something, but never did it. "Coleridge is dead," wrote Charles Lamb to a friend, "and is said to have left behind him above forty thousand treatises on metaphysics and divinity not one of them complete!"
It is a question which this author handles with a thorough impartiality, in all his political treatises, let them come in what name and form they will, with more or less clearness, indeed, as the circumstances seem to dictate.
In the first place these treatises gave only the dry husks of rhetoric, the conventional analyses, the stock definitions. In the second place rhetoric was little applied. The political life of western Europe centered in the camp, not in the forum. The classical tradition of trial by a large jury, as the Areopagus or the Centumviri, had given place to trial before the regal or manorial court.
He had also published some theological treatises which may still be found in the dusty recesses of a few old libraries; but, though texts of Scripture were always on his lips, those who had pecuniary transactions with him soon found him to be a mere swindler. At length he turned his attention almost entirely from theology to the worst part of politics.
The history of the successful execution of this purpose is familiar to all the readers of the plausible pages of Clarendon on the one side, or the complaining treatises of Neal and Calamy on the other. Charles and his advisers triumphed, not so much through their own art, dissimulation, and bad faith as through the blind bigotry, divided counsels, and self-seeking of the Nonconformists.
The theologian and the disputer ended by hiding the man in Augustin. To-day, the man perhaps interests us more. And this is a mistake. He himself would not have allowed for a moment that his Confessions should be preferred to his treatises on Grace.
Simplicity, moderation, and solitude were the features of his life. When he had finished writing any of his books he sailed either for London or for Holland, where he published them, and never spoke of them again. He published in this way twenty-seven different treatises, all written, he said, from the dictation of Angels.
Her first act was to swear a debt of two hundred pounds against Cagliostro, and to cause him to be arrested for that sum. While he was in custody in a sponging house, Scot, accompanied by a low attorney, broke into his laboratory, and carried off a small box, containing, as they believed, the powder of transmutation, and a number of cabalistic manuscripts and treatises upon alchymy.
Read that with attention, and you will know enough of the general history; but when you find there such remarkable periods as are above mentioned, consult Mezeray, and other of the best and minutest historians, as well as political treatises upon those subjects.
Charles Doe, one of Bunyan's personal friends, having purchased the copyright of this work, kept it for some years, in hope of publishing it with other treatises, as a second folio volume, to complete his works; but failing in this object, he printed it separately in 1698, and appended an interesting list of Bunyan's works, with thirty cogent reasons why these invaluable labours should be preserved and handed down, to bless succeeding ages.
Word Of The Day