United States or Cayman Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
'The wind blew against us in a short time with such violence, that we, being no seasoned sailors, were willing to call it a tempest... The master knew not well whither to go; and our difficulties might, perhaps, have filled a very pathetick page, had not Mr. Maclean of Col... piloted us safe into his own harbour. Johnson's Works, ix. 117.
The Nurse is one of the characters in which the Authour delighted: he has, with great subtility of distinction, drawn her at once loquacious and secret, obsequious and insolent, trusty and dishonest. His comick scenes are happily wrought, but his pathetick strains are always polluted with some unexpected depravations.
I endeavoured to defend that pathetick and beautiful tragedy, and repeated the following passage: "... Sincerity, Thou first of virtues! let no mortal leave Thy onward path, although the earth should gape, And from the gulph of hell destruction cry. To take dissimulation's winding way." JOHNSON. 'That will not do, sir.
When he had got down upon the foot-pavement he called out, "Fare you well;" and, without looking back, sprung away with a kind of pathetick briskness, if I may use that expression, which seemed to indicate a struggle to conceal uneasiness, and impressed me with a foreboding of our long, long separation.
But there is in this Poem not only all that Johnson so well brings in view, but a power of the Pathetick beyond almost any example that I have seen.
But the admirers of this great poet have never less reason to indulge their hopes of supreme excellence, than when he seems fully resolved to sink them in dejection, and mollify them with tender emotions by the fall of greatness, the danger of innocence, or the crosses of love. He is not long soft and pathetick without some idle conceit, or contemptible equivocation.
He treated it with ridicule, and would not allow even the scene of the dying Husband and Father to be pathetick . I am not an impartial judge; for Hervey's Meditations engaged my affections in my early years.
In a publick character, when national grievances cry aloud for inquiry and justice, it is our duty to pursue all the footsteps of guilt; and the loud, the pathetick appeal of my constituents, is more forcibly persuasive than any motive of private tenderness.
'The first time Suard saw Burke, who was at Reynolds's, Johnson touched him on the shoulder and said, "Le grand Burke." Boswelliana, p. 299. See ante, ii. 450. See post, p. 42. See ante, i. 326. This assertion concerning Johnson's insensibility to the pathetick powers of Otway, is too round.
This I ascribe to the tea, not as possessing any medicinal qualities, but as tempting them to drink more water, to dilute their salt food more copiously, and, perhaps, to forbear punch, or other strong liquors. He then proceeds, in the pathetick strain, to tell the ladies how, by drinking tea, they injure their health, and, what is yet more dear, their beauty.
Word Of The Day