United States or Madagascar ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
If indeed, as Sir Joshua labours to prove, mere imitation of existing models and attention to established rules could produce results exactly similar to those of natural powers, if the progress of art as a learned profession were a gradual but continual accumulation of individual excellence, instead of being a sudden and almost miraculous start to the highest beauty and grandeur nearly at first, and a regular declension to mediocrity ever after, then indeed the distinction between genius and imitation would be little worth contending for; the causes might be different, the effects would be the same, or rather skill to avail ourselves of external advantages would be of more importance and efficacy than the most powerful internal resources.
Burke proceeded to his own comments and declamation when the charges of rapacity, cruelty, tyranny, were general, and made with all the violence of personal detestation, and continued and aggravated without any further fact or illustration; then there appeared more of study than of truth, more of invective than of justice; and, in short, so little of proof to so much of passion, that in a very short time I began to lift up my head, my seat was no longer uneasy, my eyes were indifferent which way they looked, or what object caught them, and before I was myself aware of the declension of Mr.
And when the talk is over, each goes his way, still flushed with vanity and admiration, still trailing clouds of glory; each declines from the height of his ideal orgie, not in a moment, but by slow declension.
Moral declension in a nation is very swiftly followed by a corresponding decadence among its public men, and it will indeed be generally found that the standard of public men is apt to be somewhat lower than that of the better section of the public outside. They are exposed to very special temptations, some of which I have already indicated.
After the discovery and conquest of the West Indies, gold and silver became every day more plentiful in England, as well as in the rest of Europe; and the price of all commodities and provisions rose to a height beyond what had been known since the declension of the Roman empire.
There was the world of Julius Caesar and the Latin grammar, though this was scarcely as real to him as the Old Testament, which was brought to his notice every Sunday as a necessity of his life, while Caesar and AEneas and the fourth declension were made to be a task, for some mysterious reason, a part of his education.
Perhaps it is well here to put on record, even at risk of repetition, the principles which Mr. Muller and his colleague were wont to enforce as guards or landmarks which should be set up and kept up, in order to exclude those innovations which always bring spiritual declension.
In the commencement of that period, we may see, if not the setting, at any rate the declension of that system of personal rule which had existed under previous sovereigns, and which, after a brief and spasmodic revival in the time of George the Third, has now sunk, let us hope, into the limbo of forgotten things.
But it marks the real declension of the empire, a declension which no personal vigor in the emperor was now sufficient to disguise, that, even in the midst of victory, Aurelian found it necessary to make a formal surrender, by treaty, of that Dacia which Trajan had united with so much ostentation to the empire.
This young-old fool had nothing but the name of Wilbraham to his back. The wealth of the Wilbrahams, or what remained of it after eight decades of declension, had, during the course of a famous twenty years' law-suit between the father of the said young-old fool and a farming cousin in California, slowly settled like golden dust in the offices of lawyers in Carey-street, London. And both Mrs.
Word Of The Day