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toward the gates of the morning, he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to matins, and bye and bye gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns like those which decked the brows of Moses when he was forced to wear a veil because himself had seen the face of God; and still, while a man tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair face and a full light, and then he shines one whole day, under a cloud sometimes, and often weeping great and little showers, and sets quickly; so is a man's reason and his life. He first begins to perceive himself, to see or taste, making little reflections upon his actions of sense, and can discourse of flies and dogs, shells and play, horses and liberty; but when he is strong enough to enter into arts and little institutions, he is at first entertained with trifles and impertinent things, not because he needs them, but because his understanding is no bigger; and little images of things are laid before him, like a cock-boat to a whale, only to play withal: but before a man comes to be wise he is half dead with gouts and consumption, with catarrhs and aches, with sore eyes and worn-out body. So that, if we must not reckon the life of a man but by the accounts of his reason, he is long before his soul can be dressed; and he is not to be called a man without a wise and adorned soul, a soul, at least, furnished with what is necessary toward his well-being.

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Truth, indeed, came once into the world with her Divine Master, and was a perfect shape, most glorious to look upon; but when he ascended, and his apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the god Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down, gathering up limb by limb still as they

could find them. We have not found them all yet, Lords and Commons! nor ever shall do, till her Master's second coming; he shall bring together every joint and member, and mold them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection.

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To begin, then, with Shakspeare. He was the man who, of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously, but luckily. When he describes any thing, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those that accuse him to have wanted learning give him the greater commendation. He was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature; he looked inward, and found her there. I can not say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injustice to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clinches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great when some great occasion is presented to him; no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wits and did not raise himself as high above the rest of poets.

"Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi."

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Nothing could have more of that melancholy which once used to please me, than my last day's journey; for, after having passed through my favorite wood in the forest with a thousand reveries of past pleasures, I rid over hanging hills, whose tops were edged with groves, and whose feet watered with winding rivers, listening to the falls of cataracts below and the murmuring of the winds above; the gloomy verdure of Stonor succeeded to these, and then the shades of the evening overtook me. The moon rose in the clearest sky I ever saw, by whose light I paced on slowly, without company or any interruption to the range of my thoughts. About a mile before I reached Oxford, all the bells tolled in different notes; the clocks of every college answered one another, and sounded

forth (some in a softer tone) that it was eleven at night. All this was no ill preparation to the life I have since led among those old walls, venerable galleries, stone porticoes, studious walks, and solitary scenes of the university. I wanted nothing but a black gown and a salary to be as mere a bookworm as any there. I conformed myself to the college hours, was rolled up in books, lay in one of the most ancient, dusky parts of the university, and was as dead to the world as any hermit of the desert. If any thing was alive and awake in me, it was a little vanity, such as even those good men used to entertain when monks of their own order extolled their piety and abstraction. For I found myself received with a sort of respect which this idle part of mankind, the learned, pay to their own species, who are as considerable here as the busy, the gay, and the ambitious are in your world.

DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON. 1709-1784.

Junius burst into notice with a blaze of impudence which has rarely glared upon the world before, and drew the rabble after him as a monster makes a show. When he had once provided for his safety by impenetrable secrecy, he had nothing to combat but truth and justice, enemies whom he knows to be feeble in the dark. Being, then, at liberty to indulge himself in all the immunities of invisibility; out of the reach of danger, he has been bold; out of the reach of shame, he has been confident. As a rhetorician, he has had the art of persuading when he seconded desire; as a reasoner, he has convinced those who had no doubt before; as a moralist, he has taught that virtue may disgrace; and, as a patriot, he has gratified the mean by insults on the high. Finding sedition ascendant, he has been able to advance it; finding the nation combustible, he has been able to inflame it. Let us abstract from his wit the vivacity of insolence, and withdraw from his efficacy the sympathetic favor of plebeian malignity; I do not say that we shall leave him nothing: the cause that I defend scorns the help of falsehood; but if we leave him only his merit, what shall we praise?

LORD FRANCIS JEFFREY. 1817..

Every thing in him (Shakspeare) is in unmeasured abundance and unequaled perfection, but every thing so balanced and kept in subordination as not to jostle, or disturb, or take the place of another. The most exquisite poetical descriptions are given with such brevity, and introduced with such skill as merely to adorn, without loading the sense they accompany. Although his sails are purple, and perfumed, and his prow of beaten gold, they waft him on his voyage, not less, but more rapidly and directly, than if they had been composed of baser materials. All excellences, like those of Nature herself, are thrown out together, and, instead of interfering with, support and recommend each other. His flowers are not tied up in garlands, nor his fruits crushed into baskets, but spring living from the soil, in all the dew and freshness of youth, while the graceful foliage in which they lurk, and the ample branches, the rough and vigorous stem, and the wide-spreading roots on which they depend, are present along with them, and share in their places the equal care of their Creator.

FROM MODERN PAINTERS, BY A GRADUATE OF OX-
FORD. 1845-9.

And yet people speak in this working age, when they speak from their hearts, as if houses, and lands, and food, and raiment were alone useful, and as if sight, thought, and admiration were all profitless; so that men insolently call themselves Utilitarians, who would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race into vegetables; men who think, as far as such can be said to think, that the meat is more than the life, and the raiment than the body; who look to the earth as a stable, and to its fruit as fodder; vine-dressers and husbandmen, who love the corn they grind and the grapes they crush better than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of Eden; hewers of wood and drawers of water, who think that the wood they hew and the water they draw are better than the pine-forests that cover the mountains like the shadow of God, and the great rivers that move like his eter

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nity. And so comes upon us that woe of the preacher, that though God hath made every thing beautiful in his time, also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end."

§ 40. Having traced the Origin and History of the English language from its birth to its maturity in the age of Queen Elizabeth, when it passed from the stage of Middle English to that of Modern English, and from that epoch, by a few examples, to near the middle of the present century, we are prepared to examine its Present Tendencies. It ought, however, in passing, to be remarked, that though during her reign the capabilities of the language were fully developed in the forms of strength and elegance, both in prose and poetry, it was somewhat Latinized by such writers as Sir Thomas Browne, as afterward it was somewhat Gallicized by Dryden and the wits of Queen Anne's time.

1. The distinction between the Subjunctive and the Indicative Mode is likely to pass away. We verify this by the very general tendency to say If it is, and If he speaks, for If it be, and If he speak.

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2. The distinction between the Participle Passive and the Past Tense is likely to pass away. We verify this by the tendency to say, It is broke, and He is smote, for It is broken, and He is smitten.

3. Of the double forms, Sang and Sung, Drank and Drunk, &c., only one will be permanent.

4. It is the general tendency of the language to return to the fullest use of the Saxon element, both in words and idioms. Other tendencies will be noticed in the Etymological and Syntactical part.

§ 41. What the present language of England would have been had the Norman Conquest never taken place, the analogy of Holland, Denmark, and of many other countries, will enable us to determine. It would have been much as it is at present. What it would have been had the Saxon Conquest never taken place, is a question wherein there is far more speculation. Of France, of Italy, of Wallachia, of the Span

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