Doctor Indoctus: Strictures on Professor John Nichol, of Glasgow: With Reference to His English Composition

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Trubner, 1880 - 63 pages

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Page 59 - More lasting effect was produced by translators, who, in later times, have corrupted our idiom as much as, in early ones, they enriched our vocabulary; and to this injury the Scotch have greatly contributed : for composing in a language which is not their mother tongue, they necessarily...
Page 45 - Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth ; a stranger, and not thine own lips. 3 A stone is heavy, and the sand weighty ; but a fool's wrath is heavier than them both.
Page 38 - It is melancholy to think how little that portion of the community which is quite at ease in their circumstances have to do in a social way with the humbler classes. They purchase commodities of them, or they employ them as labourers, or they visit them in charity for the sake of supplying their most urgent wants by almsgiving.
Page 37 - Asia. It was commonly believed that half a million of human beings was crowded into that labyrinth of lofty alleys, rich with shrines, and minarets, and balconies, and carved oriels, to which the sacred apes clung by hundreds. The traveller could scarcely make his way through the press of holy mendicants, and not less holy bulls. The broad and stately...
Page 27 - The House of Socrates (' Domus Socratica' is the expression of Horace) were those who next attempted to popularize Greek prose; namely, the old gentleman himself, the founder of the concern, and his two apprentices, Plato and Xenophon. We acknowledge a sneaking hatred toward the whole household, founded chiefly on the intense feeling we entertain that all three were humbugs.
Page 39 - THE short interval between Cromwell's death and the Restoration, exhibits the picture of a nation either so wearied with changes as not to feel, or so subdued by military power as not to dare to show, any care or even preference with regard to the form of their government. All was in the army ; and that army, by such a concurrence of fortuitous circumstances, as history teaches us not to be surprised at, had fallen into the hands of one, than whom a baser could not be found in its lowest ranks.
Page 50 - Pico writes to Angelo Politian, " we rather may, than either know him or by speech utter him. And yet had men liefer by knowledge never find that which they seek, than by love possess that thing, which also without love were in vain found.
Page 38 - Had it been a worse government, it might perhaps have been overthrown in spite of all its strength. Had it been a weaker government, it would certainly have been overthrown in spite of all its merits. But it had moderation enough to abstain from those oppressions which drive men mad ; and it had a force and energy which none but men driven mad by oppression would venture to encounter.
Page 29 - ... the leaders of the opposition thus revolved plans of open rebellion, but were still restrained by fears or scruples from taking any decisive step, a design of a very different kind was meditated by some of their accomplices. To fierce spirits, unrestrained by principle, or maddened by fanaticism, it seemed that to waylay and murder the King and his brother was the shortest and surest way of vindicating the Protestant religion and the liberties of England.
Page 29 - Literature which could be carried by the post bag then formed the greater part of the intellectual nutriment ruminated by the country divines and country justices. The difficulty and expense of conveying large packets from place to place was so great, that an extensive work was longer in making its way from Paternoster Row to Devonshire or Lancashire than it now is in reaching Kentucky. How scantily a rural parsonage was then furnished, even with books the most necessary to a theologian, has already...

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