Courtesy lives by a multitude of little sacrifices, not by sacrifices of sufficient importance to impose any burdensome sense of obligation. 964 Hamerton: Human Intercourse. Essay xxii. Of Courtesy in Epistolary Communication. Courtesy is a duty public servants owe to the humblest member of the public. 965 Lord Lytton: Speeches. Prefatory Memoir. Courtesy, like grace and beauty, that which begets liking and inclination to love one another at the first sight, and in the very beginning of our acquaintance and familiarity; and, consequently, that which first opens the door for us to better ourselves by the example of others, if there be anything in the society worth notice. 966 Montaigne: Essays. Bk. i. Ch. 13. (Hazlitt, Trans.) 967 COVETOUSNESS. To the covetous man life is a nightmare, and God lets him wrestle with it as best he may. 969 Henry Ward Beecher: Proverbs from Plymouth Covetousness is ever attended with solicitude and anxiety. 970 We never desire earnestly what we desire in reason. 971 La Rochefoucauld: Reflections; or, Sentences and The covetous man explores the whole world in pursuit of a subsistence, and fate is close at his heels. 972 Saadi: The Gulistan. Ch. 8. Rules for Conduct To die, and thus avoid poverty or love, or anything painful, is not the part of a brave man, but rather of a coward; for it is cowardice to avoid trouble, and the suicide does not undergo death because it is honorable, but in order to avoid evil. 973 Aristotle: Ethics. Bk. iii. Ch. 7. (Browne, Trans.) Cowardice, the dread of what will happen. 974 Epictetus: Discourses. Bk. ii. Ch. 7. How We A coward's fear can make a coward valiant. 975 Owen Felltham: Resolves. Pt. ii. Of Cowardice. To be afraid is the miserable condition of a coward. To do wrong, or omit to do right from fear, is to superadd delinquency to cowardice. 976 David Dudley Field: Speeches, Arguments, and Miscellaneous Papers. Law Reform. Judicial Integrity. (Albany Law Journal, October, 1872.) However the vicious may laugh at religion as if in defiance, how they shrink at the fear of detection! 977 B. R. Haydon: Table Talk. He who fears to venture as far as his heart urges and his reason permits, is a coward; he who ventures further than he intended to go, is a slave. 978 Heine: Wit, Wisdom, and Pathos. Letters on the French Stage. What is in reality cowardice and faithlessness, we call charity, and consider it the part of benevolence sometimes to forgive men's evil practice for the sake of their accurate faith, and sometimes to forgive their confessed heresy for the sake of their admirable practice. 979 Ruskin: The Stones of Venice. The Fail. A plague of all cowards, I say. I Shakespeare: King Henry IV. Pt. i. Act ii. Sc. 4. Instinct is a great matter; I was a coward on instinct. shall think the better of myself, and thee, during my life; I for a valiant lion, and thou for a true prince. 981 Shakespeare: King Henry IV. Pt. i. Act ii. Sc. 4. There is nothing but roguery to be found in villanous men. Yet a coward is worse than a cup of sack with lime in it: a villanous coward. A plague of all cowards, I say still. 982 Shakespeare: King Henry IV. Pt. i. Act ii. Sc. 4. COXCOMBS. A coxcomb is the blockhead's man of merit. 983 La Bruyère: Characters. Of Judgments. (Rowe, CREATION -see Beauty. Creation is great, and cannot be understood. 984 Carlyle Essays. Characteristics. (Edinburgh God only opened his hand to give flight to a thought that he had held imprisoned from eternity. 985 Timothy Titcomb (J. G. Holland) Gold-Foil. III. Patience. CREEDS. Life is one, religion one, creeds are many and diverse. Call your opinions your creed, and you will change it every week. Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you may keep it to the end. 987 Phillips Brooks: Sermons. see Law, Liberty. Responsibility prevents crimes. 988 IV. Keeping the Faith. Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France. Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it. 989 Cato: Greek Wit. (Paley, Translator.) Crimes generally punish themselves. 990 Oliver Goldsmith: The Good-Natured Man. Act iv. If poverty is the mother of crimes, want of sense is the father. 991 La Bruyère: Characters. Of Man. (Rowe, Translator.) Purposelessness is the fruitful mother of crime. CRITICISM -see Actors. I. The Pattern in The most exquisite words and finest strokes of an author are those which very often appear the most doubtful and exceptionable to a man who wants a relish for polite learning; and they are those which a sour undistinguishing critic generally attacks with the greatest violence. 993 Addison: The Spectator. No. 291. Criticism is above all a gift, an intuition, a matter of tact and flair; it cannot be taught or demonstrated, it is an art. 994 Amiel: Journal, May 19, 1878. (Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Translator.) Sympathy is the first condition of criticism; reason and justice presuppose, at their origin, emotion. 995 Amiel: Journal, Nov. 7, 1878. (Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Translator.) Men of great talents, whether poets or historians, seldom escape the attacks of those who, without ever favoring the world with any production of their own, take delight in criticising the works of others. 996 Cervantes: Don Quixote. Pt. ii. Ch. 3. (Jarvis, Translator.) Criticism is not construction, it is observation. 997 George William Curtis: The Potiphar Papers. It is much easier to be critical than to be correct. 998 Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield): Speech, House of The most noble criticism is that in which the critic is not the antagonist so much as the rival of the author. 999 Isaac Disraeli: Curiosities of Literature. Literary Journals. ment. All truth is valuable, and satirical criticism may be considered as useful when it rectifies error and improves judgHe that refines the public taste is a public benefactor. 1000 Johnson: Works. VIII. 338. (Oxford edition, 1825.) It is advantageous to an author, that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck only at one end of the room it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends. 1001 Johnson: Boswell's Life of Johnson. V. 400. (George Birkbeck Hill, Editor, 1887.) Sir, there is no end of negative criticism. 1002 Johnson: Boswell's Life of Johnson. V. 222. (George Birkbeck Hill, Editor, 1887.) The great contention of criticism is to find the faults of the moderns and the beauties of the ancients. While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best. 1003 Johnson: Works. V. 103. (Oxford edition, 1825.) Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work, rather than its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as the bad heart of Procrustes turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture. 1004 Longfellow: Drift-Wood. Table Talk. The strength of criticism lies only in the weakness of the thing criticised. 1005 Longfellow: Kavanagh. Ch. 30. Comparative criticism teaches us that moral and æsthetic defects are more nearly related than is commonly supposed. 1006 Lowell: My Study Windows. Carlyle. We should be wary what persecution we raise against the living labors of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books, since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom; and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at the ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself; slays an immortality rather than a life. 1007 Milton: Areopagitica. 522852B CRITICS. When I read rules of criticism I inquire immediately after the works of the author who has written them, and by that means discover what it is he likes in a composition. 1008 Addison: The Guardian. No. 115. You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art. 1009 Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield): Lothair. Ch. 35. A critic should be a pair of snuffers. He is oftener an extinguisher, and not seldom a thief. 1010 J. C. and A. W. Hare: Guesses at Truth. What a blessed thing it is that nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left! 1011 Holmes: The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. There is a certain race of men that either imagine it their duty, or make it their amusement, to hinder the reception of every work of learning or genius, who stand as sentinels in the avenues of fame, and value themselves upon giving ignorance and envy the first notice of a prey. 1012 Johnson: The Rambler. No. 3. A critic is never too severe when he only detects the faults of an author. But he is worse than too severe when, in consequence of this detection, he presumes to place himself on a level with genius. 1013 Landor: Imaginary Conversations. Samuel John son and John Horne (Tooke). A wise scepticism is the first attribute of a good critic. 1014 Lowell: Among My Books. Shakespeare Once More. The critic is a literary educator, a professor of literature with a class which embraces the entire reading community. He is to instruct, if he can; he is to judge fairly and to "give his own to each;" but his main business is to stimulate the minds of people, to conduct a live conversation with the public concerning the books they are reading. 1015 E. S. Nadal: Essays at Home and Elsewhere. A critic must accept what is best in a poet, and thus become his best encourager. 1016 Stedman: Poets of America. Ch. 6. Henry The critic's first labor is the task of distinguishing between men, as history and their works display them, and the ideals which one and another have conspired to urge upon his acceptance. 1017 Stedman: Poets of America. Ch. 7. Edgar Allan |