The Edinburgh Review, Volume 15

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A. and C. Black, 1810 - English literature

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Page 411 - Roll on, ye stars ! exult in youthful prime, Mark with bright curves the printless steps of time ; Near and more near your beamy cars approach, And lessening orbs on lessening orbs encroach ; Flowers of the sky ! ye too to age must yield, Frail as your silken sisters of the field...
Page 50 - Classical literature is the great object at Oxford. Many minds so employed have produced many works, and much fame in that department ; but if all liberal arts and sciences useful to human life had been taught there, — if some had dedicated themselves to chemistry, some to mathematics, some...
Page 46 - Apollo ravished? These facts the English youth get by heart the moment they quit the nursery; and are most sedulously and industriously instructed in them till the best and most active part of life is passed away.
Page 46 - Englishman, addicted to the pursuit of knowledge, draws — his beau ideal of human nature — his top and consummation of man's powers — is a knowledge of the Greek language. His object is not to reason, to imagine, or to invent; but to conjugate, decline, and derive. The situations of imaginary glory which he draws for himself, are the detection of an anapsest in the wrong place, or the restoration of a dative case which Cranzius had passed over, and the neverdying Ernesti failed to observe.
Page 407 - ... position, to precipitate themselves towards the new equator ; the greater part of men and animals drowned in a universal deluge, or destroyed by the violence of the shock given to the terrestrial globe; whole species destroyed; all the monuments of human industry reversed: such are the disasters which a shock of a comet would produce. We see then...
Page 51 - is the great object at Oxford. Many minds, so employed, have produced many works and much fame in that department ; but if all liberal arts and sciences, useful to human life, had been taught there, if some had dedicated themselves to chemistry, some to mathematics, some to experimental philosophy, and if every attainment had been honoured in the mixt ratio of its difficulty and utility, the system of such a University would have been much more valuable, but the splendour of its name something less.
Page 45 - ... or to instruct. The second object it is difficult to effect without attending to the first ; and the cultivation of style is the acquisition of those rules and literary habits which sagacity anticipates, or experience shows to be the most effectual means of pleasing. Those works are the best which have longest stood the test of time, and pleased the greatest number of exercised minds. Whatever, therefore, our conjectures may be, we cannot be so sure that the best modern writers can afford us...
Page 302 - Greek and mathematics ; and that she would desert an infant for a quadratic equation ? We seem to imagine that we can break in pieces the solemn institution of nature, by the little laws of a boarding-school; and that the existence of the human race depends upon teaching women a little more or a little less; — that Cimmerian ignorance can aid paternal affection, or the circle of arts and sciences produce its destruction.
Page 299 - As long as boys and girls run about in the dirt, and trundle hoops together, they are both precisely alike. If you catch up one half of these creatures, and train them to a particular set of actions and opinions, and the other half to a perfectly opposite set, of course their understandings will differ, as one or the other sort of occupations has called this or that talent into action.
Page 302 - But it by no means follows, that you get rid of vanity and self-conceit, because you get rid of learning. Selfcomplacency can never want an excuse ; and the best way to make it more tolerable, and more useful, is to give to it as high, and as dignified an object as possible. But at all events, it is unfair to bring forward against a part of the world an objection which is equally powerful against the whole.

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