Life of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

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H. G. Bohn, 1854 - 545 pages
 

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Page 237 - So spake the Seraph Abdiel, faithful found; Among the faithless faithful only he ; Among innumerable false unmoved. Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified, His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal; Nor number nor example with him wrought To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind, Though single.
Page 260 - The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today, Had he thy reason, would he skip and play? Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food, And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.
Page 93 - Though equal to all things, for all things unfit, Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit ; For a patriot, too cool; for a drudge, disobedient, And too fond of the right to pursue the expedient. In short 'twas his fate, unemploy'd, or in place, sir, To eat mutton cold, and cut blocks with a razor.
Page 211 - ... his real power is not shown in the splendour of particular passages, but by the progress of his fable and the tenor of his dialogue ; and he that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen.
Page 232 - The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me...
Page 51 - ... a cabinet so variously inlaid; such a piece of diversified mosaic; such a tessellated pavement without cement; here a bit of black stone and there a bit of white; patriots and courtiers; king's friends and republicans; Whigs and Tories; treacherous friends and open enemies; that it was indeed a very curious show, but utterly unsafe to touch, and unsure to stand on.
Page 259 - ... winning the hearts, by imposing on the understandings, of the people. At every step of my progress in life, (for in every step was I traversed and opposed,) and at every turnpike I met, I was obliged to show my passport, and again and again to prove my sole title to the honour of being...
Page 212 - ... contempt for fame, and no fear of obloquy ; who shuns contention, though he will hazard an opinion : from one who wishes to preserve consistency, but who would preserve consistency by varying his means to secure the unity of his end ; and, when the equipoise of the vessel in which he sails may be endangered by overloading it upon one side, is desirous of carrying the small weight of his reasons to that which may preserve its equipoise.
Page 50 - I was not, like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled, and rocked, and dandled into a legislator; " Nitor in adversum" is the motto for a man like me.
Page 76 - Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty and passion of a man. It is like that of the principle of evil himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil. It is no easy operation to eradicate humanity from the human breast. What Shakespeare calls "the compunctious visitings of nature" will sometimes knock at their hearts, and protest against their murderous speculations.

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