17 quotes
The Dictionary, great work though it be, might have been successfully carried through by a merely mechanical genius.
Six Essays on Johnson (1910)
These Lives are the maturest and strongest of Johnson's work. It ought be a comfort to men past middle life to find Johnson, like Dryden, wrote his best prose in his latest years.
Six Essays on Johnson (1910)
Definition and division are the watchwords of science, where art is all for composition and creation.
Style (1897)
The measure of an author's power would be best found in the book which he should sit down to write the day after his library was burnt to the ground.
Six Essays on Johnson (1910)
The late Mr. Froude, with a poet's instinct for unity, chose to regard the whole story of the English Voyages as an aspect of the Protestant Reformation.
Of all the notable Elizabethans, Sir Walter Raleigh is perhaps the most difficult to understand. He has the insolent imagination of Marlowe, and the profound melancholy of Donne.
God's most candid critics are those of his children whom he has made poets.
Because he had seen much of life, his last and greatest work, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, is more than a collection of facts: it is a book of wisdom and experience, a treatise on the conduct of life, a commentary on human destiny.
Six Essays on Johnson (1910)
For some years after his death, his writings were held in huge esteem, and shaped the prose of England. That time has passed. New models have captured the public ear; and at this day Johnson's noble prose is perhaps studied chiefly by his parodists.
Six Essays on Johnson (1910)
The topics of The Rambler are many, but the great majority of them are drawn from the graver aspects of life, and it is when he treats of fundamental duties and inevitable sorrows, bereavement, and disease, and death, that Johnson rises to his full stature.
Six Essays on Johnson (1910)
Like Napoleon's Italian campaign, the achievements of Drake on the Spanish Main show a master at work, unburdened and unfettered as yet by responsibility and reputation, adapting himself solely to his material, and inventing at every stroke.
The actions that move the world have been prompted and inspired by dreams and visions. The search for the philosopher's stone laid the foundations of modern chemistry; modern travel and geography owe their chief advances to the search for the fabled realm of Cathay.
Over and against the plays of Shakespeare and his fellows, as their natural counterpart, must be set the Voyages of Hakluyt; he who would understand the Elizabethan age, and what it meant for England, must know them both.
It is one of Boswell's greatest merits that he is careful of his background; wherever it is possible he gives us a full and true account of the persons present, and the incidents and remarks that prompted Johnson's speech.
Six Essays on Johnson (1910)
The stalwart honesty and simplicity of the character and writings of Davis give a singular charm to his name and story. He was a man after Hakluyt's own heart, a fearless explorer, an ardent student and professor of the science of navigation.
The sense of liberty and power, and of belief in the capacity and destiny of man, which was quickened by the new discoveries, distinguishes the literature of the Elizabethan age from the great backward-looking periods of romance. It is a literature of youth and hope, with none of the subtle and poignant flavours that are to be tasted in a literature of regret and memory.
Almost all men are less humorous than Shakespeare; but most men are more humorous than Milton, and these, it is to be feared, having suffered themselves to be dragooned by the critics into professing a distant admiration for Paradise Lost, have paid their last and utmost tribute to the genius of its author.
Milton (1900)