Miscellaneous Works of Edw. Gibbon: With Memoirs of His Life and Writings, Composed by Himself, Volumen1

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Página 261 - How happy could I be with either, were t'other dear charmer away.
Página 18 - Call, is still read as a popular and powerful book of devotion. His precepts are rigid, but they are founded on the gospel: his satire is sharp, but it is drawn from the knowledge of human life; and many of his portraits are not unworthy of the pen of La Bruyere. If he finds a spark of piety in his reader's mind, he will soon kindle it to a flame; and a philosopher must allow that he exposes, with equal severity and truth, the strange contradiction between the faith and practice of the Christian...
Página 137 - October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter,* that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind. But my original plan was circumscribed to the decay of the city rather than of the empire : and, though my reading and reflections began to point towards that object, some years elapsed, and several avocations intervened, before I was seriously engaged in the execution of that...
Página 53 - Instead of guiding the studies, and watching over the behaviour of his disciple, I was never summoned to attend even the ceremony of a lecture; and, excepting one voluntary visit to his rooms, during the eight months of his titular office the tutor and pupil lived in the same college as strangers to each other.
Página 87 - After a painful struggle I yielded to my fate; I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son; my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence, and the habits of a new life. My cure was accelerated by a faithful report of the tranquillity and cheerfulness of the lady herself, and my love subsided in friendship and esteem.
Página 86 - Curchod were embellished by the virtues and talents of the mind. Her fortune was humble, but her family was respectable. Her mother, a native of France, had preferred her religion to her country. The profession of her father did not extinguish the moderation and philosophy of his temper, and he lived content with a small salary and laborious duty, in the obscure lot of minister of...
Página 183 - ... berceau or covered walk of acacias which commands a prospect of the country the lake and the mountains the air was temperate the sky was serene the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters and all nature was silent i will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom and perhaps the establishment of my fame...
Página 196 - In private conversation, that great and amiable man added the weight of his own experience ; and this autumnal felicity might be exemplified in the lives of Voltaire, Hume, and many other men of letters.
Página 48 - The fellows or monks of my time were decent easy men, who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder : their days were filled by a series of uniform employments ; the chapel and the hall, the coffee-house and the common room, till they retired, weary and well satisfied, to a long slumber.
Página 155 - The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise. Many experiments were made before I could hit the middle tone between a dull chronicle and a rhetorical declamation : three times did I compose the first chapter, and twice the second and third, before I was tolerably satisfied with their effect.

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