The General Biographical Dictionary: Containing an Historical and Critical Account of the Lives and Writings of the Most Eminent Persons in Every Nation: Particulary the British and Irish; from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time, Volume 8

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Alexander Chalmers
J. Nichols, 1813
 

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Page 341 - O Pallas, thou hast failed thy plighted word, To fight with caution, not to tempt the sword. I warned thee, but in vain, for well I knew What perils youthful ardour would pursue ; That boiling blood would carry thee too far ; Young as thou wert in dangers, raw to war. O curst essay of arms, disastrous doom, Prelude of bloody fields and fights to come.
Page 240 - ... of the language in which that fancy was : spread, were at least equal, if not superior to any of that time : but his glory was, that after fifty years of his life, spent with less severity or exactness than it ought to have been, he died with the greatest remorse for that license, and with the greatest manifestation of Christianity, that his best friends could desire.
Page 337 - Parliament he was a Burgess in the House of Commons, and from the debates, which were there managed with all imaginable gravity and sobriety, he contracted such a reverence to Parliaments that he thought it really impossible they could ever produce mischief or inconvenience to the kingdom, or that the kingdom could be tolerably happy in the intermission of them...
Page 341 - Houses not to admit any treaty for peace, those indispositions, which had before touched him, grew into a perfect habit of uncheerfulness ; and he who had been so exactly easy and affable to all men, that his face and countenance was always present and vacant to his company, and held any cloudiness and less pleasantness of the visage a kind of rudeness or incivility, became on a sudden less communicable; and thence very sad, pale, and exceedingly affected with the spleen.
Page 468 - The first prize was £.50, for which, being but newly acquainted with wealth, and thinking the influence of £.50 extremely great, he expected the first authors of the kingdom to appear as competitors ; and offered the allotment of the prize to the universities. But when the time came, no name was seen among the writers that had ever been seen before ; the universities and several private men rejected the province of assigning the prize...
Page 344 - He had a courage of the most clear and keen temper, and so far from fear, that he seemed not without some appetite of danger ; and therefore, upon any occasion of action, he always engaged his person in those troops which he thought, by the forwardness of the commanders, to be most like to be farthest engaged...
Page 341 - ... and affable to all men that his face and countenance was always present and vacant to his company, and held any cloudiness and less pleasantness of the visage a kind of rudeness or incivility, became on a sudden less communicable, and thence very sad, pale, and exceedingly affected with the spleen. In his clothes and habit, which he had minded before always with more neatness and industry and expense than is usual to so great a soul, he was not now only incurious, but too negligent...
Page 341 - ... one battle would end all differences, and that there would be so great a victory on one side, that the other would be compelled to submit to any conditions from the victor, which supposition and conclusion generally...
Page 339 - ... and indeed he was so exact and strict an observer of justice and truth that he believed those necessary condescensions and applications to the weakness of other men, and those arts and insinuations which are necessary for discoveries and prevention of ill, would be in him a declension from his own rules of life, though he acknowledged them fit and absolutely necessary to be practised in those employments.
Page 369 - Of Credulity and Incredulity in things divine and spiritual: wherein (among other things) a true and faithful account is given of the Platonic philosophy, as it hath reference to Christianity : as also the business of witches and witchcraft, against a late writer, fully argued and disputed.

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