KING RICHARD. Be eloquent in my behalf to her. From heaven; for even in heaven his looks and QUEEN ELIZABETH. An honest tale speeds best,

Words are like leaves; and where they most Who shall decide, when doctors disagree,

To syllable-dissectors they appeal.
Allow them accent-cadence, fools may feel;
But, spite of all the criticising elves,

Those who would make us feel - must feel them- With too much quickness ever to be taught; selves.

I have heard
That guilty creatures, sitting at a play,
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul, that presently
They have proclaimed their malefactions.

The play's the thing Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.

Hamlet, Acti. Sc. 2.

SHAKESPEARE

Lo, where the stage, the poor, degraded stage,
Holds its warped mirror to a gaping age.

Curiosity.

C. SPRAGUE,

Nay, an thon 'It mouth,

I'll rant as well as thou.
Hamlet, Act v. Sc. 1.

With too much thinking to have common
thought.

Moral Essays, Epistle II.
Glad that you thus continue your resolve
To suck the sweets of sweet philosophy;
Only, good master, while we do admire
This virtue and this moral discipline,
Let's be no stoics, nor no stocks, I pray.

POPE.

J. GAY.

Whence is thy learning? Hath tly toil
O'er books consumed the midnight oil?
Fables: The Shepherd and the Philosopher.
Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save base authority from others' books.
These earthly godfathers of heaven's lights,
That give a name to every fixed star,
Have no more profit of their shining nights
Than those that walk, and wot not what they

are.
SHAKESPEARE. | Love's Labor Lost, Acti, Sc. 1.

SHAKESPEARE

Love seldom haunts the breast where learning Immodest words admit of no defence,
For want of decency is want of sense.

lies,

And Venus sets ere Mercury can rise.

The Wife of Bath: Her Prologue.

POPE.

It down, until at last it came to be,

Oh! rather give me commentators plain,
Who with no deep researches vex the brain
Who from the dark and doubtful love to run,
And hold their glimmering tapers to the sun.

The Parish Register, Part I., Introduction.

G. CRABBE.

The readers and the hearers like my books,
But yet some writers cannot them digest;

For length and breadth, the bigness which you But what care I? for when I make a feast

see.

"T is pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in 't. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

Lest men suspect your tale untrue,

Keep probability in view.

The traveller leaping o'er those bounds,

The credit of his book confounds.

BYRON.

I would my guests should praise it, not the cooks.

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific -- and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

The Painter who pleased Nobody and Everybody. J. GAY. On first looking into Chapman's Homer.

KEATS

Then, at the last and only couplet fraught
With some unmeaning thing they call a thought,
A needless Alexandrine ends the song,

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.

That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.

along,

Essay on Criticism, Part II.

POPE.

Midsummer Night's Dream, Act v. Sc. 1. SHAKESPEARE

With which, like ships, they steer their courses. Thanks untraced to lips unknown