A New and General Biographical Dictionary: Containing an Historical and Critical Account of the Lives and Writings of the Most Eminent Persons in Every Nation; Particularly the British and Irish; from the Earliest Accounts of Time to the Present Period ...

Front Cover
W. Strahan, 1784

From inside the book

Selected pages

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 341 - In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half-hung, The floors of plaster, and the walls of dung, On once a flock-bed, but repair'd with straw, With tape-tied curtains, never meant to draw, The George and Garter dangling from that bed Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red, Great Villiers lies — alas!
Page 341 - Villiers lies— alas ! how changed from him, That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim ! Gallant and gay, in Cliveden's proud alcove, The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love ; Or just as gay at council, in a ring Of mimic statesmen and their merry King.
Page 341 - Of mimic'd statesmen and their merry king. No wit to flatter left of all his store! No fool to laugh at, which he valued more. There, victor of his health, of fortune, friends, And fame, this lord of useless thousands ends.
Page 435 - ... perspicacity. To every work he brought a memory full fraught, together with a fancy fertile of original combinations, and at once exerted the powers of the scholar, the reasoner, and the wit.
Page 180 - He thinks in a peculiar train, and he thinks always as a man of genius ; he looks round on nature and on life with the eye which Nature bestows only on a poet : the eye that...
Page 453 - Every man, acquainted with the common principles of human action, will look with veneration on the writer, who is at one time combating Locke, and at another making a catechism for children in their fourth year. A voluntary descent from the dignity of science is perhaps the hardest lesson that humility can teach.
Page 435 - He was a man of vigorous faculties, a mind fervid and vehement supplied by incessant and unlimited inquiry, with wonderful extent and variety of knowledge, which yet had not oppressed his imagination nor clouded his perspicacity.
Page 336 - If he had an immoderate ambition, with which he was charged, and is a weed (if it be a weed) apt to grow in the best soils ; it doth not appear that it was in his nature, or that he brought it with him to the court, but rather found it there, and was a garment necessary for that air.
Page 396 - Our language owes more to him than the French does to Cardinal Richelieu, and the whole Academy. A poet cannot think of him without being in the same rapture Lucretius is in when Epicurus comes in his way.
Page 36 - ... beginning to use me ill, when, happily for me, the book that I carried was perceived, and served me for a passport.

Bibliographic information