Longinus

William Rhys Roberts

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1867 edition. Excerpt: ... depth of earnestness and unpremeditated utterance, but moreover hurrying his hearers on with him into the intricacies of his long inversions. For not unfrequently, after suspending nerves not to be broken with labour; a man who could spend twenty years in one pursuit. 1 hink of a man, like the universal patiiarch in Milton (who had drawn up befoie him in his prophetic vision the whole seiies of the generations which were to issue fiom his loins), a man capable of placing in review, after having brought together from the East, the West, the Noith and the South, from the coarseness of the rudest barbarism to the most refined and subtle civilization, all the schemes of government which had ever prevailed amongst mankind, weighing, measuring, collating, and comparing them all, joining fact with theory, and calling into council, upon all this infinite assemblage of things, all the speculations which have fatigued the understandings of profoundreasoners in all times --Let us then consider, that all these were but so many preparatory steps to qualify a man, and such a man, tinctured with no national piejudice, with no domestic affection, to admire, and to hold out to the admiration of mankind, the Constitution of England." the sentence with which he began, and midway, as into an alien and inappropriate construction, thrusting in, parenthetically, a crowd of extraneous matters, having by this means filled his hearer with anxiety lest the sentence should utterly break down, and forced him to sympathize intensely with the perilous effort of the orator, at last beyond expectation, yet in due time, crowning all with the long-desired conclusion, if only by the hazardous and precarious character of such complications, he strikes a far more telling blow. 1 he...

William Rhys Roberts

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