text,updated_at,metaphor,created_at,context,theme,reviewed_on,dictionary,comments,provenance,id,work_id
"The situation of the places of our birth, the climate and temperature of the air, the circumstances of our parents, their humours and dispositions; but more especially their method of treating us in our infant years, I am persuaded give bias to our manners and actions, through the whole course of our lives. Our minds are like blank paper, as a great philosopher has observed, and the first impressions they receive are generally the most permanent and powerful. What is commonly and vulgarly called our natural temper is only what we acquire, after our births, from the example of those from whom we receive our institution, or upon whom we depend. And agreeable to this, the mild conduct of my parents, and the engaging tenderness of their behaviour to every body, certainly fixed that good humour and complacency in my soul, that no succeeding misfortune had ever the power to efface. My disposition, as the reader will have frequent occasion to observe, was serious, but not unpliant, was gentle, but not slavish. My countenance was open, and my spirit intrepid. But as my designs were not lost in the clouds of gaiety, so neither did they render my vain, conceited, and pedantic. [...]
(I.ii, p. 9-10)",2012-07-29 17:17:46 UTC,"""Our minds are like blank paper, as a great philosopher has observed, and the first impressions they receive are generally the most permanent and powerful.""",2012-07-29 17:02:57 UTC,"Volume I, Chapter ii",Blank Slate,,Writing,"","Reading Christopher Flint's The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge UP, 2011), 81.",19906,7307
"[...] Now it is natural enough while we read any composition, to turn our thoughts (especially on reading a passage that strikes us forcibly in any light) towards its author; and if known either by person, history or report, to advert to many things respecting his life, fortunes, and character. Thus it happened with me on the present occasion; and I found my ideas suddenly drawn from the sermon in my hand and (in their vagabond way) hurrying over the birth, parentage, education, and situation of the reverend penman. At once, however, they made a full stop in their career, when the still small voice within, laid this question as a stumbling block in the way. And so -- is reposing in the softest, best embraces of the holy Church, while I am still laboring as a country curate on three shillings a day? And, all things considered, why, in God's name, should not I have been raised to this exalted state of dignity, and ease, and have still wielded, what he wielded so well, the birchen sceptre of the pedagogue, and continued to frown in peril and dismay through every trembling class? How unaccountable, how unequal is the distribution of things here! [...]
(IV, p. 25)",2013-08-31 16:41:15 UTC,"""Thus it happened with me on the present occasion; and I found my ideas suddenly drawn from the sermon in my hand and (in their vagabond way) hurrying over the birth, parentage, education, and situation of the reverend penman.""",2013-08-31 16:41:15 UTC,"","",,Inhabitants,"",Reading,22618,7663
"[...] But to proceed with my history; I had not been two days in the stationer's shop, ere eight of my sheets were purchased by a pale and meagre, yet interesting figure of a man, with three half-pence and the pawn of a silver sleeve button, who tucked me between his coat and his shirt (for his full suit of clothes days were over) and glided away from me to a wretched apartment four stories high, with seeming transport. At his entrance, his little deal desk mounted on his only table, stood invitingly before him: there was inspiration in the sight; he snatched wildly a cracked ink-horn from a shelf which contained nothing else, but a few mouldy crusts, and a few mouldy books; flourished his pen, looked up a moment with a fixed and raptured eye, then pulled eagerly one of my sheets from its concealment, cried vehemently 'I have it,' and instantly laying me prostrate before him, began to trace in black characters on my body, the ideas that laboured in his mind. In short, from this exalted station, I took my first flight as an essay on wealth, which my hungry maker sold for the prodigious sum fo then shillings to the editor of a fashionable magazine, and really seemed to think he had realized his own warm description, while so many splendid pieces were paying into his pennyless palm.
(p. 36)",2013-10-01 21:23:53 UTC,"""At his entrance, his little deal desk mounted on his only table, stood invitingly before him: there was inspiration in the sight; he snatched wildly a cracked ink-horn from a shelf which contained nothing else, but a few mouldy crusts, and a few mouldy books; flourished his pen, looked up a moment with a fixed and raptured eye, then pulled eagerly one of my sheets from its concealment, cried vehemently 'I have it,' and instantly laying me prostrate before him, began to trace in black characters on my body, the ideas that laboured in his mind.""",2013-10-01 21:23:53 UTC,"","",,"","",Reading,22908,7663