work_id,theme,provenance,created_at,text,reviewed_on,id,comments,metaphor,dictionary,updated_at,context
3278,"","Reading. Discussed in Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), 191. But see Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook's Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996), 86. See also Joe Bray's The Epistolary Novel: Representations of Consciousness (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 8.",2005-03-25 00:00:00 UTC,"In a man's letters, you know, Madam, his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirror of his breast, whatever passes within him is shown undisguised in its natural process. Nothing is inverted, nothing distorted, you see systems in their elements, you discover actions in their motives.
(II, pp. 14-15 in Thrale)",2009-03-04,8539,"•REVISIT. The letter is metaphorized not what's within the breast! INTEREST. A metaphor of mind metaphorized.
•I've included twice: Body and Mirror
•Note, E. Cook thinks Watt has this exactly wrong: ""Johnson is ironically citing an 'idée reçue' here in order to undermine it""
•Was citing p. 519? (of what?)
","""In a man's letters, you know, Madam, his soul lies naked, his letters are only the mirror of his breast, whatever passes within him is shown undisguised in its natural process.""",Mirror,2013-10-12 03:56:47 UTC,To Hester Thrale
5737,"",Contributed by Joann Kleinneiur (email).,2005-05-04 00:00:00 UTC,"I much condole with you on your late loss, I know how to feel for your misfortune! [ref. to death of Edgeworth's daughter Honora (1774-1790)] ... pains and diseases of the mind are only cured by Forgetfulness;--Reason but skins the wound, which is perpetually liable to fester again.
(p. 201)",,8582,•Darwin to Richard Lovell Edgeworth,"""[P]ains and diseases of the mind are only cured by Forgetfulness;--Reason but skins the wound, which is perpetually liable to fester again""","",2009-12-14 16:24:47 UTC,""
5630,"",C18 Listserv: Joel S. Berson (3/16/2005),2005-03-17 00:00:00 UTC,"Paris, August 19, 1785. To Peter Carr.
[advice to a young man--probably just beginning college at William and Mary--on how to conduct himself morally and ethically, what to learn and read, and what other good habits to develop.]
""Give about two of them [hours] every day to exercise; for health must not be sacrificed to learning. ... Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body, and stamp no character on the mind. ... Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far. The Europeans value themselves on having subdued the horse to the uses of man; but I doubt whether we have not lost more than we have gained, by the use of this animal. No one has occasioned so much the degeneracy of the human body.",2009-01-20,15057,"","""Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body, and stamp no character on the mind.""","",2009-09-14 19:42:39 UTC,""
7331,"","Reading Peter Dorsey's Common Bondage: Slavery as Metaphor in Revolutionary America (Knoxville: U. of Tennessee Press, 2009), 33.",2013-03-07 16:06:15 UTC,"[...] With respect to the other species of poor people, such as have a place of abode, and are aged and infirm, we need no other proof of their distress and misery, than the testimony of every English traveller who has ever passed through the country, who will tell you, that, wherever he has stopped to change horses, numbers of poor unhappy people crowded round his post-chaise, soliciting the boon of a single liard. Ignorant of the state of the poor in other parts of Europe, I can only hope it is not more deplorable than in those I am acquainted with. Let any man of candour declare, whether the state of servitude and bondage, in which the poor are held both in France and England, does not merit the name of slavery, and justify the assertion of its universal existence at present, as well as the opinion of its having existed from the remotest antiquity, and that it ever must exist in the world--that it is a genus of the state of man, of which the different kinds of servitude are distinct species--that, as it is impossible totally to eradicate it, or put a stop even to the sale and purchase of the Negroes in Africa which is only one branch of the commerce of the human species, so the modification of the kind of servitude in usage in any country is not rashly to be attempted, nor, in any case, to be undertaken by persons not intimately acquainted with it in all its circumstances. Can any gentlemen in England, if they possessed the power, presume themselves competent to frame laws for the enfranchisement of all the serfs in Russia or Poland? Can any man believe, that, if those people were at this moment set free from all controul of their lords, and deprived of their cottages, and their present method of subsisting themselves, they would not be driven to pillage and devastation for their support? That such would be the consequence of giving a nominal freedom to the Negroes in the West Indies is most certain. They must, in such case, be compelled to work, by laws far more severe than the present, and those laws must be much more rigorously executed than what they are now governed by. Neither could such severity be disapproved of by the people of any nation, who, however free their poor are, oblige them to work. The difficulty the poor find of subsisting themselves throughout Europe, even in Great Britain and Ireland, where liberty is so popular a theme, is evident, from the frequent emigrations we hear of. In what does their superior happiness consist?--In the power of abandoning their native country, and changing their masters.--Be it so. I do not mean to enter into a comparison between the different degrees of servitude. Let it be believed, that the Negroes, in that particular, experience an harder lot than Europeans. It in no degree invalidates the argument, that such a desire of change, such frequent emigrations of the poor of Europe, is very far from being a proof of a superior degree of happiness.
(pp. 203-5) ",,19969,"","""Let any man of candour declare, whether the state of servitude and bondage, in which the poor are held both in France and England, does not merit the name of slavery, and justify the assertion of its universal existence at present, as well as the opinion of its having existed from the remotest antiquity, and that it ever must exist in the world--that it is a genus of the state of man, of which the different kinds of servitude are distinct species--that, as it is impossible totally to eradicate it, or put a stop even to the sale and purchase of the Negroes in Africa which is only one branch of the commerce of the human species, so the modification of the kind of servitude in usage in any country is not rashly to be attempted, nor, in any case, to be undertaken by persons not intimately acquainted with it in all its circumstances.""",Fetters,2013-03-07 16:06:15 UTC,""
7542,"",Reading; text from Google Books,2013-07-12 14:57:56 UTC,"You, my dear friend, who have felt the tender attachments of love and friendship, and the painful anxieties which absence occasions, even amidst scenes of variety and pleasure; who understand the value at which tidings from those we love is computed in the arithmetic of the heart; who have heard with almost uncontroulable emotion the postman's rap at the door; have trembling seen the well-known hand which excited sensations that almost deprived you of power to break the seal which seemed the talisman of happiness; you can judge of the feelings of Mons. du F when he received, by means of the same friend who had conveyed his letter, an answer from his wife. But the person who brought the letter to his dungeon, dreading the risk of a discovery, insisted, that, after having read it, he should return it to him immediately. Mons. du F-- pressed the letter to his heart, bathed it with his tears, and implored the indulgence of keeping it at least till the next morning. He was allowed to do so, and read it till every word was imprinted on his memory; and after enjoying the sad luxury of holding it that night on his bosom, was forced the next morning to relinquish his treasure.
(Letter XX, p. 163-4; p. 129 in Broadview ed.)",,21700,"","""You, my dear friend, who have felt the tender attachments of love and friendship, and the painful anxieties which absence occasions, even amidst scenes of variety and pleasure; who understand the value at which tidings from those we love is computed in the arithmetic of the heart.""","",2013-07-12 14:57:56 UTC,Letter 20
7542,"",Reading; text from Google Books,2013-07-12 14:59:04 UTC,"You, my dear friend, who have felt the tender attachments of love and friendship, and the painful anxieties which absence occasions, even amidst scenes of variety and pleasure; who understand the value at which tidings from those we love is computed in the arithmetic of the heart; who have heard with almost uncontroulable emotion the postman's rap at the door; have trembling seen the well-known hand which excited sensations that almost deprived you of power to break the seal which seemed the talisman of happiness; you can judge of the feelings of Mons. du F when he received, by means of the same friend who had conveyed his letter, an answer from his wife. But the person who brought the letter to his dungeon, dreading the risk of a discovery, insisted, that, after having read it, he should return it to him immediately. Mons. du F-- pressed the letter to his heart, bathed it with his tears, and implored the indulgence of keeping it at least till the next morning. He was allowed to do so, and read it till every word was imprinted on his memory; and after enjoying the sad luxury of holding it that night on his bosom, was forced the next morning to relinquish his treasure.
(Letter XX, p. 163-4; p. 129 in Broadview ed.)",,21701,"","He was allowed to do so, and read it till every word was imprinted on his memory; and after enjoying the sad luxury of holding it that night on his bosom, was forced the next morning to relinquish his treasure.""",Impressions and Writing,2013-07-12 14:59:04 UTC,""
7542,"",Reading; text from Google Books,2013-07-12 15:00:17 UTC,"I am glad you think that a friend's having been persecuted, imprisoned, maimed, and almost murdered, under the ancient government of France, is a good excuse for loving the revolution. What, indeed, but friendship, could have led my attention from the annals of imagination to the records of politics; from the poetry to the prose of human life? In vain might Aristocrates have explained to me the rights of kings, and Democrates have descanted on the rights of the people. How many fine-spun threads of reasoning would my wandering thoughts have broken; and how difficult should I have found it to arrange arguments and inferences in the cells of my brain! But, however dull the faculties of my head, I can assure you, that when a proposition is addressed to my heart, I have some quickness of perception. I can then decide, in one moment, points upon which philosophers and legislators have differed in all ages: nor could I be more convinced of the truth of any demonstration in Euclid, than I am, that, that system of politics must be the best, by which those I love are made happy.
(Letter XXIII, p. 195; p. 140 in Broadview ed.)",,21702,"","""How many fine-spun threads of reasoning would my wandering thoughts have broken; and how difficult should I have found it to arrange arguments and inferences in the cells of my brain!""",Rooms,2013-07-12 15:00:17 UTC,Letter XXIII
7542,"",Reading; text from Google Books. OCR typo caught and corrected by Andrew Dobson.,2013-07-12 15:01:03 UTC,"In every country it is social pleasure that sheds the most delicious flowers which grow on the path of life; but in France she covers the whole way with roses, and the traveller can scarcely mark its ruggedness. Happy are a people, so fond of talking as the French, in possessing a language modelled to all the charming purposes of conversation. Their turn of expression is a dress that hangs so gracefully on gay ideas, that you are apt to suppose that wit, a quality parsimoniously distributed in other countries, is in France as common as the gift of speech. Perhaps that brilliant phraseology which dazzles a foreigner, may be familiar and common to a French ear: but how much ingenuity must we allow to a people who have formed a language, of which the common-place phrases give you the idea of wit!
(Letter XXIII, pp. 197-8; p. 141 in Broadview ed.)",,21703,"","""Their turn of expression is a dress that hangs so gracefully on gay ideas, that you are apt to suppose that wit, a quality parsimoniously distributed in other countries, is in France as common as the gift of speech.""","",2016-01-25 18:45:45 UTC,Letter XXIII
7701,"",Searching in Google Books,2013-10-12 04:23:45 UTC,"The sea here at Weymouth is not half as fine as our old sea on the Sussex coast, and a marine prospect is at best a dull one after the first week: the seasons have no effect on it; and when one has once seen it rough and once seen it smooth, all is over; while every hour of every day produces some change upon a land view, and excites new images in any mind not totally crushed down or exhausted. The look from my window is mighty pretty however, and exhibits so tranquil a scene as it is difficult for old Ocean to display. I can imagine it like the Lake of Geneva, so blue, so still, so elegantly serpentized as if Mr. Brown had laid it out. In short this is no Phœnician Neptune whose beard is said to be longer than the others, because that place produced the earliest navigators: this shall be an Otaheite Neptune, and we will strike a medal of him all shaven and shorn, to shew that no canoe even of the Society Islands need fear him, though ignorant of the act of sailing till the world was got into its dotage as Goldsmith said, when he made the sharper talk about cosmogony. This nonsense came into my head as I saw a sailor on horseback this morning, and began thinking what could inspire the ancients to make Neptune the Creator of a horse, for if any thing was ever foreign from the purpose, that was foreign, or the man that rode under my window to-day had grievously degenerated.--So as you say, my dear Sir, change of place does one some good, by giving one some new thing to think on though but for a moment. I advised our Miss H--- to the same remedy, but have a notion her mind is haunted by one particular image; if so, nothing will cure her; for if the heart be broken 'tis broken like a looking-glass, and the smallest piece will for ever preserve and reflect the same figure till 'tis again ground down into a new mass.
(pp. 306-307)",,22934,INTEREST. USE IN ENTRY,"""I advised our Miss H--- to the same remedy, but have a notion her mind is haunted by one particular image; if so, nothing will cure her; for if the heart be broken 'tis broken like a looking-glass, and the smallest piece will for ever preserve and reflect the same figure till 'tis again ground down into a new mass.""",Mirror,2013-10-12 04:23:45 UTC,"Letter CCCXIX. Mrs. Thrale to Dr. Johnson. (August 30, 1783)."
7702,"","Searching ""mind"" in Google Books",2013-10-12 04:26:45 UTC,"I do not exhort you to reason yourself into tranquillity. We must first pray, and then
labour; first implore the blessing of God, and those means which he puts into our hands. Cultivated ground has few weeds; a mind occupied by lawful business, has little room for useless regret.
(p 192)
",,22935,"","""Cultivated ground has few weeds; a mind occupied by lawful business, has little room for useless regret.""","",2013-10-12 04:26:45 UTC,"Letter CCLVII. To Mrs. Thrale (April 5, 1781)
"