Date: 1715-1720
Aristotle observes, "that when Homer is obliged to describe any thing of itself absurd or too improbable, he constantly contrives to blind and dazle the Judgment of his Readers with some shining Description."
preview | full record— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)
Date: 1715-1720
"And yet no dire Presage so wounds my Mind, / My Mother's Death, the Ruin of my Kind, / Not Priam 's hoary Hairs defil'd with Gore, / Not all my Brothers gasping on the Shore; / As thine, Andromache!"
preview | full record— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)
Date: 1723
"Covetousness we may truly call, The Dropsie of the Mind, it being an insatiable Thirst of Gain"
preview | full record— Barker, Jane (1675-1743)
Date: 1733-4
"It is therefore in the Anatomy of the Mind as in that of the Body; more good will accrue to mankind by attending to the large, open, and perceptible parts, than by studying too much such finer nerves and vessels, the conformations and uses of which will for ever escape our observation."
preview | full record— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)
Date: 1733-4
"So, cast and mingled with his very frame, / The mind's disease, its ruling passion came: / Each vital humour which should feed the whole, / Soon flows to this, in body and in soul."
preview | full record— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)
Date: 1733-4
"She but removes weak passions for the strong: / So, when small humors gather to a gout, / The doctor fancies he has driv'n them out."
preview | full record— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)
Date: 1734
"Something as dim to our internal view, / Is thus, perhaps, the cause of most we do."
preview | full record— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)
Date: 1735
"The Bard whom pilf'red Pastorels renown, / Who turns a Persian tale for half a crown, / Just writes to make his barrenness appear, / And strains, from hard-bound brains, eight lines a year."
preview | full record— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)
Date: 1737
"That man makes a mean figure in the eye of reason, who is measuring syllables and coupling rhimes, when he should be mending his own soul and securing his own immortality."
preview | full record— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)
Date: 1737
"Talk what you will of Taste, my Friend, you'll find, / Two of a Face, as soon as of a Mind."
preview | full record— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)