Memoirs of the legal, literary, and political life of ... John Philpot Curran

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J. Harper, 1817 - 315 páginas

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Página 58 - No matter in what language his doom may have been pronounced ; no matter what complexion incompatible with freedom, an Indian or an African sun may have burnt upon him; no matter in what disastrous battle his liberty may have been cloven down; no matter with •what solemnities he may have been devoted upon the altar of slavery ; the first moment he touches the sacred soil of Britain, the altar and the god sink together in the dust ; his soul walks abroad in her own majesty; his body swells beyond...
Página 174 - There are men whose powers operate only at leisure and in retirement, and whose intellectual vigour deserts them in conversation ; whom merriment confuses, and objection disconcerts : whose bashfulness restrains their exertion, and suffers them not to speak till the time of speaking is past; or whose attention to their own character makes them unwilling to utter at hazard what has not been considered, and cannot be recalled.
Página 217 - A good sherrissack hath a twofold operation in it: it ascends me into the brain, dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapours which environ it, makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery and delectable shapes, which delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit.
Página 61 - In that awful moment of a nation's travail, of the last gasp of tyranny and the first breath of freedom, how pregnant is the example ! The press extinguished, the people enslaved, and the prince undone. As the advocate of society, therefore — of peace — of domestic liberty — and the lasting union of the two countries — I conjure you to guard the liberty of the press, that great sentinel of the state, that grand detector of public imposture; guard it, because, when it sinks, there sinks with...
Página 298 - Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil, that men do, lives after them ; The good is oft interred with their bones ; So let it be with Caesar.
Página 63 - ... researches of her Hume, to the sweet and simple, but not less sublime and pathetic morality of her Burns —how, from the bosom of a country like that, genius and character and talents should be banished to a distant, barbarous soil, condemned to pine under the horrid communion of vulgar vice and base-born profligacy, for twice the period that ordinary calculation gives to the continuance of human life?
Página 194 - He had the peculiar felicity that his attention never deserted him : he was present to every object, and regardful of the most trifling occurrences. He had the art of escaping from his own reflections, and accommodating himself to every new scene.
Página 75 - ... capricious rejection, or are obliged to assign a reasonable cause for their disapprobation. To that point you have a right to be heard, but I hope you do not mean to lecture the Council.
Página 231 - Britain. And if any one desires to know what that would be, I will tell him : it would be the emigration of every man of consequence from Ireland; it would be the participation of British taxes without British trade ; it would be the extinction of the Irish name as a people. We should become a wretched colony, perhaps leased out to a company of Jews, as was formerly in contemplation, and governed by a few taxgatherers and excise-men, unless possibly you may add fifteen or twenty couple of Irish members,...
Página 118 - In proportion to the humility of our submission to its rule do we rise into some faint emulation of that ineffable and presiding Divinity, whose characteristic attribute it is to be coerced and bound by the inexorable laws of its own nature, so as to be all-wise and alljust from necessity rather than election. You have seen it in the learned advocate who has preceded me most peculiarly and strikingly illustrated. You have seen even his great talents, perhaps the first in any country, languishing...

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