The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [859]
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Josephus, with Saint Paul and others, supposed man to be compounded of body, soul, and spirit. The distinction between soul and spirit is an essential point in ancient philosophy.
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Lord Lyttleton acknowledged the authorship of two dialogues, in the first of which the personages were the savior and Socrates, in the second king David and Caesar Borgia.
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Dante gives the name of sonnet to his little canzone or ode beginning
O vol che per la via d'Amor passate.
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Boileau is mistaken in saying that Petrarch'qui est regarde conmme le pere du sonnet' borrowed it from the French or Provencal writers. The Italian sonnet can be traced back as far as the year 1200. Petrarch was not born until 1304.
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The learned Menage has this epitaph on Sannazariu
Ci git, dont l'esprit fut si beau,
Sannazar, ce poete habile,
Qui par ses vers divins approche de Virgile,
Plus encore que par son tombeau.
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The two reprehensible lines in Pope's Eloisa,
Not Caesar's empress would I deign to prove;
No — make me mistress to the man I love
are to be found in the original letters of Eloisa — at least the thought.
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Mercier, in "L'an deux mille quatre cents quarante" seriously maintains the doctrines of the Metempsychosis, and J. D'Israeli says there is no system so simple, and so little repugnant to the understanding.
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One of the best epigrams affixed to the statue of Pasquin was the following upon Paul III,
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Ut canerent data multa olim sent vatibus aera
Ut taceam quantum tu mihi, Paule, dabis?
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Milton in Paradise Lost, has this passage,
——— when the scourge
Inexorably, and the torturing hour
Call us to penance.
Gray, in his Ode to Adversity, has
Thou tamer of the human breast
Whose iron scourge, and torturing hour
The bad affright.
Gray tells us that the image of his bard, where
Loose his beard, and hoary hair
Streamed like a meteor to the troubled air
was taken from a picture by Raphael: yet the beard of
Hudibras is also likened to a meteor,
This hairy meteor did denounce
The fall of sceptres and of crowns.
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The lines
For he that fights and runs away
May live to fight another day,
But he that is in battle slain
Will never rise to fight again
are not to be found, as is thought, in Hudibras. Butler's verses ran thus;
For he that flies may fight again
Which he can never do that's slain.
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The former are in a volume of' Poems' by Sir John Mennes reign of Charles II. The original idea is in Demosthenes. [[Greek text=]] Axxx xxxxxx xxxx xxxx. [[=Greek text]]
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"Semel insanivimus omnes" is not from Horace but from Mantuanus, an Italian. In a work entitled "De honesto amore" is this line,
Id commune malum, semel insanivimus omnes.
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Dryden in 'Absalom and Achitophel' has these lines,
David for him his tuneful harp had strung
And heaven had wanted one immortal song.
Pope in his Epistle to Arbuthnot has
Friend of my life which did not you prolong
The world had wanted many an idle song.
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Tickell's lines
While the charmed reader with thy thought complies
And views thy Rosamond with Henry's eyes,
are evidently borrowed from those of Boileau,
En vain contre' Le Cid' un ministre se ligue;
Tout Paris pour Chimene a les yeux de Rodrigue.
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The expression, ' nemorlumque noctem' occurring in one of Gray's Latin odes, has been repeatedly found fault with-yet Virgil has'medio nimborum in nocte.'
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Selden observes of Henry VIII, that he was a king with a pope in his belly.
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In the 'Nubes' of Aristophanes, there are several Greek verses in rhyme.
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Of the ten tragedies which are attributed to Seneca, (the only Roman tragedies extant,) nine are on Greek subjects.
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Ariosto