hourly vexation.’ Prior’s Solomon could not be better criticized than in the sentence which remarks on the importance of its single fault: ‘Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults; negligences or errors are single and local, but tediousness pervades the whole: other faults are censured and forgotten, but the power of tediousness propagates itself.’
Indeed, the Lives are crowded with good sayings. Here are some, taken from the first of them, the Life of Cowley:—
The true Genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.
The basis of all excellence is truth: he that professes love ought to feel its power.
Great thoughts are always general, and consist in positions not limited by exceptions, and in descriptions not descending to minuteness.
If that be considered as Wit which is at once natural and new, that which though not obvious is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just; if it be that, which he that never found it, wonders how he missed; to wit of this kind the metaphysical poets have seldom risen.
If their conceits were far-fetched, they were often worth the carriage. To write on their plan it was at least necessary to read and think.
Men have been wise in very different modes; but they have always laughed the same way.
The artifice of inversion, by which the established order of words is changed, or of innovation, by which new words or new meanings of words are introduced, is practised, not by those who talk to be understood, but by those who write to be admired.
What is fit for every thing can fit nothing well.
Whoever professes to benefit by pleasing must please at once.
Not all these sayings, even when their application is limited by the context, carry immediate conviction with them; but there is none of them that does not compel
