Vulgar words in Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) (Page 1)
This book at a glance
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If it were possible for a critic to weigh the merits of a great man in a balance, and to decide precisely how far his excellences exceed his defects, we should have to set off Scott's real services to the spread of a genuine historical spirit against the encouragement which he afforded to its bastard counterfeit.
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The Puritan has become a grim and ugly scarecrow, on whom every buffoon may break his jest.
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It would then have appeared how bitterly Orgon regretted the loss of the hypocrite, who, it is said, made love to his wife, but who, at any rate, had an interest in making things pleasant.
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Naturally, he hated an infidel with that kind of petulant bitterness which possesses an old lady in a country village, who has just heard that some wicked people dispute the story of Balaam's ass.
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Innocent as children may seem to be, he replies, 'yet if they are out of Christ, they are not so in God's sight, but are young vipers, and are infinitely more hateful than vipers, and are in a most miserable condition as well as grown persons; and they are naturally very senseless and stupid, being _born as the wild ass's colt_, and need much to awaken them' (iii.
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But he was indefinitely superior to the great mass of commonplace writers, who attain a kind of bastard infallibility by always accepting the average verdict of the time; which, on the principle of the _vox populi_, is more often right than that of any dissenter.