Contents
-BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
May
A true philosopherMakes death his common practice, while he lives,And every day by contemplation strivesTo separate the soul, far as he can,From off the body.
For true charityThough ne’er so secret finds its just reward.
From our tables here, no painful surfeits,No fed diseases grow, to strangle nature,And suffocate the active brain; no fevers,No apoplexies, palsies or catarrhsAre here; where nature, not entic’d at allWith such a dang’rous bait as pleasant cates,Takes in no more than she can govern well.
Health and libertyAttend on these bare meals; if all were blestWith such a temperance, what man would fawn,Or to his belly sell his liberty?There would be then no slaves, no sycophantsAt great men’s tables.
Known mischiefs have their cure; but doubts have none;And better is despair than fruitless hopeMix’d with a killing fear.
None can describe the sweets of country life,But those blest men that do enjoy and taste them.Plain husbandmen, tho’ far below our pitch,Of fortune plac’d, enjoy a wealth above us;To whom the earth with true and bounteous justice,Free from war’s cares, returns an easy food,They breathe the fresh and uncorrupted air,And by clear brooks enjoy untroubled sleeps.Their state is fearless and secure, enrich’dWith several blessings, such as greatest kingsMight in true justice envy, and themselvesWould count too happy, if they truly knew them.
Oh sad vicissitudeOf earthly things! to what untimely endAre all the fading glories that attendUpon the state of greatest monarchs, brought!What safety can by policy be wrought,Or rest be found on fortune’s restless wheel!
Seldom is faction’s ire in haughty mindsExtinguish’d but by death: it oft like fireSuppress’d, breaks forth again, and blazes higher.
There, in her den, lay pompous luxury,Stretch’d out at length; no vice could boast such highAnd genial victories as she had won;Of which proud trophies there at large were shown,Besides small states and kingdoms ruinedThose mighty monarchies that had o’erspreadThe spacious earth, and stretch’d their conquering armsFrom pole to pole, by her ensnaring charmsWere quite consum’d; there lay imperial Rome,That vanquish’d all the world, by her o’ercome;Fetter’d was th’ old Assyrian lion there;The Grecian leopard, and the Persian bear;With others numberless, lamenting by,Examples of the power of luxury.
With riotous banquets, sicknesses came in,When death ’gan muster all his dismal bandOf pale diseases.