Grocott & Ward, comps. Grocott’s Familiar Quotations, 6th ed. 189-?.
Beauty
Ay, my continent of beauty.
Shakespeare.—Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act IV. Scene 1. (Boyet to Rosaline.)
Beauty in distress shone like the sun
Piercing a Summer’s cloud.
Colman, Jun.—Battle of Hexham, Act I. Scene 3.
When beauty in distress appears,
An irresistless charm it bears:
In every breast does pity move,
Pity, the tenderest part of love.
Yalden.—To Captain Chamberlain, Verse 3.
Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll;
Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.
Pope.—Rape of the Lock, Canto V. Line 33.
Nature in various moulds has beauty cast,
And form’d the feature for each different taste:
This sighs for golden locks and azure eyes;
That for the gloss of sable tresses dies.
Gay.—Dione, Act III. Scene 1.
Were you with these, my prince, you’d soon forget
The pale, unripen’d beauties of the north.
Addison.—Cato, Act I.
’Tis not a set of features, nor complexion,
The tincture of a skin that I admire;
Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover,
Fades in the eye, and palls upon the sense.
Addison.—Cato, Act I. Scene 1.
’Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call,
But the joint force and full result of all.
Pope.—On Criticism, Line 245.
Half light, half shade,
She stood, a sight to make an old man young.
Tennyson.—The Gardener’s Daughter.
Where none admire, ’tis useless to excel;
Where none are beaux, ’tis vain to be a belle;
Beauty like wit, to judges should be shewn;
Both most are valued, where they best are known.
Lyttleton.—Soliloquy of a Beauty, Line 11.
Fair tresses man’s imperial race ensnare,
And beauty draws us with a single hair.
Pope.—Rape of the Lock, Canto II. Line 28.
She knows her man, and when you rant and swear,
Can draw you to her with a single hair.
Dryden.—Sat. of Persius.
’Tis a powerful sex; they were too strong for the first, the strongest, and the wisest man that was; they must needs be strong, when one hair of a woman can draw more than a hundred pair of oxen.
Howell.—Familiar Letters, Book II. No. 4. (To T. D., Esq.)
And Beauty slumber’d in the arms of Love.
Roscoe.—To Henry Fuseli. The Metrical Miscellany.
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness.
Keats.—Endymion, Line 1.
Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night,
As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear.
Shakespeare.—Romeo and Juliet, Act I. Scene 5. (Romeo to the Servant.)
Let him alone;
There’s nothing that allays an angry mind
So soon as a sweet beauty.
Beaumont and Fletcher.—The Elder Brother.
The beauty, that of late was in her flow’r, is now a ruin.
Quarles.—Book I. No. IX. Verse 5.