Yesterday I went out at about twelve, and visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to... see so much at once; and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into building stones, and that the mummies had all turned to dust, two thousand years ago; and, in fine, that all the material relics of so many successive ages had disappeared with the generations that produced them. The present is burthened too much with the past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I teazed him with fanciful apprehensions of unhappiness. A moth having fluttered round the candle, and burnt itself, he laid hold ...of this little incident to admonish me; saying, with a sly look, and in a solemn but quiet tone, "That creature was its own tormentor, and I believe its name was BOSWELL."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The conqueror at least; who, ere Time renders His last award, will have the long grass grow... Above his burnt-out brain and sapless cinders. If I might augur, I should rate but low Their chances: they are too numerous, like the thirty Mock tyrants, when Rome's annals wax'd but dirty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A quiet conscience makes one so serene! Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded... That all the Apostles would have done as they did.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There was the murdered corpse, in covert laid, And violent death in thousand shapes displayed;... The city to the soldier's rage resigned; Successless wars, and poverty behind; Ships burnt in fight, or forced on rocky shores, And the rash hunter strangled by the boars; The newborn babe by nurses overlaid; And the cook caught within the raging fire he made.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »