LESSON I.—­PROSE.

“The higher a bird flies, the more out of danger he is; and the higher a Christian soars above the world, the safer are his comforts.”—­Sparke.

“In this point of view, and with this explanation, it is supposed by some grammarians, that our language contains a few Impersonal Verbs; that is, verbs which declare the existence of some action or state, but which do not refer to any animate being, or any determinate particluar subject.”—­L.  Murray’s Gram., 8vo, p. 109.

“Thus in England and France, a great landholder possesses a hundred times the property that is necessary for the subsistence of a family; and each landlord has perhaps a hundred families dependent on him for subsistence.”—­Webster’s Essays, p. 87.

“It is as possible to become pedantick by fear of pedantry, as to be troublesome by ill timed civility.”—­Johnson’s Rambler, No. 173.

“To commence author, is to claim praise; and no man can justly aspire to honour, but at the hazard of disgrace.”—­Ib., No. 93.

“For ministers to be silent in the cause of Christ, is to renounce it; and to fly is to desert it.”—­SOUTH:  Crabb’s Synonymes, p. 7.

“Such instances shew how much the sublime depends upon a just selection of circumstances; and with how great care every circumstance must be avoided, which by bordering in the least upon the mean, or even upon the gay or the trifling, alters the tone of the emotion.”—­Blair’s Rhet., p. 43.

“This great poet and philosopher, the more he contemplated the nature of the Deity, found that he waded but the more out of his depth, and that he lost himself in the thought instead of finding an end to it.”—­Addison. “Odin, which in Anglo-Saxon was Woden, was the supreme god of the Goths, answering to the Jupiter of the Greeks.”—­Webster’s Essays, p. 262.

“Because confidence, that charm and cement of intimacy, is wholly wanting in the intercourse.”—­Opie, on Lying, p. 146.

“Objects of hearing may be compared together, as also of taste, of smell, and of touch:  but the chief fund of comparison are objects of sight.”—­Kames, El. of Crit., Vol. ii, p. 136.

“The various relations of the various Objects exhibited by this (I mean relations of near and distant, present and absent, same and different, definite and indefinite, &c.) made it necessary that here there should not be one, but many Pronouns, such as He, This, That, Other, Any, Some, &c.”—­Harris’s Hermes, p. 72.