“In fact, every attempt to present on paper the splendid effects of impassioned eloquence, is like gathering up dewdrops, which appear jewels and pearls on the grass, but run to water in the hand; the essence and the elements remain, but the grace, the sparkle, and the form, are gone.”—­Montgomery’s Life of Spencer.

“As in life true dignity must be founded on character, not on dress and appearance; so in language the dignity of composition must arise from sentiment and thought, not from ornament.”—­Blair’s Rhet., p. 144.

   “And man, whose heaven-erected face the smiles of love adorn,
    Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.”
        —­Burns.

    “Ah wretched man! unmindful of thy end! 
    A moment’s glory! and what fates attend.”
        —­Pope, Iliad, B. xvii, l. 231.

LESSON III.—­ADJECTIVES.

“Embarrassed, obscure, and feeble sentences, are generally, if not always, the result of embarrassed, obscure, and feeble thought.”—­Blair’s Rhet., p. 120.

“Upon this ground, we prefer a simple and natural, to an artificial and affected style; a regular and well-connected story, to loose and scattered narratives; a catastrophe which is tender and pathetic, to one which leaves us unmoved.”—­Ib., p. 23.

“A thorough good taste may well be considered as a power compounded of natural sensibility to beauty, and of improved understanding.”—­Ib., p. 18.

“Of all writings, ancient or modern, the sacred Scriptures afford us the highest instances of the sublime.  The descriptions of the Deity, in them, are wonderfully noble; both from the grandeur of the object, and the manner of representing it.”—­Ib., p. 36.

“It is not the authority of any one person, or of a few, be they ever so eminent, that can establish one form of speech in preference to another.  Nothing but the general practice of good writers and good speakers can do it.”—­Priestley’s Gram., p. 107.

“What other means are there to attract love and esteem so effectual as a virtuous course of life?  If a man be just and beneficent, if he be temperate, modest, and prudent, he will infallibly gain the esteem and love of all who know him.”—­Kames, El. of Crit., i, 167.

“But there are likewise, it must be owned, people in the world, whom it is easy to make worse by rough usage, and not easy to make better by any other.”—­Abp.  Seeker.

“The great comprehensive truth written in letters of living light on every page of our history—­the language addressed by every past age of New England to all future ages, is this:  Human happiness has no perfect security but freedom;—­freedom, none but virtue;—­virtue, none but knowledge:  and neither freedom, nor virtue, nor knowledge, has any vigour or immortal hope, except in the principles of the Christian faith, and in the sanctions of the Christian religion.”—­President Quincy.