The Poems & Letters of Andrew Marvell, Volume 1

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Clarendon Press, 1927 - 347 pages
 

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Page 236 - Resolved, &c., that all aids and supplies, and aids to his Majesty in Parliament, are the sole gift of the Commons ; and all bills for the granting of any such aids and supplies ought to begin with the Commons ; and that it is the undoubted and sole right of the Commons to direct, limit and appoint in such bills the ends, purposes, considerations, conditions, limitations and qualifications of such grants, which ought not to be changed or altered by the House of Lords.
Page 308 - They have signed and sealed ten thousand pounds a year more to the Duchess of Cleveland ; who has likewise near ten thousand pounds a year out of the new farm of the country excise of beer and ale ; five thousand pounds a year out of the Post Office ; and, they say, the reversion of all the King's leases, the reversion of all places in the Custom House, the green-wax, and, indeed, what not? All promotions, spiritual and temporal, pass under her cognisance,
Page 296 - ... tenderness only and humanity, not from an implacable sorrow. The tears of a family may flow together like those little drops that compact the rainbow, and if they be placed with the same advantage towards Heaven as those are to the sun, they too have their splendour ; and like that bow, while they unbend into seasonable showers, yet they promise, that there shall not be a second flood.
Page 300 - Opinion that the King was never since his coming in, nay, all Things considered, no King since the Conquest, so absolutely powerful at Home, as he is at present. Nor any Parliament, or Places, so certainly and constantly supplyed with Men of the same Temper. In such a Conjuncture, dear Will, what Probability is there of my doing any Thing to the Purpose?
Page 291 - I shall now studie it even to the getting of it by heart ; esteeming it, according to my poore judgment (which yet I wish it were so right in all things else), as the most compendious scale for so much to the height of the Roman Eloquence...
Page 296 - Though an only son be inestimable, yet it is, like Jonah's sin, to be angry at God for the withering of his shadow. Zipporah, though the delay had almost cost her husband his life, yet when he did but circumcise her son, in a womanish peevishness reproached Moses as a bloody husband.
Page 89 - ... times over in the House, and when at last the tellers for the ayes would have agreed the noes to be 142, the noes would needs say that they were 143, whereupon those for the ayes would tell once more and then found the noes to be indeed but 129 ; and the ayes then coming in proved to be 138 ; whereas if the noes had been content with the first error of the tellers, Sir George had been quit upon that observation.
Page 297 - Only, as in difficult things, you would do well to make use of all that may strengthen and assist you ; the word of God ; the society of good men ; and the books of the ancients...
Page 301 - Some talk of a French Queen to be then invented for our King. Some talk of a sister of Denmark : others of a good virtuous Protestant here at home. The King disavows it ; yet he has sayed in publick, he knew not why a woman may not be divorced for barrenness, as a man for impotency.
Page 302 - The jury not finding them guilty, as the Recorder and Mayor would have had them, they were kept without meat or drink some three days, till almost starved, but would not alter their verdict; so fined and imprisoned. There is a book out which relates all the passages, which were very pertinent, of the prisoners, but prodigiously barbarous by the Mayor and Recorder. The Recorder, among the rest, commended the Spanish Inquisition, saying it would never be well till we had something like it.

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