The Connoisseur, Volume 1

Front Cover
R. Baldwin, 1767 - London (England)

From inside the book

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 23 - To make up one Hermaphrodite ; Still amorous, and fond, and billing, Like Philip and Mary on a shilling...
Page 52 - ... colonels of twenty men in a company, to quaff out or convey into secret hoards, the wages of a delusive list, and...
Page 3 - ... on his head he wore a turban of imperial paper; and there hung a calf-skin on his reverend limbs, which was gilt on the back, and faced with robings of morocco, lettered (like a rubric-post) with the names of the most eminent authors. In his left hand he bore a printed scroll, which from the marginal corrections I imagined to be a proof-sheet; and in his right hand he waved the quill of a goose. He immediately accosted me. "Town1...
Page 93 - Our ballad has the air of a narrative written before Shakespeare's play ; I mean, that if it had been written after the play, it would have been much more full and circumstantial. At present, it has too much the nakedness of an original...
Page 91 - To them in streets that lie. His life was like a barrow hogge, That liveth many a day, Yet never once doth any good, Until men will him slay. Or like a filthy heap of dung, That lyeth in a whoard ; Which never can do any good, Till it be spread abroad.
Page 96 - ... which we may include Westminster, with great accuracy, yet they have not set it out in the full light which at present it deserves. They have not distinguished it as an University. Paris is an University, Dublin is an University, even Moscow is an University. But London has not yet been honoured with that title. I will allow our metropolis to have been intended originally, only as a city of trade ; and I will...
Page 105 - ... of Trajan worth fifty shillings, and a queen Anne's farthing value five pounds. He was with much ado dissuaded from carrying on his suit; as the magistrate convinced him, that however highly he might rate his own treasures, a jury, who were no Virtuosos, would consider a farthing merely as a farthing, and look upon a copper coin of a Roman Emperor as no better than a king George's halfpenny.
Page 113 - Mayoress, a taylor's wife, and Mrs. Alderman Gascoigne, who sells pins and needles on one side of the shop, while her husband works at his pestle and mortar on the other. These ordinary wretches are constant attendants on my tea-table .•"'I am obliged to take them and their brats out an airing in my coach every evening; and am afterwards often doomed to sit down to whist and swabbers, or one and thirty bone-ace for farthing.
Page 112 - are open to every dirty fellow in the country that is worth forty shillings a year ; all my best floors are spoiled by the hobnails of farmers stumping about them ; every room is a pig-stye, and the Chinese paper in the drawing-room stinks so abominably of punch and tobacco, that it would strike you down to come into it.
Page xviii - ... better knows to build, and who to dance, Or this from Italy, or that from France, Our Connoisseur will ne'er pretend to scan, But point the follies of mankind to man. Th' important knowledge of ourselves explain, Which not to know all knowledge is but vain.

Bibliographic information