Books about death

Had I called in my judgment
to my assistance, I had certainly retrenched many of them. But I defend
them not; let them pass for beautiful faults amongst the better sort of
critics: for the whole poem, though written in that which they call
Heroic verse, is of the Pindaric nature, as well in the thought as the
expression; and, as such, requires the same grains of allowance for it.
It was intended, as your lordship sees in the title, not for an elegy,
but a panegyric: a kind of apotheosis, indeed, if a heathen word may be
applied to a Christian use. And on all occasions of praise, if we take
the ancients for our patterns, we are bound by prescription to employ
the magnificence of words, and the force of figures, to adorn the
sublimity of thoughts. Isocrates amongst the Grecian orators, and
Cicero, and the younger Pliny, amongst the Romans, have left us their
precedents for our security; for I think I need not mention the
inimitable Pindar, who stretches on these pinions out of sight, and is
carried upward, as it were, into another world.


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