No language can fitly express ...

No language can fitly express the meanness, the baseness, the brutality, with which the world has ever treated its victims of one age and boasts of the next. Dante is worshipped at that grave to which he was hurried by persecution. Milton, in his own day, was "Mr. Milton, the blind adder, that spit his venom on the king's person"; and soon after, "the mighty orb of song." These absurd transitions from hatred to apotheosis, this recognition just at the moment when it becomes a mockery, saddens all intellectual history.
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 Edwin Percy Whipple

Quotes from the same author

Humor, warm and all-embracing as the sunshine, bathes its objects in a genial and abiding light.
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 Edwin Percy Whipple
The strife of politics tends to unsettle the calmest understanding, and ulcerate the most benevolent heart. There are no bigotries or absurdities too gross for parties to create or adopt under the stimulus of political passions.
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 Edwin Percy Whipple
Even in social life, it is persistency which attracts confidence, more than talents and accomplishments.
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 Edwin Percy Whipple
The familiar writer is apt to be his own satirist. Out of his own mouth is he judged.
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 Edwin Percy Whipple
Tears are copiously showered over frailties the discoverer takes a malicious delight in circulating; and thus, all granite on one side of the heart, and all milk on the other, the unsexed scandal-monger hies from house to house, pouring balm from its weeping eyes on the wounds it inflicts with its stabbing tongue.
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 Edwin Percy Whipple