Copy 1, Volume 7

The doctor &c / [Robert Southey].

  • Southey, Robert, 1774-1843
Date:
1834-1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The doctor &c / [Robert Southey]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Machiavel says of Cosmo de Medici that who ever considered his gravity and his levity might say there were two distinct persons in him. There is often times/^ says Dean Young, (father of the poet) a prodigious distance betwixt a man^s head and his heart; such a distance that they seem not to have any corres¬ pondence; not to belong to the same person, not to converse in the same world. Our heads are sometimes in Heaven, contemplating the nature of God, the blessedness of Saints, the state of eternity; while our hearts are held captive below in a conversation earthly, sensual, devilish. ^Tis possible we may sometimes com¬ mend virtue convincingly, unanswerably; and yet our own hearts be never affected by our own arguments; we may represent vice in her native dress of horror, and yet our hearts be not at all startled with their own menaces : We may study and acquaint ourselves with all the truths of religion, and yet all this out of cu¬ riosity, or hypocrisy, or ostentation; not out of the power of godliness, or the serious pur¬ pose of good living. All which is a sufficient