LITERARY MEMORIES OF THE PAST ----I

 

LITERARY MEMORIES OF THE PAST ----I

            Synonyms of memories  are : recollections, reminiscences, and remembrances. 

            Memories of ordinary events, readings, sayings are not worth preserving.

            What follows here are very valuable  literary memories of my reading in the past.   

1.     If it be well weighed, to say that a man lieth, is as much to say that he is brave towards God, and a coward towards man; for a lie faces God, and shrinks from man. -----Francis Bacon, Essays. 1597.

2.     For fountains they are a great beauty and refreshment; but pools mar all, and make the garden unwholesome, and full of flies and frogs. -----Francis Bacon, Essay Of Gardens, 1597.

3.     Whilst fortune favoured, friends, you smiled on me, but when she fled, a friend I could not see.----Robert Burton, essay On Melancholy Caused By Poverty. 1621.

4.     Language most shows a man : Speak, that I may see thee. It springs out of the most retired and innermost  parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind. No glass renders a man’s form or likeness so much as his speech.----Essay entitled Of The Dignity Of Speech by Ben Jonson, 1640.

5.     A Good Wife is man’s best movable, a scion incorporate with the stock, bringing sweet fruit; one that to her husband I more than a friend, less than a trouble: an equal with him in the yoke. Calamities and troubles she shares alike; nothing pleaseth her that doth not him. She is relative in all, and he without her, but half himself. She is his absent hands, eyes, ears, and mouth : his present and absent all. She frames her nature unto his howsoever : the hyacinth follows not the sun more willingly. Stubbornness and obstinacy are herbs that grow not in her garden. She leaves tattling to the gossips of the town, and is more than hard. Her household is her charge ; her care to that makes her seldom non-resident. Her pride is but to be cleanly, and her thrift not to be prodigal. By  her discretion she hath children, not wantons; a husband without her is a misery in man’s apparel ; none but she hath an aged husband, to whom she is both a staff and a chair. To conclude, she is both wise, religious, which makes her all this.---SIR THOMAS OVERBURY, Characters, 1614.

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  G.R.Kanwal

30 July 2026