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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Conspiracy

  • Conspiracies no sooner should be formed
  • Than executed.
  • Addison.

  • For all things are less dreadful than they seem.
  • Wordsworth.

  • Conspiracies
  • Like thunder-clouds, should in a moment form
  • And strike, like lightning, ere the sound is heard.
  • Dowe.

  • Oh think what anxious moments pass between
  • The birth of plots, and their last fatal periods;
  • Dh! ’tis a dreadful interval of time,
  • Fill’d up with horror, and big with death.
  • Addison.

  • Between the acting of a dreadful thing,
  • And the first motion, all the interim is
  • Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream;
  • The genius and the mortal instruments
  • Are then in council; and the state of man,
  • Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
  • The nature of an insurrection.
  • Shakespeare.

  • O conspiracy!
  • Shams’t thou to show thy dangerous brow by night,
  • When evils are most free? O, then by day,
  • Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough
  • To mask thy monstrous visage? Seek none, conspiracy,
  • Hide it in smiles and affability:
  • For if thou put thy native semblance on,
  • Not Erebus itself were dim enough
  • To hide thee from prevention.
  • Shakespeare.