Grocott & Ward, comps. Grocott’s Familiar Quotations, 6th ed. 189-?.
Blot
Poets lose half the praise they should have got,
Could it be known what they discreetly blot.
Waller.—On Roscommon’s Translation, De Arte Poetica.
Ev’n copious Dryden wanted, or forgot,
The last and greatest art, the art to blot.
Pope.—To Augustus, Epistle I. Line 280.
Not one immoral, one corrupted thought,
One line which, dying, he could wish to blot.
Lyttleton.—Prologue to Thomson’s Coriolanus, Line 23.
No song
Of mine, from youth to age, has left a stain
I would blot out.
Bowles.—Barnwell Hill, Part V. Line 218.
It is a consolation that from youth to age, I have found no line I wished to blot, or departed a moment from the severer taste which I imbibed from the simplest and purest models of classical composition.
Bowles.—Advertisement to St. John in Patmos.
I will excuse your blots upon paper, because they are the only blots that you ever did or ever will make.
Swift.—To Queensbury, 20th March, 1733.