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A felon could plead benefit of clergy and be saved by [reading aloud] what was aptly enough termed the neck verse, which was very usually the Miserere mei of Psalm 51.

William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt
Journalist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Painter
Philosopher
Writer
Wm. Haslett
William Carew Hazlitt
Necks
Termed
Benefit
Plead
Saved
Psalms
Benefits
Aloud
Usually
Clergy
Felon
Reading
Verse
Aptly
Book
Verses
Psalm
Enough
Neck
Felons

More quotes by William Hazlitt

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We are fonder of visiting our friends in health than in sickness. We judge less favorably of their characters when any misfortune happens to them and a lucky hit, either in business or reputation, improves even their personal appearance in our eyes.
William Hazlitt
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Perhaps propriety is as near a word as any to denote the manners of the gentleman elegance is necessary to the fine gentleman dignity is proper to noblemen and majesty to kings.
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You shall yourself be judge. Reason, with most people, means their own opinion.
William Hazlitt
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We go on a journey to be free of all impediments to leave ourselves behind much more than to get rid of others
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People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why they are not so for cause, but for secrecy's sake.
William Hazlitt
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The safest kind of praise is to foretell that another will become great in some particular way. It has the greatest show of magnanimity and the least of it in reality.
William Hazlitt
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Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion.
William Hazlitt
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Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.
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To create an unfavorable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but that they have been said.
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To be wiser than other men is to be honester than they and strength of mind is only courage to see and speak the truth.
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The confined air of a metropolis is hurtful to the minds and bodies of those who have never lived out of it. It is impure, stagnant--without breathing-space to allow a larger view of ourselves or others--and gives birth to a puny, sickly, unwholesome, and degenerate race of beings.
William Hazlitt
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Belief is with them mechanical, voluntary: they believe what they are paid for - they swear to that which turns to account. Do you suppose, that after years spent in this manner, they have any feeling left answering to the difference between truth and falsehood?
William Hazlitt
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So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.
William Hazlitt
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There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.
William Hazlitt
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Painters... are the most lively observers of what passes in the world about them, and the closest observers of what passes in their own minds.
William Hazlitt
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The person whose doors I enter with most pleasure, and quit with most regret, never did me the smallest favor.
William Hazlitt
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I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.
William Hazlitt
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Dandyism is a variety of genius.
William Hazlitt
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A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common.
William Hazlitt
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Reflection brakes men cowards. There is no object that can be put in competition with life, unless it is viewed through the medium of passion, and we are hurried away by the impulse of the moment.
William Hazlitt