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.

Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD