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More "Epigram" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Drummond on the same subject in a telling epigram. Then Lord Palmerston, in reply to the charges of Mr Horsman, mild and graceful, with a sarcastic touch. The general impression of the House was very favourable to the Ministry; all seemed changed; the Debate had cleared the political atmosphere, and, compared with ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... l'esprit, et toujours de l'esprit—trop d'esprit!" [10] No doubt, La Rochefoucauld has done his own reputation wrong by the bluster of his scepticism and also by the fact that he sometimes wraps his thoughts up in such a blaze of epigram that we are disconcerted to find, when we analyze them, that they are commonplaces. Contemporaries seemed to have smiled at the excessive subtlety into which their long conversations led Mme de La Fayette and her sublime companion. Mme de Sevigne describes such talks with ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... better.... It was simply—I speak of a section, not the party as a whole—the articulate emotion of privileged and contented people and their parasites, and its denomination as 'stupid' was an accurate description, though hardly the brilliant epigram for which, in our poverty of political wit, it has been taken. On the other hand, there was a confident Liberalism which inspired a whole party. Some wished to go faster, some slower, but all believed sincerely in a broad scheme of domestic policy. They were to reform this and ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... truth about mystical dogmas and the truth about Irish bulls; it is also the truth about the paradoxes of Bernard Shaw. Each of them is an argument impatiently shortened into an epigram. Each of them represents a truth hammered and hardened, with an almost disdainful violence until it is compressed into a small space, until it is made brief and almost incomprehensible. The case of ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... clause is intended to be unexpectedly unemphatic, it comes in appropriately, with something of the sting of an epigram. See (42). Thus: ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... the tediousness" of his erudition on the company. Salvator answered him in his own style, and having overturned all his arguments in favor of antiquity with more learning than they had been supported, ended with an impromptu epigram, in his usual way, which brought the laugher's ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... more, meek Eve's fair slenderness. Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly Up to its climax and then dying proudly? Who found for me the grandeur of the ode, Growing, like Atlas, stronger from its load? Who let me taste that more than cordial dram, The sharp, the rapier-pointed epigram? Shew'd me that epic was of all the king, Round, vast, and spanning all like Saturn's ring? You too upheld the veil from Clio's beauty, And pointed out the patriot's stern duty; The might of Alfred, and the shaft ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... arises the instant she quits the dock is, Is she sea-worthy? And with the fate of the Captain and the Vanguard in our memories, the question may well arise. The story of modern war-ships has, up to this, been one of mingled success and failure. Does not the epigram on our war-ships—our "sub-marine fleet"—owe its point and sting, in a measure, to ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... of any sort, Sam had naturally selected it when he concluded to set up shop. If Sam had ever in his life displayed any symptoms of business sagacity, Radville would never have recovered from the shock. I believe it was Legrand Gunn, our only really certificated village wit, who coined the epigram: "As useless as to take a prescription to Graham's." The implication being that Graham didn't carry sufficient stock to fill any prescription; which was largely true; he couldn't; he hadn't the money to stock up with. What ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... I have preserved the balance of sentences and the prose rhyme and rhythm which Easterns look upon as mere music. This "Saj'a," or cadence of the cooing dove, has in Arabic its special duties. It adds a sparkle to description and a point to proverb, epigram and dialogue; it corresponds with our "artful alliteration" (which in places I have substituted for it) and, generally, it defines the boundaries between the classical and the popular styles which jostle each other in The Nights. If at times it ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... Thomas in this single sentence teaches that private property, or the individual occupation of actual land or capital or instruments of wealth, is not contrary to the moral law. Consequently he would repudiate the famous epigram, "La Propriete c'est le vol." Man may hold and dispose of what belongs to him, may have private property, and in no way offend against the principles of justice, whether natural ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... on his Monarchical Republic, or any other! No, he preferred to be sarcastic upon friend Horace, and he had the worst of it. Sarcasm is so silly! What is the gain if he has been smart? People forget the epigram and remember the other's good temper. On that field, my dear, you must make up your mind to be beaten by 'friend Horace'. I have my prejudices and I have my prepossessions, but I love good temper, and I love wit, and when I see a man possessed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Cibber in his famous letter. Those were the days when, in Cibber's phrase, the author of the "Dunciad" was remarkable for his satirical itch of provocation, when there were few upon whom he did not fall in some biting epigram. He so fell upon Ambrose Philips, who forthwith hung a rod up in Button's, and let Pope know that he would use it on him should he ever catch him under that roof. The poet took a more than ample revenge in many a stinging line ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... a song neither, it's a sort of an epigram, or rather an epigrammatic sonnet; I don't know what to call it, but it's satire. ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... Jack Dobson and I were so fond of. And if I did not soon learn to do something well, even were it only how to farm my five hundred acres to a profit, Kate's cooking would really require the miraculous aid suggested in her unintentional and, to me, biting epigram. I put the book down, and gave over the hunt for my Virgil. It would probably be useless in any case, since Kate had a cunning all her own, and had surely bestowed it far beyond any searching of mine. ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... this, perhaps, is a quality, typical of San Francisco, which I can describe only as promiscuity. That promiscuity is in its best phase a frankness; a fearlessness; a gorgeous candor which made possible the epigram that San Francisco has every vice but hypocrisy. Civically, two cross currents cut through the city's life; one of, a high visioned enlightenment which astounds the visiting stranger by its force, its white-fire enthusiasm; the other a black sordidness ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... turned to America, where it was a notorious fact that there were revenue laws that had not been enforced these many years. Mr. Grenville, we may suppose, since it was charged against him in a famous epigram, read the American dispatches with considerable care, so that it is quite possible he may have chanced to see and to shake his head over the sworn statement of Mr. Sampson Toovey, a statement which throws much light upon colonial liberties ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... of one of his paper-books I find an Epigram written at this time, which, though not perhaps particularly good, I consider ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Epigram on an Old Lady who had some Curious Notions respecting the 1 Soul. First published, Letters and Journals, 1830, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... tolerably wise, and more intelligent than his party. "I stick my pins," said Beranger, "into the calves of Louis XVIII." One must have seen the fat king in small-clothes, his legs as big as posts and round as pin-cushions, to appreciate all the point of the epigram. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... since, one of its most decided and irreconcilable assailants. Nor do I think that Mr Arnold would have much relished the apology made, I think, by Mr Leslie Stephen since his death, that its critics "mistake an epigram for a philosophical definition." In the first place, the epigrammatic quality is not clearly apparent; and in the second place, an epigram would in the particular place have been anything but appropriate, while a philosophical definition is exactly ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... be observed that these records of this verse fail to mention the immediate author. Was he unknown at the time? Or did the fact that he was recently a cabinet-minister induce him to hide behind a mask? Turgot was a master of epigram,—as witness the terrible lines on Frederick of Prussia; but he was very prudent in conduct. "Nobody," said Voltaire, "so skilful to launch the shaft without showing the hand." But there is a letter from no ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... of thought, or product of imagination. But to proceed from wit, in the general notion of it, to the proper wit of an heroic or historical poem; I judge it chiefly to consist in the delightful imaging of persons, actions, passions, or things. It is not the jerk or sting of an epigram, nor the seeming contradiction of a poor antithesis (the delight of an ill-judging audience in a play of rhyme) nor the jingle of a more poor Paronomasia; neither is it so much the morality of a grave sentence, affected by Lucan, but more sparingly used by ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... am expressing myself with terrible obscurity—some of you, I know, are groaning over the logic-chopping. Be a pluralist or be a monist, you say, for heaven's sake, no matter which, so long as you stop arguing. It reminds one of Chesterton's epigram that the only thing that ever drives human beings insane is logic. But whether I be sane or insane, you cannot fail, even tho you be transcendentalists yourselves, to recognize to some degree by my trouble the difficulties that beset monistic idealism. What boots it to call the parts and the whole ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... in the tail of Lebrun's epigram struck home. Sieyes' acceptance of Crosne was, in fact, his acceptance of notice to quit public affairs, in which he had always moved with philosophic disdain. He lived on to the year 1836 in dignified ease, surveying with Olympian calm the storms of French ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... interest as a doctor of the Sorbonne might help him to find employment in Paris, we are not told. One of the many stories to his prejudice which were current in his after-career describes Buchanan as dependent on Major and ungrateful to him, repaying with a cruel epigram the kindness shown him. But there seems absolutely no foundation for this accusation which was probably suggested to after-detractors anxious for evidence that ingratitude, as one of them says, "was the great ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... better that he should take her away than that she should go away with a manager who would rob and beat her. But, if he were to take her away, he would be tied to her; it would be like marrying her. Far better stick to married women, and he remembered his epigram of last night. It was at Lady. Ascott's dinner-party, the conversation had turned on marriage, and its necessity had been questioned. "But, of course, marriage is necessary," he had answered. "You can't have husbands without marriage, and if there were no husbands, who would look after ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... of MOORE was subsequently cut by Mr. Croker on the back of a chair which the poet occupied during this visit. It produced the following epigram by the Rev. Francis ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... the name that was given to the anticourt party. The word fronde means a sling, and the origin of its use as a party name is attributed to an epigram. Someone is said to have compared the Frondeurs, as the members of the party were called, to children with slings, who let fly stones and then ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... inclined me quite To peace:—and here I am! Whilst better lions go to war, Enjoying with the lamb A lengthen'd life, that might have been A Martial Epigram. ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... really like that? No wonder Jim ..." She paused. "Why it's just as lovely as he's good!" she cried: an epigram which was appreciated, and repeated as we made our salutations, and called out after the retreating couple as they passed away under ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... it, he ordered the bed of the river to be dragged foot by foot, with the result that the ill-starred Duke of Gandia was brought up in one of the nets, whereupon the heartless Sanazzaro coined his terrible epigram concerning that successor of Saint ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... caring little whether it be correct or the reverse. And the more vivaciously she talks, the more likely she is to be dangerously insincere and cold-hearted, for the very sharpness of her wit is apt to spoil the more delicate perceptions of her nature. Show me a brilliant woman noted for turning an epigram or pointing a satire, and I will show you a creature whose life is a masquerade, full of vanity, sensuality and pride. The man who marries such a one must be content to take the second place in his household, and play ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... take much space to illustrate all the notes to which Hazlitt's voice responds—the pithy epigram of the Characteristics, the Chesterfieldian grace in his advice "On the Conduct of Life," the palpitating movement with which he gives expression to his keen enjoyment of his sensual or intellectual existence, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... near his mother's family at Poole. There at the early age of ten he fell desperately in love with his schoolmaster's daughter, aged fifteen, and was hurt by the levity with which his passion was treated. At the same period he became a poet, composed hymns, and wrote an epigram upon one of his father's creditors. He accompanied his father to the King's Bench Prison, and there Christopher Smart and others petted the lad, lent him books, and encouraged his literary aspirations. During his father's later troubles he managed to keep up ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... together as soon as may be and give us an authoritative definition of Democracy. Then we shall know where, collectively, we are. Of course you may say that it has been defined for all time by Abraham Lincoln. But thrilling in its clear simplicity as his slogan epigram may be, a complex political and social system cannot be fully dealt with in fifteen words. I thought I knew what it was until a tidy few millions of friends and myself were knocked silly by recent events in Russia. Here, where the privates of a regiment hold a mass meeting and discuss for ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... evil, not from good. This subject is indeed so copiously handled by Hegesias, the Cyrenaic philosopher, that he is said to have been forbid by Ptolemy from delivering his lectures in the schools, because some who heard him made away with themselves. There is too, an epigram of Callimachus,(69) on Cleombrotus of Ambracia; who, without any misfortune having befallen him, as he says, threw himself from a wall into the sea, after he had read a boot of Plato's. The book I mentioned of that Hegesias, is called {GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI}{GREEK SMALL LETTER ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... nuff!" he commanded, in the midst of a quaint epigram, which Bebe was delivering with unction. "Audiences don't want to hear smart babble after their seats are all down. They want to see the star and get going. Cut in Miss Hawtry at the second set-to of Harriet and aunt. Take it this way: ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Confucianism has a disputable claim to the title. If the literary classes of China find it sufficient, they do so only by rejecting the emotional and speculative sides of religion. The Emperor Wan-li[562] made a just epigram when he said that Confucianism and Buddhism are like the wings of a bird. Each requires the co-operation of the other. Confucius was an ethical and political philosopher, not a prophet, hierophant or church founder. As a moralist he stands in the first rank, and I doubt if either the ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... doubt as to the iridescent brilliance of the book. Page after page—full of caustic satire, humorous sally and profound epigram—fairly bristles with merriment. The book is a compact mass of scintillating wit."—Philadelphia ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... Methought it were all up with Solomon; and when I see his hat, it seemed to me jest as though I was a regardin with despairin eye his tumestun whereon war graven by no mortial hand the solemn an despairin epigram, 'Hic jacet!' ...
— Lost in the Fog • James De Mille
... faces. Some touch of nature, a sweet undercurrent of life, stays alive in them and is handed down to those who write of them, and the most worthless man that walks the streets of an Ohio or Iowa town may be the father of an epigram that colours all the life of the men about him. In a mining town or deep in the entrails of one of our cities life is different. There the disorder and aimlessness of our American lives becomes a crime for which men pay heavily. Losing step with one another, men lose also a sense ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... delight, and it was long before he liked his Epistles and Satires. He told me what he read SOLIDLY at Oxford was Greek; not the Grecian historians, but Homer and Euripides, and now and then a little Epigram; that the study of which he was the most fond was Metaphysicks, but he had not read much, even in that way. I always thought that he did himself injustice in his account of what he had read, and that he must have been speaking with reference ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... that some fraud might be practised on him. Then he read the letters, divided them into several packets, and signified his pleasure, generally by a mark, often by two or three words, now and then by some cutting epigram. By eight he had generally finished this part of his task. The adjutant-general was then in attendance, and received instructions for the day as to all the military arrangements of the kingdom. Then the King went to review his guards, not as kings ordinarily ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... personally, Carlyle was of course against the North, and perhaps one may say on the side of the South, as shown by his epigram, "The American Iliad in a Nutshell,"—one of the few instances (if I may trust my own opinion concerning so great a genius) in which even his immense power of humor and pointed illustration has fallen flat and let ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... prime minister, whose last breath was spent in scolding his nurse, dies with a magnificent apothegm on his lips, manufactured by a reporter. Addison gets up a tableau and utters an admirable sentiment,—or somebody makes the posthumous dying epigram for him. The incoherent babble of green fields is translated into the language of stately sentiment. One would think, all that dying men had to do was to say the prettiest thing they could,—to make their rhetorical point,—and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... had refused a seat in the Cabinet in order to preserve an absolute independence. He had a remarkable gift of taciturnity, which in a man of his class made for strength, and it was concerning him that the Prime Minister had made his famous epigram, that Furley was the Labour man whom he feared the most and ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... describes,[60] and whom he seems ambitious to outstrip. The riddles of Symphosius are uniformly of three hexameter lines, those of Aldhelm vary in length from four lines to sixteen; rarely more. The external structure is that of the Epigram, with the object speaking in the first person. The riddles both of Symphosius and Aldhelm are so closely identified with the vernacular riddles of the famous Exeter Song Book, that the reader may be glad of a specimen from each author. ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... paying audiences in the fall or autumn of the year. These lectures have been delivered many times in Australia; and, as the result of the Browning lecture given in the Unitarian Schoolroom in Wakefield street, Adelaide, I received from the pen of Mr. J. B. Mather a clever epigram. The room was large and sparsely filled, and to the modest back seat taken by my friend my voice scarcely penetrated. So he amused himself and me ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... back him at a Rebus or a Charade against the best Rhymer in the Kingdom—has your Ladyship heard the Epigram he wrote last week on Lady Frizzle's Feather catching Fire—Do Benjamin repeat it—or the Charade you made last Night extempore at Mrs. Drowzie's conversazione—Come now your first is the Name of a Fish, your second ...
— The School For Scandal • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... the local press interviewer. Uncle Piper, on the other hand, is introduced, as all of Tasma's characters are, in sundry solid-looking pages of direct narrative. It is true that their humour and epigram make bright reading, but they are necessarily without the power of pithy dialogue to create a ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... which has stated, among other symptoms of rebellion, some particulars of the sensation occasioned in all our government gazettes by the 'tear' lines,—only amplifying, in its re-statement, an epigram (by the by, no epigram except in the Greek acceptation of the word) into a roman. I wonder the Couriers, &c. &c., have not translated that part of the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... time; and the music had the faculty of luring his thoughts astray, being, as he was, fonder of music than of work. As a matter of fact, it was in this little restaurant that he winnowed the day's ideas, revamped scenes, trimmed the rough edges of his climaxes, revised this epigram or rejected this or that line; all on the backs of envelopes and on the margins of newspapers. In his den at his bachelor apartments, he worked; but here he dreamed, usually behind the soothing, opalescent veil of ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... Louis XIV., had an unsightly defect. The Princess of Eboli, the mistress of Philip II. of Spain, and Maugiron, the minion of Henry III. of France, had each of them lost an eye; and the famous Latin epigram was written upon them, which has, I believe, been either ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... endless talk. He was fond of telling stories, and he told them with a good deal of grace and humour. He held his own fairly with the wits of his Court, and bandied repartees on equal terms with Sedley or Buckingham. Even Rochester in his merciless epigram was forced to own that Charles "never said a foolish thing." He had inherited in fact his grandfather's gift of pithy sayings, and his habitual irony often gave an amusing turn to them. When his brother, the most unpopular man in England, solemnly warned him of plots against his ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... interval entered the young man whom I call "king of the profligates." The Comte Henri de Marsay, who has great beauty of an effeminate kind, entered the box with an epigram in his eyes, a smile upon his lips, and an air of satisfaction over his whole countenance. He first greeted my mother, Mme. d'Espard, and the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, the Comte d'Esgrignon, and M. de Canalis; then turning to me, ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... Ariovistus and the Germans ('The Gallic Wars') On the Manners and Customs of Ancient Gauls and Germans (same) The Two Lieutenants (same) Epigram on Terentius ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... that composed the mandates (the cahiers) which the Deputies carried with them to the National Assembly. He forgot the famines, the exactions, the oppressive privileges which made revolt, and saw only the pathos of the Queen's helplessness before it. In Paine's immortal epigram, he "pitied the plumage and forgot the dying bird." But it is paradoxically true that while he pursued the friends of humanity, his real impulse was the hatred of cruelty which modern men call humanitarian. To that hatred he was always true. No abstract ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... Of course he was unable to conceal his act, and his conduct, and that of his spiritual advisers, became a just reproach to the cause. As no material advantages were lost by it, Philip might have reversed the epigram of Francis I and have said that "nothing was lost but honor." Neither Germany nor Hesse nor the Protestant church suffered directly by his act. [Sidenote: 1541] Indeed it lead indirectly to another territorial gain. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Horace has embalmed in an epithet, a line, an ode; Varius, and Sulpicius, and Plotius, and Fonteius Capito, and Viscus; but he saw also and utilized for himself and for his master the social influence which a rising poet might wield, the effect with which a bold epigram might catch the public ear, a well-conceived eulogy minister to imperial popularity, an eloquent sermon, as in the noble opening odes of Horace's third book, put vice out of countenance and raise the tone of a ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... said little—'t was the rest that broke Forth into universal epigram; But then 't was to the purpose what she spoke: Like Addison's 'faint praise,' so wont to damn, Her own but served to set off every joke, As music chimes in with a melodrame. How sweet the task to shield an absent friend! I ask but this of mine, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... for an epigram; the lady's husband was jealous, he thought; he reddened under it, looked in the glass and tried to give ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... catalogue is missing. In a letter to Coleridge, December 2, 1796, Lamb refers to a poem which has apparently perished, beginning, "Laugh, all that weep." I have left in the correspondence the rhyming letters to Ayrton and Dibdin, and an epigram on "Coelebs in Search of a Wife." I have placed the dedication to Coleridge at the beginning of this volume, although it belongs properly only to those poems that are reprinted from the Works of 1818, the prose of which Lamb offered to Martin Burney. But it is too fine to be put among ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... given that season by the women of forty as "The Hags' Hop." Somebody else had called it "The Roaring Forties." Which was the better description of the two? "The Roaring Forties" seemed a little pretentious, and preference was given to the more natural epigram, "The Hags' Hop." ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... strains and convulsions, and some astonishing bombast, which men only, till they understand, are scared with. A verse or some such work he may sometimes get up to, but seldom above the stature of an epigram, and that with some relief out of Martial, which is the ordinary companion of his pocket, and he reads him as he were inspired. Such men are commonly the trifling things of the world, good to make merry the company, and whom only men ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... influence of Elie de Beaumont and of Flourens—the former of whom is said to have "damned himself to everlasting fame" by inventing the nickname of "la science moussante" for Evolutionism (One is reminded of the effect of another small academic epigram. The so-called vertebral theory of the skull is said to have been nipped in the bud in France by the whisper of an academician to his neighbour, that, in that case, one's head was a "vertebre pensante."),—to say nothing of the ill-will of other powerful members of the Institut, produced for ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... moment in order to enjoy the flavour of his epigram; but Gerty was too much in earnest to waste her animated ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... short-lived splendour, Flashed the ready epigram, Thoughts we uttered, soft and tender, Ending in a smothered "——"; All the truths and lies of ages Compassed we in one short breath, Flouted whims of priests and sages, Lightly toyed with ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... point is concerned with Dr. Johnson's position apart from all this fund of anecdote, and this brilliant collection of unforgettable epigram in Boswell and elsewhere. As a writer, many will tell you, Dr. Johnson is dead. The thing is absurd on the face of it. There is room for some disagreement as to his position as a poet. On that question of ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... early in life, and then her husband soon after her son had been born. She had faced a tough fight, and had thought to spare him what she herself had gone through. Too bad she hadn't realized exactly what she was doing. She was bringing him up with the ability, as the old epigram had it, to resist ...
— Divinity • William Morrison
... Dryden, a better critic than poet, Milton's repute was the work of the Whigs. The first edition de luxe of Paradise Lost (1688) was brought out by a subscription got up by the "Whig leader, Lord Somers. In this edition Dryden's pinchbeck epigram ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... the battle of Cynos Cephalas (the Dog-heads), was the following epigram, composed by Alcaeus in mockery of Philip, exaggerating ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... literature for the monk. The books used in the cathedral schools were similar. Such schools and such libraries were for the glory of God and the increase of clergy and religious. At first, especially, the ideal of the monks was high, if narrow. It is epitomised in the untranslatable epigram—Claustrum sine armario (est) quasi castrum sine armamentario.[1] "The library is the monastery's true treasure," writes Thomas a Kempis;[2] "without which the monastery is like . . . a well without water . . . an unwatched tower." Again: "Let ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... nothing.' The honest man did so, but the other cried out, See, gentlemen! what a thief we have among us! look, he is stealing my handkerchief.' The plagiarism of this person gave occasion to the following epigram; ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... mean!" said Frau Karschin, while Goethe re-read the cutting epigram. "That is just like Rammler; his tongue is like a two-edged sword for every one but himself, and he fans his own glories, and does not know that he is a fool. Frederick the Great himself called him so. One of his generals called his ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... district still remained very imperfectly opened up. The only practicable roads were those which had been made by the soldiery after the rebellions of 1715 and '45, through counties which before had been inaccessible except by dangerous footpaths across high and rugged mountains. An old epigram in vogue at the end of last century ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... Prospect of Death Verses—"When pride and envy, and the scorn" Fragment—"Oh! thou most fatal of Pandora's train" "Loud rage the winds without.—The wintry cloud" To a Friend in Distress Christmas Day Nelsoni Mors Epigram on Robert Bloomfield Elegy occasioned by the Death of Mr. Gill, who was drowned in the River Trent, while bathing Inscription for a Monument to the Memory of Cowper "I'm pleased, and yet I'm sad" Solitude "If far from me the Fates remove" "Fanny! upon thy breast ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... his shouldering of the responsibilities which belong to one of a great community. From the individual he passed to the nation, sketching in a few nervous but brilliant phrases the exact possibilities of socialistic legislation; and he wound up with a parodied epigram: Government, he declared, was philosophy teaching by failures. In the end, Miller led fourteen of his once numerous followers into the Government lobby to find himself by forty ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... day. From all which, one has to infer, That the mutual salutation by hat was probably a fact; that, for certain, there was some slight preliminary talk and gesticulation, but in the Homeric style, by no means in the Espagnac-French,—not chivalrous epigram at all, mere rough banter, and what is called "chaffing;"—and in short, that the French Mess-rooms (with their eloquent talent that way) had rounded off the thing into the current epigrammatic redaction; the authentic business-form of it being ruggedly ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... given to the company by the "teacher" and those joining in the game are each to define the subject in as terse a manner as possible, in epigram or verse, written on a slip of paper. The cards are then signed, turned in and the "teacher" reads the definitions. Then the company are to decide which one of the definitions has the greatest merit. For instance, the word "Friendship" is given and the ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... been. The popular idea that life is a shimmy is a dangerous illusion." Mr. Prohack felt the epigram to be third-rate, but he carried ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... Woman in Epigram. Flashes of Wit, Wisdom and Satire from the World's Literature. Compiled by ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... asked to DEFINE a savage. He cannot be defined in an epigram, but by way of choice of ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... been allowed to disappear through the negligence and slovenliness of the monks. Pope Leo I. erected in the centre of the quadri-portico a fountain crowned by a Bacchic Kantharos, and wrote on its epistyle a brilliant epigram, inviting the faithful to purify themselves bodily and spiritually, before presenting themselves to the apostle within. When Cola di Rienzo visited the spot, towards the middle of the fourteenth century, ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... call them, if you please, epigram, are of the composition of Barclay, or Barclaius, author ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... I quoted above, was a teacher of Koranic readings, a grammarian and a philologer, who taught in Baghdad in the ninth century. He was also a famous satirist; but satire seems to have been easier then than now. So at least I gather from the epigram which Al-Yazidi wrote upon Al-Asmai Al-Bahili: You who pretend to draw your origin from Asma, tell me how you are connected with that noble race. Are you not a man whose genealogy, if verified, proves that you descend from Bahila? "This last verse," said Ibn Al-Munajjim, "is one of the most ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... date his bones were removed to Orchomenos." An unhappy ending for the instructor of Perses! But it may not be true. To be sure, these poets—I can only say that to me it sounds improbable, and so, I take it, it sounded to Alkaeus of Messene, who wrote this epigram upon his dust: ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... Sansthanaka and Maitreya and Madanika are citizens of the world. In some of the more striking characteristics of Sanskrit literature—in its fondness for system, its elaboration of style, its love of epigram—Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti are far truer to their native land than is Shudraka. In Shudraka we find few of those splendid phrases in which, as the Chinese[6] say, "it is only the words which stop, the ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... the events of his life has long been in direct opposition to the character impressed on his writings; and Macaulay, who gave to the popular opinion its most emphatic and sparkling expression, increased this difference by exaggerating the opposite elements of the human epigram, and ended in manufacturing the most brilliant monstrosity that ever bore the name of a person. Lord Campbell followed with a biography having all the appearance of conscientious research and judicial impartiality, but ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... related by M. de Blainvilliers to be little worthy of belief, showing by a circumstance mentioned in the letter that the imprisoned man could not be the Duc de Beaufort; witness the epigram of Madame de Choisy, "M. de Beaufort longs to bite and can't," whereas the peasants had seen the prisoner's teeth through his mask. It appeared as if the theory of Sainte-Foix were going to stand, when a Jesuit father, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the epigram out of her mouth when the door opened, and an emissary of Don Gusman announced to her that she must consider herself under arrest. She demanded an explanation in vain, and was immediately removed ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... steady for him to finish a rose-leaf or the fold of a nymph's drapery in his best manner; and they will be unsteadied if he has to perform the honest drudgery which another can do for him quite as well. And it is just so with the poet, though he were only finishing an epigram; you must no more meddle roughly with him than you would shake a bottle of Chambertin and expect the "sunset glow" to redden your glass unclouded. On the other hand, it may be said that poetry is not an article of prime necessity, and potatoes ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... youthful training as shaped the development of his character; depict, with wise restraint, his political and public life: but also, and above all, re-clothe him "in his habit as he lived," as friends and associates knew him; recover his traits of voice and manner, his conversational wit or wisdom, epigram or paradox, his explosions of sarcasm and his eccentricities of reserve, his words of winningness and acts of kindness: and, since one half of his life was social, introduce us to the companions who shared his lighter hour and evoked his ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... the friend of Izaak Walton and the admirer of Herbert, has in his poems some lines which breathe almost as rapturous a passion of spiritual love as anything in Crashaw. Such is his epigram on the Insatiableness of ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... fecit olim homo,"&c. A very curious epigram to this effect was placed upon "Pasquin" while the writer was in Rome, during a past winter. It was as follows:- "Perchè Eva mangio il pomo Iddio per riscattarci si fece uomo, Ed ora il Nono Pio Per ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... is the jaunty little man in the funny, straight- brimmed high hat—cousin to the hat John D. Long wore for twenty years. This man in the long black coat, carrying a bamboo wand, who adjusts his monocle and throws off an epigram, who confounds the critics, befogs the lawyers, affronts millionaires from Colorado, and plays pitch and toss with words, is the Whistler known to newspaperdom. And Grub Street calls him "Jimmy," too, but the voice of Grub Street is guttural and in it is no tender cadence—it is ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... In another epigram he derides the city itself, calling it contemptuously "Urbicula"; and he suggests, with a humour that to modern ideas savours of irreverence, that this little city of S. Peter's, "Petropolis," unless S. Peter had the keys, would run away through ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... sculptor who worked there, whoever he may have been, had profited doubtless by the study of Myron's famous work. For what purpose he made it, does not appear;—as [286] an architectural ornament; or a votive offering; perhaps only because he liked making it. In hyperbolic epigram, at any rate, the animal breathes, explaining sufficiently the point of Pliny's phrase regarding Myron—Corporum curiosus. And when he came to his main business with the quoit-player, the wrestler, the runner, he did not for a moment forget that they too ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... those who love Plain-dealing.' So she comes before us. A graceful, comely woman,[53] merry and buxom, with brown hair and bright eyes, candid, sincere, a brilliant conversationalist in days when conversation was no mere slipshod gabble of slang but cut and thrust of poignant epigram and repartee; warm-hearted, perhaps too warm-hearted, and ready to lend a helping hand even to the most undeserving, a quality which gathered all Grub Street round her door. At a period when any and every writer, mean or great, of whatsoever merit or party, was continually assailed with vehement ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... clamour of war, and all it represented, stimulated Erasmus's satirical faculties. It is true that he flattered the English national pride by an epigram on the rout of the French near Guinegate, but soon he went deeper. He remembered how war had impeded his movements in Italy; how the entry of the pope-conqueror, Julius II, into Bologna had outraged his feelings. 'The high priest Julius wages ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... eaten, and causeth fearful dreams, so doth all venison, and is condemned by a jury of physicians. Mizaldus and some others say, that hare is a merry meat, and that it will make one fair, as Martial's epigram testifies to Gellia; but this is per accidens, because of the good sport it makes, merry company and good discourse that is commonly at the eating of it, and not otherwise to ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... an inferior workman, it is in danger of becoming flat, pointless, and insipid: and Horace has many passages which, if not flat, pointless, or insipid in themselves, are painfully liable to become so in the hands of a translator. I have accordingly on various occasions aimed at epigram and pungency when there was nothing epigrammatic or pungent in the Latin, in full confidence that any trifling additions which may be made in this way to the general sum of liveliness will be far ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... conjunction with the former two is a mere delusion of words. It is not properly a rule, but in itself the great end not only of the drama, but of the epic poem, the lyric ode, of all poetry, down to the candle-flame cone of an epigram,—nay, of poesy in general, as the proper generic term inclusive of all the fine arts as its species. But of the unities of time and place, which alone are entitled to the name of rules, the history of their origin will be their best criterion. You might take the Greek chorus to ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... slaughtered by the thousand." The essential difference between the German soldiers and our own is in the officering and training, and it is admirably expressed by Private Burrell, Northumberland Fusiliers. "We are led; they are driven,"[F] is Burrell's epigram. ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... an epigram in Martial, and one of the very good ones—for he has of all sorts—where he pleasantly tells the story of Caelius, who, to avoid making his court to some great men of Rome, to wait their rising, and to attend them abroad, pretended to have the gout; and the better to colour this anointed ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... in manner, moderate in speech. Nevertheless, perhaps therefore, made it clear that PREMIER'S overtures, unloved by his followers, will not be welcomed by Opposition. CARSON, who had enthusiastic reception from Unionists, flashed forth epigram that put Ulster's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... well-thumbed copy of the "Social Contract." marked and re- marked on page and margin. Paine and Jefferson were the only men connected with the strenuous times of Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six who had a distinct literary style—who worked epigram and antithesis. And the style of each is identical with the other. That Paine wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence needs no argument for the literary connoisseur—he simply says, "Read ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... seeming as if at every moment he would annihilate his antagonist; Disraeli, with marvellous skill and exquisite adroitness, bringing the rapier of his wit to bear upon his opponent, and again and again pinking him with some stinging epigram or smart retort that set all the Tory benches roaring with delight. It made one's young blood grow warmer to watch the struggle from the impartial ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... belong to the political history of the country; to the history of American science belong his celebrated experiments in electricity; and his benefits to mankind in both of these departments were aptly summed up in the famous epigram ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... "What an admirable epigram!" cried the Hibernian, to whom flattery was second nature. "I shall put that down in my commonplace book when I go home. How I wish you would honour me—but it is to ask too much, perhaps—how proud I should be if ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... society in the neighbourhood; he was persuaded to prolong his stay: his mind, which had been continually harassed, now enjoyed some tranquillity. On an unlucky evening, he recollected Martial's famous epigram and his wife, in one and ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... Restoration Dr. John Fell was appointed Vice-Chancellor, and he not only made the examinations very severe, but he made the examiners keep up to his standard, and was cordially hated by some of the students on that account. An epigram made about him at that time has been ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... nay, nay of Scripture. In their clothing, their homes, their churches, they, and in even more marked degree, the Quakers, registered their solemn protest against the frivolity of the times. If they went too far, it is certain their protest was needed. Macaulay's epigram is familiar, that the Puritan "hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators." In so far as that is true, it is to the credit of the Puritan; for the bear can stand the pain of being baited far better ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... bitter wit once remarked that the soul, if it were ever discovered, would be found embodied in the gastric juice. He was not altogether a fool, this man who had learnt in suffering what he taught in epigram; yet was he ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... one end of the stage to the other; he would crouch and bend as if he were going to spring upon the audience, a long, skinny finger would be shaken before their faces, or pointed as if to drive his words into their hearts. His speech was a torrent of epigram, sarcasm, invective. He was bitter; if you knew nothing about the man or his cause, you would find this repellent and shocking. You had to know what his life had been—an unceasing conflict with oppression; he had got his Socialist education in jail, where ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... large, of so intense a black, and of such sparkling lustre. His manners, too, were then admirable; easy without negligence, and respectful, as the guest at a royal table, without a shadow of servility. He also was wholly free from that affectation of epigram, which tempts a man who cannot help knowing that his good things are recorded. He laughed, and listened, and rambled through the common topics of the day, with all the evidence of one enjoying the moment, and glad to contribute to its ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... cities, presented the same appearance of prosperity. Yet if you ask for signs, there are surely many to be seen. I am anxious," he continued, gazing around him with an air of bland enjoyment, "to avoid anything in the nature of an epigram. There is nothing so unconvincing, so stultifying to one's statements, as to express them epigrammatically. People at once give you credit for an attempt at intellectual gymnastics which takes no regard to the truth. I will not, therefore, weary you with a diatribe upon the condition of that ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of controversy through all the paces of paradox and persiflage. And, when the whim changes, it is most easy and delightfully disconcerting to play with the respectable and cowardly bourgeois fetishes and to laugh and epigram at the flitting god-ghosts and the debaucheries and ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... us further in his life of S. Felix (c. 693) that that bishop built a Salutatorium (? Sacristy), "whence the bishop and his assistants proceeded at the Introit of the Mass into the presence of the people." But the Epigram which Agnellus quotes from this building would seem to suggest that the salutatorium was rather then rebuilt than added for the first ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... Tres Selecti Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum, 1707, folio, p. 27, &c.) the said Neander is described as a native of Sorau, in Bohemia, and as dying in his 70th year, A.D. 1595, having been forty-five years Principal of the monastery of St. Ildefonso. A list of his works, and a laudatory Greek epigram, by Budaeus, "UPON HIS ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... this morning a singular proof of Dr. Johnson's quick and retentive memory. Hay's translation of Martial was lying in a window. I said, I thought it was pretty well done, and shewed him a particular epigram, I think, of ten, but am certain of eight, lines. He read it, and tossed away the book, saying—'No, it is not pretty well.' As I persisted in my opinion, he said, 'Why, Sir, the original is thus,'—(and he repeated it;) 'and this man's translation is ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... and upbraided M. de Lude with the part which he had acted, desiring him never again to enter a house which he sought only to dishonour; an accusation which, from the lips of the husband of Marie Touchet, was a mere epigram. He, however, followed up this demonstration by removing his daughter from Malesherbes to Marcoussis, although with what intention it is difficult to determine, as the King at once proceeded thither, and ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... ideal host, quiet, benevolent, anxious that people should enjoy themselves in their own way, and yet with a genial firmness of administration which is the greatest of all luxuries if it co-exists with much liberty. He was not a great talker, though he occasionally uttered a witty epigram, often of a somewhat caustic kind; but the air of serene benevolence with which he used to preside always set people at their ease. There was, too, another friend, who was there less often, but who shared the expense of the house, who was a singularly charming and stimulating ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... by Mr. H.G. WELLS, is not a sustained thesis but just jets of comment and flashes of epigram about the War as he has seen it on the French, Italian and British fronts, and has thought about it in peaceful Essex. A characteristic opening chapter, "The Passing of the Effigy," suggests that "the Kaiser ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 28, 1917 • Various
... to my memory after reading in your last number the translation of the epigram by Pasidippus in the article on "Fronte capillata," &c.; it is many years since I read them, but have forgotten where. Can you or any of your correspondents inform me who is the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... when a preacher tells a story. There are very solemn persons who gravely disapprove when the sermon contains a touch of humour which causes a ripple of laughter in the holy place. Some people, again, hate an epigram, and say "the preacher is trying to be smart." It is impossible to please all the critics. The great business of the preacher is to get his work done; and if by a story, a touch of humour or of sarcasm, the use of any gift, he can, keeping within the ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... and in his library was a well-thumbed copy of the "Social Contract." marked and re- marked on page and margin. Paine and Jefferson were the only men connected with the strenuous times of Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six who had a distinct literary style—who worked epigram and antithesis. And the style of each is identical with the other. That Paine wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence needs no argument for the literary connoisseur—he simply says, "Read it." But while we know that both Paine and Jefferson fed on Rousseau ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... forty minutes. Avoiding flights of eloquence that were wont to entrance Gladstone's audience on Budget nights, resisting temptation to epigram that beset Mr. Chancellor Lowe, was content with plain business statement. The massive figures dealt with, the millions lightly scattered there and sedulously picked up here, left some passages obscure. Son Austen well advised in reserving criticism till he had opportunity ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... If Sam had ever in his life displayed any symptoms of business sagacity, Radville would never have recovered from the shock. I believe it was Legrand Gunn, our only really certificated village wit, who coined the epigram: "As useless as to take a prescription to Graham's." The implication being that Graham didn't carry sufficient stock to fill any prescription; which was largely true; he couldn't; he hadn't the money to stock up with. What ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... show inclined me quite To peace:—and here I am! Whilst better lions go to war, Enjoying with the lamb A lengthen'd life, that might have been A Martial Epigram. ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... wealth than wisdom." All the characters in the book, which is roughly in the form of a novel, speak in this way, sometimes in sentences long drawn out which are oppressively monotonous and tedious, and sometimes shortly with a certain approach to epigram. The second characteristic of the style is the reference of every stated fact to some classical authority, that is to say, the author cannot mention friendship without quoting David and Jonathan, nor can lovers ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... against Volney. Some one mentioned that you had a temper and were proud as Lucifer. 'He's such a hothead. How'll he take it?' asks Beauclerc. 'Why, quarterly, to be sure!' cries Selwyn. And that reminds me: George has written an epigram that is going the rounds. Out of some queer whim—to keep them warm I suppose—Madame Bellevue took her slippers to bed with her. Some one told it at the club, so Selwyn sat down and ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... for illustration or refutation in the heat of some strenuous argument; caricatures in the same medium, some of them trenchantly like, of the customers as well as of certain artistic celebrities, whose laurels Brodonowski's had not approved, varied here and there by an epigram or a ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... not fair play to require them to be like other human people. Their deepest feeling is for the arts; and, as everyone had declared, they are farceurs in their tragedies, tragic in their comedies. They prepare the last epigram in the tumbril; they drown themselves with enthusiasm about the alliance with Russia. In death they are witty; in war they have poetic spasms; in love they ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... omits the epigram. It is the forty-seventh epigram of the twelfth book, and is translated thus in Henry G. Bohn's Epigrams of Martial (London, 1877): "You are at once morose and agreeable, pleasing and repulsive. I can neither ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... with Johnson. At no time had there been the slightest intimacy between the great nobleman and the poor author. Chesterfield had never seen Johnson eat. The letter in which the character is drawn opens with the epigram: ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... settled; Henning drew his ill-composed cartoon of "Parliamentary Candidates under Different Heads," roughly done, but not ill-cut; and Mark Lemon, Henry Mayhew, Henry Grattan, Joseph Allen, F. G. Tomlins, Gilbert a Beckett, and W. H. Wills (the biting epigram "To the Black-balled of the United Service Club," i.e. Lord Cardigan, was his), all contributed to the first number. It is an axiom of newspaper conductors that "the first number is always the worst number," and Punch ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... formality, a suspicion that they were not quite spontaneous and unbidden, but that they were carved, so to speak, with disproportionate labour by a potent man of letters whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is for these reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity and emotion which we usually associate with lyrical poetry. There are no such epitaphs as Ben Jonson's, witness the ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... as if there were something reprehensible in an artist's pleasing the public. This notion might seem to have some basis in view of the taste that is affected to-day—a predilection for all that is shocking and displeasing in all the arts, including poetry. Sorcieres's epigram—the ugly is beautiful and the beautiful ugly—has become a programme. People are no longer content with merely admiring atrocities, they even speak with contempt of beauties hallowed by time and ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... answer, though he was not one who often let an epigram go by without a counter-thrust; but he could see that the girl was struggling towards a sincerity of expression much as a frightened horse crosses a bridge which spans a roaring waterfall, ready to bolt at the first ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... in those years Blackwood's and the New Monthly Magazine, and as I read every line of them, they were to me a vast source of knowledge. I remember an epigram by "Martial in London" ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... find that the city of Aberdeen has presented Dr Johnson with the freedom of that place, for he has sold his freedom on this side of the Tweed for a pension.' The definition of oats in the Dictionary is brought up against its author, and Bozzy is also attacked in a doggerel epigram on his Corsican Tour and his system of spelling. But the doctor easily maintained his conversational supremacy over his academic hosts, who 'started not a single mawkin for ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... you. . . . I have no compunction at all in reviving this Satire upon the old Banker, whom it is only paying off in his own Coin. Spedding (of course) used to deny that R. deserved his ill Reputation: but I never heard any one else deny it. All his little malignities, unless the epigram on Ward be his, are dead along with his little sentimentalities; while Byron's Scourge hangs over his Memory. The only one who, so far as I have seen, has given any idea of his little cavilling style, is Mrs. Trench in ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... face. He might embrace her and make love. It would perhaps flatter, please her. She fancied him a man of astounding genius. She had practically memorized his book. Thus, one had only to smile humorlessly, permit one's eyes to grow enigmatic, and think of a proper epigram. He recalled for an instant the two women who had succumbed to his technique since he had left America. They blurred in his memory and became offensive. Yet Matty had been of service and perhaps her moodiness was caused by a suppressed affection. ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... suggested by the following epigram of Dionysius "Roses are blooming on thy cheek, with roses thy basket is laden, Which dost thou sell? The flowers? Thyself? Or both, my ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the members of the body politic. Royal power was thus the most natural and the most effective instrument for suppressing anarchy and rebellion. James I summarized his idea of government in the famous Latin epigram, "a deo rex, a rege lex, "—"the king is from God, and law ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... this saying when, in his epigram on Goldsmith, speaking of the ideas of which his ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... tyranny of those whom nature had fitted only for slavery? What are the French? "The French," answers one of the epigrams of the Misogallo, "have always been puppets; formerly puppets in powder, now stinking and blood-stained puppets." "We indeed are slaves," says another epigram, "but at least indignant slaves" (a statement which the whole history of Italy in the nineties goes to disprove); "not, as you Gauls always have been and always will be, slaves applauding power whatever it be." The nasal and guttural pronunciation of the French language, the bare ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... in 1806, but he lived long enough to hear the splendid eloquence of Grattan, rich in imagination, metaphor, and epigram; and to open the doors of the official hierarchy to George Canning. Trained by Pitt, and in many gifts and graces his superior, Canning first displayed his full greatness after the death of his illustrious master. For twenty years he was the most accomplished debater ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... quarrel with the family of Rohan. Then the poet applied to the court for redress, but got none. It is said that Voltaire's enemies had persuaded the prime minister that his petitioner was the author of a certain epigram, addressed to His Excellency's mistress, in which she was reminded that it is easy to deceive a one-eyed Argus. (The minister had but one eye.) Finally Voltaire, seeing that no one else would take up his quarrel, began to take fencing lessons and to keep boisterous ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... This epigram is illustrated by the following conversation, which passed between Bouvart and a French marquis, whom he had attended during a long and severe indisposition. As he entered the chamber on a certain occasion, he was thus addressed by his patient: "Good day to you, Mr. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... 'everybody is talking about him' is a eulogy. To say 'every one is talking about her' is an elegy," is no longer true, more's the pity. More's the pity, I mean, because such a delicious bit deserves a longer life. I could weep over the early death of an epigram with a hearty spirit, which is second only to the grief I feel at a good story spoiled for relation's sake. Cleverness, like beauty, is its own excuse for being, and the first attribute of the new woman is her cleverness. It is the new woman who is responsible for the death of that epigram. But ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... said Fanny, blushing, "you are desperately gallant to-day, and just to shame you, and show how little of an angel I am, I will read the doctor's epigram:— ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... found, in a strange American book,[24] some descriptions which may be applied to his odd expression of eye. Monsieur Edmond About's mouth was sneering and sensual, and even then affected Voltaire's sarcastic grimace. His bitter and equivocal smile put you in mind of the grinding of an epigram-mill. One could detect in his attitude, his physiognomy, and his language, that obsequious malice, that familiarity, at the same time flattering and jeering, which Voltaire turned to such good account in his commerce with the great people of his day, and which his disciple was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... exclaimed. "D'you know, Katharine, that ridiculous goose came to tea with me? Oh, how I wanted you! He tried to make epigrams all the time, and I got so nervous, expecting them, you know, that I spilt the tea—and he made an epigram about that!" ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... never have arisen but for what we can only call the indefensible conduct of the King. It pains us to say such things, but, speaking as we do in the public interests (I plagiarise from Barker's famous epigram), we shall not shrink because of the distress we may cause to any individual, even the most exalted. At this crucial moment of our country, the voice of the People demands with a single tongue, 'Where is the King?' What ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... letter to his cousin Honor Driden,[31] would have been enough to assure us, even without his own testimony, that Cowley was the darling of his youth; and that he imitated his points of wit, and quirks of epigram, with a similar contempt for the propriety of their application. From these poems, we learn enough to be grateful, that Dryden was born at a later period in his century; for had not the road to fame been altered in consequence of the Restoration, his extensive information ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... concetto^, plaisanterie [Fr.], brilliant idea; merry thought, bright thought, happy thought; sally; flash of wit, flash of merriment; scintillation; mot [Fr.], mot pour rire [Fr.]; witticism, smart saying, bon-mot, jeu d'esprit [Fr.], epigram; jest book; dry joke, quodlibet, cream of the jest. word-play, jeu de mots [Fr.]; play of words, play upon words; pun, punning; double entente, double entendre &c (ambiguity) 520 [Fr.]; quibble, verbal quibble; conundrum &c (riddle) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... own." Here it is well to note that St. Thomas in this single sentence teaches that private property, or the individual occupation of actual land or capital or instruments of wealth, is not contrary to the moral law. Consequently he would repudiate the famous epigram, "La Propriete c'est le vol." Man may hold and dispose of what belongs to him, may have private property, and in no way offend against the principles of justice, whether ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... literature of adjectives, that declamatory exaggeration, that splendid show of erudition borrowed from D'Israeli, and credited to Lord Bacon and the rest, which have suggested to our friends of the Medical Journals an occasional epigram at our expense. Hence the tendency in these productions, and in medical lectures generally, to overstate the efficacy of favorite methods of cure, and hence the premium offered for showy talkers rather than sagacious observers, for the men of adjectives rather than of nouns substantive ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... they exercised the muse. He saw Tragedy conspicuous in a grave solemnity of regard; Satire louring in a frown of envy and discontent; Elegy whining in a funeral aspect; Pastoral dozing in a most insipid languor of face; Ode-writing delineated in a distracted stare; and Epigram squinting with a pert sneer. Perhaps our hero refined too much in his penetration, when he affirmed, that, over and above these discoveries, he could plainly perceive the state of every one's finances, and would have undertaken ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... the "Beggars' Opera," which was produced about four years after the date of this history, rewarded him for all his previous disappointments, though it did not fully justify the well-known epigram, alluding to himself and the manager, and "make Gay rich, and Rich gay." At the time of his present introduction, his play of "The Captives," had just been produced at Drury Lane, and he was meditating his "Fables," which were published ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... to the company by the "teacher" and those joining in the game are each to define the subject in as terse a manner as possible, in epigram or verse, written on a slip of paper. The cards are then signed, turned in and the "teacher" reads the definitions. Then the company are to decide which one of the definitions has the greatest merit. For instance, the word "Friendship" is given and ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... he was not the equal of even a police court lawyer. The spectators seemed to know that something was wrong, though they could not tell just what it was. Kahn's colleagues whispered among themselves. He made his points, but they lacked the fire and dash and audacity that once had caused the epigram that Kahn's appearance in court indicated two things—the guilt of the accused ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... our eccentric author treats us to a dazzling flood of epigram, invective, and what appears to be argument; and finally leaves us without a single clear idea as to what he has been ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... Negro Courting onto a maid, That was most Fair; to him she said, Thy Ink, my Papper, make me guess, Our Nuptial Bed will make a Press, And to our Sports, if any came They'll read a Wanton Epigram, ...
— The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony: Responses From Women • Various
... found herself. It is full of the old wit, the old humor, the old epigram, and the old knowledge of what I may call the Bohemia of London; but it is also full of a new quality, the quality of imaginative tenderness and creative sympathy. It is delightful to watch the growth of human character either in life or in literature, ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... Henry, "maybe so, but conscience is a plant of slow growth," and immediately after he had said this, he wished that he had chosen a different epigram—something which wasn't so liable to come back at him, later, ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... expression is somewhat uniform—it is the manner of George Sand; and although pleasant humor and good-natured fun abound in her pages, these owe none of their attractions to witty sayings, being curiously bare of a bon mot or an epigram. ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... heart danced with rapture: but behold, 'twas some fool, who had taken it into his head to turn poet, and made me an offering of the first-fruits of his nonsense. "It is not poetry, but prose run mad." Did I ever repeat to you an epigram I made on a Mr. Elphinstone,[65] who has given a translation of Martial, a famous Latin poet? The poetry of Elphinstone can only equal his prose notes. I was sitting in a merchant's shop of my acquaintance, waiting somebody; he put Elphinstone into my hand, and asked my opinion ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... 'though Lord Bolingbroke had no idea of wit, his satire was keener than any one's. Lord Chesterfield, on the other hand, would have a great deal of wit in them; but, in every page you see he intended to be witty: every paragraph would be an epigram. Polish, he declared, would be his bane;' and ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... of punishment, undue leniency is extended to an individual who has already proved that he merits no special consideration, in the next round a bum rap will be given some lesser offender who is morally deserving of a real chance. The Italians have an epigram: "The first time a dog bites a man, it's the dog's fault; the second time, it's ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... he Pitt's political colleague, but in private life his boon companion. A well-known epigram commemorates in ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... indeed matchless, epigram upon the three great masters (or reputed masters) of the Epopee, he found himself at no loss to characterize the last of the triad—no matter what qualities he imputed to the first and the second, he knew himself safe in imputing ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... heartlessness of the man who, at the moment of Alexander's awful grief at the murder of his son—a grief which so moved even his enemies that the bitter Savonarola, and the scarcely less bitter Cardinal della Rovere, wrote to condole with him—could pen that terrible epigram: ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... exerting himself with epigram, Fletcher stood tall and slender, with a grey overcoat hanging over his arm, and his intense eyes fixed on Lady Seveley. His gaze troubled her, and when he withdrew his eyes she looked at him, anticipant and fearing. He spoke ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... was a speech and a lecture. He loosed on us from the cold spigot of his intellect a steady flow of literary allusion—a practice which he professes to hold in scorn—and wit and epigram. He seemed torn from the page of Meredith. He talked like ink. I had believed before that only people in books could talk as he did, and then only when their author had blotted and scratched their performance for a seventh time before he sent it to the printer. To me it ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... same name. On the part of Apollonius there is a passage in the third book of the "Argonautica" (11. 927-947) which is of a polemical nature and stands out from the context, and the well-known savage epigram upon Callimachus. [1002] Various combinations have been attempted by scholars, notably by Couat, in his "Poesie Alexandrine", to give a connected account of the quarrel, but we have not data sufficient ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... erected for him at the commission of Lorenzo, beneath the organ and over the sacristy, on which he spent one hundred ducats of gold, which were paid by Nofri Tornabuoni, master of the bank of the Medici; and Lorenzo also caused Messer Angelo Poliziano to write the following epigram, which is carved on the said ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... reading. Rutherford watched him with furtive keenness. There was a line coming at the bottom of the page which he was then reading which ought to hit him, an epigram on golf, a whimsical thought put almost exactly as he had put it himself five minutes back when telling ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... after the battle of Cynos Cephalas (the Dog-heads), was the following epigram, composed by Alcaeus in mockery of Philip, exaggerating the ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... very short space of time. A month ago I was soured, cynical, I didn't brush my hair, and I slept too much. I talked a good deal about Life. Now I am blithe and optimistic. I use pomade, part in the middle, and sleep eight hours and no more. I have not made an epigram for days. It ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... of man to alter. Whether the king was fit or unfit to rule, Parliament might not change the succession, depose a sovereign, or limit his authority in any way. James rather neatly summarized his views in a Latin epigram, a deo rex, a rege lex—"the king is from God and law ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... enmity with himself, and at war with the world. Like Hamlet, who felt keenly, but was incapable of action, he saw that 'the times were out of joint'; circumstances were too strong for him. Almost the only record we have of this tour is a vicious epigram on what he considered the flunkeyism of Inveraray. Nor are we in the least astonished to hear that on the homeward route he spent a night in dancing and boisterous revel, ushering in the day with a kind of burlesque of pagan sun-worship. This was ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... to stop this nimble tongue by an epigram, "in Perfidious Albion, as the Constitutionnel has it, you may happen to meet a charming woman in any ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... being enacted on the Pincetto, where the wholly separated resting-places of the "Upper Ten" protest so successfully against the leveling notion that in death all are equal, I might have suggested many a mordant epigram to the cynically-minded visitor. I fear that there is often something provocative of cynicism in sundry of the aspects of fashionable devotion, but on such an occasion as the present it could hardly be otherwise. Rachels in Parisian bonnets and sweeping ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... perhaps, is a quality, typical of San Francisco, which I can describe only as promiscuity. That promiscuity is in its best phase a frankness; a fearlessness; a gorgeous candor which made possible the epigram that San Francisco has every vice but hypocrisy. Civically, two cross currents cut through the city's life; one of, a high visioned enlightenment which astounds the visiting stranger by its force, ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... there is nothing serious in the purest feelings. But never mind; when you cheat us you still are our dupes!'—'I see that plainly,' said I, with a stricken air; 'you have far too much wit in your anger for your heart to suffer from it.'—This modest epigram increased her rage; she found some tears of vexation. 'You disgust me with the world and with life.' she said; 'you snatch away all my illusions; ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... cessation of hostilities needs no demonstration. The resolution was thus translated: "Resolved that the war is a failure"; and the translation had that trenchant accuracy which is often found in American popular epigram. The candidate chosen was McClellan; McClellan in set terms repudiated the resolution that the war was a failure, and then accepted the candidature. He meant no harm to the cause of the Union, but he meant no definite and clearly ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... native of Col'ophon, in Ionia, who flourished in the time of Alexander the Great, with whom he was a great favorite. Of his many fine productions the finest was his painting of Venus rising from the Sea, and concerning which ANTIPATER, the poet of Sidon, wrote the following epigram: ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... given as September 21st, 1626, whereas Dr. Andrewes is known to have died on September 25th. The grammatical error is unimportant, while the gist of the sentence sums up the life and character of the departed in the brief form of an epigram: "Lumen Orbis Christiani." The inscription at the foot simply refers to the restorations of the monument in ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... might possibly be of service in his career. He touched briefly, and with apparent feeling, on the unhappy litigation commenced by his father; spoke with affectionate praise of Kenelm; and with a discriminating good-nature of Mivers, as a man who, to parody the epigram ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... reference to Peter Pounce in Book ii., it might also be supposed to have been written after Joseph Andrews. The Bath simile in chapter xiv. Book i., makes it likely that some part of it was penned at that place, where, from an epigram in the Miscellanies "written Extempore in the Pump Room," it is clear that Fielding was staying in 1742. But, whenever it was completed, we are inclined to think that it was planned and begun before Joseph Andrews was published, as it is in the highest ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... characters, and selecting pertinent circumstances, it is likewise necessary to leave off in time, and end smartly; so that there is a kind of drama in the forming of a story; and the manner of conducting and pointing it is the same as in an epigram. It is a miserable thing, after one hath raised the expectation of the company by humorous characters and a pretty conceit, to pursue the matter too far. There is no retreating; and how poor is it for a story-teller to end his relation ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... youth was such as to inspire a return of his mute devotion. Becquer was negligent in his dress and indifferent to his personal appearance, and when Julia's friends upbraided her for her hardness of heart she would reply with some such curt and cruel epigram as this: "Perhaps he would move my heart more if he affected my ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... played for the sake of pelf Where a button goes, 'twere an epigram To offer the stamp of ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... said and done, the sweets of notoriety outflavoured the sours. The Troy Artillery, down the coast, had betrayed its envy in a spiteful epigram; and this neighbourly acid, infused upon the pride of Looe, had crystallised it, so to speak, into the name now openly and defiantly given to the corps. They were the Die-hards henceforth, jealous of the title and of all that it implied. The ladies of Looe, ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and a broader outlook upon life meet us in the pages of LA BRUYERE. The instrument is still the same—the witty and searching epigram—but it is no longer being played upon a single string. La Bruyere's style is extremely supple; he throws his apothegms into an infinite variety of moulds, employing a wide and coloured vocabulary, and a complete mastery of the art of rhetorical effect. Among these short reflections he has ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... in what was perhaps the keenest epigram he ever made. He was talking about people of the stage who constantly air themselves and their views to secure personal publicity. It moved him ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... validity of her epigram in a daring way, and for a moment the shadow of my vision—the Bertha whose soul was no secret to me—passed between me and the radiant girl, the playful sylph whose feelings were a fascinating mystery. I suppose I must have shuddered, or betrayed in some other way my momentary ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... essence of our task as any page of the manifesto itself. The German, with all his craft, has an almost unlimited capacity for giving himself away. It would seem that, after all, humour is the best gift of the gods.... Our commentator ends with an epigram to the general effect that "until they adopt, in common with us, the ideal of the Gentleman, in contradistinction to that of the Superman," we must continue to strafe them in war or peace. His book constitutes an ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... of sympathy. This is especially true of eyes. Wyttenbach compares the Epigram in the Anthology, i. 46. 9. [Greek: Kai gar dexion omma kakoumenon ommati laio Pollaki tous idious ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... and harmony of numbers with which it is cloathed. If the merit of the composition lies in a point of wit, it may strike at first; but the mind anticipates the thought in the second perusal, and is no longer affected by it. When I read an epigram of Martial, the first line recalls the whole; and I have no pleasure in repeating to myself what I know already. But each line, each word in Catullus has its merit; and I am never tired with the perusal of him. It is sufficient to ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... epigram," said Sidney, impressed. "But what is to be said of a rich community which recruits its clergy from the lower classes? The method of election by competitive performance, common as it is among poor Dissenters, emphasizes the subjection of the shepherd to his flock. You catch your ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... round the house into the court; whereupon her sister-in-law, greeting Longmore with an authoritative nod, lifted her eye-glass and stared at them as they went by. Longmore heard the little old gentleman uttering some old-fashioned epigram about "la vieille galanterie francaise"—then by a sudden impulse he looked at Madame de Mauves and wondered what she was doing in such a world. She stopped before the house, not asking him to come in. "I hope you will act on my advice and waste ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... at your command. One of the best models of concise expressions of thought is to be found in the essays of Emerson. He compresses a whole world into a single sentence, and a system of philosophy into an epigram. ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... the fall or autumn of the year. These lectures have been delivered many times in Australia; and, as the result of the Browning lecture given in the Unitarian Schoolroom in Wakefield street, Adelaide, I received from the pen of Mr. J. B. Mather a clever epigram. The room was large and sparsely filled, and to the modest back seat taken by my friend my voice scarcely penetrated. So he amused himself and me ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... their welfare, their good education, and the salvation of their souls. Several of his daughters became nuns. He feared above everything to see his eldest son devote himself to poetry, dreading for him the dangers he considered he himself had run. "As for your epigram, I wish you had not written it," he wrote to him; "independently of its being commonplace, I cannot too earnestly recommend you not to let yourself give way to the temptation of writing French verses which would serve no purpose but to distract your mind; above all, you should not write against ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Governments. Let them get together as soon as may be and give us an authoritative definition of Democracy. Then we shall know where, collectively, we are. Of course you may say that it has been defined for all time by Abraham Lincoln. But thrilling in its clear simplicity as his slogan epigram may be, a complex political and social system cannot be fully dealt with in fifteen words. I thought I knew what it was until a tidy few millions of friends and myself were knocked silly by recent events in Russia. Here, ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... to America, where it was a notorious fact that there were revenue laws that had not been enforced these many years. Mr. Grenville, we may suppose, since it was charged against him in a famous epigram, read the American dispatches with considerable care, so that it is quite possible he may have chanced to see and to shake his head over the sworn statement of Mr. Sampson Toovey, a statement which throws much light upon colonial ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... gardens, their palaces, their tables, and their fine old plate. The day was portioned out in the public places, in the bath, the banquet. Martial indignantly rebukes these extravagances, as unable to purchase happiness, in his Epigram to Quintus: "Because you purchase slaves at two hundred thousand sesterces; because you drink wines stored during the reign of Numa; because your furniture costs you a million; because a pound weight of wrought silver costs you five thousand; ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... moment and then made an epigram. "C'est plus qu'un Anglais—c'est un Anglomane!" Newman said soberly that he had never noticed it; and M. de Grosjoyaux remarked that it was really too soon to deliver a funeral oration upon poor Bellegarde. "Evidently," said M. Ledoux. "But I couldn't help observing this morning ...
— The American • Henry James
... is an epigram on Dennis by Savage, which Johnson has preserved in his Life; and I feel it to be a very correct likeness, although Johnson censures Savage for writing an epigram against Dennis, while he was living in great familiarity with the critic. Perhaps that was ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... by mistake into his habit of playful appeal to Maggie, and she could not repress the answering flush and epigram. ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... marble. The sculptor who worked there, whoever he may have been, had profited doubtless by the study of Myron's famous work. For what purpose he made it, does not appear;—as [286] an architectural ornament; or a votive offering; perhaps only because he liked making it. In hyperbolic epigram, at any rate, the animal breathes, explaining sufficiently the point of Pliny's phrase regarding Myron—Corporum curiosus. And when he came to his main business with the quoit-player, the wrestler, the runner, he did not for a moment forget ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... Vanities!" and finally, in a "conclusion where nothing is concluded," they resolve to return to the happy valley. The book is little more than a set of essays upon life, with just story enough to hold it together. It is wanting in those brilliant flashes of epigram, which illustrate Voltaire's pages so as to blind some readers to its real force of sentiment, and yet it leaves a peculiar and powerful impression upon ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... they are amongst the most sincere documents on the history of the times, and many modern blunders could be corrected by the reading of them. And Elizabeth Barrett had a strength really rare among women poets; the strength of the phrase. She excelled in her sex, in epigram, almost as much as Voltaire in his. Pointed phrases like: "Martyrs by the pang without the palm"—or "Incense to sweeten a crime and myrrh to embitter a curse," these expressions, which are witty after ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... composed during the poet's exile at Tomi after A.D. 9, still survives. In other Roman writers the subject is only treated by way of allusion or illustration. Martial, however, provides, among other passages, what may perhaps be entitled to rank as the earliest notice of private fishery rights—the epigram Ad Piscatorem, which warns would-be poachers from casting a line in the Baian lake. Pliny the elder devoted the ninth book of his Natural History to fishes and water-life, and Plautus, Cicero, Catullus, Horace, Juvenal, Pliny the younger and Suetonius ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... of Boscofolto lived in one of the finest palaces of Pianura, but prodigality was the least of her failings, and the meagreness of her hospitality was an unfailing source of epigram to the drawing-rooms of the opposition. True, she kept open table for half the clergy in the town (omitting, of course, those worldly ecclesiastics who frequented the episcopal palace), but it was whispered that she had persuaded her cook to take half wages in return for the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... scorning shall reprove[457] thee, Disdain their wits, and think thine own the best. But if thou find any so gross and dull, That thinks I do to private taxing[458] lean, 10 Bid him go hang, for he is but a gull, And knows not what an epigram doth[459] mean, Which taxeth,[460] under a particular name, A general vice ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... not been nam'd in Homer's Iliads,— Her name had been in every line he wrote; Or, had those wanton poets, for whose birth Old Rome was proud, but gaz'd a while on her, Nor Lesbia nor Corinna had been nam'd,— Zenocrate had been the argument Of every epigram or elegy. [The music sounds—ZENOCRATE dies.] What, is she dead? Techelles, draw thy sword, And wound the earth, that it may cleave in twain, And we descend into th' infernal vaults, To hale the Fatal Sisters by the hair, And throw them in the triple moat of hell, For taking hence my fair Zenocrate. ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part II. • Christopher Marlowe
... political and public life: but also, and above all, re-clothe him "in his habit as he lived," as friends and associates knew him; recover his traits of voice and manner, his conversational wit or wisdom, epigram or paradox, his explosions of sarcasm and his eccentricities of reserve, his words of winningness and acts of kindness: and, since one half of his life was social, introduce us to the companions who shared his lighter hour and evoked his finer fancies; take us to the Athenaeum "Corner," or ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... those intervals was threatening now: her flushed cheeks, her feverish activity with her hands, the unconscious reflex movement of her silken knees and restless slippers, all foreboded it. Next would come the nervous laughter, the swift epigram which bored and puzzled him, the veiled badinage he was unequal to; and then the hint of weariness, the curious pathos of long silences, the burnt-out beauty of her eyes from which the fire had gone as though ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... out of which the war grew were these: In 1700 the king of Spain, Charles II., died, leaving his crown to Philip of Anjou, a grandson of Louis XIV. "There are no longer any Pyrenees," was Louis's exultant epigram, meaning of course that France and Spain were now practically one. England and Holland particularly were alarmed at this virtual consolidation of these two powerful kingdoms. Consequently a second Grand Alliance was soon formed against France, the object of which was to ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... rendering yourself in prose, then you necessarily shredded your prose into very fine paragraphs of a sentence each, or of a very few words, or even of one word. I believe this fashion prevailed till very lately with some of the dramatic critics, who thought that it gave a quality of epigram to the style; and I suppose it was borrowed from the more spasmodic moments of Victor Hugo by the editor of the Press. He brought it back with him when he came home from one of those sojourns in Paris which possess one of the French accent rather than the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... lay in state for some days. On the 4th of September 1657, the Thames bore a solemn funeral procession, which moved slowly, amid salvos of artillery, to Westminster, where a new vault had been prepared in the noble abbey. The tears of a nation made it hallowed ground. A prince, of whom the epigram declares that, if he never said a foolish thing, he never did a wise one—saw fit to disturb the hero's grave, drag out the embalmed body, and cast it into a pit in the abbey-yard. One of Charles Stuart's most witless ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... that the very finest epigram in the English language happens also to be the worst. Epigram I call it in the austere Greek sense; which thus far resembled our modern idea of an epigram, that something pointed and allied to wit was demanded in the management of the leading thought at its close, but otherwise ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... an extensive gynecologic work published in 1557, figures a lithopedion drawn in situ in the case of a woman with her belly laid open. He dedicated to this calcified fetus, which he regarded as a reversion, the following curious epigram, in allusion to the classical myth that after the flood the world was repopulated by the two survivors, Deucalion and Pyrrha, who walked over the earth and cast stones behind them, which, on striking the ground, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... word Mandchou is equally as difficult as Sanscrit or Persian, neither of which languages has ever been thoroughly acquired by any European, though at first acquaintance they flatter the student with their deceitful simplicity. I take the liberty of sending you a short original epigram in rhymed Mandchou, which if it answers no other purpose will afford you some idea of my running Mandchou hand, which, as I now write perpendicularly, is very different from that hand which I wrote previously ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... remarkably felicitous, and it is said that he adorned all that he touched. Most of his poems are quite short, and their subjects range from a touching outburst of genuine grief for a brother's death to a fugitive epigram of the most voluptuous triviality. His verses display ease and impetuosity, tumultuous merriment and wild passion, playful grace and slashing invective, vigorous simplicity and ingenious imitation of the ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... understood only save through the element in our nature from which art draws its vitality. Its deduction is thus bluntly expressed; "the nearest to nature, the farther from art," an apparent paradox paralleled by the epigram, "the nearer the church, the farther ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... quiet, benevolent, anxious that people should enjoy themselves in their own way, and yet with a genial firmness of administration which is the greatest of all luxuries if it co-exists with much liberty. He was not a great talker, though he occasionally uttered a witty epigram, often of a somewhat caustic kind; but the air of serene benevolence with which he used to preside always set people at their ease. There was, too, another friend, who was there less often, but who shared the expense of the house, who was a singularly charming ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... action and engaged in a discussion upon the instability of human affairs, which many took sides. "A good reason," declared Trimalchio, "why such an occasion shouldn't slip by without an epigram." He called for his tablets at once, and after racking his brains for a little while, he got ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... companionship of his father and mother, and his thoroughly congenial sister Sarah; passionately fond of country life, and during the time producing a novel, "The Young Duke," and three shorter works, "Popanilla," "The Infernal Marriage," and "Ixion in Heaven," gay and brilliant satires, sparkling with epigram and with beauty, and destined to live with the English language and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... This last epigram was not inappropriate to an invalid about to begin the fifth act in a roystering night's adventure. And still ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... his seat under the title of Provost of Trinity College. But he did not long enjoy his judicial office, as he died before the 9th of July 1533.—(Brunton and Haig's Senators of the College of Justice, p. 11.) Buchanan wrote an epigram on Dingwall, founded upon some verses of Sir Adam Otterburn of Redhall, King's Advocate, ("argumento sumpto ex Adami Otterburni Equitis clarissimi hexametris,") from which it may be inferred that Dingwall's ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... contrast between the reality she beheld before her, and the dark, taciturn, sharp, elderly man of business who had lurked in her imagination—a man with clothes smelling of city smoke, skin sallow from want of sun, and talk flavoured with epigram—was such a relief to her that Elfride smiled, almost ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... formless spirituality and an unspiritual formalism. The end of religious observance is the love of God, but the love of God requires more than feeling; it must impregnate life. Dubnow, in his summary of Jewish history, formulates an epigram, which, like most of its kind, becomes in its conciseness and pointed antithesis a half-truth. "At Jerusalem," he says, "Judaism appeared as a system of practical ceremonies; at Alexandria as a complex of abstract symbols." No doubt it is true that at Jerusalem ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... of the famous Quatrains—Omar Ibn Ibrahim al-Khayyam—not himself a tent-maker, but so-called, as are the Smiths of our own day—was of the city of Nishapur. The invention of the Rubaiyat, or Epigram, is not to his credit. That honor belongs to Abu Said of Khorasan (968-1049), who used it as a means of expressing his mystic pantheism. But there is an Omar Khayyam club in London—not one bearing the name of Abu Said. What is the bond which binds the Rubaiyat-maker ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... of sentences and the prose rhyme and rhythm which Easterns look upon as mere music. This "Saj'a," or cadence of the cooing dove, has in Arabic its special duties. It adds a sparkle to description and a point to proverb, epigram and dialogue; it corresponds with our "artful alliteration" (which in places I have substituted for it) and, generally, it defines the boundaries between the classical and the popular styles which jostle ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... to his taste!" said Harriet, who always delivered a platitude as if it was an epigram. She was curiously virulent about Italy, which she had never visited, her only experience of the Continent being an occasional six weeks in the Protestant ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... understand! [He glances at his watch] Yes, I understand. [He kisses IVANOFF] Good-bye, I must go to the blessing of the school now. [He goes as far as the door, then stops] She is so clever! Sasha and I were talking about gossiping yesterday, and she flashed out this epigram: "Father," she said, "fire-flies shine at night so that the night-birds may make them their prey, and good people are made to be preyed upon by gossips and slanderers." What do you think of that? She is a genius, ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... arches, where the Brothers might not speak; benignant cedars blessing the turf with extended hands; fragrant limes waving their delicate leaves; an old rose garden with fantastic beds; a long yew walk where the Brothers might meditatively pace—turning, perhaps, an epigram, regretting, perhaps, the world. Nothing now remains of the Refectory, where, of old, forty monks fed like one, except the walls. It once had a noble roof of Irish oak, but that was taken to Cowdray and perished in the fire there, together ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... strange land his fortune had been cast, began to steal into his blood. Mirth ruled the East side, working in each soul according to his limitations. It was a wink, a smile, a drink, a passing gossoon, a sly girl, a light trick, among the unspoken things; or a biting epigram, the phrase felicitous, a story gilt with humor, a witticism swift and fatal as lightning; in addition varied activity, a dance informal, a ceremonious ball, a party, a wake, a political meeting, the visit of the district leader; and with all, as Judy expressed ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... all the paces of paradox and persiflage. And, when the whim changes, it is most easy and delightfully disconcerting to play with the respectable and cowardly bourgeois fetishes and to laugh and epigram at the flitting god-ghosts and the debaucheries and ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
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