"Biographer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... regretted that no mental method of daguerreotype or photography has yet been discovered by which the characters of men can be reduced to writing and put into grammatical language with an unerring precision of truthful description. How often does the novelist feel, ay, and the historian also and the biographer, that he has conceived within his mind and accurately depicted on the tablet of his brain the full character and personage of a man, and that nevertheless, when he flies to pen and ink to perpetuate the portrait, his words forsake, elude, ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... to supply what is missing at the beginning and end, but to restore those leaves which have been torn out of the middle, imitating, as accurately as I was able, the language and manner of the old biographer, in order that the difference between the original narrative, and my own interpolations, might not ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... in the state of men's passions during that memorable war, so that it were against the French, a successful commander-in-chief could do no wrong! Yet here, probably, the matter would have rested; but when, nine years afterwards, Stanier Clarke so little appreciated the duty of a biographer as to relate a transaction susceptible of no excuse, in terms unjustified by the facts, and sought to render his hero immaculate at the expense of others, the excellent officer whose feelings ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... much, and, in the opinion of Digby, too much of himself; but with such generality and conciseness, as affords very little light to his biographer: he declares, that, besides the dialects of different provinces, he understood six languages; that he was no stranger to astronomy; and that he had seen several countries; but what most awakens curiosity is, his solemn assertion, that "his life has been a miracle of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... London a great crowd followed him, and a British statesman described Webster as one describes a majestic landscape or the sublimity of a mountain. But during the last years of his life his face took on a strangely pathetic sorrow. With the language of a Dante his biographer has pictured for us an Inferno, in which we see one, sublime of reason, walking in the very prime and strength and grandeur of full manhood, yet walking in a round of night, in a realm of bitterness, ever gnawed by disappointment ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... this biographer, "to be not much to add to our knowledge of London until his books came upon us, but each in this respect outstripped the other in its marvels. In Nickleby, the old city reappears under every aspect; and whether warmth and light are playing over what is good and cheerful ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... continues the Aretian biographer, "was that above the old refectory and opposite to the ducal stables, which had formerly been erected by the Duke Lorenzo de' Medici. In this place twenty cells were made, the roof was put on, and the various articles of wood-work ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... tree, powder, lead, moccasins, and a quantity of dried beef. One dark night, when the Indians were engaged in a drunken bout, she met Kenton in the garden and handed him three of the best rifles, which she had selected from those stacked near the house. The biographer of these events writes: ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... unfounded stories put in circulation respecting her, by some whose motives we will not inquire into, as they would scarcely bear investigation, in regard to her actions, her intentions, and even her apparel. As her biographer remarks in introducing some of her letters at this period: "It was said that her health was not seriously impaired, and that she visited the South with a view to excite attention and applause. To persons who would put forth or circulate such calumnies, a perusal ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... may, the fact remains, that Lord Gauranga is said to have earned the devotion and love of some of the most learned pundits of India and, according to a recent biographer, "he had all the frailties of a man; he ate and slept like a man. In short, he behaved generally like an ordinary human being, but yet he succeeded in extorting from the foremost sages of India, the worship and ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... suggestions of counsel may have been adopted into law. But how to assign to each his share in the mighty structure? or guess to whom any particular change may have been due? It would at all events be the office, not of the biographer, but of the historian of jurisprudence. I shall nevertheless so far venture to deviate from the advice to which I have referred as to notice five or six cases, not as being in every instance of special and remembered celebrity, but merely as ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... ravished the minds of children, must have been both simple and perfect, and as his biographer I cannot dream of equaling the young Paul Bailly. But I shall not take his hero from him. Guynemer's life falls naturally into the legendary rhythm, and the simple and exact truth ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... again as on authoress; but it is in the lowly attitude of a biographer commemorating the virtues of a departed sister and predecessor in the same field of Christian devotion—the devoted and sainted woman whose places "Fanny Forester" herself now occupies as a wife and missionary, performing the same duties, exposed ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... with Moussorgsky it was the same. Both men suffered from some sort of moral lesion. Dostoievsky was an epileptic, and the nature of Moussorgsky's "mysterious nervous ailment" is unknown to me; possibly it was a mild or masked epilepsy. Moussorgsky was said to have been a heavy drinker—his biographer speaks of him as being "ravaged by alcohol"—a failing not rare in Russia. The "inspissated gloom" of his work, its tenebrous gulfs and musical vertigoes are true indices of his morbid pathology. He was of a pious nature, as was Dostoievsky; but he might have subscribed to the ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... This vote, I believe, cost Mr. Edgeworth his peerage. 'When it was known that he had voted against the Union he became suddenly the idol of those who would previously have stoned him,' says his devoted biographer. It must not, however, be forgotten that Mr. Edgeworth had refused an offer of L3000 for his seat for two or three weeks, during that momentous period when every vote was of importance. Mr. Pitt, they say, spent over L2,000,000 in carrying the measure which ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... sagacity, her optimism, and cheerfulness also, she reminds us of Elsie Inglis. During St. Catherine's Mission to Tuscany the following story is told of her by her biographer: "The other case" (of healing) "was that of Messer Matteo, her friend, the Rector of Misericordia, who had been one of the most active of the heretic priests in Siena. To this good man, lying in extremis after terrible agony, Catherine entered, crying cheerfully: 'Rise up, rise up, Ser Matteo! ...
— Elsie Inglis - The Woman with the Torch • Eva Shaw McLaren
... women who had no such scruples—some of them right here in Hannibal—and they attempted to gain a little reflected notoriety by asserting that they were the prototypes of the character. When Albert Bigelow Paine, Mr. Clemens's biographer, gathered the material for his life of the author, he found no fewer than twenty-five women, in Missouri and elsewhere, each of whom declared she was Becky Thatcher, but he settled the controversy for all time on Mr. Clemens's ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... lived with her, it would seem, in a kind of seclusion, seeing only such chosen visitors as Margaret brought with her to cheer their labours, and forswearing all idle talk and frivolity. The Queen had such austerity mingled with her graciousness and such grace with her severity, says her monkish biographer, loving an antithesis, that all feared and respected her presence. "Her life was full of moderation and gentleness, her speech contained the very salt of wisdom; even her silence ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... 7th of June, Richard Henry Lee, in behalf of the Virginia delegates, submitted in Congress resolves on independence, a confederation, and foreign alliances. His biographer says that 'tradition relates that he prefaced his motion with a speech,' portraying the resources of the colonies and their capacity for defence, dwelling especially on the bearing which an independent position might have on foreign ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... which moved a dying empire. "Anthony," says Athanasius, "became known not by worldly wisdom, nor by any art, but solely by piety, and that this was the gift of God who can deny?" The purpose of such a life was, so his biographer thought, to light up the moral path for men, that they might ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... Numerous small courts opened off in the north side. Among these were Hemlock, Swan, Chair, Crown and Star Courts. The Row and its vicinity had for many years a notoriously bad reputation. One of the courts off Little Shear Alley was Boswell Court, not, as some have imagined, called after Johnson's biographer. This court was at one time a very fashionable place of residence; Lady Raleigh, the widow of Sir Walter, ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... of Korolenko on the literary development of Gorky can best be seen in one of the latter's letters to his biographer, Mr. Gorodetsky. "Write this," he says to his biographer, "write this without changing a single word: It is Korolenko who taught Gorky to write, and if Gorky has profited but little by the teaching of Korolenko, it is the fault of ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... as materials, and so she determined to do what must have been a great sacrifice, and burn all those which were specially dear to herself, feeling confident that the remainder would not be disturbed. The destroyed MSS. without doubt included much that would have been of particular value to the biographer. ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... presence. His eyes were large and animated, and his voice clear, but not so strong as his frame would have led one to expect. His bearing was manly and dignified. He was exceedingly fond of riding, hunting, and of swimming. Eginhard, his friend and biographer, says of him, "In all his undertakings and enterprises, there was nothing he shrank from because of the toil, and nothing that he feared because of the danger." He died, at the age of seventy, on Jan. 28, 814. He had built at Aix la Chapelle ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... retained all that he read. At the age of fourteen he could repeat from memory all of Watt's Hymns and Pope's "Essay on Man." When but a youth, Henry Clay read books of history and science and practiced giving their contents before the trees, birds, and horses. Says a biographer of Lincoln, "A book was almost ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... the distress of Catherine's mind, as she thus advanced towards the parsonage, and whatever the humiliation of her biographer in relating it, she was preparing enjoyment of no everyday nature for those to whom she went; first, in the appearance of her carriage—and secondly, in herself. The chaise of a traveller being a rare sight in Fullerton, the whole family were immediately at the ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... his comparatively small and poor kingdom to the position of a first-class military power, and won for himself rank with the greatest of all generals, often matching his troops victoriously against forces of twice and even thrice their number. In Thomas Carlyle he found an enthusiastic biographer, somewhat prone, however, to find for actions of questionable public morality a justification in "immutable laws" and "veracities," which to other eyes is a little akin to Wordsworth's apology for Rob Roy. But whether we accept Carlyle's estimate of him or no, the amazing skill, tenacity, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... grandeur, or beauty in the Indian character, at least till such traits were pointed out by others. I do abhor an Indian story. Yet no writer can be more secure of a permanent place in our literature than the biographer of the Indian chiefs. His subject, as referring to tribes which have mostly vanished from the earth, gives him a right to be placed on a classic shelf, apart from the merits which will ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the biographer, was the eldest of two sons, and was educated with great care by his father, of whom he always spoke with the greatest respect and affection. In the early part of his life, his father exacted the utmost respect from his son, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... and full of anecdote; you may enlarge on the advantages of philosophical reflection, and the superior mind required to give a judicious analysis of the Opinions and Works of deceased Authors. On the contrary, if the latter method is pursued by the Biographer; you can, with equal ease, extol the lively colouring, and truth, and interest, of ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... I remember rightly, was by Dr. James: but some old MS. copies of this remarkable treatise on the Love of Books exist, with some of which the text used by the translator should be collated. But, of the publication announced, it would not become me to say anything more, as the biographer is ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various
... forgotten, when the means of achieving it were recollected; and the Maid of Orleans was deemed the fit subject of a poem, the wittiest and most profligate for which literature has to blush. Our illustrious Don Juan hides his head when contrasted with Voltaire's Pucelle: Juan's biographer, with all his zeal, is but an innocent, and a novice, by the side ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Bonaventura, the biographer of St. Francis, who speaks. He became General of the Order in 1256, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... school determined to succeed, even if he sleeps but four to six hours out of the twenty-four, he will be benefited. However, study like that of Webster, by New Hampshire pine knots; and like Garfield's, by a wood-pile; generally proves valuable. Blaine's life is thus beautifully described by his biographer:— ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... may not be Walt Whitman's "secret," or, at any rate, the spiritual experience of which the poet's latest biographer, Mr. Emory Holloway, writes? His interesting account of Walt Whitman's Manuscript Note-Books is preceded by ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... The name is spelled indifferently with or without accent—Becquer or Becquer. In the choice of the latter spelling, the authority of his principal biographer, Ramon Rodriguez Correa, has ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... which had resulted occasionally in open violence. In 1167, Alexander III. being Pope, the Romans decided to strike the decisive blow on the Tusculans, as well as on their allies, the Albans. The cardinal of Aragona, the biographer of Alexander III., states that towards the end of May, when the cornfields begin to ripen, the Romans sallied forth on their expedition against Count Raynone, much against the Pope's will; and having crossed the frontier of his estate, set ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... had been looking forward to a release from the cares of office, and to the quiet of his country home in Westchester; but "the indignities which France was at that time heaping upon his country," says William Jay, his son and biographer, "and the probability that they would soon lead to war, forbade him to consult his personal gratification."[84] On the 6th of March, therefore, he accepted renomination on a ticket with Stephen Van ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... nothing; what is written as his life is conjecture, more or less ingenious inference, or pure fiction. In that we know so little of him he is blessed, but the blessedness has not as yet extended to his biographers. At one time a biographer's task was easy: he simply took the hearsay and inventions of Hawkins, and accepted them as gospel truth whenever they could not be tested. The fact that whenever they could by any means be tested they were found to be false—even ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... sister and biographer, exerted an influence upon his character only second to that of his father. She married her cousin, M. Périer, also of a Parliamentary family, and Counsellor of the Court of Aides at Clermont. She was alike beautiful and accomplished, a student of mathematics, ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... the gallows of fifty cubits' height on which this New England Mordecai is to be hanged up as an example to all malefactors of his class. We make no protest against this summary procedure, if the Biographer of the Republic think it due to the memory of his father; but we would submit that he has begun rather early in the day to bind the victim doomed to deck the feralia of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... conducting him over the benches of that establishment, described by Lamb as "the last retreat of his every-day waning grandeur." The following letter—the authenticity of which seems to be vouched for by the actor's biographer—supplies a different view of the ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... author has succeeded better in copying the melody and misanthropic sentiments of Childe Harold, than the nervous and impetuous diction in which his noble biographer has embodied them. The attempt, however, indicates very considerable power; and the flow of the verse and the construction of the poetical period are imitated with no ordinary ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... was one of the most charming, virtuous, brilliant, manly figures, as he was also almost the last true representative, of the great Italian Renaissance, the end of which may be described as coinciding with his decease. According to his biographer Manso, the author of the Gerusalemme Liberata was singularly noble and refined in appearance, though always possessed of an air of melancholy; he was well-built, strong, active and resourceful, anything in fact but a carpet-knight who spent ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... as well he might, the words of Campian's admiring biographer Richard Simpson, himself a Catholic, a most learned and accomplished man. "The eternal truths of Catholicism were made the vehicle for opinions about the authority of the Holy See which could not be held by Englishmen ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... so overcrowded that Hawkins had to drop 100 of his crew on the Mexican coast. Drake made straight for Plymouth, nursing a bitter grievance at the alleged breach of faith, and vowing vengeance on the whole Spanish race. "The case," as Drake's biographer, Thomas Fuller, says, "was clear in sea-divinity, and few are such infidels as not to believe doctrines which make for ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... exquisitely fascinating person,' are full of a similar insight. They contain many of those anecdotes which indicate crises, a thing very different from the merely decorative anecdotes of the ordinary biographer. The book, written by one who has been a good friend to many poets, and to none a more valuable friend than to Patmore, gives us a more vivid sense of what Patmore was as a man than anything except Mr. Sargent's ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... year after year, by the ever-varying perils of the wilderness. No life, it is true, can be fitly sketched in a chronological {3} abridgment, but history abounds with lives which, while important, do not exact from a biographer the kind of detail that for the actions of Champlain becomes priceless. Kant and Hegel were both great forces in human thought, yet throughout eighty years Kant was tethered to the little town of Koenigsberg, and Hegel did not know what the French were doing in Jena ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... Columbus, more magnanimous than most of his contemporaries, is not so greatly more wise. The noblest use he can conceive for his discovery is to aid in the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. With the precious metals that should fall to his share, says his biographer, he made haste to vow the raising of a force of five thousand horse and fifty thousand foot for the expulsion of the Saracens from Jerusalem. Nor is this the only instance in which even the noble among men have sought to clutch the grand opening ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... but very cursorily"; and we fear that in any case such remarks will be made. Very learned people are pleased to show that they know what is not in the book; sometimes they may hint that perhaps the author did not know it, or surely he would have mentioned it. But a biographer who wishes to write what most people of cultivation will be pleased to read must be courageous enough to face the pain of such censures. He must choose, as we have explained, the characteristic parts of his subject: ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... love in the Platonic sense," wrote his friend and biographer, Condivi; but this is only a part of the truth. In the heart of Michelangelo there took place the tremendous reconciliation between the Greek cult of beauty and the religion of the beyond; he blended the finest blossom of ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... collection of the writings of all preceding medical authors. When this work was finally completed it consisted of seventy books under the title "Collecta Medicinalia." He wrote also for his friend and biographer Eunapius two books on diseases and their treatment, and treatises on anatomy and on the works of Galen. He earned for himself the title of the Ape of Galen. In the "Life of Oribasius," by Eunapius, we find that Julian created Oribasius Quaestor of Constantinople, ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... a letter to his son, while the latter was a student at Harvard College, requesting him not to play at cards, a practice which he regarded as wicked. But the son (Colonel Timothy Pickering afterwards), as Mr. Upham, his biographer, well remarks, was altogether too busy with his studies to waste ...
— The Olden Time Series: Vol. 2: The Days of the Spinning-Wheel in New England • Various
... the shop of Davies, the bookseller, in Russell Street, Covent Garden. As this was one of the great literary gossiping places of the day, especially to the circle over which Johnson presided, it is worthy of some specification. Mr. Thomas Davies, noted in after times as the biographer of Garrick, had originally been on the stage, and though a small man had enacted tyrannical tragedy, with a pomp and magniloquence beyond his size, if we may trust the description given of him by ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... Lucian, Oelian, Athenaeus, Achilles Tatius, Tatian Pollux, and many more, may be consulted to advantage by the man of taste and letters, and probably may be neglected without much loss by the student." "Of modern writers on art Vasari leads the van; theorist, artist, critic, and biographer, in one. The history of modern art owes, no doubt, much to Vasari; he leads us from its cradle to its maturity with the anxious diligence of a nurse; but he likewise has her derelictions: for more loquacious than ample, and less discriminating styles than eager to accumulate descriptions, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... Dickinson, it was agreed to hold a Breckenridge and Lane state convention at Syracuse on August 8. At the appointed time three hundred delegates appeared, representing every county, but with the notable exception of the chairman, Henry S. Randall, the biographer of Thomas Jefferson, who had advocated the Wilmot Proviso in 1847, written the Buffalo platform in 1848, and opposed the fugitive slave law in 1850, practically all of them had steadily opposed the Free-soil influences of their party. To many it seemed strange, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... in the year 1336 or 1337, his biographer adds, 'no less a good Christian than an excellent painter,' and in token of his faith he painted one crucifixion in which he introduced his own figure 'kneeling in an attitude of deep devotion and contrition at the foot of the Cross.' The good taste of such an act has been questioned, so has been ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... illuminating. He could not spend an hour without study, or prayer, or writing, or some other holy occupation.[2] He transcribed, we are told, over three hundred copies of the Gospels or the Psalter—a magnification of a saint's powers by a devout biographer, but significant as it testifies to Columba's love of studious labours, and shows how highly these ascetics thought of work of this kind. On two occasions, being a man as well as a saint, he broke into violence ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... subjects, I had hoped another reception for my works. I will own, indeed, that I am not always perfectly accurate in every circumstance, nor do I give so exact and circumstantial a detail of the actions of my heroes as may be expected from a biographer who has confined himself to one or two characters. A zeal to preserve the memory of great men, and to extend the influence of such noble examples, made me undertake more than I could accomplish in the first degree of perfection; but surely the characters of my illustrious men are not so imperfectly ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... which nevertheless (besides the reason of state) was somewhat sweetened to him In a great confiscation." Excellent prince! This is the man in whose favour Richard the Third is represented as a monster. "For Lambert, the king would not take his life," continues Henry's biographer, "both out of magnanimitie" (a most proper picture of so mean a prince) "and likewise out of wisdom, thinking that if he suffered death he would be forgotten too soon; but being kept alive, he would be a continual ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... to lay very much stress on the fact that, after all, the greatest of Richardson's works is his successor, caricaturist, and superior—Fielding. When the memoirs of Miss Pamela Andrews appeared, the future biographer of her doubly supposititious brother was a not very young man of thirty-three, who had written a good many not very good plays, had contributed to periodicals, and had done a little work at the Bar, besides living, at least till ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... more inclined to regard these as, more or less, distorted legendary statements about Brendan's real career, afterwards seized upon, magnified, and worked in by the romancer, than as incidents of the romancer appropriated and nationalized into comparative possibility by the biographer. Thus the Land of Promise may have been a fond title for the imaginary site of a monastery for which he was seeking in the Western Isles. But even in Ireland the son of Finnlogh O' Alta seemingly obtained a character for certain adventures which ...
— Brendan's Fabulous Voyage • John Patrick Crichton Stuart Bute
... considered, with numberless other statements equally requiring correction in their turn. What she has omitted I trust I shall supply; and where she has gone astray I hope to set her right; that, between the two, the future biographer of my august benefactresses may be in no want of authentic materials to do full justice ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 3 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... the general has been dimmed by the superior lustre of his great countryman, Demosthenes the orator. When the name of Demosthenes is mentioned, it is the latter alone that is thought of. The soldier has found no biographer. Yet out of the long list of great men whom the Athenian republic produced, there are few that deserve to stand higher than this brave, though finally unsuccessful leader of her fleets and armies in the first half of the Peloponnesian ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... years of Prince Henry, by one of his attendants, forms an authentic collection of juvenile anecdotes, which made me feel very forcibly that there are some children who deserve to have a biographer at their side; but anecdotes of children are the rarest of biographies, and I deemed it a singular piece of good fortune to have recovered such a remarkable evidence of the precocity of character.[A] Professor Dugald Stewart has noticed a fact in ARNAULD'S infancy, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... help suspecting that it was at this time that Wycherley returned to the communion of the Church of Rome. That he did return to the communion of the Church of Rome is certain. The date of his reconversion, as far as we know, has never been mentioned by any biographer. We believe that, if we place it at this time, we do no injustice to the character either ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony, which gives competence and confidence to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same tribunal. Poetry is the image of man and nature. The obstacles which stand in the way of the fidelity of the Biographer and Historian, and of their consequent utility, are incalculably greater than those which are to be encountered by the Poet who comprehends the dignity of his art. The Poet writes under one restriction only, namely, the necessity of giving ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... it in the sense of a half-religious consecration; he desired to assume the wreath in the baptistery of San Giovanni, where, like thousands of other Florentine children, he had received baptism. He could, says his biographer, have anywhere received the crown in virtue of his fame, but desired it nowhere but in his native city, and therefore died uncrowned. From the same source we learn that the usage was till then uncommon, and was held to be ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... mere political motive for this prohibition. The cardinal, he says, objected to the importation of negroes into the colonies, as he feared they would corrupt the natives, and by confederacies with them render them formidable to government. De Marsolier, another biographer of Ximenes, gives equally politic reasons for this prohibition. He cites a letter written by the cardinal on the subject, in which he observed that he knew the nature of the negroes; they were a people capable, it was true, of great fatigue, but extremely prolific and enterprising; and that if they ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... have carried the paper written for the Society beyond the customary limits of such tributes to the memory of its deceased members. It is still but an outline which may serve a present need and perhaps be of some assistance to a future biographer. ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Zoroaster or Charlemagne XI. on the bench, may be plain Jack or Ponto en famille. So with celebrities of the genus homo. Huxley's official style and appellation was "The Right Hon. Thomas Henry Huxley, P. C., M. D., Ph. D., LL. D., D. C. L., D. Sc., F. R. S.," and his biographer tells us that he delighted in its rolling grandeur—but to his wife he was always Hal. Shakespeare, to his fellows of his Bankside, was Will, and perhaps Willie to Ann Hathaway. The Kaiser is another Willie: the late Czar so addressed him in their ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... of the affair is the one offered by his latest and ablest biographer, Mr. John Morley. Burke had entered public life without property,—probably the most serious mistake, if in his case it can be called a mistake, which an English politician can commit. It is a wise and salutary rule of English public life that a man who seeks a political ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... to the portrait of him given by his biographer Washington Irving, was a tall man, of robust and noble presence. His face was long, he had an aquiline nose, high cheek bones, eyes clear and full of fire; he had a bright complexion, and his face was much covered ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... re-read all his life. These and the philosophers of Port Royal, with Bossuet, and Fenelon, with the Bible and Virgil, were his mental food. Virgil and the Bible he read always in the Latin; he was so familiar with them both that, when a man, his biographer, Sensier, says he never met a more eloquent translator of these two books. When the time came, therefore, for Millet to go up to Paris, he was not, as has been said by some writer, an ignorant peasant, but a well-taught man who had read much and digested what he had read, and knew good books from ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... them to Mr. Darwin. We have also been able to give a few letters from Sir Charles Lyell, Hugh Falconer, Edward Forbes, Dr. Asa Gray, Professor Hyatt, Fritz Muller, Mr. Francis Galton, and Sir T. Lauder Brunton. To the two last named, also to Mrs. Lyell (the biographer of Sir Charles), Mrs. Asa Gray and Mrs. Hyatt, we desire to ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... are essentially in accord as to the deep significance and permanent poetic worth of this poem. Greenslet, the latest biographer of Lowell, says that the ode, "if not his most perfect, is surely his noblest and most splendid work," and adds: "Until the dream of human brotherhood is forgotten, the echo of its large music will not wholly die away." Professor Beers declares it to be, "although uneven, ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... arctic-alpine theory (Scharff, "European Animals", page 128). I find no suggestion of his having hit upon it in his correspondence with Darwin or Hooker. Nor am I aware of any reference to his having done so in his later publications. I am indebted to his biographer, Professor Schroter, of Zurich, for an examination of his earlier papers with an equally negative result.) Assuming that local races have derived from a common ancestor, Hooker's great paper placed the fact of the migration on an impregnable basis. And, as he pointed ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... Hare's Book," says one of my Correspondents in those years, "is easily defined, and not very condemnable, but it is nevertheless ruinous to his task as Biographer. He takes up Sterling as a clergyman merely. Sterling, I find, was a curate for exactly eight months; during eight months and no more had he any special relation to the Church. But he was a man, and had relation to the Universe, for eight-and-thirty ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... of view," he said, "that would be a bad thing for you: but I don't look at it in that way; in fact, I hope you may become my biographer. I will furnish you with material enough, and you can arrange it and put it in shape; that is, if, in the course of a few years, you consider that, in doing what I ask of you, you will be writing the true life of a man, and not a collection ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton
... corresponding to the difference in their genius. Sydney Smith had the more versatile and fruitful mind. With restless energy he supported various characters, being equally famous as a wit, Whig, Edinburgh reviewer, eloquent preacher, brilliant man of society, and canon of Saint Paul's. His biographer well describes him as a rough rider of subjects, and with surpassing good sense he overran every problem with which the public mind was occupied. He was a reformer, but it was after the English and not the French fashion. He ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... the most trustworthy traditions- for authentic testimonies on the subject are wanting — was born in 1328; and London is generally believed to have been his birth-place. It is true that Leland, the biographer of England's first great poet who lived nearest to his time, not merely speaks of Chaucer as having been born many years later than the date now assigned, but mentions Berkshire or Oxfordshire as the scene ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... with the infirmity of leaving works unfinished, and suffering reactions of disgust. But Coleridge taxed himself with that infirmity in verse before he could at all have commenced opium-eating. Besides, it is too much assumed by Coleridge and by his biographer, that to leave off opium was of course to regain juvenile health. But all opium-eaters make the mistake of supposing every pain or irritation which they suffer to be the product of opium. Whereas a wise man will say, suppose ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... glad to find that he had one true defender here," pursued the biographer of Plooie. "Though he could not fight in the ranks there was use for him. There was use for all true sons of Belgium in those black days. He was made driver of a—a charette; I do not know if you have them in your great city?" He paused, and I guessed that the rumble of heavy wheels ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... secondhand bookshops, or on some neglected shelf in the library of a country house. For their own generation, they represented a distinguished title to fame. Mrs. Inchbald—to use the expression of her biographer—"was ascertained to be one of the greatest ornaments of her sex." She was painted by Lawrence, she was eulogized by Miss Edgeworth, she was complimented by Madame de Stael herself. She had, indeed, won for ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... improving the English tongue. Had he written in Latin or on the sciences, the thing had been probable enough, but in the light in which it now stands, I think it very far from likely." From which it is evident that the biographer understood not the versatile nature of the Scot and his ability, especially when caught young, in "doing in Rome as the Romans do." Barclay's English education and foreign travel, together extending over the most impressionable years of his youth, could not have failed ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... therefore a contemporary of Paracelsus, and also of Luther, Charles V., Henry VIII. and Raphael.) Several notices of this Dr. Johann Faust occur in writers of the period. One of the most circumstantial is by the friend and biographer of Melanchthon, who himself seems to have met Faust. But the various myths that gathered round the magician were, it seems, first published in a continuous narrative in 1587, that is about fifty years after his death. This is the old Frankfurter ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... ideas of Siegfried were contemporary with the Revolution of 1848, which Wagner took part in with the same enthusiasm he put into everything else. His recognised biographer, Herr Houston Stewart Chamberlain—who, with M. Henri Lichtenberger, has succeeded best in unravelling Wagner's complex soul, though he is not without certain prejudices—has been at great pains to prove that Wagner was always a ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... writers perhaps does a clearer notion, as far as their personality goes, exist in the general mind that interests itself at all in literature than of Fielding. Yet more than once a warning has been sounded, especially by his best and most recent biographer, to the effect that this idea is founded upon very little warranty of scripture. The truth is, that as the foregoing record—which, brief as it is, is a sufficiently faithful summary—will have shown, we know very ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... FARADAY'S biographer says:—"He is oppressed with the magnitude and importance of his subject, yet is stimulated by the fact that the discovery which he aims for (the relationship between gravity and electricity) would have a bearing in importance far beyond all conception ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... upon this great episode, truly the turning point in American history, without pausing for a glance at the character of Seward. The subject is elusive. His ablest biographer* plainly is so constantly on guard not to appear an apologist that he ends by reducing his portrait to a mere outline, wavering across a background of political details. The most recent study of Seward** surely reveals between the lines the doubtfulness of the author about pushing his ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... solemn deportment, consequent upon such frisks, &c.—then taken your pen and ink and set down nothing but what you had seen, and could have sworn to:—But this is an advantage not to be had by the biographer in this planet;—in the planet Mercury (belike) it may be so, if not better still for him;—for there the intense heat of the country, which is proved by computators, from its vicinity to the sun, to be more than equal to that of red-hot iron,—must, I think, long ago have vitrified the bodies ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... whose productions, in different branches of literature, would almost of themselves fill a library, continues to pour forth volume after volume from his inexhaustible stores. Mr. Southey, too, the poet, the historian, the biographer, and I know not what besides, is remarkable for his literary industry; and last, not least, the noble bard, the glory and the regret of every one who has a soul to feel those "thoughts that breathe and words that burn," the mighty poet himself, notwithstanding ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 348, December 27, 1828 • Various
... (who had not only given him his freedom, but also taken up arms against the Revolutionists), he reported to Tybee Island to preach to the refugees there assembled. At any rate, when Liele appears in Savannah, Georgia, as a preacher of the Gospel, his biographer declares that "He came up to the city of Savannah ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... in Symonds, though few that affect the sense. The worst are in the preface, where, instead of "1793," the misleading date "1790" is given as the year at whose close Paine completed Part First,—an error that spread far and wide and was fastened on by his calumnious American "biographer," Cheetham, to prove his inconsistency. The editors have been fairly demoralized by, and have altered in different ways, the following sentence of the preface in Symonds: "The intolerant spirit of religious persecution had transferred itself into politics; ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... He leisurely allowed other men to build up profitable lines of steamboats, and he then proceeded to carry out methods which inevitably had one of two terminations: either his competitor had to buy him off at an exorbitant price, or he was left in undisputed possession. His principal biographer, Croffut, whose effusion is one long chant of praise, treats these methods as evidences of great shrewdness, and goes on: "His foible was 'opposition;' wherever his keen eye detected a line that was ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... Freeman Clarke, the biographer of Margaret Fuller, came into the Atheneum. It was plain that he came to see me and not the institution.... He rushed into talk at once, mostly on people, and asked me about my astronomical labors. ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... records of thy public services which thy own hand has given to the world with all the amiable and affecting simplicity that distinguished thy character, and in the more comprehensive composition of some accomplished Biographer, who may have opportunities and ability to do ...
— The Eulogies of Howard • William Hayley
... Jefferies; the pure and beneficent Mrs. Craik, better known as Miss Muloch; Matthew Arnold, poet, educationalist, critic, whose verse should outlive his criticisms; the noble astronomer Richard Proctor; Gustave Masson, the careful biographer of Milton; Laurence Oliphant, gifted and eccentric visionary; the naturalist J. G. Wood; the explorer and orientalist Burton; the historians Kinglake, Froude, and Freeman; the great ecclesiastics Bishop Lightfoot, Canon Liddon, Archbishop Magee of York, Dean Church, Dean Plumptre, ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... in their own feelings which is independent of fate and of the whole world.' Euripides, too, loved solitude, and avoided the noise of town life by retiring to a grotto at Salamis which he had arranged for himself with a view of the sea; for which reason, his biographer tells us, most of his similes are drawn from the sea. He, rather than Petrarch or Rousseau, was the father of sentimentality. His morbidly sensitive Hippolytos cries 'Alas! would it were possible that I should see myself ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... glory—his Frederick the Great, fascinating for obvious reasons to the patriotic German mind, and his Life of Sterling, a quiet book on the whole, a record of an uneventful life, in which the natural positions of subject and biographer are reversed, the man of genius writing the life of the unimportant friend, and the fact that the friend was exceedingly lovable in no way lessening one's discomfort in the face of such an anomaly. Carlyle stands on an eminence altogether removed from Sterling, who stands, indeed, on no eminence ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... spent a great deal of his time in playing at cards with the ladies and gentlemen of his court. In doing so, however, he was but following the example of George II., of whom the biographer already quoted (Mr. ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... and where he died peaceably in 1836, when he was eighty-one years old. He is described as a tall, handsome man, of an erect figure and carriage, a fair complexion, and a most attractive countenance. "He had," his biographer tells us, "a soft, tremulous voice, very pleasing to the hearer, and laughing gray eyes that appeared to fascinate the beholder," except in his rare moments of anger, when their fiery glance would curdle the blood of those who had roused his wrath. He was above all the heroes ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... no simple question for her biographer to answer off-hand. Lettice, as we know, had admitted into her heart a feeling of sympathetic tenderness for Alan, which, under other circumstances, she would have accepted as worthy to dominate her life and ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... girl died too—I mean when she was a little girl—wasted away, or something—I'm such a beastly idiot about expressing myself, that I wouldn't dare to write to you at all if you weren't really great. That is actually all I can tell you, and I am afraid the painter was their only biographer." ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... drawing, and later the people of Ferrara were amazed at the skill and taste which she displayed in embroidering in silk and gold. "She spoke Spanish, Greek, Italian, and French, and a little Latin, very correctly, and she wrote and composed poems in all these tongues," said the biographer Bayard in 1512. Lucretia must have perfected her education later, during the quiet years of her life, under the influence of Bembo and Strozzi, although she doubtless had laid its foundation in Rome. She was both a Spaniard and an Italian, and a perfect master of these two languages. ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... which the story makes him play, he would have deserved not only to be emasculated, but to be scourged with harp-strings in every market-town in Wales, and to be dismissed from the service of the Muse. But the writer repeats that he does not believe one tittle of the story, though Ab Gwilym's biographer, the learned and celebrated William Owen, not only seems to believe it, but rather chuckles over it. It is the opinion of the writer that the story is of Italian origin, and that it formed part of one of the many rascally novels brought over to England after the marriage of Lionel, Duke of ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... suffice to attest the kinship of the writer with the distinguished subject of his biography. It is a quiet and tranquil picture that he has given us, of a serene and tranquil life. As we have turned it over delightedly, chapter after chapter, and volume upon volume, we have wished at times that the coy biographer had been endowed with a spice of garrulity or of egotism; for, say what we will, these qualities contribute largely to the interest with which we follow the story of a life about whose incidents and development the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... this life nineteen years before him. The story of his romantic after marriage, and many details of his career from birth to death, will be found in Mr. O. B. Frothingham's "Life of George Ripley," told by his kindly biographer. ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman |
