"Congreve" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... vile dramatic era of Charles II. Wycherley led the brutes, but Congreve came up and combatted with his brilliant comedies the vileness of the Restoration school, and Hallam says of him that he introduced decency to the stage that afterward drove his own comedies off it. A little after Congreve, the school, so to speak, for we have nothing but the school, ...
— Shenandoah - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Bronson Howard
... phosphorus arose, took a match from the box, and thrust it into the bottle, with the result that he brought it out burning, after the fashion of our fathers' time before the invention of lucifer matches and congreve lights—a fashion adopted when a letter had been written and the writer, who knew not adhesive envelopes and desired to seal his missive, made use of the phosphorus bottle instead of producing a light with ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... obtained his wish; for the Prometheus had a very distinguished station assigned her on the great night of bombardment, and from her decks, I believe, was made almost the first effectual trial of the Congreve rockets. Soon after the Danish capital had fallen, and whilst the Prometheus was still cruising in the Baltic, Pink, in company with the purser of his ship, landed on the coast of Jutland, for the purpose of a morning's sporting. It ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... shall not Sir— You, the Town, are a Monstor, made up of Contrarieties, Caprice Steers— Steers your Iudgement— Fashion and Novelty, Your Affections; Sometimes so Splenitic, as to damn a Cibber, and, even a Congreve, in the Way of the World;— And some times so good-Natured as to run in Crowds after a Queen Mab, or a ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... prepare to give the reader some facts, which he may consider as a trial of credulity.—Their authorities are, however, not contemptible.—Naturalists assert that animals and birds, as well as "knotted oaks," as Congreve informs us, are sensible to the charms of music. This may serve as an instance:—An officer was confined in the Bastile; he begged the governor to permit him the use of his lute, to soften, by the harmonies of his instrument, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... a bad one. I would not willingly offend any of its prejudices. I would not affect eccentricity. At the same time, I do not feel disposed to be put out of my way because it is not the way of the world—Le Chemin du Monde, as a Frenchman entitled Congreve's comedy{1}—but I assure you these seven young women live here as they might do in the ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... to sing before their feet had strength to tread the stage, before their hands had skill to paint or carve figures from the life. With Shakespeare it was so as certainly as with Shelley, as evidently as with Hugo. It is in the great comic poets, in Moliere and in Congreve, {42} our own lesser Moliere, so far inferior in breadth and depth, in tenderness and strength, to the greatest writer of the "great age," yet so near him in science and in skill, so like him in brilliance and in force;—it is in these that we find theatrical instinct twin-born with imaginative ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... seventeen hundred and thirties when Allan Ramsay, "in fear and trembling of legal and clerical censure," lent out the plays of Congreve and Farquhar from his famous High Street library. In 1756 it was that the Presbytery of Edinburgh suspended all clergymen who had witnessed the representation of "Douglas," that virtuous tragedy written, to the dismay of all Scotland, by a minister of the Kirk. That the world, even the theological ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... course of lectures on the English Humorists. The lectures are received with great favor by an audience fit and not few. The first was upon Swift, and was a striking portraiture of that able, unscrupulous, and baffled clerical adventurer. The second lecture was upon Congreve, the most worthless, and Addison, the most amiable of the English Humorists. His treatment of Addison is characterized as more brilliant than any thing Addison himself ever produced. His appearance is thus described: "Thackeray ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... could retain public favor when they had lost the countenance of law-colleges. Something of this power the young lawyers retained beyond the middle of the last century. Fielding and Addison caught with nervous eagerness the critical gossip of the Temple and Chancery Lane, just as Congreve and Wycherly, Dryden and Cowley had caught it in previous generations. Fashionable tradesmen and caterers for the amusement of the public made their engagements and speculations with reference to the opening of term. New plays, new ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... whether in Cornwall, Ireland, or Scotland. A description of some of these monuments, the so-called Pandoo Coolies in Malabar, was given by Mr. J. Babington, in 1820, and published in the third volume of the "Transactions of the Literary Society of Bombay," in 1823. Captain Congreve called attention to what he considered Scythic Druidical remains in the Nilghiri hills, in a paper published in 1847, in the "Madras Journal of Literature and Science," and the same subject was treated ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... own deformity,' as mere cant, which the men themselves must have spoken tongue in cheek. It was as much an insincere cant in those days as it was when, two generations later, Jeremy Collier exposed its falsehood in the mouth of Congreve. If the poets had really intended to show vice its own deformity, they would have represented it (as Shakspeare always does) as punished, and not as triumphant. It is ridiculous to talk of moral purpose in works in which there is no moral justice. The only condition which can ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... the evening with Sergeant Clews—carrying ammunition from a dump near White Chateau to a Brigade dump further on to the left, behind Congreve Walk. A very ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... old caste. I liked him, though I was always conscious of that flame and steel in his nature which made his psychology a world away from mine. He was hit hard—in what I think was the softest spot in his heart—by the death of one of his A. D. C.'s—young Congreve, who was the beau ideal of knighthood, wonderfully handsome, elegant even when covered from head to foot in wet mud (as I saw him one day), fearless, or at least scornful of danger, to the verge of recklessness. General Haldane had marked him out as the most promising young soldier in ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... such stray volume from a bookcase; but here I was my own master. My grandfather's library was, as I have said already, particularly rich in literature of this semiforbidden class, and rows of plays and poems by Congreve, Etheridge, Rochester, Dryden, and their contemporaries offered themselves to my study, as though by some furtive assignation. Among other wrecks of furniture with which the worm-eaten floors were encumbered was an old and battered rocking-horse, bestriding which I studied these ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... Normandy, in 1571, when some of the best composers of the day, including Orlando Lasso, competed for the prizes which were offered. It is recorded that the first of these festivals to be held in England was in 1683. For these occasions odes were written by Dryden, Shadwell, Congreve, and other poets, and the music was supplied by such composers as Purcell and Blow. At the Church of St. Eustache, in Paris, on St. Cecilia's Day, masses by Adolphe Adam, Gounod, and Ambroise Thomas have been given their first performance. In Germany, ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... M. For sterling wit and manly sense combin'd, Where, Congreve, shall I find thy parallel? For charming ease, who equals polish'd Vanbrugh? Where shall we see such graceful pleasantry As Farquhar's muse with lavish bounty scatters? But yet, ye great triumvirate—I fear To call you back to earth, for ye debas'd With vile impurities the comic muse, And made her ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... twenty-four hours at a stretch; our quick firing yielded a very respectable number of hits at a distance of eleven hundred yards; and our grenade firing was not to be despised. We were quite as skilful with a small battery of Congreve rockets which Johnston had had sent after us from Trieste, on the advice of an Egyptian officer who had served in the Soudan—a native of Austria, and a frequent witness of our practising at Alexandria. The language of command, as well as that of our general intercourse, ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... ridiculous than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as horses?" asked a writer in the English "Quarterly Review" for March, 1825. "We should as soon expect the people of Woolwich to suffer themselves to be fired off upon one of Congreve's rockets as to trust themselves to the mercy of such a machine, going at such a rate. We trust that Parliament will, in all the railways it may grant, limit the speed to eight or nine miles an hour, which we entirely agree with Mr. Sylvester is as great ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... works are the foulest that ever disgraced the literature of a nation. They are excellent specimens of that which has been called the comedy of manners; vice is inextricably interwoven in the texture of all alike, in the broad humor of Wycherly (the most vigorous of the set), in the wit of Congreve, in the character painting of Vanbrugh, and ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... from thence with his whole force, consisting of 25,000 infantry, 3000 cavalry, and seventy-five pieces of cannon. At Cambray he divided them into three columns; the one marched by Ligny, and attacked the redoubt at Troisoille, which was most gallantly defended by Col. Congreve against this column of 10,000 men. The second column was then united, consisting of 12,000 men, which marched on the high road as far as Beausois, and from that village turned off to join the first column; and the attack recommenced against Col. Congreve's redoubt, who kept ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 207, October 15, 1853 • Various
... Addison for killing stout, old Sir Roger de Coverley, and would never listen to the butler's account of his death. Mr. Carvel, too, had walked in Gray's Inn Gardens and met adventure at Fox Hall, and seen the great Marlborough himself. He had a fondness for Mr. Congreve's Comedies, many of which he had seen acted; and was partial to Mr. Gay's Trivia, which brought him many a recollection. He would also listen to Pope. But of the more modern poetry I think Mr. Gray's Elegy pleased him best. He would ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... D'Olive, in the comedy of that name, is "the undoubted prototype of that light, flippant, gay, and infinitely delightful class of character, of the professed men of wit and pleasure about town, which we have in such perfection in Wycherly and Congreve, such as Sparkish, Witwond, Petulant, &c., both in the sentiments and the style of writing"; and Tharsalio in "The Widow's Tears," and Ludovico in "May-Day," have the hard impudence and cynical distrust of virtue, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... in England, Nelson took command off Cadiz on September 28, eager for a final blow that would free England for aggressive war. There was talk of using bomb vessels, Congreve's rockets, and Francis's (Robert Fulton's) torpedoes to destroy the enemy in harbor, but it soon became known that Villeneuve would be forced to put to sea. On October 9, Nelson issued the famous Memorandum, or battle plan, embodying what he called "the Nelson touch," and received by his ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... Fainall, and soured against the whole male sex. She says, "I have done hating those vipers—men, and am now come to despise them;" but she thinks of marrying to keep her husband "on the rack of fear and jealousy."—W. Congreve, The Way of the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... reply, "because we never saw a Boer the whole day." When the enemy are firing smokeless powder behind their splendidly constructed earthworks they are practically invisible, a fact born witness to by Captain Congreve, V.C., in his account of the first reverse at the Tugela. Now of course when you can't see your enemy you can't very well hit him, so when we clear our minds of fairy-stories about Lyddite and the universal destruction ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... the world who ought in justice to arraign her, who have been myself too much a libertine in most of my poems, which I should be well contented I had time either to purge or to see them fairly burned." Congreve was less patient, and even Dryden, in the last epilogue he ever wrote, attempts ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... Congreve that Addison's habit of shyness was an affectation. If so, it was a good stroke, for nothing is so becoming in a man known to be versatile and strong as a half-embarrassment when in society. The Duke of Wellington's awkwardness in a drawing-room put all others at their ease. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... a youth, who returned from driving by post-chaise through the principal towns of Europe in the company of a meek chaplain,[392] returned from his tour about as much refined, according to Congreve, "as a Dutch skipper from a whale-fishing."[393] The whole idea of the Grand Tour was thrown into disrepute after its adoption by crude and low-bred people, who thought it necessary to inform all their acquaintance where they had ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... at present certain theological implications. The positivists were beginning to make themselves known, and, for various reasons, were anything but attractive to him. He denounces a manifesto from Mr. Congreve in January 1857, and again from the patriotic side. Mr. Congreve had suggested, among other things, the cession of Gibraltar to Spain, in accordance with his view of international duties. The English nation, ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Aries Calvin Cambridge, Trinity College Chapel Cappellus, Ludovione Carr Carracci Castillo, de Ceriani Chaplin, Child Charles Chigi, Cardinal Chrysostom Churton Clement of Alexandria Cloquet Cockerell Congreve Cope, L.C. Cornelius à Lapide Cornely Cornish, H.P. Correggio Coypel Curteis, G.H. Curtis, E.L. Curtius, Quintus Cyprian Cyprian, pseudo- Cyril ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... piece, but the number of starts and attitudes that may be introduced into it that elicits applause. I have known a piece, with not one jest in the whole, shrugged into popularity, and another saved by the poet's throwing in a fit of the gripes. No, Sir, the works of Congreve and Farquhar have too much wit in them for the present taste; our modern ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... the truth, and not to exaggerate like Tapage, it was only reasonable that owing to the excessive speed the work of the suspensory screws should be somewhat lessened. The "Albatross" glided on its bed of air like a Congreve rocket. ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... who were cotemporary with Lord Shaftsbury, Dryden, Cowley, Pope, Prior, Congreve, Gay, Addison, &c. in the Period which this Age styles AUGUSTAN, his Lordship speaks with sovereign scorn. In his Characteristics he, without making any exception, labors to prove, that the compositions of Dryden are uniformly contemptible. See his advice to an Author in the second Volume ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... Charles II was bigotted to judicial astrology, a man, though a king, whose mind was by no means unenlightened. The most respectable characters of the age, Sir William Dugdale, Elias Ashmole,[77] Dr. Grew, and others, were members of the astrological club. Congreve's character of Foresight, in Love for Love, was then no uncommon person, though the humour, now, is scarcely intelligible. Dryden cast the nativities of his sons; and what is remarkable, his prediction relating to his son Charles, was accomplished. The incident being of so late a date, one might ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... for the stage design'd, In person graceful, and in sense refined; Her art as much as Nature's friend became, Her voice as free from blemish as her fame, Who knows so well in majesty to please, Attemper'd with the graceful charms of ease? When, Congreve's favoured pantomime[65] to grace, She comes a captive queen, of Moorish race; 810 When love, hate, jealousy, despair, and rage With wildest tumults in her breast engage, Still equal to herself is Zara seen; Her passions are the passions of a queen. ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... than when attempting to pilot others on the rough unknown sea of letters. I can not agree with you in thinking that critics are more abundant now than formerly. More books are written, and consequently more are tabooed; but the history of literature proves that, from the days of Congreve, ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... in turn merged in the land, and became English aristocrats; while the Levant decaying, the West Indies exhausted, and Hindostan plundered, the breeds died away, and now exist only in our English comedies from Wycherly and Congreve to Cumberland and Morton. The expenditure of the revolutionary war produced the Loanmonger, who succeeded the Nabob; and the application of science to industry developed the Manufacturer, who in turn aspires ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... Lamb. Possibly autobiographical in the matter of the first play. Charles Lamb's first play was the opera "Artaxerxes;" Mary's may quite well have been Congreve's "Mourning Bride." The book-shop at the corner of St. Paul's Churchyard would be Harris's (late Newbery's); that in Skinner Street (No. 41) was, of course, Godwin's, where Mrs. Leicester's School was published and sold. This pleasant art of ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... been struggling with the same lack of religion; and many of them were forced to become mere panders and sensation-mongers because, though they had higher ambitions, they could find no better subject-matter. From Congreve to Sheridan they were so sterile in spite of their wit that they did not achieve between them the output of Moliere's single lifetime; and they were all (not without reason) ashamed of their profession, and preferred to be regarded as mere men of fashion with a rakish hobby. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... aloft, and a window shedding down its light on the marble busts and tablets, yellow with time, that cover the three walls of the nook up to a height of about twenty feet. Prior's is the largest and richest monument. It is observable that the bust and monument of Congreve are in a distant part of the Abbey. His duchess probably thought it a degradation to bring a gentleman among the ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of honor on the stage, or in his sacred chair at Will's Coffee-house in Covent Garden (near the fire-place in winter, and carried into the balcony in summer), "Glorious John" was the observed of all observers. Of Will's Coffee-house, Congreve says, in Love for Love, "Oh, confound that Will's Coffee-house; it has ruined more young men than the Royal Oak Lottery:" this speaks at once of the fashion and ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee |
