"Critic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pulpit should be a similar institution; but, alas, the pulpit itself, has no adequate system of ethics—its theology has starved its ethics, and it lifts its followers, in the main, no higher than the level of exterior respectability. The task remains for some able critic to show how many of the important duties of life, though plainly implied by the fundamental law of Christianity, are ignored by ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... Papal power his mind was bent upon enforcing the practical solution of a pressing social problem, we easily misunderstand him and underrate what he had to say. A charge has been forcibly urged against him by an eminent English critic, for example, that he has confounded supremacy with infallibility, than which, as the writer truly says, no two ideas can be more perfectly distinct, one being superiority of force, and the other incapacity of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... findings of fact; findings of law; res judicata[Lat]. plebiscite, voice, casting vote; vote &c. (choice) 609; opinion &c. (belief) 484; good judgment &c. (wisdom) 498. judge, umpire; arbiter, arbitrator; asessor, referee. censor, reviewer, critic; connoisseur; commentator &c. 524; inspector, inspecting officer. twenty-twenty hindsight[judgment after the fact]; armchair general, monday morning quarterback. V. judge, conclude; come to a conclusion, draw ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... is the study of life, because poetry is the interpretation of life. Poetry is not a mere instrument for promoting enjoyment; it does not merely dazzle the imagination and excite the emotions. Through the emotions and the imagination it both interprets life and ministers to life. When the critic attempts to express that truth, that is, to interpret the interpreter, which he can do only by translating the poetry into prose, and the language of imagination and emotion into that of philosophy, he destroys the poem in the process, much as the botanist destroys the ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... of that most impartial and worthy critic, Lord Jeffrey, which is, that tourists should describe those things which make the pleasantest impression on their own minds, I should begin with an account of the delightful entertainment which genuine hospitality and courtesy ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... of view, and his greatest one in the eyes of people in general, lay in an unfortunate habit of thinking aloud, a dangerous characteristic, which persons who are apt to find themselves in the position of critic should at any cost eradicate. Luckily, his benevolence was such that these outspoken comments were never really ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... expected of the singer. This privilege of exercising individuality might even extend to the solid framework of the mele or oli and not merely to the filigree, the i'i, that enwreathed it. [Page 161] It would follow from this, if the author is correct, that the musical critic of to-day must be content to generalize somewhat and must not be put out if the key is changed on repetition and if tempo and rhythm depart at times from their standard gait. It is questionable if even the experts in the ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... fame come to him, his first prophet being the French critic Thore (who wrote as "W. Burger"), and his second Mr. Henri Havard, the author of very pleasant books on Holland from which I shall occasionally quote. Both these enthusiasts wrote before the picture opposite page 2 was ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... so highly distinguished a man, whose name had long since been favorably known in America. At this his face brightened; he arose from the sofa, shook my hand cordially, wishing me health, happiness, and a safe voyage." Later, at Brussels, he called on M. Fetiss, the famous French musical critic and biographer. At that time, in his eighty-eighth year, Fetis was a fugitive from Paris, owing to the troubles of the Franco-Prussian war. Mr. Mickley's picture of the veteran litterateur and critic is an engaging one. He says, "Considering his great age, Mr. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... from the house. Nature has been very miserly of her favors to this amorous music teacher: his countenance resembles that of an unwashed charcoal merchant, while his manners are utterly devoid of anything like gentlemanly refinement.—We are no great critic of the art of piano teaching; but we opine that it is rather unnecessary, in the first stages of the instruction, to clasp a lady's waist, or even to bring one's mouth in too close proximity to her rosy lips. It leads a sensitive female, or a fastidious gentleman to suspect the existence of ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... Sterne's pen bear inspiration. No less a critic than the severe Hazlitt was satisfied that "his works ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... obliged to choose Mr. Max Muller as his adversary. He must strike, as it were, the shield of no Hospitaler of unsteady seat, but that of the Templar himself. And this is the cause of what seems to puzzle Mr. Max Muller, namely the attacks on his system and his results in particular. An English critic, writing for English readers, had to do with the scholar who chiefly represented the philological school of mythology in the ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... perhaps, than in the neglected negro gardens of the South. Near every negro hut is a garden patch large enough to supply the family with vegetables for the entire year, but it usually is neglected. "If they have any garden at all," says a negro critic from Tuskegee, "it is apt to be choked with weeds and other noxious growths. With every advantage of soil and climate and with a steady market if they live near any city or large town, few of the colored farmers get any benefit from this, ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... disquisition; and there has since appeared an attempt to combine with this investigation the medical science. A work, however, should be judged by its design and its execution, and not by any preconceived notion of what it ought to be according to the critic, rather than the author. The nature of this work is dramatic rather than metaphysical. It offers a narration or a description; a conversation or a monologue; an incident ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... they are all false"—a sufficiently broad statement —"in literature all libelous"—also a sufficiently sweeping statement, coming from a critic who notes that we are "a people who are peculiarly extravagant in our language—" and when it is a matter of social life, "almost all biased." It seems to amount to stultification, almost. He has ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... little trick of mine, from book to book, and everything else, comparatively, plays over the surface of it. The order, the form, the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the initiated a complete representation of it. So it's naturally the thing for the critic to look for. It strikes me," my visitor added, smiling, "even as the thing for the ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... the honestest men of this age, arrayed against you, be pleased to notice the following letter from Prof. Stuart." I wrote to him, knowing as I did his integrity of purpose, his unflinching regard for truth, as well as his deserved reputation as a scholar and biblical critic, proposing the following questions:— ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... unmoved (by laughter as much as by sympathy) his story of how this offer was at first refused, then accepted. Throughout indeed you must prepare to find Mr. EMPEY an entirely independent, though generous, critic of our men and methods; it is precisely this attitude that gives his book its chief interest as a survey of all-too-familiar things from a refreshingly new angle. I hardly suppose there will be anything in the actual matter, from church parade to gas-attacks, which readers on this side will not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 19, 1917 • Various
... Medieval Christian Critic of Maimonides, Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, vol. ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... be dismissed in a very few words. As a general rule, I have avoided couplets of any sort, and chosen some kind of stanza. As a German critic has pointed out, all the Odes of Horace, with one doubtful exception, may be reduced to quatrains; and though this peculiarity does not, so far as we can see, affect the character of any of the Horatian metres (except, of course, those ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... which invariably crowned her flights of inventive fancy: To the facility and cultivation of voice, which came from her father's training, she added a fertility of musical inspiration which came from nature. A French critic wrote of her: "Her passages were not only remarkable for extent, rapidity, and complication, but were invariably marked by the most intense feeling and sentiment. Her soul appeared in everything she did." Her extraordinary flexibility enabled her to run with ease over passages ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... marks a distinct departure in the dramatist's literary progress. As a critic has well observed, it substitutes for situations produced by the mechanism of plot, characters which give rise to situations in accordance with the ordinary operations of human nature. Molire's method—the simple and only true one, and, consequently, the one which incontestably establishes ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... careless dressing men, looked best in the regulation simplicity of evening clothes, in which the despotism of fashion curbs all vagaries of fancy. More than one feminine critic smiled involuntary approval of the handsome young sailor, whose easy, slightly unconventional manner, though singular, was ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... favour as they little deserved, yet the slightest censure, such as, perhaps, could not be avoided with any pretensions to candour and impartiality, has rankled in the hearts of those authors to such a degree, that they have taken immediate vengeance on the critic in anonymous libels, letters, and lampoons. Indeed, all the writers of the age, good, bad, and indifferent, from the moment he assumed this office, became his enemies, either professed or in petto, except those of his friends who knew they had ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... was certainly very off-colored. An unkind critic might easily have misinterpreted that dim surface. It was a dull gray landscape, and as I gradually deciphered the details of it I realized that it represented a long and enormously high line of cliffs exactly like an immense cataract seen in the ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... very valuable remarks on this subject in the 70th No. of the QUARTERLY in an article on the "Life of Blucher," usually attributed to Sir Francis Head. The Prussian writer, General Clausewitz, is there cited as "expressing a positive opinion, in which every military critic but a Frenchman must concur, that, even had the whole of Grouchy's force been at Napoleon's disposal, the Duke had nothing to ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... that his excessive praise was lavished on Pompey with a view of securing the great General's assistance in his candidature for the Consulship. Even Middleton repeats this accusation, and only faintly repels it. M. Du Rozoir, the French critic, declares that "in the whole oration there is not a word which was not dictated to Cicero the Praetor by his desire to become Consul, and that his own elevation was in his thoughts all through, and ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... gazette—for 1766 refers to him as 'the favourite of our nation,' and pays him the high compliment of comparing him with Gellert, the most esteemed poet of the day. 'What Gellert is to poetry Haydn is to music,' writes the critic. ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... failure. After the first act, many left the theatre; at the end of the second, most of the others started out. A cynical critic as he rose from his aisle ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... had been convoked by the House in compliance with the eager desires of a certain ancient pundit of the constitution, who had been for many years a member, and who had been known as a stern critic of our colonial modes of government. To him it certainly seemed that everything that was, was bad,—as regarded our national dependencies. But this is so usually the state of mind of all parliamentary critics, it ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... estimates of certain situations are masterpieces of picturesque concision. "Why did I stop and sign the preliminaries of Leoben? Because I played vingt-et-un and was satisfied with twenty." His insight into (dramatic) character is that of the most sagacious critic. "The 'Mahomet' of Voltaire is neither a prophet nor an Arab, only an impostor graduated out of the Ecole Polytechnique."—"Madame de Genlis tries to define virtue as if she were the discoverer of it."—(On Madame de Stael): "This woman teaches people to think who never took to it, or ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... expressed what I meant it to convey." But the reader, who is not in the secret of the author's original design, usually views the work through a different medium; and is perhaps in this the wiser critic of the two: for the book that wanders the most from the idea which originated it may often be better than that which is rigidly limited to the unfolding and denouement of a single conception. If we accept this solution, we may be enabled to understand why an author not unfrequently ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... writer Berlioz is infinitely superior. See Paul Morillot's essay on Berlioz ecrivain, 1903, Grenoble.] One would think that such an imaginative and skilful writer, accustomed in his profession of critic to express every shade of feeling, would be able to tell us more exactly his ideas of art than a Beethoven or a Mozart. But it is not so. As too much light may blind the vision, so too much intellect may hinder the understanding. Berlioz's mind spent ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... Poems towards which I entreat the lenity of the Public. The Critic will doubtless find in them much to condemn; he may likewise possibly discover something to commend. Let him scan my faults with an indulgent eye, and in the work of that correction which I invite, let him remember he is holding the iron Mace of Criticism over the flimsy superstructure ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... one to feel discouragement when at first he does not admire all that the critics say is beautiful, but prefers some of the simple things that he knew in his childhood. The critic is right from his point of view, but there is merit, too, in the judgment of the humble reader. A person would hesitate to say the critic's judgment is the higher were it not for the fact that anyone reading carefully will find his tastes changing ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... grew more and more dangerous as during eighteen years our people saw, or thought that they saw, that one concession led always to a fresh demand, and that the Dutch republics aimed not merely at equality, but at dominance in South Africa. Professor Bryce, a friendly critic, after a personal examination of the country and the question, has left it upon record that the Boers saw neither generosity nor humanity in our conduct, but only fear. An outspoken race, they conveyed their feelings to their neighbours. ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... thus highly distinguished, has already demonstrated itself worthy of the exalted name, so happily bestowed upon it, the most carping critic must admit. With a population now reaching up toward a million and a half, and with all the forces that make for industrial, commercial and agricultural supremacy in full swing, and gathering new momentum yearly, Washington is moving onward and upward ...
— A Review of the Resources and Industries of the State of Washington, 1909 • Ithamar Howell
... limit has been set to the expense; the finest materials the country yields have been used in its construction; the richest example of the richest order which antiquity has left us, has been lavishly employed in its decoration; and yet," continues the critic, "is not the whole a failure?" He then describes the effect of it as "poor, or at best but pretty," and attributes the absence of grandeur to the "want of sufficient elevation."—"To the general elevation it may be objected, that it has no prominent ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 342, November 22, 1828 • Various
... to honesty I am not sure. There was a man (I know him well) wrote a book on Alaska or some such place, claimed he had been there. There was another man, his friend, who was a reviewer. Now the Alaskaian said to the critic: "Why don't you get my book from the paper? I'll write the review—I know more about the book than anybody else, anyway; and you sign it and get the money." And this was done; and it was an excellent review; and the paper (which you read every day) ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... not in Wall Street, are you? It is a seething hell. Now, forgive, forget; meet me frankly at the Century for dinner, and I may be able to make your fortune and save your friendship. Burn this; don't answer, even by wire, as I shall be swinging around by Pittsburg. Wade is your only critic. He wants the place for his nephew, Tom. We can't blame him. Blood is thicker than water, after all; but we'll beat him at his own game. Rely ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... being her critic he grew to be her advocate. Cynical things he had uttered to himself about her; but no man can be always a cynic and live; and he withdrew them. The mistake of expressing them had arisen from his allowing himself to be influenced by general principles to the disregard ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... paid Mrs. Grote a visit at Burnham Beeches. Our party consisted only of my sister and myself; the Viennese composer, Dessauer; and Chorley, the musical critic of the Athenaeum, who was very intimately acquainted with us all. The eccentricities of our hostess, with which some of us were already tolerably familiar, were a source of unfeigned amazement and awe to Dessauer, who, himself the most ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... my quoting from a letter of the date of the 22d April, 1848. "I desire no better for my fame, when my personal dustiness shall be past the control of my love of order, than such a biographer and such a critic." "You know me better," he wrote, resuming the same subject on the 6th of July, 1862, "than any other man does, or ever will." In an entry of my diary during the interval between these years, I find a few words that not only mark the time when I first saw in its connected shape the autobiographical ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... originally came out under the title of "A Love Story" in a paper called the "Artiste," edited by that famous art critic and courtier of the Second Empire, Arsene Houssaye, author of "Les Grandes Dames," as well as of those charming volumes "Hommes et Femmes du 18eme Siecle," and ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... an adagio introduction for instruments which is of a very dramatic character, and, unlike nearly all of the sacred music of that time, is noticeable for the absence of the fugue. Barbedette, the great French critic, pronounces it the chef-d'oeuvre of introductions, and a masterpiece in the serious style. The first number is a recitative and aria for tenor, sung by Jesus ("All my Soul within me shudders"), which, notwithstanding the anomaly of such a scene ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... every situation, from beginning to end, is the work of Wilkie Collins. The actual writing is entirely his up to a certain point: from that point to the end it is partly his, but mainly mine. Where his writing ends and mine begins, I need not point out. The practised critic will, no doubt, at once lay his ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... Revolution, by a young American scholar, who has recently resided in France. The book, though deficient and sometimes incorrect in details, deserves much praise for its general correctness and accuracy. The author, though by no means a critic of the first class, is altogether above the herd of Grub street hacks who commonly undertake the popularizing of literary history. He is no Winstansley and no Cibber. The range of his reading appears to be ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... The publication in book form of the best native pieces presented by the enthusiasts of whom I have spoken, but not offered to the general public for a run, would satisfy any critic that the English modern drama exists although we are still waiting for the English ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... Revision, we wish specially to name Prof. Henry M. Worrell, of the Polytechnic Institute; and in this edition of the work, as in the preceding, we take pleasure in acknowledging our great indebtedness to our critic, the distinguished Prof. Francis A. March, of ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... directly the opposite way. [For example ("CORRESPONDENCE WITH FREDERSDORF"),—OEuvres,—xxvii. iii. 145.] Friedrich, in his own utterances and occasional rhymes, is abundantly cynical; now and then rises to a kind of epic cynicism, on this very matter. But at no time can the painful critic call it cynicism as of OTHER than an observer; always a kind of vinegar cleanness in it, EXCEPT in theory. Cynicism of an impartial observer in a dirty element; observer epically sensible (when provoked to it) of the brutal contemptibilities ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... "I give you the critic's words verbatim. I really looked at the young lady in astonishment, that she should see nothing but a want of liveliness in a picture, which most of us feel to be sublime. But Miss D——- had an old grudge against you, for not having ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... passage in 1865, but 'I think,' he says in 1880, 'that I was a heavy old man thirty years ago. Fifteen years ago I was at the height of my strength. I am beginning to feel now a little more tolerant towards the boy who wrote this than the man who criticised it in 1865; but he was quite right.' The critic of 1865, I may note, is specially hard upon the lad of 1850 for his ignorance of sound utilitarian authorities. He writes against an allusion to Hobbes, 'Ignorant blasphemy of the greatest of English philosophers!' The lad has misstated an argument from ignorance ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... revealed for the first time to the Frenchmen of her day the grandeur and mystery and charm of Italy, but also showed the national characteristics of French and Englishmen for the first time in their respective, and in a European light. Moreover, as one European critic has pointed out, it is also one of the first, and still one of the subtlest, studies in the psychology of sex and emancipation of woman of the nineteenth century. Madame de Stael's relations with the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... tired, so that the officers had no lack of partners, and voted it great fun. There were many very pretty girls among them, and several with much more of the rose on their cheeks than usually falls to the share of West Indian damsels. Some censorious critic even ventured to hint that it was added by the hand of art. That this was false was evident, for the weather was so hot that had rouge been used it would have inevitably been detected; but the island damsels trusted to their good figures and features, and their lively ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... Mr. Needham's Reply to Mr. Goodwin's Book against Triers" appeared Aug. 25; but we need not follow the controversy farther. It had come to be Mr. John Goodwin's fate to be the severest public critic of Cromwell's Established Church; it had come to be Mr. Marchamont Needham's to be the most prominent ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... consistently on the side of the North. Moreover, it realised that the North was going to win, and ought to win, and so would abolish slavery. There is a special tradition at the "Spectator" office of which we are very proud. It is that the military critic of "The Spectator," at that time Mr. Hooper, a civilian but with an extraordinary flair for strategy, divined exactly what Sherman was doing when he started on his famous march. Many years afterwards ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... not rehearse the Vicar at all well. One day, when he was stamping his foot very much as if he were Mathias in "The Bells," my little Edy, who was a terrible child and a wonderful critic, said: ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... is almost as important as what is included. But we must not carry this too far; we should be foolish indeed did we assert that those things omitted from such a code as Ptah-hotep's were not practised or not held to be important in his day. For example, he 'knows nothing'—as a Higher Critic would say—of kindness to animals; but we know from many things that the Egyptians treated animals kindly and made much of them as pets. In the very tomb of that Ptah-hotep mentioned above,[15] who may be our author, is depicted the bringing of three dogs and a tame monkey to ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... of Applied Arts sent Paul Horti as its representative. Mr. Paul Horti is a well known art critic of Hungary. Mr. R.E. Rombauer was also a member of ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... in pronouncing 'that there is little in the technique of palliatae to excite our admiration.' Again we insist (to borrow the jargon of the modern dramatic critic) it was but a "vehicle" ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... though a spirit of criticism had entered into all the Poketownites. There was Walky Dexter scoffing at her Uncle Jason; and here was Selectman Moore criticising the father of little Lottie. Yet neither critic, as far as Janice could see, set much of an example for his ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... amicably. In 1872 Mrs. Lynn Linton published "The True History of Joshua Davidson," a powerfully simple story that has had much influence on working-class thought. "Christopher Kirkland," a later story, is largely autobiographical. Mrs. Linton died in London on July 14, 1898. She was a trenchant critic of what she regarded as tendencies ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... critic (born in Prague in 1825), professor of the history of music in the University of Vienna.— The letter refers to the Mozart jubilee concert conducted by Liszt in Vienna, and to Hanslick's critique, in which he censured the want ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... one great source from which all historians derive their insight into the closing years of the reign of the "Grand Monarch," Louis XIV: whom the author shows to be anything but grand—and of the Regency. The opinion of the French critic, Sainte-Beuve, is fairly typical. "With the Memoirs of De Retz, it seemed that perfection had been attained, in interest, in movement, in moral analysis, in pictorial vivacity, and that there was no reason ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... life most natural and most dear to him. No one would venture to call the successful merchant a Visionary; and even his brother owns that "the old fellow has got more brains, after all, by Jove! than he ever gave him credit for." Yet, as the same critic, and others of his calibre, often say of him, "He has some remarkably queer notions. There's no making him out,—he is so different ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... tell the reader of a painter's coloring. I should be glad to hear what Titian's "Assumption" is like from some one who knew it by descriptions. Can any one who has seen it tell its likeness, or forget it? Can any cunning critic describe intelligibly the difference between the styles of Titian, of Tintoretto, and of Paolo Veronese,—that difference which no one with the slightest feeling for art can fail to discern after looking thrice at their works? It results from all this ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... "I feel!" replied the critic simply. "Of course, I am prejudiced in favour of your work; but that would not make it haunt me as if it were my own. I can see your faults; you are horribly uneven. There are lines here and there which make me cold; lines which are put in for the sake of the rhyme, and nothing more; but there ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... class lightens up its heavy columns—that is, it thinks it lightens them up—with a profound, an abysmal, book criticism; a criticism which carries you down, down, down into the scientific bowels of the subject—for the German critic is nothing if not scientific—and when you come up at last and scent the fresh air and see the bonny daylight once more, you resolve without a dissenting voice that a book criticism is a mistaken ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of originality, accusing him of having borrowed all the interesting passages in his work from the Ethiopics. In common with Heliodorus, Tatius has found a host of followers among the later Greeks, some of whom (as the learned critic just quoted, observes) have transcribed, rather than imitated him. In the "Hysminias and Hysmine" of Eumathius, a wretched production of the twelfth century, not only many of the incidents, but even of the names, as Sostratus, Sosthenes, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... Bessie might not do my lady was quite at liberty to do herself, and she made an end of the tale before she retired. And not only that. She wrote to Mr. Logger to recommend a publisher, and to ask how proper payment could be assured to a young and unknown author. She described the story to the veteran critic as a sad, pretty story of true love (which people go on believing in), sensibly written, without serious flaws of taste or grammar, and really worth reading if one had nothing else to do. In the morning she informed Bessie of what she had done. Bessie was not quite sure that Harry would feel ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... this,—not that they exceeded their instructions (a very serious charge), but that their estimate of what constituted faithfulness, and involved the necessity of change, was, from time to time, in the judgement of their critic, mistaken or exaggerated. Such language however as that used in reference to the changes made by the Revisers as "unnecessary and uninstructive alterations," and "irritating trivialities," was a somewhat harsh form of expressing the judgement ...
— Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture • C. J. Ellicott
... failed not to include a long letter—considerable portion of which, as it virtually belongs to yourself, you will now allow me to transcribe. Perhaps it were thriftier in me to reserve this for another occasion; but considering how seldom such a Writer obtains such a Critic, I cannot but reckon it pity that this friendly intercourse between them ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... to his room. They continued talking, and he was easily prevailed upon to stay a little time longer there. The Count lost himself in old times, spoke eagerly of Charlotte's beauty, which, as a critic, he dwelt ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... that Mr. Potter conceived at once a humorous opposition to the artistic enthusiasm of the critic, and, plunging into the garden, took a mischievous delight in its wildness and the victorious struggle of nature with the formality of art. At every step through the tangled labyrinth he could see where precision and order had been invaded, and even the rigid masonry broken ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... must now rehearse together. Edmund proposed, urged, entreated it, till the lady, not very unwilling at first, could refuse no longer, and Fanny was wanted only to prompt and observe them. She was invested, indeed, with the office of judge and critic, and earnestly desired to exercise it and tell them all their faults; but from doing so every feeling within her shrank—she could not, would not, dared not attempt it: had she been otherwise qualified for criticism, her conscience must have restrained her ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... on the morning of June 6, a British military critic has with justice assigned the turning of the tide in the affairs of Upper Canada.[62] It is perfectly true that that well-judged movement, admirable in conception and execution, checked the progress of the American arms at a moment most favorable to them, and ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... stood now for great differences, and this renewed inhalation of her native air had somehow left her to feel that she already, that she mainly, struck the compatriot as queer and dissociated. She moved such a critic, it would appear, as to rather an odd suspicion, a benevolence induced by a want of complete trust: all of which showed her in the light of a person too plain and too ill-clothed for a thorough good time, and yet too rich and too befriended—an intuitive cunning ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... him, he sent the letter first to his old instructor, the principal of the Brienne school. And the instructor—even though he, perhaps, agreed with this boy-critic—saw how foolish and hurtful for Napoleon's interest it would be to send such a surprising letter; and he promptly suppressed it. But the letter still exists; and a curious epistle it is for a fifteen-year-old boy to write. Here is ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... you will agree with me that the tone of our public debates is less elevated than that of our social gatherings, especially when our ministers are addressed, but at times even among fellow members, although of this I am no competent critic. I do not even criticize the behavior toward the ministers, for I am hardened by an experience of many years and can stand it. I am merely describing the reasons why no minister clings to his post, and why you do me an injustice if you believe that it takes an artful effort to make a minister ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... all were as able to endure analysis as yourself, Miss Marsden. In any case, you have no reason to fear a severe critic in me." ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... Passin' On Party," raises the author to the rank of a classic. To quote a critic: it is "a little like 'Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch,' a little like 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' but not just like either of them. She reaches right down into human breasts and grips the ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker
... "said that the evolution of species depends only on natural selection." The letter closes with an imaginary scene between Sir Wyville and a breeder, in which Sir Wyville criticises artificial selection in a somewhat similar manner. The breeder is silent, but on the departure of his critic he is supposed to make use of "emphatic but irreverent language about naturalists." The letter, as originally written, ended with a quotation from Sedgwick on the invulnerability of those who write on what they do not understand, but ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... "Severance" in the old knightly language of love, which is now apparently lost to the world. I tried it in the Lyrics of Camoens and found that I was speaking a forgotten tongue, which mightily amused the common sort of critic and reviewer. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... Bougainville having verified his positions in this navigation. He adds, "I do this justice to M. D'Anville's work with pleasure; I knew him intimately, and he appeared to me to be as good a member of society as he was a critic and a man of erudition." Bougainville now kept along the shore of Java, and after being out at sea for ten months and a half, arrived at Batavia ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... Atares. Now that we know Alexander VI, let us take a glance at his court. It has often been said, and is no doubt taken from Vasari's book, that in the Borgia Apartment Pinturicchio painted Pope Alexander VI adoring the Virgin represented under the likeness of his beloved, Julia Farnese. The critic must have been confused, because none of these madonnas recalls the face of Giulia la bella, whom people used to call the Bride of Christ. The picture that Vasari refers to must be one in ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... entirely to the name of Marius. Catulus was a polished and clever man, so graceful a speaker that his euphonious language sounded almost like eloquence, a tolerable writer of memoirs and occasional poems, and an excellent connoisseur and critic of art; but he was anything but a man of the people, and his victory was a victory of the aristocracy. The battles of the rough farmer on the other hand, who had been raised to honour by the common people and had led the common people to victory, were not merely defeats of the Cimbri and ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... while the writer was in that city a few years ago. Whence it came no one knew, but it was heard on every side. "She was a woman of sorts;" "he is a Tory of sorts;" "he had a religion of sorts;" "he was a critic of sorts." While it originally meant "of different or various kinds," as hats of sorts; offices of sorts; cheeses of sorts, etc., it is now used disparagingly, and implies something of a kind that is not satisfactory, or of a character that is rather poor. This, as Shakespeare might have said, ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser
... publications. There are two collections of Scaligerana—the Prima and Secunda. The first was compiled by a physician named Francois Vertunien, sieur de Lavau, who attended a family with whom Joseph Scaliger resided. He, in consequence, had frequent opportunities of meeting the celebrated critic, and was in the custom of committing to writing the observations which dropped from him in the course of conversation, to which he occasionally added remarks of his own. This collection, which was chiefly Latin, remained in manuscript many years after the death of the compiler. It was at ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... clear." In the Bible the various sorts of men are never confounded, but have the advantage of being exhibited by Nature herself, and are not a contrivance of the imagination. "Shylock," observes a recent critic, "seems so much a man of Nature's making, that we can scarce accord to Shakspeare the merit of creating him." What will you say of Balak, Nabal, Jeroboam? "Macbeth is rather guilty of tempting the Weird Sisters than of being tempted by them, and is surprised and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... me at the nooning to the shade of the old blacksmith shop, where I proposed that we should write them together. There sentence by sentence I made my little essay, covering one side of my slate, with Launa for inspirer and critic. My subject was the saw-mill, that one I knew best. There was a pricking of ears in the school-room when I named my humble subject, and an elder boy by my side whispered, "Now, give us some sawdust." I prospered this time and ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... of a patron at once and a pupil, he arranged the circle around, and hushed them into silence; and he himself sat down with an air of expectation and interest, not altogether unmixed with the gravity of the professed critic. The courtiers turned their eyes on the King, that they might be ready to trace and imitate the emotions his features should express, and Thomas de Vaux yawned tremendously, as one who submitted unwillingly to a wearisome penance. The song of Blondel was of ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... on with the inspection of the drawings, in which Mr. Fairfax showed himself deeply interested. His own manipulative powers were of the smallest, but he was an excellent critic. ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... subject of agriculture I have occasionally dwelt at more length, being somewhat of a farmeress, as Arthur Young styles it, and having now studied a considerable portion of France from an agricultural point of view. The noble dictum of 'that wise and honest traveller'—thus aptly does our great critic describe the Suffolk squire—'the magic of property turns sands to gold,' will be here as amply illustrated as in my works on ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... offered. But Morgan derived his sense of the ghastly failure of the whole business, not so much from the demeanour of the audience as from that of one of the critics, who somehow summed it up for him. This critic, whose bald pate had fascinated his eye, had a curiously irritating, spasmodic chuckle, and Morgan in vain tried ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... Celebration of James Russell Lowell last year showed that he has become more esteemed as a critic and essayist than as a poet. Lowell himself felt that his true calling was in critical work rather than in poetry, and he wrote very little verse in the latter part of his life. He was somewhat chagrined that the poetic flame ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... on Dramatic Art and Literature." Translated by John Black, the translation being revised by A. J. W. Morrison. Madame de Stael heard these lectures delivered in Vienna, and in her work on Germany says she was "astonished to hear a critic as ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... the friends of Protestant missionaries to answer the critic's charge of interference in native lawsuits by stating that it does not justly lie against them, but only against the Roman Catholics, the rule of the Protestant missionaries being to avoid such interference save in rare and extreme cases. Mr. Alexander ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... peut-etre quand on n'ecrit plus." This is the only allusion I have read to the possibility that the sources of literature, varied and infinite as they seem now, may sometime be exhausted. It surprises me to find that such an idea has crossed the mind of any one, especially of a highly gifted critic. The very fact that the nineteenth century has not produced many authors whom the world may count among the greatest of all time does not in my opinion justify the remark, "There may come a time when ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... apprentice, with his struggles for existence and his ultimate final failure owing to the irresistible indulgence of a passionate physical instinct." At first this too seemed to be a failure. To use the words of Arne Garborg, a Norwegian author and critic, Lie "had spoken—cried out in the passion or agony of his soul, and people stood there quite calm and as if they had heard nothing;" there seemed to be a total lack of sympathetic comprehension on the part of the public. In the end, however, the book ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... ones, as the writer will presently show; not one of these, however, has been detected and pointed out; but the best passages in the book, indeed whatever was calculated to make the book valuable, have been assailed with abuse and misrepresentation. The duty of the true critic is to play the part of a leech, and not of a viper. Upon true and upon malignant criticism there is an excellent fable by the Spaniard Iriarte. The viper says to the leech, "Why do people invite your bite, and flee from mine?" "Because," says the leech, ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... perhaps significant that a German critic has of late reminded us that the one test which the most authoritative and dramatic portrayal of the Day of Judgment offers, is the social test. The stern questions are not in regard to personal and family relations, but did ye visit ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... frankness of composition which pleases soldiers, sailors and young people of bold and active disposition."[383] I have tried to show that this quality was one which he not only enjoyed, in his own work and in that of other writers, but that as a critic he very seriously approved ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... bilious eyes of the omniscient Saxon, and not a soul be aware of its growth! However, Monsignor was a pleasant man, a true college lad, an interesting talker, with music in his voice, and a sincere eye. He was not a controversialist, but a critic, and he did not seem to mind when Horace went off into a dream of Sonia, and asked questions ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... the impressions of the writer upon events in Tuscany of which she was a witness. "From a window," the critic may demur. She bows to the objection in the very title of her work. No continuous narrative nor exposition of political philosophy is attempted by her. It is a simple story of personal impressions, whose only value is ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... be thought below Criticism; or meet with a Critic who, perhaps, will not look on them with so candid and favorable an eye; I am ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... account of its inherent frivolity, has always seemed to me unfit for the accompaniment of any manifestation of power. To despise Bellini because he is not Schubert would be to adopt the attitude of the buffo's critic who escaped from Paris in the teatrino at Palermo; nevertheless the countrymen of Schubert have known how to appear before the world clothed in the solemn splendour of Haydn's majestic Hymn to the Emperor, while the Italians come mountebanking ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... Landor, and De Quincey; the poets, Browning and Tennyson; the philosophical writers, Hamilton, Mill, and Spencer; with Lyell, Faraday, Carpenter, Tyndall, Huxley, Darwin, Wallace, and Lord Kelvin in science; John Ruskin, the eminent art critic; and, in addition, the chief artists of the period, Millais, ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... given by Juno before my entrance? It didn't surprise me that her nephew was in bed from Master Mayrant's lusty blows. One could readily guess the manner in which young John, with his pent-up fury over the custom house, would "land" his chastisement all over the person of any rash critic! And what a talking about it must be going on everywhere to-day! If Kings Port tongues had been set in motion over me and my small notebook in a library, the whole town must be buzzing over every bruise given and taken in this evidently ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... Indian tribes, and was warmly praised for his freshness, his novelty, and his hardy originality. The people of France and Germany delighted in this soldier-writer. "There was not a word in his books which a school-boy could not safely read aloud to his mother and sisters." So says a late English critic, to which another adds, that if he has somewhat gone out of fashion of late years, the more's the pity for the school-boy of the period. What Defoe is in Robinson Crusoe—realistic idyl of island solitude—that, in his romantic ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... appear somewhat coarse, as addressed by one Goddess to another: but I assure the English reader that in this passage especially I have greatly softened down the expression of the original; a literal translation of which, however forcible, would shock even the least fastidious critic. It must, indeed, be admitted that the mode in which "the white-armed Goddess" proceeds to execute her threat is hardly more dignified than the language, in which it is ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... first published in 1668, with the separately printed edition of Boileau's ninth satire; in the same year it was included in a collected edition of the satires. It was occasioned, evidently, by a critic's complaint that the modern satirist, departing from ancient ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... passage at length in order to give the critic's argument its widest scope. But, alas, who does not see the argument's fallacy? Who does not perceive that this reenforced skyscraper is a cardboard column liable to fall with the first push ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... in astonishment, but like Brer Rabbit, I lay low to see if they cared for an explanation. I thought I saw a twinkle in my critic's eye as ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... that forehead. He's a high-brow. We'll make him dramatic critic. In the meantime, I'll be little fairy godmother, an' if you'll get on your bonnet I'll stake you and the young 'un to strawberry shortcake an' chocolate ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... are a survival from the Hoffmann period, but written so as to throw an ironic light upon the artistic tendencies of our time. Need I add that he did not care for the vaporous tonal experiments of Debussy and the new school! But then he was an indifferent critic ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... open arch showing an odd, clustered, castellated house, rising on its steep rocks among dark brushwood, with a glimmering pool below, and mysterious persons drawing near—it all had a tyrannical effect on Hugh's mind. Probably a conventional critic would have spoken approvingly of the Raphael and disdainfully enough of the Domenichino—but the point to Hugh was not in the art revealed, but in the association, the remoteness, the suggestiveness of the pictures. The faults ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a sinner, or unintelligent or a fool, in a word, whoever is god-forsaken ([gr kakodaimwn]), him the Kingdom of God will receive." (2) Thus Celsus, the accomplished, clever, philosophic and withal humorous critic, laughed at the new religionists, and prophesied their speedy extinction. Nevertheless he was mistaken. There is little doubt that just the inclusion of women and weaklings and outcasts did contribute LARGELY to ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... no representative material; where, that is, the man is his own material, and there is nothing between. With the actor the style is the man, in another, a more immediate, and a more obvious sense than was ever intended by that saying. Therefore we may allow the critic—and not accuse him of reaction—to speak of the division between art and Nature in the painting of a landscape, but we cannot let him say the same things of acting. Acting has a technique, ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... The eminent Danish critic, George Brandes, though a special student of English literature, overlooked these poets when he declared, in one of his lectures on literary history (1872), that the book in which love is for the ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... of Roman orators, has neither mentioned Maternus, nor Marcus Aper. The Dialogue, for that reason, seems to be improperly ascribed to him: men who figure so much in the enquiry concerning oratory, would not have been omitted by the critic who thought their ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... It occurs to me that perhaps Dr. Drake had begun to tire of the spiritless echoes of the classical schools, and that he fondly hoped that such shrieks and groans as those he admired in this essay would satisfy his cravings for better things in poetry. But the critic had no adequate knowledge of the way in which genius works. His one desire in these studies of Scandinavian mythology was "to recommend it to the votaries of the Muse, as a machinery admirably constructed for their purpose" (p. 158). He hopes for "a more extensive adoption ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... day; the Athenaeum devoting to it less space even than to "the anonymous Pauline," while the "Philip van Artevelde" of Henry Taylor (now hardly remembered) received fifteen columns of tribute, in which the critic confided to the public his enthusiastic estimate of that production. Neither Blackwood's, the Quarterly, nor the Edinburgh even mentioned "Paracelsus"; the Athenaeum admitted that it had talent, but admonished the poet that "Writers would do well to remember ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... The musical critic of the Herold was captivated by her capricious playing. He called her an extraordinary talent, and predicted a brilliant future for her. Andreas Doederlein accepted the congratulations in the spirit of a seasoned patron of the arts; Herr Carovius was in the seventh heaven of joy. He who had ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... Tennent's "Nottingham Sermon" had made further fellowship between the two parties for the time impossible. The sermon flagrantly illustrated the worst characteristic of the revivalists—their censoriousness. It was a violent invective on "The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry," which so favorable a critic as Dr. Alexander has characterized as "one of the most severely abusive sermons which was ever penned." The answer to it came in a form that might have been expected. At the opening of the synod ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... the chief difference consisting in a more sparing use of punctuation than that employed by the well-known German editor. Wherever a variant reading is adopted, some good and recognized SHAKSPEREAN critic has been followed. In no case is a new rendering of the text proposed; nor has it been thought necessary to distract the reader's attention by ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... accepted a pension from Louis XIV., and Gallienus devolved the burden of his Eastern provinces on a Syrian Emir. Their tastes and pursuits were as similar as their histories. Charles excelled as a wit and a critic; Gallienus as a poet and a gastronomer. Charles was curious about chemistry, and founded the Royal Society. In the third century the conception of the systematic investigation of nature did not exist. Gallienus, therefore, could not patronise exact science; and the ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... who, but for the light periodical publications, would never have known that such books existed: many who would not otherwise have extended their reading beyond the columns of a newspaper, are led by the pleasures of a represented play, to read the critic's strictures upon it, and thence, by a natural transition, to peruse attentively the various other subjects which surround those strictures in the magazines. This is the reason why hundreds read the Monthly Mirror and similar ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... and sat without speaking. For several moments they continued the silence, then turned slowly and looked at each other; then looked slowly and gravely away, as if to an audience in front of them. They knew how to do it; but probably a critic in the first row would have concluded that Cora felt it even more than Valentine Corliss ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... so desultory as Mr. Schlosser, the critic has a right to an extra allowance of desultoriness for his own share; so excuse me, reader, for rushing at once in ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... is known chiefly as a musical critic and author; for thirty-eight years he was connected with the "London Athenaeum." His ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... to him when discarded, and carried on the trade of faction beyond and within the seas several years after." In the great original genius, born, like BACON and NEWTON, to create a new era in the history of the human mind, this political literary critic, who was not always deficient in his perceptions of genius, could only discover "a trader in faction," though in his honesty he acknowledges him to ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... with alterations if he chose, under the conviction that their main scope could not be damaged by such a process. It was the same with me afterwards, as regards other publications. For two years I furnished a certain number of sheets for the British Critic from myself and my friends, while a gentleman was editor, a man of splendid talent, who, however, was scarcely an acquaintance of mine, and had no sympathy with the Tracts. When I was Editor myself, ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... critical historian can concur, no matter what his tastes or where his home. But it is less easy for an English, French, or Italian critic than a German to pardon the incongruities, incoherences, and silly buffooneries which mar the opera. Some of the disturbing elements are dear to the Teutonic heart. Papageno, for instance, is but a slightly ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... forward with interest, for the great teacher makes of it always an artistic triumph. That year there was more than usual excitement over the event, because of the first appearance in public of Mademoiselle Dulany, whose voice had been enthusiastically written of by every critic whom Josef had permitted to hear her sing. Two of the greatest singers of the world, old pupils of Josef, had been bidden to sing with her. Campanali and Rigard, whose sonorous bass tones have thrilled ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... powerless? If powerful, why did He not let us sleep in peace, without setting us here to taste of every pain and mortification, to become acquainted with every grief, and then to perish miserably?" Old questions these, which the sprightly critic justly condemns as morbid and futile, and not to be dangled before a merry world of make-believe. Perhaps he is right. It is better to play at marbles on a sepulchre than to lift the lid and peep inside. But, for all that, they will arise when we sit alone at even ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... consider the General's antecedents as bearing very decided testimony to his practical soldiership. A thorough knowledge of the science of war seems to be conceded to him; he is allowed to be a good military critic; but all this is possible without his possessing any positive qualities of a great general, just as a literary critic may show the profoundest acquaintance with the principles of epic poetry without being able to produce a single ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the ballad style, are free from any palpable irreverence. The plates are after the works of masters, and in the style, both of drawing and colouring, remind one of the severe and simple effect of old painted windows."—British Critic. ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... touches as on these clouds!" His joking friends clubbed him "Director-General of the Fine Arts for Scotland," a title which he complacently accepted. Besides showing off his pictures, Davie was an art critic, and wrote articles for the newspapers and magazines. Unfortunately, however, his attention to pictures prevented him from attending to his shop, and his customers (who were not artists) forsook him, and bought their clothes elsewhere. He accordingly shut up his shop, and devoted ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... young Verhovensky, of course, and make much of him. He's imprudent, but then he's young; he's thoroughly well-informed, though. He's not an out-of-date, old-fashioned critic, anyway." Varvara Petrovna hastened to observe that Stepan Trofimovitch had never been a critic, but had, on the contrary, spent all his life in her house. He was renowned through circumstances of his early career, "only too well known to the whole world," and of late for his researches in Spanish ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Unprecedented and magnificent As were our strivings in the previous war, Our efforts in the present shall transcend them, As men will learn. Such efforts are not sized By this light measuring-rule my critic here Whips from his pocket like a clerk-o'-works!... Tasking and toilsome war's details must be, And toilsome, too, must be their criticism,— Not in a ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... would forget this theory, as he had apparently forgotten the many theories which had ere now proposed themselves to his excitable brain, and which he had found unworkable. His practical shrewdness acted as a critic on his visionary notions—never in thought, for he did not seem able to exercise the two phases of his mind at once, but always in practice—and Susannah could not conceive that a new order of marriage would appear feasible, even though it would certainly raise a new barrier ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... we know, he showed his early predilection for religious music; and his oratorios "The Redemption," "Mors et Vita," and several masses have been given with varying success. Perhaps one of the greatest points ever made in Gounod's favour by a critic was that by Pougin, who asks what other composer could have written two such operas as "Faust" and "Romeo et Juliette" and still have them essentially different musically. The "Garden Scene" in the one and the ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... disquietude as to the ruin of Montesquieu's reputation by the publication of such a work. Such was his alarm that he did not venture to write to the author on the subject, but gave the manuscript to another critic, Saurin, the author of a work entitled Spartacus, long since extinct, who passed the same judgment upon it. Both concurred in thinking that the reputation of Montesquieu would be entirely ruined by the publication of the new ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... She Stoops to Conquer; Sheridan: The Rivals, The School for Scandal, The Critic; R. Edgeworth: Essay on Irish Bulls; M. Edgeworth: Castle Rackrent, The Absentee; Maginn: Miscellanies in Prose and Verse; Carleton: Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry; Mahony (Father Prout): Reliques of Father Prout; John and Michael Banim: Tales ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... his own great soul the canvass warms, Creates, inspires, impassions human forms, Spurns critic rules, and seizing safe the heart, Breaks down the former frightful bounds of Art; Where ancient manners, with exclusive reign, From half mankind withheld her fair domain. He calls to life each patriot, chief or sage, Garb'd ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... concert with a brilliant solo by way of overture, which was duly reported by the musical critic in the shape of a chalk line on the table. The length of the effusion did not matter; a long aria, or a brilliant but spasmodic cadenza, each counted one, and one only. The Bermondsey bird, heedless of the issue at stake, devoted the precious moments ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... justifies the means depends upon the judgment of the critic. It is possible that there is too much of personality herein, but in justice to the writer, it must be borne in mind that no attempt has been made for literary style; that the task imposed upon him was attempted solely to comply with the insistence of others and that the use ...
— The Spirit of 1906 • George W. Brooks
... amused in reading an effusion by one critic who, in discussing the question of the canal lines, remarked that he could not accept 'these one-man discoveries,' oblivious of the fact that they are the discoveries of many observers. He then very naively gives the illuminating ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... to him. Like his late critic, Pete availed himself of two, though he had not the excuse of a pipe to be filled. One he coyly tucked above his left ear and one he lighted. Then he sat gracefully back upon his heels and drew smoke into his innermost recesses, a shrunken little ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... several occasions, Fujifusa left the Court and took the tonsure. It says much for the nobility of the Emperor's disposition that he commissioned Nobufusa, father of Fujifusa, to seek out the persistent critic and offer him a greatly higher office if he would consent to return, and it says much for Fujifusa's sincerity that, hoping to give weight to his counsels, he embraced the life of a recluse and was never seen ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi |
