"Essayist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the author of one book. His "Essays" are the whole of him. He wrote letters, to be sure, and he wrote journals of travel in quest of health and pleasure. But these are chiefly void of interest. Montaigne the Essayist alone is emphatically the Montaigne that survives. "Montaigne the Essayist,"—that has become, as it were, a personal name in ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... asks, who would be Ion of Chios rather than Sophocles; or in lyric poetry, Bacchylides rather than Pindar? Yet Bacchylides and Ion are "faultless, with a style of perfect elegance and finish." In short, the essayist regards Bacchylides as a thoroughly finished poet of the second class, who never commits glaring faults, but never reaches ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... as old, am going to assume no preposterous airs of superiority. I do not claim to be a bit wiser than you; all I claim is to be older. I have outgrown your stage; but I was once such as you, and all my sympathies are with you yet. But it is a difficulty in the way of the essayist, and, indeed, of all who set out opinions which they wish to be received and acted on by their fellow-creatures, that they seem, by the very act of offering advice to others, to claim to be wiser and better than those whom they advise. But in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... An American essayist, writing on this point, says—"When your mother came and told her mother that she was engaged, and your grandmother told your grandfather, how much did they know of the intimate nature of the young gentleman to whom she had pledged her existence? ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... from violets I must, with a brutality akin to that which M. Zola himself displays in some of his transitions, pass to very different things, for some time back a well-known English poet and essayist wrote of the present work that it was redolent of pork, onions, and cheese. To one of his sensitive temperament, with a muse strictly nourished on sugar and water, such gross edibles as pork and cheese and onions were peculiarly offensive. That humble plant the onion, employed to ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... these, women of imperfect sanity. It is a small matter that you should protest against some small maladjustment or folly; but it is a great matter that you should be perfectly sane and well-balanced. Now education helps sanity. It shows the proportion of things. An American essayist bids us "keep our eyes on the fixed stars." Education helps us to do this. It helps us to live the life we have to lead on a higher mental and spiritual level ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... professor of anatomy at Harvard College—this position he held from 1847 to 1882. He was nearly fifty before he became widely known as a writer, when "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" was published. He was successful as essayist, novelist, poet, a kindly wit playing through much of his work. His best-known poems are "Old Ironsides," "The Chambered Nautilus," "The One-hoss Shay," "The Last Leaf," and "The Boys." ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... in the 7th Leinsters in which I did not spend the Saturday and Sunday on this business—generally in company with the most brilliant speaker, taking all in all, that I have ever heard. Kettle, then a lieutenant in the battalion, was wit, essayist, poet and orator: whether he was most a wit or most an orator might be argued for a night without conclusion; but as talker or as speaker he had few equals. He was the son of a veteran Nationalist, who had taken a lead in Parnell's day; ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... women alike accept this notion; the serious essayist and philosopher, as well as the novelist and paragrapher, reflect it in their pages. The force of inertia acts in the domain of psychics as well as physics; any idea pushed into the popular mind with considerable force will keep on going until some opposing ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... Jeffrey's criticisms on the early poets of this century; an historical or a biographical article by Alison; or one of Professor Wilson's sketches in his "Recreations of Christopher North." But be most desirous of reading that brilliant essayist, and that most impressive of contributors to the "Edinburgh Review,"— Macaulay. I wish you would read his articles which have special reference to literature, perhaps in this order: Moore's "Life of Byron," "Mme. D'Arblay," "Goldsmith," "Samuel Johnson," "Addison," "Dryden," "Leigh Hunt," ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... appear to me to condense the result of deliberate and candid reflection, and I have therefore quoted them. The most important remarks of either Essayist on the details of the plot and execution are annexed to the last edition of the poem; and show such an {p.021} exact coincidence of judgment in two masters of their calling, as had not hitherto been exemplified in the professional criticism ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... costumbres, and her books are perhaps better known in England than those of some of the later novelists. By far the greater writer of the day in Spain, however, in light literature, is Juan Valera, at once poet, critic, essayist, and novelist. His Pepita Jimenez is a remarkable novel, full of delicate characterisation and exquisite style, second to none produced in any country—a novel full of fire, and yet irreproachable in taste, handling a difficult ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... statesman, Chesterfield's fame rests on his short but brilliant administration of Ireland. As an author he was a clever essayist and epigrammatist. But he stands or falls by the Letters to his Son, first published by Stanhope's widow in 1774, and the Letters to his Godson (1890). The Letters are brilliantly written—full of elegant wisdom, of keen wit, of admirable portrait-painting, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... the emotions that are to be represented. Better by far than the familiar si vis me flere axiom of Horace, who there tells us, "If you would have me weep, you must first weep yourself," is the sagacious comment on it in the Tatler, where (No. 68) the essayist remarks, with subtle discrimination: "The true art seems to be when you would have the person you represent pitied, you must show him at once, in the highest grief, and struggling to bear it with decency and patience. In this case," adds the writer, "we sigh for him, and give him every groan ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... even such a firmly established tradition as that no one who amounted to anything could be elected to a fashionable club in New York. Once at the Federal Club old Galloway quoted with approval some essayist's remark that every clever human being was looking after and holding above the waves at least fifteen of his weaker fellows. Norman smiled satirically round at the complacently nodding circle of gray heads and white heads. "My observation has been," ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... he was almost entirely occupied with his Dictionary. The last paper of his Rambler was published March 2, this year; after which, there was a cessation for some time of any exertion of his talents as an essayist. But, in the same year, Dr. Hawkesworth, who was his warm admirer, and a studious imitator of his style, and then lived in great intimacy with him, began a periodical paper, entitled The Adventurer, in connection with other ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... at all times with the susceptibility of genius, was exercising the finest feelings of the heart; the same generosity of temper which deluded his judgment, and invigorated his passions, rendered him a tender and pathetic dramatist; a most fertile essayist; a patriot without private views; an enemy whose resentment died away in raillery; and a friend, who could warmly press the hand that chastised him. Whether in administration, or expelled the House; whether affluent, or flying from his creditors; in ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Sincerity, not less than the suggestions of taste, will preserve the integrity of each style. A philosopher, an investigator, an historian, or a moralist so far from being required to present the graces of a wit, an essayist, a pamphleteer, or a novelist, would be warned off such ground by the necessity of expressing himself sincerely. Pascal, Biot, Buffon, or Laplace are examples of the clearness and beauty with which ideas may be presented wearing all the graces of fine literature, and ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... essayist, born 1837. Has written much on nature observation. Among his books are "Wake Robin," "Winter Sunshine," "Birds and Poets," "Pepacton," "Fresh Fields," "Signs and Seasons," etc. He was at first a school ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... clever and beautiful daughter of the first Populist governor of Kansas, was a well-known essayist and short story writer. For many years she was one of the editors ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker
... Graeme's; there was the Viscount Chambery, who had penned a pamphlet on finance—indited a folio on architecture—and astonished Europe with an elaborate dissertation on modern cookery; there was Charles Selby, the poet and essayist; Daintrey, the sculptor—a wonderful Ornithologist—a deep read Historian—a learned Orientalist—and a novelist, from France; whose works exhibited such unheard of horrors, and made man and woman so irremediably vicious, as to make this young gentleman celebrated, even ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... but I fear that his health was impaired by his few mad outbursts. Charles Lamb, who is dear to us all, reduced himself to a pitiable state by giving way to outbreaks of alcoholic craving. When Carlyle saw him, the unhappy essayist was semi-imbecile from the effects of drink; and the savage Scotsman wrote some cruel words which will unfortunately cleave to Lamb's cherished memory for long. Lamb fought against his failing; he suffered ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... world at large, which its length and longwindedness might have marred. Mr. Ward's essays (generally in the form of stories) were not so successful with the public as his fictions. We think he was by nature designed for an essayist—naturally given to discuss and expound; but nature had denied him that penetrating originality of perception, that vigor of thought, and (as a consequence) that terseness of style, which are necessary to render the essay attractive and to preserve it. As Robert Plumer ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... eight pages foolscap, in scholarly handwriting, with perfect grasp of subject, and concentrated, pithy expression. I could with difficulty accept the assurance that it was written by a Madrassee and not by some famous essayist! So, perhaps, if one Eastern can grasp Ruskin's best thoughts it may be worth the effort of trying to teach thousands who can't? Is it not folly, this anglicising of the Indians, Irish, and Scots by the English schoolmaster, who knows as little ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... had read it and told what an interesting piece of work it was, Thyrsis sat down and wrote the great man about his plight, and asked for help; which led to correspondence, and to the passing round of the manuscript among a group of literary people. One of these was Haddon Channing, the critic and essayist, who was interested enough to write Thyrsis several long letters, and to read the rest of his productions, and later on to call to see him. Which, visit proved a curious ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... can only be attained by winning entire freedom from all preoccupation with the difficulties of technical processes. But when that time came, he was not only a consummate musician, like Mozart, but a dramatic poet and a critical and philosophical essayist, exercising a considerable influence on his century. The sign of this consummation was his ability at last to play with his art, and thus to add to his already famous achievements in sentimental drama that lighthearted art of comedy of which the greatest masters, like ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... and a Protestant from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress than from the Second Epistle of John; but neither would think of inserting these books in the Canon. He who finds as much religious inspiration in some modern poet or essayist as in a book of the Bible, may be correctly reporting his own experience; but he is confusing the purpose of the Bible if he suggests the substitution of these later prophets for those of ancient Israel. The Bible ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... given by the poet-errant of this his second sally in quest of adventures. We cannot but think it was here and there touched up a little with the fanciful pen of the future essayist, with a view to amuse his mother and soften her vexation; but even in these respects it is valuable as showing the early play of his humor, and his happy knack of extracting sweets from that worldly experience which to others yields nothing ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... Buildings, for one of the least popular, but by no means the least remarkable, of the Charles Lamb set came to lodge at No. 9, half-way down on the right-hand side as you come from Holborn. There for four years lived, taught, wrote, and suffered that admirable essayist, fine-art and theatrical critic, thoughtful metaphysician, and miserable man, William Hazlitt. He lodged at the house of Mr. Walker, a tailor, who was blessed with two fair daughters, with one of whom (Sarah) Hazlitt, then a married man, fell madly ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... directing more attention to this problem, the author does not treat the race question from an economic point of view. This has been the defect of the historical works which Dr. DuBois has written. He is at best a popular essayist with a bit of poetic genius. In all of his discussions of the race problem his mind has not as yet been adequate to the task of scientific treatment of the question. The Suppression of the African Slave Trade is a literary compilation or digest of State and national legislation to curb ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... of her old friend, Mr. Wordsworth, who was her guest whenever he came up to London. She expressed the warmest admiration for the moral and political, though not all of the religious, writings of our Dr. Channing, whom she pronounced the finest essayist of the time. She also felt a curious interest (which I discovered in many other notable people in England) to learn what she could in regard to our American Indians, and expressed much admiration when I gave her some quotations from the picturesque ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... sufferings, till he becomes a Tityus to himself—are wasting to a span; and for the giant of self-importance, which I was so lately, you have me once again in my natural pretensions—the lean and meagre figure of your insignificant Essayist. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... although it was past midnight. Men came into the club, too, on that eventful night who were not members, but who were moved by an irrepressible anxiety to learn the truth as to what had happened. Among these I remember Abraham Hayward, Q.C., the essayist and Society rattle, who, characteristically enough, proclaimed to us all the fact that the gentleman who accompanied him was my Lord So-and-so. But it was outside the club that I witnessed the most extraordinary ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... Cotter Morison, English essayist and historian, was born in London on April 20, 1832, and was the son of the inventor and proprietor of "Morison's Pills." His first years were spent in Paris, where he laid the foundation of his intimate knowledge of the French people. After graduating at Oxford, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... Repplier, the distinguished essayist, discusses in the Atlantic Monthly (March, 1914) the plain speech on sex topics that are before the public to-day. While she holds no brief for "the conspiracy of silence," which she admits was "a menace in its day," she maintains that "the breaking of silence need not imply the opening ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... Tarrytown have been Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, well known to a previous generation for her romantic novels, John Kendrick Bangs, the humorist, and Hamilton Wright Mabie, editor and essayist. Carl Schurz (1829-1906) is buried here in the Sleepy Hollow churchyard. Tarrytown is the trading center of a prosperous agricultural region; it also has about 100 manufacturing establishments with ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... English essayist, studied at Oxford, became Fellow of Magdalen, was a Whig in politics, held a succession of Government appointments, resigned the last for a large pension; was pre-eminent among English writers for the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... if but faintly. The soil of a new country does not grow sentiment of this sort readily, but the plant is indigenous to the human heart; and its fair flowers have been gathered and wreathed around their pages by many an essayist and poet. We cannot do without the element of mystery in our life, however we may represent it. It is part of the spirit within us, and we find it in everything around us. It is the veil of "Isis" which science, her worshipper, is ever trying to lift, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... "fascinating creatures." They have, says the reverend author, what one would not expect, many light toyish books (novels and plays, doubtless), others on Rosycrucian subjects, and of an abstruse mystical character; but they have no Bibles or works of devotion. The essayist fails not to mention the elf-arrow heads, which have something of the subtlety of thunderbolts, and can mortally wound the vital parts without breaking the skin. These wounds, he says, he has himself observed ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... Soames! you know me better than to suppose that I.... After all, the name "Max Beerbohm" is not at all an uncommon one, and there must be several Enoch Soameses running around—or rather, "Enoch Soames" is a name that might occur to any one writing a story. And I don't write stories: I'm an essayist, an observer, a recorder.... I admit that it's an extraordinary coincidence. ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... Prince Serge Wolkonsky, was certainly the most versatile man I have ever known: a playwright, an actor, an essayist, an orator, a lecturer, and admirable in each of these capacities. At a dinner given me, just before my departure from St. Petersburg, by the Russians who had taken part in the Chicago Exposition, I was somewhat troubled by the fact that the speeches of the various officials were in Russian, ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... a dramatist, an essayist, and a novelist, besides writing many political, geographical, and biographical sketches. As a poet, his fame is steadily waning. The tendency at first was to rank him too high, owing to the undeniable charm of many of the poems in the Child's Garden of Verses. The child's view of the ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in order to do so he had to grope along his rabbit's burrow almost on hands and knees. To reach his bedroom from the ground, he climbed up the spiral staircase as the visitor does today. The steps are much worn in places, and the boots of the essayist must have had something to do with this, for he probably used the tower more than any other man. The room, nearly circular in shape, with brick floor and small windows, looks to modern eyes more like a prison than a bed-chamber befitting a nobleman. But independently of the great difference ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... Athens about 430 B.C.; died after 357; celebrated as historian and essayist, being a disciple of Socrates; joined the expedition of Cyrus the Younger in 401, and after the battle of Cunaxa became the chief leader of ten thousand Greeks in their march to the Black Sea, the story being chronicled in his famous "Anabasis"; fought ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... readers. He has been called the greatest humorist in the world, and that is probably the truth; but he is also a charming and attractive story-teller, an alert romancer, a clever and penetrating observer, a philosopher without pretensions, and therefore all the more profound, and finally, a brilliant essayist." ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... affectedly self- conscious, you may imitate the ingenious persons who carefully avoid the natural word, the spontaneous phrase, and employ some other set of terms which can hardly be construed. You may use, like a young essayist whom I have lovingly observed, a proportion of eighty adjectives to every sixty- five other words of all denominations. You may hunt for odd words, and thrust them into the wrong places, as where you say that a man's ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... In their writings they are eccentric, vague, labyrinthine, pretentious, transcendental,[35] and frequently ungrammatical. These men, if write they must, should confine themselves to the descriptive; for when they enter the essayist's domain, which they are very prone to do, they write what I will venture ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... sacrifice too much to their friends. Especially after the friends are dead. "The cream of the joke is," as our lively essayist remarks, "that the dead do not dream of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... 'Corsica Boswell' than what they can gather from the lively picture of Macaulay. There he is known only as it were in the gross, to which indeed, as Johnson said of Milton, the undramatic nature of the essayist's mind was rather prone, careless as it was or incapable of the finer shades of character. Yet, as we know, he was not the solitary masker or mummer in this extraordinary carnival, which seems not creditable to the taste of its promoters, ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... course, the business of the essayist to select; but in the present case there is little to choose. He tells of invitations to dinner, accepted, evaded, or refused; but he does not always tell who were there, what he thought of them, or what they had ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae
... at West Park on the west bank, is the home of John Burroughs, our sweetest essayist, the nineteenth century's "White of Selborne." Judge Barnard of Poughkeepsie, once said to the author of this handbook, "The best writer America has produced after Hawthorne is John Burroughs; I wish I could see him." It so happened that there had been ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... who was the cause of much warfare. 2. A wrong and illegal act. 3. A celebrated physician. 4. A continuous line of cars. 5. A philosopher and essayist. ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... "collective" introduction possible is that of a speaker or essayist to an audience. At a club meeting or other assemblage where a stranger is present as guest of honor, the members should request the hostess or the president of the ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... older mind, these realities of the past have a deep and ever-growing interest. The later periods of the Colony, the period of the Revolution and the period immediately following, are increasingly fertile in materials for the historian, the essayist, and the novelist. To bring out into clearer light, to present in forms adapted to the mass of readers, and to arouse a more lively interest in this history, especially the romantic element of it, is one leading ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... the essayist fails to achieve ridicule easily accomplishes. James Russell Lowell was the satirist of the abolition movement. With biting scorn and irony he laughed men out of narrowness, ignorance, and selfishness. ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... in the somewhat limited space of a chapter to give the full attention that should be given to such a brilliant and original essayist (which is not always an ipso facto of brilliant essayists) as Chesterton. Essayists are of all men extremely elastic. Occasionally they are dull and prosy, very often they are obscure, quite often ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... perhaps, with birds' nests and fights with eagles; and frightened Wilkins out of his wits with dashing betwixt rocks and pulling the noses of seals and gulls. ("Book for a Corner," 1868, i. 68, &c.) Could criticism be more delightful? But in the "London Journal," November 5, 1834, the genial essayist's fancy dallied even more daintily with the theme: "A peacock with his plumage displayed, full of 'rainbows and starry eyes,' is a fine object, but think of a lovely woman set in front of an ethereal shell and wafted about like ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... spoken of Lady Gregory as translator, as collector of folk-lore, as essayist, and as dramatist; but there is another role in which she has brought no less advantage to the Celtic Renaissance, though it is a role that has not brought her, as have these other, the joys of recapturing ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... trace somewhat of the same idea in Flora's kingdom? The Dutch roses, tulips, and other flowers, like the naval architecture of the Low Countries, have a certain breadth of beam and bluntness of prow that makes them differ from the same fragrant family of France. Has any learned essayist ever attempted to draw philosophical deductions from these aspects of the vegetable world, as showing local ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... heaped upon us. Poetry and religion and the essay and the sermon are all alike, in that they are addressed to what can be taken for granted in men—to sum-totals of experience—the power of seeing sum-totals. They are addressed to generalising minds. The essayist of the highest rank induces conviction by playing upon the power of generalisation, by arousing the associations and experiences that have formed the principles of his reader's mind. He makes his appeal ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... his affections by the brief quarrel with Southey. Certainly, he might call himself, with some plausibility, 'the king of good haters.' But, after all, Hazlitt's cynicism is the souring of a generous nature; and when we turn from the politician to the critic and the essayist, our admiration for his powers is less frequently jarred by annoyance at their wayward misuse. His egotism—for he is still an egotist—here takes a different shape. His criticism is not of the kind which is ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... spirit. Montaigne knew a man who had lived among the Tupis of Brazil for ten or twelve years, and had learned their language and customs. He remembered several of their songs of war and love, and translated them to gratify the insatiable thirst for knowledge of the famous essayist. The refrain of one of them, supposed to be addressed to one of those beautiful serpents of the ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... last, grows around it as the cocoon grows around the silkworm. The essay-writer is a chartered libertine, and a law unto himself. A quick ear and eye, an ability to discern the infinite suggestiveness of common things, a brooding meditative spirit, are all that the essayist requires to start business with. Jacques, in "As You Like It," had the makings of a charming essayist. It is not the essayist's duty to inform, to build pathways through metaphysical morasses, to cancel abuses, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... England conducted its operations. Here, in one room, with almost primitive simplicity were gathered all who performed the duties of the establishment. "I looked into the great hall where the bank is kept," says the graceful essayist of the day, "and was not a little pleased to see the directors, secretaries, and clerks, with all the other members of that wealthy Corporation, ranged in their several stations according to the parts they hold in that just and regular economy." The secretaries ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... young things always choose subjects that would tax the powers of a great essayist!" thought Miss Maxwell, as she tried to sleep. "Are they dazzled, captivated, taken possession of, by the splendor of the theme, and do they fancy they can write up to it? Poor little innocents, hitching their toy wagons to the stars! How pretty this particular innocent looks ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... (1672-1719).—Poet, essayist and statesman, was the s. of Lancelot Addison, Dean of Lichfield. B. near Amesbury, Wilts., A. went to the Charterhouse where he made the acquaintance of Steele (q.v.), and then at the age of fifteen to Oxford where he had a distinguished career, being specially ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... regularly every fortnight, a fire of peat, sod, and dross lit up the curious company who sat round the table shaking their heads over Shelley's mysticism, or requiring to be called to order because they would not wait their turn to deny an essayist's assertion, that Berkeley's style was superior to David Hume's. Davit Hume, they said, and Watty Scott. Burns was simply referred to as ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... names are before me, I venture to inquire how the remarkable interchange occurred between that of Whitelock Bulstrode the Essayist, and Bulstrode Whitelock the Memorialist, of the parliamentary period. Was ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... behind Luther's shield the deftest thrusts are not the reformer's, but the essayist's own. Fundamentally, I fancy, this is an outbreak of that artistic paganism which is so prevalent among the so-called "advanced" Hebrews. The idea that obedience to law is degrading; that conformity to traditional morals is soul-crippling and unworthy of a free spirit; ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... allotted space before reaching the tiresome theme I have set myself ... A deanery, the cawing of rooks, their effect on the nervous system, Trollope's delineations of deans, the advantages of the Mid-Victorian novel ... But your discursive essayist is a nuisance. Best come to the point. The bore is in finding a point to come to. Besides, the chances are that any such point will have long ago been worn blunt by a score ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... but I have rather been instigated to appeal to the public, and to ask them to agree with me against my friends. It is not only that Cicero has touched all matters of interest to men, and has given a new grace to all that he has touched; that as an orator, a rhetorician, an essayist, and a correspondent he was supreme; that as a statesman he was honest, as an advocate fearless, and as a governor pure; that he was a man whose intellectual part always dominated that of the body; that in taste he was excellent, in thought both correct and ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... "my good and worthy friend, the Rev. Charles Carlton, Fellow of Leicester, and sometime Ireland Essayist, is not preferring the Church of Rome to ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... stands second to no man, either as an historian or as a bibliographer; and when I regard him as a popular essayist, I look in vain for any writer who has conveyed so much information, from so many and such recondite sources, with so many just and original reflections, in a style so lively and poignant, yet so uniformly classical and perspicuous; no one, in short, who has ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... 'externality,' for sure, nor yet of imitativeness, will this writer lose his hold on the attention and regard of his countrymen. The debate, before his place in literature is settled, must rather turn on other points: as whether the genial essayist and egoist or the romantic inventor and narrator was the stronger in him—whether the Montaigne and Pepys elements prevailed in his literary composition or the Scott and Dumas elements—a question indeed which among those who care ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... suffrage claim that as they are governed by the laws they have a right to a voice in making them. Many of the ablest women of this country hold that belief, and of all our noble statesmen, not one has advanced an answer to this demand—reasonable, if it does come from women. A French essayist held that as women are a part of society, they have a right to be judges of its members, assist in making its laws, and condemn and punish transgressors. They have their influence, but that is not so effective as power. * * * * Some of the brightest intellects that adorn ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... one who feels himself congenial to some Great or Significant Man, to give expression to his cordial feelings and his inspiration. It becomes an obsession with him to communicate to others what he sees in his Idol, his Divinity. Yet it is not Inspiration for his Subject alone that makes the Essayist. Some point that has no marked attraction in itself may be inexpressibly precious to the Author as Material, presenting itself to him with some rare stamps or unexpected feature, that affords a special vehicle for the expression ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... in weddings in Westminster at the present day, I should be much obliged to any of your readers who can throw any light on the observation of the Essayist, as above cited. What other authors ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 59, December 14, 1850 • Various
... echoes, are united. "He wrote some later novels of indifferent merit," says a critic in "Chambers' Encyclopaedia." "Has anyone ever been able to write with free and genuine appreciation of even the later novels?" asks or echoes a lady, Miss Grace Toplis, writing on Jefferies. "In brief, he was an essayist and not a novelist at all," says Mr. Henry Salt. "It is therefore certain that his importance for posterity will dwindle, if it has not already dwindled, to that given by a bundle of descriptive selections. But these will occupy a foremost place on their particular ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... his assertions called forth discussion and contradiction but when he said that all existence involves suffering no one disputed the dictum: no one talked of the pleasures of life or used those arguments which come so copiously to the healthy-minded modern essayist when he devotes a page or two to disproving pessimism[440]. On this point the views and temperament of the Buddha were clearly those of educated India. The existence of this conviction and temperament in a large body of intellectual men is as important ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... sorrow the demise of that true son of our soil, the lamented Cooper, we rejoice that a Bryant and a Halleck, a Verplanck and a Paulding, are still left with us. Warm in our feelings, and made happier by the relations of intercourse, we extend the cordial hand to Tuckerman, our classical essayist and poet; to Willis, for his felicitous comments on passing events; to Griswold, for his admirable works in criticism and biography; to Dr. Mayo, for his Kaloolah; to Stoddard, for his exquisite poems; to the generous Bethune, the orator and bard; to Morris, for his Melodies; ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... on such "great occasions" is that the essayist—for such he is—has been chosen not because of his speaking ability but because his grandfather fought in a certain battle, or his constituents sent him to Congress, or his gifts in some line of endeavor other ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... experience, and there is hardly any law established for criticism which has not been overthrown as often as the French government. Upon one point—namely, that a critic should judge an author solely by his work, and never by anything known of him personally—we think no one will disagree with our essayist. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... friend of his once said, "He makes the majesties of imagination seem familiar." It is precisely thus with his own imagination. It eludes the observation of the ordinary reader in the modesty of its truth, in its social and familiar air. His fancy as an Essayist is distinguished by singular delicacy and tenderness; and even his conceits will generally be found to be, as those of his favorite Fuller often are, steeped in human feeling and passion. The fondness he entertained for Fuller, for the author of the "Anatomy of Melancholy," and for other ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... monument to the essayist Hazlitt, born 1778, died 1830. The inscription says that he lived to see his deepest wishes gratified as he expressed them in his essay on the "Fear of Death," and proceeds to set forth at considerable length ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... English taxation was originally included in a warning to the United States after the war of 1812 against indulging a marital spirit or being inflamed with a desire for naval renown. "Taxes," said the witty essayist in the Edinburgh Review, "are the inevitable consequences of being too fond of glory." He bade us beware of Essex, Porter, and Stephen Decatur. Even in the second year of the civil war in which we were struggling for life rather than for glory, we had ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... conclusion, is the natural out-put of scholastic all-sufficiency; so, the form of the essay, as we have it towards the end of the sixteenth century, most significantly in Montaigne, representative essayist because the representative doubter, inventor of the name as, in essence, of the thing—of the essay, in its seemingly modest aim, its really large and adventurous possibilities—is indicative of Montaigne's peculiar function in ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... womanhood, the special Southern contributions to the composite American. In general literature, too, the South is doing its full share. In its histories, the note of provincialism still lingers,—inevitably, and not blamably. The Southern essayist or historian naturally gravitates to the past of his own section,—and naturally he seeks to vindicate his comrades or his ancestors, and to interpret the past from their standpoint. But, compared with the provincialism of the South of 1860, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... But the essayist continues:—'It seems as if it were the season for vain things when the hurtful oppress us; in a time when doing ill is common, to do nothing but what signifies nothing is a kind of commendation. 'Tis my comfort that I shall be one of the last that shall be called in question,—for ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... monopolise the name. Cunning is the only resource of the feeble; and why may we not feel for victorious cunning as strong a sympathy as for the bold, downright, open bearing of the strong? That there may be no mistake in the essayist's meaning, that he may drive the nail home into the English understanding, he takes an illustration which shall be familiar to all of us in the characters of Iago and Othello. To our northern thought, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... writings of Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, and Schelling, and from the works of Coleridge and Carlyle, who had domesticated German thought in England. In Channing's Remarks on a National Literature, quoted in our last chapter, the essayist urged that our scholars should study the authors of France and Germany as one means of emancipating American letters from a slavish dependence on British literature. And in fact German literature began, not long after, to be eagerly studied ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... given me a book called The Aquarium, written by Philip Henry Gosse (father of the present poet, essayist, and critic), illustrated with pictures of sea-anemones and other marine creatures done from his own drawings in color, and so well done that nothing which has been done since in the way of color-reproductions surpasses them. It was delightfully written, and I absorbed ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... written by Addison, the celebrated English poet and essayist, about 1701, in grateful commemoration of his delivery from shipwreck in a storm off the coast of Genoa, Italy. It originally contained thirteen stanzas, but no more than four or six are commonly sung. It has put the language of devotional ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... hat with mock deference. "Make way for the great prize essayist, gentlemen!" he said. "The ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... who disapproved of these proceedings read aloud to the Bibliotaph that scorching little essay entitled Involuntary Bailees, written by perhaps the wittiest living English essayist. An involuntary bailee—as the essayist explains—is a person to whom people (generally unknown to him) send things which he does not wish to receive, but which they are anxious to have returned. If a man insists upon lending you a book, you become ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... believed in their brilliant schoolmate and friend at last felt themselves justified in their faith. The artist that sent this unframed picture to be hung in a corner of the literary gallery was equal to larger tasks. There was but one voice in the circle that surrounded the young essayist. He must redeem his pledge, he can and will redeem it, if he will only follow the bent of his genius and grapple with the heroic labor of writing a ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... years," writes the essayist; "sweet in their homely moderate delights, sweet in their wholesome employments, sweet in their peacefulness and repose. But sweeter and holier yet were they in the loyalty of a friendship that, covering a long period of endeavor, of struggle and adversity, survived to illumine and ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... Balfour Stevenson (1850-94), novelist, essayist, and poet, was descended from a famous family of lighthouse builders. He was born at Edinburgh, Scotland, and was intended for the ancestral profession of engineer. Abandoning this, he tried law with no better success, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... an atmosphere of the old-fashioned liberalism which had followed the discoveries of Darwin and the other pioneers of the nineteenth century. As a child, I happened to spend most of my waking hours with an uncle who was a great collector of the books written by Montaigne, the great French essayist of the sixteenth century. Because I was born in Rotterdam and educated in the city of Gouda, I ran continually across Erasmus and for some unknown reason this great exponent of tolerance took hold of my intolerant self. Later I discovered Anatole France and my first experience ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... as a succinct statement, set out in an appreciative, interesting, skilful, and sometimes sparkling fashion, of the labours and pursuits that make up the tireless life of the great poet and essayist." ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... country?—and there were persons of discrimination among the laudators of Robert Cortes Holliday. People like James Huneker and Simeon Strunsky, who praised not lightly, were quick to express their admiration of this new essayist. ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... pathetic wisdom in the saying which might well weigh down the blithest spirit. It had occurred to him in connection with an old essay of Hazlitt's, which he had been reading, on the comparative methods of English and French painters in their work. The essayist held, almost literally, that the French pictures were better because the French painters had taken more pains, and taken especial pains in the least interesting parts of their pictures. He was dealing more specifically with copying, but ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Stendhal's genius, whether making for good or for ill, that are missed by this analyst, and, moreover, both the lights and shadows are justly distributed... He seeks to show you the color of a man's mind, and it is evidence of his validity as an essayist that straightway he interests you in the color of his own. He is an impressionist in criticism... Such an essayist is Mr. Huneker, a foe to dulness who is also a man of brains."—Royal Cortissoz in New ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... degrading God to man. It is the old dilemma whose horns are the irreconcilable attributes of goodness and omniscience in the supposed Creator of sin and suffering. If the one quality be predicable, the other cannot be predicable of the same subject. Far better and wiser is the essayists poetical explanation now apparently despised because it was the fashionable doctrine ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... rather than their employers. I am not going to trace the stages of that improvement. I will not try to decide in what year servants passed from wistfulness to resentment, or from resentment to exaction. This is not a sociological treatise, it is just an essay; and I claim an essayist's privilege of not groping through the library of the British Museum on the chance of mastering all the details. I confess that I did go there yesterday, thinking I should find in Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb's 'History of Trade Unionism' the means of appearing ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... Praise of King Richard the Third," which was published by Sir William Cornwallis, Knight, the celebrated "Essayist," in 1617, is reprinted in the third volume of the Somers' Collection ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... his attitude towards life, as you may see when he writes of his favourite eighteenth century in his own fascinating style. How angry he becomes with the vices and corruption of a dead past! Now no Oxford essayist would dream of being angry with the past. How annoyed the sentimental author of The Four Georges would be with Mr. Street's genial treatment of the same epoch! It would, however, be the annoyance of a father for his eldest son, whom he sent to Oxford perhaps to show that ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... month papers were read on "Three Comedies of Shakespeare," "Pope," and "Herodotus," and when no paper was produced there was a discussion on Capital Punishment. In another, the subjects were "The Brontes," "Macaulay as an Essayist," "Frank Buckland" (the naturalist) and "Tennyson." A pretty wide range of reading was called for from schoolboys in addition to their ordinary work, even though on one occasion the Secretary sternly notes that the reading of the paper occupied only ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... From a letter to Bonstetten, dated "Cambridge, April 12, 1770." Bonstetten was a Swiss philosopher and essayist who had formed a close friendship with Gray and many other eminent English men of culture. Bonstetten left England in March of the year in which this letter was written, Gray going with him as far as London, where he pointed out in the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... ever the friend of Majesty,—but the brilliant man of letters is left out in the cold. Yet it is the man of letters who chronicles the age, and who will do so, we may be sure, according to his own experience. As the King treats the essayist, the romancist or the historian, so will these recording scribes ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... ungratefully forgotten the book in which I found it; and when I first saw, in Izumo, the singular structure of the old Shinto temples, with queer cross-projections at their gable-ends and upon their roof-ridges, the suggestion of the forgotten essayist about the possible origin of much less ancient forms returned to me with great force. But there is much in Japan besides primitive architectural traditions to indicate a nomadic ancestry for the race. Always and everywhere there is a total absence of what we would call solidity; and the characteristics ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... Darby: "I have always said that tin was one of the best filling-materials we have, and believe more teeth could be saved with it than with gold. I have restored a whole crown with tin, in order to show its cohesive properties; the essayist has paid a very high and worthy ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... peculiar style in his speeches and public documents. It was criticised as labored and that of an essayist. I asked him, after he had retired to private life, how he had acquired it. He said his father was a clergyman and he had been educated by him largely at home. His father was very particular about his compositions and his English, so that ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... of the whole world, the gems of current thought and information, digest them carefully, and pour them forth, in attractive form, for their delectation on Sunday. As a sort of oratorical and poetical reviewer, essayist and rhapsodist, the parson and his church had survived the decadence ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... to the "Edinburgh Review." Edinburgh was a literary center, and you could not throw a stone in Princess Street, any more than you can in Tremont Street, Boston, without hitting a poet and caroming on two novel-writers and an essayist. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... 'All that is mortal of the great essayist is being borne to the grave: in fact, the cold ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Runciman was anything but a smug, smooth, sermonical essayist. He was a Berserker of the true Northern breed, whose fiery soul glowed none the less fiercely because he wore a large soft hat instead of the Viking's helmet and wielded a pen rather than sword or spear. Like the war-horse ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... Dr. Johnson received their education at Lichfield Grammar School: Elias Ashmole, founder of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, Joseph Addison the great essayist, whose father was Dean of Lichfield, and David Garrick the actor, were all educated at the Grammar School. There were five boys who had at one period attended the school who afterwards became judges of the High Court: Lord Chief Justice Willes, ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... through under the worst weather I ever saw in France; I have been wet through nearly every day of travel since the second (inclusive); besides this, I have had to fight against pretty mouldy health; so that, on the whole, the essayist and reviewer has shown, I think, some pluck. Four days ago I was not a hundred miles from being miserably drowned, to the immense regret of a large circle of friends and the permanent impoverishment of British Essayism and Reviewery. My boat culbutted me under a fallen ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Harrison, Mary Johnston, Ellen Glasgow, Marion Harland, Kate Langley Bosher, James Branch Cabell, Edward Peple, dramatist, J.H. Whitty, biographer of Poe, and Colonel W. Gordon McCabe, soldier, historian, essayist, and local character—a gentleman upon whose shoulders such imported expressions as litterateur, bon viveur, and raconteur alight as naturally ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... Lamb, but attempts a complete treatment. Indeed, many longish books, like Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship and Ruskin's Modern Painters, are, in spirit, rather literary essays than formal treatises. The most popular essayist and historian of his time was Thomas Babington Macaulay, (1800-1859), an active and versatile man, who won splendid success in many fields of labor. He was prominent in public life as one of the leading orators and writers of the Whig party. He ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... future generations. On the ideas of the master, his successors built up their conceptions of the Jewish people. Abraham Mapu, the father of the historical novel in Hebrew, drew his inspiration from the "Guide", and in our days the well-known essayist Ahad ha-'Am has seized upon certain of Krochmal's principles, notably the importance to be attached to the spiritual element in the life of the Jewish people. [Footnote: R. Brainin, in his biography of Mapu, p. 64, ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... politician he ran Nationalism for Ireland and Socialism for England. Neither Nationalists nor Socialists believed in him; yet few men were more worthy of belief. In literature he had distinguished himself as a poet, a playwright, a novelist and an essayist. He did everything so well that he was supposed not to do anything quite well enough. Because of his politics other men of letters suspected his artistic sincerity; yet few artists were more sincere. His very distinction was unsatisfying. Without any of the qualities that make even ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... of the essay was proposed in the form of a question, "Are live hedges to be recommended either for utility or ornament, and if they are, what plants are most suitable?" The answer to this question was given from the experiments of the essayist during the last forty years. The deciduous plants tried were the buckthorn, Osage orange, honey-locust, privet and barberry. The evergreens were the Norway spruce, ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... have either leisure or inclination to recall the workings of their own minds, or observe the intellectual process by which they have been conducted to any conclusion. By what they are prone to consider as a kind of instinct—if by chance they are philosophers, and delight in what old Wilson, the essayist, calls 'inkhorn terms,' they designate it 'intuition'—they arrive at a truth, but have no recollection whatever of the road they travelled to reach it, and are able neither to retrace their own steps nor indicate to another the way they came. The poet, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... and occasionally persons of controlling and acknowledged importance in commercial life. Lord Macaulay is the first instance in which this high compliment has been conferred for literary merit; and it was well understood, when the great essayist and historian was ennobled, that the exception in his favor was mainly due to the fact that he was unmarried. With his untimely death the title became extinct. Lord Overstone, formerly Mr. Loyd, and a prominent member of the banking firm of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... as unfair to overlook the special form in which Emerson gave most of his thoughts to the world, as it would be to leave out of view the calling of Shakespeare in judging his literary character. Emerson was an essayist and a lecturer, as Shakespeare was a dramatist and ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... of August, 1891, the famous poet, essayist, and man of affairs died. He was nearly seventy-three years ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... which his thorough acquaintance with ancient learning enabled him to make. But I am principally indebted to the indulgence and friendly attention of My Lord Hailes, who under the name of Sir David Dalrymple,[74] has been long known to the world as an able Antiquarian, and an elegant and humourous Essayist; to whom the world has no fault but that he does not give them more of his own writings, when they value them ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... of the shrine. They had noticed everything that doesn't matter about the high and holy ones—how they looked, spoke, dressed, behaved. It was awfully clever, some of it; one of the women imitated Legard the essayist down to the ground—the way he pontificates, you know—but nothing else. They were simply interested in the great men, and not interested in what make the great men different from other people, but simply in their resemblance to other people. Even great people have ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... become now weak and wabbly. One hurdles dispiritedly over trailing skirts. One tries in conversation to think of the name of a play he has just seen, but it escapes him. It is, however, so nearly in his grasp, that it prevents him from turning to another topic. Benson, the essayist, also disliked formal receptions and he quotes Prince Hal in their dispraise. "Prithee, Ned," says the Prince—and I fancy that he has just led a thirsty Duchess to the punchbowl, and was now in the very act of escaping while her face was buried ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... had grown with some rapidity into a writer recognised and welcomed by the more cultivated sections of the American public, and even known to a select circle of British readers. To his American discoverers he had first appeared as an essayist, a serious essayist who wrote about aesthetics and Oriental thought and national character and poets and painting. He had come through America some years ago as one of those Kahn scholars, those promising writers and ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... said a Library was "an act of faith," and some unknown essayist spoke of one so beautiful, so perfect, so harmonious in all its parts, that he who made it was smitten with a passion. In that faith the promoters of Everyman's Library planned it out originally on a large scale; and their idea in so doing was to make it conform as far as possible to ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... spirit as he was wayward in his conduct, exhibited, both in his poems and tales, which are unique in their character, the traits of a wild and somber genius. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), admired as a poet, but more generally as an essayist, valuing insight above logic, has commented on nature, man, and literature with so rare a penetration and felicity of expression that Matthew Arnold has placed his productions on a level with the Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. In the list ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Sir Sydney Smith, the essayist, died shortly before this. Born in 1771, he studied for orders and became a clergyman. At the opening of the Nineteenth Century he entered the field of authorship with the publication of "Six Sermons Preached at Charlotte Chapel." Then came the famous "Letters on the Catholics, from Peter Plymley ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... Channing, who has just published a very neat little volume of poems, we feel the necessity of employing the indefinite rather than the definite article. He is a, and by no means the, William Ellery Channing. He is only the son* of the great essayist deceased. . . It may be said in his favor that nobody ever heard of him. Like an honest woman, he has always succeeded in keeping himself from being made the subject of gossip. His book contains ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... mark the old essayist sends his arrow! He is right about the essential qualities of good talk. They are not merely intellectual. They are moral. Goodness of heart, freedom of spirit, gayety of temper, and friendliness of disposition,—these are four fine things, and ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... beauty of style for which they were distinguished—if they were remarkable only for rhetorical flourishes—we would not be apt to estimate these flourishes at more than their due value. We would not agree with the doctrines of the essayist on account of the elegance with which they were urged. On the contrary, we would be inclined to disbelief. But when all ornament save that of simplicity is disclaimed—when we are attacked by precision of language, by perfect accuracy ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles A. Dana (1819-1897), afterward editor of the New York Sun, George Ripley, in later times distinguished as the literary critic of the New York Tribune, and GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS (1824-1892), who became a well-known essayist, magazine editor, and civil service reformer. The original pioneers numbered about twenty; but the membership increased to nearly one hundred and fifty. Brook Farm had an influence, however, that could not be measured by the number of ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... to express a profound and difficult thought clearly and lucidly. The only piece of literary advice that I have ever found to be of real and abiding use, is the advice I once heard given by Professor Seeley to a youthful essayist, who had involved a simple subject in mazes of irrelevant intricacy. "Don't be afraid," said the Professor, "of letting the bones show." That is the secret: a piece of literary art must not be merely dry bones; the skeleton must be overlaid with ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... regular,—I said; for I remembered that the distinguished essayist was too fond of his brandy and water, and I confess that the thought was not pleasant to me of following Dr. Johnson's advice, with the slight variation of giving my days and my nights to trying on the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... a vehement assailant of received religious views, and was burned at the stake at Rome (1600). In some gifted minds, the conflict of doctrinal systems, and the influence of the Renaissance, engendered skepticism. Montaigne (1533-1592), the genial essayist on men and manners, the Plutarch of France, is an example of this class. The opposition to Aristotle and to the schoolmen found a great leader in the English philosopher, Francis Bacon (1561-1626). The influence of Lord Bacon ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... reason his positions out like Wycliffe; he was a suggestive essayist rather than a constructive philosopher; and, radical though he was in some of his views, he held firm to what he regarded as the fundamental articles of the Christian faith. He believed in the redemptive value of the death of Christ. He believed that man must build his hopes, not so much on ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... the conclusion that this was to be the great prize bestowed upon the successful essayist. Delightful idea; how well the trinket would look round her smooth white throat! Instantly she determined to try for this prize, and of course as instantly the bare idea of defeat became intolerable to her. She went steadily and methodically to work. With extreme care she ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... this passage, in explanation, adds, that 'Montaigne in his Essays supposes his cat thought him a fool for losing his time in playing with her;' but, under favour, this is a misinterpretation of the essayist's sentiment, and something like a libel on the capacity of both himself and cat. Montaigne's words are: 'When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me? We mutually divert each other with our play. If I have my hour to begin ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... young essayist's pen. It is to be feared that in roving among those shelves in Great Russell-street he showed himself something of a freebooter, taking his "bien" wherever it was to be found; but did not Moliere frankly acknowledge the same practice? Mr. Hawkehurst wrote about anything ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... [3]Historian, Biographer, Essayist, Author of a "Precis of English History," a "Continuation of Grecian History," etc., and for many years ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... venture to hope that neither are you drowned, nor my sister's leg broken, nor a celebrated professor and essayist 'in a high fever wi' pulling any of ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pictures from fancy rather than from nature, and whose chief merit consists in the agreeable pertness and vivacity of his dialogue—Addison, whose fame as a poet greatly exceeded his genius, which was cold and enervate; though he yielded to none in the character of an essayist, either for style or matter—Swift, whose muse seems to have been mere misanthropy; he was a cynic rather than a poet, and his natural dryness and sarcastic severity would have been unpleasing, had not he qualified them, by adopting the extravagant humour of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... than I, of the greatness and goodness of his heart. . . . In no place should I take it upon myself at this time to discourse of his books, of his refined knowledge of character, of his subtle acquaintance with the weaknesses of human nature, of his delightful playfulness as an essayist, of his quaint and touching ballads, of his mastery over the English language. . . . But before me lies all that he had written of his latest story . . . and the pain I have felt in perusing it has not been deeper than the conviction that he was in the healthiest vigour ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... cheat were detected and exposed. Let those who have the truth give forth its light, that the falsehood may wither and die. Unless they do so, the life which has already extended over so many centuries may gain fresh vigor, and renew its youth. Even yet the vision of the essayist may be realized: "She may still exist in undiminished vigor, when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel |
