"Rhetorical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... interfere with the study and recognition of the active principles which silently mould the national character and history. The double-faced platforms of conventions, the loose manifestoes of itinerant candidates for the Presidency, the rhetorical misrepresentations of "campaign documents," form the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... periods, his mystic vocabulary, his bold flights into the rarefied air of the abstract, were thrilling to a fancy unhampered by the need of definitions. This purely verbal pleasure was supplemented later by the excitement of gathering up crumbs of meaning from the rhetorical board. What could have been more stimulating than to construct the theory of a girlish world out of the fragments of this Titanic cosmogony? Before Paulina's opinions had reached the stage when ossification sets in their form was ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... the English novelists and essayists; he saturated himself with the sentiment of Rousseau; he studied Bacon and Hobbes and Berkeley and Hume; he became fascinated, in Burke, by the union of a wide intellect with a brilliant fancy and consummate rhetorical skill.[3] Though he called himself at this time dumb and inarticulate, and the idea of ever making literature his profession had not suggested itself to him, he was eager to talk about the things he read, and in Joseph Fawcett, a retired minister, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... ecclesiastical activity—the wide and impassioned correspondence, the series of marvellous sermons—which have won for him the title of the Last of the Fathers. His early essays are vigorous, but lack judgement and skill; they are stiff and rhetorical, and far removed from the tender poetry of his later writings. Three years later we find Bernard credited with many miracles, narrated by William of St. Thierry, who afterwards retired to become a monk at Signy, where he wrote his record of the saint. It was then regarded as natural that ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... great adversary of Parliamentary government, this did not arise from any incapacity to hold his own in Parliamentary debate. He did not indeed aim at oratory; then, as in later years, he always spoke with great contempt of men who depended for power on their rhetorical ability. He was himself deficient in the physical gifts of a great speaker; powerful as was his frame, his voice was thin and weak. He had nothing of the actor in him; he could not command the deep voice, the solemn tones, ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... subject to its laws, to think of bringing man and nature into conflict. Two factors conspire in the later period of ancient life, however, to exalt literary and humanistic studies. One is the increasingly reminiscent and borrowed character of culture; the other is the political and rhetorical bent of Roman life. ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... them for its existence. In the first place, since argumentation is spoken or written discourse, it belongs to rhetoric, and the rules which govern composition apply to it as strongly as to any other kind of expression. In fact, perhaps rhetorical principles should be observed in argumentation more rigidly than elsewhere, for in the case of narration, description, or exposition, the reader or hearer, in an endeavor to derive pleasure or profit, is seeking ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... unreflective, but, on the other hand, it is also natural for the reflective man to be reflective. Besides, in dubbing any doctrine "natural," we are apt to assume that doctrines contrasted with it may properly be called "unnatural" or "artificial." It is an ancient rhetorical device, to obtain sympathy for a cause in which one may happen to be interested by giving it a taking name; but it is a device frowned upon by logic and ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... ornamental kind, but a direct denunciation, all the more vigorous perhaps from the limitation of mind and language under which the speaker laboured. Yet, fool that he had been made by the candidate, there was nothing acrid in his attack. Genuine flashes of rhetorical fire were occasionally struck by that plain and simple man, who knew what straightforward conduct was, and who did not know the illimitable caprice of a ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... order followed in the text. Besides, since, like several other Tales, the Monk's tragedies were cut short by the impatience of the auditors, it is more natural that the Tale should close abruptly, than by such a rhetorical ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... propose to enter into any elaborate discussion of this complicated subject, but we will state briefly the reasons given by Keyser and others for believing that these men had a hand in preparing the Prose Edda. In the first place, we find that the writer of the grammatical and rhetorical part of the Younger Edda distinctly mentions Snorre as author of Hattatal (the Clavis Metrica), and not only of the poem itself, but also of the treatise in prose. In the second place, the Arne Magnan parchment ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... Brother. Such Ciceronian language cannot have proceeded from the Maid. It is all very well to say that a saint of those days could do everything, could prophesy on any subject and in any tongue, so fine an epistle remains far too rhetorical to have been composed by a damsel whom even the Armagnac captains considered simple. Nevertheless, a careful examination will reveal in this missive, at any rate in the second half of it, certain of those bluntly naive passages and some of that childish assurance which are noticeable in Jeanne's ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... remark that on this occasion the facts of the scene are well to the fore; Emma's mood counts for very little, and we get a direct view of the things on which her eyes casually rest. We hear the councillor's rhetorical periods, Rodolphe's tender speeches, Emma's replies, with the rumour of the crowd breaking through from time to time. It is a scene which might be put upon the stage, quite conceivably, without any loss ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... prize rhetorical exercise is called by this name; the reason is not given. The students speak of "making a rush for moonlight," i.e. of attempting to gain the ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... when the Rhodians asked him to teach them oratory, he replied that he did not know it himself. He took pride in being looked upon as a representative of natural oratorical genius who had had little help from the traditions of the schools. "If, however, Aeschines was no rhetorical artist," writes Doctor Jebb, "he brought to public speaking the twofold training of the actor and the scribe. He had a magnificent voice under perfect musical control. 'He compares me to the sirens,' says Aeschines of ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... domestic tranquillity, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity," interrupted Abel, who had been scanning the Constitution, and who delivered the words with a rhetorical pomp of manner. ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... of the terse, effective treatment of a great subject in language suitable for popular readers. Of course they have no pretence to the keen polish of Junius, or the weight of thought of Burke, or the rhetorical splendours of Milton; but their humour, freshness, and spirit are inimitable. The 'Drapier Letters,' to which they have often been compared, were more effective at the moment; but no fair critic can deny, I ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... at a time at Channing's house; his wife was a handsome, delicate, very nervous woman; his daughter Fanny was a beauty, and became still more beautiful in after years; she was married, when past her first youth, to Edwin Arnold, author of "The Light of Asia," and of many rhetorical leading articles in the London Telegraph. She died a few years ago. They were, all of them, kind to me. I did the best I could to be a good little boy there; but I recollect Mrs. Channing's face ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... fifty cents per double-columned quarto page for shaking my young boughs over his foolscap apron? Was it not an intoxicating vision of gold and glory? I should doubtless have revelled in its wealth and splendor, but for learning that the FIFTY CENTS was to be considered a rhetorical embellishment, and by no means a literal expression of past ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... and impassioned logic, when once he was fairly under way, in denouncing the tricks and selfish cunning of mere party management. The printed reports of his speeches are mere skeletons, which give but a faint idea of them. Even the few rhetorical passages that are retained have lost much of their original form and beauty. The professional stenographers confessed themselves utterly baffled in the attempt to report him, and he was quite as unfitted to report himself. Indeed, he complained that he never could reproduce the best thoughts, ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... This rhetorical question, in fact, was not necessary, as we all, hearing the word "Proletariat" in the middle of Khokhriakov's speech had already started to make a noise and to applaud, the cheers densely hung in the room,—and ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... his elbow;—for sheer largeness of mind, quickness and daring, he stoood absolutely the Superman among pygmies. He knew his aim, and could make or wait for it; and it was big and real. Other men crowed or fumbled after petty and pinch-beck ends; impossible rhetorical republicanisms; vain senatorial prestiges; —or pleasure pure and simple—say rather, very complex and impure. Let them clack, let them fumble! Caesar would do things and get things done. He wore the whole armor of his greatness, and ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... sorry part. Exaggerated language was such an inveterate habit with him at this period of his life that it is difficult to know with what exactness his words express his real feelings.[91] That he was unhappy, however, we cannot doubt, make what reserves we may for rhetorical excesses of style. Here are a few passages from letters addressed to his friend Salzmann during his stay at Sesenheim: "It rains without and within, and the hateful evening winds rustle among the vine ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... Schiller's rhetoric. It is this, again, that makes many popular songs so affecting. As in architecture an excess of decoration is to be avoided, so in the art of literature a writer must guard against all rhetorical finery, all useless amplification, and all superfluity of expression in general; in a word, he must strive after chastity of style. Every word that can be spared is hurtful if it remains. The law of simplicity and naivete holds good of all fine art; for ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... world," continued Dupin, "abounds with very strict analogies to the immaterial; and thus some color of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma, that metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a description. The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... This had only been granted to a few tribes who had helped in crushing Vindex (see i. 8 and 51). The Treviri and Lingones had been punished. But it is a good rhetorical point. ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... her, or the like of her, 'how much the stone-work of the Coliseum would fetch, properly burned down to lime?'—she would shudder from head to foot and call you 'barbaro' with good Trojan heart.) Now you suppose—(watch my rhetorical figure here)—you suppose I am going to congratulate myself on being so much for the better, en pays de connaissance, with my 'other friend,' E.B.B., number 2—or 200, why not?—whereas I mean to 'fulmine over Greece,' since thunder frightens you, for all the laurels,—and to have reason ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... really the plot that had won the prize, you understand, though indeed I had found the style eminently praiseworthy also according to all the principles of criticism. It almost fulfilled the rhetorical rules about ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... and ostensible aim of the book, however, has been kept steadily in view; which is to furnish the best possible exercises for practice in Rhetorical reading. To this end, the greatest variety of style and sentiment has been sought. There is scarcely a tone or modulation, of which the human voice is capable, that finds not here some piece adapted precisely to its best expression. There is not an inflection, however delicate, not an ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... received by instruction or study; acquired knowledge or ideas in any branch of science or literature; erudition; literature; science; knowledge acquired by experience, experiment, or observation." Milton gives us a rhetorical definition in a negative form, which is of equal value, at least, with any authority yet cited. "And though a linguist," says Milton, "should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he have not studied the ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... Seminar. The topics discussed in 1898-9 will be: Canons of rhetorical propriety (first half-year); the teaching of formal rhetoric in the secondary school (second half-year). ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... modern readers. Moreover, in spite of the stiltedness of the style where the author yet remembers to be euphuistic, in spite of the long 'orations,' 'passions,' 'meditations' and the like, each carefully labelled and giving to the whole the air of a series of rhetorical exercises, in spite of the mediocre quality of most of the verses, if we except its one perfect gem, the romance yet retains not a little of its silvan ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... evident anxiety, over-shot the mark as usual, Corinna reflected. It was his way, she had observed, to cover a mental disturbance with pretended hilarity. There was, as always when he was unnatural and ill at ease, a touch of coarseness in his humour, a grotesque exaggeration of his rhetorical style. With his mind obviously distracted he told several anecdotes of dubious wit; and while he related them Miss Spencer sat primly silent with her gaze on her plate. Only Corinna laughed, as she laughed at any honest jest however out of place. After all, ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... from the Canadian fort in the care of the preacher Finney. He was a revivalist of great renown, possessing a lawyer-like keenness of intellect, much rhetorical power, and Pauline singleness of purpose. That night he ate ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... democratic new life urging Hepzibah to abandon gentility and be proud of her cent shop as a genuine thing in a practical and real world,—she would begin to live now at sixty, such was his narrowness of youthful view; but the democratic sentiment is Hawthorne's. So, too, in his rhetorical impeachment of the past, though the passage is meant to summarize the point of view of reform, there is an emphasis ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... second sentence which may be classed with the preceding is the interrogative. There is a disposition on the part of speakers to ask direct questions of the audience. Frequently the rhetorical question—which is one asked because the answer is the quite apparent fact the speaker wants to impress upon his hearers—is an effective method of making a seemingly personal appeal to sluggish intellects or lazy wills. The interrogative form ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... of generalisation prevents me from saying that this is the Mahometan point of view. Indeed, I have reason to know that it is not. But it is a Mahometan point of view in one province. And it was endorsed, more soberly, by less rhetorical members of the community. Some twenty-five years ago, they say, Mahometans woke to the fact that they were dropping behind in the race for influence and power. They started a campaign of education and organisation. At every point they found themselves thwarted; ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... of character,' that his men and women are 'the incarnations of abstract properties rather than living human beings,' that they are in fact mere 'masqueraders and mechanical puppets.' Eloquence is a beautiful thing but rhetoric ruins many a critic, and Mr. Symonds is essentially rhetorical. When, for instance, he tells us that 'Jonson made masks,' while 'Dekker and Heywood created souls,' we feel that he is asking us to accept a crude judgment for the sake of a smart antithesis. It is, of course, true that we do not find ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... much like his countenance and his voice, of immense variety; sometimes plain and unpretending even to flatness; sometimes whimsically brilliant and rhetorical almost beyond the license of private discourse. He has many interesting anecdotes, and tells them very well. He is a shrewd observer; and so fastidious that I am not surprised at the awe in which many people seem to stand when in ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... that these gentlemen—externally so deficient!—constituted the 'Forlorn Order of Very Red Republicans.' Here Monsieur turned to the forlorn order, as it, with one accord bowed, in confirmation of what he said. 'Gentlemen!' continued the speaker with a rhetorical flourish, 'you must not judge these men by their exteriors. We have here the rough bark covering the fine tree. Gentlemen! have not these men hearts of oak, nerves of steel, and bone that, like their souls, never ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... consent of the learned had made; an expression borrowed from Quintilian. A plausible and a consolatory argument for the greater part of mankind! It, however, roused the indignation of Leland, the eloquent translator of Demosthenes, and the rhetorical professor at Trinity College, in Dublin, who has nobly defended the cause of classical taste and feeling by profounder principles. His classic anger produced his "Dissertation on the Principles of ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... extremely obscure, occasionally even journalistic in tone, but the author's foreign origin and his military life and training partially explain this. Further, the work being intended for public recitation, some rhetorical embellishment was necessary, even at the cost of simplicity. It is a striking fact that Ammianus, though a professional soldier, gives excellent pictures of social and economic problems, and in his attitude to the non-Roman peoples of the empire he ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... prayer by the minister, who was surrounded on the dais by some dozen girls. I noticed that few were very good-looking; but in their faces was religious fervour. Yet they kept their eyes on the man. The prayer was long, intolerably and trickily eloquent and rhetorical, very self-conscious. The man posed before the throne. But I listened to every word, half absorbed though I was in myself. He was followed in prayer by ambitious and emotional people in the seats. One woman prayed for those who would not bow the ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... assigned 'Cato' a secondary place, and it is remembered mainly on account of its many felicitous passages. It lacks real dramatic unity and vitality; the character of Cato is essentially an abstraction; there is little dramatic necessity in the situations and incidents. It is rhetorical rather than poetic, declamatory rather than dramatic. Johnson aptly described it as "rather a poem in dialogue than a drama, rather a succession of just sentiments in elegant language than a representation ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... for quarter when a bayonet is at his throat. The doctrine which from the very first origin of religious dissensions, has been held by all bigots of all sects, when condensed into a few words, and stripped of rhetorical disguise is simply this: I am in the right, and you are in the wrong. When you are the stronger you ought to tolerate me; for it is your duty to tolerate truth. But when I am the stronger, I shall persecute you; for it is my ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... brought against you by legal evidence, not a mere rhetorical appeal, Sir William Wallace," added the regent, "else the sentence of the law must be passed on so tacit an acknowledgment ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... they worshipped so. I was telling them that at one moment he looks like this, and at another moment he looks like that, when I was amazed to hear them go into fits of laughter! In describing Mr. Gladstone I dilate upon him first in a rhetorical vein, and then proceed to caricature my own delineations, and it has always been flattering to me to find that the serious portraits have been received with a grave attention only equalled by the laughter with ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... the calm and thorough consideration of another subject, more important if possible than the foregoing one, but like it somewhat difficult to seize by reason of the very opulence of the phraseology, logical and rhetorical, in which it has been set forth. The subject now to be considered relates to what has been called 'the death-point of bacteria.' Those who happen to be acquainted with the modern English literature of the question ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... LIFE," by Dr. R. C. Flower, Spectator Publishing Co., Boston, 52 pages, 50 cents. This handsome brochure discusses many prevalent evils in a pungent and rhetorical style and gives a great amount of good advice in ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... politicians was thrown into the ranks of a discordant opposition. No one else could have induced the king to give way on catholic emancipation, but the king had not forgiven him, and submitted to him out of fear rather than out of confidence. Though singularly deficient in rhetorical power, he still maintained his ascendency in the house of lords by the aid of more eloquent colleagues, but Peel was his only efficient lieutenant in the house of commons. The vacancy in the office of lord privy seal, occasioned ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... knowledge, and only at last concedes to the argument such a qualified approval as is consistent with the feebleness of the human faculties. Cebes is the deeper and more consecutive thinker, Simmias more superficial and rhetorical; they are distinguished in much the same manner as Adeimantus and Glaucon ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... 'Arachne', it is obvious that he does not expect the reader to think of the daring challenger of Minerva's art, or the Princess of Lydia, but just of a plain spider. And again, when Falconer, in his early Monody on the death of the Prince of Wales, expresses a rhetorical wish ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... Abimilki (Abisharri) demands on one occasion from the King of Egypt ten men to defend Tyre, on another occasion twenty; the town of Gula requisitioned thirty or forty to guard it. Delattre thinks that these are rhetorical expressions answering to a general word, just as if we should say "a handful of men"; the difference of value in the figures is to me ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... you taken the ideas wholesale and expressed them in your own words, I should have said nothing at all. But you did not do that. Landis, you know you did not, and you cannot convince me by a few fine words that you did. The oration you delivered in chapel, the last rhetorical before the holidays, is almost word for word like the original. You gave me your copy to write up for our society paper. I have it, and also the original. If you are still doubtful of my statement, I'll go with you to Dr. Morgan and give them to ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... after being a General Superintendent and the most conspicuous man in the community. It was sad to see his name disappear from the newspapers; sadder still to see it resurrected at intervals, shorn of its aforetime gaudy gear of compliments and clothed on with rhetorical tar ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Demosthenes, a man who in his whole life never drank wine. That is not the cause of this, said I; but we have never asked them anything. But unless you have something more useful, I think I can put before them from Homer's poetry a case of antinomy in rhetorical theses. ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... of her condition. Had she but read Euphues, and forgotten that accursed mill and shieling-hill, it is my thought that her converse would be broidered with as many and as choice pearls of compliment, as that of the most rhetorical lady in the court of Feliciana. I trust she means to ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... Watson even more rhetorical. "Yes, it's their only salvation from their rotten insignificance." He meditated. "And yet—hnn!" He was about to say something much kindlier when suddenly he laughed down from a side window upon the twins ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... wife (a sister of the celebrated pianoforte maker, Erard). Spontini generally listened deferentially to what the others had to say, his attitude being that of a man who expected to be asked for his opinion. When he did speak in the end it was with a sort of rhetorical solemnity, in sharp and precise sentences, categorical and well accentuated, which forbade contradiction from the outset. Herr Ferdinand Hiller was among the invited guests, and he began to speak about ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Aelfric's general practice is like that of Alfred. He declares repeatedly[4] that he translates sense for sense, not always word for word. Furthermore, he desires rather to be clear and simple than to adorn his style with rhetorical ornament.[5] Instead of unfamiliar terms, he uses "the pure and open words of the language of this people."[6] In connection with the translation of the Bible he lays down the principle that Latin must give way to English idiom.[7] For all these things Aelfric ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... pronunciation very different from that in the dictionary, and Mr. Jones admits this and would teach it sepritly as 'style A'. But it is wrong to suppose that its characteristics are a mere fashion or a pedantic regard for things obsolete, or a nice rhetorical grace, though Mr. Jones will have it to be mostly artificial, 'due to well-established, though perhaps somewhat arbitrary rules laid down by teachers of elocution'. The basis of it is the need of being heard and understood, together with ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... great essential fact, unhappily, in gloating over the finale. Why didn't the woman say the butcher shop, and done with it, since she was so set upon a rhetorical slump of some sort? However, he smothered his interest in the detail, and went back again to ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... were almost ready to wish for a state of revolution and the guillotine of France for a short space, in order to punish the miscreants who enervate and disgrace the government." Mr. Jefferson's opinion of the treaty is well known from his rhetorical letter to Rutledge, which, in two or three lines, contains the adjectives, unnecessary, impolitic, dangerous, dishonorable, disadvantageous, humiliating, disgraceful, improper, monarchical, impeachable. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... Poem[50]—that the Muse of Poetry was not mine. In prose, I was more successful. My work for The Harrovian gave me constant practice, and I twice won the School-Prize for an English Essay. In writing, I indulged to the full my taste for resonant and rolling sound; and my style was ludicrously rhetorical. The subject for the Prize Essay in 1872 was "Parliamentary Oratory: its History and Influence," and the discourse which I composed on that attractive theme has served me from that day to this as the basis of a popular lecture. The "Young Lion" of the Daily ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... Roman writers remarked this with bitterness.[160] Then the rhetors commenced to multiply, who taught the art of speaking well.[161] Some of these teachers had their pupils compose as exercises pleas on imaginary rhetorical subjects. The rhetor Seneca has left us many of these oratorical themes; they discuss stolen children, brigands, and ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... a different complexion for Joan. Money talks. Mr. Peters' words might have been merely the rhetorical outburst of a heated moment; but, even discounting them, there seemed to remain a certain exciting substratum. A man who shouts that he will give five thousand dollars for a thing may very well ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... of ignorance, but it is a rhetorical way of rebuking, and of expressing wonder. He knew, and the Galatians knew, well enough who it was that had bewitched them. The whole letter is a polemic worked in fire, and not in frost, as some argumentation is, against a very well-marked ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... sat immediately behind me, a gun on each hip, his arms folded, looking at the audience; fixing his gaze with instant intentness on any section of the house from which there came so much as a whisper. The audience listened to me with rapt attention. At the end, with a pride in my rhetorical powers which proceeded from a misunderstanding of the situation, I remarked to the chairman: "I held that audience well; there wasn't an interruption." To which the chairman replied: "Interruption? Well, I guess not! Seth had sent round word that ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... form no uninteresting article to gather a few of the rhetorical weeds, for flowers we cannot well call them, with which they mutually presented each other. Their rancour was at least equal to their erudition,—the two most learned ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Chief, etc. Note here, as often, the simile put BEFORE that which it illustrates,—an effective rhetorical, though not the ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... not aspiring to rhetorical beauties beyond the reach of its author, and out of keeping with the simple character of a chronicle. The sentences are arranged with more art than in most of the unwieldy compositions of the time; ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... been unable to recover, the floating corpse. The people in the court began to weary of the proceedings, the more so as it was confidently rumoured that Etienne Rambert had proudly declined to call any witnesses on his behalf, and even to allow his counsel to make any rhetorical appeal to the jury. It might be imprudent, but there was something fine ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... steeped in superstitions like their neighbours, attending freely their immoral games and dances, and sharing in the sins connected with them. Thus Arianism had many affinities with heathenism, in its philosophical idea of the Supreme, in its worship of a demigod of the vulgar type, in its rhetorical methods, and in its generally lower moral tone. Heathen ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... musician. And this he proved by the way in which he abandoned all laws and rules, or, in more precise terms, all style in music, in order to make what he wanted with it, i.e., a rhetorical medium for the stage, a medium of expression, a means of accentuating an attitude, a vehicle of suggestion and of the psychologically picturesque. In this department Wagner may well stand as an inventor and ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... rhetorical it is because Stroeve was rhetorical. (Do we not know that man in moments of emotion expresses himself naturally in the terms of a novelette?) Stroeve was trying to express a feeling which he had never known before, and he did ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... that this principle of rhetorical pause ought to be easily grasped and applied, but a long experience in training both college men and maturer speakers has demonstrated that the device is no more readily understood by the average man when it is ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... my best to give him my ideas such as they were. And as they were still very vague ideas I have no doubt he found me rhetorical. I can imagine myself talking of the White Man's Burthen, and how in Africa it had seemed at first to sit rather staggeringly upon our under-trained shoulders. I spoke of slackness ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... actually the effect of seeing new scenes, of facing a fresh climate. Her love of the soil, of flowers, and the sky, for whatever was young and unspoilt, seems to animate every page—even in her passages of rhetorical sentiment we never suspect the burning pastille, the gauze tea-gown, or the depressed pink light. Rhetoric it may be, but it is the rhetoric of the sea and the wheat field. It can be spoken in the open air and read by the ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... morbid curiosity, had then written down, 'Are you a polygamist?' The answer to this is, 'No such luck' or 'Not such a fool,' according to our experience of the other sex. But perhaps a better answer would be that given to W. T. Stead when he circulated the rhetorical question, 'Shall I slay my brother Boer?'—the answer that ran, 'Never interfere in family matters.' But among many things that amused me almost to the point of treating the form thus disrespectfully, ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... Lyrics of the Heart never heard of rhetorical figures? But he is not Goldsmith's only hyper-critic. Charles Fox, who admired The Traveller, thought Olivia's famous song in the Vicar "foolish," and added that "folly" was a bad rhyme to "melancholy."[3] ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... rather grandiloquent, it is a study in declamation, the declamation of the slow movement in the F minor concerto. Schumann may have had the first phrase in his mind when he wrote his Aufschwung. This page of Chopin's, the torso of a larger idea, is nobly rhetorical. ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... find him very unhappy in his choice and disposition of his words, and, for want of variety, repeating them, especially the particles, in a manner very grating to an English ear. But I confine myself to this Introduction, as his last work, where endeavouring at rhetorical flowers, he gives us only bunches of thistles; of which I could present the reader with a plentiful crop; but I refer him to every page and line of ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... this was intended to be purely in the nature of a rhetorical question: for naturally, if Henry decided to sell, he would want Bob Standish to handle the transaction for him, and to get the commission: and also, if Henry had to find employment, he would go to his friend, and be sure of a cordial ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... red colour of my hair. Frank was a remarkably good man. He had been constantly devoted to the safety and welfare of the whites. A most fluent speaker in his native tongue, he would address his people with long flights of uninterrupted rhetorical skill. ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... of expression as characterise verse, or rhetorical prose. I find in one sermon the sentence, "Think you St Paul trembled at the prospect?" Please re-write this, and say, "Do you think St Paul was afraid?" For you certainly would not say, speaking however gravely, to your friend, "Think you that we shall have a fine ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... private recreation was working out for himself the propositions of Euclid. He had a mind not only peculiarly just but singularly logical, one might really say singularly mathematical. His reasoning is always so good as to make his speeches in contrast to the finest rhetorical oratory a constant delight to those who have something of the same type of mind. In this he had a certain affinity with Jefferson. But while in Jefferson's case the tendency has been to class him, in spite of his great practical achievements, as a ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... study of these sciences, therefore, naturally made men shallow and dishonest in general; but it had a peculiarly fatal effect with respect to religion, in the view which men took of the Bible. Christ's teaching was discovered not to be rhetorical, St. Paul's preaching not to be logical, and the Greek of the New Testament not to be grammatical. The stern truth, the profound pathos, the impatient period, leaping from point to point and leaving the intervals for the hearer to fill, the comparatively ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... It was not in ordinary talk either deep or profound, though it could and did become both on occasions, especially when he made a quotation, which he did with some solemnity. I used at first to think that there was a touch of rhetorical affectation about his quotations. They were made in a high musical tone, and as often as not ended with the tears coming into his eyes. He spoke to me once about this. He said that it was a mistake to think ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... from his own; for the nature of the latter is not to be doubted, whereas there is nothing but tradition to shew for the bitterness of hers. Foscolo is of opinion that the tradition itself arose simply from a rhetorical flourish of Boccaccio's, in his Life of Dante, against the marriages of men of letters; though Boccaccio himself expressly adds, that he knows nothing to the disadvantage of the poet's wife, except that her husband, after quitting Florence, would never either come where she was, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... whole scene between Achilles and Priam, when the latter comes to the Greek camp for the purpose of redeeming the body of Hector, is at once the most profoundly skilful, and yet the simplest and most affecting passage in the Iliad. Quinctilian has taken notice of the following speech of Priam, the rhetorical artifice of which is so transcendent, that if genius did not often, especially in oratory, unconsciously fulfil the most subtle precepts of criticism, we might be induced, on this account alone, to consider the last book of the Iliad as what is called spurious, in other ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... Works, 1. De Inventione Rhetorica, "On the Rhetorical Art;" intended to exhibit, in a compendious form, all that are most valuable in the works of the Grecian rhetoricians. 2. De Partitione Oratorio Dialogus, "A Dialogue on the several Divisions of Rhetoric," a sort of catechism of rhetoric. 3. De Oratore, "On the True Orator," ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... tradition which affirms that The Dynasty of Raghu originally consisted of twenty-five cantos. A similar tradition concerning Kalidasa's second epic has justified itself; for some time only seven cantos were known; then more were discovered, and we now have seventeen. Again, there is a rhetorical rule, almost never disregarded, which requires a literary work to end with an epilogue in the form of a little prayer for the welfare of readers or auditors. Kalidasa himself complies with this rule, certainly in ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... himself had been the bearer. He however devoted himself with characteristic energy to the presentation of his case, and prepared a memoir wherein all the most serious grievances of the Upper Canadian people were set forth in detail. In this document the writer adopted a discursive and rhetorical style which, as the Colonial Secretary justly remarked, were "singularly ill adapted to bring questions of so much intricacy and importance to a definite issue." The facts were nevertheless pretty comprehensively embodied, and were generally speaking of such a character as to tell their ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... this article insists on the impartiality of law and the equal admission of all citizens to office. The Declaration of 1793 is more emphatic about equality, and more rhetorical. Article III reads, "All men are equal by ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... a little book on Tennyson, which has, I believe, the merit of containing all the most interesting anecdotes about him, and I also wrote the Rossetti in the Men of Letters Series, a painstaking book, rather rhetorical; though the truth about Rossetti cannot be told, even if ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... lower eyelid, the decided curl of the corresponding nostril, and a languid utterance affected as the best vehicle to convey the idea of general indifference, but more particularly because of the opportunities it afforded for certain rhetorical pauses thought to be of prime importance to enable the listener to take the happy conceit or receive the virus of the stinging epigram. Such a stop occurred in the answer just given, at the end of the allusion to the Egyptian and Idumaean. ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... any mental gift, it requires culture. But style is little helped from without. The most, as to the form of his utterance, that a writer can get from others—whether through study of the best masters or through direct rhetorical instruction—is in the mechanical portion of the art; that is, how to put sentences together according to relation of clauses, how by position of words and phrases to avoid obscurity and awkwardness, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... more copious illustration of the grammatical constructions, also of the rhetorical and poetical usages peculiar to Tacitus, without translating, however, to such an extent as to supersede the proper exertions of the student. Few books require so much illustration of this kind, as the Germania and Agricola of Tacitus; ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... the King appeared a second time before the Convention. M. de Seze, labouring night and day, had completed his defence. The King insisted on excluding from it all that was too rhetorical, and confining it to the mere discussion of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... would be a quarry for the debates in either Congress, as they had been a quarry for centuries of rhetorical historians. And as for the "winged words," why should they have wings, if not to flit from character to character? A well-known scholar, at a loss for authentic details as to the life of Pindar, fell back on a lot of apophthegms attributed to his ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... for years. At this moment of reading the Duke had already been dead seven months. Alwyn could now no longer bind himself down to machine-made synecdoche, antithesis, and climax, being full of spontaneous specimens of all these rhetorical forms, which he dared not utter. Who shall wonder that his mind luxuriated in dreams of a sweet possibility now laid open for the first time these many years? for Emmeline was to him now as ever the one dear thing in all the world. The issue of his silent ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... myself; and I shall flourish till the arrows of the divine archer pierce me, or till Caesar commands me to open my veins. I love the odor of violets too much, and a comfortable triclinium. I love even our gods, as rhetorical figures, and Achaea, to which I am preparing to go with our fat, thin-legged, incomparable, godlike Caesar, the august ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... at Angouleme, so closely connected through its paper-mills with the art of typography in Paris, the only machinery in use was the primitive wooden invention to which the language owes a figure of speech—"the press groans" was no mere rhetorical expression in those days. Leather ink-balls were still used in old-fashioned printing houses; the pressman dabbed the ink by hand on the characters, and the movable table on which the form of type was placed in readiness for ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... followers came to be regarded as a superfluous enthusiasm. And it is this same misconception of the fundamental principle of all Kingdoms that has deprived modern Christianity of its vitality. The failure to regard the exclusive claims of Christ as more than accidental, rhetorical, or ideal; the failure to discern the essential difference between His Kingdom and all other systems based on the lines of natural religion, and therefore merely Organic; in a word, the general neglect of the claims of Christ as the Founder of a new and higher Kingdom—these ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... the wording was English —English, and yet not exactly English. The style was easy and smooth and flowing, yet there was something subtly foreign about it—A something tropically ornate and sentimental and rhetorical. It turned out to be the work of a Hindoo youth, the holder of a humble clerical billet in a railway office. He had been educated in one of the numerous colleges of India. Upon inquiry I was told that the country was full of young fellows of his like. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the happy expression used by the "Saturday Review" in characterising this account of the alleged rupture with its consequences; and no reader will fail to admire the rhetorical skill with which the expulsion from Streatham with its library formed by himself, the chapter in the Greek testament, the gloomy and desolate home, the music-master in whom nobody but herself could see anything ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... too have seen a good deal of hard service in their time; but Vyatcheslav Ilarionovitch has no pretensions to splendour, and goes so far as to think it beneath his rank to make an ostentation of wealth. Hvalinsky has no special gift of eloquence, or possibly has no opportunity of displaying his rhetorical powers, as he has a particular aversion, not only for disputing, but for discussion in general, and assiduously avoids long conversation of all sorts, especially with young people. This was certainly judicious on his part; the worst of having ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... loftiest kind. The few who enjoy the glorious privilege, not often felt, nor long conferred, of surrendering themselves to the magic of that spell, cease for the time to be artists; they take no thought of ornament, or of any rhetorical artifice, but throw themselves headlong into their subject, trusting to nature for that language which is at once the shortest and the most appropriate to the occasion; spurning all far-fetched metaphors aside, and ringing out their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... the Burgundian regime and supported the duke's policy, whether friendly or antagonistic to France. From a literary point of view, they are greatly inferior to their predecessors and often lapse into rhetorical eloquence. Their style, which appears to be overloaded with flowery images, excited great admiration at the time, especially in the case of Chastellain, who was hailed by his contemporaries as a ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... client; (2) Writing speeches for a client to deliver; (3) Teaching pupils; (4) Giving public displays of his skill. There is a doubtful statement that Lucian failed in (1), and took to (2) in default. His surviving rhetorical pieces (The Tyrannicide, The Disinherited, Phalaris) are declamations on hypothetical cases which might serve either for (3) or (4); and The Hall, The Fly, Dipsas, and perhaps Demosthenes, suggest (4). A common form of exhibition was for a sophist to appear before an audience and ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... not to trouble themselves at all about it. From that moment, Ostap began to pore over his tiresome books with exemplary diligence, and quickly stood on a level with the best. The style of education in that age differed widely from the manner of life. The scholastic, grammatical, rhetorical, and logical subtle ties in vogue were decidedly out of consonance with the times, never having any connection with, and never being encountered in, actual life. Those who studied them, even the least scholastic, could ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... redundant syllable, a defect which might be corrected by the removal of the article before the word "louder", or by the poetical contraction of "sympathy" into "symp'thy". The third line of the fourth stanza possesses only four feet. This may be an intentional shortening to give rhetorical effect, yet it mars none the less the ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... throughout the room was distinctly audible as he ended his paragraph with a rhetorical pause. He caught the sound on the instant and understood its meaning as the orator, holding his audience in breathless intensity, allows them to drop suddenly that he may appreciate his control of their feelings. Their pent-up energies give way to an abrupt relaxation followed ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... villainous monster on the one hand, and a virtuous fairy on the other: He has shown how a period that is said to have changed the thought of the world like the epochs of Socrates, of Christ, of the Reformation, and of the French Revolution, has been described in a series of "able rhetorical efforts, enlarged Fourth-of-July orations, or pleasing literary essays on selected phases of the contest." These writers have ignored the fearful struggle of the patriots with the loyalists, the early leniency of ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... the translator becomes doubly hazardous in case of translating a European language into Japanese, or vice versa. Between any of the European languages and Japanese there is no visible kinship in word-form, significance, grammatical system, rhetorical arrangements. It may be said that the inspiration of the two languages is totally different. A want of similarity of customs, habits, traditions, national sentiments and traits makes the work of translation all the more difficult. ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... Plutarch's great merit consists in his attention to these little things, without giving them undue preponderance, or neglecting those which are of greater moment. Sometimes he hits off an individual trait by an anecdote, which throws more light upon the character described than pages of rhetorical description would do. In some cases, he gives us the favourite maxim of his hero; and the maxims of ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... is because Stroeve was rhetorical. (Do we not know that man in moments of emotion expresses himself naturally in the terms of a novelette?) Stroeve was trying to express a feeling which he had never known before, and he did not know how to put it into common terms. He was like the mystic seeking ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... other accomplishments, the Crows are famed for possessing a Billingsgate vocabulary of unrivalled opulence, and for being by no means sparing of it whenever an occasion offers. Indeed, though Indians are generally very lofty, rhetorical, and figurative in their language at all great talks, and high ceremonials, yet, if trappers and traders may be believed, they are the most unsavory vagabonds in their ordinary colloquies; they make no hesitation ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... Maybridge was standing with her back to Mr. Fotheringay, washing glasses; the others were watching him, more or less amused by the present ineffectiveness of the assertive method. Goaded by the Torres Vedras tactics of Mr. Beamish, Mr. Fotheringay determined to make an unusual rhetorical effort. "Looky here, Mr. Beamish," said Mr. Fotheringay. "Let us clearly understand what a miracle is. It's something contrariwise to the course of nature, done by power of will, something what couldn't happen without ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... that of a clearly-told narrative, with little of a strained or rhetorical character about it; indeed there is less of this than in much of the canonical Daniel. Ideas are well expressed and the story well proportioned. There is nothing superfluous; everything bears on the main theme. Nor is it unnatural that Daniel is made ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... To go back to vegetation in Durdlebury, even with so desirable a companion cabbage as Peggy, just when he was beginning to conjecture what there might be of joy and thrill in life—the thought dismayed him; and the sudden dismay found expression in his rhetorical outburst. ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... force and fraud are precisely those who insidiously dictate what men shall be appointed to these omniscient courts, before whose edicts all men are expected to bow in speechless reverence. [Footnote: This is far from being a rhetorical figure of speech. Witness the dictating of the appointment and nominations of judges by the Standard Oil Company (which now owns immense railroad systems and industrial plants) as revealed by certain authentic correspondence of that trust made public ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... Company, the premier, and the nobility and gentry of the British realm. The master-at-arms, finding he had no chance in argument, doused the glim—pitiable resource of a weak disputant—then basely fled the rhetorical consequences. ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... cleared 100o, and I went home a beaten man. I had not felt the heat before, save as a beautiful exaggeration of sunshine; but now it oppressed me with the prosaic vulgarity of an oven. What had been poetic intensity became all at once rhetorical hyperbole. I might suspect his thermometer (as indeed I did, for we Harvard men are apt to think ill of any graduation but our own); but it was a poor consolation. The fact remained that his herald Mercury, standing a tiptoe, could look down on mine. I seem ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... Menelaus and Helen, AEsop and Rhodope, Tiberius and Vipsania, Leofric and Godiva, Roger Ascham and Jane Grey, and a hundred other heroes and heroines of the past, converse not only with dramatic appropriateness, but with rhetorical force—with amplitude of thought and spontaneity of image. By the side of such a wonderful flower-show (as one of our poets said of a selection from a brother poet's lyrics), Lyttelton's trim parterre shows, no doubt, but dimly; nevertheless, to that accomplished nobleman there is due ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams |
