"Rhetorician" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... drop and bump of the sailing gasbag upon catch-words of enthusiasm, which are the rhetoric of the merely windy, and a collapse on a poetic line, which too often signalizes the rhetorician's emptiness of his wind, the article was eminent for flight, sweep, and dash, and sailed along far more grandly than ordinary provincial organs for the promoting or seconding of public opinion, that are as little to be compared with the mighty metropolitan as are ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... long been the fashion, among a certain school of half-hearted Americans—and unless I am mistaken, the teaching has increased during the last decades—to minimize the value of Jefferson's "self-evident truths." Rufus Choate, himself a consummate rhetorician, sneered at those "glittering generalities," and countless college-bred men, some of them occupying the highest positions, have echoed the sneer. The essence of the objection to Jefferson's platform lies of course in his phrase, "all men are created equal," with the subsidiary phrase ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular, and full of influence, And should they paint or write still it is action: The struggle of the fly in marmalade. The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours, The sentimentalist himself; while art Is but ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... from Lindau's reading and feeling rather than his reflection. That was the notion he formed of some things he had met with in Ruskin to much the same effect; he regarded them with amusement as the chimeras of a rhetorician run ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Burke, either in style or matter. Burke was a metaphysician, Mackintosh a mere logician. Burke was an orator (almost a poet) who reasoned in figures, because he had an eye for nature: Mackintosh, on the other hand, was a rhetorician, who had only an eye to common-places. On this I ventured to say that I had always entertained a great opinion of Burke, and that (as far as I could find) the speaking of him with contempt might be made the test of a vulgar democratical ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Juvenal, who flayed with his pen; Plautus, who composed the best comedies of antiquity while turning a mill-wheel; Seneca the philosopher, of whom it is said that the noblest act of his life was his death; Quintilian the rhetorician; the immoral Sallust, who speaks so eloquently of virtue; the two Plinys; Suetonius and Varro—in a word, all the Latin letters from the time when they stammered their first word with Livius Andronicus until they exhaled their last ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... his own mind between them and facts which they know its well as he; but when, by independent and indefatigable research, at home and abroad, he indisputably widened the sphere of their information, they pardoned the faults of the rhetorician in their gratitude to the toiling investigator who had added ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... cannot be solid, that what is clear cannot be profound. Very slowly was the public brought to acknowledge that Mansfield was a great jurist, and that Burke was a great master of political science. Montague was a brilliant rhetorician, and, therefore, though he had ten times Harley's capacity for the driest parts of business, was represented by detractors as a superficial, prating pretender. But from the absence of show in Harley's discourses many people inferred that there must be much substance; and he ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... it on the Trojan side. Before the actual fighting, some personal descriptions of the chief heroes and heroines are given, curiously feeble and strongly tinged with mediaeval peculiarities, but thought to be possibly derived from some similar things attributed to the rhetorician Philostratus at the end of the third century. And among these a great place is ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... with new talent. Among other appointments confidently spoken of in the best-informed circles, we learn that Lord Vargrave is to have the place of ———. It will be a popular appointment. Lord Vargrave is not a holiday orator, a mere declamatory rhetorician—but a man of clear business-like views, and was highly thought of in the House of Commons. He has also the art of attaching his friends, and his frank, manly character cannot fail to have its due effect with the English public. In another column of our journal our ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... descendants of prophets,) could they foresee that another Burke was soon to illuminate this occidental hemisphere, by the blaze of his genius,—embodying in his own person half the wisdom of the whole nation of Rhode Island,—who should revive and indorse the dictum of the florid British rhetorician, and fix upon the name of the American merchant as fact, the fancy sketch first drawn by a brilliant but libellous imagination! Had it been otherwise, I am sure my friend would have been spared the toils and perplexities incident alike to the mercantile calling, whether ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... likes to be balanced between opposing difficulties; to play with any symbol of worship without actually worshipping it; to prostrate himself sincerely at many shrines, and yet with a half smile on his lips. He cannot be a rhetorician in the ordinary sense of the word; he would have been hopelessly out of place on the floor of the senate, stirring men's patriotism or sense of right; for half his sympathy would always be with the Opposition. He could not have moved the ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... century ago, taxes on articles of general consumption produce thirteen millions more. Robbery is a capital offence because the poor alone are tempted to it. Among the poor alone is all combination forbidden. Godwin was often an incautious rhetorician. He painted the present in colours of such unrelieved gloom, that it is hard to see in it the possibility of a brighter future. Mankind seems hopeless, and he ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... three years before been engaged with him on a similar mission to Brundusium, were men whose thoughts were given more to literature than to politics. Horace starts from Rome with Heliodorus, a celebrated rhetorician, and they make their way very leisurely to Anxur (Terracina), where ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... art as a poet consists not so much in the direct expression of feeling in sensuous and passionate language, as in the transfiguration of thought by means of impassioned imagery. In his poems as elsewhere he is a good deal of a rhetorician, but he is never insincere. His verse came from the heart, only it was the expression of character and convictions rather than of moods and fancies. It seems intended to edify rather than to portray; to impress rather than to delight. Some of it, too, is occupied with ideal sentiments so abstract ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... that the author of the Shakespearean plays was a lawyer. Certainly he was a logician and a rhetorician. The clash of minds and of speech appearing in Julius Caesar, in Antony and Cleopatra, in Henry IV., and in many other plays, shows a most wonderful facility for stating a case, for presenting ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... which was in more senses than one that of a borderer between two worlds, gives to the study of his writings an exceptional value. Born a few years after the overthrow of the Western Empire, a Roman noble by his ancestry, a rhetorician-philosopher by his training, he became what we should call the Prime Minister of the Ostrogothic King Theodoric; he toiled with his master at the construction of the new state, which was to unite the vigour of Germany and the ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... but wanted the faculty which gives it life and truth. Cazales was the opposite of Maury: he had a just and ready mind; his eloquence was equally facile, but more animated; there was candour in his outbursts, and he always gave the best reasons. No rhetorician, he always took the true side of a question that concerned his party, and left declamation to Maury. With the clearness of his views, his ardent character, and the good use he made of his talents, his only fault was that ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... similar passages rightly and to explain at the same time how it was possible for Baius and Jansenius to bolster their heretical systems with quotations from the writings of St. Augustine and his disciples, it is necessary to observe that the quondam rhetorician and Platonic idealist of Hippo delights in applying to the genus the designation which belongs to its highest species, and vice versa.(163) Thus, in speaking of liberty, he often means the perfect liberty enjoyed by our first parents in Paradise;(164) in using the ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... a little is not possible. The man who lies tells the whole lie. Lying is the face of the fiend; and Satan has two names,—he is called Satan and Lying." Victor Hugo the romancer would seem to be a safer guide, so far, for the physician or the nurse in the sick-room, than Pliny the rhetorician, or Rothe ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... very lack of order—which shows that "browsing" instinct which Charles Lamb declared to be essential to a right feeling for literature—the charm of the book lies. This habit of straying, and his lack of style, prove Aelianus more of a vagabond in the domain of letters than a rhetorician. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... personally hostile to Socrates because of the influence the philosopher had exerted over his son, yet who then had considerable influence from the active part he had taken in the expulsion of the Thirty Tyrants. The more formidable accuser was Meletus,—a poet and a rhetorician, who had been irritated by Socrates' terrible cross-examinations. The principal charges against him were, that he did not admit the gods acknowledged by the republic, and that he corrupted the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... PHILOLOGIST, a freedman, was born at Athens. Of him, Capito Atteius [869], the well-known jurisconsult, says that he was a rhetorician among the grammarians, and a grammarian among the rhetoricians. Asinius Pollio [870], in the book in which he finds fault with the writings of Sallust for his great affectation of obsolete words, speaks thus: "In this work his ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... think first of the direct statements made by Latin writers. These are to be found in the writings of Cicero, Quintilian, Seneca the Rhetorician, Petronius, Aulus Gellius, Vitruvius, and the Latin grammarians. The professional teacher Quintilian is shocked at the illiterate speech of the spectators in the theatres and circus. Similarly a character in Petronius utters a warning against the words such people use. Cicero openly ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... then, Marius came down now from White-nights, to live in the house of his guardian or tutor, that he might attend the school of a famous rhetorician, and learn, among [46] other things, Greek. The school, one of many imitations of Plato's Academy in the old Athenian garden, lay in a quiet suburb of Pisa, and had its grove of cypresses, its porticoes, a house for the master, its chapel and images. For the memory of Marius ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... they wrought out again the sorrows of their troubled record. When the morning broke through the dull gray of the eastern sky rim, he would be a heartless surgeon of emotions who attempted to probe the pathos of their thoughts, and a dull and vulgar rhetorician who should attempt to parse the fathomless sorrow ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... their Children's Throats are cut and Troy in Flames:—Dido does not sigh in Madrigals, when she flies to the Pile upon which she's going to sacrifice herself:—Demosthenes has no Prettinesses, when he animates the Athenians to War; if he had, he'd be a Rhetorician indeed, instead of which ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... interlocutors also correspond to the parts which are assigned to them. Gorgias is the great rhetorician, now advanced in years, who goes from city to city displaying his talents, and is celebrated throughout Greece. Like all the Sophists in the dialogues of Plato, he is vain and boastful, yet he has also ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... with s. 11, and the judicious remark there on the mere accommodation in the 'prae' of predestination. But the subject was too tempting for the rhetorician. ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... passions of man; and follow nature (saith he) therein, and thou shalt not err. The lawyer saith what men have determined. The historian what men have done. The grammarian speaketh only of the rules of speech; and the rhetorician, and logician, considering what in nature will soonest prove and persuade, thereon give artificial rules, which still are compassed within the circle of a question, according to the proposed matter. The physician weigheth the nature of a man's body, and the nature of things helpful, or ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... been thought necessary in this chapter to notice either Arnobius, an African rhetorician, who wrote seven Books against the Gentiles; or the Christian Cicero, Lactantius, who is said to have been his pupil. Both these authors appeared about the end of the period embraced in this history, and consequently exerted little or no ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... of persuasion is not solely intellectual, but is largely emotional. It uses every principle of public speaking, and every "form of discourse," to use a rhetorician's expression, but argument supplemented by special appeal is its peculiar quality. This we may best see ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... was no difficulty in improvising any number of such orations. To praise the Athenians among the Athenians was easy,—to praise them among the Lacedaemonians would have been a much more difficult task. Socrates himself has turned rhetorician, having learned of a woman, Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles; and any one whose teachers had been far inferior to his own—say, one who had learned from Antiphon the Rhamnusian—would be quite equal to the task of praising men to themselves. When we remember that Antiphon is described ...
— Menexenus • Plato
... It has substituted pomp for grandeur, school routine for individual inspiration, elaborateness for simplicity, fadeur and the monotony of literary orthodoxy for variety, the source and spring of intellectual life; and in the works produced under its auspices we discover the rhetorician and the writer, never the man. By all its traditions the academy was made to be the natural ornament of a monarchical society. Richelieu conceived and created it as a sort of superior centralization applied to intellect, as a high literary ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... should run over the very wretched history of Lacretelle, merely for the, dates, and afterwards read the two hundred pages of the naive du Hausset, who, in every half page, overturns half a dozen misstatements of this hollow rhetorician. Madame du Hausset was often separated from the little and obscure chamber in the Palace of Versailles, where resided the supreme power, only by a slight door or curtain, which permitted her to hear all that was said there. She had for a 'cher ami' the greatest practical philosopher of that period, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... one go down, both would be six and Allah is all-knowing."[FN438] With this the philosopher put off his clothes and fled: whereupon the next contest took place, for she turned to the Olema present and said, "Which of you is the rhetorician that can discourse of all arts and sciences?" There came forward a sage hight Ibrahim bin Siyyr and said to her, "Think me not like the rest." Quoth she, "It is the more assured to me that thou wilt be beaten, for that ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... cares whether he commits the rhetorical blunder of mixing up metaphors or not. That matters very little, except to a pedant and a rhetorician. In his impetuous way he blends three here, and has no time to stop to disentangle them. They all mean substantially the same thing which I have stated in the words that conduct here determines the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the reader's indulgence if he or she find in the ensuing pages any serious lapses from true literary style. I write merely as I feel, and do not pretend to be either an expert hieroglyphist or a rhetorician of commanding quality. Perhaps I should do more wisely if I were to accept the advice of my great-grandson Ham, who, overhearing my remark to a caller last Sunday evening that the work I have undertaken is one of ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... only to find it dead under a gray heaven and harsh blasts from the northeast. Robespierre's words on the Supreme Being are never a brimming stream of deep feeling; they are a literary concoction: never the self-forgetting expansion of the religious soul, but only the composite of the rhetorician. He thought he had a passion for religion; what he took for religion was little more than mental decorum. We do not mean that he was insincere, or that he was without a feeling for high things. But here, as in all else, his ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... tobacco, but with his hands folded, and in silence. "I know not why it is," said he, "but that story of yours, my friend, brings to my mind a story of a man whom I once knew—a great magician in his time, and a necromancer and a chemist and an alchemist and mathematician and a rhetorician, an astronomer, an astrologer, and a ...
— Twilight Land • Howard Pyle
... patients, by all the rules of logic and rhetoric, to submit to disagreeable treatment; and for that end has taken lessons in informal oratory from Isocrates or one of his associates. Some of Menon's competitors (feeling themselves less eloquent) have actually a paid rhetorician whom they can take to the bedside of a stubborn invalid, to induce him by irrefutable ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... Victorinus was born in Africa, and died at Rome in 370. He was a distinguished orator, grammarian, and rhetorician. His chief work was a treatise entitled "De Orthographia." He also wrote many theological ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... old Phoenician navigators, besides availing himself of the observations of Hipparchus, and of the accounts given of their travels by various Greek and Roman authors. Contemporary with Marinus was Paulus, a native of Tyre, who was noted as a rhetorician, and deputed by his city to go as their representative to Rome and plead the cause of the Tyrians before Hadrian.[14495] A little later we hear of Maximus, who flourished under Marcus Aurelius and Commodus (ab. A.D. 160-190), a Tyrian, like Paulus, and a rhetorician ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... in a period when it was acceptable to the Athenian policy (B. C. 443), was enforced by Pericles. Adventurers from all parts of Greece, but invited especially from the Peloponnesus, swelled the miscellaneous band: eminent among the rest were Lysias, afterward so celebrated as a rhetorician ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... then, inflamed Augustine "to the loving and seeking and finding and holding and inseparably embracing of wisdom itself, wheresoever it was." Yet, when he looked for wisdom in the Christian Scriptures, all the literary man, the rhetorician in him, was repelled by the simplicity of the style. Without going further than Mr. Pater's book, "Marius, the Epicurean," and his account of Apuleius, an English reader may learn what kind of style a learned African of that date found not too simple. But Cicero, rather than Apuleius, ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... And what reflection would conclude, a little examination will confirm. The mistake has, doubtless, grown out of a misconception of the nature of eloquence itself.[15] If eloquence were all figure—even if it were, in any considerable degree, mere figure—then the tawdriest rhetorician would be the greatest orator. But it is not so. On the contrary, the use of many words (or figures) to express an idea, denotes not command of language, but the absence of that power—just as the employment of ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... a delirious rhetorician. One might fancy they had been composed as exercises, except for certain traits which mark the frenzy of genuine exaltation. Threats, imprecations, and blasphemies alternate with prayers, vows of fidelity and reminiscences of past delights in love. Samminiati bends before 'his lady' in an attitude ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Christians. The ecclesiastical historians, from whom alone we derive a partial and imperfect knowledge of this persecution, are at a loss how to account for the fears and dangers of the emperors. Two of these writers, a prince and a rhetorician, were eye-witnesses of the fire of Nicomedia. The one ascribes it to lightning, and the divine wrath; the other affirms, that it was kindled by the malice ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... B.C.), Greek rhetorician and historian, was a favourite of Alexander the Great, whom he accompanied in his Persian campaigns. He wrote histories of Greece and of Philip, and an epic on Alexander (fragments in Muller, Scriptores Rerum Alexandri Magni.) As a rhetorician, he was ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... seeks to establish by an argument, which to us appears singular and unsatisfactory. The existence of true opinion is proved by the rhetoric of the law courts, which cannot give knowledge, but may give true opinion. The rhetorician cannot put the judge or juror in possession of all the facts which prove an act of violence, but he may truly persuade them of the commission of such an act. Here the idea of true opinion seems to be a right conclusion from imperfect knowledge. But the correctness of such an opinion will ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... door and begs for a Christmas-box, I must again cry out and say, "My dear sir, it is true your simile is offensive, but can you make it out? Are you not hasty in your figures and illusions?" If I might give a hint to so consummate a rhetorician, you should be more careful in making your figures figures, and your similes like: for instance, when you talk of a book "swelling the tide of exhilaration incident to the inauguration of the new year," or of a book "bearing the stamp of its origin ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... everyone in vast good humour. You might wonder that his sweetly idyllic picture did not stir bitterness by contrast; it were to credit the English workman with too much imagination. Resonance of applause rewarded the sparkling rhetorician. A few of the audience availed themselves of the noise to withdraw, for the clock showed that it was close upon ten, and public-houses shut their doors early ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... mouth, but out there flew a trope: And when he happen'd to break off I' th' middle of his speech, or cough, H' had hard words, ready to shew why And tell what rules he did it by. Else, when with greatest art he spoke, You'd think he talk'd like other folk. For all a Rhetorician's rules Teach nothing but to ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... amanuensis of the Infinite God, as it is my privilege literally to be, than a slave to the formulated rules of any rhetorician, or to the opinions of any critic. Oh, the people, the people over and over! Let me give something to them that will lighten the every-day struggles of our common life, something that will add a little sweetness here, a little hope ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... They sought for a rival to oppose to him, and found only men who envied him. Barnave presented himself, and they surrounded him, applauded him, intoxicated him with his self-importance. They persuaded him for a moment that phrases were politics, and that a rhetorician ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... of D. Junius Juvenalis (57-128 A. D.), commonly called Juvenal, we behold the foremost satirist in literary history. Born at Aquinum of humble but comfortably situated parents, he came to Rome as a rhetorician; though upon discovering his natural bent, turned to poetical satire. With a fierceness and moral seriousness unprecedented in literature, Juvenal attacked the darkest vices of his age; writing as a relentless enemy rather than as a man of the world like Horace, or ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... to exclaim again: but I went on, proleptically, as a rhetorician would say, before their voices would break out ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... abstained from adding fuel to the flames. They limited their role to that of dignified, courteous hosts, and played it as Carolina gentlemen are wont to do. From Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas came the fiery spirits, led by Mr. William L. Yancey of Alabama, an able rhetorician. This gentleman had persuaded his State Convention to pass a resolution, directing its delegates to withdraw from Charleston if the Democracy there assembled refused to adopt the extreme Southern view as to the rights of citizens in the territories. In this he was opposed ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... taught that the sole aim of the orator is to turn the minds of his hearers into such a train as may best suit his own interest; that, consequently, rhetoric is the agent of persuasion, the art of all arts, because the rhetorician is able to speak well and convincingly on every subject, though he may have no ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... to break off I' th' middle of his speech, or cough, H' had hard words, ready to show why, And tell what rules he did it by: Else when with greatest art he spoke, You'd think he talk'd like other folk, For all a rhetorician's rules Teach nothing but to name his tools. But, when he pleas'd to show't his speech In loftiness of sound was rich; A Babylonish dialect, Which learned pedants much affect: It was a party-coloured dress Of patch'd and pye-ball'd ...
— English Satires • Various
... protest, far above all contests here." You must remember that Callicles has been taunting Socrates with his lack of worldly wisdom and the certainty that in any court of justice he would be absolutely helpless because of his lack of knowledge of the rhetorician's art: "This way then we will follow, and we will call upon all other men to do the same, not that which you believe in and call upon me to follow; for that way, Callicles, ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... weaver of fictions," are some expressions of Sappho's preserved by Maximus Tyrius; and Libanius, the rhetorician, refers to Sappho, the Lesbian, as praying "that night might be doubled for her." But the most important of her love-poems, and the one on which her adulators chiefly base their praises, is the following fragment addressed [Greek: Pros Gunaika ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... natural evolution have been applied by the writer to the study of oratory. The orator must illustrate in his art the same steps of progress which govern the growth of other arts. He may have developed the power of the painter, the sculptor, the musician, yet if he would unfold the art of the rhetorician, he must pass through the progressive gradations that have marked the education of his powers in other departments. In a single lifetime he may attain the highest art expression, yet he cannot escape the necessity of cultivating his powers by the same process of evolution which ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... (Parrhesiades), Swans and Amber, Alexander, Hermotimus (Lycinus), Menippus and Icaromenippus (in which Menippus represents him), A literary Prometheus, Herodotus, Zeuxis, Harmonides, The Scythian, The Death of Peregrine, The Book-fancier, Demonax, The Rhetorician's Vade mecum, Dionysus, Heracles, A Slip of the Tongue, Apology for 'The dependent Scholar.' Of these The Vision is a direct piece of autobiography; there is intentional but veiled autobiography ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... outlived the glamour of the eloquence and ascendancy of Goerres, and spoke of him long after his death as a man of real knowledge, and of greater religious than political insight Between the imaginative rhetorician and the measured, scrutinising scholar, the contrast was wide. One of the many pupils and rare disciples of the former complained that his friend supplied interminable matter for the sterile and unavailing Mystik, in order to amuse him with ropes of sand: and the severest censure of Doellinger's ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... to his own genius by showing, with due exordium and argument and peroration, that Pompilia is all that her worst adversaries allege, and yet can be established innocent, or not so very guilty, by her rhetorician's learning and legal deftness in quart ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... to the multitude, Edgar Poe to the select? Then would some of the mysteries of French reading of English be explained otherwise than by the plainer explanation that has hitherto satisfied our haughty curiosity. The taste for rhetoric seemed to account for Byron, and the desire of the rhetorician to claim a taste for poetry seemed to account for Poe. But, after all, patatras! ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... in the middle. Picture, if you will, an insane man being choked by a supposedly sane one, and he in turn being choked by a temporarily sane insane friend of the assaulted one, and you will have Nemesis as nearly in a nutshell as any mere rhetorician has yet been able ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... in a style which would be thought foppish in a much younger man. You must imagine such a man standing before the gravest tribunal in the land, and engaged in causes of the deepest moment; but still apparently thinking how he can declaim like a practised rhetorician in the London Cockpit, which he used to frequent. Yet you must, at the same time, imagine his declamation to be chaste and precise in its language and cogent, logical and learned in its argument, free from the artifice and affectation of his manner, and in short, ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... a Roman by descent, but of provincial birth, being native to Cirta, in Numidia. Thence he migrated to Rome in the reign of Hadrian, and became the most famous rhetorician of his day. As a pleader and orator he was counted by his contemporaries hardly inferior to Tully himself, and as a teacher his aid was sought for the noblest youths of Rome. To him was ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... the risk of talking some nonsense about her. "And we must all feel for the cruelty of her position. But if she is—as I have no doubt she is—truly attached to Mr. Torrens, she will find her consolation in the thought that it is given to her to ... to...." But the Countess was not rhetorician enough to know that choice words should be kept for perorations. She had quite taken the edge off her best arrow-head. She could not wind up "to be a consolation to her husband" with any convincingness. So when Gwen interrupted her with:—"I see what you mean, but it's nonsense," she fell back ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Italy, and Gaul, making his way by use of his wits, as Goldsmith did long afterwards when he started, at the outset also of his career as a writer, on a grand tour of the continent with nothing in his pocket. Lucian earned as he went by public use of his skill as a rhetorician. His travel was not unlike the modern American lecturing tour, made also for the money it may bring and for the ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... 3l. 10s. a gallon, and the inhabitants were feeding on old leather bottles, shoes, and the bodies of the dead. A deputation came out, but Sulla sent them back because they began an harangue on the deeds of their ancestors, put into their mouths, no doubt, by the rhetorician Aristion. Sulla told them they were the scum of nations, not descended from the old Athenians at all, and that instead of listening to their rhetoric he meant to punish their rebellion. On the night ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... manufacture of cut-and-dried constitutions is, in consequence, a puerile task, the useless labour of an ignorant rhetorician. Necessity and time undertake the charge of elaborating constitutions when we are wise enough to allow these two factors to act. This is the plan the Anglo-Saxons have adopted, as their great historian, Macaulay, teaches us in a passage that the politicians of all Latin countries ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... age of Cicero, and still more in that of Diogenes Laertius and Appuleius, many other legends had gathered around the personality of Plato,—more voyages, more journeys to visit tyrants and Pythagorean philosophers. But if, as we agree with Karsten in supposing, they are the forgery of some rhetorician or sophist, we cannot agree with him in also supposing that they are of any historical value, the rather as there is no early independent testimony by which they are supported or with which ...
— Charmides • Plato
... a criterion, this new master of Vergil's was a rhetorician of the elaborate Asianistic style,[2] then still orthodox at Rome. This school—except in so far as Cicero had criticized it for going to extremes—had not yet been effectively challenged by the ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... great acuteness. His traditions, no doubt, require sifting, like other men's, and sometimes dissolve in the light of criticism. He has his weak points also, whether in his interpretations or in his views of things. But what then? Who refuses to listen to the heathen rhetorician Aristides or the apostate Emperor Julian on matters of fact because they are both highly superstitious—the one paying a childish deference to dreams, the other showing himself a profound believer in magic? In short, Irenaeus betrays no incapacity which affects his competency as a witness ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... that the complaints had been made "by no rhetorician," but by letter from the magistrates themselves (on whom he relied so confidently) to the state-council. The councillor added, rather tartly, that since his honest words of defence and of warning, had been "taken in so scoffing ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... 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 "supreme rhetorician." ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... above all things a rhetorician; he was an instinctive master of those qualities in words which go to produce effects of passionate vehemence, vigorous precision, and culminating force. His great tirades carry forward the reader, or the listener (for indeed the verse ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... been spending the morning with Lysias, the celebrated rhetorician, and is going to refresh himself by taking a walk outside the wall, when he is met by Socrates, who professes that he will not leave him until he has delivered up the speech with which Lysias has regaled him, and which he is carrying about in his mind, or more probably in a book hidden under ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... Quin., x. i. Section 82; Plat. Phed., p. 262.] His voice was sweet, and his utterance distinct and rapid. Pisistratus was also famous for his eloquence, although he was a usurper and a tyrant. Isocrates [Footnote: Born 436 B.C.] was a professed rhetorician, and endeavored to base it upon sound moral principles, and rescue it from the influence of the Sophists. He was the great teacher of the most eminent statesmen of his day. Twenty- one of his orations have come ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Giovanni is the greatest, both as a master of style and as an historical artist. Matteo is valuable for the general reflections which form exordia to the eleven books that bear his name. Filippo was more of a rhetorician. He is known as the public lecturer upon the Divine Comedy, and as the author of some interesting but meager lives of eminent Florentines, his predecessors ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... is taken almost word for word from Holinshed. The rest of the speech shows us Shakespeare, as a splendid rhetorician, glorifying glory; now and then the rhetoric ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... with the learned men of Alexandria; and at another of these literary dinners, when Diodorus, the rhetorician, who was thought to have been the inventor of the Dilemma, was puzzled by a question put to him by Stilpo, the king in joke said that his name should be Cronus, a god who had been laughed at in the comedies. Indeed, he was so teased by ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... with great assiduity to declaiming, in hopes of being one day numbered among the orators. Isaeus was the man he made use of as his preceptor in eloquence, though Isocrates then taught it; whether it was that the loss of his father incapacitated him to pay the sum of ten minae, which was that rhetorician's usual price, or whether he preferred the keen and subtle manner of Isaeus as more fit ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... erection of a statue in his honour. These facts may not improbably have led him to seek residence elsewhere. Be this as it may, when we next hear of him he is in Carthage, enjoying the highest renown as philosopher, poet, and rhetorician. It was during this residence at Carthage that he delivered the flamboyant orations of which fragments have been preserved to us in the Florida. A few of these excerpts can be dated. The seventeenth is written during ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... of thought deeper and more enduring than State transactions. For his ideas were adopted by the greatest writer then living, and were expounded by him in the most eloquent and gracious prose that had been heard for a thousand years. Petrarca called the appearance of the patriotic tribune and rhetorician the dawn of a new world and a golden age. Like him, he desired to purge the soil of Italy from the barbaric taint. It became the constant theme of the Humanists to protest against the foreign intruder, that is, against the feudal noble the ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... declining to be held by the limitations of the lawyer, the historian, the grammarian, the rhetorician, the logician, the physician, the metaphysician is lifted up with the vigor of his own imagination; doth grow in effect into another nature in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth or quite anew, as the Heroes, ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... set out from Rome accompanied by Heliodorus, a rhetorician whom he calls by far the most learned of the Greeks, and that they found a middling inn at Aricia, the first stopping-place, on the Appian Way, sixteen miles out, at the foot of ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... Burke, a fine rhetorician, who rarely faced realities, said, I think, that an Englishman's house is his castle. This is honestly entertaining; for as it happens the Englishman is almost the only man in Europe whose house is not his castle. Nearly everywhere else exists the assumption of peasant proprietorship; ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... uncertain and unequal was the grasp of Meyerbeer's genius, and to explain in part why he was so prone to gorgeous effects, aside from that tendency of the Israelitish nature which delights in show and glitter. We see something in it akin to the trick of the rhetorician, who seeks to hide poverty of thought under glittering phrases. Yet Meyerbeer rose to occasions with a force that was something gigantic. Once his work was clearly defined in a mind not powerfully creative, ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... gorgeous rhetoric of The Letter to a Noble Lord, the Reflections, and others. It has nothing so lively as the contrast between France and Algiers in its immediate predecessor. It may even seem, to those who have accustomed themselves to think of Burke wholly or mainly as a gorgeous rhetorician, rather tame as a whole. But if it does not soar, it never droops; it is admirably proportioned, admirably written, and admirably argued throughout, and it shows great knowledge and mastery of foreign ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... industry in every walk; men trained in the wide experience and high responsibilities of public office; lynx-eyed rivals and opponents. Is this the scene, or were these the men, for the triumphs of the barren rhetorician and the sophist, whose words have no true relation to the facts? Where could general mental strength be better tested? As a matter of history most of those who have held the place of leading minister in the House of Commons have hardly been orators at all, any more ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... Aristotle's method. And when I exhorted you, (not so much for the sake of saving myself trouble, as because I really thought it advantageous for you yourself,) either to read them yourself, or to get the whole system explained to you by some learned rhetorician, you told me that you had already tried both methods. But the obscurity of the subject deterred you from the books; and that illustrious rhetorician to whom you had applied answered you, I suppose, that ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... education will seek exactness so far in each subject as the nature of the thing admits, it being plainly much the same absurdity to put up with a mathematician who tries to persuade instead of proving, and to demand strict demonstrative reasoning of a Rhetorician. ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... that, when the others commended Philip for his able speaking, his beautiful person, nay, and also for his good companionship in drinking, Demosthenes could not refrain from cavilling at these praises; the first, he said, was a quality which might well enough become a rhetorician, the second a woman, and the last was only the property of a sponge; no one of them was the ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... rather too much plays the rhetorician. If the faith worketh the works, what is true of the former must be equally affirmed of the latter;—'causa causae causa causati'. Besides, he falls into something like a confusion of faith with belief, taken as a conviction or assent of the judgment. The faith and the righteousness of ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... were still mere boys, completely dependent upon their guardian, Pothinus, to whom the King left the care of the government, and their tutor, Theodotus, a clever but unprincipled rhetorician. These two men and Achillas, the commander of the troops, would gladly have aided Dionysus, the King's oldest male heir, to obtain the control of the state, in order afterwards to rule him, but the flute-player baffled their plans. You know that ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the most eminent writer, rhetorician, and orator of his time. He anticipated many modern ethical teachings, and in some of his writings we find a strong religious sentiment, quite like that of Christianity, leading one to think that he may have been influenced ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... Zonas, and probably Automedon, of the period immediately preceding it. The latest certain allusion in the poems of Antiphilus is to the enfranchisement of Rhodes by Nero in A.D. 53.[14] One of the epigrams under the name of Automedon in the Anthology[15] is on the rhetorician Nicetas, the teacher of the younger Pliny. But there are at least two poets of the name, Automedon of Aetolia and Automedon of Cyzicus, and the former, who is pre-Roman, may be the one included by Philippus. If so, we need not, with Jacobs, date this collection ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... oratory was a main source of his power, both in Parliament and over the people, the effort of his enemies to represent him as a mere rhetorician will seem absurd to the historian who reviews his whole career. The mere rhetorician adorns and popularizes the ideas which have originated with others, he advocates policies which others have devised; he follows and expresses ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... mere dry summaries which had sufficed for "the Hebrew and the Chaldee." The exact authenticity of these fuller texts is a matter of no importance, but their substance, whether it was the work of a Persian civil servant or of a Greek-Jew rhetorician, is most curious. Whosoever it was, he knew King's Speeches and communications from "My lords" and such like things, very well indeed; and the contrast of the mention in the first letter of "Aman who excelled ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... made, with the intention of making one like it in Rome, but larger and more splendid. When he was in Rhodes, he heard all the sophists and made each a present of a talent. Poseidonius[300] put in writing the discourse which he read before Pompeius in opposition to the rhetorician Hermagoras on the doctrine of general invention. In Athens Pompeius behaved in like manner to the philosophers, and after giving also to the city fifty talents towards its restoration, he was in hopes to set foot in Italy with a reputation above that of any man and to be received ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... State, commercial or banking offices, manufacturing firms, and the making of political appointments. The latter is more carelessly dealt with than any other department of life. The public are not sufficiently vigilant in distinguishing between a mere entertaining rhetorician and a wholesome-minded, natural-born statesman. What terrible calamities have come to the State through putting men into responsible positions they have neither training, wit, nor wisdom to fill efficiently! Providence ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... repasts served to his retainers were abolished and all alike found themselves forced to restrict their appetites to the dainties they could purchase with the table allowance accorded them. "The court's leg is broken," said Michel, the rhetorician.[10] ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... honest man (whose name of Titus Castricius should not be forgotten by posterity) maintained that Metellus Numidicus could not have spoken more properly; 'For remark,' said he, 'that Metellus was a censor, not a rhetorician. It becomes rhetoricians to adorn and disguise and make the best of things; but Metellus, sanctus vir,—a holy and blameless man, grave and sincere to wit, and addressing the Roman people in the solemn capacity of Censor,—was bound to speak the plain truth, especially as he was treating ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the square, is a marble tablet erected to the memory of the deputy Felice Cavalotti. We all remember Cavalotti, the last—with Imbriani—of the republican giants, a blustering rhetorician-journalist, annihilator of monarchs and popes; a fire-eating duellist, who deserved his uncommon and unlovely fate. He provoked a colleague to an encounter and, during a frenzied attack, received into his open mouth the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... the one purporting to be by M. Cicero against Sallust, and the other by Sallust against Cicero; but both are evidently unworthy of the character and style of the men whose names they bear, and are justly considered to be the production of some wretched rhetorician of the third or fourth century of the Christian era.[2] Such declaimers made use of all possible reports that were current respecting the moral weaknesses of the two men, and respecting an enmity between them, of which history knows nothing, ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... fundamentally, and in substance, no more than a bit of theological commonplace splendidly decorated. He did indeed speak of 'the concatenation of human affairs,' but only in the same sentence with 'the sequence of the counsels of God.' The gorgeous rhetorician of the Church was not likely to rise philosophically into the larger air of universal history, properly so called. His famous Discourse is a vindication of divine foresight, by means of an intensely narrow survey of such sets of facts as might be thought not inconsistent with the deity's fixed ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... used them sensibly. He frequently quotes the very words of his authorities; and his history thus acquires a charm such as very few ancient or modern military narratives possess. The anecdotes and expressions which he records we fairly believe to be genuine, and not to be the coinage of a rhetorician, like those in Curtius. In fact, in reading Arrian, we read General Aristobulus and General Ptolemy on the campaigns of the Macedonians, and it is like reading General Jomini or General Foy on the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... of addressing a Dedication to your Lordship without calling to mind the well-known reply of the Spartan to a rhetorician, who proposed to pronounce an eulogium on Hercules. "Oh Hercules!" said the honest Spartan, "who ever thought of blaming Hercules?" In a similar manner the concurrence of public opinion has left to the panegyrist of your Lordship a very superfluous task. I shall, therefore, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Mort. Persecutor. c. 18. Were the particulars of this conference more consistent with truth and decency, we might still ask how they came to the knowledge of an obscure rhetorician. But there are many historians who put us in mind of the admirable saying of the great Conde to Cardinal de Retz: "Ces coquins nous font parlor et agir, comme ils auroient fait eux-memes a notre place." * Note: This attack upon Lactantius is unfounded. Lactantius ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... to the orators. Isocrates, the eldest of those who have survived, is a mere scholastic rhetorician: for he was a timid man, and did not dare to confront the terrors of a stormy political audience; and hence, though he lived about an entire century, he never once addressed the Athenian citizens. It is ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... and the one which forever contradicts the idea of mere showiness, is passion. In his method of approaching a subject, he may be, and perhaps is, rather tedious, but when once he has come to the matter really in hand, he is no longer the rhetorician, dealing in fine phrases, but the great seer, clothing his thoughts in words suitable and becoming. The most magnificent passages in his writings—the Conciliation is rich in them—owe their charm and effectiveness ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... always appealed to for dates and matters of fact, but his mind was not remarkable for general lucidity. Other friends of Stevens's were Dr. Birdmore, the Master of the Charterhouse, who abounded in anecdote; Walker, the rhetorician and dictionary-maker, a most intelligent man, with a fine enunciation, and Dr. Towers, a political writer, who over his half-pint of Lisbon grew sarcastic and lively. Also a grumbling man named Dobson, who between asthmatic paroxysms ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury |
