"Rhetorician" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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 ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... 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 ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... 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, he expressed it in music with such vigor, energy, and warmth ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... Boccaccio, and Alain Chartier. When he returned, he opened a school in his monastery for teaching the sons of the nobility composition and the art of versification. His acquirements were, for the age, universal. He was a poet, a rhetorician, an astronomer, a mathematician, a public disputant, and a theologian. He was born in 1370, ordained sub-deacon in 1389, deacon in 1393, and priest in 1397. The time of his death is uncertain. His great patron was Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, to whom he complains sometimes of necessitous circumstances, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... by immutable right. He does not describe the common multitude of the dead, leading a dark sad existence, like phantoms in a dream: his references to death and Hades seem cheerful in comparison with those of many other ancient Greek authors. Dionysius the Rhetorician, speaking of his Threnes, dirges sung at funerals, says, "Simonides lamented the dead ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... 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 court to maintain ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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. ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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 they ...
— Charmides • Plato
... man of the greatest genius, and of the most various knowledge, being excited by the glory of the rhetorician Isocrates,[5] commenced teaching young men to speak, and joined philosophy with eloquence: so it is my design not to lay aside my former study of oratory, and yet to employ myself at the same time in this greater and more fruitful art; for I have always thought that to be able to ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... travel faster and endure longer than a falsity in prose. The man who would sneer or stare at a silly proposition nakedly put, will admit that "there is a good deal in that" when "that" is the point of an epigram shot into the ear. The rhetorician's rules—if they are rules—teach him not only to name his tools, but to use his tools, the capacity of his tools—their extent—their limit; and from an examination of the nature of the tools—(an examination ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... 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 ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... question of the 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 proconsulate of Scipio Orfitus in 163-164 A.D. The ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... century ago the great Scotch rhetorician Campbell framed five canons or rules for correct writing. They have never been improved. They should be learned by heart, thoroughly mastered, and constantly practiced by every writer and ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... not ope His mouth, but out there flew a trope; And when he happened 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 languages; 'Twas English ...
— English Satires • Various
... syllables make nouns and verbs; and thus, at last, from the combinations of nouns and verbs arrive at language, large and fair and whole; and as the painter made a figure, even so shall we make speech by the art of the namer or the rhetorician, or by some other art. Not that I am literally speaking of ourselves, but I was carried away—meaning to say that this was the way in which (not we but) the ancients formed language, and what they put together ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... owner; but I conquered my disgust, and I did well. The prelate, with his semi-clerical, semi-courtly air, made me a low bow. I calmly waited, so as to give him time to deliver his message. The famous rhetorician ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... not ope His 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 ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... with and throwing off the blasts of winter; drawing from Nature her myriad stores of nutrition and giving back to Nature a wealth of power and grace in return; seemed Henry Ward Beecher, in his youth of old age, to the observation of men. Original orator, advocate, poet, humorist, agitator, rhetorician, preacher, moralist and statesman. The greatest preacher of modern times, possibly of all times, the man was one of the wonders of America; one of the ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... what is splendid 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 ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... mastered all the learning of the age. His family influence enabled him to get an early introduction to public affairs, and he proceeded to train himself as a speaker, and a writer of speeches for others. He put himself under the teaching of a famous rhetorician, Iaenus, and profited by the discourses of Plato and Isocrates then in the height of their fame. He also was a great student of Thucydides, and copied his whole history, with his own hand, eight times. He still had to contend against a poor voice, and an ungraceful gesticulation; but by unwearied ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... not weary of books relating to that momentous epoch. It is a "Biography of Camille Desmoulins," by Ed. Fleury—an octavo volume, lately issued at Paris. The author discusses the history of this famous pamphleteer and revolutionary rhetorician, as an advocate defends a ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • 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 ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... history, practising different professions and in many sorts of fortune. My present personality is the result of my lost personalities. I have been a boatman on the Nile, a leno in Rome at the time of the Punic wars, then a Greek rhetorician in Subura where I was devoured by insects. I died during the Crusade from having eaten too many grapes on the Syrian shores, I have been a pirate, monk, mountebank and coachman. Perhaps also even emperor ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... hydrographical accumulations of the 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 and Platonic philosopher.[14496] ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... doctrinaire who has decided in his own mind what the world ought to be, and who regulates in advance, and bit by bit, the whole dogma of Collectivism. However, since he had taken pay as a deputy, the outside Socialists had looked upon him as a mere rhetorician, an aspiring dictator who only tried to cast society in a new mould for the purpose of subordinating it to his ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... bitter hatred against those who wish to cure an evil by removing its causes. A good example is the language of writers like Mr. Chesterton about eugenics and population. If social maladies were treated scientifically, the trade of the emotional rhetorician would be gone. ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... 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 of his position; Maury, on the other hand, added ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... in the 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 Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... which the Established Church of Scotland has produced, Dr. John Caird is one of the most brilliant as a preacher, as a thinker, and as a rhetorician. During the comparatively short period of his ministry, he secured a world-wide fame for the eloquence and beautiful diction of his sermons, and although his pulpit appearances are now few and far between, they ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... 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 numerous ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... 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 ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... which the Hudson River passes in a deep and picturesque gorge; Eolus God of the winds; Boreas God of the North wind; Seneca one of the Finger Lakes in central New York State; Grecian king both the Senecas of antiquity, the rhetorician (54 BC-39 AD) and his son the philosopher/statesman (4 BC-65 AD), were, of course, Romans—in any case, Lake Seneca is named after the Seneca nation of the Iroquois Indians; Park-Place already in 1816 a fashionable street in lower Manhattan; Chippewa an American army ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... (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 in several of the other pieces; in others again conclusions can be drawn from comparison ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... to be able to persuade his 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
... become occupied with children. I remember a man who was proud and pleased because he had distracted Morris' thoughts from an attack of gout by leading the conversation delicately to the hated name of Milton. He began at Swinburne. 'Oh, Swinburne,' said Morris, 'is a rhetorician; my masters have been Keats and Chaucer for they make pictures.' 'Does not Milton make pictures?' asked my informant. 'No,' was the answer, 'Dante makes pictures, but Milton, though he had a great earnest mind, expressed himself as a rhetorician.' ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... study. From that time I have let many things be settled as they could, renounced much which I might have understood or learnt, and, following your counsels by trusting to my innate senses, that voice of the heart, I have gone forward in my own road as far as I was able. This rhetorician appeared to me to build his firmly-cemented edifice with great ability. It seemed to bear itself on its firm and solid foundation, and stood, as it were, on its own absolute necessity. Then I missed in the edifice what I particularly ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... 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
... 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, ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... person who has held his peace too long. On the day when the rhetorician Gymnastoras left his prison, bearing in his body many dilemmas and numerous syllogisms which had struck in, he halted in front of the first tree which he came to, harangued it and made very great efforts to convince it. The prioress, who was usually ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... by special order of Mr. Speaker, to hear a "great" speech of Mr. Gladstone, whom he had not before heard. When we went away, I said: "Well, what do you think of him?" He replied: "He is a great rhetorician, but—he is not an orator." Would that men would not be carried away in a torrent of happy words. One hour of the late Patrick Smyth was, to my mind, worth a week of ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... not necessary in Poetry for the Points of the Comparison to correspond with one another exactly, but that a general Resemblance is sufficient, and that too much Nicety in this Particular favours of the Rhetorician and Epigrammatist. ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... ut non solum valentes viribus, sed etiam infirmi et senes lacessantur ad pugnam, etiam pro vilissimis rebus. Quibus foralibus certaminibus contingunt homicidia injusta; et crudeles ac perversi eventus judiciorum." Like a prudent rhetorician, he suppresses the legal ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... 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 considerable difficulty, climbed up into my lap and in ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... (declamationes), 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 ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... rather be an 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 there, something ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... all the pomps and vanities of life ultimately repose. This trite but unwearying theme, this impassioned common-place of humanity, is the subject in every age of variation without end, from the poet, the rhetorician, the fabulist, the moralist, the divine, and the philosopher. All, amidst the sad vanity of their sighs and groans, labor to put on record and to establish this monotonous complaint, which needs not other record or evidence ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... one of the points on which the advocates of the punishment, whether from the point of view of deterrence or from that of retribution, chiefly rely, it seems something of a blunder to bring it out with all the power of a poet and a rhetorician. We want "M. l'Assassin," in fact, to be made very uncomfortable—as uncomfortable as possible—and we want M. l'Assassin, in intention or deliberation, to be warned that he will be so made. "Serve him right" sums up the one view, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... 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
... oppressed, stories of social ruin averted by the voice and hand of the heaven-sent legislator, pictures of self-sacrifice and of resigned submission to a standard of duty—these were lessons that may have been taught both by rhetorician and philosopher. Nor was the teaching of history different. In the literary environment in which the Gracchi moved, ready answers were being given to the most vital questions of politics and social science. ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... Apollo near Antioch, complains of the ingratitude of Vulcan to that God, who had formerly discovered to him the infidelity of his wife; a subject upon which St. Chrysostom seems to think that the rhetorician would have done ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... 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 to this emotional ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... he tramples its grammars and its dictionaries under his feet, and makes new and unheard-of words and combinations of words on the spot for himself and for his subject. He heaps up a hyperbole the like of which no orator or rhetorician of Greece or Rome had ever needed or had ever imagined before. He takes sin, and he makes a name for sin out of itself. The only way to describe sin, he feels, the only way to characterise sin, the only way to aggravate sin, is just to call it sin; sinful sin; 'sin by the ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... that they were divided by no deep cleft or ultimate principle. Doellinger never 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: ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... form. In the same way Shaw washed away for ever the idea that Socialists were weak dreamers, who said that things might be only because they wished them to be. G. B. S. in argument with an individualist showed himself, as a rule, much the better economist and much the worse rhetorician. In this atmosphere arose a celebrated Fabian Society, of which he is still the leading spirit—a society which answered all charges of impracticable idealism by pushing both its theoretic statements and its practical negotiations to ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... freedman of one of the Cassii Longini, or of an eastern family with a mixture of Greek and Roman blood? The author of the Treatise avows himself a Greek, and apologises, as a Greek, for attempting an estimate of Cicero. Longinus himself was the nephew and heir of Fronto, a Syrian rhetorician of Emesa. Whether Longinus was born there or not, and when he was born, are things uncertain. Porphyry, born in 233 A.D., was his pupil: granting that Longinus was twenty years Porphyry's senior, he must have come into the world about 213 A.D. He travelled much, studied in many cities, ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... cause for 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 given ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... purse of his resolution, and expended all the arrows of the quiver of his argument. "Take heed and retreat not from the orator's attack, for nothing is left him but metaphor and hyperbole. Wield thy polemics and law citations, for the wordy rhetorician made a show of arms over his gate, but has not a soldier within his fort":—At length, having no syllogism left, I made him crouch in mental submission. He stretched forth the arm of violence, and began ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... three 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 a certain ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... the gracefulness of a rhetorician—his is a gentle music, quivering like the voice of a great-grandmother in powdered hair. Mozart, he's the precursory genius—the first who endowed an orchestra with an individual voice; and those two will live mostly because they created Beethoven. Ah, Beethoven! power ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... 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 true, that, although no ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... while three powerful heretics grovel at his feet, and beneath are the Sciences and Moral Qualities and certain distinguished men who served them conspicuously, such as Aristotle, the logician, whom S. Thomas Aquinas edited, and Cicero, the rhetorician. In real life Aquinas was so modest and retiring that he would accept no exalted post from the Church, but remained closeted with his books and scholars; and we can conceive what his horror would be could he view this apotheosis. On the ceiling is a quaint rendering ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... 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
... him at times into a region loftier than that of frigid and pedantic platitude. The most popular passages were certain purple patches, not arising very spontaneously or with much relevance, but also showing something more than the practised rhetorician. The "poor Indian" in one of ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... scourge of the Caesars; Lucretius the pantheist; 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 ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... claimed 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 an argument. Let us then assume ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... to the rage of the 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 History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... am no rhetorician, or my words Might keep more even with the love I feel: Simply, I thank you. With an honest hand I take the hand which you extend to me, And hope our grasp may never lose its warmth.— You marked the bastion by the water-side? Weak as a bulrush. ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... 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 Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... for de repetundis (pecuniis), used i. of money extorted by an official and to be returned, ii. of money extorted as a bribe. Caesar lost his case, but succeeded in showing that Sulla's senatorial judges were corrupt. 4. Apollonio Moloni, the famous rhetorician, whose pupil Cicero was both at Rome and at Rhodes. Very possibly Caesar took this step by the advice of Cicero. 7. circa Pharmacussam insulam: S.W. of Miletus ( mod. Farmako). 8-9. non sine summa indignatione: Plutarch, Caes. gives a picturesque account of his adventures as their prisoner. ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... 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 new experience acquired ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... 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 ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... who has already, in the councils and tribunals of the nation, reared his front to the dismay of the shallow conservative, to the exposure of the humanitarian incendiary, and the discomfiture of the antiquated rhetorician." ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... parallel bars are usually set up for exhibiting feats of mental agility. The mental agility is often moral suppleness, and nobody expects a critical examination of the parallelism itself. He was not an historian of the first rank, but a phrase-making rhetorician, who is responsible for the current saying, History is philosophy teaching by examples. This definition is about as valuable as some of those other definitions that express one art in terms of another: poetry in terms of painting, and painting in terms of poetry. "Architecture is frozen ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... are mentioned as their abode. One is a Pope, a second a Catholic Bishop, a third a Bishop of a schismatical party, a fourth an emperor, a fifth a soldier, a politician, and a suspected infidel, a sixth a statesman and courtier, a seventh a rhetorician and philosopher. 'He cut out the tongues by the roots,' says Victor, Bishop of Vito; 'I perceived the tongues entirely gone by the roots,' says AEneas; 'as low down as the throat,' says Procopius; 'at the roots,' say Justinian and St. ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... 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 of March 1, 86 B.C., he ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... broken sleep 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 of ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... 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
... 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, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... line—written, let us remember, by a frigidly ingenious rhetorician, who had never looked out of his study-window—does it not seem to mingle, in a trance of absolute simplicity, the peerless beauty of a Claude with the misery and ruin of a ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... but drink, dance, and wanton with their whores. This they propose for us to imitate; they permit us to have mimics and music at our feasts, but forbid philosophy; she, forsooth, being very unfit to be wanton with us, and we in a bad condition to be serious. Isocrates the rhetorician, when at a drinking bout some begged him to make a speech, only returned: With those things in which I have skill the time doth not suit; and in those things with which the time suits I have ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... 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
... an occasional 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 fife and bugle boys practising ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Tales, may be found indications of his familiarity with the internal economy of the Inns of Court; while numerous legal phrases and references hint that his comprehensive information was not at fault on legal matters. Leland says that he quitted the University "a ready logician, a smooth rhetorician, a pleasant poet, a grave philosopher, an ingenious mathematician, and a holy divine;" and by all accounts, when Geoffrey Chaucer comes before us authentically for the first time, at the age of thirty-one, he was possessed of knowledge and accomplishments ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... 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 possession of life hereafter; but they put it in three different figurative fashions which we may ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 in his last ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... phraseology. His taste for simplicity is evinced, by sprinkling up and down his interminable declamations, a few descriptions of baby-houses, and of old hats with wet brims; and his amiable partiality for humble life, by assuring us, that a wordy rhetorician, who talks about Thebes, and allegorizes all the heathen mythology, was once a pedlar—and making him break in upon his magnificent orations with two or three awkward notices of something that he ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... are slow in foreseeing its consequences; asking, if I may so say, for something different from the conditions under which we live, and yet comprehending inadequately those very conditions; very slaves to the pleasure of the ear, and more like the audience of a rhetorician than the ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... on to speak of exercise, lest I should share the reproach of that ancient rhetorician who,—as related by Plutarch, in his Aphorisms,—after delivering an oration in praise of Hercules, was startled by the satirical inquiry from his audience, whether any one had ever dispraised Hercules. As with Hercules, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... consented to be a mere advocate, taking a side and seeing only half the truth of anything; but a man gifted with the judicial faculty, that precious gift without which a man may be anything you please—a rhetorician, a special pleader, a picturesque writer, a laborious collector of facts; but an historian never. And yet Matthew Paris was a magnificent hater, with a fund of indignant scorn and righteous anger which never fails him upon occasion. Friend of King and nobles as he was, he will not spare ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... 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 politics—the point in which English ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... the next; and by this double process you get the Christian—"the highest style of man." With all this, our new-made divine is an unmistakable poet. To a clay compounded chiefly of the worldling and the rhetorician, there is added a real spark of Promethean fire. He will one day clothe his apostrophes and objurgations, his astronomical religion and his charnel-house morality, in lasting verse, which will stand, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... they did a 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 has to prove ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... 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 vented his spleen on all sides. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... in easy familiarity 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 ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... 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 ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... class of American writers. On subjects like that treated in the volume before us, his whole heart and mind seem to be poured into his pages; and in their perusal we doubt whether most to admire the divine or the rhetorician. ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... The Greek rhetorician, Longinus, quotes from the Mosaic account of the creation what he calls the sublimest passage ever uttered: "God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light." From the centre of black immensity effulgence burst forth. Above, beneath, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... to his client and 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
... moderated the impressions when too painful, and immediately introduced a musical alleviation of our sympathy. He had not those rude ideas of his art which many moderns seem to have, as if the poet, like the clown in the proverb, must strike twice on the same place. An ancient rhetorician delivered a caution against dwelling too long on the excitation of pity; for nothing, he said, dries so soon as tears; and Shakespeare acted conformably to this ingenious maxim, without ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... consistent. He looked before he leaped. His songs prove him to be a melodist, the most original since Brahms in this form. Otherwise, originality is conditioned. He is, for instance, not as original as Claude Debussy, who has actually said something new. Strauss, a rhetorician with enormous temperamental power, modifies the symphonic form of Liszt, boils down the Wagnerian trilogy into an hour and thirty minutes of seething, white-hot passion, and paints all the moods, human and inhuman, with incomparable virtuosity. It is a question ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... very details did not often degenerate into childish folly, better adapted to spoil the taste of youth than to form it; we need discretion before we can read him. I say nothing of Livy, his turn will come; but he is a statesman, a rhetorician, he is everything which is unsuitable ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... Vacation took the rhetorician back to the north of Normandy. Now it was shooting at Saint Julien-l'Hospitalier, across fields, bogs, and through the woods. From that time on he sealed his pact with the earth, and those "deep and delicate roots" which ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... 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 of Corneille loses half its value when it is unheard), on ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... companion was a rhetorician, or talker by profession, and the most learned of his class in extraordinary legends and fabrications; in other respects an useful civil fellow, with an Irish brogue, which his service in the French army had not been able to eradicate, ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... 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 proper commendation ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... men of color, the Websters, and Clays, and Hamiltons, and Dwights, and Edwardses of the day. I listen to their voice as judges and representatives, and rulers of the people—the whole people." This glowing vision was not the handiwork of a rhetorician writing with an eye to its effect upon his hearers. The ardent hope of the reformer was rather the father of ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke |
