"Epigrammatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he would slip into the corridor," continued the princess, smiling at her friend's epigrammatic remark. "Once or twice, either to see me or to make me see him, he looked through the glass sash of the box exactly opposite to mine. If I received a visit, I was certain to see him in the corridor ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... than money," repeated Mr. Wright, not to be denied: for it struck him as a really fine utterance, with a touch of the epigrammatic too, of which he had not believed himself capable. In the stir of his feelings he was conscious of an unfamiliar loftiness, and conscious also that it did him credit. He paused and added, "There's darters, ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Ware, pp. 324-339.) I have read somewhere this saying of Bonaparte's: "An army of deer commanded by a lion is better than an army of lions commanded by a deer." While that statement is only figurative in its nature, it is, however, a strong epigrammatic expression of the fact that the commander of soldiers in battle should be, above all other things, a forcible, determined, and ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... are either lyrical or epigrammatic. Indeed I am mistaken if a single epigram included fails to preserve at least some faint thrill of the emotion through which it had to pass before the Muse's lips let it fall, with however exquisite deliberation. ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... German, but a grotesque, whose writings will probably never be read much out of Germany, excellent as they are, on account of the "jarring combination of parentheses, dashes, hyphens, figures without limit, one tissue of metaphors and similes, interlaced with epigrammatic bursts and sardonic turns,—a heterogeneous, unparalleled imbroglio of perplexity and extravagance." There was another, on Schiller, not an idol to Carlyle as Goethe was, yet a great poet and a ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... his crude notions and erroneous observations, his ridiculous inferences and theories, with his grasp of method, his lofty views of the true scope of Medicine, his lucid statements, his incisive and epigrammatic criticisms of men and motives.[244:1] After remaining at Basle for about a year, he resumed his wanderings, frequenting taverns and spending whole nights in carousals, with the lowest company. Paracelsus believed that it was reserved for him to indicate the ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... years which contains so much good writing, and so many fine and original comments on topics of current interest. Mr. Oracle Bluff is a self-opinionated, genial, whole-souled fellow.... His talk is terse, epigrammatic, full of quotable proverbs and isolated ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... in objective Christianity, Grundtvig naturally exalts the God-given means of grace, the word and sacraments, through which the Spirit works. In one of the epigrammatic expressions often found in his ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... lost the taste for poetry of this class one poem may seem about as good as the other; but Pope's superiority is plain enough to a reader who will condescend to distinguish. His verses are an excellent specimen of his declamatory style—polished, epigrammatic, and well expressed; and, though keeping far below the regions of true poetry, preserving just that level which would commend them to the literary statesmen and the politicians at Will's and Button's. ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... of January, 1861, Robert Toombs delivered his farewell speech to the United States Senate. It received profound attention. It was full of brief sentences and bristling points. In epigrammatic power, it was the strongest summary of the demands of the South. As Mr. Blaine said, it was the only speech made by a congressman from the seceding States which specified the grievances of the South and which named the conditions upon which the States would stay in the Union. Other Senators ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... with a statement which he deems self-evident, namely, that, "in order to contend against the air, we must be specifically heavier than the air"—a truth which was also, we are told, announced by the first Napoleon in the epigrammatic sentence, "There can be no progress without resistance." From this the Frenchman proceeds to prove that, in order to command the air, it is necessary to support one's-self upon it, instead of being at its mercy; that we can only rest upon that which resists, ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... it is a ground of very solid satisfaction, be the cause what it may, that recent American literature has been so free from the emasculate fin-de-siecle-ism, the nauseating pseudo-realism, the epigrammatic hysteria, that has of late been so rife in certain British circles. Moreover, it is impossible to believe that any really strong talent could have been stifled by the frown of the magazine editor. Walt Whitman made his mark without that potentate's assistance; and if America had produced ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... universalist; the finest lyrical poets (who only take short flights, compared with the narrators); the purely contemplative poets who have more thought than feeling; the descriptive, satirical, didactic, epigrammatic. It is to be borne in mind, however, that the first poet of an inferior class may be superior to followers in the train of a higher one, though the superiority is by no means to be taken for granted; otherwise Pope would be superior to Fletcher, and ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... death of that turbulent and refractory enthusiast, John Lilburne, alias Free-born John, alias Lilburne the Trouble-world, there appeared the following epigrammatic epitaph:— ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 281, November 3, 1827 • Various
... and carry it forward to the conclusion. The conclusion should be a resultant summing the total of the suggestion in the preceding lines. . . . While the conclusion should leave a sense of finish and completeness, it is necessary to avoid anything like epigrammatic point." ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Bibles she used are in existence, and bear testimony to the thoroughness of her methods. Almost every page is a mass of interlineations and notes. As one turns them over, phrases here and there catch the eye, arresting in thought and epigrammatic in form; such for ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... epigrammatic, harum-scarum Irish trooper, in the Indian service, whose adventures and sayings are narrated in Soldiers Three, The Courting of Dinah Shadd, etc., ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... from his being really a good-natured man, who unconsciously thinks aloud. Interest Ward on a subject, and I know no one who can talk better. His expressions are concise without being poor, and terse and epigrammatic without being affected," etc. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... and ecclesiastical cares of the papacy never prevented Gregory from what he considered the chiefest duty of his office, that of preaching. His sermons, which were as famous as those of Chrysostom in Constantinople, were {65} direct in their appeal, vivid in their illustration, terse and epigrammatic in their expression. Paul the Deacon sums up his work by saying that he was entirely engrossed in ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... foreshadowings of future beauties, that make these early works so interesting. The above-mentioned three polonaises are full of phrases, harmonic, progressions, &c., which are subsequently reutilised in a. purer, more emphatic, more developed, more epigrammatic, or otherwise more perfect form. We notice the same in the waltzes which remain yet ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Horace has many passages which, if not flat, pointless, or insipid in themselves, are painfully liable to become so in the hands of a translator. I have accordingly on various occasions aimed at epigram and pungency when there was nothing epigrammatic or pungent in the Latin, in full confidence that any trifling additions which may be made in this way to the general sum of liveliness will be far more than compensated by the heavy outgoings which must of necessity be the lot of every translator, and more particularly ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... Elliott, "the Corn-law Rhymer." He was born and died in Yorkshire. He was the author of several pleasing poems, of a somewhat epigrammatic character. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... periods are of the simplest construction and they are not methodically combined in the artificial patterns beloved of the eighteenth century followers of the plain style. Not that he altogether neglects the devices of parallelism and antithesis when he wishes to give epigrammatic point to his remarks, but he more generally develops his ideas in a series of easily flowing sentences which are as near as writing can be to "the tone of lively and sensible conversation." It is impossible to match in the English essay such talk as ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... resist. My pleasure, a very keen one, came from the imagined excitement produced by the thwarting of this desire. (Are not your own words—that 'emotion' is 'motion in a more or less arrested form'—an epigrammatic summary of all this, though in a somewhat different connection?) I did not undress her from any connection of nakedness with sexual feeling, but simply to enhance her feeling of helplessness and defenselessness ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... in preaching, his tendency was to become vulgar. I have in my possession hundreds of his skeleton notes. They consist of the main points of his argument, written out clearly and underlined, with a certain amount of the texture indicated, sentence-summaries, epigrammatic statements, dicta, emphatic conclusions. He attained his remarkable facility by persistent, continuous, and patient toil; and a glance at his notebooks and fly-leaves would be the best of lessons for anyone who was tempted to depend upon fluid and easy volubility. He used ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the other towns we had seen, and we remarked to that sort of foreign sojourner who is so often met in strange cities that the children seemed like little men and women. "Yes," he said, "the Spaniards are not children until they are thirty or forty, and then they never grow up." It was perhaps too epigrammatic, but it may have caught at a fact. From another foreign sojourner I heard that the Catholicism of Spain, in spite of all newspaper appearances to the contrary and many bold novels, is still intense and unyieldingly repressive. But how far the severity of the church characterizes manners ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... religious poems. All three writers describe the love of the soul for God in the terms of passionate human love: Crashaw with an ardour which has never been surpassed, Herbert with a homely intimacy quite peculiar to him, and Christopher Harvey with a point and epigrammatic setting which serve only to enhance the ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... discriminating mind. But as a revelation of both author and subject there are few more delightful papers than Burroughs's essay on Thoreau. In manner it is as pungent and as racy as Thoreau's writings, and as epigrammatic as Emerson's; and his defense of Thoreau against the English reviewer who dubbed him a "skulker" has the sound of the trumpet and the martial tread of soldiers marching ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... deprecating glance, who stammers and makes a painful spectacle of himself when you ask him his opinion of "The Glees of the Gulches," by Popocatepetl Jones. The slender, dark-haired novelist of your imagination, with epigrammatic points to his mustache, suddenly takes the shape of a short, smoothly-shaven blond man, whose conversation does not sparkle at all, and you were on the lookout for the most brilliant of verbal fireworks. Perhaps it is a dramatist you have idealized. ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the supreme dramatic artist, never omits from her tragedies. These were the Duke's old friend the Marquis de Coeur-Volant, fleeing from his chateau as the peasants put the torch to it, and arriving in Pianura destitute, gouty and middle-aged, but imperturbable and epigrammatic as ever. With him came his Marquise, a dark-eyed lady, stout to unwieldiness and much given to devotion, in whom it was whispered (though he introduced her as the daughter of a Venetian Senator) that a reminiscent eye might still detect the outline of the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... forceful and epigrammatic writer, and had a command of English second to no scientist that England has ever produced. He was the only one of his group who had a distinct literary style. As a speaker he was quiet, deliberate, decisive, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... Henry and Donaldson. The latter attracted unusual attention because it was the most important Union victory up to that time, and because of his epigrammatic reply to the offer of surrender. When asked what terms he would allow, his reply was, "Unconditional surrender." As these initials happened to fit the initials of his name, he was for a long time called "Unconditional Surrender Grant." So he passed ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... A famous and epigrammatic author said that life copied literature; it seems clear that life really caricatures it. I suggested recently that the Germans submitted to, and even admired, a solemn and theatrical assertion of authority. A few hours after I had sent up my "copy," ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... Hume's statement is too epigrammatic to be true. Governments can and do maintain themselves by force rather than consent. They have done this even when they were greatly inferior in numbers. Witness Cortez in Mexico, the Belgians in the Congo, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Do not be epigrammatic. Never "coin a phrase." Never make a sentence for the purpose of having the newspaper quote it next day. Usually such sentences are not quoted. Even if they are, these artificial arrangements of words never live. ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... said, interrupting him, "that you have hit upon those admirable methods of deception which I was intending to describe in a Meditation entitled The Act of Putting Death into Life! Alas! I thought I was the first man to discover that science. The epigrammatic title was suggested to me by an account which a young doctor gave me of an excellent composition of Crabbe, as yet unpublished. In this work, the English poet has introduced a fantastic being called Life in Death. This personage crosses the oceans of the world in pursuit of a living skeleton ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... rose by the strength of his talents, and fell by the strength of his passions. Burns was perfectly well aware of the passionate and quarrelsome nature of the man. He compared himself with such a companion to one travelling with a loaded blunderbuss at full-cock; and in his epigrammatic way he said of him to Mr. Walker, 'His mind is like his body; he has a confounded, strong, in-kneed sort of a soul.' The man, however, had some good qualities. He had a warm heart; never forgot the friends of his early years, ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... seaside and the various attractions outre-mer. Surely, of the two, life out of town has even more delights, for the poet, at any rate, than life in town. Sylvester is reported to have said that people, after tiring in town, go to re-tire in the country. But the saying, if epigrammatic, is not strictly true. No doubt some of us feel bored, wherever we may go, or whatever we may do. But to most people, I imagine, the Recess, if spent out of London, is a time of genuine enjoyment, and certainly it is a time which deserves to be ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... of them was laid on His own back, and He carried our griefs, our sorrows, our diseases, and our transgressions. 'He saved others, Himself He cannot save.' But the impossibility was purely the result of His own willing and obedient love; or, if I put it in more epigrammatic form, the priests' 'cannot' was partially true, but if they had said 'would not' they would have hit the mark, and come to full truth. The reason for His death becomes clear, and each of the contrasted facts is enhanced, when we set ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... which they were—but whither seemed yet all undecided. The cart halted at last at a miserable-looking hut, which the signpost announced to be an inn that afforded good accommodation to travellers; to which announcement was annexed the following epigrammatic distich: ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... instantly reproduced, fixed, registered by it, the operating light being the wonderful native force of her intellect. And the photographs so produced were by no means evanescent. If ever the admirably epigrammatic phrase, "wax to receive and marble to retain," was applicable to any human mind, it was so to that of George Eliot. And not only were the enormous accumulations of stored-up impressions safe beyond reach of oblivion or confusion, but they were all and always miraculously ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... write about it beautifully, even if you're not very virile or epigrammatic or passionate. I won't let you ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... must have an unexpected turn of thought. This turn of thought may spring from an apparent contradiction, from the solemn assertion of a truism, from a play on words, or from other sources. There is an apparent contradiction in Wordsworth's epigrammatic line,— ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... of the Bible Society. The record speaks for itself. So far as the Indian is concerned, the story has been told by Mrs. Jackson in her earnest, eloquent protest, entitled "A Century of Dishonor." It has received epigrammatic treatment in the saying tersely enunciated by one of our military commanders, and avowedly accepted by the others, that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." So far as the African is concerned, the similar apothegm once was that "the black man has ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams
... was a genial and entertaining companion, unsurpassed in conversational powers, delighting in witty and sarcastic observations and epigrammatic sentences. He was elegant in his manners and bland and refined in his deportment. He was a skilful musician and passionately fond of children, and it was his wont in early life to gather them in groups about him and beguile ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... exercise," she said. "The epigrammatic ones keep me always jumping over fences. Besides, I like to make ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... wit and most shameless punster of Westminster Hall; and such pride did he take in his reputation as a punster, that after the fashion of the wits of an earlier period he was often at considerable pains to give a pun a well-wrought epigrammatic setting. Bored with the long-winded speech of a prosy sergeant, he wrote on a slip of paper, which was in due course passed along the barristers' benches in the ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... Francesca probably reads your screeds at her Christian Endeavour meetings just as you cull extracts from Salemina's for your Current Events Club. In a word, the loosened leaf leads to the loosened tongue, and that's rather epigrammatic for a farmer at ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... it be the speaker's own book, speech or poem. Of course, if the company meet especially for mutual enjoyment in elocution or recitation, this rule does not apply. It is applicable only for general society. Short, pungent, epigrammatic quotations, if suitable to the subject of conversation, may be occasionally introduced, but their use should be the ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... epigrammatic expression,' said Trent, rising from the table. 'If only it could be crystallized into some handy formula, like "No Popery", or "Tax the Foreigner", you would find multitudes to go to the stake for it. But you were planning to ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... a question touching her standard, deemed enchanted by her judges. It elicited one of those epigrammatic replies she loved. ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... discussing here. Certain other stylistic qualities of these metrical epitaphs, which are intended to produce somewhat the same effects, will not seem to us so admirable. I mean alliteration, play upon words, the acrostic arrangement, and epigrammatic effects. These literary tricks find little place in our serious verse, and the finer Latin poets rarely indulge in them. They seem to be especially out of place in an epitaph, which should avoid studied effects and meretricious devices. But writers in the early stages of a literature ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... all he said—even, indeed, to utterances which, if spoken by another, would sometimes have sounded commonplace or obvious. Sarcasm he could use with effect, and a telling point was often made by an epigrammatic phrase which delighted his hearers. And, more than all else, his meaning was never in doubt. In lucidity of statement he excelled many much greater orators, and was surpassed by none; and these qualities, ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... used; abused among the worst." It is hard to distil what is already a quintessence without loss of what is just as good as the product of our labor. A sentence or two may serve to give an impression of the epigrammatic wisdom of ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... write a hundred essays on Balzac and not exhaust him. One might write a volume on his women, a volume to refute the charge that his bad men are better drawn than his good, a volume to discuss Mr. Henry James's epigrammatic declaration that a five-franc piece may be fairly called the protagonist of the 'Comedie humaine.' In short one might go on defending and praising and even criticizing Balzac for a lifetime, and be little further advanced than when one began; for to criticize Balzac, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... have given to us battles, laws, histories, songs; now we have in Solomon's writings a new style in short, epigrammatic sentences. The proverb was the most ancient way of teaching among the Greeks. The seven wise men of Greece each had his own motto on which he made himself famous. These were engraved on stone in public places. Thus the gist of an argument or a long discussion may be thrown ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... not, could contain the attar of the epigrammatic literature of all time. Few of the perfumes of this diminutive form of wit and satire have survived. Pretty and scented vaporings, most of the thousands and thousands of them, that have died on the air of ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... Jesu has the advantage of being at the outer end of the quadrangle, and thus having no house opposite to it, faces a sheer fall of three thousand feet. A fountain splashes in the courtyard below, and a low wall forms a long seat where the devout pass the evening hours in that curt and epigrammatic conversation, which is more peaceful than the quick talk of Frenchmen, and deeper than the ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... the book was the most unbridled kind of balderdash, founded on my callow recollections of the Green Chalybeate,—not the least bit accurate, as I was afterward to discover,—with all the good people exceedingly oratorical and the bad ones singularly epigrammatic and abandoned and obtuse. I introduced a depraved nobleman, of course, to give the requisite touch of high society, seasoned the mixture with French and botany and with a trifle of Dolly Dialoguishness, and inserted, at judicious intervals, ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... elementary as a primer and as intricate as life. It is a bloodhound when it comes to detecting the false from the true. Take that little sketch, 'Trapped,' you sent me out to see last week. A more sophisticated audience might have mistaken its brittle epigrammatic quality for brilliancy and its flippancy for cleverness. But not your ten-twenty-thirty's. In real life a husband doesn't psychanalyze his wife's lover. He horsewhips him. And that lovely blank-verse fantasy that you attempted on your own. That is the sort of thing you are going to stand for some ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... Krehbiel, who has printed the entries, with running comment, in his "Music and Manners in the Classical Period" (London, 1898). Mr Krehbiel rightly describes some of the entries as mere "vague mnemonic hints," and adds that one entry which descants in epigrammatic fashion on the comparative morals of the women of France, Holland and England is unfit for publication. Looking over the diary, it is instructive to observe how little reference is made to music. One or two of the entries are plainly memoranda of purchases to be made ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... for life, but for the school." The only novelty which could be given to the treatment of old abstract themes or puerile questions was novelty of phrase, and the one great mark of the literature of this time is therefore the pursuit of the striking expression, of something epigrammatic or glittering. A speech was judged by its purple patches of rhetoric, not by the soundness of its thoughts. Prizes, apparently of books, were offered in these Roman schools, and a prize would go to the youth who could tell you in the most remarkable string of brilliant language what ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... period, a very young man, little known but for his attachment to his profession—the army, and the idea of his being placed at the head of the treasury must have been absurd. His father, Lord Northumberland, indeed, had been spoken of for that office: and, perhaps, Mr. Walpole, in his epigrammatic way, has taken this mode of explaining the motive which might have induced Lord Bute ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... of mine, and never failing to catch with quick intelligence the sense of the most epigrammatic or delicate metaphor, Eveena started and looked up, as if stung by a serious reproach. Fancying that overpowering fatigue had so shaken her nerves, I would not allow her to speak. But I did not understand how much she had been distressed, till in ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... could be more amusing than to see him strut up the House of Commons to take the chair; nor was the amusement less to listen to him, when he delivered his edicts, or the thanks of the House from the chair. His sonorous voice issuing from a diminutive person, and the epigrammatic points of empty sentences, formed with great artifice, were in very bad taste—though much admired by a House which consisted of so few men of a classical education. His rise was extraordinary, because his talents little exceeded mediocrity. But he ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 554, Saturday, June 30, 1832 • Various
... question was, "What kind of a man was Mr. Pope in his conversation?" His Lordship answered, that if the conversation did not take something of a lively or epigrammatic turn, he fell asleep, or perhaps pretended to do so.' Johnson's Works (1787), xi. 200. Johnson in his Life of Pope (Works, viii. 309) says that 'when he wanted to sleep ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... Many of his epigrammatic sayings have passed into proverbs: for example, that "genius is but a supreme capacity for taking pains." Another and still more celebrated passage shall be given in its entirety and ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... alone together, she suddenly made the epigrammatic remark, "Dangerous, very dangerous indeed; like most bears. Mind you don't get badly clawed, Meryl!..." and then with her usual lightness ran off ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... backgammon, which, seasoned with his own improving conversation, and terminating in a supper of cold roast beef and salad, beguiles the golden evening until pretty late. Mr. Sapsea's wisdom being, in its delivery to mortals, rather of the diffuse than the epigrammatic order, is by no means expended even then; but his visitor intimates that he will come back for more of the precious commodity on future occasions, and Mr. Sapsea lets him off for the present, to ponder on the ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... thunders of applause, that in response to the manifest desire of the audience, Mrs. Burleigh again came forward, and delivered a highly interesting and eloquent address upon the general subject of woman's improvement, under the epigrammatic title of "Woman's Right to be a Woman." An extract or two will show the spirit with which she ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... sides. His adroitness, his fancy, his insight, his perfect good-humor, and his rare scholarship and delicate art, emphasize themselves on every page of his books. His political and literary addresses were models of what those things should be. They were often graceful and epigrammatic, but always sterling in their value and full of thought. Long ago he established his claim to the title of poet, and as the years went by, his muse grew stronger, richer, fresher, and more original. As an English critic, writing pleasantly of him and his work, in the London Spectator said ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... remember, since Catullus' yacht had been towed up the Mincio past Vergil's home when he was a lad of about thirteen. Indeed we hope he was out fishing that day and shared his catch with the home-returning travelers. Parodies are usually not works of artistic importance, and this for all its epigrammatic neatness is no exception to the rule. But it is not without interest to catch the poet at play for a moment, and learn his opinion on a political character of ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... vivid, delicate, sympathetic fancy of the Celt, still remains unmatched. Amongst Dafydd's contemporaries and successors, Iolo Goch's noble poem, "The Labourer," very appropriate to our breadless days, Lewis Glyn Cothi's touching elegy on his little son John, and Dr. Sion Cent's epigrammatic "The Noble's Grave" have been treated as far as possible in the metres of the originals, and I have gone as near as I could to the measures of Huw Morus' "The Bard's Death-Bed Confession," Elis Win's "Counsel in view of Death," and the Vicar ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... enlivening these historical data, and as an epigrammatic conclusion to our description, we subjoin a pleasant little anecdote related by Sir Walter Scott, of a certain old Earl of Strathmore, who, in superintending some improvements of the castle, displayed an eccentric love of uniformity. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... factory was the sphere of the Senator, a supper-table was the place for Mr. Figgs. The others felt that they had never before known fully all the depth of feeling, of fancy, and of sentiment that lurked under that placid, smooth, and rosy exterior. The Doctor was epigrammatic; the Senator sententious; ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... been used by Chaucer and the Elizabethans, and recently by Hookham Frere in The Monks and the Giants and by Byron in Don Juan. Compare Keats's use of the form with that of either of his contemporaries, and notice how he avoids the epigrammatic close, telling in satire and mock-heroic, but inappropriate to a serious ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... to Kenilworth Mansions!' Henry speculated. At the same time Mr. Snyder's epigrammatic remarks impressed him. He saw the art of Richardson and Balzac in an entirely new aspect. It was as though he had walked round the house of literature, and peeped in at ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... was old-fashioned; some that he was "old-timey"; some that he was unpractical, the shades of criticism ranging up to those saying he was a fool. This did not mean intellectually, for none denied his intellect. He drove a virile pen, and had an epigrammatic tongue. He had had a hard time. He had borne the yoke in his youth. This, we have strong authority for saying, is good for a man; but it leaves its mark upon him. He had been desperately poor. He ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... champion of the heavy-weights of English literature, the "Great Moralist," the typical Englishman of his time, wrote the pamphlet called "Taxation no Tyranny." It is what an Englishman calls a "clever" production, smart, epigrammatic, impertinent, the embodiment of all that is odious in British assumption. No part of the Old World, he says, has reason to rejoice that Columbus discovered the New. Its inhabitants—the countrymen of Washington and Franklin, of Adams and Jefferson—multiply, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... Many epigrammatic sayings come back to me, and one is too good to be omitted, An old woman was fiercely criticising a neighbor and ended in this way: "Folks that pretend to be somebody, and don't act like nobody, ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... of the care with which he treasured up the felicities of his wit, appears in the use he made of one of those epigrammatic passages, which the reader may remember among the memorandums for his Comedy of Affectation, and which, in its first form, ran thus:—"He certainly has a great deal of fancy, and a very good memory; but, with a perverse ingenuity, he employs ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... many points certain affinities to Carlyle's hero Johnson, but lacked his epigrammatic wit—and much else. But he seems to have desired to emulate Johnson in one particular, as we ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... fully realize the nature of this form of art, partly because they could not limit the sweep of the creative power within such narrow limits. Schubert was a revelation to his countrymen in his musical treatment of subjective passion, in his instinctive command over condensed, epigrammatic expression. This rich and gifted life, however quiet in its exterior facts, was great in its creative and spiritual manifestation. Born at Vienna of humble parents, January 31, 1797, the early life of Franz Schubert was commonplace in the extreme, ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... framers of the Commonwealth Constitution to create in the Senate a States' rights House I am amazed at the remoteness of the intention from the achievement. The Senate is as much a party House as is the House of Representatives. Nothing, perhaps, describes the position better than the epigrammatic if somewhat triumphant statement of a Labour Senator some time ago. "The Senate was supposed to be a place where the radical legislation of the Lower Chamber could be cooled off, but they had found that the saucer was ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... whole, his seems to have been a strongly artistic nature; for he was a musician of repute, skillful too at painting, and above all a poet. As master and model in metrical composition he chose Martial, and in his epigrammatic turn he is akin to the great Latin poet. He was fond of experimenting in Latin lyrical forms, and wrote many madrigals and sonnets. They are full of vigorous thought and bright satire, of playful ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... have discovered that servants and wives are so expensive,—still a young lady's delight in a ball, if not raisonnable, has always—quelque raison! and I am determined, if I die in the cause, that ours shall be a success!' Her conversation was always epigrammatic. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... evident, is padded with a good deal of farce, but though the construction never evinces any great power on the part of the author, it is not on the whole inadequate. The verse is in great part rimed in couplets, and there are frequent attempts at epigrammatic effect, which at times lead to some obscurity. The language betrays, as in the case of the author's eclogues, a pseudo-archaism, which points, particularly in such phrases as 'doe ycleape,' to a perhaps unfortunate study of ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... woman who was not of her own type. She was tempted to take advantage of Angela's desire not to be known, and say: "Oh, she's one of a thousand other pretty travelling women with intermittent husbands." This would have been epigrammatic, and at the same time it might have quenched dawning interest in the stranger. Neither the brother nor sister was of the sort who favoured flitting ladies with vague male belongings kept in the background. But suddenly a brilliant idea occurred ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... winter 1865-66, I met Dannevig frequently at clubs, student festivals, and social gatherings, and his melodious voice, his epigrammatic talk, and his beauty never failed to extort from me a certain amount of reluctant admiration. I could not help noticing, however, that his charming qualities were all very much on the surface, and as for his beauty, it was of a purely physical ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... he said quickly, feeling in his satisfaction in an epigrammatic answer a certain measure of victory. He felt his mistake when she went ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... examples Mr. Parish has perhaps made the Sussex labourer a thought too epigrammatic: a natural tendency in the illustrations to such a work. The following narrative of adventure from the lips of a South Down shepherd, which is communicated to me by my friend, Mr. C. E. Clayton, of Holmbush, is nearer the normal loquacity of the type:—"I mind one day I'd been to buy some lambs, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... stories, singing bad songs over and over again. Milk punch—smoking—ghastly headache—frightful spectacle of dessert-table next morning, and smell of tobacco." But the satirist is often tempted to be epigrammatic at the expense of accuracy, and this picture is at least too highly coloured. In the recently published memoir of "J"—John Willis Clark—some reminiscences of the late Registrary are included; and "J" does not recognize Thackeray's picture as quite true of the "wines" of his ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... but he was not altogether without his influence, for he was, as I have just said, one of the models on which Propertius and Ovid formed themselves; and some, indeed, call him the Father of the Latin elegy, with its terseness, grace, and clear epigrammatic form of thought, and, therefore, in a great degree, of our modern eighteenth century poets; not a useless excellence, seeing that it is, on the whole, good for him who writes to see clearly what he wants to say, and to be able to ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... often startling, are yet within the bounds of probability. His dialogue is good, growing easily out of the situation and condition of the interlocutors, and presenting occasionally, especially in response, an epigrammatic poise, that is worthy of all praise. The plot abounds with adventure, and presents many scenes of startling interest, while the denouement is such as to amply satisfy the most fastidious reader's ideas of ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... Ben Jonson. To Fine Grand " Brainhardy " Doctor Empiric " Sir Samuel Fuller On Banks, the Usurer " Chevril the Lawyer Epigrammatic Verses by Samuel Butler Opinion Critics Hypocrisy Polish The Godly Piety Poets Puffing Politicians Fear The Law " " " " Confession Smatterers Bad Writers The Opinionative Language of the Learned ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... of dialogue, with such success, that for a period he was the fashionable writer, and the court ladies even formed their conversation after the model of his Euphues. His comedy in prose, Campaspe, is a warning example of the impossibility of ever constructing, out of mere anecdotes and epigrammatic sallies, anything like a dramatic whole. The author was a learned witling, but in ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... literary activity. In the adjacent churchyard formerly stood a house in which Milton for a time resided. In later times it has been mostly called to the minds of lion hunters as being the living of the Reverend E. C. Hawkins, the father of our most successful and famed epigrammatic novelist,—Mr. Anthony ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... is not a brilliant play, as its dialogue lacks epigrammatic sparkle: neither is it an interesting play, as the plot, such as it is, is too weak for words,—which, by the way, at once accounts for the absence of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... the Minister to play his part seriously and solemnly; instead of that they had listened to a series of epigrams with no apparent logical connection. We know how dangerous it is, even in England, for a responsible statesman to allow himself to be epigrammatic in dealing with serious affairs. Much more was it in Germany, where the Ministers were nearly always officials by training. Bismarck had the dangerous gift of framing pregnant and pithy sentences which would give a ready handle ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... conditions and sentiment in the colonies. His examination before the House of Commons in February, 1766, marks perhaps the zenith of his intellectual powers. His wide knowledge, his wonderful poise, his ready wit, his marvelous gift for clear and epigrammatic statement, were never exhibited to better advantage and no doubt hastened the repeal of the Stamp Act. Franklin remained in England nine years longer, but his efforts to reconcile the conflicting claims of Parliament and the colonies were of ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... is an epigrammatic force which would make palatable a less interesting story of human lives or one less deftly told."—London Saturday Review. "Perfectly easy, graceful, humorous.... The author's skill in character-drawing is ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... set in the background, to be limited in means, was always to him a source of anger, which manifested itself now in impassioned vehemence, now in vague, gloomy dreaminess, from which he would rise up again with some violent sarcasm or some epigrammatic remark. ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... however, like the great Martinus Scriblerus, was both doctor and author. And he was a John Arbuthnot. And to carry the resemblance still further, he was gifted with a vein of rough epigrammatic humor, in which it pleased his independence to indulge without much respect of persons, times, or places. His tongue, indeed, cost him some friends and gained him some enemies; but I am not sure that it diminished his popularity ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... William, was present at the table, and Lord Elling, with whom he was in repute as a talker and a wit. Quickened with his host's renowned good wine (and the bare renown of a wine is inspiriting), Edward pressed to be brilliant. He had an epigrammatic turn, and though his mind was prosaic when it ran alone, he could appear inventive and fanciful with the rub of other minds. Now, at a table where good talking is cared for, the triumphs of the excelling tongue are not for a moment to be despised, even by the huge appetite of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... entirely to prose, he speedily became known as a writer of brilliant epigrammatic essays and even more brilliant paradoxical plays such as An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. His aphorisms and flippancies were quoted everywhere; his fame as a wit was only surpassed by his notoriety ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... suggestion of her mode of escape. He called aloud to her; the vacant Woods let his helpless voice die in their unresponsive depths. He gazed into the air and down at the bark-strewn carpet at his feet. Like most of his vocation, he was sparing of speech, and epigrammatic after his fashion. Comprehending in one swift but despairing flash of intelligence the existence of some fateful power beyond his own weak endeavor, he accepted its logical result with characteristic grimness, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... birthplace of Shapleigh, who was always boasting that two towns claimed him as their citizen, as the towns, cities, and islands of Greece claimed Homer as a native. Barron, with all the good humor imaginable, put an end to the conversation by the following epigrammatic impromptu:— ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... recall or to reconstruct; and when older people attempt to reconstruct it, they remember the emotions which underlay it, and the eager interests out of which it all sprang; and they make it something picturesque, epigrammatic, and vernacular which is wholly untrue to life. The fact is that the talk of schoolboys is very trivial and almost wholly symbolical; emotion reveals itself in glance and gesture, not in word at all. I suppose that most of us remember our boyish friendships, ardent and eager ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... presented to Lord Auckland, or to the Duke of Bedford, as hereafter, according to circumstances, they may happen to represent this kingdom. Few can have so little imagination as not readily to conceive the nature of the boxes of epigrammatic lozenges that ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... provide the "plot" of The Inscrutable Lovers. Though slender it is original and might lend itself either to farce or tragedy. Mr. MACFARLAN'S attitude is pleasantly analytical. It is indeed his delightful air of remote criticism, his restrained and epigrammatic style queerly suggestive of ROMAIN ROLAND in The Market Place, and his extremely clever portraiture, rather than any breadth or depth appertaining to the story itself, that entitle the author to a high place among the young novelists of to-day. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... stones, that the wisdom of the earth looked but to the future, and that the study of the classics, however essential, is but the ground work for combining and working out the problems of the future. He was epigrammatic, terse, and gifted with a quaint humour, with which he was apt, even when in the driest philosophy, to drive in and ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... a most unrelenting tribunal for literary culprits, as well as a determined assertor of its own political maxims. The common idea regarding its chief conductor represented him as a man of extraordinary sharpness, alternating between epigrammatic flippancy and democratic rigour. Gentle and refined feeling would certainly never have been attributed to him. It will now be found that he was at all times of his life a man of genial spirit towards the entire circle of his fellow-creatures—that his leading tastes were for ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... Perticari (1779-1822) are written with extreme polish, erudition, judgment, and dignity. In Leopardi, philosophical acumen equals the elegance of his style. Giordani (d. 1848), as a critic and an epigraphist, deserves notice for his fine judgment and pure taste, as do Tommaseo and Cattaneo, who are both epigrammatic, witty, and pungent. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... be smoked at other moments than epigrammatic ones, but on these other occasions you will not need to deal so fully with it in the stage directions. "Duke (lighting cigarette). I trust, Perkins, that ..." is enough. You do not want to say, "Duke (dropping ash on trousers). It seems to me, my love ..." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... quite epigrammatic," said Billy, snappishly; "but there is some truth in your contention. We will begin again. When we see Rita, we will formulate a plan and try to ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... The epigrammatic style lends itself to quotation. Taste of the spring brings the traveller back to the same fountain on a day of greater leisure. Many times these "Beautiful Thoughts" have enlightened my darkness, and I send ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... Clingman, who represented North Carolina, was alternately enlivened by epigrammatic wit or envenomed by scorching reply. Mr. Justin S. Morrill, of Vermont, was commencing a long and useful Congressional career. Mr. Schuyler Colfax, an editor- politician, represented an Indiana district. The veteran Mr. Charles J. Faulkner, with his ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... a word to the published accounts of his death. There is something strangely pitiful in that last desperate effort to achieve humour. We have all read the account of his own death that he dictated from the sick-bed—cold, epigrammatic, and, alas! characteristically lacking in taste. And once more it was his fate to make us rather ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... reign, was with the literary or writing sort. Nor have they failed to write about him, they among the others, about him and about him; and it is notable how little real light, on any point of his existence or environment, they have managed to communicate. Dim indeed, for most part a mere epigrammatic sputter of darkness visible, is the "picture" they have fashioned to themselves of Friedrich and his Country and his Century. Men not "of genius," apparently? Alas, no; men fatally destitute of true eyesight, and of loyal heart first of all. So far as I have noticed, there was not, with the ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... of history to guide him, exquiritque auditque dolos; and whether it be praise or blame, or a mixture of both, that he awards, the judgment is pronounced in a temperate spirit, and with judicial impartiality; and it is expressed in pure and elegant Latin, and often with epigrammatic felicity."—Scotsman. ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.02.23 • Various
... With this epigrammatic touch he took his leave, I and the rest of the company laughing heartily, and having eaten as heartily as we then laughed. The facetious sheriff now had it all his own way, and said several things, nearly, or perhaps, quite as good as those which I have already placed on record. We were thus ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... sometimes above a crest, an idea perhaps derived from the "war-cries" of early times. Amotto may be emblematical, or it may have some allusion to the person bearing it, or to his name and armorial insignia; or it may be the epigrammatic expression of some sentiment in special favour with the bearer of it. As a matter of course, allusive mottoes, like allusive arms, afford curious examples of medival puns. Igive a few characteristic examples:—"Vero ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... brooded over phrases like a lover; Newman, of pure and melodious style; Stevenson, forever in quest of the scrupulously precise word; Tennyson, graceful and exquisite as the limpid stream; Emerson, of trenchant and epigrammatic style; Webster, whose virile words sometimes weighed a pound; and Lincoln, of simple, Saxon speech,—all these illustrious men were assiduous in their study ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser
... however, in the same path, but in a different, that Massillon outran Bourdaloue. In his own sphere, that of unimpassioned appeal to reason and to conscience, Bourdaloue is still without a rival. No one else, certainly, ever earned, so well as he, the double title which his epigrammatic countrymen were once fond of bestowing upon him,—"The king of preachers, ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... shall find ourselves in queer places, some of us," said Dot. Dot had a way of putting little round, practical periods to things. She did not do it with intent to be smart, or epigrammatic. She simply announced ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... said to Wieland, "Life is a ticklish business—I propose to spend my time looking at it." This he did, viewing existence from every angle, and writing out his thoughts in terse, epigrammatic language. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... to be Public Works, I suppose," grumbled Kilshaw, finding some comfort in this epigrammatic statement of the ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... language, and the true canons of taste. Political causes may co-operate in a revolt of this kind; and, as a nation declines in patriotism, so does its language in purity. It seems to me as if the sententious, epigrammatic style of writing, which set in with Seneca, and is seen at least as late as in the writings of St. Ambrose, is an attempt to escape from the simplicity of Caesar and the majestic elocution of Cicero; while Tertullian, with more of genius ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... abruptly concrete at the contact. The world became full of easy-mannered, graceful, gracefully-dressed, conversationally dexterous, finally shallow Wedderburns, Bishops Wedderburn, Wedderburn M.P.'s, Professors Wedderburn, Wedderburn landlords, all with finger-bowl shibboleths and epigrammatic cities of refuge from a sturdy debater. And everyone ill-clothed or ill-dressed, from the cobbler to the cab-runner, was a man and a brother, a fellow-sufferer, to Hill's imagination. So that he became, as it were, a champion of the fallen and oppressed, albeit to outward seeming ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Such popularity for any particular type of literature never arises without a reason. The aim of the sonnet is to embody one single idea or emotion, one deep thought or wave of strong feeling, to concentrate the reader's whole mind on this one central idea, and to clinch it at the end by some epigrammatic phrase which will fasten it firmly in the reader's memory. For instance, in Milton's sonnet On his Blindness, the central idea is the glory of patience; and the last line drives this main idea home in words so pithily adapted that they have ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... have carried conviction even if he had not had a thick, dark bang coming almost to the brows of his mobile gray eyes, and had not spoken English with quick, staccato impulses, so as to give it the effect of epigrammatic and sententious French. One of the ladies said that you always thought of him as having spoken French after it was over, and accused herself of wrong in not being able to feel afraid of him. None ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells |
