"George Eliot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... George Eliot,—so awfully wise and preachy and dismal! I really couldn't wade through 'Daniel Deronda,' though 'The Mill on the Floss' wasn't bad," answered Carrie, with another yawn, as she recalled the Jew Mordecai's ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... time before that," Captain Abersouth resumed, after a pause, more, apparently, to con his memory than to enjoy my good opinion of it, "you lost me at sea—look here; I didn't read anything but George Eliot at that time, but I'm told that you lost me at sea in the Mudlark. Have I ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... silly phrase about George Eliot, who surely was no more than one of those dull clever people, unlit by any ray of genius, I might say with Swinburne I have nothing to regret, nothing to withdraw. Maybe a few flippant remarks about my private friends; but to withdraw ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, and they are gently guided toward a bright and calm land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be that of a little child.—GEORGE ELIOT ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... well drawn, are figures in the background. Standing out in front of them, and in lurid relief, is the central figure of the miser, represented with the same mobility of temperament noticeable in George Eliot's creations—a thing exceptional in Balzac's work. Grandet, as long as his wife lives is reclaimable—just reclaimable. Subsequently, he is an automaton responsive only to the sight and ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... George Eliot once said: "You love the roses—so do I! I wish the sky would rain down roses as they rain from off the shaken bush. Why will it not? Then all the valleys would be pink and white, and soft to tread ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... such as the Good Schoolmaster, the Clown, the Country Magistrate; much as in some modern Heads of the People where Douglas Jerrold or Leigh Hunt sketches the Medical Student, the Monthly Nurse, etc. A still more modern instance of the kind is George Eliot's Impressions of Theophrastus Such, which derives its title from the Greek philosopher, Theophrastus, whose character-sketches were the original models of this kind of literature. The most popular character-book in Europe ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... an awful thing that would be. Oh, love is so beautiful—so beautiful, that it makes me sad. When I think of love in all its beauty I am sad, sad like Romola in George Eliot's well-known novel ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... variation of detail, however skilful, greatly affects this result. In our own days we have seen that, in spite of both authors, the public declined to believe that the Harold Skimpole of Charles Dickens, and George Eliot's Dinah Morris, were not perfectly recognisable copies ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... In George Eliot's story of "The Mill on the Floss," the author gives to one chapter the title, "How a Hen Takes to Stratagem." The two cases are not parallel; and yet I always think of this chapter-heading when I recall what followed Amos Judson's admonition to Mrs. Whately, to use her influence ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... minds as soon as they are able to receive them, with the creations of art in which love is represented in its sublimest aspects. The youth who is familiar with the love-stories of Shakespeare, and George Eliot, and Meredith, will suffer little harm from the gilded sensualism of the Restoration drama. Let us hasten to implant the images of beauty that will keep the soul sweet and wholesome, and free from the taint of any later influences, however sordid ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... whose relations to George Eliot began after Margaret Fuller's visit. Lewes was not a Frenchman, but of Welsh descent, born in London, and a grandson of Charles ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... reputation": such was "Mat's sublime waggery." Tennyson heaped coals of fire on the other poet, bidding him, as he liked to be bidden, to write more poetry, not "prose things." Tennyson lived much in the society of Browning and George Eliot, and made the acquaintance of Renan. In December 1879 Mr and Mrs Kendal produced The Falcon, which ran for sixty-seven nights; it is "an exquisite little poem in action," as Fanny Kemble said. During a Continental tour Tennyson visited ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... fact about our experience is that it is a process of change. For the 'trower' at any moment, truth, like the visible area round a man walking in a fog, or like what George Eliot calls 'the wall of dark seen by small fishes' eyes that pierce a span in the wide Ocean,' is an objective field which the next moment enlarges and of which it is the critic, and which then either suffers alteration or is continued unchanged. The critic sees ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... a memoir. A translation of Strauss's 'The Old Faith and the New' appeared in 1873, which contained in a subsequent edition a biography of the author. In 1883, Miss Blind wrote the initial volume, 'George Eliot,' for the 'Eminent Women Series,' which she followed in 1886 in the same series with 'Madame Roland.' Her first novel, 'Tarantella,' appeared in 1885. Besides these prose works, she has made frequent contributions of literary criticism to the Athenaeum and other reviews, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... the environment have for the most part had the game in their own hands. They founded themselves on the very reasonable basis of sympathy, a basis which the eighteenth-century moralists had prepared, which Schopenhauer had formulated, which George Eliot had passionately preached, which had around its operations the immense prestige of the gospel of Jesus. The environmental Socialists—always quite reasonably—set themselves to improve the conditions of ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... falsely called cynicism, to believe that she may be a little devil after all. Yet so it is: she may be a tale-bearer, a liar, and a thief; she may have a taste for brandy, and no heart. My compliments to George Eliot for her Rosamond Vincy; the ugly work of satire she has transmuted to the ends of art, by the companion figure of Lydgate; and the satire was much wanted for the education of young men. That doctrine of the excellence of women, however chivalrous, is cowardly as well as false. ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... know the supremacy of the Intellectual life—the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it—can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.—GEORGE ELIOT. ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... they are growing like the one and unlike the other, by reason of their evil deeds; and the penalty is, that they lead a life answering to the pattern which they resemble." "On the other hand,"-to supplement Plato with Emerson, [Footnote: Essays, First Series: "Spiritual Laws." Cf. George Eliot, in Romola: "The contaminating effect of deeds often lies less in the commission than the hero the avowal of a just and brave act, it will go unwitnessed and unloved. One knows it himself and is pledged by it to sweetness of peace and to nobleness of aim, which will prove ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... tale of the Divine Pity was never yet believed from lips that were not felt to be moved by human pity."—GEORGE ELIOT. ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... bringing them up to be like men. But this matter will be discussed more fully in the chapter on Greece, as will that of the adulation which was paid to wanton women by Greek and Roman poets, and which has been often mistaken for adoration. George Eliot speaks of "that adoration which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels to be greater and better than himself." No Greek ever felt a woman to be "greater and better than himself," wherefore true adoration—the deification ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... intensity with which I hated my surroundings was that I read a lot of good novels—George Eliot, the Brontes, Scott, Dickens, Jane Austen, Thackeray, Besant, etc. A book which I read over and over again was Arthur Benson's Hill of Trouble, and other Stories. Those legends, with their imaginative setting, charm of language ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... which made Mrs. Carlyle feel "in charity with the whole human race" could be no ordinary one. Adam Bede contains all George Eliot's broad and catholic knowledge of life, and the characters are all drawn by the ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... dramatic representation,—then it is mere dogmatism in Mr. Darwin to deny that she may yet do the same in other departments. We in this generation have actually seen this success achieved by Rachel and Ristori in the one art, by "George Sand" and "George Eliot" in the other. Woman is, then, visibly gaining on man in the sphere of intellect; and, if so, Mr. Darwin, at least, ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... every young man who intends to enter the pulpit to read carefully the best life of this wonderful preacher, reformer, and statesman. And supplement your study of him and his methods by reading George Eliot's ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... perfect pupil, and in all fine things literary, keenly alive, she had written several short sketches which showed imaginative originality and a sympathetic sensitiveness, especially toward human suffering. And her uncle was sure that a greater than George Eliot had come. There was to be a year abroad, and as the doctor and her teacher in English agreed on Italy, there she went. At seventeen, during the year in Florence, the inevitable lover came. Family traditions, parents, ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... to call Elizabeth Barrett the greatest poetess of the nineteenth century, so there is little hesitation in pronouncing George Eliot the foremost of the many women who have written fiction. The literary critics sometimes dispute her supremacy by urging the claims of Jane Austen, who is said to have Shaksperean power in the delineation of character. But the name of Jane Austen is unknown to the general public. For every ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... marsh may become the instrument to deliver a nation from bondage, and an unostentatious man, unknown to fortune and to fame, may become the agent of a mighty work destined to benefit the human race as long as it may last upon the earth. George Eliot says, "Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never; they have an indestructible life, both in and ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... The First Snow-fall James Russell Lowell "We Are Seven" William Wordsworth My Child John Pierpont The Child's Wish Granted George Parsons Lathrop Challenge Kenton Foster Murray Tired Mothers May Riley Smith My Daughter Louise Homer Greene "I Am Lonely" George Eliot Sonnets from "Mimma Bella" Eugene Lee-Hamilton Rose-Marie of the Angels ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... earlier in Germany. Strauss and others were already at work in Germany upon the problem of the New Testament, Vatke and Reuss upon that of the Old. This was a different kind of labour, and destined to have immeasurably greater significance. George Eliot's maiden literary labour was the translation into English of Strauss' first edition. But the results of that criticism were only slowly appropriated by the English. The ostensible results were at first radical and subversive in the ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... protector of the settlement. Though he bars his own issue, he cannot bar any remainder or reversion, and the estate (i.e. the base fee) thus created is determinable on the failure of his issue in tail. An example of this kind of estate was introduced by George Eliot into the plot of Felix Holt. Another example of a base fee is an estate descendible to heirs general, but terminable on an uncertain event; for example, a grant of land to A and his heirs, tenants of the manor of Dale. The estate terminates whenever the prescribed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... taken off the Westminster, and my occupation now was to write Chapman's letters, to keep his accounts, and, most disagreeable, to "subscribe" his publications, that is to say, to call on booksellers and ask how many copies they would take. Of George Eliot, who lodged at No. 142, I have often spoken, and have nothing to add. It is a lasting sorrow to me that I allowed my friendship with her to drop, and that after I left Chapman I never called on her. ...
— The Early Life of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... who wrote under the name of George Eliot, was born at Aubury Farm, near Nuneaton, England, November 22, 1819. She was carefully educated and was a most earnest student. While her poems are beautiful, her best work is in prose, and she ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... have loved her. And she believed the same of mine. She wandered in the panoply of her maiden independence to far-off rookeries attended by me only (or some other swain only). Though we were fain to discuss De Musset and Herbert Spencer, Darwin and Dobson, George Eliot and Philip Gilbert Hamerton—strange names to the elder generation—our scheme of life was still essentially grave and plain for all Josephine's Japanese sunshade and tendency to make the most of her willowy figure. Little ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... are representative of real girls, we cannot guess; with none of them except perhaps one, who died young, does he seem to have been really in love. He was forty years old when most of his amorous Odes were written; an age at which, as George Eliot has reminded us, the baptism of passion is by aspersion rather than immersion. Something he must have known of love, or he could not write as he has done; but it is the superficial gallantry of a flirt rather than the ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... Shakespeare she seemed to regard as eminently proper, and, I noticed, hesitated and mumbled only when she came to certain parts of Ophelia's song. It seems strange now that I never rated Mrs. Henry Wood's novels with those of George Eliot or Thackeray or Dickens. There seemed to be some imperceptible difference which my mother never explained, but which I, instinctively, understood; and when Anthony Trollope's "Orley Farm" was read, I placed him above Mrs. Henry Wood, but not on an ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... river-steamers, brilliantly lit. I had often seen illustrations of these craft, but never before the reality. A fine sight-and it made me think of Mark Twain's incomparable masterpiece, Life on the Mississippi, for which I would sacrifice the entire works of Thackeray and George Eliot. We ran into a big town, full of electric signs, and stopped. Albany! One minute late! I descended to watch the romantic business of changing engines. I felt sure that changing the horses of a fashionable ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... Formerly a suburb, now a part of London, to the S.W. It is famous for its literary associations. Swift, Thomas Carlyle, Leigh Hunt, George Eliot, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and many other distinguished writers lived in Chelsea at various times. It contains a great hospital, to which Stevenson ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... first, perhaps, and to George Eliot most of all, we should find ourselves indebted for faithful studies of plain people,—studies made with an eye single to {3} the object, and leaving, therefore, no unlovely trait slurred over or excused, yet giving us that perfect understanding of every-day ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... first weeks of our residence Miss Starr started a reading party in George Eliot's "Romola," which was attended by a group of young women who followed the wonderful tale with unflagging interest. The weekly reading was held in our little upstairs dining room, and two members of the club came to ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... single-eyed devotion to his life-work that one great maker was enabled to gather up all the perfections of his predecessors, and stand out for all time as the flower of the Cremonese school and the master of the world. George Eliot, in her poem, "The Stradivari," probably pictures ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... certainty of his, carried into his prose essays in argument, produces sometimes strange results. One is peculiarly interesting to us now in view of current controversy. He was unhappily married, and because he was unhappy the law of divorce must be changed. A modern—George Eliot for instance—would have pleaded the artistic temperament and been content to remain outside the law. Milton always argued from ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... are Jane Austen and Alice Meynell, the greatest of them suffer from this garrulous, gesticulating inefficacy. It runs abroad in Wuthering Heights and Aurora Leigh and Sonnets from the Portuguese. And George Eliot, for all her spurious masculinity, is as the rest. You may trace the disease in her most admired ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... sometime in July there is an agreeable shortage of office business. So I am left to pass a day of cultured leisure and to meditate on the felicity of the Tennysonian "infinite torment of flies." I read Gibbon and Tennyson and George Eliot and the Times by turns, with intervals of an entertaining work, the opening sentence of which is "Birds are warm-blooded vertebrate animals oviparous and covered with feathers, the anterior limbs modified into wings, the skull articulating ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... Miss Cushman in Rome, and in London she saw many lions—Mazzini, Kossuth, Dickens and Talfourd, Kingsley, Lover, the Howellses, Miss Mitford, Mrs. Muloch Craik, George Eliot, etc. ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... that great novelists are not always equally successful in the character-sketch. One is reminded of Johnson's phrase about Milton's inability "to carve heads upon cherry stones" when one thinks of "Theophrastus Such" on the one hand, and the almost unique position of George Eliot as a novelist on the other. Less successful as she often is in lightness of touch when she has to pause and interpret her story, she had not prepared us for such a complete exhaustion of power as her attempt ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... mason who has mixed his cement before he is ready to use it. When he is ready the cement has set, and he can't use it. It sticks together, but it won't stick to anything else. George Eliot describes such a predicament in her sketch of the Reverend Amos Barton. Mr. Barton's plans, she says, were, like his sermons, "admirably well conceived, had the state ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Victor Hugo, read aloud and discussed; these were a treat—no task—here. These great artists were considered not only as makers of romance, creators of literature, but also as historians of their times. Their books were studied along with ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... skill in writing of Olive Schreiner and Miss Harraden, added to the fullness of knowledge of life which is a chief factor in the success of George Eliot and Mrs. Humphry Ward.... There is as much strength in this book as in a dozen ordinary successful ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... possible, because the public, which is scornful of failure—making no allowance, and receiving no excuses—is also generous and quick to recognise success. In this Market clever women have exactly the same chances as clever men; their work commands the same price. George Eliot is as well paid as Thackeray; and the Market is full of the most splendid prizes both of praise and pudding. It is a most wonderful Market. In all other Markets the stalls are full of good things which the vendors are anxious to sell, but cannot. ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... diffidence, he would have done so much for the literature of his country without the enthusiastic encouragement of various great foreign novelists, who were his friends and admirers: George Sand, Gustave Flaubert, in France; Auerbach, in Germany; W. D. Howells, in America; George Eliot, ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... in his affections did this brother hold, and yet how wide apart were these two in their real lives! I know of no one who has pictured the pathos of lives so near and yet so far apart as has George Eliot when she says: "Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion, and ties ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... which seem to you particularly strong is a good way to strengthen your vocabulary. Take, for instance, the oft-quoted expression of George Eliot's: "Inclination snatches argument to make indulgence seem judicious choice." Substitute "takes" for "snatches" and read the sentence again. Leave out "seem" and put "appear" in its place. "Proper" is a synonym for "judicious"; substitute it, and put "selection" ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... would quickly drive him back to work again. Having to choose between methods of locomotion on his holidays, he chose going afoot, the most laborious and least satisfying available. Brought to bay by his human need for a woman, he directed his fancy toward George Eliot, probably the most unappetizing woman of his race and time. Drawn irresistibly to music, he avoided the Fifth Symphony and "Tristan und Isolde," and joined a crowd of old maids singing part songs around a cottage ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... devotion of the artist whose pure children of the brain in poetry, painting, music, and science are ever beckoning her upward into an ideal world of beauty. They who give the world a true philosophy, a grand poem, a beautiful painting or statue, or can tell the story of every wandering star; a George Eliot, a Rosa Bonheur, an Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a Maria Mitchell—whose blood has flowed to the higher arches of the brain,—have lived to a holier purpose than they whose children are of the flesh alone, into whose minds they have breathed no clear perceptions ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... he is known to have written and published poems. I suppose the Professor and myself have hardly been suspected of writing love-poems; but there is no telling,—there is no telling. Why may not some one of the lady Teacups have played the part of a masculine lover? George Sand, George Eliot, Charles Egbert Craddock, made pretty good men in print. The authoress of "Jane Eyre" was taken for a man by many persons. Can Number Five be masquerading in verse? Or is one of the two Annexes the make believe lover? Or did these girls lay their heads together, and send ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Fairfax, a harmless lady with a passion for ecclesiastical embroidery, I maintain an attitude of benevolent neutrality. But Mrs. Holmes, Randall's mother, and her sisters, the daughters of an eminent publicist who seems to have reared his eminence on bones of talk flung at him by Carlisle, George Eliot, Lewes, Monckton Milnes, and is now, doubtless, recording their toe-prints on the banks of Acheron, I never could and never can abide. My angel of a wife saw good in them, and she loved the tiny Randall, of whom I too was ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... of Yuletide "wassail", can be derived from his having "powlert up and down" in a county abounding with comfortable manor houses and cosy inns. It is a ripe and mellow tradition of good cheer, that is quite distinct from the bovine stolidity of a harvest home in George Eliot's Loamshire or the crude animalism of Meredith's Gaffer Gammon. For Kent, even from the time of Caesar's Commentaries, has been "the civil'st place of ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... read in an evening paper on October 20th of the serious illness of Sir Andrew Clark, so truly spoken of by George Eliot as "the beloved physician." Only the previous day he had presided at the Annual Harveian Oration as President of ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... does not even know the ingredients that constitute character, still less the cause why character is good or bad. Mr. Robert Buchanan said in one of his essays: "I can advance no scientific knowledge for seeing a great genius in Robert Browning, or a fine painstaking talent in George Eliot, for thinking George Meredith almost alone in his power of expressing personal passion, and Walt Whitman supreme in his power of conveying moral stimulation. I can take a skeleton to pieces scientifically, but ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... rather tamely out in a discussion of the laws of economics, has not more than half accomplished the work that was assigned it. There is everywhere among thinking men a feeling of distrust and half disappointment. Lowell felt it here, George Eliot in England; and Herman Grimm in Germany, a sanguine man, speaks of the deep-seated unrest which almost ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... has an advantage over her married sister in freedom of choice, of self-improvement, and service to others. Says George Eliot of the wife, "A woman's lot is made for her by the love she accepts." The "bachelor girl," on the other hand, has virtually all the liberty of the man whom her name ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... and things like that. Yes; don't deny it: you mean to be a writer! I'm sure you can succeed at that. Lots of women do; some of the best writers are women. You will write novels like—like—George Eliot." ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... hate the parlour, and if I were to let out according to my fancy I should use violent language. In that dull, stupid place one learns to appraise the talk about sociality and joviality at its correct value. I am afraid I must utter a heresy. I have heard that George Eliot's chapter about the Raveloe Inn is considered as equal to Shakespeare's work. Now I can only see in it the imaginative writing of a clever woman who tried to dramatise a scene without having any data ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... practice which goes far to justify the belief of some foreign critics that the English, or, since Mr. Shaw is in question, let us say the inhabitants of the British Islands, are congenitally incapable of producing a work of pure art. Our novelists—Fielding, Thackeray, George Eliot—have been sufficiently, though perhaps not unjustly, called over the coals for their habit of coming in front of their canvas, and either gossiping with the reader or preaching at him. But, if it be a sound ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... made upon such men as Emerson, Thoreau, William O'Connor, Mr. Stedman, Colonel Ingersoll, and others in this country, and upon Professors Dowden and Clifford, upon Symonds, Ruskin, Tennyson, Rossetti, Lord Lytton, Mrs. Gilchrist, George Eliot, in England, has been followed by an equally deep or deeper impression upon many of the younger and bolder spirits of both hemispheres. In fact Whitman saw his battle essentially won in his own lifetime, though his complete triumph is of course a ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... was over-matched throughout by Serjeant Buzfuz, and Mr. Phunky was no match even for the scheming junior on the other side, and Perker was no match for Dodson and Fogg. The law, as we are told in one of George Eliot's books, is a kind of cock-fight, in which it is the business of injured honesty to get a game bird with the best pluck and the strongest spurs; and I venture to think that the combined pluck of Buzfuz and Skimpin by far outweighed any of that ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... book to "Poor Boys Who Became Famous." Biographical sketches of Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, Helen Hunt Jackson, Harriet Hosmer, Rosa Bonheur, Florence Nightingale, Maria Mitchell, ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... oldest in Mexico, is certainly very interesting in its belongings, carrying us in imagination far into the dim past. "The earliest and longest have still the mastery over us," says George Eliot. This was the first church erected by the Spaniards in Mexico, and was in constant use by Cortez, who, notwithstanding his heartless cruelty, his unscrupulous and murderous deeds, his gross selfishness, faithlessness, and ambition, was still a devout Catholic, never omitting ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... of pounds. I never read her, of course. Life is far too long and lovely for that sort of thing; but a bishop once told me that she was a great artist, and that if she had a sense of gravity, she would rival George Eliot. Dickens had probably no sense of humour. That is why he makes second-rate people die of laughing. Oscar Wilde was utterly mistaken when he wrote the 'Picture of Dorian Gray.' After Dorian's act of cruelty, the picture ought to have grown more sweet, more ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... School tinted the entire art world: Millet, Rousseau, Daubigny, Corot, Diaz. And the people who worked a complete revolution in the theological thought of Christendom were these: Darwin, Spencer, Mill, Tyndall, Wallace, Huxley and, yes, George Eliot, who bolstered the brain of Herbert Spencer when he was learning to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... manager, the other in a telegraph office. It is not unrecognized that the school has many notable failures to indicate how even the fittest sometimes do not survive the school routine. Among such cases were Darwin, Beecher, Seward, Pasteur, Linnaeus, Webster, Edison, and George Eliot, who were classed by their schools as stupid or incompetent.[51] In reference to the pupil's responsibility for the failures, Thorndike remarks[52] that "something in the mental or social and economic status of the pupil who enters high school, or in the particular kind of education ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... private tyrants. We have not room under this head to do more—nor, if we had all room, could we do better—than to quote a short paragraph from George Eliot's immortal Mrs. Poyser: "It seems as if them as aren't wanted here are th' only folks as aren't wanted ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... brilliant young man who had written some stirring verse and splendid prose; the Brontes were schoolgirls; Thackeray was dreaming of becoming an artist; Dickens had not written a line of fiction; Browning and George Eliot were ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... clinging wistfully to the spiritual strength of this frail woman, and catching at the end not only her spirit of calm submission, but even something of her exaltation, one is irresistibly reminded of another scene—George Eliot's marvellous description in "Adam Bede" of Dinah's ministry to Hetty in the prison. But this scene is real, that only imagined; and here no third person, but the consoler herself, reveals the meaning of the ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... of Tom and Maggie Tulliver is taken from the early chapters of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. The book follows the fortunes of Tom and Maggie, whom at the opening of the story we find living with their parents at the old mill house on the Floss River, until they meet their death, in their early manhood and womanhood. We give here, however, only ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... of Daniel Deronda: D'Arcy is a sort of Grandcourt cheapened and made popular, acting out his instincts of tyranny and brutality with more ostentation and less good taste. What is subtly indicated by George Eliot is given with profuse effect by the present writer. Viola, if not a Gwendolen, is yet an unloving wife. Sir Douglas Roy plays a somewhat difficult role—that of friend to the husband and undeclared lover to the wife—without losing our respect. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... in knowledge made by Plato, Aristotle, Roger Bacon, and Thomas Edison. He shows Himself through Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, and St. Paul, but also through Homer, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Beethoven, Darwin, George Eliot, William James, and Henry Irving. I take the names at random as illustrating different branches of endeavour, and if I use only great ones it is not that the lesser are excluded. No one department of human ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... aged blind scholar, father of Romola. She is his colaborer in the studies he pursues despite his infirmity.—George Eliot, Romola. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... by Guido or Guercino, with wings and harps and haloes. So ladies have occasionally seen their own faces in the glass of fancy, and, thus inspired, have drawn Romola and Consuelo. Yet when these fair idealists, Mdme. Sand and George Eliot, designed Rosamund Vincy and Horace, was there not a spice of malice in the portraits which we miss in your least ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... of the Penal Laws," we read "Father Campian was betrayed by one of Walsingham's spies, George Eliot, and found secreted in the house of Mr. Yates, of Lyford, in Berkshire, along with two other priests, Messrs. Ford and Collington. Eliot and his officers made a show of their prisoners to the multitude, and the sight of the priests in the hands of the constables was a matter ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... Fourth Gospel—controversies which received their first great impulse from the 'Leben Jesu' of David Friedrich Strauss, first published in 1835. An English translation of the fourth edition, 1840, by Marian Evans (George Eliot), was published ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... of them!" I exclaimed. "Well, I suppose you have heard of some of my great countrymen: Beaconsfield, Gladstone, Darwin, Burne-Jones, Ruskin, Queen Victoria, Tennyson, George Eliot, Herbert Spencer, ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... brings forth latent energy that may remain dormant but for it. Most people hunt after pleasure, look for good luck, hunger after success, and complain of pain, ill-luck, and failure. It does not occur to them that 'they who make good luck a god are all unlucky men,' as George Eliot has wisely observed. Pleasure ceases to be pleasure when we attain to it; another sort of pleasure displays itself to tempt us. It is a mirage, it beckons to us to lead us astray. When an overwhelming misfortune looks us in ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... same narrow spirit which alienated Byron from his native land, because that great genius rebelled against the monotony, dullness, and pettiness of his country. It was Puritanism, too, that forced some of England's freest women into the conventional lie of marriage: Mary Wollstonecraft and, later, George Eliot. And recently Puritanism has demanded another toll—the life of Oscar Wilde. In fact, Puritanism has never ceased to be the most pernicious factor in the domain of John Bull, acting as censor of the artistic expression of his people, and stamping ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... at luncheon by the Eighty Club, and the occasion was marked by some more than usually interesting speeches. It always is satisfactory to see public honours rendered, not to a monument or a tomb, but to the living man; and, in Lord Ripon's case, the honours, though ripe, were not belated. George Eliot has reminded us that "to all ripeness under the sun there comes a further stage of development which is less esteemed in the market." The Eighty Club avoided that latent peril, and paid its honours, while they were still fresh and worth having, ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... at the height of his popularity and reputation, cultivated and imaginative prose was but another expression of the older poesy. But within twenty-five years of Scott's concluding fictions, Dickens and Thackeray, and still later, George Eliot and Kingsley, had come into the mart with an entirely new brand of wares, a development unknown to Scott, and of a tendency which was to popularize literature far more than the most sanguine hopes ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... fancy that Savonarola's thrilling challenge to the luxury of his day went far deeper than the mere question of sin. The modern rationalistic admirers of Savonarola, from George Eliot downwards, dwell, truly enough, upon the sound ethical justification of Savonarola's anger, upon the hideous and extravagant character of the crimes which polluted the palaces of the Renaissance. But they need not be so anxious to show ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... me, the first volume of Forster's "Life of Swift," "Goodsir's Life," and a couple of novels of George Sand, with a trifle of Paul Heyse. You should read George Sand's "Cesarine Dietrich" and "La Mare au Diable" that I have just finished. She is bigger than George Eliot, more flexible, a more thorough artist. It is a queer thing, by the way, that I have never read "Consuelo." I shall get it here. When I come back from my lecture I like to rest for an hour or two over a good story. It ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... the frequent failure of the modern fairy tale is that it fails to keep in harmony with the times. Just as the modern novel has progressed from the romanticism of Hawthorne, the realism of Thackeray, through the psychology of George Eliot, and the philosophy of George Meredith, so the little child's story—which like the adult story is an expression of the spirit of the times—must recognize these modern tendencies. It must learn, from ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... Garrick would never have been taken for an actor in his coach and four, so our heroine did not in the least resemble George Eliot, for instance, as she sat before her mirror at high noon with Monsieur Cadron and her maid Mathilde in worshipful attendance. Some of the ladies, indeed, who have left us those chatty memoirs of the days before the guillotine, she might have been likened to. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... their parts, and all build themselves after some favourite model. In this woman of society you trace the influence of the Princess Metternich. In another we see her admiration (and a very proper one) for Her Britannic Majesty. In another we behold George Eliot, or Queen Louise of Prussia, or the influence of some modern society leader. But no matter who it is, from the lowest to the highest, the actor is dominant in the human being, and this trait exhibits itself early in the youngest ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... know this bit of country, and there are very often some hoboes hanging around the old quarry up that lane. They have a cave there where they go into winter quarters. I was afraid some of them might bother you. You could hardly have chosen a worse place to camp out. By the bones of George Eliot, Pratt ought to have warned you. I can't conceive why you didn't stop at ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... George Eliot, who had a face of extreme plainness, possessed a low musical voice that had a perfect fascination for the listener. At times such a voice is the gift of nature, but usually it requires careful cultivation, and the earlier the age at which this cultivation begins, the surer and the simpler is the ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... girls—some poor mothers' daughters—have been degraded and cast aside into the gutter, that she, the twenty-first in this honorable harem, may be held in apparent honor as a wife; only when no woman worthy the name will marry under the conditions portrayed by our great novelist, George Eliot,—that of another woman being basely forsaken for her sake—then, and then only, will this reproach that men level at us drop off; then, and then only, shall we be able to save our own sons and bring in a better and purer state of things, ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... I now have dates from this time, when I was a mental incompetent and confined in an institution. Lying on a shelf in my room was a book by George Eliot. For several days I cast longing glances at it and finally plucked up the courage to take little nibbles now and then. These were so good that I grew bold and at last began openly to read the book. Its contents at the ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... be so till the railway system is extended to the planting districts. At present novels that cannot be read more than once are quite out of the question on the score of cost, and, under the circumstances, the planter should content himself with buying Scott's and Bulwer's and George Eliot's novels. He should, of course, have a good Atlas, an Encyclopaedia—Chambers' is good and moderate in price, and Balfour's "Cyclopaedia of India," which contains much valuable and interesting information. He might also buy Lecky's Works, and Sir John Strachey's "India," and Buckle's ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections." So wrote George Eliot in "Daniel Deronda." And the truth of the apothegm may account for much of the friction in the intercourse of John Bull and Brother Jonathan. For, undoubtedly, there is a wide difference between the humour of the Englishman and the humour of the American. John Bull's downrightness ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Mrs. Ward is most successful in female portraiture, her own mind and culture have an unmistakable virility and grasp and scientific firmness. This indispensable intellectual process, which will be relished by admirers of George Eliot, is relieved constantly by the sense of a charming landscape background, for the most part English. Mrs. Ward has been a true disciple in the school of Wordsworth, and really undergone its influence. Her ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... and rare charm in Tom's manner as he uttered these words. 'I don't know,' Henry had replied. 'Yes, you do,' Tom had insisted. 'Speak the truth. I won't let it go any further. Do you think yourself as big as George Eliot, for example?' Henry had hesitated, forced into sincerity by Tom's persuasive and serious tone. 'It's not a fair question,' Henry had said at length. Whereupon Tom, without the least warning, had burst into loud laughter: 'My bold buccaneer, you take the cake. You always did. You always will. ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... way into the secret places of the soul.' 'It is the manifestation,' whispers the deaf Beethoven, 'of the inner essential nature of all that is,' or in the hint of Leibnitz, 'it is a calculation which the soul makes unconsciously in secret.' It is 'love in search of a name,' sang George Eliot, nearer in her intuition to the truth than all the philosophers, since love is the dynamic of pure spirit. But I," he continued after a pause for breath, and smiling amid the glow of his great enthusiasm, ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... dreamers and fanatics, all are the descendants of the people in the Quijote and the Novelas Ejemplares, of the rogues and bandits of the Lazarillo de Tormes, who through Gil Blas invaded France and England, where they rollicked through the novel until Mrs. Grundy and George Eliot packed them off to the reform school. But the rogues of the seventeenth century were jolly rogues. They always had their tongues in their cheeks, and success rewarded their ingenious audacities. The moulds of society had not hardened ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... of her mother's positive orders that withheld Gillian from the declaration that mamma always let them read George Eliot; and in a cooler moment of reflection she was glad she had abstained, for she recollected that always was limited to mamma's having read most of Romola aloud to her and Mysie, and to her having had Silas Marner to read when she was unwell ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... voracious and indiscriminate reader. In the long list here given of novelists whose books he read—good, bad, and indifferent—it is curious not to find the name of Mrs. Humphry Ward. With Thackeray he was intimate; and he was in cordial relations with Dickens, Douglas Jerrold, and George Eliot. Among the poets, besides Edward Fitzgerald and Coventry Patmore, he saw much of William Allingham. Though he admired parts of ‘Festus’ greatly, we do not gather from these volumes that he met the author. Dobell he saw much of at Malvern ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... lifted his starry eyes with their mystic, visionary rapture fully on the young physician. "And yet I remember how George Eliot prayed that when her troubles came she might get along without being drugged by that stuff—meaning the Christian religion, sir—and I guess I'd kind o' like that me and mine ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... and became a philosopher to be eulogized on all occasions in most rhapsodic, if bewildering, terms. Many others too, besides professional philosophers, began to read Spinoza with much sympathy and unbounded admiration. Goethe, Matthew Arnold, Heine, George Eliot, Flaubert, Coleridge, and Shelley—to mention only a few distinguished lay names—found in Spinoza a powerful, stimulating and, in varying degrees, congenial thinker. To-day, after having been one of the liberating thinkers of mankind ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... similar idiosyncrasies, inherited from a clever father, so it was just as well that she preferred Archie to Frank. Had the latter young gentleman married her, he would have dwindled to Lady Random's husband, and would have found too late that he had domesticated a kind of imitation George Eliot. When he congratulated Archie on his engagement somewhat ruefully, he little thought what an ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... all languages. As a regular principle of verse (in place of rime) it is characteristic of Spanish and of Old French; in English its deliberate use is very rare—the best example is perhaps the song "Bright, O bright Fedalma" in George Eliot's ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... the ideal of all great novelists; among the number Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade. Most of the heroines in up-to-date fiction ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara
... experienced editor in George Henry Lewes, who had contributed extensively to most of the reviews then in progress. The success of the new review was assured by the presence of such names as Walter Bagehot, George Eliot, Sir John Herschel, Mr. Frederic Harrison and Herbert Spencer on its list of contributors. It provided articles of timely interest in politics, literature, art and science; in its early volumes appeared serially Anthony Trollope's Belton Estate ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... style, stops short at Miss Austen, and only glances, by a sort of anticipation, at Scott. The late Mr. Sidney Lanier's English Novel and the Principle of its Development is really nothing but a laudatory study of "George Eliot," with glances at other writers, including violent denunciations of the great eighteenth-century men. There are numerous monographs on parts of the subject: but nothing else that I know even attempting the whole. ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... and Bismarck. King William is the one anointed of the most high, as they claim—the one upon whose head has been poured the divine petroleum of authority. Compare him with Bismarck, who towers, an intellectual Colossus, above this man. Go into England and compare George Eliot with Queen Victoria—Queen Victoria, clothed in the garments given to her by blind fortune and by chance. George Elliot, robed in garments of glory, woven in the loom of her own genius. Which does the world pay respect to? I tell you we are advancing! ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... fratricide, is depicted with masterly insight and consistency. This phase of Ludwig's art strikes us as fresh and modern today, and it must have appeared like a revelation to a generation that did not yet, know Flaubert's Madame Bovary or George Eliot's Adam Bede. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... can only be amended and enlarged by the study of the Russian mind as it expresses itself in its own literature. The mind of the great artist, of whatever race he springs, cannot lie. From the works of Thackeray and George Eliot in England and Turgenev and Tolstoi in Russia, a critic penetrates into the secret places of the national life, where all the clever objective pictures of foreign critics must lead him astray. Ostrovsky's drama, ...
— The Storm • Aleksandr Nicolaevich Ostrovsky
... to the kind of books people are reading nowadays is somewhat discouraging to the book-lover who has been brought up in the old traditions. We are told that Scott and Thackeray and George Eliot cannot compete with the year's "best sellers," and that the old classics are read only by the few who have a cultivated taste and ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... the same state twice; history does never really repeat itself. Our personality is being built up each instant with its accumulated experience; it shoots, grows, and ripens without ceasing. We are reminded of George Eliot's lines: ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... is the dominant character, Piney Woods is, I think, the central character. She is central in this story just as little Aglaia is central in Tennyson's "Princess," or Eppie in George Eliot's "Silas Marner," or the baby offspring of Cherokee Sal in "The Luck of Roaring Camp." Bret Harte had just written the last-named story when he began the composition of "The Outcasts of Poker Flat." The same great ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... and, in a word, the small nature. When a large and sombre fate befalls a little nature, and the stage is too narrow for the action of a tragedy, the disproportion has sometimes made a mute and unexpressed history of actual life or sometimes a famous book; it is the manifest core of George Eliot's story of Adam Bede, where the suffering of Hetty is, as it were, the eye of the storm. All is expressive around her, but she is hardly articulate; the book is full of words—preachings, speeches, daily talk, aphorisms, ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... Shiere whose surface seems most brute." —George Eliot, like Drayton a native of fertile Warwickshire, entitles the neighbouring ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... neglect. As yet there is no autobiography or biography of an egocentric personality so convincing as George Meredith's The Egoist. The miser is a social type; but there are no case studies as sympathetic and discerning as George Eliot's Silas Marner. Nowhere in social science has the technique of case study developed farther than in criminology; yet Dostoevsky's delineation of the self-analysis of the murderer in Crime and Punishment dwarfs all comparison outside ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... George Eliot, in one of her novels, has a good-natured mother, who confesses that when she administers justice she is obliged to spare the offenders who have fair hair, because they look so much more innocent than the rest. And if this is the state of maternal feelings where all are more or ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... some, almost all the representative men of literature in England, recognized in Walt Whitman, from the first, a beauty, a grandeur, which appealed to and captivated their higher susceptibilities and mental appreciation. Such critics as George Eliot, Dowden, and even Matthew Arnold, and such poets as Tennyson, Swinburne, and even William Morris, have uttered expressions of the warmest appreciation of his great talent; but the class of general readers are not endowed ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... man in the position of Lord Kew may actually be the born brother of Mr. Moss of Wardour Street? Nor does this apply merely to Thackeray, but to all those Victorians who prided themselves on the realism or sobriety of their descriptions; it applies to Anthony Trollope and, as much as any one, to George Eliot. For we have not only survived that present which Thackeray described: we have even survived that future to which George Eliot looked forward. It is no longer adequate to say that Dickens did not understand that old world of gentility, of parliamentary politeness and ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... below,—a road that crosses deep gorges and chasms, always with the iridescent colors of the sea below,—and from Sorrento to Amalfi again, only, if possible, even more wonderful,—is there in the world any drive that can rival this picturesque and sublime route? Of it George Eliot wrote:— ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... to George Eliot's residence in Coventry, and to the Coventry circle of which she was ...
— George Eliot Centenary, November 1919 • Coventry Libraries Committee
... of the Victorian Age. Alfred Tennyson. Robert Browning. Minor Poets of the Victorian Age. Elizabeth Barrett. Rossetti. Morris. Swinburne. Novelists of the Victorian Age. Charles Dickens. William Makepeace Thackeray. George Eliot. Minor Novelists of the Victorian Age. Charles Reade. Anthony Trollope. Charlotte Bronte. Bulwer Lytton. Charles Kingsley. Mrs. Gaskell. Blackmore. Meredith. Hardy. Stevenson. Essayists of the ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... instance, I will utilise him a little further. I ought to have read Berkeley, you say; just as I ought to have read Spenser, Ben Jonson, George Eliot, Victor Hugo. Not at all. There is no "ought" about it. If the mass of obtainable first-class literature were, as it was perhaps a century ago, not too large to be assimilated by a man of ordinary limited leisure in ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... follows it with her sewing to the window, and gets another needleful out of it, as one may run after a departed visitor for a last word, but now the gas is lit, and no longer is it shameful to sit down to literature. If the book be a story by George Eliot or Mrs. Oliphant, her favourites (and mine) among women novelists, or if it be a Carlyle, and we move softly, she will read, entranced, for hours. Her delight in Carlyle was so well known that various good people ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... the simpler tea so dear to the hearts of our hospitable ladies of good society. It was George Eliot who earnestly inquired, "Reader, have you ever drunk a cup of tea?" There is something undeniably heart-warming and conversation-making in a cup of steaming hot tea served with delicious cream; it is an ideal prescription ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... writers would make fame and fortune if, like Bunyan and Milton and Dickens and George Eliot and Scott and Emerson, they would write their own lives in their MSS., if they would write about things they have seen, that they have felt, that they have known. It is life thoughts that stir and convince, that ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... ill-repute. That Boccaccio should have reported these tales as emanating from such a company is proof positive of the immodesty of those days, whose story is rehearsed in the "Decameron." Rousseau's "Confessions" is another book showing the absence of current morality in his age. Notwithstanding George Eliot's panegyric, these memoirs are the production of unlimited conceit, of a practical absence of any moral sensitiveness; and while Rousseau could not be accused of being sensual, nor amorous and heartless as Goethe, he yet shows so crude a moral state ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... to master dialogue as an element by itself is to study the novels of writers like Dickens, Thackeray, or George Eliot. Dialogue has its full development only in the novel, and it is here and not in short stories that the student of fiction should study it. The important points to be noticed are that only characteristic and significant speeches are reproduced. When the conversation gives only facts that should ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... I could do which would not compromise me," he thought. "I might become an inventor, or an author. I could do better at that, for I have some talent for yarning, they say. Wilkie Collins and George Eliot make heaps of money with their pens. Yes, ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... quiet worldliness was thus broken, here and there, by horrid scandals, in other places it was conspicuously relieved by splendid instances of piety and self-devotion, such as George Eliot drew in the character of Edgar Tryan of Milby. But the innovating clergy of the Evangelical persuasion had to force their way through "the teeth of clenched antagonisms." The bishops, as a rule, were opposed to enthusiasm, and the bishops of that day were, in virtue of their wealth, ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... George Eliot, expressed her matured views on the subject of religious opinions in these words: "I have too profound a conviction of the efficacy that lies in all sincere faith, and the spiritual blight that comes with no faith, to have any negative propagandism ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... had reached a firm, safe strand, but was looking with helpful pity towards the strugglers still tossed by the waves, had an effect on Maggie at this moment which was afterwards remembered by her as if it had been a promise.' And then George Eliot makes this trite and significant remark. 'The middle-aged,' she says, 'who have lived through their strongest emotions, but are yet in the time when memory is still half-passionate and not merely contemplative, should surely be a sort of natural priesthood, ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... all those things, and if one remains as well the faithful beast of burden to one man, one is counted in the world a moral woman! But that shining light of hypocrisy and virtue—to judge by her sentiments in her writings—your George Eliot, must be classed as immoral because, having chosen her mate without the law's blessing, she yet wrote the highest sentiments of British respectability! To me she was being immoral only because she was deliberately doing what—, ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... might be corrected. The artists invariably discovered that Her Majesty's suggestions were of the highest value. In literature her interests were more restricted. She was devoted to Lord Tennyson; and, as the Prince Consort had admired George Eliot, she perused "Middlemarch:" she was disappointed. There is reason to believe, however, that the romances of another female writer, whose popularity among the humbler classes of Her Majesty's subjects was at one time enormous, secured, ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... feeling somewhat sore. "Needs must when the Devil drives;" but as matters were, Dan and I could well have afforded domestic assistance. It rankled in my mind that to fit in with the foolish fad of old Deleglise, I the future Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot, Kean, Macready and Phelps rolled into one, should be compelled to the performance of menial duties. On this morning of all others, my brilliant literary career just commenced, the anomaly of the ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... He took a vivid interest both in plot and characters, and would on no account know beforehand, how a story finished; he considered looking at the end of a novel as a feminine vice. He could not enjoy any story with a tragical end, for this reason he did not keenly appreciate George Eliot, though he often spoke warmly in praise of 'Silas Marner.' Walter Scott, Miss Austen, and Mrs. Gaskell, were read and re- read till they could be read no more. He had two or three books in hand at the same time—a ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... be able to make as much out of his abilities as his brother, of like ability, who goes into Law, or Engineering, or Commerce; it is not a question of "maintaining a due number of saddle horses," as George Eliot somewhere puts it—it is a question of living ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... most of us mediocre—authors like Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot are the exception—and so are artists like Millais and Landseer, but when books and paintings give pleasure they ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... much more of the same sort. He heard the ancient argument about bullets and ballots, and in the same breath his attention was called to Semiramis conquering Assyria, the Amazons invading Asia, the triumph of Sappho in song, Aspasia in the salon, Deborah among the Judges of Israel, George Eliot in literature, and a host of others ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... compared to his prose, is tame and fettered; it never reaches the glow and splendor of expression which mark the finest passages of the Journal. It has ability, thought—beauty even, of a certain kind, but no plastic power, none of the incommunicable magic which a George Eliot seeks for in vain, while it comes unasked, to deck with imperishable charm the commonplace metaphysic and the simpler emotions of a Tennyson or a Burns. Still as Amiel's work, his poetry has an interest for those who are interested in him. Sincerity is written in every line of it. Most ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... theory. The amount of labor involved in an inquiry of this kind will depend very much upon the author. In some cases the critic will find express declarations; in other cases he will have to content himself with conscientious inductions. In a writer so fond of digressions as George Eliot, he has reason to expect that broad evidences of artistic faith will not be wanting. He finds in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... First, there was the Early Victorian time, the eighteenth century in homespun. It was not great and pompous like that century, but it lived by formality, propriety, and conventionality. It was horribly shocked when George Eliot published Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede in 1858 and 1859. Outwardly it was eminently respectable, and its respectability was its particular method of lapsing into paganism. It was afraid of ideals, and for those who cherish this fear ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... also the dates agree. Dickens, most typical of all early Victorians, died in 1870. George Eliot's last great novel, Daniel Deronda, was published in 1876. Victor Hugo's greatest poem, La Legende des Siecles, the imaginative synthesis of all the ages, appeared in the 'seventies. There have been many writers ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... the swallowing of which merits jam! And the more modern a classic is, the more it resembles the stuff of the year and the less it resembles the classics of the centuries, the more easy and enticing do you find that classic. Hence you are glad that George Eliot, the Brontes, Thackeray, are considered as classics, because you really do enjoy them. Your sentiments concerning them approach your sentiments concerning a "rattling ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... would seem hard to trace any illustration of the doctrine of heredity in the case of this master of romance. George Eliot's dictum that we are, each one of us, but an omnibus carrying down the traits of our ancestors, does not appear at all to hold here. This fanciful realist, this naive-wistful humorist, this dreamy mystical casuist, crossed by the innocent bohemian, this ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... concerning Shakespeare's plays, Milton's works, and those of Bacon, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, De Foe, Locke, Pope, Swift, Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Byron, Coleridge, Hood, Scott, Macaulay, George Eliot, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, Browning, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, and Disraeli—a fact which shows that into the restricted stomach of the public-school pupil is shoveled every year the blood, bone, and viscera of a gigantic literature, and the same is there digested ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... brothers, carpenters. Seth loves the fair gospeller Dinah Morris, but she marries Adam.—George Eliot, Adam Bede. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... a doubt to assail her. Too often, within our own memory even, has the slender yet firm hand of a woman been seen outstretched to snatch the life of a brother, husband or friend from the sluggish and perilous stream which runs slowly but surely on towards a hopeless ruin. "The mere idea," says George Eliot, "that a woman had a kindness towards him, spun little threads of tenderness from out his heart towards hers" and "there are natures," she tells us, "in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a sort of baptism and consecration; ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... Fielding, Sterne, Heine, and Thackeray—the confidential one. Du Maurier's Trilby was a confidence. But he adds, "It wants the last respect for the reader's intelligence—it wants whatever is the very greatest thing in the very greatest novelists—the thing that convinces in Hawthorne, George Eliot, Tourgenief, Tolstoy. But short of this supreme truth, it has every grace, every beauty, every charm." The word "Every" here seems to us an American exaggeration. We should ask ourselves whether in spite of all its confidentialness Trilby makes an intimate revelation. ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... with its description of Necton Fair, will forcibly remind many readers of George Eliot. Taken altogether it is ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... variety of knaves or fools. Thackeray takes a youthful hero, follows him through school and later life, and shows the steady degeneration of a man who is governed not by vicious but by selfish impulses. From beginning to end Pendennis is a penetrating ethical study (like George Eliot's Romola), and the story is often interrupted while we listen to the author's moralizing. To some readers this is an offense; to others it is a pleasure, since it makes them better acquainted with the mind and heart of Thackeray, the gentlest of ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... short—and her complexion olive. But she lured with her eyes—great sphinx-like eyes of hazel-brown—that looked men through and through. Liszt has told us that "she had eyes like a cow," which is not so bad as Thomas Carlyle's remark that George Eliot had a face like a horse. George Sand was silent when other women talked, and her look told in a half-proud, half-sad way that she knew all they knew, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... a clergyman, which reminds me that liberal thought is under great obligations to the clergy, since their sons, taught by antithesis, are often shining lights of radicalism. Godwin was a non-resistant, philosophic anarchist. He was the true predecessor of George Eliot, Walt Whitman, Henry Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy, and the best that is now being expressed from advanced Christian pulpits harks back to him. All that the foremost of our contemporary thinkers have written and said was suggested and touched upon by ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... mainly of her own making. For the most part she wrote with superficial feeling and without real soul. During the Napoleonic regime, time was a creeping horror to her, but she found pleasure in the thought that it was a torture to her suffering heart. George Eliot knew and used her extraordinary power; Madame de Stael wasted hers. Nevertheless she had many friends who loved her society. Wellington was brought under her influence. Byron, who shrank from her at first, says, "She was the best creature in the world." She had been ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... that the wages of the labour in question are determined not by custom or competition, but by some other law. Where the product is of the highest intellectual or artistic quality, sex makes no difference in the price; "the rent of ability" of George Eliot or Madame Patti is determined by the law of monopoly values. In certain employments, as, for instance, the stage, sexual attractions give women a positive advantage, which in certain grades of the profession assist them to secure a high level of remuneration. ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... wallflower. That is to say, she had early in life rid herself of the admiration of the many, by refusing to supply an unlimited amount of small talk. In feature she was as plain as George Eliot. A boy is plastic, and even a modest wallflower can woo him; but a man, for her, inspires awe—with him she takes no liberties. And the wallflower woos the youth unwittingly, thinking the while she is only using her influence the better to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... second of the 'Famous Women Series,' which Roberts Brothers, Boston, propose to publish, and of which 'George Eliot' was the initial volume. Not the least remarkable of a very remarkable family, the personage whose life is here written, possesses a peculiar interest to all who are at all familiar with the sad and singular history of herself and her sister ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... called criticism that is poisonous, not because it is mistaken, but because it invites people to assert beyond their knowledge or capacity. A popular lecturer discusses the errors of Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Bronte, or George Eliot before an audience but superficially acquainted with the works of these great authors and not qualified to pass judgment upon them. He is considered 'cheap' ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... proving that you regard a classic as a pill, the swallowing of which merits jam! And the more modern a classic is, the more it resembles the stuff of the year and the less it resembles the classics of the centuries, the more easy and enticing do you find that classic. Hence you are glad that George Eliot, the Bronts, Thackeray, are considered as classics, because you really *do* enjoy them. Your sentiments concerning them approach your sentiments concerning a "rattling ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... was hopelessly modern in those days—quite an every-day young man; the names I held in the warmest and deepest regard were those of then living men and women. Darwin, Browning, and George Eliot did not, it is true, exist for me as yet; but Tennyson, Thackeray, Dickens, Millais, John Leech, George Sand, Balzac, the old Dumas, Victor ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... changed a little. She thinks now that he ought to be stimulated, if anything—that he ought to read George Eliot. She's put Middlemarch and Romola on his shelf. She says that ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... the veil of the next world? Which of the two men is better fitted for the condition in which he is placed? What religious significance does the story of Lazarus come to have to Karshish? What parallel ideas do you find in Rabbi Ben Ezra and in this poem? Compare George Eliot's story, The Lifted Veil. ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... elections figure, I need not say. The name of political tales is legion, and merely to enumerate them would occupy a fair amount of space. Who, for example, does not remember the contest pictured by George Eliot in 'Felix Holt'—that which leads to the riot in which Felix becomes unintentionally and unfortunately embroiled? 'The nomination day,' says the novelist, 'was a great epoch of successful trickery, or, to speak in a more parliamentary manner, of war-stratagem, on the part ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... might well have placed the following lines which George Eliot wrote above Chapter XXXI. ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller |
