"John Wilkes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be 'full of discrimination, feeling, and humour, set off by the various tones of a voice full, harmonious, and flexible.' Pretty well this, for such a mere baby as he was at the time! He recited on various occasions before Garrick, Foote, John Wilkes, Sheridan, Burke, Johnson, Churchill, and other famous people, resting for the night or to change horses at Devizes on their road to Bath. Old Lawrence lost no opportunity of talking to his customers, and of exhibiting his ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... times had not as yet been shaken. I had attained, perhaps, that degree of reputation at which prudence, or certainly timidity, would have made a halt, and discontinued efforts by which I was far more likely to diminish my fame than to increase it. But, as the celebrated John Wilkes is said to have explained to his late Majesty, that he himself, amid his full tide of popularity, was never a Wilkite, so I can, with honest truth, exculpate myself from having been at any time a partisan of my own poetry, even when it was in the highest ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... memories by the Law of Concurrence. When we recall the name of Pocahontas, we are apt to revive also the name of Capt. John Smith and vice versa. Another case:—A gentleman was present at Ford's Theatre in Washington when John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln. Just a moment before, he recognised the odour of a hyacinth held by a lady in front of him. The next moment he heard the fatal shot, and turning whence the report came, he saw the murderous result. After the lapse of a quarter of a century, he could not smell, see, or ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... Parliament were regarded as hereditary possessions, which could be let at rental, or to which the nominations could be sold. Town corporations often let, to the highest bidders, seats in Parliament, for the benefit of the town funds. The election of John Wilkes for Middlesex, in 1768, was taken as a triumph of the people. The King and his ministers then brought the House of Commons into conflict with the freeholders of Westminster. Discontent became active and general. "Junius" began, in his letters, to attack boldly the King's friends, and into the ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... Byronic sort, both in beauty and temperament, with a dash perhaps of insanity, John Wilkes Booth, had long meditated killing the President. A violent secessionist, his morbid imagination had made of Lincoln another Caesar. The occasion called for a Brutus. While Lincoln was planning his peaceful war with the Vindictives, scheming how to keep them from grinding the prostrate South beneath ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... story of Benjamin's birth was remembered and sent out upon the winds of scandal in picaresque and incredible forms. It was said that Benjamin was really the father of Roger Button, that he was his brother who had been in prison for forty years, that he was John Wilkes Booth in disguise—and, finally, that he had two small conical horns sprouting from ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... this man was John Wilkes Booth, who afterwards assassinated Mr. Lincoln in Ford's Theatre, on the night of the 14th ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... England of just such illegal and arbitrary warrants was one of the causes that led to the tremendous agitation headed by John Wilkes. The excitement in that controversy grew, and notwithstanding the repeated arrests of Wilkes and his expulsions from Parliament, his reelection was repeated as often, and his following increased until not only the ministry ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... have written a satire on Pope (Nichols' Literary Anecdotes, ii. 11), and was a constant correspondent of Swift's. She was always a Whig, and shortly before her death in 1769 she made a present of 100 pounds to John Wilkes, then in prison in the Tower. Writing of Lady Betty Butler and Lady Betty Germaine, Swift says elsewhere, "I saw two Lady Bettys this afternoon; the beauty of one, the good breeding and nature of the other, and the wit of either, would have made a fine woman." ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... Bradley, built the house at number 1688 31st Street. At the time of Lincoln's assassination he was living out in the country near Georgetown. He bore a remarkable resemblance to John Wilkes Booth and on April 15, 1865, the night after the tragic event in Ford's Theater, he was driving home in his buggy along a lonely road when he was held up by policemen and arrested. When he protested, ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... their impudence; for surely never did an adventurer set out with less capabilities about him; his whole story was so flagrant a fib, that in spite of the very respectable certificates of My Lord Mayor, John Wilkes, and Mr. Alderman Bull, I was obliged to tell him plainly, that I did not believe him to be a gentleman, nor his wife to be a relation of the Prince of Monaco. All this he took in good part, and then assured me they were both very hungry, and without ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... war on the press. John Wilkes, member of Parliament for Aylesbury, was singled out for persecution. Wilkes had, till very lately, been known chiefly as one of the most profane, licentious, and agreeable rakes about town. He was a man of taste, reading, and engaging manners. His sprightly conversation was the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay |
