"Laureate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... or personal value. But as cases it was different. The more broken a man was, the more precarious his grip on life, the greater his significance in the eyes of Doctor Bicknell. He would as readily forsake a poet laureate suffering from a common accident for a nameless, mangled vagrant who defied every law of life by refusing to die, as would a child forsake a Punch and Judy for ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... hundred marks a year! besides the wine and the disgrace; but then remorse would make me drown myself in my own butt before the year's end, or the finishing of my first dithyrambic.—So that, after all, I shall not meditate our laureate's death ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... have been easy to bribe a man of these simple habits and tastes, as some critics have contended that Horace was bribed, to become the laureate of a party to which he had once been opposed, even had Maecenas wished to do so. His very indifference to those favours which were within the disposal of a great minister of state, placed him on a vantage-ground in his relations with Maecenas which he could in no other way have secured. Nor, we ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... introduced him to Augustus, who, according to Suetonius, offered him a place in his own household, which the poet prudently declined. But as the unrivalled lyric poet of the time Horace gradually acquired the position of poet-laureate; and his ode written to command for the celebration of the Secular Games in 17 B.C., with the official odes which followed it on the victories of Tiberius and Drusus, and on the glories of the Augustan age, mark the highest level which this kind of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... more humor, more keen enjoyment, out of a census report or an etymological dictionary than from a novel. My favorite literary dissipation is to read the works of that distinguished statistician at Washington, Mr. O. P. Austin, the poet-laureate of industrial America, or the toilsome and exciting verbal journeys of the Rev. Mr. Skeat. The classic humorists do not compare with them, in my humble opinion, as sources of fantastic surprises. This, perhaps, accounts for my sincere admiration for that quality of scholarship, learning, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... genial and many-sided poet-laureate, who is also a philosopher, in his "Life of Emerson," has finely worked out the theory that no man writes other than his own experience: that consciously or otherwise an author describes himself in the characters he draws; that when he loves the character he delineates, it is in some measure ...
— Shakespeare's Insomnia, And the Causes Thereof • Franklin H. Head
... she wouldn't be so alarmingly outspoken when she sings our praises to strangers. She gave him to understand that I am a full-fledged author and playwright, the peer of any poet laureate who ever held a pen; that Lloyd is a combination of princess and angel and halo-crowned saint, and Joyce a model big sister and an all-round genius. How she managed in the short time they were alone to tell him as much as she did will always remain ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... schoolmasters? Has he no word for those who are striving, bleeding, dying, to keep from spreading itself over a continent a system which legalizes outrages almost too fearful to be told even to those who know all that is darkest in the record of English pauperism and crime? Where is the Laureate, so full of fine indignations and high aspirations? Has he, who holds so cheap those ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... spoken of with reverence among his countrymen: he was the laureate of the epoch of Catherine, and had a fresh ode for every new military glory. There is much fire and vigour in his productions and he could develop the strength and flexibility of his native language ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... had, long before, during his student days in Moscow, written syllabic verses, an elegy on the death of Peter the Great, and a couple of dramas, which were acted by his fellow-students. In 1732 he became the court poet, or laureate and panegyrist, and wrote, to the order of the Empress Anna Ioannovna, speeches and laudatory addresses, which he presented to the grandees, receiving in return various gifts in accordance with the custom of the epoch. But neither his ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... The beautiful gates must open to our quest, Somewhere that marvellous City of the West Would lift its towers and palace domes in view, And, to! at last its mystery is made known— Its only dwellers maidens fair and young, Its Princess such as England's Laureate sung; And safe from capture, save by love alone, It lends its beauty to the lake's green shore, And Norumbega is a ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Men dead many days, That wonted to praise The rhymes and the lays Of poets laureate: Whose verse did decorate, And their lines 'lustrate Both prince and potentate. These from their graves See asses and knaves, Base idiot slaves, With boastings and braves Offer to upfly To the heavens high, With vain ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... Our poet-laureate must be a close observer of natural history. In his "In Memoriam," xciv., he distinctly alludes to some very curious West African bats first described by the late amiable Edward T. Bennett, long the much-valued secretary ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... Tupper's emptiness or absurdities, the outworn platitudes again find their constant lover in Alfred Austin, Tennyson's successor as poet laureate. Austin brought the laureateship, which had been held by poets like Ben Jonson, Dryden, Southey and Wordsworth, to an incredibly low level; he took the thinning stream of garrulous poetic conventionality, reduced it to the merest trickle—and ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... in touch with the life of the Indiana farmer. About 1873 he first contributed verses, especially in the Hoosier dialect, to the papers, and before long had attained a recognized position as poet-laureate of the Western country folk. His materials are the incidents and aspects of village life, especially of the Indiana villages. These he interprets in a manner as acceptable to the na[:i]ve as to the sophisticated, which is saying a good deal for this type of verse. ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... according to Wachter, is of very ancient use, and is common to many nations. The Britons, and the Anglo-Saxons, had the word, though not the thing. It was first printed by Caxton in the modern sense, in the Siege of Rhodes, which was translated by John Kay, the Poet Laureate, and printed by Caxton about the year 1490. In the Assembly of Foulis, which was printed by William Copland in 1530, there is the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 42, Saturday, August 17, 1850 • Various
... through the musical dramas of Wagner. Any understanding of English civilization would be similarly incomplete without the semi-historic figure of King Arthur, glorified through the accumulated legends of the Middle Ages and made to live again in the melodic idylls of the great Victorian laureate. And so one might go on. In many ways the mythology and folklore of a country are a truer index to the life of its people than any of the pages of actual history; for through these channels the imagination and the heart speak. All the chronicles of rulers ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... poet, gave himself wholly to write impure and lascivious things: so SKELTON (I know not for what great worthiness, surnamed the Poet Laureate) applied his wit to scurrilities and ridiculous matters; such [as] among the Greeks were called Pantomimi, with ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... Marino was too skillful a master in the craft of pleasure to revolt or to regale his readers with grossness. He had too much of the Neapolitan's frank self-abandonment to nature for broad indecency in art to afford him special satisfaction; and the taste of his age demanded innuendo. The laureate of Courts and cities saturated with licentiousness knew well that Coan vestments are more provocative than nudity. It was his object to flatter the senses and seduce the understanding rather than to stimulate coarse appetite. Refinement was the aphrodisiac of a sated ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... them, they spoke of the future, the dim, vague, but so happy future, when Albert was to be the nation's poet laureate and Madeline, as Mrs. Laureate, would share his glory and wear, so to speak, his second-best laurels. The disagreeable problems connected with the future they ignored, or casually dismissed with, "Never mind, dear, it will be all right by and by." Oh, it ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... now intent on obtaining the honour of Poet Laureate. His wishes were at length gratified, and in a manner that made the offer more ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... people") It has been supposed that on this journey he met at Padua Petrarch, whose residence was near by at Arqua. The statement of the "Clerk" in the "Canterbury Tales" that he learnt the story of patient Griseldis "at Padua of a worthy clerk...now dead," who was called "Francis Petrarch, the laureate poet," may of course merely imply that Chaucer borrowed the "Clerk's Tale" from Petrarch's Latin version of the original by Boccaccio. But the meeting which the expression suggests may have actually taken place, and may have been accompanied ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... historical origin need be sought, surely. Yet part of the latter has been at least applied to a historical personage in a way that is worth recalling. Dr. H. J. Pye, who was created Poet Laureate in succession to Thomas Warton, in 1790, was, as a poet, regularly made fun of. In his New Year Odes there were perpetual references to the coming spring: and, in the dearth of more important topics, each tree and field-flower were described: and the lark, and ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... conformed, in a certain poem, to a number of rules of versification and to certain principles in the use of different sound values. "Yes," answered the poet in substance, "I carefully observed all those rules and was entirely unconscious of them!" There was no contradiction between the Laureate's practice of his craft and the technical rules which govern it. The poet's instinct kept him in harmony with those essential and vital principles of language of which the formal ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... Westminster streets, called Barton Street and Cowley Street, after his name and the place where he was buried. Mrs. Pritchard was honoured by a memorial near Shakespeare's statue, upon which the poet-laureate of the day wrote a florid inscription. She began her professional career after Booth's death, but lived long enough to tread the same boards as Garrick, whose grave is just below; she predeceased the younger actor by ten years. Only one actress, Ann Oldfield, ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... have been given the privilege of selecting his poet-laureate we may be sure he would have named Whittier. For they were both lovers of nature and of man. Both earnest abolitionists, intensely patriotic, loving liberty and the rights of the humblest of God's ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... of my maisteris dere, Gowere and Chaucere, that on steppis satt Of rhetorick, quhill thai war lyvand here, Superlative as poets laureate, In moralitee and eloquence ornate, I recommend my buik in lynis seven, And eke their saulis unto the blisse ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 570, October 13, 1832 • Various
... Henry IV. had been succeeded by the stormy minority of Louis XIII., when Malherbe (1556-1628), the tyrant of words and syllables, appeared as the reformer of poetry. He attracted attention by ridiculing the style of Ronsard. He became the laureate of the court, and furnished for it that literature in which it was beginning to take delight. In the place of Latin and Greek French, he inaugurated the extreme of formality; the matter of his verse was made subordinate to the manner; he substituted polish for native ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Billy earned a hand-out from a restaurant keeper in a small town by doing some odd jobs for the man. The food he gave Billy was wrapped in an old copy of the Kansas City Star. When Billy reached camp he tossed the package to Bridge, who, in addition to his honorable post as poet laureate, was also cook. Then Billy walked down to the stream, near-by, that he might wash away the grime and sweat of honest toil from his ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... poetry, it seems to be a poetry rapidly approaching state approval, there is in it the flavour of the budding laureate, it seems to me to be poetry already "in orders". Brooke was certainly in danger of becoming a good poet, like the several other poets who perished in the throes of heroism. Like them, he would, had he lived, have had to save himself from the evils of prosperity, ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... was the most remarkable work that Jasmin had up to this time composed. There is no country where an author is so popular, when he is once known, as in France. When Jasmin's poem was published he became, by universal consent, the Poet Laureate of the South. Yet some of the local journals of Bordeaux made light of his appearance in that city for the purpose of reciting his as yet unknown poem. "That a barber and hairdresser of Agen," they said, "speaking and ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... girls," Mary Godwin (Mrs. Shelley) and Jane Clairmont. Byron not only denied the charge, but retorted upon him, in his "Observations upon an Article in 'Blackwood's Magazine'" (March 15, 1820), as the author of 'Wat Tyler' and poet laureate, the man who "wrote treason and serves the King," the ex-pantisocrat who advocated "all things, including women, in common." Southey's 'Vision of Judgment', an apotheosis of George III., published in 1821, gave Byron a second provocation ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... whole current of Mr R's ideas, and altered his plans for me. I was no longer to be the future poet-laureate; I was no more enticed to sing great deeds, but to do them. The sword was to displace the pen, the hero the poet. Verse was too effeminate, and rhyme was severely interdicted, and to be forgiven only when it ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... which I refuse you: Love's Goddess has oft to her parents complain'd, Of my favouring a bard who her empire disdain'd; That at my instigation, a poem you writ, Which to beauty and youth preferr'd judgment and wit; That, to make you a Laureate, I gave the first voice, Inspiring the Britons t'approve of my choice. Jove sent her to me, her power to try; The Goddess of Beauty what God can deny? She forbids your preferment; I grant her desire. Appease ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... name of God. He was a very learned and accomplished man; and his writings, both in prose and verse, were equal to those of Zahiri and Naziri. When he first came to India, he resided for some years at Delhi; but having had some dispute with the poet-laureate of the Emperor Mohammed Shah, he found himself under the necessity of retiring to Benares, where he lived in great privacy. As he was a stranger in the country, was engaged in no calling or profession, and received ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... accepts their genuineness, is of a different opinion. He styles the "Book of Ruth" and the "History of Joseph" "beautiful idylls," of such high excellence that, "if we found them in the collected works of a poet laureate, we should consider that a difficult task had been accomplished successfully." It would seem almost doubtful whether Mr. Froude can have read the compositions that he commends so largely, and so much beyond their merit. The following ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... Room," afterwards suppressed. Seizing on this, Lytton had re-echoed in his "New Timon: A Romance of London," the strictures which Christopher North has so severely, though good-naturedly, passed upon it in "Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine" for May, 1832, and furthermore taunted the Laureate with the pension of L200 which had just been conferred upon him. The attack was just the sort to extort ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... perpetually; and therefore he ought eternally to be remembered, of whom the body and corpse lieth buried in the Abbey of Westminster beside London, to-fore the chapel of Saint Benedict, by whose sepulchre is written on a table hanging on a pillar his Epitaph, made by a Poet Laureate, whereof the ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God's great, unflattering laureate, Nature.* ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... calls himself "poet of the Emperor Joseph II." He was in the habit of thus designating himself and it was small wonder that his biographers almost unanimously interpreted these words to mean that he was poet laureate, or Caesarian poet. After the mischief, small enough, except perhaps in an ethical sense, had been done, he tried to correct it in a foot note on one of the pages of his "Memorie," in which he says that he was not "Poeta Cesario," but "poet to the ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... leading thread of literary research might be profitably followed by the student who should trace the footsteps of all the poets, dead and gone, that have held, in England, the office of laureate. John Kay was laureate in the reign of King Edward the Fourth; Andrew Bernard in that of King Henry the Seventh; John Skelton in that of King Henry the Eighth, and Edmund Spenser in that of Queen Elizabeth. Since then the succession has included the names of Samuel Daniel, Michael ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... "He's the true poet of spiderdom!" and then he added: "Hans, we'll crown you poet laureate if ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... early determination—a first one—to follow some ennobling profession, once he has come to man's estate, such as being a policeman, or a performer on the high trapeze. The poet would not have been the "Peoples' Laureate," had his fairy god- mother granted his boy-wish, but the Greenfield baker. For to his childish mind it "seemed the acme of delight," using again his own happy expression, "to manufacture those snowy loaves ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... to be a brisk one: we are to have good books of history, travel, and science, besides something from Carlyle and the Laureate; and in the matter of light literature there will be no lack; Thackeray is again in the field, with three volumes of the old-fashioned sort, so acceptable to novel readers; and Sir Thomas Talfourd has found time for literary as well as legal work. A learned Hindoo, after thirty-five ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... estate, and he was frequently found indulging in his undeniable passion for litigation. The purchase of a house in Blackfriars is recorded in 1613, and it led to the seemingly inevitable lawsuit some two years later. Nicholas Rowe, poet-laureate to King George I., wrote a life of Shakespeare in the early years of the eighteenth century, and we owe to him a statement, founded upon such information as a lapse of a century could validate, that Shakespeare spent the last years of his life enjoying ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... apprehension gave way to disappointment, she was not there. Collecting himself, he was presently introduced to a smart, jaunty, and, to do him justice, distingue old beau. This was Colley Cibber, Esq., poet laureate, and retired actor and dramatist, a gentleman who is entitled to ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... e'en the man who runs may read The lesson with this lay entwined. (If Topsey-turvey thus succeed, The noble Laureate will not mind!) And liberal applications lie In this quaint Legend, good my friend. So, put the song and picture by, And hook it—to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 26, 1891 • Various
... he was born in 1809, and that he married Lucy, daughter of Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where among his contemporaries and friends were the present poet-laureate and Mr. Spedding, the editor of Bacon. The London Catalogue names three works as by Mr. FitzGerald. These, as we find from inspection of the works themselves, are as follows: 1. Euphranor, a Dialogue on Youth, 1851 (it reached a second edition, increased by an ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... readily occur to the antiquary, that these verses are intended to imitate the antique poetry of the Scalds—the minstrels of the old Scandinavians—the race, as the Laureate so ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... west, as if at haphazard, until only the navigating officers and the director of the Society knew how our course lay. We were searching for an island about the bearings of which, it transpired, some mistake had been made. I do not know whether the great laureate ever sailed these seas. But I know that his glorious islands of flowers and islands of fruit, with all their luscious imagery, were here eclipsed by our own islands of foliage. The long lagoons, the deep blue bays, the glittering parti-coloured fish that swam ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... him, of course. What else would a young fool like her do? He inthrojooced her to the Poet Laureate, thinking shed inspire him. ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... too romantic for the herd of vulgar politicians, our enthusiast stood at bay, and at last turned on the pivot of a subtle casuistry to the unclean side: but his discursive reason would not let him trammel himself into a poet-laureate or stamp-distributor, and he stopped, ere he had quite passed that well-known "bourne from whence no traveller returns"—and so has sunk into torpid, uneasy repose, tantalized by useless resources, haunted by vain imaginings, his lips idly moving, but his heart ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... so far from taking from the beauty of Nature, was itself a chief cause of that beauty being left unspoiled and unimpaired. The improvements, when the place was sufficiently tranquil to admit of any, though absurd and monstrous in themselves, were confined (as our present Laureate has observed, I remember, in one of his essays) to an acre or two about the house in the shape of garden with terraces, &c. So that Nature had greatly the advantage in those days, when what has been called English gardening was unheard of. This is now beginning ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... his "Rich and rare were the gems she wore," in some such place as the Quadrant, or Opera Colonnade; and Sir Walter Scott celebrating the Field of Waterloo, not in the broad-margined octavos of Paternoster-row, but about the purlieus of the Horse Guards. Wordsworth would be his own Skylark. The laureate, Southey, would perch himself on the dome of the New Palace. Campbell would step out of New Burlingtonstreet into the Park; Miss Mitford would keep a Covent-Garden audience awake with her own tragedies, and Planche would no longer ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828 • Various
... execution the messenger who brought him Saul's crown and bracelet, confessing that his own hand had given the king the coup de grace. His lamentation over Saul and Jonathan rises to the height of the sublime. Never laureate sang in strains more solemn ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... indeed, had paid less attention to dress. Now and then, in the course of five years, she had been asked to read aloud or to write a copy of verses. But better readers might easily have been found: and her verses were worse than even the Poet Laureate's Birthday odes. Perhaps that economy, which was among her majesty's most conspicuous virtues, had something to do with her conduct on this occasion. Miss Burney had never hinted that she expected a ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... its author's character, of the splendor of his genius, or of the breadth of intellectual and spiritual interests which was so signally manifested in all that Tennyson thought and wrote? Among the "Beacon Lights" in the present series of volumes the Laureate of the age has not hitherto been included, and to fill the gap the writer of this sketch has ventured, not, of course, to say all that might be said of the great poet, but modestly to deal with the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... out according to the standard which he had set for himself. Occupying the position almost of a court poet, he continued to work for Mahmud, and this son of a Turkish slave became a patron of letters. On February 25, 1010, his work was finished. As poet laureate, he had inserted many a verse in praise of his master. Yet the story goes, that though this master had covenanted for a gold dirhem a line, he sent Firdusi sixty thousand silver ones, which the poet spurned and distributed as largesses and hied him ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... successor of Alexander Henderson in the task of persuading the King to accept Presbytery! The person sent, however, was the one next to Hobbes in literary repute among the Royalist exiles, the one most liked by Hobbes, and oftenest in his company. He was no other than the laureate and dramatist Will Davenant, known on the London boards by that name for a good many years before the war, but now Sir William Davenant, knighted by the King in Sept. 1643 for his Army-plotting and his gallant soldiering. He was over forty years of age, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... in" together, and fill the little boat. The baronet follows up his luck, and keeps close to Edith. How beautiful she is with the soft silver light on her face. He sits and watches her, and thinks of the laureate's lines: ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... but of course u remains long, as in 'mutable'. Longer words throw the stress further back, except mere negatives, like 'impl['a]cable', and words with heavy consonants such as 'delectable'. Examples are 'miserable', 'admirable', 'intolerable', 'despicable'. The Poet Laureate holds that in these words Milton kept the long Italian a of the penultimate or ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... all decanted off from their historic antecedents and their costume of circumstance into the every-day aspect of the gentleman of common cultivated society. That is Sir Coeur de Lion Plantagenet in the mutton-chop whiskers and the plain gray suit; there is the Laureate in a frockcoat like your own, and the leader of the House of Commons in a necktie you do not envy. That is the kind of thing you want to take the nonsense out of you. If you are not decanted off from yourself every few ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... briefly remark, in conclusion, that the dates and other circumstances favour the supposed interview at Padua, between Fraunceis Petrark the laureate poet, and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 187, May 28, 1853 • Various
... penal to receive the Irish into religious houses. War was waged also against their Thomas Moores, Samuel Rogerses, and Walter Scotts, who went about the country harping and singing against English oppression. No such turbulent guests were to be received. The plan of making them poets-laureate, or converting them to loyalty by pensions of 100 pounds per annum, had not then been thought of. They debarred the Irish even from the pleasure of running away, and fixed them to the ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... New Orleans will plume itself upon this dish which drew from Thackeray a world-famous tribute. "In New Orleans you can eat a Bouillabaisse, the like of which was never eaten in Marseilles or Paris." Which is much, very much, from the laureate of Bouillabaisse, as native to Marseilles. The reason of superiority is not far to seek—it lies in the excellence and flavor of the fish native to the Gulf of Mexico. Lacking Pompano, Red Snapper, and Redfish, even Milly could not quite ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... to the plea of Dr. Budge, the poet laureate, for purer English, a writer in the 'Daily Chronicle' ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... leaving the thorny way of matrimony, failed to carry out the laureate's metaphor. Having less of the fallen star in her than Mr. Rowe imagined, and perhaps more of the hen, she refused to set, but resolutely faced the world, and in spite of all rules of decorum, tried to earn ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... a local laureate described the incident in stirring verse. An extract from this effort, translated by Professor J. G. Legge, in his Rhyme and Revolution in ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... involved, labored, quite sophisticated—even when the theme is ever so simple or rustic, (a shell, a bit of sedge, the commonest love-passage between a lad and lass,) the handling of the rhyme all showing the scholar and conventional gentleman; showing the laureate too, the attache of the throne, and most excellent, too; nothing better through the volumes than the dedication "to the Queen" at the beginning, and the other fine dedication, "these to his memory" (Prince Albert's,) ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... This stratum was not to be found in R——, which rejoiced instead in the most squalid types of poverty and crime, types wherewith the mild shrivelled Unitarian minister had about as much power of grappling as a Poet Laureate with a ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... Till I had got the name of Villars here: Now 'tis so full that when therein I look I see a cloud of glory fills my book. Here stand it still to dignify our Muse, Your sober handmaid, who doth wisely choose Your name to be a laureate wreath to her Who doth both love and fear you, ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... stalls clear out the stock so grows the vociferousness of their proprietors, and soon the ear becomes deadened by the striving rush of sound. Every stall and shop has its wide-mouthed laureate, singing its present glories and adding lustre ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... beautiful language and admirable? Is it not the last relic saved from the shipwreck in which all the national possessions of our people were lost? And is not he, Lebensohn himself, the heir to the prophets, the poet laureate and high priest to the holy language? With what pride he unveils the state ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... these latter days quite as much as it did in the classic times of Augustus with Virgil and Horace for his intimates, and of Petrarch crowned at the Capitol laureate of all Italy during the vacancy of a popedom in the Vatican. Not but that, with or without any titular distinction, authorship is practically the most noticeable rank amongst us. Many will pass by a duke who would have stopped and waited ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... done—when these few freaks of a crowded brain are thrown overboard to the sharks of verbal criticism who feed on such things—Mr. Browning and his great poetical achievement remain behind to be dealt with and accounted for. We do not get rid of the Laureate by quoting:— ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... as old as Homer. Its laureate is Montesquieu. The more northerly you go, he said, the sterner the man grows. You must scorch a Muscovite to make him feel. Gray was a convert. One of the prose hints for his noble fragment of a didactic poem runs thus: "It is the proper ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... the gobble-gobble, moo-moo, baa-baa, etc., as long as the laureate's imagination and the infant's breath hold good. The tune is pretty, and I do not know, or did not, when I was young, a more ...
— The Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... These paintings are in general designed to show what is exhibited within; but this alludes to a dispute that arose at the time when this print was published, which was in the year 1733, between the players and the patentee of Drury-lane Theatre, when young Cibber, the son of the Laureate, was at the head of the faction. Above, on one side, is an equilibrist swinging on a slack rope; and on the other, a man flying from the tower to the ground, by means of a groove fastened to his breast, slipping over a line strained from one place to the other. At the back of this plate is ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... a few of his lines and they were not poetic. The office of Poet Laureate should be abolished. Men cannot write poems to order as they could deliver cabbages or beer. By poems I do not mean jingles of words. I mean ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... The Laureate had read this, and yet considers it the language of a heart that 'never was hardened.' He says that 'the wickedness of the tinker has been greatly overcharged, and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally to pronounce of John Bunyan, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the laureate of the eagle's nest soared, and fell to a whisper, and swelled again, and Friedrich wondered if "example" would be "Muster" or "Beispiel." And "different class,"—what did that mean? How stupid he ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... the "Pall Mall") to see how the rival committees, the one for the prosecution and the other for the defence of Mr. Eyre, parade the names of distinguished persons who are enrolled as subscribers on either side. Mill is set against Carlyle, and to counterbalance the adhesion of the Laureate to the Defence Fund, the "Star" hastens to announce that Sir Charles Lyell and Professor Huxley have given their support to the Jamaica Committee. Everything, of course, depends on the ground on which the subscriptions are given. One can readily ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... headed by Professor Wilson, declared he was Burns's rival as a song-writer, and his superior in anything relating to external nature! indeed they wrote of him as unsurpassed by poet or painter in his fairy tales of ancient time, dubbing him Poet Laureate to the Queen of Elfland; and yet his unrefined manner tempted these friends to speak of him familiarly as the greatest hog in all Apollo's herd, or the Boar of the Forest, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... out- Castlereaghing Castlereagh, Pantisocratists, Ultra-Tories, heretics, persecutors, breaking the old laws against sedition, calling for new and sharper laws against sedition, writing democratic dramas, writing Laureate odes panegyrising Marten, panegyrising Laud, consistent in nothing but an intolerance which in any person would be censurable, but which is altogether unpardonable in men who, by their own confession, have had such ample experience of their own fallibility. We readily concede to some of these ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... rather have been Ireland than Shakespeare; and then it was his delight to write Greek versions of a poem that might attach the mark of plagiarism to Tennyson, or show, by a Scandinavian lyric, how the laureate had been poaching from the Northmen. Now it was a mock pastoral in most ecclesiastical Latin that set the whole Church in arms; now a mock despatch of Baron Beust that actually deceived the Revue des Deux Mondes and caused quite a panic at the ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... Robert Southey, Esq.—Sir T. Lawrence—We hope the president's portrait will please the laureate, for he has been rather tenacious about his "likenesses" which have been engraved. The present is, perhaps, one of the most intellectual portraits in the room, but is too energetic ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 376, Saturday, June 20, 1829. • Various
... poet alluded to by Scott in the forty-first chapter of The Heart of Mid-Lothian, as "him of the laurel wreath," was Robert Southey, who was appointed poet laureate of England in 1813. The lines quoted are from Southey's poem of "Thalaba the ...
— Harper's Young People, September 21, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... him that he had made a speech which sent cold shivers down the spine of our young Apollo; that, in a fine rhetorical flourish—dear old fox-hunting ignoramus—he declared that the winner of the Newdigate carried the bays of the Laureate in his knapsack; that Randall, white-lipped with horror, murmured to Betty Fairfax, his neighbour at the table: "My God! The Poet-Laureate's unhallowed grave! I must burn the knapsack and take to a hod!" It was too tragical a conversation for ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... and must hit the right pitch of extraordinary popular emotion. It is the difficulty of turning out good work under such arduous conditions that has too often shipwrecked or stranded some unlucky laureate. ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... But it has its romantic side as well. It is, in fact, a love-match. The fact that the royal lovers have never seen each other only emphasizes its romantic quality. Their joy in beholding in actuality what they have for three long months cherished so dearly in imagination, is a theme for the poet laureate—who will, however, we fear, judging from his past performances, hardly do it justice. It is, as we have said, a love- match. The royal pair fell in love with what they had heard of each other—the Princess of Basque with the image she had formed in her mind ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... scorning Phrebus lovely** fyre, On the Thessalian shore from him did flie; For which the gods, in theyr revengefull yre, Did her transforme into a laurell-tree. Then fly no more, fayre Love, from Phebus chace, But in your brest his leafe and love embrace. [* I. e. as poet-laureate.] ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... poet laureate, Saith that Nature, which is mother of all things, Without strife can give life to nothing create; And Heraclitus, the wise clerk, in his writing, Saith in all things create strife is their working; And there is nothing ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... The Evening News, lambs have already put in an appearance in Dorset. People who expect the POET LAUREATE to rush to the spot ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... a last glimpse of the University dome, towering over the treetops; and we felt very tenderly toward everyone there. But there were "sweet girl graduates" on board; and, as you know well enough, it required no laureate to sing their praises, though he has done so with all the gush and ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... to the ancient race, even until long after the times of which we now speak—their unconquerable prejudice against defensive armour. Gilbride McNamee, the laureate to King Brian O'Neil, gives due prominence to this fact in his poem on the death of his patron in the battle of Down (A.D. 1260). Thus sings ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... revulsion. It became, in an instant, the fashion to admire and to pity a gentleman so talented and so unfortunate. Likenesses of Mr. Crauford appeared in every print-shop in town; the papers discovered that he was the very fac-simile of the great King of Prussia. The laureate made an ode upon him, which was set to music; and the public learned, with tears of compassionate regret at so romantic a circumstance, that pigeon-pies were sent daily to his prison, made by the delicate hands of one of his former mistresses. ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of effeminateness, but of notable stirring of courage; not of abusing man's wit, but of strengthening man's wit; not banished, but honoured by Plato; let us rather plant more laurels for to ingarland the poets' heads (which honour of being laureate, as besides them only triumphant captains were, is a sufficient authority to show the price they ought to be held in) than suffer the ill-favoured breath of such wrong speakers once to blow upon the clear ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... to the skies, That I may form a starry crown, Beyond what Helicon supplies In laureate garlands of renown; To nobler worth be brighter glory given, And to a heavenly mind a recompense ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... favor. He had been made a Knight of the Bedchamber and also Historiographer of France. The chief duty of the first office consisted in signing the monthly voucher for salary, and the other was about the same as Poet Laureate—with salary in inverse ratio to responsibility. It was considered, however, that the holder of these offices was one of the King's family, and therefore was bound to indulge in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... innocence amuse him best, Yet still Obscurity's a welcome guest. If Inspiration should her aid refuse To him who takes a Pixy for a muse, [38] 260 Yet none in lofty numbers can surpass The bard who soars to elegize an ass: So well the subject suits his noble mind, [xvii] He brays, the Laureate ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... opinion that he declared that there was "more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson's than in all Tom Jones"; the two Wartons, Joseph, the Headmaster of Winchester and editor of Pope, and Thomas the author of the history of English Poetry and himself Poet Laureate; both good scholars and critics who partly anticipated the poetic tastes of the nineteenth century: Paoli, the hero of Boswell and the Corsicans, with whom Johnson loved to dine: Douglas, Bishop of Salisbury, who wrote against Hume and edited Clarendon; Savage, the poet of mysterious birth whose ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... a strenuous time on deck while the sou'wester crashed on the Welsh coast. Or in the roll of the Bay of Biscay, after a space watching the swinging fields of stars, to come down there was to drop into a welcoming circle of friends, to throw one's self down and pick up a book, the Laureate's "In Memoriam" or Mr. Thackeray's latest—and to glance from the pages of "Henry Esmond" to Prince Charlie's dagger lying peacefully on the desk.... How near! how near!... And up forward the lookout paced, or leaned over the bows, humming ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... Peter Laureate wishes to know whether the work upon "Horal Surgery" is not a new-invented description of almanack, as it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... unction Once, as a rule, in a week, 'cleansing the Earth of her stain'; (Here you will possibly pardon the natural scion of poets, Proud with humility's pride, spoiling a passage from Keats)— Vainly your voice on the ears of impregnable Laureate-makers, Rang as the sinuous sea rings on a petrified coast; Vainly your voice with a subtle and slightly indelicate largess, Broke on an obdurate world hymning the advent of Me; When from the 'commune of air,' from 'the exquisite fabric ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... that H. liked my letter to the Laureate." Hazlitt wrote, in the essay "On the Pleasures of Hating," "I think I must be friends with Lamb again, since he has written that magnanimous Letter to Southey, and told him a piece of his mind!" Coleridge ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... feeling. A good example maybe found in the work of Mr Swinburne: the latter is the better poetry, the earlier remains the more popular — because of its eloquence of margin. Mr Tupper might long ago have sat with laureate brow but for his neglect of this first principle. The song of Sigurd, our one epic of the century, is pitiably unmargined, and so has never won the full meed of glory it deserves; while the ingenious gentleman who wrote "Beowulf,'' our other English epic, grasped the great fact from the ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... them with the heroic drama, which at the bottom of his heart he knew to be no better than an organized trick, done daily with a view to "elevate and surprise". Too far, because, in spite of his own candid and generous temper, it was well-nigh impossible for the Laureate of the Restoration to comprehend the highly strung nature of a man like Corneille, and his intense realization ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... wrangles, and perhaps helping to develop later on an editor. Memorable were the Young People's Conventions of 1886 and 1887, and Lylians will never forget the patriot Kromm, Spoopendyke Shreve, the poet laureate and a dozen others. The Fourth of July picnics at Pamrapo and Nyack are happy ...
— The Kirk on Rutgers Farm • Frederick Bruckbauer
... time of Henry IV. "He made disguises for the King's sons, writ in ballad-royal daintily well, and was regarded and rewarded." Jonson calls him the moral Skogan; and introduces him with Skelton, the poet laureate of Henry VIII., into his Masque, entitled "The Fortunate Isles," where he keeps them in character, and makes them rhyme in their ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... POEMS. The Complete Poems of Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate. With numerous Illustrations by Eminent Artists, and Three Characteristic Portraits. 8vo, ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... then, what luck! A "run" unprecedented, Or almost so; and fodder With which the Laureate's Bird had been contented: Fortune has freaks far odder Than e'en a poet's whimsies, any day, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... esteem But Virtue's patriot theme, You lov'd her hills, and led her laureate band; But staid to sing alone To one distinguish'd throne, And turn'd thy face, and fled ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... You're a poet, poet laureate, And representative of all the race. Although 'tis true that you turned out a Tory at Last, yours has lately been a common case. And now my epic renegade, what are ye at With all the lakers, in and out of place? A nest of tuneful persons, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... irregularities sometimes led him into unpleasant rencontres with these military conservators of public order, and who mentions them so often that he may be termed their poet laureate,* thus admonishes his readers, warned ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... to Messer Guido, who laughed a little, and said that I might be the laureate of the tavern and the brothel, but that this new and nameless singer was a man of another metal, whom I could never understand. Whereat I laughed, too; but being none the less a little piqued, as I think, I made it a point thereafter, whenever Guido had one of these new poems ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... eminent of modern experimental philosophers—of him, who has been described as "unlocking the hidden treasures of nature, and explaining the various systems by which air, and earth, and fire, and water, counteract and sustain each other"[259]—to fix the laureate crown round the ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Tennyson is a greater Calvinist in one sense than either of the Scotch poets we have named—he owes more to the general faith of others in his genius than to any special or strong works of his own; but let us be dumb, he is now Laureate—the crowned grasshopper of a summer day! Bailey of 'Festus' has a vast deal more power than Tennyson, who is only his delicate, consumptive brother; but 'Festus' seems either different from, or greater than, a work. We are reminded of one stage in the history of the nebular ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... to live on less than two hundred dollars a year, derived from the proceeds of poems, pamphlets and essays. At this time he was already an "Academy Laureate," having received honorable mention for a poem ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... alike, you women." A wicked light snapped into his eyes. "Hear, dear lady, the Bard of the Congaree, the Poet Laureate of South Carolina, Coogle for your benefit," hissed The Author, ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... for Madame Astier, who had only accepted marriage as a means of escape from a hard and selfish grandfather in his anecdotage, it had not taken her long to find out how poor was the laborious peasant brain, how narrow the intelligence, concealed by the solemn manners of the Academic laureate and manufacturer of octavos, and by his voice with its ophicleide notes adapted to the sublimities of the lecture room. And yet when, by force of intrigue, bargaining, and begging, she had seated him at last in the Academie, she felt herself possessed by a ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... Hixley. "If I ever get my deserts in this world, I'll make you Laureate to the Forces, with a hogshead of your own native whiskey for every victory of ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... society flocked to his drawing-room, there to be received by Simonetta herself, wearing the blanched draperies and tragic pearls of the labyrinth he had made for her. Grimshaw offered no apologies. He was the uncrowned laureate and kings can do no wrong. He was painted by the young Sargent, of course, and by the aging Whistler—you remember the butterfly's portrait of him in a yellow kimono leaning against a black mantel? I, for one, think ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... 1839 Oxford did the same, and the reception of the poet (now in his seventieth year) at the University was enthusiastic. In 1842 he resigned his office of Stamp-Distributor, and Sir Robert Peel had the honor of putting him upon the civil list for a pension of L300. In 1843 he was appointed Laureate, with the express understanding that it was a tribute of respect, involving no duties except such as might be self-imposed. His only official production was an Ode for the installation of Prince Albert as Chancellor of the University ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... pessimistic rhyme, Dared to bid men adventure and rejoice. His "yawp barbaric" was a human voice; The singer was a man. America Is poorer by a stalwart soul to-day, And may feel pride that she hath given birth To this stout laureate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 9th, 1892 • Various
... will note that Natural Beauty is having an increasing effect upon the movements of men. There is a very definite relationship between the Beauty of the Earth and her human inhabitants. The Poet Laureate builds his house on the top of Boar's Hill not because the soil is specially productive up there so that he may be able to grow food, for the soil is rather poor; not because water is easily available, for ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... adding to his former prose tributes in various pamphlets that most splendid and subtle one of all which flames through several pages of his Defensio Secunda. It is Milton now, almost alone, that we remember as Cromwell's laureate; but among the sub-laureates there were some by no means insignificant. Old George Wither, though his marvellous metrical fluency had now lapsed into doggrel and senility, had done his best by sending forth, in 1654-5, from some kind of military superintendentship ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... southern part of the island witch-hanging or burning proceeded with only less vehemence than in Scotland. One of the most celebrated cases in the earlier half of the seventeenth century (upon which Thomas Shadwell the poet laureate, who, under the name of MacFlecknoe, is immortalised by the satire of Dryden, founded a play) is the story of the Lancashire Witches. This persecution raged at two separate periods; first in 1613, when ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams |
