"Modern English" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The modern English imperialists tried for some time to apply the idea of national homogeneity to the facts of the British Empire. From the publication of Seeley's Expansion of England in 1883 till the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 they strove to believe in the existence of a 'Blood,' an ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... finish of style. She is not a creation. She is only the best possible example of the clever sleight-of-hand of an accomplished artificer. She is in literary fiction cousin to the witty, flirtatious ladies of the modern English theatre. Her conversation is delightful, but it belongs to nobody. It does not even belong to her author. Mrs Hawksbee talks as all well-dressed women talk in the best books. She does it with a volubility and resourcefulness which almost disguises the fact that she lives only by ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... is the most conventionally deep mourning allowed, and every one who has seen an English widow will agree that she makes a "hearse" of herself. Bombazine and crape, a widow's cap; and a long; thick veil—such is the modern English idea. Some widows even have the cap made of black cr^pe lisse, but it is generally of white. In this country a widow's first mourning dresses are covered almost entirely with crape, a most costly and disagreeable material, easily ruined by the dampness and dust—a sort of penitential ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... commentaries were written on the older literature of the country, and dictionaries and grammars compiled. It was now that that mixed language arose, or at least was admitted into the literary dialect, which made Babylonian so much resemble modern English. The lexicon was filled with Sumerian words which had put on a Semitic form, and Semitic lips expressed themselves in ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... denouement—the time and place in which the hero of it existed, considered—not much out of keeping; yet it must be confessed, that it required a delicacy of handling both from the author and the performer, so as not much to shock the prejudices of a modern English audience. G., in my opinion, had ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... if Lord Brouncker's native sagacity had not deserted his ghost, he would need no long reflection to discover that all these great ships, these railways, these telegraphs, these factories, these printing-presses, without which the whole fabric of modern English society would collapse into a mass of stagnant and starving pauperism,—that all these pillars of our State are but the ripples, and the bubbles upon the surface of that great spiritual stream, the springs of ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... composing," the parish clerk often used to give vent to his poetical talents in the production of epitaphs. The occupation of writing epitaphs must have been a lucrative one, and the effusions recording the numerous virtues of the deceased are quaint and curious. Well might a modern English child ask her mother after hearing these records read to her, "Where were all the bad people buried?" Learned scholars and abbots applied their talents to the production of the Latin verses inscribed on old brass ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... man who had come from afar. There was not a square inch about him that had anything to do with modern English life. His visage, which was of the colour of light porphyry, had little of its original surface left; it was a face which had been the plaything of strange fires or pestilences, that had moulded ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... not always so gentle with young men who deserted or neglected her for an earthly rival;—the offence which irritated her most, and occasionally caused her to use language which hardly bears translation into modern English. Without meaning to assert that the Queen of Heaven was jealous as Queen Blanche herself, one must still admit that she was very severe on lovers who showed willingness to leave her service, and take service with ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... that the question is, not what they call it now, but what it was called in Cromwell's time. Throw away general usage as a lawgiver, and this is the point which emerges. Probably R[u]ke-by would be right, with a little turning of the Italian [u] towards [o] of modern English. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... to speak solely of "the modern English novel," the stay and bread-winner of Mr. Mudie; and in the author of the most pleasing novel on that roll, "All Sorts and Conditions of Men," the desire is natural enough. I can conceive then, that he would hasten to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... debate. But it is nothing but the plainest justice to say that he was a philosopher, a theologian, and, we may add, a prophet, of whom, for his great gifts, and, still more, for his noble and pure use of them, the modern English Church ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... Editor that the voyagers and travellers should tell their own story: In that department of his labour, his only object has been to assume the character of interpreter between them and the readers, by translating foreign or antiquated language into modern English. Sometimes, indeed, where no record remains of particular voyages and travels, as written by the persons who performed them, the Editor has necessarily had recourse to their historians. But, on every such occasion, the most ancient and most authentic ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... prose has been employed instead of verse, for two reasons. In the first place, no metrical form has yet been found which, in the writer's judgment, at all adequately represents in modern English the effect of the Old English alliterative verse, or stave-rime. And in the second place, to the writer's thinking, no one but a poet should attempt to write verse: and on that principle, translations would be few and far ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... of that word, better than the Quatre Fils d'Aymon—the history of Renaut de Montauban and his brothers and cousin, the famous enchanter-knight Maugis. As a "boy's book" there is perhaps none better, and the present writer remembers an extensive and apparently modern English translation which was a favourite "sixty years since." Berte aux grands Pies, the earliest form of a well-known legend, has the extrinsic charm of being mentioned by Villon; while there is no ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... and the group-spirit of the "Society" at this period. Whatever any individual could contribute was given for the common cause and went into the life of the whole. I have given the passages, which I have quoted from this "Epistle," in modern English. ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... absorbed by them, and, in consequence, of reproducing, according to the measure of his power, these, and these alone. Of this prepondering quality of Shakespeare's genius, accordingly, almost the whole of modern English poetry has, it appears to me, felt the influence. To the exclusive attention on the part of his imitators to this, it is in a great degree owing that of the majority of modern poetical works the details alone ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... summer exhibition he contributed three pictures, showing great and various power in their composition. Dante at Verona, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Golden Hours. The first of these, one of the most remarkable pictures of our modern English school, in which "Dante" appears, is a large work, with figures something less than life-size. It illustrates the verses in ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys |
