"Critic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 1831 to 1849, when Poe's unhappy life came to an end in a Baltimore hospital, his literary activity was chiefly that of a journalist, critic, and short story writer. He lived in Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York. Authors who now exploit their fat bargains with their publishers may have forgotten that letter which Poe wrote back to Philadelphia ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... asserts her iron reign, There, as in vengeance of the world's disdain, This half-flesh'd hag midst Wit's bright blossoms stalks, And, breathing winter, withers where she walks; Though there, long outlaw'd, desp'rate with disgrace, Invidious Dulness wields the critic mace, And sworn in hate, exerts his ruffian might Where'er young genius meditates his flight. Erewhile, when WHITE, by this fell fiend oppress'd, Felt Hope's fine fervours languish in his breast, When shrunk with scorn, and trembling to aspire, He dropp'd desponding his insulted ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... The conventional critic may smile at the conceit of a fat Hamlet, but I am satisfied that my theory is amply sustained by the text, as well as by the true solution of the alleged knotty points of Shakspeare's mental character, over which the ponderous but inflated brain of Dr. Johnson stultified itself. He ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... woman wishes she were a little smaller; one does not like her complexion, or the color of her eyes and hair; one has a nose too large; another has a nose too small; one has round shoulders; another has a low forehead; and so every one becomes a critic of his or her style of structure. When we find a man or a woman who is absolutely faultless in form and features, we usually find a fool. I do not remember that I ever met a very handsome man or woman, who was not as vain and shallow as a peacock. ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... the amiable critic—and say that I know this is not the Italian spelling of cafe. I use the French spelling here, as in later chapters where it belongs, for the sake ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... with the picture of these two old pensioners from the high seas, living together in the evening of their days in a narrow court in a London slum, the one paralysed and the other blind; the one a most brilliant and imaginative story-teller, the other a most cautious, modest, tentative, and genial critic. And let us sit between their two chairs for a moment and listen to the moving story of Old Joe, believing it with all the simplicity, if not with all the stupefied, admiration of the little slum children who gaze at the pirate ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... to-day you were fairly beaming with triumph and joy, and now I have scarcely left you for an hour and return to find you in the depths of melancholy. Have you seen anything in the papers which has annoyed you? Something from the pen of a malicious, spiteful critic, I'll be bound." ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... the original English; but I actually knew a German who kept Bayard Taylor's Faust by his bedside because he preferred it to Goethe's. I think there is something the matter with people who prefer translated to original poetry, but I will leave a critic of standing to explain what ails them. I have never met a German who would admit that Shakespeare was an Englishman. They say that his birth at Stratford-on-Avon was a little accident, and that he belongs to the world. They say this out of politeness, because what ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... critic would have us believe one of two things; God either took the heathen sacrificial ritual, veneered it with some sort of divine approval, and handed it over to his people for their use, or by some sort of evolution the book of Leviticus came up out of the heathen ...
— The Testimony of the Bible Concerning the Assumptions of Destructive Criticism • S. E. Wishard
... If any critic falls on me for putting inarticulate sounds in a dialogue as above, I answer, with all the insolence I can command at present, "Hit boys as big as yourself"—bigger, perhaps, such as Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes; they began ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... the actors we have ever seen in the old world or in the new, he who imposes the most difficult task upon the critic is Mr. Cooper. It is scarcely possible to generalize his acting. The great inequality of his performance, the defects of some parts, the doubtfulness of others, and the amazing beauties which he ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... wasn't looking. Oh, it's you!" she murmured vaguely. Her fellow-assistant had a headache, and forty-five written papers to correct. She had just heard, too, a cutting criticism of her work made by the self-appointed faculty critic; the criticism was cleverly worded, and had just enough truth to fly quickly and hurt her with the head of her department. So she was not ...
— A Reversion To Type • Josephine Daskam
... of the service one of the trustees of my reverend critic's church came and apologized for his pastor. He had a high regard for him, the trustee said, but in this instance there could be no doubt in the mind of any one who had heard both sermons that of the two mine was the tolerant, ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... emotions so rigidly reject critical restraints, and disdain to be bound by rule, as those excited by the fine arts. A man unimpressible and incapable of moods and tenses, is for that reason an incompetent critic; and the sensitive, excitable man, how can he know that he does not impose his peculiar ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... I had not done so. The wretched Pamela, once my pride, was for some reason unpopular with the only critic about whose opinion I cared, and had fallen accordingly from ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... state of his soul he represented it as humble, penitent, and purified. Two of these gentlemen were High-Church, and he noticed their peculiarities: one was a certain half-musical monotony in speaking which might be called by a severe critic sing-song. Perhaps they thought the intoning of the service in a cathedral could be transferred with advantage ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... slender! As for the men, the case is little better; Some, of the dialogue scarce know a letter: All unacquainted with each classic rule, We feel we've need enough to go to school; And trembling stand, afraid to come before ye, And of the Schoolfellows to tell the story. Yet need this be? I see no critic here; No surly newspaper have we to fear; Our scenery may be bad, but this is certain, Bright decorations are before the curtain, Under whose influence, you may well believe, We do not sigh for Stanfield, grieve for Grieve! Yet not too far to carry innovation, And to comply with settled regulation, ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... meal. It was not hard for him to lead Krafft round to the desired subject. It seemed that one of the masters in the Conservatorium had expressed a very unequivocal opinion of Schilsky's talents as a composer, and Krafft was now sarcastic, now merry, at this critic's expense. Maurice laid down his knife, and, in the first break, asked abruptly: "When ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... Watts-Dunton stood for enthusiasm. His gospel as a critic was to seek for the good that is to be found in most things, literary or otherwise; and what is, perhaps, most remarkable in one who has known so many great men, he never seemed to draw invidious comparisons between the writers and ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... a major critic a good part of his charm and interest for us stems from a mind that is not in the least doctrinaire. His method is inductive, his appeal is always to the human psychology as that can be known experientially, and his standards are Aristotelian (if by ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... "you must make the most of the time. The Yankees may not give us another chance. Across yonder, where you see that dim light trying to shine through the dirty window, Winthrop is printing his paper, which comes out this morning. As he is a critic of the Government, I suggest that we go over and see the task ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... everything yields up its latent negation, passing on to its own contradiction—gives truer lights and shades than your pedantic Philistinism. Is Truth really in the cold white light, or in the shimmering interplay of the rainbow tints that fuse in it? Bah! Your Philistine critic will sum me up after I am dead in a phrase; or he will take my character to pieces and show how they contradict each other, and adjudge me, like a schoolmaster, so many good marks for this quality, and so many bad marks for that. Biographers ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... specialist can but partially open a limited province. So with what confidence can one with no pretensions to original scholarship, however he may use the work of deeper students, express his opinion on any special point in a survey of thirty centuries? If, accordingly, any competent critic shall trouble himself to convict the present writer of error: "This view of Epictetus confuses the earlier and the later Stoics;" or "This account of the Hebrew prophets lacks the latest fruit of research,"—or, other like defect,—acknowledgment of such error as quite possible ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... what else he may have written in this copious record, and what passages of gloom and melancholy may have been suppressed; but as his Diaries stand, they offer in a remarkable degree the reflection of a mind whose development was not in the direction of sadness. A very clever French critic, whose fancy is often more lively than his observation is deep, M. Emile Montegut, writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes, in the year 1860, invents for our author the appellation of "Un Romancier Pessimiste." Superficially speaking, perhaps, the title is a happy one; but only ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... Touchstone, and Jaques. The latter is most noteworthy. Hazlitt calls him the only purely contemplative character Shakespeare ever drew. From the beginning to the end of the play he does absolutely nothing except to think and moralize. Another critic has said, "Shakespeare designed Jaques to be a maker of fine sentiments, a dresser forth in sweet language of the ordinary commonplaces...." It has been suggested,[1] not without some show of reason, that Shakespeare ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... little window. Her disappointment amounted to actual physical pain. She found no comfort, as a wiser person might have done, in certain of Miss Delia's expressions; she only realized that her best friend and her most generous critic could find nothing good in what she had done. Her duty this afternoon was only to make up the mail for the down train; then her time was her own till the next mail train came up at half-past five. At two o'clock she closed the office again ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... letters which brought me in contact with some of the first circles on the Continent, MUST have left it without leaving his character behind him; and that such a character could not, in the natural order of things—seen even through the sensitive medium of a French critic—have been guilty of the grossness and improprieties imputed to me by M. Licquet. I treat therefore this "damnation in wholesale" with scorn and contempt: and hasten to impress the reader with a more favourable ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the city editor's desk, when that gentleman was upstairs fighting for two more columns of space, was always a source of innocent joy to us, and his imitations of the comedians of the variety halls delighted even the dramatic critic, from whom the comedians themselves failed ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... account of a Mission to Ashantee, p. 480, and perceiving that the errors in that translation are thus propagated to the public through the medium of the London Papers; which although perhaps of little consequence to the general reader, yet, as they are of importance to the critic, and to the investigator of African affairs, I shall take the liberty of offering a few observations ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... good or for bad they speedily became indistinguishable from the native-born. The greater proportion of failures among the Irish, brave and vigorous though they were, was due to their quarrelsomeness, and their fondness for drink and litigation; besides, remarks this Kentucky critic, "they soon take to the gun, which is the ruin of everything." None of these foreign-born elements were of any very great importance in the development of Kentucky; its destiny was shaped and controlled by its men of ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the business side of the transaction, raised rents arbitrarily to such a pitch that the tenantry were unable to meet their liabilities. Wholesale evictions ensued, and in this wise arose the condition of things in which the Times—never an unfriendly critic of the landed interest—was constrained to admit in 1852 that "the name of an Irish landlord stinks in the ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... forward to Ivanhoe, by Sir ARTHUR S. SULLIVAN, Mus. Doc. From what our Musical Critic has seen of the score, he is able to wink his eye wisely but not too well, and to hint that as Mr. Guppy says, "There are chords"; and to make these chords in combination, the strings are admirably fitted. There is one chord (will it be recognised as belonging to Box?) ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various
... sense; Misliking women, not from cross or whim, But that his mother shared too much in him, And he half felt that what in them was grace Made the unlucky weakness of his race. 40 What powers he had he hardly cared to know, But sauntered through the world as through a show; A critic fine in his haphazard way, A sort of mild La Bruyere on half-pay. For comic weaknesses he had an eye Keen as an acid for an alkali, Yet you could feel, through his sardonic tone, He loved them all, unless ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... my wife than even she perhaps quite realizes. Not only has it been her study, since our marriage, to give me freedom for my work, but her literary advice, founded on her own experience as writer and critic, has been of the highest value, and she has ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... of a certificate?" a Spaceland critic may ask: "Is not the procreation of a Square Son a certificate from Nature herself, proving the Equal-sidedness of the Father?" I reply that no Lady of any position will mary an uncertified Triangle. Square offspring has sometimes resulted from a slightly Irregular Triangle; but in almost ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... same in every place and age. In Pope's time 'coxcombs' attempted to 'vanquish Berkely with a grin,' and they would fain do the same to-day. 'Is not this common,' exclaimed a renowned musician, 'the least little critic, in reviewing some work of art, will say, pity this and pity that—this should have been attired, that omitted? Yea, with his wiry fiddle-string will he creak out his accursed variations. But let him sit down and compose himself. He sees no improvements ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... without the mane? That's Tom Day, the dramatic critic of a dozen papers. A terrible Philistine. Lucky for Shakspeare he didn't ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Intrinsically considered, "Common Sense" was indeed no great performance. The matter, thin at best, was neither profoundly nor subtly reasoned; the manner could hardly be described by even the most complacent critic as humane or engaging. Yet "Common Sense" had its brief hour of fame. Its good fortune was to come at the psychological moment; and being everywhere read during the months from January to July, 1776, it was precisely suited to convince men, not so much that they ought to declare ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... but with all the nervous agitation of a hypochondriac. But why should he defend his opinion by arguments at once unfair and untrue? it is not true, that "in the present case the public has decided" in favour of the altered play: "Cordelia," says the critic, "from the time of Tate has always retired with victory and felicity:" but does he mean to assert, that the original drama, before Tate's corruption, was not well received by the public? he cannot assert this, because he could not make good such an assertion. The fact ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... shall show hereafter, his disregard of truth) is valuable as a contemporary of high rank; Lesley, also a contemporary, and of unblemished character, is still more valuable. Plowden is a fair and sagacious commentator; Jones, a subtle and suggestive critic ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... Show the Flag Soldier on Crutches, The Soldierly Spring in the Trenches Struggle, The Sympathy Taking His Place Thanksgiving Things That Make a Soldier Great, The Thoughts of a Soldier Time for Deeds, The To a Kindly Critic To a Lady Knitting To the Men at Home Undaunted, The United Unsettled Scores, The Waiter at the Camp, The Warriors War's Homecoming We Need a Few More Optimists We've Had a Letter From the Boy We Who Stay at Home When the Drums Shall Cease ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... that had arisen over his conception and treatment, and surely few readers would like to miss from the volume the clever and humorous apology for his own method which the poet advances in the Introduction to the third canto. William Erskine, refined critic and life-long friend, is asked to be patient and generous while the poet proceeds ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... eyes hid the most masterful woman at that court. He made himself her assiduous servant, whether in hunting amid the snow or in the entertainments at the palace, but a quizzical deliberate word would now and again show him that she was still his enemy. With the Princess Casimira he was a profound critic of observances: he invented a new cravat and was most careful that there should never be a wrinkle in his stockings; with the Princess Charlotte he laughed till his head sang. He played all manner of parts; the palace might ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... complete indifference during the reading of the sonnet; he was unfamiliar as yet with the disconcerting impassibility of the professional critic, wearied by much reading of poetry, prose, and plays. Lucien was accustomed to applause. He choked down his disappointment and read another, a favorite with Mme. de Bargeton and with some of his friends in the ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... manager, owner, critic or spectator, who went through the world's series of 1912 ever will forget it. There never was another like it. Years may elapse before there shall be a similar series and it may be that the next to come will be equally sensational, perhaps ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... known as a teacher of literature and critic, also as a writer of books on literary subjects, has written a novel, and one of singular appeal. Its central character is a young man facing the world, taking himself perhaps over-seriously, but genuinely perplexed as to what to ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... is there. You will miss much. He is not impassioned nor a great orator, such as Chatham or Fox, or Webster or Dolliver, or even Bryan—but he has a keen, quick, cutting mind, the mind of a really great critic, and his manner is that of the gentleman scholar. He is first among all men to-day, ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... praise or a little more blame, and he would have suspected himself of genius; as it was, he was content to stand distinguished from the ruck of the popular and the respectable by virtue of that imagination which his critic had allowed to him. He was not a great painter, and he knew it; but he was a brilliantly clever one, and he knew that also, and in the fact and his intimate knowledge of it lay the secret of his success. He kept a cool head on his shoulders, and thus his position and the personal ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... makes another trip in the present (April) number of The Newcomes. Clive writes a letter dated "May 1, 183—," which is at once answered by Pendennis, who sends him "an extract from Bagham's article on the Royal Academy," and Mr. Thackeray makes the critic ask, "Why have we no picture of the sovereign and her august consort from Smee's brush?" To which it may be answered, "Because, even if the '183—' represents the time of Victoria's reign, her Majesty did not take ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... well known) a 4to volume that in some respects is the very worst 4to now extant in the world—viz., a critical edition of the. "Paradise Lost." I observe, in the "Edinburgh Review," (July, 1851, No. 191, p. 15,) that a learned critic supposes Bentley to have meant this edition as a "practical jest." Not at all. Neither could the critic have fancied such a possibility, if he had taken the trouble (which I did many a year back) to examine it. A jest book it certainly is, and the most prosperous of jest books, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... often thought, that it would be neither uninstructive nor unamusing to analyze, and bring forward into distinct consciousness, that complex feeling, with which readers in general take part against the author, in favour of the critic; and the readiness with which they apply to all poets the old sarcasm of Horace upon the scribblers of ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... her hand, her veil fell away from her face, and he saw its beauty with the benevolent admiration of an old man whose blood has cooled. He was so tall that the erect, thin figure reminded Victoria of a lonely desert palm. The young girl was no stern critic, and was more inclined to see good than evil in every one she met; therefore to her the long snowy beard, the large dreamy eyes under brows like Maieddine's, and the slow, benevolent smile of the Agha meant nobility of character. Her heart was warm for the splendid ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... autumn's here, And the leaves curl up in sheer Disgust, And the cold rains fringe the pine, You really must Stop that supercilious whine—- Or you'll be shot, by some mephitic Angry critic. ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... it would be almost the same as ask you for another, if I shall make apology in case I have not find the correct idiotism of your language in this letter; so I shall not make none at all—only throw myself at your mercy, like a great critic. ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... however, to find a stranger better acquainted with the brightest poetical ornament of this country than any of ourselves; and that the admiration of the English nation for Shakspeare should first obtain a truly enlightened interpreter in a critic of Germany. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Europe when Field had counted on having his companionship in London carried the former back to Washington, where he joined with some other equally sanguine writers in the attempt to float a literary and political periodical named The Critic. On February 15th, 1890, Field wrote to his friend from ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... acquainted with Randal said he had not a vice! The fact being that his whole composition was one epic vice, so elaborately constructed that it had not an episode which a critic could call ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... so terribly out of tune, you see, Master Ned." He was evidently looked upon as something of a critic in music. He rather liked to be so considered, and thought it unnecessary to assure them he knew nothing about it. The old piano sounded to him very much like the bottom of two tin pans mildly banged together; but if it had been a much better ...
— Harper's Young People, June 29, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... draughts of wine compels To cool the cutlets' seething grease, When the sonorous Breguet tells Of the commencement of the piece. A critic of the stage malicious, A slave of actresses capricious, Oneguine was a citizen Of the domains of the side-scene. To the theatre he repairs Where each young critic ready stands, Capers applauds with clap of hands, ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... possessed in no small degree, though curiously enough entirely disclaiming the quality, the gift of presenting the essential personality of the sitter, that which a critic has called the power of "realizing an individuality." This is seen most clearly in his portraits of men, and naturally in the portraits of the men he knew ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... anent the Snark's departure with refrains like, "Not yet, but soon." And Charmian cheered me up by reminding me of the bow, and I went to a banker and borrowed five thousand more. There was one recompense for the delay, however. A friend of mine, who happens to be a critic, wrote a roast of me, of all I had done, and of all I ever was going to do; and he planned to have it published after I was out on the ocean. I was still on shore when it came out, and he has ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... the time of writing been in existence for three years, the term of office, it will be remembered, of the Council of Agriculture and of the two Boards. It would be unreasonable to expect in so short a time any great achievement; but the understanding critic will attach importance rather to the spirit in which the work was approached than to the actual amount of work which was accomplished. He may say that no true estimate of its value can be formed until ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... patriarchs was followed by one that dealt with the incidents of the Exodus. The writer said that he feared that even the most indulgent critic must allow that the whole scheme of Moses was a shocking one; but he was probably the greatest man that ever lived on the face of the earth, if he was the leader and organizer of a band of depredators who for bloodthirst and rapacity had no parallel in history. How could it be expected that a kingdom ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... candid critic, I would ask you if the likeness can be considered correct when you give her no legs? You will see at the ballet that you are in error about women at present, Richard. That admirable institution which our venerable elders have imported from Gallia for the instruction ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sculpture or portraiture, that here nature is to be exalted or idealized rather than imitated, is in error. No pictorial or sculptural combinations of points of human liveliness do more than approach the living and breathing beauty. In landscape alone is the principle of the critic true; and, having felt its truth here, it is but the headlong spirit of generalization which has led him to pronounce it true throughout all the domains of art. Having, I say, felt its truth here; for the feeling is no affectation or chimera. The mathematics afford no ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... critic, a learner who wants to analyze and dissect; the man of affairs is a director and builder and wants to command and construct; the man of this group is a seer. He is a lover and a dreamer; he watches and broods over life, profoundly feeling it, enamored ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... enters but seldom into the camp Sunday—such privileges are rare, although now camp parsons are more numerous than a few years ago—but at best one can only count on one or two services a year. When a Church service is held he would be a carping critic indeed who is not satisfied and pleased with the earnest attention with which the service is followed and the vigorous singing of hymns and chants in which all the boys join so lustily; it is a reminder of Home to them, and the familiar service is ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... instance of the same result much nearer our own times. Schiller's Raeuber, that wonderful play, written by a green youth, perverted the taste and imagination of all the young men in Germany. An accomplished critic of our own country (Hazlitt), speaking of this play, says it was the first he ever read, and such was the effect it produced on him, that "it stunned him, like a blow." After the lapse of five-and-twenty years, he could not forget it; ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... of continental Europe. That is no answer to the criticism that the only law now needed was one to 'abolish and extinguish' the persecuting laws which had been enacted of old. But even to such a critic, and on the ground of theory, there is something to be said. It is not true that the new theory was worse than the old. On the contrary, the old theory allowed no private judgment to the individual at ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... trial was in July, 1837. Mr. Cocking's parachute was totally different in principle from that form which, as we have seen, had met with a fair measure of success at the hands of early experimenters; and on the eve of its trial it was strongly denounced and condemned in the London Press by the critic whom we have recently so ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... novel suffered, perhaps deservedly, for what was involved in these intentions—for its quality of unexpectedness in particular—that unforgivable sin in the critic's sight—the immediate precursor of 'Ethelberta' having been a purely rural tale. Moreover, in its choice of medium, and line of perspective, it undertook a delicate task: to excite interest in a drama—if such a dignified word may be used in the connection—wherein servants ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... of course the great majority of those who followed the story were silent. A writer cannot, like a speaker, look into the eyes of his audience and observe its mental attitude toward his thought. If my memory serves me, Mr. R. R. Bowker was the earliest critic to write some friendly words in the "Evening Mail;" but at first my venture was very generally ignored. Then some unknown friend marked an influential journal published in the interior of the State and mailed it so timely that it reached me on Christmas ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... that is, that I am grateful to God and to you, dear friends, for the unbroken harmony, confidence, affection, and forbearance which have brightened and lightened my work. Of its worth I cannot judge; its imperfections I know better than the most unfavourable critic; but I can humbly take the words of this text as expressive, not, indeed, of my attainments, but of my aims. One of my texts, on my first Sunday in Manchester, was 'We preach Christ and Him crucified,' and I look back, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... this, the first play under his actor-management, will go well. It ought to, for though, in point of power to thrill, it did not quite confirm the promise of its sinister name and theme it was never for a moment dull, and its faults were the kind of stage-faults about which, while they give the critic a chance of being unkind, a British audience never worries ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various
... Montesquieu what Homer has been to the didactic writers on epic poetry. As the latter have considered the work of the immortal bard as the perfect model from which the principles and rules of the epic art were to be drawn, and by which all similar works were to be judged, so this great political critic appears to have viewed the Constitution of England as the standard, or to use his own expression, as the mirror of political liberty; and to have delivered, in the form of elementary truths, the several characteristic principles of that particular ...
— The Federalist Papers
... accumulates should turn out to be. It can laugh at the phenomenal distinctions on which science is based, for it draws its vital breath from a region which—whether above or below—is at least altogether different from that in which science dwells. A critic, however, who cannot disprove the truth of the metaphysic creed, can at least raise his voice in protest against its disguising itself in 'scientific' plumes. I think that all who have had the patience ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... but inferior man, having a pardonable fondness for ugliness. A great critic like ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... He pored over them, driving his cart or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse, carefully noting the true, tender, or sublime from affectation or fustian. 'I am convinced,' he adds, 'I owe to this practice much of my critic craft, such ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... series of impartial hand-shakes, accompanied by a "Happy to make your acquaintance, sir." He looked at Madame de Cintre, but she was not looking at him. If his personal self-consciousness had been of a nature to make him constantly refer to her, as the critic before whom, in company, he played his part, he might have found it a flattering proof of her confidence that he never caught her eyes resting upon him. It is a reflection Newman did not make, but ...
— The American • Henry James
... time I was blessed with a hearer the like of whom I shall never get again. He had so inordinate a capacity for being pleased as to have utterly disqualified him for the post of critic in any of our monthly Reviews. The old man was like a perfectly ripe Alfonso mango—not a trace of acid or coarse fibre in his composition. His tender clean-shaven face was rounded off by an all-pervading baldness; there was not the vestige of a tooth to worry the inside of his mouth; ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... the critic simply. "Of course, I am prejudiced in favour of your work; but that would not make it haunt me as if it were my own. I can see your faults; you are horribly uneven. There are lines here and there which make me cold; lines which are put in for the sake of ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... minister's wife has the grace of a kind and tactful courtesy toward all classes, she may contribute mightily to the popular influence of her husband; and if she is a woman of culture and literary taste, she can be of immense service to him in the preparation of his sermons. The best critic that ministers can have is one who has a right to criticize and to "truth it in love." Who has a better right to reprove, exhort and correct with all long suffering than the woman who has given us her heart and herself? There are a hundred matters in the course of a year in which a sensible ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... lies in the fact that the Grail legend consists of a congeries of widely differing elements—elements which at first sight appear hopelessly incongruous, if not completely contradictory, yet at the same time are present to an extent, and in a form, which no honest critic ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... Homer, perceive the bitter inefficacy of fighting the scientific critics. Walt Mason saw the versification was artful instead of "bungling and crude," but the Times critic knows a copy out of a "chanty ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... of life." The subject was not a new one to Froude. He had lectured on Erasmus and Luther at Newcastle five-and-twenty years before. The contrast between the two reformers is perennially interesting. Goethe, a supreme critic, thought that reform of the Church should have been left to Erasmus, and that Luther was ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... him a favor, which wrought upon his feelings and induced him to impart to his benefactor the composition of his extraordinary Powder. This English knight was at different periods of his life an admiral, a theologian, a critic, a metaphysician, a politician, and a disciple of Alchemy. As is not unfrequent with versatile and inflammable people, he caught fire at the first spark of a new medical discovery, and no sooner got home to England than he began ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... spirit of the age which he was the last to touch lived on in Dryden. He loved and studied Chaucer and Spenser even while he was copying Moliere and Corneille. His noblest panegyric was pronounced over Shakspere. At the time when Rymer, the accepted critic of the Restoration, declared "our poetry of the last age as rude as our architecture," and sneered at "that Paradise Lost of Milton's which some are pleased to call a poem," Dryden saw in it "one of the greatest, most noble and sublime poems which either this age or nation ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... them, and rest a little, and think new thought, or let new thought flow into them, from the gentle air of some new place, where nobody has heard of them—a place whose cares, being felt by proxy, almost seem romantic, and where the eyes spare brain and heart with a critic's self-complacence? If any such place yet remains, the happy soul may seek it in ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... successful; that is to say, the fire-engine I have invented is now going, and answers much better than any other that has yet been made." This is as is usual with the Scotch in speech, in a low key and extremely modest, on a par with the verdict rendered by the Dunfermline critic who had ventured to attend "the playhouse" in Edinburgh to see Garrick in Hamlet—"no bad." The truth was that, so pronounced were the results of proper workmanship, coupled with some of those improvements which Watt was constantly devising, ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... Alders-gate-street, in Jewin-street, in Barbican, in Bartholomew-close; in Holborn, looking back to Lincoln's Inn Fields; in Holborn, near Red-lion-square; in Scotland-yard; in a house looking to St. James' Park, now belonging to an eminent writer on legislation, and lately occupied by a celebrated critic and metaphysician; and he died in Artillery-walk, Bunhill-fields; and was buried in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... the classics was most extensive and accurate, and by her translations from the Latin her reputation was to a great extent made. Wordsworth and Southey were her intimate friends, and intense admirers of her genius. In a review written by an eminent critic, it was remarked of her that "she was the inheritrix of her father's genius, and almost rival of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... is nothing like it in the whole range of naval literature.... The work is entirely original in conception, masterful in construction, and scholarly in execution.—The Critic. ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... the beginning of Bob's career as a dramatic critic, a career in which he gained authority and in which his literary faculties, his felicity of expression and soundness of judgment ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... Timrod's death a Northern critic, writing of the new birth of interest in Timrod's work, said: "Time is the ideal editor." Surely, Editor Time's blue pencil has dealt kindly ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... sympathy with people who owned insanitary cottages. It had been her fond belief that she at least possessed none. And now here was Coryston, her eldest son, camped in the very midst of her property, not as her friend and support, but as her enemy and critic; poking his nose into every corner of the estates, taken in by every ridiculous complaint, preaching Socialism at full blast to the laborers, and Land Acts to the farmers, stirring up the Nonconformists to such antics as the Baptists had lately been playing on Sundays at her gates; discovering ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... existence, she breaks through the wall she is easy game for anybody—as likely to marry a jockey or a professional forger as one of the young men of her desire. One should not blame a rich girl too much for marrying a titled and perhaps attractive foreigner. The would-be critic has only to step into a Fifth Avenue ballroom and see what she is offered in his place to sympathize with and perhaps applaud her selection. Better a year of Europe than a cycle of—shall we say, Narragansett? After ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... of the careers of our great English actors will really sustain the charge of want of literary appreciation. It may be true that actors pass too quickly away from the form, in order to get at the feeling that gives the form beauty and colour, and that, where the literary critic studies the language, the actor looks simply for the life; and yet, how well the great actors have appreciated that marvellous music of words which in Shakespeare, at any rate, is so vital an element of poetic ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... one absorbed in the spectacle of a world travailing for lack of the gospel of "Political Justice", the study of orthographical niceties must have seemed an occupation for Bedlamites. Again—as a distinguished critic and editor of Shelley, Professor Dowden, aptly observes in this connexion—'a great poet is not of an age, but for all time.' Irregular or antiquated forms such as 'recieve,' 'sacrifize,' 'tyger,' 'gulph,' 'desart,' 'falshood,' and the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... unique, needful, valuable, stimulative. The originality, audacity, and brilliancy of the attempt are always a tonic to my brain and spiritual nature. With good reason has this poem been termed "extraordinary;" and that thinker and critic, James Mudge, has named it "the finest illustration of grotesque art ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... Department, and one of the very first paleographers of the age; Mr. Collier has made a formal reply; the Department of Public Records has spoken through Mr. Duffus Hardy; the "Edinburgh Review" has taken up the controversy on one side and "Fraser's Magazine" on the other; the London "Critic" has kept up a galling fire on Mr. Collier, his folio, and his friends, to which the "Athenaeum" has replied by an occasional shot, red-hot; the author of "Literary Cookery," (said to be Mr. Arthur Edmund Brae,) a well-read, ingenious, caustic, and remorseless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... she told the dentist, "I'm no critic, I only know what I like." She knew that she liked the "Ideal Heads," lovely girls with flowing straw-colored hair and immense, upturned eyes. These always had for title, "Reverie," or "An Idyll," or "Dreams ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... on American literature are, as all her other remarks, to be received with great caution. Where she obtained her information I know very well, and certain it is that she has been most egregiously deceived. An American critic observes very truly:— ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... who have passed on. The verbal are by trance mediums, whose utterances appear to be controlled by outside intelligences. The written from automatic writers whose script is produced in the same way. At these words the critic naturally and reasonably shies, with a "What nonsense! How can you control the statement of this medium who is consciously or unconsciously pretending to inspiration?" This is a healthy scepticism, and should animate every experimenter who tests a new medium. The proofs must lie in the communication ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... him, which he quotes, respecting his famous picture of the Galatea, Raphael says, that in order to paint a beautiful woman, he must see many, but that, after all, he must work upon a certain ideal image present in his mind. 'We thus see,' says the French critic, 'that he really sought after the beautiful which Nature presents to art, but which the imagination of the artist alone can seize, and genius ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... misinterpretation, we call the work insincere, though the author may have written in perfect good faith. That is a necessary distinction to keep in mind. If you call a man's work insincere, the superficial critic will take it as calling the man himself insincere; but the two are distinct, and it needs to be emphasised, for sincere men are making these propagandist plays, of which the manifest and glaring untruth is working mischief to the national mind. A type of such a play is familiar ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... you see I correct these? Well, I am not less intelligent now. But there are many difficulties. I am far clearer on all points than I was shut up in the prisoned body (prisoned, prisoning or imprisoned you ought to say). No, I don't mean, to get it that way. 'See here, H, don't view me with a critic's eye, but pass my imperfections by.' Of course, I know all that as well as anybody on your sphere (of course). Well, I think so. I tell you, old fellow, it don't do to pick all these little errors too much when they amount to nothing in one way. You have light enough and brain ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... as those with which, in days when there existed for me no critic less gentle than yourself, I brought to you my childish manuscripts; feelings only such as those which have, in later years, associated with your heart all that has moved or occupied my own,—lead me once more to seek assurance from the grasp ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... night when work is done— how marvellously all these tone with the general sentiment. Shall it be maintained that they are arbitrary conventions, mere fanciful products of the association of ideas? Armed with triple brass must be the breast of the critic who could uphold such a view. For the common heart of humanity repudiates it, and intuitively feels that in such a picture there is more than a display of artistic skill embodying subtle symbols—it feels that there is a blending of elements ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... which inoculates the minds of our women with wrong ideas may have, the following three cases reported briefly in The Critic ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... the officers had no lack of partners, and voted it great fun. There were many very pretty girls among them, and several with much more of the rose on their cheeks than usually falls to the share of West Indian damsels. Some censorious critic even ventured to hint that it was added by the hand of art. That this was false was evident, for the weather was so hot that had rouge been used it would have inevitably been detected; but the island damsels trusted to their good figures ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... language of the national religion. But both in religion and in philosophy he remains before all things a man of the world; his satire is more of manners and follies than of vice or impiety; and his excellent sense keeps him always to that "golden mean" in which he sums up the lesson of Epicurus. As a critic he shows the same general good sense, but his criticisms do not profess to be original or to go much beneath the surface. In Greek literature he follows Alexandrian taste; in Latin he represents the tendency of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... a substratum of truth in the remark once made by a caustic foreign critic, that an Englishman talks more and knows less about horses and their management than ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... dear master?" Porbus asked respectfully, while the young man with difficulty repressed his strong desire to beat the critic. ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... predominance of which in this tragedy a recent critic has not a little carpingly condemned, is entirely natural in such an untamed savage as Abdelazer, whilst history affords many a parallel ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... even profound; but the expression is surely rugged and jolting to the last degree; and there are many lines nearly as ineuphonious. Here are some samples, collected by that fastidious critic, Mr. Frederic Harrison— ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... through superstition, doubt, fear, reason,—in tight inexpressibles, with "a belt such as is worn by the old German students." You will pardon me for treating such an awful person as this somewhat lightly; but there is always, I think, such a dash of the ridiculous in the French sublime, that the critic should try and do justice to both, or he may fail in giving a fair account of either. This character of Hebronius, the type of Mrs. Sand's convictions—if convictions they may be called—or, at least, the allegory under which her doubts are represented, is, in parts, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... not believe (scribbled a critic, hurriedly jotting down his impressions, to be expanded when he got back to his office) that Donna Lola smiled once throughout her performance. As she withdrew, numbers of bouquets fell on to the stage. But the proud one of Seville did not deign to return to pick them up, and one ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... the man from his work, if you are to be a good critic," Mrs. Faulkner said, and though this remark may be true enough I did not answer it, for Nina was looking extremely bored by the conversation we ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... were impressed by his mastery and poetic feeling. Heymann was not, however, to begin teaching at the Frankfort Conservatory until the following autumn, so MacDowell remained in Wiesbaden, studying composition and theory with the distinguished critic and teacher, Louis Ehlert, while his mother returned ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... his own productions, and that whatever the merit of the fragments may be, that merit does not belong to himself. He is an Editor and an Editor only; and he therefore feels himself as much at liberty to express his opinion of the contents of the following pages as the most impartial critic. ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... ostensibly studying engineering, there are but two pamphlets, printed in his boyhood, which are not written when he had acquired his finished style. Louis' last creation, Weir of Hermiston, he himself thought was his master-piece, and he was always his own surest and severest critic. The portrait of the judge on whom he modelled Hermiston, i.e., Braxfield, was not in Stevenson's advocate days bequeathed to the Parliament House, but he had seen it in a Raeburn Exhibition he reviewed. He recollected ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... a fair critic of the works in verse and prose that are shown me; but perhaps I speak my opinion with almost too great freedom. Another fault in me is that I have sometimes a spirit of delicacy far too scrupulous, ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... a failure. After the first act, many left the theatre; at the end of the second, most of the others started out. A cynical critic as he rose from his aisle seat ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... with its material, and produced in the mastery of this every-day material, commonly called sordid, a phantasmagoria intense with beauty. A clue to all Russian realism may be found in a Russian critic's observation about Gogol: "Seldom has nature created a man so romantic in bent, yet so masterly in portraying all that is unromantic in life." But this statement does not cover the whole ground, for it is easy to see in almost all of Gogol's work his "free Cossack soul" trying to break ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... neglected of an idle mind, Hides for a moment from the eyes of men; Or lightly opened by a critic wind, ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... falls on Everyman, and the artist who played this part seemed to me, though I am no dramatic critic, to have caught the atmosphere and the spirit of the play. His performance, indeed, was very wonderful from the moment when he offers Death a thousand boons if only the dread summons may be delayed, to that ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... credit for my good taste." The lesson in English pronunciation, however, was not yet terminated. Madame was charmed with our hero's uncommon discrimination and extraordinary talents. He was the most skilful and the most agreeable critic with whom she had ever been acquainted. How invaluable must the opinion of such a person be to her on her great work! No one had yet seen a line of it; but there are moments when we are irresistibly impelled to seek a confidant; ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... be more credulous and imaginative than most. Probably why I'm a critic. And I really should know better." He looked down at ...
— Indirection • Everett B. Cole
... principally entrusted to him."* (* Naval Chronicle Volume 32 180.) These facts indicate that he was applying himself seriously to the scientific side of his profession, and that he had won the confidence of a captain who was certainly no over-indulgent critic of subordinates. ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... of these defects is hardly to be called secret, though, on the other hand, it is not well known. A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions said that "the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it"—to look at it not on a great party field-day, or at a time of parade, but in the ordinary transaction of business. There are perhaps ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... strenuous. Marcella soon developed all the airs of independence and all the jargon of two professions. Working with consuming energy and ambition, she pushed her gifts so far as to become at least a very intelligent, eager, and confident critic of the art of other people—which is much. But though art stirred and trained her, gave her new horizons and new standards, it was not in art that she found ultimately the chief excitement and motive-power of her new life—not in art, but in the birth of social and philanthropic ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... about her in the papers that were copied far and wide. Indeed, she could thank him for all the success she had had. He was at the theatre every night, watching her from the front, taking the liveliest interest in her success, and promoting it in every possible way. A critic who ventured to find fault he threatened to horsewhip; he put her portrait in the papers and printed interesting stories concerning her that had only his imagination for foundation. He transacted business for her with the local manager, and acted in her behalf in all the necessary ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... be disturbed by an angel's vengeful music too mighty our ears and too awful for our terrors? Thus it happens to us to be struck suddenly by the lightning of wrath. The reader will go on reading if the book pleases him and the critic will go on criticizing with that faculty of detachment born perhaps from a sense of infinite littleness and which is yet the only faculty that seems to assimilate man ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... Look at that," as, with a turn in the air, the hanging Hummer changed its jet-black throat to flame and scarlet that silenced the critic. ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... our object as that close familiarity with the plays, that native strength and justice of perception, and that habit of reading with an eager mind, which make many an unscholarly lover of Shakespeare a far better critic than ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... she was too utterly preoccupied to attend to anything I said of herself then, so I did not insist farther, and went up to the easel. I was not an artist nor a critic, nor in any way qualified to be a judge of painting as painting; but of genius, who is not a judge? In any art it is recognisable, patent, obvious to all. There is no human clod, no boor who is utterly insensible to its influence. It needs no education to perceive its presence, though ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... European antiquarian research on the native mind of India. Babu Rajendralal reads Sanskrit of course with the greatest ease. He is a pandit by profession, but he is at the same time a scholar and critic in our sense of the word. He has edited Sanskrit texts after a careful collation of MSS., and in his various contributions to the 'Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal,' he has proved himself completely above the prejudices of his class, freed from the erroneous views ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... were as able to endure analysis as yourself, Miss Marsden. In any case, you have no reason to fear a severe critic in me." ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... daily only stupefies him. Once a week the German daily of the highest class lightens up its heavy columns—that is, it thinks it lightens them up—with a profound, an abysmal, book criticism; a criticism which carries you down, down, down into the scientific bowels of the subject—for the German critic is nothing if not scientific—and when you come up at last and scent the fresh air and see the bonny daylight once more, you resolve without a dissenting voice that a book criticism is a mistaken ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Or it can be divided as one cuts wood—along the grain: if one thinks that there is a grain. But the two are never the same: the names never come in the same order in actual time as they come in any serious study of a spirit or a tendency. The critic who wishes to move onward with the life of an epoch, must be always running backwards and forwards among its mere dates; just as a branch bends back and forth continually; yet the grain in the branch runs true ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... January, "An arrowy and acceptable preacher in the prime of his manhood while his bow abode in strength. Genial critic, shrewd diviner of motive, and ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... the Civil Service Commission should receive the careful attention of the opponents as well as the friends of this reform. The Commission invites a personal inspection by Senators and Representatives of its records and methods, and every fair critic will feel that such an examination should precede a judgment of condemnation either of the system or its administration. It is not claimed that either is perfect, but I believe that the law is being executed with impartiality ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various |
