"Verbose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... friends, to equal or excel, (Macrob. Saturnal. l. v. c. i.) But the luxcriancy of Symmachus consists of barren leaves, without fruits, and even without flowers. Few facts, and few sentiments, can be extracted from his verbose correspondence.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... intelligible, but his manner is not to be mistaken. It is clear that he is either mad or inspired. In company, even in a tete-a-tete, Mr. Wordsworth is often silent, indolent, and reserved. If he is become verbose and oracular of late years, he was not so in his better days. He threw out a bold or an indifferent remark without either effort or pretension, and relapsed into musing again. He shone most (because he seemed most roused and animated) in reciting his own poetry, or in talking about it. ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... know whar Miss T'rese," with a rising inflection on the "whar." "I yain't seed her sence mornin', time she sont Unc' Hi'um yonda to old Morico wid de light bread an' truck," replied the verbose Betsy. "Aunt B'lindy, you ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... as lived in Paris in the eighteenth century! ineffective, sardonic, verbose, sociable, intellectual, elegant, immoral—grand gentlemen and ladies, with tears for mimic woes and none for actual ones, praise for wit, rewards for cleverness, and absolute ignorance of the destinies they ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... was more interested than in political questions. And yet, in entering the Chamber of Peers he enters public life. His sphere is enlarged, he becomes one of the familiars of the Tuileries. LOUIS PHILIPPE, verbose and full of recollections that he is fond of imparting to others, seeks the company and appreciation of this listener of note, and makes all sorts of confidences to him. The King with his very haughty bonhomie ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... say. You've asked me a question, and I'm going to answer it, that's all! I don't think, in my present frame of mind, I could bear to have you entertain the suspicion that the answer was affected or lacking in candor. Allons! Already I'm growing too verbose!" ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... and political tastes. Send him to a public school, having first eliminated as much youthfulness as is compatible with continued existence. Add some flattering masters, and a distaste for games. Season with the idea that he is born for a great career. Let him be, if possible, verbose and argumentative, and inclined to contradict his elders. Eliminate more youth and transfer hot to a University. Add more verbosity, and a strong extract of priggishness. Throw in a degree, and two speeches at the Union. Set him to simmer for two ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... voluntary gratuities to the natives, he is considered a fool—they entertain a contempt for him, which develops into intolerable impertinence. If the native comes to borrow, lend him a little less than he asks for, after a verbose preamble; if one at once lent, or gave, the full value requested, he would continue to invent a host of pressing necessities, until one's patience was exhausted. He seldom restores the loan of anything voluntarily. On being ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... Publick Accounts be laid before the Grand Jury at least twice a year.' That the grand jury was to be purged of all its French-Canadian members is evident from the addendum slipped in behind their backs. This addendum is a fine specimen of verbose invective against 'the Church of Rome,' the Pope, Bulls, Briefs, absolutions, etc., the empanelling 'en Grand and petty Jurys' of 'papist or popish Recusants Convict,' ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... mind there had been some lurking belief in her innocence, it was so supreme an agony to him to imagine that she had taken a step which must make her guilt a certainty. He did not waste much time in questioning the verbose Brobson. The child was missing—that was quite clear—and his wife, and his wife's maid. It was some small relief to him to know that she had taken the honest Yorkshire girl. If she had been going to ignominy, ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... cried, impatiently. "Read us poetry!" I cannot describe the desolation which fell upon us as she opened a little volume and mouthed out the verbose, sentimental ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... told him my story after his fashion. Of course I shall not go and print his version; you might like his concise way better than my verbose; and I'm not here to hold up any man's coat-tails. Short as he made it, Edouard's eyes were moist more than once; and at the end he caught Raynal's hand and kissed it. Then he asked time to reflect; "for," said he, "I must ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... denay? 14 Tell us where haply dwell'st thou, speak outright, Be bold and risk it, trusting truth to light, Say do these milk-white girls thy steps detain? If aye in tight-sealed lips thy tongue remain, All Amor's fruitage thou shalt cast away: Verbose is Venus, loving verbal play! 20 But, an it please thee, padlockt palate bear, So in ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... accuses him of being an amiable aristocratic stick who failed to frighten the Junkers from their plan of war. Now, it is not in the least a question of whether we happen to like this quality or that: Mr. Shaw, I rather fancy, would dislike such verbose compromise more than downright plotting. It is simply the fact that Englishmen like Grey are open to Mr. Shaw's attack and are not open to yours. It is not true that the English were sufficiently clearheaded or self-controlled to conspire for the destruction ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... not much, and of what they had to say, which was a great deal too much; for the piece would be far more tolerable if considerably shorn of its unfair proportions. The translator seems to have followed the verbose text of his original with minute fidelity, except where the idioms bothered him; and although the bills declare it is adapted by Mr. Charles Selby to the English stage, the thing is as essentially French as it is when performed at the Palais Royal, except where the French ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... immense affectation of naive poetry, and psychology too. He described the wreck of some steamer on the English coast, of which he had been the witness, and how he had seen the drowning people saved, and the dead bodies brought ashore. All this rather long and verbose article was written solely with the object of self-display. One seemed to read between the lines: "Concentrate yourselves on me. Behold what I was like at those moments. What are the sea, the storm, the rocks, the splinters of wrecked ships to you? I have described all that sufficiently ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... something[4] {of my own}, that variety of subjects may gratify the taste, I trust, Reader, you will take it in good part; provided that my brevity be a fair return for such a favour: of which, that {my} praises may not be verbose, listen to the reason why you ought to deny the covetous, {and} even to offer to the modest that for which they have ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... propensities to wordiness, and his unlucky habit of debasing pathos with vulgarity. The fact accordingly is, that in this production he is more obscure than a Pindaric poet of the seventeenth century; and more verbose "than even himself of yore"; while the wilfulness with which he persists in choosing his examples of intellectual dignity and tenderness exclusively from the lowest ranks of society, will be sufficiently apparent, from the circumstance ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... 'the Monch von Carmel.'—These letters of Schiller were found among his papers at his death; rescued from destruction by two of his executors, and published at Carlsruhe, in a small duodecimo, in the year 1819. There is a verbose preface, but no note or comment, though some such aid is now and ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... the manifestation of a free conception of a grand spirit. Walt Whitman is spontaneous without being careless. His style is unhesitating, his diction is flowing, smooth, without being searching or verbose! It seems as if his soul were responsive—not plaintively, but appreciatively responsive—to all the chords, influences, and objects of nature; and that his imagination were absorptive enough to embrace and love, and reflect all changes and transitions of light and shadow in nature and life, particularly ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... out of breath with the length and vehemence of the tirade, which her feelings had prompted her to utter with crescendo violence. She was verbose; but the lawyer had listened with the most perfect patience and unflagging attention to every ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... tied to her." But she has talents. What is she, an authoress? "Yes, she is." But, like other authoresses, she isn't appreciated, and has returned to her legitimate occupation, the Wash-Tub; but still doth she itch for fame, and so, between times, she writes verbose essays on Female Suffrage, composed during the process known as "wringing." And when there's a Woman's Rights Convention in that locality, she sits on the platform, and applauds all the Red-Hot Resolutions with that trenchant female weapon, the umbrella, in one hand, and an ...
— Punchinello, Volume 2, No. 37, December 10, 1870 • Various
... he stared at Clutton with astonishment: he had no notion what he meant, Clutton had no gift of expression in words, and he spoke as though it were an effort. What he had to say was confused, halting, and verbose; but Philip knew the words which served as the text of his rambling discourse. Clutton, who never read, had heard them first from Cronshaw; and though they had made small impression, they had remained in his ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... 3, 1828.—I am reading Sir William Temple's works, with great pleasure. Such enlarged views are rarely to be found combined with such acuteness and discrimination. His style, though diffuse, is never verbose or overloaded, but beautifully expressive; 'tis English, too, though he was an accomplished linguist, and wrote much and well in. French, Spanish, and Latin. The latter he used, as he says of the Bishop of Munster, (with whom he corresponded in that tongue,) "more like a man of the court ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the principal specimen is that of Don Roderic, a fabulous account of the reign of King Roderic, the conquest of the country by the Moors, and the first attempts to recover it in the beginning of the eighth century. The style is heavy and verbose, although upon it Southey has founded much of his beautiful poem of "Roderic, the last of the Goths." This chronicle of Don Roderic, which was little more than a romance of chivalry, marks the transition to those romantic fictions that had already begun to inundate Spain. But the series ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... prompt answer. 'Well, what did you think of the Dare-all,—as the vicar calls her sometimes? is she not like a pleasant edition of Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy,—verbose and full of long sentences? How many words did she coin to-night, ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... confidence, and permit them to copy his opinions in advance of their delivery upon their pledges that they should not be printed before they were officially made public. He wrote a great many editorials, somewhat ponderous and verbose, for the Washington Union, and the elaborate statements on executive matters made by the correspondents who enjoyed his favor were ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... developments of the day and had begged to be excused. And I was frankly glad not to have to endure another discussion of the deceased Farquharson, of which I was heartily tired after hearing little else for the last three days. I could not help wondering how the verbose and pompous major had paraphrased and condensed that inchoate mass of biography and reminiscence into an orderly account for his wife and niece. He had doubtless devoted the whole afternoon to it. Sitting under the cool green ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... teeth, but from the victor's privilege of verbose taunting he had no redress. After all, it would be a transient victory. Parish might "rub it in" now, but in a few hours he would be dangling at a ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... called MONK Lewis, from his once popular romance of that name, was a good-hearted man, and, like too many of that fraternity, a disagreeable one—verbose, disputatious and paradoxical. His Monk and Castle Spectre elevated him into fame; and he continued to write ghost-stories till, following as he did in the wake of Mrs. Radcliffe, he quite overstocked the market. Lewis visited his estates in Jamaica, and came back perfectly negro-bitten. ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... epistle ascribed to Clement, but we know not that this is as highly approved as the former, and know not that it has been in use with the ancients. There are also other writings reported to be his, verbose and of great length. Lately, and some time ago, those were produced that contain the dialogues of Peter and Apion, of which, however, not a syllable is recorded by the primitive Church" (Eusebius' "Eccles. Hist." bk. iii., chap. ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... an immense sale. Ten years ago he had sold forty million copies. And yet it had this same defect. It was cold, dull, disconnected, and verbose. There was only one good thing in the book, and that was a little literary gem regarding a boy who broke in and stole the apples of a total stranger. The story was so good that I have often wondered whom Mr. Webster got ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... Treachery Insidious Thing Real Throat Jugular, gutteral Taste Insipid Thought Pensive Thigh Femoral Tooth Dental Tear Lachrymal Vessel Vascular World Mundane Wood Sylvan, savage Way Devious, obvious, impervious, trivial Worm Vermicular Whale Cutaceous Wife Uxorious Word Verbal, verbose Weak Hebdomadal Wall Mural Will Voluntary, spontaneous Winter Brumal Wound Vulnerary West Occidental War Martial Women Feminine, female, effeminate Year Annual, ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... drawings surpass all others in accuracy and spirit, while his enthusiasm and devotion to the work he had undertaken have but few parallels in the history of science. His chapter on the wild goose is as good as a poem. One readily overlooks his style, which is often verbose and affected, in consideration of enthusiasm so genuine ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... genius to dwell on such paltry failings as bad table manners, slight personal uncleanliness and the like. Many of the greatest men in the world have bitten their nails, and if we are to believe contemporary biographers, even the gloriously verbose Carlyle was known to expectorate frequently and with the utmost abandon while writing his world-famed fantasy ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... 191: Colonel Parnell, writing in the English Historical Review on "Dean Swift and the Memoirs of Captain Carleton," has spoken of the biography as "this most partial, verbose, and inaccurate account of the dean's life and writings." He says also that in editing Carleton's Memoirs Scott adopted, without investigation and in the face of evidence, Johnson's opinion that the memoirs were genuine; that Scott was mistaken about the date of the first edition and misquoted ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... translations, popular and vernacular, from (Professor Antoine) Galland's delightful abbreviation and adaptation (A.D. 1704), in no wise represent the eastern original. The best and latest, the Rev. Mr. Foster's, which is diffuse and verbose, and Mr. G. Moir Bussey's, which is a re- correction, abound in gallicisms of style and idiom; and one and all degrade a chef d'oeuvre of the highest anthropological and ethnographical interest and importance to a mere fairy book, a nice present ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... marvels of Neoplatonism. But he draws no conclusion except that spiritualism is retrogressive. His book is wonderfully ill-printed, and, though he had some curious reading, his style was cumbrous, jocular, and verbose. It may, therefore, be worth while, in the light of anthropological research, to show how very closely human nature has repeated ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... had given him a verbose definition of the word "pestiferous," David looked at her comprehendingly. "Like Jud," ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... Vapouring, Verbose Varmit of a Vulgar Villainous Vagabond, who Very Verdantly Ventured on a Versatile, Veteran, Valueless Velocipede to Visit the Viceroy of Venice, instead of ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... literature or with our own estimate of excellence in speech. Scarcely ever do we find a thought clothed in clear, precise, closely-fitting words, or a metaphor which really corresponds to the abstract idea that is represented by it. We take up sentence after sentence of verbose and flaccid Latin, analyse them with difficulty, and when at last we come to the central thought enshrouded in them, we too often find that it is the merest and most obvious commonplace, a piece of tinsel wrapped in ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... by the Republic of Texas to annex New Mexico. Lost on the Staked Plains and then marched afoot as a prisoner to Mexico City, he found plenty of copy and wrote a narrative that if it were not so journalistically verbose might rank alongside Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. Fayette Copeland's Kendall of the Picayune, 1943 but OP, is a biography. An interesting parallel to Kendall's Narrative is Letters and Notes on the Texan Santa Fe Expedition, ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... Critics") were they drawn into discussions of their contemporaries, and then, as in the Emerson- Whitman affair, they sometimes regretted it. Reviewing was carried on in small type, in the backs of certain magazines. Most of it was verbose and much of it was worthless as criticism. The belated recognition of the critical genius of Poe was due to the company he kept. He was a sadly erratic reviewer, as often wrong, I suppose, as right, but the most durable literary criticism of the age came ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... ballad literature of Spain. We hope Irish publishers and the Irish people will not disgrace their country by allowing such a work to be published abroad. We are too often and too justly accused of deficiency in cultivated taste, which unfortunately makes trashy poems, and verbose and weakly-written prose, more acceptable to the majority than works produced by highly-educated minds. Irishmen are by no means inferior to Englishmen in natural gifts, yet, in many instances, unquestionably they have ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... American William Kelly, considered by many to have been a victim of Bessemer's astuteness—or villainy. Because of Robert Mushet's preference for the quiet of Coleford, many important facts about his career are lacking; but even if his physical life was that of a recluse, his frequent and verbose contributions to the correspondence columns of the technical press made him well-known to the iron trade. It is from these letters that ...
— The Beginnings of Cheap Steel • Philip W. Bishop
... authors of whom Racine said that their works were "the admiration of scholars and the consolation of all pious persons." But she seems to have had the cleverness to observe that in one respect the literature of Port Royal, as it expressed itself before "Les Provinciales," had the fault of being verbose and redundant. Mme. de Sable deserves more merit than seems to have been given to her for her fervent cultivation ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... lively, figurative, polished, graceful, fluent, rhythmical, copious, elevated, flexible, smooth, dignified, terse, epigrammatic, felicitous, euphonious, elegant, and lofty. Undesirable qualities are the diffuse, verbose, redundant, inflated, prolix, ambiguous, feeble, monotonous, loose, slip-shod, dry, flowery, pedantic, pompous, rhetorical, grandiloquent, artificial, formal, ornate, halting, ponderous, ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... at the impossible metres, the grandiose phrases, the verbose repetitions of my poem. Years ago I must have laughed at it, when I threw my only copy into the wastebasket. The copy I am now turning over was loaned me by Miss Dwight, who faithfully preserved it all these years, for ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... Hall was the ultra-respectable Abram S. Hewitt, a millionaire capitalist. The Republican party nominated a verbose, pushful, self-glorifying young man, who, by a combination of fortuitous circumstances, later attained the position of President of the United States. This was Theodore Roosevelt, the scion of a moderately rich New York family, and a remarkable character whose ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... angry, Captain Servadac adroitly gave a new turn to the conversation by asking him whether he would gratify them by relating his own recent experiences. The astronomer seemed pleased with the proposal, and at once commenced a verbose and somewhat circumlocutory address, of which the following summary presents the ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... a-sneakin' up and settin' your dogs on me." Mother Borton again drew on an apparently inexhaustible vocabulary of oaths. "Oh, you're as bad as him," she shouted, "and I reckon you'd be worse if you knowed how." And she spat out more curses, and shook her fist in impotent but verbose rage. ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... sestines, canzons, and other attempts after Italian masters. The style, both verbal and poetical, needs chastising in places, and Barnes's expression in particular is sometimes obscure. He is sometimes comic when he wishes to be passionate, and frequently verbose when he wishes to be expressive. But the fire, the full-bloodedness, the poetical virility, of the poems is extraordinary. A kind of intoxication of the eternal-feminine seems to have seized the poet to an extent not ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... his way in speech, as best he could, past conventionalities. There had dawned on him, duskily and half-seen, the unfitness of little proprieties and verbose frills while he went to war across the roofs ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... compendious, short, good, and profitable." Purvey says, "Men might expound much openlier and shortlier the Bible than the old doctors have expounded it in Latin." Besides approving the avoidance of verbose commentary and exposition, critics and translators are always on their guard against the employment of over many words in translation. Tyndale, in his revision, will "seek to bring to compendiousness that which is now translated at the length."[180] In certain cases, he says, English reproduces ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... verbose writer. If he sometimes multiplies words, it is not for want of ideas, but because there are no words that fully express his ideas, and he tries to do it as well as he can by different ones. He had nothing of the set or formal style, the measured cadence, and stately ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the affair had not, perhaps, been laboriously collected as yet, but luckily Mrs. Heth was not the sort that requires a mass of verbose testimony and dull statistics. The right note awaited her touch six floors below, and time was pressing. Already her mind had flown well ahead, perceived with precision just what was required. Willie must be seen, and at least two ladies, of different sets, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... precisely the same. The capital of the country would be the same, though a greater number of pieces might be requisite for conveying any equal portion of it from one hand to another. The deeds of assignment, like the conveyances of a verbose attorney, would be more cumbersome; but the thing assigned would be precisely the same as before, and could produce only the same effects. The funds for maintaining productive labour being the same, the demand for it would be the same. Its price or wages, therefore, ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... was news to him. It must have occurred while he was on the high seas. The verbose positiveness of the doctor did not permit any doubt whatever.... Besides, that lady ought to know better than those who lived ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... writer. His mental derangement affected his criticism. He thought at one time of burning all the copies of Homer that could be got at; at another of removing all the statues of Livy and Virgil, the one as unlearned and uncritical, the other as verbose and negligent. One is puzzled to know to which respectively these criticisms refer. We do not venture to assign them, but translate literally ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... and verbose sketch of his character and services, written after his death by his jealous brother, the priest-king, wherein he is by turns meanly disparaged and damned with faint praise, we ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... Smith, Van Feloon, and Mondelet, the latter a French Canadian. The first case argued was a long-pending one between Sir John Stewart and an architect, who had superintended the erection of some buildings on one of Sir John's farms. The counsel were not over clever, but sufficiently verbose, and full enough of 'instances,' both ancient and modern. The counsel for Sir John laid great stress upon the erroneous manner in which the action had been laid, and contended that as the English form of' assumpsit' had been taken, in order to get both ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... in his verbose mania, spoke of Jaime's ancestors, of the illustrious Febrers, the finest and ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... speeches—which, moreover, have no relation to the subject,—put into the mouth of Lear. Lear's vacillations between pride, anger, and the hope of his daughters' giving in, would be exceedingly touching if it were not spoilt by the verbose absurdities to which he gives vent, about being ready to divorce himself from Regan's dead mother, should Regan not be glad to receive him,—or about his calling down "fen suck'd frogs" which he invokes, upon the head of his daughter, or about the heavens being obliged ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... bread soaked in cold water, thus imitating to a certain extent our William Ptynne, who would from time to time momentarily suspend his interminable scribble to recruit exhausted nature with a moistened crust; only the verbose author of "Histriomastix" used to dip his crusts in Strong ale. And the bitter old pamphleteer, for all that his ears had been cropped and his cheeks branded by the Star Chamber, lived to be nearly seventy. Jules Noriac was never to be seen abroad until ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... requital yield. But thou of all the suitors roughly treat'st Ulysses' servants most, and chiefly me; 470 Yet thee I heed not, while the virtuous Queen Dwells in this palace, and her godlike son. To whom Telemachus, discrete, replied. Peace! answer not verbose a man like him. Antinoues hath a tongue accustom'd much To tauntings, and promotes them in the rest. Then, turning to Antinoues, quick he said— Antinoues! as a father for his son Takes thought, so thou for me, who bidd'st me chase The stranger harshly hence; ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... One Quarter Hours, or Contes Tartares, have as little of the Tartar as those above mentioned of the Chinese, but if somewhat verbose, they are not wholly devoid of literary quality. The substance is, as in nearly all these cases, Arabian Nights rehashed; but the hashing is not seldom done secundum artem, and they have, with the Les Sultanes de Gujerate and Nouveaux Contes ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... would betray you. "Thy speech bewrayeth thee"—Matt. xxvi 73. There is much justice in the observation that Burke is often verbose, yet such paragraphs as this prove how well he knew to condense and prune his expression. It is an excellent plan to select from day to day passages of this sort and commit them to memory for recitation when the speech has ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... hour. At last the conversation ended by its appearing that the lady had suggested, and her visitor agreed to, a walk round the estate. When he gathered this, X. eagerly seconded the proposition, but it took all joy out of it to find that the verbose proprietor insisted upon accompanying them himself to do the honours of the place. It was in vain that X. endeavoured to plant him on his friend, for his prolonged assumption of intelligent interest had apparently been so successful, that his host was flattered and never left his side. ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... without eloquence, an ambassador without dignity, and a plenipotentiary without address. The other had natural parts and acquired knowledge; spoke with confidence; and in dispute was vain, sarcastic, petulant, and verbose. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... besides, would have felt that they had not received in it their full due, their full money's worth. They often fell asleep and were fiercely awakened by the tithingman, and often they could not have understood the verbose and grandiose language of the preacher. They were in an icy-cold atmosphere in winter, and in glaring, unshaded heat in summer, and upon most uncomfortable, narrow, uncushioned seats at all seasons; but in every record and journal which I have read, throughout which ministers and ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... came with a parcel of papers, which General Johnston said were from Mr. Reagan, Postmaster-General. He and Breckenridge looked over them, and, after some side conversation, he handed one of the papers to me. It was in Reagan's handwriting, and began with a long preamble and terms, so general and verbose, that I said they were inadmissible. Then recalling the conversation of Mr. Lincoln, at City Point, I sat down at the table, and wrote off the terms, which I thought concisely expressed his views and wishes, and explained ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... avoided, but only with great difficulty, owing to her criticism of Mr. Stobell's signature. It took the united and verbose efforts of Messrs. Chalk and Tredgold to assure her that it was in his usual style, and rather a good signature for him than otherwise. Miss Vickers, viewing it with her head on one side, asked whether he couldn't make his mark instead; a question which Mr. Stobell, at the pressing instance ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... souls, with little or no taste for classical music, who have sat in the dark (mentally and physically), applauding what they didn’t understand, and listening to vague German mythology set to sounds that appear to us outsiders like music sunk into a verbose dotage. I am convinced the greater number would have preferred a jolly performance of Mme. Angot or the Cloches de Corneville, cut in ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... empirical generalizations, they are neither so clearly apprehended, nor so much respected, as they would be were they deduced from some simple first principle. We are told that "brevity is the soul of wit." We hear styles condemned as verbose or involved. Blair says that every needless part of a sentence "interrupts the description and clogs the image;" and again, that "long sentences fatigue the reader's attention." It is remarked by Lord Kaimes, that "to give the utmost ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... Slaughter, whose face was set and hard in an expression that conveyed even to the men of Birralong the fact that they were in the presence of something which over-ruled them and subjugated them into a state of mental inferiority. The verbose Marmot, wordless; the listless Slaughter, dominant. It was a psychological crisis that ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... still one of assurance, enthusiasm, and hope. The only noteworthy change is in the style. Political Justice belongs to the generation of Gibbon, eloquent, elaborate and periodic at its best; heavy and slightly verbose at its worst. With The Enquirer we are just entering the generation of Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. The language is simpler and more flexible, the construction of the sentences more varied, the mood more vivacious, and the tone more ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... /n./ [COmmon Business-Oriented Language] (Synonymous with {evil}.) A weak, verbose, and flabby language used by {card walloper}s to do boring mindless things on {dinosaur} mainframes. Hackers believe that all COBOL programmers are {suit}s or {code grinder}s, and no self-respecting hacker will ever admit to having learned the ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... leave of this book with reluctance. It is verbose and dull, but it has led us along the path of American renown; it recites a story which, however awkwardly told, can never fall coldly on an American ear. It has, besides, given us an opportunity, of which we have gladly availed ourselves, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... Shakespeare was but a poor actor. He could write Hamlet and As You Like It; but when it came to casting the parts, the Ghost in the one and old Adam in the other were the best he could aspire to. Verbose biographers of Shakespeare, in their dire extremity, and naturally desirous of writing a big book about a big man, have remarked at length that it was highly creditable to Shakespeare that he was not, or at all events that it does not appear that he was, jealous, after the true theatrical tradition, ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... melancholy temper which grew on him in later years. He employs the semi-dramatic form of easy dialogue throughout the book with extraordinary lightness and skill. The familiar hexameter, which Lucilius had left still cumbrous and verbose, is like wax in his hands; his perfection in this use of the metre is as complete as that of Virgil in the stately and serious manner. And behind this accomplished literary method lies an unequalled perception of common human nature, a rich vein of serious and quiet humour, and a power of language ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... application of sea terms to land objects, Captain Samuel Crowe has a good deal of the rough charm of his prototypes. Still more distinct, and among Smollett's personages a more novel figure, is the Captain's nephew, the dapper, verbose, tender-hearted lawyer, Tom Clarke. Apart from the inevitable Smollett exaggeration, a better portrait of a softish young attorney could hardly be painted. Nor, in enumerating the characters of Sir Launcelot Greaves who fix themselves in a reader's memory, ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... does not exhibit in his narrative the verbose diction characteristic of pagan literature, where we often find one and the same argument embellished and polished by a variety of colors. We find by experience that no human power of description can do justice to inward emotions. In consequence, verbosity, as a rule, comes ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... repose for ever in the soft wrappings of universal peace. Questions of national defence bored Englishmen. The judgment of the greatest strategical authority of the age weighed less than one of Lord Haldane's verbose platitudes, and the urgent warnings of Lord Roberts less than the impudent snub administered to him by an Under-Secretary. Speakers on public platforms found that sympathy with Ulster carried a more potent appeal to their audience than any other they could make ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... all, it was Nan who furnished the greater part of the composition. Mrs. Challoner was rather verbose and descriptive in her style. Nan cut down her sentences ruthlessly, and so pruned and simplified the whole epistle that her mother failed to trace her own handiwork: and at the last she added a postscript in her own ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... there was any particular gift in Mr. Chadband's piling verbose flights of stairs, one upon another, after this fashion. But this can only be received as a proof of their determination to persecute, since it must be within everybody's experience that the Chadband style of oratory is ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... Vulgar Traditions of that kind of people. In Tragedy, nothing was so sure to Surprize and cause Admiration, as the most strange, unexpected, and consequently most unnatural, Events and Incidents; the most exaggerated Thoughts; the most verbose and bombast Expression; the most pompous Rhymes, and thundering Versification. In Comedy, nothing was so sure to please, as mean buffoonry, vile ribaldry, and unmannerly jests of fools and clowns. Yet even in these our Author's Wit buoys up, and is born above his subject: his Genius ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... Ferneres, Baron Rothschild's house, in which the King was at that time quartered. The French envoy did not make a favourable impression; a lawyer by profession, he had no experience in diplomatic negotiations; vain, verbose, rhetorical, and sentimental, his own report of the interview which he presented to his colleagues in Paris is sufficient evidence of his incapacity for the task he had taken upon himself. "He spoke to me as if I were a public meeting," ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... point every where to be as little verbose as possible, though; at the same time, my constant determination not to sacrifice my author's full ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... In one of the Ramblers, Dr. Johnson praises Knolles (a General History of the Turks to the present Year. London, 1603) as the first of historians, unhappy only in the choice of his subject. Yet I much doubt whether a partial and verbose compilation from Latin writers, thirteen hundred folio pages of speeches and battles, can either instruct or amuse an enlightened age, which requires from the historian some tincture of philosophy and criticism. Note: * We could have wished ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... naturally anxious, as we thought that in steering straight ahead, as we had done, we ought to have reached the ships with which we had the rendezvous. So far as we could, with the roar of the wind and the propeller, we held a consultation—nothing verbose—in mid-air to determine what would be the best move. We decided to alter our course so as to be sure of getting in sight of land. Half an hour later we saw the first sign of life since we had been out—an old tramp steamship. ...
— Some Naval Yarns • Mordaunt Hall
... was so obscure that Gil Blas could not comprehend the meaning of a single line of his writings. His poetry was verbose fustian, and his prose a maze of far-fetched expressions and ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... powerful apparatus of a protecting magistrate, to rescue those who had survived the slaughter of the first day: nothing of this. On the 3rd of September, (that is, the day after the commencement of the massacre,[3]) he writes a long, elaborate, verbose epistle to the Assembly, in which, after magnifying, according to the bon-ton of the Revolution, his own integrity, humanity, courage, and patriotism, he first directly justifies all the bloody proceedings of the 10th of August. He considers the slaughter of that day ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... home ever so pressing. But sometimes, by the sudden and hasty turning in of a Coach, these Committees are all suspended, and squeez'd up against the Walls, or else oftentimes, through their being a little too verbose and vociferous; the Court, by their Officer upon the Leads, calls them to ...
— The Tricks of the Town: or, Ways and Means of getting Money • John Thomson
... statesmen, and remote from the libraries and archives of the Swiss republics. My ancient habits, and the presence of Deyverdun, encouraged me to write in French for the continent of Europe; but I was conscious myself that my style, above prose and below poetry, degenerated into a verbose and turgid declamation. Perhaps I may impute the failure to the injudicious choice of a foreign language. Perhaps I may suspect that the language itself is ill adapted to sustain the vigour and dignity of an important narrative. But if France, so rich in literary merit, had produced ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... another master in matters relating purely to conscience or salvation." As a result of the heated discussion of the matter in Convocation, that body was virtually suspended for a century and a half. Pope ridicules Hoadley for his verbose eloquence, speaking of "Hoadley with his periods of a mile." He was, however, a great favourite of George I., whose private chaplain he became on that king's accession; and it was under royal protection that he published the works which gave rise to ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... fight a duel to one Col. Anglesea, at present a resident of this county. You can take my warrant in your own hands and read it with your own eyes, if you wish to do so, young gentleman," said the mild, old officer, handing the verbose document to which he so briefly referred ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... clearly proved on the fatal night in question." After these preliminary reflections comes a narration of the facts much in the words in which I have given them. This is followed by a statement of the arguments for the prosecution and for the defence, consisting of a number of verbose paragraphs, each beginning, "considering that," &c. The case of the prosecution was clear enough. The medical evidence proved that the father died of the wounds received on the above-named night. The fact that the wounds were inflicted by the prisoner, was established ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... Eliot is for the most part fresh, vital and energetic. It is pure in form, rich in illustrations, strong and expressive in manner. There are exceptions to this statement, it is true, and she is sometimes turgid and dry, again gaudy and verbose. Sententious in her didactic passages, she is pure and noble in her sentiment, poetical and impressive in her descriptions of nature. Her diction is choice, her range of expression large, and she admirably suits her words to the thought she would present. There is a ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... far the greater portion of writers had been much more interested in gaining points than rounding periods. It is almost a hopeless task to wade through the ridiculously lengthy terms of the seventeenth century. But it may be said, in their defence, that the method of verbose composition was not without some appearance of utility. The intelligence of the reader could not be relied upon to such an extent as now, and the eager eyes of so many opponents made it necessary to guard every word of importance ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... wrote letters, listening all the time with apparent indifference to the discussions of her friends. Frequently tempted to take a share in the conversation, she bit her lips in order to check her desire. Her soul of energy and action was inspired with secret contempt for the tedious and verbose debates which led to nothing. Action was expended in words, and the hour passed away taking with it ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... discussed the change in her sister's manner; but Maud's explanation, though verbose, ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... analysis we possess of quiet modern domestic feeling; while Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh" is, as far as I know, the greatest poem which the century has produced in any language. Cast Coleridge at once aside, as sickly and useless; and Shelley, as shallow and verbose; Byron, until your taste is fully formed, and you are able to discern the magnificence in him from the wrong. Never read bad or common poetry, nor write any poetry yourself; there is, perhaps, rather too much than too little ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... Attorney was equally verbose in his apology; he was almost in tears because of his "deep contrition at having cast aspersions on the spotless character of so ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... very concise, preferring the main points in each to a verbose and tiresome description of the minutiae; and although the number might have been extended to many hundreds, I trust a sufficiency have been detailed to establish the success of my practice, and to show ...
— Observations on the Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Scrofula or King's Evil, Scurvy, and Cancer • John Kent
... have been expressed about Wagner in his capacity of philosopher. To some he appears as a verbose dilettante totally unable to put two ideas logically together, while others look up to him as a teacher of the profoundest truths. I cannot say that either view is wrong. On the one hand he possessed the deep insight which is the first qualification for a philosopher, but ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... are preserved by Dudo of St. Quentin, a verbose and confused writer, whose work was abridged and continued by William of Jumieges, a contemporary of the Conqueror. William's work in turn served as the basis of the "Roman de Rou" composed by Wace in the time of Henry the Second. ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... justified the prediction, he scarcely surpassed the favorable sense which it incloses. Verbose, incorrect, poor in form, pale and washy as diluted Indian ink, his verses occasionally display witty touches, because every one was witty in the eighteenth century; but to class them with the works of the poets of his day as poetry ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... day will be of interest to others. One consolation you can have is that the more uninteresting and the fewer my letters are the more harmless my life. If there was anything doing I should become as verbose again as ever. However, I will try to give ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... manner began to appear. But in Cecilia the imitation of Johnson, though not always in the best taste, is sometimes eminently happy; and the passages which are so verbose as to be positively offensive are few. There were people who whispered that Johnson had assisted his young friend, and that the novel owed all its finest passages to his hand. This was merely the fabrication of envy. Miss Burney's real excellences were as much ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... standard edition, twenty-two thick, closely-printed volumes. These cover every department of medicine, anatomy, physiology, pathology, medical theory, therapeutics, as well as clinical medicine and surgery. In style they are verbose and heavy and very frequently polemical. They are saturated with a teleology which, at times, becomes excessively tedious. In the anatomical works, masses of teleological explanation dilute the account of often imperfectly described structures. Yet to this element we owe the preservation ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... After a verbose, pious, and pedantic diatribe, Abbot comes to the point. Sprot was arrested in April 1608, first on the strength 'of some words that fell from himself,' and, next, 'of some papers found upon him.' What papers? They are never mentioned in the Indictment of Sprot. They ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... arm, one on the shoulder and one across the ankle. I don't waste time in words, like you two, my verbose friends. That gives the three of us combined twelve wounds, a fair average of ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... his own and the following generation, even men so great as Gibbon and the young Ruskin, and women so brilliant as Fanny Burney. Then a reaction came and it was generally denounced as pompous, empty and verbose. After the Revolution people gave up wearing wigs, and with the passing of wigs and buckle-shoes there came a dislike of the dignified deportment of the eighteenth century in weightier matters than costume. Now Johnson, whatever ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... a series of articles and stipulations, long papers of rules and restrictions which were considered a necessary part of fine tapestry weaving. These papers are tiresome to read—the constitution of many a nation or a state is far less verbose. They give the impression that the craft of tapestry weaving is beset with every sort of small deceit, so protection must be the arrangement between master and worker, and between the factory and the great outside ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... generally have active minds, but their minds never present anything clearly. To their mental vision all is ill-defined, chaotic. They see everything in a haze. Whether such men talk or write, they are verbose, illogical, intangible, will-o'-the-wispish. Their thoughts are phantomlike; like shadows, they continually escape their grasp. In their talk they will, after long dissertations, tell you that they have not said just what they would like to say; there is always a subtle, lurking ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... answer your letter, nor do more than cast an eye on your manuscripts. To say the truth, my patience is not tough enough to go through Wolsey's negotiations. I see that your perseverance was forced to make the utmost efforts to transcribe them. They are immeasurably verbose, not to mention the blunders of the first copyist. As I road only for amusement, I cannot, so late in my life, purchase information on what I do not much care about, at the price of a great deal of ennui. The old wills at the end of your ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Mondino apply to another eminent anatomist of those times. Gabriel de Zerbis, who flourished at Verona towards the conclusion of the 15th century, is celebrated as the author of a system in which he is obviously more anxious to astonish his readers by the wonders of a verbose and complicated style than to instruct by precise and faithful description. In the vanity of his heart he assumed the title of Medicus Theoricus; but though, like Mondino, he derived his information from the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... them down, at a time when the country was unfamiliar with the conception of the United States as a national force. Many of those of judges of inferior ability do not rise above their source. They are verbose, repetitious, slovenly, inaccurate in statement, loose in form; perhaps sinking into a humor or sarcasm always out of place in the reports;[Footnote: See, for instance, Mincey v. Bradburn, 103 Tennessee Reports, 407; Terry v. McDaniel, ibid., 415; ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... helping us to understand the precise and definite meaning of the writers who used them, and the chances of misinterpreting or misunderstanding them are reduced to a minimum. It is I think well-known that avoidance of technical terms has often rendered philosophical works unduly verbose, and liable to misinterpretation. The art of clear writing is indeed a rare virtue and every philosopher cannot expect to have it. But when technical expressions are properly formed, even a bad writer can make himself understood. In the early days of Buddhist philosophy in the Pali ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... that Mr. Arnold should tell us on the title-page that his version is after that of Goethe. Nothing could be truer,—and it is a very long way after, too. By substituting the slow and verbose pentameter of what is called the classic school of English poetry for the remarkably forth-right and simple eight-syllabic measure of the original, the translator has contrived to lose almost wholly that homely flavor of the old poet, which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... verbose was the sermon that day, for not only was the preacher aware that bright eyes looked upon his deeds, but he saw his enemies in the front of the battle. Surely all extemporaneous speakers, in court, pulpit, or senate, must be accessible to such external ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... have even thought of spending fifty of my own dollars, privily and without collusion with his publisher, to advertise that remarkable book of his called "WE" which is probably the ablest and most original, and certainly the most verbose, book that has been written about the war. Now Mr. Lee (let me light my pipe and get this right) is the most eminent victim of words that ever lived in New England (or indeed anywhere east of East Aurora). Words crowd upon him like flies upon a honey-pot: he is helpless to resist ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... Infelicities. These two equalised bundles of hay might have held in suspense the casuistical ass of Sterne, till he had died from want of a motive to choose either. Yet Spizelius is not to be contemned because he is verbose and heavy; he has reflected more deeply than Valerianus, by opening the moral causes of those calamities ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... man very well educated for his time, whether self taught or not one cannot say; but that he was an excellent draughtsman, and had a complete knowledge of geometry, is evident from the wonderful drawings in his book, and the careful though rather verbose directions he gives for perspective drawing. Many of his numerous designs for furniture and ornamental items, are drawn to a scale with the geometrical nicety of an engineer's or architect's plan: he has drawn ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... confess that the process of wading through Mr. "Commissioner's" verbose and clumsy pleadings has given me a "hot fit," which, I undertake to say, will be followed by not so much as a passing shiver of repentance. And it is under the influence of the genial warmth diffused through the frame, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... branch out; rant. maunder, prose; harp upon &c. (repeat) 104; dwell on, insist upon. digress, ramble, battre la campagne[Fr][obs3], beat about the bush, perorate, spin a long yarn, protract; spin out, swell out, draw out; battologize[obs3]. Adj. diffuse, profuse; wordy, verbose, largiloquent|, copious, exuberant, pleonastic, lengthy; longsome[obs3], long-winded, longspun[obs3], long drawn out; spun out, protracted, prolix, prosing, maundering; circumlocutory, periphrastic, ambagious[obs3], roundabout; digressive; discursive, excursive; loose; rambling episodic; flatulent, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... promise, couched in the most impressive words, that the traitor shall be punished; which will make all the more noticeable the utter defeat which verbose royalty soon afterward suffers. Renard worsts the king's messengers; Bruin the bear has his nose torn off; Tybert the cat loses half his tail; Renard jeers at them, at the king, and at the Court. And all through the story he triumphs over Ysengrin, as Panurge ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... phrases and still louder affirmation, just as most of us hide our cowardly submission to monotony under some word like duty, loyalty, conscience. If you have ever been an office-holder or been close to officials, you must surely have been appalled by the grim way in which committee-meetings, verbose reports, flamboyant speeches, requests, and delegations hold the statesman in a mind-destroying grasp. Perhaps this is the reason why it has been necessary to retire Theodore Roosevelt from public life every now ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... suggested a slight mistake on my side, and expressed a wish that he were conversing with a writer able to sustain the opposite part. With his experience and skill in rhetoric, his long habitude of composition, his knowledge of life, of morals, and of character, he should be less verbose than Cicero, less gorgeous than Plato, and less trimly ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... exaggerate. Gray, in a phrase which has been much discussed, dismissed the poetry of Joseph Warton by saying that he had "no choice at all." It is evident to me that Gray meant by this to stigmatise the diction of Joseph Warton, which is jejune, verbose, and poor. He had little magic in writing; he fails to express himself with creative charm. But this is not what constitutes his interest for us, which is moreover obscured by the tameness of his Miltonic-Thomsonian versification. ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... by respect for the laws of evidence. When he knew a thing, he knew it; then he either acted or did not act, as the circumstances might dictate. And when the deed was done or left undone, and was quite beyond the reach of criticism, he would send in a verbose, voluminous report, written out in several colored inks, on all the special forms he could get hold of. The heads of departments would be too busy for the next twelvemonth trying to get the form of the report straightened ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... acquiesce in the ipse dixit of this new Pythagoras. He rejudged the characters of all the principal authors, who had died within a century of the present time; and, in this revision, paid no sort of regard to the reputation they had acquired — Milton was harsh and prosaic; Dryden, languid and verbose; Butler and Swift without humour; Congreve, without wit; and Pope destitute of any sort of poetical merit — As for his contemporaries, he could not bear to hear one of them mentioned with any degree of ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... open with earth, and made to assume their embossment in the operation of healing. In their movements they are sluggish, though agile when stimulated to action. Their limbs are of surprising tenuity. In their communications with one another they are volatile; verbose in conversation, and puerile in manner: continually embroiled in some quarrel, which either ends in words, or terminates in the act of the secret assassin; rarely coming to an open rupture while the adversaries are on ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... intensely eloquent. His speakings and writings are profuse in their use of the fulness of the Spanish language, and teem with rich words and phrases to express abstract ideas. Indeed, judged by Anglo-Saxon habit, they would be termed grandiloquent and verbose. He indulges in similes and expressions as rich and varied as the vegetation of his own tropical lands. The most profound analogies are called up to prove the simplest fact, not only in the realm of poetry, or description, but in scientific ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... in Oriental costumes kept re-forming in ever-shifting kaleidoscopic grouping. And then the audience suddenly were aware that the medley had divided into two harmonious sub-medleys, whilst, in the chasm left towards the front, Cleo stood majestically and addressed a verbose harangue to the Basha, her relation to whom was known from the title of the play. In full view and hearing of so heterogeneous a crowd did the Basha in return reproach her with coldness and indifference to him, which she vehemently denied, playing the femme incomprise and ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... a weak and cowardlie faith: Christopherus a Vega is with him in this). Others again will blame, hiss, reprehende in many things, cry down altogether my collections, for crude, inept, putid, post coenam scripta, Coryate could write better upon a full meal, verbose, inerudite, and not sufficiently abounding in authorities, dogmata, sentences of learneder writers which have been before me, when as that first-named sort clean otherwise judge of my labours to bee nothing else but a messe of opinions, a vortex attracting indiscriminate, ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... believe that the sound of their own words was the cause why many people were so silent. It was common to hear that a man was afraid to hear himself talk. By reducing therefore the signs of speech, a stimulus would be given to the reserved and a curb imposed upon the verbose. ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... foresaw." He will see his predictions accomplishing yet for a long time, for Mazzini has a mind far in advance of his times in general, and his nation in particular,—a mind that will be best revered and understood when the "illustrious Gioberti" shall be remembered as a pompous verbose charlatan, with just talent enough to catch the echo from the advancing wave of his day, but without any true sight of the wants of man at this epoch. And yet Mazzini sees not all: he aims at political ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... to mind the verbose eloquence and elegant circumlocutions which in a long professorial career had grown habitual to his old tutor, and almost regretted that he had admitted him; but just as he was about to wish to see him safely outside, he promptly suppressed his secret desire ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... in the House of Lords on Friday night. He attacked Pechell and Codrington for having attacked him[14] because he had abused the Navy in his Slavery speech, and was very violent, tedious, and verbose. He informed the House that he had written a remonstrance to the Speaker for not having called the two sailors to order, and he treated them with great contumely and abuse in his speech. Lyndhurst[15] made him very wroth by asking him 'if he had any right to write to the ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... whole, considering the celerity wherewith the poem was finished, I was astonished at the unfrequency of weak lines, I had expected to find it verbose. Joan, I think, does too little in battle, Dunois perhaps the same; Conrade too much. The anecdotes interspersed among the battles refresh the mind very agreeably, and I am delighted with the very many passages of simple pathos ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... unstained by blood and perjury, by hypocrisy and verbose genuflection. Can I not worship and say my prayers among the clouds?" And she pointed to the lofty ceiling and the ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... contemporary of Heine's of no particular importance, a poet of the Romantic School and a verbose literary historian. He wrote a work in five volumes upon Shakespeare's plays. In this he interprets the poet in a wholly romantic sense and winds up by presenting him as an ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... i.e. the parts, which they have in common, follow in the same order. The same may be said of the Constantinopolitan liturgy, commonly attributed to S. Chrysostom, of that of the Armenian church, and of the florid and verbose composition in use among the Nestorians of Mesopotamia. So that the liturgy of Antioch, commonly attributed to S. James, appears to be the basis of all the oriental liturgies". Tracts for the Times, N. 63. The author then proceeds to state ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... in a separate volume, has probably given rise to the absurd practice of endeavouring to teach his grammar without them. The forms of parsing and correcting which this author furnishes, are also misplaced; and when found by the learner, are of little use. They are so verbose, awkward, irregular, and deficient, that the pupil must be either a dull boy or utterly ignorant of grammar, if he cannot express the facts extemporaneously in better English. They are also very meagre as a whole, and altogether inadequate to their purpose; many things that frequently occur ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... opposite him, on the doctor's left, a talkative Moscow fur-merchant who, having come to definite conclusions of his own about things n general, was persuaded the rest of the world must share them, and who delivered verbose commonplaces with a kind of pontifical utterance sometimes amusing, but usually boring; on his right a gentle-eyed, brown-bearded Armenian priest from the Venice monastery that had sheltered Byron, a man who ate ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... bloodless face of the horrified murderer? But Griffin deserves mention other than as a dramatist and novelist. It is saddening to know that in an age where so much weak sentiment, scarcely discernible in its wealth of verbose ornamentation, is so easily imposed upon the public under the name of poetry, that so much really good poetry should be forgotten and unread. One is often provoked to regret that the scalping knife has become blunted in ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... with a word of advice to inexperienced collectors. Avoid the jolie edition printed at Paris by F. A. Didot, par ordre de monseigneur le comte d'Artois, in 1781. It is the very worst specimen of editorship. Avoid also the London edition of 1792. The preface is a piratical pasticcio; the verbose notes are from the most accessible books; the portraits, very unequal in point of execution, I believe to be chiefly copies of prints—not d'apres des tableaux originaux. The most desirable editions are, 1. The edition ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 219, January 7, 1854 • Various
... go through with this of Milton's, or the other's life of Boileau, where there is such a dull, heavy succession of long quotations of disinteresting passages, that it makes their method quite nauseous. But the verbose, tasteless Frenchman seems to lay it down as a principle, that every life must be a book, and what's worse, it proves a book without a life; for what do we know of Boileau, after all his tedious stuff? You are the only one, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... she continued, "that if I had known how many classics there are in English literature, and how verbose the best of them contrive to be, I should never have undertaken the work. They only allow one seventy ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... became autocephalic. Even bishops in Tuscany abandoned communion with the see of Rome because the council and Vigilius had condemned Theodore, Theodoret, and Ibas (v. supra, 93). Justin II attempted to heal the schism, and his verbose edict may be found in Evagrius, Hist. Ec., V, 4. A serious problem was presented to the Roman see. In dealing with them, however, it was possible to treat each group separately. On account of the ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... dictionary little lives of celebrities he had never heard of. To be printed, anywhere and anyhow, was a form of glory for a man so unable to be acted, and to be paid, even at encyclopaedic rates, had the consequence of making one resigned and verbose. He couldn't smuggle style into a dictionary, but he could at least reflect that he had done his best to learn from the drama that it is a gross impertinence almost anywhere. He had knocked at the door of every theatre in London, and, at a ruinous expense, had multiplied ...
— Nona Vincent • Henry James
... fitted by nature as well as by training for the work to which he happily turned his hand. Possessed of a charming style; precise and clear instead of verbose; completely conscious of what he intends to convey and perfectly competent to convey it; and dowered with a perspicacious breadth of view which dwells on all that is important and passes over all that is irrelevant, Captain Mahan has ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... Meanwhile, the more verbose Captain proceeded, "Och, py Cot, and it was an awfu' mistake, and I could draw the penknife across my finger for having written the word.—By my sowl, and I scratched it till I scratched a hole in the paper.—Och! that I should live to do an uncivil thing by ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... sweetest analysis we possess of quiet modern domestic feeling; while Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh" is, as far as I know, the greatest poem which the century has produced in any language. Cast Coleridge at once aside, as sickly and useless; and Shelley as shallow and verbose; Byron, until your taste is fully formed, and you are able to discern the magnificence in him from the wrong. Never read bad or common poetry, nor write any poetry yourself; there is, perhaps, rather too much than too little in the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... wheelwright managed to send the boy six florins, and that sum was immediately expended on Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum and Mattheson's Volkommener Capellmeister—heavy, dry treatises both, which have long since gone to the musical antiquary's top shelf among the dust and the cobwebs. These "dull and verbose dampers to enthusiasm" Haydn made his constant companions, in default of a living instructor, and, like Longfellow's "great men," toiled upwards in the night, while less ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... antiquated but still valuable for its vast store of political facts; Victor Duruy, History of Modern Times from the Fall of Constantinople to the French Revolution, trans. by E. A. Grosvenor (1894), verbose and somewhat uncritical, but usable for French history. More up-to-date series of historical manuals are now appearing or are projected by Henry Holt and Company under the editorship of Professor C. H. Haskins, by The Century ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... to forgive the verbose style that suggests authors were paid by the word. The gems of character description and contemporary ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... stroll about the Pantiles in company with Captain Audaine. The latter has been at pains to record the events of the afternoon and evening, so that I give you his own account of them, though I abridge in consideration of his leisured style. Pompous and verbose I grant the Captain, even in curtailment; but you are to remember these were the faults of his age, ingrained and defiant of deletion; and should you elect to peruse his memoirs [Footnote: There appears to ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell |
