"Contemporary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... themselves had been, in ancient times, intruders, who, issuing from their seats in Asia, had invaded and dislocated the proper autochthons of Europe. In the Pleistocene age there existed in Central Europe a rude race of hunters and fishers, closely allied to the Esquimaux. Man was contemporary with the cave bear, the cave lion, the amphibious hippopotamus, the mammoth. Caves that have been examined in France or elsewhere have furnished for the stone age, axes, knives, lance and arrow points, scrapers, hammers. ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... the statesmen and writers of Boyle's time for failing to recognize the inward significance of national and racial manifestations any more than we condemn his contemporary physicians for failing to separate from the mass of disease such conditions as are known to modern medical men as appendicitis and typhoid fever. Typhoid fever and appendicitis existed in Boyle's time ...
— Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View • Arthur Keith
... was secure, upon whom Art had showered gifts, gazed at it, absorbed and reverent. He realized that in this picture his age had achieved a masterpiece; he was at least the contemporary ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... of Northwestern University, has said: "In studying the lives of contemporary business men, two facts stand out pre-eminently. The first is that their labors have brought about results that to most of us would have seemed impossible. Such men appear as giants in comparison with whom ordinary men sink to the size of pygmies. ...
— Initiative Psychic Energy • Warren Hilton
... speculative consideration of the immediate might have led to it independently. For in the immediate there is marked expectancy, craving, prayer; nothing absorbs consciousness so much as what is not quite given. Therefore it is a good reading of the immediate, as well as a congenial thing to say to the contemporary world, that reality is change, growth, action, creation. Similarly the sudden materialisation of mind, the unlooked-for assertion that consciousness does not exist, has its justification in the same quarter. In the immediate what appears is the thing, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... to the Scriptures, Vol. I. page 26, where ample references to contemporary French ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... diversity of languages before the flood; but, since the life-time of Adam extended fifty-six years into that of Lamech, the father of Noah, and two hundred and forty-three into that of Methuselah, the father of Lamech, with both of whom Noah was contemporary nearly six hundred years, it is scarcely possible that there should have occurred any such diversity, either in Noah's day or before, except from some extraordinary cause. Lord Bacon regarded the multiplication of languages at Babel as a general evil, which had had no ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... willing to get married. He was very fond of books, and he had a handsome library; that is, his books were much more numerous than Mr. Wentworth's. He was also very fond of pictures; but it must be confessed, in the fierce light of contemporary criticism, that his walls were adorned with several rather abortive masterpieces. He had got his learning—and there was more of it than commonly appeared—at Harvard College; and he took a pleasure ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... energies, steering clear, however, of any attempt to form an opinion of his own upon Arnold's life and character, while achieving a result that not only assured his own position at Oxford, but brought him well into the front rank of contemporary writers. The religious animosity at Oxford was uncongenial to Stanley, and it was only the prospect of Dr. Arnold occupying the Chair of Modern History that reconciled him to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... Louvre. Clearness, compactness, measure, and balance are evident in nearly every canvas. Everywhere is the air of reserve, of intellectual good-breeding, of avoidance of extravagance. That French painting is at the head of contemporary painting, as far and away incontestably it is, is due to the fact that it alone has kept alive the traditions of art which, elsewhere than in France, have given place to other and more material ideals. From the first its practitioners have been artists ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... contemporary La Nature, the annexed figure, illustrating an ingenious type of locomotive designed for equally efficient use on both level ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... have thoroughly examined antique art, Victor Cousin would seem the one with whom Delsarte had most in common, if this eminent philosopher were not a contemporary of the master and had not attended his lectures, his artistic sessions and his concerts. In his manner of treating art, this is often shown bywords and forms and flashes of instinctive reminiscence which recall the great ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... modern attire looking almost odd where everything else was old-fashioned, and throwing over the familiar garniture of the trees a homeliness that seemed to demand improvement by the addition of a few contemporary novelties also. Grace seemed to regard the selling with the interest which attaches to memories revived after an interval ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... of the 16th and 17th centuries are, undoubtedly, those which tell us how the people lived, how they were employed, housed, and fed, what measure of happiness fell to their lot, and what were the causes that affected their welfare, that made them contented and loyal, or miserable and disaffected. Contemporary authors, who deal with social phenomena, are also read with special interest for the same reason. They present pictures of society in their own time, and enable us to conceive the sort of life our forefathers led, and ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... of Historical Evidence; Letters; Monuments. Contemporary Letters of Peter, Pliny and John. Prove the Existence of Churches. And Their Worship, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... defects. Such an one was the Pisaroni, a celebrated contralto, said to have been so ill-favoured that she always forwarded her likeness to any opera director to whom she was personally unknown, who offered her an engagement. But so exceptional were her voice and talent, that certain of her contemporary artists have declared that by the time Pisaroni had reached the end of her first phrase, ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... is allowed on all hands. Virgil made Dido and AEneas contemporary, though they were not so; and Shakspeare, by the creative power of his genius, changed an inland town into a seaport. Come, come, have bowels. Let epic swearing be treated with the same courtesy shown to epic poetry, that is, if both are the production of a rare genius. I maintain, that ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... humour that was all their own. The manner has been appropriated by Artemus Ward and Mark Twain, but it was invented by Munchausen. Now the stories mainly relate to sporting adventures, and it has been asserted by one contemporary of the baron that Munchausen contracted the habit of drawing such a long-bow as a measure of self-defence against his invaluable but loquacious henchman, the worthy Roesemeyer. But it is more probable, as is hinted in the first preface, that ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... for chroniclers of contemporary history to determine significant dates to define the beginning and end of succeeding periods. But I fancy that any fellow-citizen of mine, if he thinks for a moment, will agree with me that that Jubilee Summer of 1897 was the last manifestation in our town of ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... drawn up between King Ethelred the Second and Olaf still exists to fix the date of the invasion, while the famous battle of Maldon, in which the Norse adventurer gained a victory over the East Anglians, is described at length by a nameless contemporary poet, whose "Death of Brihtnoth" remains as one of the finest of early English narrative poems, full of noble ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... about the same age as the Marechal, but, being more grave and cautious, he answered in vague and few words, and made a sign to his contemporary in order to induce him to observe the unpleasant emotions which he had caused the mistress of the house by reminding her of the recent death of her husband and in speaking thus of the minister, his friend. But it was in vain, for Bassompierre, pleased with the sign ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... legends, as in those of Greece, may have been the names of real personages, but yet the narrative, they say, must not be taken as historical. This may be true, but in what sense can we regard it as more probable that the story-makers invented allegories, and clothed them with the names of contemporary or preceding heroes, than that they invented tales of wonder to fit these heroes? Is it easier to believe, for instance, that Arthur came after the myths, and was tacked on to them, than that the myths, or stories, came after Arthur, and were tacked ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... conjunction with the main question, may well be designated a piece of contemporary history; they depict exactly both the Science of the time and the peculiar philosophical language it adopted. Hardly more than one, or at most two, of them could one ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... by no means certain that the Institutes and the Vedas represent a contemporary state of things. All doctrinal writings contain something appertaining to a period older than that of ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... profligacy of the higher Scottish clergy (with notable exceptions) in Knox's youth, are not matter of controversy. They are as frankly recognised by contemporary Catholic as by Protestant authors. In the very year of the destruction of the monasteries (1559) the abuses are officially stated, as will be told later, by the last Scottish Provincial Council. Though three of the four Scottish universities were founded ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... year;—killed, some say on the other hand, by the noise of the cannon firing for joy over it! [Forster, Friedrich Wilhelm I., Konig von Preussen (Potsdam, 1834), i. 126 (who quotes Morgenstern, a contemporary reporter). But see also Preuss, Friedrich der Grosse mit seinen Verwandten und Freunden (Berlin, 1838), pp. 379-380] Yes; and the first baby Prince, these same parties farther say, was crushed to death by the weighty dress you put upon it at christening ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... no reason to doubt that Bel and the Dragon always formed a part of this Greek version of Daniel. Pusey (quoted in Churton, Uncan. and Apocr. Script, p. 389) speaks of it as 'contemporary with the LXX,' while Rothstein (Kautzsch, 178, 9) attributes it to the second century B.C., being probably of the same ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... represented by the extant writings of this class is that which immediately follows the completion of the epic.[1] These works, although they contain no real history, yet reflect history very plainly, and since the advent and initial progress of Puranic Hinduism, with its various cults, is contemporary with important political changes, it will be necessary briefly to consider the circumstances in which arose these new creeds, for they were destined to become in the future the controlling force in ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... of Charles II, nearly every municipal borough in the kingdom was forced to surrender its charter to the king, the citizens of Durham surrendered theirs to the Bishop, who, to the intense horror of a contemporary writer, reserved to himself and his successors in the See the power of approving and confirming the mayor, aldermen, recorder, and common council of ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... convicted, and sentenced to penal servitude. A couple of months previously (on March 13) he had delivered another bitter attack on the War Government in the Prussian Diet. He accused the German educational authorities of systematically teaching hate to school children and of distorting even contemporary history so as to poison their minds to the glorification of Prussian militarism. He said it was not the business of the schools to turn children into machines for ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... cuts, in turn, were adapted with little change from 17th-century sources—etchings by Francis Barlow and line engravings by Sebastian Le Clerc. Bewick's cuts repeated the earlier designs but changed the locale to the English countryside of the late 18th century. This was to be expected; to have a contemporary meaning the actors of the old morality play had to appear in modern dress and with up-to-date scenery. But technically the cuts followed the pattern of Croxall's wood engraver, although with a slightly ...
— Why Bewick Succeeded - A Note in the History of Wood Engraving • Jacob Kainen
... judicially reserved for one person; but any such reservation of friendship, affection, admiration, sympathy and so forth is only possible to a wretchedly narrow and jealous nature; and neither history nor contemporary society shews us a single amiable and respectable character capable of it. This has always been recognized in cultivated society: that is why poor people accuse cultivated society of profligacy, poor people being often so ignorant and uncultivated that they have nothing to offer each ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... had shown that they could be of political service to the administration of the time, too often received a mitre for their reward. Amid the general relaxation of principle which by the universal confession of all contemporary writers had pervaded society, even worthy and good men seem to have condescended at times to a discreditable fulsomeness of manner, and to an immoderate thirst for preferments. There were many scandals in the Church which greatly needed reform, but none which were so keenly ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... a descent we know. But, of a sequel which of us is sure? Which of us is secured against the dangers of subsequent depreciation? And, moreover, which of us shall trace the contemporary tendencies, the one towards honour, the other towards dishonour? Or who shall discover why derivation becomes degeneration, and where and when and how the bastardy befalls? The decivilized have every grace as the antecedent of their ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... were three tributary princes. He had four children, three sons and a daughter. He possessed greater treasures than could be estimated, as well as innumerable camels, horses, and flocks of sheep; and was held in awe by all contemporary sovereigns. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... a discourse upon round dances, country dances, morris dances, and quadrilles, all of which are entirely superior to the bastard waltz and spurious polka which have ousted them most unjustly in contemporary popularity—when the waiters gently pushed him on to his table ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... (1594-1646) was born at Brussels, and was known in Rome as Il Fiammingo. The Archduke Albert sent him to Rome to study, and he was a contemporary of Bernini. When his patron died Duquesnoy was left without means, and was forced to carve small figures in ivory for his support. His figures of children, which were full of life and child-like expression, became quite famous. An important ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... French Critics" deserves a friendly welcome from everybody who desires to know something of the best in contemporary French letters.—The Philadelphia Press. ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... We want, however, quite a small library of works of that kind before the harvest that is ready for the sickle of intelligent native observers is gathered in.—The Right Hon. Sir M.E. Grant Duff, G.C.S.I., in the Contemporary Review. ...
— Tales of Ind - And Other Poems • T. Ramakrishna
... tortured with remorse, afterwards approached Buddha; mention is also made of his brother Abhayakumara, likewise Makkhali Gosala is mentioned among Buddha's opponents and rivals. It is thus clear that the oldest Jaina legend makes Vardhamana a fellow countryman and contemporary of Buddha, and search might be suggested in the writings of the Buddhists for confirmation of these assumptions. Such indeed are to be found in ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... attend upon Dr. Johnson with respectful affection. He has for some time been very ill...I wish to publish as a regale [ante, iii. 308, n. 2; v. 347, n. 1] to him a neat little volume, The Praises of Dr. Johnson, by contemporary Writers. ...Will your Lordship take the trouble to send me a note of the writers you recollect having praised our much respected friend?...An edition of my pamphlet [ante, iv. 258] has been published in London."' —Nichols's Literary ...
— Life of Johnson, Volume 6 (of 6) • James Boswell
... and his officers.) The spitfire Chronicle "claimed" that Captain William Henry Hayes was one of Nature's gentlemen, and "was certainly not the cause of a terrible affliction that had befallen the editor of a certain esteemed morning contemporary." (The wife of the editor referred to had eloped with ...
— Concerning "Bully" Hayes - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... than in using their eyes and ears, and giving me the benefit of their brains as to where knowledge lies, and how it can best be utilised. I propose to make a beginning by putting two capable men and a boy in an office, with instructions to cut out, preserve, and verify all contemporary records in the daily and weekly press that have a bearing upon any branch of our departments. Round these two men and a boy will grow up, I confidently believe, a vast organisation of zealous unpaid workers, ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... Hugo's Les Miserables; historical dramas, e.g., Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice; historical poems, e.g., Longfellow's Courtship of Miles Standish; historical essays and monographs, e.g., articles in the Historical Review and other contemporary magazines. ...
— A Guide to Methods and Observation in History - Studies in High School Observation • Calvin Olin Davis
... the classical works of continental composers he transcribed and carefully arranged for his employers, whose confidence he completely enjoyed, whether in addressing them on matters relative to prospective treaties with contemporary composers, or in regard to works tendered to them for publication, or on recommending them upon the pianoforte arrangement of orchestral scores. Personally, I participated in the satisfaction of frequently dining in his company. Amongst the personal memories which I ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... take the contemporary account, which also we have at first hand; which is almost pathetic to read; such a contrast between ruddy morning and the storms of the afternoon! Here are two Letters from Voltaire; fine transparent human Letters, as his generally are: the first of them written directly on ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... to you to find means for carrying out our design—and these means vary with circumstances—we would point out that dancing is one of the very best abysses in which love may bury itself. This point having been very well treated by a contemporary, we will give him here an opportunity of speaking ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... prime place for the humours of London; and it may be feared that this, rather than the architecture, was the chief idea in the minds of the youths, as a babel of strange sounds fell on their ears, "a still roar like a humming of bees," as it was described by a contemporary, or, as Humfrey said, like the sea in a great hollow cave. A cluster of choir-boys were watching at the door to fall on any one entering with spurs on, to levy their spur money, and one gentleman, whom they had thus attacked, ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in her secret heart and conscience she mistook her moral situation, as my unlearned readers have done perhaps. Though not acquainted with the nice distinctions of the contemporary law, she knew that betrothal was a marriage contract, and could no more be legally broken on either side than any other compact written and witnessed; and that marriage with another party than the betrothed had been formerly ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... Contemporary with this group there is a legacy of a dozen and more fine tunes composed by Tallis and Orlando Gibbons, the neglect or treatment of which is equally disgraceful to ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... imagination admirably fitted him. There, at any rate, "Reuben Hallard" was, ready to face all the world, to go, perhaps, to the farthest Hebrides, to be lost in all probability, utterly lost, in the turgid flood of contemporary fiction. ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... determined by Fielding's past experience of the public taste. His latest comedy had failed, and its predecessors had not been very successful. But his burlesques had met with a better reception, while the election episodes in Don Quixote had seemed to disclose a fresh field for the satire of contemporary manners. And in the satire of contemporary manners he felt his strength lay. The success of Pasquin proved he had not miscalculated, for it ran more than forty nights, drawing, if we may believe the unknown author of the life of Theophilus Cibber, numerous and enthusiastic audiences ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... will not stand for increased railway fares," says a contemporary. They have had too much ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... in the "Speculum Historiale" of Vincent of Beauvais, himself a younger contemporary and probably a personal acquaintance of Helinand, throws considerable light on the real date of Helinand's "Chronicle". After recounting certain matters connected with the early years of the thirteenth century, the last date ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown
... these heroes that it was at one time the fashion to treat them as belonging as purely to legend as the feats of St. George or King Arthur. Careful investigation, however, has shown that so far from this being the case, almost every deed reported to have been performed by them is verified by contemporary historians. Sir William Wallace had the especial bad fortune of having come down to us principally by the writings of his bitter enemies, and even modern historians, who should have taken a fairer view of his life, repeated the cry of the old English ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... the condescensions of rank do not in themselves confer any power on talent, they have the effect of producing that complacency of mind in those who are the objects of them, which is at once the reward and the solace of intellectual exertion, at the same time that they tend to mollify the spirit of contemporary invidiousness. The day after, the fleet sailed; and when they had passed the rock, the captains of the two men of war [Footnote: The two frigates, the Shannon, Captain Meadow, since Lord Manvers, whose intimacy still continues ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... after another in which he attacks, and in many cases successfully vanquishes, profound difficulties in the application of the Newtonian theory of gravitation to the explanation of the solar system. Like his great contemporary Lagrange, he loftily attempted problems which demanded consummate analytical skill for their solution. The attention of the scientific world thus became riveted on the splendid discoveries which emanated from these two men, each gifted with ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... loathed but esteemed contemporary, the Statesman, speaks of our town as "this city," and calls the marshal "chief of police," we are none the less a country town. Like hundreds of its kind, our little daily newspaper is equipped with typesetting machines and ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... like the first of Spanish troubadours was a Jew,[44] Antonio di Montoro (Moro), el ropero (the tailor), of Cordova, of whom a contemporary says, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... main body of the Synagogue we have to wait for the same moment for a formulation of Articles of Faith. Maimonides (1135-1204) was a younger contemporary of Hadassi; he it was that drew up the one and only set of principles which have ever enjoyed wide authority in Judaism. Before Maimonides there had been some inclination towards a creed, but he is the ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... he could best correct the bias of the other. Marshall's nationalism rescued American democracy from the vaguer horizons to which Jefferson's cosmopolitanism beckoned, and gave to it a secure abode with plenty of elbowroom. Jefferson's emphasis on the right of the contemporary majority to shape its own institutions prevented Marshall's constitutionalism from developing a privileged aristocracy. Marshall was finely loyal to principles accepted from others; Jefferson was speculative, experimental; the personalities of these two men ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... neglected works of fiction. In much the same manner and at the same time that John Gay was satirizing Walpole's government in The Beggar's Opera, Defoe began to use his pirates as a commentary on the injustice and hypocrisy of contemporary English society. Among Defoe's gallery of pirates are Captain White, who refused to rob from women and children; Captain Bellamy, the proletarian revolutionist; and captain North, whose sense of justice and honesty was a rebuke to ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... we have done our best to make available but not intrusive. There is a great deal of conversation in Elizabethan English, but this will not bother you if you are used to reading the plays of Shakespeare. Finally, there are a few short extracts from contemporary letters, in which the spelling would not pass muster these days, but there were no real standards of spelling in those times. In a very few cases in these letters we have adjusted the spelling to give you, the reader, ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... displeasing his royal master. Another class affirm that as the stories of his plays are all antecedent to his own time, therefore he never mentions either the drinking of tobacco, or the tumultuous scenes of the ordinary which belonged to it, and which are so constantly met with in his contemporary dramatists. Says one: ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... to a greater beauty than the ancient Greeks saw and the forms they carved are not strange to us, and if this is true of the outward form it is true of the indwelling spirit. What is essentially noble is contemporary with all that is splendid to-day, and, until the mass of men are equal in spirit, the great figures of the past will affect us less as memories than as prophecies of the Golden Age to which youth is ever hurrying in ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... for moral or political reasons have viewed the power of literature with distrust: but their fear is itself evidence of that power. Thus literature is a very important part both of the past and of contemporary life, and no one can enter fully into either without some real knowledge of it. A man may be a very great man or a very good man without any literary culture; he may do his country and the world imperishable services in peace or war. But the older the world grows, the rarer must these unlettered ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... faith of the orthodox Marxian religion. It is quite needless to add that these men who had probed beneath the surface of the problem and had diagnosed so much more completely the complex malady of contemporary society were intensely disliked by the superficial ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... infinitesimal errands, doing everything that nobody else liked, hard-worked from morning to night, and called up from her hard pallet to recommence her toil before she had realised that she was asleep. Ursula's temper, too, did not improve with time; and Parnel, the associate and contemporary of Maude, was by no means to be mistaken for ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... she had never, as yet, read a single word, although she had managed to maintain a twenty minutes' eulogism and discussion of them without a blunder. She now read them all. Then she wanted to compare these books with the best that contemporary literature had produced. By the time d'Arthez came to see her she was having an indigestion of mind. Expecting this visit, she had daily made a toilet of what may be called the superior order; that is, a toilet which expresses an idea, and ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... sensations of the two men as they found themselves face to face with a human being who had lived in the days when history was yet young and was collecting the stories told by tradition; face to face with a body contemporary with Moses, which yet preserved the exquisite form of youth; as they touched the gentle little hand impregnated with perfumes, which a Pharaoh perhaps had kissed; as they fingered the hair, more durable than empire, more solid than granite monuments. At the sight ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... wrote poetry which was published in the local journals of Cecil and Lancaster counties, and subsequently contributed poetry to the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper, being a contemporary contributor to that journal with his brother, William P. Ewing, and the ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... styles between which it comes historically, we cannot look on it as a proper model for modern imitation. Several diversities of detail may on minute examination be seen in the different bays of the nave of Fecamp, just as in the contemporary nave of Wells. Just as at Wells, the western part—in this case the five western bays—is slightly later than the rest. And, as at Wells, the distinction between the older and newer work is easily ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... contemporary life a novelist is goaded into too many pusillanimous concessions to plausibility. He no longer moves with the gait of omnipotence. It was very different in the palmy days when Dumas was free to play at ducks and drakes with ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... express my contempt for the assertion that all things occur for the best, for a wise and beneficent end, and are ordered by a humane intelligence! It is the most utter falsehood and a crime against the human race. Even in my brief time I have been contemporary with events of the most horrible character; as when the mothers in the Balkans cast their own children from the train to parish in the snow; as when the Princess Alice foundered, and six hundred human beings were smothered in foul water; as when the hecatomb of two thousand maidens ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... Contemporary with the Columbia Baseball Club was a so-called "Mind-cultivating Society," organized by the undergraduates of McElligott's School, in Greene Street. The Boy, as usual, was secretary when he was not treasurer. The object was "Debates," but ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton
... may show any very great originality or differ to any marked degree from contemporary buildings in Spain or even in the south of France, yet to a great extent they fixed a type which in many ways was followed down to the end of the Gothic period. The plan of Braga, Pombeiro, Evora or Coimbra is reproduced with but little change at Guarda, and ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... mentioned, by reflecting the sun from a hollow surface; but this method required costly apparatus, and could never have been in common use. Hence, although so far as I am aware, the Bible, and Homer, and other records of great antiquity, are absolutely silent on the contemporary methods of procuring fire; and although Pliny says the reverse—I think we are justified in believing that the plan of rubbing sticks together was absolutely universal in the barbaric infancy of the human race. In later Greek ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... born at Chaeronea in Boeotia, probably about A.D. 50, and was a contemporary of Tacitus and Pliny, has written two works still extant, the well-known Lives, and the less-known Moralia. The Lives have often been translated, and have always been a popular work. Great indeed was their power at the ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... troublous years of civil war, when his native city caused equal offence to Pompey and to Caesar. Doubtless, too, he would have had stories to tell of the noble Sertorius, and of the tame fawn which gained for him the credit of divine assistance; and contemporary reminiscences of that day of desperate disaster when Caesar, indignant that Cordova should have embraced the cause of the sons of Pompey, avenged himself by a massacre of 22,000 of the citizens. From his mother Helvia, Seneca must often have heard about the fierce ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... accomplishments of some of the New England clergy. The face of the Revolutionary preacher, Samuel Cooper, as Copley painted it, looks upon me with the pleasantest of smiles and a liveliness of expression which makes him seem a contemporary after a hundred years' experience of eternity. The Plato on this lower shelf bears the inscription: "Ezroe Stiles, 1766. Olim e libris Rev. Jaredis Eliot de Killingworth." Both were noted scholars and philosophers. The hand-lens before ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... For evidence that even the stiffest of Scotch Presbyterians have come to discard the old literal biblical narrative of creation and to regard the declaration of the Westminster Confession thereon as a "disproved theory of creation," see Principal John Tulloch, in Contemporary Review, March, 1877, on Religious ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... wire-puller and incorrigible reactionary whose name figures in the bibliographies as the author of a series of commentaries on Isaiah—a performance which has not been widely read since its tardy first appearance in 1571. The delay in publishing this work, and the contemporary neglect of it, were apparently ascribed by Castro to the personal hostility of Luis de Leon who, though he did not approve of the book, seems to have been perfectly ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... and inexorable satirist Juvenal was the contemporary of Domitian and ten other emperors; and the following is his description of the vice in the gaming ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... Kimchi has come to be regarded as the teacher par excellence of Hebrew grammar and lexicography, and Judah ibn Tibbon, one of the most notable of translators, in his testament addressed to his son made a complete presentation of contemporary science, a cyclopaedia of the Arabic and the Hebrew language and literature, grammar, poetry, botany, zoology, natural history, and particularly religious philosophy, the studies of the Bible ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... change of time and place affects him only in so far as it affects his familiarity with his materials. His experience in the United States Navy gave him a sure hand in the sea novels: and in a book like "The Spy" he was near enough to the scenes and characters to be studies practically contemporary. He had the born romanticist's natural affection for the appeal of the past and the stock elements can be counted upon in all his best fiction: salient personalities, the march of events, exciting situations, and ever that arch-romantic lure, the one trick up the sleeve to pique anticipation. ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... California in 1854, he was, successively, a school-teacher, drug-store clerk, express messenger, typesetter, and itinerant journalist. He worked for a while on the NORTHERN CALIFORNIA (from which he was dismissed for objecting editorially to the contemporary California sport of murdering Indians), then on the GOLDEN ERA, 1857, where he achieved his first moderate acclaim. In this latter year he married Anne Griswold of New York. In 1864 he was given the secretaryship of the California mint, a virtual ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... influential and useful part in the later history of the colony, and his career of peaceful service to Rhode Island belies the opinion, based on Winslow's partisan pamphlet, Hypocrasie Unmasked, and other contemporary writings, that he was a blasphemer, a "crude and half-crazy thinker," a "proud and pestilent seducer," and a "most prodigious minter of exorbitant novelties." He preferred "the universitie of humane reason and ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... these Frenchmen could give points even to our "Modern School of Nature Study." It may be remembered that Michelet said the bird floated, and that it could puff itself up so that it was lighter than the air! Not a little contemporary natural science can beat the bird ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... to class Nash with the Precursors of Shakespeare, and until quite lately it was conjectured that he was older than Greene and Peele, a contemporary of Lodge and Chapman. It is now known that he was considerably younger than all these, and even than Marlowe and Shakespeare. Thomas Nash, the fourth child of the Rev. William Nash, who to have ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... interest aroused by their two papers in the London of 1709-12. There is no need to review here the particulars of Gay's eulogy, but one or two points may be noted. In the first place, Gay's remarks are not extravagant when compared with other contemporary testimony. Many of these tributes were brought together by Aitken in his monumental biography of Steele, and since 1889 other contemporary sources have been published which give corroborating support. Hearne first mentions the Spectator on April 22, 1711, in a comment on No. 43, and even this ...
— The Present State of Wit (1711) - In A Letter To A Friend In The Country • John Gay
... ran her eye along the passage the Lady pointed out, blushed, laughed, and slapped the book down as though she would have liked to box the ears of Mr. John Milton, if he had been a contemporary and fellow-contributor to the "Weekly Bucket."—I won't touch the thing,—she said.—-He was a horrid man to talk so: and he had as many ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... was a famous Sufi saint. He was a contemporary of Nanak, and many of his sayings are embodied in the Granth. In Central India, there is a holy hill of his called Girur. The Gazetteer of the Central Provinces edited by C. Grant, 2nd edition, Nagpur, 1870, says ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... say!" repeated the captain; and then turning to Fletcher, with a meaning look, he added: "If I am interrupted again, I will make the sun shine through you." The governor did not press the matter.—The story of the Charter Oak is denied by some, who claim that contemporary history does not mention it, and that probably Andros seized the charter, while the colonists ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... indeed the best of them, had no antetypes in our ancient music. New music was, therefore, to be sought for them. Not on their account only was it to be sought. We hoped they would be the means of calling out and making known a contemporary music fresh with the spirit of the time, and rooted ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... the assembly met, and the republic was proclaimed. The real feelings and opinions of the assembly were soon seen; they were elicited by the ministerial reports. The following description of the scene presented on the occasion is quoted from the contemporary press:— ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Mr. Punch's sharp contemporary, the Lancet, the effect of bagpipe-playing upon the teeth is to blunt them; in fact, in course of time, to wear them away. To the auditor the music has a contrary effect. Mr. Punch is able to say, from experience, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 5, 1890 • Various
... how to extricate a common thing from commonness, and to give it an underlook of pleasant consciousness and wisdom. ...The receipt of these verses has set us upon thinking of the good-natured countenance, which men of genius, in all ages, have for the most part shewn to contemporary writers. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... been joined by some eight or ten carriages, which formed, as it were, a funeral cortege behind us. But I could perceive that these carriages were filled for the most part by young men, and that there was no contemporary of Crasweller to be seen at all. As we went up the town hill, I could espy Barnes gibbering on the doorstep of his house, and Tallowax brandishing a large knife in his hand, and Exors waving a paper over ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... of direct contemporary evidence, Saunders's story is practically uncorroborated. All the letters mentioned in the narrative were destroyed, with the exception of the last note which Eustace received, or rather which he would have received had not Saunders ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... the risk of advertising an Australian immigrant of Fulham—who, like the Kangaroo of his country, is born with a pocket and puts everything into it—and, in spite of much wise advice, we ought not to resist the joy of noticing how readily a hurried contemporary has fallen a prey to its superficial knowledge of its various departments, and, culminating in a "Special Edition" last week to embody a lengthy interview headed "The Home of Taste," has discovered again the nest of the mare ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... was contemporary with, and imitator of, Sir Philip Sydney, with Daniel, Lodge, Constable, and others, in the pastoral strain of sonnets, &c. Watson ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... claim for high excellence on behalf of this unknown playwright. The writing is at times thin and feeble, and the versification is somewhat monotonous. But with all its faults, the language is dramatic. The writer was a contemporary of Shakespeare, and something of Shakespeare's spirit breathes through the pages of this forgotten play. Take such a speech as the following, from the second scene of the ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... a Sicilian tyrant of the sixth century B.C., famous for his cruelties. The Greek poet Stesichorus was a contemporary ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... two or three streaks of light on our horizon can be perceived in this: that the moral breakdown of these papers has been accompanied by a mental breakdown also. The contemporary official paper, like the "Daily News" or the "Daily Chronicle" (I mean in so far as it deals with politics), simply cannot argue; and simply does not pretend to argue. It considers the solution which it imagines that wealthy people want, and it signifies the same in the usual ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... to scorn. And the extraordinary thing was that these young men were perfectly right—extraordinary, because, even as Jacob copied his pages, he knew that no one would ever print them; and sure enough back they came from the Fortnightly, the Contemporary, the Nineteenth Century— when Jacob threw them into the black wooden box where he kept his mother's letters, his old flannel trousers, and a note or two with the Cornish postmark. The ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... he was by no means a delicate one. His lines, as the story of the circle would lead us to expect, are always firm, but they are never fine. Even in his smallest tempera pictures the touch is bold and somewhat heavy: in his fresco work the handling is much broader than that of contemporary painters, corresponding somewhat to the character of many of the figures, representing plain, masculine kind of people, and never reaching any thing like the ideal refinement of the conceptions even of Benozzo ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... Grattelard's dialogues bodily, and converted it into the celebrated fable of The Acorn and the Pumpkin. Grattelard was contemporary with Tabarin, as remarked above: he and his partner, Desiderio Descombes, sold quack medicines at the north end of the Pont Neuf. The dialogue in question follows, at least so much of it as is in point, and will serve as tailpiece to the specimens ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... for. In the mean time, you see it is my fault if I am not a favourite, but alas! I am not heavy enough to be tossed in a blanket, like Doddington; I should never come down again; I cannot be driven in a royal curricle to wells and waters: I can't make love now to my contemporary Charlotte Dives; I cannot quit Mufti and my parroquet for Sir William Irby,(112) and the prattle of a drawing-room, nor Mrs. Clive for Aelia Lalia Chudleigh; in short, I could give up nothing but ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... historian is dealing with men who have played a very prominent part on the stage of life, the general acceptance of his judgment is a strong corroboration of its truth. It may be added that the later judgment of men is not unfrequently more true than the contemporary judgment. The wisdom of a teaching or of a policy is shown by its results, and these results are in most cases very gradually disclosed. Great men are like great mountains which are surrounded by lower peaks ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... and many other figures in the great frescoes. Dominated by the fierce spirit of Dante, he was less influenced by the grave dignity of the Greek philosophy and art than might have been expected from the contemporary and possible pupil of Poliziano. In my estimate of him as a Sculptor in comparison with him as Painter, I am likely to be in a minority of one! but I think that when he is thought of as a painter his earlier pictures are thought of, and these certainly are unworthy of him, but the Prophets ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral and intellectual faculties, all at their highest." Other writers are not so dependent upon their times for our clear understanding of their books. Dante to be intelligible to the modern mind, cannot be taken out of the thirteenth century. "Its contemporary history and its contemporary spirit" says Brother Azarias in his Phases of Thought and Criticism, "constitute his clearest and best commentary." Only in the light of this commentary can we hope to know his message and realize its supremacy. And that it is worth while ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... the attempts contemporary with the infancy of society, or nearly so, that we are to look for the complete realization of the precepts of the natural law; for principles obey the rule laid down by Aristotle. "The nature of each ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... eighteenth-century manners, as he himself was an eighteenth-century personage (he died in 1799, in his seventy-eighth year); and that for the date in which the story is cast (1814) such manners are somewhat of an anachronism. During the generation contemporary with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars—or, to put it another way, the generation that elapsed between the days when Scott roamed the country as a High School and University student and those when he settled in the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson |
