"Rhetorical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were not always prompted by an earnest desire to know the truth, and an earnest purpose to embrace and do the right. They talked and argued for mere effect—to display their dialectic subtilty, or their rhetorical power. They taught virtue for mere emolument and pay. They delighted, as Cicero tells us, to plead the opposite sides of a cause with equal effect. And they found exquisite pleasure in raising difficulties, maintaining paradoxes, and passing off mere tricks of oratory for solid proofs. This ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... E.g. in I. iv. This is so also in II. iii. 114 ff., though here there is some real imaginative excitement mingled with the rhetorical antitheses and balanced clauses ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... amid bursting shells, or while flying over the prairies at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour, in order, first of all, to be ahead of his rivals, this seemed a joke. In after-years of calm and leisure, when writing his books, he painted word pictures and finished his chapters, giving them a rhetorical gloss impossible when writing in haste against the pressure of rushing time. Although Boston was two hundred miles farther from Cairo than New York, yet all New England had read Carleton's account in the Journal before any correspondent's letters from ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... than Hyperion himself,' replied Saturn, 'the favourite counsellor of Enceladus. He is a fine orator, and makes up by his round sentences and choice phrases for the rhetorical deficiencies of his chief, who, to speak the truth, is somewhat curt and husky. They have enough now to do to manage their comrades and keep a semblance of discipline in their routed ranks. Mark that ferocious Briareus there ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... is very much like his countenance and his voice, of immense variety; sometimes plain and unpretending even to flatness; sometimes whimsically brilliant and rhetorical almost beyond the license of private discourse. He has many interesting anecdotes, and tells them very well. He is a shrewd observer; and so fastidious that I am not surprised at the awe in which many people seem to stand when in his company. ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... much, it may seem a sort of wilful profanation, to turn to the spiritless abstract of this speech, which is to be found in all the professed reports of Parliamentary oratory, and which stands, like one of those half-clothed mummies in the Sicilian vaults, with, here and there, a fragment of rhetorical drapery, to give an appearance of life to its marrowless frame. There is, however, one passage so strongly marked with the characteristics of Mr. Sheridan's talent—of his vigorous use of the edge of the blade, with his too frequent display of the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... had meant to kill him; or telling the Khedive Ismail that he 'must have the whole Soudan to govern'; or reducing his salary to half the regulation amount because 'he thought it was too much'; or ruling a country as large as Europe; or collecting facts for Lord Ripon's rhetorical efforts—we perceive a man careless alike of the frowns of men or the smiles of women, of life or comfort, ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... literature with a name so eminent. In 1835 the Anglo-Saxon Psalter of the Paris manuscript was first printed at Oxford, and as this book gives a hundred of the Psalms in vernacular poetry, the suggestion that they might be Aldhelm's, though modernised, had rhetorical attractions for the editor (Thorpe), and supplied him with material for a few rather idle sentences of his Latin preface. In 1840 Jacob Grimm edited (from Thorpe's editio princeps) two poems of the ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... you a powerful petition, For absolute, instant, entire abolition. This question our Chamber is taking a lead in Composed, as you know, of the Flowers of Dunedin, Intelligent Druggists, rhetorical Quakers, Broad acres—a few—but no want of wiseacres. All are perfectly clear that these horrid restrictions Are the proximate cause of our present afflictions, Obstructing the bowels, as 'twere, of the nation, And entirely deranging ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... but a sophist. It is difficult to understand how anyone could have ever been deceived so far as to overlook the sophistical character of this pastoral romance of Longus, or could have discovered genuine naivete in this most artificial of all rhetorical productions. No attentive reader who has some acquaintance with the ways of the Sophistic writers will have any difficulty in apprehending the true inwardness of the story... As this sophist, in those offensively licentious love-scenes, suddenly shows the cloven foot under the cloak of innocence, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... stranger himself courteously drank with the young men of the village, who, like many wiser folk, thus yielded to the charm of mystery. To every one he said a hearty thing, and sometimes touched his greeting off with a bit of poetry or a rhetorical phrase. These dramatic extravagances served him well, for he was among a race of story-tellers ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... ludicrous, it will be set down a piece of spoofing, and perhaps denounced as in bad taste. But all the while that main purpose will remain clear enough to the judicious. It is, in brief, the purpose of clarifying the current exchange of rhetorical gas bombs upon the subject of American ideals and the American character, so copious, so cocksure and withal so ill-informed and inconclusive, by putting into plain propositions some of the notions that lie at the heart of those ideals and enter into the very substance ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... him for his resolution, at the same time advising him not to give up his mind entirely to dog-fighting, as he had formerly done, but, when the present combat should be over, to return to his rhetorical studies, and above all to marry some rich and handsome lady on the first opportunity, as, with his person and expectations, he had only to sue for the hand of the daughter of a marquis to be successful, telling him, with a sigh, that all women were not Annettes, and that ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... situation appealed profoundly to Browning, and Andrea's monologue is one of his most consummate pieces of dramatic characterisation. It is a study of spiritual paralysis, achieved without the least resort to the rhetorical conventions which permit poetry to express men's silence with speech and their apathy with song. Tennyson's Lotos-eaters chant their world-weariness in choral strains of almost too magnificent ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... together in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all." "All" here means both Jews and Gentiles; and the reference is to the universal annulment of the universal fatality, and the impartial offer of heaven to every one who sanctifies the truth in his heart. In some cases the word "all" is used with rhetorical looseness, not with logical rigidness, and denotes merely all Christians. Ruckert shows this well in his commentary on the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians. In other instances the universality, which is indeed plainly there, applies to the removal from the race of the inherited ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... extolled the Burgundian regime and supported the duke's policy, whether friendly or antagonistic to France. From a literary point of view, they are greatly inferior to their predecessors and often lapse into rhetorical eloquence. Their style, which appears to be overloaded with flowery images, excited great admiration at the time, especially in the case of Chastellain, who was hailed by his contemporaries as a ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... de Machault (1295- 1377) inaugurated a revival, hardly of lyric poetry, but of the cultivation of lyric forms. He introduced a new style which made the old conventional themes again presentable by refinement of phrase and rhetorical embellishments, and he directed the pursuit of form not to the invention of ever new variations, but to the perfection of a few forms. And it is noticeable that these fixed forms were not selected from those elaborated under ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... the source of the stream—"out of his belly." Will you observe for a moment the rhetorical figure here? I used to suppose it meant "out of his heart." The ancients, you remember, thought the heart lay down in the abdominal region. But you will find that this book is very exact in its use of words. The blood is the life. The heart pumps the blood, but the stomach ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... 'how much the stone-work of the Coliseum would fetch, properly burned down to lime?'—she would shudder from head to foot and call you 'barbaro' with good Trojan heart.) Now you suppose—(watch my rhetorical figure here)—you suppose I am going to congratulate myself on being so much for the better, en pays de connaissance, with my 'other friend,' E.B.B., number 2—or 200, why not?—whereas I mean to 'fulmine over Greece,' since thunder frightens you, for all the laurels,—and to have reason ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... stiltedness of the style where the author yet remembers to be euphuistic, in spite of the long 'orations,' 'passions,' 'meditations' and the like, each carefully labelled and giving to the whole the air of a series of rhetorical exercises, in spite of the mediocre quality of most of the verses, if we except its one perfect gem, the romance yet retains not a little of ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... journey from the Peruvian port of Mollendo to the Bolivian interior, which the writer made in the year stated, are here transcribed. No rhetorical merit is claimed, facts only are related, and the compiler of the manuscript only hopes that his efforts may, in part at least, justify a cursory perusal, without exhausting the patience of the readers, or overtaxing ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... used in 1789, while still a Corsican in feeling, when addressing Paoli. They strain chronology for the sake of rhetorical effect, but they truthfully picture the circumstances under which he was conceived. Among many others of a similar character there is a late myth which recalls in detail that when the pains of parturition seized his mother she was at ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... smell of the lamp. Adj. ornament &c v.; beautified &c 847; ornate, florid, rich, flowery; euphuistic^, euphemistic; sonorous; high-sounding, big-sounding; inflated, swelling, tumid; turgid, turgescent; pedantic, pompous, stilted; orotund; high flown, high flowing; sententious, rhetorical, declamatory; grandiose; grandiloquent, magniloquent, altiloquent^; sesquipedal^, sesquipedalian; Johnsonian, mouthy; bombastic; fustian; frothy, flashy, flaming. antithetical, alliterative; figurative &c 521; artificial &c (inelegant) 579. Adv. ore ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... all events, for what we in particular wanted, which was a play that the League could stage for half an evening's entertainment; but it left existent not a shred of the rhetorical fripperies which I had in the beginning concocted, and it made of the actual first public performance a collaboration with almost as many contributing authors as though the production had been a ...
— The Jewel Merchants - A Comedy In One Act • James Branch Cabell
... trick learned from the environment," I lightly replied. "Does it hurt much?" This was rhetorical, for I knew a stab wound from the cane smarted and ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... had emptied all her vials, and that I was nerved, because there was nothing more to dread. But the worst is always behind, and this is the irony of fate. You think that merely a rhetorical metaphor, a tragic trope? How should you know? That Christmas card is the solitary dove I sent out to hunt a resting-place for mother and for me, when the flood engulfed us. It was my design sent to Boston, to compete ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... genius and ambition when he found himself thus compelled to put up with an empty office at a sham court. Bolingbroke's desire was to play on a great stage, with a vast admiring audience. He loved the heat and passion of debate; he enjoyed his own rhetorical triumphs. He must have been chilled and cramped indeed in a situation which allowed him no opportunity of displaying his most splendid and genuine qualities, while it constantly called on him for the exercise of the very qualities which he had ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... differentiation, or the law of the passage from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, or the dialectic of the concept of pure being, or the impulse towards life, or the vocation of spirit is what actually hatches them? Alas, these words are but pedantic and rhetorical cloaks for our ignorance, and to project them behind the facts and regard them as presiding from thence over the course of nature is a piece of the most deplorable scholasticism. If eggs are really without structure, the true causes of the ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... first I thought him cold, infected with the rhetorical ice of the Leconte de Lisle. He had no new creed to proclaim nor old creed to denounce, the inherent miseries of human life did not seem to touch him, nor did he sing the languors and ardours of animal or spiritual passion. But there is this: ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... of her condition. Had she but read Euphues, and forgotten that accursed mill and shieling-hill, it is my thought that her converse would be broidered with as many and as choice pearls of compliment, as that of the most rhetorical lady in the court of Feliciana. I trust she means to return to bear ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... acquire the art of speaking effectively and of "thinking on his feet." The claims of pure literature, of philosophy, and of history were accorded too little attention, and the chief drill centered about the technique of declamatory prose. Not that the rhetorical study was itself made absolutely practical. The teachers unfortunately would spin the technical details thin and long to hold profitable students over several years. But their claims that they attained practical ends imposed on the parents, and ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... meaning of which even the man in the street knows. No tautology is to be found and no attempt at ornate expression. It is a model of simplicity, and as it flows through the reaches of history it will always excite the admiration of those who love clarity and not rhetorical excesses. One can say of it as Horace said of his ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... physical discomfort, sense of disappointment, or other of the necessary incidents of so toilsome an effort and long sacrifice. As was the character of the man, so is his paper, simple, direct, without any of the exaggerations of peculiar features in the exploration or rhetorical artifices of description to enhance the effect of the discoveries of the traveller, and with an entire suppression of himself. For all that appears in the paper, he might have been engaged in the most enjoyable ...
— Memoir of William Watts McNair • J. E. Howard
... guilty of less gross a blunder. He rails at morality as commonly understood, calling it "the morality of the herd," and he recommends isolation, the repression of sympathy, and a contempt for one's fellows. To be sure, the "herd" is a scornful, rhetorical expression,—what Bentham would have called a "question-begging epithet,"—for men do not, properly speaking, live in herds; but they do normally live in human societies of some sort, and they have the instincts and impulses which fit them ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... Carlisle perceived a rhetorical question, though she didn't know it under that name; she made no reply. She would really have preferred no more questions of any sort—what was the use of them? In her, as in all the Maker's creatures, the instinct ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... dependent for its revelation on this passage, belonging as it does to the very truth as it is in Jesus; but it is therein magnificently expressed by the apostle, and differently from anywhere else—that is, if I am right in the interpretation which suggested itself the moment I saw the probable rhetorical relation of ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... printing establishments. Even at Angouleme, so closely connected through its paper-mills with the art of typography in Paris, the only machinery in use was the primitive wooden invention to which the language owes a figure of speech—"the press groans" was no mere rhetorical expression in those days. Leather ink-balls were still used in old-fashioned printing houses; the pressman dabbed the ink by hand on the characters, and the movable table on which the form of type was placed in readiness for the sheet of paper, being made of marble, literally deserved its ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... likes. That's Shakespeare, Cruttendon. I'm with you there. Shakespeare had more guts than all these damned frogs put together. 'Hang there like fruit my soul,'" he began quoting, in a musical rhetorical voice, flourishing his wine-glass. "The devil damn you black, you cream-faced loon!" he exclaimed as the ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... apprehensive than myself, especially such as best know his character; for his very enemies and even his ridiculers, who are of the two by far the greater number, allow him to be a peaceable man in all things except his words, his rhetorical actions, his looks, and his hatred to the clergy; which however are all known by abundance of experience to be perfectly harmless, and particularly as to the clergy. I do not doubt but, if he will be so ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... style of Rubens was Johnsonese all his life, and he made his meaning plain only by repetitions and many rhetorical flounderings. Like the average sixteen-year-old boy who sits himself down and takes his pen in hand, all his sprightliness of imagination vanished at sight of an ink-bottle. With a brush his feelings were fluid, and in a company grace dwelt upon ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... never found themselves, never touched their power, until they forgot their rules for construction, their grammar, their rhetorical arrangement, by losing themselves in their subject. Then ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... refer to the jealousy of the Crown, so deeply embedded in the very substance of constitutional authority; so many people are loth to admit the Queen, in spite of law and fact, to be the people's appointee and agent, that it is a good rhetorical emphasis to speak of her prerogative as something NON-popular, and therefore to be distrusted. By the very nature of our government our executive cannot be liked and trusted as the Swiss or the American is liked ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... statement. In the place of the logical subtleties which Donne and his school had sought in the scholastic writers of the Middle Ages, they brought back the typically Renaissance study of rhetoric; the characteristic of all the poetry of the period is that it has a rhetorical quality. It is never intimate and never profound, but it has point and wit, and it appeals with confidence to the balanced judgment which men who distrust emotion and have no patience with subtleties ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... or rhetorical method are very striking. It is almost incredible that the superb imaginative amplification of the description of Hyder Ali's descent upon the Carnatic should be from the same pen as the grave, simple, unadorned Address to the King (1777), where each sentence falls on the ear with ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... p. 180, ascribes the petition to the King, of 1774, (1 Journ. Cong. 67) to the pen of Richard Henry Lee. I think myself certain, it was not written by him, as well from what I recollect to have heard, as from the internal evidence of style. He was loose, vague, frothy, rhetorical. He was a poorer writer than his brother Arthur; and Arthur's standing may be seen in his Monitor's Letters, to insure the sale of which, they took the precaution of tacking to them a new edition of the Farmer's Letters; like Mezentius, who 'mortua jungebat corpora vivis.' You were of the ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... working for us," said Senator Cannon. "Whether I need him or not may be a point of argument. Whether Matthew Fisher needs him or not is a rhetorical question." ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... nations, forgetful of their ancient animosities, and delivered from the apprehension of future danger." Thus wrote the Roman historian, and Gibbon states that when we discount as much of this as we please as rhetorical and declamatory, the fact remains that the substance of this description is in accordance with the facts of history. Never until the Christian era was any thought given to the regular care of the helpless and the ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... is imperfect, of the Gallic war. Of Caesar's Commentaries, Cicero, in his Brutus, speaks thus: "He wrote his Commentaries in a manner deserving of great approbation: they are plain, precise, and elegant, without any affectation of rhetorical ornament. In having thus prepared materials for others who might be inclined to write his history, he may perhaps have encouraged some silly creatures to enter upon such a work, who will needs be dressing ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... that this particular experiment in language was one which had to be made, and that our fifteenth-century poets made it with all their might, we can understand how Hawes could hail Lydgate as 'the most dulcet spring of famous rhetoric' (this new poetry being essentially rhetorical); how Skelton, after condescendingly praising Chaucer for the 'pleasant, easy and plain' terms in which he wrote, hastened to explain that Lydgate's efforts were 'after a higher rate'; and how the same Skelton thought it necessary in his Phylyp Sparowe to make ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... Maybridge was standing with her back to Mr. Fotheringay, washing glasses; the others were watching him, more or less amused by the present ineffectiveness of the assertive method. Goaded by the Torres Vedras tactics of Mr. Beamish, Mr. Fotheringay determined to make an unusual rhetorical effort. "Looky here, Mr. Beamish," said Mr. Fotheringay. "Let us clearly understand what a miracle is. It's something contrariwise to the course of nature done by power of Will, something what couldn't ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... come to the French court from Italy in boyhood, and had risen, in 1672, from a subordinate position to that of chief musician. Undertaking to make reforms, he succeeded in giving his adopted country a national opera. He established the overture, gave recitative rhetorical force, added coloring to the orchestra, and introduced the ballet. New life was infused into the traditions he left when Jean Philippe Rameau, in 1733, at fifty years of age, wrote his first opera. He was well-known as a theorist and ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... In the rhetorical use of the Dilemma, it may be observed that the disjunction in the minor premise ought to be obvious, or (at any rate) easily acceptable to the audience. Thus, Either the Tories or the Whigs will win; Either AEschines joined in the rejoicings, or he did not; such propositions are not likely ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... seamstress of Beaucaire. It was a very lucky thing that our hero had in mind his numerous readings, which allowed him, by amalgamating the Red Indian eloquence of Gustave Aimard's Apaches with Lamartine's rhetorical flourishes in the "Voyage en Orient," and some reminiscences of the "Song of Songs," to compose the most Eastern letter that you could expect ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... it is that he doesn't impress me as being afraid. But there is certainly something very wrong with the fellow. A man who will deliberately desert a woman in distress"— Carroll's manner expanded into the roundly rhetorical—"whatever else he may be, cannot ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the poem. It is also remarkable for its large and impressive style, its rich command of words, and the lofty beauty of its diction. One of its most striking qualities, as Mr. Henry James, Jr., suggests, "is its extraordinary rhetorical energy and eloquence," and "its splendid generosity of diction." The same writer says of the character of Don Silva, that "nowhere has her marvellous power of expression, the mingled dignity and pliancy of her style, obtained a greater triumph." The critics have almost without exception dealt ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... only of such individuals as were concerned in great events. It is but a step from realising the greatness of an event to believing that the persons concerned in it were equally great, and this belief, fostered by the somewhat rhetorical literature of Rome, met the new consciousness of personality more than half way, and led to that unlimited admiration for human genius and achievement which was so prominent a feature of the early Renaissance. ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... period of his most extensive reading. He absorbed the English novelists and essayists; he saturated himself with the sentiment of Rousseau; he studied Bacon and Hobbes and Berkeley and Hume; he became fascinated, in Burke, by the union of a wide intellect with a brilliant fancy and consummate rhetorical skill.[3] Though he called himself at this time dumb and inarticulate, and the idea of ever making literature his profession had not suggested itself to him, he was eager to talk about the things he read, and ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... not of itself sufficient to secure the condign punishment of the culprit, which consists in compelling him to refund. But this redress only extends to one particular kind of fraud, that, namely, included under the rhetorical figure called metonymy, (i.e. the substitution of one thing for another,) and does not extend beyond this; so that, though a dealer were to sell an old hatchet for one hundred pounds, provided it had the necessary ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... their own feet, and some from lack of restoratives. The mice, he avers, enjoyed the pleasures of the chase with composure. But if "Roman history is nine-tenths lying," we can hardly expect a smaller proportion of that rhetorical figure in the annals of a people capable of so incredible cruelty to a lovely women; for a hard ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... interests of the people. The evils which the lottery system creates, and the evils which it exasperates, are so various and complicated, that the undersigned memorialists cannot attempt an enumeration. They are so revolting as to furnish no motive for rhetorical exaggeration. A few only of these evils the undersigned memorialists ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... Biggar, who spoke (if my memory serves me right) for nearly six hours on one occasion. Biggar, however, merely read interminable extracts from Blue Books, whereas my uncle indulged in four hours of genuine rhetorical declamation. My uncle derived his nickname from the fact that in our family the second son is invariably christened Claud, so I had already a brother of that name. There happen to be three Lord Claud Hamiltons living now, of three ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... The handwriting was excellent, and the wording was English —English, and yet not exactly English. The style was easy and smooth and flowing, yet there was something subtly foreign about it—A something tropically ornate and sentimental and rhetorical. It turned out to be the work of a Hindoo youth, the holder of a humble clerical billet in a railway office. He had been educated in one of the numerous colleges of India. Upon inquiry I was told that the country was full of young ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the identity of lyric and pure intuition. It is a really admirable passage, containing many profound truths in a few short, simple words, although, as is natural, without full consciousness of their richness. Aristotle, then, is still discussing the said rhetorical and poetical propositions, semantic and not apophantic, and he remarks that in them there rules no distinction between true and false: to alaetheueion hae pseudeothai ouk hyparchei. Art, in fact, is in contact with palpitating reality, but does not know that ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... appreciation of the Revolution across the Channel. Her temper was above all industrial. Men who were working hard and fast growing rich, who had the narrow and practical turn of men of business, looked angrily at this sudden disturbance of order, this restless and vague activity, these rhetorical appeals to human feeling, these abstract and often empty theories. In England it was a time of political content and social well-being, of steady economic progress, as well as of a powerful religious revival; and an insular lack ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... Blanc's appeal to the people of England is declamatory and rhetorical in tone, and I am inclined to think that the people of England are but a Richard Doe, and that in reality it is addressed to the Parisians. M. Blanc asks the English in Paris to bear witness that the windows of ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... conspicuous man in the community. It was sad to see his name disappear from the newspapers; sadder still to see it resurrected at intervals, shorn of its aforetime gaudy gear of compliments and clothed on with rhetorical ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... twice or thrice across the dingy room, as if he would show how far he has gained his equilibrium. "I shall go straight mad; yes, mad, if the whiskey be not brought in," he pursues, stopping short in one of his sallies, and with a rhetorical flourish, pointing at the piece of silver he so exultingly tossed upon the table. As if his brain were again seized by the destroyer's flame, his countenance becomes livid, his eyes glare wildly upon each object near him; then he draws himself into a tragic attitude, contorts ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... of his views on that important subject, then for the first time brought to bear on the annals of man, that has chiefly gained for him, and with justice, the character of a philosophic historian. To this may be added the admirable clearness and rhetorical powers with which he has stated the principal arguments for and against the great changes in the English institutions which it fell to his lot to recount—arguments far abler than were either used ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... crowned women, and warned all men that if they presume to defend the same when any "noble heart" shall be raised up to vindicate the liberty of his country, they shall not fail to perish themselves in the ruin, he concludes with a last rhetorical flourish: "And therefore let all men be advertised, for THE TRUMPET ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in some cases for their literary and rhetorical excellences, but in every case for their helpfulness in solving some of the problems of Christian living. No two persons are likely to agree upon "the best" of anything, and readers will probably wish in ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume I - Basil to Calvin • Various
... new promise of emancipation to English Literature, for a new influence has freshened the blood of conventional style that in the decadence of the End of the Century had grown dilute. This adjuvant strain is found in the enthusiasm of Slang. Slowly its rhetorical power has won foothold in the language. It has won many a verb and substantive, it has conquered idiom and diction, and now it is strong enough to assault the very syntax of our ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him."[366] Whether his use of the plural pronoun "we" indicates that he was sent by the Sanhedrin, or by the society of Pharisees—the members of which were accustomed to so speak, as representatives of the order—or was employed in the rhetorical sense as indicating himself alone, is of little importance. He acknowledged Jesus as a "teacher come from God," and gave reasons for so regarding Him. Whatever of feeble faith might have been stirring in the heart of ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... regard to the massacre of the children and the conduct of the disciples in Gethsemane, are met with frequently enough to this day, and in works of a more professedly critical character than Justin's. The description of the carpenter's trade and of the crowd at the Crucifixion may be merely rhetorical amplifications in the one case of the general Synoptic statement, in the other of the special statement in St. Mark. A certain fulness of style is characteristic of Justin. That he attributes the genealogy to Mary may be a natural instance of reflection; the inconsistency in ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... powerful animal sensibility; and I knew the one great secret for maintaining its equipoise, viz., by powerful daily exercise; and thus I lived in the light and presence, or, (if I should not be suspected of seeking rhetorical expressions, I would say,) in one eternal solstice of ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... facts that there should be more than a century—and such a century!—from him to Wordsworth. The passing of time between them is strange enough, but the passing of Pope, Prior, and Gray—of the world, the world, whether reasonable or flippant or rhetorical—is more strange. Vaughan's phrase and diction seem to carry the light. Il vous semble que cette femme degage de la lumiere en marchant? Vous l'aimez! says Marius in Les Miserables (I quote from memory), and it seems to be by a sense ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... such times, one hears much, nonsense and vanity, much making of phrases and sentimental grimace; but there was one excellent speaker, adroit and rapid as only a Frenchman could be. With admirable readiness, skill, and rhetorical polish, he examined the arguments of all the others, and built upon their failures a triumph for himself. His management of the language, too, was masterly, and French is the best of languages for such a purpose,—clear, flexible, full of sparkling points and quick, picturesque turns, ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... common tales in such enormous phrases, with such gigantic structure of rhetorical flourish, that the mere disproportion amounts to false-hood; and, the diseased appetite in listeners growing more and more diseased, feeding on such diseased food, it is impossible to predict what it will not be necessary for story-mongers to invent at the end of a century or so more ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Talleyrand in the single department of diplomacy, but an infinitely more respectable and many-sided man. He had an immense eclat in the early part of this century as writer and poet, although his literary fame has now greatly declined. Lamartine, in his sentimental and rhetorical exaggeration, speaks of him as "the Ossian of France,—an aeolian harp, producing sounds which ravish the ear and agitate the heart, but which the mind cannot define; the poet of instincts rather than of ideas, who gained ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... and the exotic fancy of the Oriental Rasselas. He might have believed, what many excellent critics have believed, that in this age comedy requires more genius than tragedy; and with his audience he might have infinitely more esteemed his own original humour, than Johnson's rhetorical declamation. He might have thought, that with inferior literature he displayed superior genius, and with less profundity more gaiety. He might have considered that the facility and vivacity of his pleasing compositions were preferable to that art, that habitual pomp, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... deeply read in Greek have all the qualities of fustian and effusiveness which Longinus most despised. Greek will not make a luxuriously Asiatic mind Hellenic, it is certain; but it may, at least, help to restrain effusive and rhetorical gabble. Our Asiatic rhetoricians might perhaps be even more barbarous than they are if Greek were a sealed book to them. However this may be, it is, at least, well to find out in a school what boys are worth ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... tranquillity, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity," interrupted Abel, who had been scanning the Constitution, and who delivered the words with a rhetorical pomp of manner. ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... in the house when Cicero spoke; he had gone down to his villa at Tibur. There he remained for a fortnight, brooding over his reply—taking lessons, it was said, from professors in the art of rhetorical self-defence. At last he came to Rome and answered his opponent. His speech has not reached us; but we know that it contained the old charges of having put Roman citizens to death without trial in the case of the abettors of ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... meetings were an immense success. That at Aylesbury realized L5,851 for a county corps; and one at Epsom, for Surrey, brought in nearly double as much.[324] Most noteworthy of all these meetings was one of 19th April 1794 at Birmingham, where loyal sentiments crystalized in a rhetorical jewel of rare lustre. The "Loyal True Blues" of Birmingham, in view of the threats of the French "to insult the chalky cliffs of Albion and to plant in this island their accursed tree of liberty, more baneful in its effects than the poisonous tree of Java which desolates ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... appeal to no rich personal experience, no patience of study, no delicacy of sense; and if at rare moments some 'Memory of the Dead' can take its strength from one; at all other moments manner and matter will be rhetorical, conventional, sentimental; and language, because it is carried beyond life perpetually, will be as wasted as the thought, with unmeaning pedantries and silences, and a dread of all that has salt and savour. After a while, in a land that has given itself to agitation ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... writers is warranted in saying that the scene was indescribable. Correspondents did their best, and after they had squeezed the rhetorical sponge of its last drop of ink distilled to frenzy of adjectives in inadequate effort, they gaspingly laid their copy on the table of the censor, who minded not "word pictures" which contained no ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... Tocqueville's sense, but he likewise was full of ideas and hopes which the unchecked or undirected course of democracy would defeat without chance of reparation. This fact he accepted, and from this he started. Mr. Carlyle, and one or two rhetorical imitators, poured malediction on the many-headed populace, and with a rather pitiful impatience insisted that the only hope for men lay in their finding and obeying a strong man, a king, a hero, a dictator. How he was to be found, neither the ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... a poet, and a rather rhetorical than sincere one. He has the art, but, as we shall ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... the beaten track of preferment,—and the universities on the other. The latter prided themselves on their closer approximation to the ancient rules and ancient regularity—taking the theatre of Greece, or rather its dim reflection, the rhetorical tragedies of the poet Seneca, as a perfect ideal, without any critical collation of the times, origin, or circumstances;—whilst, in the mean time, the popular writers, who could not and would not abandon what they had found to delight their countrymen ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... Amos speaks as well as Mr. Burke; but in general the speakers are more argumentative, and less rhetorical. And whereas there are with you not more than ten or a dozen tolerable speakers, here every member is ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... House of Commons. Cobden himself was chosen, in 1841, as member for Stockport. Almost immediately he exercised his gift as a speaker, securing at once the attention of his colleagues by his style of oratory, which, with little formal eloquence or rhetorical elaboration, was powerfully persuasive, enriched by many happy illustrations drawn from life, and infused with a pure and lofty spirit. Whatever the topic under discussion, he was always able to show its relation to the obnoxious ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... of the little treatise, the literary texture of which is plain and homely, rather than rich, learned, or rhetorical. "Pomp and ostentation of reading," he expressly says, "is admired among the vulgar; but doubtless in matters of Religion he is learnedest who is plainest." It was, we may remember, his first considerable English dictation for the press since his blindness, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... the prize rhetorical exercise is called by this name; the reason is not given. The students speak of "making a rush for moonlight," i.e. of attempting to gain the ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... simulated grief, the falsehood and sycophancies—all uttered in the name of Heaven in our State churches: these monstrous Threnodies which have been sung from time immemorial over kings and queens, good, bad, wicked, licentious. The State parson must bring out his commonplaces; his apparatus of rhetorical black-hanging.... ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... irresistible urge to smash his fist into her jaw. Straight-laced, hopelessly blind to every standard but her own—what right did Ann have to pass judgment on Niaga? It was a rhetorical question. Ann Howard represented the Federation no less than Lord did himself. By law, the teachers rode every trading ship; in the final analysis, their certification could make or break ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... academical teaching—the encouragement and spread of the highest forms of national culture. To what use could a gentleman of Edward III's or Richard II's day have put the acquirements of a "Clerk of Oxenford" in Aristotelian logic, supplemented perhaps by a knowledge of Priscian, and the rhetorical works of Cicero? Chaucer's scholar, however much his learned modesty of manner and sententious brevity of speech may commend him to our sympathy and taste, is a man wholly out of the world in which he lives, ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... inadvertently buried alive, that he was heard to cry out in his coffin, and that when it was opened some days after, he was found to have gnawed his arm. But these facts are not known to earlier and more authentic historians, and the invention of them seems to be only a rhetorical way of putting the fact that he died at enmity ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... brother of W. D. Washburn, in the course of which the Illinois congressman published a letter in a St. Paul paper attacking Donnelly's personal character. Believing this to be part of the campaign against him, the choleric Minnesotan replied in the house with a remarkable rhetorical display which greatly entertained the members but did not increase their respect for him. His opponents at home made effective use of this affair, and the outcome of the contest was a divided convention, the nomination of two Republicans, ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... nevertheless certain, that many pains, as well as pleasures, are heightened by rhetorical affectation, and that the picture is, for the most part, bigger than ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... Mr. Goldwin Smith's historic art, his lax criticism, his superficial acquaintance with foreign countries, his occasional proneness to sacrifice accuracy for the sake of rhetorical effect, his aversion for spiritual things, are all covered by one transcendent merit, which, in a man of so ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... as a teacher, but as a writer, that Cicero demands a place in educational history. His writings furnish the finest examples of Latin style, and his orations are studied for their classic beauty and rhetorical finish. He wrote many philosophical works, in which are set forth advanced ideas on education. Especially was he in advance of his age in regard to the punishment of children. He held that corporal punishment should be resorted to only when all else has failed; that the child should not be degraded ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... another, who adorned the concluding half of the first century of our era, viz.:—Juvenal, Persius, and Martial. They are severally representative of distinct modes or types of satire. Juvenal illustrates rhetorical or tragic satire, of which he is at once the inventor and the most distinguished master—that form of composition, in other words, which attacks vice, wrongs, or abuses in a high-pitched strain of impassioned, declamatory eloquence. In this type of ...
— English Satires • Various
... fact because it "points a moral and adorns a 'tail.'" The French always give this extra touch. Everything has its silk snapper. Are not the literary whips of Paris famous for their rhetorical tips and the sting there is in them? What French writer ever goaded his adversary with the belly of his lash, like the Germans and the English, when he could blister him with its silken end, and the percussion of wit be heard ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... his own; for the nature of the latter is not to be doubted, whereas there is nothing but tradition to shew for the bitterness of hers. Foscolo is of opinion that the tradition itself arose simply from a rhetorical flourish of Boccaccio's, in his Life of Dante, against the marriages of men of letters; though Boccaccio himself expressly adds, that he knows nothing to the disadvantage of the poet's wife, except that her husband, after quitting Florence, would never either come where she ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... Taylor, "and century followed century, there was no falling off in the study of the Aeneid. Virgil's fame towered, his authority became absolute. But how? In what respect? As a supreme master of grammatical correctness and rhetorical excellence and of all learning. With increasing emptiness of soul, the grammarians—the Virgils'—of the succeeding centuries put the great ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... became Eloquent, and began to get rid of long Boston Words that hadn't been used before that Season. He grabbed a rhetorical Roman Candle in each Hand and you couldn't ...
— Fables in Slang • George Ade
... deal of trouble to work the Doctor's talk up into this formal shape. Some of his sentences have been rounded off for him, and the whole brought into a more rhetorical form than it could have pretended to, if taken as it fell from his lips. But the exact course of his remarks has been followed, and as far as possible his expressions have been retained. Though given in the form of a discourse, it must be remembered that ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... piece bears little resemblance to either. Throughout Shakespeare's 'Richard III' the effort to emulate Marlowe is undeniable. The tragedy is, says Mr. Swinburne, 'as fiery in passion, as single in purpose, as rhetorical often, though never so inflated in expression, as Marlowe's "Tamburlaine" itself.' The turbulent piece was naturally popular. Burbage's impersonation of the hero was one of his most effective performances, and his vigorous enunciation of 'A horse, a horse! my kingdom ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... of mind, quickness and daring, he stoood absolutely the Superman among pygmies. He knew his aim, and could make or wait for it; and it was big and real. Other men crowed or fumbled after petty and pinch-beck ends; impossible rhetorical republicanisms; vain senatorial prestiges; —or pleasure pure and simple—say rather, very complex and impure. Let them clack, let them fumble! Caesar would do things and get things done. He wore the whole armor of his greatness, and could see no chink ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... at all about it. From that moment, Ostap began to pore over his tiresome books with exemplary diligence, and quickly stood on a level with the best. The style of education in that age differed widely from the manner of life. The scholastic, grammatical, rhetorical, and logical subtle ties in vogue were decidedly out of consonance with the times, never having any connection with, and never being encountered in, actual life. Those who studied them, even the least ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... client; (2) Writing speeches for a client to deliver; (3) Teaching pupils; (4) Giving public displays of his skill. There is a doubtful statement that Lucian failed in (1), and took to (2) in default. His surviving rhetorical pieces (The Tyrannicide, The Disinherited, Phalaris) are declamations on hypothetical cases which might serve either for (3) or (4); and The Hall, The Fly, Dipsas, and perhaps Demosthenes, suggest (4). A common form of exhibition was ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... this way he cleared himself out. There are men who have no control of their blasphemous utterances, who want us to send them to Congress. Others have blasphemed in senatorial places, pretending afterwards that it was a mere rhetorical flourish. ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... different from that in the dictionary, and Mr. Jones admits this and would teach it sepritly as 'style A'. But it is wrong to suppose that its characteristics are a mere fashion or a pedantic regard for things obsolete, or a nice rhetorical grace, though Mr. Jones will have it to be mostly artificial, 'due to well-established, though perhaps somewhat arbitrary rules laid down by teachers of elocution'. The basis of it is the need of being heard ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... to appear who represented the rising classes: Camille Desmoulins, a rhetorical journalist, with literary but not political talent, harangued the people in the garden of the Palais Royal; and one of the strong men of history, Danton, showed that he knew how to manage and to ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Nina witnessed unmoved. She might have been deaf, dumb, without any feeling as far as any expression of opinion went. Yet oft when her father had sought the refuge of the great dusty rooms of "Almayer's Folly," and her mother, exhausted by rhetorical efforts, squatted wearily on her heels with her back against the leg of the table, Nina would approach her curiously, guarding her skirts from betel juice besprinkling the floor, and gaze down upon her as one might look into the quiescent crater of a volcano after a destructive eruption. Mrs. Almayer's ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... inexperienced orators—of trying to lower himself to the intellectual level of his audience, he was only elaborately stupid. No man can speak too well for a crowd,—as no man can write too well for the stage; but in neither case should he be rhetorical, or case in periods the dry bones of reasoning. It is to the emotions or to the humours that the speaker of a crowd must address himself; his eye must brighten with generous sentiment, or his lip must expand in the play of ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... falsehood and sycophancies—all uttered in the name of Heaven in our State churches: these monstrous threnodies have been sung from time immemorial over kings and queens, good, bad, wicked, licentious. The State parson must bring out his commonplaces; his apparatus of rhetorical black-hangings. Dead king or live king, the clergyman must flatter him—announce his piety whilst living, and when dead, perform the obsequies of "our ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... goats on the other. His pages are the record of sentences passed, not the presentation of human characters in all their fulness and colour; and the consequence is that even now and so soon, in spite of all their rhetorical brilliance, their hold on men has grown slack. Contrast the dim depths into which his essay on Johnson is receding, with the vitality as of a fine dramatic creation which exists in Mr. Carlyle's essay ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... only to open their eyes to see it. The Beautiful itself could only be the mirror of the Truth present before us in Nature. Patriotism, like all the other virtues based on a religious attitude of mind, and which can be mentioned only when people have the courage to talk in earnest, became a rhetorical theme on which it was rather ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... quotations he shows his predilection for the classics, especially for Plutarch's "Lives." He also read much of the literature of the French Revolution. He was a very impressive orator; his addresses and proclamations show much emphasis, and the rhetorical artifice is apparent, as it is in all literature of this kind. In his letters he uses a very simple and naturally witty style. He was a great coiner of sentences, many of which can be found in his proclamations and addresses. His political perspicacity was remarkable. ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... of the imagination. Whether supporting or assailing, he makes his way either by argument or by appeals to the affections, unsurpassed even by the schoolmen in subtlety, 415 agility, and logic wit, and unrivalled by the most rhetorical of the fathers in the copiousness and vividness of his expressions and illustrations. Here words that convey feelings, and words that flash images, and words of abstract notion, flow together, and whirl and rush onward like a stream, at ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... composition, such as epistles or panegyrical orations, are more liable to suspicion than others; those, again, which have a taste of sophistry in them, or the ring of a later age, or the slighter character of a rhetorical exercise, or in which a motive or some affinity to spurious writings can be detected, or which seem to have originated in a name or statement really occurring in some classical author, are also of doubtful credit; while there is no instance of any ancient writing proved to be ...
— Menexenus • Plato
... and his eccentricity lies only in the extraordinary occupation which he has chosen for himself. Riemann also traces to Sterne, Fielding and their German followers, Goethe's occasional use of the direct appeal to the reader. Doubtless Sterne's example here was a force in extending this rhetorical convention. ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... sweeping between the buildings,—and afterward, gathering yourself up in your cloak, watch in a sleepy, listless maze the flickering lamps that hang around the dreary chapel! You follow half unconsciously some tutor's rhetorical reading of a chapter of Isaiah; and then, as he closes the Bible with a flourish, your eye, half open, catches the feeble figure of the old Dominie as he steps to the desk, and, with his frail hands stretched out upon the cover of the big ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... most important transactions have generally been made in the terms of original documents, or the publications of the day; as I deemed it more just and proper so to do, than to give them my own coloring. And I must apprize the reader, that instead of aiming to express the recital in the fluency of rhetorical diction, or of aspiring to decorate my style of composition with studied embellishments, MY PURPOSE HAS SIMPLY AND UNIFORMLY BEEN TO RELATE FACTS IN THE MOST PLAIN AND ARTLESS MANNER; and I trust that my description of scenes and occurrences will be ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... the stylistic tools is also seen in Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie (1589). When we move to the latter part of the sixteenth century and then change the genre as exemplified in Day's The English Secretorie, we see a stylistic extension to the art of letter writing which borrowed rhetorical terms and rules and applied them to written correspondence. The emphasis in these rhetorics on style is the same: ornateness in communication is achieved ...
— A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes • Richard Sherry
... was his fury when, instead of the expected secrets, he found nothing but dull Latin exercises, wearisome rhetorical commonplaces on such subjects as the charms of spring and summer, the excellence of agriculture, the advantages of knowledge, the danger of the passions, and similar interesting themes. He was just about to tie the bundle up again, when it occurred to him to read one of these ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... transfigured; there selfishness and brutality hold carnival till it seems as though justice had been exiled and God had forgotten his own. The number of cases reported is very large, and the method in which the author has done his work is commendable. There is no rhetorical ambition. The narratives are embodied in plain language. The facts are left to make their own impression, without an attempt to embellish them by the aid of imagination. ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... reaching the cave, and meanwhile Sturges restored the lost illusions of Pilar. Not only did he make love to her without any of the rhetorical nonsense of the caballero, but he was big and strong, and it was evident that he was afraid of nothing, not even of Dona Brigida. The dreams of her silent girlhood swirled in her imagination, but looked vague and shapeless ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... world," continued Dupin, "abounds with very strict analogies to the immaterial; and thus some color of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma, that metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a description. The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... generalisation prevents me from saying that this is the Mahometan point of view. Indeed, I have reason to know that it is not. But it is a Mahometan point of view in one province. And it was endorsed, more soberly, by less rhetorical members of the community. Some twenty-five years ago, they say, Mahometans woke to the fact that they were dropping behind in the race for influence and power. They started a campaign of education and organisation. At every point they found themselves thwarted; and always, ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... of illness or the manner of death; don't quote endlessly from the poets and Scriptures. Remember that eyes filmed with tears and an aching heart can not follow rhetorical lengths of writing. The more nearly a note can express a hand-clasp, a thought of sympathy, above all, a genuine love or appreciation of the one who has gone, the greater ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... of the book, however, has been kept steadily in view; which is to furnish the best possible exercises for practice in Rhetorical reading. To this end, the greatest variety of style and sentiment has been sought. There is scarcely a tone or modulation, of which the human voice is capable, that finds not here some piece adapted precisely to its best expression. There is not an inflection, ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... convention a week earlier were no better and no different. Their rhetorical stock-in-trade was the same old shop-worn figures of speech in which their predecessors have dealt for ages, and in which their successors will traffic to the end of—well, to the end of that imitative quality in the national character, ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... opera that night? Pshaw! what a rhetorical affectation this question! as if I could ever forget! Die Zauberfloete, and it rang pure and clear through my thrilled heart. It followed me around to Van Wyck's, where I found Henrietta and Fanny. A compliment to madame, a German with mademoiselle, and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... trying to persuade tribunals is almost all performed by a set of men, the great body of whom very seldom do anything else; but in Turkey this division of labour has never taken place, and every man is his own advocate. The importance of the rhetorical art is immense, for a bad speech may endanger the property of the speaker, as well as the soles of his feet and the free enjoyment of his throat. So it results that most of the Turks whom one sees have a lawyer-like habit of speaking connectedly, and at length. Even the treaties continually going ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... arrange it on earth for myself; and I shall flourish till the arrows of the divine archer pierce me, or till Caesar commands me to open my veins. I love the odor of violets too much, and a comfortable triclinium. I love even our gods, as rhetorical figures, and Achaea, to which I am preparing to go with our fat, thin-legged, incomparable, godlike Caesar, the august period-compelling ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... by the too rhetorical statement of matters which would have been better presented in a simpler way; thus, the fervid description of oxygen, however appropriate in Faraday's admirable lectures before the Royal Institution, is out of place in the "Iron-Manufacturer's Guide." We must also enter an earnest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... short sentences; and in this manner he seemed to go back to the ancients, who had not yet invented the period: but still there was a great difference between his style, in which the ancient simplicity was artificially restored, and the genuine ancient sentence formed without any rhetorical art. He wrote without periods, because he would not write otherwise, and not because he could not; he divided the rhetorical period into separate sentences, because it appeared to him advantageous in his animated description ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... country curate, and the job was carried out. His lectures remain to this day, in their own place in the protracted series of annual Discourses to which they belong, distinguished amid a number of heavyish compositions by the rhetorical and ambitious diction for which he went into the market. This learned divine, indeed, and the author I have quoted, differ from each other in the estimate they respectively form of literary composition; but they agree together in this,—in considering such composition a trick and a trade; they ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... them his highly spiced opinion of their strictures on his teaching and of the worth of any teacher they could find who would submit to them. Then he had gone home and put on his overalls. This last was rather a rhetorical flourish; for his cosmopolitan, urban youth had left him ineradicably ignorant of the processes of agriculture. But like all Professor Marshall's flourishes it was a perfectly sincere one. He was quite cheerfully prepared to submit himself to ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... no time to hate. He had no time to indulge in foolish debates and struggle for rhetorical mastery—he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... "those who own the country ought to govern it," pointing to the State Constitution which he drafted, to prove that only the well-to-do could vote. The Dutch, largely the slave holders of the State, accused him of wishing to rob them by the abolition of slavery. Dressed in other rhetorical clothes, these stories did service again ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... of the Koraks to shake my confidence in my own skill. But my resources were not yet exhausted, and I hurled monosyllable, dissyllable, and polysyllable at their devoted heads, shouted "Akh! Te shelma! Proclataya takaya! Smatree! Ya tibi dam!" but all in vain; the dogs were evidently insensible to rhetorical fireworks of this description, and manifested their indifference by a still slower gait. As I poured out upon them the last vial of my verbal wrath, Dodd, who understood the language that I was so recklessly using, drove slowly up, and remarked carelessly, "You swear pretty ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... the other side, who, during his opponent's explosive display of rhetorical gas and brimstone, had been holding an earnest consultation with Phillips (now also at hand with a disclosure which had been reserved for the present moment), then calmly rose, and said he had a statement to make, which ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson |
