"Verisimilitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mysteries of the purple East, shrouded as it is in legend and fable, scholars have marshaled sufficient facts to prove that the beverage was known in Ethiopia "from time immemorial," and there is much to add verisimilitude to Dufour's narrative. This first coffee merchant-prince, skilled in languages and polite learning, considered that his character as a merchant was not inconsistent with that of an author; and he even went so far as to say there ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... possibilities of the palette, and got the lighted objects themselves as nearly as he could,—thus destroying the relative values, but getting an extraordinary joyous and glowing effect; and one, too, of unexpected verisimilitude, for it would seem that in a sunlit scene we are really attentive to the shaded objects alone, and what becomes of the others does not so much matter. This effect was made still more possible by the so-called dissociation of colors,—i.e. the juxtaposing ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... of its relatively high state of civilization. Schliemann may or may not have been correct in identifying one of the seven cities that he unearthed at Hissarlik as the fabled Troy itself, but at least his efforts sufficed to give verisimilitude to the Homeric story. With the lessons of recent Oriental archaeology in mind, few will be sceptical enough to doubt that some such contest as that described in the Iliad actually occurred. And now, thanks to the efforts of a large company of workers, notably ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... embodiment of national virtue. And Mark Twain's method is his own as intimately as the puppets of his imagining. It is impossible to read a page of his masterpieces without recognising that they could have been composed only in an American environment. The dialect in which they are written enhances their verisimilitude without impairing their dignity; and the flashes of humour which light up the gravity of the narrative are never out of place nor out of tune. The cunning and resourcefulness of his boyish heroes are the cunning and resourcefulness of America, and the sombre Mississippi is the proper background ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... rhyme,' said Bunyip Bluegum, 'may stand excused from a too strict insistence on verisimilitude, so that the general gaiety is thereby promoted. And now,' he added, 'before retiring to rest, let us all join in song,' and grasping each other's hands they ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... delineation of what has actually come under his notice. Norham at twilight, with the solitary warder on the battlements, and Crichtoun castle, as Scott himself saw it, instantly commend themselves by their realistic vigour and their consistent verisimilitude. Any visitor to Norham will still be able to imagine the stir and the imposing spectacle described in the opening stanzas of the first canto; and it is a pleasure to follow Scott's minute and faithful picture of Crichtoun by examining the imposing ruin as it stands at the present day. ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... lunar element is a little too pervasive. The action wavers between the streets of Rome, whose literal features the author perpetually sketches, and a vague realm of fancy, in which quite a different verisimilitude prevails. This is the trouble with Donatello himself. His companions are intended to be real—if they fail to be so, it is not for want of intention; whereas he is intended to be real or not, as you please. He is of ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... of characterization exhibited by the author fascinates us; we gaze and examine as if we were face to face with real personages, whose passions are laid bare, whose life is traced, whose countenance is portrayed with miraculousness, distinctness and verisimilitude. All the phenomena of life in the camp, the court, the boudoir, the low faubourg, or the country chateau are ranged in order, and catalogued. This is done with relentless audacity, often with a touch of ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden
... Monks," compiled in A.D. 519, and a later work, the "Memoirs of Marvellous Monks," by the third emperor of the Ming dynasty (A.D. 1403-1424), which, however, is nearly all borrowed from the other; and all in them that has an appearance of verisimilitude can be brought ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... walking towards the Belle Tout, it would, without a doubt, be surmised that we had been drowned while bathing. The only thing we regretted was that we had not left some portion of our clothing on the beach to give verisimilitude to the suggestion. However, we troubled ourselves not one whit about the past. I was glad to escape from the doom of the gas-lit cellar, and was looking forward with keen anticipation to a new life in that mystic ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... drapery, whose folds clung to the form and thence swung down from the edge of the rocky battlement, the mouldering ruins leaning against the quiet sky in the rear, and the glassy stretch of topaz-tinted sea in the foreground, were all painted with pre-Raphaelite exactness and verisimilitude, and every detail attested the careful, tender study, with which the ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... touching as lightly as possible on the politics of the time, to give merely personal sketches of the characters as they appeared upon the scene to me. Many of them were my acquaintances—some of them my intimates; and the aim throughout has been a verisimilitude in the portraiture;—in short, to make the reader as familiar with the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... short novel, the history "Of Captain Misson and his Crew" reveals many of the same techniques which Defoe used in his longer works. To gain a sense of verisimilitude the narrator pretends to be working from a manuscript, a device which Defoe also employed in his Memoirs of a Cavalier. As in Colonel Jack real historical figures and events from the War of the Spanish Succession ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... the wondrous tales of adventure invariably left in the afternoon for New York, but his name was on the hotel register as a corroborative detail intended to give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. Perhaps I should explain that the hotel clerk was a ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... doubt which had showed itself when first he listened to the story. Amid all the wildness of the tale there was yet a certain air, not merely of truthfulness in the narrator—that was not to be questioned—but of verisimilitude in the narration, which had its effect, although it gave rise to no conscious exercise of discriminating or ponderating faculty. Leopold's air of conviction also, although of course that might well accompany the merest invention rooted in madness, yet had its force, ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... learning apparent in these contrivances. The Essay bedstead is a particularly handsome piece of furniture, being made of polished mahogany, elaborately carved, and intricately embellished throughout. When closed, this bedstead presents the verisimilitude of a large book-case filled with the essays of Emerson, Carlyle, Bacon, Montaigne, Hume, Macaulay, Addison, Steele, Johnson, Budgell, Hughes, and others. These volumes are made in one piece, of the best seasoned oak, and are hollow within throughout; so that each shelf constitutes ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... wasn't anything important. I was only appealing to you for corroborative detail to give artistic verisimilitude to a ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... modern proper names I have thought it best in each case to decide which would give the keener impression of verisimilitude. Consistency has, therefore, been abandoned. Horace, Virgil and Ovid exist side by side with such original Latin names as Julius Paulus. While Como has been preferred to Comum, the "Larian Lake" has been retained. Perugia (instead ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... indeed, but for the help of a worthy sergeant-major, who saw that each individual assumed and maintained the attitude proper for the situation at whatever inconvenience, the artist could not possibly have impressed upon her picture that verisimilitude which ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... Balzac's Peau de Chagrin is no doubt a great feat of the realistic-supernatural; but no one can help feeling how much the author is aided by his "broker's clerk" style of description, and by the familiar Parisian scenes among which he makes his hero move. It is easier to compass verisimilitude in the Palais-Royal than on the South Pacific, to say nothing of the thousand assisting touches, out of place in rhyme and metre, which can be thrown into a prose narrative. The Ancient Mariner, however, in spite ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... and so is fiction, if indeed it resembles life—such as we know it, or such as it might be. The art of verisimilitude is ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... the caffein content exists therein in a free state. This acid compound of caffein will be largely decomposed during the process of torrefaction, so that in roasted coffee a larger percentage will be present in the free state. Microscopical examination of the roasted bean lends verisimilitude to this contention. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... personal at times, and perhaps not always just; and some other events I have carefully paraphrased (notably his trial at the Old Bailey), and given for them as careful an equivalent as I could manage without too great a loss of verisimilitude. ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... might happen again, a certain probability, at least no kind of improbability, was attached to the idea taken in itself, of miraculous intervention in later times, and miraculous accounts were to be regarded in connexion with the verisimilitude, scope, instrument, character, testimony, and circumstances, with which they presented themselves to us; and, according to the final result of those various considerations, it was our duty to be sure, ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... There is one other striking circumstance about St. Martin; and that is that, although he is in the Virgin's presence, he wears the violet chasuble of an Intercessor. The chasuble is lined with red, and it and the rich vestments, on which scenes of the Passion are displayed, are the patient verisimilitude of ancient vestments. In St. Martin's gloved left hand is his crozier and the right glove, which he has drawn off to bestow ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... "A most diverting extravaganza, rather in the style of Jules Verne.... The apology of the translator for the lack of verisimilitude in the last scene is entirely unnecessary; otherwise she has done her work with credit, while M. Veilliemin's spirited illustrations heighten the attractions of a most entertaining ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... violet-colored ink and a ruby pen; that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers' accounts, and inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains. It is true that we are constantly struck with the want of verisimilitude in their representations of the high society in which they seem to live; but then they betray no closer acquaintance with any other form of life. If their peers and peeresses are improbable, their literary men, tradespeople, and cottagers are impossible; and their intellect seems to ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Lateran, said by ecclesiastical tradition to have belonged to Pilate's house in Jerusalem, and to have been the identical ones which our Saviour descended when He left the judgment-hall, are made of this marble; so that, whatever we may think of the tradition itself, there is a feature of verisimilitude in the material. ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... resolved to give the affair the strongest possible air of verisimilitude; and he engaged a governess, a Miss Belthrop, for Pollyooly. That led to his engaging a nurse, Emily Gibbs, for the Lump, though Pollyooly protested ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... have been yet able to discover is, that whereas the Sermon is a thorough-going and uncompromising defence of our Evangelical majority in the Church, the Dialogues form an equally thorough-going and uncompromising attack upon them. This, however, compared with the numerous points of verisimilitude, the reader will, we are sure, deem but a trifle, especially when he has learned further that they represent the same mind, and have employed the same pen—that the Sermon was published by the Rev. Alexander Clark of Inverness in 1840, and the Dialogues by the Rev. Alexander Clark of Inverness ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... world. This supposition is the more natural, as M. Comte was avowedly of that opinion. He indeed disclaimed, with some acrimony, dogmatic atheism, and even says (in a later work, but the earliest contains nothing at variance with it) that the hypothesis of design has much greater verisimilitude than that of a blind mechanism. But conjecture, founded on analogy, did not seem to him a basis to rest a theory on, in a mature state of human intelligence. He deemed all real knowledge of a commencement inaccessible ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... Some years earlier, Du Bellay had, while on an embassy, set forth his royal master's pretended convictions in favor of the Reformation with so much verisimilitude as to alarm the papal nuncio, who dreaded the effect of his speeches upon the Protestants. "Non e piccola murmoration qui en Corte, ch'l Orator Francese facea piu che l'officio suo richiede in animar Lutherani." ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... indicated with genial emphasis, in one of his essays, how much more wonderful as a psychological phenomenon is the clairvoyance of imagination than that ascribed to mesmerism: since, by the former, writers of genius describe with verisimilitude, and sometimes with a moral accuracy such as we can scarcely believe to originate in the creative mind alone, all the traits and phases of a scene, an event, or a character, the details of which ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... also an allusion to the later history. Hence we may safely conclude that the entire narrative is due to the imagination of Plato, who has used the name of Solon and introduced the Egyptian priests to give verisimilitude to his story. To the Greek such a tale, like that of the earth-born men, would have seemed perfectly accordant with the character of his mythology, and not more marvellous than the wonders of the East narrated ...
— Critias • Plato
... that flows the delightful stream of naive confession and mordant sarcasm that never seems either ill-natured or artificial, that lashes without vindictiveness, and excoriates without malice. In strict ratio, however, to the verisimilitude of the performance, must be esteemed the talents of the non-Oriental writer, who was responsible for so lifelike a creation. No man could, have written or could now write such a book unless he were steeped and saturated, not merely in Oriental ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... is not a little verisimilitude in this conception of America as a sort of central office and a tower of strength in the projected federation of neutral nations, however pharisaical an appearance it may all have in the self-complacent utterances of patriotic Americans. The American republic ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... Mere accident it was that had intercepted those explanations as to the extent of fiction in these points which in this case it would have been so natural to make. Indeed, considering the exquisite verisimilitude of the work meeting with such absolute inexperience in the reader, it was almost a duty to have made them. This duty, however, something had caused me to forget; and when next I saw the young mountaineer, I forgot that I had forgotten ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... publishing his story Mackenzie read it to Adam Smith, in order to be told whether anything should be omitted or altered as being out of keeping with Hume's character, and so completely was Smith carried away by the verisimilitude that he not only said he found not a syllable to object to, but added that he was surprised he had never heard the anecdote before. In his absence of mind he had forgotten for the moment that he had been asked to listen to the story as a work of fiction, ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... however, help thinking that there is more than a little exaggeration in more than one point of the story. The Abbe Birotteau is surely a little too much of a fool; the Abbe Troubert an Iago a little too much wanting in verisimilitude; and the central incident of the clause about the furniture too manifestly improbable. Taking the first and the last points together, is it likely that any one not quite an idiot should, in the first place, remain so entirely ignorant of the value of his property; should, ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... conjecture is entirely devoid, not merely of verisimilitude, but even of possibility. Tacitus could not be deceived in appropriating to the Christians of Rome the guilt and the sufferings which he might have attributed with far greater truth to the followers of Judas the Gaulonite, for the latter never went to Rome. Their ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... quite so horrible a creature as you make him: as to his person, I mean; for with regard to his mind, by all I have heard, you have done him but justice: but you have such a talent at an ugly likeness, and such a vivacity, that they sometimes carry you out of verisimilitude. In short, my dear, I have known you, in more instances than one, sit down resolved to write all that wit, rather than strict justice, could suggest upon the given occasion. Perhaps it may be thought, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... with his dark penetrating glance. I was struck by the absolute verisimilitude of this suggestion. But we were always tilting at each other. I saw an opening and pushed my ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... in this country, and is unsurpassed in English poetry for subtle conception, masterly ingenuity of versification, and consistent sustaining of imaginative lift;" and by that of one of the most extraordinary instances of the naturalness of detail—-the verisimilitude of minute narrative—for which lie was preeminently distinguished, his "Mesmeric Revelation," purporting to be the last conversation of a somnambule, held with his magnetizer just before his death, which was followed by the yet more striking exhibition ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... the course of his narratives with dreams,—dreams that often have no connection with the plot, so far as there may be said to exist a plot,—but dreams of vivid and sharp verisimilitude. Whether these dreams were interjected to deceive the reader, or merely to indulge the novelist's whimsical fancy, is hard to divine; but one always wakes with surprise to find that it is all a dream. A few hours before Svidrigailov commits suicide he has an extraordinary dream ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... the Uffizi are of course only a pretext for gloriously coloured arrangements of people with rich scenic backgrounds. No.621 is the finer. The way in which the baby is being held in the other indicates how little Giorgione thought of verisimilitude. ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... happened instead of collecting traditions about it. The paleographers and daters of first quotations may say what they please: John's claim to give evidence as an eyewitness whilst the others are only compiling history is supported by a certain verisimilitude which appeals to me as one who has preached a new doctrine and argued about it, as well as written stories. This verisimilitude may be dramatic art backed by knowledge of public life; but even at that we must not forget that the ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... but it is more of the kind shown by Walter Scott than of the kind shown by Shakspeare. He can reproduce historical characters with great vividness and effect, and with enough knowledge of humanity to make the verisimilitude admirably strong; but as to the deep knowledge with which Shakspeare searches the radical elements of the human soul, he has it not. His Death of Queen Elizabeth is a strong Walter Scott picture; so are his Execution of Strafford, ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... if suddenly sicklied over with a pale cast of doubt; a withering shadow seems to flit across his soul, and chill it in his loftiest moods. The dark condition of the man who longs to believe and longs in vain, he can represent with a verisimilitude and touching beauty, which shows it to have been familiar to himself. Apart from their ingenuity, there is a certain severe pathos in some of these passages, which affects us with a peculiar emotion. The hero of another work is made to ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... If verisimilitude itself does not repudiate Guicciardini's story, there are the Capuan chronicles to do it—particularly that of Pellegrini, who witnessed the pillage. In those chronicles from which Guicciardini drew the matter for this portion of his history of Italy, you ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... once admit not only that this view is much more attractive and more truly tragic than the ordinary conscience theory, but that it has more verisimilitude. But I feel no doubt that it does not answer to Shakespeare's meaning, and I will simply mention, out of many objections to it, three which seem to be fatal. (a) If it answers to Shakespeare's meaning, why in the world did he conceal that meaning until the last ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... fiction is remarkable for his keen observation of every-day life and character, the average existence in town and country of mankind high and low: he is a truthful reporter, the verisimilitude of the picture is part of its attraction. It is not too much to say that, pictorially, he is the first great English realist of the Novel. For broad comedy presentation he is unsurpassed: as well as for satiric gravity of comment ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... glory in the sun and an influence in the stars, and a spark in her own bosom responsive to his devotion. For the tumultuous moment, however, when Adrian's name was on all men's tongues, and before all men's eyes, the ghost walked in triumphant verisimilitude of life. At all the meetings of Jaffery and Doria, he was there smiling beneath his laurels, whenever he was evoked; and he was evoked continuously. Either by law of irony or perhaps for intrinsic merit, the bridges ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... around her. Nature, Phadrick, was in great state; the earth was undher our feet, an' the sky above us. The frost, too, was hard, Phadrick, the air keen, an' the grass tendher. All things were enrobed wid verisimilitude an' scrupulosity. In this manner was the terraqueous part of our system, when Parra Ghastha's mare, after havin' taken a cowld collation on Barny Branagan's grass, was returnin' to her master's side o' the merin; an' Barny Branagan's goats, havin' tasted the sweets ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... differences are accompanied by resemblances as striking to passages in other Platonic writings. They are sensible of a want of point in the dialogue and a general inferiority in the ideas, plan, manners, and style. They miss the poetical flow, the dramatic verisimilitude, the life and variety of the characters, the dialectic subtlety, the Attic purity, the luminous order, the exquisite urbanity; instead of which they find tautology, obscurity, self-sufficiency, sermonizing, ...
— Laws • Plato
... more, will also give the fullest warning of the impracticability of the method, after all; for Richardson is forced to pay heavily for its single benefit. He pays with the desperate shifts to which he is driven in order to maintain any kind of verisimilitude. The visible effort of keeping all Clarissa's friends at a distance all the time, so that she may be enabled to communicate only by letter, seems always on the point of bearing him down; while in the case ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... (xi. 54), a town on the border between Judea and Samaria, and from there he started towards Jerusalem when the Passover drew near. This record of John has, as Dr. Sanday has recently remarked (HastBD II. 630), so many marks of verisimilitude that it must be accepted as a true tradition. It demands thus that in our conception of the last journey from Galilee room be found for several excursions to Jerusalem or its neighborhood. One of these at least—to the feast ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... quite so good as in the chansons de geste proper; but the marvels are excellent, the poet relating them with an admirable mixture of gravity and complaisance, in spirited style and language, and though with extremely little attention to coherence and verisimilitude, yet with no small power of what may be called ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... usual essay he read them a story: "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut." It was the story of a man's warfare with a personified conscience—a sort of "William Wilson" idea, though less weird, less somber, and with more actuality, more verisimilitude. It was, in fact, autobiographical, a setting-down of the author's daily self-chidings. The climax, where conscience is slain, is a startling picture which appeals to most of humanity. So vivid is it all, that it is difficult in places not to believe in the reality of the tale, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... trouble to make all the errors and omissions found in our twelve pages and all the additions and corrections representing different ages, different styles, when less than half the number would have served to give the forged document an air of verisimilitude. The assumption that the Morgan fragment is a forgery thus becomes highly unreasonable. When you add to this the fact that there is nothing in the twelve pages that in any way arouses suspicion, ...
— A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger • Elias Avery Lowe and Edward Kennard Rand
... I like best to go. The Marionette prevail with me, for I find in the performances of these puppets, no new condition demanded of the spectator, but rather a frank admission of unreality that makes every shadow of verisimilitude delightful, and gives a marvelous relish to the immemorial effects and traditionary tricks of ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... but Eric was not dissatisfied with the progress of his play. Ease and command had grown reassuringly; his psychology was surer, perhaps because his own psychological experience had been so much enriched; and his dialogue, losing nothing of its neatness and economy, had taken on an added verisimilitude. It was too early to judge dispassionately; but, as Eric made his last corrections and sent a copy of the script to Manders, he felt a warmer glow of confidence than either of his ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... which I must even leave to wiser heads than mine to determine the true issues of, as well as their bearing upon the events just narrated, but this I may say, that here is the same 'crazy tale' my cousin mentioned to you, set down in all true verisimilitude by, reverend sir, your very faithful ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... the woman, who arrogated a spirit of prophecy and had long practised the devices of a fortune-teller, thus accustomed to scan the possibilities and in some degree versed in the adjustment of the probabilities, accorded the homely verisimilitude of their worldly-wise representations the meed of a simple and respectful credulity. The mountaineers were ignorant indeed in their sort, but far too sophisticated to entertain aught but the most contemptuous disbelief in her pretensions of special foresight ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... erstwhile he cultivated so successfully, has returned to see if the ground will yield him another rich harvest. Though it must be admitted that in Sir Launcelot Greaves his labours were but partially successful, yet the story possesses a good deal of the lively verisimilitude which Fathom lacked. The very first page, as we have seen, shows that its inns are going to be real. So, too, are most of its highway adventures, and also its portion of those prison scenes of which Smollett seems to have been so fond. As for the description of the parliamentary ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... being able to remove or to replace, has been augmented no less than six millions of livres, or 270,000 pounds English. A further augmentation of this or other duties is now talked of; and it is certainly necessary to their affairs: so exceedingly remote from either truth or verisimilitude is the author's amazing assertion, that the burdens of France in the war were in a great measure temporary, and must be greatly diminished by a ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... another person's life-history in the first person, and yet give to it the verisimilitude of a genuine autobiography, would under ordinary circumstances be a difficult if not impossible undertaking." So Mr. C. E. GOULDSBURY tells us in a note to Reminiscences of a Stowaway (CHAPMAN AND HALL), and most of us will cordially agree ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... his emotions are mixed. Joy may be said to predominate, but with the joy comes also uncertainty. Are these people, he asks himself, proposing to set up as farmers of a large scale, or do they merely want the seed to give verisimilitude to their otherwise bald and unconvincing raspberry jam? On the solution of this problem depends the important matter of price, for, obviously, you can charge a fraudulent jam disseminator in a manner which an ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... three plays—each dominant feature reduced a little to give the others scope as well. It is a wonderful specimen of what might be called the new realism—of that realism which is paying more attention to spiritual than to material actualities. Yet it is by no means lacking in the more superficial verisimilitude either. Its character-drawing and its whole atmosphere are startlingly faithful to life, even though the life portrayed may represent a clearly defined and limited ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... is suited to the street-corner is not always suited to the library, and the taste of the United is as yet but imperfectly attuned to the lyrical liltings of the pool-room Muse. It is both hard and unwise to take the "Best Sport Page" seriously. As a copy of "yellow" models it is a work of artistic verisimilitude; indeed, were Mr. Dowdell a somewhat older man, we might justly suspect a ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... convinced her that he really had served. She became thoughtful. Rust, eager to show off his accomplishments, explained that he had been recommended for a commission and had joined St. Cyr. More details followed, all of a verisimilitude wholly convincing. Madame, who knew France and the French Army up and down, became more thoughtful and more puzzled. It was plain that Rust had really served in the ranks of the Army, and had been at St. Cyr. Yet he was an Englishman and an officer of the English Flying Corps! She asked further ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... the story itself, it may be worth while to remark that, differing from all or most others of the series in that the interest aimed at is of an ideal or subjective nature, and frankly imaginative, verisimilitude in the sequence of events has been subordinated to the ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... the mystical and philosophical conception of "Seraphita," which is full of religious poetry, and who yet had the power in "Cesar Birotteau" to invest prosaic and even sordid details with absolute verisimilitude, or in the "Contes Drolatiques" would write, in Old French, stories of Rabelaisian breadth and humour. The only solution of these contradictions is that, partly perhaps by reason of great physical strength, certainly because of an abnormally powerful ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... discovered and worked out for the short-story in the medium of poetry.[8] The ballad and narrative poem must be, by reason of their highly artificial form, comparatively short, possessing totality, immediateness, compression, verisimilitude, and finality. The old ballad which commemorates the battle of Otterbourne, fought on August 10, 1388, is a fine example of the short-story method. Its opening stanza speaks the last word ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... Allworthy is a type rather than a character—a fault which also seems to apply to that Molieresque hypocrite, the younger Blifil. Fielding seems to have welded this latter together, rather than to have fused him entire, and the result is a certain lack of verisimilitude, which makes us wonder how his pinchbeck professions and vamped-up virtues could deceive so many persons. On the other hand, his father, Captain John Blifil, has all the look of life. Nor can there ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... twice in the last three days? That "Thomas Carlyle is coming to America," and the tidings cordially greeted by the editors; though I had just received your letter silent to any such point. Make that story true, though it had never a verisimilitude since thirty odd years ago, and you shall make many souls happy and perhaps show you so many needs and opportunities for beneficent power that you cannot be allowed to grow old or withdraw. Was I not once ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... battle to the present day. There can be no doubt that Bjoernson, whose sympathies are strongly democratic, permitted the debate between the two to become needlessly didactic, and strained historical verisimilitude by veiled allusions to contemporaneous conditions. Greatly superior is his ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the understanding of Hamsun himself that they have their chief significance. As a by-product, one might almost say, the reader gets the art which reveals the story of the Falkenbergs by a process of indirect approach equalled in its ingenuity and verisimilitude only by Conrad's ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... yards. It was a baffling problem, not wholly incapable of solution by circumstantial evidence, but best left to be elucidated by Hilton Fenley himself. They believed now that he was about to oblige them by supplying that corroborative detail which, in the words of Poohbah, "lends artistic verisimilitude to an ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... find this factor is never entirely absent, while if we were to apply the same pertinacity and subtlety that Jung in his "Wandlungen" has brought to bear in working over the treacherous material of mythology, we might prove with no less verisimilitude than he has shown the primacy of the libido that in the beginning was anger, and that not Anaxagoras' love or the strife of Heraclitus was the fons et origo of all things, that the Ichtrieb is basal, and that the fondest and most comprehensive ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... and what can there be for us more certain than our life, our sensation of life? And yet it is possible that you and I are not living people at all, but only characters in a novel, and that the author of this novel is not at all concerned with its external verisimilitude. His capricious imagination had taken this dark earth for its material, and out of this dark, sinful earth he grew these strange black maples and these mighty black poplars and these twittering birds in the ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... was,' went on Maud, dully conscious of failure, but stippling in like an artist the little touches which give atmosphere and verisimilitude to a story. 'All scented. Horace will tease me about ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... lui dit-il, "vous parlez si souvent de chastete que cela devient indecent. Votre amitie n'est pas plus 'sainte' que celle des autres." [If he had added "maternite" the stigma would have been completer still.] And there is also a startling verisimilitude in the reply ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... inferior painter will move only a languid interest; by a still more inferior painter they may be represented so as to please none but the most uncultivated eye. Each spectator is charmed in proportion to his recognition of a triumph over difficulty which is measured by the degree of verisimilitude. The degrees are many. In the lowest the pictured object is so remote from the reality that we simply recognise what the artist meant to represent. In like manner we recognise in poor novels and dramas what the authors mean ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... when A bought of B, some phrase like the following is recorded: A said thus to B: "Give me thy property and I will give thee so much silver." Then we read that "B listened to him and gave A his property and A gave him so much silver." It is a curious little touch of verisimilitude. ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... trial before a jury of the simple issue—whether William Shakespeare, of Stratford-upon-Avon, 'the testator in the cause of Hall v. Russell,' was the author of the plays in the Folio of 1623. We are favoured with the names of counsel employed, who snarl at one another with such startling verisimilitude, whilst the remarks that fall from the bench do so with such naturalness, that it is perhaps not surprising, or any very severe reflection upon his literary esprit, that a member of the Bar, having heard Judge Willis deliver his lecture in the Inner Temple ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... Swift's assumption of the existence of little people not six inches high, and of a country in which the inhabitants 'appeared as tall as an ordinary spire-steeple,' the exactness and verisimilitude of the narrative, with its minute geographical details, make it appear so reasonable that a young reader may feel inclined to resent the criticism of an Irish bishop who said that 'the book was full of improbable lies, ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis |
