"Biographer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Bischofsheim on the Tauber, a tributary of the Main, under her care. Here she carried on the traditions of Wimborne, for she taught and encouraged learning in every way. Her rule was sane and wise. Her biographer says of her, "She was careful always not to teach others what she herself did not practise. Neither conceit nor overbearing found any place in her disposition; but she was gentle and kind to everyone without exception. She was beautiful as an angel and her conversation ...
— Early Double Monasteries - A Paper read before the Heretics' Society on December 6th, 1914 • Constance Stoney
... should ever become the sad duty of this biographer to write of disappointed love, I am sure he would not have any sensational story to tell of the Young Lady. She is one of those women whose unostentatious lives are the chief blessing of humanity; who, with ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... was really beyond the jurisdiction of any Canadian tribunal. It afforded to Dr. Rolph an opportunity for addressing the House at considerable length, and in a speech which, as remarked by Mr. Mackenzie's biographer, "will ever be memorable in Canadian history."[265] It was delivered on the 30th of January, 1837. It dealt in most trenchant fashion with the various abuses which had been practised during the elections. The serio-comic tone which pervaded a ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... with the authors of the Lay of the Last Minstrel, and Childe Harold, is recorded by his biographer—his own son—to have exhibited "a remarkable indifference to all the proper objects of taste;" to have had "no real love for painting, or music, or architecture or for what a painter's eye considers as the beauties of landscape." "In botany, grasses, the most useful but the least ornamental, ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... without her. There are not many men who would give their wives a better character than these two emperors. Capitolinus wrote in the time of Diocletian. He may have intended to tell the truth, but he is a poor, feeble biographer. Dion Cassius, the most malignant of historians, always reports, and perhaps he believed, any scandal ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... by Mme. Ancelot proves to what a degree the union of "grandeur" and "want" she has alluded to went. "Mme. d'Abrantes," says her biographer of the moment, "was always absorbed by the present impression, whatever that might happen to be; she passed from joy to despair like a child, and I never knew any house that was either so melancholy or so gay." One evening, however, it would seem that the Hotel ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... forth;—watched her loose in her frisks, her gambols, her capricios; and after some notice of her more solemn deportment, consequent upon such frisks, &c.—then taken your pen and ink and set down nothing but what you had seen, and could have sworn to:—But this is an advantage not to be had by the biographer in this planet;—in the planet Mercury (belike) it may be so, if not better still for him;—for there the intense heat of the country, which is proved by computators, from its vicinity to the sun, to be more than equal to that of ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... Epicurean, and Peripatetic systems; giving, however, an exclusive preference to the Pythagorean, which he studied with Euxenus of Heraclea, a man, however, whose life ill accorded with the ascetic principles of his Sect. At the early age of sixteen years, according to his biographer, he resolved on strictly conforming himself to the precepts of Pythagoras, and, if possible, rivalling the fame of his master. He renounced animal food and wine; restricted himself to the use of ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... by a divine fire find a pure delight in their own feelings which is independent of fate and of the whole world.' Euripides, too, loved solitude, and avoided the noise of town life by retiring to a grotto at Salamis which he had arranged for himself with a view of the sea; for which reason, his biographer tells us, most of his similes are drawn from the sea. He, rather than Petrarch or Rousseau, was the father of sentimentality. His morbidly sensitive Hippolytos cries 'Alas! would it were possible that I should ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... danger of having my beliefs unsettled by reasonings of this stumbling cast. "Be sure," said both my uncles, as I was quitting Cromarty for the south, "be sure you go and hear Dr. M'Crie." And so Dr. M'Crie I did go and hear; and not once or twice, but often. The biographer of Knox—to employ the language in which Wordsworth describes the humble hero of ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... asunder those two things which God has joined,—the poet and the man,—as if it were not the same rash improvidence that was the happiness of the verse and the misfortune of the gauger. But his death-bed was at least not haunted by the unappeasable apprehension of a German for his biographer; and that the fame of Lessing should have four times survived this cunningest assault of oblivion is proof enough that its base is ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... the most attractive branches of natural history. Wilson was the pioneer; Ord, his biographer, followed, and his friend Titian Peale; Audubon is universally known, and stands preeminent; and the learned Nuttall and excellent and enthusiastic Townsend are much respected. Most of these men have compassed sea and land, and encountered many perils and ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... man of letters he must be judged primarily as a biographer, and, if this be done, it will be found that Borrow has achieved the great object of biography; he has transmitted a great personality. The blemishes in his work are not particularly hard to find. Inadvertently ...
— George Borrow - Times Literary Supplement, 10th July 1903 • Thomas Seccombe
... him we owe not to an admiring disciple, but to a clergyman, to whom his theories were detestable; and his biographer allows that the most malignant scrutiny had failed to detect a blemish in his character,—that except so far as his opinions were blameable, he had lived to all outward appearances free from fault. We desire, in what we are going to say of him, to avoid offensive ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... Those who remained steadfast to the last were then burned at the stake; they who in the last extremity renounced their faith were strangled before being thrown into the flames. Such was the Spanish inquisition—technically—so called: It was, according' to the biographer of Philip the Second, a "heavenly remedy, a guardian angel of Paradise, a lions' den in which Daniel and other just men could sustain no injury, but in which perverse sinners were torn to pieces." It was a tribunal superior to all human ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... that no history should exist of the childhood and early life of an emperor of such note as "Barbarossa;" yet, in spite of most diligent search, we have been compelled almost to renounce one of the most pleasing tasks of a biographer, which consists in making acquaintance with a hero in his infancy, and through childhood and youth following his career to fame and glory. So far as we have been able to discover, no trace, except a few dry data, exists of "Frederick of the Red Beard," until we find him setting out ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... teachers of his time, he could write his own textbooks. He had an affectionate and fatherly manner and always showed a conscientious interest in the welfare of his pupils. "He carefully studied their dispositions," says his biographer, "and sought to develop by gentle assiduity the peculiar talents of each individual pupil. With some persuasion was his only incitement, others he stimulated to a laudable emulation; and even with the most obdurate ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... Thus there is a family of graph (or write) words: graphic, lithograph, cerograph, cinematograph, stylograph, telegraph, multigraph, seismograph, dictograph, monograph, holograph, logograph, digraph, autograph, paragraph, stenographer, photographer, biographer, lexicographer, bibliography, typography, pyrography, orthography, chirography, calligraphy, cosmography, geography. There is also a family of phone (or sound) words: telephone, dictaphone, megaphone, audiphone, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... there's any more realism to the square inch in a Life of Cavour than in a Life of Napoleon III. It would take as much labor on the part of a biographer to tell what Napoleon III really was as to tell what Cavour really was—perhaps more. But you come up against the law of supply and demand. You can't get around that. There isn't much inquiry for Napoleon, now that ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... principle, that diplomacy was impossible without it. Bacon said, "Tobacco-smoking is a secret delight serving only to steal away men's brains." Newton abstained from it: the contrary is often claimed, but thus says his biographer, Brewster,—saying that "he would make no necessities to himself." Franklin says he never used it, and never met with one of its votaries who advised him to follow the example. John Quincy Adams ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... as refuges in troublous times. One site was Oxford, and it is the first authentic event recorded in the history of the city—the foundation of the university by Alfred being abandoned by scholars, as an interpolation in Asser, the king's biographer. ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... and biographer, calls our attention to the similarity between Wagner's music and Bocklin's painting. While Wagner was "luring the colours of sound from music," Bocklin's "symphonies of colour streamed forth like a crashing orchestra," and he calls him the greatest colour-poet ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... position to be safeguarded, the danger point for the enemy. Obedient himself, he expected instant obedience from others. Willing to risk his own life, he expected the same self-sacrifice on the part of his fellow officers. One biographer calls him "a master quartermaster," telling us that he knew how to feed and supply an army. Another calls Grant a great drillmaster, exhibiting him as the teacher of his own generals. Another terms ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... and shoeless, and, says his biographer, "a little flushed with drink"—as a man might be who spent most of his waking hours swigging pure rum—stumbled up on deck and made a ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... enough, but it has "a certain heartiness and epic greatness of cynicism"; and so his biographer continues justifying this royal outburst of racy profanity with Rabelaisian gusto. I dare not follow him; but I am anxious to know why Carlyle's "Frederick" circulates with impunity and even applause, while the Freethinker ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... with trade opportunities in China. Afterwards he was the prime mover in the construction of the Pekin-Hankow Railway. I do not think most persons know that Leopold at one time tried to establish a Belgian colony in Ethiopia. Another act in his life that has escaped the casual biographer was his effort to purchase the Philippines from Spain. Now you can see why he seized upon the Congo as a colonizing possibility the moment he read Henry M. Stanley's first article about it ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... who were ready to dispute on all topics, and inclined to be convinced on none. This club had the pleasure of subscribing for the first edition of the works of its great associate. It has been questioned by his first biographer, whether the refinement of mind, which follows the reading of books of eloquence and delicacy,—the mental improvement resulting from such calm discussions as the Tarbolton and Mauchline clubs indulged in, was not injurious ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... we meet with the next attack of a purely literary kind, viz., by Porphyry, the most distinguished opponent that Christianity has yet encountered.(196) The pupil of Longinus, perhaps of Origen,(197) and the biographer and interpreter of Plotinus, he is best known for his logical writings, and for the development of the theory of predication in his introduction to the Categories, which formed the text on which hung the mediaeval speculations of scholasticism.(198) His Syrian ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... believe that we are going to pull it off, after all." He slapped me on the shoulder with a sudden burst of hilarity. "I am going out now. It is only a reconnaissance. I will do nothing serious without my trusted comrade and biographer at my elbow. Do you stay here, and the odds are that you will see me again in an hour or two. If time hangs heavy get foolscap and a pen, and begin your narrative of how we saved ...
— The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans • Arthur Conan Doyle
... telis vulnerat ista agyrtarum colluvies, sed theriaca quadam magis perniciosa, non pyrio, sed pulvere nescio quo exotico certat, non globulis plumbeis, sed pilulis aeque lethalibus interficit." This was certainly thought fine by the author, and is still admired by his biographer. In October, 1702, he became one of ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... and many of the pages on this 'angular, vivid, discordant, and yet exquisitely fascinating person,' are full of a similar insight. They contain many of those anecdotes which indicate crises, a thing very different from the merely decorative anecdotes of the ordinary biographer. The book, written by one who has been a good friend to many poets, and to none a more valuable friend than to Patmore, gives us a more vivid sense of what Patmore was as a man than anything except Mr. Sargent's ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... friendships and strong animosities. These have been dealt with only where they seemed to have a bearing upon history, as in the case of Sir John A. Macdonald and of the Roman Catholic Church. It seems to be a profitless task for a biographer to take up and fight over again quarrels which had no public importance and did not affect the course ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... June, Richard Henry Lee, in behalf of the Virginia delegates, submitted in Congress resolves on independence, a confederation, and foreign alliances. His biographer says that 'tradition relates that he prefaced his motion with a speech,' portraying the resources of the colonies and their capacity for defence, dwelling especially on the bearing which an independent position might have on foreign Powers, and concluded by urging the members ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... generally been supposed that two other difficulties must confront any conscientious biographer of Burton—the first being Burton's choice of subjects, and the second the friction between Lady Burton and the Stisteds. But as regards the first, surely we are justified in assuming that Burton's studies were pursued ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... matter,—and that after death he ceases to be conscious until the resurrection."[180] But speculative inquiry was soon to give place to spiritual faith. The death of his revered and pious father brought his mind into realizing contact with an unseen and eternal world; and, in the words of his biographer, distinguished alike for profound science and deep practical piety, "The death of Mr. Hall's father tended greatly to bring his mind to the state of serious thought with which he entered on the pastoral office. Meditating with the deepest veneration upon the ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... the reception of the illustrious surgeon, physiologist, and physician, John Hunter? While he lived, "most of his contemporaries looked upon him as little better than an enthusiast and an innovator," according to his biographer; and when, in 1859, it was decided to inter his remains in Westminster Abbey, it was hard to find his body, which was at last discovered in a vault along with ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... in one way or another have been great: the prose-painter Richard Jefferies; the pure and beneficent Mrs. Craik, better known as Miss Muloch; Matthew Arnold, poet, educationalist, critic, whose verse should outlive his criticisms; the noble astronomer Richard Proctor; Gustave Masson, the careful biographer of Milton; Laurence Oliphant, gifted and eccentric visionary; the naturalist J. G. Wood; the explorer and orientalist Burton; the historians Kinglake, Froude, and Freeman; the great ecclesiastics Bishop Lightfoot, Canon Liddon, ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... Blackwell, officers of the National Suffrage Association, and by Mrs. May Wright Sewall, vice-president of the International Council of Women, Mrs. Clara Bewick Colby, editor of the Woman's Tribune and Mrs. Ida Husted Harper, Miss Anthony's biographer. ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... Gerard Voss, that a public lecture of Moestlin, the instructor of Kepler, was the means of making Galileo acquainted with the true system of the universe. This assertion, however, is by no means probable; and it has been ably shown, by the latest biographer of Galileo,[5] that, in his dialogues on the Copernican system, our author gives the true account of his own conversion. This passage is so interesting, that we shall give ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... been repugnant to his taste; but he evidently felt that it would be Dredge's role to reveal him to posterity. And the young man seemed at that time to take the same view of his calling. When he was not busy about Lanfear's work he was recording their conversations with the diligence of a biographer and the accuracy of a naturalist. Any attempt to question or minimize Lanfear's theories roused in his disciple the only flashes of wrath I have ever seen a scientific discussion provoke in him. In defending his ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... The biographer of Dermod Eustace would need to bring a wary mind to his work. For though the old master of Lennon House has not lain twenty years in his grave, he is already swollen into a legendary character. Anecdotes have grown upon his memory like barnacles, and any man in those parts with a knack ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... world are strict vegetarians. The gorilla, the king of the Congo forests, is a nut feeder. Milo, the mighty Greek, was a flesh abstainer, as was also Pythagoras, the first of the Greek philosophers, Seneca, the noble Roman Senator, and Plutarch, the famous biographer. The writer has excluded meat from his diet for more than fifty years, and has within the last forty years, supervised the treatment of more than a hundred thousand sick people at the Battle Creek Sanitarium ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... contemporaries, is not so greatly more wise. The noblest use he can conceive for his discovery is to aid in the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. With the precious metals that should fall to his share, says his biographer, he made haste to vow the raising of a force of five thousand horse and fifty thousand foot for the expulsion of the Saracens from Jerusalem. Nor is this the only instance in which even the noble ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... disposition, and the utmost amenity of manners, John Mayne was warmly beloved among the circle of his friends. Himself embued with a deep sense of religion, though fond of innocent humour, he preserved in all his writings a becoming respect for sound morals, and is entitled to the commendation which a biographer has awarded him, of having never committed to paper a single line "the tendency of which was not to afford innocent amusement, or to improve and increase the happiness of mankind." He was singularly modest and even retiring. His eulogy has been ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... misunderstanding between Mr. Haden and his biographer—a misdeal of data—an accident with the anecdotes—because no one was more keenly alive to all relating to these plates and their various states than Mr. Haden himself, whose strong sense of the importance of printing was acquired while watching ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... Maid of Orleans was deemed the fit subject of a poem, the wittiest and most profligate for which literature has to blush. Our illustrious Don Juan hides his head when contrasted with Voltaire's Pucelle: Juan's biographer, with all his zeal, is but an innocent, and a novice, by the side of ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... way. Godwin transformed the daughter into a son. Lamb, however, seems to have believed this episode to be in the first edition, 1724, and afterwards to have been removed at the entreaty of Southerne, Defoe's friend (see Lamb's letters to Walter Wilson, Defoe's biographer, of December 16, 1822, and February 24, 1823). But it is in reality the first edition which lacks the episode, and Mr. G.A. Aitken, Defoe's latest editor, doubts Southerne's interference altogether and considers Susannah's curiosity an alien interpolation. For Lamb's other remarks ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... that care and affection could devise. "He spent," says his amiable biographer, Izaak Walton, "much of his childhood in a sweet content under the eye and care of his prudent mother, and the tuition of a chaplain or tutor to him and two of his brothers in her own family." At Cambridge he became orator to the University, gained ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... service in Ireland in the year 1829, and came away sick with the scenes he had witnessed at the evictions and forced collections of tithes where his troops were employed to strengthen the arm of the law. "Ireland," his biographer, Professor Henderson, tells us,[34] "was to him a tragedy of unrealized possibilities." The people had "good capacities for self-government," but Englishmen "showed a vicious tendency to confuse cause and effect," and attributed ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... retained all that he read. At the age of fourteen he could repeat from memory all of Watt's Hymns and Pope's "Essay on Man." When but a youth, Henry Clay read books of history and science and practiced giving their contents before the trees, birds, and horses. Says a biographer of Lincoln, "A book was almost always ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... less than by authorship, he made his contemporary mark. When a tomb has been closed for centuries, the effaced lineaments of its tenant can be re-coloured only by the idealizing hand of genius, as Scott drew Claverhouse, and Carlyle drew Cromwell. But, to the biographer of the lately dead, men have a right to say, as Saul said to the Witch of Endor, "Call up Samuel!" In your study of a life so recent as Kinglake's, give us, if you choose, some critical synopsis of his monumental writings, some salvage from his ephemeral and scattered papers; trace so much of ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... other and better qualities than these, and such as it affords his biographer far greater pleasure to record. His tenderness of heart, his sympathy, his brotherly or paternal care for his men, had been displayed in a hundred instances, and had gained him the enthusiastic affection of all who served under his command. ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Swift was really invited by Walpole to meet him. Swift's visit to England concerned itself mainly with the publication of "Gulliver's Travels," but Sir Henry Craik thinks that Swift had other thoughts. "As regards politics," says this biographer, "he was encouraged to hope that without loss either of honour or consistency, it was open to him to make terms with the new powers. In the end, the result proved that he either over-estimated his own capacity ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... virtues, they are not to be found in the Doctor's picture of him, and it is well for Milton that some sourness in his temper is the only vice with which his memory has been charged; it is evident enough that if his biographer could have discovered more, he ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... singing," says his biographer, Thomas of Celano, the author of the magnificent Dies irae, dies illa. On his deathbed St. Francis composed and sang without interruption the Hymn to the Sun, that lofty song of praise in which the sum total of his noble life, love for all created things,—is comprised and transfigured. ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... Scotland is not clear. He may have laboured for a time there under St. Columba, but he became Abbot of Drumhome in Donegal. On the night St. Columba went to his reward, as we are told by that saint's biographer, St. Adamnan, Ernan was favoured with a vision in which the saint's death was revealed to him. St. Ernan died in his Irish monastery at an advanced age in the year 640. The church of Killernan, in Ross-shire, is named ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... Coleridge himself, and where he has been his own biographer, will be carefully noticed and given here, when it falls in with the intention and purposes of this work; for this reason the Biographia Literaria has been so frequently quoted. Coleridge had passed nearly half his life in a retirement almost amounting to solitude, and this he preferred. First, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... Twain's death his various literary effects passed into the hands of his biographer and literary executor, ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Columbus, according to the portrait of him given by his biographer Washington Irving, was a tall man, of robust and noble presence. His face was long, he had an aquiline nose, high cheek bones, eyes clear and full of fire; he had a bright complexion, and his face was much covered with freckles. He was a truly Christian ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... compared with Lord Macaulay's prose, strikingly shew how the same subject can be degraded or elevated by the mode of treatment; and how easily the historian or biographer, who expands his authorities by picturesque details, may brighten or ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... Scotland as a companion volume to Wild Wales? He preserved in little leather pocket-books or leather-covered exercise-books copious notes of both tours. Two of his notebooks came into the possession of the late Dr. Knapp, Borrow's first biographer, and are ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... village on Stane Street, or rather a little south of it, about two miles beyond Halnaker, is Eartham; which brings to mind William Hayley, the friend and biographer of Cowper and the author of The Triumphs of Temper, perhaps the least read of any book that once was popular. Hayley succeeded his father as squire of Eartham; here he entertained Cowper and other friends; here Romney painted. ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... disgraced and would appear in the light of one who could trample on a fallen foe, and there can be no question as to the accuracy of the fact, that in his impulsiveness he did seek the life of Li Hung Chung; though the Governor afterwards became a bosom friend of his. Mr. Wilson, another biographer, who has already been quoted, read his MS. over to Gordon, so that his account is likely to be accurate. ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... Shakespeare, and by almost all persons who devote themselves to sound literature. It is equally rejected by Mr. Spedding, the chief authority on Bacon; by Mr. H. H. Furness, the learned and witty American editor of the 'Variorum Shakespeare;' by Dr. Brandes, the Danish biographer and critic; by Mr. Swinburne, with his rare knowledge of Elizabethan and, indeed, of all literature; and by Mr. Sidney Lee, Shakespeare's latest biographer. Therefore, the first point which strikes us in the Baconian hypothesis is that its devotees are nobly careless ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... by no means confidential, must possess considerable value to any future biographer of the writer. It very clearly shows the light in which Smollett was willing to be viewed by the public. It explains the share he took in more than one literary enterprise, and establishes his paternity of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... "Beethoven, eine Kunststudie" is a "Leben des Meisters," a mere sketch, made up from the same works as the "Catalogue," with a very few additions from other sources. As a biographer, Lenz fails as signally as in his capacity of critic. Much original matter, from one living so far away, was not to be expected; but he has made no commendable use of the printed authorities which he had at hand. His style is bombastic and feeble; there is neither a logical nor ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... in the lecture-room, Boswell," said Shakespeare, as the great biographer took his seat behind his friend the Doctor. "Doesn't the Gossip want a report ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... moment, while to the casual eye, in search of discovery, it would appear chaos." Wilson had no love for fine furniture, and he seems to have crowded his books together without regard to any system of classification. He had a habit of mixing his books around with fishing-tackle, and his charming biographer tells us it was no uncommon thing to find the "Wealth of Nations," "Boxiana," the "Faerie Queen," Jeremy Taylor, and Ben Jonson occupying close quarters with fishing-rods, boxing-gloves, and tins ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... Dr. Gregory (Biographer of Chatterton) to-day; a very brown-looking man, of most pinquescent, and full-moon cheeks. There is much tallow in him. I like his wife, and perhaps him too, but his Christianity is of an intolerant order, and he affects a solemnity when talking of it, which savours of the high priest. When ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... there are substances in nature called amalgams, whose property it is to combine incongruous materials. Now I am a moral amalgam, and have a peculiar talent for mixing up human materials in society, however repellent their natures." "And certainly," adds his biographer, "I have seen a party composed of materials as ill-sorted as could possibly be imagined, drawn out and attracted together, till at last you would believe they had been born ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... should of course read carefully | | the paper on "Classical Metres in English" by W. J. Stone in | | Bridges' Milton's Prosody (2d ed.), pp. 113 ff. Mr. Stone | | regards the hexameters of Clough's ActA|on and some specimen | | verses by Spedding (the biographer of Bacon) as the best he | ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... advocacy of Shargar's rights, nay, even if the relation was not altogether free from some amount of show-off on Robert's part, I cannot yet help thinking that it had its share in that development of the character of Falconer which has chiefly attracted me to the office of his biographer. There may have been in it the exercise of some patronage; probably it was not pure from the pride of beneficence; but at least it was a loving patronage and a vigorous beneficence; and, under the reaction of these, the good which in Robert's nature was as yet only in a state of ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... and important time to Abel when Jan learned to walk; but, as he was neither precocious nor behindhand in this respect, his biographer may be pardoned for not dwelling on it ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... The biographer of William Morris fixes 1868 as the beginning of the poet's Icelandic stories.[30] Eirikr Magnusson, an Icelander, was his guide, and the pupil made rapid progress. Dasent's work had drawn Morris' attention to the sagas, and within a few months most of the sagas had been read in ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... in the most critical situations, the unerring sagacity with which he penetrated the purposes of his adversaries, the address with which he soothed the passions and guided the judgments of his colleagues, it is impossible to find a single fault. If he had a fault, says his biographer, it was that of using the razor when he would have done better with the axe. But the axe is not a diplomatic weapon. The simulation of temper may serve an occasional purpose, but temper itself is a mistake; and to Mr. Gallatin's credit be it said, it was a mistake never committed by him in the ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... in like manner, (we quote from the same biographer,) "was a stranger to every evil and malignant passion; and, indeed, was not much under the influence of passion of any sort. But his disposition was cheerful and gentle, and his heart was brimful of kindly affections. He was friendly and benevolent, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... no great historian after Tacitus, who should have belonged to the Ciceronian epoch. Suetonius, born about the year 70 A.D., shortly after Nero's death, was rather a biographer than an historian; nor as a biographer does he take a high rank. His "Lives of the Caesars," like Diogenes Laertius's "Lives of the Philosophers," are rather anecdotical than historical. L. Anneus Florus, who flourished during the reign of Trajan, has ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... services were ill repaid. Philip lent him a favoring ear, and despatched him to the Indies as general of the fleet and army. Here he found means to amass vast riches; and, in 1561, on his return to Spain, charges were brought against him of a nature which his too friendly biographer does not explain. The Council of the Indies arrested him. He was imprisoned and sentenced to a heavy fine; but, gaining his release, hastened to court to throw himself on the royal clemency. His petition was most graciously received. Philip restored his command, but remitted ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... readers," I replied, "who quarrel with a writer for telling them too much. But these things were worth telling: they show that you retained a youthful palate as well as a youthful heart; and I like you the better both for your diet and your menagerie. The old biographer, indeed, with the best intentions, has been far from understanding the character which he desired to honour. He seems, however, to have been a faithful reporter, and has done as well as his capacity permitted. I observe that he gives you credit for 'a deep foresight and judgment of the times,' ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... may not be Walt Whitman's "secret," or, at any rate, the spiritual experience of which the poet's latest biographer, Mr. Emory Holloway, writes? His interesting account of Walt Whitman's Manuscript Note-Books is preceded by ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... He surely cannot imagine that Ussher would have endorsed such statements; for he knows well that the Primate of Armagh condemned the Epistle to Polycarp as a forgery. He has still less reason to claim Bentley as on his side. On authority which Bishop Monk, the biographer of Bentley, deemed well worthy of acceptance, it is stated that in 1718, "on occasion of a Divinity Act," the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, "made a speech condemning the Epistles of S. Ignatius." His address created a "great ferment" in ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... treated, but at the greatest length by Zachariae, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, &c., Heidelberg, 1834. Zachariae has drawn the character of Sulla in an apologetical tone. I think the character of Sulla is drawn better by Plutarch, and that he has represented him as near to the life as a biographer can do. Whatever discrepancies there may he between Plutarch and other authorities, whatever Plutarch may have omitted which other authorities give, still he has shown us enough to justify his delineation ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... moralist Dr. S. JOHNSON, his biographer Boswell tells us, "was a man of very nice discernment in the science of cookery," and talked of good eating with uncommon satisfaction. "Some people," said he, "have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat; for my part, I mind my belly very studiously and very carefully, ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... Elizabeth, he did not know a worse man in the whole band than himself; yet he was then in possession of an inheritance of four thousand a year. "It was the constant custom of that queen," pursues the earl's biographer, "to call out of all counties of the kingdom, the gentlemen of the greatest hopes and the best fortunes and families, and with them to fill the more honorable rooms of her household servants, by which she honored them, obliged their kindred ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... brave, noble, generous, and disinterested,—a complete hero, in fact, and a regular fire-eater. Yet, in spite of these qualifications and the eulogiums of his biographer, it is pretty evident to those who impartially consider the career of this potentate, that he was by no means of a sane mind. In short, to speak plainly, he was mad, and deserved a strait-waistcoat as richly as any straw-crowned monarch in Bedlam. A single instance, in my opinion, fully substantiates ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 290 - Volume X. No. 290. Saturday, December 29, 1827. • Various
... The biographer of Pitt was a grandson of the Lord Mahon, afterwards Earl of Stanhope, who married, in 1774, the great statesman's eldest sister. Philip Henry Stanhope was born at Walmer on January 30, 1805, and entered the House of Commons as Lord Mahon in 1831. He took a prominent part in the foundation of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... and Hanny smiled brightly, and, like a true biographer began at the beginning, the first time the children had seen Daisy, with her long golden curls and pallid face, like a snow-drift. And how Doctor Joe had been in the hospital when ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... experience and by actual collision with many varieties of men, and that it gave him on several social questions much the advantage over the more learned of his contemporaries. As he passed through Flanders, Louvain attracted him, and here, according to his first biographer, he took the degree of medical bachelor. This is likely enough. Certain it is he made some stay at Louvain, became acquainted with its professors, and informed himself of its modes of study. Some little time he also passed at ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Congress of the death of Washington, they instantly adjourned until the next day, when John Marshall, then a member of the House of Representatives and afterward chief justice of the United States and biographer of Washington, addressed the speaker in the ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... which yet remained to him sufficed for erecting that literary monument of which I have spoken, but his public usefulness was done. To the reader of his biography it will seem that these coming fourteen years will lack much of the grace which adorned the last twenty. The biographer will be driven to make excuses, which he will not do without believing in the truth of them, but doubting much whether he may beget belief in others. He thinks that he can see the man passing from one form to another—his ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... it is as well that the reader should understand M. Zola's aim in writing it, and his views—as distinct from those of his characters—upon Lourdes, its Grotto, and its cures. A short time before the book appeared M. Zola was interviewed upon the subject by his friend and biographer, Mr. Robert H. Sherard, to whom he ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... said, I lose my right hand in Vernon," he resumed, "and I am, it seems, inevitably to lose him, unless we contrive to fasten him down here. I think, my dear Miss Dale, you have my character. At least, I should recommend my future biographer to you—with a caution, of course. You would have to write selfishness with a dash under it. I cannot endure to lose a member of my household—not under any circumstances; and a change of feeling toward me on the part of any of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... London, Bracknell in Berkshire: Ireland and Edinburgh were also revisited. Various strange adventures befell; the oddest of all being an alleged attempt at assassination at Tanyrallt. Shelley asserted it, others disbelieved it: after much disputation the biographer supposes that, if not an imposture, it was a romance, and, if not a romance, at least a hallucination,—Shelley, besides being wild in talk and wild in fancy, being by this time much addicted to laudanum-dosing. In June ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... had not instantly won my liking, I should still have been glad of the glimpse of the older and statelier Boston which my slight acquaintance with George Ticknor gave me. The historian of Spanish literature, the friend and biographer of Prescott, and a leading figure of the intellectual society of an epoch already closed, dwelt in the fine old square brick mansion which yet stands at the corner of Park Street and Beacon, though sunk ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... form, and displays the technical and conventional insincerity of the age.[2256] The augmentative form of the name Lorenzaccio expresses the notion that he was great, awful, and wicked.[2257] His biographer says that he was a "mattoid."[2258] He missed success because his antagonists were stronger than he, but his career was typical of the age. He was in part a victim of the classical suggestion. He expected to be glorified as a tyrannicide. This taste for the imaginative element was an important ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... permit, I have endeavoured to make my own part in the book entirely impersonal. My experience is that the constant iteration by the biographer of his relationship to the subject of his memoir, can become exasperating to the reader; so that at the risk of offending in the opposite direction, I have chosen ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... gentlemen, as we are, but professional men—the height of whose ambition at that moment was to cut his throat. But the story is too pleasing to be abridged; I shall give it, therefore, accurately, from the French of his biographer: "M. Des Cartes had no company but that of his servant, with whom he was conversing in French. The sailors, who took him for a foreign merchant, rather than a cavalier, concluded that he must have money about him. Accordingly they came to a resolution by ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Here we also find the confutation of that false conception of sincerity, which maintains that the artist, in his volitional or practical life, should be at one with his dream, or with his incubus. Whether or no he have been so, is a matter that interests his biographer, not his critic; it belongs to history, which separates and qualifies that which art does not ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... greatly distinguished themselves, and some,—the brave Mackie, at Ciudad Rodrigo, for instance—successfully led forlorn-hopes. Finally, passing over the old sore of non-decoration for Peninsular services, since that, common to many regiments, is at last about to be healed,—Mr Robinson, the biographer of Sir Thomas Picton, has dared, in order to vindicate the harsh and partial conduct of his hero, to cast dust upon the facings of the brave boys of Connaught. It need hardly be said that they ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... prospects. Prior to this he had been secretary to the imperious Duchess of Monmouth. He was now left without money or employment, and owed much to the generosity of Pope. It was Gay's lot 'in suing long to bide,' to be always hoping, and nearly always disappointed. 'He seems,' says his latest biographer, 'to have begun his career under the impression that it was somebody's duty to provide for him in the world, and this impression clung to him through nearly the whole of a lifetime.'[27] Ten years before his death he was eagerly looking to others for support. Writing to Swift, he says: ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... the heart—how young! What a glorious gift it is when rightly used and governed! Hear Charlotte Bronte's testimony, as recorded by her biographer: "They are all gone," she says, "the sisters I so loved, and I have only my imagination left to comfort me. But for this solace I should despair or perish." The words are not exact—the book is not beside me, but such is their substance. He who lists ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... after an investigation and adverse report by members of the Royal Society, his practice fell into disrepute, and he retired to his native land, where he sojourned in obscurity until his death, which is supposed to have occurred after the year 1682. One David Lloyd, a biographer, issued a tract entitled "Wonders no Miracles, or Mr. Valentine Greatrakes' Gift of Healing Examined," wherein he endeavored to show that the famous "Irish stroaker" was little better than an impostor. In reply to this, Greatrakes published a pamphlet, vindicating his methods, ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... biographer, Mr. Charles Welsh, John Newbery was born in a quaint parish of England in seventeen hundred and thirteen. Although his father was only a small farmer, Newbury inherited his bookish tastes from an ancestor, Ralph or Rafe Newbery, who had been a great publisher of the sixteenth ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... his earliest work.[127] Armance, Beyle's first published novel,[128] though by no means the one which has received most attention, is certainly illuminating. Or rather, perhaps one should say that it poses the puzzle which Beyle himself put briefly in the words quoted by his editor and biographer: "Qu'ai-j'ete? que suis-je? En verite je serais bien embarrasse de le dire." To tell equal truth, it is but a dull book in itself, surcharged with a vague political spite, containing no personage whom we are permitted ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... composed by Christian musicians form an important part of our musical heritage. [11] The cathedral school at Metz and the monastery at Saint Gall became famous as musical centers, and of the work of one of the teachers of music at Saint Gall (Notker) it was written by his biographer: "Through different hymns, sequences, tropes, and litanies, through different songs and melodies as well as through ecclesiastical science, the pupils of this man made the church of God famous not merely in Alemannia, but everywhere ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY |
