"Critic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... An eminent modern writer: Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), eldest son of Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby; a distinguished critic and poet, and professor of poetry at Oxford. The allusion is to Arnold's essay, Sweetness and Light. The phrase, "sweetness and light," is one which Aesop uses in Swift's Battle of the Books to sum up the superiority of the ancients over the moderns. "As for us, the ancients, ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Certainly, my dear. CHAUCER was our first eminent poet, but, as a distinguished American critic has observed, he could not spell. This greatly interfered with his popularity. Then there was SHAKSPEARE, who wrote quaint old-fashioned plays quite unsuitable for filming, but nevertheless enjoyed a certain fame until it was proved that he never existed ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 153, November 7, 1917 • Various
... the Communists themselves. At the second congress of the Third International, Trotsky remarked. "A party as such, in the course of the development of a revolution, becomes identical with the revolution." Lenin, on the same occasion, replying to a critic who said that he differed from, the Communists in his understanding of what was meant by the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, said, "He says that we understand by the words 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' what is actually the dictatorship of its determined and conscious minority. And that ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... tediousness will never do— 'T is being too epic, and I must cut down (In copying) this long canto into two; They 'll never find it out, unless I own The fact, excepting some experienced few; And then as an improvement 't will be shown: I 'll prove that such the opinion of the critic is ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... winter in Rome he was permitted by the authorities to make a cast of a mutilated bust of Cicero which had long lain in the Vatican. A critic writing from Rome in 1857 says of this bust of Cicero: 'Mr. Akers obtained permission to take a cast from it; he then restored the eye, brow, and ears, and modelled a neck and bust for it in accordance with the temperament ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... the time when the predominant colours of Cyclamen were purple and magenta, and it was impossible for the most friendly critic to feel enthusiastic concerning these flowers. But the new colours—Salmon Pink, Salmon Scarlet, the intense Vulcan, Rose Queen and Cherry Red, together with Giant White and White Butterfly—are now regarded ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... sublimity of aspect and figure as the creations of Michael Angelo? Why, "a beggar," says one of his greatest critics, "arose from his hand the patriarch of poverty; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity; his infants are men, and his men are giants." And, says another critic, "he is the inventor of epic painting, in that sublime circle of the Sistine Chapel which exhibits the origin, progress, and final dispensation of the theocracy. He has personified motion in the cartoon of Pisa, portrayed meditation in the prophets and sibyls ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... if I remember rightly, was made in the course of a sparring match with the late Ferdinand Brunetiere over the principles and rules of literary criticism. As was fitting for a man to whom we owe the memorable saying, "The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces," M. Anatole France maintained that there were no rules and no principles. And that may be very true. Rules, principles, and standards die and vanish every day. Perhaps they are all dead and vanished by this time. These, if ever, ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... very lately, to literary society; and I have not been wrong, perhaps, in citing him as the example, par excellence, in this country, of the privately admired and publicly-unappreciated man of genius. Within the last year or two, it is true, an occasional critic has been urged, by honest indignation, into very warm approval. Mr. Webber,[4] for instance (than whom no one has a keener relish for that kind of writing which Mr. Hawthorne has best illustrated), gave us, in a late number of The American Review, a cordial and certainly ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... light from its loophole glows in its caverned gloom, and the hope of discovering within it the first steps of a stair winding up into the blue heaven. I apologize for the unavoidable rudeness of a critic who would fain be honest if he might; and I humbly thank all such as Dr. Newman, whose verses, revealing their saintship, make us long ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... of the Fleet, past and present, his description of the constant efforts to increase it both in ships and men, and his quietly confident prophecy that with this sure shield we might face the future in cheerful serenity, there were little sidethrusts at an imaginary critic. Some people had been silly enough to suggest that the new Board of Admiralty was so content with what had been done by "my right hon. and learned—I beg his pardon—gallant friend" that it had adopted a policy of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... support; and, if he set them aside in one instance, he may be induced to repeat this act till his mind shall lose all confidence in itself, and become utterly debilitated. To this it may be added, that the critic ought never to forget that he is himself exposed to the same errors as the Poet, and, perhaps, in a much greater degree: for there can be no presumption in saying of most readers, that it is not probable they will be so well acquainted with the various ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... floor; jewels of value in her ears and on her hands and neck; and finally a lace scarf of Mrs. Lloyd's, which was very rich and extremely costly. Norton was absent on some business of his own; David was the only critic on ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... and interprets the oracles of the Greeks and Saracens, in which, after the fashion of prophecy, the past is clear and historical, the future is dark, enigmatical, and erroneous. From this boundary of light and shade an impartial critic may commonly determine the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... about them. Of the four or five women who were of the field, but one wore a habit with any pretensions to conformity with the sacred laws of fashion, and its colour was a blue that, taken in connection with a red, brass-buttoned waistcoat, reminded the severe critic from Royal Meath of the head porter at the Shelburne Hotel. So she informed Major Booth in one of the rare intervals permitted to ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... die. Dull as the pictures, which adorn their halls, They think all learning fix'd within their walls: In manners rude, in foolish forms precise, All modern arts, affecting to despise. Yet prizing Bentley's[6] Brunck's[6] or Porson's[7] note, More than the verse, on which the critic wrote; With eager haste, they court the tool of power, (Whether 'tis PITT or PETTY rules the hour:) To him, with suppliant smiles they bend the head, Whilst mitres, prebends, to their eyes are spread. But should a storm o'erwhelm him ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... will presently show; not one of these, however, has been detected and pointed out; but the best passages in the book, indeed whatever was calculated to make the book valuable, have been assailed with abuse and misrepresentation. The duty of the true critic is to play the part of a leech, and not of a viper. Upon true and upon malignant criticism there is an excellent fable by the Spaniard Iriarte. The viper says to the leech, "Why do people invite your bite, and flee from mine?" "Because," says the ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... write a book on Epic Poetry, he dedicated his first chapter to "Differences of Taste in Nations." A critic of to-day might well find it necessary, on the threshold of a general inquiry, to expatiate on "Differences of Taste in Generations." Changes of standard in the arts are always taking place, but it is only with advancing ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... taste; and Longinus, who of all men seems most exquisitely to have possessed it, will puzzle his reader very much if he should attempt to decide whether imagination or judgment shine the brighter in that inimitable critic. ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... necessary here to reply to a critic who suggested that in emphasizing the role of the secret societies in World Revolution I had abandoned my former thesis of the Orleaniste conspiracy. I wish therefore to state that I do not retract one word I wrote in The French Revolution on the Orleaniste conspiracy, I merely supply a further ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... kept in ignorance of it. But this is a small matter. The chief point is that Reality has the pulse of life in it—in a word that it confirms its title; which, indeed, is about the highest praise that a critic can bestow. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... and Easter Day," Browning becomes the true critic of the nineteenth-century religious movements. He passes in review in a series of dramatic pictures the three most diverse modes of religious thought of the century. The dissenter's view is symbolized by a scene ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... positions, (though he sets aside the first, as pertaining to lexicography, and not now to grammar, as it formerly did,) the learned critic deduces first his four parts of the subject, and then his definition of grammar. "Hence," says he, "there arise Four Parts of Grammar; Analogy, which treats of the several parts of speech, their definitions, accidents, and formations; Syntax, which treats of the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... America; and yet Scipio is dispatched with a lucrative commission to New Spain. It may fairly be inferred, therefore, that so vast a portion of the Spanish monarchy did not escape the notice of the attentive critic who wrote Gil Blas; and the silence can only be accounted for by the fact, that the principal anecdotes relating to America, were reserved to make out the Bachelier de Salamanque, from the remainder of which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... critic, George Brandes, though a special student of English literature, overlooked these poets when he declared, in one of his lectures on literary history (1872), that the book in which love is for the first time looked on as something composite and an attempt made to analyze it into ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Bob's career as a dramatic critic, a career in which he gained authority and in which his literary faculties, his felicity of expression and soundness of ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... of these defects is hardly to be called secret, though, on the other hand, it is not well known. A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions said that "the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it"—to look at it not on a great party field-day, or at a time of parade, but in the ordinary transaction ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... was,' said Z., 'a little one. I will not say that Soult was in Spain a successful commander, or an agreeable colleague, or an obedient subordinate, but whenever things went wrong there, Soult was the man whom the Emperor sent thither to put them to rights. Great as Thiers may be as a military critic, I venture to put ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... liberal critic as to the defects of this performance, will be changed into astonishment, when I tell him, that a work of this inestimable moment, was begun, carried on, and finished in the state in which it now appears, in a period of ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... him. One day, Buonarotti came into the chapel as usual, and whistled and sneered at a copy which Torregiani was making. The aggrieved artist, a man of large proportions, very truculent of aspect, with a loud voice and a savage frown, sprang upon his critic, and dealt him such a blow upon the nose, that the bone and cartilage yielded under his hand, according to his own account, as if they had been made of dough,—"come se fosse stato un cialdone." This was when both were very young men; but Torregiani, when relating the story many years ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... philosophy (see above). That twentieth debatable portion scarcely in any degree affects our judgment of Plato, either as a thinker or a writer, and though suggesting some interesting questions to the scholar and critic, is of little ...
— Alcibiades I • (may be spurious) Plato
... arisen he could not tell; and it was not till the following year, when he had completed and sold them at a very fair price, that in one of his impersonal moods, he found himself able to recollect the Art critic, and to discover in his own achievement another proof that he was ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of a Standard reviewer, to write yourself down a back-number, as they say. I preserve the cutting which damns with faint praise some thus antiquated short stories of 1910. Browning and Wagner were so obsolete! . . . How young that critic must have been—so young that he had never seen a star return. Quite differently they come back—or is it quite the same? Soon we shall be able to judge, for this star is returning, and—oh wonder!—is trailing ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... conspicuously. There were always small groups before it, for it created something like the uproar that Manet's "Olympia" had raised in its time. Peter learned from one critic that his technique was magnificent, his picture a masterpiece of psychology and of portraiture, and that if he kept on he'd soon be one of the Immortals. He learned from another that while he undoubtedly ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... tale, like many another Biblical story, is found imbedded in the folk-lore-myths of other peoples and religions. Prof. White's "Warfare of Science and Theology" quotes Fansboll as finding it in "Buddhist Birth Stories." The able Biblical critic, Henry Macdonald, regards the Israelitish kings as wholly legendary, and Solomon as unreal as Mug Nuadat or Partholan; but let its history be real or unreal, the Bible accurately represents the condition of women under the Jewish patriarchal ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... became averse to the profession which had been chosen for him, and soon turned his attention to the law. Soon after graduation, he betook himself to London, where he studied with great zeal, meanwhile supplying his wants by acting as the theatrical critic of the 'Morning Chronicle.' There, seated in an obscure corner of the pit or upper gallery, we may imagine the Chancellor in embryo, jotting down the petty excellences and failings of the players, to pamper the taste of the frivolous ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... chapter, which produced upon Gibbon such an effect as almost to anticipate Walter Pater's famous definition, 'To feel the virtue of the poet, of the painter, to disengage it, to set it forth—these are the three stages of the critic's duty.' ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... in Bethlehem of Judea. The town is there and we can stand on the very spot where Jesus was born. The narrative places the time of his birth, in the days of Herod the king. History knows Herod; there is nothing mythical about this monster of iniquity. These statements are facts that no keenest critic or scholarly unbeliever can plausibly dispute. So the gospel sets its record in the rigid frame of history; it roots its origin down in the rocky ledge of Judea. Christ was not born in a dream, but in Bethlehem. We are not, then, ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... book, and wears a great (not a big or bag) coat.' When Boswell came to publish The Life of Johnson, he took the opportunity to justify himself, though he did not care to refer directly to his anonymous critic. This explanation I discovered too late to insert ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... "I am a fair critic of the works in verse and prose that are shown me; but perhaps I speak my opinion with almost too great freedom. Another fault in me is that I have sometimes a spirit of delicacy far too scrupulous, and a spirit of criticism far too severe. I do not dislike an argument, and I often of my own ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... our own century, and in what we are wont to consider the Roscian Period of the British stage, its condition seemed so deplorable to Leigh Hunt, then the dramatic critic of "The News," as to require "An Essay on the Appearance, Causes, and Consequences of the Decline of British Comedy." "Of Tragedy," he wrote, "we have nothing; and it is the observation of all Europe that the British Drama is rapidly declining." Yet the golden reign of the Kembles was then in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... they brought. Those, who call theirs the golden age of poetry, have only this reason for it, that they were then content with acorns before they knew the use of bread; or that [Greek: Alis druos] was become a proverb. They had many who admired them, and few who blamed them; and certainly a severe critic is the greatest help to a good wit: he does the office of a friend, while he designs that of an enemy; and his malice keeps a poet within those bounds, which the luxuriancy of his fancy would tempt ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... name of history saved them! Robinson Crusoe was preserved as a true narrative; and Swift's Tale of a Tub escaped, as it was assumed (there being no time to read any of the books, and in this respect John Cross showed himself much more of a professional critic than he conjectured) to be a treatise on one branch of the cooperage business, and so, important to domestic mechanics in a new country. The reader will remember the manner in which the library ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... my mother in her note to you speaks well of my acting in Bianca. It has succeeded very well, and I think I act some of it very well; but my chief pleasure in its success was certainly her approbation. She is a very severe critic, and, as she censures sharply, I am only too thankful when I escape her condemnation. I think you will be pleased with Bianca. I was surprised when I came to act it at finding how terribly it affected me, for I am not naturally at all jealous, and in ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... and assistance of this sort all that the future philosopher and critic owed to the friend of his youth: he probably owes him his life also, and hence the world is, in a sense, indebted to M. About for the History of English Literature and Les Origines de la France contemporaine. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... successful dramatist; his series of eleven plays, produced within the space of fifteen years, from 1839 to 1854; the success of his tragedy, Uriel Acosta, in 1846, and the resulting appointment of the author in the same year as playwright and critic at the Royal Theatre in Dresden; his temperate participation in the popular movement of 1848 and consequent loss of the Dresden position; the death of his wife, Amalia, in the same-year after an estrangement ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... The Final Critic of the craft, As stage tradition tells; And yet—perhaps 'twill only be The jester with ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... of the quaintness and mannerism laid to my charge, and am very sure that I have always written too naturally (that is, too much from the impulse of thought and feeling) to have studied 'attitudes,' yet the critic was quite right in stating his opinion, and so am I in being grateful to him for the liberal praise he has otherwise given me. Upon the whole, I like his review better than even the 'Examiner,' notwithstanding my being perfectly satisfied ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... one another's houses; and I am therefore in a position to declare that Mrs. Erskine, having escaped by her marriage from the vile caste in which she was relatively poor and artificially unhappy and ill-conditioned, is now, as the pretty wife of an art-critic, relatively rich, as well as pleasant, active, and in sound health. Her chief trouble, as far as I can judge, is the impossibility of shaking off her distinguished relatives, who furtively quit their abject splendor to drop in ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... landlord, "we can dispense with your criticisms. A pretty thing indeed for you, on the strength of knowing half-a-dozen words of Welsh, to set up for a Welsh critic in the house of a person who knows the ancient British ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... slackens the bent bow, and plunges itself and relaxes itself in floods of abstractions, and idealisations, and dreams of sentimentality? Assuredly it is because the Russian is so inwardly discontented with his own actions that he is such a keen and incisive critic of everything false and exaggerated, that he despises all French rhetoric and German sentimentalism. And in this sense it is that the Russian's lack of will comes in to deepen his soul. He surrenders himself thereby to the universe, and, as do the ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... life. In his separation of the utterance of whole truths from insistance upon accidents of detail, Reynolds was right, because he guarded the expression of his view with careful definitions of its limits. In the same way Boileau was right, as a critic of Literature, in demanding everywhere good sense, in condemning the paste brilliants of a style then in decay, and fixing attention upon the masterly simplicity of Roman poets in the time of Augustus. Critics by rule of thumb reduced the principles clearly defined by Boileau ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... "is the old hat of Claude Vignon, a great critic, in the days when he was a free man and a free-liver. He has lately come round to the ministry; they've made him a professor, a librarian; he writes now for the Debats only; they've appointed him Master of Petitions ...
— Unconscious Comedians • Honore de Balzac
... business—that's what you are paid for. Every one for himself," cried Random, insolently throwing the manuscript at Forester; and, as he flung out of the shop with his companions, he added, with a contemptuous laugh, "A printer's devil setting up for a critic! He may be a capital judge of pica and brevier, perhaps—but let not the ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... standpoint, and the dialogue, though unequal, is quite admirable at the best. Indeed there is a Gilbertian tone about the whole piece which I should be rather more surprised at being the first to note, so far as I know, if I were not pretty well prepared to find that the study of the average dramatic critic is not much in Peacock. The choric trochees (which by the way is a tautology) are of the highest ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... distinction be allotted to the Sabbath. The rigidity of the laws regarding Sabbath observance is undeniable. Movement was restricted, many acts were forbidden which were not in themselves laborious. The Sabbath was hedged in by a formidable array of enactments. To an outside critic it is not wonderful that the Jewish Sabbath has a repellent look. But to the insider things wear another aspect. The Sabbath was and is a day of delight. On it the Jew had a foretaste of the happiness of the world to come. ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... my return. But if I should describe the kitchen-grate, the prodigious pots and kettles, the joints of meat turning on the spits, with many other particulars, perhaps I should be hardly believed; at least, a severe critic would be apt to think I enlarged a little, as travellers are often suspected to do. To avoid which censure, I fear I have run too much into the other extreme; and that if this treatise should happen to be translated into the language of Brobdingnag (which is the general name of that kingdom) ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... days John did very little in the office, beyond finding his way about, but on the third day of his employment, Tarleton suddenly called him into his room and told him that the musical critic had telephoned to say he was unwell and would not be able to attend a concert at the ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... occasion, especially with ladies or persons of rank; the love of "talk" in which he assumed the lead—and kept it too; and the contemptuous scorn of what he did not approve. But then all this was backed by admirable training and full knowledge. He was a deeply read, cultivated man, a fine critic, and, with all his arrogance, despotism, and rough "ways," a most interesting, original, delightful person—for those he liked that is, and whom he had made his own. His very "build" and appearance was also that of the redoubtable Doctor: so was his loud and hearty laugh. Woe betide ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... excel lent "cut" of such a craft, taken from M. Blundeville's "New and Necessarie Treatise of Navigation," published early in the seventeenth century. Appearing in a work of so high character, published by so competent a navigator and critic, and (approximately) in the very time of the Pilgrim "exodus," there can be no doubt that it quite correctly, if roughly and insufficiently, depicts the outlines, rig, and general cast of a vessel of the MAY-FLOWER type and time, as she appeared ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... agreeable book, the Memoirs of Grammont perhaps deserve that character more than any which was ever written: it is pleasantry throughout, pleasantry of the best sort, unforced, graceful, and engaging. Some French critic has justly observed, that, if any book were to be selected as affording the truest specimen of perfect French gaiety, the Memoirs of Grammont would be selected in preference to all others. This has a Frenchman said of the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind. But among the writings of the representative Eugenists one cannot ignore the distinct middle-class bias that prevails. As that penetrating critic, F. W. Stella Browne, has said in another connection, "The Eugenics Education Society has among its numbers many most open-minded and truly progressive individuals but the official policy it has pursued for years has been inspired by class-bias and sex bias. The society laments with increasing ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... Except for certain streaks of a slovenliness which seems to be an almost unavoidable defect in me, there is little to be ashamed of in the writing of the opening portion; but it will be fairly manifest to the critic that instead of being put aside and thought over through a leisurely interlude, the ill-conceived latter part was pushed to its end. I was at that time overworked, and badly in need of a holiday. In addition to various necessary journalistic tasks, I had in hand another book, Love and ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... his army—which he had done—he had brought back nothing in safety but that "old impudent face of his."[32] Altogether it is a tirade of abuse very inferior to Cicero's dignity. Le Clerc, the French critic and editor, speaks the truth when he says, "Il faut avouer qu'il manque surtout de moderation, et que la gravite d'un orateur consulaire y fait trop souvent place a l'emportement d'un ennemi." It is, however, full of life, and amusing as an expression of honest hatred. The reader when reading ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... enough to open a suit—" began the other; but the critic was gone. "So you've found out that Little Miss Grouch is Cecily Wayne, have you?" Alderson observed, turning to ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... bright at the praise, but she laughed as she answered. "You always think me and my scribbles perfection, Prue,—even the love verses that shocked the Ladies' Aid. You are a bad critic. But doesn't the snow make you think—pretty things, Prudence? Come now, as you stood at the window ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... violated one of the first of the laws of his class, and by his unfailing fidelity to his wife continued to resist it), superstitious rather than religious, an immense admirer of the Kaiser, and a decidedly hostile critic of our own country—such was the general impression made on one British observer by ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... of a smith's apprentice, with his struggles for existence and his ultimate final failure owing to the irresistible indulgence of a passionate physical instinct." At first this too seemed to be a failure. To use the words of Arne Garborg, a Norwegian author and critic, Lie "had spoken—cried out in the passion or agony of his soul, and people stood there quite calm and as if they had heard nothing;" there seemed to be a total lack of sympathetic comprehension on the part of the public. In the end, however, ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... both apprehended and indicated solely through the attributes. In the "living processes of thought and language" the extension, though in this case really thought of (which in the case of the predicate it is not), is thought of only through the medium of what my acute and courteous critic ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... touches as on these clouds!" His joking friends clubbed him "Director-General of the Fine Arts for Scotland," a title which he complacently accepted. Besides showing off his pictures, Davie was an art critic, and wrote articles for the newspapers and magazines. Unfortunately, however, his attention to pictures prevented him from attending to his shop, and his customers (who were not artists) forsook him, and bought their clothes elsewhere. He accordingly shut up his shop, ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... marrow of Froude's book. Those who think that in history there is no side may blame him. He followed Carlyle. "Froude is a man of genius," said Jowett: "he has been abominably treated." "Il a vu iuste," said a young critic of our own day* in reply to the usual charges of inaccuracy. The real object of his attack was that ecclesiastical corruption which belongs to no Church exclusively, and is older than ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... followed it. Cicero himself began a warm correspondence with Caesar, and through Quintus sent continued messages to him. Literature was a neutral ground on which he could approach his political enemy without too open discredit, and he courted eagerly the approval of a critic whose literary genius he esteemed as highly as his own. Men of genuine ability are rarely vain of what they can do really well. Cicero admired himself as a statesman with the most unbounded enthusiasm. He was proud of his verses, ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... reprehensibly inadequate Peter could never rid himself of a dislike to these pronouncements; in the case of the actresses especially they struck him as brutal and offensive—unmanly as launched by an ensconced, moustachioed critic over a cigar. At the same time he was aware of the dilemma (he hated it; it made him blush still more) in which his objection lodged him. If one was right in caring for the actor's art one ought to have been interested ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... defects of his great qualities, the over-ideality, the haste, the incoherence, and the want of grasp on narrative, are glaringly apparent in these early works. But while this is true, the qualities themselves are absent. A cautious critic will only find food in "Zastrozzi" and "St. Irvyne" for wondering how such flowers and fruits of genius could have lain concealed within a germ apparently so barren. There is even less of the real Shelley discernible ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... his reports, and furbished up the rest to such a pitch of lustre, that Lord Clarendon himself need scarce have been ashamed of them. And though this cost a great deal of ale, and even of strong waters (for Lizzie would have it the duty of a critic to stand treat to the author), and though it was otherwise a plague, as giving the maid such airs of patronage, and such pretence to politics; yet there was no stopping it, without the risk of mortal offence to both writer and reviewer. Our mother also, while disapproving Lizzie's long stay ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... adding hypothetical facts or raising new critical difficulties of our own. No such foreign criticisms are or can be worth much unless the original Chinese histories and the original Chinese philosophers have been carefully examined by the foreign critic ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... on Schumann in Grove's Dictionary Dr. Philip Spitta, the well-known historian and critic, comments upon the conducting of ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... the "Fable Danoise" of Uriel Freudenberger of Bern (1760) becomes a mere absurdity, and the indignant Canton of Uri had no less right to burn it (although to burn was not to answer it, suggests the critic,) than to honor the "Defence" by Balthasar with two medals of gold. And what has been written to establish him may be read in Zurlauben, (whose approbation is almost proof, says Mueller, reverentially,) and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... Manfred or Cain to this adorable half-fledged creature, whom he had known five days! Supposing Elsmere had been there to hear—Elsmere with his sane eye, his laugh! As he leant over the gate he found himself quivering with impatience to be away—by himself—out of reach—the critic in him making the most bitter remorseless mock of all these heroics and despairs the other self had been indulging in. But for the life of him he could not find a word to say—a move to make. He stood hesitating, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... we have a poet we must have a critic—won't this one do? he has a book; perhaps he is going to review it, or perhaps it is his encyclopaedia to save him from ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... 1830 his Sartor Resartus, which, clothing the man in 'der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid,' usurped for him at once an office not inferior to that of the Erd-geist in Faust. The shrill notes of the bagpipe of the critic of Craigenputtock blew across the mountains and valleys of his island home, rousing the judge on the bench, and, penetrating the long halls of Cambridge and Oxford, streamed yet distinct and powerful to our shores. Astonished by ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... in pink. Or perhaps Charles Edward—if that young man's artistic ability had been equal to his sense of it there would have been less danger in taking him into the factory. Or probably Maria, with her great head for business—oh, Maria, I grant you, is like what the French critic said of the prophet Habakkuk, "capable ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... listening with the decorous attitude of a conventional audience. I marked one dapper catbird, perched on a poplar limb, who cocked his head and heard the singer through, and then made that almost imperceptible gesture with which a great critic indicates his approval of a novice. "Not half bad," he seemed to say,—this blase old habitue of the thicket music-halls. "I shouldn't wonder if something could be made of that voice if it were trained ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... daring and painful attempts than the sensitive and pampered taste of a democratic century can approve of?—There is no doubt these coming ones will be least able to dispense with the serious and not unscrupulous qualities which distinguish the critic from the skeptic I mean the certainty as to standards of worth, the conscious employment of a unity of method, the wary courage, the standing-alone, and the capacity for self-responsibility, indeed, they will avow among themselves ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... divine forgiveness for the past. So the sneers that we often hear about Christian 'philanthropists taking tracts to people when they want soup,' and the like, are excessively shallow sneers, and indicate nothing more than this, that the critic has superficially diagnosed the disease, and is wofully wrong about the remedy. God forbid that I should say one word that would seem to depreciate the value of other forms of beneficence, or to cast doubt upon the purity of motives, or even to be lacking ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... reason,—in tight inexpressibles, with "a belt such as is worn by the old German students." You will pardon me for treating such an awful person as this somewhat lightly; but there is always, I think, such a dash of the ridiculous in the French sublime, that the critic should try and do justice to both, or he may fail in giving a fair account of either. This character of Hebronius, the type of Mrs. Sand's convictions—if convictions they may be called—or, at least, the allegory ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... did not last long enough to test Trollope's hypothesis. Mr. Hutton, critic for the Spectator, recognized Trollope as the author and so stated in his review. Trollope did not deny ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... electric vitality of this friend of ours, that those of us who followed him could only think of him as approving the funeral pageant, not the object of it, but still the spectator and critic of every scene in which he was a part. We did not think of him as dead. We never shall. In the moist, warm midsummer morning, he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... those who are always grumbling, who are full of "ifs" and "buts," and "I told you so's." We like the man who always looks toward the sun, whether it shines or not. It is the cheerful, hopeful man we go to for sympathy and assistance; not the carping, gloomy critic,—who always thinks it is going to rain, and that we are going to have a terribly hot summer, or a fearful thunder-storm, or who is forever complaining of hard times and his hard lot. It is the bright, cheerful, hopeful, contented man who makes ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... seemed competent to impart at short notice any information required of her. She had never struck Mrs. Peyton as more alert and efficient. A melting grace of line and colour tempered her edges with the charming haze of youth; but it occurred to her critic that she might emerge from this morning mist as a dry and metallic ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... History, novels, voyages and travels, and various specific treatises of fancy or fact, invite perusal, and like a common acquaintance, it requires some moral effort to negative their claims. "Judgment," says a celebrated critic, "is forced upon us by experience. He that reads many books must compare one opinion, or one style with another, and when he compares must necessarily distinguish, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... persons, who will feel disposed to deny that every minute event mentioned in these volumes ever befell one and the same ship, though ready enough to admit that they may very well have occurred to several different ships: a mode of commenting that is much in favour with your small critic. To this objection, we shall make but a single answer. The caviller, if any there should prove to be, is challenged to produce the log-book of the Montauk, London packet, and if it should be found to contain a single sentence to controvert any one of our statements ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... sanctions the morality of his people; for instance, sanctions veracity and unselfishness, as Mr. Howitt distinctly avers. These are examples of 'righteousness' in conduct. I do not mean that these virtues were impressed on savages in some supernatural way, as a critic has daringly averred that I do. The strong reaction of some early men against the cosmical process by which 'the weakest goes to the wall,' is, indeed, a curious moral phenomenon, and deserves the attention of moralists. But I never dreamed ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... went into ecstasies over the affair. Paganini, he said, who had been attacked for hard-heartedness and avarice, was present at the concert, and at the end prostrated himself before Berlioz, and shed tears. Hope returned and Berlioz went home in triumph, for he had satisfied one great musical critic. The next day he received a note from Paganini enclosing twenty thousand francs, to be devoted to three years of ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... after all. Nevertheless, he very naturally rebelled against the strongly expressed adverse judgment of his enemy of the copying-clerk proposal, and begged to be allowed to appeal to a competent and impartial critic. To this request his father assented, and M. Surville, who was now engaged to Laure, proposed that M. Andrieux, of the Academie Francaise, formerly his own master at the Ecole Polytechnique, should be asked to give an opinion. Honore, his ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... engineering and obeying the vagaries of successive Popes. Therefore, when he came at last to paint the Last Judgment, he was a worn man, exhausted in services of many divers sorts. And, what is most perplexing to the reconstructive critic, nothing in his correspondence remains to indicate the stages of his labour. The letters tell plenty about domestic anxieties, annoyances in his poor craftsman's household, purchases of farms, indignant remonstrances with stupid brethren; but we find in them, as I have said, no clue ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... murmured, as he put the sheet back; "I think that such a theme, adequately treated, will considerably astonish my learned friends in general, and my esteemed critic, Van ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... cited the passage at length in order to give the critic's argument its widest scope. But, alas, who does not see the argument's fallacy? Who does not perceive that this reenforced skyscraper is a cardboard column liable to fall with the first push that ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... corresponded; they exchanged their verses, Greek, Latin, and English, with a confession on Milton's part that he prefers English and Latin composition to Greek; that to write Greek verses in this age is to sing to the deaf. Gill, Milton finds "a severe critic of poetry, however disposed to be lenient ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... word in a letter half jocose and half pathetic to his friend. If a man's deeds be always honest, surely he should not be accused of dishonesty on the strength of some light word spoken in the confidence of familiar intercourse. The light words are taken to be grave because they meet the modern critic's eye clothed in the majesty of a dead language; and thus it comes to pass that ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... was "figuree assez grossierement et sans details.") These statements are useful as enabling us to understand why Baudin was so shy about showing his charts to Flinders. If they gave little satisfaction to the writer of the Moniteur article, we can imagine what a critic who had been over the ground himself ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... shall hope to deal with the real and supposed portraits of those two great men. I will, however, take the present opportunity of protesting against a sentence which caught my eye in passing, and which I believe to be as fundamentally unsound as any I ever saw written, even by a professional art critic or by a director of a national collection. Sir Henry Layard, in his chapter on ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... the Compigne-Senlis region, and are apparently moving towards the southeast, thus continuing a movement that began on Friday. General Cherfils, the military critic of the Gaulois, taking a very optimistic view of the situation, thinks the movement may be to assure a retreat by some route other than by a return through Belgium. General Cherfils says: "This rush of the German right wing upon ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... longer to write a Geography than, according to Moses, it took to create the World which it is the Geographer's business to describe; and since the Critic has been added to the list of created beings, it is no longer the fashion for the Author to pass ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford
... sanguine Talbot, "you must make the most of the time. The Yankees may not give us another chance. Across yonder, where you see that dim light trying to shine through the dirty window, Winthrop is printing his paper, which comes out this morning. As he is a critic of the Government, I suggest that we go over and see the task ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... He must strike, as it were, the shield of no Hospitaler of unsteady seat, but that of the Templar himself. And this is the cause of what seems to puzzle Mr. Max Muller, namely the attacks on his system and his results in particular. An English critic, writing for English readers, had to do with the scholar who chiefly represented the philological school of mythology ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... going to say, but you wouldn't let me finish my sentence. Oh, yes, he was quite a success. One old gentleman wanted to know if he would accept the part of art critic on his paper. It was very exciting." She leans back in her chair, the troubled look on her face growing intensified. She seems glad to be silent, and with downcast eyes plays with the ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... is painted, and the tubes are twisted and dried, When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died, We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it—lie down for an aeon or two, Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall set ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... are a critic! Knowing nothing of sunshine except that it warms you, and never having touched paint, you are going to tell about them to a man who spends his life studying them! You look up in the night and the truth you see is that the moon and stars are crossing the ocean. ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... inclined to do so—and he is very often inclined. He received the "Prix Vitet" in 1879 from the Academy for Le Drapeau. Despite our unlimited admiration for Claretie the journalist, Claretie the historian, Claretie the dramatist, and Claretie the art-critic, we think his novels conserve a precious and inexhaustible mine for the Faguets and Lansons of the twentieth century, who, while frequently utilizing him for the exemplification of the art of fiction, will salute him as ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... but not of an intemperate sort, nor very inclusive. The descriptive, the poetic, the more pretentious phases of the book did not receive attention. Mr. Howells was perhaps the first critic of eminence to recognize in Mark Twain not only the humorist, but the supreme genius-the "Lincoln of our literature." This was later. The public—the silent public—with what Howells calls "the inspired ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... sarcasm, what the dramatist had been doing all that time. Buntline had played the part of "Gale Durg," who met death in the second act, and a second paper, commenting on this, suggested that it would have been a happy consummation had the death occurred before the play was written. A third critic pronounced it a drama that might be begun in the middle and played both ways, or played backward, quite as well as the way in which ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... consciousness of self-esteem which dwelt, like a perpetual spring, upon the mind of Mr. Stubbs. Mr. McCrab was himself an amateur actor; he had also written a tolerably successful comedy, as well as an unsuccessful tragedy; and he was, besides, a formidable critic, whose scalping strictures, in a weekly journal, were the terror of all authors and actors who were either unable or unwilling to dispense turtle ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... of the day; the Athenaeum devoting to it less space even than to "the anonymous Pauline," while the "Philip van Artevelde" of Henry Taylor (now hardly remembered) received fifteen columns of tribute, in which the critic confided to the public his enthusiastic estimate of that production. Neither Blackwood's, the Quarterly, nor the Edinburgh even mentioned "Paracelsus"; the Athenaeum admitted that it had talent, but ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... by some nice critic, anxious to be just before he was generous, that the book commonly known as Webster's Dictionary, sometimes, with a ponderous familiarity, as The Unabridged, should more properly be called The Webster Dictionary, as indicating the fact that the original private enterprise ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... these lines, an Ingres exhibition has been opened in the Georges Petit Gallery, Paris. Apropos of this event, the Revue des Deux Mondes (May 15, 1911) contains a striking paper by the art-critic, M. de Sizeraine. Some of the conclusions here arrived at are startling. Certain authorities on art are said to regard the great Montalbanais as a victim ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... ("Pari. Hist.," xxiii., pp. 801,902.) He escaped censure by agreeing to suspend them. One was proved guilty, the other committed suicide. It was subsequently shown that one of the men had been an agent of the Burkes in raising India stock. (Dilke's "Papers of a Critic," ii-, p. 333—"Dict. Nat Biography": art Burke.) Paine, in his letter to the Attorney-General (IV. of this volume), charged that Burke had been a "masked pensioner" ten years. The date corresponds with a secret arrangement made ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... are among the honestest men of this age, arrayed against you, be pleased to notice the following letter from Prof. Stuart. I wrote to him, knowing as I did his integrity of purpose, his unflinching regard for truth, as well as his deserved reputation as a scholar and biblical critic, proposing the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... you can't have heard much at all, my dear Alexander. It's only lately, since MacConnell and his set have got hold of her, that she's come up. Myself, I always knew she had it in her. If we had one real critic in London—but what can one expect? Do you know, Alexander,"—Mainhall looked with perplexity up into the top of the hansom and rubbed his pink cheek with his gloved finger,—"do you know, I sometimes think of taking to criticism seriously myself. In a way, it ...
— Alexander's Bridge and The Barrel Organ • Willa Cather and Alfred Noyes
... incorrectly used for contemptuous. A story is told of Richard Parson, an English scholar and critic. A gentleman being in dispute with him, angrily exclaimed, "My opinion of you is most contemptible, sir," upon which Parson quickly retorted, "I never knew an opinion of yours that was ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... branded by a critic of those days, in a review ascribed to Mrs. Barbauld, as unnatural and absurd. I admire the genius of Mrs. Barbauld, and am certain that, had her education been favourable to imaginative influences, no female of her day would ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... obligation of contracts clause, as the evidence amply shows, was to protect private executory contracts, and especially contracts of debt. * In actual practice, on the other hand, the decision produced one considerable benefit: in the words of a contemporary critic, it put private institutions of learning and charity out of the reach of "legislative despotism and ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... their days in a narrow court in a London slum, the one paralysed and the other blind; the one a most brilliant and imaginative story-teller, the other a most cautious, modest, tentative, and genial critic. And let us sit between their two chairs for a moment and listen to the moving story of Old Joe, believing it with all the simplicity, if not with all the stupefied, admiration of the little slum children ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie |
