"Laureate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Government will not think just now about appointing a Poet Laureate. I hardly think they can be altogether in the right mood. The business just now before the country makes a very good detective story; but as a national epic it is a little depressing. Jingo literature always weakens a nation; but even healthy ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... old as Homer. Its laureate is Montesquieu. The more northerly you go, he said, the sterner the man grows. You must scorch a Muscovite to make him feel. Gray was a convert. One of the prose hints for his noble fragment of a didactic poem runs thus: "It is the proper ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... sterling metal. Shakespeare was a theater-manager, Milton a secretary, Bobby Burns a farmer, Lamb a bookkeeper, Wordsworth a government employee, Emerson a lecturer, Hawthorne a custom-house inspector, and Whitman a clerk. William Morris was a workingman and a manufacturer, and would have been Poet Laureate of England had he been willing to call himself a student of sociology instead of a socialist. Socialism itself (whatever it may be) is ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... romantic side as well. It is, in fact, a love-match. The fact that the royal lovers have never seen each other only emphasizes its romantic quality. Their joy in beholding in actuality what they have for three long months cherished so dearly in imagination, is a theme for the poet laureate—who will, however, we fear, judging from his past performances, hardly do it justice. It is, as we have said, a love- match. The royal pair fell in love with what they had heard of each other—the Princess of Basque with the image ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... Laureate obedient to an editor's decree Puts his verses in the columns of the Times; When the endless minor poet in an endless minor key Gives the public his unnecessary rhymes, When you're weary of the poems which they constantly compose, And endeavour their existence to forget, ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... Williams, and by Sir Ralph Hare, K.C.B., both benefactors to the College. Other noteworthy portraits are those of Sir Noah Thomas, physician to King George III., by Romney; William Wordsworth, poet-laureate, by Pickersgill; Professor John E. B. Mayor, by Herkomer; Professor B. H. Kennedy, long headmaster of Shrewsbury School, by Ouless; Professor E. H. Palmer, Lord Almoner's Reader of Arabic in the University, and a famous oriental scholar, by the Hon. John Collier; and Professor G. D. Liveing, ...
— St. John's College, Cambridge • Robert Forsyth Scott
... to read into a dissyllable, and pretty much like Boney's old friend on the road from Moscow, General Doct'roff, who 'doctor'd them off,' as the Laureate observes, and prescribed for the whole French army gratis. But ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... most interesting poem is The Thistle and the Rose. This was written when Margaret, the daughter of King Henry VII of England, came to be the wife of King James IV of Scotland. Dunbar was the "Rhymer of Scotland," that is the poet-laureate of his day, and so, as was natural, he made a poem upon this great event. For a poet-laureate is the King's poet, and it is his duty to make poems on all the great things that may happen to the King. For this he receives a certain amount of money and a cask of wine every year. But it is the honor ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... NOTICE.—This is to state, That these are the specimens left at the gate Of Pinafore Palace, exact to date, In the hands of the porter, Curlypate, Who sits in his plush on a chair of state, By somebody who is a candidate For the office of Lilliput Laureate. William Brighty Rands. ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... this voyage around England the Premier visited the Orkneys on a similar trip, in the "Pembroke Castle," the poet laureate being of the party on this occasion. From the Orkneys he sailed across to Denmark and suddenly appeared at Copenhagen, where Mr. Gladstone entertained the Czar and Czarina, the King of Greece, and the King and Queen of Denmark, and many others ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... had attended on the prince during his last illness. I was supping with Veraci, the poet-laureate, on the eve of the prince's death, and in the course ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... a Thursday, and give alms to the poor in the name of God. He was a very learned and accomplished man; and his writings, both in prose and verse, were equal to those of Zahiri and Naziri. When he first came to India, he resided for some years at Delhi; but having had some dispute with the poet-laureate of the Emperor Mohammed Shah, he found himself under the necessity of retiring to Benares, where he lived in great privacy. As he was a stranger in the country, was engaged in no calling or profession, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... from all these troubles to an extent which the average Bailee can only fancy by looking with his mind's eye through "patent double million magnifiers." A man so eminent as the Laureate is the butt of all the miserable minor poets, all the enthusiastic school- girls, all the autograph-hunters, all the begging-letter writers, all the ambitious young tragedians, and all the utterly unheard-of and imaginary relations in Kamschatka or Vancouver's Island with whom the wide world ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... look at our syllabus! One night we have a discussion on Shakespeare. Eh? What do you think of that? Shakespeare no less! Next night we deal with an equally great poet—Tannahill." (No doubt the speaker meant to compliment Paisley in thus comparing the author of Lear and Hamlet with the poet-laureate of the loom.) I have heard Milton's Paradise Lost and Pollok's Course of Time clashed together in the same ludicrous way. I was dreadfully nonplussed on one occasion by hearing a speaker strongly recommend the audience to give their days and nights to the study of Bunyan and M'Cheyne. ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... of that Philip Herbert who was the brother of Shakespeare's friend, showed how tenderly she remembered her old instructor, Daniel, the poet-laureate, by erecting a handsome monument to him in Beckington Church, bearing this inscription: "Here lies, expecting the second coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the dead body of Samuel Daniel, Esq., who was tutor to the Lady Anne Clifford in her youth. She was that daughter and heir to ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... those heaven-darkening murders, with a red cap on his head, and a many-stringed harp in his hand, chanting the praises of the murderers, and exciting the drunken populace to greater horrors? Lebrun. Yes, the French Pindar is appointed poet-laureate to the guillotine, and has apartments assigned him at the national cost in the Louvre. Whenever an atrocity is to be committed, an ode is published, "by order of authority," to raise the passions of the people to the proper pitch. When the atrocity is over, another ode is ordered to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... was Abel's poem. Its half-dozen beds were so many cantos. Nature crowded them for him with imagery such as no Laureate could copy in the cold mosaic of language. The rhythm of alternating dawn and sunset, the strophe and antistrophe still perceptible through all the sudden shifts of our dithyrambic seasons and echoed in corresponding floral harmonies, made melody in the soul of Abel, the plain ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God's great, unflattering laureate, Nature.* ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... those who came there. Basil was not strong. He was pleasant, idle, rather vain, and a little inclined to be dissipated. Mrs. Octagon did not know that Basil was fond of dissipation. She thought him a model young Oxford man, and hoped he would one day be Laureate of England. ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... king wept, among the tears of the lord chief justice, the poet laureate (who had been awfully frightened when he heard of the rattlesnakes), the maids of honour, the chaplain royal, and everyone but Colonel McDougal, a Scottish soldier of fortune, who ...
— Prince Prigio - From "His Own Fairy Book" • Andrew Lang
... piece is Mr. A-FR-D A-ST-N. Like others who might be named, he has not the honour to be an agricultural labourer; but no living man has sung at greater length of rural life, and its simple joys. Many of his admirers have asserted that Britain ought to have more than one Laureate, and that Mr. A-FR-D A-ST-N ought to be among the number. Others are not prepared to go quite so far. They have been heard to complain that cows and trees, and woodmen and farms, and sheep and wains, and hay and turnips, do not necessarily suggest the highest happiness, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... active, enterprising world. Was there anything illegitimate in taking advantage of such an opportunity? Surely, he should remain his own master, and write nothing except what his own conscience approved. But would he not feel, even if no one else knew it, that he was the poet-laureate of a corporation? ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... changed the whole current of Mr R's ideas, and altered his plans for me. I was no longer to be the future poet-laureate; I was no more enticed to sing great deeds, but to do them. The sword was to displace the pen, the hero the poet. Verse was too effeminate, and rhyme was severely interdicted, and to be forgiven only when ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... wouldn't be so alarmingly outspoken when she sings our praises to strangers. She gave him to understand that I am a full-fledged author and playwright, the peer of any poet laureate who ever held a pen; that Lloyd is a combination of princess and angel and halo-crowned saint, and Joyce a model big sister and an all-round genius. How she managed in the short time they were alone to tell him as much as she did ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... contemptuously in one of his satires, and again in his "Epistle to Arbuthnot," and in the fourth book of the "Dunciad" attacked him with acrimony, to which the provocation is not easily discoverable. Perhaps he imagined that, in ridiculing the Laureate, he satirised those by whom the laurel had been given, and gratified that ambitious petulance with which he affected to insult the great. The severity of this satire left Cibber no longer any patience. He had confidence enough in his own powers to believe that he could disturb ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... of the shores of Attica lies the island of Aegina, famous in legend as the home of Aeacus, grandfather of Achilles, and distinguished for its school of sculpture, and for its mighty breed of athletes, whose feats are celebrated in the laureate strains of Pindar. The Aeginetans had obtained the first prize for valour displayed in the battle of Salamis, and for many years they had pressed the Athenians hard in the race for maritime supremacy. They ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... and short syllables—as far as "long" and "short" can be definitely distinguished in English—correspond precisely to the rules of Roman prosody. The present Laureate, Robert Bridges, whose investigations in English and Roman prosody have been incessant, has recently published a book of experiments in writing English quantitative hexameters. [Footnote: Ibant Obscuri. New York, Oxford University Press, 1917.] Here ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... we say—for, alas! there was no speculation in the other. His dexter daylight was utterly darkened, and, indeed, the orb that remained was as sanguinary a luminary as ever struggled through a London fog at noonday. To borrow a couplet or so from the laureate of the Fancy: ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... awful state maintaining evermore— The statesman, with no Burleigh nod, whate'er court tricks may be; The courtier, who, for no fair Queen, will rise up to his knee; The court-dame, who for no court tire will leave her shroud behind; The laureate, who no courtlier rhymes than "dust to dust" can find; The kings and queens who having ta'en that vow and worn that crown, Descended unto lower thrones and darker, deeper adown; "Dieu et mon Droit," what is't to them? what meaning can it ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... men, to soften their manners, and make them less of wild beasts. Some have thought it omnipotent for this; others have given it as a sign of the decline and fall of the nobler part of us. Neither is, and both are true. Art does, as our Laureate says, make nobler in us what is higher than the senses through which it passes; but it can only make nobler what is already noble; it cannot regenerate, neither can it of itself debase and emasculate ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... a sudden revulsion. It became, in an instant, the fashion to admire and to pity a gentleman so talented and so unfortunate. Likenesses of Mr. Crauford appeared in every print-shop in town; the papers discovered that he was the very fac-simile of the great King of Prussia. The laureate made an ode upon him, which was set to music; and the public learned, with tears of compassionate regret at so romantic a circumstance, that pigeon-pies were sent daily to his prison, made by the delicate hands of one of his former mistresses. Some sensation, also, was ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... will be more impressed than we are by the Laureate's versatility. He has touched so many strings, from "Will Waterproof's Monologue," so far above Praed, to the agony of "Rizpah," the invincible energy of "Ulysses," the languor and the fairy music ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... Tate was preferred to Congreve. Dorset was too practised a courtier not to study the tastes of his master to good purpose. A liking for the stage, or a lively sense of poetic excellence, was not among the preferences of King William. The Laureate was sub-purveyor of amusement for the court; but there was no longer a court to amuse, and the King himself never once in his reign entered a theatre. The piety of Queen Mary rendered her a rare attendant at the play-house. Plays were therefore no longer wanted. A playwright ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... beautiful gates must open to our quest, Somewhere that marvellous City of the West Would lift its towers and palace domes in view, And, to! at last its mystery is made known— Its only dwellers maidens fair and young, Its Princess such as England's Laureate sung; And safe from capture, save by love alone, It lends its beauty to the lake's green shore, And Norumbega ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... his eminent compatriot, Dr. Richard Strauss, has gone to Friedrich Nietzsche, the laureate of the modern German tone-art, for his inspiration in this gigantic work. His text is to be found in Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, which was not published until after the poet's death, but the composition really belongs to Also sprach Zarathustra, ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... opened your hoard Of truthful and tasteful tales— How you sat on the knees of the Laureate Lord, How you danced with the Prince of Wales— And we knew that the Sunday Times had scored In Literature ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... indeed quite destitute of poets. As Henry V is said by a French chronicler to have ennobled all his army on the eve of Agincourt, so perhaps it might be well to make all our poets poets-laureate [laughter]—there must be a sip for each of them in the butt of malmsey or sack. But when the general public says "literature" the general public ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... profitable workes of maister Skelton, Poete Laureate. Nowe collected and newly published. Anno 1568. Imprinted at London in Fletestreate, neare vnto saint ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... object of this article to show that dialect is not a thing to be despised in any event —that its origin is oftentimes of as royal caste as that of any speech. Listening back, from the stand- point of to-day, even to the divine singing of that old classic master to whom England's late laureate refers as ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... rather the Persian spirit which rules,—the spirit of the Shahnameh and Firdausi,—"charming elegance, servile court flattery, and graceful wit." In none are the characteristics so manifest as in Abu Nuwas (762-819), the Poet Laureate of Harun, the Imr-al-Kais of his time. His themes are wine and love. Everything else he casts to the wind; and like his modern counterpart, Heine, he drives the wit of his satire deep into the holiest feelings ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... faultiest of his poems. It includes glowing, although somewhat quaint and fantastic, descriptions of the Dutch War and the Great Fire in London. In 1668, by the death of Sir William Davenant, the post of Poet-Laureate became vacant, and Dryden was appointed to it. He was also appointed historiographer-royal. The salary of these two offices amounted to L200 a year, besides the famous annual butt of canary, while his profits from the theatre were equivalent to L300. His whole income ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... e'en the man who runs may read The lesson with this lay entwined. (If Topsey-turvey thus succeed, The noble Laureate will not mind!) And liberal applications lie In this quaint Legend, good my friend. So, put the song and picture by, And hook it—to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 26, 1891 • Various
... could retire. They entered; his apprehension gave way to disappointment, she was not there. Collecting himself, he was presently introduced to a smart, jaunty, and, to do him justice, distingue old beau. This was Colley Cibber, Esq., poet laureate, and retired actor and dramatist, a gentleman who is entitled ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... is very narrow. Dean Swift, who lodged here, is perhaps one of the best-known names, and his friend Atterbury, who first had a house facing the Embankment, afterwards came and lived opposite to him. Thomas Shadwell, Poet Laureate, was associated with the place, and also Bowack, whose "Antiquities of Middlesex," incomplete though it is, remains a valuable book of reference. Bowack lived near the Rectory, and not far from him ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... Noel ought to be poet laureate, and she actually went out in the cold and got some laurel leaves—the spotted kind—out of the garden, and Dora made a crown and we put it on him. He was quite pleased; but the leaves made a mess, and Eliza said, 'Don't.' I believe that's a word grown-ups use more than any ...
— The Story of the Treasure Seekers • E. Nesbit
... chief executioner, and subsequent chief of the hero, whose swaggering cowardice is so vividly depicted, was, in actual life, Feraj Ullah Khan. The commander of the King's Camel Corps, who had to give up his house to the British Elchi, was Mohammed Khan. The Poet Laureate of the story, Asker Khan, shared the name of his sovereign, Fath Ali Khan; and the story of his mouth being filled on one occasion with gold coins, and stuffed on another with sugar-candy, as a mark of the ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... his readers with grossness. He had too much of the Neapolitan's frank self-abandonment to nature for broad indecency in art to afford him special satisfaction; and the taste of his age demanded innuendo. The laureate of Courts and cities saturated with licentiousness knew well that Coan vestments are more provocative than nudity. It was his object to flatter the senses and seduce the understanding rather than to stimulate coarse appetite. Refinement was the aphrodisiac of a sated ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... absolute perfection, as yet unrealized on earth, so dominates all his thinking, and has such peculiar features of its own, that even familiar quotations must be quoted here. You will find an exquisite translation of a typical passage in our Poet Laureate's Anthology, The Spirit of Man (No. 37). Specially to be noted here is the stress on the unchanging character of this eternal perfection and the suggestion that it cannot be fully realized in the world. At the same time, ...
— Progress and History • Various
... great relative, accepted the Restoration gladly and lived to chuckle over the Revolution. The forgetfulness, no less than the vindictiveness, of men is often surprising. Marvell, who played the part of Laureate during the Protectorate, produced two songs for the conventionally joyful occasion. The second of the two is decidedly ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... song have taken the English reading world.... When we turn to the larger portion of 'The Seven Seas,' how imaginative it is, how impassioned, how superbly rhythmic and sonorous!... The ring and diction of this verse add new elements to our song.... The true laureate of Greater Britain."—E. C. Stedman, in ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... failed to influence its hearers, to carry you indeed a little out of yourself by its variety of intonation, its fire and fervour, its languishing modulations, broken pauses, yearning melancholy of effect. The part of the neurotic hero of the—then—Laureate's poem, that somewhat pinch-beck Victorian Hamlet, suited our young friend, moreover, down to the ground. It offered sympathetic expression to his own nature and temperament; so that he wooed, scoffed, blasphemed, orated, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... hair hanging upon their shoulders in luxuriant curls; but one of those whom the proud and unfeeling style the dregs of the populace, a haggard, houseless, penniless man, in rags and tatters: I allude to Manuel, the—what shall I call him?—seller of lottery tickets, driver of death carts, or poet laureate in Gypsy songs? I wonder whether thou art still living, my friend Manuel; thou gentleman of Nature's forming- -honest, pure-minded, humble, yet dignified being! Art thou still wandering through the courts of beautiful Safacoro, or on the banks of the Len ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... this brook has conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean; and thus the ashes of Wiclif are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over;" or, in the more carefully selected words of an English laureate of ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... been justly called the "Laureate of the South." He was born at Charleston, and being left an orphan by the death of his father, Lieutenant Hayne of the Navy, he was reared and educated by his uncle, Robert Young Hayne. His fortune was ample, ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... one of the most interesting of the Shepherd's friendships; both the poets were pleased with each other, and the closest intimacy ensued. It was on his way to visit Wilson, at Elleray, his seat in Cumberland, during the autumn of 1814, that the Shepherd formed the acquaintance of the Poet-laureate. He had notified to Southey his arrival at one of the hotels in Keswick, and begged the privilege of a visit. Southey promptly acknowledged his summons, and insisted on his remaining a couple of days at ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... his poetry, it seems to be a poetry rapidly approaching state approval, there is in it the flavour of the budding laureate, it seems to me to be poetry already "in orders". Brooke was certainly in danger of becoming a good poet, like the several other poets who perished in the throes of heroism. Like them, he would, had ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... indeed, is so good that there would be a difficulty in spoiling it completely; but the prose of the translation in the English Bible, faultless as it is, loses nothing in Bunyan's hands, and if we found these poems in the collected works of a poet laureate, we should consider that a difficult task had been accomplished successfully. Bunyan felt, like the translators of the preceding century, that the text was sacred, that his duty was to give the exact meaning of it, without epithets or ornaments, and thus the original ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... journey he met at Padua Petrarch, whose residence was near by at Arqua. The statement of the "Clerk" in the "Canterbury Tales" that he learnt the story of patient Griseldis "at Padua of a worthy clerk...now dead," who was called "Francis Petrarch, the laureate poet," may of course merely imply that Chaucer borrowed the "Clerk's Tale" from Petrarch's Latin version of the original by Boccaccio. But the meeting which the expression suggests may have actually taken place, and may have been accompanied by the most suitable conversation ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... readily occur to the antiquary, that these verses are intended to imitate the antique poetry of the Scalds—the minstrels of the old Scandinavians—the race, as the Laureate so ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... confide his patriotic sorrows. Paul Sillery was serving in the army of the Loire. Arthur Papillon, who had shown such boisterous enthusiasm on the fourth of September, had been nominated prefet in a Pyrenean department, and having looked over his previous studies, the former laureate of the university examinations spent much of his time therein, far from the firing, in making great speeches and haranguing from the top of the balconies, in which speeches the three hundred heroes of antiquity in a certain mountain-pass were a great deal too often mentioned. ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... LITTLE PRUDY STORIES would be elected Aunty-laureate if the children had an opportunity, for the wonderful books she writes for their amusement. She is the Dickens of the nursery, and we do not hesitate to say develops the rarest sort of genius in the specialty of depicting smart little ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... "Where was the Poet Laureate during the visit of President Wilson?" asks a correspondent in a contemporary. We do ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... looking alike modern, all decanted off from their historic antecedents and their costume of circumstance into the every-day aspect of the gentleman of common cultivated society. That is Sir Coeur de Lion Plantagenet in the mutton-chop whiskers and the plain gray suit; there is the Laureate in a frockcoat like your own, and the leader of the House of Commons in a necktie you do not envy. That is the kind of thing you want to take the nonsense out of you. If you are not decanted off from yourself every few days or weeks, you will think it sacrilege ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... A "run" unprecedented, Or almost so; and fodder With which the Laureate's Bird had been contented: Fortune has freaks far odder Than e'en a poet's whimsies, any day, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... and pity will heal the old hurt and heart-ache of humanity. There is nothing in history, dark as much of it is, against the ultimate fulfilment of the prophetic vision of Robert Burns—the Poet Laureate of Masonry: ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... the reason for which I refuse you: Love's Goddess has oft to her parents complain'd, Of my favouring a bard who her empire disdain'd; That at my instigation, a poem you writ, Which to beauty and youth preferr'd judgment and wit; That, to make you a Laureate, I gave the first voice, Inspiring the Britons t'approve of my choice. Jove sent her to me, her power to try; The Goddess of Beauty what God can deny? She forbids your preferment; I grant her desire. Appease the fair Goddess: you then may rise higher." The next[2] that appear'd had good hopes of ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... was sailing in the full current of success at Byzantium, the Vandal Stilicho was enjoying an uninterrupted course of prosperity in the somewhat less stifling air of Italy. The poet Claudian, who acted as a sort of poet-laureate to Honorius, was really an apologist for Stilicho, who patronized and paid him. Almost every public poem he produced is an extravagant panegyric on that general, and we cannot but suspect that many of his utterances were direct manifestoes suggested by his patron. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... Revolutionists, quickly cooled off their ardor, and as Taine cleverly puts it, "at the end of a few years, the three, brought back into the pale of State and Church, were, Coleridge, a Pittite journalist, Wordsworth, a distributor of stamps, and Southey, poet-laureate; all converted zealots, decided Anglicans, and intolerant conservatives." The "handful of silver" for which the patriot in the poem is supposed to have left the cause included besides the post of "distributor of stamps," given to him by Lord Lonsdale ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... has an early determination—a first one—to follow some ennobling profession, once he has come to man's estate, such as being a policeman, or a performer on the high trapeze. The poet would not have been the "Peoples' Laureate," had his fairy god- mother granted his boy-wish, but the Greenfield baker. For to his childish mind it "seemed the acme of delight," using again his own happy expression, "to manufacture those snowy loaves of bread, those ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... vulgar politicians, our enthusiast stood at bay, and at last turned on the pivot of a subtle casuistry to the unclean side: but his discursive reason would not let him trammel himself into a poet-laureate or stamp-distributor, and he stopped, ere he had quite passed that well-known "bourne from whence no traveller returns"—and so has sunk into torpid, uneasy repose, tantalized by useless resources, haunted by vain imaginings, his lips idly moving, but his heart for ever still, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... whom the Mermaid Inn Had dubbed our London laureate, hauled the cask Out of its ancient harbourage. "Ben," he cried, Bustling into the room with Dekker and Brome, "The prentices are up!" Ben raised his head Out of the chimney-corner where he drowsed, And listened, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... irregularities sometimes led him into unpleasant rencontres with these military conservators of public order, and who mentions them so often that he may be termed their poet laureate,* thus admonishes his readers, warned ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Clio,1 to the skies, That I may form a starry crown, Beyond what Helicon supplies In laureate garlands of renown; To nobler worth be brighter glory given, And to a heavenly mind ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... Templars, sheepish lads from universities, translators and index makers in ragged coats of frieze. The great press was to get near the chair where John Dryden sate. In winter that chair was always in the warmest nook by the fire; in summer it stood in the balcony. To bow to the Laureate, and to hear his opinion of Racine's last tragedy, or of Bossu's treatise on epic poetry, was thought a privilege. A pinch from his snuff-box was an honour sufficient to turn the head of a ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... by a hopeful and cheerful man, lies in the fact that we place small premium in either honor or money on the business of teaching. As, in the olden times, barbers and scullions ranked with musicians, and the Master of the Hounds wore a bigger medal than the Poet Laureate, so do we pay our teachers the same as coachmen and coal-heavers, giving them a plentiful lack ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... Apulia, was introduced to Pope Leo X., as a buffoon, but was promoted to the laurel. This laureate was called the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... the reception of the poet (now in his seventieth year) at the University was enthusiastic. In 1842 he resigned his office of Stamp-Distributor, and Sir Robert Peel had the honor of putting him upon the civil list for a pension of L300. In 1843 he was appointed Laureate, with the express understanding that it was a tribute of respect, involving no duties except such as might be self-imposed. His only official production was an Ode for the installation of Prince Albert ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... in much unrecorded work for the betterment of his own estate, and he was frequently found indulging in his undeniable passion for litigation. The purchase of a house in Blackfriars is recorded in 1613, and it led to the seemingly inevitable lawsuit some two years later. Nicholas Rowe, poet-laureate to King George I., wrote a life of Shakespeare in the early years of the eighteenth century, and we owe to him a statement, founded upon such information as a lapse of a century could validate, that Shakespeare spent the last years of his life enjoying "ease, retirement, and the conversation ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... and Victor. A schoolboy in Paris, Victor Hugo rhymed his chivalric epic, his tragedy, his melodrama—"les betises que je faisais avant ma naissance." In 1816 he wrote in his manuscript book the words, "I wish to be Chateaubriand or nothing." At fifteen he was the laureate of the Jeux Floraux, the "enfant sublime" of Chateaubriand's ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Mail has just celebrated its twenty-first birthday, and the silence of the POET LAUREATE on the matter is being adversely ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... bestows on the hero a magic horse" (520. 211). In Bulgaria we even find mother-months, and Miss Garnett has given an account of the superstition of "Mother March" among the women of that country (61.I. 330). William Miller, the poet-laureate of the nursery, sings of ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... whom we have named enjoyed any share of the royal bounty, except W. Whitehead, who succeeded to the place of laureate at the death of Cibber; and some of them whose merit was the most universally acknowledged, remained exposed to all the storms of indigence, and all the stings of mortification. While the queen lived, some countenance was given to learning. She conversed with Newton, and corresponded ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... established himself permanently at Greta Hall, near Keswick, Cumberland, in the "Lake Country," where he enjoyed the friendship and society of Wordsworth and Coleridge, other poets of the "Lake School." He was appointed poet laureate in 1813, and received a pension of 300 Pounds a year from the government in 1835. Mr. Southey was a voluminous writer in both prose and verse. As a poet, he can not be placed in the first rank, although some of his minor poems are very happy in thought and expression. Among ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... spiritual; noblesse; noble, nobleman; lord, lordling[obs3]; grandee, magnifico[Lat], hidalgo; daimio[obs3], daimyo, samurai, shizoku [all Japanese]; don, donship[obs3]; aristocrat, swell, three-tailed bashaw[obs3]; gentleman, squire, squireen[obs3], patrician, laureate. gentry, gentlefolk; *squirarchy[obs3], better sort magnates, primates, optimates[obs3]; pantisocracy[obs3]. king &c. (master) 745; atheling[obs3]; prince, duke; marquis, marquisate[obs3]; earl, viscount, baron, thane, banneret[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... You're a poet—Poet-laureate, And representative of all the race; Although 't is true that you turned out a Tory at Last,—yours has lately been a common case; And now, my Epic Renegade! what are ye at? With all the Lakers, in and out of place? A nest of tuneful ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... hand-out from a restaurant keeper in a small town by doing some odd jobs for the man. The food he gave Billy was wrapped in an old copy of the Kansas City Star. When Billy reached camp he tossed the package to Bridge, who, in addition to his honorable post as poet laureate, was also cook. Then Billy walked down to the stream, near-by, that he might wash away the grime and sweat of honest toil from his hands ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... "LAUREATE OF THE COMMON HUMAN HEART."—"God must love the common people," said President Lincoln, "because he has made so many of them." Longfellow wrote for "the common human heart." In him the common people found a poet who could gild the commonplace things of life and ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... unpropitious. He had, long before, during his student days in Moscow, written syllabic verses, an elegy on the death of Peter the Great, and a couple of dramas, which were acted by his fellow-students. In 1732 he became the court poet, or laureate and panegyrist, and wrote, to the order of the Empress Anna Ioannovna, speeches and laudatory addresses, which he presented to the grandees, receiving in return various gifts in accordance with the custom of the epoch. But neither ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... held a label with a characteristic inscription. His house was ornamented with minarets, adorned with golden balls, and surmounted by a large gilt eagle. He equipped it with costly furniture, with paintings, and a library. He went so far as to procure the services of a poet laureate, whose business it seems to have been to sing his praises. Surrounded with splendors like these, the plain title of "Mr." Dexter would have been infinitely too mean and common. He therefore boldly took the ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... his house a cousin of Miss Martineau, who told us some good stories, especially about Tennyson. On this a brother of our host said that he was once travelling when he met with a party of tourists, among whom he recognized the Laureate. "Who is that gentleman?" said they. "He has been the life and soul of our party, and we cannot get a clue to his name, for he has baffled us in every way, tearing it off his luggage and out of the book he was reading." Mr. Sharpe betrayed the secret, not much to the ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... well-attired woodbine, With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, And every flower that sad embroidery wears: Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffodillies fill their cups with tears, To strow the laureate hearse where Lycid lies. For so to interpose a little ease, Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise. Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurled, Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides, Where thou, perhaps, under the ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... in her yearly letter wrote that she had heard from Mrs. A. T. that the Laureate was still suffering. I judge from your Letter that he is better. . . . I never heard any of his coadjutor Sullivan's Music. Is there a Tune, or originally melodious phrase, in any of it? That is what I always missed in Mendelssohn, except ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... sufficiently ritualistic to content their consciences. One cannot help thinking, with a little unmalicious amusement, what a cuckoo child the poet must have been to this pair. Here, too, lived a good old man and prolix poet, a friend of Tennyson. It is asserted, on authority, that the laureate, in his visits to the family, sometimes found himself so intolerably bored by his fellow-craftsman that he was fain to betake himself to a bathing-machine, dallying therein and over his bath for two or three hours to purchase the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... perpendicularly. Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man. The State does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet-laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe. As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... exceptions in their works being so few and unimportant. But of the specific excellence described in the quotation from Garve, I appear to find more, and more undoubted specimens in the works of others; for instance, among the minor poems of Mr. Thomas Moore, and of our illustrious Laureate. To me it will always remain a singular and noticeable fact; that a theory, which would establish this lingua communis, not only as the best, but as the only commendable style, should have proceeded from a poet, whose diction, next to that of Shakespeare and Milton, appears to me of ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... already been observed in the Introduction that this grand lyric gave the model for Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade." This latter poem appears along with "Maud," and another piece in the same slender volume contains unequivocal proof of the Laureate's acquaintance with Drayton. In the powerful poem entitled ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... England, claiming a licence 563 years old. But it has many rivals, such as the "Fighting Cocks" at St. Albans, the "Dick Whittington" in Cloth Fair, St. Bartholomews, the "Running Horse" at Leatherhead, wherein John Skelton, the poet laureate of Henry VIII, sang the praises of its landlady, Eleanor Rumming, and several others. The "Seven Stars" has many interesting features and historical associations. Here came Guy Fawkes and concealed himself ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... Northern spirits lagged over military reverses, and at the time when the indecision of General McClellan drew from him the satiric broadside,—"Tardy George"—privately printed in 1865—Boker's thoughts were concerned with poetry. His official laureate consciousness did not serve to improve the verse. His "Our Heroic Themes"—written for the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa—was mediocre in everything but intent, recalling what Taylor wrote to him: "My Harvard poem, [he had read it in 1850 before ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... satire by Alexander Pope—written to revenge himself upon his literary enemies. The plot is this: Eusden the poet-laureate being dead, the goddess of Dulness elects Colley Cibber as his successor. The installation is celebrated by games, the most important being the "reading of two voluminous works, one in verse and the other in prose, without nodding." King Cibber is then taken ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... January 21st, 1613. He was first minister at Weemyse, the first admitted under Presbytery 1638. He was minister at Weemyse about two years. He was very young when laureate, before he was seventeen. He was chaplain first to my lord Kenmure, then to the Lord of Cassilis. When he was with Cassilis, he wrote his 'English Popish Ceremonies,' which when printed, he was about twenty-two. He wrote a 'Dialogue between a Civilian and Divine,' ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... Our poet-laureate must be a close observer of natural history. In his "In Memoriam," xciv., he distinctly alludes to some very curious West African bats first described by the late amiable Edward T. Bennett, long the ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... in Dublin, in 1652, and educated there at Trinity College. He was appointed poet-laureate by King William III. in 1690, and it was in conjunction with Dr. Nicholas Brady that he executed his "New" metrical version of the Psalms. The entire Psalter, with an appendix of Hymns, was licensed by William and Mary and published in 1703. The hymns in the volume are all ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... summer of 1831, a civil ceremony was performed over the insurgents killed in the previous year, and Hugo was constituted poet-laureate of the Revolution by having his hymn sung in ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... that our countrywoman MARIA DEL OCCIDENTE was on terms of familiar intimacy with the poet-laureate, whose admiration of her genius is illustrated in several allusions to her in his works, and particularly in that passage of "The Doctor" in which she is described as "the most impassioned and imaginative of all poetesses." ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... you women." A wicked light snapped into his eyes. "Hear, dear lady, the Bard of the Congaree, the Poet Laureate of South Carolina, Coogle for your benefit," hissed The Author, ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... had the honour, if it was one in those days, of being made Laureate on the accession of George I. His odes, epistles, and songs are without merit, but he gained reputation as the translator of Lucan's Pharsalia, of which Sir Arthur Gorges had produced a version ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... The Laureate had read this, and yet considers it the language of a heart that 'never was hardened.' He says that 'the wickedness of the tinker has been greatly overcharged, and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally to pronounce of John Bunyan, that he was at any time depraved. The worst ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... looked to Ursula (being dark herself, she admired golden hair more than anything) as bright as the sunshine. And in the light she caught the out-line of a pretty head, and of a nose slightly "tip-tilted," according to the model which the Laureate has brought into fashion. Where had she seen her before? She remembered all at once with a rush ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... tort'ring Castlereagh On his own Dublin rack, sir; We'll drown the King in Eau de vie, The Laureate in his sack, sir, Old Eldon and his sordid hag In molten gold we'll smother, And stifle in his own green bag The Doctor ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... criminals; but the ordinary, every-day, picturesque worthies of good, honest scoundrelism and disreputableness is Sir Robert Louis Stevenson. You can afford conscientiously to stuff ballot boxes in order that his election may be secured as Poet Laureate of Rascals. Leaving out John Silver and Billy Bones and Alan Breck, whom every privately shriven rascal of us simply must honor and revere as giants of courage, cunning and controlled, conscience, Stevenson turned from singles and pairs, and in "The Ebb Tide," drove, by turns, tandem and abreast, ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... close by, but in 1551 a devoted admirer, himself a versifier, Nicholas Brigham, placed an ancient tomb here in memory of the master, with a fancy painting of Chaucer at the back. Before this monument are the graves of the two most famous poets of our generation, the Laureate Tennyson and Robert Browning, side by side. Above them is the beautiful bust of another Poet Laureate, Dryden, and the less artistic portrait bust of the ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... dreams, would place a sprig under the pillow of their bed. It was the symbol, too, of victory, and it was thought that the laurel could never be struck by lightning. From this word comes that of "laureate;" Alfred Tennyson being the present poet laureate, crowned with laurel as the ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... of Byron's 'Sardanapalus'?" exclaimed the actor, throwing up his hands. "Why, it's one of the finest things ever put upon the boards. Full of telling effects, and not too many bothering lengths, you know. The Poet Laureate, dear good man, worried my life out a year ago to let him write a play upon the subject especially for me. The part of Sardanapalus was to be devised so as to bring out all my particular—er—capabilities, and any little hints that might occur to me were to be acted upon and embodied in the text. ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... musical dramas of Wagner. Any understanding of English civilization would be similarly incomplete without the semi-historic figure of King Arthur, glorified through the accumulated legends of the Middle Ages and made to live again in the melodic idylls of the great Victorian laureate. And so one might go on. In many ways the mythology and folklore of a country are a truer index to the life of its people than any of the pages of actual history; for through these channels the imagination and the heart speak. All the chronicles of rulers and governing ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... lese-majeste, a local laureate described the incident in stirring verse. An extract from this effort, translated by Professor J. G. Legge, in his Rhyme and Revolution in Germany, is ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... all ye good Centurions and wise men of the times, You've made a Poet Laureate, now you must hear his rhymes. Extend your ears and I'll respond by shortening up my tale:— Man cannot live by verse alone, he must have cakes ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... Mr. Coleridge must have been thinking of that "very pithy and profitable" ballad by the Laureate, wherein is shown how a young man "would read unlawful books, and how he ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... explained Jarman, "this ain't an ordinary case. This chap's going to be the future Poet Laureate. Now, when the Prince of Wales invites him to dine at Marlborough 'ouse, 'e don't want to go there tacked on to a girl that carries aitches with her in a bag, and don't know which end of the spoon out of ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... remember, too, those weighty words of warning which the Laureate of the Empire wrote nearly twenty years ago, of ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... hermit, "what else? 'Jeremy Bentham,' a new work; Ricardo, another book on economy; Southey the Laureate, 'Life of Nelson.' Really, Mr. Young might have known that naval deeds have no joy for me, hardly more than for you, Renny," smiling grimly on his servant. "'Edinburgh Review,' a London magazine for the last six months; 'Rees's Cyclopaedia,' vols. 24-27; Wordsworth, 'The Recluse.' Ah, old Willie ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... dower, till 1676. After leaving Cambridge, he became secretary to his near relative, Sir Gilbert Pickering, at that time Cromwell's chamberlain, and a member of his Upper House. In 1670 he succeeded Davenant as Poet Laureate,[10] and Howell as Historiographer, with a yearly salary of two hundred pounds. This place he lost at the Revolution, and had the mortification to see his old enemy and butt, Shadwell, promoted to it, as the best poet the Whig party could muster. ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... age when kings were somebody), if he were a poor writer by making him more conspicuous, and if he were a good one by setting him at war with the little fry of his own profession, for there are poets little enough to envy even a poet laureate. ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... battles had set him among the national heroes; he had been, in The Persians, the laureate of Salamis; by the sheer grandeur of his poetry he had won the prize thirteen times in succession.—And by the bye, it is to the eternal credit of Athenian intelligence that Athens, at one hearing ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... delicacy of taste. Christian has not the grand manner of the eleventh century, and never recalls the masculine strength of the "Chanson de Roland" or "Raoul de Cambrai." Even his most charming story, "Erec et Enide," carries chiefly a moral of courtesy. His is poet-laureate's work, says M. Gaston Paris; the flower of a twelfth-century court and of twelfth-century French; the best example of an admirable language; but not lyric; neither strong, nor deep, nor deeply felt. ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... EDISON is reported to have invented a machine to record communication with the other world. As a final experiment an attempt is to be made to get into touch with the POET LAUREATE. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... and many-sided poet-laureate, who is also a philosopher, in his "Life of Emerson," has finely worked out the theory that no man writes other than his own experience: that consciously or otherwise an author describes himself in the characters he draws; that when he loves the character he delineates, it is in some measure his ...
— Shakespeare's Insomnia, And the Causes Thereof • Franklin H. Head
... of Greece always had the power of exciting the little fellow's imagination. His godfather, the lawyer Labarta, poet-laureate, could not repeat this name without a lively thrill passing across his grizzled beard and a new light in his eyes. Sometimes the mysterious power of such a name evoked a new mystery and a more intense interest,—Byzantium. How could that august lady, sovereign ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... that at the Kipling's we heard the news, and being two newspaper men, refused to believe it and went to the postoffice of the little village to call up Brighton on the 'phone. It was very dramatic, the real laureate of the British Empire asking if the King were really in such danger that he could not be crowned, while the small boy in charge of the grocery shop, where the postoffice was, wept with his elbows on the counter. They sent me my ticket—unasked—for the Abbey, ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... can amuse himself without the "Civium ardor!" As I have not so much dignity of character to fill up my time, I could like a little more company. With all this leisure, you may imagine that I might as well be writing an ode or so upon the victory; but as I cannot build upon the Laureate's[2] place till I know whether Lord Carteret or Mr. Pelham will carry the Treasury, I have bounded my compliments to a slender collection of quotations against I should have any occasion for them. Here are some ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... somehow apt to fade with the circumstance that inspired it, and becomes the yesterday's editorial of literature. Oblivion likes especially to get hold of occasional poems. That makes it hard for feeble poets laureate. ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... character, who appears for the first time among the inedited episodes of Lavengro, was a real one, although his true name (Parkerson) is given somewhat veiled, as usual with Mr. Borrow. He seems to have been the poet-laureate of farmers, corn-merchants, drovers and publicans, selling his muse to the highest bidder, at first in printed sheets of eight pages, and subsequently gathered into pamphlets of thirty or more pages which he offered for one or two shillings each. They were printed ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... effeminateness, but of notable stirring of courage; not of abusing man's wit, but of strengthening man's wit; not banished, but honoured by Plato; let us rather plant more laurels for to ingarland the poets' heads (which honour of being laureate, as besides them only triumphant captains were, is a sufficient authority to show the price they ought to be held in) than suffer the ill-favoured breath of such wrong speakers once to blow upon the ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... poet laureate, Baston, a Carmelite friar, who had accompanied the army for the purpose of writing a poem on the English victory. His ransom was fixed at a poem on the Scotch victory at Bannockburn, which the friar ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... "more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson's than in all Tom Jones"; the two Wartons, Joseph, the Headmaster of Winchester and editor of Pope, and Thomas the author of the history of English Poetry and himself Poet Laureate; both good scholars and critics who partly anticipated the poetic tastes of the nineteenth century: Paoli, the hero of Boswell and the Corsicans, with whom Johnson loved to dine: Douglas, Bishop of Salisbury, ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... Fortnightly Review,[284] some surprise at my loftier estimate was expressed here. The reasons for this depreciation are not hard to give, and as they form a base for, and indeed really a part of, my critical estimate they may be stated shortly. The "Bohemia"[285] of which Murger was the laureate, both in prose and verse, is a country whose charms have been admitted by some of the greatest, but which no wise person has ever regarded, much less recommended, as providing any city to dwell in; and which has certainly been the scene if not the occasion, not merely of much mischief, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... had inscribed on the fly-leaf of a gift-copy of the collective edition of his Poems sent to the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. This very tender, beautiful, and pathetic Poem will be found on the other side of this Dedication. It must 'for all time' take its place beside the living Laureate's imperishable ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... reign of Henry IV. had been succeeded by the stormy minority of Louis XIII., when Malherbe (1556-1628), the tyrant of words and syllables, appeared as the reformer of poetry. He attracted attention by ridiculing the style of Ronsard. He became the laureate of the court, and furnished for it that literature in which it was beginning to take delight. In the place of Latin and Greek French, he inaugurated the extreme of formality; the matter of his verse was made subordinate to ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... of record that the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia ever discovered the junior laureate, the writer will not essay to ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... among Babylonian professions that of the poet. It is true that a sort of poet-laureate existed at the court, and that we hear of a piece of land being given by the King to one of them for some verses which he had composed in honor of the sovereign. But poetry was not a separate profession, and the poet must be included in the class ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... designed to show what is exhibited within; but this alludes to a dispute that arose at the time when this print was published, which was in the year 1733, between the players and the patentee of Drury-lane Theatre, when young Cibber, the son of the Laureate, was at the head of the faction. Above, on one side, is an equilibrist swinging on a slack rope; and on the other, a man flying from the tower to the ground, by means of a groove fastened to his breast, slipping over a line strained from one place to the other. At the back of this plate is Lee and ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... although intimate, were not of the inner circle. This comprised Mr. and Mrs. Curtice, Mr. and Mrs. Todd, Mr. and Mrs. Banford, Mr. and Mrs. Viedler, and ourselves. Curtice was our poet laureate, and in a song he composed and sang at a dinner were ...
— The Romance and Tragedy • William Ingraham Russell
... of the race, chiefly because he was a famous traveler as well as a pedestrian himself, and so was a judge of such matters. He was the same of whom the Gander, the poet-laureate, had written ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... matched by his aristocratic hatred of the mob. Geibel succeeded in once more gaining the widest popularity, in days filled with partisan clamor, for the pure lyric of romantic inspiration. He was in a true sense the poet-laureate of his generation. Lacking in real originality, he was yet sincere in the expression of his emotion, and his faultless form clothed the utterance of a soul of rare ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... August 9, 1631. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. His poem in honor of the restoration of Charles II won him the position of Poet Laureate. His best-known works are the poetic "Translation of Virgil's Aeneid," "Alexander's Feast," "The Hind and the Panther," and the drama "The Indian Emperor." He died ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... intensity—on the two former, because they were patriots; and on the latter, because she was a beautiful woman; and his allusions to them rank with the finest parts in his or any poetry. He seemed especially adapted to be the poet-laureate of Wallace—a modern edition, somewhat improved, of the broad, brawny, ragged bard who actually, it is probable, attended in the train of Scotland's patriot hero, and whose constant occupation it was to change the gold ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... his appointment always seemed to me, even before I knew that he had acted against Wilde, curiously characteristic of English life and of the casual, contemptuous way Englishmen of the governing class regard letters. In the same spirit Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister made a journalist Poet Laureate simply because he had puffed him for years in the columns of The Standard. Lord Salisbury probably neither knew nor cared that Alfred Austin had never written a line that could live. One thing Mr. Brookfield's witnesses established: every offence alleged ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... robbers, of the threatened dissolution of every tie, legal, social, or political; an age of earthquake, war, and famine! Bacchus, who is known from Aristophanes not to have excelled in criticism, protested that his laureate was greater than Homer; and, though Homer could not go quite so far as this, he graciously conceded that if he had himself been an Egyptian of the fifth century, with a faint glimmering of the poetical art, and encumbered with more learning ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... another, out-Paining Paine, out- Castlereaghing Castlereagh, Pantisocratists, Ultra-Tories, heretics, persecutors, breaking the old laws against sedition, calling for new and sharper laws against sedition, writing democratic dramas, writing Laureate odes panegyrising Marten, panegyrising Laud, consistent in nothing but an intolerance which in any person would be censurable, but which is altogether unpardonable in men who, by their own confession, have had such ample experience of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the first parts of The Faery Queen (1590) raised Spenser to the foremost place in English letters. He was made poet-laureate, and used every influence of patrons and of literary success to the end that he be allowed to remain in London, but the queen was flint-hearted, insisting that he must give up his estate or occupy it. So he returned ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... the arras hangings, because the voice would be clearer, by reason of the reverberation of the wall." In the like manner they persuaded one Baraballius of Caieta, that he was as good a poet as Petrarch; would have him to be made a laureate poet, and invite all his friends to his instalment; and had so possessed the poor man with a conceit of his excellent poetry, that when some of his more discreet friends told him of his folly, he was very angry with them, and said [2175]"they envied ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the larks of the spring. Throned on my seaside, like Canute, bearded Ossian smites his hoar harp, wreathed with wild-flowers, in which warble my Wallers; blind Milton sings bass to my Petrarchs and Priors, and laureate ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... sweet sounds, and answer it one to the other until the ear can no longer follow it through space. The ferns and rich foliage of the mountain side trail their long fingers in the water, and cluster and quicken among the crevices of the rocks. Recently the Laureate visited Ireland for the first time; hitherto this land of poetry had been to him but "the damnable country" of the politician. He came, he saw, but Killarney conquered; and he, like all others who have gazed upon its beauty, renders tribute where it rightly belongs. "Damnable" is not ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... of a poet. When the great poet laureate, Tennyson, died, and I found that the place was open, I tried to get it—but I did not get it. Anybody can write the first line of a poem, but it is a very difficult task to make the second line rhyme with the first. When I was down in Australia there were two towns ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... reason of the dedication of "Zanoni" to Gibson the sculptor, in which it was said that the book was not for "the common herd." The story of Lytton's castigation by Tennyson is duly related where the Laureate's contributions to Punch are spoken of. In Lytton's case, at least, Punch forgot to apply Swift's aphorism that a man has just as much ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... which of these four I should like best, I should say as the Laureate did when they gave him his choice of two kinds of cake, ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... things are lost to the world, by the world's own laziness. Why have we not a Boswell in every city? Her majesty pays a laureate, who writes nothing but the annual receipt for his pension. Why not transfer the office to a Boswell? why not establish a Cabinet-dinner Boswell? a Buckingham-palace Boswell? a Windsor Boswell? with orders to make their weekly returns of gaiety and gossipry to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... gradually his calm and dignified descriptions of nature asserted their rightful influence. After publishing his greatest poem, The Excursion, the tide of generous appreciation set in. In 1843, Wordsworth was made Poet Laureate. His pure and fervent poetry was a protest against the diseased ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home |
