"Rhetorical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by the too rhetorical statement of matters which would have been better presented in a simpler way; thus, the fervid description of oxygen, however appropriate in Faraday's admirable lectures before the Royal Institution, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... it is not profitable, the population regard it with a latent abhorrence, compared with which the rhetorical and open invectives of Garrison and Phillips are feeble and tame. Anybody who has read Olmsted's truthful narrative of his experience in the slave States can not doubt this fact. The hatred to slavery too often finds ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... reason and spirit of it; or the cause which moved the legislator to enact it. For when this reason ceases, the law itself ought likewise to cease with it. An instance of this is given in a case put by Cicero, or whoever was the author of the rhetorical treatise inscribed to Herennius[n]. There was a law, that those who in a storm forsook the ship should forfeit all property therein; and the ship and lading should belong entirely to those who staid in it. In a dangerous tempest all the mariners forsook ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... this practice in some cases may be inferred from a parity of reason, in this manner. If it be lawful (as by the best authorities it plainly doth appear to be), in using rhetorical schemes, poetical strains, involutions of sense in allegories, fables, parables, and riddles, to discoast from the plain and simple way of speech, why may not facetiousness, issuing from the same principles, directed to the same ends, serving to like ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... grief, the falsehood and sycophancies—all uttered in the name of Heaven in our State churches: these monstrous threnodies have been sung from time immemorial over kings and queens, good, bad, wicked, licentious. The State parson must bring out his commonplaces; his apparatus of rhetorical black-hangings. Dead king or live king, the clergyman must flatter him—announce his piety whilst living, and when dead, perform the obsequies of "our most ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... not the least need of maintaining the perfect fitness and rhetorical felicity of every phrase and every word used by him in his interview with Lord Clarendon. It is not to be expected that a minister, when about to hold a conversation with a representative of the government to which he is accredited, ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... murderous sentence passed against Mytilene; and when the question was brought forward again, he made a vehement harangue, the substance of which has been preserved by Thucydides. In this speech he appears as a practised rhetorical bravo, whose one object is to vilify his opponents, and throw contempt on their arguments, by an unscrupulous use of the weapons of ridicule, calumny, and invective. He reproaches the magistrates for convening a second assembly, in a matter which had already ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... tossed a cigar to Tom, lighted one, and had begun to talk with a rhetorical and sententious balancing of periods—which, to his mind, full of the oratory of Prentiss, was the essence of impressiveness—when a negro woman entered the room. And hereupon ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... with a name so eminent. In 1835 the Anglo-Saxon Psalter of the Paris manuscript was first printed at Oxford, and as this book gives a hundred of the Psalms in vernacular poetry, the suggestion that they might be Aldhelm's, though modernised, had rhetorical attractions for the editor (Thorpe), and supplied him with material for a few rather idle sentences of his Latin preface. In 1840 Jacob Grimm edited (from Thorpe's editio princeps) two poems of the Vercelli book, the "Andreas" and the "Elene;" and in his preface he sought to fix this poetry upon ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... question of sex. If manhood suffrage is a mistake; if voting is a privilege and not a right; if government does not derive its just powers from the consent of the governed; if Lincoln's aphorism that ours is a "government of the people, for the people and by the people" is only a rhetorical generality, then women have no case. If not, they see no reason why, as they are governed, they should not have a voice in choosing their rulers; why, as people, they are not covered by Lincoln's definition. They feel naturally that their ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... through each step and each note. If your head's full of that, you'll have no room for fright." And she was ready to try again. When she finished the last notes of "Suwanee River," there was an outburst of hearty applause. And the sound that pleased her most was Tempest's rich rhetorical "Bravo!" As a man she abhorred him; but she respected the artist. And in unconsciously drawing this distinction she gave proof of yet another quality that was to count heavily in the coming days. Artist he was not. But she thought him an artist. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... important, it cannot be entered upon too soon, provided the ideas are already competent to the capacity of the pupil. The Roman Cornelia, who never suffered a provincial accent, or a grammatical barbarism in the hearing of her children, has always been cited with commendation; and the subsequent rhetorical excellence of the Gracchi has been in a great degree ascribed to it. Fluency, purity and ease are to be acquired by insensible degrees: and against habits of this kind I apprehend there can ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... is much the fashion with those who delight to deal in doleful vaticinations as to the future destiny of England, to dwell with great emphasis upon the amazing diversity of conditions to be seen here—to exaggerate the suffering of the millions of our poor, and to place them in a sort of rhetorical contrast with the extravagant wealth of a favored few. But there is still something in the mutual relations of all classes of society in this country that proves a healthy condition to exist in our body politic, that shows that we are really brethren, and that whether interest ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... is to be eulogized. He then commences to recite his loa, carrying himself like a clown in a circus, while he sings the praises of the person in whose honor the fiesta has been arranged. This loa, which was in rhetorical verse in a diffuse style suited to the Asiatic taste, set forth the general's naval expeditions and the honors he had received from the King, concluding with thanks and acknowledgment of the favor that he had conferred in ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... occupation which he has chosen for himself. Riemann also traces to Sterne, Fielding and their German followers, Goethe's occasional use of the direct appeal to the reader. Doubtless Sterne's example here was a force in extending this rhetorical convention. ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... discovery at Memphis of a number of votive ears of the god, intended to facilitate or to symbolise his reception of the prayers of his votaries. In fact, the taunt of the psalmist against the images of the heathen—"Eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears, and yet they hear not"—is not a merely rhetorical one, as it seems to us, but real and practical, if spoken to men who gave their gods ears and eyes that they might hear ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... outside then rushed in and dispersed the representatives of the Greek nation. No rhetorical Greek ever prepared this precious decree. It tells its own tale; it is too diplomatically laconic. It served its purpose in Europe: it looked so well suited to act as an annex to a protocol. Here, however, we have the source of half the evils of the Greek ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... were carved, so to speak, with disproportionate labour by a potent man of letters whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is for these reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity and emotion which we usually associate with lyrical poetry. There are no such epitaphs as Ben Jonson's, witness the charming ones on his own children, on Salathiel Pavy, the child-actor, and many more; and this even though the rigid ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... of jurisprudence, the Romans were eminently original. The writings of the great jurists were simple and severe, and free from the rhetorical traits which Roman authors in other departments borrowed from ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... told it you twice before, that I swam from Sestos to Abydos. I do this that you may be impressed with proper respect for me, the performer; for I plume myself on this achievement more than I could possibly do on any kind of glory, political, poetical, or rhetorical. Having told you this, I will tell you nothing more, because it would be cruel to curtail Cam's narrative, which, by-the-by, you must not believe till confirmed by me, the eye-witness. I promise myself much pleasure from contradicting the greatest part of it. He has been ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... for a moment to stem the torrent, by voting for the Crittenden propositions. His delivery was graceful and dignified, his manner sometimes courteous, often contemptuous, and always impressive. His eloquence consisted rather in the lucid logic and deliberate thought evinced than for rhetorical beauty or range of imagination; occasionally, however, he would diverge from the plain thread of argument, and rise to declamation of striking brilliancy and power. Over-quick, with all his natural phlegm, to discern and to resent personal affronts—oftentimes ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... an immediate, continued, and deserved success. It was critically contrasted with Robertson's account of Columbus, and it is open to the charge of too much rhetorical color here and there, and it is at times too diffuse; but its substantial accuracy is not questioned, and the glow of the narrative springs legitimately from the romance of the theme. Irving understood, what ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... ii. p. 90, 91) gives a very particular account of this battle; but the descriptions of Zosimus are rhetorical ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... am not of Paracelsus's mind, that boldly delivers a re- ceipt to make a man without conjunction; yet cannot but wonder at the multitude of heads that do deny traduction, having no other arguments to confirm their belief than that rhetorical sentence and antimetathesis<51> of Augustine, "creando infunditur, infundendo creatur." Either opinion will consist well enough with religion: yet I should rather incline to this, did not one objection haunt me, not wrung from speculations and subtleties, but from common sense ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... prize rhetorical exercise is called by this name; the reason is not given. The students speak of "making a rush for moonlight," i.e. of attempting to ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... But even after his manly retraction Sprecher was not completely cured of the virus of Reformed subjectivism. Sprecher was among the first who, within the General Synod, declared that "inspiration does not make a book free of ... grammatical errors, rhetorical faults, and historical inaccuracies in minor and secondary matters." ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... rhythm, of the nuance, of personal emotion. French poetry has always leant to the frigid, the academic, the rhetorical—in a word, to the prosaic. The spirit of Boileau has ruled it from his cold marble urn. It has always lacked "soul," the haunting, elusive magic of wistful words set to the music of their own rhythm, the "finer light in light," that are of the essence of poetry. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... character of so great a man. On the other hand, Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria were perhaps excessively broad. Of two noted Alexandrines, Archdeacon Farrar says: "They were philosophers in spirit; they could enforce respect by their learning and their large, rounded sympathy, where rhetorical denunciation and ecclesiastical anathemas would only have been listened to with a frown of anger, or a look of disdain. Pagan youths would have listened to Clement when he spoke of Plato as 'the truly noble and half-inspired,' while they would have looked on ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... League—"freedom" being a question-begging synonym for "parliamentary franchise"—and everywhere in the literature of woman's suffrage we have talk of woman's "emancipation"; and we have women characterised as serfs, or slaves—the terms serfs and slaves supplying, of course, effective rhetorical synonyms ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... the best. But this is a low estimate of the great art of painting, for it is simply one of man's means of expression, just as music or poetry is. The artist learns to compose his pictures, to draw his forms, to lay on his colors, just as the poet learns the meanings of words, rhetorical figures, and the laws of harmony and rhythm, or the musician his notes and ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... abolition of every form of authority" would seem to indicate that Lenine's ideal is that of the old Nihilists—or of Anarchists of the Bakuninist school. That is very far from the truth. The phrase in question is merely a rhetorical flourish. No man has more caustically criticized and ridiculed the Anarchists for their dream of organization without authority than Nikolai Lenine. Moreover, his conception of Soviet government provides for a very strong central authority. It is a new kind ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... not expect me ever to be either serious or—or satirical, only look to me to be amiable and merry. 'Your only jig-maker,' as Hamlet said—a sprightly Columbine. Am I rhetorical?" ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... fact because it "points a moral and adorns a 'tail.'" The French always give this extra touch. Everything has its silk snapper. Are not the literary whips of Paris famous for their rhetorical tips and the sting there is in them? What French writer ever goaded his adversary with the belly of his lash, like the Germans and the English, when he could blister him with its silken end, and the percussion of wit be heard ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... its instinct is rather to command, a vigilant moral sense and great energy of character are needed. The Greeks—those artists of the spoken or written word—were artificial by the time of Ulysses, sophists by the time of Pericles, cunning, rhetorical, and versed in all the arts of the courtier down to the end of the lower empire. From the talent of the nation sprang ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... who fancied himself a madman? Who sought to climb over his senses and found himself impaled by a tower of Babel? Where are his angers, his disgusts that were the noble shadows thrown by his egoism to blot out a world? Ballad of rhetorical questions. My vanity preens itself with reminiscences. I smile. I am depressed and content. Answers whisper. Mallare is on his feet. His experiments are ended. His mania to possess himself is a snow that falls forgotten in his past. Vale, the ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... an all-inclusive Deity has recently been adopted and popularized by Mr. Campbell,[6] who has done all that rhetorical skill combined with genuine religious earnestness can do to present it in an attractive and edifying dress. And yet the same Logic which leads to the assertion that the Saint is part of God, leads also to the assertion that Caesar Borgia and Napoleon Buonaparte and ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... not merely twisting a Biblical incident round to an interpretation which it does not bear, but am stating a plain un-rhetorical truth when I say that it is so still. Jesus Christ is no dead Christ who is to be remembered only. He is a living Christ who, at this moment, is all that He ever was, and is doing in loftier fashion all ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... the Dialogue chiefly centres in the youth Charmides, with whom Socrates talks in the kindly spirit of an elder. His childlike simplicity and ingenuousness are contrasted with the dialectical and rhetorical arts of Critias, who is the grown-up man of the world, having a tincture of philosophy. No hint is given, either here or in the Timaeus, of the infamy which attaches to the name of the latter in Athenian history. He is simply a cultivated person ...
— Charmides • Plato
... 1792, the King appeared a second time before the Convention. M. de Seze, labouring night and day, had completed his defence. The King insisted on excluding from it all that was too rhetorical, and confining it to the mere discussion of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... unto all and every one of the bold and hazardous attempts which he relateth. And these he delivereth with such candour of stile, such ingenuity of mind, such plainness of words, such conciseness of periods, so much divested of Rhetorical Hyperboles, or the least flourishes of Eloquence, so hugely void of Passion or national Reflections, as that he strongly perswadeth all-along to the credit of what he saith; yea, raiseth the mind of the Reader to believe these things far greater than what he hath said; and ...
— The Pirates of Panama • A. O. (Alexandre Olivier) Exquemelin
... much crafty subtlety in his mind! He complained, with proud and honest bitterness, of the construction that had been forced upon his words by the Opposition. "If," he added (and no man knew better the rhetorical effect of the tu quoque form of argument),—"if every sentence uttered by the noble lord opposite in his zeal for liberty had, in days now gone by, been construed with equal rigour, or perverted ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book III • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... comply; the master-at-arms insisted; she threatened him with the vengeance of the Company, the premier, and the nobility and gentry of the British realm. The master-at-arms, finding he had no chance in argument, doused the glim—pitiable resource of a weak disputant—then basely fled the rhetorical consequences. ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... confirmatory of Darwin's idea of variation, was that a sheep had been born shortly before in a flock in the North of England, having an addition of one to the vertebrae of the spine. The Bishop was declaring with rhetorical exaggeration that there was hardly any evidence on Darwin's side. "What have they to bring forward?" he exclaimed. "Some rumoured statement about a long-legged sheep." But he passed on to banter: "I should ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... a General Superintendent and the most conspicuous man in the community. It was sad to see his name disappear from the newspapers; sadder still to see it resurrected at intervals, shorn of its aforetime gaudy gear of compliments and clothed on with rhetorical tar and feathers. ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... Dictionary; and he carried in his hand a large English oak stick. Let me not be censured for mentioning such minute particulars. Every thing relative to so great a man is worth observing. I remember Dr. Adam Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow[31], told us he was glad to know that Milton wore latchets in his shoes, instead of buckles. When I mention the oak stick, it is but letting Hercules have his club; and, by-and-by, my readers will find this stick ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... the sentences not so snipt as in the dedication. The paragraph near the conclusion beginning with "some opinion may now be expected," &c. and ending with "relation between guilt and punishment," deserves to be quoted as a master-piece of rhetorical ratiocination in a series of questions that permit no answer; or (as Junius says) carry their own answer along with them. The great art of Junius is never to say too much, and to avoid with equal anxiety a commonplace ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... attitude is still further strengthened. All these writers extolled the Burgundian regime and supported the duke's policy, whether friendly or antagonistic to France. From a literary point of view, they are greatly inferior to their predecessors and often lapse into rhetorical eloquence. Their style, which appears to be overloaded with flowery images, excited great admiration at the time, especially in the case of Chastellain, who was hailed by his contemporaries ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... as is indicated by the fact that he was the orator of one of the literary societies, and was selected by the Faculty to deliver the valedictory oration at Commencement. In every department of study he was a good scholar,—in the classical, moral, and rhetorical departments, pre-eminent. As a preacher, he was distinguished for a certain fullness and harmony of style, justness in the exposition of doctrine, and weight of exhortation. He was prudent without being ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... spiritual excrescences, were sure to honour every head they sat upon as if they had been cloven tongues, but especially that of the preacher, whose ears were usually of the prime magnitude, which upon that account he was very frequent and exact in exposing with all advantages to the people in his rhetorical paroxysms, turning sometimes to hold forth the one, and sometimes to hold forth the other; from which custom the whole operation of preaching is to this very day among their professors styled by the phrase ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... begins one of those long dialogues, where one person is represented as taking both sides of an argument. This rhetorical device, so wearisome to modern readers, is used by Chretien preferably when some sentiment or deep emotion is to be portrayed. Ovid may well have suggested the device, but Ovid never abuses it as does the more prolix mediaeval ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... part. In many respects, and these not the least important, no one could desire a better instrument for the achievement of great reforms than the Irish party. They are far beyond any similar group of English members in rhetorical skill and quickness of intelligence and decision, qualities which no doubt belong to the mechanism rather than the soul of politics, but which the practical worker in public life will not despise. But ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... the Plot (equal to Tom Jones according to Coleridge!) remains; namely, that OEdipus, after so many years reigning in Thebes as to have a Family about him, should apparently never have heard of Laius' murder till the Play begins. One acceptable thing I have done, I think, omitting very much rhetorical fuss about the poor man's Fatality, which I leave for the Action itself to discover; as also a good deal of that rhetorical Scolding, which, I think, becomes tiresome even in its Greek: as the Scene between OEdipus and Creon after ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... of that measure, but condemned the policy of government in bringing it forward without the hope of carrying it, for by that means the cause lost ground." This was mere pretence on the part of the honourable and rhetorical leader of the opposition; he knew well that, assured of the support of the commons, the government acted justly to the country and to those aggrieved by bringing the measure through the lower house, and throwing the responsibility of rejecting it upon the lords. Besides, the election of Baron Rothschild ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... am an atheist in the fullest sense of the word. I have no belief in God, in society, in happiness. Take a good look at me, father; for in a few hours' time life will be over for me. My last sun has risen," said Lucien; with a sort of rhetorical effect he waved ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... accessible provinces of French art to foreigners, precisely because it lies at the very heart of France. It bored him horribly; he found it cold, dry, and revolting in its tricks and pedantry. The action was thin or forced, the characters were rhetorical abstractions or as insipid as the conversation of society women. They were caricatures of the ancient legends and heroes: a display of reason, arguments, quibbling, and antiquated psychology and archeology. Speeches, speeches, speeches; the eternal loquacity of the French. Christophe ironically ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... article before the word "louder", or by the poetical contraction of "sympathy" into "symp'thy". The third line of the fourth stanza possesses only four feet. This may be an intentional shortening to give rhetorical effect, yet it mars none the less ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Hugh Peters, one of those preachers who was able to exchange the obscurity of a country parish for the public fame of a London pulpit, by reason of a certain gift of rhetorical power, the value of which it is impossible to estimate to-day. Such of his sermons as are still extant are prosy, long-winded, dogmatic absurdities, overloaded with periphrastic illustrations in scriptural language. They are meaningless to a degree, which would make one wonder at the docility and ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... superstitions like their neighbours, attending freely their immoral games and dances, and sharing in the sins connected with them. Thus Arianism had many affinities with heathenism, in its philosophical idea of the Supreme, in its worship of a demigod of the vulgar type, in its rhetorical methods, and in its generally lower moral tone. Heathen influences therefore ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... knowledge, and only at last concedes to the argument such a qualified approval as is consistent with the feebleness of the human faculties. Cebes is the deeper and more consecutive thinker, Simmias more superficial and rhetorical; they are distinguished in much the same manner as Adeimantus and Glaucon ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... thought, philosophers fall almost always into the ideas of the common herd, in supposing God to be jealous of His glory, to be choleric, to love vengeance, and in taking rhetorical figures for real ideas. The interesting subject for the whole universe, is to know if it be not better, for the good of all mankind, to admit a rewarding and revengeful God, who recompenses good actions ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... unmoved. She might have been deaf, dumb, without any feeling as far as any expression of opinion went. Yet oft when her father had sought the refuge of the great dusty rooms of "Almayer's Folly," and her mother, exhausted by rhetorical efforts, squatted wearily on her heels with her back against the leg of the table, Nina would approach her curiously, guarding her skirts from betel juice besprinkling the floor, and gaze down upon her as one might look into ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... bears little resemblance to either. Throughout Shakespeare's 'Richard III' the effort to emulate Marlowe is undeniable. The tragedy is, says Mr. Swinburne, 'as fiery in passion, as single in purpose, as rhetorical often, though never so inflated in expression, as Marlowe's "Tamburlaine" itself.' The turbulent piece was naturally popular. Burbage's impersonation of the hero was one of his most effective performances, and his vigorous enunciation of 'A horse, a horse! my kingdom ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... the contemplated Apology, concerning which we read in the prefatory remarks to the so-called Torgau Articles mentioned above: "To this end [of justifying the Elector's peaceable frame of mind] it will be advantageous to begin [the projected Apology] with a lengthy rhetorical introduction." (68; C. R., 26, 171.) This introduction, later on replaced by another, was composed by Melanchthon at Coburg and polished by him during the first days at Augsburg. May 4 he remarks in a letter to Luther: "I have shaped the Exordium of our ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... activity—the wide and impassioned correspondence, the series of marvellous sermons—which have won for him the title of the Last of the Fathers. His early essays are vigorous, but lack judgement and skill; they are stiff and rhetorical, and far removed from the tender poetry of his later writings. Three years later we find Bernard credited with many miracles, narrated by William of St. Thierry, who afterwards retired to become a monk at Signy, where he wrote his record of the saint. It ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... the puzzlement which has arisen in the efforts to get something exact out of the stately periods and splendid promises of the Novum Organum and its companions has arisen from oversight of this eminently rhetorical character; and this character is the chief property of his style. It may seem presumptuous to extend the charges of want of depth which were formulated by good authorities in law and physics against Bacon in his own day, yet he is everywhere "not deep." He is stimulating beyond ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... enthusiasm. And it is this same misconception of the fundamental principle of all Kingdoms that has deprived modern Christianity of its vitality. The failure to regard the exclusive claims of Christ as more than accidental, rhetorical, or ideal; the failure to discern the essential difference between His Kingdom and all other systems based on the lines of natural religion, and therefore merely Organic; in a word, the general neglect of the claims of Christ as the Founder ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... the translator becomes doubly hazardous in case of translating a European language into Japanese, or vice versa. Between any of the European languages and Japanese there is no visible kinship in word-form, significance, grammatical system, rhetorical arrangements. It may be said that the inspiration of the two languages is totally different. A want of similarity of customs, habits, traditions, national sentiments and traits makes the work of translation ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... this article insists on the impartiality of law and the equal admission of all citizens to office. The Declaration of 1793 is more emphatic about equality, and more rhetorical. Article III reads, "All men are equal by ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... have the daily benefit of their searching investigations. There has been a certain liveliness on the Hibernian front, but we hope that Mr. Asquith was justified in assuming that the Sinn Fein excesses were only an expression of the "rhetorical and contingent belligerency" always present in Ireland, and that in spite of them the Convention would make all things right. Meanwhile, the Sinn Feiners have refused to take part in it. And not a single Nationalist member has denounced them for their dereliction; ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... respect of Noddy, was not the least of these influences. If the writer has not "moralized," it was because the true life, seen with the living eye, is better than any precept, however skilfully it may be dressed by the rhetorical genius ...
— Work and Win - or, Noddy Newman on a Cruise • Oliver Optic
... political liberalism recur in liberal Christianity; it is only half serious, and its theology is too much mixed with worldliness. The sincerely pious folk look upon the liberals as persons whose talk is rather profane, and who offend religious feelings by making sacred subjects a theme for rhetorical display. They shock the convenances of sentiment, and affront the delicacy of conscience by the indiscreet familiarities they take with the great mysteries of the inner life. They seem to be mere clever special pleaders, religious rhetoricians like the Greek sophists, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... subdued excitement. The sober servant who took the despatch, and receipted for it as gravely as if witnessing a last will and testament, respectfully paused before the entrance of the drawing-room. The sound of measured and rhetorical speech, through which the occasional catarrhal cough of the New-England coast struggled, as the only effort of nature not wholly repressed, came from its heavily-curtained recesses; for the occasion of the evening ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... examinations can save us from degeneration if the inner mystery be lost. That mystery, as once the secret and the glory of our English-speaking race, consists in nothing but two common habits, two inveterate habits carried into public life,—habits so homely that they lend themselves to no rhetorical expression, yet habits more precious, perhaps, than any that the human race has gained. They can never be too often pointed out or praised. One of them is the habit of trained and disciplined good temper towards the opposite party when it fairly wins its innings. It was by breaking ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... by the coveys of novels that wing into editorial offices by every mail? Is the reviewing of novels left to the novice as a mere rhetorical exercise in which, a subject being afforded, he can practise the display of words? Or is it because a novel is only a novel, only so many, many novels, for which the same hurried criticism must do, whether they be bad or mediocre or best? The reviewing page ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... a remarkably good man. He had been constantly devoted to the safety and welfare of the whites. A most fluent speaker in his native tongue, he would address his people with long flights of uninterrupted rhetorical skill. ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... of the stream—"out of his belly." Will you observe for a moment the rhetorical figure here? I used to suppose it meant "out of his heart." The ancients, you remember, thought the heart lay down in the abdominal region. But you will find that this book is very exact in its use of words. The blood is the life. The heart pumps the blood, but the stomach makes it. ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... a recent French critic, who has made careful study of his subject, that the new school was founded by Chateaubriand, who first, at the last century's end, laid an axe to the root of all this rhetorical artifice, these frigid and grotesque incongruities, and filled his romances with local colour, stamping them with the impress of reality and conformity to nature, by picturesque reproduction of the landscape, costumes, usages, and conditions of existence of the time and ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... rhetorical it is because Stroeve was rhetorical. (Do we not know that man in moments of emotion expresses himself naturally in the terms of a novelette?) Stroeve was trying to express a feeling which he had never known before, and ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... the most plausible forms of rhetorical cant is the cant about the soul of average humanity expressing itself in art, in an art which has sloughed off like an outworn skin all ancient race-instincts ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... word, which means to install in office with certain ceremonies, is made, by many lovers of big words, to do service for begin; but the sooner these rhetorical high-fliers stop inaugurating and content themselves with simply beginning the things they are called upon to do in the ordinary routine of daily life, the sooner they will cease to set a very ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... determine in all cases the question of chronological precedence between the deification of the abstraction and the assignment of the epithet to a god. We know that in the later Roman period abstractions were personalized, but this procedure was often poetical or rhetorical.[1209] ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... warriors, and, we presume, in no very choice language; for, among their other accomplishments, the Crows are famed for possessing a Billingsgate vocabulary of unrivalled opulence, and for being by no means sparing of it whenever an occasion offers. Indeed, though Indians are generally very lofty, rhetorical, and figurative in their language at all great talks, and high ceremonials, yet, if trappers and traders may be believed, they are the most unsavory vagabonds in their ordinary colloquies; they make no hesitation to call a spade a spade; and when they once undertake to call hard names, ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... appointing Demetrius of Lucca librarian, after Platina's death, he says distinctly that the library has been got together "for the use of all men of letters, both of our own age, or of subsequent time[410]"; and that these are not rhetorical expressions, to round a phrase in a formal letter of appointment, is proved by the way in which manuscripts were lent out of the library, during the whole time that Platina was in office. The Register of Loans, ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... the palm of eloquence to General Hamilton, whom he frequently characterized as a man of strong and fertile imagination, of rhetorical and even poetical genius, and a powerful declaimer. Burr's ruling passion was an ardent love for military glory. Next to the career of arms, diplomacy, no doubt, would have been his choice, for which not only his courtly ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... monster on the one hand, and a virtuous fairy on the other: He has shown how a period that is said to have changed the thought of the world like the epochs of Socrates, of Christ, of the Reformation, and of the French Revolution, has been described in a series of "able rhetorical efforts, enlarged Fourth-of-July orations, or pleasing literary essays on selected phases of the contest." These writers have ignored the fearful struggle of the patriots with the loyalists, the early leniency of England as expressed in the conduct of General Howe, the Clinton-Cornwallis ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... had been opened by the great speech of Philibert of Brussels, which the young Maltese described as a masterpiece of the finest rhetorical art. At the close of this address a solemn silence pervaded the hall, for the Emperor Charles had risen to take leave of his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... in so diminutive a consummation as the Catholic Church, is likely to obtain a very effective hold of that broad sequence and many-linked chain of events, to which Bossuet gave a right name, but whose real meaning he never was even near seizing. His merit is that he did in a small and rhetorical way what Montesquieu and Voltaire afterwards did in a truly comprehensive and philosophical way; he pressed forward general ideas in connection with the recorded movements of the chief races of mankind. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... nevertheless clear that it was not insisted on; nor were the earliest fonts, to judge from the ruins of them, large and deep enough for such an usage. The earliest literary notices of baptism are far from conclusive in favour of submersion, and are often to be regarded as merely rhetorical. The rubrics of the MSS., it is true, enjoin total immersion, but it only came into general vogue in the 7th century, "when the growing rarity of adult baptism made the Gr. word [Greek: baptizo]) patient of an interpretation that suited that of infants only."[2] ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... course of statesmanship. But no such crisis has now arisen. England and Ireland were as safe under the government of Lord Salisbury as under the government of Mr. Gladstone—perhaps safer. No one except an extremely excited and very rhetorical politician will venture to assert that, if Lord Salisbury instead of Mr. Gladstone had last summer gained a majority of forty, any man or woman throughout the United Kingdom would have trembled for the ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... manoeuvres of parties interfere with the study and recognition of the active principles which silently mould the national character and history. The double-faced platforms of conventions, the loose manifestoes of itinerant candidates for the Presidency, the rhetorical misrepresentations of "campaign documents," form the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... regulars. Papineau was present for a while at the scene of conflict, but he took no part in it and lost no time in making a hurried flight to the United States—an ignominious close to a successful career of rhetorical flashes which had kindled a conflagration that he took very good care should not even scorch him. Colonel Wetherall defeated another band of rebels at St. Charles, and their commander, Mr. Thomas Storrow Brown, ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... Modulation, Melody of Speech, Pitch, Tone, Inflections, Sense, Cadence, Force, Stress, Grammatical and Rhetorical Pauses, Movement, Reading of Poetry, Faults in the Reading of Poetry, Action, Attitude, Analysis of the Principles of Gestures, ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... partakers of the divine nature." These are the words of a Hebrew apostle, but of Hellenism and Hebraism alike this is, I say, the aim. When the two are confronted, as they very often are confronted, it is nearly always with what I may call a rhetorical purpose; the speaker's whole design is to exalt and enthrone one of the two, and he uses the other only as a foil and to enable him the better to give effect to his purpose. Obviously, with us, it is usually Hellenism which is thus reduced to minister to the ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... if one may judge by the proceedings last winter, when the Councils met for the first time under the new conditions, there is little reason to fear, as many did at first, that he will be taken at a disadvantage in debate owing to the greater fluency and rhetorical resourcefulness of the Indian politician. It was not only in the Imperial Council in Calcutta that the official members, having the better case and stating it quite simply, proved more than a match for the more exuberant eloquence of their opponents. On the contrary, the personal ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... incidents of the physical life and death of Jesus. He is crucified with Christ; he is risen with Christ; he bears about in his body the dying of Christ. "Death worketh in us, but life in you." This sounds like exaggerated and rhetorical language. It seems a strange use of words to say that the death of self is the life of the world. But consider how it was with this man Paul. He had been ambitious, sanguine, impetuous, and it had all come to nothing, and worse than nothing. He had been ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... she said. "Where are we? You know quite a lot of people in that show, don't you?" This was a rhetorical question. It was notorious that Jimmy knew more or less everybody. So, without waiting for an answer, she went on, "Well, have you been behind the scenes ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... sententious, address, recovered his breath, and completely his gravity. "My dear young gentleman," he said, "I admire your spirit as much as your person and manner. All three puzzle me, I must say. So young and so rhetorical! So simple and so polished—an egg! an egg! Are you English, Dutch, Irish? What the devil are you? You won't tell me, and I don't know. But with all you say of my whirligig self I entirely and heartily agree. That at least is to the good. I propose ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... essential fact, unhappily, in gloating over the finale. Why didn't the woman say the butcher shop, and done with it, since she was so set upon a rhetorical slump of some sort? However, he smothered his interest in the detail, and went back again to ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Cambon who did know and who took risks.[3184]—In relation to a foreign policy his speech on the state of Europe is the amplification of a schoolboy; on exposing the plans of the English minister he reaches the pinnacle of chimerical nonsense;[3185] eliminate the rhetorical passages, and it is not the head of a government who speaks, but the porter of the Jacobin club. On contemporary France, as it actually exists, he has not one sound or specific idea: instead of men, he sees only twenty-six millions simple robots, who, when duly led and organized, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... come, recollect that your reasoning powers are almost as worthy of employment as your rhetorical abilities! We are not quite so bad as that, you know. We may be a little behind the times in Lichfield; we certainly let well enough alone, and we take things pretty much as they come; but we meddle with nobody, and, after all, we ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... great was his fury when, instead of the expected secrets, he found nothing but dull Latin exercises, wearisome rhetorical commonplaces on such subjects as the charms of spring and summer, the excellence of agriculture, the advantages of knowledge, the danger of the passions, and similar interesting themes. He was just about to tie the bundle up again, when it occurred ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... property, which he was sure would end what the law called crime, because all would be supplied on the basis of a common balance. Whenever he told his ancient exploits or suggested new ones, he glossed them invariably with a rhetorical varnish about the laws of nature, social contracts, human rights, meum and tuum; and concluded, to his perfect satisfaction, with a favorite axiom, that "he had quite as much right to the world's goods ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... who may be communed with and read but must see, therefore, and resent the error of making the text of any one of them a source to draw grammar from, forcing the parts of speech to stand out stark and cold from the warm text; or a store of samples whence to draw rhetorical instances, setting up figures of speech singly and without support of any neighbor phrase, to be stared at curiously and with intent to copy or dissect! Here is grammar done without deliberation: the phrases carry their ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... times. He attended the teachings of Plato, the celebrated philosopher. The repulse of Isocrates did not keep the ardent student from his classes. His naturally capable mind became filled with all that Greece had to give in the line of logical and rhetorical thought. He not only read but wrote. He prepared orations for delivery in the law courts for the use of others, and in this way eked ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... I. iv. This is so also in II. iii. 114 ff., though here there is some real imaginative excitement mingled with the rhetorical antitheses and balanced clauses and ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... one which had to be made, and that our fifteenth-century poets made it with all their might, we can understand how Hawes could hail Lydgate as 'the most dulcet spring of famous rhetoric' (this new poetry being essentially rhetorical); how Skelton, after condescendingly praising Chaucer for the 'pleasant, easy and plain' terms in which he wrote, hastened to explain that Lydgate's efforts were 'after a higher rate'; and how the same Skelton thought it necessary in his Phylyp Sparowe to make his 'young maid' ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... homilies on this subject, and which makes them look so supremely silly to men whose lives have been spent in wrestling with these questions. There is no attempt to hide away real stumbling-blocks under rhetorical stucco; no resort to the tu quoque device of setting scientific blunders against theological errors; no suggestion that an honest man may keep contradictory beliefs in separate pockets of his brain; no question that the method of scientific investigation is valid, whatever the results to which ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... might appeal to his brethren, and this resemblance is made still more striking by the oratorical flights or prayers with which she interrupts her argument to address her Creator. Moreover, the book is throughout, as Leslie Stephen says, "rhetorical rather than speculative." It is unmistakably the creation of a zealous partisan, and not of a calm advocate. It reads more like an extempore declamation than a deliberately written essay. Godwin says, as if in praise, ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... touches of expression as characterise verse, or rhetorical prose. I find in one sermon the sentence, "Think you St Paul trembled at the prospect?" Please re-write this, and say, "Do you think St Paul was afraid?" For you certainly would not say, speaking however gravely, to your friend, "Think you ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... action to go as it will, provided he gratifies them with occasional bursts of fine writing, and with a show of isolated thoughts and images; that is, they permit him to leave their poetic sense ungratified, provided that he gratifies their rhetorical sense and their curiosity." ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... trouble themselves at all about it. From that moment, Ostap began to pore over his tiresome books with exemplary diligence, and quickly stood on a level with the best. The style of education in that age differed widely from the manner of life. The scholastic, grammatical, rhetorical, and logical subtle ties in vogue were decidedly out of consonance with the times, never having any connection with, and never being encountered in, actual life. Those who studied them, even the least scholastic, could not apply their knowledge to anything whatever. The learned ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... was imposed by Carlyle on the men he judged of in his writings with an austerity not only cruel but almost stupid. They are too often broken outright on the Procrustean bed; they are probably always disfigured. The rhetorical artifice of Macaulay is easily spied; it will take longer to appreciate the moral bias of Carlyle. So with all writers who insist on forcing some significance from all that comes before them; and the writer of short studies is bound, by the necessity of the case, to write entirely ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "Learning is the knowledge of principles or facts received by instruction or study; acquired knowledge or ideas in any branch of science or literature; erudition; literature; science; knowledge acquired by experience, experiment, or observation." Milton gives us a rhetorical definition in a negative form, which is of equal value, at least, with any authority yet cited. "And though a linguist," says Milton, "should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he have not studied the solid things in them, ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... way a son of the eighteenth century; he began as a didactic and patriotic poet, and might at first be considered a follower of Jakob Cats. He became principally a lyric poet, but his lyric knew no deep sentiment, no suppressed feeling; its greatness lay in its rhetorical power. His ode to Napoleon may therefore be one of the best to characterize his genius. When he returned to his native country after eleven years' exile, with heart and mind full of Holland, it was old Holland he sought and did not find. He did not understand young Holland. In spite of this, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... began its work of capturing seats in the House of Commons. Cobden himself was chosen, in 1841, as member for Stockport. Almost immediately he exercised his gift as a speaker, securing at once the attention of his colleagues by his style of oratory, which, with little formal eloquence or rhetorical elaboration, was powerfully persuasive, enriched by many happy illustrations drawn from life, and infused with a pure and lofty spirit. Whatever the topic under discussion, he was always able to show its relation to the obnoxious ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... ancients, who had not yet invented the period: but still there was a great difference between his style, in which the ancient simplicity was artificially restored, and the genuine ancient sentence formed without any rhetorical art. He wrote without periods, because he would not write otherwise, and not because he could not; he divided the rhetorical period into separate sentences, because it appeared to him advantageous in his animated description of minute details; and he wrote concisely, because he ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... were the privilege of the nobles. He thus laid the foundation of a free, though aristocratic constitution—according to Aristotle, the first who surrendered the absolute sway of royalty, and receiving from the rhetorical Isocrates the praise that it was a contest which should give most, the people of power, or the king of freedom. As an extensive population was necessary to a powerful state, so Theseus invited to Athens all strangers willing to share in the benefits of its protection, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... outstanding temptations to insincerity in some ministers that must be pointed out here. (1) Ministers with a warm rhetorical temperament are beset continually with the temptation to pile up false fire on the altar; to dilate, that is, both in their prayers and in their sermons, upon certain topics in a style that is full of insincerity. Ministers who have no real hold of divine ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... virtue made it innocent to him, yet nothing could make it quiet. These were the reasons that moved him to follow the violent inclination of his own mind," &c. I doubt if either the sarcastic antiquary or the rhetorical panegyrist have developed the simple truth of Cowley's "violent inclination of his own mind." He does it himself more openly in that beautiful picture of an injured poet, in "The Complaint," an ode warm with individual feeling, but which Johnson coldly passes ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... private rooms and played charades, in which on occasion they amused themselves with the ever-delightful sport of taking off and satirizing their instructors. At this time the future Emperor's favourite subjects were history and literature, and he was fond of displaying his rhetorical talent before the class. The classical authors of his choice were Homer, Sophocles, and Horace. Homer particularly attracted him; it is easy to imagine the conviction with which, as a Hohenzollern, he would deliver the declaration of King ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... the country ought to govern it," pointing to the State Constitution which he drafted, to prove that only the well-to-do could vote. The Dutch, largely the slave holders of the State, accused him of wishing to rob them by the abolition of slavery. Dressed in other rhetorical clothes, these stories did service again in ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... a long breath, and again began, the carving- knife cutting a rhetorical path before him. "I was engaged upon the military problem—demonstration in force, no scouts ahead, no rearguard, ravine on the right, stump fence on the left, red coats, fife-and-drum band, concealed ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the details of illness or the manner of death; don't quote endlessly from the poets and Scriptures. Remember that eyes filmed with tears and an aching heart can not follow rhetorical lengths of writing. The more nearly a note can express a hand-clasp, a thought of sympathy, above all, a genuine love or appreciation of the one who has gone, the greater ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... on the "common sense" of mankind. Nor was it only a unity of spirit which pervaded the literature of the eighteenth century. Everywhere there was as striking an identity of form. In poetry this showed itself in the death of the lyric, as in the universal popularity of the rhetorical ode, in the loss of all delight in variety of poetic measure, and in the growing restriction of verse to the single form of the ten-syllable line. Prose too dropped everywhere its grandeur with its obscurity; and became the same quick, clear ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... said the Tribune, "since the days of Clay and Webster, spoke to a larger assemblage of the intellect and mental culture of our city. The speech was packed with reason, facts, but stripped bare of rhetorical flourish. Its keynote was, 'Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.'" Four morning newspapers reported the speech in full, and Greeley called him the Great Convincer, saying ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... once he was fairly under way, in denouncing the tricks and selfish cunning of mere party management. The printed reports of his speeches are mere skeletons, which give but a faint idea of them. Even the few rhetorical passages that are retained have lost much of their original form and beauty. The professional stenographers confessed themselves utterly baffled in the attempt to report him, and he was quite as unfitted to report himself. ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... relation to the Princesses of Oude produced an impression almost without a parallel in ancient or modern times. Mr. Burke's admiration was sincere and unbounded, but Fox thought it too florid and rhetorical. His fame now rests on his dramas. But his life was the shipwreck of genius, in consequence of his extravagance, his recklessness in incurring debts, and his dissipated habits, which disorganized his moral character and undermined the ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... for years in Rome, and as I had often discussed the problems of Italian politics with him, I was quite sure he understood the raison d'etre for the Giordano Bruno Club. Fortunately in the midst of the rhetorical attack, our friendly relations remained unbroken with the neighboring priests from whom we continued to receive uniform courtesy as we cooperated in cases of sorrow and need. Hundreds of devout communicants identified with the various Hull-House clubs and classes ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... white stone pulpit against the rock on the right of the Grotto was occupied by a priest from Toulouse, whom Berthaud knew, and to whom he listened for a moment with an air of approval. He was a stout man with an unctuous diction, famous for his rhetorical successes. However, all eloquence here consisted in displaying the strength of one's lungs in a violent delivery of the phrase or cry which the whole crowd had to repeat; for the addresses were nothing more than so much vociferation interspersed ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... identified with Hippolytus, who exclaims, 'Who is ignorant of the books of Irenaeus and Melito and the rest, which declare Christ to be God and man' [230:1]. The fragments, and more especially the Syriac fragments, accord fully with both these descriptions. They are highly rhetorical, and their superior elegance of language (compared with other Christian writings of the same age) is apparent even through the medium of a Syriac version. They also emphasize the two natures of Christ in many ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... glowing imagery and strong figures is by no means confined to highly-educated persons. Those who are illiterate, as Boone certainly was, often indulge in this style. Even the Indians are remarkably fond of bold metaphors and other rhetorical figures, as is abundantly proved by their speeches ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley |
