"Satirist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his inventive brain, and literature no masterpiece to his discrimination. Ariosto, the most brilliant poet of the Renaissance, returned in disappointment from the Vatican. "When I went to Rome and kissed the foot of Leo," writes the ironical satirist, "he bent down from the holy chair, and took my hand and saluted me on both cheeks. Besides, he made me free of half the stamp-dues I was bound to pay; and then, breast full of hope, but smirched with mud, I retired and took ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... scattered documentary vestiges are preserved) scarcely offers more points for the imagination to exercise itself upon than Burns's excisemanship or Wordsworth's collectorship of stamps (It is a curious circumstance that Dryden should have received as a reward for his political services as a satirist, an office almost identical with Chaucer's. But he held it for little more than a year.), though doubtless it must have brought him into constant contact with merchants and with shipmen, and may have suggested to him many a broad descriptive touch. On the other hand, ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... his last farthing at a gaming table, and then shoot him through the head, by way of making amends; or who scrupulously discharges all gambling and betting debts; utterly neglecting those of the poor tradesman, or industrious mechanic, but the "justum et tenacem propositi virum," of the Roman satirist, the man of strict integrity, and immoveable principles. Frederic had long since formed a determination, that as soon as he could clear himself from the army, he would most seriously incline himself to the search of a wife. Although considered by his fair-haired ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... a "devouring hand." But the survival of—at least—three fairly current citations from a practically forgotten minor Georgian satirist would certainly seem to warrant a few words upon the writer himself, and his ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... distinct predilection for the marvellous, an unquestionable piety combined with man-of-the-worldliness, and a toleration of human infirmities. It is hardly necessary to point out the critical incompetence of those who say that a satirist like Map could not have written the Quest and the Mort. Such critics would make two Peacocks as the simultaneous authors of Nightmare Abbey and Rhododaphne—nay, two Shakespeares to father the Sonnets and the Merry Wives. If any one will turn ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... of equality, before private property was known, when all men held in common the goods of the earth, and robber kings were evils of the future. The god of Love and his barons, with the hypocrite monk Faux-Semblant—a bitter satirist of the mendicant orders—besiege the tower in which Bel-Accueil is imprisoned, and by force and fraud an entrance is effected. The old beldame, who watches over the captive, is corrupted by promises and gifts, and frankly exposes her own iniquities and those ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... No—for the satirist! There is no humor In what you see and I see when we look On this crude world wherein our lives are spent— This sordid sphere where we are but spectators— This crass grim modern spectacle of lives Torn with consuming ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... a very good one, in the sense of being valuable. Whatever your mood may be, that of the moralist, cynic, satirist, humourist, whether you love, pity, or despise your fellow-man, here is grist for your mill. It feeds ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... answered," says Caudle, "but I know this: in less than a fortnight I found myself in a sort of a green bird-cage of a house, which my wife—gentle satirist—insisted upon ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold
... or less a natural result of the economic law of intake and output. As is the habit of most young writers, he wrote on various subjects, put enough material for a two-volume novel into a short story, and generally revelled in the prodigality of literary youth. He was prepared to be a social satirist, a chronicler of the Smart Set, a champion of the down-trodden masses, or a commercial essayist, according to the first public that showed appreciation of ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... poems are, it is as a satirist that Dunbar has performed his greatest feats. He was by nature "dowered with the scorn of scorn," and its edge was whetted by life-long ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... part, and sacrificed them resolutely for his son's welfare. The young fellow, I dare say, gave his parent no more credit for his long self-denial, than many other children award to theirs. We take such life-offerings as our due commonly. The old French satirist avers that, in a love affair, there is usually one person who loves, and the other, qui se laisse aimer; it is only in later days, perhaps, when the treasures of love are spent, and the kind hand cold which ministered ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... not, fair countrywomen, like the declaimer and satirist, to paint you all vice and imperfection, nor, like the venal panegyrist, to exhibit you all virtue. As impartial historians, we confess that you have, in the present age, many virtues and good qualities, which were either nearly or altogether unknown to your ancestors; but do you not exceed ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... flight than the Teian wing is accustomed to soar. But in a poet of whose works so small a proportion has reached us, diversity of style is by no means a safe criterion. If we knew Horace but as a satirist, should we easily believe there could dwell such animation in his lyre? Suidas says that our poet wrote hymns, and this perhaps is one of them. We can perceive in what an altered and imperfect state his works are at present, when ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... were the sharpest political darts that were fired at the time, and when the verses were collected and set forth, with a paraphernalia of introductions and notes professedly prepared by an old-fashioned, scholarly parson, Rev. Homer Wilbur, the book gave Mr. Lowell a distinct place as a wit and satirist, and was read with delight in England and America after the circumstance which called it out had become a matter of history and ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... for the philosopher's stone, or the grand panacea; and the discovery would be equally useless, or rather pernicious to mankind. The most holy band of society is friendship. It has been well said, by a shrewd satirist, "that rare as true love is, true ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... all places; veritably is. In most times and places it is greatly overlooked; and the Universe, definable always in one or the other dialect, as the realised Thought of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplace matter,—as if, says the Satirist, it were a dead thing, which some upholsterer had put together! It could do no good at present, to speak much about this; but it is a pity for every one of us if we do not know it, live ever in the knowledge of it. Really ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... the mind of those that take it. He cannot help being in a sort of close communion. Perhaps he mainly borrows the very indignation, not so very pure and independent, with which he reproves some ingenuous satirist of what may appear indecent in our fashions of amusement, or unbecoming in the relations of the sexes or the habits of the young. "The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... new order which thus struggled into existence, which so speedily made itself felt, and at length so completely succeeded in seizing the lapsed inheritance of the old spiritual organisation? Who is this man of letters? A satirist may easily describe him in epigrams of cheap irony; the pedant of the colleges may see in him a frivolous and shallow profaner of the mysteries of learning; the intellectual coxcomb who nurses his own dainty ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... originality of Pope's genius, it is the imitations of Horace. These are dismissed in a disparaging sentence. There is no adequate recognition of Congreve's brilliance as a dramatist; none of Swift's amazing powers as a satirist. Yet all these were men who lived more or less within the range of ideas and tendencies by which Johnson's own ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... crown made necessary, the annual butt of sack, originally granted to Jonson, and continued to Jonson's successors, should be omitted. [231] This was the only notice which the King, during the first year of his reign, deigned to bestow on the mighty satirist who, in the very crisis of the great struggle of the Exclusion Bill, had spread terror through the Whig ranks. Dryden was poor and impatient of poverty. He knew little and cared little about religion. If ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... truth and honor and integrity which is no stranger to the uncultivated bosom, and which is found in the lowest abodes in as great strength as in the halls of nobles and the palaces of kings. Mr. Dickens is also a satirist. He satirizes human life, but he does not satirize it to degrade it. He does not wish to pull down what is high into the neighborhood of what is low. He does not seek to represent all virtue as a hollow thing, in which no confidence can be placed. He satirizes only ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Murray is a kindly satirist who evidently delights in the analysis of character, and who deals shrewdly but gently with the frailties of our nature.... The pages are perpetually brightened by quaintly humorous touches. Often in describing some character or something that is commonplace ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... that. The American invention of "reversing" is admirable in its unexaggerated form, but requires both study and practice; and the reason that it was voted "bad form" in England was simply that the indolence of the gilded youth prevented him ever taking the trouble to master it. Our genial satirist Punch hit the nail on the head: "Shall we—eh—reverse, Miss Lilian?" "Reverse, indeed; it's as much as you can do to keep on your legs as ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... verses will not be out of place. The satire in them was not meant to have any personal, but only a general, application. Of the gentleman upon whose letter they were intended as a commentary Mr. Biglow had never heard, till he saw the letter itself. The position of the satirist is oftentimes one which he would not have chosen, had the election been left to himself. In attacking bad principles, he is obliged to select some individual who has made himself their exponent, and in whom they are impersonate, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... to Saint Monday, gains usually, in his course through life, a considerable amount of sense. Shoemakers are often in large proportions intelligent men; and Bloomfield, the poet, Gifford the critic and satirist, and Carey the missionary, must certainly be regarded as thoroughly respectable contributions from the profession, to the worlds ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... religious world in the fashionable watering-place of Steamingbath, and derives her notions of the past, present, and future state of the universe principally from those two meek and unbiased periodicals, the Protestant Hue- and-Cry and the Christian Satirist, to both of which O'Blareaway is a constant contributor. She has taken such an aversion to Whitford since Argemone's death, that she has ceased to have any connection with that unhealthy locality, beyond the popular and easy one of rent-receiving. ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... The publication of various MS. tracts, e.g. Advis et Devis de l'ancienne et nouvelle Police de Geneve, 1865; Advis et Devis des Lengnes, etc., 1865, which were edited by the late J. J. Chaponniere, and, after his death, by M. Gustave Revilliod, has placed his reputation as historian, satirist, philosopher, beyond doubt or cavil. One quotation must suffice. He is contrasting the Protestants with the Catholics (Advis et Devis de la Source de Lidolatrie, Geneva, 1856, p. 159): "Et nous disons ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... part of the eighteenth century offered rich material to the satirist, and Swift brought to his work unparalleled fierceness and power. He attacked the corruption of the politician and the minister, the vanity and vice of the courtier, the folly and extravagance of ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... poets and philosophers lent distinction to American literature. At that time Motley was writing his "History of the Netherlands"; Prescott, his "History of Mexico and Spain"; Whittier, his songs of slavery and freedom; Lowell was the satirist of the debate, and was writing his "Biglow Papers," and Emerson, the philosopher, was undermining the foundations and shaking the principles of slavery, even as Samson pulled down the ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Poems, Lachrymae Musarum, and the series of sonnets upon Armenia, called The Purple East. There is in Watson nothing of the dramatist or of the epic writer. He is a lyrist and a sonneteer. He is also a critic, and might very conceivably be a satirist. But, whatever he is in writing, he is mainly and before all things an intellectual rather than an emotional poet; he is an artist rather than a seer. His poems are constructions of taste and intellectual judgment. Let me take, as an example, his poem upon the Father of the Forest. ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... of the people. The more power such women exercise over men, the more easily can they lead them into iniquitous desires, and in this way can lay a very heavy yoke upon their shoulders. It was with such things in mind that the satirist said: ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... be worked successfully with a large measure of sincerity and good will. In the hands of the ambitious, the self-seeking, and the unscrupulous, democratic politics are a machine for frustrating popular representation, and as this state of things is always prevalent somewhere, the humorist and the satirist naturally ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... the satirist. "Seems to me, Thornton, you ought to be there. They'll be calling for ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... on Mr. Gladstone by one of the young anarchic Tories, which began by asserting that Mr. Gladstone was a bad public speaker. If these people would, as I have said, go quietly and read Pope's "Atticus," they would see how a great satirist approaches a great enemy: ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... subjects and the handling, and without moralizing upon the age which they describe. Skelton, a contemporary of the French Rabelais, seems to us a weak English portrait of that great author; like him a priest, a buffoon, a satirist, and a lampooner, but unlike him in that he has given us no English Gargantua and Pantagruel ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... "Upon the Eating of Oysters", is reputed to have rendered a still more signal service to literature, for in its two concluding paragraphs is contained the idea which, under the transforming hand of the master satirist, eventually took the world by storm when it appeared, ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... to the Taste of the Beau Monde, with all the Embellishments that can please the nice Ears of an intelligent Reader, and with that inoffensive Satir, which corrects the Vices of Men, without making them conceive any Aversion for the Satirist. ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... but, as I think, entirely affected discrimination between the sources respectively of Persian virtues and vices, it might be sufficient answer to point out that in "Hajji Baba" Morier takes up the pen of the professional satirist, an instrument which no satirist worthy of the name from Juvenal to Swift has ever yet dipped in honey or in treacle alone. But a more candid and certainly a more amusing reply was that which Morier himself received, after the publication of the book, from the Persian ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... Stapylton likened their respective choices, Horace and Juvenal, to Socrates and Plato; and Rigault considered all three satirists to be philosophers, distinguished only by the different styles which their different periods required. The satirist might disguise himself as a jester, but only to make his moral wisdom more easily digestible; peeling away his mask, "we find in him all the Gods together," "Maxims or Sentences, that like the lawes of nature, are ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... time comes Archilochus of Pa'ros, a satirist who flourished between 714 and 676 B.C. He is generally considered to be the first Greek poet who wrote in the Iambic measure; but there are evidences that this measure existed before his time. This poet was betrothed to the daughter ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... are a few; if the satirist had not been prevented from indulging in them by his taste, he would have been debarred by his ignorance. Lord Chesterfield, as the incarnation of the world and the most brilliant servant of the arch-enemy, comes in for a lashing ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... although a caricaturist, was entirely devoid of guile, and, in addition, was as absent-minded as the popularly-accepted type of ardent scientist or professor of ultra-abstruse subject. Well, this curious species of satirist was setting forth on travels in foreign climes, and in order to lighten in some measure the vicissitudes inseparable from peripatetic wandering, he was provided with a letter of introduction to a certain British consul. The writer of this letter enclosed it in one ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... anonymously, and circulated surreptitiously in Berlin, but a copy soon fell into Frederick's hand, who knew at once that but one man in the kingdom was capable of such a production. He wrote so severely to Voltaire that the malicious satirist was frightened and gave up the whole edition of the pamphlet, which was burnt before his eyes in the king's own closet, though Frederick could not help ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... of James Russell Lowell, too, in these years was incipient. As a writer he had shown himself to be elegantly schooled, but in the Fable for Critics and the Biglow Papers, he had burst forth as a most effective and slashing satirist. His culture was closely and perfectly fitted, but when scratched, revealing in full proportions the "Whang-doodle" Yankee. The whang, however, handling with all the deftness in the world the broadest and subtlest themes, ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... admit so much even jestingly of himself, it is but legitimate to presume that there is no great exaggeration in the portrait of him in 1735, by the anonymous satirist of Seasonable Reproof:— ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... effort, but again her resolution abandoned her; when a tribune burst into the gardens, and plunging his sword into her body, she instantly expired. Thus perished a woman, the scandal of whose lewdness resounded throughout the empire, and of whom a great satirist, then living, has said, perhaps ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... to distil out of our incurably wicked hearts to eat out the heart of our own nearest and dearest friendships. Envy, for one thing, which no preacher, not even Pascal or Newman, no moralist, no satirist, no cynic has yet dared to tell the half of the horrible truth about: drip, drip, drip, its hell-sprung venom soaks secretly into the oldest, the dearest and the truest friendship. Yes, let it be for once said, the viper-like venom of envy—the most loyal, ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... the portrait which Lely had painted of him when he was only twenty-eight, and often murmured, Quantum mutatus ab illo. He was still nervously anxious about his literary reputation, and not content with the fame which he still possessed as a dramatist, was determined to be renowned as a satirist and an amatory poet. In 1704, after twenty-seven years of silence, he again appeared as an author. He put forth a large folio of miscellaneous verses, which, we believe, has never been reprinted. Some of these pieces had probably circulated through the town in manuscript. For, before ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... his own capital. His wife, Poppaea, died of a kick which she received from this monster, because she had petulantly reproved him. Longinus, an eminent lawyer, Lucan the poet, and Petronius the satirist, alike, were victims of his hatred. This last of the Caesars, allied by blood to the imperial house of Julius, killed himself in his thirty-first year, to prevent assassination, to the universal joy of the Roman world, without having done a great deed, or ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... group and swept along by the palings. The other three horses followed abreast for a moment or so, and cleared the first hurdle and then the second very well. Each of the three riders played a different game. The Duke di Beffi tried to keep with the group, so that Satirist might be induced to follow the example of the other horses at the obstacles; Caligaro moderated Carbonilla's pace in order to save up her strength for the last five hundred yards. Sperelli increased his ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... a warrior-pair that stood In feigned strife upon a knoll of green, Their weapons clashing but unstained with blood, A satirist him besought to intervene, Whereat he slew them as he drave between— "Thy spear to me," the satirist cried the while, The hero answering, "Nay," he ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... and Mrs. ——, of Brooklyn, but, lo! a lot of people in full dress. We had a regular state dinner, course after course. Dr. —— sat next me and made himself very agreeable, except when he said I was the most subtle satirist he ever met (I did run him a little). Mrs. —— is a picture. She had a way of looking at me through her eyeglass till she put me out of countenance, and then smiling in a sweet, satisfied manner, and laying down her ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... Juvenal a poet.' The scholar needs no explanation; but the reader whose scholarship is yet amongst his futurities (which I conceive to be the civilest way of describing an ignoramus) must understand that Juvenal, the Roman satirist, who was in fact a predestined poet in virtue of his ebullient heart, that boiled over once or twice a day in anger that could not be expressed upon witnessing the enormities of domestic life in Rome, was willing to forego all pretensions to natural power ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... the principals of the quarrel are known. "Histriomastix," a play revised by Marston in 1598, has been regarded as the one in which Jonson was thus "represented on the stage"; although the personage in question, Chrisogonus, a poet, satirist, and translator, poor but proud, and contemptuous of the common herd, seems rather a complimentary portrait of Jonson than a caricature. As to the personages actually ridiculed in "Every Man Out ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... St. Cyr was a school founded by Mme. de Maintenon for the education of girls of good families who were in reduced circumstances. Mme. de Maintenon was the daughter of M. D'Aubigne, a writer of fair repute both as a historian and a satirist. Her first husband had been a M. Paul Scarron, a comic poet of indifferent reputation. After his death, she was induced, after an artful show of affected reluctance, to become governess to the children of Louis XIV. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... and sympathy with cant—natural fruits of that extraordinary idealization of "success" in the mere outward sense of "getting there," and getting there on as big a scale as we can, which characterizes our present generation. What was Reason given to man for, some satirist has said, except to enable him to invent reasons for what he wants to do. We might say the same of education. We see college graduates on every side of every public question. Some of Tammany's stanchest supporters are Harvard men. Harvard men defend our treatment ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... creativeness." Whatever he could sympathize with, he could embody and vitally represent; but his sympathies, though wide, were far from being universal, and when he was indifferent or hostile, the dramatist was partially suspended in the satirist and caricaturist, and oversight took the place of insight. Indeed, his limitations are more easily indicated than his enlargements. We know what he has not done more surely than we know what he has ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... watch'd the pay-table on Saturday night, and collected what I stood engag'd for them, having to pay sometimes near thirty shillings a week on their accounts. This, and my being esteem'd a pretty good riggite, that is, a jocular verbal satirist, supported my consequence in the society. My constant attendance (I never making a St. Monday)[45] recommended me to the master; and my uncommon quickness at composing occasioned my being put upon all work of dispatch, which was generally ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... in our mind of Mrs. Warren is farthest away from satire. To judge by the costume she wore when she sat to Copley for her portrait, she must have been graced with all the feminine wiles of the period. Behold Mrs. Mercy Warren, satirist, as the records ...
— The Group - A Farce • Mercy Warren
... There is hardly, indeed, a Latin author from which an attentive reader may not pick up some detail of Roman customs. Cicero's letters are themselves very prolific. But the pretty things of the poets are not quite facts, nor are the bitter things of the satirist; and though a man's letters to his friend may be true, such letters as come to us will have been the products of the greater minds, and will have come from a small and special class. I fear that the Newgate Calendar of the day would tell us more of the ways of living then prevailing than the ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... young days it was used as a schoolbook, and thought necessary as a part of polite education; and as they have read little or nothing since, it is only reasonable that they should stick to their colours. Indeed, the French satirist's boast that he could predicate the views of any man with regard to both worlds, if he were only supplied with the simple data of his age and his income, is quite true in the general with regard to literary taste. Given the age of the ordinary individual—that is to say of the gentleman ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... endowments which might have made him, under favourable circumstances, a poet, a hero, a man, and a saint, he became, partly through his own fault, and partly through the force of destiny, a satirist, an unfortunate politician, a profligate, died early; and we must approach his corpse, as men do those of Burns and Byron, with sorrow, wonder, admiration, and blame, blended into one strange, complex, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... Boeotian; and this feeling was carried so far, that at last it provoked satire itself to turn round with scorn upon the very prejudice which the spirit of satire had originally kindled. Disgusted with this arrogant assumption of disgust, the Roman satirist reminded the scorners that men not inferior to the greatest of their own had been bred, or might be bred, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... certainly expected that you would do so. You did look up; and I was now assured that I had correctly followed your steps. But in that bitter tirade upon Chantilly, which appeared in yesterday's 'Muse,' the satirist, making some disgraceful allusions to the cobbler s change of name upon assuming the buskin, quoted a Latin line about which we have often ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... began to study for the bar, but he displayed such distinct talents for literature and for politics that there seemed little likelihood of his devoting himself to the business of law. He soon became known at Oxford as a charming poet, a keen and brilliant satirist, and a public speaker endowed with a voice of marvellous intonation and an exquisite choice of words. He made the acquaintance of Sheridan and of Burke; by Burke he was introduced to Pitt, and by Sheridan to Fox, and it is believed to have been on the suggestion of Pitt ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... offered up to the devouring monster, Mammon, may see virgin after virgin given away, just as in the Soldan of Babylon's time, but with never a champion to come to the rescue.' We would by no means withhold from the modern satirist of manners the privilege of using forcibly figurative language or of putting a lash to his whip. Yet if his novels are, as we have suggested, to be regarded as historical, in the sense of recording impressions drawn from life for the benefit of posterity, such ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... then numbered among its contributors Ned Buntline, Harriet Prescott, George Marshall, George Arnold, Bayard Taylor, W. Scott Way, and many other distinguished writers with whom she ranked as an equal in many respects, and many of whom she excelled as a brilliant satirist and pathetic painter of ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... courage to expose, their consequences—the name of Choiseul, or Uzeda, or Buckingham, or Bruhl, or Kaunitz, may be applied to such descriptions with equal probability and equal justice. But when the Tiers Etat are portrayed, when the satirist enters into detail, when he enumerates circumstances, when local manners, national habits, and individual peculiarities fall under his notice; when he describes the specific disease engendered in the atmosphere by which his characters are surrounded; when, to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... is the greatest of English satirists and the only one who as a satirist claims large attention in a brief general survey of English literature. He is one of the most powerfully intellectual of all English writers, and the clear force of his work is admirable; but being first a man of affairs and only secondarily a man of letters, he stands ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... and when Shakspeare portrays the blind movements of the people in a mass, he almost always gives himself up to his merry humour. To the plebeians, whose folly is certainly sufficiently conspicuous already, the original old satirist Menenius is added by way of abundance. Droll scenes arise of a description altogether peculiar, and which are compatible only with such a political drama; for instance, when Coriolanus, to obtain the consulate, must solicit the lower order of citizens whom he holds in contempt ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... capital idea, if only one could carry it out; but if the thing is to be done at all it must be well done. We should want a first-class satirist; and where are ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... conjectures you please; but I know of no anti-bibliomaniacal satirist of this period. STUBBES did what he could, in his "Anatomy of Abuses,"[337] to disturb every social and harmless amusement of the age. He was the forerunner of that snarling satirist, Prynne; but I ought ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... see Carlyle's 'Latter Day Pamphlets'? They make the world laugh, and his friends rather sorry for him. But that is because people will still look for practical measures from him: one must be content with him as a great satirist who can make us feel when we are wrong though he cannot set us right. There is a bottom of truth in Carlyle's wildest rhapsodies. I have no news to tell you of books or music, for I scarce see or hear any. And moreover I must be up, and leave the mahogany coffee-room table on which I write ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... edge of ridicule, to see natural hilarity defy depression; and a whole nation laugh, sing, and dance, under burthens that would nearly break the firm-knit sinews of a Briton. Such was the picture of France at that period, but it was a picture which our English satirist could not contemplate with common patience. The swarms of grotesque figures who paraded the streets excited his indignation, and drew forth a torrent of coarse abusive ridicule, not much to the honour of his liberality. He compared them to Callot's beggars—Lazarus on the painted cloth—the prodigal ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... FITZGERALD MOLLOY, for The English Illustrated Magazine of this month. The Baron does not remember if THACKERAY touched on the story of this talented Actress in his Lectures on "The Four Georges;" but the sad finish to the brilliant career of Mrs. JORDAN could hardly have escaped the great Satirist as being one instance, among many, illustrating the wise King's advice as to "not putting your trust in Princes;" "or," for the matter of that, and in fairness, it must be added, "in any child of man." Poor DOROTHY, or DOLLY JORDAN! but now a Queen of "Puppets," and now—thus, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... a point of dispute capable of bringing gods, popes, emperors, kings, princes, cities, and whole nations into conflict. At the same time the satirist betrays his malice by departing as little as possible from the main current of actual events. History lends verisimilitude to the preposterous assumption that heaven and earth were drawn into a squabble about a bucket: and if there is any ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... at present to rely for its attraction upon scenes and incidents of ordinary life, and the minute portraiture of manners and of character. Dickens owes his popularity largely to the unique sort of drollery and the genuine pathos that are mingled in his pages. Thackeray is a satirist, with a keen eye to detect the weaknesses of humanity, but with a deep well of sympathy, veiled, however, and sedulously guarded from sentimentalism, by a tone of banter and a semblance of cynicism. Measured by their popularity with the cultivated class, the novels of Mrs. Lewes ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... get in touch with humanity. Our careful humanitarians, our charitable ones, never do, for they stick to their conservatism. How we do fashion our own fetters, from chains to corsets, and from gods to governments. Oh, how I wish I were a fine lean satirist!—with a great black-snake whip of sarcasm to scourge the smug and genial ones, the self-righteous, charitable, and respectable ones! How I would lay the lash on corpulent content and fat faith with folds in its belly; chin and hands[3]; those ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... wrapped her weakness as in a glittering garment. That ironical smile, worn through so many years, had gradually changed the lines of her face, and when she looked in the mirror she saw not herself, but the scathing critic, the amused observer and satirist of herself. ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... Our satirist seemed to have lost something of his gayety. "Aren't you taking the matter a little ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... over, the more nonsense it became, as all words turn to drivel on repetition; but chiefly he was amazed that even love could have wrought this change in him. In his distress he happened to think of Dean Swift. Had not that fierce satirist created a dialect of his own for ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... inner values or an attempt to win superiority or "difference" of a superior kind by acting. In either case it excites ridicule, hatred or disgust, and shafts at it form part of the stock in trade of the satirist, humorist and indeed every portrayer of life. What men demand of each other is sincerity, and even where the insincerity is merely a habitual pose it arouses hostile feeling which expresses itself all the way from criticism to ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... visionary; but it is clear that what is "dramatic" in him exfoliates, as it were, from a root of character and thought which are altogether Browning's own. Browning is apparent in the vivacious critic and satirist of religious extravagances, standing a little aloof from all the constituted religions; but he is apparent also in the imaginative and sympathetic student of religion, who divines the informing spark of love in all sincere worship; and however far he may have been from putting forward ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... he probably ever delivered in parliament, reminded Mr. Disraeli of his taunts and abuse of Sir Robert Peel for changing his opinions on the subject of a corn-law, and invited the right honourable satirist to account for his own change, if it were effected by any other motive than to retain office. He went to the country advocating the re-imposition of a corn-tax, and on his return presented himself to the house a convert to the opinion that it would be wrong to disturb ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... this book might make Mr. Jacks memorable as a satirist. It brings philosophy down from the air, like a peaceful thunderbolt, to shatter the vain illusions we entertain of our material success and our civilised strides forward. The fact that when you have begun to read the book you ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... misrepresentation, introducing Diderot personally on the stage, and putting into his mouth a mixture of folly and knavery that was as foreign to Diderot as to any one else in the world. In 1782 the satirist again attacked his enemy, now grown old and weary. In Le Satyrique, Valere, a spiteful and hypocritical poetaster, is intended partially at least for Diderot. A colporteur, not ill-named as M. Pamphlet, comes to urge ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... from a few inconsequential precursors the first English artist of note was Hogarth (1697-1764). He was an illustrator, a moralist, and a satirist as well as a painter. To point a moral upon canvas by depicting the vices of his time was his avowed aim, but in doing so he did not lose sight of pictorial beauty. Charm of color, the painter's taste ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... actor at the Haymarket once took off David Garrick, Foote limped from the boxes to the green-room, and severely rated him for his impudence. "Why, sir," said the fellow, "you take him off every day, and why may not I?"—"Because," replied the satirist, "you are not qualified to kill ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... a practical politician, rejoiced in the aspect of things. The fundamental change, with its incalculable chances to play upon, the opening of the gate to admit plain detriment in the first instance for the sake of benefit, easily beclouded, in the second, the effective arm, in the hands of a satirist, of sentiment in politics—and if there was a weapon Mr Winter owned a weakness for it was satire—the whole situation, as he often confessed, suited him down to the ground. He professed himself, though no optimist under any circumstances very well pleased. Only in one other place, he declared, would ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... are, of course, unfair; but that is part of their charm. One would no more take for granted Hazlitt's valuation of Wordsworth than Timon's judgment of Alcibiades. Hazlitt sees through coloured glasses, but his vision is not the less penetrating. The vulgar satirist is such a one as Hazlitt somewhere mentioned who called Wordsworth a dunce. Hazlitt was quite incapable of such a solecism. He knew, nobody better, that a telling caricature must be a good likeness. If he darkens the shades, and here and there exaggerates an ungainly feature, we still know ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... as their stations in life were equal, it seemed that they had only to be satisfied themselves to render their union easy. But her father, in addition to being a very devout man, was a zealot of the Old Light; and Jean, dreading his resentment, was willing, while she loved its unforgiven satirist, to love him in secret, in the hope that the time would come when she might safely avow it: she admitted the poet, therefore, to her company in lonesome places, and walks beneath the moon, where they both forgot themselves, and were at last obliged to own a private marriage as ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... wrought and burnished with excessive pains; or (which in this case is also known) when that particular passage is pushed into singular prominence as having obtained a singular success. In no part of his poetic mission did Pope so fascinate the gaze of his contemporaries as in his functions of satirist; which functions, in his latter years, absorbed all other functions. And one reason, I believe, why it was that the interest about Pope decayed so rapidly after his death (an accident somewhere noticed ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... product. Italy was the birthplace of Pantomime and the immortal Pulcinello; Spain had produced Cervantes; France had produced Rabelais and Moliere, and classic wits innumerable; England had yielded Shakspeare and a host of humorists. But Germany had borne no great comic dramatist, no great satirist, and she has not yet repaired the omission; she had not even produced any humorist of a high order. Among her great writers, Lessing is the one who is the most specifically witty. We feel the implicit influence of wit—the "flavor of mind"—throughout his writings; ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... style was scarcely less remarkable than the change of his fortunes. He was then no longer the hot and heady satirist; he had become the sly and subtle scorner. No man said so many cutting things, yet so few of which any one could take advantage: he anatomized human character without the appearance of inflicting a wound; he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... uncommon solicitude."—Webster's Essays, p. 403. "They put Minos to death, by detaining him so long in a bath, till he fainted."— Lempriere's Dict. "For who could be so hard-hearted to be severe?"— Cowley. "He must neither be a panegyrist nor a satirist."—Blair's Rhet., p. 353. "No man unbiassed by philosophical opinions, thinks that life, air, or motion, are precisely the same things."—Dr. Murray's Hist. of Lang., i, 426. "Which I had no sooner drank, but I found a pimple ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... work belonged to the German satirist, the extract from the 'Ship of Fools' is placed under the essay entitled 'Sebastian Brandt.' His 'Eclogues' show Barclay at his best. They portray the manners and customs of the period, and are full of local proverbs ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... The licentious thinker and writer prejudices the liberty of thinking and writing. Those who excel in letters, and in the right use of letters, are sensitive to their misapplication. Hence arises a species of satire, or, if you will, satirist—THE SCRIBLERO-MASTIX. He must attack individuals. A heavily-resounding lash should scourge the immoral and the profane. Light stripes may suffice for quelling the less nocent dunces. In commonplace prose criticism, whatever form it may take, this can be done without supposed personal ill-will; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... (anywhere in Italy save in Tuscany) to possess, appeared, to be followed in after years by many an avowed one. These have given the name of Giusti a high and peculiar place on the roll of Italian poets. But the satirist's serpent scourge is changed for a somewhat contemptuously used foolscap when the Tuscan ruler is introduced in the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... whom I hated so, Not for thy faults, but mine; it is a curse To understand, not feel, thy lyric flow, To comprehend, but never love thy verse, Although no deeper moralist rehearse Our little life, nor bard prescribe his art, Nor livelier satirist the conscience pierce, Awakening without wounding the touched heart, Yet fare thee well—upon ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... way, La Bruyere knew how to be. Witness the following thrust at a contemporary author, not named by the satirist, but, no doubt, recognized by ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... appropriate their portraits; venerable bachelors, who have striven to earn some little local notoriety by the diligent use of an odd phrase, a quaint garment, or an eccentric fling in the peripatetic, dread a satirist's powers of retributive burlesque; table orators suddenly grow dumb, for they suspect such a caitiff intends cold-blooded plagiarisms from their eloquence; the twinkling stars of humble village spheres shun him for an ominous comet, whose very trail robs them ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Bohemian cafes of the outer boulevards, the Folies Bergeres, the Moulins Rouges, the Bals Bulliers, with their meretricious and vulgar attractions, frequented by the more facile daughters of Gaul, "whose havoc of virtue is measured by the length of their laundresses' bills," as a genial satirist of their sex has phrased it—all these manifestations of la vie, so unutterably dull and sordid, are of small concern to the cultured traveller. The intimate charm and spirit of Paris will be heard and felt by him not amid the whirlwind of these saturnalia largely maintained ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... that the aim of the true satirist is not to be severe upon persons, but only upon falsehood, and as Truth and Falsehood start from the same point, and sometimes even go along together for a little way, his business is to follow the path of the latter after it diverges, and to show her floundering in the bog at ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... rogain, "unless it is Luchdonn the satirist in Emain Macha, who makes this hand-smiting when his food is taken from him perforce: or the scream of Luchdonn in Temair Luachra: or Mac cecht's striking a spark, when he kindles a fire before a king of Erin where he sleeps. Every spark and every shower which his fire would let fall ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... bias. Christianity has been judged at its best, paganism at its worst. The rhetorical denunciations of writers like Seneca, Juvenal, and Tacitus are taken at their face value, and few have remembered the convention which obliged a satirist to be scathing, or the political prejudice of the Stoics against the monarchy, or the non-representative character of fashionable life in the capital. The modern Church historian, as Mr. Benn says, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... brotherly tenderness which seems to exist in the literary brotherhood. He did, indeed, meet a degree of sincere helpfulness and friendliness from the members of the Turinese Literary Club; from Cesarotti, the translator of Ossian; from Parini, the great Milanese satirist, and from one or two other men of letters; which shows that there is more kindness in the world than he ever would admit, and confirms me in my remark that he was singularly well treated by fate and mankind. But all this was very lukewarm sympathy; and except from his two great ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... kindled. "I'm glad to see you like Horace; not merely as a clever satirist and writer of amatory odes, but as a true lover of Nature. How pleasant are his simple and beautiful descriptions of his yellow, flowing Tiber, the herds and herdsmen, the harvesters, the grape vintage, the varied aspects of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... why they were sacred in Roland's eyes. I had gained a great way when he longed to enter the home that should have been his and I could make him pause of his own accord and say, "No, I must first be worthy of it." Then you would have smiled—sly satirist that you are—to have heard me impressing upon this acute, sharp-witted youth all that we plain folk understand by the name of Home,—its perfect trust and truth, its simple holiness, its exquisite happiness, being to the world what conscience ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... relative to men, and men demanded a sensitive weakness, a shrinking timidity. Courage, honour, truth, sincerity, independence—these were items in a male ideal. They were to a woman as unnecessary, nay, as harmful in the marriage market as a sturdy frame and well-knit muscles. Dean Swift, a sharp satirist, but a good friend of women, comments on the prevailing view. "There is one infirmity," he writes in his illuminating Letter to a very young lady on her marriage, "which is generally allowed you, I mean that of cowardice," and he goes on to express what was in his day the wholly unorthodox ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... types and was not intimate with the actors on the social stage. Johnson, still more of an outsider, wrote a most effective and sonorous poem with the help of Juvenal; but it becomes a moral disquisition upon human nature which has not the special sting and sparkle of Pope. No later satirist has approached Pope, and the art has now become obsolete, or is adopted merely as a literary amusement. One obvious reason is the absence of the peculiar social backing which composed Pope's audience and supplied ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... 138-161). Thus it is not very far removed, in point of time, from the age of Ignatius. This Peregrinus is represented by Lucian, writing immediately after his death (A.D. 165), as being incarcerated for his profession of Christianity, and the satirist thus describes ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... became Tories in spite of themselves. Later on, the methods of the inquisitorial communities possibly made Tories out of some who were the victims of their attentions. The outbreak of armed rebellion must have shocked many into a reactionary attitude. It was of these that a Whig satirist ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... His letters to John Poynes and Sir Francis Bryan deserve more notice, they argue him a man of great sense and honour, a critical observer of manners and well-qualified for an elegant and genteel satirist. These letters contain observations on the Courtier's Life, and I shall quote a few lines as a specimen, by which it will be seen how much he falls short of his noble cotemporary, lord Surry, and is above those writers that preceded ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... upon his admirer, with whom he lived, filling a nominal post of bailiff to the estates, and launching forth verse of some satiric and sentimental quality; for being inclined to vice, and occasionally, and in a quiet way, practising it, he was of course a sentimentalist and a satirist, entitled to lash the Age and complain of human nature. His earlier poems, published under the pseudonym of Diaper Sandoe, were so pure and bloodless in their love passages, and at the same time so biting ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... inability to care for herself, owing, also, to there being nowhere else to which she could go, she has been forced to enter the Home. Her caustic comments on its management are of a clear-cut variety. Bettie was born for a satirist and became an epileptic. The result at times is speech that is not guarded, a calling of things by ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... arbitrary-enough origin; it is satira, from satur, mixed; and the application is as follows: each species of poetry had, among the Romans, its own special kind of versification; thus the hexameter was used in the epic, the iambic in the drama, etc. Ennius, however, the earliest Latin 'satirist,' first disregarded these conventionalities, and introduced a medley (satira) of all kinds of metres. It afterward, however, lost this idea of a melange, and acquired the notion of a poem 'directed against the vices and failings of men with a view ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to the middle period. The deeper complexities of the subject are merely indicated. Simple and trenchant outlines of character are yet to be supplanted by features of subtler suggestion and infinite interfusion. Hamlet himself is almost more of a satirist than a philosopher: Asper and Macilente, Felice and Malevole, the grim studies after Hamlet unconsciously or consciously taken by Jonson and Marston, may pass as wellnigh passable imitations, with an inevitable streak ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... future wife, but keeping such feelings as he had for the most part to himself, Peacock slipped through all the critical stages of youth till in 1816 he published "Headlong Hall." Brains will not make a poet, but they made a superb satirist. ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... Satir. xi. 191, &c. The expressions of the historian Ammianus are not less strong and animated than those of the satirist and both the one and the other painted from the life. The numbers which the great Circus was capable of receiving are taken from the original Notitioe of the city. The differences between them prove that they did not transcribe each other; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... features of peculiarity, which mark a character to all succeeding generations, are slow in coming to their growth." That ingenious lady adds, with her usual vivacity, "Can one, on such an occasion, forbear recollecting the predictions of Boileau's father, who said, stroking the head of the young satirist, 'This little man has too much wit, but he will never speak ill ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... sufficiently slight in construction, it must be confessed) considerably more compact and interesting than the irregular narration which serves Byron to string together the bitter beads of his satirical rosary; but, at the same time, the aim and scope of the English satirist is infinitely more vast and comprehensive. The Russian has also none of the terrible and deeply-thrilling pictures of passion and of war which so strangely and powerfully contrast with the bitter sneer ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... depends on personal and momentary advantages. But in appealing to the public, no one triumphs but in the triumph of some public cause, or by shewing a sympathy with the general and predominant feelings of mankind. In a private room, a satirist, a sophist may provoke admiration by expressing his contempt for each of his adversaries in turn, and by setting their opinion at defiance—but when men are congregated together on a great public question and for a weighty object, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... modern writers, Junius most strongly reminds us of Rochefoucauld. Some examples from both are given in the notes to this translation. It is curious to see how the expressions of the bitterest writer of English political satire to a great extent express the same ideas as the great French satirist of private life. Had space permitted the parallel could have been drawn very closely, and much of the invective of Junius traced to ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... satirist, was b. in Kincardineshire, and after studying at Aberdeen and Oxford, took his degree of M.D. at St. Andrews. Settling in London, he taught mathematics. Being by a fortunate accident at Epsom, he was called in to ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... satirical vein; but I should hope that a young lady of her sense, and right cast of mind, must know that the end of satire is not to exasperate, but amend; and should never be personal. If it be, as my good father used to say, it may make an impartial person suspect that the satirist has a natural spleen to gratify; which may be as great a fault in him, as any of those which he pretends to censure and expose ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... disciple Arnald of Brescia, whose ascetic mind was shocked at the fatal opulence of cardinals. Altogether Walter was a man who feared God, no doubt, but hardly showed it in the large jests which he made, which to our ears often sound rather too large. But Hugh recognised in the satirist a power for righteousness, and certainly loved and favoured him. Consequently the Hereford Canons with those of Angers and of the Lincoln Chapter laid their heads together to compose the strife between king and bishop: and the readiest ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... obsolescent, takes heavily from the realism of Jonson's methods, nor does his use of a careful vocabulary of contemporary colloquialism and slang save him from a certain dryness and tediousness to modern readers. The truth is he was less a satirist of contemporary manners than a satirist in the abstract who followed the models of classical writers in this style, and he found the vices and follies of his own day hardly adequate to the intricacy and elaborateness of the plots ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... differently. No satire can be excellent where displeasure is expressed with acrimony and vehemence. When satire ceases to smile, it should be momentarily, and for the purpose of inculcating a moral. Juvenal is hardly more a satirist than Lucan: he is indeed a vigorous and bold declaimer, but he stamps too often, and splashes up too much filth. We Italians have no delicacy in wit: we have indeed no conception of it; we fancy we must be weak if we are not offensive. The scream of Pulcinello ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... stimulated the demand for his other writings. Among those which are well worthy of being read for their own sakes, I would assign a prominent place to the present volume. Much of the story element in it is admirable, and, further, it shows M. Zola as a genuine satirist and humorist. The Rougons' yellow drawing-room and its habitues, and many of the scenes between Pierre Rougon and his wife Felicite, are worthy of the pen of Douglas Jerrold. The whole account, indeed, of the town of Plassans, its customs and its notabilities, ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... defacement, stupefied by the contemplation of the mask: his vision was of the great of old, the possibly great in the graver strife ahead, respecters of life, despisers of death, the real English whereas an alienated Celtic satirist, through his vivid fancy and his disesteem, saw the country incarnate in Bull, at most a roguish screw-kneed clown to be whipped out of him. Celt and Saxon are much inmixed with us, but the prevalence of Saxon blood is evinced by the public ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... hand?—I say, I am almost afraid to pray you to give way to it, for fear you should, for that very reason, restrain it. For the edge may be taken off, if it does not make the subject of its raillery wince a little. Permitted or desired satire may be apt, in a generous satirist, mending as it rallies, to turn too soon into panegyric. Yours is intended to instruct; and though it bites, it pleases at the same time: no fear of a wound's wrankling or festering by so delicate a point as you carry; not envenomed by personality, not intending ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson |
