"Biographer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... barbarians!" He refused one day to destroy a Greek city. "If we exterminate all the Greeks who fail of their duty," said he, "where shall we find the men to vanquish the barbarians?" This feeling was rare at that time. In relating these words of Agesilaus Xenophon, his biographer, exclaims, "Who else regarded it as a misfortune to conquer when he was making war on peoples ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... peculiar field of American fiction by an inability to see any romance, or poetry, or grandeur, or beauty in the Indian character, at least till such traits were pointed out by others. I do abhor an Indian story. Yet no writer can be more secure of a permanent place in our literature than the biographer of the Indian chiefs. His subject, as referring to tribes which have mostly vanished from the earth, gives him a right to be placed on a classic shelf, apart from the merits which ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... truly be said to stand near the chapel (as his biographer calls it), being distant only the width of the road, thirty-four feet, which in Herbert's time was forty feet, as the building shows. On the south is a grass-plat sloping down to the river, whence is a beautiful ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... Margaret brought with her to cheer their labours, and forswearing all idle talk and frivolity. The Queen had such austerity mingled with her graciousness and such grace with her severity, says her monkish biographer, loving an antithesis, that all feared and respected her presence. "Her life was full of moderation and gentleness, her speech contained the very salt of wisdom; even her silence was full ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... short the arctic-alpine theory (Scharff, "European Animals", page 128). I find no suggestion of his having hit upon it in his correspondence with Darwin or Hooker. Nor am I aware of any reference to his having done so in his later publications. I am indebted to his biographer, Professor Schroter, of Zurich, for an examination of his earlier papers with an equally negative result.) Assuming that local races have derived from a common ancestor, Hooker's great paper placed ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... restore Byron's reputation is the more necessary, since Moore himself, who is his best biographer, failed not only in his duty as a friend, but as the historian of the poet's life: for he knew the truth, and dared not proclaim it. Who, for instance, could better inform us of the cause which led to Byron's separation from his wife? ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... descent from the landed gentry of England, and had relatives among the aristocracy. The name was originally Rodeney. We are told by his son-in-law and biographer that the Duke of Chandos, a connection by marriage, obtained the command of the Royal yacht for the admiral's father, Henry Rodney. In one of the trips which George I. frequently made between England and Hanover, he asked his captain if there were anything he could ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... with the expression of great decision, with firmness and activity to execute his well-digested plans. These were my remarks the first time I saw him, and his subsequent conduct soon proved I was right." His French biographer makes a remark, commonplace enough, which yet notes the essential difference in the lot of the two gallant men who thus casually met. "For the few who allow occasions to escape them, how many could justly complain that a chance has never been offered them? Admiral Baudin never had the opportunity ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... one biographer as being "a well-dressed man, polite and confident, with hair powdered and tied in a queue." He stooped slightly, and did not move with the grace or ease one would have expected from so experienced a soldier, but ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... devote themselves to sound literature. It is equally rejected by Mr. Spedding, the chief authority on Bacon; by Mr. H. H. Furness, the learned and witty American editor of the 'Variorum Shakespeare;' by Dr. Brandes, the Danish biographer and critic; by Mr. Swinburne, with his rare knowledge of Elizabethan and, indeed, of all literature; and by Mr. Sidney Lee, Shakespeare's latest biographer. Therefore, the first point which strikes us in the Baconian ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... Rome. The emperor built several villas in different parts of the beautiful islet, and, having gathered a band of congenial companions, passed in this pleasant retreat the later years of his reign. Both Tacitus the historian and Suetonius the biographer tell many stories of the scandalous profligacy of the emperor's life on the island; but these tales, it should be added, ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... were then burned at the stake; they who in the last extremity renounced their faith were strangled before being thrown into the flames. Such was the Spanish inquisition—technically—so called: It was, according' to the biographer of Philip the Second, a "heavenly remedy, a guardian angel of Paradise, a lions' den in which Daniel and other just men could sustain no injury, but in which perverse sinners were torn to pieces." It was a tribunal superior to all human law, without appeal, and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... been somewhat of an interlude; but Goya had early shown signs of great talent, and before he left Saragossa, his master, Josepha Bayen, had confidence enough in his future to entrust the happiness of his daughter to his care by permitting his marriage to her. Goya's biographer notes that through all the various adventures of his career he had the utmost care for the material comfort of this lady. Her character must impress us to-day as charitable to excess; for, shortly after the bull-fighting episode, Goya found himself ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... composed in the style of the purest age: his simplicity is elegant, his brevity copious; he exhibits a series of men and manners; and with such illustrations, as every pedant is not indeed qualified to give, this classic biographer may initiate a young student in the history of Greece and Rome. The use of fables or apologues has been approved in every age from ancient India to modern Europe. They convey in familiar images the truths of morality and prudence; and ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... numerous enemies seeking his chamber with the intent to assassinate him. Seizing the Persian cimeter [156] that lay beside him, he plunged it in the breast of the intruder, and the object of his passion fell dead at his feet. "From that hour," says the biographer, "he could rest no more!" A spectre haunted his nights—the voice of the murdered girl proclaimed doom to his ear. It is added, and, if we extend our belief further, we must attribute the apparition to the skill of the priests, that, still tortured by the ghost of ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... premises" was the writer of these notes, who, earlier in the year, had become his biographer, and, in the course of time, his daily companion and friend. The farm mentioned was one which he had bought at Redding, Connecticut, where, later, he built the house known ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Mother and Sisters fulfil, and which was suitable to the way of Life which he had been used to. His indifference to her sufferings seems to me rather because of Blindness than Neglect; and I think his Biographer has been a little too hard upon him on the Score of selfish disregard ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... full description of his trial consult Macaulay's "Essays." Also his biographer, Montagu, whose judgment of Bacon is much ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... letters we learn that Swift was really invited by Walpole to meet him. Swift's visit to England concerned itself mainly with the publication of "Gulliver's Travels," but Sir Henry Craik thinks that Swift had other thoughts. "As regards politics," says this biographer, "he was encouraged to hope that without loss either of honour or consistency, it was open to him to make terms with the new powers. In the end, the result proved that he either over-estimated his own capacity of surrendering his independence, or under-estimated the terms that would be exacted." ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... flat on his face in the road, but continued to laugh softly, and turned towards his flying companion a face of peculiar peace and benignity. Evan's mind went through a crisis of instantaneous casuistry, in which it may be that he decided wrongly; but about how he decided his biographer can profess no doubt. Two minutes afterwards he had overtaken Turnbull and told the tale; ten minutes afterwards he and Turnbull had somehow tumbled into the yacht called the Gibson Girl and had somehow pushed off from the ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... them, and tearing to pieces an unfortunate bear who only licked his infant chops. As was said above, he has no wild-oats period of education like his father's, but his company is less carefully chosen than that of Gargantua in the days of his reformation, and gives his biographer opportunities ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... life with dignity as one 'good at many things,' who had at last 'attained to be at rest.' You know, in a word, that he took his part in the general struggle for existence, and manfully did his best; and it is with something like a pang that you find his biographer insisting on the merits of the feat, and quoting approvingly the sentimentalists who gathered about his death- bed. To make eloquence about heroism is not the way to breed heroes; and it may be that Jefferies, had his last environment been less fluent and sonorous, would now seem something ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... "His fame," says his biographer, "must rest not so much on what he did or said in Parliament as on what he did and proposed to do out of it—on his consistent and to a great degree successful efforts to expose the fallacy of the miscalled Protective system, and gradually, but effectively, to root it out of the statute-book, ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... was the source of all art, that everyone here who is more distinguished than the others has been to Paris. We go to Paris with baskets on our backs, and sticks in our hands, and bring back what we can pick up. And having lived immersed in art till you're forty, you return to the Catholic Celt! Your biographer will be puzzled to explain this last episode, and, however he may explain it, it ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... conception of sincerity, which maintains that the artist, in his volitional or practical life, should be at one with his dream, or with his incubus. Whether or no he have been so, is a matter that interests his biographer, not his critic; it belongs to history, which separates and qualifies that which art does not discriminate, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... enjoying there the company of the great painter and the most eminent artists of the day, and that on the occasion of Titian's memorable visit to Rome he was his close friend, cicerone, and companion. Allowing for the Aretine biographer's well-known inaccuracies in matters of detail and for his royal disregard of chronological order—faults for which it is manifestly absurd to blame him over-severely—it would be unwise lightly to disregard or overrule his ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... Peel should be a worshipper of expediency might be matter of small moment to any but his biographer, were it not that we are so prone to copy the example of those whose names are ever in our mouths. It has now become the doctrine of a large class of politicians that political honesty is unnecessary, slow, subversive of a man's interests, and incompatible ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... understood it in the sense of a half-religious consecration; he desired to assume the wreath in the baptistery of San Giovanni, where, like thousands of other Florentine children, he had received baptism. He could, says his biographer, have anywhere received the crown in virtue of his fame, but desired it nowhere but in his native city, and therefore died uncrowned. From the same source we learn that the usage was till then uncommon, and was held to be inherited by the ancient Romans from the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Jonathan Swift's cousin and biographer sums up his views of the mystery of Stella in definite fashion: "For that she was married to Dr Swift about the year 1716, I am thoroughly persuaded, although it is certain they continued to live in separate ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... whatever its nature, was known in England? On this point we have no trustworthy authority. The English writers say nothing about the whole matter; to the Norman writers this point was of no interest. No one mentions this point, except Harold's romantic biographer at the beginning of the thirteenth century. His statements are of no value, except as showing how long Harold's memory was cherished. According to him, Harold formally laid the matter before the Witan, and they unanimously voted that the oath—more, ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... was born in a house at the head of the College Wynd. When Johnson and Boswell returned to Edinburgh Jeffrey was a baby there seventeen days old. Some seventeen or eighteen years later 'he had the honour of assisting to carry the biographer of Johnson, in a state of great intoxication, to bed. For this he was rewarded next morning by Mr. Boswell clapping his head, and telling him that he was a very promising lad, and that if "you go on as you've begun, you may live to be a Bozzy ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... M. Zola's aim in writing it, and his views—as distinct from those of his characters—upon Lourdes, its Grotto, and its cures. A short time before the book appeared M. Zola was interviewed upon the subject by his friend and biographer, Mr. Robert H. Sherard, to whom he spoke ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Scotchman who came to London to push his literary fortunes. He received some encouragement from Lyttelton, but was disappointed in his hopes of any substantial aid from the British Maecenas. His biographer informs us that "about his thirteenth year, on Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' falling accidentally in his way, he was immediately struck with the picturesque descriptions of that much admired ancient bard and powerfully incited to imitate his style and manner."[34] In 1767 ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the sanctity of the tomb. Cant may talk of your "inter pocula" errors with pious horror; and pretension, now that its indulgence is safe, may affect to disclaim your acquaintance; but kinder, and better, and truer men than those who furnished your biographer with his facts will not fail to recollect your talents with pride, and your wit and your humour with ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... themselves, and some,—the brave Mackie, at Ciudad Rodrigo, for instance—successfully led forlorn-hopes. Finally, passing over the old sore of non-decoration for Peninsular services, since that, common to many regiments, is at last about to be healed,—Mr Robinson, the biographer of Sir Thomas Picton, has dared, in order to vindicate the harsh and partial conduct of his hero, to cast dust upon the facings of the brave boys of Connaught. It need hardly be said that they have found defenders. Of these, the most recent is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... since the great success in England of the former editions of these Memoirs, and the high reputation they have acquired on the European Continent, and in every part of the civilised world where the fame of Bonaparte has ever reached, sufficiently establish the merits of M. de Bourrienne as a biographer. These merits seem to us to consist chiefly in an anxious desire to be impartial, to point out the defects as well as the merits of a most wonderful man; and in a peculiarly graphic power of relating facts and anecdotes. With this happy faculty ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... written at a time when the author was busying himself not only with other literary work, but also with semi-private theatricals. John Forster, Charles Dickens's biographer and friend, even had some sort of fear at that time that Dickens was in danger of adopting the stage as a profession. Domestic troubles, culminating a year later in the separation from his wife, also explain the restlessness ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... and biographer, exerted an influence upon his character only second to that of his father. She married her cousin, M. Périer, also of a Parliamentary family, and Counsellor of the Court of Aides at Clermont. She was alike beautiful and accomplished, ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... contemporaries have told me incidents and recalled sayings right back to his early boyhood. This part of the material has been unusually rich and copious so that I could get a clearer picture of the boy and the young man than is usually granted to the biographer. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Sterne or Fielding, Horace Walpole or Boswell." The love of reading which Gibbon declared he would not exchange for all the treasures of India was, in fact, with Macaulay "a main element of happiness in one of the happiest lives that it has ever fallen to the lot of the biographer to record." ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... improved, Burke was enabled, in the summer of 1774, to travel from London to Bristol, to meet the electors there, in little more than four and twenty hours; but his biographer takes care to relate that he "travelled with incredible speed." Glasgow was still ten days' distance from the metropolis, and the arrival of the mail there was so important an event that a gun was fired to ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... of the Bronte story can give no idea of its undying interest, its exceeding pathos. Their life as told by their biographer Mrs Gaskell is as interesting as any novel. Their achievement, however, will stand on its own merits. Anne Bronte's two novels, it is true, though constantly reprinted, survive principally through ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Lord Macaulay's prose, strikingly shew how the same subject can be degraded or elevated by the mode of treatment; and how easily the historian or biographer, who expands his authorities by picturesque details, may brighten or darken characters ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... burn all those which were specially dear to herself, feeling confident that the remainder would not be disturbed. The destroyed MSS. without doubt included much that would have been of particular value to the biographer. ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... splendor after a morning of tempest, clouds, and darkness, it will be a fit companion for that of Hodgkinson. As a piece of composition, it is perhaps the very finest specimen to be found in any language of the unaffected, unadorned modest style that becomes a biographer, and particularly a writer of his ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... his bed at their disposal, his carpets at their feet. Everybody was kindly disposed towards the sick man and his family. His heart (and his mother's too, as we may fancy) melted within him at the thought of so much good-feeling and good-nature. Let Pen's biographer be pardoned for alluding to a time not far distant when a somewhat similar mishap brought him a providential friend, a kind physician, and a thousand proofs of a most touching ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Government of the day tried by statute after statute to suppress the tables at Tunbridge and Bath, thereby only driving the sharpers to new subterfuges. That the Beau was in alliance with sharpers, or, at least, that he was a sleeping partner in the firm, his biographer admits; but it is urged on his behalf that he was the most generous of winners, and again and again interfered to prevent the ruin of some gambler by whose folly he would himself have profited. His constant charity was well known; the money so lightly come by was ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... it proper to refer publicly, until the pages of one of our most respectable periodicals[B] reproduced the rumors, which were subsequently publicly refuted in the Boston Herald, by Mr. Webster's able biographer, George Ticknor Curtis. The friends of Mr. Webster would have been false to his memory and their own moral obligation had they failed to put forward the evidence in their possession to disprove the charges on which such rumors ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... years of Prince Henry, by one of his attendants, forms an authentic collection of juvenile anecdotes, which made me feel very forcibly that there are some children who deserve to have a biographer at their side; but anecdotes of children are the rarest of biographies, and I deemed it a singular piece of good fortune to have recovered such a remarkable evidence of the precocity of character.[A] Professor Dugald Stewart has noticed a fact in ARNAULD'S ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... in form, and displays the technical and conventional insincerity of the age.[2256] The augmentative form of the name Lorenzaccio expresses the notion that he was great, awful, and wicked.[2257] His biographer says that he was a "mattoid."[2258] He missed success because his antagonists were stronger than he, but his career was typical of the age. He was in part a victim of the classical suggestion. He expected to be glorified as a tyrannicide. This taste for the imaginative element ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... was growing up in Boston under the benignant, large-minded teachings of the Rev. James Freeman, the famous Dr. John M. Mason, at New York, was fiercely attacking the noble humanity of "The Universal Prayer." "In preaching," says his biographer, "he once quoted Pope's lines as to God's being adored alike 'by saint, by savage, and by sage,' and pronounced it (in his deepest ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... in Latin, as before mentioned. The biographer thinks that the busy life in London some time back, and the intrusion of the baby, account for this. These were hindrances, but were there no others? He is always overlooking a detail here and there that might be valuable ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... have the fascination of a romance united to the integrity of history. The work is written by a lady of considerable learning, indefatigable industry, and careful judgment. All these qualifications for a biographer and an historian she has brought to bear upon the subject of her volumes, and from them has resulted a narrative interesting to all, and more particularly interesting to that portion of the community ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... inconsistent; but who is there who is not? His theology probably had no more gaps in it than that of the latest and most enlightened preacher who denies miracles and affirms the Universal Benevolence. His present biographer, from intimate acquaintance with the class to which Zachariah belonged, takes this opportunity to protest against the general assumption that the Calvinists of that day, or of any day, arrived at their belief by putting out their eyes and accepting blindly the ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... Revolution. Shaw still talks entertainingly about this group. As far as I can make out, it was almost entirely female. When a book came out called A Girl among the Anarchists, G. B. S. was provoked to a sort of explosive reminiscence. "A girl among the anarchists!" he exclaimed to his present biographer; "if they had said 'A man among the anarchists' it would have been more of an adventure." He is ready to tell other tales of this eccentric environment, most of which does not convey an impression of a very bracing atmosphere. That revolutionary society must have contained ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... RETREAT.—Precisely when and why Washington came to a determination in his own mind to retreat has been made the subject of a somewhat nice historical inquiry. Gordon gives one story; Mr. William B. Reed, biographer of Colonel Reed, gives another; and Mr. Bancroft, General Carrington, and others indulge in more or less extended criticisms on the point. Gordon's account is the most ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... should be that bit of colour. There, take my scarlet cloak, and perch yourself yonder on that low rock. A few minutes will do. Was there ever immortality so cheaply purchased! Your biographer shall tell that you were the figure in that famous sketch—what will be called in the cant of art, one of Nina Kostalergi's earliest and happiest efforts. There, now, dear Mr. Donogan, do ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... esteem of Scotland at large. His "Life of Beattie," whom he befriended and patronised in life, as well as celebrated after his decease, was not long published, before the benevolent and affectionate biographer was called to follow the subject of his narrative. This melancholy event very shortly succeeded the marriage of the friend, to whom this introduction is addressed, with one of ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... biographer can record and dwell with fondness upon the acts of men and women, which were prompted by this power of ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... 1781, twenty years after a portion of it first appeared at Covent Garden.[3] Nor were censorship and a bad start his only problems as a playwright. He also, and apparently with good reason,[4] was fearful of piracy and was thus reluctant to have his plays printed. His eighteenth-century biographer Kirkman mentions Macklin's threats to "put the law against every offender of it, respecting my property, in full force."[5] His biographers also mention his practice of giving each actor only his own role at rehearsals while keeping the manuscript ...
— The Covent Garden Theatre, or Pasquin Turn'd Drawcansir • Charles Macklin
... believe there were columns about it in the Associated Press reports. I doubt not that Mr. Pendleton and Mr. Cornish each read it in the morning papers, and that the latter explained it to the former in Chicago. From these reports the future biographer may glean, if he happens to come into being and to care about it, certain interesting facts about the people of this history. He will learn that Mr. Barslow, having (with truly Horatian swimming powers) rescued President Elkins from a watery ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... the casual eye, in search of discovery, it would appear chaos." Wilson had no love for fine furniture, and he seems to have crowded his books together without regard to any system of classification. He had a habit of mixing his books around with fishing-tackle, and his charming biographer tells us it was no uncommon thing to find the "Wealth of Nations," "Boxiana," the "Faerie Queen," Jeremy Taylor, and Ben Jonson occupying close quarters with fishing-rods, boxing-gloves, and tins ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... his part, reciprocated in no small degree the feeling of admiration which his works had aroused in the young American. His biographer, John Forster, relates that Dickens called his attention to two sketches by Bret Harte, "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," in which, writes the biographer, "he had found such subtle strokes of character as he had not anywhere else in later years discovered; the manner ...
— Dickens in Camp • Bret Harte
... There was a brute strength in the neck and shoulders that would have been no inadequate endowment for a pugilist; yet this suggestion was offset by an expression of which his pictures had given scarcely a hint. It was not difficult to understand how his enthusiastic biographer had been carried away by that probity and sweetness, so that he made both himself and his hero ridiculous and aroused inextinguishable laughter among the arbiters of good taste. The subject was one that tempted men to violent opinions on one side or ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... Mr. Henley 157. It should also be noticed that the material added to Moore's 'Life' in the second and third collections consists almost entirely of letters which were already in print, and had been, for the most part, seen and rejected by the biographer. The material added in Mr. Murray's edition, on the contrary, consists mainly of letters which have never before been published, and were inaccessible to Moore when he wrote his ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... process by which scientific truths have been established cannot be so presented as even to appear to be in accordance with it." I quote from one of Mr. Ellis' contributions to the great work of Bacon's most learned, competent, and impartial biographer, Mr. Spedding. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... side Captain Cook, as his biographer relates, "was employed to procure accurate soundings of the channel between the Island of Orleans and the shore of Beauport—a service of great danger, which could only be performed in the night-time. He had scarcely finished ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... ambition to be other than that—it will only be by working in a different manner. A 'public' to appreciate the 'Hound of Heaven' is to me inconceivable." Mr. William Archer, an experienced judge of popular likes, was of the same opinion. "Yet," Francis Thompson's biographer tells us, "in the three years after Thompson's death the separate edition of the 'Hound of Heaven' sold fifty thousand copies; and, apart from anthologies, many more thousands were sold of the books containing it." When the "Hound of Heaven" ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson
... student, well versed in modern history and in architecture, and with a good head for arithmetic (did he add up the figures of the fortune of Janet Dalrymple entirely to his own satisfaction?), and he had the additional amazing distinction chronicled by his eulogising biographer— ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... under a spell by the flowing stream of his delightful monologue. He had been the friend in boyhood of Macaulay, and almost the first published words of the afterward famous writer had appeared in conjunction with a like youthful effort of Derwent Coleridge. Mr. Coleridge has been the biographer of Winthrop Praed and the editor of his poems, and only a year ago he published a touching tribute to John Moultrie. These two poets were also the companions in youth of Macaulay, and each was in a way a stimulus to the others in their first intellectual efforts. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... first-class letter-writing, like poetry, has been inspired by the ardour and freshness and audacity of youth. He lived so long that these letters could be published very soon after his death without much damage to the susceptibilities of those whom his hard hitting might concern; and, lastly, his biographer was a man of nerve, who loved colour and strong lineaments, and would always sacrifice minor considerations to the production of a striking historical portrait. Undoubtedly, Carlyle's letters have this virtue—that they largely contribute to the creation of a true ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... "There seemed," says this biographer, "to be not much to add to our knowledge of London until his books came upon us, but each in this respect outstripped the other in its marvels. In Nickleby, the old city reappears under every aspect; and whether warmth and light are playing over what is good and cheerful in it, or the veil ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... its place as one of the great biographies in our language. The inexplicable fact that hitherto no full biography of the first man to circumnavigate Australia has appeared is also a fortunate fact. Flinders has waited a century for his biographer, and it was worth this silence of a hundred years to find Ernest Scott.... And to this fervor of research must be added Ernest Scott's lucid literary style and his interest in the personal side of his subject. ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... off in the north side. Among these were Hemlock, Swan, Chair, Crown and Star Courts. The Row and its vicinity had for many years a notoriously bad reputation. One of the courts off Little Shear Alley was Boswell Court, not, as some have imagined, called after Johnson's biographer. This court was at one time a very fashionable place of residence; Lady Raleigh, the widow of Sir Walter, lived here for ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... ideas of Siegfried were contemporary with the Revolution of 1848, which Wagner took part in with the same enthusiasm he put into everything else. His recognised biographer, Herr Houston Stewart Chamberlain—who, with M. Henri Lichtenberger, has succeeded best in unravelling Wagner's complex soul, though he is not without certain prejudices—has been at great pains to prove that Wagner was always a patriot ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... only by his adopted name of Junipero, which he took out of reverence for the chosen companion of St. Francis, was a native of the Island of Majorca, where he was born, of humble folk, in 1713. According to the testimony of his intimate friend and biographer, Father Francesco Palou, his desires, even during boyhood, were turned towards the religious life. Before he was seventeen he entered the Franciscan Order, a regular member of which he became a year or so later. His favorite ...
— The Famous Missions of California • William Henry Hudson
... form of snuff, which he apparently used on Talleyrand's principle, that diplomacy was impossible without it. Bacon said, "Tobacco-smoking is a secret delight serving only to steal away men's brains." Newton abstained from it: the contrary is often claimed, but thus says his biographer, Brewster,—saying that "he would make no necessities to himself." Franklin says he never used it, and never met with one of its votaries who advised him to follow the example. John Quincy Adams used it in early youth, and after ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... on the literary development of Gorky can best be seen in one of the latter's letters to his biographer, Mr. Gorodetsky. "Write this," he says to his biographer, "write this without changing a single word: It is Korolenko who taught Gorky to write, and if Gorky has profited but little by the teaching of Korolenko, it is the fault of ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... no simple question for her biographer to answer off-hand. Lettice, as we know, had admitted into her heart a feeling of sympathetic tenderness for Alan, which, under other circumstances, she would have accepted as worthy to dominate her life and dictate its moods and duties. But the man for whom this sympathy had been aroused was ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... only a member of the Mather dynasty could justify, the ways of God to Boston men. Hawthorne and Whittier, Longfellow and Lowell knew this book well and found much honey in the vast carcass. To have had four such readers and a biographer like Barrett Wendell must be gratifying to Cotton Mather ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... crowning an early manhood in which love of any kind had, for better or worse, played hardly any part at all. Yet almost nothing in these beautiful and often brilliant lyrics is in any strict sense personal. The biographer who searches them for traits quivering with intimate experience searches all but in vain. Browning's own single and supreme passion touched no fountain of song, such as love sets flowing in most poets and in many who are not poets: even the memorable ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... content to do the grouping, toning, and proportioning of his picture for himself, under penalty of redundancy and confusion. People nowadays seldom do or think the right thing at the fitting moment; insomuch that the biographer, if he would be intelligible, must use his own discretion ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... compels attention. He is prejudiced against the Saracens, against the French, and against all the rivals or enemies of his master; but he is never guilty of deliberate misrepresentation. He is rather to be treated as a biographer than as a historian of the Crusade in its broader aspects. None the less he is the chief authority for the events of the years 1190-1192, so far as these are connected with the Holy Land. The Itinerarium Regis Ricardi (formerly attributed to Geoffrey Vinsauf, but in reality the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... was called upon to assist, conjointly with my three brothers, Moses, Raphael, and Mazliakh, and five sisters, in providing for the maintenance of the family." Moses, the eldest of his brothers, died at the age of thirty-two, and Joseph (the biographer) entered the business of Sabbati Zevi Morini of Pesaro. Being prosperous in his commercial pursuits, he provided for his sisters, probably by giving to each of them a suitable dowry. One of them, Flaminia by name, became the wife of a celebrated preacher, Nathaniel Levi, ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... de Graeme or Graham, who settled in Scotland in the twelfth century, became Lord of Glencardine, and the great castle was built by his son. They were indeed a noble race, as their biographer has explained. Ever fearless in their country's cause, they sneered at the mandates from impregnable Stirling, and were loyal in ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... his biographer, after thus expressing, in terms the most affectionate and flattering, his inability to say more that would add to a fame so great, so nobly and so rapidly won throughout Cuba, France, and Spain,—here he ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... William Curtis, Noyes, Wilkes, Opdyke, Horace Greeley, and some twenty-five others. In the movement were such prominent people as Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, and Benjamin F. Wade, of Ohio. One of the men favorable to the proposition was Governor Andrew of Massachusetts. "He," says his biographer, Peleg W. Chandler, "was very busy in the movement in 1864 to displace the President." "The secrecy," he adds, "with which this branch of the Republican politics of that year has been ever since enveloped is something marvelous; there ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... accustomed to the notion of great art as the product of a flawed life. But in the eighteenth century, an age largely devoted to the idea of discreet biography which concealed or minimized the subject's weaknesses, a man like Johnson presented formidable problems to the biographer and his readers. Although Courtenay merely versified material which other writers had discussed in much more detail, his poem is important because it synthesizes the conflicting attitudes towards Johnson which prevailed immediately after his death. Courtenay, like many others, ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... improving the English tongue. Had he written in Latin or on the sciences, the thing had been probable enough, but in the light in which it now stands, I think it very far from likely." From which it is evident that the biographer understood not the versatile nature of the Scot and his ability, especially when caught young, in "doing in Rome as the Romans do." Barclay's English education and foreign travel, together extending over the most impressionable years of his youth, ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... Aurelius Victor. By comparing these authors, it should seem that Maximin had the particular command of the Tribellian horse, with the general commission of disciplining the recruits of the whole army. His biographer ought to have marked, with more care, his exploits, and the successive steps of his ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... whose striking likeness to Dante in certain prominent features of character has been remarked by Foscolo, there are in Dante's minor works continual allusions to himself of great value as material for his biographer. Those who read attentively will discover that the tenderness he shows toward Francesca and her lover did not spring from any friendship for her family, but was a constant quality of his nature, and ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... war was closed by a brilliant success. But England owed to it more than this temporary advantage. It was a new beginning, the opening event of the period of splendid triumphs on the sea on the reputation of which we are still living. To quote the words of Rodney's latest biographer,[16] "it marked the beginning of that fierce and headlong yet well-calculated style of sea-fighting which led to Trafalgar, and made England undisputed mistress ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... 1856,—the paper of which Mr. Miller had been the editor from its establishment in 1840. It presents an authentic account of the circumstances attending his death, and is understood to be from the pen of the REV. WILLIAM HANNA, L.L.D., the son-in-law and biographer of Dr. Chalmers, and sometime editor ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... opium-eaters are tainted with the infirmity of leaving works unfinished and suffering reactions of disgust. But Coleridge taxed himself with that infirmity in verse before he could at all have commenced opium-eating. Besides, it is too much assumed by Coleridge and by his biographer that to leave off opium was of course to regain juvenile health. But all opium-eaters make the mistake of supposing every pain or irritation which they suffer to be the product of opium; whereas a wise man will say, 'Suppose you do leave off ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... June, Richard Henry Lee, in behalf of the Virginia delegates, submitted in Congress resolves on independence, a confederation, and foreign alliances. His biographer says that 'tradition relates that he prefaced his motion with a speech,' portraying the resources of the colonies and their capacity for defence, dwelling especially on the bearing which an independent position ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... be sorry to convey an impression that I am responsible for, or that I entirely agree with, the defence of the unhistoric which I have here recorded. I have given it in my capacity of editor and in some sort biographer, but am far from being prepared to maintain that it is likely, or indeed ought, to meet with the approval of any considerable number of Christians. But, surely, in these days of self-mystification it is refreshing ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... sensible, that the most worthy memorial of thy virtues will be found in those pure records of thy public services which thy own hand has given to the world with all the amiable and affecting simplicity that distinguished thy character, and in the more comprehensive composition of some accomplished Biographer, who may have opportunities and ability to do justice to ...
— The Eulogies of Howard • William Hayley
... subjects, I had hoped another reception for my works. I will own, indeed, that I am not always perfectly accurate in every circumstance, nor do I give so exact and circumstantial a detail of the actions of my heroes as may be expected from a biographer who has confined himself to one or two characters. A zeal to preserve the memory of great men, and to extend the influence of such noble examples, made me undertake more than I could accomplish in the first degree ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... of the subordinate rewards to which he looked forward. His death was to Livingstone a kind of scientific widowhood, and must have deprived him of a great spring to exertion in this last wandering. On Sir Roderick's part the affection for him was very great. "Looking back," says his biographer, Professor Geikie, "upon his scientific career when not far from its close, Murchison found no part of it which brought more pleasing recollections than the support he had given to African explorers—Speke, Grant, notably ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... King Nasone, as the lazzaroni nicknamed him; also to Padre Rocco, a popular preacher, and the idol of the lower classes of Neapolitans; and to Cardinal Perelli, remarkable for his simplicity, which quality, as may be supposed, loses nothing in passing through the hands of his present biographer. With his usual skill, M. Dumas glides from a ticklish story of which the cardinal is the hero, (a story that he does not tell, for which forbearance we give him due credit, since he is evidently sorely tempted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... the first half of the second century A.D.; biographer and historian; private secretary of the emperor Hadrian about 119-121; a friend of the younger Pliny, whom he accompanied to Bithynia in 112; wrote several works, of which only His "Lives of the Twelve ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... popular poet, he was the creator of the older national hymn and other patriotic songs; an ardent lover of his country, opposed to Danish influences in politics and culture; strictly orthodox and a powerful orator. Hauge. Hans Nilsen Hauge (1771-1824), a peasant lay-preacher, of whom a biographer has said: "Since the Reformation no single man has had so profound an influence on ecclesiastical and Christian life in Norway." The "Haugian revival" of the emotional religious life is proverbial. Its value was great in every way; directly and also by his widely distributed writings it fostered ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... his heart; and when he had taken his last farewell of his wife, he said, "The bitterness of death is now over." He suffered the sentences of his judges with resignation and composure. Some of his expressions (says his biographer) imply much good-humour in this last extremity. The day before his execution, he was seized with a bleeding at the nose. "I shall not now let blood to divert this distemper," said he to Burnet, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 322, July 12, 1828 • Various
... survived her sister, Princess Elizabeth, the Landgravine of Hesse Homburg, only eight months. Princess Augusta carried away with her many memories of the Court of George III. By a coincidence, the lady who may almost be called the Princess's biographer, at least whose animated sketches and affectionate praises of her "dear Princess Augusta" were destined to give the world of England its principal knowledge of an amiable princess, died at a great age the same year. Madame D'Arblay, ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... two factors are responsible for making all living organisms what they are. When a naturalist attempts to unfold the life-history of any animal, he proceeds precisely on these same lines. Biography is really a branch of Natural History; and the biographer who discusses his hero as the resultant of these two tendencies, follows the scientific method as rigidly as Mr. Darwin in studying "Animals and ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... an unrivalled charm. "This master of asceticism," writes a biographer[3] of St. Ignatius Loyola, "loved the garden and loved the flowers. In the balcony of his study he sat gazing on the stars: it was then Lainez heard him say: 'Oh, how earth grows base to me when I look on Heaven!' . . . The like imaginative strain, so scorned of our petty day, inhered in ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... her Serene Highness kept fond motherly records of the babyhood and childhood of the Queen? If so, what a rich mine it would be for a poor bewildered biographer like me, required to make my foundation bricks with only a few golden bits of straw. I have searched the chronicles of the writers of that time; I have questioned loyal old people, but have found or gained little that ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... meaning of the recognition. "It is observable, that the ancient writers almost always speak of our kings as elected. Edwy's grandmother in her charter, (Lye, App. iv.) says, "He was chosen, gecoren." The contemporary biographer of Dunstan, (apud Boll. tom. iv. Maii, 344.) says, "Ab universis ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip |
