"Biography" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Massachusetts Historical Society, who have honored the author with their presidency for eight years past. It is rather an autobiography than a biography, and an autobiography of the most trustworthy kind, 'written accidentally and unconsciously, as it were, in familiar letters or private journals, or upon the records of official service.' Such a Life is the volume before us. The most skilful use has been made of his material by our author. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... this period Bracciolini commenced the forgery of the Annals. In noticing the preliminary steps to that fabrication, and then glancing back at a few circumstances peculiar to his age, while touching upon some incidents hitherto passed over in his biography, we shall have all the necessary lights and shades in his life that will be of use to us in the maintenance ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... facts in political science, and that liberal view of institutions, habits, and manners, differing in some degree from his own, by which his philosophical writings are so eminently distinguished. Here, as in the biography of almost all other really great men, it is found, that some circumstances apparently trivial or accidental have given a permanent bent to their mind; have stored it with the appropriate knowledge, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... Esq., Norroy King of Arms, whose splendid Biography of Illustrious Personages stands an unrivalled specimen of historical literature, and magnificent illustration. Of Mr. Lodge's talent for the task he has undertaken, we need only appeal to his former productions. It contains the exact ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... impartial biography of John Macrossan should ever be written, it will prove interesting ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... Volumes will include all classes of Literature, both copyright and non-copyright; Biography, History, Voyages, Travels, Poetry, sacred and secular, Books of Adventure and Fiction. They will include Translations of Foreign Books, and also such American Literature as may be considered ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... Barrie production which gave him perhaps more pleasure than anything he did in his whole stage life. The advent of "Peter Pan" was at hand. The remarkable story of how Charles got the manuscript of "Peter Pan" has already been told in this biography. ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... authoritative book on Nietzsche's life and works and to read all that is there said on the subject. Those who can read German will find an excellent guide, in this respect, in Frau Foerster-Nietzsche's exhaustive and highly interesting biography of her brother: "Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsche's" (published by Naumann); while the works of Deussen, Raoul Richter, and Baroness Isabelle von Unger-Sternberg, will be found to throw useful and necessary light upon ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... by Prince Bismarck to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 1st of January, relating to the biography of the late Mr. Motley. His Highness deeply regrets that the state of his health and pressure of business do not allow him to contribute personally, and as largely as he would be delighted to do, to your depicting of a friend whose memory will ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of our Country, and more particularly when our national History becomes the Biography of eminent Englishmen, English Heraldry has the strongest claims upon the attention not only of all Historians, but also of all who desire to become familiar with their writings. In like manner, Heraldry may be studied with no less of advantage than of satisfaction by all Artists, whether ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... knew about it, "still lived." They had—or said they had—bought some land. I have not heard of their receiving any oil raised from their own wells. They have sent off a monstrous quantity of circulars, prospectuses and advertisements. They caused a portrait and biography of the Honorable A. Bee to be printed in a very respectable periodical, and paid five hundred dollars for it. They had themselves systematically puffed up to the seventh heaven in a long series of articles in another periodical, and paid the ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... No biography of Governor Hancock has ever been written. The record of his life flutters only in newspaper paragraphs, letters, and chance mention in ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... a somewhat generous scale and intended to sell at a high price, the size of the type being merely incidental to this plan. These include books of travel, history, or biography in several volumes, somewhat high-priced sets of standard authors, and books intended ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... first to examine the subject critically. They separated—so far as was then possible (1871)—the real from the traditional Giorgione, and their account of his life and works must still rank as the nearest equivalent to a modern biography. Morelli, who followed in 1877, was in singular sympathy with his task, and has written of his favourite master enthusiastically, yet with consummate judgment. Among living authorities, Dr. Gronau, Herr Wickhoff, Signor Venturi, and Mr. Bernhard Berenson have contributed effectively to the elucidation ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... her head in the air as she held the door. "No, we don't want any to-day. We HAVE the biography of Abraham Lincoln. Don't want to subscribe to any Home Book of Art. We're not artistic; we use drapes in our parlors. Don't want 'The Wives and ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... and were commissioned to declare it. The presence of the Holy Spirit no more preserved men from errors in science in the one case than in the other. One may as well seek to study surveying in a biography of Washington, as the details of ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... the room that evening he read "The City" bore evidence of the playwright's personality. The paintings and bric-a-brac, the books—mostly biography and letters—the tapestries which seemed to blend with the bowls of flowers and furniture of French design, the windows looking out on lawns, gardens, and a pond with swans upon it, the moonlight on the Cupids that kept guard at intervals along the top of a snakelike stone fence—and Fitch, vital, ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... light fiction, the mind is directed away from the really important things of life. The reading of children should be thoughtfully controlled, both as to quality and quantity. Exciting stories should, as a rule, be excluded, but a taste for biography, historical and scientific writings, and for the great works of literature should be cultivated. Simple fairy tales which have a recognized value in developing the imagination of the child need not be omitted, but it is of vital importance that the ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... by the warm and large, and generous-hearted Chalmers, dwelt richly in her whose biography we have tremblingly attempted to portray. She knew little of the soothing influences of nature and solitude. Her life's work was spent in this city, so cosmopolitan, composed, almost, of every creed ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... The early biography of Archibald Cameron is interesting. As the youngest son of old Lochiel, he, with his famous brother 'the gentle Lochiel,' set about reforming the predatory habits of their clan, with considerable success. Archibald went to Glasgow University, and read Moral Philosophy ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... even Lady Hercules, which is my mother. They say "like master, like man," and I may add, "like lady, like maid." Lady Hercules was fine, but her maid was still finer. Most people when they write their biography, if their parents were poor, inform you that they left them a good name and nothing else. Some parents cannot even do that; but all parents can at all events leave their children a pretty name, by taking a little trouble ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... Inquisition at Valladolid—that under the name of D. Riz, as he called it, he had known the lovely Queen of Scots—was a LITTLE too much. "Sir," then I said, "you were speaking about a Miss Bechamel. I really have not time to hear all of your biography." ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... non-human attributes. This enormous incongruity, not the exception but the rule, the current theory fails to explain. Suppose it to be granted that the great terrestrial and celestial objects and agents naturally become personalized; it does not follow that each of them shall have a specific human biography. To say of some star that he was the son of this king or that hero, was born in a particular place, and when grown up carried off the wife of a neighbouring chief, is a gratuitous multiplication of incongruities already sufficiently great; ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... was invariably sound and sane. He advised El Gitano, as he sometimes called Borrow, "to avoid Spanish historians and POETRY like Prussic acid; to stick to himself, his biography and queer adventures," {343a} to all of which Borrow promised obedience. Ford wrote to Borrow (Feb. 1841) suggesting that The Bible in Spain should be what it actually was. "I am delighted to hear," he wrote, "that you meditate giving us your travels in Spain. The ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... time his visions and revelations possessed him; he did not possess nor control them. In later years the spirit of the prophet was more subject to the prophet. But the Koran is an unintelligible book unless we can connect it with the biography of its writer. All the incidents of his life took shape in some revelation. A separate revelation was given to encourage or to rebuke him; and in his later years the too subservient inspiration came to appease the jealousy ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... assert that Soulavie only lent his name to the work. They also call attention to the fact that a History of Madame de Pompadour, by Mlle. Fouque, was published in London, as early as 1759. But no such general history, or biography, could possibly have the intimate value of a document written at the closest range of its subject. "These Memoirs," say the French editors, "give a faithful portrait of Madame de Pompadour.... They are ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... uttered at such a time, would have had the weight of a command; and from that day to this pious affection has carried out in the spirit as well as to the letter the desire of the dying man. No biography of Cooper has, in consequence, ever appeared. Nor is it unjust to say that the sketches of his career, which are found either in magazines or cyclopaedias, are not only unsatisfactory on account of their incompleteness, but are all in greater or ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... professor in the Catholic University of Louvain, where his name was one of the principal glories of this now wrecked seat of learning. Thence he went as professor to Liege, where he died. He was, says his biography in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, "of a peculiarly gentle and amiable character and remained a devout Catholic throughout his life." Schwann's experiments tended to show that the introduction of air—of course containing oxygen—did not ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... of years of imprisonment so infernal in its unnatural stupidity and panic-stricken cruelty, that their advocates can disavow neither the dagger nor the bomb without stripping the mask of justice and humanity from themselves also. Be it noted that at this very moment there appears the biography of one of our dukes, who, being Scotch, could argue about politics, and therefore stood out as a great brain among our aristocrats. And what, if you please, was his grace's favorite historical episode, which he declared he never read without intense satisfaction? ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... some time, and find out what he means by it," Wingrave said. "I don't want to find my biography in the American newspapers. It might interfere with my operations there. Here's this woman coming to worry us! You take her off, Aynesworth! I shall go into ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... are not critical. If you are, then get thee to a library and bury thyself in books of biography, for portrait painters were deceivers ever, historical ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... my part, that Mr. Rawdon's marriage was one of the honestest actions which we shall have to record in any portion of that gentleman's biography which has to do with the present history. No one will say it is unmanly to be captivated by a woman, or, being captivated, to marry her; and the admiration, the delight, the passion, the wonder, the unbounded confidence, and frantic ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a New Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Biography; comprising about 12,000 Memoirs. New Edition, with Supplement. Fcap. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 33, June 15, 1850 • Various
... very great. 'The sports of childhood satisfy the child:' the sorrows of childhood overwhelm the poor little thing. We think a sympathetic reader would hardly read without a tear as well as a smile, an incident in the early life of Patrick Fraser Tytler, recorded in his recently published biography. When five years old he got hold of the gun of an elder brother, and broke the spring of its lock. What anguish the little boy must have endured, what a crushing sense of having caused an irremediable evil, before he sat down ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... other, and to call either they always shouted "Poet-and-Pythagoras!" Some other names had been known coupled in a like manner. Thus for two years I was the school friend of poor Louis Lambert; and during that time my life was so identified with his, that I am enabled now to write his intellectual biography. ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... the value of biography depends upon the judgment and taste of the biographer: but on the contrary it may be maintained, that the merits of a biographer are inversely as the extent of his intellectual powers and of his literary talents. A plain unvarnished ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... proceeded to tell me that whenever Gladstone entered a bookshop he made a practice of buying everything in sight. That magnificent, sweeping gesture of his comprehended everything—theology, history, social science, folk-lore, medicine, travel, biography—everything that came to ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... form a somewhat gloomy prelude to a biography. Yet the student of Shelley's life, the sincere admirer of his genius, is almost forced to strike a solemn key-note at the outset. We are not concerned with one whose "little world of man" for good or ill was perfected, but with one whose growth was interrupted just before the synthesis ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... new Hypothesis of the Universe" of Thomas Wright, whose anticipations of modern speculation on the milky way, the central sun, and some other points, make him one of the most remarkable astronomical thinkers of his day. In the biography in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1793, he is described as struggling for a livelihood when a young man, and no account is given of the manner in which he obtained the handsome competence with which he emerges in 1756, or thereabouts. A few ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... divines who engaged in this controversy, a Jesuit named Andrew Patton, whom Mr. Oliver, in his biography of the Order, pronounces to have been a man of distinguished ability, very frankly owns his deficiencies. "A. P. having been eighteen years out of his own country, pretends not yet to any perfection of the English expression or orthography." His orthography is indeed deplorable. In one of his letters ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... if I did not mention, as a curiosity, the biography of M. and Mme. de Combray, united in one person in the "Dictionaire Historique" (!!!) of Larousse. It is unique of its kind. Names, places and facts are all wrong. And the crowning absurdity is that, borne out by these fancies, fragments are given of the supposed Memoires that ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... whatsoever. Or, from another angle, how many readers buy novels, and buy them to keep? How many modern novels does one find well bound, and placed on the shelves devoted to "standard reading"? In these Olympian fields a mediocre biography, a volume of second-rate poems, a rehash of history, will find their way before the novels that in the last decade have equaled, if not outranked, the rest of our ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Trinity College, where he introduced me to Mr. Thomas Warton, with whom we passed a part of the evening. We talked of biography—JOHNSON. 'It is rarely well executed. They only who live with a man can write his life with any genuine exactness and discrimination; and few people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him. The chaplain of ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... of the British Empire. I have another motive also: I should wish to contribute some information bearing upon any future account of the life of the late Duke of Newcastle. He is dead: and, so far, no one has attempted to write his biography. That may be reserved for another generation. He was the Colonial Minister under whose rule and guidance the foundations of the great measure of Confederation were, undoubtedly, laid; and to him, more than to any minister since Lord ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... Farquharson, of which I was heartily tired after hearing little else for the last three days. I could not help wondering how the verbose and pompous major had paraphrased and condensed that inchoate mass of biography and reminiscence into an orderly account for his wife and niece. He had doubtless devoted the whole afternoon to it. Sitting under the cool green of the lemon-trees, beneath a sky powdered with stars, I reflected that I, at ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... more ancient than their own. Bengal has given many illustrious sons to the empire. Among the dead I may mention Pandits Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Kissari Mohan Ganguli, whose vast learning was eclipsed by their zeal for social service; Dr. Sambhu Chandra Mukharji, whose biography I wrote in 1895; and Mr. Umesh Chandra Banarji, a lawyer who held his own with the flower of our English bar. A Bengali Brahmin is still with us who directs one of the greatest contracting firms in the empire. How much brighter would India's outlook be if this highly-gifted race were ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... where there is one who has been able to struggle on under the habits of intemperance, there are thousands who have perished in the experiment, and some among the most powerful minds that the world ever produced. On the other hand, we shall find, by looking over the biography of the great men of every age, that those who have possessed the clearest and most powerful minds, neither drank spirits nor indulged in the pleasures of the table. Sir Isaac Newton, John Locke, Dr. Franklin, John Wesley, Sir William Jones, John Fletcher, and President Edwards, furnish a striking ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... of the 'reformed drunkards,' and eschews Madeira especially. He is now an attorney, in embryo, and gives ample promise of carrying into his profession all the acuteness and cunning which distinguished his exploits on the memorable night that opened this chapter in the biography of Mr. ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... the kirk-yard behind Cairnforth Manse covers the poor body in which it dwelt for more than forty years, I feel it might do good to many, and would do harm to none, if I related the story—a very simple one, and more like a biography than a tale—of Charles Edward Stuart ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... threw the coasts of England and Scotland—are matters comparatively well known to Americans; but the incidents of his subsequent career have been veiled in obscurity, which is dissipated by this biography. A book like this, narrating the actions of such a man, ought to meet with an extensive sale, and become as popular as Robinson Crusoe in fiction, or Weems's Life of Marion and Washington, and similar books, in fact. ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... giving particulars of a dinner at the Dillys', booksellers, in the Poultry, at which he met Goldsmith and Johnson, with several other literary characters. His anecdotes of the conversation, of course, go to glorify Dr. Johnson; for, as he observes in his biography, "His conversation alone, or what led to it, or was interwoven with it, is the business of this work." Still on the present, as on other occasions, he gives unintentional and perhaps unavoidable gleams of Goldsmith's good sense, which show that the latter only wanted ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... organized biographical bureau, by which every man, President or private, has his lot apportioned him,—one mulcted in a folio, the other in a paragraph. If we examine somewhat closely the features of this peculiar institution, we shall learn that a distinguishing characteristic of the new school of biography is the astonishing familiarity shown by the narrator with the circumstances, the conversations, and the very thoughts of remarkable boys in their early life. The incidents of childhood are usually forgotten before the man's renown has given them any importance; the few anecdotes which tradition ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... at his inharmonious surroundings at home. The very atmosphere, therefore, of this great city, laden with the hum of activity, was stimulating and even intoxicating to his boundless ambition. He had been a great reader. Biography had been his favorite pastime. He knew the struggles and triumphs of many of our most conspicuous merchant princes. Not a few familiar names, displayed on great buildings which towered over the tops of their smaller neighbors, greeted his eyes as he approached the city by boat, and ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... his sermon, but his thoughts were inclined to wander. Sir Morton Pippitt, the Duke of Lumpton, and Lord Mawdenham hovered before him like three dull puppets in a cheap show; and he was inclined to look up the name of Marius Longford in one of the handy guides to contemporary biography, in order to see if that flaccid and fish-like personage had really done anything In the world to merit his position as a shining luminary of the 'Savage and Savile.' Accustomed as he was to watch the ebb and flow of modern literature, he had not yet sighted either the Longford straw or the ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... The biography of Gilpin Horner, and the marvellous pedestrian page, who travelled twice as fast as his master's horse, without the aid of seven-leagued boots, are 'chefs d'oeuvre' in the improvement of taste. For incident we have the invisible, but by no means sparing box on the ear bestowed ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... appearance of them in succession is what we mean by the 'workings' of the idea. According to what they are, does the trueness or falseness which the idea harbored come to light. These tendencies have still earlier conditions which, in a general way, biology, psychology and biography can trace. This whole chain of natural causal conditions produces a resultant state of things in which new relations, not simply causal, can now be found, or into which they can now be introduced,—the relations namely which we epistemologists ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... hundred writers of history, philosophy, biography, travel, poetry, plays, fiction, etc., with a large number of translated extracts grouped under the above headings and arranged in ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... the extant authors of antiquity, and, supplying the deficiency of materials by fictions of their own imagination, have arranged what they call a life of Anacreon. These specious fabrications are intended to indulge that interest which we naturally feel in the biography of illustrious men; but it is rather a dangerous kind of illusion, as it confounds the limits of history and romance, and is too often supported ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... southern end of the saloon. The group on the eastern pediment originally represented the birth of Minerva. The visitor will probably be first attracted to the great recumbent figure marked 93, generally believed to have represented Theseus, the Athenian hero, whose biography opens the series of Plutarch's Lives. The figure is now much mutilated; the nose has been chipped, and the feet are wanting, but still the form reclining on a rock is majestic. Mr. Westmacott, in a lecture, gave ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... that Frederic would not have said this of a work like that of M. de Schloezer; and as to Chasot, it is not too much to say that, after the days of Mollwitz and Hohenfriedberg, the day on which M. de Schloezer undertook to write his biography was perhaps the most fortunate for ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... name at all; in which case it is somewhat more than probable that these memoirs would never have appeared; or, if they had, that being comprised within a couple of pages, they would have possessed the inestimable merit of being the most concise and faithful specimen of biography, extant in the literature of ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... know still less; we can observe something, we can get more from hearsay; but that is a chaos of impressions; the larger part is inference and construction, a work of the imagination, which may or may not be true. Even the biography, carefully made from all available data in the way of personal recollections, letters, and diaries, although it may approach to wholeness, remains, nevertheless, very largely a construction, a work ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... Solomon's Song now ready for publication. But it is so difficult now-a-days to find a publisher for such a subject. The rage is for sentimental sermons, or else for fiction (f) under a thin disguise of religious biography." ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... adjoined hers. This was many years ago. She had been on the verge of turning over to the college a great deal of interesting data regarding Brooke Hamilton which was private family history. Doctor Burns, then president of Hamilton, was to write the biography of the lovable founder of our college. After the falling-out with the Board member she refused to give up the data. Since then she has ignored the college. Brooke Hamilton's biography ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... horses, cafes, avenues and squares, a city of 60,000, a whole county, are being named after him, and minor poets are taking his name in vain daily, "Hindenburg Marches" are being composed in endless procession, a younger brother is about to publish his biography, and legends are already thickly clustering about his name. He laid the Russian bugaboo before it had a chance to make its debut; there is not today the slightest nervousness about the possible coming of the Cossacks, and there will not be, so long as the Commander in Chief of all the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... aloud at the pitiful imposture. Another device was to create points of interest, like a series of shrines along a tedious road, which should present some aspect of allurement. There was a book-shop here or an art-shop there; yesterday a biography of Napoleon was exhibited in the one, or a print of Murillo's 'Flight into Egypt,' in the other; and it is become a matter of speculation whether they were there to-day. Just as a solitary sailor will beguile the tedium of empty days at sea by a kind of cribbage, in ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... the Edinburgh Review, and to the dawn of the criticism with which we are, unhappily, only too familiar in our own time. From criticism we pass, in the extract from Ellwood's life of himself, to biography and social history, to the most vivid account we have of Milton as a personality and in private life. Next comes a series of pamphlets illustrating social and literary history in the reigns of Anne and George I., opening with ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... with much that, so far as we see, was universal and will endure for ever. It is in failing to note the special and transitory element, and the limitations which it imposed on the hero's greatness, that Carlyle's noble biography runs into poetry, and departs from historic truth. To supply this defect is the proper work of rational criticism; but the criticism which begins with "Philistine" is not ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... eyelids in a non-committal manner which might be taken either for assent or denial. She was afraid to confess ignorance of the Johnson family, lest Aunt Margaret's love of biography should take a further flight in order to recall Sarah Wedderburn's cousin to ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... literary achievements, of finding it intolerable, of breaking down, and of never doing any really good work after her release, through much more than half of her long life. On this fact critical biography has fastened almost exclusively. Macaulay, in one of his most brilliant and best known essays, represents the world as having been deprived of unknown quantities of admirable work by the misplaced kindness, and the positive unkindness, of Queen Charlotte. Some have agreed ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... the private biography of Mr. Ivy, and it is quite possible that he may have possessed endearing traits which he had no opportunity to manifest in our intercourse. It would be foolish and futile for the ends I have in view in this writing to cite or comment ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... and Mr. Silsbee, and, for friendly counsel, Prof. Dowden; and I must particularly thank Lady Shelley for conveying to me her husband's courteous message and permission to use passages of letters by Mrs. Shelley, interspersed in this biography. ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... dry sum of a charming Court biography, which first appeared in a periodical published in 1829, in Silesia, and which has been twice republished in a separate form—once (in 1838) at Brieg, under the title of "Passages from the Life of Dorothea Sibylla, Duchess of Liegnitz and Brieg." It purports to consist of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... sympathize particularly with him. We find that his goodness shines as prominently as does his genius, and we feel that it can bear any test at any epoch of, alas! his too short existence. As, however, I do not purpose here to write his biography, I shall confine myself merely to a few instances, and will give only a few proofs taken from his early life. To no one can the words of Alfieri be better applied than to Byron:—"He is the continuation of the child"—an idea which has been expressed even more elegantly of late by Disraeli, ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... which Horace Walpole has supplied in the Anecdotes of Painting (see Works, vol. iii. p. 189.); but his diplomatic negotiations, and his career as an artist and adventurer, never forgetting his academy at Whitefriars and Bethnal Green, would furnish matter for a very amusing volume. The general biography, however, to which he would be most appropriately remitted, and which is still a desideratum in literature, is that which is proposed by Dr. Johnson, in Chalmers's ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 77, April 19, 1851 • Various
... warms and illumines whole generations; they are the few who, born with rich endowments, by ceaseless labor develop their powers until they become capable of work which, were it not for them, could not be done at all. History is the biography of aristocrats, of the chosen ones with whom all improvement originates, who found States, establish civilizations, create literatures, and teach wisdom. They work not for themselves; for in spite of human selfishness and the personal aims of the ambitious, the poet, ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... publishing, and Mr. Symington has the advantage, in treating of Lover, of writing from personal knowledge. He has rather slurred over the earlier part of Lover's career, apparently from a fear of trespassing on the preserves of a longer biography previously published; which is a pity, as his sketch will have most interest for readers who come fresh to the subject. Even those whose curiosity in regard to the writer has not been stirred by reading his works may get a very good idea of them from the selections printed here. The book is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... Administration-ward. The police accident report is detailed and in triplicate. There is sure to be in the "personal files" at Culebra a history of the deceased and the names of his nearest relative or friend both on the Isthmus and in the States; for every employee must make out his biography at the time of his engagement. There are men whose regular duty it is to list and take care of his possessions down to the last lead pencil, and to forward them to the legal heirs. A year's pay goes to his family—were as much required of every employer and his the burden of proving the accident ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... the subject of this biography, was born on the 2d of November, 1755. Few of the inhabitants of this world have commenced life under circumstances of greater splendor, or with more brilliant prospects of a life replete with happiness. She was ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... cemetery of Pere la Chaise. Fresh funeral wreaths continue to this day to be hung on the ornamental bronze railings round the tomb by the Countess's own hand. She lives in the strictest retirement at Versailles. Not long since she published a biography of her deceased husband. The work throws no light whatever on the name that was really his own or on the secret history of his life—it is almost entirely devoted to the praise of his domestic virtues, the assertion of his rare abilities, and the enumeration of the honours conferred on ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... her intelligence and imagination, drawing, moulding, enlightening her. In the library of a somewhat grim hotel at Avila, in old Castile, she lighted upon an English translation of the life of St. Theresa—that woman of countless practical activities, seer and sybil, mystic and wit. The amazing biography set her within the magic circle of Christian feminine beatitude; and opened before her gaze mighty perspectives of spiritual increase, leading upward through unnumbered ranks of prophets, martyrs, saints, angelic powers, to the feet of the ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Oh, do you not know who Busie is? Have you forgotten? Then I will tell you her biography all over again, briefly, and in the very same words I used when telling it you once on a ...
— Jewish Children • Sholem Naumovich Rabinovich
... "Noble Blood," and "Love—or a Name," are the novels which I have written since my return; and I also published a biography, "Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife." I cannot conscientiously say that I have found the literary profession—in and for itself—entirely agreeable. Almost everything that I have written has been written from necessity; and there is very little of it that I shall not be glad to ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... Mr. Edgeworth of Edgeworthstown now permits that these letters should be read beyond the limits of the family circle. An editor has had little more to do than to make a selection, and to write such a thread of biography as might unite ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... noon, in the distance toward which he was heading, Blair detected a brown dot against the white. Steadily, as he advanced, it resolved itself into the thing he had expected, and stood revealed before him, the centre of a horribly legible page, the last page in the biography of a noble horse. Let us pass it by: Ben did, looking the other way. But a new and terrible vitality possessed him. His weariness left him, as pain passes under an opiate. He did not pause to eat, to drink. Tireless as a waterfall, watchful as ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... when greatly alarmed. There is some evidence that he aimed at saying good things; though it must be confessed that the wit is not of a high order. Altogether he has more character than most Oriental monarchs; and the monotony of Arsacid biography is agreeably interrupted by the idiosyncrasy which ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... indicated American parentage, while all but three of the non-jokers had foreign names. Abraham Lincoln is, of course, the great example of this tendency to introduce the element of humour into the graver concerns of life; and his biography narrates many instances of its most happy effect. All the newspapers, including the religious weeklies, have ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Sweeting, indeed, is really worthy of a biography, its history was so romantic, its fate so sad. Let me try ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... interested enough in him to wonder what his politics or religion might be if anything so stupendous as a religious or political idea, or a general idea of any sort, were to occur to him. He is tolerable as a child; but he never becomes a man, and might be left out of his own biography altogether but for his usefulness as a stage confidant, a Horatio or "Charles his friend" what they call on ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... he recognised her window as an adaptation of Fra Angelico's picture, and he told her how the saint had wandered from monastery to monastery painting pictures on the walls. More he could not tell her, but he promised to procure a small biography of the saint. She received the book a few days after, and as she turned over the leaves she heard the children coming home from school, and she took the book out to them, for her sight was failing, and they read bits of it aloud, and she frightened them by dropping on her knees ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... history, but could you write one now? Even for a biography, you would have to read and study for months—perhaps years. As to the social questions you have been treating, men generally change their opinions about such things when they know a little more; and who would utter his opinions, knowing ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... peculiar caption the auto-biography of a man who for a number of years has figured very largely in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In his preface he says that, intermingled with this unwritten history, is the story of his life. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... more comprehensive than its title implies. Purporting to tell the life of the Prince Consort, it includes a scarcely less minute biography—which may be regarded as almost an autobiography—of the Queen herself; and, when it is complete, it will probably present a more minute history of the domestic life of a queen and her 'master' (the term is Her Majesty's) than has ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... his court with success to the great, in one uniform clothing of Norwich drugget. I have eat tarts with him and Madam Reeve at the Mulberry Garden, when our author advanced to a sword and a Chadreux wig."—Page 99 [This letter is a famous crux in the biography of Dryden. It has been suggested that the writer was Southerne, but it is impossible to make things tally. As Dryden certainly had paid his court to the great by 1670, if not by 1665, there is the almost insuperable difficulty of supposing that the writer could have associated with Dryden in ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... Johnson has said, in those familiar words in his epitaph, that he touched nothing which he did not adorn, and whose character has been very much misunderstood, chiefly by reason of the misrepresentations of Boswell. This parasite of Johnson, who has given us one of the most entertaining books of biography ever written, was jealous not only of Goldsmith's literary reputation, so far as it might rival that of his special idol, but also of the real hold which Goldsmith, because of his simplicity as well as his genius, had upon the affections of the great moralist. While he was himself ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... one little community where a community building would be erected which would be used as a school in daytime, a motion-picture house at night, and a church on Sunday. A community secretary would have his office here, and would have charge of a select little library of fiction, poetry, biography, and works of reference. The leading periodicals dealing with farm problems, sociology, and economics, as well as lighter subjects, would be on file. In connection with this building would be an assembly-room suitable for dances, social events, and theatricals, and equipped with a player ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... Child (HUTCHINSON) Mr. PHILIP GIBBS has chosen a difficult theme—the story of a broken home, told from the child's point of view, and he has handled it like an artist. Of the three books into which this biography of Nicholas Barton is divided, the first is so much the best that the second seems a little tame. This was, of course, inevitable, for the first book is the thunderstorm, the second the gentle rain which follows it. I have another reason ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various
... cut a convict figure, The very Botany Bay in moral geography; Their loyal treason, renegado rigour, Are good manure for their more bare biography. Wordsworth's last quarto, by the way, is bigger Than any since the birthday of typography; A drowsy frowzy poem, call'd the 'Excursion.' Writ in a ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... Auto-biography of men, who held no distinguished rank in the political world, is often very pleasant reading; especially where the writer has a strong tincture of vanity, and is obviously blind to his own character; for, if he does not know it himself, he is sure to let his readers know it; if he does not see ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various
... the least forceful; but her position was one of peculiar difficulty, and she apparently took pains to adjust herself with tact and dignity to conditions which her more spirited successors would have found unbearably galling. Professor George Herbert Palmer, in his biography of his wife, epitomizes the early situation when he says that Mr. Durant "had, it is true, appointed Miss Ada L. Howard president; but her duties as an executive officer were nominal rather than real; neither his disposition, ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... abbot of St. Evroul. In the thirty-third year of his age, he was ordained a priest; and thenceforward his life wore away in study and tranquillity. Aged and infirm, he completed his Ecclesiastical History, in the sixty-seventh year of his age; and this great and valuable work ends with his auto-biography, which is written in an affecting strain of simplicity and piety.—The Ecclesiastical History of Ordericus is divided into parts: the first portion contains an epitome of the sacred and profane history of the world, beginning with the incarnation, and ending with Pope Innocent IInd. The ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... Huxley's life has been fully given in the interesting biography edited by Mr. Leonard Huxley. (32/2. "Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley." London 1900.) Readers of this book and of the "Life and Letters of Charles Darwin" gain an insight into the relationship between this pair of friends to which any words ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... lieutenant of William Randolph Hearst, she became acquainted with the writings of Fourier. Brisbane then was not yet submerged in the swamp of political corruption. He sent Emma Goldman an amiable letter to Blackwell's Island, together with the biography of his father, the enthusiastic ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... a library, you will find much information about Wales in Social England, the Dictionary of National Biography, the publications of the Cymmrodorion and other societies. You will find articles of great value and interest over the names of F. H. Haverfield, J. W. Willis-Bund, Egerton Phillimore, the Honourable ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... honor,—we turn away and say, Poor Walter Scott! How desolately touching is the account in Lockhart, of his dim and indistinct agony the day his wife was brought here to be buried! and the last part of that biography is the saddest history that I know; it really makes us breathe a long sigh of relief when we read of the lowering of the ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... strikes us forcibly in considering the biography of the subject of this sketch. Closing his life at an age when most professional men are but beginning theirs, he had already studied broadly, had traveled widely over two continents, had gained credit and fame by the sword and the pen, and had amassed a fund of erudition ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... Smith's recommendation. The negotiations with Ferguson were conducted through Smith, and some of Ferguson's letters to Smith on the matter still exist, but contain nothing of any interest for the biography of the latter. But in contemplation of Ferguson's going abroad with the Earl of Chesterfield, Hume, ever anxious to have his friend near him, sounds Smith on the possibility of his agreeing to act during Ferguson's absence as his substitute in the Moral Philosophy ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... following Madame de Sta%l into exile, and in her devotion to Ballenche and Chateaubriand. She had the genius of friendship, a native sincerity, a certain reality of nature—those fine qualities which so often accompany the shy that we almost, as we read biography and history, begin to think that shyness is but a veil for ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... in his biography of David Zeisberger, errs in his interpretation of the term "Limping Messenger" (Tiadaghton), used by Bishop Spangenburg in his account of their journey to the West Branch Valley in 1745. He notes that on their way to Onondaga (Syracuse) after leaving "Ostonwaken" ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... loyally; meanwhile he admired the structure from all points of view. As President of the Elgin Chamber of Commerce, he was enabled once a year to produce no end of gratifying figures; he was fond of wearing on such occasions the national emblem in a little enamelled maple leaf; and his portrait and biography occupied a full page in a sumptuous work entitled Canadians of Today, sold by subscription, where he was described as the ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... of his life he had strong religious convictions, and felt a loathing for the sins which he had committed. "On their account," says he in the concluding page of his biography, "there is a strong necessity for me to consider my ways and to inquire about a Saviour, since it is utterly impossible for me to save myself without obtaining knowledge of the merits of the Mediator, in which I hope I shall terminate my short time on earth in the peace ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... and third of these essays are on Biography and Fiction respectively and principally; treating, however, of collateral subjects as well. Deep is the relation between the life shadowed forth in a biography, and the life in a man's brain which he shadows forth in a fiction—when that fiction is of the highest order, and written ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... impairing its feminine character. If this be true in the delineation of the outer and material form, how much more true is it of all attempts to portray the female mind and heart! If the words and ways, the style of thinking and the modes of acting, all that goes to make up a biography, have a character sufficiently marked to individualize the subject, there is a danger that, in the relating, she may seem to have overstepped the decorum of her sex, and so forfeit the interest with which only true delicacy ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... very fond of reading, has lent us a short biography of Melanchthon, which we are ...
— Three Years in Tristan da Cunha • K. M. Barrow
... original intention to write a biography of Alexander Hamilton in a more flexible manner than is customary with that method of reintroducing the dead to the living, but without impinging upon the territory of fiction. But after a visit to the British and Danish West Indies in search of the ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... in quite modern times, although by family and connections he was of a higher rank than most men of letters, and although his genius was at once recognised by his contemporaries so soon as it displayed itself in its proper sphere, his biography until very recently was by no means full; and the most recent researches, including those of Mr Austin Dobson—a critic unsurpassed for combination of literary faculty and knowledge of the eighteenth century—have not altogether sufficed to fill up the gaps. His family, ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... the influence of these readers upon the mind and character of this great preacher is again noted in Rev. Joseph Fort Newton's biography of David Swing in which the books which influenced that life are named as "The Bible, Calvin's Institutes, Fox's Book of Martyrs and the McGuffey Readers;" and the author quotes David Swing as saying that "The Institutes were rather large reading for a boy, but to the end of his life ...
— A History of the McGuffey Readers • Henry H. Vail
... with no hope or intention of making a formal and finished biography, but only to place on record some of my brother's sayings and doings, to fix scenes and memories before they suffered from any dim obliteration of time, to catch, if I could, for my own comfort and delight, the tone and sense of that vivid and animated atmosphere which Hugh ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... enthusiastic and discriminating reader, with a catholicity of taste and interest that will lead him beyond the agricultural journal and newspaper, important as these are, to the works of fiction, material and social science, travel and biography, current magazines and journals, and whatever else belongs to the intellectual life of an intelligent, educated ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... the narrative of what civilized man has done. It deals with those social groups called states and nations. Just as biography describes the life of individuals, so history relates the rise, progress, ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... life of Catherine there is no need to dwell. This is not the biography of a woman, but the history of the empire she magnificently ruled for thirty-four years. It is enough to say she was not better than her predecessors, the Tsaritsas Elizabeth and Anna. The influence exerted by Menschikof in the reign of Catherine I., and Biron in that of Anna, was to be exerted ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele |
