"Boswell" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The raised dais, occupied during the delivery of the addresses by James Stevenson, Esq., Senior Vice-President, L. & H. Society, in the chair; Lieut.-Col. Bland Strange, R. S. M. Bouchette, Esq., Dr. Boswell, Vice-Presidents, J. M. LeMoine, Esq., and Commander Ashe, R.N., ex-Presidents, was flanked on either side with the blue and silver banners of St. Andrew's Society, bearing the arms and escutcheon of Scotia, and their proud motto "Nemo me impune lascessit." Bunting ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... them to search the parish register of Lynn, in order that they might be able to twit a lady with having concealed her age. That truly chivalrous exploit was reserved for a bad writer(14) of our own time, whose spite she had provoked by not furnishing him with materials for a worthless edition of Boswell's "Life of Johnson," some sheets of which our readers have doubtless seen round parcels of ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... a much greater interest in the soil than the proprietor had. This place had been put up to the hammer, and sold to the trustees of a lunatic. I had taken it on a lease; the manor, mansion, farms, lands, and the manorial rights. Mr. James, the land-agent, in Old Boswell-court, bad the letting of it, under the direction of John Foster, Esq. the head of the firm of Foster, Cooke, and Frere, of Lincoln's Inn, who was the acting trustee for the lunatic. On application to Mr. James, I soon found that he must have a certain price ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... government of various states, more likely to have engaged the attention of a Fleet-Street author, living in an atmosphere of books, than to have occupied the mind of a tramp anxious about his supper and his night's lodging. Boswell says he "disputed" his way through Europe. It is much more probable that he begged his way through Europe. The romantic version, which has been made the subject of many a charming picture, is that he was entertained by the peasantry whom he had delighted with his playing on the flute. It ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... imbibe Tory principles from Dr. Sacheverel's sermons: another, the boy carried by his schoolfellows: and a third displays him undergoing a penance for youthful disobedience by standing up for an hour bareheaded in the rain. The "Three Crowns Inn" is also in the market-place, where in 1776 Boswell and Johnson stayed, and, as Boswell writes, "had a comfortable supper and got into high spirits," when Johnson "expatiated in praise of Lichfield and its inhabitants, who, he said, were the most sober, decent people in England, were the genteelest ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... that time regarded in the more civilized parts of Europe somewhat in the same light as the Arctic regions are now considered by the inhabitants of England, and other polished nations: "When I was at Ferney in 1764," Boswell relates, "I mentioned our design (of going to the Hebrides) to Voltaire. He looked at me as if I had talked of going to the North Pole, and said, 'You do not insist on my accompanying you!' 'No, sir.' 'Then I am very willing you should go.'" In this remote, and, in the circles of London, ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... New York this morning. Received fifty thousand dollars from Uncle Darwent. We shall expect to meet you at the Hotel Boswell in Pittsburg Saturday. ...
— Comrades of the Saddle - The Young Rough Riders of the Plains • Frank V. Webster
... social life, and gained admission to the cottage hearth. Lady Anne Barnard aroused the nation to admiration by one plaintive lay. Allan Cunningham wrote the Scottish ballad in the peculiar rhythm and with the power of the older minstrels. Alike in mirth and tenderness, Sir Alexander Boswell was exquisitely happy. Tannahill gave forth strains of bewitching sweetness; Hogg, whose ballads abound with supernatural imagery, evinced in song the utmost pastoral simplicity; Motherwell was a master ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... remoteness and all the vividness which memory preserves from early impressions. I think I now might find him wearisome; not so in boyhood. He was to me then, and seems to me now, a glorified Flexible Grommet or Jonathan Oldjunk; ranking, as to them, as Boswell does towards the common people of biography. That there are many solid chunks of useful information to be dug out of him I am sure; that his stories are all true, I have no desire to question; but what among it all is so instructive, so entertaining, as the point of view of himself, his ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... central figure among the English men of letters of that generation was Samuel Johnson (1709-84), whose memory has been preserved less by his own writings than by James Boswell's famous Life of Johnson, published in 1791. Boswell was a Scotch laird and advocate, who first met Johnson in London, when the latter was fifty-four years old. Boswell was not a very wise or witty person, but he reverenced ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... that I rubbed her hands vigorously and administered hartshorn. It occurred to me at once that she had barely escaped a sunstroke. After rallying from this terrible fit of exhaustion, she seemed quite like herself again, and listened with much interest while the girls read to her out of Boswell's Johnson. She was in a sweet, gentle mood all the afternoon. "I prayed this morning," she said, "that I might be a comfort to-day ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... wanted; these I indicated, of course thinking that he meant me to buy them of him,—but he immediately insisted upon giving them, if I would allow him. This fair beginning led to better acquaintance, often improved under our mutual roof-trees. It was his ambition to be my Boswell, as he has sometimes told me; and probably there are bundles somewhere of his MSS. and of our antiquarian letters (he wrote very well), about which I have vainly made inquiry of a near relative, who knew nothing about them. Some day they'll ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... continued through the years, until Accepted Masons were in the majority. Noblemen, gentlemen, and scholars entered the order as Speculative Masons, and held office as such in the old Lodges, the first name recorded in actual minutes being John Boswell, who was present as a member of the Lodge of Edinburgh in 1600. Of the forty-nine names on the roll of the Lodge of Aberdeen in 1670, thirty-nine were Accepted Masons not in any way connected with the building trade. In England the earliest ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... friendship above admiration and love. "Admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne; judgment and friendship like being enlivened." See Boswell's Life of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Henrietta Clarke. He seemed now in an enviable position, with a small but agreeable freehold on the banks of Oulton Broad, able to indulge in "idleness and the pride of literature" to his heart's content. If he had had a "club" or a Boswell about him, he might still have been tolerably happy. But he was not a clubbable man, Borrow! Nevertheless it was during the years that followed that, like Johnson, he achieved his best title to fame, the wondrous five volumes of autobiography so capriciously planned and so strangely ...
— George Borrow - Times Literary Supplement, 10th July 1903 • Thomas Seccombe
... see, lay more in circulating library lore, and he was not deep in Johnson—as few of us would be, I'm afraid, if it were not for Boswell. ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... mysterious; all the more so because Jaffery had never been a man of mystery, like Adrian. I went away wondering. If it had occurred to me at the time that I was destined to play Boswell to Jaffery's Johnson, perhaps I might have gone straight to him and demanded a solution of my difficulties. As it was, in my unawakened condition, I did nothing of the kind. I spent an hour or two looking up something in the British ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... following will show that a palpable absurdity will pass before the eyes of generations of men of letters without notice. In Boswell's Life of Johnson (chapter viii. of the edition with chapters), there is given a conversation between Dr. Adams and Johnson, in which the latter asserts that he could finish his ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.15 • Various
... down;" said Mr. Boswell, and then turning to Atherton, he continued, "You see how free I am with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various
... to foresee that if it spread to the extent which seemed likely, it would deprive them of much of their clandestine and corrupting power. Senator Roscoe Conkling, one of the wittiest and most brazen of these, remarked, that when Dr. Johnson told Boswell that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," he had not ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... the subject, these are very likely the observers of only a part of his life, the seri studiorum of his latter or middle career, and unacquainted with that period when the strong lines of character are formed and the mental tendencies fixed. Boswell's "Life of Johnson" is considered one of the best performances of its kind in our language; but it is, after all, only half a biography, as it were. We have the pensioned and petted life of the rough and contemptuous man of genius,—whose great renown in ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... a corruption. I may also remark, that Mr. Knight dismisses Dr. Farmer's theory as worthless, without sufficient consideration. It by no means follows that 1607 is the date of the first edition of Caleb Shillocke, merely because Boswell saw a ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 14. Saturday, February 2, 1850 • Various
... fate. Compared with his, Michelangelo's mind was still mediaeval, his reproach the reproach of one who cares for doing more than for being, and certainly Michelangelo did a thousand times more; but from his own day to ours the world has not judged Leonardo by his achievement. As Johnson had his Boswell so he has had his legend; he means to us not books or pictures, but himself. In his own day kings bid for him as if he were a work of art; and he died magnificently in France, making nothing but foretelling a race ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... chiefly for his craze about the degeneracy of us poor moderns, when compared with the men of pagan antiquity; which craze itself might possibly not have been generally known, except in connection with the little skirmish between him and Dr. Johnson, noticed in Boswell's account of the doctor's Scottish tour. "Ah, doctor," said Lord M., upon some casual suggestion of that topic, "poor creatures are we of this eighteenth century; our fathers were better men than we!" "O, no, my lord," was Johnson's reply; "we are ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... [Footnote: That Thayendanegea was the grandchild of one of these sachems who were so honoured appears from information given in an article published in the London Magazine; of July 1776. The material for this account of him is supposed to have been supplied by the famous author James Boswell, with whom, while on a visit to England in that year, he was intimate.] or petty king, of the Six Nations, and heard the old man tell the romantic story of his trip to England in the pear 1710, when Anne was sovereign queen; heard how five sachems at this time had gone on an embassy for their ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... wanted?" asked the wheelsman, who had given the name of Boswell. "Why didn't you bring the sick boy ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... talked more amusingly than he wrote," explained Joan. "Get Boswell's Life of him. Or I'll lend you mine," she added, "if you'll be careful of it. You'll find all the passages marked that are best worth remembering. ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... know of these years of private life is mainly due to Mr. William Herndon, the young lawyer already quoted, whom he took into partnership in 1845, and who kept on the business of the firm in Springfield till Lincoln's death. This gentleman was, like Boswell, of opinion that a great man is not best portrayed as a figure in a stained-glass window. He had lived with Lincoln, groaned under his odd ways, and loved them, for sixteen years before his Presidency, and after his death he devoted much research, in his own ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... before this a young Scotsman named James Boswell got to know the great man. He worshiped Johnson and spent as much time with him as he could. It was a strange friendship which grew up between these two. The great man bullied and insulted yet loved the little man, and the little man accepted all the insults ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... spite of its formality, is still a very impressive book. The literary critic may amuse himself with the question how Johnson came to acquire the peculiar style which imposed upon contemporaries and excited the ridicule of the next generation. According to Boswell, it was due to his reading of Sir Thomas Browne, and a kind of reversion to the earlier period in which the Latinisms of Browne were still natural, when the revolt to simple prose had not begun. Addison, at any rate, as Boswell ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... Lynn, in order that they might be able to twit a lady with having concealed her age. That truly chivalrous exploit was reserved for a bad writer of our own time, whose spite she had provoked by not furnishing him with materials for a worthless edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson, some sheets of which our readers have doubtless seen round ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Now his faithful Boswell gives elaborate details of Hugh's long dying, not knowing that his work would speak to a generation which measures a man's favour with God by the oily slipperiness with which he shuffles off his clay coil. It was a case of hard dying, redoubled paroxysms, fierce fever, and ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... [2] Johnson told Boswell, his biographer, that he remembered the incident, and that "he had a confused, but somehow a sort of solemn recollection of a lady in diamonds and a long black ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... of our old plays, part of the dialogue was spoken; and in front of it curtains likewise were hung, so as occasionally to conceal the persons in it from the view of the audience."—Malone's "History of the Stage." See his edition of "Shakespeare" by Boswell, iii. 79. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... George Chapman translated much of Homer at Hitchin, and is believed to have been born in that town. Young, the author of the Night Thoughts, was for many years Rector of Welwyn; his son was visited there by Boswell and Dr. Johnson. Macaulay was at school at Aspenden. John Scott, the Quaker poet, lived at Amwell; Lee, the dramatist, was born at Hatfield. Skelton probably stayed at Ashridge just before the Dissolution of the Monasteries; Sir Thomas More lived ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... give another instance. One of the most instructive, interesting, and delightful books in our language is Boswell's Life of Johnson. Now it is well known that Boswell's eldest son considered this book, considered the whole relation of Boswell to Johnson, as a blot in the escutcheon ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... neither of them—the Rambler nor the Idler—were at all successful. Rasselas, a tale with a purpose, is melancholy reading; the Journey to the Western Hebrides has been utterly eclipsed by Boswell's livelier and more human chronicle of the same events. The Lives of the Poets, his greatest work, was composed with pain and difficulty when he was seventy years old; even it is but a quarry from which a reader may dig the ore of a sound critical judgment ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... learned society, a society devoted to Shakespeare and to the stage, was taken in by a boy of eighteen. Young Ireland not only palmed off his sham prose documents, most makeshift imitations of the antique, but even his ridiculous verses on the experts. James Boswell went down on his knees and thanked Heaven for the sight of them, and, feeling thirsty after these devotions, drank hot brandy and water. Dr. Parr was not less readily gulled, and probably the experts, like Malone, who held aloof, were as much influenced by ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... think," said Boswell, "that the proprietor of all this (Keddlestone, the seat of Lord Scarsfield) must be happy." "Nay, sir," said Johnson, "all this excludes ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... be written on "poor men's servants." For they have had of the very best. The whole world knows Boswell, and with all his faults it loves him still, for he was loyal to a royal soul. Well, most great men have had their Boswells. When all is known it will be found that the men of the five talents have owed much of their success and more of their ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... John would not believe him, but at last made him a present. He afterwards visited Justice Grose, of Bromfylde, who presently knew him, and made him very welcome; from whence, setting out for Exeter, he visited on the road Mr. John Bampfylde, of Hesticomb, the Rev. Mr. Boswell, and Dr. Hildyard, of Taunton, the Rev. Mr. Manifee, Squire Bluet, of Melcombe Regis, the Rev. Mr. Newt, of Tiverton, Squire Blundel, and Major Worth, in the neighbourhood of that place, who, being all his particular friends, were very glad to see him ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... verses translated by the Marchioness of Northampton from "Ha tighinn fodham," in "Albyn's Anthology," or Croker's "Boswell." ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Arnold Artus Ballade Ballande Barnes Bart Bartram Beaur Behrens Belmondi Berzelius Bizanger Blackwood Blair Bolley Bonney Bossin Boswell Bottger Boutenguy Braconnot Brande Bufeu Bufton Bure Carter Caw Cellier Champion Chaptal Chevallier Clarke Close Cochrane Collin Cooke Coupier and Collins Coxe Crock Cross Darcet Davids Davis Delunel Delarve Delang Derheims Dize Draper Druck Duhalde Dumas Dumovlen ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... where you are. I am lost without my Boswell. And this promises to be interesting. It would be a pity to ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... In another place Boswell tells us what were Johnson's views on book collecting. "When I mentioned that I had seen in the King's Library sixty-three editions of my favourite Thomas a Kempis, amongst which it was in eight languages, Latin, German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, Arabick, and Armenian, he said he ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... T. Boswell, his brother, and another miner, who had spent most of the summer on the river prospecting, and from them I ...
— Klondyke Nuggets - A Brief Description of the Great Gold Regions in the Northwest • Joseph Ladue
... work has not issued from the press for many years. It is in truth a complete Boswell sketch of the greatest diplomatist ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... Boswell's first considerable book was a lively description of his tour in Corsica, but his fame rests on his "Life of Dr. Johnson" (see LIVES AND LETTERS), and his "Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D." was really the first portion of that ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... proposals for a new edition of Shakespeare in 1745, but met with no encouragement. He resumed the scheme in 1756, and issued a new set of Proposals (reprinted in Malone's preface), 'in which,' says Boswell, 'he shewed that he perfectly well knew what a variety of research such an undertaking required, but his indolence prevented him from pursuing it with that diligence, which alone can collect those scattered facts that genius, however acute, penetrating, and luminous, cannot ...
— The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] - Introduction and Publisher's Advertising • William Shakespeare
... He was not aware, however, of a fact which became afterwards distressingly apparent—that from her mother she inherited a tendency to insanity, which broke out in capricious waywardness, some time before it culminated in madness. We know not but this may explain Dr Johnson's saying to Boswell—"Beattie," he said, "when he came first to London, 'sunk upon' us that he was married," 'i.e.', tried to hide that he was married. Perhaps the reason of this remark, which so much offended Beattie himself, was, that, afraid of her ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... related, with much satisfaction, how he had assisted in detecting the cheat, and had published an account of it in the newspapers. Upon this subject I incautiously offended him, by pressing him with too many questions,' says Boswell,—questions which the good doctor was obviously ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... The two Wesleys were attacking the Church, and calling upon men to methodize their lives and eliminate folly; Gibbon was writing his "Decline and Fall"; Burke, in the House of Commons, was polishing his brogue; Boswell was busy blithering about a book concerning a man; Captain Cook was sailing the seas finding continents; the two Pitts and Charles Fox were giving the king unpalatable advice; Horace Walpole was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... prose-writers of the following century. But, above all, the Satires of Lucilius were in the fullest sense of the word an autobiography. The famous description of Horace, made yet more famous for English readers by the exquisite aptness with which Boswell placed it on the title-page of his Life ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... we would not quarrel with him nor his publisher for calling his life a 'definitive biography' if one did not know that there is not and cannot be anything 'definitive' about a biography except in the case of a Master. Boswell, Lockhart, Mrs. Gaskell are authors who had the advantage of knowing personally the subjects of their biographies. Any biographer who has not met his hero face to face and is dependent solely on documents is crippled ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... said the other, who, while perhaps somewhat lacking in the matter of original thought, was a most useful fellow to have by one. A sort of Boswell. ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... most unfortunate in his biographer. In picturing the great writer, Boswell writes more entertainingly than Johnson ever did, and thereby overtops his subject. And when in reply to the intimation that Boswell was going to write his life, Johnson answered, "If I really thought he was, I would take his," he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Buck Boswell. Let me tell you, Jim he works, he does. He's the workingest man in this here county, ba thundas! What! Jim he don't sit 'round like you fellers down on th' creek an' wait fer pawpaws to git ripe, so he can git a square meal, ba thundas!" ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... translation made by him of the most popular of these pieces. At all events, it is certain that these Poems of Milton are now much read, and loudly praised, yet were they little heard of till more than 150 years after their publication, and of the Sonnets, Dr. Johnson, as appears from Boswell's Life of him, was in the habit of thinking and speaking as contemptuously as Steevens wrote upon ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... General Boswell was a rich man and had a good and growing business; and that Washington's work world be light and he would get forty dollars a month and be boarded and lodged in the General's family—which was as good as ten dollars more; and even better, for he could not live as well even ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... menagerie of wrangling, jangling, quibbling, dissatisfied pensioners in his household; and so far as we know he never learned the truth that all pensioners are dissatisfied. "If I can stand things at home, I can stand things anywhere," he once said to Boswell, as much as to say, "If I can stand things at home, I can stand even you." Goldsmith referred to Boswell as a cur; Garrick said he thought he was a bur. Socrates had a similar satellite by the name of Cheropho, a dark, dirty, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... Troil, D.D., of Stockholm, contains no chapter of the kind. Such a chapter had appeared, however, in N. Horrebow's (Danish, 1758) Natural History of Iceland: "Chap. LXXII. Concerning snakes. No snakes of any kind are to be met with throughout the whole island." In Boswell's Johnson, Vol. IV, p. 314, Temple ed., there is a much more correct allusion, which may have been in De Quincey's mind: "Langton said very well to me afterwards, that he could repeat Johnson's conversation before dinner, as Johnson had said that he could repeat a complete ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... no means gratified by the ponderous prancings of his imitator. We learn from Boswell that when the great man met Captain Cook at a dinner given by the President of the Royal Society, he said that he "was much pleased with the conscientious accuracy of that celebrated circumnavigator, who set me right as to many of the exaggerated accounts given by Dr. Hawkesworth of ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Ben Jonson. "Glorious John Dryden" shared in the general enthusiasm for the veteran Beeston, and bestowed on him the title of "the chronicle of the stage"; while John Aubrey, the honest antiquary and gossip, who had in his disorderly brain the makings of a Boswell, sought Beeston's personal acquaintance about 1660, in order to "take from him the lives of ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... came the Ploughman Poet and the Ettrick Shepherd, Boswell and Dr. Johnson, Dr. John Brown and Thomas Carlyle, Lady Nairne and Drummond of Hawthornden, Allan Ramsay and Sir Walter; and is it not a proof of the Wizard's magic art, that side by side with the wraiths of these real people walked, or seemed to walk, the Fair ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... the King's Bench for debt, wrote his Annotations on the Parian Chronicle, which were first published by Prideaux. He was the learned scholar alluded to by Johnson; an allusion not known to Boswell and others. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... had built up his small library—Defoe, Hakluyt, Hazlitt and the essayists, Boswell, some indifferent romances, and a shelf of spirited poetry. His tastes became known, and he acquired a reputation for a scholarly habit. He was president of the Literary Society of the Guthrie Memorial Kirk, and read to its members a variety of papers full of a gusto which rarely ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... from the shelf? A Boswell, writing out himself! For though he changes dress and name, The man beneath is still the same, Laughing or sad, by fits and starts, One actor in a dozen parts, And whatsoe'er the mask may be, The voice assures ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... artistic criticism, their incapacity for judging a work of art on its own merits, their singular habit of allowing their disapprobation of a man's private character to depreciate his work, that an acknowledged critic like Macaulay could waste time in carefully considering whether Boswell was more fool or more knave, and triumphantly announce that he produced a good book by accident. Probably Boswell did not realise how matchless a biographer he was, though he was not disposed to belittle his ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... we are told that Holland's love of literature was already marked. "I can remember reading Wordsworth with him, and Carlyle, and Clough; and, after Sunday breakfasts, Boswell's Life of Johnson." Then, as always, he found a great part of his ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... Poets, belongs to his later days. This delightful work pronounces with unfaltering dogmatism judgments founded on canons of criticism which were accepted in the then expiring age of Augustan literature. His Life by his satellite Boswell holds the first place among biographies as a triumph of portraiture. The new interest in antiquity was fostered by the rise of English historical writing. In the earliest years of the reign Hume completed his History of England, which, though no longer regarded as of ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... been taken to this biography as likely to disappoint its readers in not making them "talk to Dickens as Boswell makes them talk to Johnson." But where will the blame lie if a man takes up Pickwick and is disappointed to find that he is not reading Rasselas? A book must be judged for what it aims to be, and not for what it cannot ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... to give an account of his descendants, or their prosperous or adverse fortunes: they are noticed at length by Burigni. In Mr. Boswell's Life of Johnson, mention is made of one who was then in a state of want. Dr. Johnson, in a letter ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... well say so," answered the cattle-drover. "Why, that's the famous Doctor Samuel Johnson, who, they say, is the greatest and learnedest man in England. I saw him in London Streets, walking with one Mr. Boswell." ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... those whose needs my scanty supply could not satisfy, you might judge of the sincerity with which I now entreat you to assure him of the most complete success. Lord Holland said, when I asked his opinion—"Opinion! We did not one of us go to bed last night—nothing slept but my gout." Frere, Hallam, Boswell,[45] Lord Glenbervie, William Lamb,[46] all agree that it surpasses all the other novels. Gifford's estimate is increased at every reperusal. Heber says there are only two men in the world—Walter Scott and ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... interesting, but you are truthful, and we spooks hate libellers. Just because one happens to be a thing is no reason why writers should libel it, and that's why I have always respected you. We regard you as a sort of spook Boswell. You may be dull and stupid, but you tell the truth, and when I saw you in imminent danger of becoming a mere grease spot, owing to the fearful heat, I decided to help you through. That's why I'm here. Go to sleep now. I'll stay here and keep you shivering ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... it is technically expressed, is in meditatione fugae;—Wilkes. "That, I should think, may be safely sworn of all the Scotch nation." Johnson (to Mr. Wilkes). "You must know, Sir, I lately took my friend Boswell, and showed him genuine civilized life in an English provincial town. I turned him loose at Lichfield, my native city, that he might see for once real civility; for you know he lives among savages in Scotland and among rakes in London." Wilkes. "Except when ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... 1637 and the opening of the territory to settlement, the founding of towns as far west as Stamford and Greenwich had rendered acute the conflict of titles. There was no western limit to the English claims, and, as the colonists were perfectly willing to accept Sir William Boswell's advice to "crowd on, crowding the Dutch out of those places which they have occupied, without hostility or any act of violence," a collision was bound to come. The Dutch, who in their turn were not abating a jot of their claims, had already ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... 'Walter Pater' would have signified no style, but an unslakable thirst for information, and a bustling human sympathy, and power of carrying things through. Or take two names often found in conjunction—Johnson and Boswell. Had the dear great oracle been named Boswell, and had the sitter-at-his-feet been named Johnson, would the two names seem to us less appropriate than they do? Should we suffer any greater loss than if Salmon were Gluckstein, and Gluckstein ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... whether major or minor, whether affecting the foundation of conduct or the surface of manners, remain fixed. On the contrary, one of the most interesting things in literature is to mark the shifts and changes in men's standards. For instance, Boswell tells a curious story of the first occasion on which Johnson met Sir Joshua Reynolds. Two ladies of the company were regretting the death of a friend to whom they owed great obligations. Reynolds observed that they had at any rate the comfort of being relieved from a debt of gratitude. The ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... those things that, having once been, must ever be. The Scotch Novels had not then been heard of: so we said nothing about them. In general we were hard upon the moderns. The author of the "Rambler" was only tolerated in Boswell's Life of him; and it was as much as any one could do to edge in a word for Junius. Lamb could not bear Gil Blas: this was a fault. I remember the greatest triumph I ever had was in persuading him, after some years' difficulty, that Fielding ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... Johnson. It was not a very novel suggestion, but the excavation deserves notice as probably the one engineering achievement of old Ursus major. We may fancy the Titan of the pen and the tea-table, in his snuffy habit as he lived and as photographed by Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, Fanny Burney, and their epitomizer Macaulay, diving under the turnpike and emerging among the osiers and water-rats to offer his orisons at the shrine of Shakespeare. For, in the fashion of the day, Garrick erected a little brick "temple," and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... the Scotch; for, if he had been conscious of that, he never would have thrown himself into the bosom of their country, and trusted to the protection of its remote inhabitants with a fearless confidence."—BOSWELL'S JOHNSON. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Yet, in respect to even these, we feel justified in assenting to the opinion of one abundantly capable of appreciating the character of Baxter as a writer. "What works of Mr. Baxter shall I read?" asked Boswell of Dr. Johnson. "Read any of them," was the answer, "for they are all good." He has left upon all the impress of his genius. Many of them contain sentiments which happily find favor with few in our time: philosophical and psychological disquisitions, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Boxing World had not thought of offering any free-gifts, but on learning that BOSWELL had written a Life of JOHNSON seemed inclined ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... like Browning, with the undergraduates, to whom the Master's hospitality was freely extended. Yet, where he was familiar, Tennyson was a gay companion, not shunning jest or even paradox. "As Dr Johnson says, every man may be judged of by his laughter": but no Boswell has chronicled the laughters of Tennyson. "He never, or hardly ever, made puns or witticisms" (though one pun, at least, endures in tradition), "but always lived in an attitude of humour." Mr Jowett writes (and no description of the poet ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... generous enthusiasm, and, with regard to this fault in criticism, it should perhaps be said that exaggerated praise is not so base in its beginning or so harmful in the end as exaggerated blame. From the use of the former Dr. Johnson defended himself with his usual vigour. Boswell presumed to find fault with him for saying that the death of Garrick had eclipsed the gaiety of nations. Johnson: "I could not have said more, nor less. It is the truth. His death did eclipse, it was like a storm." Boswell: "But ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... however, would be spoiled by such arrant egotism as our author displays on every page. We are never rid of Mr. Parker for a moment. Wherever Mr. Choate is visible, Mr. Parker is strutting by his side. He exhibits, indeed, all the intrusiveness of Boswell, without any of that honest, self-forgetting, simple-hearted admiration of his distinguished friend which makes Boswell positively respectable. A single illustration of this weakness is so apt that we quote it. "Mr. Choate said, 'Some one should write a History ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... [Footnote 4: From Boswell's "Life of Johnson." Wilkes was the famous publicist and political agitator who was expelled from Parliament, imprisoned and outlawed, but afterward elected Lord Mayor of London and allowed to ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... could adjourn for the last time.—"I wrote something for Lord Charles," said the great Johnson once, many years afterwards; "and I thought he had nothing to fear from a Court-Martial. I suffered a great loss when he died: he was a mighty pleasing man in conversation, and a reading man" (Boswell's Life of Johnson: under date, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... Boswell, "I admonish you avoid poverty, the temptation and worry it breeds." There is something humiliating in being poor. The very consciousness that we have nothing to show for our endeavor besides a little character and the little we ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... [Footnote: Johnson's Works, xi. 270.]The poems of Gray—an exception must be made, to Johnson's honour, in favour of the Elegy [Footnote: In the bosom of "the Club" the exception dwindled to two stanzas (Boswell's Life, ii. 300).] are slaughtered in detail; [Footnote: Johnson's Works, xi. 372-378. Johnson is peculiarly sarcastic on the Bard and the Progress of Poetry.] the man himself is given dog's burial with the compendious epitaph: "A dull fellow, sir; dull in company, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as with any one else. Another charge was that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it." When Boswell paid Johnson his memorable first visit in 1763, Smart had recently been released from Bedlam, and Johnson naturally spoke of him. He said: "My poor friend Smart showed the disturbance of his mind by falling upon his knees and saying his prayers in the street, or in any ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... beautiful model rode in on the crest of the wave, with Sir Joshua, the Herschels, Edmund Burke, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Doctor Johnson, Goldsmith, Horace Walpole and various others of equal note caught in amber, all of them, by the busy Boswell. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... a hundred years ago the whole kingdom was disturbed by the judicial proceedings which were taken with reference to the succession to the ancient honours of the great Scotch house of Douglas. Boswell, who was but little indisposed to exaggeration, and who is reported by Sir Walter Scott to have been such an ardent partizan that he headed a mob which smashed the windows of the judges of the Court of Session, says that ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... be a guest there was to meet the best people in England, and to hear such good talk that much of it has not lost its flavor even yet. Strawberry Hill, Holland House, or any other famous house of that day, has left but faint memories of itself, compared with those of Streatham. Boswell, the most sagacious of men in the hunt after good company, had the good wit and good fortune to get entrance here. One day, in 1769, Dr. Johnson delivered him "a very polite card" from Mr. and Mrs. Thrale, inviting him to Streatham. "On the 6th of October, I complied," ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... definite flesh and blood Virginian named Washington behind it all. Even so sturdy an historian as Professor Channing calls him the most elusive of historic personages. Who has not wished that James Boswell could have spent a year with Wellington on terms as intimate as those he spent with Dr. Johnson and could have left a report ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... oats. Oats occurs as spring and winter varieties, but only one winter variety has as yet found place in the list of dry-farm crops. The leading; spring varieties of oats are the Sixty-Day, Kherson, Burt, and Swedish Select. The one winter variety, which is grown chiefly in Utah, is the Boswell, a black variety originally brought ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... a weak man who marries for love." We then talked of marrying women of fortune; and I (Boswell) mentioned a common remark, that a man may be, upon the whole, richer by marrying a woman with a very small portion, because a woman of fortune will be proportionally expensive; whereas a woman ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... the "beautiful and feeling verses by Dr. Johnson to the memory of his humble friend Levett, ... which with me, though a tolerably ardent Scotchman, atone for a thousand of his prejudices."[223] Not only did he admire the great biography, but he called Boswell "such a biographer as no man but [Johnson] ever had, or ever deserved to have."[224] But he once said that many of the Ramblers were "little better than a sort of pageant, where trite and obvious maxims are made to swagger in lofty and mystic ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... Dr. Johnson would have had woefully little patience with that tendency to weigh moonbeams which in Hawthorne was almost as much a quality of race as of genius; albeit that Hawthorne has paid to Boswell's hero (in the chapter on "Lichfield and Uttoxeter," in his volume on England), a tribute of the finest appreciation. American intellectual standards are vague, and Hawthorne's countrymen are apt to hold the scales with a rather uncertain hand and ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... achieved. Alexander is known but little to us, because we know so little of the details of his life. Caesar is much to us, because we have in truth been made acquainted with him. But Shakspeare, of whose absolute doings we know almost nothing, would not be nearer or dearer had he even had a Boswell to paint his daily portrait. The man of letters is, in truth, ever writing his own biography. What there is in his mind is being declared to the world at large by himself; and if he can so write that the world at large shall care to read what ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... of highly refined and sensitive expressions of grief—they were the noblest savages of them all. For some readers the rumors of imposture served to dampen their initial enthusiasm, and such was the case with Hume, Walpole, and Boswell, but many of the admirers of the poems found them rapturous, ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... to which Protestant divines of all shades of opinion contributed their various arguments. 'It is barely possible,' says Mr. Stephen, 'with the best intentions, to take such a discussion seriously. Boswell tells us how a lady interrogated Dr. Johnson as to the nature of the spiritual body. She seemed desirous, he adds, of "knowing more; but he left the subject in obscurity." We smile at Boswell's ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... meet with— The stock never fails— Some Memoirs replete with Fatiguing details; But the chance isn't great of A Lockhart and Scott, Or a Boswell ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 12, 1917 • Various
... good thing, similarly, to change one's mind. But the thing must be done very deliberately, and even with scientific precision, or a man may make himself perfectly ridiculous. Let me produce a pair of illustrations, one from Boswell, which is good; and one from the ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... on the right of the Engraving, SAMUEL JOHNSON was born on the 18th of September, N.S. 1709. We learn from Boswell, that the house was built by Johnson's father, and that the two fronts, towards Market and Broad Market-street stood upon waste land of the Corporation of Lichfield, under a forty years lease; this expired in 1767, when on the 15th of August, "at a common ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various
... The writer is equally wrong in supposing the prevailing deer of our parks to be the roe deer, which are very little known. It is the fallow deer that chiefly people our parks. Red deer were also found at Blenheim, in Oxfordshire, when it was visited by Dr. Johnson, as may be seen in "Boswell."] As my father always retained a town-house in Manchester (somewhere in Fountain-street), and, though a plain, unpretending man, was literary to the extent of having written a book, all things were so arranged that there was no possibility of any commercial mementos ever penetrating ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... with him in the morning, and heard him talk and crack jokes over his breakfast and his mug of small beer. Who would not give something to pass a night at the club with Johnson, and Goldsmith, and James Boswell, Esq., of Auchinleck? The charm of Addison's companionship and conversation has passed to us by fond tradition—but Swift? If you had been his inferior in parts (and that, with a great respect for all persons present, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Piozzi. This school was conspicuous for affectation and high-flown panegyrics on each other. It was stamped out by Gifford, in The Baviad, in 1794, and The Moeviad, in 1796. Robert Merry, who signed himself Della Crusca, James Cobb, a farce-writer, James Boswell (biographer of Dr. Johnson), O'Keefe, Morton, Reynolds, Holcroft, Sheridan, Colman the younger, Mrs. H. Cowley, and Mrs. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... complete one-volume edition of this, too. Emerson came next—the Essays in two volumes. That made four. He added Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, a translation of the AEneid, and his beloved Keats. He hesitated a long time over the last two, but finally took down Boswell's Life of Johnson and the Essays of Elia, neither of which ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... the box. You may, perhaps, breathe the breath of life into the nostrils of the coldest clay of conservatism you know: for true it is that men not only catch manners, as they do diseases, one from another, but that they catch unconscious inspiration also. Boswell, when absent from London and his hero, acknowledged himself to be empty, vapid; and he became somewhat only when "impregnated with the Johnsonian ether." So the ether of your own earnest, fervent, patriotic character may impregnate the spiritless and help to sustain the brave. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... has left us an extremely foreign Book,[3] which the labours of the Camden Society have brought to light in these days. Jocelin's Book, the 'Chronicle,' or private Boswellean Notebook, of Jocelin, a certain old St. Edmundsbury Monk and Boswell, now seven centuries old, how remote is it from us; exotic, extraneous; in all ways, coming from far abroad! The language of it is not foreign only but dead: Monk-Latin lies across not the British Channel, but the ninefold Stygian Marshes, Stream of Lethe, and one knows not where! Roman Latin ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... good-naturedly relieving the necessities of others, and the consolation of being harassed to death with his own! He is the most amusing and interesting person, in one of the most amusing and interesting books in the world, Boswell's Life of Johnson. His peach-coloured coat shall always bloom in Boswell's writings, and his fame survive in his own!— His genius was a mixture of originality and imitation: he could do nothing without some model before him, and he could copy nothing that he did not adorn ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... he was cracky and vagarious. He had been a fashionable jeweler in St. James's Street, no doubt the son or grandson of Wirgman at "the well-known toy-shop in {259} St. James's Street," where Sam Johnson smartened himself with silver buckles. (Boswell, aet. 69). He would not have the ridiculous large ones in fashion; and he would give no more than a guinea a pair; such, says Boswell, in Italics, were the principles of the business: and I think this may be the first place in which ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... Ana in the English language—and, indeed, in any language—is to be found in a work which does not correspond to the normal type either in name or in form. In his Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., Boswell relates that to his remark, a propos of French literature, "Their Ana are good,'' Johnson replied, "A few of them are good; but we have one book of that kind better than any of them—Selden's Table-Talk.'' Boswell's own work, however, is ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... language has been more read; to the nineteenth century it bears a relation not less characteristic than Boswell's 'Johnson' ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... what a bird-of-paradise Queen Hatshepset was, and all the history she made!" enthusiastically exclaimed my historical Boswell. She was the daughter of King Thothmes I., who gave her a Pullman palace car name; she was regarded as the Boadicea of the Orient. "Hattie" built temples, fought battles, and was, in fact, found on the firing line during most of her reign. Like most other ladies, she ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... gambling, in Scott's lifetime, during the Regency, had crippled or destroyed many an historical Scottish family. With this in his mind he drew the portrait of Mowbray of St. Ronan's. His picture of duelling is not more seductive; he himself had lost his friend, Sir Alexander Boswell, in a duel; on other occasions this institution had brought discomfort into his life, and though he was ready to fight General Gourgaud with Napoleon's pistols, he cannot have approved of the practices of ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... a controversial member of Parliament, as a first-rate wit, and as an intimate friend of Boswell, Courtenay remains a shadowy figure. References to him occur often in the last volumes of Boswell's journal, but few of them are particularly revealing. Courtenay evidently never met Johnson; indeed, the anonymous ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... twenty-two years after the appearance of the paper, but often with gross inaccuracy, states that the Champion "owed its chief support to his [Fielding's] abilities," but that "his essays in that collection cannot now be so ascertained as to perpetuate them in this edition of his works." Boswell refers to Fielding as possessing a "share" in the paper. A manuscript copy of some of the Minutes of meetings of the Champion partners, written out in an eighteenth-century handwriting, and now in the possession of the present writer, ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... was true. But in the free encounter of wit and argument, the same want of readiness that made him silent in parliament would most likely restrict his conversational power. It may be doubted if there is a striking remark or saying of his on record. His name occurs in Boswell, but nearly always as a persona muta. Certainly the arena where Johnson and Burke encountered each other was not fitted to bring out a shy and not very quick man. Against Johnson he manifestly harboured a sort of ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... the Scotch judge, who was a pioneer in regard to many modern ideas, had already in the eighteenth century realized the hygienic value of "air-baths," and he invented that now familiar name. "Lord Monboddo," says Boswell, in 1777 (Life of Johnson, edited by Hill, vol. iii, p. 168) "told me that he awaked every morning at four, and then for his health got up and walked in his room naked, with the window open, which he called taking an air-bath." It is said also, I know not on what authority, that he made his ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... that Johnson and Boswell, in their tour to the Hebrides or Western Islands, saw nothing of the "spectral puppet play" hinted at in this passage—the most imaginative in any of Spenser's school till ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... egotism is a curious variety of that Protean passion, compounded as skilfully as the melancholy of Jaques. It is not the fascinating and humorous egotism of Lamb, who disarms us beforehand by a smile at his own crotchets. Hazlitt is too serious to be playful. Nor is it like the amusing egotism of Boswell, combined with a vanity which evades our contempt, because it asks so frankly for sympathy. Hazlitt is too proud and too bitter. Neither is it the misanthropic egotism of Byron, which, through all its affectation, implies a certain aristocratic contempt of the world ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... "Captain Boswell is examining the South Fork, sir, with a view to finding the best place for the foot bridge you ordered constructed. I have here the map you ordered me ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... of Boswell's Life of Johnson is that it not merely records his admirable conversation, but also gives us many of those lesser peculiarities which are as necessary to a true biography as lights and shades to a portrait on canvas. We are much obliged to Professor Thayer therefore ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... critic, he was not to be tolerated as poet or historian, Dr. Johnson had said everything he could say against an author when he declared that he was a vile Whig. Macaulay, a Whig, always consulted his prejudices for his judgment, equally when he was reviewing Croker's Boswell or the impeachment of Warren Hastings. He hated Croker,—a hateful man, to be sure,—and when the latter published his edition of Boswell, Macaulay saw his opportunity, and exclaimed before he had looked at the book, as you will remember, "Now I will dust his ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... for a time neglected, had been growing up outside its bounds. It was so with Methodism; it was so also with Quakerism. When Quakers found that its more reasonable tenets could be held, and find a certain amount of sympathy within the Church, it quickly began to lose its strength. A remark of Boswell's in 1776, that many a man was a Quaker without his knowing it,[493] could scarcely have been made in the corresponding year of the previous century. At the earlier date there was almost nothing in common between the Church and a sect which, both on its strongest and ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton |
