"Contemporaries" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... emotional strain, and that contrast is required to bring out the full force of an effect. But a good drama of our own time shows nothing approaching to the regularity with which in the plays of Shakespeare and of his contemporaries the principle is applied. And the main cause of this difference lies simply in a change of theatrical arrangements. In Shakespeare's theatre, as there was no scenery, scene followed scene with scarcely any pause; and so the readiest, though ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... says in his Histoire de la Chimie, "to jeer at [the alchemical] theory is to commit at once an anachronism and an injustice.... Unless the world should finish to-morrow, no one can have the pretension to suppose that our contemporaries have said the last word of science, and nothing will remain for our descendants to discover, no errors for them to correct, no theories for them ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... Condorcet should have permitted himself to be drawn into a position where his want of that magical quality by which even Marat could gain the sympathies of men, should be so conspicuously made visible. The character of Condorcet, unlike so many of his contemporaries, offers nothing to the theatrical instinct. None the less on this account should we be willing to weigh the contributions which he made to the stock of science and social speculation, and recognise the fine elevation of his sentiments, his noble solicitude for human wellbeing, his eager ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... Demophanes had the principal tuition of him, after he was past the years of childhood. They were both Megalopolitans; they had been scholars in the academic philosophy, and friends to Arcesilaus, and had, more than any of their contemporaries, brought philosophy to bear upon action, and state affairs. They had freed their country from tyranny by the death of Aristodemus, whom they caused to be killed; they had assisted Aratus in driving ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... that the writer who spelt (or spelled, for we have some varieties still) a word variously in different parts of the same book or document, and even the printer whose own name appeared one way on the title-page and another on the colophon, was not contradicting his contemporaries or himself: he was not breaking the law, for there was none to break—or, at least, none that could be broken in that way. He would, perhaps, have said to the same effect, though not so elegantly as Quintilian: 'For my part, except where there is any established ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... Andrews and his friend were hunting for personal details in the recollections of their contemporaries, my father maintained one day, that the most interesting of miscellanies might be drawn up by a well-read man from the library in which he lived. It was objected, on the other hand, that such a work would ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... them. When the names of Mary and Elizabeth, of Joan of Arc with her wild enthusiasm, of De Stael and her literary contemporaries, have all been lost, these will live as ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... are we to ascribe so strange an antipathy? This question perplexed the Master's contemporaries; and any answer which may now be offered ought to be offered with diffidence. [222] The most probable conjecture is that he was actuated by an inordinate, an unscrupulous, a remorseless zeal for what seemed to him to be the interest of the state. This ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... permit, no better illustration of true dialect sketch and characterization might here be offered than Colonel Johnston's simple story of "Mr. Absalom Billingslea," or the short and simple annals of his like quaint contemporaries, "Mr. Bill Williams" and "Mr. Jonas Lively." The scene is the country and the very little country town, with landscape, atmosphere, simplicity, circumstance—all surroundings and conditions—VERITABLE—everything ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... an iron fork, and suggested to the witches that if they continued in their confession he would deal with them in the same manner.' These are some of the interesting particulars of this judicial commission as reported by contemporaries. Seventy persons were condemned to death. One woman pleaded (a frequent plea) in arrest of judgment that she was with child; the rest perseveringly denying their guilt. Twenty-three were burned in a single fire at the village of Mohra. Fifteen children were also executed; ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... handsome. My mind tells me that I have seen another somewhere in Great Britain, but cannot recollect the spot, unless it were Arundel Castle in Sussex, but I am not sure: none was ever painted so since the days of Pietro Perugino I believe, so their antiquity is unquestionable: he and his few contemporaries drew her white, as Sir Joshua Reynolds ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... these simply summed-up guests were fine young men, tall, manly, intelligent, and accomplished. Prince Albert was very handsome and winning, as all his contemporaries must remember him, with a mixture of thought and gentleness in his broad forehead, deep-blue eyes, ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... it does not exist; in the region of logical conceptions and abstractions, which are not realities, but only, after all, symbols of our own, whereby we express to ourselves the processes of our own brain? May not his Christian contemporaries have been nearer scientific truth, as well as nearer the common sense and practical belief of mankind, in holding that that which is spiritual is personal, and can only be seen or conceived of as residing ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... versed in history, astronomy, and literature, he turned to writing as an avocation, producing numerous stories which were published in the Herald and News and several magazines. One of his stories, A Dance with Death, considered by his contemporaries "one of the most thrilling narratives," was based on true experiences which earned him the reputation of being a "stranger to danger and absolutely fearless." His Kershaw's Brigade ... was written, as he announced, at the request of the local chapter of the United Confederate Veterans ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... interpretation of the myths in the Phaedrus, the task 'of a not very fortunate individual, who had a great deal of time on his hands.' The irony of Socrates places him above and beyond the errors of his contemporaries. ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... Cromwell lay a-dying made all the oak-woods groan round about here, and tore the thatch from the very roofs I gaze upon. When I think of this, I can almost, so to speak, lay my hand on Shakspeare and on Cromwell. These poor walls were contemporaries of both, and I find something affecting in the thought. The mere soil is, of course, far older than either, but it does not touch one in the same way. A wall is the creation of a human hand, the ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... I am well convinced, will be dead long before this page shall offer itself to thy perusal; for however short the period may be of my own performances, they will most probably outlive their own infirm author, and the weakly productions of his abusive contemporaries. ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... rather say, this new office, with its absolute power based on a decree of the people and restrained by no set term or colleague, was no other than the old monarchy, which in fact just rested on the free engagement of the burgesses to obey one of their number as absolute lord. It was urged even by contemporaries in vindication of Sulla that a king is better than a bad constitution,(2) and presumably the title of dictator was only chosen to indicate that, as the former dictatorship implied a reassumptionwith ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... heavier weights on our backs. The doer of iniquity is 'laden with iniquity.' Notice, too, how the awful entail of evil from parents to children is adduced—shall we say as aggravating, or as lessening, the guilt of each generation? Isaiah's contemporaries are 'a seed of evil-doers,' spring from such, and in their turn are 'children that are corrupters.' The fatal bias becomes stronger as it passes down. Heredity is a fact, whether you call it original ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... say, nothing but a hundred and fifty francs. Having thus rudely, and very pikelike, knocked my nose against the bottom—this book was, most assuredly, the bottom of the literature of 1830—I came up to the surface and began to look around my contemporaries for something to read. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... entertainments of no ordinary distinction. The host himself was of greater interest than the most eminent of his guests. All but he, were more or less one's contemporaries: Rogers, if not quite as dead as he looked, was ancient history. He was old enough to have been the father of Byron, of Shelley, of Keats, and of Moore. He was several years older than Scott, or Wordsworth, or Coleridge, and only four years younger than Pitt. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... 1616, great literary productions attributed to him as author had been before the London world and in high favor for twenty-four years. Yet his death was not an event. It made no stir, it attracted no attention. Apparently his eminent literary contemporaries did not realize that a celebrated poet had passed from their midst. Perhaps they knew a play-actor of minor rank had disappeared, but did not regard him as the author of his Works. "We are ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... is exactly coeval with the commencement of its decline. The feverish and ungraceful natural history of Paul, called, "of the birds," Paolo degli Uccelli, produced, indeed, no harmful result on the minds of his contemporaries, they watched in him, with only contemptuous admiration, the fantasy of zoological instinct which filled his house with painted dogs, cats, and birds, because he was too poor to fill it with real ones. Their judgment of this morbidly naturalistic ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... sluices, The water sluices of Cloudland— Locked in the infinite azure— Drowning the plains and mountains, The shaggy beasts and hybrids, The nameless birds—and the reptiles, Monstrous in bulk and feature, Which alone were thy grim contemporaries. Here, in the State of Wisconsin, In newly discovered America, I, curious to know what secrets Were hid in the mounds of thy building, Have gone down into their chambers, Into their innermost grave-crypts, Unurning dry bones and skulls, Fragments of thy mortality! ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... displayed this art, though his successors in the next generation matched his skill and did still more thorough work, are the best introduction from which we can learn the technical process by which within living memory the study of modern history has been renewed. Ranke's contemporaries, weary of his neutrality and suspense, and of the useful but subordinate work that was done by beginners who borrowed his wand, thought that too much was made of these obscure preliminaries which ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... ago, and has gradually been taking form ever since. When civilization makes up its mind to re-enter upon that country, nothing more will be needed for the re-awakening in it of life and reproductive energy, than the restoration of the great works undertaken by the contemporaries of ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... board, and to chat freely with the lieges who came down in their barges, occasionally, and much to his own amusement, buying cabbages and other wares from them. We should consider such actions indicative of a kindly disposition and of simplicity of taste. But in the eyes of his contemporaries they were inexpressibly low. And be it remembered that it was not a question of associating with persons of more or less education, whose mental standard might be unequal to his own. There was no mental standard whereby to measure ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... edition, and has since been translated into many languages. The work is more of a satire on optimism and on human life in general than a novel, and perhaps is little more than a ponderous dissertation on Johnson's favourite theme, the "vanity of human wishes." As to its actual merits, Johnson's contemporaries differed widely, some proclaiming him a pompous pedant with a passion for words of six syllables and more, others delighting in those passages in which weighty meaning was illustrated with splendour ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... It is practically unsupported. Many persons pretend that Berlioz wanted a knowledge of harmony and counterpoint. Certainly his feeling for harmony was a very rudimentary one, in nowise refined beyond that of his predecessors, very simple when compared to that of his contemporaries, Chopin and Schumann. And his attempts at creating counterpoint, judged from the first movement of "Harold in Italy," are clumsy enough. But it is questionable whether this ignorance did not stand him in good stead rather than in bad; ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... find that during these early years some of his finest work is alleged to have been executed, and he must—if we accept the chronology of his biographers—have been well known to and highly esteemed by his contemporaries.[149] Moreover, it is not for want of diligent search amongst the archives that nothing has been found, for Italian and German students have alike sought, but in vain, to discover any documentary evidence relating to his career ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... in love with a man of about twenty-three. He was the son of people whom she knew very well in Paris, French people who were almost her contemporaries, and was the sporting type of Frenchman, very good-looking, lively, satirical and strong. He was a famous lawn tennis player and came over to London for the tournament at Wimbledon. She had already seen him in ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... said, "A la distance de quelques siecles du moment ou il a vecu, Diderot paraitra un homme prodigieux; on regardera de loin cette tete universelle avec une admiration melee d'etonnement, comme nous regardons aujourd'hui la tete des Platon et des Aristote." [15:20] All his contemporaries agreed that nothing was so charged with divine fire as the conversation of Diderot. Gautherin, in his fine bronze of him on the Place Saint-Germain-des-Pres, seems to have caught the spirit of his talk and has depicted him as he might have ...
— Baron d'Holbach • Max Pearson Cushing
... Button, a brave soldier, a gentleman at heart, a kind, if crotchety, commander, and a lenient man rather than a disciplinarian. Much given, himself, to criticism of his own superiors or contemporaries, he could not abide it that he should lack the full and enthusiastic support, much less be made the object of the criticism, of his officers or men. A vain man, was Button, and dearly he loved the adulation of his ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... a' old man, but he's a-breakin' fast an' he ain't long fer this wuld." She spoke with the frank satisfaction that, among country folks, the old take in ushering their contemporaries through the portals, and Gray could hardly help smiling. He rose to leave presently, and the old woman pressed him to stay for supper; but Mavis's manner somehow forbade, and the boy climbed back up the ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... which this system rests is so enormous that it would take a very considerable library to contain it, and the witnesses are not shadowy people living in the dim past and inaccessible to our cross-examination, but are our own contemporaries, men of character and intellect whom all must respect. The situation may, as it seems to me, be summed up in a simple alternative. The one supposition is that there has been an outbreak of lunacy extending over two generations ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... inability to analyse scientifically the situation they had to face, and to recognise the general character of the struggle in which they were about to engage. That the true nature of a war should be realised by contemporaries as clearly as it comes to be seen afterwards in the fuller light of history is seldom to be expected. At close range accidental factors will force themselves into undue prominence and tend to obscure the true horizon. Such error can scarcely ever be eliminated, ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... certainly do not feel myself justified in withholding them. They were all revised and corrected by the author himself with great care; and nothing but a true and full account of the sentiments which Lord Brougham's conduct had excited amongst his colleagues and contemporaries at that time can account for the catastrophe which awaited him, and which excluded him for the rest of his life from official ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... battery; and five years ago was only a military chieftain. The difference is as immense, indeed, between the sceptre of a Monarch and the sword of a general, as between the wise legislator who protects the lives and property of his contemporaries, and the hireling robber who wades through rivers of blood to obtain plunder at the expense and misery of generations. The lower classes of all countries have produced persons who have distinguished themselves as warriors; but what subject has yet usurped a throne, and by his eminence ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... but he reasoned none the less clearly as to its mutual convertibility with mechanical work. But important as his conclusions seem now that we look back upon them with clearer vision, they made no impression whatever upon his contemporaries. Carnot's work in this line was an isolated phenomenon of historical interest, but it did not enter into the scheme of the completed narrative in any such way as did the work ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... opinion of the professional capacity of the British officer. From the age of eighteen he had been his own master except during the intervals which he had spared from South Africa and spent at Oxford, when he was temporarily subject to the lax discipline of a University. While his contemporaries were amusing themselves at college, or performing routine duties in the Army or the Civil Service, or preparing to enter a profession, Rhodes was spending the critical years of his life in outlining the future and scheming for a South African ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... that class, but he came upon honest principles, and was therefore one of the few who held fast; by good conduct and temperance, he transmitted to me his fair inheritance, when not above one in fourteen of his contemporaries ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... scientifically, and felt all its powers. To Samuel Johnson, the sweetest airs and most superb harmonies were but unmeaning noises. {39} I often regret that Milton and Handel were not contemporaries; that the former knew not the delight of hearing his own poetry heightened as Handel has ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... various seeds of culture and progress, which grew and flowered richly in this peaceful soil. Iceland became the center of brilliant maritime and colonial achievements, the home of a native literature which surpassed that of all its contemporaries except Dante's Italy.[890] But after the decay of the Greenland colonies converted Iceland from a focal into a remote terminal point, and after the progress of the world became based upon complex and far-reaching commercial ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... affection; and to recognize in the amiable Mrs. Bute Crawley my excellent pupil of former years, the sprightly and accomplished Miss Martha MacTavish. I am happy to have under my charge now the daughters of many of those who were your contemporaries at my establishment—what pleasure it would give me if your own beloved young ladies had ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... good fortune which is so often its attendant. His contest therefore with Antonius and Sextus Pompeius was the contest of cunning with bravery; but from his youth upward he was accustomed to overreach, not the bold and reckless only, but the most considerate and wily of his contemporaries, such as Cicero and Cleopatra; he succeeded in the end in deluding the senate and people of Rome in the establishment of his tyranny; and finally deceived the expectations of the world, and falsified the lessons of the republican history, in reigning ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... the connecting links between the selfish and the social passions. By the fundamental principle of Christianity, the happiness of the individual is interwoven, by innumerable and imperceptible ties, with that of his contemporaries. By the power of filial reverence and parental affection, individual existence is extended beyond the limits of individual life, and the happiness of every age is chained in mutual dependence upon that of every other. Respect for his ancestors ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... of the scattered life of the world and been more keenly interested in the work of the world than some of his literary contemporaries. But this does not imply that he is any the less devoted to the craft of letters. Indeed, we shall realise that he is one of the craftiest authors who ever lived. He is more crafty than Stevenson. He ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... Acharnian deme, was afflicted with a weakness which caused him to be constantly letting off loud, stinking farts, even in public—the cause of many gibes on the part of the Comic poets and his contemporaries. ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... four fundamental ideas was laid out,—Radiates, Mollusks, Articulates, and Vertebrates were present at that first representation of life upon our globe. If, then, all the primary types appeared simultaneously, one cannot have grown out of another,—they could not be at once contemporaries and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... They are not so grandly conceived as that wondrous composition of his, the Triumph of Death, in the Pisan Campo Santo; but they are additional proofs of his intense and Dante-like genius. No doubt Dante influenced him deeply, as he did all his contemporaries, whose minds were fertile enough to ripen such seed. The large picture on the left—a view of paradise—is full of energetic and beautiful figures, combined with much dramatic effect and great technical skill. The opposite pictures, representing hell, were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... and then relates the story that illustrates something fine in his character. Judge Marshall was born in 1755 and died in 1835. By recalling what events happened during his lifetime and what great men were his contemporaries, you will get a clearer idea of the setting of the story. In reading it try to ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... that he has by a Divine help been enabled to plant his foot somewhere beyond the waves of Time. He may depart hence before the natural term, worn out with intellectual toil; regarded with suspicion by many of his contemporaries; yet not without a sure hope that the love of Truth, which men of saintly lives often seem to slight, is, nevertheless, accepted before ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... Pagan imagery which graces the churches of the Caelian and Aventine, the basilicas of Ravenna, and which would seem the necessary accompaniment of this stately Neo-Byzantine architecture. The churches of Lucca, like their contemporaries and immediate predecessors throughout Tuscany and North Italy, are ornamented ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... line of distinction between himself and some of his parliamentary opponents whom he admired as fluent orators, but whose leadership he deemed to be unsafe. If he considered himself a poor public speaker he was greatly mistaken. His contemporaries held different views, and several of them fortunately were so deeply impressed by his power that they analyzed the means with which he won his great parliamentary victories. His bitter political opponent, Ludwig Bamberger, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... singular relations, Madame Moehl states that it was the general belief of Madame Recamier's contemporaries that she was the own daughter of Monsieur Recamier, whom the unsettled state of the times had induced him to marry; but there is not a shadow of evidence in support of this hypothesis,—though, to make it more probable, Madame Moehl ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... all bounds. On these accounts, the regret was universal. Of all who have left memorials behind them, and who were not of the military profession, Cosmo was the most illustrious and the most renowned. He not only surpassed all his contemporaries in wealth and authority, but also in generosity and prudence; and among the qualities which contributed to make him prince in his own country, was his surpassing all others in magnificence and generosity. His liberality became more obvious after his death, ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... that progress in the science of chemistry alone would be the subject of his address. The initial point was the views of Dalton and his contemporaries compared with the ideas which now prevail; and he (the president) examined this comparison by the light which the research of the last fifty years had thrown on the subject of the Daltonian atoms, in the three-fold aspect of their ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... on the 11th of August, 1719. Walpole says that he knew him at eight years old, and as the two were at Eton about the same time, it is presumed that they were contemporaries there. In fact, a list of the boys there, in 1732, furnished to Eliot Warburton, contains the names of Walpole, Selwyn, Edgecumbe, and Conway, all in after-life intimate friends and correspondents. ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... Allen's books, considered merely as to its sale, but it is also the one in which he has carried to the highest pitch that fineness of perception and that distinction of manner that have from the first set his work apart from the work of nearly all of his contemporaries. Hardly since Hawthorne have we had such pages as the best of these; hardly since The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun have we had fictive work so spiritual in essence and adorned with such ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... undisputed testimony of all the contemporaries of Madame de Maintenon that she possessed a character of rare excellence. Her personal attractions, sound judgment, instinctive delicacy of perception, and conversational brilliance, gave her a certain supremacy wherever ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... is that it does with ease and economy what the language is always trying to do. Carlylese, though individual and vigorous, is yet not style; it is a Teutonic mannerism. Nor is the prose of Milton and his contemporaries strictly English; it is semi-Latin done ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... good illustration of the fact that there may be parallel streams of philosophic thought (section 87) when we turn to the Stoics and the Epicureans. Zeno and Epicurus were contemporaries, but they were men of very dissimilar character, and the schools they founded differed widely in spirit. Zeno went back for his view of the physical world to Heraclitus, and for his ethics to the Cynics. Epicurus borrowed his fundamental ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... warm at his coming. This new doctor of Tiverton was no younger than Dorcas herself, yet with his erect carriage and merry blue eye she seemed to be not only of another temperament, but another time. It had never struck him that they were contemporaries. Once he had told Phoebe, in a burst of affection and pitying praise, that he should have liked Miss Dorcas ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... reaches a thousand pounds, while the enormous brown Kadiak bears, the largest carnivorous animals in the world, reach two thousand pounds; but the black bear usually averages about two hundred. Black Bruin had far outstripped all his contemporaries in size and prowess. In the fall of his seventh year he weighed upon the scales four hundred and two pounds, which fairly earned him ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... the son-in-law of Hongi, a Napoleonic figure in Maori annals. Hongi was before Sir George's time, but he heard all about him from contemporaries. ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... the mental progress made, John Stuart Mill may, as he says, have entered life "a quarter of a century in advance of his contemporaries," but was he a quarter of a century ahead of others of his own age when he left it? The question is at ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... expressed by an elegant and enlightened scholar, now that more than a quarter of a century has passed, bringing triumph to the missionary cause, and honor to its first founders and advocates; but such we regret to say was not the universal sentiment of her contemporaries. Many persons well remember the unfounded stories put in circulation respecting her, by some whose motives we will not inquire into, as they would scarcely bear investigation, in regard to her actions, her intentions, ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... in its immediate results, Dante, while he began his poem in Latin, the learned language of the time, soon transposed and completed it in Italian, the corrupted Latin of his commoner contemporaries, the tongue of his daily life. That is, he wrote not for scholars like himself, but for a wider circle of more worldly friends. It is the first great work in any modern speech. It is in very truth the recognition of a new world of men, a new and more practical set of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... things, human laws which are contrary to this law of Nature are so many culpable infractions of the legitimate order of things. Before these laws were imposed on humanity everything was in common—land, goods, and women. According to certain contemporaries, the Carpocratians returned to this primitive system by instituting the community of women and indulging in ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... as a writer from most of his Puritan contemporaries, are most conspicuous in the works by which he is chiefly known, "The Pilgrim's Progress," the "Holy War," the "Grace Abounding," and we may add, though from the repulsiveness of the subject the book is now scarcely read at all, the "Life ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... preserved in the royal library at Berlin. The business of this fortunate adept increased so rapidly, that he found it necessary to employ a number of subaltern assistants, who, together with their master, realized considerable fortunes. He died in high reputation and favour with his superstitious contemporaries. ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... unemphatic kind in the most emphatic way, and Howard was amused at the radiant hues with which the lapse of time had touched the very simplest incidents of his career. Mr. Sandys had been, it seemed, a terrible customer at Cambridge—disobedient, daring, incisive, the hero of his contemporaries, the dread of the authorities; but all this on high-minded lines. Moreover, he had brought with him a note-book of queries, to be settled in the Library; while he had looked up in the list of residents everyone with whom ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the age, and our contemporaries are the people, that bring into prominence the little worries, that cause the tempest in the teapot, that bring about the worship of the intangible, and the magnification of the unessential. If we had lived in another epoch we might have dreamt of the eternal happiness of ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... a poet prevents his contemporaries from fixing their attention exclusively upon the merits of his verse, in how much better case is posterity, if the poet's personality makes its way into the heart of his poetry? We have Browning's dictum ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Fielding's Squire Weston. If in "Peregrine Pickle" Smollett occasionally exhibits a tendency to secure variety by extravagant caricature, it is certain that in none of his works, and in none of those of any of his contemporaries, does a richer and more various crowd of personalities appear—a crowd at once quaint and amusing, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... fact that many men of genius are of pathological nature does not authorize us to regard every person of genius or originality as insane, whether he attacks the routine and prejudices of his contemporaries, or whether he opens up new horizons and goes out of the beaten track. Let ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... and brief. He had the genius of condensation and the reserve which is innate in power, and to his reader could convey as much in a paragraph as could be expressed in a page by many of his predecessors and contemporaries, ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... department of literature, to which he has given a lustre previously unknown;—in which he stands confessedly unrivalled, and not approached, even within moderate limits, except, among predecessors, by Cervantes, and among contemporaries, by the author of Anastasius." We shall merely enumerate these works, with the date of their publication, and, as a point of kindred interest, the sums for which the original manuscripts, in the hand-writing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... The contemporaries of Champlain did not perhaps appreciate his merits, or his heroic efforts as a founder. This is not altogether singular, for even in the physical world one cannot rightly estimate the altitude of a mountain by remaining close to its base, but ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... to an eminent degree, and to such an extent that, in this particular, none of his associates or adversaries compare with him, while, among the men of the Revolution, only Mirabeau equals or surpasses him. He is an original, spontaneous genius and not, like most of his contemporaries, a disputatious, quill-driving theorist,[3143] that is to say, a fanatical pedant, an artificial being composed of his books, a mill-horse with blinkers, and turning around in a circle without an issue. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... met in Rome were George Sand, Mrs. Kemble, George Mason the painter, of Harvest Moon fame, Gibson the sculptor, and Lord Lyons. Like Robert Browning, let us add, he was readily responsive to the quickening of his contemporaries, and vigorously studied the present in order that he might the better paint the past, and put live souls into the archaic raiment of Cimabue and ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... retired to their homes on hearing that their families were exposed to the dangers of war and stood in need of their protection; a few had been corrupted by the arts of the enemy. For it was a circumstance often noticed by contemporaries, that no envoy was ever sent from Orleans to the court who did not return, if not demoralized, yet so lukewarm as to be incapable of performing any good service in future.[144] Yet the dispersion of the higher rank of the reformed soldiers, and the consequent weakening of Conde's ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... wash and dress. A prayer when we begin to work at our calling. A prayer at noon. A prayer toward evening. A prayer when we undress. A prayer of thanks for the bitter passion and dying of JESUS CHRIST.' What does the man mean? many of his contemporaries who came upon his Holy Week would say, What does the madman mean? Would he have us pray all day? Would he have us pray and do nothing else? Yes; it would almost seem so. For in his Supersensual Life the Master says to the disciple who has asked, 'How shall I be able to live aright amid all ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... mentioned the Society appointed a number of committees to report on the state of Irish agriculture, commerce, and industry. One of these reports is full of information touching the drain of capital from the country, and its consequent decay, as registered by contemporaries; we shall learn from another how things stood with regard to coal. At the time of the Union the Irish Parliament granted a bounty of 2s. per ton on Irish coal carried coastwise to Dublin, and levied a duty of 10-1/2d. ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... considerable power and skill. The greatest of them and the greatest of Italian poets was Dante Alighieri. In Italian mediaeval literature three names stand out far above all others. They are Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. So completely do they overshadow their contemporaries, that in making our selection of Italian literature we shall confine ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... pursued. Schiller probably reflected that, whether he related his marvels in the dialogue of his personages, or represented them as facts in his drama, he must in both cases depend, for the impression he should produce, on a successful appeal to the superstitious feelings of his contemporaries. In whatever era a poet may find his materials, his authority for using them must lie in the age he writes for—in the interest they are capable of exciting in that age. His success as a dramatic poet required that he should kindle the love of the marvellous; and he may have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... multiplied towards the close of the last century and a little later—owing to the conclusion of the Edition Definitive with its additions and illustrative matter—this point has perhaps been too frequently lost sight of. The great critics who were his contemporaries and immediate survivors were rather too near. The greatest of the later batch, M. Brunetiere, was a little too eager to use Balzac as a stick to beat the Romantics with for one thing, and to make him ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... influences of a Past which still survived and, by the continuity of a corporate life, made an integral part in the Present. The Cathedral life, in which by virtue of their office canons and dean were living relics of antiquity, and as much the contemporaries as the successors of the ecclesiastics who lay crumbling in the crypt, stirred this sense in him as it had been stirred by the ancient Inns of London. Almost the last words that he wrote were a tribute ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... OF LEGENDS OF HEALING.—THE LIFE OF XAVIER AS A TYPICAL EXAMPLE. Growth of legends of miracles about the lives of great benefactors of humanity Sketch of Xavier's career Absence of miraculous accounts in his writings and those of his contemporaries Direct evidence that Xavier wrought no miracles Growth of legends of miracles as shown in the early biographies of him As shown in the canonization proceedings Naturalness of ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... If there be any truth whatsoever in the Gospel narrative, the disciples themselves, instead of exhibiting anything approaching to the credulity with which the author of "Supernatural Religion" taxes the contemporaries of Christ, exhibited rather a spirit of unbelief. If they had transmitted to us "cunningly devised fables," they never would have recorded such instances of their own slowness of belief as is evinced by their conduct respecting the feeding of ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... to announce to her that a barge was in readiness for her immediate conveyance to the Tower. She entreated first to be permitted to write to the queen; and the earl of Sussex assenting, in spite of the angry opposition of his companion, whose name is concealed by the tenderness of his contemporaries, and undertaking to be himself the bearer of her letter, she took the opportunity to repeat her protestations of innocence and loyalty, concluding, with an extraordinary vehemence of asseveration, in these words: "As for that traitor Wyat, he might peradventure write ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... There he spent nine years in the Shao Lin[FN26] Monastery, mostly sitting silent in meditation with his face to the wall, and earned for himself the appellation of 'the wall-gazing Brahmin.' This name itself suggests that the significance of his mission was not appreciated by his contemporaries. But neither he was nor they were to blame, because the lion's importance is appreciated only by the lion. A great personage is no less great because of his unpopularity among his fellow men, just as the great Pang[FN27] is no less great because of his unpopularity among the winged ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... the German, Helmholtz, a kindred genius, thus speaks of him: "His was one of the most profound minds that the world has ever seen; but he had the misfortune to be too much in advance of his age. He excited the wonder of his contemporaries, who, however, were unable to follow him to the heights at which his daring intellect was accustomed to soar. His most important ideas lay, therefore, buried and forgotten in the folios of the Royal Society, until a new generation gradually ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... to the British Foreign Secretary May 20, 1812. The Government was at the moment in confusion, through the assassination, May 11, of Mr. Perceval, the Prime Minister; who, though not esteemed of the first order of statesmanship by his contemporaries and colleagues, had been found in recent negotiations the only available man about whom a cabinet could unite. A period of suspense followed, in which the difficulty of forming a new government, owing to personal antagonisms, was complicated by radical ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... were heard; may not have laid bare the chaotic elements of our nature, brought to the surface its primaeval instincts? Historically, all you know is that Gluck's Orpheus made our ancestors weep; and that Wagner's Tristram makes our contemporaries sob...." ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... a Behaviour as gentle as is usual in the first Steps towards Greatness? And if it were possible to express that easie Grandeur, which did at once perswade and command; it would appear as clearly to those to come, as it does to his Contemporaries, that all the great Events which were brought to pass under the Conduct of so well-govern'd a Spirit, were the Blessings of Heaven upon Wisdom and Valour: and all which seem adverse fell out by divine Permission, which we are not to ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... was echoed by his younger contemporaries, Bion and Moschus.[6] The former is best known through the oriental passion of his 'Woe, woe for Adonis,' probably written to be sung at the annual festival of Syrian origin commemorated by Theocritus in his fifteenth idyl.[7] ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... of Canada West. But he was too true a patriot to hesitate a moment on that score, and in any case he was sufficiently confident of his own abilities to believe that he could hold his own in a fresh field. In this expectation he was deceived. No man among his contemporaries surpassed him in sheer ability, in fearless honesty, in vigor of debate, but he lacked Macdonald's genial and supple art of managing men. And with broad questions of state policy for the moment out of the way, ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... nothing of them except their hostility to the Roman religion, and he probably thought that they were dangerous to the state, notwithstanding the professions false or true of some of the Apologists. So much I have said, because it would be unfair not to state all that can be urged against a man whom his contemporaries and subsequent ages venerated as a model of virtue and benevolence. If I admitted the genuineness of some documents, he would be altogether clear from the charge of even allowing any persecutions; but as I seek the truth ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... Mary Zattiany would have, if she chose, as many suitors among men of his own age as among her former contemporaries. They would discuss the phenomenon furiously, joke about it, try to imagine her as she had been, back water, return out of curiosity, hesitate, ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... because the power of multiplying indefinitely was lost when it ceased to be of use.... John Hunter, supported by his experiments on anabiosis, hoped to prolong the life of man indefinitely by alternate freezing and thawing; and the Veronese Colonel Aless. Guaguino made his contemporaries believe that a race of men existed in Russia, of which the individuals died regularly every year on the 27th of November, and returned to life on the 24th of the following April. There cannot however ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... predominantly Puritan, and the whole world has been informed that English Puritanism was hostile to Art. They were preoccupied with material and moral concerns. Even if they had remained in England, Professor Trent affirms, these contemporaries of Milton and Bunyan would have produced no art or literature. Now it is quite true that for nearly two hundred years after the date of the first settlement of the American colonists, opportunities for cultivating the arts did not exist. But that the sense of ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... seem in this chapter to assume sometimes the liberties which are habitual to historians, but which, in spite of the greater knowledge with which we speak, we generally hesitate to assume towards contemporaries, let the reader excuse me when he remembers how greatly, if it is to understand its destiny, the world needs light, even if it is partial and uncertain, on the complex struggle of human will and purpose, not yet finished, ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... above stated, died on 24th August, A.D. 79, and by his will adopted Pliny, whose name thereafter was C. Plinius L. f. Ouf. Caecilius Secundus. He therefore changed his praenomen to that of his adoptive father, and put his former nomen among his cognomina. By his contemporaries he is called Plinius (cf. Martial, x. 19), or Secundus, as by Trajan. The name Caecilius was confined to ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... evidence of his having been more intimately acquainted with the countries of which we are now speaking, the character of the inhabitants, and the political transactions of the period, than any of his contemporaries; and it appears highly probable that what he has related is substantially true: but there is also reason to believe that he composed his work from recollection after his return to Europe, and he may not have been scrupulous in supplying ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... His contemporaries were obliged to take sides when so aggressive a spirit was among them. His doctrines were discussed in society and in print. The [Greek: Ph B K] Society at Yale debated upon the adoption of Webster's orthography, ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... recommendation of the 'Athenaeum,' for which I am sure we should be grateful to Mr. Chorley. I think Leigh Hunt should have the Laureateship. He has condescended to wish for it, and has 'worn his singing clothes' longer than most of his contemporaries, deserving the price of long as well as noble service. Whoever has it will be, of course, exempted from Court lays; and the distinction of the title and pension should remain for Spenser's sake, if not for Wordsworth's. We are very anxious to know about Tennyson's new work, 'In Memoriam.' ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... Might I not, after having spoken of Dun Scotus's works, say;—"he is reported to have surpassed all his contemporaries in subtlety of logic:"—yet still mean no other works than those before mentioned? Are not Philo's works full of, crowded with, Platonic and Pythagorean philosophy? Eusebius knew from his works that he was a great Platonic scholar; but that he was greater than ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... dwell on the great national loss which we have all sustained in this dispensation; but, perhaps, I may be permitted to say that to me the loss is not only a public one, but a private and personal calamity likewise. Both of these distinguished men were my contemporaries, both, I believe I may without presumption say, my intimate friends. It is a singular coincidence that three successive Governors-General of India should have stood towards each other in this relationship ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... By his contemporaries Luis de Leon was perhaps more esteemed as a theologian or a scholar than as a man of letters. This judgement has been reversed by posterity mainly on the strength of the Spanish poems which were little known during the author's lifetime beyond ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... employed to welcome, or stifle, a newcomer; though Meredith, and more frequently Swinburne, have on occasion elected to pronounce judgment upon the passing generation; as Mrs. Meynell or Mr. G.K. Chesterton have sometimes said the right thing about their contemporaries. The days when postcard notices from Gladstone secured a record in sales are over; and, from whatever combination of causes, we hear ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... self-activity of Spirit, whose modus operandi no man can explain? All origination is inscrutable; the plummet of understanding cannot sound it; but wherefore may not one sleep as sweetly, knowing that the wondrous fact is near at hand, in the bosoms of his contemporaries and in his own being, as if it were pushed well out of sight into the depths of primeval time? To my mind, there is something thoroughly weak and ridiculous in the way that Comte and his company run away from the Absolute and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of Mr. Henry James—"under an evil star;" he aimed poisoned shafts at Louis Philippe; he scoffed, at first, at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and seriously retarded its progress; he failed to appreciate Lord Aberdeen's statesmanship, like the rest of his contemporaries, during the Crimean War; he joked at Turner, and sneered at the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; he attacked Bright and Cobden for their attitude during the Chinese War; he denounced Carlyle's "Latter-day Pamphlets" as mere "barking and froth;" he ridiculed Joseph ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... were Romances. The characteristic of the early Flemish writers, apart from the satiric poetry of Willem, is the seriousness of their thought and purpose. They feel strongly their responsibility in influencing their contemporaries and seldom abandon the tone of the preacher or teacher. The most eloquent verses of van Maerlant may be found in Van den Lande van Oversee, in which he preaches a new crusade after the fall of ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... work behind him; and though he claimed no freedom from error for himself, yet he felt conscious of having done all his work carefully and honestly, and was willing to leave it, such as it was, to the judgment of his contemporaries and of posterity. Once only during the whole of his life did he allow himself to be drawn into a literary controversy; and here, too, he must have felt what most men feel in the end—that it would have been better if he had not engaged in it. The subject ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... appreciated by direct study, a task of no small import in these days of cheap literature. That the plan has succeeded, and that its intention has been fully recognised, is borne out by the testimony of a score of our contemporaries. Of their praise we have no disposition to make an idle boast; and our only object in the present notice is to do for ourselves what we could not perhaps expect a weekly or monthly critic to do for us, viz. to quote the subjects of a few of the valuable ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 488, May 7, 1831 • Various
... has never returned. But we find more than the analogy between the old point of view and the one that was revealed not long ago when the French musicians complained that they were more or less sacrificed in favor of their foreign contemporaries. At bottom it is the same spirit in ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... magician) a powerful man and did not receive divine worship.[646] In recent times the followers of the Brahma-Samaj leader Sen are said to have worshiped him as a god[647]—apparently an isolated phenomenon, the origin of which is not clear. Buddha was purely human to himself and his contemporaries. The ascription of divinity to the Tibetan Grand Lamas is a product of the transformation of Buddhism under the influence of a crude non-Aryan population that retained the old conception of the essential identity of nature ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... arts is that of portraiture. Raised by Titian and his contemporaries to the position of one of the noblest walks of Art, and in the generations following depressed to the position of minister to vanity and foolish pride, it has remained, during the most of the years since, one of the lowest and least reputable of the fields of artistic labor. The lost vein was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... stayed behind to adminster{sic} his newly conquered provinces lest they fall into the hands of wandering Barbarians and become themselves a menace to Roman safety. It sounds rather complicated and yet to the contemporaries it was so very simple, as you shall ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... asked had been jilted by her; and more still had left her. A succession of near ten years' crops of beauties had come up since her time, and had been reaped by proper HUSBANDmen, if we may make an agricultural simile, and had been housed comfortably long ago. Her own contemporaries were sober mothers by this time; girls with not a tithe of her charms, or her wit, having made good matches, and now claiming precedence over the spinster who but lately had derided and outshone them. The young beauties were beginning to look down ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... Ministers. And then they got to books—to novels, new poetry, magazines, essays, and reviews; and with the slightest touch of pleasant sarcasm the judge passed sentence on the latest efforts of his literary contemporaries. And thus at last they settled down on a certain paper which had lately appeared in a certain Quarterly—a paper on a grave subject, which had been much discussed—and the judge on a sudden stayed his hand, and spared his raillery. ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... name in modern science is that of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), who rejected the theory of Copernicus in favor of a modified form of the Ptolemaic system. This was still taught in the schools when two mighty contemporaries, geniuses of science, rose to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... poor Marian, on the other hand, every one was fond of Gerald. His behaviour in the schoolroom was so very nice and good, and out of doors his climbing, running, and riding were no less admired by his contemporaries. Now and then, indeed, a dispute arose between him and the other two boys, when Gerald criticised, and declared that "Edmund and everybody" thought as he did; or when he would try to outdo the sporting exploits reported of ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... every new generation there springs up a new order of ideas. The earlier the age at which a man seizes the ideas that will influence his own generation, the more he has a start in the race with his contemporaries. If Kenelm comprehends at sixteen those intellectual signs of the time which, when he goes up to college, he will find young men of eighteen or twenty only just prepared to comprehend, he will produce a deep impression of his powers for reasoning and their adaptation ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... difficulty in steering a middle course for the review between Lord Brougham, who sought to use its pages to further his own political ambitions, and Macaulay, who vigorously denounced the procedure. The Edinburgh was no longer conspicuous among its numerous contemporaries; but the literary quality was much higher than at first. Among the other famous contributors of this period were Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Thackeray, Bulwer, Hallam, Sir William Hamilton and many others. This was undoubtedly the greatest period in the history of the ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... small oysters and pearls merely as signs of degeneracy? The largest of modern pearls measured two inches long by a circumference of four inches and weighed eighteen hundred grains. The containing shell may have been big only in comparison with its contemporaries. A very small man has been known to be afflicted with a disproportioned goitre, and there are some who argue that the goitre may be but ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... at Vienna who had thoroughly mastered Wigand's great anti-Darwinian work, an intelligent investigator who had set to work in the spirit of Wigand. Another talented zoologist, Hans Driesch, dedicates to the memory of Wigand two books in rapid succession and reprehends the contemporaries of that master of science for ignoring him. O. Hammann abandons Darwinism for an internal principle of development. W. Haacke openly disavows Darwinism; and even at the convention of naturalists in 1897, L. Wilser was allowed to assert without contradiction that, "anyone ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... in the third century B.C., held that the earth revolves about the sun as a fixed centre, and rotates on its own axis. He was the Greek Copernicus. But his theory was rejected by his contemporaries and successors. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... connection that remote rag, 'The Noonoon Advertiser,' shone as a reproach to its great contemporaries. Not by their grandeur and acclamations shall they be judged, but by the quality ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... Isocrates and Aristotle; and he requests his friend Atticus to disperse the copies of his work at Athens, and in the other cities of Greece, (Ad Atticum, i. 19. ii. i.) But it must not be forgotten, that from infancy to manhood Cicero and his contemporaries had read and declaimed, and composed with equal diligence in both languages; and that he was not allowed to frequent a Latin school till he had imbibed the lessons of the Greek grammarians and rhetoricians. In modern times, the language of France has been diffused by ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... firmness, so that details are more easily imagined by the observer, even when an expected delineation is absent. Even the older men, though still under the influence of earlier tradition, show a distinctiveness of style that sets them well apart from their English, French or German contemporaries. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... many later centuries with learning, made its way all over educated Europe very quickly. Not only so, but we find English scholars (Aldhelm and Bede) quoting Spanish writers on grammar and Spanish poets who were almost their own contemporaries. ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... rapturous acclamations by his own contemporaries, who held that he had saved the credit of the English prentice world, and insisted on carrying him enthroned on their shoulders back to Cheapside, in emulation of the journeymen and all the butcher kind, who were thus bearing home the King ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the first discovery of Gall, has been the first to receive its demonstration from pathology and vivisection. But the pioneer teacher to whom contemporaries are unjust has to wait very long for an honorable recognition. The existence of an organ of Language at the junction of the front and middle lobes, at the back of the eye-sockets, has become established in our physiology from the developments ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... from his account of affairs sixteen years earlier. Thus one fails to understand the remark, that "of the manner in which the deed was done we may be certain that Knox would disapprove as vehemently as any of his contemporaries." {251b} The words may be ironical, for vehement disapproval was not conspicuous among Protestant contemporaries. Knox himself, after Mary scattered the party of the murderers and recovered power, prayed ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... of tricks of all kinds. These prestidigitators even obtained at times such celebrity that history has preserved their names for us—at least of two of them, Euclides and Theodosius, to whom statues were erected by their contemporaries. One of these was put up at Athens in the Theater of Bacchus, alongside of that of the great writer of tragedy, schylus, and the other at the Theater of the Istiaians, holding in the hand a small ball. The grammarian ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... taught to look upon him with veneration as a great man. As, however, he spent little in the place, and gave little away, he was not much regarded by the people of Battersea. I mentioned to her the names of several of his contemporaries, but she recollected none, except that of Mallet, who, she said, she had often seen walking about in the village, while he was visiting at Bolingbroke House. The unassuming dwelling of this gentlewoman affords another proof of the scattered and unrecorded wealth of Britain, in works ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... there prevailed in the South economic and social forces similar to those in the North, the emancipation of the Negro would have taken place naturally and normally in both sections. That Locke and his contemporaries felt no incongruity between their ideas of liberty and the existence of slavery must be attributed to the fact that the full social implications of their doctrines had not yet been brought home to them by industrial development. They accepted ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... years afterward, the execution of his mistress, according to the verdict of her contemporaries in France, avenged the blood of a lover who had died without uttering a word to realize the apprehension which, according to Knox, had before his trial impelled her to desire her brother "that, as he loved her, he would slay Chastelard, and let him never ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... his fine Latinity and the elegant turn of those classical lines which all his learned compeers admired and applauded. The part that he played in history has been made to look odious by skilled critics; and the great book in which he recorded the deeds of his contemporaries and predecessors has been assailed violently and bitterly as prejudiced, partial, and untrue. But nobody has been able to attack his Latin or impair the renown of his scholarship; and perhaps had he himself chosen the foundation on which to build his fame, this is what he would have preferred ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... illusion is not so very subtle. We begin by reading the satires of our fathers' contemporaries; and we conclude (usually quite ignorantly) that the abuses exposed by them are things of the past. We see also that reforms of crying evils are frequently produced by the sectional shifting of political ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... are told, cometh not with observation, and the deeper meaning of the greatest events in human history may often escape the attention of contemporaries. My father and yours, perhaps, heard little and thought less of Perry's exploit, and yet it marked not merely a new historical epoch, but a new act in the long drama of human evolution itself. Curious, ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... the work he took it to Brockhaus, and agreed to leave the question of remuneration open. In the following year the second edition was issued (500 copies of the first volume, and 750 of the second), and for this the author was to receive no remuneration. "Not to my contemporaries," says Schopenhauer with fine conviction in his preface to this edition, "not to my compatriots—to mankind I commit my now completed work, in the confidence that it will not be without value for them, even if this should be late recognised, as is commonly ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... France. Some designs have been discovered engraved on the bone of a reindeer or on the tusk of a mammoth. One of these represents a combat of reindeer; another a mammoth with woolly hide and curved tusks. Doubtless these men were the contemporaries of the mammoth and the reindeer. They were, like the Esquimaux of our day, a race of hunters and fishermen, knowing how to work in flint and ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... been sixteen we had been just of an age and contemporaries altogether. Now we were a year and three-quarters older, and she—her metamorphosis was almost complete, and I was still only at the beginning of a man's ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... here came Alice and Phoebe Cary on their romantic pilgrimage, and here have come many others of the illustrious women of the day, most of whom he reckons as his friends in this generation as he did Lydia Maria Child and Lucretia Mott and their contemporaries in the last." ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... similarly marked by a large number of geniuses whose ability is not disproved, because overshadowed by the presence of some titanic contemporary. It would be a mere impertinence to state such an axiom of art as this, were it not the plain truth that almost all criticism of contemporaries is based upon an arrant neglect of it; and if it were not for the fact that I am about to string out a long, long list of American music-makers whose ability I think noteworthy,—a list whose length may lead many a wiseacre to pull a ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... predict the future, especially not so when the person in question was a naturalist. But that there was at this time a general tendency to reject the art of divination is evident from the fact that Herodotus as well as Sophocles, both of them contemporaries of Pericles and Anaxagoras, expressly contend against attempts in that direction, and, be it remarked, as if the theory they attack was commonly held. Sophocles is in this connexion so far the more interesting of ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... influence almost corresponds with that of the kingdoms of Sravasti or Kosala, Vidcha, Magadha, and A[.n]ga,—the modern Oudh, and the provinces of Tirhut and Bihar in Western Bengal. Very frequently he spent the rainy season in his native place Vai['s]ali and in Rajag[r.]iha. Among his contemporaries were, a rival teacher Gosala the son of Ma[.m]khali—whom he defeated in a dispute, the King of Videha—Bhambhasara or Bibbhisara called Sre[n.]ika, and his sons Abhayakumara and the parricide Ajata['s]atru or Ku[n.]ika, who protected him or accepted his doctrine, and also the nobles of the Lichchhavi ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... start of a round to the finish, he never spoke a word except when absolutely compelled to do so by the exigencies of the game. And it was this man who subsequently, for a black period which lives in the memory of all his contemporaries, was known as Gabby George and became a shade less popular than the germ of Spanish Influenza. Truly, corruptio ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... was little before the public. He could afford now to indulge his natural indolence and selfishness. His private life was perhaps not worse than that of the majority of his contemporaries. He had his intrigues, his mistresses, the same love of wine, and the same addiction to gluttony. He had the reputation of a wit, and with wits he passed his time, sufficiently easy in his circumstances to feel no damping to his spirits in the ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... only coarse, distorted types of humanity, exaggerations of foolish fashion, and political antagonisms, but grace and beauty, even with the changing form of the time-spirit; and it is just here that Rowlandson infinitely surpasses those contemporaries whom we studied in our last chapter. His female figures have often that rich English beauty which we find in Reynolds, Hoppner, or sometimes in Morland; and his landscape has qualities of very exceptional merit. He might, we are frequently tempted to think, have been a painter worthy to take ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... between 55 and 60 A.D.; that is, more than twenty years after the event; a period much more than sufficient for the development of any amount of mythology about matters of which nothing was really known. A few years later, among the contemporaries and neighbours of the Jews, and, if the most probable interpretation of the Apocalypse can be trusted, among the followers of Jesus also, it was fully believed, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that the Emperor Nero was not really ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... light is gone out, the radiance of a clear vision and a beneficent purpose. One of those high and most worthy spirits who arise from time to time to stir their generation with new mental impulses in the deeper things, has perished from among us. The death of one who did so much to impress on his contemporaries that physical law works independently of moral law, marks with profounder emphasis the ever ancient and ever fresh decree that there is one end to the just and the unjust, and that the same strait tomb awaits alike the poor dead whom nature or circumstance imprisoned in mean horizons, and ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... the glory with the famous master; his portrait is in the Vatican, and his lamentations, his motets, and his Magnificat rest here, forgotten for centuries. And Victoria? Do you know him? Another of the same period; his jealous contemporaries called him 'Palestrina's monkey' taking all his works to be imitations, in consequence of his long sojourn in Rome; but, believe me, instead of being plagiarisms from the Italian, they are far superior. Here also is Rivera, a Toledan master ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... teachings are concerned, we may briefly dismiss these first with the acknowledgment that most great Teachers have wrought works which, on the physical plane, appear as miracles in the sight of their contemporaries, but are known by occultists to be done by the exercise of powers possessed by all Initiates above a certain grade. The teachings He gave may also be acknowledged to be non-original; but where the student of Comparative Mythology thinks that he has proved that none is divinely inspired, ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... fawning on Washington for office, or utilizing his power for partisan ends. Washington, during his second administration, when his mental decline was remarked by himself, by Jefferson, and others, was regarded by many of his eminent contemporaries as fallen under the sway of small partisans. Not only was the influence of Jefferson, Madison, Randolph, Monroe, Livingston, alienated, but the counsels of Hamilton were neutralized by Wolcott and Pickering, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... that the young and gay dame from the city would have adhered to the free principles cherished by the court party, and indulged in rather to extremity, in opposition to their severe and carping contemporaries. ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... public appearance at the Gymnasium of Westeras, and by the delivery of a poetical speech in Latin—a speech which is still preserved and which is remarkable for its literary merits—he astonished all his seniors. Henceforth Johan Olof Wallin was a marked man among his contemporaries. ...
— The Angel of Death • Johan Olof Wallin
... after the lapse of a century and a quarter. Poets too often, are not fully appreciated till they have been dead a hundred years, and thieves, it would appear, share the disadvantage. But posterity is grateful if our contemporaries are not; and Jack Sheppard, faintly praised in his own day, shines out in ours the hero of heroes, preeminent above all his fellows. Thornhill made but one picture of the illustrious robber, but Cruikshank has made dozens, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... his "Bacchus and Ariadne". Standing before the grave of this tireless maker of beauty, let us recall the story of his life. Titian, as we call him—Tiziano Vecellio, or Vecelli, or Tiziano da Cadore, as he was called by his contemporaries—was born in Cadore, a Venetian province. The year of his birth varies according to the biographer. Some say 1477, some 1480, some 1487 or even 1489 and 1490. Be that as it may, he was born in Cadore, the son of a soldier and councillor, Gregorio ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... Santals, are remarkable for as pure a love of truth as the most moral among civilized men. The Hindoo and the Polynesian have a high artistic feeling, the first traces of which are clearly visible in the rude drawings of the palaeolithic men who were the contemporaries in France of the Reindeer and the Mammoth. Instances of unselfish love, of true gratitude, and of deep religious feeling, sometimes ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... impressed, as we paced up and down the avenue, by the Vicar's words and weighty, weighed advice. He spoke of the various professions; mentioned contemporaries of his own who had achieved success: how one had a Seat in Parliament, would be given a Seat in the Cabinet when his party next came in; another was a Bishop with a Seat in the House of Lords; a third was a Barrister who was ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... more imposing piece of sculpture. A horseman fully armed is thrusting his spear into the body of his fallen foe—a hoplite. The inscription relates that the unhappy foot-soldier fell at Corinth by reason of those five words of his!—a record intelligible enough, doubtless, to his contemporaries, but sufficiently obscure and provocative of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... Nowadays, when we are turning in weary disgust and disillusion from Neo-Darwinism and Mechanism to Vitalism and Creative Evolution, it is difficult to imagine how this new departure of Darwin's could possibly have appealed to his contemporaries as exciting, agreeable, above all as hopeful. Let me therefore try to bring back something of the atmosphere of that time by describing a scene, very characteristic of its superstitions, in which I took what was then considered an ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw |
