"Gibbon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... what she was doing, then introduced me to the first of them, saying, 'Duchess of Devonshire, Miss Burney.' She made me a very civil compliment upon hoping my health was recovering; and Lady Spencer then, slightly, and as if unavoidably, said, 'Lady Elizabeth Foster.'" Gibbon said of the latter, that, "No man could withstand her; and that if she chose to beckon the Lord Chancellor from his woolsack, in full sight of the world, he could not resist obedience." Reynolds painted a portrait of her, showing a bright-eyed, smiling lady, with close-curled hair, of girlish ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... indeed, Gibbon's entire command, move up at the time when the Sixth Michigan cavalry was contending alone with a superior force ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... indeed you should, my dear. It's no use your attempting your embroidery, for your mind would still wander to him that is no more. You should read; indeed you should. Do go on with Gibbon. I'll fetch it for you, only tell me where ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... Notes and a General Index, by the Reverend J. Selby Watson, M.A., forms the new volume of the same publisher's Classical Library. Mr. Bohn has this month commenced a New Series under the title of Bohn's British Classics. The first work is an edition of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, with the notes of Guizot, Wenck, and other continental writers; and farther illustrations by an English Churchman. In thus choosing Gibbon, Mr. Bohn has not shown his usual tact. He may not mean his edition to be a rival ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... Young in Postle Jas. Morton shoemaker Calton John Morison do. there Wm. Somerville miller Glasgow Wm. Henderson weaver there John Falconer there William Allan there John Gray Westmuir James Ralston Glasgow Wm. M'Gibbon there Agnes Dalrymple there James Glen farmer Woodside James Dickson Auldhousebridge James Findlay weaver Gorbals Peter Gray coalhewer Shettleston James Graham Glasgow Wm. Loudon gardener Dalbeth Agnes Dyer Glasgow Margaret Boyd there James Logan miller Woodside ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... Gibbon, in his great work, tells us that as early as the sixth century, caravans conveyed the silks and spices and sandal wood of China by land from the Chinese Sea westward to Roman markets on the Mediterranean, a distance of nearly 6,000 miles. But we hear no mention of the introduction ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... band which consists, we take it, of Merimee, Mme. de Sevigne, Horace Walpole, Byron, and whom else? But in that larger second class, the class of Gray and Julie de Lespinasse, Lady Mary Montagu, Swift, Flaubert, Leopardi, Charles Lamb, Gibbon, Fitzgerald, Voltaire, Cicero we suppose, and a good many more, she is entitled to a place. Jane Welsh, however, is by no means Mrs. Carlyle. She was but twenty-five when she married. Here we find her rather ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... as any in the history of our literature. Besides the high priests, Reynolds and Johnson, there came Edmund Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and many another of less note, to represent the senate: Goldsmith, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Malone, Dr. Burney, Percy, Nugent, Sir William Jones, three Irish bishops, and a host of others, crowded in from the ranks of learning and literature. Garrick and George Colman found here an indulgent audience; and the light portion of the company comprised such men as Topham ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... men, for righteousness, and for happier living. We have seen in him an example of the word made flesh. "He has forged a link of union," writes Tyrrell, "between intellects so diverse as those of Dante, Montaigne, Bossuet, La Fontaine, Voltaire, Hooker, Chesterfield, Gibbon, Wordsworth, Thackeray." ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... the consummate cleverness, of this caricature compels us to remember that this was written in the most insular period of our manners, and during a brief lull in a century of almost incessant mutual hostility between the two nations. Aristocrats like Walpole, Gibbon, and Chesterfield could regard France from a cosmopolitan point of view, as leading the comite of nations. But to sturdy and true-born patriots, such as Hogarth and Smollett, reciprocal politeness appeared as grotesque as an exchange of amenities would be between ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... pleasant room on the fourth floor. Every floor of that hotel had its memories for me. In this room lived that brave reactionary officer who boasted that he had made a raid on the Bolsheviks and showed little Madame Kollontai's hat as a trophy. In this I used to listen to Perceval Gibbon when he was talking about how to write short stories and having influenza. There was the room where Miss Beatty used to give tea to tired revolutionaries and to still more tired enquirers into the nature of revolution while she wrote the only book that has ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... Quickly collecting the troops of Palmyra and the Arabs and Armenian who were his allies, the fearless "head-man" fell upon the army of the haughty Persian king, defeated and despoiled it, and drove it back to Persia. As Gibbon, the historian says: "The majesty of Rome, oppressed by a Persian, was protected ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... mention of poison Lucretia Borgia springs to mind. This is the lady of whom Gibbon writes with the ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... contended in the ancient circus at Constantinople. The white and the red were the most ancient. In the sixth century the dissension between the green (or Prasini) and the blue (or Veneti) was so violent, that 40,000 men were killed, and the factions were abolished from that time. See also Gibbon's "Rome," ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... lies so much in the attempt to decipher the past, and to build up intelligible forms out of the scattered fragments of long-extinct beings, fail to take a sympathetic, though an unlearned, interest in the labours of a Niebuhr, a Gibbon, or a Grote? Classical history is a great section of the palaeontology of man; and I have the same double respect for it as for other kinds of palaeontology—that is to say, a respect for the facts which it establishes as for all facts, and a still ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... into Salemina's bedroom, and knew perfectly well that she had consulted the Peabody notebook, lying open on the desk; but the professor looked as surprised as if he had heard a pretty paroquet quote Gibbon. I don't like to see grave and reverend scholars stare at pretty paroquets, but I won't belittle Salemina's exquisite and peculiar charm ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Omnium Augustissimus; but Alexius deeply offended him, by afterwards recognising the superior and simpler dignity of a Sebastos. His eminent qualities, both in peace and war, are acknowledged by Gibbon: and he has left us four books of Memoirs, detailing the early part of his father-in-law's history, and valuable as being the work of an eye-witness of the most important events which he describes. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Americans and their friends. Dr. Samuel Johnson, whom it employed in this business, was so savage that even the ministers had to tone down his pamphlets before printing them. Far more weighty was Edward Gibbon, who was in time to win fame as the historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He had at first opposed the government; but, on being given a lucrative post, he used his sharp pen in its support, causing his friends to ridicule him in ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... leading the practical statesmen of his generation. And there is a curious fitness in the dedication to him in 1649 of Edward Pococke's Arabic studies, which nearly a century and a half later were to form the basis of Gibbon's great chapters. But the year of Mare Clausum is at once the greatest in Selden's life, and the last months of greatness in the life of his ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... Oxford's love of destruction. People of Hearne's way of thinking, people who respect antiquity, protest in vain, and, like Hearne, must be content sadly to enjoy what is left of grace and dignity. He died before Oxford had quite become the Oxford of Gibbon's autobiography. ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... we gave the outline of the story of Rienzi, principally from Gibbon, but interspersed from other authorities. Miss Mitford's tragedy has since been represented with considerable success, and published. In the preface, we are told, that in addition to the splendid narrative of Gibbon, recourse has been had to "the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... the Altamaha, passed through the centre of Georgia with the determination of engaging the American posts. Marching entirely in the night, through unfrequented ways, subsisting on meal made of parched corn, and guided by white men, they reached the neighbourhood of the American army then encamped at Gibbon's plantation, near Savannah, without being perceived, and made arrangements to attack it. In the night they emerged from the deep swamp in which they had been concealed, and, approaching the rear of the American camp with the utmost secrecy, reached it about three ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... and am afraid I do not), Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold, Thoreau, Lewis Carroll, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne, Wuthering Heights, Lamb's Essays, Johnson's Lives, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Gibbon, the immortal Pepys, the egregious Boswell, various American children's books that I loved as a child and read and love to this day; various French children's books, loved for the same reason; whole rows of German children's books, on which I was brought up, with their charming woodcuts of quaint ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... Foot-Regiments: Lieutenant-General Fleetwood, Lambert, Robert Overton, Matthew Alured, John Hewson (with John Duckinfield for his Lieutenant-Colonel), John Biscoe, William Sydenham, Edward Salmon, Richard Mosse, Richard Ashfield, Sir Arthur Hasilrig, Thomas Kelsay, John Clerk, Robert Gibbon, Robert Barrow.—One finds, besides, certain Colonels appointed to garrison commands: e.g. Colonel Thomas Fitch to be Governor of the Tower, Colonel Nathaniel Whetham to be Governor of Portsmouth, Colonel Mark Grimes to be Governor of Cardiff Overton was ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... possess an overwhelming importance, far beyond that of the baboons and monkeys. There are only four principal kinds now existing, namely, the gibbon, orang-outang, chimpanzee, and the gorilla, of which the first is much less familiar than the others. The known species of gibbons occur in Indo-China and the Malay Peninsula. The typical animal stands about three feet high; its overarching ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... nation. This nation is set forth by the prophet under the figure of the River Euphrates. In their first appearance they were to be very numerous. In the eleventh century they began to invade Europe. The historian Gibbon, speaking of them, says: "Myriads of Turkish horsemen overspread the whole Greek empire, until at last Constantinople fell into their hands." From 1453 till now have they held this grand capital. John, in Rev. ix., pictures this invasion, and speaks of the number of horsemen. He speaks ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... the fact that there were Saxon settlers in England before the arrival of Hengist and Horsa seems settled, by the appointment of a "Comes Littoris Saxonici in Britannica."[191] The date of this official and imperial Roman document is fixed by Gibbon between A.D. 395 and 407. About forty years earlier we have—what is more to our present purpose—a notice by Ammianus Marcellinus of Saxons being leagued with the Picts and Scots, and invading the territories south of the Forth, which ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... the long vacations, a little group of five would vow that during the summer we would read all of Motley's "Dutch Republic" or, more ambitious still, all of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." When we returned at the opening of school and three of us announced we had finished the latter, each became skeptical of the other two. We fell upon each other in a sort of rough-and-tumble examination, in which ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... design, and written in a philosophic spirit and in highly polished language. The work of one historian of the time is great alike as a monument of learning and of literary faculty. The first instalment of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared in 1766, the last in 1788. The grandeur of its conception, the orderly method of its construction, the learning it displays, and the unflagging pomp with which the historian presents his narrative, ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... sided with Gibbon in thinking that the Man in the Iron Mask might possibly have been Henry, the second son of Oliver Cromwell, who was held as a hostage by ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... of a person, one Rutherford, who had purchased the MS., were given to the world in "A View of Ancient History." But one highly-finished composition he had himself published; it is a philosophical review of Despotism: had the name of Gibbon been affixed to the title-page, its authenticity had ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... were true, Mr. Cooper had no right to disregard the "settled and satisfactory opinions of the country upon the subject." We could never so appreciate as perfectly to admit the truth of the canon in criticism here involved, and to this day we cannot help agreeing with Gibbon, that "Truth is the first virtue of history." Mrs. George seems to concur with Gibbon and Cooper, and disregarding the poetry and romance woven about the name of Isabella the Catholic, has painted her according to the documents, which by no means warranted ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... soon to leave, did not satisfy the poet. Oxford did not satisfy Gibbon, or later, Shelley; and young men of genius are not, in fact, usually content with universities which, perhaps, are doing their best, but are neither governed nor populated by minds of the highest ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... now—all was ended—but the Confederate arms were to snatch a last, and supreme laurel, which time can not wither. Attacked in Fort Gregg, by General Gibbon, Harris's Mississippi brigade, of two hundred and fifty men, made one of those struggles which throw their splendor ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... finest poetry. Humor and pathos, tragedy and comedy, all find their place and glimpses of the pageant of human history flit through the pages. It would seem as if it were impossible to read extracts from Thucydides and Tacitus and Gibbon and not long to go to their histories and learn all that could be said by such men about the life of man upon earth, about Athens and Rome and the rise and fall of empires. Selections are unsatisfying and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... and we speculate upon them in the present year of grace, as our grandchildren, a hundred years hence, will give their judgment about us. As for your book-learning, O respectable ancestors (though, to be sure, you have the mighty Gibbon with you), I think you will own that you are beaten, and could point to a couple of professors at Cambridge and Glasgow who know more Greek than was to be had in your time in all the universities of Europe, including that of Athens, if ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... true, a game will probably give at least as much pleasure as a book. Nor must we measure the pleasure of reading altogether by the language of the genuine scholar. It is not every one who could say, like Gibbon, that he would not exchange his love of reading for all the wealth of the Indies. Very many would agree with him; but Gibbon was a man with an intense natural love of knowledge, and the weak health of his early life intensified this predominant passion. But while the tastes which ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... thought it would be a capital arrangement to take Red Brae for three or four months. There would be plenty of room for you, and your father and Theo too," she continued as he remained silent; "and it would be so nice for us to be together, and our old nurse Mrs. Gibbon—you know Mrs. Gibbon, dear—would help us to take care ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... a certain time deposed or exiled, the same thing may happen, and does happen in our waking hours. Therefore isolement must not be regarded as anything wonderful or mystic, but merely as a day-dream. I admit that this seems at first sight a plausible explanation. Yet I can say with Gibbon, "this statement is probable; but ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Cantacuzene, who ruled at Constantinople when the plague was, and who wrote about it. [Footnote: His four books of Histories are to be found in the "Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae."] Didn't he? Nay! Hadn't he a son, Andronicus, who died of it? How did it come to pass that Gibbon did not so much as allude to it? Some, peradventure, think of Rome and of Rienzi, and how it was about that time that he was potent, or was he in hiding there among the Fraticelli? And isn't there ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... so long between the embryo of man and of the higher apes disappears much earlier in the lower apes. It naturally remains longest in the large anthropomorphic apes (gorilla, chimpanzee, orang, and gibbon). The physiognomic similarity of these animals, which we find so great in their earlier years, lessens with the increase of age. On the other hand, it remains throughout life in the remarkable long-nosed ape of Borneo (Nasalis larvatus). ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... "My latest passion will be for books," said Frederick the Great, in his old age. He had hardly looked down into the waters until he got nearly to the other shore. Gibbon declared that a taste for books was the pleasure and glory of his life; and Carlyle, who, it is supposed, was better acquainted with books than any man who has yet lived, declared that of all man could do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... [Footnote 141: Gibbon has fallen into a remarkable error. The unmonastic retreat of Amurath was that of an epicurean rather than of a dervis; more like that of Sardanapalus than of Charles the Fifth. Profane, not divine, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... Gibbon Wakefield.—In 1829 a small book was published in London which attracted a great deal of attention, not only by reason of its charming style and the liveliness of its manner, but also on account of the complete originality of the ideas it contained. It purported to be a ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... describing: "678.—In this year, the star [called] comet appeared in August, and shone for three months every morning like sunbeam. And bishop Wilfrith was driven from his bishopric by king Ecgferth." We are far from the art of Gibbon or Carlyle. Few monuments, however, are more precious than those old annals; for no people in Europe can pride itself on having chronicles so ancient written ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... had been a drover in Central Australia for thirty years, and the names of the water-holes which Tom Gibbon had read out were very familiar to him. Tom, however, was new to the country and did not know who his visitor was. Stobart did not show any surprise at the state of the country to the south of him, but merely remarked casually: "Oh, well, I'll ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... and doings of whom alone, it is said, would fill a good-size volume, chess has had to contend against the consideration that the greatest historians and biographers, with the exception of Cunningham and Forbes, and perhaps Gibbon were not players, hence what we do possess is gathered from scattered allusion, incidental and accidental rather than sustained or connected narrative or biographical notice. Canute the Dane, 1016-1035, William ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... the impulse of its creator's genius and in the absence of all material complications from without, that monarchy developed itself more purely and freely than any similar state. From Caesar's time, as the sequel will show and Gibbon has shown long ago, the Roman system had only an external coherence and received only a mechanical extension, while internally it became even with him utterly withered and dead. If in the early stages of the autocracy ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... languishing existence of about six centuries and a half—that is, from the revival of the western empire in 800 by Charlemagne, to the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453—was brought to a close by the death of Constantine Palaeologus, the last of a race who had continued, says Gibbon, 'to assume the titles of Caesar and Augustus after their dominions were circumscribed to the limits of a single city, in which the language as well as manners of the ancient Romans had ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... only American authors were considered, certain familiar foreign names are conspicuously absent. Achmed Abdullah, Stacy Aumonier, F. Britten Austin, Phyllis Bottome, Thomas Burke, Coningsby Dawson, Mrs. Henry Dudeney, Lord Dunsany, John Galsworthy, Perceval Gibbon, Blasco Ibanez, Maurice Level, A. Neil Lyons, Seumas MacManus, Leonard Merrick, Maria Moravsky, Alfred Noyes, May Sinclair and Hugh Walpole all illustrate recovery from the world war. But with their stories ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... positive external testimony whatsoever. He came at a fortunate time, when the stately yet not pompous or over-elaborated model of the latest Georgian prose, raised from early Georgian "drabness" by the efforts of Johnson, Gibbon, and Burke, but not proceeding to the extremes of any of the three, was still the academic standard; but when a certain freedom on the one side, and a certain grace and colour on the other, were being taken from the new experiments of nineteenth-century prose proper. Whether ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... his anxiety to do business, he will, perhaps, fish out a guide to Derbyshire, dated 1854—a shabby old book—and offer it for four or five shillings, the price of a Crabbe in eight volumes, or of Gibbon's Decline and Fall in six volumes, bound in calf. Talk to this man, and to the other eleven, and they will tell you that there is always a sale for guide-books—that the supply does not keep pace with the demand. It may be taken as a fact that ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... my Lord in a very good humour and kind to me. After dinner to the Temple, where I met Mr. Moore and discoursed with him about the business of putting out my Lord's L3000, and that done, Mr. Shepley and I to the new Play-house near Lincoln's-Inn-Fields (which was formerly Gibbon's tennis-court), where the play of "Beggar's Bush" was newly begun; and so we went in and saw it, it was well acted: and here I saw the first ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Luther's. In the Latin there is added to the imperfection of the form, when measured by classical standards, the difficulty of expressing in an old language the new thoughts of the Reformation. German was regarded even by Gibbon, two hundred and fifty years later, as a barbarous idiom. Luther, especially in his earlier writings, struggled to give form to a language and to express the highest thoughts in it. Where Luther thus struggled with two languages, it is evident ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... Gibbon refers to this ancient tradition, though not as accepting it for a part of ascertained history, yet in a spirit less sceptical than was usual to him. He writes thus: 'It is supposed that Odin was chief of a tribe of barbarians which dwelt on the banks ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... the Strand known as the Adelphi—so called from the pile of buildings erected here in 1768 by the brothers Adam—there still exists an Adelphi Hotel which may well perpetuate the building in which Gibbon found a temporary home in 1787. Ten years earlier it was known as the Adelphi Tavern, and on the thirteenth of January was the scene of an exciting episode. The chief actors in this little drama, which nearly developed into a tragedy, were a Captain ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... suspect Louis XVIII is by no means of a relenting nature, and that he is as little inclined to pardon political trespasses as his ancestor Louis IX was disposed to pardon those against religion; for, according to Gibbon, his recommendation to his followers was: "Si quelqu'un parle contre la foi chretienne dans votre presence, ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... herds of pigs, droves of cattle, or flocks of sheep in the woods, they cut off the haunches of the men and the breasts of the women, and these they regard as great dainties;" in other words they prefer the shepherd to his flock. Gibbon who quotes this passage says on it: "If in the neighbourhood of the commercial and literary town of Glasgow, a race of cannibals has really existed, we may contemplate, in the period of the Scottish history, the opposite ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... party, and the resort of Tories of the strictest school. It became later a noted gambling house ("The gamesters shook their elbows in White's and the chocolate houses round Covent Garden," National Review, 1878), and ultimately developed into a literary club, including amongst its members Gibbon, the historian, ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... "the Reading Rooms, in our town, open as early as nine. Very well. Go to the Rooms this morning, on the stroke of the clock." He stopped, and consulted the letter which lay open on his bed. "Ask the librarian," he continued, "for the third volume of Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.' Open the book at pages seventy-eight and seventy-nine. If you find a piece of paper between those two leaves, take possession of it when nobody is looking at you, and bring it to me. That's all, Dennis. And ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... Confederate States Army, have supplied me with new matter. Colonel Miller, U.S.A., most courteously responded to my request for a copy of the services of his regiment, the First Artillery, in the Mexican war. The late General John Gibbon, U.S.A., wrote for me his reminiscences of Jackson as a cadet at West Point, and as a subaltern in Mexico; and many officers who fought for the Union have given me information as to the tactics and discipline of the Federal armies. The Reverend J. Graham, ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... speakers were manly and dignified figures. The fire and force of their rhetoric were not only aided by graceful gesture but were set out in a language worthy of the eloquent. If we cannot say of the Maori tongue as Gibbon said of Greek, that it "can give a soul to the objects of sense and a body to the abstractions of philosophy," we can at any rate claim for it that it is a musical and vigorous speech. Full of vowel-sounds, entirely without sibilants, but rich in guttural and chest ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... colleagues by his reserved demeanour and seeming want of confidence in them. In December several of the ministers resigned. The strength of parties in the House of Commons was thus quaintly reckoned by Gibbon: "Minister 140; Reynard 90; Boreas 120; the rest unknown or uncertain." But "Reynard" and "Boreas" were now about to join forces in one of the strangest coalitions ever known in the history of politics. No statesman ever attacked another more ferociously than Fox ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... narrative of events where such questions are prominently present. A few familiar instances will illustrate this. No one can take either Lingard's or Macauley's History of England as anything more than a plea for either writer's personal views. Gibbon's anti-Christian feeling is as perceptibly disabling to him in many passages as in the church historians is their search for "acts of Providence," and the hand of God in ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... religion by the cultured element of Roman society in that enlightened era, which, designated as the golden age of literature, was adorned by such distinguished orators, philosophers, historians, poets and naturalists as Cicero, Tacitus, Pliny, Horace and Virgil. In reference to this subject, Gibbon, in his history of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. I., chapter 2, says: "The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosophers as equally false and ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... talk as if they had all history behind them and the world's processes were to them, as to us, old and familiar things. "War seemed a civil game To this uproar," says Raphael, as if he were fresh from reading Livy or Gibbon and had all the wars of Europe and Asia in his memory. Often Milton calls attention, as it were, to his own inconsistencies, putting in an apology like that of Michael when he talks to Adam ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... in London, an old man sat reading Gibbon's History of Rome. He did not put down his book when the postman brought him a letter. He just glanced indifferently at the letter, and impatiently at the postman. Zerviah Holme did not like to be interrupted when he was reading Gibbon; and as he was always reading Gibbon, an interruption ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... Walker a mass of periodical literature, papers from New Zealand and magazines from America, and it exasperated him that Mackintosh showed his contempt for these ephemeral publications. He had no patience with the books that absorbed Mackintosh's leisure and thought it only a pose that he read Gibbon's Decline and Fall or Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. And since he had never learned to put any restraint on his tongue, he expressed his opinion of his assistant freely. Mackintosh began to see the real man, and under the boisterous good-humour ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... that drew from Gibbon, sir J. Reynolds, Sheridan, Joseph Warton, &c. the celebrated Round Robin, composed by Burke, intreating Johnson to write an English epitaph on an English author. His reply was, in the genuine spirit of an old scholar, "he would ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... read "Clarissa," they would continue her distressing adventures across the way. By a lingering progress up the street, "Sir Charles Grandison" might be nibbled down—by such as had the stomach—without the outlay of a single penny. As for Gibbon and the bulbous historians, though a whole perusal would outlast the summer and stretch to the colder months, yet with patience they could be got through. However, before the end was come even a hasty reader whose eye was nimble on the page would be blowing on his nails and pulling his tails between ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... cried M'Gibbon. "It's all true. Look at the newspapers! It's just your confounded ignorance that sets you snickering. I tell you, it's as much a trade as underwriting, and a ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul." The representative minds of the eighteenth century were such as Voltaire, the master of persiflage, destroying superstition with his souriere hideux; Gibbon, "the lord of irony," "sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer"; and Hume, with his thorough-going philosophic skepticism, his dry Toryism, and cool contempt for "zeal" of any kind. The characteristic products of the era were satire, burlesque, and travesty: ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... of Lincoln's Inn Fields a winding and confined court leads to Vere Street, Clare Market. Midway or so in the passage there formerly existed Gibbon's Tennis Court—an establishment which after the Restoration, and for some three years, served as a playhouse; altogether distinct, be it remembered, from the far more famous Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, situate ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... into admiration of the parts of his own learned pig, now wallowing in the stye. The best thing he knew about America was that there a man could have meat for his labor. He did not read Plato, and he disparaged Socrates. Mirabeau was a hero; Gibbon the splendid bridge from the old world to the new. It is interesting also to hear that "Tristram Shandy" was one of the first books he read after "Robinson Crusoe," and that Robertson's "America" was an early favorite. Rousseau's "Confessions" had discovered to him ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... America which lies in the midst of the Western Andes and upon the slopes of these mountain monarchs which look toward the Atlantic. In this century one can almost count upon his hand the travelers who have written of their journeys in this unknown region. Our own Herndon and Gibbon descended—the one the Peruvian and the other the Bolivian waters—the affluents of the Amazon, beginning their voyage where the streams were mere channels for canoes, and finishing it where the great river appears a fresh-water ocean. Mr. ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... and modern, on which the world has pronounced its verdict. These works, in whatever shape we may be able to possess them, are the necessary foundations of even the smallest collections. Homer, Dante and Milton Shakespeare and Sophocles, Aristophanes and Moliere, Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon, Swift and Scott,—these every lover of letters will desire to possess in the original languages or in translations. The list of such classics is short indeed, and when we go beyond it, the tastes of men begin to differ very widely. An assortment of broadsheet ballads and scrap-books, bought in ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... song never before known, for your collection; the air by M'Gibbon, but I know not the author of the words, as I got it from ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... monkey; in this still vague and patriarchal group a branch diverges, before the monkey-features are fixed, in the direction of the anthropoids; and this group in turn spreads into a number of types, some of which are the extinct apes of the Miocene, four become the gorilla, chimpanzee, orang, and gibbon of to-day, and one is the group that will become man. To put it still more precisely, if we found a whole series of remains of man's ancestors during the Tertiary, we should probably class them, broadly, as femur-remains in the Eocene, monkey-remains in the ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... World by Goodspeed or in Meyer's Ancient History. A more detailed treatment of the contemporary history will be found in the History of Greece by Curtius or by Holm. The History of Rome is fully traced in the monumental works of Mommsen or Gibbon or the more recent study in The Greatness and Decline of Rome by Ferrero. Briefer but equally reliable histories of Rome are those ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... For instance: Gibbon selects the period between the accession of Trajan and the death of Marcus Aurelius as the time in which the human race enjoyed more general happiness than they had ever known before, or had since known. Yet, says Mr. Froude, in the midst of this prosperity the heart of the empire was ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of the Spencers has been illustrated and enriched by the trophies of Marlborough; but I exhort them to consider the 'Fairy Queen' as the most precious jewel of their coronet." Thus wrote Gibbon in his memoirs, and all must feel the beauty of the passage. Perhaps it is not too much to say that this nobility may claim another illustration from its ties of friendship and neighborhood with the family of Washington. ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... is coeval with the foundation of Rome, but the number of the troops of which it was composed varied at different periods. It rarely exceeded six thousand men. Gibbon estimates the number at six thousand eight hundred and twenty-six men. For many centuries it was composed exclusively of Roman citizens. Up to the year B.C. 107, no one was permitted to serve among the regular troops except those who were regarded as possessing a strong personal interest ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... was among the audience, and this is what I saw. It may not be in every detail in complete accordance with the received views of historians, but the marionettes take their history wherever they find it. In this case they found it not in Gibbon but in a favourite legend of the people, and, considering that they depend upon the favour of the people, to take it from that source was a ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... chapter I find many pages of information concerning Shakespeare's plays, Milton's works, and those of Bacon, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, De Foe, Locke, Pope, Swift, Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Byron, Coleridge, Hood, Scott, Macaulay, George Eliot, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, Browning, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, and Disraeli—a fact which shows that into the restricted stomach of the public-school pupil is shoveled every year the blood, bone, and viscera of a gigantic ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... carefully through the entire series of the Byzantine writers who treat of the time, besides availing himself of the various modern works to which reference has been made above. If he has been sometimes obliged to draw conclusions from his authorities other than those drawn by Gibbon, and has deemed it right, in the interests of historic truth, to express occasionally his dissent from that writer's views, he must not be thought blind to the many and great excellencies which render ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... Christianity again, is essentially sociology. Numerous works—Atkinson's "Primal Law," and Andrew Lang's "Social Origins," for example—may be considered, as it were, to be fragments to the same purport. In the great design of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," or Carlyle's "French Revolution," you have a greater insistence upon the dramatic and picturesque elements in history, but in other respects an altogether kindred endeavour to impose upon the vast confusions of the past ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... they will be distressed in that trade, while we by convoy engross all the European traffic and navigation."[78] This cynical philosophy was echoed in 1784 by the cultured English statesman, Lord Sheffield, the intimate friend of the historian Gibbon, and editor of his memoirs. "If the great maritime powers know their interests," he wrote, "they will not encourage the Americans to be carriers. That the Barbary States are an advantage to the maritime powers ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... of the Julian line, a new class of emperors succeeded, by whom the prosperity of the empire was greatly advanced. We have now to fall back on Niebuhr, Gibbon, and the Roman historians, and also make more use of Smith's digest of these authors. But so much ground still remains to go over, that we can only allude to salient points, and our notice of succeeding emperors ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... therefore, mark the boundary of the Mohammedan advance in Western Europe. Gibbon, in his narrative of these great events, makes this remark: "A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire—a repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... begged God to 'take Arius away'] is said to have been offered about 3 P.M. on the Saturday; that same evening Arius was in the great square of Constantine, when he was suddenly seized with indisposition" (p. clxx). The "infidel" Gibbon seems to have dared to suggest that "an option between poison and miracle" is presented by this case; and it must be admitted, that, if the Bishop had been within the reach of a modern police magistrate, things might ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... Louisville, must surely be the Great Chief of interviewers. Interviewing, he tells us, is, after all, only a form of reporting, and so are history, poetry and romance. What, he asks, were MOMMSEN and GIBBON, WORDSWORTH and KEATS but reporters, and I can only answer, What indeed? To have been found worthy of tonsure by Mr. MARCOSSON it is necessary to be very eminent, and to win his highest praise it is essential also to be a good "imparter," though he has a kind of sneaking admiration for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... very fond of study, and read scores of books on all kinds of subjects. Emerson was my favorite, and I procured and read his complete works. Gibbon and Macaulay were eagerly read as revealing some of the religious life of the world. Ingersoll, with many others, got his turn. But the book that produced the greatest effect on my life at this time was Fleetwood's "Life of Christ," ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... economical questions. Conspicuous opponent of Pitt's policy in opening West India trade to American navigation, i. 50; leading constructive ideas of, in scheme of policy towards the United States, 63-64, 65-66; success of, in preventing Pitt's measure, 67, 68; Gibbon's estimate of, 73 (note); apparent temporary success of policy of, 75-79; Canada and the other North-American colonies fail to fulfil the part expected from them, 86; pamphlet of, "Observations on the Commerce of the American States," 65; quotations from, ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... this good family of the day continued without dire misadventure. Ab at nine years of age was a fine boy. There could be no question about that. He was as strong as a young gibbon, and, it must be admitted, in certain characteristics would have conveyed to the learned observer of to-day a suggestion of that same animal. His eyes were bright and keen and his mouth and nose were worth looking at. ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... stopper to the pursuing army. There was the making of a good rider in many of them, too; they only wanted ballast, for they knew no more of fear than Nelson did, and would grind over the Vale of the Evenlode and the Marsh Gibbon double timber as gayly and undauntedly as over the accommodating Bullingdon hurdles. And what screws they rode! ancient animals bearing as many scars as a vieux de la vieille, that were considered short of work if they did not come out ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... expressed by Pomponius Mela, 1. iii, c. 6 (he wrote under Claudius), that, by the success of the Roman arms, the island and its savage inhabitants would soon be better known. It is amusing enough to peruse such passages in the midst of London.—Gibbon: c. i. ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... His generous nature showed itself in his opposition to slavery and the slave-trade, and his open sympathy with the American Revolution. His correspondence was large, including such names as those of Benjamin Franklin, Sir Joseph Banks, Lord Monboddo, Gibbon, Warren Hastings, Dr. Price, Edmund Burke, and Dr. Parr. Such a man ought to be remembered, especially by all who take an interest in the studies to which he has opened the way, for he was one who had a right to speak of himself, as he has spoken ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... feelings of some eminent animals were too strong for them: the Orang-outang's jaw dropped so as seriously to impair the vigour of his expression, the edifying Pelican screamed and flapped her wings, the Owl hissed again, the Macaw became loudly incoherent, and the Gibbon gave his hysterical laugh; while the Hyaena, after indulging in a more splenetic guffaw, agitated the question whether it would not be better to hush up the whole affair, instead of giving public recognition to an insect whose produce, ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... "Commentaries" also; Plutarch's "Lives" and Increase Mather's witches; all of Fielding in four stately quarto volumes; Sterne, stained and shabby; Congreve, in red morocco, richly gilt; Moliere, pocket size, in an English translation; Gibbon in sober ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... of that dry witticism in Gibbon, "Abu Rafe says he will be witness for this fact, but who will be witness for Abu Rafe?" but he remained silent, only fixing on Levy those dark observant eyes, with ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cultivation of the mind and other natural powers. "Education is the harmonious development of all our faculties. It begins in the nursery, and goes on at school, but does not end there. It continues through life, whether we will or not.... 'Every person,' says Gibbon, 'has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one more important, which he gives himself.'" JOHN LUBBOCK The Use of Life ch. vii, p. 111. [MACM. '94.] Instruction, the impartation of knowledge by others (L. instruere, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... scholars should vote as to who were the two best historians, I have little doubt that Thucydides and Tacitus would have a pretty large majority. If they were asked to name a third choice, it would undoubtedly lie between Herodotus and Gibbon. At the meeting of this association in Cleveland, when methods of historical teaching were under discussion, Herodotus and Thucydides, but no others, were mentioned as proper object lessons. What are the merits of Herodotus? Accuracy in details, ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... every chapter, and we seem to have a nearer and more personal interest in its success. What a powerful sensation, for instance, is that which we experience when, after studying the 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,' Gibbon tells us how the thought of writing it came to him upon the Capitol, among the ruins of dead Rome, and within hearing of the mutter of the monks of Ara Coeli, and how he finished it one night by Lake Geneva, and laid his pen down and walked forth and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... found chief expression in politics, the professions, and the press; but with greater wealth, and an older condition of society, literature, science, and art, will be cultivated to a far larger extent. 'It was amid the ruins of the Capitol,' says Gibbon, 'that I first conceived the idea of writing the "History of the Roman Empire."' Such a work could not have been written among the forests of Canada, while men were labouring with the many difficulties of a pioneer existence. But with the greater ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... Garnett was killed, with Kemper and Gibbon being borne from the field more dead than alive. At last the expected crash came, when infantry met infantry. Pickett's right strikes Hancock's center, then a dull, sullen roar told too well that Greek had met Greek. Next came Davis, then Brockenborro, followed on the left by Archer's and Pettigrew's ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... is peculiar to himself; it partakes more of the style of the writers of the last century than of the style of the present age. It possesses great merit, but sometimes is negligent and loose. Mr. Gibbon mentioned it to the editor in warm terms of commendation; and was astonished when he heard how much of our author's life had been spent abroad. Speaking of our author's Lives of the Saints, (vol. iv. 457,) he calls it "a work of merit,—the sense and learning belong to the author—his ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler |
