"Reviewer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... command are much lower, and the two branches of the novelist's trade are not to be compared in a business way. As for the essayist, the poet, the traveller, the popular scientist, they are nowhere in the competition for the favor of readers. The reviewer, indeed, has a pretty steady call for his work, but I fancy the reviewers who get a hundred dollars a thousand words could all stand upon the point of a needle without crowding one another; I should rather like to see them doing it. Another gratifying ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... looking in the direction towards which this reviewer points was actually passed by the General Convention of our own Church at its late ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... to see Mrs. H. Ward the other day: she insists on doing battle with the reviewer in the Quarterly, and is thinking of another novel, of which the subject will be the free-thinking of honest working-men in Paris and elsewhere. People say that in "Robert Elsmere" Rose is intended for you, Catherine for your sister Laura, the Squire for Mark Pattison, the Provost ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... matter-of-fact observer who tells what he has seen with his own eyes, and exaggerates nothing. Dr. Holland, one of the editors of that magazine, sent to me a number of uncomplimentary criticisms of my article. One reviewer said: "This Langford must be the champion liar of the Northwest." Resting for a time under this imputation, I confess to a feeling of satisfaction in reading from a published letter, written later in the summer of 1871 from the Upper Geyser basin by a member of the U.S. ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... are desirous of, or have a real occasion for the perusal of them." The number of volumes is 2889. For the knowledge of the existence of this catalogue, and for a variety of curious particulars regarding it, the Reviewer is indebted to one of the dignitaries of Oxford, whose bibliographical information is only exceeded by the obligingness with which he puts it at the command of others, the Rev. Dr. Macbride, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... the principal literary journals of London, Mr. Welby's book is recommended as "carrying on its front the stamp of plain dealing, truth and candor, and entitled, from internal evidence, to the highest authority amid the conflicting statements and opinions respecting emigration to America." The reviewer adds:—"From a country so destitute of moral beauty as the author depicts it, so disgusting in its human externals, and so low in the scale, not merely of refinement, but of good principles, we are happy to withdraw." As Mr. Welby spent a winter in Philadelphia, and had ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... out the same reviewer, and think your estimate correct. On another occasion, when we have more time, I am going to ask how you like the musical critic's opinions; for on that subject you would be ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... capital work, the Parliament of Bees, is incomparably more workmanlike than the Maydes Metamorphosis; but the latter, it should be remembered, is beyond all doubt a very juvenile performance. Turning over some old numbers of a magazine, I found a reviewer of Mr. Tennyson's Princess complaining "that we could have borne rather more polish!" How the fledgling poet of the Maydes Metamorphosis would have fared at the reviewer's hands I tremble to think. But though his rhymes are occasionally slipshod, and the general texture is undeniably thin, still ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... "Starr King was not thought to be what a teacher of Boston Unitarianism ought to be. He was regarded rather as a florid platform speaker, one interested in the crude and restless attempts at reform which sober men distrusted." Another reviewer mingles praise and criticism quite ingeniously. "He astonishes and charms his hearers by a rare mastery over sentences. He is a skilful word-marshal. Hence his popularity as a lyceum lecturer. However much of elegant leisure the more ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... of princes. Many of them chafed under the salutary discipline of the Church. They wished to be rid of her yoke. They desired to be governed by no law except the law of their licentious passions and boundless ambitions. And as a Protestant American reviewer(302) well said about forty years ago, it was a blessing of Providence that there was a spiritual Power on earth that could stand like a wall of brass against the tyranny of earthly sovereigns and say to them: "Thus far you shall go, and no farther, and here you ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... few such in America. No keen-witted reader would ever confound the active, rosy, domestic Phoebe Pyncheon with the dreamy, sensitive, and strongly subjective Hilda of "The Marble Faun;" and Hawthorne might have sent a communication to the Athenaeum to refresh the reviewer's memory, for it was not Zenobia in "The Blithedale Romance" who was dogged by a mysterious persecutor, but her half-sister—Priscilla. Shakespeare's Beatrice and his Rosalind are more alike (for Brandes supposes them to have been taken ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... known as a writer of books about the French Renaissance, on which she became an acknowledged authority. She was less well known, but not less effective, as a reviewer—no one ever dissected Charlotte Yonge so justly—and she excelled in personal description. Her accounts of her friends Miss Emily Lawless, Miss Mary Coleridge, and Joseph Joachim, are masterpieces of characterization. All her literary ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... Saturday Reviewer—you censor morum, you who pique yourself (and justly and honorably in the main) upon your character of gentleman, as well as of writer, suppose, not that you yourself invent and indite absurd twaddle ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the book-reviewer there is sometimes found the oasis of opportunity to recommend to a (comparatively) less suffering community a book worth reading. My Baronite has by chance come upon such an one in Timothy's Quest, by KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN. The little ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... nice episode during the summer holidays when some of the boys row down the river Thames from Oxford to London, which your reviewer has also done more than once. Many of the landmarks that they saw are still there. You will enjoy reading or listening ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... so popular, especially being printed by the Reviewer of that Country, that the Lord of the Isles could make nothing of his Design whenever he talk'd of the good Design of the Party; he was only laugh'd at, and bid remember his Grandfathers ...
— Atalantis Major • Daniel Defoe
... existence more simple, more full, more human in short, than either of the two hitherto known by these names has been,—this problem is but poorly solved in the "Countess of Rudolstadt," the sequel to Consuelo. It is true, as the English reviewer says, that George Sand is a far better poet than philosopher, and that the chief use she can be of in these matters is, by her great range of observation and fine intuitions, to help to develop the thoughts of the time a little way further. But the ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Expeditions—Population and Emigration—the notable Conspiration de Babeuf—the West India Question—and last, though not least, "the Bill" itself. We have endeavoured to adopt from the first paper, some particulars of a spot which bears high interest for every lover of adventure; the reviewer's observations connecting the extracts from Captain Beechey's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 492 - Vol. 17, No. 492. Saturday, June 4, 1831 • Various
... I began to be horribly afraid that Delancey's novel would be very, very long indeed. And even if nobody read it through, not even a reviewer, I should have to without skipping a word or ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... of friars and nuns. It would be pleasant to have studious monks exploring quaint corners of my unphilosophized annals, and gentle, snuff-taking abbes writing up episodes in the history of my noble families, and dedicating them to the present heirs of past renown; while the thinker and the reviewer should never penetrate my archives. Being myself done with war, I should be glad to have my people exempt, as they are under the Pope, from military service; and I should hope that if the Legates taxed them, the ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... saw him a captive, and addressed by the vulgar with the language they seem to find most appropriate to such occasions—that of thrusts and blows. Silently, his head averted, he ignored their existence, as Plotinus or Sophocles might that of a modern reviewer. Probably, he listened to the voice of the cataract, and felt that congenial powers flowed free, and was consoled, though his ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... widely known until it was separately published in 1845. It may be noted, however, that the 'Quarterly Review' (December, 1839) called the attention of its readers to the merits of the 'Journal' as a book of travels. The reviewer speaks of the "charm arising from the freshness of heart which is thrown over these virgin pages of a strong intellectual man and an ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... read with pleasure, except when he tries to be droll; that a more insufferable jester never existed; and that, often as he attempts to be humorous, he in no single occasion has succeeded further than to be quaintly and flippantly dull. Another reviewer warned the author of the Doctor, that there is no greater mistake than that which a grave person falls into, when he fancies himself humorous; adding, as a consolatory corollary to this proposition, that unquestionably the doctor himself was in this predicament. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... sketched a slender memoir for the leading family of saints amongst the Edinburgh reviewer's holy Suddozyes. Great must have been their sanctity amongst the Affghans. The reader will judge for himself whether that aureola, or supernatural glory about their heads, was altogether sufficient to guarantee the throne of King Soojah. And it must ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... 648 The Reviewer thinks that the first stage was in tone like Lucretius, i.e. Epicureanism. The second and third are described here in the text. The Queen Mab (end of the first division) expressed the first stage; the first speech of Ahasuerus in the Hellas is a ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... we are not sure that one or two may not after all have been omitted,) it will be seen that Heliodorus had a tolerably numerous progeny, even in his own language, to answer for; though we fear we must concur in the sweeping censure of a Quarterly Reviewer, (vol. x. p. 301,) who condemns then en masse, with the single exception of the "Ethiopics" of the last-named author, as "a few tiresome stories, absolutely void of taste, invention, or interest; without influence even upon ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... hopes to remove this name before the next edition. Its insertion is entirely due to the machinations of book reviewers, who claim Miss Corelli's books have fallen into the "was" class. The editor never contradicts a book reviewer. ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... distinguished as were the ladies in the earlier day, when Addison wrote his paper on party patches. There were seats of Moral Philosophy to be handed out, under-secretaryships, consular appointments. It is not enough to say that Francis Jeffrey was a reviewer, he was as well a Whig and was running a Review that was Whig from the front cover to the back. Leigh Hunt was not merely a poet, for he was also a radical, and therefore in the opinions of Tories, a believer in immorality and indecency. No matter how innocent a title might ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... the reviewer might say, you have hidden it rather successfully. I have certainly done my best to hide it. For although the personalities of the villain and his legal spouse crop up periodically, with ominous insistence, from the first ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... Conrady existed, or was invented or adapted by Lamb to prove his point, I have not been able to discover. But the evidence of Lamb's "reverence for the sex," to use Procter's phrase, is against her existence. The Athenaeum reviewer on February 16, 1833, says, however, quoting the fallacy: "Here is a portrait of Mrs. Conrady. We agree with the writer that 'no one that has looked on her can pretend to forget the lady.'" The point ought to be ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... "knack at hoping," which led frequently to their undoing; neither could subscribe easily to the "decent formalities of rigid virtue"; and, as of the latter we may also say of the former, in the language of a reviewer, "He had lights and shadows, virtues and foibles—vices you cannot call them, be you never ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... once observed to Dr. Johnson, he disputed his passage through Europe[1210]. He then came to England, and was employed successively in the capacities of an usher to an academy, a corrector of the press, a reviewer, and a writer for a news-paper. He had sagacity enough to cultivate assiduously the acquaintance of Johnson, and his faculties were gradually enlarged by the contemplation of such a model. To me and many others it appeared that he studiously copied ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... case and the remark he makes on Mr. Britton's theory (as to Col. Barre) may equally well apply to his own, namely, that it affords "a [another] curious instance of the delusion to which ingenious men may resign themselves, when they have a favourite opinion to uphold!" The reviewer, indeed, admits that he has "traced the parallel from the scantiest materials;" and in another passage repeats, that but "few materials exist for a sketch of Thomas Lyttelton's life." Of these materials used by ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... London publisher, has disposed of his second importation, and has sent to Ridge for a third—at least so he says. In every bookseller's window I see my own name, and say nothing, but enjoy my fame in secret. My last reviewer kindly requests me to alter my determination of writing no more: and "A Friend to the Cause of Literature" begs I will gratify the public with some new work "at no very distant period." Who would not ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... say, that in this book we have the completest defence of the Federal cause and the most effective onslaught on the Slave Power which any writer has thus far placed on record; and we cordially agree with the vigorous reviewer of the Westminster, in believing that a work more needed could scarcely have been produced at the present time, 'since,' as he adds, 'it contains more than enough to give a new turn to English feeling on the subject, if those who guide and sway public opinion were ever likely to reconsider ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the name of Isaiah; Miss Landon by a comparison with La Rochefoucault; and Don Trueba, with Pigault le Brun. This is a refinement in cruelty. It is twining the rack with flowers; and hanging a man with a cord of gold. The sentence of the reviewer should be "Yea, yea; and nay, nay!" A Barmecide's feast of fame is a supererogation of malice. We hold that all authors so derided have a right to call upon their critics to make good their words; and build up the visionary castles of their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 564, September 1, 1832 • Various
... 'Rolliad,' and as Lockhart had done in the case of "Peter's Letters," so successfully that he had to write the book itself as a "second edition" to answer the demand for it). This review was so cleverly done that "most of the newspaper critics took the part of the poet against the reviewer, never suspecting the identity of both, and maintained the poetry to be fine poetry and the critic a dunce." The sarcasm of 'Firmilian' is so delicate that only those familiar with the school it is intended to satirize can fairly appreciate its qualities. The ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... literary demonstrations of its immorality, nor are churches emptied by criticism. At all events, taking the risk of consequences, we have entered on an era of almost complete literary impunity; the bonfire is as extinct as the pillory; the only fiery ordeal is that of criticism, and dread of the reviewer has taken the place of all fear of ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... As one reviewer aptly puts it, these stories are "just full of fun and good times," for Mrs. Montgomery, the author of them, has the happy faculty of knowing what the small boy and his sister like in the way ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Mountains - or Bessie King's Strange Adventure • Jane L. Stewart
... the history of literature, but there pretty well even well-read people are content to leave him. "What have our literary critics been about that they have suffered such a writer to drop into neglect and oblivion?" asks a recent Quarterly Reviewer. He does not live as Cowper does by a few lyrics and ballads and by incomparable letters. Scarcely a line of Crabbe survives in current conversation. If you turn to one of those handy volumes of reference—Dictionaries of ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... unconscious little author of things told in this record, was taken lately to see a fellow author of somewhat different standing from her own, inasmuch as he is, among other things, a Saturday Reviewer. As he dwelt in a part of the South-west of the town unknown to her, she noted with interest the shops of the neighbourhood as she went, for they might be those of the fournisseurs of her friend. "That is his bread shop, and that is his book shop. And that, mother," she said finally, ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... orders us to do something; Reason (the balance of faculties) directs; and the strongest motive controls. Modern Science, by the discovery of Radiant Matter, a fourth condition, seems to conciliate the two schools. La dcouverte dun quatrime tat de la matire, says a Reviewer, cest la porte ouverte linfini de ses transformations; cest lhomme invisible et impalpable de mme possible sans cesser dtre substantiel; cest le monde des esprits entrant sans absurdit dans la domaine des hypothses scientifiques; cest la possibilit ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... hard to see how the distinguished Arabist came to such a conclusion: at most it can be true only of the editors and scribes of MSS. evidently copied from each other, such as the Mac. and the Bul. texts. As the Reviewer (Forbes Falconer?) in the "Asiatic Journal" (vol. xxx., 1839) says, "Every step we have taken in the collation of these agreeable fictions has confirmed us in the belief that the work called the Arabian Nights is rather a vehicle for ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... book have elicited on their appearance two utterances in the shape of comment and one distinctly critical charge. A reviewer observed that I liked to write of men who go to sea or live on lonely islands untrammeled by the pressure of worldly circumstances because such characters allowed freer play to my imagination which in their case was only bounded by natural laws and the ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... hero and heroine is not divided with subordinate characters. But the poem of Jack Horner possesses this excellence in a more eminent degree; in the former the interest, is divided between two, in the latter it is concentrated in one; and, notwithstanding the ingenuity of the reviewer, it must be confessed that so little is indicated by the poet, as to the character of Jack and Jill, that we feel no more interest in their fate, tragical as it is, than if they were designated by the letters X and Y of algebraical notoriety; or by the names of those personages, who figure in legal ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 545, May 5, 1832 • Various
... people at various times—their feasts and fairs, sports and pastimes, faiths and superstitions—and to describe the scenes which once took place in the fields and lanes they know so well. A friendly reviewer remarked that the wonder was that a book of that kind had never been written before, and that that was the first attempt to give a popular and readable sketch of the history and associations of our villages. In ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... avow the pride he felt in "living in the same parish with a man of that humble station of life of the defendant's," who was capable of paying money out of his own pocket to punish what he believed to be an outrage to decency. The second allusion was to a statement of the reviewer of the American Notes in the Edinburgh to the effect, that, if he had been rightly informed, Dickens had gone to America as a kind of missionary in the cause of international copyright; to which a prompt contradiction had been ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... certainty—was that no other hand but that of Burke could have written the greater part of the letter; [Footnote: It is amusing to observe how tastes differ;—the following is the opinion entertained of this letter by a gentleman, who, I understand, and can easily believe, is an old established Reviewer. After mentioning that it was attributed to the pen of Burke, he adds,—"The story, however, does not seem entitled to much credit, for the internal character of the paper is too vapid and heavy for the genius ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... a reviewer to dinner in his life. I have told him over and over again that this is madness, and find that this is the only thing I can say to him which makes him ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... press. It was at this time that Lyell experienced a singular piece of good fortune, comparable with that which befel Darwin thirty years afterwards, by his book falling into the hands of a very sympathetic reviewer. John Murray, who had undertaken the publication of the Principles, was also the publisher of the Quarterly Review, and Lockhart, the editor of that publication, undertook that an early notice of the book should appear, if the proof-sheets were sent to the reviewer. Buckland and Sedgwick ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... continued the reviewer, 'whose style is for the most part easy and dignified, with a praiseworthy absence of all inflation or bombast, seems at times to have been smitten by a fatal desire to "split the ears of the groundlings" and produce an impression by showy parades ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... position, then, in contravention of that taken by the Reviewer in the North American, is that, by stimulating the Clergy over the whole country, to collect and circulate all sorts of marvelous and supposed preternatural occurrences, by giving this direction to the preaching and literature of the times, these two active, zealous, ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... unworthy of notice in the new system is its tendency to narrow the openings for the writer by profession. If an article is to be signed, the editor will naturally seek the name of an expert of special weight and competence on the matter in hand. A reviewer on the staff of a famous journal once received for his week's task, General Hamley on the Art of War, a three-volume novel, a work on dainty dishes, and a translation of Pindar. This was perhaps taxing versatility and omniscience over-much, and ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... in their way. Walter Scott, who best knew how to write for the young so as to charm grandfathers as well as Hugh Littlejohn, Esq., and all the grandchildren, is said to have wiped his kind eyes as he put down 'Simple Susan.' A child's book, says a reviewer of those days defining in the 'Quarterly Review,' should be 'not merely less dry, less difficult, than a book for grown-up people; but more rich in interest, more true to nature, more exquisite in art, more abundant in every quality that replies ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... understand any subject whatever, read the best book upon it you can hear of; not a review of the book. If you don't like the first book you try, seek for another; but do not hope ever to understand the subject without pains, by a reviewer's help. Avoid especially that class of literature which has a knowing tone; it is the most poisonous of all. Every good book, or piece of book, is full of admiration and awe; it may contain firm assertion or stern satire, but it never sneers coldly, nor ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the surprising reputation of Tennyson. There was a time when the first series of Poems and Ballads was read for what seemed startling in its subject-matter; but that time has long since passed, and it is not probable that any reviewer of the new edition now reprinted verbatim from the edition of 1866 will so much as allude to the timid shrieks which went up from the reviewers of that year, except perhaps as one of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... American coin, and even satirized the American flag." He also was so foolish as to reply to certain adverse criticisms made on "The Bravo," and in seeking to bring down the lightning on the head of his reviewer, he brought down both thunder and lightning on his own head and about his ears. It must be added, too, that he did not live at peace with his neighbors. Discussion and litigation as to a piece of land which the people ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Edinburgh immediately flocks to your doors to inquire after your pure hand, or your pure foot.' 'Their temper,' he observed, 'stands anything but an attack on their climate; even Jeffrey cannot shake off the illusion that myrtles flourish at Craig Crook.' The sharp reviewer stuck to his myrtle allusions, and treated Smith's attempts with as much contempt as if he had been a 'wild visionary, who had never breathed his caller air,' nor suffered under the rigours of his climate, nor spent five years in 'discussing metaphysics ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... the greater part of this work I have been anxious, to use his own expression, to creep along the ground. No doubt there is danger in all this, the danger of triviality, pertness, and occasional vulgarity. Gifford's own work was attacked on its first appearance by a reviewer of the day precisely on those grounds: and though he seems to have made a vehement reply to his assailant, the changes which he made in his second edition showed that the censure was not without its effect. Still, where it is almost impossible to walk quite straight, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... would not shrink from the use of poison or calumny; and his taste has little in common with that which cannot tolerate the hardy details of a prize-fight, but which luxuriates on descriptions of the murder dens of modern England. But prize-fighters and pugilists are blackguards, a reviewer has said; and blackguards they would be provided they employed their skill and their prowess for purposes of brutality and oppression; but prize-fighters and pugilists are seldom friends to brutality and oppression; and which ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... hardly go without notice. Alluding to a certain question, which seems to have greatly bothered Mr. Allen and likewise Mr. Clodd, who, it would appear, was associated with him in this performance, the reviewer says: "The puzzle was solved completely long ago, in the clearest possible manner, and the 'Principia' is the witness to it; but it is still felt to be a difficulty by beginners, and I suppose there is no offence in applying this harmless epithet to both Mr. Grant Allen and Mr. Clodd, ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... their aim, but were quite satisfied with their success in it; not only sought for causes which should carry in their mere statement evidence of their efficiency, but fully believed that they had found such causes. The reviewer can see plainly that this was an error, because he does not believe that there exist any relations between material phenomena which can account for their producing one another; but the very fact of the persistency of the Greeks in this error, shows that their minds were in a very different ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... convenient is for the reviewer to perch himself resolutely, as it were, on the shoulder of his author, and therefrom to show as if he commanded him and looked down upon him by natural superiority of stature. Whatsoever the great man says or does the little man shall treat with an air of knowingness and light ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... subdued him, and he received his wife's copy of the Investigator with a kind of impersonal curiosity. The review was a long one, full of extracts: he saw, as he glanced over them, how well they would look in a volume of "Selections." The reviewer began by thanking his author "for sounding with no uncertain voice that note of ringing optimism, of faith in man's destiny and the supremacy of good, which has too long been silenced by the whining chorus of a ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... tea-drinking was a very serious affair. Lord Mallow went at the poem like a professional reviewer, and criticised without mercy, yet contrived not ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... review on my book in the "Athenaeum" (November 19, 1859.), and it excites my curiosity much who is the author. If you should hear who writes in the "Athenaeum" I wish you would tell me. It seems to me well done, but the reviewer gives no new objections, and, being hostile, passes over every single argument in favour of the doctrine,...I fear from the tone of the review, that I have written in a conceited and cocksure style (The Reviewer speaks of the author's "evident self-satisfaction," and of his ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... A reviewer of the old dispute and separation made the following comments on them in a paper ten years ago: "It was in America, where there had been no persecution worth mentioning since Mary Dyer was hang'd on Boston Common, that about fifty years ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... amateur but a luminous author, I must also be a most intensely refractory person, liable to go out and to go wrong at inconvenient moments, and with incendiary possibilities. These are the faults of my qualities; and I assure you that I sometimes dislike myself so much that when some irritable reviewer chances at that moment to pitch into me with zest, I feel unspeakably relieved and obliged. But I never dream of reforming, knowing that I must take myself as I am and get what work I can out of myself. All this you will understand; for ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... to them, which at this date is the only means of preserving the original charge. (p. 043) It was in his prefaces that he was apt to express his resentment most warmly, for he well knew that this was the one part of a book which the reviewer is absolutely certain to read. In these he frequently took occasion to point out to the generation of critical vipers the various offenses of which they were guilty, the stupidities that seemed to belong to their very nature, and that utter lack of literary skill which prevented ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... we could give a parallel account of what the French do when they adopt an English word into their language. Le Dictionnaire des Anglicismes, lately published by Delagrave, has two hundred pages, and is much praised by a reviewer in the Mercure de France, Feb. 15, p. 246: but it does not give the current French pronunciations of the English words. The reviewer writes: 'Ce qui me gene bien davantage, c'est que M. Bonnaffe supprime, partout, avec rigueur, la facon francaise de prononcer le mot anglais. Etait-il superflu ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... excellent work had not reached us in time for the close reading which it demands, and our "Notes" from it at present are consequently few. The first in the number is a powerful paper on Dr. Southey's Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society—"a beautiful book," says the reviewer, "full of wisdom and devotion—of poetry and feeling; conceived altogether in the spirit of other times, such as the wise men of our own day may scoff at, but such as Evelyn, or Isaak Walton, or Herbert would have delighted to honour." The work is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... world. The judgment passed upon this set of poems at the time by the Critical Review seems blasphemous to the fond biographer, and is so devoid of modern smartness as to be almost interesting as a literary fossil. But it must be deemed essentially just, though the reviewer errs, as many reviewers have erred, in measuring the writer's capacity by the standard of his first performance. "These poems," said the Critical Review, "are written, as we learn from the title-page, by Mr. Cowper of the Inner Temple, who seems to be a man of a sober ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... those "Tendencies of one's Time"! O those dismal Phantoms, conjured up by the blatant Book-taster and the Indolent Reviewer! How many a poor Soul, that would fain have been honest, have they bewildered into the Slough of Despond and the ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... and by awarding credit to Mr. Gage for his fidelity, industry, and accuracy in his part of the work. So that, perhaps, the fault-finding was thrown in only as a necessary part of the duty of the reviewer; for fault-finding is, ex officio, his expected function. A judge ought always to be seated above the criminal, and every author before his reviewer is only a culprit. The author may have given years to the study of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... able and respectful Review of that discourse—a Review which, in some points, is unanswerable, especially in the matter of Scripture and female dress. The dominie appealed to Scripture, and the reviewer "has him fast." I have heard it more than once intimated that the writer of this able, and in some instances most eloquent, review, is a lady of this city. Are we to understand that it is an article in the code of anti-progressive ethics, that the same article written by ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of men whom I tried to limn with loving care, but sparing none of their weaknesses, was characterised by a friendly reviewer as a lot of engaging ruffians. This gave me some food for thought. Was it, then, in that guise that they appeared through the mists of the sea, distant, perplexed, and simple-minded? And what on earth is an "engaging ruffian"? He must be a creature of literary imagination, I thought, ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... there to help us with the dinner. But she was hardly equal, single-handed, to the superintendence of such dishes as we had to set before Herr Grosse. It was high time I relieved Zillah if we were to pass successfully through the ordeal of the great surgeon's criticism, as reviewer ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... which of them she had drawn her inspiration. In 1859 a review of Adam Bede from the pen of one of the oldest and ablest of our contributors was published in this magazine, and on its appearance George Eliot wrote the editor, 'I should like you to convey my gratitude to your reviewer. I see well he is a man whose experience and study enabled him to relish parts of my book which I should despair of seeing recognized by critics in London back drawing-rooms. He has gratified me keenly by laying his fingers on passages ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... that had raised him to eminence in his field. Outwardly he was a sloven and a misanthrope; inwardly he was simple and rather boyish, but years of experience in a box-office, then as advance man and publicity agent for a circus, and finally as a Metropolitan reviewer, had destroyed his illusions and soured his taste for theatrical life. His column was widely read; his name was known; as a prophet he was uncanny, hence managers treated him with a gingerly courtesy not ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... Such claim as I had has been taken from me. In fact I stand unmasked. An English reviewer writing in a literary journal, the very name of which is enough to put contradiction to sleep, has said of my writing, "What is there, after all, in Professor Leacock's humour but a rather ingenious ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... characteristic trick of humorous mock-humility, Arnold wrote to a friendly reviewer who praised these lectures on translating Homer: "I am glad any influential person should call attention to the fact that there was some criticism in the three lectures; most people seem to have gathered ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... propositions with the exploded "Mercantile Theory" is very satisfactorily established by the Edinburgh reviewer; and it is certainly humbling to see a man of his ability coming forward to revive doctrines which had well nigh gone down to oblivion. On the subject where Colonel Torrens conceives himself strongest, the distribution of ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... studies in the Legend will make my meaning clear. A reviewer of my small Quest of the Holy Grail volume remarked that I appeared to be ignorant of Miss Peebles's study The Legend of Longinus "which materially strengthens the evidence for the Christian origin."[2] ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... "Field's inclinations led him to the society of the green-room. Of western critics and reviewers he was the first favorite among dramatic people. Helpful, kind, and enthusiastic, he was rarely severe and never captious. Though in no sense an analyst, he was an amusing reviewer and a great advertiser. Once he conceived an attachment for an actor or actress, his generous mind set about bringing such fortunate person more conspicuously into public notice. Emma Abbott's baby, which she never had, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... the constitution, the shortest and most effectual method is by beginning with the Established Church; but will any person of veracity, any person of ordinary decency, say that he has deserved the accusation which the Edinburgh reviewer, with a want of decency peculiarly his ...
— Guy Fawkes - or A Complete History Of The Gunpowder Treason, A.D. 1605 • Thomas Lathbury
... to the lot of the young Goethe, then an unknown reviewer, to write for the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen in November, 1772, a notice of some of Buerger's early poems. "The 'Minnelied' of Mr. Buerger," he says, "is worthy of a better age; and if he has more such happy moments, these efforts of his will be among the most potent influences to render ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... is carried on in his own peculiar and inimitable style, it is an onslaught into the camp of the enemy. Speaking of the prize-fighters, whom a reviewer condemned as blackguards, he exclaims defiantly, "Can the rolls of the English aristocracy exhibit names belonging to more noble, more heroic men than those who were called respectively Pearce, Cribb, and Spring? ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... The reviewer in his art must quote passages. It is hardly the part of a Preface writer to do that. But to show what I mean I can at least ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... the club and tomahawk. But it is a different matter with the submerged reputation—down in the deep water; once a favorite there, always a favorite; once beloved, always beloved; once respected, always respected, honored, and believed in. For, what the reviewer says never finds its way down into those placid deeps; nor the newspaper sneers, nor any breath of the winds of slander blowing above. Down there they never hear of these things. Their idol may be painted clay, up then at the surface, and fade and waste and crumble ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... that court intrigues had much to do with the many changes which the score had to undergo before it became entirely acceptable to the powers that be in the Czar's empire. Possibly. But every change which has come under the notice of this reviewer has been to its betterment and made for its practical presentation. It is said that the popular scenes were curtailed because they represented the voice of the democracy. But there is still so much choral work in the opera that the judgment of the operatic audiences of to-day is likely ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... to Berthollet, de la Place, Monge, Morveau, Fourcroy and others on "Considerations on the Doctrine of Phlogiston and the Decomposition of Water." It is the old story in a newer dress. Its purpose was to bring home to Americans afresh his particular ideas. The reviewer of the Medical Repository staff was evidently impressed by ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... to evade difficult questions, to take the popular side of a debated matter at the cost of loyalty to truth. Controversy almost inevitably breeds inaccuracy; there are few writers who fight fair. Quotations, torn from their context, mislead; carefully chosen figures give a wrong impression; the reviewer is tempted to pick out passages that support only his contention, whether eulogistic or depreciatory. Leslie Stephen speaks of "the ease with which a man endowed with a gift of popular rhetoric, and a facility for catching at the current phrases, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... [A reviewer in a recent issue of The Times Literary Supplement asks, "Why should the characters in the psychological novel be invariably horrid?" and is inclined to explain this state of affairs by the undiscriminating study of "the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 10th, 1920 • Various
... justifies the publishing business, refreshes the heart of the reviewer, strengthens faith in the outcome of the great experiment of putting humanity on earth. The Rosary is a rare book, a source of ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... reviewer of the Vestiges in Blackwood's Magazine, who is understood to be a naturalist of distinguished ability, expresses himself in an equally ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... Chiefly Lyrical, was published with the name of Alfred Tennyson alone on the title page. The volume was reviewed enthusiastically by Hallam, but was more or less slated by Christopher North in the columns of Blackwoods' Magazine. Tennyson was very angry about the latter review and replied to the reviewer in some caustic, but entirely ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... AND UNWIN) is somewhat embarrassing to a reviewer, for it has the theme of a great book with the manner of a trivial one. It is the history of a very much smaller nation, Ethuria, left despoiled and starving at the end of a nine-years' war, in which its great neighbours have used it as a battle-ground. Revolution ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... a Gypsy student. He collected data which can be verified, but do not often give an impression of life, except the life of a young Cambridge man who is devoted to Gypsies. The "Athenaeum" reviewer {221b} begs the question by calling the Gypsy dialogues of Hindes Groome, photographic; and is plainly inaccurate in saying that if they are compared with those in "Lavengro" "the illusion in Borrow's narrative is disturbed by the uncolloquial vocabulary of the speakers." ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... the holiday together, doing various things with boats, fish, seaweed, and visiting various interesting places, some of which they find to be a con! They travel to the Isle of Wight, just a few miles across the Solent, and even visit Seaview where I, the reviewer, was brought up. Many of the interesting things they did were what we as boys fifty ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... simplicity" of which the Pall Mall Gazette, December 12, 1879, declared that Mr. Darwin was "a master." The final sentence, about the "weakness of thought and mental anachronism which no one can envy," was especially successful. The reviewer in the Pall Mall Gazette just quoted from gave it in full, and said that it was thoroughly justified. He then mused forth a general gnome that the "confidence of writers who deal in semi-scientific ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... sure, amusing to read the clamours which have been raised against some of the most valuable, and now generally received, works! When an author recollects the pert conclusion of Dr. Kenrick's review of Dr. Johnson's Tour to the Hebrides,[90] he need not fear the flippancy of a reviewer's wit, as decisive of the ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... up and caught Miss Windsor's eye. She colored, turned away, and said something to the Saturday Reviewer, who had before found his satirical remarks thrown away on ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... superiors of the reviewers, and in a general way acquainted with their character, who would accept as conclusive upon the merits of a book the opinions they gave, nor ever question a mode of quotation by which a book was made to show itself whatever the reviewer chose to call it. A scandalous rumor of any kind, especially from the region styled "high life," often false, and always incorrect, was the delight both of the paper and of its readers; and the interest it thus awoke, ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... individual were born, which varied in some manner, giving it twice as good a chance of life as that of the other individuals, yet the chances would be strongly against its survival. Supposing it to survive and to breed, and that half its young inherited the favourable variation; still, as the Reviewer goes onto show, the young would have only a slightly better chance of surviving and breeding; and this chance would go on decreasing in the succeeding generations. The justice of these remarks cannot, I think, be disputed. If, for instance, a bird of some kind could procure ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin |
