"Rhetorical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eloquence, carried for the moment all before him—his audience becoming like clay in the hands of the potter. But I must confess that the pregnant thoughts and serene self-possession of the young Boston minister had a greater charm for me than all the rhetorical splendours of ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... age, (which I believe was Schleiermacher's view:) and so forth. The two miraculous Draughts of fishes,—the Stater found in the fish's mouth,—the stilling of the Storm,—might perhaps, by a little rhetorical sophistry, in unscrupulous hands, be so disposed of. But the Creative Power displayed on the two occasions of a miraculous feeding of thousands,—the giving of sight to a man born blind,—the calling of Lazarus out of the grave where he had been for four days buried;—these ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... suffer: for my temperament was constitutionally ardent; I had a powerful animal sensibility; and I knew the one great secret for maintaining its equipoise, viz. by powerful daily exercise; and thus I lived in the light and presence, or (if I should not be suspected of seeking rhetorical expressions, I would say)—in one ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... life-time in studying stammering, stuttering and kindred speech defects. I have written this book out of the fullness of that experience—I might almost say out of my daily work. I have made no attempt at literary style or rhetorical excellence and while the work may be homely in expression the information it contains is definite and positive—and what is more important—it ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... weakness, a possible deterrent to action. The last year has not confirmed that view. It has rather shown that eloquence is a supplementary weapon. By "eloquence" I naturally do not mean public speaking, nor yet the rhetorical writing too often associated with the word. Rhetoric is the dressing-up of conventional sentiment, eloquence the fearless expression of real emotion. And this gift of the fearless expression of emotion—fearless, ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... Justice and Abundance, while Avarice appears to bring her treasures, and a lady in high, powdered hair, and no visible clothing, gazes astonished from the background. The contents of the report are not such as we are in the habit of expecting in financial documents, but are rhetorical and self-complacent. The ordinary revenues of the country are said to exceed the expenditures by ten million livres. As a matter of fact, no such surplus existed, but Necker was an optimist by temperament, and was moreover anxious to bolster credit. The nation was delighted, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... a practical turn of mind, was always uncomfortable when Rita spread her rhetorical wings. He did not see why she could not speak plain English. But he kissed her affectionately, heartily glad that he could leave her content with her surroundings; and with a cordial farewell to the good people of the house, he rode away, followed by his clanking ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... to ask me whether I accept a novel interpretation, which I have only heard five minutes ago, delivered in a somewhat hasty and rhetorical form?' ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... the smooth style of Fairfax, Waller, and Dryden. The metre, the grammar, and the thought, are all perfectly easy to follow, even though he employs many of the Ovidian 'turns' and 'clenches'. A certain attempt at realization of the different characters is observable, but the poems are fine rhetorical exercises rather than realizations of the dramatic and passionate possibilities of their themes. In 1596, Drayton, as we have seen, published the Mortimeriados, a kind of epic, with Mortimer as its hero, of the wars between King Edward ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... Antichrist." But while I thus thought such a protest to be based upon truth, and to be a religious duty, and a rule of Anglicanism, and a necessity of the case, I did not at all like the work. Hurrell Froude attacked me for doing it; and, besides, I felt that my language had a vulgar and rhetorical look about it. I believed, and really measured, my words, when I used them; but I knew that I had a temptation, on the other hand, to say against Rome as much as ever I could, in order to protect myself against ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... massacre of the children and the conduct of the disciples in Gethsemane, are met with frequently enough to this day, and in works of a more professedly critical character than Justin's. The description of the carpenter's trade and of the crowd at the Crucifixion may be merely rhetorical amplifications in the one case of the general Synoptic statement, in the other of the special statement in St. Mark. A certain fulness of style is characteristic of Justin. That he attributes the genealogy to Mary may be a natural instance of reflection; the inconsistency ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... those who paint in music; but though Handel wrote more great choruses, his debt to Purcell is enormous. His way of hurling great masses of choral tone at his hearers is derived from Purcell; and so is the rhetorical plan of many of his choruses. But in Purcell, despite his sheer strength, we never fail to get the characteristic Purcellian touch, the little unexpected inflexion, or bit of coloured harmony that reminds that this is the music of the open air, not of the study, ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... deficiency in the processes of logic, but she set her mind to work at once to make the prospects of the cause appear as alluring and important as she could. She delivered herself of an harangue in which she asked a great many rhetorical questions and answered them with a little bang of one ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... after being a General Superintendent and the most conspicuous man in the community. It was sad to see his name disappear from the newspapers; sadder still to see it resurrected at intervals, shorn of its aforetime gaudy gear of compliments and clothed on with rhetorical tar and feathers. ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... these gentlemen—externally so deficient!—constituted the 'Forlorn Order of Very Red Republicans.' Here Monsieur turned to the forlorn order, as it, with one accord bowed, in confirmation of what he said. 'Gentlemen!' continued the speaker with a rhetorical flourish, 'you must not judge these men by their exteriors. We have here the rough bark covering the fine tree. Gentlemen! have not these men hearts of oak, nerves of steel, and bone that, like their souls, never ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... with Pompey, who was overthrown the next year in the battle of Pharsalus and later murdered in Egypt. Cicero returned to Italy, where Caesar treated him magnanimously, and for some time he devoted himself to philosophical and rhetorical writing. In 46 B.C. he divorced his wife Terentia, to whom he had been married for thirty years and married the young and wealthy Publilia in order to relieve himself from financial difficulties; but her also he shortly divorced. Caesar, who had now become supreme ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... over his foolscap apron? Was it not an intoxicating vision of gold and glory? I should doubtless have revelled in its wealth and splendor, but for learning that the FIFTY CENTS was to be considered a rhetorical embellishment, and by no means a literal expression of past fact or ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... multiply difficulties,—real or imaginary,—and so, to create a miserable sense of the dangers which fairly hem the subject in,—in order to render more palatable a desperate escape from them all. Thus, we are told of the risks to which Grammatical nicety, and Rhetorical accommodation expose us; and again, the snares into which the Logical method may betray. Metaphysical aid, we are assured, mystifies; and even Learning, (would to Heaven we had a little more of it!) ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... the details of illness or the manner of death; don't quote endlessly from the poets and Scriptures. Remember that eyes filmed with tears and an aching heart can not follow rhetorical lengths of writing. The more nearly a note can express a hand-clasp, a thought of sympathy, above all, a genuine love or appreciation of the one who has gone, the ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... of an innate appreciation of good literature which she told me with her own lips. I asked her once, when I was a lad, what she thought of "Junius," who had begun to exercise a great influence over my rhetorical instincts. It was as natural to consult her on a point of literature as on one of domestic surgery. Her reply was perhaps the strangest ever made by a woman over sixty to a boy of undergraduate age. It ran in this way, for ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... a somewhat rhetorical fashion, natural to time and place, but he was in great earnest. Harry went on, and entered the office of the Pendleton News, the little weekly newspaper which dispensed the news, mostly personal, within a radius of fifty ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Heaven in our State churches: these monstrous threnodies have been sung from time immemorial over kings and queens, good, bad, wicked, licentious. The State parson must bring out his commonplaces; his apparatus of rhetorical black-hangings. Dead king or live king, the clergyman must flatter him—announce his piety whilst living, and when dead, perform the obsequies of "our most ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Seneca stands deservedly high. Though infected with the rhetorical vices of the age, his treatises are full of striking and often gorgeous eloquence, and in their combination of high thought with deep feeling, have rarely, if at all, been surpassed. The rhetorical manner was so ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... national biography into relief by the suppression of comparatively unimportant details.' He found no examples to follow, for Villani with all his merits was of a different order. Diarists and chroniclers there were in plenty, and works of the learned men led by Aretino, written in Latin and mainly rhetorical. The great work of Guicciardini was not published till years after the Secretary's death. Machiavelli broke away from the Chronicle or any other existing form. He deliberately applied philosophy to the sequence of facts. He organised civil and political history. He ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... speeches are still real speeches, intended to affect the audience addressed, and yet partly intended also for the reporters. When the audience becomes merely the pretext, and the real aim is to address the public, the speech tends to become a pamphlet in disguise and loses its rhetorical character. I may remark in passing that almost the only legal speeches which, so far as my knowledge goes, are still readable, were those of Erskine, who, after trying the careers of a sailor and a soldier, found the true application for his powers in ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... lived for years in Rome, and as I had often discussed the problems of Italian politics with him, I was quite sure he understood the raison d'etre for the Giordano Bruno Club. Fortunately in the midst of the rhetorical attack, our friendly relations remained unbroken with the neighboring priests from whom we continued to receive uniform courtesy as we cooperated in cases of sorrow and need. Hundreds of devout communicants identified ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... rather heart-breaking calmness and common-sense with which she had soothed Louis a while ago; he remembered her cool, patient logic in the midst of the drunken man's ravings—and he decided in a flash of insight that this rather rhetorical way of talking to him was very real to her. She saw him with the dream-endowed eyes of the Kelt and, embarrassing though it might be to him, and unreal though it made him feel, he had to accept the fact that, ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... that author's pedantic, artificial manner, and catching the groundlings with cheap sentiment and rhetorical platitudes, is yet full of telling dramatic effects, which, through the inspiration of a fine actor, lift the most critical audience to sudden heights. One of this sort is justly famous. We moderns, who so feebly catch the spell which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... the happy expression used by the "Saturday Review" in characterising this account of the alleged rupture with its consequences; and no reader will fail to admire the rhetorical skill with which the expulsion from Streatham with its library formed by himself, the chapter in the Greek testament, the gloomy and desolate home, the music-master in whom nobody but herself could see anything to admire, the few and evil days, the emotions that convulsed the frame, the ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... line, and as we can sell the same paragraph to almost every paper, we sometimes pick up a very decent day's work. Now and then the muse is unkind, or the day uncommonly quiet, and then we rather starve; and sometimes the unconscionable editors will clip our paragraphs when they are a little too rhetorical, and snip off twopence or threepence at a go. I have many a time had my pot of porter snipped off of my dinner in this way; and have had to dine with dry lips. However, I cannot complain. I rose gradually in the lower ranks of the craft, and am now, I think, ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... revelation, as assurance of the awakening of divine grace in the human heart, as actual proof that wistful mortality is inherently endowed with immortality, had electrified this symposium. Though it was fashionable, so to speak, in this remote cove among the Great Smoky Mountains, to be repentant in rhetorical involutions and a self-accuser in finespun interpretations of sin, doubt, or more properly an eager questioning, a desire to possess the sacred mysteries of religion, was unprecedented. Kennedy was a proud man, reticent, reserved. Although ...
— The Christmas Miracle - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... children say to A Wonder Book, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, with pictures in color by Arthur Rackham? I do not know why I ask this rhetorical question, which, like most questions of the sort, should be followed by exclamation points! There will be exclamations, at any rate, over this book, surely the most beautiful of the year, perhaps of several years. ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... conduct was consistent with common honesty. He seemed never to care for the soundness of his opinion before he uttered it, or for the truth of the fact before he said it, if only he could produce a rhetorical effect. He seemed to like to defame men whom the people loved and honored. Toward the latter part of his life, he seemed to get desperate. If he failed to make an impression by argument, he took to invective. If vinegar would not answer he resorted to cayenne ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... important transactions have generally been made in the terms of original documents, or the publications of the day; as I deemed it more just and proper so to do, than to give them my own coloring. And I must apprize the reader, that instead of aiming to express the recital in the fluency of rhetorical diction, or of aspiring to decorate my style of composition with studied embellishments, MY PURPOSE HAS SIMPLY AND UNIFORMLY BEEN TO RELATE FACTS IN THE MOST PLAIN AND ARTLESS MANNER; and I trust that my description of scenes and occurrences will be admitted to be natural ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... sat immediately behind me, a gun on each hip, his arms folded, looking at the audience; fixing his gaze with instant intentness on any section of the house from which there came so much as a whisper. The audience listened to me with rapt attention. At the end, with a pride in my rhetorical powers which proceeded from a misunderstanding of the situation, I remarked to the chairman: "I held that audience well; there wasn't an interruption." To which the chairman replied: "Interruption? Well, I guess not! Seth had ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... poet; he has the tradition of virtuosity in his blood, he has before him the example of all contemporaries, and he has at hand an instrument of wonderful sonority and compass. Yet not once is Joao de Deus clamorous or rhetorical, not once does he indulge in idle ornament. His prevailing note is that of exquisite sweetness and of reverent purity; yet with all his caressing softness he is never sentimental, and, though he has not the strength for ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... of the stream—"out of his belly." Will you observe for a moment the rhetorical figure here? I used to suppose it meant "out of his heart." The ancients, you remember, thought the heart lay down in the abdominal region. But you will find that this book is very exact in its use of words. The blood is the life. The heart pumps the blood, but the stomach makes ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... time. Me no likum. Agent one time givum plenty flour, plenty meat, plenty tea. Huh. Them damn' folks no eatum. All time playum cards, drinkum whisky. All time otha fella ketchum flour, ketchum meat, ketchum tea—ketchum all them thing b'longum." In the rhetorical pause he made there, his black eyes wandered inadvertently to Evadna's face. And Evadna, the ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... that I rise with a feeling of timidity to thank you for the distinguished honour you have conferred on me. Praise, like wine, elevates a man, but it likewise thickens and obstructs his speech; therefore, without attempting any rhetorical flourish, I will simply say, I sincerely thank you all for the very handsome manner in which you have responded to the friendly wishes of Brother Sniggs; and, now as the hour of midnight is at hand, I bid ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... the seeds of worthless products exist everywhere, and can germinate and grow in almost all circumstances, while the reverse is the case with those which are valuable; and this being equally true of mental products, this mode of conveying an argument, independently of its rhetorical advantages, has a logical value; since it not only suggests the grounds of the conclusion, but points to another case in which those grounds have been found, or at least ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... scrofulous, has been the nourishment furnished by the rhetorical time-servers and polished conventionalists, whose gifts have been all directed against the highest good of the country's mind, to offer sweets to its crying conscience, and draughts of fierce or languid cordials to lull the uneasy moods of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... labor and the honor of penning the draft, which was adopted with trifling revision. He was always very proud of this famous document, and it was certainly effective. Among the ordinary people of America he is, perhaps, better known for this rather rhetorical piece of composition than for all his other writings put together. It was one of those happy hits of genius which make a man immortal,—owing, however, no small measure of its fame to the historic importance of the occasion that called it forth. It was publicly read on every Fourth-of-July ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... The rhetorical exaggerations, in which the Managers of the prosecution indulged,—Mr. Sheridan, from imagination, luxuriating in its own display, and Burke from the same cause, added to his overpowering autocracy of temper—were ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... small provincial printing establishments. Even at Angouleme, so closely connected through its paper-mills with the art of typography in Paris, the only machinery in use was the primitive wooden invention to which the language owes a figure of speech—"the press groans" was no mere rhetorical expression in those days. Leather ink-balls were still used in old-fashioned printing houses; the pressman dabbed the ink by hand on the characters, and the movable table on which the form of type was placed in readiness for the sheet of paper, being made ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... scriptural salt and pepper; and he would do it with a gusto so serious, that it would have been no unreasonable apprehension that he intended to eat you afterward. And the value of his triumph was enhanced, too, by the consideration that it was won by no meretricious graces or rhetorical flourishes; for the ease of his gesticulation was such as you see in the arms of a windmill, and his enunciation was as nasal and monotonous as that of the Reverend Eleazar Poundtext, under whose ministrations he had been brought up in ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... not quite spontaneous and unbidden, but that they were carved, so to speak, with disproportionate labour by a potent man of letters whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is for these reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity and emotion which we usually associate with lyrical poetry. There are no such epitaphs as Ben Jonson's, witness the charming ones on his own children, on Salathiel Pavy, the ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... his fury when, instead of the expected secrets, he found nothing but dull Latin exercises, wearisome rhetorical commonplaces on such subjects as the charms of spring and summer, the excellence of agriculture, the advantages of knowledge, the danger of the passions, and similar interesting themes. He was just about to tie the bundle ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... strengthened. All these writers extolled the Burgundian regime and supported the duke's policy, whether friendly or antagonistic to France. From a literary point of view, they are greatly inferior to their predecessors and often lapse into rhetorical eloquence. Their style, which appears to be overloaded with flowery images, excited great admiration at the time, especially in the case of Chastellain, who was hailed by his contemporaries ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... literature is conspicuously grave and decorous. This plainly indicates that race has much to do with the matter, and that the mere admission or exclusion of women is but one among several factors. In short, it is easy to make out a case by a rhetorical use of the facts on one side; but, if we look at all the facts, the matter ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... composition of the poetry in question, Angelo Poliziano was indubitably the most successful. This giant of learning, who filled the lecture-rooms of Florence with students of all nations, and whose critical and rhetorical labours marked an epoch in the history of scholarship, was by temperament a poet, and a poet of the people. Nothing was easier for him than to throw aside his professor's mantle, and to improvise 'Ballate' for the girls to sing as they danced their 'Carola' upon the Piazza di Santa ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... most successful. It is the only one by which the comparison with Raphael, so dear to German critics, seems at all warranted: there is certainly some kinship between Duerer's St. John and St. Paul and apostolic figures in the cartoons or on the Vatican walls. The German artist's manner is less rhetorical, but his conception is hardly less grandiose; and his taste does not so closely border on over-emphasis, but neither is it so conscious or so fluent. Technically it seems to me that the chief influence is a recollection ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... complicated the whole undertaking, became the concentration of naval forces in the Channel sufficient to secure temporary control. "Let us be masters of the Strait for 6 hours," Napoleon wrote to Latouche-Treville in command of the Toulon fleet, "and we shall be masters of the world." In less rhetorical moments he extended the necessary period to from two to ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... contained local allusions, which the general reader would fail to understand; in such cases excision became imperative. Further than this, remark or comment is unnecessary. Mark Twain never resorts to tricks of spelling nor rhetorical buffoonery for the purpose of provoking a laugh; the vein of his humor runs too rich and deep to make surface gliding necessary. But there are few who can resist the quaint similes, keen satire, and hard, good sense which form the staple of his ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of the Church in a well-defined locality. It is apparent that the evidence must be incomplete, for many places must have received the Christian faith which were unknown to the writers whose works we have or which they had no occasion to mention. Rhetorical overstatement of the extension of the Church was a natural temptation in view of the rapid spread of Christianity. Each text needs to be scrutinized and its merits assessed. It should, however, be borne in mind that the existence ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... glowing imagery and strong figures is by no means confined to highly-educated persons. Those who are illiterate, as Boone certainly was, often indulge in this style. Even the Indians are remarkably fond of bold metaphors and other rhetorical figures, as is abundantly proved by ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... is a rhetorical amplitude and brilliancy in the Messias,' says Mr. Carlyle, 'which elicits in our critic (Mr. Taylor) an instinct truer than his philosophy is. Neither has the still purer spirit of Klopstock's odes escaped him. Perhaps ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... enrolled himself as a member in one of these societies. It may easily be inferred, therefore, that they had already become bodies of recognized importance. The rhetorical chambers existed in the most obscure villages. The number of yards of Flemish poetry annually manufactured and consumed throughout the provinces almost exceed belief. The societies had regular constitutions. Their presiding officers were called ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... stranger himself courteously drank with the young men of the village, who, like many wiser folk, thus yielded to the charm of mystery. To every one he said a hearty thing, and sometimes touched his greeting off with a bit of poetry or a rhetorical phrase. These dramatic extravagances served him well, for he was among a race ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... avail, and that such is too expensive for us to contemplate—as it probably is—is re-enforced by the common statement that the ship built to-day becomes obsolete in an extremely short time, the period stated being generally a rhetorical figure rather than an exact estimate. The word "obsolete" itself is used here vaguely. Strictly, it means no more than "gone out of use;" but it is understood, correctly, I think, to mean "become useless." A lady's bonnet may ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... any fair appreciation of the Revolution across the Channel. Her temper was above all industrial. Men who were working hard and fast growing rich, who had the narrow and practical turn of men of business, looked angrily at this sudden disturbance of order, this restless and vague activity, these rhetorical appeals to human feeling, these abstract and often empty theories. In England it was a time of political content and social well-being, of steady economic progress, as well as of a powerful religious revival; and an insular lack of imaginative ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... musician. And this he proved by the way in which he abandoned all laws and rules, or, in more precise terms, all style in music, in order to make what he wanted with it, i.e., a rhetorical medium for the stage, a medium of expression, a means of accentuating an attitude, a vehicle of suggestion and of the psychologically picturesque. In this department Wagner may well stand as an inventor ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... But they are not to be regarded as the stages of an idea, rising above one another to a climax. They are fanciful, partly facetious performances, 'yet also having a certain measure of seriousness,' which the successive speakers dedicate to the god. All of them are rhetorical and poetical rather than dialectical, but glimpses of truth appear in them. When Eryximachus says that the principles of music are simple in themselves, but confused in their application, he touches lightly ...
— Symposium • Plato
... night? Pshaw! what a rhetorical affectation this question! as if I could ever forget! Die Zauberfloete, and it rang pure and clear through my thrilled heart. It followed me around to Van Wyck's, where I found Henrietta and Fanny. A compliment ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... however, he adopts a mode of utterance which many people consider equally objectionable, overlooking, as he does, the existence through all the processes of nature of a principle of reserve and concealment. Amid much that is prosaic and rhetorical, however, it remains true that there is real poetic insight and an intense and singularly fresh sense of nature in the best ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... be no doubt, however, that Buchanan made out the case against the Queen with all the rhetorical force of which he was capable; that the accusation was bitter, as of a man who had been personally deceived and injured, as indeed it is quite possible that he may have felt himself to be; and that there was no pity, no mercy, nor compunction ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... to have been written during Sennacherib's campaign against Judah, and suggests that the prophet added on his previous oracle to them, thus diverting it from its original application. Others, such as Stade and Wellhausen, regard the opening verses as embodying a mere rhetorical figure. Jerusalem, they say, appeared to the prophet as though changed into Samaria, and it is this transformed city which he calls "the crown of pride of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... no response to this rhetorical question, but a further inquiry as to whether the Kelly patent "could be bought"[109] elicited a response from Kelly. Writing from Hammondsville, Ohio, Kelly[110] said, ...
— The Beginnings of Cheap Steel • Philip W. Bishop
... of the book, however, has been kept steadily in view; which is to furnish the best possible exercises for practice in Rhetorical reading. To this end, the greatest variety of style and sentiment has been sought. There is scarcely a tone or modulation, of which the human voice is capable, that finds not here some piece adapted ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... a rhetorical strain on the eternal, universal, and absolutely unchangeable character of the law of Nature or Right Reason, he specifies the sense wherein the eternal moral obligations are independent of the will of God himself; it comes to this, that, although God makes all things and ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... is not to produce critical readers of literature, nor to prepare the pupil to answer questions about rhetorical theory, but to enable every pupil to express in writing, freely, clearly, and forcibly, whatever he may find ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... himself to be adored. There are the careless hedonistic Count more given to love than to charity or churchgoing, the fidalgo de ra[c,]a, the haughty fidalgo de solar with a page to carry his chair, the judge who through his wife accepts bribes from the Jews, the rhetorical goldsmith, the usurer (onzeneiro) with his heart in his cassette (arca)[127]. There too the pert servant-girl, the gossiping maidservant, the witch busy at night over a hanged man at the cross-roads, ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... those who are acquainted with Catholic theological criticism are at first surprised to find what very severe critics Catholic theologians are one of another. In this case, where the writer had from the nature of his task to make so much use of rhetorical arguments, allusions, irony, and unusual forms of expression, there was more than usual chance of fault being found, especially as every possible thorny subject is introduced somehow, and that in terms meant to please not Roman theologians, ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... Peters, one of those preachers who was able to exchange the obscurity of a country parish for the public fame of a London pulpit, by reason of a certain gift of rhetorical power, the value of which it is impossible to estimate to-day. Such of his sermons as are still extant are prosy, long-winded, dogmatic absurdities, overloaded with periphrastic illustrations in scriptural language. They are meaningless to a degree, ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... particularly felt in the descriptions of nature with which you interrupt your dialogues; when one reads those descriptions one wishes they were more compact, shorter, put into two or three lines. The frequent mention of tenderness, whispering, velvetiness, and so on, give those descriptions a rhetorical and monotonous character—and they make one feel cold and almost exhaust one. The lack of restraint is felt also in the descriptions of women ("Malva," "On the Raft") and love scenes. It is not vigour, not breadth of touch, but just lack of restraint. Then there is the frequent use of ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... Fotheringay, washing glasses; the others were watching him, more or less amused by the present ineffectiveness of the assertive method. Goaded by the Torres Vedras tactics of Mr. Beamish, Mr. Fotheringay determined to make an unusual rhetorical effort. "Looky here, Mr. Beamish," said Mr. Fotheringay. "Let us clearly understand what a miracle is. It's something contrariwise to the course of nature done by power of Will, something what couldn't ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... soon, provided the ideas are already competent to the capacity of the pupil. The Roman Cornelia, who never suffered a provincial accent, or a grammatical barbarism in the hearing of her children, has always been cited with commendation; and the subsequent rhetorical excellence of the Gracchi has been in a great degree ascribed to it. Fluency, purity and ease are to be acquired by insensible degrees: and against habits of this kind I apprehend there ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... rhythmic prose that has an economy and a shapeliness seldom found in ordinary speech or even oral narration. What Anderson employs here is a stylized version of the American language, sometimes rising to quite formal rhetorical patterns and sometimes sinking to a self-conscious mannerism. But at its best, Anderson's prose style in Winesburg, Ohio is a supple instrument, yielding that "low fine music" which he admired so much in the stories ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... in the dedication. The paragraph near the conclusion beginning with "some opinion may now be expected," &c. and ending with "relation between guilt and punishment," deserves to be quoted as a master-piece of rhetorical ratiocination in a series of questions that permit no answer; or (as Junius says) carry their own answer along with them. The great art of Junius is never to say too much, and to avoid with equal anxiety a commonplace manner, ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... the energy of his look, gesture, and impassioned logic, when once he was fairly under way, in denouncing the tricks and selfish cunning of mere party management. The printed reports of his speeches are mere skeletons, which give but a faint idea of them. Even the few rhetorical passages that are retained have lost much of their original form and beauty. The professional stenographers confessed themselves utterly baffled in the attempt to report him, and he was quite as unfitted ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... beckoning them on their way—as coolly as he might the emigration of a colony of ants. Yet, although there is little animation or poetry in his general manner, he usually succeeds in riveting the reader's attention; and the speeches he puts into the mouths of his heroes glow with at least rhetorical fire. And as a critic truly remarks—'Injustice to the ancient versifier, we should remember that he had still only a rude language to employ, the speech of boors and burghers, which, though it might possess a few songs and satires, could afford him no models ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... taken place since Helen's rhetorical failure is not recorded in the minutes from which this narrative is constructed. But when the man who had been summoned had gone to get the carriage ready, Helen resumed something ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... declamation and sparkling wit, and his speech in relation to the Princesses of Oude produced an impression almost without a parallel in ancient or modern times. Mr. Burke's admiration was sincere and unbounded, but Fox thought it too florid and rhetorical. His fame now rests on his dramas. But his life was the shipwreck of genius, in consequence of his extravagance, his recklessness in incurring debts, and his dissipated habits, which disorganized his moral character and undermined the ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... turned on the cardinal his own invention. Gerbier, who had written the letter, was also its bearer. The cardinal started at the first sight, never having been addressed with such familiarity, and was silent. On the following day, however, the cardinal received Gerbier civilly, and, with many rhetorical expressions respecting the duke: "I know," said he, "the power and greatness of a high admiral of England; the cannons of his great ships make way, and prescribe law more forcibly than the canons of the church, of which I am a member. I acknowledge the power of the favourites of great ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... the author's relative C. Herennius, is usually printed among Cicero's works, and is attributed to him by the MSS. and by Jerome and Priscian. But it is clearly not by Cicero, for (a) it does not agree with his own description of his early rhetorical writings as 'incohata ac rudia'; (b) the author's position, as described by himself, is not Cicero's. It is generally held that one Cornificius was the author; Quintilian (e.g. v. 10, 2) attributes to a person of that name several ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... Synge's poetry was not his major concern, numbering only twenty-four original pieces and eighteen translations, it had a surprising effect upon his followers. It marked a point of departure, a reaction against both the too-polished and over-rhetorical verse of his immediate predecessors and the dehumanized mysticism of many of his associates. In that memorable preface to his Poems he wrote what was a slogan, a manifesto and at the same time a classic credo for all that we call the ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... he was inadvertently buried alive, that he was heard to cry out in his coffin, and that when it was opened some days after, he was found to have gnawed his arm. But these facts are not known to earlier and more authentic historians, and the invention of them seems to be only a rhetorical way of putting the fact that he died at enmity ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... equality of arguments, as leave the controversy undetermined. I am not of Paracelsus's mind, that boldly delivers a re- ceipt to make a man without conjunction; yet cannot but wonder at the multitude of heads that do deny traduction, having no other arguments to confirm their belief than that rhetorical sentence and antimetathesis<51> of Augustine, "creando infunditur, infundendo creatur." Either opinion will consist well enough with religion: yet I should rather incline to this, did not one objection haunt me, not wrung from speculations and subtleties, ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... the prize rhetorical exercise is called by this name; the reason is not given. The students speak of "making a rush for moonlight," i.e. of attempting to gain ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... Westminster, under the tuition of Dr Busby, whom he always respected, and who discovered in him poetical power. He encouraged him to write, as a Thursday's night's task, a translation of the third Satire of Persius, a writer precisely of that vigorously rhetorical, rapidly satirical, and semi-poetical school, which Dryden was qualified to appreciate and to mirror; besides other pieces of a similar kind which are lost. During the last year of his residence at Westminster, and when only eighteen years of age, he wrote one among ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... have received an erroneous designation, than longer ones; and some kinds of composition, such as epistles or panegyrical orations, are more liable to suspicion than others; those, again, which have a taste of sophistry in them, or the ring of a later age, or the slighter character of a rhetorical exercise, or in which a motive or some affinity to spurious writings can be detected, or which seem to have originated in a name or statement really occurring in some classical author, are also of doubtful credit; while there is no instance of any ancient writing proved to be a forgery, which ...
— Alcibiades I • (may be spurious) Plato
... trace; but the passages amplified from the letters have not been improved, and the manly force and directness of some of their views and reflections, conveyed by touches of a picturesque completeness that no elaboration could give, have here and there not been strengthened by rhetorical additions in the printed work. There is also a charm in the letters which the plan adopted in the book necessarily excluded from it. It will always, of course, have value as a deliberate expression of the results gathered from the American experiences, but the personal narrative of ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... seen in Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie (1589). When we move to the latter part of the sixteenth century and then change the genre as exemplified in Day's The English Secretorie, we see a stylistic extension to the art of letter writing which borrowed rhetorical terms and rules and applied them to written correspondence. The emphasis in these rhetorics on style is the same: ornateness in communication is ...
— A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes • Richard Sherry
... without moving, while two red lines slowly defined themselves across his face. The theatrical quality of the scene and the turgid rhetorical bathos of the boy's speeches attested his youth and the unformed violence of his emotions. Did they also indicate a rehearsal, or had the boy merely been goaded to vague action by implicit belief in a woman's vagaries? Orde did not know, but the incident brought home to him, as ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... words in a sentence. The first requirement is that the arrangement of words should be logical, that is grammatical. The rhetorical requirements are that—- ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... impressively conveyed by the whole make of the poem. It is also remarkable for its large and impressive style, its rich command of words, and the lofty beauty of its diction. One of its most striking qualities, as Mr. Henry James, Jr., suggests, "is its extraordinary rhetorical energy and eloquence," and "its splendid generosity of diction." The same writer says of the character of Don Silva, that "nowhere has her marvellous power of expression, the mingled dignity and pliancy of her style, obtained a greater triumph." The critics have almost without exception dealt ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... in his works which are nevertheless full of the highest poetic beauty. Besides, it has been pointed out to me that even the Hebrew poems, like the Egyptian, follow certain rules, which however I might certainly call rhetorical rather than poetical. The first member in a series of ideas stands in antithesis to the next, which either re-states the former one in a new form or sets it in a clearer light by suggesting some ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... extraordinary occupation which he has chosen for himself. Riemann also traces to Sterne, Fielding and their German followers, Goethe's occasional use of the direct appeal to the reader. Doubtless Sterne's example here was a force in extending this rhetorical convention. ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... he often has at other contests and of other candidates, that never, in the course of his political career, had he listened to more mature wisdom, adorned with nobler eloquence, than that which had fallen from "Our young and popular Candidate," he was merely satisfying a burning desire for rhetorical expansion, without any particular regard to accuracy of statement. But the candidate himself greedily gulps that lump of flattery, and all the praise which is the conventional sauce for every political ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... mopped our brows at each other, he told me that he had just cleared 100o, and I went home a beaten man. I had not felt the heat before, save as a beautiful exaggeration of sunshine; but now it oppressed me with the prosaic vulgarity of an oven. What had been poetic intensity became all at once rhetorical hyperbole. I might suspect his thermometer (as indeed I did, for we Harvard men are apt to think ill of any graduation but our own); but it was a poor consolation. The fact remained that his herald Mercury, standing ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... one may almost call beautiful in their bitter phrasing. There is nothing make-believe here as there is in the virtue of the letters. This is Pope's confession, the image of his soul. Elsewhere in Pope the accomplishment is too often rhetorical, though The Rape of the Lock is as delicate in artifice as a French fairy-tale, the Dunciad an amusing assault of a major Lilliputian on minor Lilliputians, and the Essay on Criticism—what a regiment of witty lines to be written by a youth of twenty or twenty-one!—much ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... least a generation. "The Puritan hated bear-baiting," he says, "not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators." How coolly Gardiner disposes of this well-turned rhetorical phrase: "The order for the complete suppression of bear-baiting and bull-baiting at Southwark and elsewhere was grounded, not, as has been often repeated, on Puritan aversion to amusements giving 'pleasure to the spectators,' but upon Puritan disgust at the immorality which these ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... the purpose of adding rhetorical force to his "brigand-chief"—that Cesare was no statesman and no soldier—is entirely of a piece with the rest of the chapter in which it occurs(1)—a chapter rich in sweeping inaccuracies concerning Cesare. But it is staggering ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... attaching to the great subjects handled by St. Augustine in his many works, and from the literary attractions of writings which unite high moral earnestness and the use of a cultivated rhetorical style, his works formed a model for Latin theologians as long as that language continued to be habitually used by Western scholars; and to-day both the spirit and the style of the great man have a wide influence on the devotional ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... centre of the modern country of Westphalia, where the Roman general conducted himself with all the arrogant security of the governor of a perfectly submissive province. There Varus gratified at once his vanity, his rhetorical tastes, and his avarice, by holding courts, to which he summoned the Germans for the settlement of all their disputes, while a bar of Roman advocates attended to argue the cases before the tribunal of Varus, who did not omit the opportunity of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... (Abisharri) demands on one occasion from the King of Egypt ten men to defend Tyre, on another occasion twenty; the town of Gula requisitioned thirty or forty to guard it. Delattre thinks that these are rhetorical expressions answering to a general word, just as if we should say "a handful of men"; the difference of value in the figures is to me a ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... of generalisation prevents me from saying that this is the Mahometan point of view. Indeed, I have reason to know that it is not. But it is a Mahometan point of view in one province. And it was endorsed, more soberly, by less rhetorical members of the community. Some twenty-five years ago, they say, Mahometans woke to the fact that they were dropping behind in the race for influence and power. They started a campaign of education and organisation. At every point they ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... aggression. Talk to the public we could not, for it would have hindered and not helped us to do so. A "preventive war," which the Entente Powers would not have been so ready to meet as they became later on, might well have been the result. Rhetorical declarations on platforms would have been wholly out of place. But we could think, and to the best of such abilities as we and our expert advisers possessed, we did try ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... That the rhetorical manner had not gained entire possession of Lincoln at that time, but was simply used by him on what seemed to be appropriate occasions, is sufficiently shown by a speech delivered in the legislature early in 1839, in which we find the strictly ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... speeches or their books; but they give their best energies to them, and have little current coin of high thought left for ordinary life. The mischief is that these interviews are generally conducted by inquisitive and rhetorical strangers, not distinguished for social tact or overburdened with good taste; and so the whole occasion tends to wear a melodramatic air, which is fatal both to artistic effect as ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... by the coveys of novels that wing into editorial offices by every mail? Is the reviewing of novels left to the novice as a mere rhetorical exercise in which, a subject being afforded, he can practise the display of words? Or is it because a novel is only a novel, only so many, many novels, for which the same hurried criticism must do, whether they be bad or mediocre or best? The reviewing page of the standard newspaper ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... outbreak of hostilities. She spoke often of her mother, always sad, but striving to hide her grief and keeping herself up in the hope of a letter from her son; she spoke, too, of the war, commenting on the latest events with the rhetorical optimism of the official dispatches. She could describe the first flag taken from the enemy as minutely as though it were a garment of unparalleled elegance. From a window, she had seen the Minister of War. She was very much affected when repeating the story of some fugitive ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... eminent justice of peace.) 'A Perspective View of Billingsgate, or Lectures on Elocution;' and 'The True Robin Hood Society, a Conversation or Lectures on Elocution,' its companion; these two by Barnsley. (These two strike at a famous lecturer on elocution and the reverend projector of a rhetorical academy, are admirably conceived and executed, and—the latter more especially—almost worthy the hand of Hogarth. They are full of a variety of droll figures, and seem, indeed, to be the work of a great master struggling to suppress his superiority of genius, and endeavouring to paint ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... well-known simile fell upon the ear, there was a general stir in the group, for Turrible Wiley, when rhetorical, sometimes grew tearful, and this was a mood not to ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... prose, I was more successful. My work for The Harrovian gave me constant practice, and I twice won the School-Prize for an English Essay. In writing, I indulged to the full my taste for resonant and rolling sound; and my style was ludicrously rhetorical. The subject for the Prize Essay in 1872 was "Parliamentary Oratory: its History and Influence," and the discourse which I composed on that attractive theme has served me from that day to this as the basis of a popular lecture. The "Young Lion" of ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... such a little book as Fritz Kreisler's "Four Weeks in the Trenches"—scarcely more than a magazine article, with no sensational adventures and no attempt at rhetorical effect, and of several little collections of published letters—reveals at once the correspondent's other disability. People feel that this man really was there—this is what one real man with a gun in his hand ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... him for his resolution, at the same time advising him not to give up his mind entirely to dog-fighting, as he had formerly done, but, when the present combat should be over, to return to his rhetorical studies, and above all to marry some rich and handsome lady on the first opportunity, as, with his person and expectations, he had only to sue for the hand of the daughter of a marquis to be successful, telling him, ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... mood it is curious to note how inadequate common speech and ordinary language appear, to meet the needs of expression. Even young people with no literary turn, no gift of style, find their memory supplying for them all sorts of broken echoes and rhetorical phrases, picked out of half-forgotten romances; speech must be soigneux now, must be dignified, to meet so uplifting an experience. How oddly like a book the young lover talks, using so naturally the loud inflated phrases that seem so divorced from common-sense ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Here the rhetorical phantom was interrupted by the sound of a very good violin, touched with unusual skill, in the next room. The phantom vanished, but Mr. Helwyse seated himself softly upon the bed, listening with full enjoyment to every note; his very toes seeming to partake of his appreciation. Music is ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... you a polygamist?' The answer to this is, 'No such luck' or 'Not such a fool,' according to our experience of the other sex. But perhaps a better answer would be that given to W. T. Stead when he circulated the rhetorical question, 'Shall I slay my brother Boer?'—the answer that ran, 'Never interfere in family matters.' But among many things that amused me almost to the point of treating the form thus disrespectfully, the most amusing was the thought of the ruthless outlaw who should ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... Swiss, the German, and the Belgian preachers all used literally the same discourse; but I suppose that in the seminaries there are supplied certain skeleton discourses for the whole year, and these skeletons are dressed up sometimes in homely fustian, sometimes in rhetorical tinsel: yet they never ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... is this work of educating the electors to be accomplished? Not, I maintain, by furious speeches and rhetorical displays; not by bribery, baits and banter; but by patient, never-ceasing labour, by lectures on history and science, by individual instruction, is the great work to be accomplished upon which the security and stability of ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... justice, insure domestic tranquillity, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity," interrupted Abel, who had been scanning the Constitution, and who delivered the words with a rhetorical pomp ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... movement of the outer corner of the lower eyelid, the decided curl of the corresponding nostril, and a languid utterance affected as the best vehicle to convey the idea of general indifference, but more particularly because of the opportunities it afforded for certain rhetorical pauses thought to be of prime importance to enable the listener to take the happy conceit or receive the virus of the stinging epigram. Such a stop occurred in the answer just given, at the end of the ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... and each note. If your head's full of that, you'll have no room for fright." And she was ready to try again. When she finished the last notes of "Suwanee River," there was an outburst of hearty applause. And the sound that pleased her most was Tempest's rich rhetorical "Bravo!" As a man she abhorred him; but she respected the artist. And in unconsciously drawing this distinction she gave proof of yet another quality that was to count heavily in the coming days. Artist he was not. But she thought him an artist. A girl or boy without the intelligence ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... This rhetorical question, in fact, was not necessary, as we all, hearing the word "Proletariat" in the middle of Khokhriakov's speech had already started to make a noise and to applaud, the cheers densely hung in the room,—and even before ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... irreconcilably different. You probably think all divorce wrong. We think, in America, that a marriage which has become a burden to either party is no marriage, and ought to cease. But that, of course"—she waved a rhetorical hand—"we cannot discuss. I do not propose for a moment to discuss it. You must allow me my national point of view. But surely we can, putting all that aside, ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... her speech on most occasions, that when she gets into a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I interrupt it. I could not help, however, smiling at the phantom of wealth which her dear imagination had conjured up out of a clear income of poor—hundred pounds a year. "It is true we were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger, my cousin. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... like one of my father's—so naive an imitation of that subtle reasoner's use of the rhetorical figure called Antanaclasis (or repetition of the same words in a different sense)—that I laughed and my mother smiled. But she smiled reverently, not thinking of the Antanaclasis, as, laying her hand on Roland's arm, she replied in the yet more ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ornaments and symbols, and were cold and repulsive when the people were not excited by religious truths. Nor did they favor eloquence in the ordinary meaning of that word. Pulpit eloquence was simple, direct, and without rhetorical devices; seeking effect not in gestures and postures and modulated voice, but earnest appeals to the heart and conscience. The great Catholic preachers of the eighteenth century—like Bossuet and Bourdaloue and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... was shot straight into the celestial ear at short range. It produced no effect. The gentleman's patience and rhetorical vigilance were now completely exhausted. He walked round, and planting himself defiantly in front of the vicarious mourner, he stuck his hands doggedly into his pockets and delivered the following rebuke, like the desultory explosions ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... precipitate, kind temper, excellent in colloquial attractions, caressing the young, not courting rulers; conception, perception, and demonstration quick and clear, with logical precision arguing paradoxes, and carrying home conviction beyond rhetorical illustration; his own impressions so intense as to discredit, scarcely listen to, any other suggestions; well educated ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... held the two volumes of his folio Dictionary; and he carried in his hand a large English oak stick. Let me not be censured for mentioning such minute particulars. Everything relative to so great a man is worth observing. I remember Dr Adam Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow, told us he was glad to know that Milton wore latchets in his shoes, ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... has enjoyed the best of opportunities, and is a writer of rare taste and rhetorical force, and an eloquent and impressive speaker. As a preacher he is never speculative and theoretical, never dogmatic nor sectarian, but eminently spiritual and practical. But the strongest point in his character is his downright, never-failing common sense. He never blunders, and never ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... surprise that in every new edition I adhere to my views on Fir, Oak, and Beech, though he himself had told me that I was wrong, and when he calls my expressed desire for real criticism a mere "rhetorical flourish," is this, according to the opinion of American gentlemen, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... and an affable yet satirical mouth. The speaker cleared his throat with the slight preparatory cough of the practiced orator, and, approaching the window, to Key's intense surprise, actually began in the identical professional and rhetorical style previously indicated ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... figures in so diminutive a consummation as the Catholic Church, is likely to obtain a very effective hold of that broad sequence and many-linked chain of events, to which Bossuet gave a right name, but whose real meaning he never was even near seizing. His merit is that he did in a small and rhetorical way what Montesquieu and Voltaire afterwards did in a truly comprehensive and philosophical way; he pressed forward general ideas in connection with the recorded movements of the chief races of mankind. For a teacher of history to leave the bare chronicler's road so far ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... frame of mind of a Sioux on the war-path, and in corresponding alertness and acuteness of every faculty. The little glove was swiftly put where it would furnish a spot of light to no one else; and in breathless readiness for action, though that is rhetorical, for Rollo's breath was as regular and as calm as cool nerves could make it, he subsided again into the utter inaction which is all eye and ear. And then in a few minutes, from across the road again, and near where he was at first, came these ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... we thus pronounce Johnson's failure in the production of dramatic effect, we will not withhold our tribute of admiration from Irene, as a moral piece. For, although a remark of Fox's on an unpublished tragedy of Burke's, that it was rather rhetorical than poetical, may be applied to the work under consideration; still it abounds, throughout, with the most elevated and dignified lessons of morality and virtue. The address of Demetrius to the ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... inflexible tests, and then sent to join the sheep on the one hand, or the goats on the other. His pages are the record of sentences passed, not the presentation of human characters in all their fulness and colour; and the consequence is that even now and so soon, in spite of all their rhetorical brilliance, their hold on men has grown slack. Contrast the dim depths into which his essay on Johnson is receding, with the vitality as of a fine dramatic creation which exists in Mr. Carlyle's essay on the same man. Mr. Carlyle knows as well as Macaulay how blind and ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, or the dialectic of the concept of pure being, or the impulse towards life, or the vocation of spirit is what actually hatches them? Alas, these words are but pedantic and rhetorical cloaks for our ignorance, and to project them behind the facts and regard them as presiding from thence over the course of nature is a piece of the most deplorable scholasticism. If eggs are really without structure, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... however, conducted by the Sophists with the best motives. They were not always prompted by an earnest desire to know the truth, and an earnest purpose to embrace and do the right. They talked and argued for mere effect—to display their dialectic subtilty, or their rhetorical power. They taught virtue for mere emolument and pay. They delighted, as Cicero tells us, to plead the opposite sides of a cause with equal effect. And they found exquisite pleasure in raising difficulties, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Channing's house; his wife was a handsome, delicate, very nervous woman; his daughter Fanny was a beauty, and became still more beautiful in after years; she was married, when past her first youth, to Edwin Arnold, author of "The Light of Asia," and of many rhetorical leading articles in the London Telegraph. She died a few years ago. They were, all of them, kind to me. I did the best I could to be a good little boy there; but I recollect Mrs. Channing's face of sorrow ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... when he graduated, in 1822. He soon afterwards entered the Theological Seminary at Andover, where he remained three years, giving much of his tune to literature, and writing, besides various moral and critical dissertations, a Sacred Drama, which was acted by the students at one of their rhetorical exhibitions, and an elaborate poem pronounced when his class received their diplomas. On being ordained an evangelist, according to the usage of the Congregational Church, he became Professor of Moral Philosophy and Belles-Lettres ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... in declamation, the declamation of the slow movement in the F minor concerto. Schumann may have had the first phrase in his mind when he wrote his Aufschwung. This page of Chopin's, the torso of a larger idea, is nobly rhetorical. ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... It, written between 1596 and 1600, the blank verse is more like that of Kyd and Marlowe, with less monotonous regularity in the structure and an increasing tendency to carry on the sense from one line to another without a syntactical or rhetorical pause at the end of the line (run-on verse, enjambement). Redundant syllables now abound and the melody is richer and fuller. In Shakespeare's later plays the blank verse breaks away from all bondage to formal line limits, ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... falls essentially within the sphere of rhetoric, it is one's sense of rhetoric which has to fix its tone and style, so as to keep a certain note always sounding in it; in an English speech from the throne, whatever its faults, this rhetorical note is always struck and kept to; in a Prussian speech from the throne, never. An English speech from the throne is rhetoric; a Prussian speech is half talk,—heavy talk,—and half effusion. This is one instance, it may be said; true, but in one ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... have written many volumes in an allegorical and mystical style, and therefore such mighty matters and business being committed to you, require not to be set off with any rhetorical flourishes of speech, but only with ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... a straight-up little gentleman for fair?" the foreman asked himself in rhetorical and exuberant question, slapping his hat against his leg as he strode toward the corral. "Think of her coming at me like she did, the blamed little thoroughbred. Y'u bet she knows me down to the ground and how sudden I got over any fool notions I might a-started to get in my cocoanut. But the ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... it extraordinary, that he should deny the power of rhetorical action upon human nature, when it is proved by innumerable facts in all stages of society. Reasonable beings are not solely reasonable. They have fancies which may be pleased, passions ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill |
