"Epigrammatical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... entirely to prose, he speedily became known as a writer of brilliant epigrammatic essays and even more brilliant paradoxical plays such as An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. His aphorisms and flippancies were quoted everywhere; his fame as a wit was only surpassed by his notoriety as an aesthete. ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... give an impetus to his history of commerce in the Indies, welded to it the declamation of Diderot. The Abbe Barthelemy covered over the realities of Greek manners and customs with his literary varnish. Science was expected to be either epigrammatic or oratorical; crude or technical details would have been objectionable to a public composed of people of the good society; correctness of style therefore drove out or falsified those small significant facts which give ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... that a republic, which could produce men like Regnier Klaaszoon and his comrades, could be subjected again to despotism, after a war for independence of forty years, and that such sailors could be forbidden to sail the eastern and western seas. No epigrammatic phrase has been preserved of this simple Regnier, the son of Nicholas. He only did what is sometimes talked about in phraseology more or less melo-dramatic, and did it in ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... windmiller might have said, if he had been in the habit of putting his thoughts into an epigrammatic form, as a groan from his wife and a growl of thunder broke simultaneously upon his ear, whilst the rain fell scarcely faster than ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Next in extent of influence, and with a like faculty of reaching immense and widely scattered masses of people, was the late Charles Haddon Spurgeon, a preacher of singularly homely power, Calvinistic in theology, epigrammatic in style, and with an earnest evangelical spirit which had a powerful influence on both hearers and readers. His sermons, like those of Dr. Talmage, were read in every land and were instrumental in conversions wherever they went. Strongly resembling Mr. Spurgeon in his ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... public anniversaries, were noted for their directness and power in dealing with the greater moral questions before the people. On the other hand, there was a saying then current, "Dull as Dr. Bacon when he's nothing but the Gospel to preach"; but this, like so many other smart sayings, was more epigrammatic than true: even when I heard him preach religious doctrines in which I did not at all believe, he seemed to me to show ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... considered the chiefest duty of his office, that of preaching. His sermons, which were as famous as those of Chrysostom in Constantinople, were {65} direct in their appeal, vivid in their illustration, terse and epigrammatic in their expression. Paul the Deacon sums up his work by saying that he was entirely ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... it; and its inspirations constantly maintained the noblest temper in his soul. The end of Literature was not, in Schiller's judgment, to amuse the idle, or to recreate the busy, by showy spectacles for the imagination, or quaint paradoxes and epigrammatic disquisitions for the understanding: least of all was it to gratify in any shape the selfishness of its professors, to minister to their malignity, their love of money, or even of fame. For persons who degrade it to ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... after eloquent and flowery expression. Repetition of pet poetic picturesquenesses. Confused and wandering statement. Metaphor gone insane. Meaningless words, used because they are pretty, or showy, or unusual. Sorrowful attempts at the epigrammatic. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a speech, a passage from a book, especially if it be the speaker's own book, speech or poem. Of course, if the company meet especially for mutual enjoyment in elocution or recitation, this rule does not apply. It is applicable only for general society. Short, pungent, epigrammatic quotations, if suitable to the subject of conversation, may be occasionally introduced, but their use should be the exception, ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... the world! That is, unless it is literary, musical, artistic gossip. Scandal ruins conversation, and should never be included even in a definition of small-talk. Polite, humorous, vivacious, speculative, dry, sarcastic, epigrammatic, intellectual, and practical people all meet around a dinner-table, and much agreeable small-talk should be the result. It is unfortunately true that there is sometimes a failure in this respect. Let a hostess ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... was at the same time the brightest wit and most shameless punster of Westminster Hall; and such pride did he take in his reputation as a punster, that after the fashion of the wits of an earlier period he was often at considerable pains to give a pun a well-wrought epigrammatic setting. Bored with the long-winded speech of a prosy sergeant, he wrote on a slip of paper, which was in due course passed along the barristers' benches in the ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... Bible Society. The record speaks for itself. So far as the Indian is concerned, the story has been told by Mrs. Jackson in her earnest, eloquent protest, entitled "A Century of Dishonor." It has received epigrammatic treatment in the saying tersely enunciated by one of our military commanders, and avowedly accepted by the others, that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." So far as the African is concerned, the similar apothegm once was that "the black man has ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams
... I met Dannevig frequently at clubs, student festivals, and social gatherings, and his melodious voice, his epigrammatic talk, and his beauty never failed to extort from me a certain amount of reluctant admiration. I could not help noticing, however, that his charming qualities were all very much on the surface, and as for his beauty, it was of a purely physical kind. As a mere ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... tribunal for literary culprits, as well as a determined assertor of its own political maxims. The common idea regarding its chief conductor represented him as a man of extraordinary sharpness, alternating between epigrammatic flippancy and democratic rigour. Gentle and refined feeling would certainly never have been attributed to him. It will now be found that he was at all times of his life a man of genial spirit towards the entire circle of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... which lends such a charm to the author's essays,— brilliant, epigrammatic, vigorous. Indeed, herein lies the fault of the work, when viewed as a mere detail of historical facts. Its sparkling rhetoric is not the safest medium of truth to the simple-minded inquirer. A discriminating and able critic has done the author no injustice in saying ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... turn of thought may spring from an apparent contradiction, from the solemn assertion of a truism, from a play on words, or from other sources. There is an apparent contradiction in Wordsworth's epigrammatic line,— ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... by Mr. CARTON, is not a brilliant play, as its dialogue lacks epigrammatic sparkle: neither is it an interesting play, as the plot, such as it is, is too weak for words,—which, by the way, at once accounts for the absence of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... French verse; and, from his boyhood, his great ambition was to be "a correct poet." He worked and worked, polished and polished, until each idea had received at his hands its very neatest and most epigrammatic expression. In the art of condensed, compact, pointed, and yet harmonious and flowing verse, Pope has no equal. But, as a vehicle for poetry— for the love and sympathy with nature and man which every true poet must feel, Pope's verse is artificial; and its style of expression has now ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... the eminent barrister) says: "The following translations will serve to give the English reader a faint, though perhaps, but a faint idea of the Welsh Tribanau, which are most of them, like these, remarkable for their quaintness, as well as for the epigrammatic point in which ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... to us battles, laws, histories, songs; now we have in Solomon's writings a new style in short, epigrammatic sentences. The proverb was the most ancient way of teaching among the Greeks. The seven wise men of Greece each had his own motto on which he made himself famous. These were engraved on stone in public places. Thus the gist of an argument ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... who represented North Carolina, was alternately enlivened by epigrammatic wit or envenomed by scorching reply. Mr. Justin S. Morrill, of Vermont, was commencing a long and useful Congressional career. Mr. Schuyler Colfax, an editor- politician, represented an Indiana district. The veteran Mr. Charles ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... lady, and she had a quaint cast in her left eye that gave her the oddest, most sporting look. The cast was working overtime as she gazed at the gowns, and the ridiculous old sprigs on her rusty black bonnet trembled with her silent mirth. She looked like one of those clever, epigrammatic, dowdy old duchesses that one reads about in English novels. I'm sure she had cardamon seeds in her shabby bag, and a carriage with a crest on it waiting for her just around the corner. I ached to slip my hand through her arm and ask her what she thought of it all. I ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... that is gloriously realized. To the vigilant thinker a decade is worth more than aeons to his sleeping brother. The Emerson of to-day is not the Emerson of twenty or even ten years ago. Here is still the true, epigrammatic style of his youth. He is as lavish of his aphorisms, which, like the coins of Donatello, hang over our heads and are free to every passer-by. Still an antiquarian, like Charles Kingsley, he peers among Etruscan vases, Greek ruins, Norse runes and ancient Dantean Infernos and ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... been excepted for praise, each is in a manner sui generis, while the whole group stands, in a manner also, apart from others and by itself. There is astonishing cleverness everywhere, in regard to almost every point of novel-composition, though with special regard to epigrammatic phrase. But the whole is inorganic somehow, and more than somehow unreal; without (save in the cases mentioned) attaining that obviously unreal but persuasive phantasmagoria which some great writers of fiction have managed to put in existence and motion. How far this is due ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... became known, in the parlance of those days, as the "family compact," not quite an accurate designation, since its members had hardly any family connection, but there was just enough ground for the term to tickle the taste of the people for an epigrammatic phrase. The bench, the pulpit, the banks, the public offices were all more or less under the influence of the "compact." The public lands were lavishly parcelled out among themselves and their followers. Successive governors, ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... was the most characteristic literary form in which the sages treasured and imparted their teachings. Poetical in structure, terse, often figurative or epigrammatic, the proverb was well calculated to arouse individual thought and make a deep impression on the mind. Transmitted from mouth to mouth for many generations, like the popular tradition or law, it lost by attrition all its unnecessary elements, so that, 'like ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... terrace and a little way up the zigzag path. The day was superb. I found Mr. Tillington, in spite of his studiously languid and supercilious air, a most agreeable companion. He knew Europe. He was full of talk of Rome and the Romans. He had epigrammatic wit, curt, keen, and pointed. We sat down on a bench; he kept Lady Georgina and myself amused for an hour by his crisp sallies. Besides, he had been everywhere and seen everybody. Culture and agriculture seemed all ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... was the most unbridled kind of balderdash, founded on my callow recollections of the Green Chalybeate,—not the least bit accurate, as I was afterward to discover,—with all the good people exceedingly oratorical and the bad ones singularly epigrammatic and abandoned and obtuse. I introduced a depraved nobleman, of course, to give the requisite touch of high society, seasoned the mixture with French and botany and with a trifle of Dolly Dialoguishness, and inserted, at judicious intervals, the most poetical of descriptions, so that the skipping ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... turbulent and refractory enthusiast, John Lilburne, alias Free-born John, alias Lilburne the Trouble-world, there appeared the following epigrammatic epitaph:— ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 281, November 3, 1827 • Various
... man, sir; but you can't horsewhip a neighborhood," said the lawyer, in his politely epigrammatic manner. "We will fight our battle, if you please, without borrowing our weapons of the coachman yet a while, at ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... slip into the corridor," continued the princess, smiling at her friend's epigrammatic remark. "Once or twice, either to see me or to make me see him, he looked through the glass sash of the box exactly opposite to mine. If I received a visit, I was certain to see him in the corridor close to my door, casting a furtive glance upon ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... judgment, and dignity. In Leopardi, philosophical acumen equals the elegance of his style. Giordani (d. 1848), as a critic and an epigraphist, deserves notice for his fine judgment and pure taste, as do Tommaseo and Cattaneo, who are both epigrammatic, witty, and pungent. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... the more piquant from his being really a good-natured man, who unconsciously thinks aloud. Interest Ward on a subject, and I know no one who can talk better. His expressions are concise without being poor, and terse and epigrammatic without being ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... but it is the picturesqueness and richness of the truly bewildering Roman architecture of the Renaissance—half Byzantine, three-eighths Gothic, and the remainder Greek. But Motley, with all his varied learning and association, is still perfectly and nobly Anglo-Saxon. His short, epigrammatic sentences ring like the click of musketry before the charge, and swell into length and grandeur with the progress of his theme. The simplicity, not of ignorance but of genius, characterizes him. He does not cater to our hungry fancy, he appeals grandly to our noblest impulses. In ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... of course, will be smoked at other moments than epigrammatic ones, but on these other occasions you will not need to deal so fully with it in the stage directions. "Duke (lighting cigarette). I trust, Perkins, that ..." is enough. You do not want to say, "Duke (dropping ash on trousers). It seems to me, my love ..." or, "Duke ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... foreign sojourner who is so often met in strange cities that the children seemed like little men and women. "Yes," he said, "the Spaniards are not children until they are thirty or forty, and then they never grow up." It was perhaps too epigrammatic, but it may have caught at a fact. From another foreign sojourner I heard that the Catholicism of Spain, in spite of all newspaper appearances to the contrary and many bold novels, is still intense and unyieldingly repressive. ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... 'It needs epigrammatic expression,' said Trent, rising from the table. 'If only it could be crystallized into some handy formula, like "No Popery", or "Tax the Foreigner", you would find multitudes to go to the stake for it. But you were planning to go to White Gables before the inquest, I think. You ought to be off ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... missionaries, of pirates and crusaders. When the first of Da Gama's sailors to land at Calicut was asked what he sought, his laconic answer, "Christians {443} and spices," had in it as much of truth as of epigrammatic neatness. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... only the general idea of what he said. The thing that mainly struck me was his terse remark that the enemy originated the idea of the march to the sea. It struck me because it was so suggestive of the General's epigrammatic fashion—saying a great deal in a single crisp sentence. (This is my account, ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... Lies" (252a), but we are still without a correspondingly accurate and extensive compilation of "The Thoughts and Reasonings of Parents," and a plain, unbiassed register of the "white lies" and equivoques, the fictions and epigrammatic myths, with which parents are wont to answer, or attempt to answer, the manifold questions of their tender offspring. From time immemorial the communication between parent (and nurse) and child, between the old of both ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... you had drawn by appearing before you as a personage of slender limb and deprecating glance, who stammers and makes a painful spectacle of himself when you ask him his opinion of "The Glees of the Gulches," by Popocatepetl Jones. The slender, dark-haired novelist of your imagination, with epigrammatic points to his mustache, suddenly takes the shape of a short, smoothly-shaven blond man, whose conversation does not sparkle at all, and you were on the lookout for the most brilliant of verbal fireworks. Perhaps it is a dramatist you have idealized. Fresh from ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... book, witty, epigrammatic, flavorsome ... recalls Frank Stockton's bewitching foolery and perennial ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... popular essays published of late years which contains so much good writing, and so many fine and original comments on topics of current interest. Mr. Oracle Bluff is a self-opinionated, genial, whole-souled fellow.... His talk is terse, epigrammatic, full of quotable proverbs and isolated bits of ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... doubt not, could contain the attar of the epigrammatic literature of all time. Few of the perfumes of this diminutive form of wit and satire have survived. Pretty and scented vaporings, most of the thousands and thousands of them, that have died on the air of the foibles of ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... effective form. Jefferson was the greatest moulder of public opinion in the early days of this country. He did not create Democratic sentiment; he simply took the aspirations that had nestled in the hearts of men from time immemorial and put them into appropriate and epigrammatic language, so that the nation thought his thoughts after him, as the world is now doing. The proverbs of Solomon are priceless for the same reason; they are full of wisdom—wisdom so expressed that it can ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... suffices to secure variety in thought. But the aspiring and ardent nature of his intellect made him love to attempt also constant experiments in the theme and in the style. The romantic ballad, the classical tale, the lyric, the didactic, the epigrammatic—the wealth of his music comprehended every note, the boldness of his temper adventured every hazard. Yet still, (as in our Byron, in our Goldsmith, and as, perhaps, in every mind tenacious of its impressions,) some favourite ideas take possession of him so forcibly, as to be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... enjoy the heroic incident in Koerner's short life, when, as he lay wounded on the battle-field, he scribbled his famous "Farewell to Life." Incidents of a similar kind were not at all unusual in our warfare. Our pithy, epigrammatic poems were particularly well suited to the improvisation of a single sentiment. Everybody of any education was either a poet or a poetaster. Not infrequently a marching soldier might be seen to halt, ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... compactness. Superb sense of economy, of terseness the art calls for, excessive pruning and clipping. Singular that these three artists, so gifted in brevity were women. There is little, after all, in existence that warrants lengthy dissertation. Life itself is epigrammatic and brief enough. No volumes needed by way of explanation. The fascinating enigma diverts and perplexes everyone alike. The simple understand it best, or at least they seem to do so. Segregation, aloofness, spiritual imprisonment, which is another name for introspection, ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... exercised by pamphlets, speeches, and, in later times, by the newspaper press. What does Mr. Pattison say to Burke's "Reflections on the French Revolution," to Paine's "Common Sense," to the tracts written by Halifax and Defoe at the time of the Revolution? Neither thought nor action is his epigrammatic condemnation of Milton's political writings, but an appeal which stirs men to action is surely both. Again of "Eikonoklastes" we are told that "it is like all answers, worthless as a book." Bentley's "Phalaris" is an answer, Demosthenes' ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... one-sidedness and epigrammatic exaggeration can always be felt where whole groups of men are to be characterized. "The faults of the dwarf are sixty, of the red-haired man eighty, of the humpback a hundred, and of the ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... because all progress must be from a scientific basis. If our care in managing experiments is such that we cannot avoid getting rich, we will accept the result. (Laughter.) I am glad that in connection with this discussion Mr. Corsan made one epigrammatic remark,—that he was not nervous and could watch a hickory tree grow. I tell you there's a lot ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... epigrammatic," said Billy, snappishly; "but there is some truth in your contention. We will begin again. When we see Rita, we will formulate a plan and ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... Mulvaney (Terence). Rollicking, epigrammatic, harum-scarum Irish trooper, in the Indian service, whose adventures and sayings are narrated in Soldiers Three, The Courting of Dinah Shadd, etc., by ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... to-day the sonorous generalisations, the epigrammatic maxims, which each of us applies in his own way. But to Burke's contemporaries they meant only one thing—a defence of the unreformed franchise. All his reverence for the pre-ordained order of providence, the ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... deshabille, with a flask of good wine, iced water, and delicate cakes and confitures before him, a witty and licentious epigrammatic poem close under his hand, sat lazily enjoying the luxuries that it had been his daughter's satisfaction to procure for him ever since her marriage. He sprang up to meet her with a grace and deference that showed how different a person was the Comtesse de ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "Wit consists in the epigrammatic expression of a commonplace truth, and the dullest remark on the worth of money is almost as sure of successful appreciation as the dullest remark on the worthlessness of women. Certainly I am ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... no doubt upon how ill at ease I was and how perfectly at ease I wished to appear. Because of the constant need for appearing happier than I really was, I developed a knack for saying things in an amusing, sometimes an epigrammatic, way. I recall one remark made long before I could possibly have heard of Malthus or have understood his theory regarding birth rate and food supply. Ours being a large family of limited means and, among the five boys of the family, unlimited appetites, we often used the cheaper, ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... said to Wieland, "Life is a ticklish business—I propose to spend my time looking at it." This he did, viewing existence from every angle, and writing out his thoughts in terse, epigrammatic language. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... faults, there is continually haunting us, amid incontestable richness, vigour, and beauty, a sense that the work is over-done. Spenser certainly did not want for humour and an eye for the ridiculous. There is no want in him, either, of that power of epigrammatic terseness, which, in spite of its diffuseness, his age valued and cultivated. But when he gets on a story or a scene, he never knows where to stop. His duels go on stanza after stanza till there is no sound part left in either champion. His palaces, ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... opened a dripping box was felt to have perpetrated a pleasantry; and a Brazilian gentleman, whose luggage dropped to pieces and was scattered in the flood about the diligence, was looked upon as a very subtile humorist. Our own contribution to these witty passages was the epigrammatic display of a reeking trunk full of the pretty rubbish people bring away from Rome and Naples,—copies of Pompeian frescos more ruinous than the originals; photographs floating loose from their cards; little earthen busts reduced to the lumpishness of common clay; Roman scarfs stained ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... poetry of nature and of truth—abounding with tasteful and fervid imagery, but never drawing too freely on the stores of fancy for embellishment. We could detach many passages that have charmed and fascinated us in out reading; but one must suffice for an epigrammatic exit:— ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... in octosyllabic verse, frequently not rising above doggerel: it is full of verbal "quips and cranks and wanton wiles:" in parts it is eminently epigrammatic, and many of its happiest couplets seem to have been dashed off without effort. Walpole calls Butler "the Hogarth of poetry;" and we know that Hogarth illustrated Hudibras. The comparison is not inapt, but the pictorial element in Hudibras is ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... whose work is preserved in the Palatine Anthology, from Nicarchus and Lucilius to Strato, all show the same heaviness of handling and the same tiresome insistence on making a point, which prevent Martial's epigrams from being placed in the first rank. But while in any collection of Greek epigrammatic poetry these authors naturally sink to their own place, Martial, as well by the mere mass of his work—some twelve hundred pieces in all, exclusive of the cracker mottoes—as by his animation and pungent wit, set a narrow and rather disastrous type for later literature. He appealed strongly ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... matter for themselves might, if they do not choose to read the whole, turn to the admirable picture of camp-life on the Lower Rhine at the opening of Book VI. as a short contrast, while the story is full of others. Nor should one forget to add that Chateaubriand can, when he chooses, be epigrammatic as well as declamatory. "Such is the ugliness of man when he bids farewell to his soul and, so to speak, keeps house only with his body" is a phrase which might possibly shock La Harpe, but which is, as far as I remember, original, and is certainly ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... Mr. Parish has perhaps made the Sussex labourer a thought too epigrammatic: a natural tendency in the illustrations to such a work. The following narrative of adventure from the lips of a South Down shepherd, which is communicated to me by my friend, Mr. C. E. Clayton, of Holmbush, is nearer the normal loquacity of the type:—"I mind one day I'd been to buy some lambs, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... Corn-law Rhymer." He was born and died in Yorkshire. He was the author of several pleasing poems, of a somewhat epigrammatic character. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... recent opponents of Home Rule have written against that policy with more brilliance and epigrammatic keenness than Mr. Goldwin Smith. But no one has stated with more force the facts and considerations which, operating on men's mind for years past, have made the Liberal party Home Rulers now. His coup d'oeil remains the most pointed indictment ever ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... Sanyo spread broadcast over the country thus grew hands of iron and hearts of steel. This process shows how closely related are history and politics, and affords another illustration of the significance of the epigrammatic expression of Professor Freeman: "History is past politics, ...
— The Constitutional Development of Japan 1863-1881 • Toyokichi Iyenaga
... peculiar character of Milton may be found in all his works; but it is most strongly displayed in the Sonnets. Those remarkable poems have been undervalued by critics who have not understood their nature. They have no epigrammatic point. There is none of the ingenuity of Filicaja in the thought, none of the hard and brilliant enamel of Petrarch in the style. They are simple but majestic records of the feelings of the poet; as little tricked ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... doubt, derisively,[30] and in Julian's time they had a cant saying that they had suffered nothing from the X or the K (Christ or Constantius). A celebrated school of rhetoric was established here, and no doubt some of the effusions penned at this time, abounded with rich and epigrammatic humour. ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... whom man too often covers up, smothers, or corrupts." Speaking of the sixteenth century, he says: "What it wanted was taste, if by taste we understand choice clean and perfect, the disengagement of the elements of the beautiful." When, to give a paragraph its fit ending, the thought allows of an epigrammatic point, if he does not happen to have one of his own he knows where to borrow just what is wanted. Speaking of embellished oratorical diction, he quotes Talleyrand on some polished oration that was discussed in his presence: "It is not enough to have fine sentences: you must have something ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... the darting eye of a migratory interest. He often didn't "follow through," as they say in golf. With the result that he is often scored for insufficient motivation. But my knowledge of him makes me realize he felt and saw deeper than his epigrammatic style indicated. His technique was therefore often threadbare in spots,—not of that even mesh which makes of Pinero such an exceptional designer. I would put Fitch's "Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines" above Edward Sheldon's "Romance" for the faithful reproduction of ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... life out of town has even more delights, for the poet, at any rate, than life in town. Sylvester is reported to have said that people, after tiring in town, go to re-tire in the country. But the saying, if epigrammatic, is not strictly true. No doubt some of us feel bored, wherever we may go, or whatever we may do. But to most people, I imagine, the Recess, if spent out of London, is a time of genuine enjoyment, and certainly it is a time which deserves to be ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... basis than his metaphysical reveries, assuming the title of "Politique de Ferdinand," already repeatedly noticed; Garnier, whose perspicuous narrative, if inferior to that of Gaillard in acuteness and epigrammatic point, makes a much nearer approach to truth; and, lastly, Sismondi, who, if he may be charged, in his "Histoire des Francais," with some of the defect incident to indiscreet rapidity of composition, succeeds by a few brief and animated touches in opening deeper ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... The epigrammatic style lends itself to quotation. Taste of the spring brings the traveller back to the same fountain on a day of greater leisure. Many times these "Beautiful Thoughts" have enlightened my darkness, and I send them forth with a hope and prayer that they may ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... event, I could not step outside the circle which was fitted to teach me, and inspire me with an interest. In this view I wrote at first certain little poems, in the form of songs or in a freer measure: they are founded on reflection, treat of the past, and for the most part take an epigrammatic turn. ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... would have been adapted for the closet of a Sidney, or for a House of Lords such as it was in the time of Lord Bacon; but they are plain and sensible whenever the author is in the right, and whether right or wrong, always shrewd and epigrammatic, and fitted for the coffee-house, the exchange, the lobby of the House of Commons, and to be read aloud at a public meeting. When connected, dropping the forms of connection, desultory without abruptness or appearance of disconnection, epigrammatic and antithetical to excess, sententious ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... "old-timey"; some that he was unpractical, the shades of criticism ranging up to those saying he was a fool. This did not mean intellectually, for none denied his intellect. He drove a virile pen, and had an epigrammatic tongue. He had had a hard time. He had borne the yoke in his youth. This, we have strong authority for saying, is good for a man; but it leaves its mark upon him. He had been desperately poor. He had not minded that except for his mother, and ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... nobles and great ladies, had some right to complain of the absurdity that had been put in their mouths, before the days of Waverley;[439] but neither does Scott's dialogue bear criticism. His lords brave each other in smart epigrammatic speeches, but the dialogue is in costume, and does not please on the second reading; it is not warm with life. In Shakespeare alone, the speakers do not strut and bridle, the dialogue is easily great, and he adds to so many titles that of being ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... simplicity. Many an Eastern dervish has, I think, got immortality upon less laziness and resignation than this temporary sojourner in Massachusetts. It is a common notion that the world (meaning the people in it) has become tame and commonplace, lost its primeval freshness and epigrammatic point. Mandeville, in his argumentative way, dissents from this entirely. He says that the world is more complex, varied, and a thousand times as interesting as it was in what we call its youth, and that it is as fresh, as individual and capable ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... was, "What kind of a man was Mr. Pope in his conversation?" His Lordship answered, that if the conversation did not take something of a lively or epigrammatic turn, he fell asleep, or perhaps pretended to do so.' Johnson's Works (1787), xi. 200. Johnson in his Life of Pope (Works, viii. 309) says that 'when he wanted to ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... Ivanovitch advised him to read the theological works of Homiakov. Levin read the second volume of Homiakov's works, and in spite of the elegant, epigrammatic, argumentative style which at first repelled him, he was impressed by the doctrine of the church he found in them. He was struck at first by the idea that the apprehension of divine truths had not been vouchsafed ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... earlier ages of human development were poor and unworthy of respect on the part of the closing eighteenth century. A very large part of the journal was written by the two brothers, Friedrich furnishing the most aggressive contributions, more notably being responsible for the epigrammatic Fragments, which became, in their, detached brevity and irresponsibility, a very favorite model for the form of Romantic doctrine. "I can talk daggers," he had said when younger, and he wrote the greater part of these, though some ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... that the poem was not calculated to excite passion in any mind, or to make any impression except on poetic readers; and that from the culpable levity betrayed at the close of the eclogue by the grotesque union of epigrammatic wit with allegoric personification, in the allusion to the 175 most fearful of thoughts, I should conjecture that the 'rantin' Bardie', instead of really believing, much less wishing, the fate spoken of in the last line, in application to any human individual, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... epigrammatic bits of philosophy, keenness of wit, and full insight into human nature, 'Concerning Isabel Carnaby' is ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... Jonson, who said that "for not keeping accent, Donne deserved hanging," down to Coleridge, who declared that his "muse on dromedary trots," and described him as "rhyme's sturdy cripple." Coleridge's quatrain on Donne is, without doubt, an unequalled masterpiece of epigrammatic criticism. But Donne rode no dromedary. In his greatest poems he rides Pegasus like a master, even if he does rather weigh the poor beast down by carrying an ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Scott," said Winthrop, when one of his battalions was finally ordered thither, "is that it's too fashionable for my taste. What this regiment needs now is more drill and less dinners." He loved to be epigrammatic. The head-quarters, staff, band, and six troops had taken station at a big frontier post, two other troops went with the lieutenant-colonel to a second post, so that that officer could have a command, and two more with the senior major, but the Interior ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... to recall or to reconstruct; and when older people attempt to reconstruct it, they remember the emotions which underlay it, and the eager interests out of which it all sprang; and they make it something picturesque, epigrammatic, and vernacular which is wholly untrue to life. The fact is that the talk of schoolboys is very trivial and almost wholly symbolical; emotion reveals itself in glance and gesture, not in word at all. I suppose that most of us remember our boyish friendships, ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... inferior. Only a few fragments are left; but he was not altogether without his influence, for he was, as I have just said, one of the models on which Propertius and Ovid formed themselves; and some, indeed, call him the Father of the Latin elegy, with its terseness, grace, and clear epigrammatic form of thought, and, therefore, in a great degree, of our modern eighteenth century poets; not a useless excellence, seeing that it is, on the whole, good for him who writes to see clearly what ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... works which, in the actual state of their habits and beliefs, are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure: classicism, on the contrary, presents them with what gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great grand-fathers"—a definition which is epigrammatic, if not convincing.[8] De Stendhal (Henri Beyle) was a pioneer and a special pleader in the cause of French romanticism, and, in his use of the terms, romanticism stands for progress, liberty, originality, and ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... interest of the meeting, but this is such a waste of time, there is no coming to the point. "That's jus' so, dear," she said, "but that their ign'rance. Ign'rance does waste time, honey. Ign'rance can't come to a pint." That last sentence struck me as a piece of epigrammatic wisdom. ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 38, No. 06, June, 1884 • Various
... Krehbiel, who has printed the entries, with running comment, in his "Music and Manners in the Classical Period" (London, 1898). Mr Krehbiel rightly describes some of the entries as mere "vague mnemonic hints," and adds that one entry which descants in epigrammatic fashion on the comparative morals of the women of France, Holland and England is unfit for publication. Looking over the diary, it is instructive to observe how little reference is made to music. One or two of the entries are ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... THREADS. From the Writings of Goethe. Selected by Carrie Adelaide Cooke. With an Introduction by Kev. Alexander McKenzie, D.D. Boston: D. Lothrop & Co. Price $1.00. No other volume of the Spare Minute Series contains more real meat than this. Goethe was epigrammatic, and his ideas took the concentrated form of bullets, instead of scattering like shot. We doubt if there is another author, always excepting Shakespeare, from whose books so many noble and complete thoughts can be extracted. In the two hundred ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... specimen of the difficult art of reasoning in verse. His verse is at best vigorous epigrammatic writing, such as would now be converted into leading articles, twisted with more or less violence into rhyme. And yet there is a poetical side to his mind, or at least a susceptibility to poetical impressions of a certain order. And as a novelist is on the border-line between ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... which would come upon him from time to time, it occurred to M. Linders to reflect upon his misdeeds, and adopt an apologetic tone concerning them, he was wont to propound a singular theory respecting his life, averring, in general terms, that it had been spoilt by women,— a speech more epigrammatic, perhaps, than accurate, since of the two women who had loved him best, his mother and his wife, he had broken the heart of the one, and ruined the happiness of the other. And yet it was not without its grain of meaning, however false and distorted; for M. Linders, ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... few remarks upon the public mind of Touraine are essential to our story. The subtle, satirical, epigrammatic tale-telling spirit stamped on every page of Rabelais is the faithful expression of the Tourangian mind,—a mind polished and refined as it should be in a land where the kings of France long held their ...
— The Illustrious Gaudissart • Honore de Balzac
... are human ties, have said the beaux esprits of every age in one epigrammatic fashion or another. But frailty can bleed; in fact, it's first ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... padded with a good deal of farce, but though the construction never evinces any great power on the part of the author, it is not on the whole inadequate. The verse is in great part rimed in couplets, and there are frequent attempts at epigrammatic effect, which at times lead to some obscurity. The language betrays, as in the case of the author's eclogues, a pseudo-archaism, which points, particularly in such phrases as 'doe ycleape,' to a ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... advanced he launched out into a series of stories and anecdotes which served very well to pass the time and to attract notice to himself. As Mr. Barker was generally not very talkative at table, though frequently epigrammatic, his sudden eloquence was calculated to engage the attention of the party. Claudius and Margaret were glad of the rattling talk that delivered them from the burden of saying anything especial, and they both laughed quite naturally at Barker's odd wit. They were grateful ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... lead. This caution is worth particular heed when the lead contains a single-sentence quotation, an indirect question, or a paragraph of direct statement from somewhere in the body of the speech. Few things are more incongruous in a story than a clever epigrammatic lead and a succession of quoted statements following, none of which exhibits a definite bearing on the lead. Oftentimes this incongruity is produced by the reporter's attempt to follow the precise order adopted by the speaker. Such an ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... neither, it's a sort of an epigram, or rather an epigrammatic sonnet; I don't know what to call it, but it's satire. ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... events—that comic note which life, the supreme dramatic artist, never omits from her tragedies. These were the Duke's old friend the Marquis de Coeur-Volant, fleeing from his chateau as the peasants put the torch to it, and arriving in Pianura destitute, gouty and middle-aged, but imperturbable and epigrammatic as ever. With him came his Marquise, a dark-eyed lady, stout to unwieldiness and much given to devotion, in whom it was whispered (though he introduced her as the daughter of a Venetian Senator) that a reminiscent eye ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... over-filled as was his time, highly taxed as were his resources, all these hardships were felt in double proportion by the minister's wife. The old Hebrew standard of praise quoted by Cotton Mather, "A woman worthy to be the wife of a priest," was keenly epigrammatic; and ample proof of the wise insight of the standard of comparison may be found in the lives of "the pious, prudent, and prayerful" wives of New England ministers. What wonder that their praises were sung in many loving though halting threnodies, ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... the political horizon, her dauntless courage, the fidelity and devotion of her love. Retz, moreover, mistakes entirely the order of her adventures; he forgets and then invents. In striving after epigrammatic point, he sacrifices truth to smartness of style, and writes as though he looked upon events in which the passions of the Duchess made her take part as mere trifles, whereas among them there were some than which none were ever of graver or even more ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... distinction even to the verses of the people, which we are discussing here. Certain other stylistic qualities of these metrical epitaphs, which are intended to produce somewhat the same effects, will not seem to us so admirable. I mean alliteration, play upon words, the acrostic arrangement, and epigrammatic effects. These literary tricks find little place in our serious verse, and the finer Latin poets rarely indulge in them. They seem to be especially out of place in an epitaph, which should avoid studied effects and meretricious devices. ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott |
