"Contemporaries" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by the spirited proprietors of All Sorts to decide the 'Model Husband Contest'—which was established on lines similar to one recently inaugurated by one of our New York contemporaries—have now issued their award. Two competitors have sent in certificates which have been found equally deserving of the prize; viz., Mrs. CORNELIA GALAHAD-GREEN, Graemair Villa, Peckham, and Mrs. GRISELDA ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., February 7, 1891 • Various
... time," I would answer apologetically. A person of some importance among my contemporaries at Harvard, I had looked forward to a residence in my native city with the complacency of one who has seen something of the world,—only to find that I was the least in the new kingdom. And it was a kingdom. Larry opened up to me something of the significance and extent of it, something of the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... fragments of the walls built by Diocletian. The most interesting of the buildings is the Palais des Dauphins, now the Palais de Justice. In the square in front is a bronze statue of Bayard, one of the most illustrious heroes of a chivalrous age, esteemed by his contemporaries the model of soldiers and of men of honour. Born in 1476 at the neighbouring castle of Pontcharr, he died at Rebecq on the 30th April 1524 from wounds received at the battle of Romagnane, and was buried in the church of the Minimes, 1m. from Grenoble, whence in 1823 ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... time. And it must be admitted that in England, especially, the Romantic movement was slow to go back to classical themes. Winckelmann and Goethe, and Chenier—the last, indeed, practically all unknown to his contemporaries—had long rediscovered Antiquity, and felt its pulse anew, and praised its enduring power, when English poetry had little, if anything, to show in answer to the plaintive invocation of Blake to the ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... rely on me for that! The people who are worth chronicling are sure to have lived in the back numbers of our contemporaries, and I can always hunt them up in the Museum. As for the people who are not, their families will send them in, and your only trouble will be to conciliate the families ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... is made in any of the chronicles of the office of Master of Dance. In all other essential respects Sir Edwin is corroborated by his contemporaries. ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... aeroplane models. All manner of novelties were the outcome of his fertile brain, and as it has been truly remarked, "his novelties have the peculiarity, not granted to most pioneers, of being in one respect or another ahead of his contemporaries." In addition, he studied the flight ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... is still living, as most of her contemporaries and social equals are living, not quite free of care, but free of tiresome associations, cramped rooms, bad beds, and bad food, with an environment which you can perfectly control if you are willing to pay ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... to say Swift was a cynic because he wrote satire. Thackeray wrote about villains because he wished to also write about heroes; Swift was satirical because he had the intelligence to see that his contemporaries were fools when they might have been wise. The cynics are the people of to-day who write books which attribute low motives to every one, which turn love into lust, which care not what is written so long as it can be made certain that there is ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... like a ghost of that antiquity. I had a sense of haunting it, in the inner twilight and the outer sunlight, where a tender wind was stirring the leaves of its embowering trees and scattering them on the graves of my eleventh and twelfth century contemporaries. ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... of our days flows on. Paul was no less overwhelmed and affected at the sight of this great papaw tree, loaded with fruit, than is the traveller, when, after a long absence from his own country, he finds not his contemporaries, but their children, whom he left at the breast, and whom he sees are become fathers of families. Paul sometimes thought of hewing down the tree, which recalled too sensibly the distracted image of that ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... had." In a time when, for the Cavalier element, license still ruled and lawless passion was glorified by every play writer, the Puritan demanded a different standard, and lived a life of manly purity in strange contrast to the grossness of the time. Of Hutchinson and Dudley and thousands of their contemporaries the same record held good: "Neither in youth nor riper years could the most fair or enticing woman draw him into unnecessary familiarity or dalliance. Wise and virtuous women he loved, and delighted in all pure and holy and unblameable conversation with them, but so as never to excite ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... seventy years old, wearing an humble, meditative, yet gracious look, as one whose relations to this world were those of stewardship, and whose nearly obsolete dress was the badge, not of worldly pride, but of perished joys and contemporaries. His unaffected countenance seemed to say: "I wear it because it is useless to put off what no one else will wear, when presently I shall ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... of knowing how to think, in the exact sense of that term, was hardly among them, and neither now nor at any other time did he go through any of that toilsome and vigorous intellectual preparation to which the ablest of his contemporaries, Diderot, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Turgot, Condorcet, Hume, all submitted themselves. His comfortable view was that "the sensible and interesting conversations of a woman of merit are more proper to form a young man than all the pedantical philosophy ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... highest sense of the term, he towered pre-eminent, and his superiority to each of them (except Burke) in general acquirements, intellectual power, and force of expression, was hardly contested by his contemporaries. To be associated with his name has become a title of distinction in itself; and some members of his circle enjoy, and have fairly earned, a peculiar advantage in this respect. In their capacity of satellites revolving round the sun of their idolatry, they attracted and reflected his ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... and sensibilities of the soul. It is too subtle and too elusive to be judged by external appearances. In his fine treatment of the world, Bishop Alexander cites, by way of illustration, still another of the contemporaries of William Penn. He paints a pair of companion pictures. He depicts a gay scene at the frivolous and dissolute Court of Charles the Second; and, beside it, he describes a religious assembly of the same period. The first gathering appears to be altogether worldly: the second has nothing ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... different from that recently pursued by several of my contemporaries; I publish my memoirs while I am still here to answer for what I write. I am not prompted to this by the weariness of inaction, or by any desire to re-open a limited field for old contentions, in place of the grand arena at present ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... restrained as I can, I shall merely suggest that the arrival of Creme Chantilly is a historic event and that in reporting on it I feel something of the responsibility that the contemporaries of Madame Harel, the famous cheese-making lady of Normandy, must have felt when they were passing judgment ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... thorough, and valuable Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith, we find an almost humiliating insistance on the complaint that Oliver Goldsmith did not receive greater recognition and larger sums of money from his contemporaries. Goldsmith is here "the poor neglected sizar"; his "marked ill-fortune" attends him constantly; he shares "the evil destinies of men of letters"; he was one of those who "struggled into fame without the aid of English institutions"; in short, "he wrote, and ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... MASSOUDI, the earliest of the Arabian geographers[1], were contemporaries of Abou-zeyd, in the ninth century, and neither adds much to the description of Ceylon, given in the narratives of "The two Mahometans." The former assigns to the island the fabulous dimensions ascribed ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... poignantly incisive was Mrs. Warren's satire that many people would not credit her with the pieces she actually wrote, and there were those who thought it incredible that a woman should use satire so openly and so flagrantly as she. The consequence is, many of her contemporaries attributed the writing of "The Group" to masculine hands, and this attitude drew from Mrs. Warren the following letter written ...
— The Group - A Farce • Mercy Warren
... details of his life is baffled by the general ignorance about the man—his antecedents, his parentage, the date of his birth, his early training and education, his work as a professor in the Jardin des Plantes, the house he lived in, the place of his burial, and his relations to his scientific contemporaries. ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... example in English after the Norman Conquest of prose used not for religious edification but for amusement (though with the purpose also of giving instruction). 'Mandeville,' however, is a very minor figure when compared with his great contemporaries, especially with the chief of them, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... another silence while everybody thought of Morton Ellis as the imitator of every poetic form under the sun except the forms adopted by his contemporaries. ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... changements written by M. de La Madelaine for the air of the Freischuetz are permissible, is proved by the fact that Weber himself has sanctioned and approved them, as, if need be, a great number of contemporaries can ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... Last Leaf", I spoke of the possibility that I myself might linger on the old bough until the buds and blossoms of a new spring were opening and spreading all around me. I am not as yet the solitary survivor of my literary contemporaries, and, remembering who my few coevals are, it may well be hoped that I shall not be. But I feel lonely, very lonely, in the pages through which I wander. These are new names in the midst of which I find my own. In another sense I am very far from alone. I have daily assurances ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... incapacity to dream according to the rules prescribed by these infuriate maniacs; although these have never been uniform—never assimilated in any two countries—never borne the same features in any two ages, nor even had the united concurrence of the persecuting contemporaries. ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... specially enlightened) despised Chopin, and fell quite ill when she heard him played. But finding herself free from the scrutiny of this Wagnerian, who was sitting, at some distance, in a group of her own contemporaries, Mme. de Cambremer let herself drift upon a stream of exquisite memories and sensations. The Princesse des Laumes was touched also. Though without any natural gift for music, she had received, some fifteen years earlier, the instruction which a music-mistress ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... be a mark of the reach and size of their own understandings, of the extent and comprehensiveness of their views, they will look upon this neglect merely as an indication of poverty, and narrowness, in the mental exertions of their contemporaries, and only think that the world is not yet prepared to receive their ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... obtain it? Is there more real value to gold than other metals? Not at all. There is no more intrinsic value to gold than brass, but centuries ago, a semi-savage glutton discovered that he could not eat all the swine he could raise nor legally steal all his contemporaries could breed, so he originated a plan whereby he could secure for himself what others had produced through the agency of a financial system in which gold could be used as a medium of exchange. He found that he could get other ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... often its attendant. His contest therefore with Antonius and Sextus Pompeius was the contest of cunning with bravery; but from his youth upward he was accustomed to overreach, not the bold and reckless only, but the most considerate and wily of his contemporaries, such as Cicero and Cleopatra; he succeeded in the end in deluding the senate and people of Rome in the establishment of his tyranny; and finally deceived the expectations of the world, and falsified the lessons of the republican history, in reigning himself forty years in disguise, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... by the extracts from his memorandum-book, which I have given, that Mr. Peel was one of his contemporaries at Harrow; and the following interesting anecdote of an occurrence in which both were concerned, has been related to me by a friend of the latter gentleman, in whose words I shall endeavour as nearly as possible ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... wall-pictures by Andrew Orgagna. They are not so grandly conceived as that wondrous composition of his, the Triumph of Death, in the Pisan Campo Santo; but they are additional proofs of his intense and Dante-like genius. No doubt Dante influenced him deeply, as he did all his contemporaries, whose minds were fertile enough to ripen such seed. The large picture on the left—a view of paradise—is full of energetic and beautiful figures, combined with much dramatic effect and great technical skill. The opposite pictures, representing hell, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... faith. Symonds says that during the Dark Ages that followed upon this first battle between faith and sight, the meaning of Latin words derived from the Greek was lost; that Homer and Virgil were believed to be contemporaries, and "Orestes Tragedia" was supposed to be the name of an author. Milman says that "at the Council of Florence in 1438, the Pope of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople, being ignorant, the one of Greek, and the other of Latin, discoursed through an interpreter." It was near the time of the ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... in the hanging of a guiltless gentleman and, in after years, more happily inspired an immortal tale; while on 1st January, 1753, occurred the disappearance of Elizabeth Canning, that bewildering damsel whose mission it was to baffle her contemporaries and to set at nought the ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... contains two things—the king, who must die, and royalty, which never dies. The minister, so feared, so hated by his master, has descended into the tomb, drawing after him the king, whom he would not leave alone on earth, lest his work should be destroyed. So blind were his contemporaries that they regarded the cardinal's death as a deliverance; and I, even I, opposed the designs of the great man who held the destinies of France within the hollow of his hand. Raoul, learn how to distinguish the king from royalty; the king ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Chief among the modern imitators of Theophrastus is La Bruyere, who published in 1688 Les caracteres, ou les moeurs de ce siecle, a series of essays on the manners of his time, illustrated by portraits of his contemporaries. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... a past age carried on all their business in a quiet way and with little expense, is as strongly impressed on the minds of the present generation, as it is here seen to have been on those of Defoe's contemporaries, a hundred and twenty years ago, although it is quite impossible that the notion can be just in both cases. The truth probably is, that in Defoe's time, and at all former times, there were conspicuous, but not very numerous, examples of finely decorated ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... religious unbelief of many of the tyrants gave, in the minds of their contemporaries, a peculiar color to this awful and God-forsaken existence. When the last Carrara could no longer defend the walls and gates of the plague-stricken Padua, hemmed in on all sides by the Venetians (1405), the soldiers of the guard heard ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... error and are not entitled to take on themselves the responsibilities of final judgment. Yet, if I seem in this chapter to assume sometimes the liberties which are habitual to historians, but which, in spite of the greater knowledge with which we speak, we generally hesitate to assume towards contemporaries, let the reader excuse me when he remembers how greatly, if it is to understand its destiny, the world needs light, even if it is partial and uncertain, on the complex struggle of human will and purpose, not yet finished, which, concentrated in the persons ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... lived long enough to receive the honour that his astonishing discoveries so justly merited, and though for many years of his life his renown was much greater than that of any of his contemporaries, yet it is not too much to say that, in the years which have since elapsed, Newton's fame has been ever steadily advancing, so that it never stood higher than ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... I have been in many climes, and met many men, and read history a bit—I hope not without profit. And this I have learned: that the person who stands at the head of his class (be he country lad or presidential candidate) is always the target for calumny and the unkindness of contemporaries who can neither appreciate ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... which it was founded, were too obscure to engage the attention of Josephus, or to obtain a place in his history" ("Evid. of Christianity," p. 73. Ed. 1845). We answer, it is plain, from the fact that Josephus entirely ignores both, that the pretended story of Jesus was not widely known among his contemporaries, and that the early spread of Christianity is much exaggerated. But says Paley: "Be, however, the fact, or the cause of the omission in Josephus, what it may, no other or different history on the subject has been given by him or ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... She had certainly become more fascinating. Her beauty was at its height. The year in Paris, lived almost wholly among clever and very unprejudiced French people, had given her a peculiar polish—one Frenchman who knew English slang called it "a shine"—which made her stand out among her English contemporaries. Many of them when girls had received a "finish" in Paris. But girls cannot go about as she had gone about. They had learnt French; she had learnt Paris. From that time onward she was probably the most truly cosmopolitan of all the aristocratic Englishwomen of ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... been unduly silent about these disaffected men. At the time so real was the belief in state rights that contemporaries were reluctant to admit that any Southerner, once his State had seceded, could fail to be loyal to its commands. Nevertheless in considerable areas—such, for example, as East Tennessee—the majority remained to the end openly for the Union, and there were large regions in the ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... ones, as they looked round, and saw the fluency of every one else, felt themselves, like sediment, gradually sinking to their level. As long as the stir of term life had lasted, they had imagined themselves as well up, even better than most of their contemporaries; but now they began to find out it was ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... with their heads as well as their heels." Certainly Sainte Aldegonde had learned other lessons than these. He was one of the many-sided men who recalled the symmetry of antique patriots. He was a poet of much vigor and imagination; a prose writer whose style was surpassed by that of none of his contemporaries, a diplomatist in whose tact and delicacy William of Orange afterwards reposed in the most difficult and important negotiations, an orator whose discourses on many great public occasions attracted the attention of Europe, a soldier whose ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the fascination of an intellect even more brilliant than his own, he at least enjoyed in his retirement whatever good may come from hearty and genuine labor, and from the high regard entertained for him by the noblest spirits among his contemporaries. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... disclaimed for himself, and denied to others, the right of assuming the title of "Universal Bishop," appears to have had very strong ideas respecting the authority which he conceived to belong to the successors of St. Peter, whilst his talents and holiness gave him an extensive influence over his contemporaries. [Sidenote: and Hadrian I.] Succeeding Popes laid claim to more extended powers, especially Hadrian I. (A.D. 772-A.D. 793), who first advanced the doctrine that the whole Christian Church was subject to the see of Rome. [Sidenote: Rise of the temporal power of the Popes under Leo III.] ...
— A Key to the Knowledge of Church History (Ancient) • John Henry Blunt
... towering national figures like Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Marshall, or the great state leaders like Peyton Randolph, Richard Bland, George Wythe, or Edmund Pendleton who astounded contemporaries. It was the fact that they knew of other men in Virginia as capable—Thomas Nelson, Jr., Benjamin Harrison, Severn Eyre, Francis Lightfoot Lee, John Page, John Blair, Jr., Robert Carter ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... a poet prevents his contemporaries from fixing their attention exclusively upon the merits of his verse, in how much better case is posterity, if the poet's personality makes its way into the heart of his poetry? We have ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... over the surface of the land." A young prince, Don Henry, duke of Viseu, third son of John I., who was very fond of the study of astronomy and geography, exercised a considerable influence over his contemporaries; it is to him that Portugal owes her colonial power and wealth and the expeditions so repeatedly made, which were vividly described, and their results spoken of as so wonderful, that they may have aided in awakening Columbus' love ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... famous master; his portrait is in the Vatican, and his lamentations, his motets, and his Magnificat rest here, forgotten for centuries. And Victoria? Do you know him? Another of the same period; his jealous contemporaries called him 'Palestrina's monkey' taking all his works to be imitations, in consequence of his long sojourn in Rome; but, believe me, instead of being plagiarisms from the Italian, they are far superior. Here also is Rivera, a Toledan master who no one remembers, but ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... judgment, both o'er-matched in wit. In him all beauties of this age we see, Etherege his courtship, Southern's purity, The satire, wit, and strength of manly Wycherly. All this in blooming youth you have achieved, Nor are your foiled contemporaries grieved; So much the sweetness of your manners move, We cannot envy you, because we love. Fabius might joy in Scipio, when he saw A beardless consul made against the law, And join his suffrage to the votes of Rome; Though he with Hannibal was overcome. Thus old Romano bowed to ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... family of Falstaff." Ticknor described him as "corpulent but not gross." Macaulay spoke of his "rector-like amplitude and rubicundity." He was of middle height, rather above it than below, and sturdily built. He used to quote a saying from one of his contemporaries at Oxford—"Sydney, your sense, wit, and clumsiness, always give me the idea of an Athenian carter." Except on ceremonious occasions, he was careless about his dress. His daughter says:—"His neckcloth ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... accidental; like age or sex it is a physical fatality which can be made the basis of specific and comely virtues; but it is not an end to pursue or a flag to flaunt or a privilege not balanced by a thousand incapacities. Yet of this distinction our contemporaries tend to make an idol, perhaps because it is the only distinction they feel ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... Contemporaries have described the lofty and well-ordered pomp with which such a commissioner entered on the performance of his exalted duties. Priests, monks, and magistrates, schoolmasters and scholars, men, ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... which it is hardly possible for any conqueror to obtain the material or moral successes that give him a place in history; that win for him the love, the respect, and sometimes the hatred, of his contemporaries. Sir Alfred Milner would have known how to make the work of Cecil Rhodes of permanent value to the British Empire. It was a thousand pities that when Sir Alfred Milner took office in South Africa the influence of Cecil Rhodes, at one time politically dominant, had so materially ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... lived and wrote her verses, a woman author was almost unknown in English literature. This lady was the wife of the governor of Massachusetts, and because of her literary tendencies was looked upon by the people of her time as a marvel of womankind. Her contemporaries called her the "tenth muse lately sprung up in America," and one of them, Rev. Nathaniel Ward, was inspired to write an address to her, in which he declares his wonder at her success as a poet, and playfully foretells the consequences ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... excellencies I can never enough admire; and in this they have been followed, especially by Sir John Suckling and Mr Waller, who refined upon them. Neither have they, who succeeded them, been wanting in their endeavours to adorn our mother tongue: But it is not so lawful for me to praise my living contemporaries, as to ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... Striking events, dramatic episodes, like the discovery of America, Drake's voyage around the world, the capture of New Amsterdam by the English, George Rogers Clark's taking of Vincennes, and the bombardment of Fort Sumter, inspired the imagination of contemporaries, and stir the blood of their descendants. A few words should be said as to the make-up of the volumes. Each contains a portrait of some man especially eminent within the field of that volume. Each volume also contains a series of colored and black-and-white maps, ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... not attempt cooperation in business so extensively as did its Southern contemporaries, but a number of Alliance grain elevators were established in Minnesota and Dakota, cooperative creameries flourished in Illinois, and many of the alliances appointed agents to handle produce and purchase supplies for the members. It was in the field ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... other concurrent testimonies we conclude, that those facts were once really existant, and that so many men, without any interest, would never conspire to deceive us; especially since they must, in the attempt, expose themselves to the derision of all their contemporaries, when these facts were asserted to be recent and universally known. The same kind of reasoning runs through politics, war, commerce, economy, and indeed mixes itself so entirely in human life, that it is impossible to act or subsist a moment without having ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... the best proof of our maintenance of public esteem; and so long as our efforts are guided by the same singleness of purpose that first directed them we shall hope for a continuance of such favour. A multitude of contemporaries "whet each other;" "thinking nurseth thinking;" and, in like manner, reading nurseth reading, and awakens a spirit of inquiry, untiring and exhaustless, among all concerned in pursuit ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 584 - Vol. 20, No. 584. (Supplement to Vol. 20) • Various
... disinterested men who have lived in this century, Bentham and J. S. Mill, whose lives were a long devotion to the service of their fellows, have been among the most enthusiastic supporters of utility; while among their contemporaries, some who were of a more mystical turn of mind, have ended rather in aspiration than in action, and have been found unequal to the duties of life. Looking back on them now that they are removed from the scene, we feel that ...
— Philebus • Plato
... century ago, even among many gently nurtured women, the sight of a man overcome by liquor excited only sorrow and sympathy; now it commands nothing less than abhorrence. I and my surviving contemporaries started in life under the old system. You, my dear boy, are more fortunate in having begun with the new. Among the old soldiers there are still some few votaries of Bacchus who have to count their cups most carefully or risk their commissions. Among those under forty our army ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... that any one has such a reversionary benevolence as seriously to intend the remote good of a late posterity, who can give up the present enjoyment which every honest man must have in the happiness of his contemporaries. Everybody is satisfied that a conservation and secure enjoyment of our natural rights is the great and ultimate purpose of civil society, and that therefore all forms whatsoever of government are only good as they are subservient to that purpose to which they are entirely subordinate. Now ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... incidents that touch you more nearly. Do you remember GORTON? Many years ago GORTON went to Oxford with a brilliant reputation. Every triumph that the University could confer was held to be within his grasp. His contemporaries looked upon him as a marvellous being, who was destined to rise to the top of whatever tree he felt disposed to climb. He was really a delightful fellow, fresh, smiling, expansive, amusing, and his friends all worshipped ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... Ceuta campaign in giving positive knowledge of western and inland Africa to a mind like Henry's already set on the finding of a sea-route to India, have been noticed by all contemporaries and followers, who took any interest in his plans, but it was not merely caravan news that he gained in these two visits of 1415 and 1418. Both Azurara, the chronicler of his voyages and Diego Gomez, his lieutenant, the explorer of the Cape ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... unity: he calls it a well constructed system of wholes. A discussion of the origin of evil is also given, with a solution based on the existence and misuse of freedom. Finally, it is to be mentioned to the great credit of Taurellus, that, like his younger contemporaries, Galileo and Kepler, he vigorously opposed the Aristotelian and Scholastic animation of the material world and the anthropomorphic conception of its forces, thus preparing the way for the modern view of nature to ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... III., the grandfather of Ivan the Terrible, sent a delegate to Venice to seek out for him an architect who, in addition to his own craft, knew how to make guns; and in due course appeared in the Kremlin a certain Muroli, called Aristotle by his contemporaries on account of his profound learning. He undertook "to build churches and palaces, to cast big bells and cannons, to fire off the said cannons, and to make every sort of castings very cunningly"; and for the exercise of these various arts it was solemnly stipulated in a ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... patron of those great ecclesiastics whose names are consecrated. The great Ambrose was his special friend, in whose arms he expired. Augustine, Martin of Tours, Jerome, Gregory Nazianzen, Basil, Chrysostom, Damasus, were all contemporaries, or nearly so. In his day the Church was really seated on the high-places of the earth. A bishop was a greater man than a senator; he exercised more influence and had more dignity than a general. He was ambassador, courtier, and statesman, as well as ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... Shun Chih, the first actual Emperor of the Ch'ing dynasty, "became a guest on high." He does not rank as one of China's great monarchs, but his kindly character as a man, and his magnanimity as a ruler, were extolled by his contemporaries. He treated the Catholic missionaries with favour. The Dutch and Russian embassies to his court in 1656 found there envoys from the Great Mogul, from the Western Tartars, and from the Dalai Lama. China, in the days when her civilization towered above that of most ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... perhaps, no one among our English writers, who for so great a part of his life has been an object of curiosity to his contemporaries as Johnson. Almost every thing he said or did was thought worthy of being recorded by some one or other of his associates; and the public were for a time willing to listen to all they had to say of him. A mass of information ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... the Lord is, in the truest manner, to be with His people," is a guarantee for His help in the present distress also. The Prophet then states the time in which the land shall be entirely delivered from its present enemies. The contemporaries, as the representative of whom [Pg 30] the child appears (the Prophet, in the energy of his faith, has transferred the birth of this child from the future to the present), shall, after the short space of about two years, again obtain the full enjoyment of the products of the land, ver. 15. For, before ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... mere critic, and it is an axiom of the Arts that the critics "are the fellows who have failed," or have not succeeded. The persons who really can paint, or play, or compose seldom tell us how it is done, still less do they review the performances of their contemporaries. That invidious task they leave to the unsuccessful novelists. The instruction, the advice are offered by the persons who cannot achieve performance. It is thus that all things work together in favour of failure, which, indeed, may well appear so easy that special instruction, however competent, ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... is not only the most ambitious of Mr. Allen's books, considered merely as to its sale, but it is also the one in which he has carried to the highest pitch that fineness of perception and that distinction of manner that have from the first set his work apart from the work of nearly all of his contemporaries. Hardly since Hawthorne have we had such pages as the best of these; hardly since The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun have we had fictive work so spiritual in essence and adorned with such delicate and lovely embroiderings of the imagination. There are ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... but the greatest of all was in his mediocrity. Mediocrity, it must be confessed, is almost always the brand of these idols of the people: either that the mob, mediocre itself, has only a taste for what resembles it; or that jealous contemporaries can never elevate themselves sufficiently high towards great characters and great virtues; or that Providence, which distributes gifts and faculties in proportion, will not allow that one man should unite in himself, amidst a free people, these three irresistible ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... (applied to a bas-relief), 'contrition' for bruising ('the contrition of the serpent'), 'probable' for worthy of approval ('a probable doctor'). The author of the excellent Lexique de la Langue de Corneille claims the same merit for him and for his great contemporaries or immediate successors: Faire rendre aux mots tout ce qu'ils peuvent donner, en varier habilement les acceptions et les nuances, les ramener a leur origine, les retremper frequemment a leur source etymologique, constituait un des secrets principaux ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... stand out in tremendous contrast as contemporaries—the realist of the Soul, and the realist of the Flesh, the Saint and the Sinner, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... scientific heritage Europe received from the Orient; for in the records of Babylonian science we have to do with the Eastern mind at its best. Let us turn to the specific inquiry as to the achievements of the Chaldean scientist whose fame so dazzled the eyes of his contemporaries of the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... grief-stricken father was startling, and to many who knew him and more who did not, it was incomprehensible. In the quaint phraseology of one of his contemporaries, he had "avoided the snares of infidelity" hitherto, but his religion had been of a conventional type. During the child's illness he underwent an old-fashioned religious conversion. The miracle has happened before, to greater men, and ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... who insisted that the rules of evidence should be rigidly adhered to. I may mention, one, whose abilities were of a remarkable order, and whose memory is still fresh in the minds of many of my contemporaries—I mean Mr. Justice Maule. His asthmatic cough was the most interesting and amusing cough I ever heard, especially when he was saying anything more than usually humorous, which was not infrequently. He was a man of great wit, sound sense, and a curious humour such as I never heard in any ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... into the dark, for which, when a man is in the blue devils, he has specially to harden his heart. That splendid scoundrel, Maxime de Trailles, took the news of marriages much as an old man hears the deaths of his contemporaries. "C'est desesperant," he cried, throwing himself down in the arm-chair at Madame Schontz's; "c'est desesperant, nous nous marions tous!" Every marriage was like another grey hair on his head; and the jolly church-bells seemed to taunt him with his fifty years ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... scurrilous. Over against this persistent acrimony may be put the fine eulogy of Mr. C. Kegan Paul, his biographer, to represent the favourable judgment of our own time, whilst I will venture to quote one remarkable passage that voices the opinions of many among Godwin's most eminent contemporaries. ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... been attacking the question with which we are concerned from the side of the subject-matter and tone of the story of Petronius. Another method of approach is suggested by the Menippean satire,[87] the best specimens of which have come down to us in the fragments of Varro, one of Cicero's contemporaries. These satires are an olla podrida, dealing with all sorts of subjects in a satirical manner, sometimes put in the dialogue form and cast in a melange of prose and verse. It is this last characteristic which ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... preaching was developed, and a Christian doctrine about Christ and about GOD. In confident reliance upon His advocacy and His support the Apostles were made bold to confront in the name of Jesus a hostile world. Is it any wonder that in the eyes of their contemporaries they appeared as men possessed, as men made drunk with the new wine of some strange ecstasy, or mad with the fervour of some inexplicable exaltation? Yet the Spirit did not normally issue in ecstasy. It is not the way of GOD to over-ride men's reason, or to place their individual personalities ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... were predominantly Puritan, and the whole world has been informed that English Puritanism was hostile to Art. They were preoccupied with material and moral concerns. Even if they had remained in England, Professor Trent affirms, these contemporaries of Milton and Bunyan would have produced no art or literature. Now it is quite true that for nearly two hundred years after the date of the first settlement of the American colonists, opportunities for cultivating the arts did not exist. But that the sense of beauty was wholly ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... many graces of person, by his own confession, takes nothing seriously. As to that matter of religious beliefs, "the breeze of the age, and of science, has blown [222] over him, as it has blown over his contemporaries, and left empty space there." Still, when he saw his childish religious faith departing from him, as he thinks it must necessarily depart from all intelligent male Parisians, he wept. Since that moment, however, a gaiety, ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... serious poet, and the author of 'Lalla Rookh' (1817), 'The Loves of the Angels' (1823), and 'Alciphron' (1839), Moore was perhaps overrated by his contemporaries. In spite of their brightness of fancy, metrical skill, and brilliant cleverness, they lack the greater elements ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... was to be no real revival of appreciation for these poems. There were to be no lack of admirers, however, of the audience "fit though few." Byron's praise has been too often quoted for repetition. Wordsworth, who rarely praised his contemporaries in poetry, declared of Crabbe that his works "would last from their combined merit as poetry and truth." Macaulay writes of "that incomparable passage in Crabbe's Borough which has made many a rough and cynical reader cry like a child"—the passage ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... extinction were the alternatives; and as he carried things with a high hand, using fire and sword freely, it is not a matter of wonder that his conquests were rapid and complete. It has been said of Harald Fairhair by his contemporaries, handed down by the scalds, and recorded in the Icelandic Sagas, that he was of remarkably handsome appearance, great and strong, and very generous and affable to ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... he never violated the Cincian law, but historians of his period intimate that by secret loans and testamentary gifts his practice proved to be very profitable. And it is certain, at least, that many of his contemporaries were made very rich by professional remuneration. Augustus directed the passage of another law forbidding compensation to orators and advocates, but it was disregarded and subsequent emperors contented themselves with fixing limits for the fees to be charged. ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... not to end in the dismissal of Ministers. And then they got to books—to novels, new poetry, magazines, essays, and reviews; and with the slightest touch of pleasant sarcasm the judge passed sentence on the latest efforts of his literary contemporaries. And thus at last they settled down on a certain paper which had lately appeared in a certain Quarterly—a paper on a grave subject, which had been much discussed—and the judge on a sudden stayed his hand, and spared his raillery. "You have not heard, I suppose, ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... effigy has figures of censing angels at its head. The whole style of this exquisite structure is akin to that of the cloisters and the chapter house. The artists who executed the sculptures are believed to have been contemporaries of Niccola Pisano. A chantry was formerly attached to this monument, to the east of which is a double aumbry, or cupboard, for the reservation of ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... masterpiece in this kind, the full-length of Captain Coram at the Foundling. On the other hand, he says a great deal about Hogarth which has no very obvious connection with History Painting. He discusses the Analysis and the serpentine Line of Beauty with far more insight than many of its author's contemporaries; refers feelingly to the Act by which in 1735 the painter had so effectively cornered the pirates; and finally defines his satirical pictures succinctly as follows:—"M. Hogarth has given to England a new class of pictures. They contain a great number ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... tried to bring all relevant, ascertainable fact to bear on the establishment of the author's text and the explication of his obscurities. For Theobald was the first editor of Shakespeare who displayed a well grounded knowledge of Shakespeare's language and metrical practice and that of his contemporaries, the sources and chronology of his plays, and the broad range of Elizabethan-Jacobean drama as a means of illuminating the work of the master writer. Thus both in the edition itself and in his Preface, ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... my contemporaries,' says Schopenhauer, 'not to my countrymen, but to humanity do I commit my work which is now completed, in the confidence that it will not be without value to the race. Science, and more than every other science, philosophy is international.' ... ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... though he did not, like Wordsworth, read nature into human life with that spiritual insight for which he was so remarkable, yet as a poet of fancy, the vivid, delicate, sympathetic fancy of the Celt, still remains unmatched. Amongst Dafydd's contemporaries and successors, Iolo Goch's noble poem, "The Labourer," very appropriate to our breadless days, Lewis Glyn Cothi's touching elegy on his little son John, and Dr. Sion Cent's epigrammatic "The Noble's Grave" have been treated as far as possible ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... the progress of improvement, and dashed in pieces down the tremendous precipice of human perfectibility. Then comes Mr. Malthus forward with the geometrical and arithmetical ratios in his hands, and holds them out to his affrighted contemporaries as the only means of salvation. "For" (so argued the author of the Essay) "let the principles of Mr. Godwin's Enquiry and of other similar works be carried literally and completely into effect; let every corruption and abuse of power be ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... displayed this art, though his successors in the next generation matched his skill and did still more thorough work, are the best introduction from which we can learn the technical process by which within living memory the study of modern history has been renewed. Ranke's contemporaries, weary of his neutrality and suspense, and of the useful but subordinate work that was done by beginners who borrowed his wand, thought that too much was made of these obscure preliminaries which a man may accomplish for himself, in the ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... of an orator depends upon two things, the witness of contemporaries to the impression produced upon them, and the written or printed—we may, perhaps, be soon able to say the phonographed—record of his speeches. Few are the famous speakers who would be famous if they were tried by this latter test alone, and Mr. Gladstone was not one of them. It is only by ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... casually read. If we are writers of fiction ourselves, perhaps we judge it by personal and temperamental methods and preferences, just as certain groups of American poets of widely different sympathies judge the poetry of their contemporaries to-day. Let us affirm our faith anyhow in our own spiritual substance. Let us believe in our materials and shape them passionately to a creative purpose. Let us be enthusiastic about life around us and the work that is being done, and in much ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... displayed the power and the foresight of Pitt. They were the fall of Thurlow and the endeavour of the Prime Minister to form a working alliance with the Old Whigs. The former of these events greatly impressed the contemporaries of Pitt, who likened the ejected Chancellor to Lucifer or to a Titan blasted by Jove's thunderbolt. In this age we find it difficult to account for the prestige of Thurlow. His legal learning was ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... it is not that which startles him from publishing the secret demur which his heart prompts, upon hearing false praises of a Greek poet, or praises which, if not false, are extravagant. What he fears, is the scorn of his contemporaries. Let once a party have formed itself considerable enough to protect a man from the charge of presumption in throwing off the yoke of servile allegiance to all that is called classical,—let it be a party ever so small numerically, and the rebels ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... Europe, and even in England. There, not only are artists and men of letters honoured when they are successful—they are, of course, honoured at that stage in America; but the pursuit of literature and art is one which a young man need not feel it discreditable to adopt. The contemporaries of a brilliant youth at Oxford or at Cambridge do not secretly despise him if he declines to enter business. The first-class man does not normally aspire to start life as a drummer. Public life and the Church offer honourable careers; and both of them have traditional affinities ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... artistic {vii} purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result.' It is criticism inspired by this liberalising principle that is especially applicable to the vast sonnet-literature which was produced by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It is criticism of the type that Arnold recommended that can alone lead to any accurate and profitable conclusion respecting the intention of the vast sonnet-literature of the Elizabethan era. In accordance with Arnold's suggestion, ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... excited and weak. Kind as he looked and spoke, he forgot all his promises about coveting my property, and scarcely got over the first salutation before he began begging for many things that he saw, and more especially for a deole, in order that he might wear it on all great occasions, to show his contemporaries what a magnanimous man his white visitor was. I soon lost my temper whilst striving to settle the hongo. Lumeresi would have a deole, and I would not ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... them!) were born and bred of similar stock, in much the same surroundings and station in life—from the same England—and at a similar period. One to radiate all of art's, all literature's splendor—a splendor so dazzling that he himself is almost lost in it, and his contemporaries the same—his fictitious Othello, Romeo, Hamlet, Lear, as real as any lords of England or Europe then and there—more real to us, the mind sometimes thinks, than the man Shakspere himself. Then the other—may ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... immense chamber: later the Chapter House was connected with the main building by the Vestibule. Then the Choir was replaced by a larger and finer building in the then latest architectural fashion. The new choir contained the east window, which in the eyes of contemporaries was wonderful and unrivalled for its size and painted glass. It occupies nearly all the central space of the east wall from a few feet above the ground to almost the apex of the gable. Gothic architecture was so marvellously adaptable ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... the Middle Ages remarks, not without irony, that the Egyptians were perhaps the only people in the world who never kept any stores of provisions by them, but each one went daily to the market to buy the pittance for his family. The improvidence which he laments over in his contemporaries had been handed down from their most remote ancestors. Workmen, fellahin, employes, small townsfolk, all lived from hand to mouth in the Egypt of the Pharaohs. Pay-days were almost everywhere ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero |
