"Critic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... order to a man's obtaining these two rights, it is clearly needful that the worth of him should be approximately known; as well as the want of worth, which has, unhappily, been usually the principal subject of study for critic law, careful hitherto only to mark degrees of de-merit, instead of merit;—assigning, indeed, to the Deficiencies (not always, alas! even to these) just estimate, fine, or penalty; but to the Efficiencies, on the other side, which are by much the more interesting, as well as the only ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... her translations from the Latin her reputation was to a great extent made. Wordsworth and Southey were her intimate friends, and intense admirers of her genius. In a review written by an eminent critic, it was remarked of her that "she was the inheritrix of her father's genius, and almost ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions are the original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realise such primary data for one's self, or not at all. And he who experiences these impressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... critic of life and letters, my principal business in the world is that of manufacturing platitudes for tomorrow, which is to say, ideas so novel that they will be instantly rejected as insane and outrageous by all right thinking men, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... of literature—to use a necessary but an unpopular and a misleading epithet. Hazlitt has it that there have only been but three perfect, absolute, and unapproached egotists in all literature—Cellini, Montaigne, and Wordsworth. But why that fine critic leaves out Sir Thomas Browne, I cannot understand or accept. I always turn to Sir Thomas Browne, far more than to either of Hazlitt's canonised three, when I want to read what a great man has to tell me about himself: and in this case ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... sort of religion in literature, believing that no author can justly intrude upon the public without feeling that his writings may be of some benefit to mankind, I beg leave to apologize for this little book. I know, no critic can tell me better than I know myself, how much it falls short of what might have been done by an abler pen. Yet it is something—an index, I should say, to something better. The French in America may sometime ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... reader of a painter's coloring. I should be glad to hear what Titian's "Assumption" is like from some one who knew it by descriptions. Can any one who has seen it tell its likeness, or forget it? Can any cunning critic describe intelligibly the difference between the styles of Titian, of Tintoretto, and of Paolo Veronese,—that difference which no one with the slightest feeling for art can fail to discern after looking thrice at their works? It results ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... major critic a good part of his charm and interest for us stems from a mind that is not in the least doctrinaire. His method is inductive, his appeal is always to the human psychology as that can be known experientially, and his standards are Aristotelian (if by such a reference ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... important service as a Biblical critic. In 1516 A.D. he published the New Testament in the original Greek, with a Latin translation and a dedication to the pope. Up to this time the only accessible edition of the New Testament was the old Latin version known as the Vulgate, which St. Jerome had made near the close of the fourth ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... and "thees" and "thous" abound in the conversation, which runs on investments, the new English loan, banking accounts in London, the rent moratorium in Paris, and the war. It is said that every German is a critic of war. But so is every Frenchman a critic of war. The criticism I now hear is the best spoken criticism, utterly impartial, that I ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... remarks would have extended to more than a certain number of plays, which were most frequently acted. Thus much, however, appears certain, that the commentaries are rather those of an habitual play-goer, than of a studious critic; and it will be easy to show that a great portion of the new readings he proposes are really changes for the worse, while a still larger number are at least unnecessary! I shall content myself with only a few instances, on this occasion, as I am unwilling to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various
... fragments of modems (his friends with tails, wings, etc.), hastily wash his hands, trot along in front of them to his place of business, and in a brief space of time turn out some complicated legal instrument with which it would defy the sharpest critic to find ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... and ever-ready smile, it carried considerable weight. His fair skin had not yet taken on its summer scorch of carmine, and its soft and babyish pinkness softened the salience of his short nose, and induced the critic to condone the want of decision in ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... Bright too much for doing as he did. Hear the story out before you pass judgment. He was only a man. You are under the same condemnation, my self-contained critic! ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... difficulty in accepting the remainder of his statement. For we have here, there can be little doubt, the portrait of Lodovico's daughter, by the hand of a Milanese painter, in all probability, as Morelli divined, the court-painter of the ducal house, Ambrogio de Predis. And the German critic, Dr. Muller-Walde, is probably right in his conjecture that the companion picture in the Ambrosiana is the portrait of Bianca's husband, Galeazzo di Sanseverino. This picture has been called by many names, and ascribed to many ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... shown Delsarte as a composer, as pre-eminently an artist, who, as a certain critic says, "was never surpassed;" I have insisted upon the two titles which form his special glory: that of revealer of the laws of aesthetics, and that of creator of a science to support his discoveries; a science whose application ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... Johnson's Feelings and Conduct Miss Wynn's Commonplace Book Johnson's unfounded Objections to the Marriage and erroneous Impressions of Piozzi Miss Seward's Account of his Loves Misrepresentation and erroneous Theory of a Critic Last Days and Death of Johnson Lord Macaulay's Summary of Mrs. Piozzi's Treatment of Johnson Life in Italy Projected Work on Johnson The Florence Miscellany Correspondence with Cadell and Publication of the "Anecdotes" Her alleged Inaccuracy, with Instances H. ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... me worse than the Hessians He shot in the Bennington scrimmage— Have I outlived the newspaper critic, To be ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... congress of the Third International, Trotsky remarked. "A party as such, in the course of the development of a revolution, becomes identical with the revolution." Lenin, on the same occasion, replying to a critic who said that he differed from, the Communists in his understanding of what was meant by the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, said, "He says that we understand by the words 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' what is actually ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... exercise of his powers. He selected wood as nearly as possible resembling that found in the works of Niccolo Amati. The backs are mostly of even grain, and compact; the modelling can only be found fault with near the purfling, where its sharpness at once catches the attention of the critic in these matters, and divulges the true author. The varnish, though good, is not equal to that of Amati. The scroll is inferior to the body in merit. The purfling is of whalebone, like that of ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... a charming maiden, she, of twenty summers. The artistic outlines of her plump arms and shoulders, beautifully modelled bust, throat and neck, so admirably proportioned, would have satisfied the most carping critic; poet or painter, he would have pronounced them a dream of perfect symmetry. Her queenly shaped head, so gracefully poised, like a clear cut cameo, was a poem of intellectual development on lines of rarest beauty. Her thick, glossy ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... this tediousness will never do— T' is being too epic, and I must cut down (In copying) this long canto into two; They'll never find it out, unless I own The fact, excepting some experienced few; And then as an improvement 't will be shown: I'll prove that such the opinion of the critic is From ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... discredit to Congress. Mean and contemptible partisanship colors all their acts." It is amusing to note that while Secretary Welles was thus outspoken in his criticisms of others, he himself did not escape calumny. One critic (Thurlow Weed, who, it may be remembered, had objected to Welles's appointment to a Cabinet position when Lincoln suggested it to him in their consultation at Springfield before the inauguration) declared that "It is worse than ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... pronunciation harsh: but, after all, as nothing can be improved beyond its own species, or farther than its original nature will allow; as an ill voice, though ever so thoroughly instructed in the rules of music, can never be brought to sing harmoniously, nor many an honest critic ever arrive to be a good poet; so neither can the natural harshness of the French, or their perpetual ill accent, be ever refined into perfect harmony like the Italian. The English has yet more natural disadvantages than the French; our original Teutonic, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... be recognised by any one now alive. I was mistaken, however, and indeed had endangered what I desired should be considered as a secret; for I afterwards learned that a highly respectable gentleman, one of the few surviving friends of my father, and an acute critic, had said, upon the appearance of the work, that he was now convinced who was the author of it, as he recognised, in the Antiquary, traces of the character of a very intimate friend* ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... are many difficulties. I am far clearer on all points than I was shut up in the prisoned body (prisoned, prisoning or imprisoned you ought to say). No, I don't mean, to get it that way. 'See here, H, don't view me with a critic's eye, but pass my imperfections by.' Of course, I know all that as well as anybody on your sphere (of course). Well, I think so. I tell you, old fellow, it don't do to pick all these little errors too much when they amount to nothing in one way. You have light enough ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... to Wittenberg for another year, that he might complete the work for graduation; graduated in December of that year as Master of Arts, and then returned to his work in Berlin. He worked industriously, not only as critic, but also in translation from the classics, from French, English, and Italian; and he was soon able to send help towards providing education for the youngest of the household of twelve children in the Camenz parsonage. In 1753 he gave himself eight weeks of withdrawal from other ...
— Nathan the Wise • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... creations—a woman strong to endure. That was sufficient for him; and he turned his attention to his horses and his men. He never saw the background to his own life. It is usually the onlooker who sees that, just as a critic sees more in a picture than ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... almost with reluctance that a critic feels obliged to name this powerful but prosaic painter as the Giotto of the fifteenth century in Florence, the tutelary angel of an age inaugurated by Masaccio. He was a consummate master of the science collected by his predecessors. No one surpassed ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... for the benefit of the drivelling, cantankerous critic, with a squint in his eye, who never looks for anything good in a piece of writing, but is always on the search for a flaw, that I send passages from Tennyson floating through my Marie's brain with good justification. She had received a very fair education at a convent in Red River. ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... The true critic strives for a clear vision of things as they are—for justice and fairness; his effort is to get free from himself, so that he may in no way disfigure that which he wishes to understand or reproduce. His superiority to the common herd lies in this ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... spite of all his care, is, of course, possible; but if a writer is to be called to account for all the misapplications, or distortions, of his philosophy, writing may as well come to an end. Yet, inconceivable as it may sound, a critic very properly held in popular esteem recently gave it as his opinion that the teaching of Walter Pater was responsible for the tragic career of the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Certainly that remarkable man was an "epicurean"—but one, to quote Meredith, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... in 1668, with the separately printed edition of Boileau's ninth satire; in the same year it was included in a collected edition of the satires. It was occasioned, evidently, by a critic's complaint that the modern satirist, departing from ancient practice, ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... his heart beat spasmodically and his fingers curled and tingled. No power, no wish to pray was left in him, no sense of responsibility; he was too far gone in jealous vindictiveness to be his own judge or critic, and he stared at the guide, saying: "If you get drunk it is your own fault. You'll be doing it yourself. I have nothing to do with it, nothing. I will not touch the stuff, you shall ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... colours that afforded him delight—as for instance, afterwards, the crimson covering the walls of the dining-room, whose colour was of that soft deep-penetrable character which a flock paper alone can carry. Then there were pictures, bad enough most of them, no doubt, in the eyes of the critic, but endlessly suggestive, therefore endlessly delightful to Gibbie. It is not the man who knows most about Nature that is hardest to please, however he may be hardest to satisfy, with the attempt to follow her. The accomplished poet will derive pleasure from verses ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... material, but the sublimer art of investigating it, of discerning truth from falsehood and certainty from doubt. It is by solidity of criticism more than by the plenitude of erudition, that the study of history strengthens, and straightens, and extends the mind 60. And the accession of the critic in the place of the indefatigable compiler, of the artist in coloured narrative, the skilled limner of character, the persuasive advocate of good, or other, causes, amounts to a transfer of government, to a change of dynasty, in the historic realm. For the ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... certainty and truth. He scarcely believed in this any longer, and surely had no hope of finding it among the Catholics; but still he went to hear Ambrose's sermons. He went in the first place as a critic of language, with the rather jealous curiosity of the trained man who watches how another man does it. He wanted to judge himself if the sacred orator was as good as his reputation. The firm and substantial eloquence of this former official, ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... study, full of "onion atoms" as Sydney Smith's famous salad, and we flaunt it merrily in the face of those who are frequently crapehanging and dirging that we have no sparkling young Chestertons and Rebecca Wests and J.C. Squires this side of Queenstown harbor. Rarely have creator and critic been joined in so felicitous a marriage. And indeed the union was appointed in heaven and smiles in the blood, for (as I have noted) Mr. Holliday's grandfather was the biographer of Tarkington's grandsire, also a pioneer preacher of the metaphysical ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... principles more clearly than those that were prior to him; for neither are the writings of Numenius, Cronius, Moderatus, and Thrasyllus, to be compared with those of Plotinus on this subject." After such a testimony as this from such a consummate critic as Longinus, the writings of Plotinus have nothing to fear from the imbecile censure of modern critics. I shall only further observe, that Longinus, in the above testimony, does not give the least hint of his having found any polluted streams, or corruption of the doctrines ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... chaste youths, remarks an acute critic of modern life (Hellpach, Nervositaet und Kultur, p. 175), are merely actuated by traditional principles, or by shyness, fear of venereal infections, lack of self-confidence, want of money, very seldom ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... on the following morning. It was a curious composition. A critic might have classed it with Kid Brady's reminiscences, for there was a complete absence of literary style. It was just a wail of pity, and a cry of indignation, straight from the heart ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... landlord, "we can dispense with your criticisms. A pretty thing indeed for you, on the strength of knowing half-a-dozen words of Welsh, to set up for a Welsh critic in the house of a person who knows the ancient British ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... critic not quite ingenuously, is the line to be drawn between local and Imperial affairs? Problems far more perplexed than this have been solved by the wit of man. The line was drawn by O'Connell and Butt, by Parnell and Gladstone. It can be drawn to meet the circumstances ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... criticism. We have heard village critics of the loom and the forge discuss such questions as are handled by Colenso, and the Essays and Reviews, and often with much more acuteness and penetration. With what eclat has our village critic unhorsed the itinerant preacher with the inquiry, What became of the forks belonging to the nine and twenty knives which Ezra brought back from Babylon? but was, alas! himself routed in the moment of triumph ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... far forth bad style, because it defeats its own end, which is expression; but beyond this, our interest in technical execution is purely intellectual, whereas art reaches the emotions. At the theatre a critic sits unmoved; dispassionately he looks upon the personages of the drama, as they advance, retreat, and countermarch, little by little yielding up their secret, disclosing all the subtle interplay of human motives. From the heights of his knowledge the critic surveys the spectacle; ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... supposed to separate art from philosophy; and, as I shall try to show, there was in the poet a growing tendency to turn the power of dialectic on the pre-suppositions of his art. Yet, even Browning puts great difficulties in the way of a critic, who seeks to draw a philosophy of life from his poems. It is not by any means an easy task to lift the truths he utters under the stress of poetic emotion into the region of placid contemplation, or to connect them into ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... critic has observed that the poet himself seems to have felt a doubt on the matter, because he has supplemented the dubious moonbeams by the "lantern dimly burning." The more generous, if somewhat a sanguine remark has been also ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... Almamoulin, the son of Nouradin, or of Anningait and Ayut, the Greenland lovers, much more refreshing to modern readers. That Johnson possessed humour of no mean order, we know from Boswell; but no critic could have divined his power from the clumsy gambols in which he occasionally recreates himself. Perhaps his happiest effort is a dissertation upon the advantage of living in garrets; but the humour struggles and gasps dreadfully under the weight ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... and most unsparing critic of the old order was Voltaire. In clear and forceful French he exposed existing conditions in society and government, and particularly the control of affairs exercised by the most ancient and most powerful organization ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... rhapsodist and seer. I was particularly struck with his having laid aside the diffidence and self-consciousness of the first days of our acquaintance. He had become by this time a disembodied observer and critic; the shell of sense, growing daily thinner and more transparent, transmitted the tremor of his quickened spirit. He seemed to pick up acquaintances, in the course of our contemplations, merely by putting out his hand. If I left him for ten minutes I was sure to find him on my return ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... glowed with a sense of his own generous wisdom. He had never felt so keen a self-approval. Indeed, that emotion seldom came to solace him; for the most part he was the severest critic of his own doings and sayings. But for once it appeared to him that he uttered golden words, the ripe fruit of experience and reflection. That personal unrest had anything to do with the counsel he offered to his wife, he did not for the moment even suspect. Alma had touched him ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... why and in what sense the early days of life are the best days, and how rapidly the evil days succeed them, and consequently how infinitely important it is to use well the golden dawn of our being. But the verbal critic will content himself with the remark that Virgil always uses fugio of the flight of time, and always joins "old age" with "disease," and consequently that these are tags to be remembered, and plagiarized hereafter in the pupils' "original composition." Similarly, if the book in hand be Cicero's ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... residuum of hair in the proportion of half a dozen white ones to half a dozen black ones, though the latter were black indeed. No further observed, she was not a woman to like. But there was more to see. To the most superficial critic it was apparent that she made no attempt to disguise her age. She looked sixty at the first glance, and close ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... published his "Das Bewegungsvermogen der Pflanzen", a book devoted to the criticism of "The Power of Movement in Plants". A letter to Wiesner, published in "Life and Letters", III. page 336, shows Darwin's warm appreciation of his critic's work, and of the spirit in which it is written.) and of the subsequent history of the problems. We must now pass on to a consideration of the central thesis of the book,—the relation of circumnutation to ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... for a satisfactory history of newspapers, lie scattered in facts known one to this person, and one to that. If each London or provincial journalist, each reader, and each critic, who has an anecdote and a date, would give it publicity, some future volume might be prepared from the combined supply, much more complete than any to be fairly expected from a comparatively unaided writer who ventures upon an almost ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... primitive happiness. It was as if the people, having thrown off the more galling restraints of civilization and order, felt their limbs and spirits free for the first time, and exercised both with the freedom and, the austere critic may say, the ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... active servant of Venice through a long life. He had filled almost all the great offices which were intrusted to her nobles. He had governed her distant colonies, accompanied her armies in that position of proveditore, omnipotent civilian critic of all the movements of war, which so much disgusted the generals of the republic. He had been ambassador at the courts of both emperor and pope, and was serving his country in that capacity at Avignon when the news ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... dear master?" Porbus asked respectfully, while the young man with difficulty repressed his strong desire to beat the critic. ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... Pilgrim period, has been rewarded by the discovery of the excel lent "cut" of such a craft, taken from M. Blundeville's "New and Necessarie Treatise of Navigation," published early in the seventeenth century. Appearing in a work of so high character, published by so competent a navigator and critic, and (approximately) in the very time of the Pilgrim "exodus," there can be no doubt that it quite correctly, if roughly and insufficiently, depicts the outlines, rig, and general cast of a vessel of ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... thing. And if I hadn't, Llewellyn Stanhope would; Stanhope cherishes Duff as he cherishes the critic of the Chronicle. He refers to him as a pillar of the legitimate. Whenever he begs me to turn the Norwegian crank, he says, 'I'm sure Mr. ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... and crowned by a billy-cock hat set at a rakish angle. Its most marked characteristic was the positive hatred which glowed in the sharp, pale-blue eyes. Grant wondered who this highly censorious young man might be. At any rate, he meant to ascertain whether or not the critic was susceptible of satire at his own expense. He walked up to the window, elevated his eyebrows at the frowning person within, pretended to read the words on the screen, looked again at the man inside, and shook his head ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... conceiving mood, so I knew would be the nature of my diving, dipping, pale-throated, fork-tailed words. But, after all—I thought, sitting there—I need not take my critical pronouncements seriously. I have not the firm soul of the critic. It is not my profession to know 'things for certain, and to make others feel that certainty. On the contrary, I am often wrong—a luxury no critic can afford. And so, invading as I was the realm of others, I advanced with a light ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... unrivalled skill in logical fence, his unfailing good-humour and love of fun, in which his personal clumsiness set off the vivacity and nimbleness of his joyous moods. "He was," says Mr. Mozley, "a great musical critic, knew all the operas, and was an admirable buffo singer."—No one could doubt that, having started, Mr. Ward would go far and ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... this predisposition in her favor. She must have known that she was very attractive, for few girls reach her age without attaining such knowledge; but her observer, and in a certain sense her critic, could not detect the faintest trace of affectation or self-consciousness. Her manner, her words, and even their accent seemed unstudied, unpracticed, and unmodelled after any received type. Her glance was peculiarly open and direct, and from the first she gave Graham the feeling that ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... don't know. I'm no art critic, but it seems to me the thing won't work. It looks like the worst kind of a chromo to me. I don't want to cast any reflections upon the artistic talent of your constituent, Senator, but I, myself, wouldn't give six bits for the ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... and diplomacy, until the possession of such a significant organ has become almost the sine qua non of an individual destined to be famous or successful. Varieties of course existed, such as when combined with beetling brows and sunken eyes one recognized the professor or arch-critic of his generation. Or, when taken with the square forehead, thin mouth and visionary eyes of the military genius, one saw some great general. Or simply existing in some silly scion of good family, and meaning nothing whatever, ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... separate the man from his work, if you are to be a good critic," Mrs. Faulkner said, and though this remark may be true enough I did not answer it, for Nina was looking extremely bored by the conversation we ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... editor of the Athenaeum, in my time, was a charming and accomplished writer; he is also my very good friend and too generous critic, and I should be a wretch if I did not love him. But on the evening when a weekly paper goes to press, when the pages are pouring in, and some one, as likely as not, is waiting at the Cafe Royal, even ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... his favourite poem and his favourite poet, and it has always seemed to me that one of the hardest tasks of the critic is to decide on the position of a poet among poets, or of a poet in relation to life. For myself, to speak modestly, I cannot see how I could condemn the taste of the man who thinks that Browning and Swinburne and Tennyson, ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.'" (Part III, Art. 3, Sec.Sec. 42-45; p. 329.) The Lutheran Church has received this statement of Luther into her confessional writings. This is the Luther of whom a modern Catholic critic says: "This thought of the all-forgiving nature of faith so dominated his mind that it excluded the notion of contrition, penance, good works, or effort on the part of the believer, and thus his teaching destroyed root and branch the whole idea of ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... shoulders. 'I'm certainly not going to become a professional critic like Stackton Dunckley, who hasn't even the excuse that he's an Irishman; or Lucia Carlotti, who hardly ever leaves London because her dinners cost her nothing. But I reserve the right ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... always considered the first verse of Genesis as indicating, rather than denying, a PREADAMITE world" ("Memoir of Leonard Horner, II.", page 303).) I declare I had fancied that the date was somehow in the Bible. You are coming out in a new light as a Biblical critic. I must thank you for some remarks on the "Origin of Species" (404/4. Mr. Horner (page xxxix) begins by disclaiming the qualifications of a competent critic, and confines himself to general remarks on the philosophic candour and freedom from dogmatism ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... art and literature bearing the soothing title of Mes Haines. Zola, pitching overboard many friends, wrote his famous eulogy of Manet in the Evenement, and the row he raised was so fierce that he was forced to resign as art critic from that journal. The fight then began in earnest. The story is a thrice-told one. It may be read in Theodore Duret's study of Manet and, as regards Cezanne, in the same critic's volume on Impressionism. Cezanne ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Frye's manuscript and the privilege of publishing it for the first time I owe to the kindness of two French ladies, the Misses G——. Their father, a well known artist and critic, used to spend the summer months at Saint Germain-en-Laye together with his wife, who was an English woman by birth. They had been for a long time intimately acquainted with Major Frye, who lived and ended his life in that quiet town. The Major's hostess, Mme. ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... was the matchless writer, Miss Anthony the collector of material, the searcher of statistics, the business manager, the keen critic, the detector of omissions, chronological flaws and discrepancies in statement such as are unavoidable even with the most careful historian. On many occasions they called to their aid for historical facts Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage, one of the most logical, scientific and fearless ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... have what are called "appreciations;" the attempt, that is to say, to enter into a character and appreciate its traits or its art, and to love it with the mind. Perhaps that is what this ancient law asks of you in your relation to God, to come not as a critic, but as a lover, to the rational appreciation of the ways of God. Here is the noblest capacity with which human life is endowed. It is a great thing to love God with the heart and soul, to let the emotions of gratitude to Him or of joy in his world ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... Sainte Chapelle. Then Lady Adela's style—marvellous, marvellous. I give you my word as an expert! Full of distinction; choice; fastidious; penetrated everywhere by a certain je ne sais quoi of dexterity and aptitude; each word charged with color, as a critic might say. You have not seen any of the sheets?" continued Mr. Quirk, with his mouth full of steak and olives. "Dear me! You haven't quarrelled with Lady Adela, have you? I did hear there was some little disappointment that you did not get Lady Sybil's ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... natura—if it is the right, as it is the common reading—Cicero must mean the same as by nulla crescendi natura, or coalescendi, either of which Lambinus proposes; for, as the same learned critic well observes, is there not a cohesion of parts in a clod, or in a piece of stone? Our learned Walker proposes sola cohaerendi natura, which mends the sense very much; and I wish he had the authority of any ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... their place. These public affections, combined with manners, are required sometimes as supplements, sometimes as correctives, always as aids to law. The precept given by a wise man, as well as a great critic, for the construction of poems, is equally true as to states:—"Non satis est pulchra esse poemata, dulcia sunto." There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of their strength in forging chains for themselves; they alone know how strong the chains need to be. But there are other souls who walk the woods like Diana, with a sort of wild chastity. I confess I think that this Irish purity a little disables a critic in dealing, as Mr. Shaw has dealt, with the roots and reality of the marriage law. He forgets that those fierce and elementary functions which drive the universe have an impetus which goes beyond itself and cannot always easily be recovered. So the healthiest men may often erect a law to watch ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... intention of the obligation of contracts clause, as the evidence amply shows, was to protect private executory contracts, and especially contracts of debt. * In actual practice, on the other hand, the decision produced one considerable benefit: in the words of a contemporary critic, it put private institutions of learning and charity out of the reach of "legislative despotism and ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... of the German newspapers on President Wilson's note of June 9 was reported by THE TIMES staff correspondent in Berlin on June 12 as being "surprisingly restrained and optimistic." Captain L. Persius, the naval critic of the Berliner Tageblatt, which is close to Dr. von Bethmann-Hollweg, writing under the caption, "On the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... An eminent modern writer: Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), eldest son of Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby; a distinguished critic and poet, and professor of poetry at Oxford. The allusion is to Arnold's essay, Sweetness and Light. The phrase, "sweetness and light," is one which Aesop uses in Swift's Battle of the Books to sum up the superiority of the ancients ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... told the dentist, "I'm no critic, I only know what I like." She knew that she liked the "Ideal Heads," lovely girls with flowing straw-colored hair and immense, upturned eyes. These always had for title, "Reverie," or "An Idyll," ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... the background; the mediocrity of the shepherd's figure. But, for all this, Paul Potter's bull was crowned with glory as one of the noblest examples of art, and Europe considers it as the greatest work of the prince of animal-painters. An illustrious critic very rightly said that "Paul Potter with his bull has written the true ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... impressions of the Far East is called "The Critic in the Orient," because the writer for over thirty years has been a professional critic of new books—one trained to get at the best in all literary works and reveal it to the reader. This critical work—a combination of rapid reading and equally rapid written estimate of new publications—would ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... John was the guest of Mr. Fox at Stable Yard, the subject of Lord Melville's acquittal by the Peers came up for discussion. Next day the shrewd young critic wrote the following characteristic remark in his journal: 'What a pity that he who steals a penny loaf should be hung, whilst he who steals thousands of the public money should be acquitted!' The brilliant qualities of Fox made a ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... mention the names of the celebrated editors by whom he had been employed as literary or dramatic critic, and was never tired of eulogizing these and other lettered heroes for whom he had slaved in the distant past. He insisted on the appreciation that these forgotten lions had shown of his work; but, however that might be, its manifestation had certainly never been translated into terms of ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... Margaret's consent, sir?" said my fair critic. "I love books which teach a proper deference in young persons to their parents. In a novel the young people may fall in love without their countenance, because it is essential to the necessary intricacy of the story; but they must always ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... these positions, (though he sets aside the first, as pertaining to lexicography, and not now to grammar, as it formerly did,) the learned critic deduces first his four parts of the subject, and then his definition of grammar. "Hence," says he, "there arise Four Parts of Grammar; Analogy, which treats of the several parts of speech, their definitions, accidents, and formations; Syntax, which treats of the use of those things in construction, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... made no effort to bring the separate figures into an harmonious unity. A single figure, or half length, he placed on his canvas with unerring sense of right proportion. Perhaps the best summary of Van Dyck's art has been made by the English critic, Claude Phillips, in these words: His was "not indeed one of the greatest creative individualities that have dominated the world of art, but a talent as exquisite in distinction, as true to itself in every successive phase, ...
— Van Dyck - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... am the severest critic you ever have in the congregation. If you only knew how nervous you sometimes make me!—when you get started on some exciting passage and make a gesture that would throw a stone image into a fit, and then begin to speak of something ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... Miss Pritchard's one hope. Presently, she sought out an old friend who had been a musician of note and later a teacher and musical critic on an evening paper, and confided her difficulty to him. Hearing her story, he was interested and very sympathetic. He advised her to drop the concert idea and dwell wholly upon the possibility of opera as a lure: only the dramatic ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... with his hand upon his heart. "Alas, madam! I could as soon play critic to the choir of angels. My ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... idle mind, Hides for a moment from the eyes of men; Or lightly opened by a critic wind, Affrightedly reviews ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... out that Christian had his armour on. The young critic would not allow this as an excuse, and brought up cases of gentlemen of his acquaintance who had swum incredible distances ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... perhaps the best passport to our friendship. This was Henri's. He was about to test me. I had read and admired his favourite VAURELLES—in the original French. Would I love his daring LAFORGUE? My reputation as a man, as a writer, as a critic, depended on it. He handed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... tea, or supper! Bites can neither be fried nor boiled, measured nor weighed. A bite, indeed!'—and once more the cynic loses himself in laughter. That is all he knows about it, and it merely supplies us with another evidence of the superficiality of cynicism. The critic is sometimes right, but the cynic is never right; and the roar of laughter that I hear from the cynic's chair, as he talks about bites, is, therefore, rightly translated and interpreted, a kind of thunderous applause. Why, in some respects, a bite is ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... which he quotes, respecting his famous picture of the Galatea, Raphael says, that in order to paint a beautiful woman, he must see many, but that, after all, he must work upon a certain ideal image present in his mind. 'We thus see,' says the French critic, 'that he really sought after the beautiful which Nature presents to art, but which the imagination of the artist alone can ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... Great Britain fought chiefly with her main weapon, the navy, leaving the land war to her allies. A contemporary critic remarked that she "worked with her navy and played with her army"; though the latter did useful service in colonial conquests and in Egypt, the two expeditionary forces to the Low Countries in 1793 and 1799 ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... Marcella soon developed all the airs of independence and all the jargon of two professions. Working with consuming energy and ambition, she pushed her gifts so far as to become at least a very intelligent, eager, and confident critic of the art of other people—which is much. But though art stirred and trained her, gave her new horizons and new standards, it was not in art that she found ultimately the chief excitement and motive-power of her new life—not in art, but in the birth ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of any artist, the quality of her feeling and expression justly interprets the character of his performance. When Jenny Lind first sang in America one of the most accomplished critics said that he must wait a little to decide whether she was a great singer. That critic could never really hear her. Another said that she was a consummate ventriloquist. He meant that in the Herdsman's Song and the other Volkslieder and native melodies there was an effect of vocalism which seemed to him a trick. ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... who followed him, and listened to him with attention and the most unequivocal sympathy, whilst the young man gave such free scope to his thoughts and presentiments as he had never ventured to do before in the presence of the severe critic. But the truth is, there belongs to a dweller on the borders of the kingdom of death a peculiar rank, a peculiar dignity, and man believes that the whispering of spirits from the mysterious land reaches the ear which ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... letters "I. H. S." on the priest's chasuble were paraphrased into the words, "I hate Siwashes." It must not be thought, however, that Derby's life was wholly devoted to fun and frivolity, for he has been pronounced by an accomplished military writer and critic to have been "an able and accomplished engineer." He was the author of "The Squibob Papers" and of "Phoenixiana; or Sketches and Burlesques," either of which would worthily place him in the forefront ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... violated one of the first of the laws of his class, and by his unfailing fidelity to his wife continued to resist it), superstitious rather than religious, an immense admirer of the Kaiser, and a decidedly hostile critic of our own country—such was the general impression made on one British ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... thinking that it is of sufficient importance to affect the ultimate denouement, when it really has no bearing upon it. Reverse this, and you have another good rule to follow in writing the scenario. As one critic said in substance, if you intend to have one of your characters die of heart disease toward the end of the play, prepare your audience for this event by "registering" in an earlier scene the fact that his heart is affected. ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... crazy—crazy to see this Monsieur Baudouin; for what do you think Flo Aplin says? That he is a real viscomte or marquis, or something of that sort, but that he came into his title only a year or two ago, and is much prouder of his reputation as an art authority and critic and his name, Pierre Baudouin,—it's his own name, you know,—and he won his reputation under that. The Aplins met him last year in Paris. Windlow Aplin, who is studying art there, just swears by him, and says the artists ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... in the somewhat altered character of women far advanced in life,—I can be as minute in its details as I please; and the details of the misadventure which stripped the shipmaster of the earnings of long years of carefulness and toil, blended as they are with what an old critic might term a curious machinery of the supernatural, seem not unworthy of ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... industry. In what manner he spent his time in London, it is none of my business to inquire; thof I know pretty well what kind of lives are led by gemmen of your Inns of Court.—I myself once belonged to Serjeants' Inn, and was perhaps as good a wit and a critic as any Templar of them all. Nay, as for that matter, thof I despise vanity, I can aver with a safe conscience, that I had once the honour to belong to the society called the Town. We were all of us attorney's clerks, gemmen, and ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... this post a review by Chauncey Wright, as I much want your opinion of it, as soon as you can send it. I consider you an incomparably better critic than I am. The article, though not very clearly written, and poor in parts for want of knowledge, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... necessity for a sane and vigorous patriotism began to be dimly realized. One of the earliest symptoms of this new attitude was the publication, in 1903, of Federigo Garlanda's La terza Italia; the book professed to be written by a friendly American observer and critic of Italian affairs, and the author regards the absence of militant patriotism as the chief cause of Italy's weakness in comparison with other nations. Mario Morasso, in his volume, L'Imperialismo nel Secolo XX, published in 1905, opened fire on the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... A dramatic critic, still a well-known writer, lost his place because he would not get his hair cut. Bennett in Paris asked him why he wore his hair so long and was told because he liked it that way. An order sending him to Copenhagen followed. When his return was announced by a secretary, Bennett asked ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... the bland consciousness of self-esteem which dwelt, like a perpetual spring, upon the mind of Mr. Stubbs. Mr. McCrab was himself an amateur actor; he had also written a tolerably successful comedy, as well as an unsuccessful tragedy; and he was, besides, a formidable critic, whose scalping strictures, in a weekly journal, were the terror of all authors and actors who were either unable or unwilling to dispense ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... the world's disdain, This half-flesh'd hag midst Wit's bright blossoms stalks, And, breathing winter, withers where she walks; Though there, long outlaw'd, desp'rate with disgrace, Invidious Dulness wields the critic mace, And sworn in hate, exerts his ruffian might Where'er young genius meditates his flight. Erewhile, when WHITE, by this fell fiend oppress'd, Felt Hope's fine fervours languish in his breast, When shrunk ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... the disappearance of James Rutlidge occupied columns in the newspapers, from coast to coast. In every article he was headlined as "A Distinguished Citizen;" "A Famous Critic;" "A Prominent Figure in the World of Art;" "One of the Greatest Living Authorities;" "Leader in the Modern School;" "Of Powerful Influence Upon the Artistic Production of the Age." The story of the unknown mountain girl's abduction and escape ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... Julius Scaliger. Leibnitz writes that Scaliger had praised in verse the famous men of Verona. In dream he saw a certain Brugnolus who complained that he had been forgotten. Later Scaliger's son Joseph discovered that there really had been a Brugnolus who had distinguished himself as grammarian and critic. Obviously Scaliger senior had once known, and had completely forgotten about him. In this case the dream had been just a refreshing of the memory. Such a dream may be of importance, but is unreliable and ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... the necessity for guidance, and I sketched out a few of the points involved (Folklore Journal, ii. 285, 347; iii. 1-16) in what was afterwards called by a friendly critic a sort of grammar of folklore. The science of folklore has advanced far since 1885 however, and not only new problems but new ranges of thought have gathered round it. Still, the claims of folklore as a definite section of historical material remain not only unrecognised but ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... he saw his men on the hill instead of in the valley. He spoke winged words to them, but it was too late. In such fashion did Mr. Rogers outwit his heritors. I regret that no literary relics of this acute divine are to be had. He seems to have been in his way a kind of Higher Critic judging from a remark he made on the Ark: "How did you manage," he said, as if addressing Noah in person, "how did you manage to keep the first plank of your boat from getting rotten before the last was nailed ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... Strindberg, Knut Hamsen, Hauptmann, and a number of others, mostly names I did not recollect ever having heard before, and she often used the word "decadent," which she pronounced in the French way and which I did not then understand. Now and then she would quote some critic, or some remark heard from a friend or from her father, and once she dwelt on an argument of her oldest brother, who seemed to be well versed in Russian literature and to have clear-cut opinions ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... amicably. In 1872 Mrs. Lynn Linton published "The True History of Joshua Davidson," a powerfully simple story that has had much influence on working-class thought. "Christopher Kirkland," a later story, is largely autobiographical. Mrs. Linton died in London on July 14, 1898. She was a trenchant critic of what she regarded as tendencies towards degeneration ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... purpose. If poets and their work must fall under this rigorous rule, then alas "Lilith" will knock at the door of public opinion with a trembling hand indeed. If the poem have either moral aim or lesson of any kind (which observe, gentle critic, it is by no means asserted that it has), it is simply to show that the strongest intellectual powers contain no elements adverse to the highest and purest exercise of the affectional nature. That, in its true condition, the noblest, the most cultured ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... that I have read either Amymone or Azeth, but I have seen extracts from them which I found it literally impossible to digest. They presented to my imagination Lytton Bulwer in petticoats—an overwhelming vision. By-the-bye, the American critic talks admirable sense about Bulwer—candour ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... the new order will not be so wholly irksome and unrewarded as might at first appear to the critic who does not reckon children as rewards themselves. It may involve some momentary sacrifices, but it needs very little critical study of the ordinary man's expenditure to discover that, on the whole, these sacrifices ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... stories "each of which has singularity enough to recommend it to the reader," and gave three columns to a long extract from "The Maypole of Merry Mount"; the notice being no doubt the work of the critic Chorley, who afterward met Hawthorne in England. Thus encouraged, he thought of collecting his tales and publishing them in volume form, connected by the conception of a travelling story-teller, whose shiftings ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... from every department of the theatrical world, each in turn claimed attention and applause. Katharine watched it all with an interest always strained, a gaiety somewhat hysterical; Jocelyn Thew with the measured pleasure of a critic; Richard with uproarious, if sometimes a little unreal merriment. The time slipped by apparently unnoticed. Suddenly Richard glanced at his wrist-watch and ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... "Living Writers of the South" has made his name well known as a critic and student of literature, and his labors in behalf of Southern letters ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... The character of this history of Justus of Tiberias, the rival of our Josephus, which is now lost, with its only remaining fragment, are given us by a very able critic, Photius, who read that history. It is in the 33rd code of his Bibliotheca, and runs thus: "I have read [says Photius] the chronology of Justus of Tiberias, whose title is this, [Footnote The Chronology of] the Kings of Judah which succeeded one another. This [Justus] came ...
— The Life of Flavius Josephus • Flavius Josephus
... in advance of the story. Henchard, being uncultivated himself, was the bitterest critic the fair girl could possibly have had of her own lapses—really slight now, for she read omnivorously. A gratuitous ordeal was in store for her in the matter of her handwriting. She was passing the dining-room ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... January, "An arrowy and acceptable preacher in the prime of his manhood while his bow abode in strength. Genial critic, shrewd diviner of motive, and sagacious ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... could not have kept that quarter clean; the Augean stables were nothing to it. But look at these fellows we are coming to now. You seem to be a bit of a military critic; what do you think of them, and how do you like ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... a critic. He has pulled out his carving-knife and his tomahawk and is starting after a book which he is going to have for breakfast. This one's arms are put on wrong. I did not notice it at first, but I see it now. Somehow he has got ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to make up the Dutch, doll, or fairy cheeses, as the seed vessels are called by children. Only once is the mallow mentioned in the Bible, and then as food for the most abject and despised poor (Job 30: 4); but as eighteen species of mallow grow in Palestine, who is the higher critic ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... scorn'd, Unseen, unheeded, unadorn'd, Than him, to whom indulgent heav'n, Has talents and has genius giv'n; If stung by envy, warp'd by pride, Such gifts, alas! are misapplied; Not all by nature's bounty blest In beauty's dazzling hues are drest; But who shall play the critic's part, If for the form atones the heart? But if the gloomiest thoughts prevail, And Atheist doctrines stain the tale; If calumny to pow'r addrest, Attempts to wound its Sovereign's breast; If impious it shall try to part, The Father from the Daughter's heart; If it shall aim to wield ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... recollection of Harte, of a purely personal nature, was of an occurrence in 1866, when he was dramatic critic of the Morning Call at the time I was doing a little reporting on the same paper. It happened that a benefit was arranged for some charity. "Nan, the Good-for-Nothing," was to be given by a number of amateurs. The Nan asked me to play Tom, and I ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... world, with no fortune but my own talent, and even that I was beginning to doubt, because it brought no money. For a year I had worked and hoped, with a brave spirit; had written my life into poems and tales; tried a play; turned critic and reviewed books; offered my pen and time to any one who would employ them, and now was ready for the hardest literary work, and the poorest pay, for starvation ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag, Vol. 5 - Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... above-mentioned letter to Count Prozor, Ibsen confirmed that critic's conjecture that "the series which ends with the Epilogue really began with The Master Builder." As the last confession, so to speak, of a great artist, the Epilogue will always be read with interest. It ...
— When We Dead Awaken • Henrik Ibsen
... upon a paragraph describing the discovery by the police of a batch of infernal machines supposed to have been sent over from America by friends of the Royalists. Among the emissaries captured he read the name of Cedric Ruskin, an old schoolfellow and great-grandson to an art critic of that surname who flourished in former days by force of his own specific gravity. Pained at the intelligence, he sighed heavily, and was on the point of sitting down upon a rustic bench close at hand when a melodious, gladsome voice hallooing ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... nourished with the pure juice of the grape, while naught but the dregs is sold to the English, who will take anything for liquor that is liquid." The case is put with scarcely greater politeness by a living French critic of high repute, according to whom the English, still weighted down by Teutonic phlegm, were drunken gluttons, agitated at intervals by poetic enthusiasm, while the Normans, on the other hand, lightened by their ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... is one of those books which, for some reason or other, have failed to come down to us, as they deserved, along the current of time, but have drifted into a literary backwater where only the professional critic or the curious discoverer can find them out. "The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy;" and nowhere more blindly than in the republic of letters. If we were to inquire how it has happened that the true value of ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... auxiliary cruiser was in the neighborhood. His account to some extent filled the gaps that Don Sebastian's narrative had left, but now he came to put the different points together and consider them as a whole, their significance seemed less. He began to see how a hostile critic would look at the thing. Much of his evidence was based upon conjecture that might be denied. Yet, while it was not ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... a good critique on a poem may be written by one who is no poet himself. This, according to your idea and mine of poetry, I feel to be false-the less poetical the critic, the less just the critique, and the converse. On this account, and because there are but few B-'s in the world, I would be as much ashamed of the world's good opinion as proud of your own. Another than yourself might here ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... opening of our play, she has played a summer engagement with a stock company in Denver, which has just ended. She has met JOHN MADISON, a man of about twenty-seven years of age, whose position is that of a dramatic critic on one of the local papers. LAURA MURDOCH, with her usual wisdom, started to fascinate JOHN MADISON, but has found that, for once in her life, she ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... rising generation. The master sees at a glance if a boy be clever, and takes pains with him accordingly. He is not a mere teacher of hexameters and sapphics. His learning embraces all literature, ancient and modern. He is a good writer and a fine critic; admires Wordsworth. He winks at fighting: his boys know how to use their fists; and they are not in the habit of signing post-obits before they are fifteen. Merton School is the place ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cray-fish more like it than a crystal. But when all is said, though I owe more to Mr. Bradley than I can ever acknowledge adequately, I cannot help feeling that there are two men in Mr. Bradley, a great constructive thinker and a subtle destructive critic, and that the destructive Hyde is perpetually pulling to pieces all that the constructive Jekyll has built up. Of course it is obvious that the truth of mathematics, if mathematics are true, is a fatal stone of stumbling for this type of philosophy. Mathematics ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... noble country for 'ee, Senor Viscount. The debate thereon is to come off to-morrow. It will be the finest thing the Commons have had since Pitt's time. Sheridan, who is open to it, says he and Canning are to be absolutely unanimous; and, by God, like the parties in his "Critic," when Government and Opposition do agree, their unanimity is wonderful! Viscount Materosa, you and your friends must be in the ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... Songs of Greece; now a high caste Chinaman; now a miniature painter; now a tenor, a pianiste, a mandolin player, a missionary, a drawing master, a virtuoso, a collector, an Armenian, a botanist with a new flower, a critic with a new theory, a doctor ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... The conventional critic may smile at the conceit of a fat Hamlet, but I am satisfied that my theory is amply sustained by the text, as well as by the true solution of the alleged knotty points of Shakspeare's mental character, over which the ponderous but inflated brain of Dr. Johnson stultified ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... critic would have us believe one of two things; God either took the heathen sacrificial ritual, veneered it with some sort of divine approval, and handed it over to his people for their use, or by some sort of evolution the book of Leviticus came up out of the heathen ...
— The Testimony of the Bible Concerning the Assumptions of Destructive Criticism • S. E. Wishard
... "I give you the critic's words verbatim. I really looked at the young lady in astonishment, that she should see nothing but a want of liveliness in a picture, which most of us feel to be sublime. But Miss D——- had an old grudge against you, for not having ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... could put into the field. But besides this experienced and able campaigner, who so thoroughly shared the opinions of Prince Maurice, every military man in the provinces of any consideration, was opposed to, the scheme. Especially Lewis William—than whom no more sagacious military critic or accomplished strategist existed in Europe, denounced it with energy and even with indignation. It was, in the opinion of the young stadholder of Friesland, to suspend the existence of the whole commonwealth ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... people who can see only your faults, and who like to tell you of them. You will find in the inexorable sequence of events a corrector of these faults more potent than any critics can be. But I am not your critic, but your friend. If many of you had not admitted me, a stranger, into your friendship during my many very solitary years, of what sort should I be now? How could I have lived those years alone? You kept ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... in the Preface to the French translation of the "Conquest of Mexico," infers from the plan of the composition, that I must have carefully studied the writings of his countryman, M. de Barante. The acute critic does me but justice in supposing me familiar with the principles of that writer's historical theory, so ably developed in the Preface to his "Ducs de Bourgogne." And I have had occasion to admire the skillful manner in which he illustrates this theory himself, by ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... translation of the works of Silvio Pellico has appeared at Paris, from the pen of M. LEZAUD. It includes the Memoirs of the celebrated Italian, and his Discourses upon Duties. The translation is praised by no less a critic than ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... short to waste In critic peep or cynic bark, Quarrel or reprimand: 'T will soon be dark; Up! mind thine own aim, and ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... A text, writing, or statement is amended by the author or by some adequate authority; it is often emended by conjecture. A motion is amended by the mover or by the assembly; a constitution is amended by the people; an ancient text is emended by a critic who believes that what seems to him the better reading is what the author ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... the desecration of the Nelson Column by the delivery of seditious speeches. Sir JOHN BAIRD explained that it was impossible to know beforehand what sort of speech was going to be delivered. But his critic would have none of this paltry excuse. "Did not the regulations provide," he boomed, "that the objects of the meetings must be specified?" Fortunately for the Minister, who had nearly been blown off the Treasury Bench, Mr. HOGGE came to the rescue. "Is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various
... newspapers. [Laughter.] In one journal there was a long correspondence—the sort of thing we generally get at one season of the year—about the condition of the stage, and a well-known writer who, I believe, combines the function of a dramatic critic with the responsibility of a watch-dog to the Navy, informed his readers that the sad decadence of the British Drama was due to the evils of party government. That is certainly an original idea; but I fancy that if the author were to unfold it to this company, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... "The critic's task is never for me a pleasant one, Alice. Least pleasant when it touches one I love. If you had not asked what I thought of your appearance, I would have intruded no exceptions. I have been ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur |
