"Prolixity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of thought and language that he pours out incessantly, when they are lost like drops of water in the ground. The principal work, in which he has attempted to embody his general views of things, is the FRIEND, of which, though it contains some noble passages and fine trains of thought, prolixity and obscurity are the ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... prolixity, which is yet too brief for all I could wish to say. God give you comfort, and all that are of your household! Our loves and best ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... without ceremony, without indulging in a long speech: cut it short with an apophthegm;[6] quick, quick, Mr. Gorgibus, make haste, avoid prolixity. ...
— The Jealousy of le Barbouille - (La Jalousie du Barbouille) • Jean Baptiste Poquelin de Moliere
... who was to reform Italian opera. The school of Paisiello, notwithstanding its many merits, had several grievous weaknesses, of which the most prominent were uniformity of melodic type, nerveless and conventional orchestration, and intolerable prolixity. Rossini brought to his task a vein of melody as inexhaustible in inspiration as it was novel in form, a natural instinct for instrumental colour, and a firm conviction that brevity was the soul of wit. He leapt into fame with 'Tancredi,' which was produced in 1813 and established his ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... promoting, or in contemplating the comfort and happiness of mankind.—And without suffering myself to be deterred, either by the fear of being thought to give the subject a degree of importance to which it is not entitled, or by the apprehension of being tiresome to my readers by the prolixity of my descriptions,—I shall proceed to investigate the subject in all its parts and details with the utmost care and attention. —And first with regard to ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... and fell into a deep thinking fit, as he does sometimes. He had had his own say, it is true, but he had established his character as a listener to my own perfect satisfaction, for I, too, was conscious of having preached with a certain prolixity. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... President of the Directory, replied to Bonaparte with so much prolixity as to weary everyone; and as soon as he had finished speaking he threw himself into the arms of the General, who was not much pleased with such affected displays, and gave him what was then called the fraternal embrace. The other ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... or prolixity a quality of these early narrators? What English prose written before 1640 is superior to the work of these three men? Why is it especially important for Americans to know something of their writings? What advance in prose narrative ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... various times and at various places, but chiefly in bar-rooms, did this Ulysses of Monte Flat recount the story of his wanderings. There were several discrepancies in his statement; there was sometimes considerable prolixity of detail; there was occasional change of character and scenery; there was once or twice an absolute change in the denoument: but always the fact of his having visited his wife and children remained. Of course, ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... his favorite theme, the profusion with which the late war had been carried on. That profusion, he said, had made taxes necessary. He called on the gentlemen opposite to him to say where they would have a tax laid, and dwelt on this topic with his usual prolixity. "Let them tell me where," he repeated in a monotonous and somewhat fretful tone. "I say, sir, let them tell me where. I repeat it, sir; I am entitled to say to them, Tell me where." Unluckily for him, Pitt had come ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... such a keen personal joy to evoke and follow out, and realize to myself by means of pen and pencil, all these personal reminiscences; and with such a capital excuse for prolixity! ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... Victorian romance; and I do not think we ought to pass that judgment now in this last quinquennium of our century. I shall have to put our friend Anthony in a very moderate and prosaic rank; I shall not conceal my sense of his modest claims and conspicuous faults, of his prolixity, his limited sphere, his commonplace. But in view of the enormous popularity he once enjoyed, of the space he filled for a whole generation, I cannot altogether omit him from these studies of ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... open a fourth door next day, and if what I had seen before was capable of surprising me, that which I saw then put me into a perfect ecstasy. I went into a large court, surrounded with buildings of an admirable structure, the description of which I shall pass by to avoid prolixity. This building had forty doors, wide open, and through each of them there was an entrance into a treasury, several of which were of greater value than the largest kingdoms. The first contained heaps of pearls; and, what is almost incredible, the number of ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... predecessors, the Spectator and the like," by the "greater length of the separate essays, by their closer connection with each other, and by the predominance of one object, and the common bearing of all to one end." It was, of course, exactly this plus of prolixity and minus of variety which lowered the sum of the Friend's attractions so far below that of the Spectator as to deprive the success of Addison of all its ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... make little doubt he (Knox) has curtailed the same, and formed it so as to serve his own purpose: And had this Credit been contained in as few words as this author relates it, the Regent might have easily inserted the whole of it in her letter, without any unbecoming prolixity. I do, therefore, recommend to my readers not to satisfy themselves with this account of the Credit, but to look into that which Archbishop Spottiswood narrates; which, as it is much more distinct in answering to each part ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... Prolixity characterised these solemn utterances, packed full of cant phrases such as "undigested securities" and "the treacherous ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... miracle of injuvenations, distortions, misrepresentations, and eccentric spelling. In the eighteen enormous folio volumes, which he filled with his minute and gothic characters, he gives his own version of the story of what he terms his downfall, and, having, notwithstanding his prolixity, exhausted this subject in the first five of the eighteen tomes, he proceeds to deal with so much of the history of his own day as came immediately under his notice in his ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... in the productions of this author, that, on whatever he employs his pen, he exhausts the subject; not with any prolixity that fatigues the attention, but by a quick succession of new ideas, equally brilliant and apposite, often expressed in antitheses. Void of obscenity in expression, but lascivious in sentiment, he may be said rather to stimulate immorally the natural passions, than to corrupt ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... desirous to explain and justify the state of feeling in which we enter on the consideration of a new poem by Robert Browning. Those who already feel with us will scarcely be disposed to forgive the prolixity which, for the present, has put it out of our power to come at the work itself: but, if earnestness of intention will plead our excuse, we need ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... with prolixity, as befits a virtuous, God-fearing man, the simple Jesuit relates a special instance of the way in which he was enabled to work both for his own glory and for the profit of the Lord. Not far from San Estanislao was situate the forest of M'baevera, in which grew quantities of trees ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... beauteous volumes and ornate writings, of whom he made many books and treatises of many a noble history, as well in metre as in rhyme and prose; and them so craftily made that he comprehended his matters in short, quick, and high sentences, eschewing prolixity, casting away the chaff of superfluity, and shewing the picked grain of sentence uttered by crafty and sugared eloquence; of whom among all others of his books I purpose to print, by the grace of God, the book of the tales of Canterbury, in which I ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... to exhaust the subject; we refer it rather to the calm meditations of others, who will find materials enough within themselves. And lest the impatient should throw aside our essay with the disgust of satiety, or the persevering should by our prolixity be vexed with the very spirit which we would rather teach them to exorcise, we here take a respectful leave, with our sincerest wishes, that life may be to the reader a succession of pleasant emotions, and death a resting place neither coveted ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... in the different cities and towns he either repaired or built from their foundations, I will say nothing (to avoid prolixity), allowing those things to speak for themselves. These qualities, in my opinion, deserve the imitation of all good men. Now let us ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... their accuracy. His materials have been since used for the basis of more than one narrative, not inaccurate, in French, German and Spanish journals of high authority. It is seldom the case that French writers err by prolixity. They have done so in this case. The present narrative, which contains no sentence derived from any foreign one, has the great advantage of close compression; my own pages, after equating the size, being as 1 to 3 of the shortest continental form. In the ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... I had plenty to think about besides Randall, I meant to string off a list. My prolixity over the Volunteer Training Corps came upon me unawares. I wanted to show you that my time was fairly well occupied. I was Chairman of our town Belgian Relief Committee. I was a member of our County Territorial ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... Howells came home and read it in the usual way he declared that, while the opening was killingly funny, when he got into the story itself it seemed to him that he was "made a fellow-sufferer with the Sultan from Scheherazade's prolixity." ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... made with jets of an oblong shape, and they give results differing in some degree from those obtained with circular jets. Yet as the general conclusions from both are found the same, it will avoid unnecessary prolixity by using the data from experiments made with a circular jet of 0.05 square inch area, discharging a stream at the rate of 40 ft. per second. This amounts to 52 lb. of water per minute with an available head of 25 ft., or 1,300 foot-pounds ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... second part covers the same subject for the rest of the century; it is composed of the accounts given by Murillo Velarde, Diaz, and other historians, arranged in chronological order—sometimes synopsized, sometimes translated in full, according to the prolixity or the relative importance of each. From the beginning were evident various elements of hostility—racial, religious, and commercial—between the Spaniards and the Moros, which were soon aggravated by the Spanish desire for conquest and the Moro greed for plunder and bloodshed. The unfortunate ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... others which I omit to avoid prolixity, have been executed up to the present age of our artist, which is above seventy-six years. Titian has been always healthy and happy; he has been favored beyond the lot of most men, and has received ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... Essay, though not strictly from pointing at, yet from making it a part of my present work explicitly and circumstantially to deliver, especially since I now find (though late and not without some Blushes at my prolixity) that what I intended but for a short Essay, is already swell'd ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... judgment, comes to grief. This is but to say that he possesses the defects of his qualities. There is altogether too much of the "Go to: let me be Titanic" about the book. AEschylus has grown a trifle too well aware of his reputation, has taken to underscoring his points, and tends to prolixity in consequence. Mr. Hall Caine has not a little of Hugo's audacity, but, with it, not a little of Hugo's diffuseness. Standing, like Destiny, with scourge lifted over the naked backs of his two poor sinners, he spares ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... v.; verbosity, verbiage, cloud of words, copia verborum[Lat]; flow of words &c. (loquacity) 584; looseness. Polylogy[obs3], tautology, battology[obs3], perissology|; pleonasm, exuberance, redundancy; thrice-told tale; prolixity; circumlocution, ambages [obs3]; periphrase[obs3], periphrasis; roundabout phrases; episode; expletive; pennya-lining; richness &c. 577. V. be diffuse &c. adj.; run out on, descant, expatiate, enlarge, dilate, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... compactly thus: 1d., 2d., 3d., &c.;—1mo., 2mo., 3mo., &c. But, take which mode of naming we will, our ordinary expression of these things should be in neither extreme, but should avoid alike too great brevity and too great prolixity; and, therefore, it is best to make it a general rule in our literary compositions, to use the full form of proper names for the months and days, and to denote the years by ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... that these writers were so unconscious of their future fame, that not one of their names has travelled down to us. There were eager readers in their days, but not a solitary bibliographer! All these romances now require some indulgence for their prolixity, and their Platonic amours; but they have not been surpassed in the wildness of their inventions, the ingenuity of their incidents, the simplicity of their style, and their curious manners. Many a Homer lies hid among them; but a ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... many others which I omit, to avoid prolixity, have been executed up to the present age of our artist, which is above seventy-six years.... In the year 1566, when Vasari, the writer of the present history, was at Venice, he went to visit Titian, as one who was his friend, and found him, although then very old, still with ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... this from shady bowers, nodding groves, and amaranthine shades,—close by old Father Thames's silver side- -fair Twickenham's luxurious shades—Richmond's near neighbour, where great George the King resides. You will wonder at my prolixity—in my last I informed you that I was going into the country to transact business for a private gentleman. This gentleman is the Hon. Horatio Walpole, son to the late great Sir Robert Walpole, who is very studious, and an admirer of all the liberal ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... the idea that to merit in poetry prolixity is indispensable, has for some years past been gradually dying out of the public mind, by mere dint of its own absurdity, we find it succeeded by a heresy too palpably false to be long tolerated, but one ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... coolness of declining day. We bear our shades about us; self-deprived Of other screen, the thin umbrella spread, And range an Indian waste without a tree. Thanks to Benevolus—he spares me yet These chestnuts ranged in corresponding lines, And, though himself so polished, still reprieves The obsolete prolixity of shade. ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... "Philomela," "penned to approve women's chastity," is the best of Greene's tales, and approaches more closely the modern novel than any work of the time. It is related with much less than the usual prolixity, and contains two characters of distinct individuality. The scene is placed in Venice, partly in consequence of the Italian origin of the story, and partly, it would seem, because writers of fiction imagined that the further distant they could represent their incidents to have ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... inspector Matias Beltran de Manurga. Either of them is, in my opinion, a person as capable as is necessary for the said offices, as well as for things of more importance. I entreat your Majesty to pardon my prolixity in matters in which you have not asked my advice; for my zeal and desire for your royal service, and also for some one who may aid me therein, obliges me ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various
... not one of them is properly a geyser. "How much better for you as seller and the nation as buyer ... than to sink ... in cutting one another's throats." Should be each other's. "A minister, noted for prolixity of style, was once preaching before the inmates of a lunatic asylum. In one of his illustrations he painted a scene of a man condemned to be hung, but reprieved under the gallows." These two sentences are so faulty ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described, as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize: in this class, I comprise occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying, instead of progression, ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... effected by Linnaeus was in the matter of scientific terminology. Technical terms are absolutely necessary to scientific progress, and particularly so in botany, where obscurity, ambiguity, or prolixity in descriptions are fatally misleading. Linnaeus's work contains something like a thousand terms, whose meanings and uses are carefully explained. Such an array seems at first glance arbitrary and unnecessary, but the fact that it has remained in use for ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... to compare Plutarch's lives of demigods and heroes with our modern biographies of deminoughts and zeroes. Those will appear but tailors and ninth-parts of men in comparison with these, every one of whom would seem to have had nine lives, like a cat, to justify such prolixity. Yet the evils of print are as dust in the balance to those ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... satirical and sublime poetry. But the grossest improprieties of this poem discover an originality of invention, and its absurdities often border on sublimity. We are surprised that a poet should write one hundred cantos on hell, paradise, and purgatory. But this prolixity is partly owing to the want of art and method, and is common to all early compositions, in which everything is related circumstantially and without rejection, and not in those general terms which ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... would she were as lying a gossip in that, as euer knapt Ginger, or made her neighbours beleeue she wept for the death of a third husband: but it is true, without any slips of prolixity, or crossing the plaine high-way of talke, that the good Anthonio, the honest Anthonio; o that I had a title good enough to keepe his name company! Sal. Come, the ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... writing it is nearly impossible to affix a date—with the exception of a "dramatic journal," kept by fits and starts during the Christmas holidays when he was sixteen. G.K. solemnly tells the reader of this diary to take warning by it, to beware of prolixity, and it does in fact contain many more words to many fewer ideas than any of his later writings. But it is useful in giving the atmosphere of those years. Great part is in dialogue, the author appearing ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... For with the prolixity of the eye-witness he was detailing the points of the battle; what troops were engaged; how the flank was turned; how the reserve was delayed; how the guns were planted; how the cavalry was ordered to ...
— The Lost Guidon - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... which relate to the social, moral and religious well-being of mankind. Touching the style of the writer, as evinced in these selections, we should say that it was formed mainly upon a due avoidance of prolixity, (an observance not always characteristic of BENTHAM'S writings,) concerning which he himself very justly remarks: 'Prolixity may be where redundancy is not. Prolixity may arise not only from the multifarious insertion of unnecessary articles, but from the conservation ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... writings and correspondence, which have been published, throw no light upon his domestic relations. We have complained of the prolixity of Mr. Randall's book, but we do not wish to be understood as complaining of the number of family letters it contains. They form its most pleasing and novel feature. They show us that the placid philosopher had a nature which was ardent, tender, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... treatise, put upon him by his Majesty's special command, 'De Authoritate Regum et Officio Subditorum,' ['On the Authority of Kings and the Duty of Subjects'] will shortly come to light.——Thus, craving pardon for this prolixity of scribbling, I take humbly my ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... as helpless as animals of the male kind generally do when appealed to with such prolixity on feminine details; in reply to it all, only he ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... prolixity into which my youth had fallen, I had labored through with genuine industry, in company with so many worthy men. The numerous quarto volumes of manuscript which I left behind with my father might serve for sufficient ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... bearing a despatch* in which, to China's simple "greeting," Japan returned a "respectful address;" to China's expression of ineffable superiority Japan replied that the coming of the embassy had "dissolved her long-harboured cares;" and to China's grandiloquent prolixity Japan made answer with half a dozen brief lines. Imoko was now accompanied by eight students four of literature and four of religion. Thus was established, and for long afterwards maintained, a bridge over which the literature, arts, ethics, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... his mates, until a Villon arrives to prove that this language, too, was awaiting the advent of its bully and master. In the meantime, what directness and modest sufficiency of utterance distinguishes the dock compared with the fumbling prolixity of the old gentleman on the bench! It is the trite story,—romanticism forced to plead at the bar of classicism fallen into its dotage, Keats judged by Blackwood, Wordsworth exciting the pained astonishment of ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... why that every tale is told, *nucleus, chief matter If it be tarried* till the list* be cold *delayed **inclination Of them that have it hearken'd *after yore,* *for a long time* The savour passeth ever longer more; For fulsomness of the prolixity: And by that same reason thinketh me. I shoulde unto the knotte condescend, And maken of ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... imitating the English ideal of prolixity in discussion, for which Engineering has recently patted it on the back approvingly, treats us, in its issue of February 11th, to a page article, to be continued, under the title of "Warming and Ventilation of Railroad Cars." In this article the writer takes the ground that people in general are ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... was discovered a few years ago by Christopher Columbus, where we remained two months and two days repairing our vessels and procuring necessaries for the voyage home. During our stay there we suffered many insults from the Christian inhabitants, the particulars of which are here omitted to avoid prolixity. Leaving that island on the 22d of July, we arrived at the port of Cadiz on the eighth of September[7], after a voyage of six weeks, where we were honourably received; having thus, by the blessing of God, finished our ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... show a falling away from the example of William of Malmesbury or of Roger of Hoveden. The one English chronicler of the thirteenth century who is a considerable man of letters, Matthew Paris, belongs to the early half of it, before the academic tradition was fully established, and even with him prolixity impairs the art without injuring the colour of his work. The age of Edward I., the great time of triumphant scholasticism, is recorded in chronicles so dreary that it is hard to make the dry bones live. Walter of Hemingburgh, the ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... world those masterly works which have invigorated the theology and sustained the devotion of unnumbered readers in either hemisphere. Amongst others, folio by folio, came forth that Exposition of the Hebrews, which, amidst all its digressive prolixity, and with its frequent excess of erudition, is an enduring monument of its author's robust understanding and spiritual insight, as well as his astonishing industry. At last the pen dropped from his band, and on the 23d of August, 1683, he dedicated a note to his likeminded ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... consequently the axioms on which they are founded, and other points of interest connected with these questions. But I have decided to pass over the subject here, partly because I have set it aside for another treatise, partly because I am afraid of wearying the reader by too great prolixity. Nevertheless, in order not to omit anything necessary to be known, I will briefly set down the causes, whence are derived the terms styled "transcendental," such as Being, Thing, Something. These terms arose from the fact, that the human body, being limited, is only capable of distinctly ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... Athos!' cried D'Artagnan, losing all patience at the innkeeper's prolixity,—'Athos, what is become ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... great book, enable us to understand the causes of certain confusions in Amy Robsart's mystery. Mr. Froude practically aimed at giving the gist, as he conceived it, of the original papers of the period, which he rendered with freedom, and in his captivating style—foreign to the perplexed prolixity of the actual writers. But, in this process, points of importance might be omitted; and, in certain cases, words from letters of other dates appear to have been inserted by Mr. Froude, to clear up the situation. The result is not ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... neglect, is he atoning for the renewal of glory in which he shone during the seventeenth century, when the Jansenists, in their inveterate obstinacy, identified him with the defence of their cause? The reputation of sour austerity and of argumentative and tiresome prolixity which attaches to the remembrance of all the writers of Port-Royal, save Pascal—has that affected too the work of Augustin, enlisted in spite of himself in the ranks of these pious schismatics? And yet, if there have ever been any beings who do not ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... that he had a poet's feeling for beauty; he handles the language with the strength and skill of a master. On the other hand, he lacks all sense of proportion, and cannot shape an imaginative plan; his prolixity wearies the reader, and it cannot be denied that as a moral reformer he sometimes topples into immorality. The success of the poem was extraordinary, and extended far beyond France. It was attacked and defended, and up to the time of Ronsard its ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... the Merovingians, following in the steps of Chlodwig, were outdoing each other in bloodshed and cruelty. In the midst of this hard time Fortunatus stood out alone among the poets by virtue of his talent and purity of character. His poems are often disfigured by bombast, prolixity, and misplaced learning; but his keen eye for men and things is undeniable, and his feeling for Nature shews not only in dealing with scenery, but in linking it with the ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... well, objects reader, and very easy to consider this done; but the difficulty is—not so much to do it, answers writer, as to escape the bother of prolixity by proving how much has been done, and how speedily all might be even completed, had poor poesy in these ticketing times only a fair field and no disfavour; for there is at hand good grist, ready ground, baked and caked, and waiting for its eaters. But in this ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... "History," with that quaint prolixity which was his peculiar proclivity gives numerous instances of the rise and fall of families connected with Birmingham. In addition to the original family of De Birmingham, now utterly extinct he traced back many ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... as before, and elected to stand his trial at once, which was precisely what the Attorney-General desired. The indictment, which may still be seen among the records at Osgoode Hall, was a truly formidable instrument, and set out the offence with great prolixity. The trial took place on Saturday, the 25th, before Mr. Justice Sherwood, who, in charging the jury, inveighed against the defendant with nearly as great vehemence as did the Crown prosecutor, stigmatizing him as "a wholesale retailer of calumny." He pronounced the Freeman's report to be "a gross ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... when I was hardly a 'soph' myself. But this I should not have taken upon myself to mention, but only in defence of the 'length' of my letter; for nobody writeth 'shorter' or 'pithier,' when the subject requireth 'common forms' only—but, in apologizing for my 'prolixity,' I am 'adding' to the 'fault,' (if it were one, which, however, I cannot think it to be, the 'subject' considered: but this I have said before in other words:) so, Sir, if you will excuse my 'post-script,' I am sure you will not find fault ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... of the picturesque, and offered Handel opportunities for what may be called spectacular music on the grand scale, his literary style was pompous, rhetorical, and long-winded. Handel protested perpetually against the length of the work, for the Handelian style of composition naturally extended the prolixity of the words; Jennens greatly resented the musician's criticism, and insisted on printing the ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... of the Cambrian. If the reasonable limitations imposed on the prolixity of authorship compel its reduction, in these pages, into more or less broad outline, it is not for lack of plentiful material available to the more meticulous student of its details, out of which, it would be easy to weave a hundred volumes. ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... thought, he produced a close and telling composition. He also weeded it of every trait and every term he had observed in mad people's talk, or the letters they had shown him. So there was no incoherency, no heat, no prolixity, no "spies," no "conspiracy," no italics. A simple, honest, earnest story, with bitter truth stamped on every line; a sober, strong appeal from a sore heart but hard head to ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... he would depart, when he caught sight of the magic skin hanging in a frame, with a red line drawn around it. Suppressing, with a shudder, his secret desire, he patiently bore with the old man's prolixity. Porriquet wanted very much to ask him for money, but did not like to do so, and after complaining for quite an hour or more about things in general, he ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... political bow, offers many impressive apologies for the unprepared state in which he finds himself, informs his hearers that he appears before them only as a substitute for his very intimate and particular friend, General Vardant. He, too, has a wonderful prolixity of compliments to bestow upon the free, the patriotic, the independent voters of the very independent district. He tries to be facetious; but his temperament will not admit of any inconsistencies, not even in a political contest. No! he must be serious; because the election of a ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... prolixity of Gabriel's "period of a mile," are described with a facetious extravagance, which may be given as a specimen of the eloquence of ridicule. Harvey entitled ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... was used the other time, namely, of twice raising the royal standard, and in testimony [of the friendship] the Governor embraced them to the sound of trumpets, observing other solemnities which I do not write in order to avoid prolixity. This done, the cacique stood up and, in a vase of gold, gave drink to the Governor and the Spaniards with his own hands, and then all went off to eat, it ...
— An Account of the Conquest of Peru • Pedro Sancho
... rest of the uncials and, what is of more importance, the whole body of the cursives, exhibit [Greek: hote],—which, as every one must see, is certainly what St. John wrote in this place. Tischendorf's assertion that the prolixity of the expression [Greek: ephonesen ek tou mnemeiou kai egeiren auton ek nekron] is inconsistent with [Greek: hote][101],—may surprise, but will never convince any one who is even moderately acquainted with ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... of its most disgusting forms, and makes 666 in the most straightforward way. This explanation has as good a chance as any other. The work contains a general {353} attempt at explanation of the Apocalypse, and some history of opinion on the subject. It has not the prolixity which is so common a fault ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... Hall. He inquired into the state of the horses; examined their feet; prescribed a drench for one, and bleeding for another; and then took me to look at his own horse, on the merits of which he dwelt with great prolixity, and which, I noticed, had the ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... atmosphere. This he largely secures by means of description and with his wealth of material, does not hesitate to take his time in building up his effects. Perhaps the most common criticism of him heard to-day refers to his slow movement. Superabundance of matter is accompanied by prolixity of style, with a result of breeding impatience in the reader, particularly the young. Boys and girls at present do not offer Scott the unreserved affection once his own, because he now seems an author upon whom to exercise the gentle art of skipping. Enough has been said ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... specially may it now be declared that Professor Teufelsdrockh's acquirements, patience of research, philosophic and even poetic vigor, are here made indisputably manifest; and unhappily no less his prolixity and tortuosity and manifold ineptitude; that, on the whole, as in opening new mine-shafts is not unreasonable, there is much rubbish in his Book, though likewise specimens of almost invaluable ore. A paramount popularity ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... when it was desired to restore Plain Song to its primitive purity, one met with insurmountable obstacles due to its prodigious prolixity of long series of notes, repeating indefinitely the same musical forms; but in considering this in the light of explanations given by St. Isidore, and in view of the Oriental origin of the Christian religion, we are led to infer that these long series of notes were chants or vocalizations ...
— On the Execution of Music, and Principally of Ancient Music • Camille Saint-Saens
... through the haze of memory, a mist brooding over and around it, as if it were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people its wooden houses, and walk its homely lanes, and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main street. Henceforth it ceases to be a reality of my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else. My good townspeople will not much regret me; for—though it has been as dear an object as any, in my literary efforts, to be of some importance ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... moderator, was nevertheless a good man, in the old Scottish presbyterian phrase, God-ward and man-ward. No divine was more attentive in visiting the sick and afflicted, in catechising the youth, in instructing the ignorant, and in reproving the erring. And hence, notwithstanding impatience of his prolixity and prejudices, personal or professional, and notwithstanding, moreover, a certain habitual contempt for his understanding, especially on affairs of genius and taste, on which Blattergowl was apt to be diffuse, from his hope of one day fighting his way to a chair of ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... patriotic attraction of "Miss Darlings, the American Star," as she was billed in English, but they were in time for one of those equestrian performances which leave the spectator almost exanimate from their prolixity, and the pantomimic piece which ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that could not deal for five minutes with the abstract, and when Philip gave way to his taste for generalising she very quickly showed that she was bored. Mildred dreamt a great deal, and she had an accurate memory for her dreams, which she would relate every day with prolixity. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... stifled every least whim, and had lived so as not to cause the slightest movement in the terrible talisman. The Magic Skin was like a tiger with which he must live without exciting its ferocity. He bore patiently, therefore, with the old schoolmaster's prolixity. ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... not difficult to pick up; nevertheless, there are an awful quantity of them and they are at the best most imperfect mediums of communication. No one who has been on the Coast can fail to recognise how inferior the native language is to the native's mind behind it—and the prolixity and repetition he has therefore to employ to make ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... exertion, and supports under endurance. But I forget myself,' said the count, checking his enthusiasm; 'I promised to speak soberly. If I have said too much, your own good sense, my lord, will correct me, and your good-nature will forgive the prolixity of an old man, touched upon his favourite subject—the passion of ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... admirable, at any rate touching and delicious or piquant and finely comic in observation, there is a dreadful pell-mell. What a throng of volumes, what a flight of tales, novels of all sorts, droll, philosophic, and theosophic. There is something to be enjoyed in each, no doubt, but what prolixity! In the elaboration of a subject, as in the detail of style, Monsieur de Balzac has a facile, unequal, risky pen. He starts off quickly, sets himself in a gallop, and then, all at once, he stumbles to the ground, rising only to fall again. Most of his openings are delightful; but his conclusions ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... illustrate Guarini's laborious method of adding touch to touch without augmenting th force of the picture.[184] We find already here the transition from Tasso's measured art to the fantastic prolixity of Marino. And though Guarini was upon the whole chaste in use of language, his rhetorical love of amplification and fanciful refinement not unfrequently betrayed him into Marinistic conceits. Dorinda, for instance, thus addresses Silvio (act iv. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... only of the ladies of the nineteenth century, but of the Middle Age monks, who, having in general no poetry on which to form their taste, except the effeminate and bombastic productions of the dying Roman empire, fell into a certain washy prolixity, which has made monk Latin a byword, and puts one sadly in mind of what is too ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... have ceased to be disputed questions, or no longer attract much interest. Above all, its course was clouded and confused by verbal misunderstandings, arising in part, perhaps, from the occasional prolixity of Hoadly's style, but chiefly from the distorting influence of ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... years the topography of the moon and planets. The field was then almost untrodden; he had but few and casual predecessors, and has since had no equal in the sustained and concentrated patience of his hourly watchings. Both their prolixity and their enthusiasm are faithfully reflected in his various treatises. Yet the one may be pardoned for the sake of the other, especially when it is remembered that he struck out a substantially new line, and that ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... to Saints and Bishops. I shall only instance one of each, because I hate prolixity. The first Saint that presents himself to me, is the renowned St. Augustin, who himself owns, that he used to get drunk sometimes. Crapula autem nonnunquam surrepit servo tuo misereberis ut longe fiat a me. Thy ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... Drayton with Holinshed we find him omitting some circumstances which he might have been expected to have retained, and adding others with good judgment and in general with good effect, but which by some fatality usually tend in his hands to excessive prolixity. This is certainly not the case with his dignified and spirited exordium, but in the fourth stanza he begins to copy history, and his muse's wing immediately flags. No more striking example of the superiority ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... wider, if not deeper, unfolding in the period of the Renascence, and to this day pervades and fertilises our spiritual life. I might have been less digressive, but I hope that two reasons will justify my prolixity; the first is the great importance of the subject from the point of view of a history of civilisation, and the second and more particular one is its close inner relationship to my principal theme. For, in complete contrast with the sexuality on which ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... be difficult to produce a long list of ancients and moderns, who, in various forms, have exhibited their own portraits. Such portraits are often the most interesting, and sometimes the only interesting parts of their writings; and if they be sincere, we seldom complain of the minuteness or prolixity of these personal memorials. The lives of the younger Pliny, of Petrarch, and of Erasmus, are expressed in the epistles, which they themselves have given to the world. The essays of Montaigne and Sir William Temple bring us home to the houses and bosoms ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... your researches could never have enabled you fully to discover those great events in the Chronicles of St. Denis, as you sent me word: neither could you for certain know whether the author had given a true relation of those matters, either by reason of his prolixity, or that he was not himself present when they happened. Nevertheless this book will agree with ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... countenance those who, without sagacity to discriminate character, without elegance of style to relieve the tediousness of narrative, without enlargement of mind to draw any conclusions from the facts they relate, simply pour forth anecdotes, and retail conversations, with all the minute prolixity of a gossip ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... OF INGENUITY is one of the most modern forms of the short story, and, if I may be pardoned the prolixity, one of the most ingenious. It might be called the "fairy tale of the grown-up," for its interest depends entirely upon its appeal to the love for the marvelous which no human being ever outgrows. It requires fertility of invention, vividness of imagination, and a plausible ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... Publication. And as you have in Confidence submitted to my Opinion some of those Variations, I am much pleased that you have so managed the Matter, as to make no Alteration in the Facts; and, at the same time, have avoided the digressive Prolixity too ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson
... no verbiage. We do not merely mean by this that he never used a superfluous word (which, in fact, he rarely did), but that he kept quite clear of the hazy, half-relevant ideas which encumber meaning and are the chief source of prolixity. He threw away every idea that did not decidedly help on his argument, and expressed the others in the fewest words that would make them clear. He began at once where the pith of his argument began; and had the secret, possessed by few writers, of stopping ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... always intent to smooth away the asperities of his subject, and, like some stately grandame enthroned in high-backed chair, he remembers that his simple auditors are to be not merely entertained by the matter of his discourse, but impressed by the suave tones and high-bred prolixity of the speaker. With a dignified courtesy unknown in these latter times—when biographers and historians do not scruple to take liberties with their heroes to the extent even of designating them by nicknames—the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... written for the general reader. Until that appears, I offer this little book, which attempts to cover lightly but accurately the whole ground, including the history of cacao, its cultivation and manufacture. This is a small book in which to treat of so large a subject, and to avoid prolixity I have had to generalise. This is a dangerous practice, for what is gained in brevity is too often lost in accuracy: brevity may be always the soul of wit, it is rarely the body of truth. The expert will find that I have considered him in that I have given attention to recent developments, and if ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... interesting from a historical point[81] of view, are very labored and lack any real poetic growth. They are, moreover, often prolonged to an interminable length—one example, as late as Handel, consisting of an Air with sixty-two Variations; prolixity or "damnable iteration" being as bad a blemish in music as in any of the other arts. In the early days of instrumental composition, about all that composers could do was "to put the theme through its paces." That is, there was no unfolding of the poetic possibilities of the melody. The ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... reached, the middle is forgotten, and by the time the middle is reached the beginning has been lost. Moderately good preachers are accepted, provided they are brief, and the best become tiresome when they are too lengthy. There is no more disagreeable quality in a preacher than prolixity." ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... and read with avidity, especially by children, and are well calculated to excite their attention, inform their understanding, and improve them in the art of reading, the greatest care has been observed to render the style easy, the language comprehensive, and the description natural. Prolixity has been studiously avoided. The line of distinction between virtue and vice has been rendered distinctly visible; and chastity of expression and sentiment have received due attention. Strict fidelity has ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... into lime water; but in vain—no precipitation took place. Indeed, I tried in several ways to obtain the lost air from this alkaline mixture, but as the results were similar to the foregoing, in order to avoid prolixity I shall not cite these experiments. Thus much I see from the experiments mentioned, that the air consists of two fluids, differing from each other, the one of which does not manifest in the least the property of attracting phlogiston, while the other, which composes between the third ...
— Discovery of Oxygen, Part 2 • Carl Wilhelm Scheele
... misplaced—non erat his locus. The text of a story-book is too frail to bear so ponderous a burden of classical Arabian lore, and the annotations injure the symmetry of the book as a work of art. They begin with excessive prolixity: in the Introduction these studies fill 27 closely printed pages to 14 of a text broken by cuts and vignettes. In chaps. i. the proportion is pp. 20, notes: 15 text, and in chaps. ii. it is pp. 20: 35. Then they become ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... bearers, Vasco scaled rugged mountains, crossed several large rivers, either by means of improvised bridges or by throwing beams from one bank to another, and always succeeded in keeping his men in health. Rather than become wearisome and incur the reproach of prolixity, I make no mention of some of the trials and fatigues they endured, but I judge that I should not omit to report what took place between them and the caciques whom ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... class of navigation to which it was dedicated. It was a Sicilian schooner from Trapani, built for fishing. An artistic calker had sculptured a wooden cray-fish climbing over the rudder. From the two sides of the prow dangled a double row of cray-fish carved with the innocent prolixity of ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... place, which, by its label, belonged to Paris; the pair wandering the street under what it would be flattery to call the guidance of an eminently drunken driver. I boarded him; he dissolved at once into maudlin tears and prolixity. It appeared that on the 29th he had brought over a bourgeois family from the capital, and had spent the last three days in perambulating Etampes, and the past three nights in crapulous slumber within his vehicle. Here was my chance, and I demanded to know if for a price he would ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... parts just as it is the case with the shells that are gathered in Canaria and are sold for so great a price in the Mine of Portugal. "There are infinite kinds of spices which have been seen of which I do not care to speak for fear of prolixity." All these ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... which I had taken up was the Mad Trist of Sir Launcelot Canning[25]; but I had called it a favorite of Usher's more in sad jest than in earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth and unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for the lofty and spiritual ideality of my friend. It was, however, the only book immediately at hand; and I indulged a vague hope that the excitement which now agitated the hypochondriac, might find relief (for the history of mental ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... you will reproach me with the prolixity of these details. The subject is attractive to me, and I feel that you will accompany me with pleasure in my pilgrimage, from chapel to shrine, dwelling with me in contemplation on the relics of ancient skill and the memorials of the piety of the departed. ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... Fort Johnson; and as more than eleven hundred Indians appeared at his call, his larder was sorely taxed to entertain them. The speeches were interminable. Johnson, as master of Indian rhetoric, knew his audience too well not to contest with them the palm of insufferable prolixity. The climax was reached on the fourth day, and he threw down the war-belt. An Oneida chief took it up; Stevens, the interpreter, began the war-dance, and the assembled warriors howled in chorus. Then a tub ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... sprightliness; but whatever I wanted in gaiety was amply made up in the triumphant and gracious good humour of my mother, whose smiles of benevolence and exultation were showered around as bountifully as the summer sunshine. I will not weary you with unnecessary prolixity. Let it suffice to say, that I was married to Lord Glenfallen with all the attendant pomp and circumstance of wealth, rank, and grandeur. According to the usage of the times, now humanely reformed, the ceremony was made until long past midnight, ...
— Two Ghostly Mysteries - A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family; and The Murdered Cousin • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... the insults offered to Helga by his henchmen important tributary impulses are given toward the following development. Unfortunately, the third act, dramatically considered, is concerned chiefly with details. It suffers, even more than the first act, from a certain prolixity which is not wholly made good by its theatrically effective ending. However bright and skillfully wrought in the incident of the fraudulent miracle, it might well be spared, with a view for the whole. And the same is true of a considerable part of ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... remains on those who survive. You know whom I mean, Homo. We were four, and now we are but three. Life is but a long loss of those whom we love. They leave behind them a train of sorrows. Destiny amazes us by a prolixity of unbearable suffering; who then can wonder that the old are garrulous? It is despair that makes the dotard, old fellow! Homo, the wind continues favourable. We can no longer see the dome of St. Paul's. We shall pass ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... causes follow the simple laws of nature, and have no embarrassment of laws and doubts and contrary interpretations. They have no delays by reports or prolixity of writs, for they do not waste a single dedo [65] of paper in that. The accusation, the plea, and the evidence are quickly heard—all in the manner of the time of Noah. If there is no testimony, they admit the parties to the oath, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... fourth door. If what I had seen before was capable of exciting my surprise, what I now beheld transported me into perfect ecstacy. I entered a large court surrounded with buildings of an admirable structure, the description of which I will omit, to avoid prolixity. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... lawyers of the present age differ from their ancestors, is in their prolixity. It was reserved for modern invention to make a trial for high treason last eight days, or to extend a speech to ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... let them pass! To right your wrong, Aspasia of the ardent South, Your poet means to sing a song With some prolixity of mouth. ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... of a letter from Mr. ROOSEVELT, censuring President WILSON for the prolixity and verbosity of his Presidential messages, will, it is believed, lend a powerful impetus to the campaign on behalf ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... they possess none of that elegant regularity, of that classical finish and clear-cut outline, which impress us in the works of Turgeneff and Gontcharoff. On the contrary, they surprise us by their awkwardness, their prolixity, their lack of severe finish, which requires abundant leisure. It is evident that they were written in haste, by a man who was eternally in want, embarrassed with debts, and incapable of making the two ends meet financially. At the ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... deserere cogebantur; pars huc illucque quovis momento rapiebantur; nec ulli certus ordo suumve propositum diu constabat.—The happy change of the last year was then contrasted with proper point and prolixity.—The University of Oxford to the Queen: MS. Domestic, ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... (without prolixity if possible) with the few things I have been able to comprehend of all these sublime ideas. With regard to the system of our world, disputes were a long time maintained, on the cause that turns the planets, and keeps them in their ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... are performed by many are perforce done by a few. Hence the spectacle in the new Spanish and Portuguese world, as in the old, of men and women who are at once journalists, novelists, dramatists, politicians, soldiers, poets and what not else. Such a versatility, often joined to a literary prolixity, no doubt serves to lower the artistic worth of works produced ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... sweetness, their choice wording, their originality in epithet, name, and phrase, were novelties of Milton's own. His English masters were Spenser, Fletcher, and Sylvester, the translator of Du Bartas's La Sepmaine, but nothing of Spenser's prolixity, or Fletcher's effeminacy, or Sylvester's quaintness is found in Milton's pure, energetic diction. He inherited their beauties, but his taste had been tempered to a finer edge by his studies in Greek and Hebrew poetry. He was the last of the Elisabethans, and {154} his style was ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... immense number of volumes behind him, which have been printed at various times, the greater number of them after his death. It would be possible to reduce them to a tenth part if we could rid them of all useless and foreign matter, and of a prolixity which I find almost overwhelming; were this only done, his books should be regarded as among the best we have on the subject of natural history in its entirety. The plan of his work is good, his classification ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... in which Giulio executed many other works worthy to be praised, of which, in order to avoid prolixity, I shall say nothing, he reconstructed with masonry many rooms in the castle where the Duke lives at Mantua, and made two very large spiral staircases, with very rich apartments adorned all over with stucco. In one hall he caused the whole of the story of Troy and the Trojan War to be painted, ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari
... are generally divided into Students, Professors, Philistines, and Cattle, the points of difference between these castes being by no means strictly defined. The "Cattle" class is the most important. I might be accused of prolixity should I here enumerate the names of all the students and of all the regular and irregular professors; besides, I do not just at present distinctly remember the appellations of all the former gentlemen; while among the professors are many who as yet have no name at ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... been attempted, we fear with too much prolixity and repetition, to describe the evils attendant on a neglected state of the minds of the people. The representation does not comprehend all those even of magnitude and prominence; but it displays that portion of them which is the most serious and calamitous, ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... slightly modified and abridged what follows, being impatient of its prolixity, as well as ashamed of what is truly called the ludicrous under-estimate of the mass of the ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... (New York, 1888), seems to me to lay too much stress on the weight which our charter-claims gave us, and too little on the right we had acquired by actual possession. The charter-claims were elaborated with the most wearisome prolixity at the time; but so were the English claims to New Amsterdam a century earlier. Conquest gave the true title in each case; the importance of a claim is often in inverse order to the length at which it is set ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... with sufficient prolixity by Martel, (Forma de Celebrar Cortes, cap. 52, 53,) and a curious illustration of it in Zurita, Anales, tom. ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... to have been inserted by Parchas, who informs us likewise, that he possessed divers letters from Mami, captain of the gallies at Mokha, to Captain Saris, which he omits, as he says, to avoid prolixity, being similar to that of Haydar aga. In the Pilgrims he has inserted figures of three of their seals, by way of novelty, stating that these seals were stamps in ink, not on wax. He likewise adds a piece of a letter in the Banian language and character, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... Letamendi was prolixity and puerile ingenuity personified. Yet Letamendi was no different from all other Spaniards of his day, including even the most celebrated, such ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... I hope Milo may have conducted the reader. In relation to the sea you may take him for an expert in the terrors he describes. Not so in Cyprus. War tempts him to prolixity, to classical allusion, even to hexameters of astonishingly loose joints. Every stroke of his hero's sword-arm seems to him of weight. No doubt it was, once; but not in a chronicle of this sort, where the ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... too tired for speech.] Prolix to the point of somnolence. It might be affirmed without inexactitude that the prolixity of counsel is the somnolence of the judiciary. I am fatigued, ah! [A little suddenly, awaking to the fact that his orders have not been carried out to the letter.] Thomas! My Post is not in its ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... been, and there still are, many who take a seeming delight in telling you how many conquests they have made, and they not infrequently have the bad taste to explain with wearisome prolixity the ways and the means whereby those conquests were wrought; as, forsooth, an unfeeling huntsman is forever boasting of the game he has slaughtered and is forever dilating upon the ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... this mystery was embodied in a small sacramental narrative, which we possess under four forms,[1] very similar to one another. John, preoccupied with the Eucharistic ideas,[2] and who relates the Last Supper with so much prolixity, connecting with it so many circumstances and discourses[3]—and who was the only one of the evangelists whose testimony on this point has the value of an eye-witness—does not mention this narrative. This is a proof that he did not regard the Eucharist as a peculiarity ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... of Fielding's genius, and after the advent of a new luminary in Smollett, Richardson once more presented to the public an elaborate and ceremonious novel of extreme prolixity. The History of Sir Charles Grandison, in seven (and six) volumes, appeared in the spring of 1754, after having been pirated in Dublin during the preceding winter. Richardson's object in this new adventure was, having already painted the portraits of two virtuous young ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... would never set foot again in the place. The hot blood of shame had burned my cheeks whenever I recalled my dismissal from the lips of the daughter of the house. But I had received a letter from Mrs. Bowser, setting forth that I was wanted at the house of Doddridge Knapp, and her prolixity was such that I was unable to determine whether she, or Mrs. Knapp, or Luella, wished to see me. But as all three appeared to be concerned in it I pocketed pride and resentment, and made my bow with some nervous quavers ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... beloved by women, "wandering over the crooked hills of delicious pleasure"; but their reign over him was over, and long before Savonarola's famous "bonfire of vanities," he had destroyed those love-songs in the vulgar tongue, which would have been such a relief to us, after the scholastic prolixity of his Latin writings. It was in another spirit that he composed a Platonic commentary, the only work of his in Italian which has come down to us, on the "Song of Divine Love"—secondo la mente ed opinione dei Platonici—"according to the mind and opinion of the ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater |
