"Rhetorical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cultivated classic literature with success; as an antiquary and an historian acquired reputation; wrote energetically and fluently; spoke in public with earnestness and force, but had none of the graces of the finished orator, and he despised all "rhetorical artifices." In conversation he was persuasive, but in public debate deficient in this quality; and while he possessed courage to confront mobs, or dictators, as he did also to meet an armed host in his country's service, he was not characterised by that presence of mind in public discussion, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of those long dialogues, where one person is represented as taking both sides of an argument. This rhetorical device, so wearisome to modern readers, is used by Chretien preferably when some sentiment or deep emotion is to be portrayed. Ovid may well have suggested the device, but Ovid never abuses it as does the more prolix mediaeval poet. For the part playing by the eyes in mediaeval ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... began his literary career by writing his personal confessions; nor is there any harm in this if he had not continued them for the remainder of his life. He is a man of genuinely forcible mind and of great command over a kind of rhetorical and fugitive conviction which excites and pleases. He is in a perpetual state of temporary honesty. He has admired all the most admirable modern eccentrics until they could stand it no longer. Everything he writes, ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... so pointless as Macaulay thought it. Sincerity and intensity are, indeed, to the modern reader, the most obvious characteristics of Demosthenes. His style is, on the whole, singularly free from what we are accustomed to regard as rhetorical embellishment. Where the modern orator would employ a wealth of imagery, or elaborate a picture in exquisite detail, Demosthenes is content with a phrase or a word. Burke uses, in reference to Hyder Ali, the same image which Demosthenes uses in reference to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... a different complexion for Joan. Money talks. Mr. Peters' words might have been merely the rhetorical outburst of a heated moment; but, even discounting them, there seemed to remain a certain exciting substratum. A man who shouts that he will give five thousand dollars for a thing may very well mean he will give five hundred, and Joan's finances were perpetually in a condition which ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... word, which means to install in office with certain ceremonies, is made, by many lovers of big words, to do service for begin; but the sooner these rhetorical high-fliers stop inaugurating and content themselves with simply beginning the things they are called upon to do in the ordinary routine of daily life, the sooner they will cease to set ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... Spanish literature is conspicuously grave and decorous. This plainly indicates that race has much to do with the matter, and that the mere admission or exclusion of women is but one among several factors. In short, it is easy to make out a case by a rhetorical use of the facts on one side; but, if we look at all the facts, the matter ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... hurling out all his force. And the people could no longer restrain themselves; the rhetorical artifice took them by storm, and they shouted and cheered with one loud, ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... of the widest possible use. In the document appointing Demetrius of Lucca librarian, after Platina's death, he says distinctly that the library has been got together "for the use of all men of letters, both of our own age, or of subsequent time[410]"; and that these are not rhetorical expressions, to round a phrase in a formal letter of appointment, is proved by the way in which manuscripts were lent out of the library, during the whole time that Platina was in office. The Register of Loans, beginning with his own appointment and ending in 1485, has been printed ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... composed shortly after, if not during, the persecution of the Jews in Egypt under Ptolemy Philopator. This hypothesis would give a particular point to the bitter exposure of idolatry, to the comparison between the sufferings of the Jews, and those of idolatrous nations, to the long rehearsal and rhetorical declaration of the plagues of Egypt, and to the reward of 'the just man' after a death of martyrdom; and would besides help to explain the putting together of the first ten chapters, and the fragment contained in the remaining chapters. They were works written at the same ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... regard for my safety are no more apprehensive than myself, especially such as best know his character; for his very enemies and even his ridiculers, who are of the two by far the greater number, allow him to be a peaceable man in all things except his words, his rhetorical actions, his looks, and his hatred to the clergy; which however are all known by abundance of experience to be perfectly harmless, and particularly as to the clergy. I do not doubt but, if he will be so good to continue steadfast in his principles and practices, he may at proper ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... can do justice. Read any one of his speeches, as reported with astonishing correctness in the London "Times," and you will appreciate the clear, philosophical statement of political truth,—the dignified, elevated, statesmanlike tone,—the rare felicity of expression,—the rhetorical beauty of style, never usurping the place of argument, though often concealing the sharp angles of his relentless logic,—the marvellous ease with which he makes the dry details of finance not only instructive, but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... journey from the Peruvian port of Mollendo to the Bolivian interior, which the writer made in the year stated, are here transcribed. No rhetorical merit is claimed, facts only are related, and the compiler of the manuscript only hopes that his efforts may, in part at least, justify a cursory perusal, without exhausting the patience of the readers, or overtaxing their ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... aristocrat in De Tocqueville's sense, but he likewise was full of ideas and hopes which the unchecked or undirected course of democracy would defeat without chance of reparation. This fact he accepted, and from this he started. Mr. Carlyle, and one or two rhetorical imitators, poured malediction on the many-headed populace, and with a rather pitiful impatience insisted that the only hope for men lay in their finding and obeying a strong man, a king, a hero, a dictator. How he was to be found, neither the ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... visitor commented with a rising inflection for rhetorical effect. "By the way, may I ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... found doctrines on obscure passages, explaining away those plain ones by which the more difficult should be expounded, and overlooking those cautions by which the Holy Spirit guards against exaggeration. By such men a rhetorical illustration, a poetical figure, a local or temporary instruction, are made to form points of faith or positive rules of practice. It is evident many, even of the moral precepts, given by our Saviour, cannot be literally obeyed[7]; and were intended rather to cultivate a general feeling, than ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... diffidence in the Doctor's manner this time. His clutch on the letter was distinctly inquisitive, and he read out the opening sentences with almost rhetorical effect. ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... a Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery, London, 1806, is a repertory of information for all writers on gesture, who have not always given credit to it, as well as on all branches of oratory. This has been freely used by the present writer, as has also the volume by the canon Andrea de ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... of birth or accomplishment. His work is mainly after the Italian model. The Laberinto de fortuna, by which he is best known, is a dull allegory with much of Dante's apparatus. There are historical passages where the poet's patriotism leads him page xvii to a certain rhetorical height, but his good intentions are weighed down by three millstones: slavish imitation, the monotonous arte mayor stanza and the deadly earnestness of his temperament. He enjoyed great renown and authority ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... however, was interdicted from being his auditor, because Libanius was a pagan in religion; nevertheless because he admired his orations, he procured them and read them secretly and diligently. As he was becoming very expert in the rhetorical art, Maximus the philosopher arrived in Nicomedia, not the Byzantine, Euclid's father, but the Ephesian whom the Emperor Valentinian afterward caused to be executed as a practicer of magic. This took place later; at that time the only thing that attracted him to Nicomedia was the fame ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... he would naturally treat three-fourths of the subject in his own fantastic way, and do his best to illustrate the action required in the remaining part. The result would be (what might be expected) forced or stagey, and the action rhetorical, and that is exactly what has happened ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... righteousness of some specific cause. Convince a blue-blooded American like Wendell Phillips that the abolition of slavery is right, and, straightway, words and even facts become to him mere weapons in a splendid warfare. His statements grow rhetorical, reckless, virulent. Proof seems to him, as it did to the contemporary Transcendentalist philosophers, an impertinence. The sole question is, "Are you on the Lord's side?" i.e., on the ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... letter, was also its bearer. The cardinal started at the first sight, never having been addressed with such familiarity, and was silent. On the following day, however, the cardinal received Gerbier civilly, and, with many rhetorical expressions respecting the duke: "I know," said he, "the power and greatness of a high admiral of England; the cannons of his great ships make way, and prescribe law more forcibly than the canons of the church, of which I am a member. I acknowledge the power of the favourites of great ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... rhetorical expressions of Orosius, "in arido et aspero montis jugo;" "in unum ac parvum verticem," are not very suitable to the encampment of a great army. But Faesulae, only three miles from Florence, might afford space for the head-quarters of Radagaisus, and would be comprehended ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... since Helen's rhetorical failure is not recorded in the minutes from which this narrative is constructed. But when the man who had been summoned had gone to get the carriage ready, Helen resumed something ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... the very magnates whose power rests on force and fraud are precisely those who insidiously dictate what men shall be appointed to these omniscient courts, before whose edicts all men are expected to bow in speechless reverence. [Footnote: This is far from being a rhetorical figure of speech. Witness the dictating of the appointment and nominations of judges by the Standard Oil Company (which now owns immense railroad systems and industrial plants) as revealed by certain ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... for an eminent justice of peace.) 'A Perspective View of Billingsgate, or Lectures on Elocution;' and 'The True Robin Hood Society, a Conversation or Lectures on Elocution,' its companion; these two by Barnsley. (These two strike at a famous lecturer on elocution and the reverend projector of a rhetorical academy, are admirably conceived and executed, and—the latter more especially—almost worthy the hand of Hogarth. They are full of a variety of droll figures, and seem, indeed, to be the work of a great master struggling to suppress his superiority of genius, and endeavouring to paint ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... with his principal character and produced a strong effect by minute, accumulated touches. Clarissa Harlowe is his masterpiece, though even in that the situation is painfully prolonged, the heroine's virtue is self-conscious and rhetorical, and there is something almost ludicrously unnatural in the copiousness with which she pours herself out in gushing epistles to her female correspondent at the very moment when she is beset with ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... vividness? Contrast the effect of saying, "Who would willingly linger on the hideous details?" with "No one would willingly linger", etc. The author does not expect an answer, he throws the sentence into the question form for the rhetorical effect. The reader pays more attention to the thought by trying to find an ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... time to hate. He had no time to indulge in foolish debates and struggle for rhetorical mastery—he had his work ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... monotonous repetition of sentence structure. To give variety to successive sentences: (1) vary the length, (2) vary the beginnings, (3) avoid a series of similar compound sentences, (4) interchange loose with periodic structure, (5) use rhetorical question, exclamation, direct discourse, (6) avoid an excessive use of participles ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... the Yugoslavs under an officer's mattress, was transcribed and replaced. Since it made admissions with regard to the Croats the contents were telegraphed to Paris. It is a lengthy and to us at times a rather rhetorical expose, of which it will suffice to make some extracts. "The Officer," says Admiral Millo, "should place himself in a calm and dignified fashion outside and above the disputes which divide the sentiments of the local population. ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... of ostensible Democracy is indeed so strong that it is impossible to consider the present wide establishment of Democratic institutions as being the outcome of any process of intellectual conviction; it arouses suspicion even whether ostensible Democracy may not be a mere rhetorical garment for essentially different facts, and upon that suspicion we ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... eulogized. He then commences to recite his loa, carrying himself like a clown in a circus, while he sings the praises of the person in whose honor the fiesta has been arranged. This loa, which was in rhetorical verse in a diffuse style suited to the Asiatic taste, set forth the general's naval expeditions and the honors he had received from the King, concluding with thanks and acknowledgment of the favor that he had conferred in passing through their town and visiting such ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... translation has been adhered to as far as possible—one or two remarks at the close being the only additions. So if any defects exist in the work they belong solely to the translator, whose aim has not been rhetorical composition, but the greater glory of God. And if but one heart be won more closely to the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ by its perusal, she will be amply repaid, and prays that the blessing of the ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... the antipathy to the executive, we refer to the jealousy of the Crown, so deeply embedded in the very substance of constitutional authority; so many people are loth to admit the Queen, in spite of law and fact, to be the people's appointee and agent, that it is a good rhetorical emphasis to speak of her prerogative as something NON-popular, and therefore to be distrusted. By the very nature of our government our executive cannot be liked and trusted as the Swiss or the American ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... it is an experiment! But it is made in corpore vili. It is not irreparable, and there is no reason, more's the pity, why I should not please myself. I will ask—it is a rhetorical question which needs no answer—what is a hapless bachelor to do, who is professionally occupied and tied down in a certain place for just half the year? What is he to do with the other half? I cannot live on in my college ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... great consideration. This paragraph has been censured for its too florid style. It may be rather gorgeous and rhetorical when considered as part of an argument, yet it is very characteristic of Burke as a writer. In no other passage of the speech is there such vivid clear-cut imagery. Note the picturesque quality of the lines and detect if you can any confusion ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... your readers may remember a speech in parliament by, as I think, Lord Plunket, in which his lordship argued with great eloquence in behalf of the Bill for the Emancipation of the Roman Catholics. Among many passages therein of equal truth and rhetorical power, there was one long afterwards much quoted, paraphrased, and praised. It was that in which he reminded the House, that those for whom he pleaded were fellow-subjects of the same race, offspring of the same Creator, alike ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 45, Saturday, September 7, 1850 • Various
... because it "points a moral and adorns a 'tail.'" The French always give this extra touch. Everything has its silk snapper. Are not the literary whips of Paris famous for their rhetorical tips and the sting there is in them? What French writer ever goaded his adversary with the belly of his lash, like the Germans and the English, when he could blister him with its silken end, and the percussion of wit ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... of the American diplomat at a private dinner is the truest defence and explanation of America's delay in coming into the war that I remember to have read. The scene is set in the high light of excitement, and the rhetorical phrasing of the speech would do credit ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... government, even the very same proper names, at the end of the period, as had been in use at its beginning. One cannot but think that the bouleversement which Egypt underwent has been somewhat exaggerated by the native historian for the sake of rhetorical effect, to enhance by contrast the splendour of the ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... saturated himself with the sentiment of Rousseau; he studied Bacon and Hobbes and Berkeley and Hume; he became fascinated, in Burke, by the union of a wide intellect with a brilliant fancy and consummate rhetorical skill.[3] Though he called himself at this time dumb and inarticulate, and the idea of ever making literature his profession had not suggested itself to him, he was eager to talk about the things he read, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... "the constitutional principle wound up in the bowels of the monarchy"; "the Herculean labour of the honourable member, who will find himself quite disappointed when he has at last brought forth his Hercules"—such are a few of the rhetorical gems which occasionally sparkled in the dull quartz of his plentiful output. Nevertheless, so manly was his bearing, so dogged his defence, that he always gained a respectful hearing; and supporters of the Government plucked up heart when, after ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... sermon, historically important, as being the earliest Christian attempt to reduce to a science daemonology and the temptation of daemons: but its involved and rhetorical form proves sufficiently that it could not have been delivered by an unlettered man like Antony. Neither is it, probably, even composed by St. Athanasius; it seems rather, like several other passages in this biography, the interpolation of some later scribe. It ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... Later on, we have, leaving farther and farther behind the Giorgionesque ideal, the overpowering force and majesty of the Assunta, the true passion going hand-in-hand with beauty of the Louvre Entombment, the rhetorical passion and scenic magnificence of the ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... feeling, and you might perhaps have attributed it to many motives rather than the true one. But now at five-and-thirty, find out the yellow manuscript, and read it carefully over; and I will venture to say, that, if you were a really clever and eloquent young man, writing in an ambitious and rhetorical style, and prompted to do so by the spontaneous fervor of your heart and readiness of your imagination, you will feel now little sympathy even with the literary style of that early composition,—you ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... warrantableness of this practice in some cases may be inferred from a parity of reason, in this manner. If it be lawful (as by the best authorities it plainly doth appear to be), in using rhetorical schemes, poetical strains, involutions of sense in allegories, fables, parables, and riddles, to discoast from the plain and simple way of speech, why may not facetiousness, issuing from the same principles, directed to the same ends, serving to like purposes, be likewise used blamelessly? ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... while I thus thought such a protest to be based upon truth, and to be a religious duty, and a rule of Anglicanism, and a necessity of the case, I did not at all like the work. Hurrell Froude attacked me for doing it; and, besides, I felt that my language had a vulgar and rhetorical look about it. I believed, and really measured, my words, when I used them; but I knew that I had a temptation, on the other hand, to say against Rome as much as ever I could, in order to protect myself against the ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... But are such rhetorical caprices condemnable only for their deviation from the language of real life? and are they by no other means to be precluded, but by the rejection of all distinctions between prose and verse, save that of metre? Surely good sense, and a moderate insight into the constitution ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... It is indeed known that, up to a somewhat late period, the bards continued to compose pieces under the names—which had become popular—of Aneurin, Taliessin, and Liwarc'h Hen; but no confusion can be made between these insipid rhetorical exercises and the really ancient fragments which bear the names of the poets cited— fragments full of personal traits, local circumstances, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... "Sir John Mandeville," Mallory, and Hall's Chronicle.] of English prose notable as prose—that is, consciously essaying what is connoted by the term style—had been produced before Elizabeth's accession, apart from the liturgical, rhetorical, or controversial work of the clergy or clerical disputants. The Acts and Monuments of Foxe, popularly known as, the "Book of Martyrs," published in the first decade of the reign, showed the development ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... It purports to be a warning to these captives against the idolatrous practices which they shall witness in Babylon, and is made up of a long discourse on the impotence of the idols which the heathen worship, written in a rhetorical style, in imitation of Jer. 10:1-16. Its author is supposed to have been a Hellenistic Jew who lived towards the ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... or rhetorical writers use the words "slave" and "slavery" in a very lax way. Thus, when protesting against the so-called "Subjection of Women," they absurdly apply those terms to the condition of the wife in the modern society of the west—designations which are inappropriate even in the case of the inmate ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... The simplicity of the thought, which never gathers into those perplexed knots of rhetorical condensation, which we find in the dramatic poets ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... of a high morality,—the demand for practical Christianity in nations as well as individuals. It burned no incense under the nostrils of an already inflated and vain people. It gratified them by no rhetorical falsehoods about "the land of the free and the home of the brave." It did not apostrophize military heroes, nor strut "red wat shod" over the plains of battle, nor call up, like another Ezekiel, from the valley of vision the dry bones thereof. It uttered none of the precious scoundrel ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Modulation, Melody of Speech, Pitch, Tone, Inflections, Sense, Cadence, Force, Stress, Grammatical and Rhetorical Pauses, Movement, Reading of Poetry, Faults in the Reading of Poetry, Action, Attitude, Analysis of the Principles ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... which make it impossible for me to believe that his conduct was consistent with common honesty. He seemed never to care for the soundness of his opinion before he uttered it, or for the truth of the fact before he said it, if only he could produce a rhetorical effect. He seemed to like to defame men whom the people loved and honored. Toward the latter part of his life, he seemed to get desperate. If he failed to make an impression by argument, he took to invective. If vinegar would not answer ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... (1 Journ. Cong. 67) to the pen of Richard Henry Lee. I think myself certain, it was not written by him, as well from what I recollect to have heard, as from the internal evidence of style. He was loose, vague, frothy, rhetorical. He was a poorer writer than his brother Arthur; and Arthur's standing may be seen in his Monitor's Letters, to insure the sale of which, they took the precaution of tacking to them a new edition of the Farmer's Letters; like Mezentius, who 'mortua jungebat corpora ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... which prevailed amongst the Romans. But as a traveller remarks, "it is a curious relic of paganism, combined with Christian usages." Thus the dirge sung by women, their wild lamenting, their impassioned apostrophizing of the dead, their rhetorical declamation of his virtues, finds its analogy among many of the customs of pagan nations, while the prayer for the dead, "the relatives standing about the bed of death reciting the Rosary," the Confraternity of the Brothers ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... freely in talk or social intercourse. They do not save themselves up for their speeches or their books; but they give their best energies to them, and have little current coin of high thought left for ordinary life. The mischief is that these interviews are generally conducted by inquisitive and rhetorical strangers, not distinguished for social tact or overburdened with good taste; and so the whole occasion tends to wear a melodramatic air, which is fatal both to artistic effect as ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... narrative, except of a very peculiar kind and on a small scale, than that either of Euphues or of the Arcadia, which, though an uncritical tradition credits it with driving out Lyly's, is practically only a whelp of the same litter. Embarrassed, heavy, rhetorical, it has its place in the general evolution of English prose, and a proper and valuable place too. But it is bad even for pure romance purposes: and nearly hopeless for the panoramic and kaleidoscopic variety which should characterise the ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... To which rhetorical questions, the answer in each case, as it happens, is "No." The blush is not, of course, a bad sign in the box-office. But the chuckle of recognition is a better one. So is the glow of sentiment. So is the tear of sympathy. The smutty and the scandalous have ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... Paris applaud at the remembrance of Waterloo is perhaps one of the most brilliant triumphs of eloquence which the annals of history record. But this rhetorical success is not a triumph of truth. There were those who were conquered at Waterloo; and, to judge by what has been going on for some time past in Europe, it would seem that those who were conquered are bent on taking their revenge. We may infer from ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... a talented elocutionist of Lincoln, devoted some months to lecturing. Her great intellectual and rhetorical gifts made her a ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... were an immense success. That at Aylesbury realized L5,851 for a county corps; and one at Epsom, for Surrey, brought in nearly double as much.[324] Most noteworthy of all these meetings was one of 19th April 1794 at Birmingham, where loyal sentiments crystalized in a rhetorical jewel of rare lustre. The "Loyal True Blues" of Birmingham, in view of the threats of the French "to insult the chalky cliffs of Albion and to plant in this island their accursed tree of liberty, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... man can be a proper poet unless he be an elocutionist; for, unless he be an elocutionist, how can he make his verses emphatic in the right places, or manage the harmonic inflexes, or deal with the rhetorical pauses? And now, ladies and gentlemen, I'll show you, from various passages in this book, that the untaught journeyman mason who made it never took lessons in elocution. I'll first read you a passage ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... read in the prefatory remarks to the so-called Torgau Articles mentioned above: "To this end [of justifying the Elector's peaceable frame of mind] it will be advantageous to begin [the projected Apology] with a lengthy rhetorical introduction." (68; C. R., 26, 171.) This introduction, later on replaced by another, was composed by Melanchthon at Coburg and polished by him during the first days at Augsburg. May 4 he remarks in a letter to Luther: "I have shaped the Exordium of our Apology somewhat more rhetorical (hretorikoteron) ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... the qualities of fustian and effusiveness which Longinus most despised. Greek will not make a luxuriously Asiatic mind Hellenic, it is certain; but it may, at least, help to restrain effusive and rhetorical gabble. Our Asiatic rhetoricians might perhaps be even more barbarous than they are if Greek were a sealed book to them. However this may be, it is, at least, well to find out in a school what boys are worth instructing ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... suffer that action to go as it will, provided he gratifies them with occasional bursts of fine writing, and with a show of isolated thoughts and images; that is, they permit him to leave their poetic sense ungratified, provided that he gratifies their rhetorical sense and ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... understood at once as inviting his professional services. He, therefore, uttered a few simple words of gratitude, very quietly,—much to the satisfaction of some of the guests, who had expected one of those elaborate effusions, with rolling up of the eyes and rhetorical accents, so frequent with eloquent divines when they address their Maker ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... syllable, a defect which might be corrected by the removal of the article before the word "louder", or by the poetical contraction of "sympathy" into "symp'thy". The third line of the fourth stanza possesses only four feet. This may be an intentional shortening to give rhetorical effect, yet it mars none the less the symmetry of ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Poem[50]—that the Muse of Poetry was not mine. In prose, I was more successful. My work for The Harrovian gave me constant practice, and I twice won the School-Prize for an English Essay. In writing, I indulged to the full my taste for resonant and rolling sound; and my style was ludicrously rhetorical. The subject for the Prize Essay in 1872 was "Parliamentary Oratory: its History and Influence," and the discourse which I composed on that attractive theme has served me from that day to this as the basis of a popular lecture. The "Young ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... Latin production was more widely known and studied from the beginning of the Italian Renaissance to the middle of the seventeenth century. In its style, however, it is far from classic. It is full of archaisms and rhetorical conceits. In striving to say things finely, the author frequently failed to say them well. This fault, however, largely disappears in the translation; and whatever may be the literary defects of the novel, it offers rich ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... rhetoric in four Books, addressed to the author's relative C. Herennius, is usually printed among Cicero's works, and is attributed to him by the MSS. and by Jerome and Priscian. But it is clearly not by Cicero, for (a) it does not agree with his own description of his early rhetorical writings as 'incohata ac rudia'; (b) the author's position, as described by himself, is not Cicero's. It is generally held that one Cornificius was the author; Quintilian (e.g. v. 10, 2) attributes to a person of that name several expressions ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... contains few things more interesting than these confessions. They relate to railroad accidents, and the confessor is manifestly a man not only of remarkable discernment, but likewise of rhetorical skill."—Stone ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... which gives them convincing power. They derive their cogency from a favouring atmosphere of opinion or feeling. Two features of recent controversy suffice of themselves (if proof were needed) to establish the truth of this assertion. The rhetorical emphasis laid by Home Rulers on the baseness of the arts which carried the Act of Union is, as an argument in favour of repealing the Act, little else than irrational. The assumed infamy of Pitt does not prove the alleged wisdom of Gladstone; ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... lover during the fortnight of her convalescence. But she knew that the two Poles had been to ask after her health during her illness. The first letter Grushenka got from them was a long one, written on large notepaper and with a big family crest on the seal. It was so obscure and rhetorical that Grushenka put it down before she had read half, unable to make head or tail of it. She could not attend to letters then. The first letter was followed next day by another in which Pan Mussyalovitch begged her for a loan of two thousand roubles ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... attain to wisdom than a kitchen scullion can attain to a keen sense of smell or avoid stinking of the grease. With your indulgence, I will speak out: you—teachers —are chiefly responsible for the decay of oratory. With your well modulated and empty tones you have so labored for rhetorical effect that the body of your speech has lost its vigor and died. Young men did not learn set speeches in the days when Sophocles and Euripides were searching for words in which to express themselves. In the days when Pindar and the nine lyric poets feared to attempt Homeric verse there was no ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... very choice language; for, among their other accomplishments, the Crows are famed for possessing a Billingsgate vocabulary of unrivalled opulence, and for being by no means sparing of it whenever an occasion offers. Indeed, though Indians are generally very lofty, rhetorical, and figurative in their language at all great talks, and high ceremonials, yet, if trappers and traders may be believed, they are the most unsavory vagabonds in their ordinary colloquies; they make no hesitation to ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... a peroration of considerable eloquence, subtly graduated through a rising series of rhetorical questions, till it finally culminated and broke in the ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... like his countenance and his voice, of immense variety; sometimes plain and unpretending even to flatness; sometimes whimsically brilliant and rhetorical almost beyond the license of private discourse. He has many interesting anecdotes, and tells them very well. He is a shrewd observer; and so fastidious that I am not surprised at the awe in which many people seem to stand when in his company. Though not altogether ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... become known as the great adversary of Parliamentary government, this did not arise from any incapacity to hold his own in Parliamentary debate. He did not indeed aim at oratory; then, as in later years, he always spoke with great contempt of men who depended for power on their rhetorical ability. He was himself deficient in the physical gifts of a great speaker; powerful as was his frame, his voice was thin and weak. He had nothing of the actor in him; he could not command the deep voice, the solemn tones, the imposing gestures, the Olympian mien by which men ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... fury when, instead of the expected secrets, he found nothing but dull Latin exercises, wearisome rhetorical commonplaces on such subjects as the charms of spring and summer, the excellence of agriculture, the advantages of knowledge, the danger of the passions, and similar interesting themes. He was just about to tie the bundle up again, when it occurred to him to read one of these tiresome dissertations ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... avoided the ornamental Dress of Rhetorical Flourishes, esteeming them unfit for the naked Truth of historical Relations, and improper for the ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones
... this;—a speech from the throne falls essentially within the sphere of rhetoric, it is one's sense of rhetoric which has to fix its tone and style, so as to keep a certain note always sounding in it; in an English speech from the throne, whatever its faults, this rhetorical note is always struck and kept to; in a Prussian speech from the throne, never. An English speech from the throne is rhetoric; a Prussian speech is half talk,—heavy talk,—and half effusion. This is one instance, it may be said; true, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... epigrammatic,—of producing startling effects by artifices almost theatrical; and though his devices are obvious, they are more than forgiven for the genuine power and real naturalness behind the rhetorical masquerade. Other men's freaks and eccentricities lead to the distortion of truth and the confusion of relations, but Mr. Reade has freaks of wisdom and eccentricities of practical sagacity. Occasionally he has a stroke of observation that comes like a flash of lightning, blasting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... text is in parts uncertain, and includes obvious expansions. These removed, we can fairly distinguish a continuous metrical form up to 29, with the exception perhaps of 25-27. The metre is sometimes irregular enough to raise the suggestion(530) that the whole is rhetorical prose, between which and metre proper it is often hard, as we have seen, to draw the line. But we have also learned how often and how naturally irregular, when the subject requires it, Jeremiah's metres tend to ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... late. Mrs. Wimbush's question had been what the grammarians call rhetorical; it asked for no answer. It was a little conversational flourish, a gambit ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... as if their attitude, so long as it was maintained, was felt as a reproach by the government. At last, four were carried down to Westminster Abbey, to hear the Bishop of Durham deliver his famous sermon against the pope; and when this rhetorical inanity had also failed, and as they were thought to confirm one another in their obstinacy, they were dispersed among other houses the temper of which could be depended upon. Some were sent to the north; others to Sion, where a new prior had been appointed, ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... and equality of arguments, as leave the controversy undetermined. I am not of Paracelsus's mind, that boldly delivers a re- ceipt to make a man without conjunction; yet cannot but wonder at the multitude of heads that do deny traduction, having no other arguments to confirm their belief than that rhetorical sentence and antimetathesis<51> of Augustine, "creando infunditur, infundendo creatur." Either opinion will consist well enough with religion: yet I should rather incline to this, did not one objection haunt me, not wrung from speculations ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... form of his original, could vary from it so successfully. Most notable, probably, are the passages in which he intensified the expression of his source. They may indicate no more than the eternal "ham" in our author; but I think they probably indicate as well a new style of acting, more rhetorical in one way, more natural in another. A good example, in which the new rhetoric is not oppressive, is the account of the sea fight at the end of Act III. Even when Harris followed his original most closely, we ...
— The City Bride (1696) - Or The Merry Cuckold • Joseph Harris
... ecclesiastical activity—the wide and impassioned correspondence, the series of marvellous sermons—which have won for him the title of the Last of the Fathers. His early essays are vigorous, but lack judgement and skill; they are stiff and rhetorical, and far removed from the tender poetry of his later writings. Three years later we find Bernard credited with many miracles, narrated by William of St. Thierry, who afterwards retired to become a monk at Signy, where he wrote his record of the saint. It was then ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... and unbidden, but that they were carved, so to speak, with disproportionate labour by a potent man of letters whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is for these reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity and emotion which we usually associate with lyrical poetry. There are no such epitaphs as Ben Jonson's, witness the charming ones on his own children, ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... style of Rubens was Johnsonese all his life, and he made his meaning plain only by repetitions and many rhetorical flounderings. Like the average sixteen-year-old boy who sits himself down and takes his pen in hand, all his sprightliness of imagination vanished at sight of an ink-bottle. With a brush his feelings were fluid, and in a company grace dwelt upon his lips; but when asked to write it out he gripped ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... to take such words as a text, with any idea of exhausting or of enhancing them. My object is very much more humble. I simply wish to bring out the remarkable order, in which Paul here marshals, in his passionate, rhetorical amplification, all the enemies that can be supposed to seek to wrench us away from the love of God; and triumphs over them all. We shall best measure the fullness of the words by simply taking these clauses as they ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... wouldn't be The Gore without him," Mrs. Googe spoke earnestly. "The Colonel"—she laughed as she always did when about to quote her rhetorical neighbor—"speaks of him to everyone as 'the heart of the quarry that responds to the throb of the universal human,' and so far as I know no one has ever taken exception to ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... buildings,—and afterward, gathering yourself up in your cloak, watch in a sleepy, listless maze the flickering lamps that hang around the dreary chapel! You follow half unconsciously some tutor's rhetorical reading of a chapter of Isaiah; and then, as he closes the Bible with a flourish, your eye, half open, catches the feeble figure of the old Dominie as he steps to the desk, and, with his frail hands stretched out upon the cover of the ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... nature with scrupulous fidelity to detail, rather than conveying any special feeling or notion of what a picture of, or the landscape itself, may convey; and leaving aside the American pupils of the Academy in Paris and Rome, most of whom returned with a rich sense of rhetorical conventionalities in art—men like William Morris Hunt and Washington Allston—we may turn to that other group of men as being far more typical of our soil and temper. I mean artists such as Homer Martin, Albert P. Ryder, George ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... walk from Dover to the Solway, exercising some care that he should rise before the sun, and that he should see in clear weather the views of which I speak. A man who has done that has seen England—not the name or the map or the rhetorical catchword, but the thing. And it does not take ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... having only told it you twice before, that I swam from Sestos to Abydos. I do this that you may be impressed with proper respect for me, the performer; for I plume myself on this achievement more than I could possibly do on any kind of glory, political, poetical, or rhetorical. Having told you this, I will tell you nothing more, because it would be cruel to curtail Cam's narrative, which, by-the-by, you must not believe till confirmed by me, the eye-witness. I promise myself ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... an iron tyranny now should bend or cease"—"a cause that I felt to be pure and true"—"a giant liar"—is intolerable in a poem of which the climax is so high-pitched. Better the merest conversational familiarity, than this rhetorical magniloquence. ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... others were watching him, more or less amused by the present ineffectiveness of the assertive method. Goaded by the Torres Vedras tactics of Mr. Beamish, Mr. Fotheringay determined to make an unusual rhetorical effort. "Looky here, Mr. Beamish," said Mr. Fotheringay. "Let us clearly understand what a miracle is. It's something contrariwise to the course of nature done by power of Will, something what couldn't happen without being ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... that he hoped there would be pork for dinner on Sunday and plenty of crackling. He felt certain that Mr Bright would be sympathetic in the matter of crackling; he didn't know why, but he was sure of it. Equally convinced was he that the great statesman would express his desire in impressive and rhetorical language. He repeated "bits" from the speeches that he knew, to see if he could fasten on a chance phrase here and there that could be introduced into the common conversations of life; but they never did fit, and he was fain to express his small ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... is left out of account. Mr. Henson relegates it to a footnote, and there he declares "once for all, that the Mosaic Law has nothing to do with the question." But Mr. Henson's "once for all" has not the force of a Papal decree. It is simply a bit of rhetorical emphasis, like a flourish to a signature. Does he mean to say that the author of the Mosaic Law was not the same God who speaks to us in the New Testament? If it was the same God, "the same, yesterday, to-day, and for ever," the Mosaic Law has very much to do with the question; unless—and ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... sense the reference to the heavens is a trifle over-rhetorical. Santos-Dumont differed from all aviators (or pilots of airplanes) and most navigators of dirigibles in always advocating the strategy of staying near the ground. In his flights he barely topped the roofs of the houses, and in his writings he repeatedly ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... are somewhat offensive as the mere sentimentality of conscience and religion, introduced for the purposes of fine writing. Suspicion, also, always attaches to the morality which exhibits itself on rhetorical stilts, and the refinement which is always proclaiming itself refined. Since the time of Joseph Surface there has been a great decline in the market price ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... the Koraks to shake my confidence in my own skill. But my resources were not yet exhausted, and I hurled monosyllable, dissyllable, and polysyllable at their devoted heads, shouted "Akh! Te shelma! Proclataya takaya! Smatree! Ya tibi dam!" but all in vain; the dogs were evidently insensible to rhetorical fireworks of this description, and manifested their indifference by a still slower gait. As I poured out upon them the last vial of my verbal wrath, Dodd, who understood the language that I was so recklessly using, drove slowly up, and remarked carelessly, "You swear pretty well for ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... the next morning, to inform him that this here window-breaking case was a Messina, he found Mr. Nathan Asche already solidly there present, engaged in advising Mr. Magnus most emphatically to the exact contrary. Indeed the attorney was rhetorical in his insistence that this destruction of the property of ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... be pressed too far. The critical faculty, even where fully present, may be overpowered by the rhetorical impulse; and of all forms of poetry the epigram has the greatest right to be fanciful. "This is the Satyr of Diodorus; if you touch it, it will awake; the silver is asleep,"[17]—obviously this play of fancy has nothing to do with serious criticism. And of a really serious feeling ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... mean, has there been for me? If it is true that success is to be measured by the fulfilment of desires, then through all these years I have but stood by the bank of the Danube. You know that I am an exemplar, fit for a schoolboy's rhetorical exercise, of the old lesson of life, that wealth and power do not bring fruition in the intimate affections and hopes. My son, my daughter, have died.[3] The only son left to me is a daily torture to ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... provinces, cities and towns," continues Burton, "have their periods, and are consumed." "Kingdoms and provinces, and towns and cities," exclaims Mr. Shandy, throwing the sentence, like the "born orator" his son considered him, into the rhetorical interrogative, "have they not their periods?" "Where," he proceeds, "is Troy, and Mycenae, and Thebes, and Delos, and Persepolis, and Agrigentum? What is become, brother Toby, of Nineveh and Babylon, of Cyzicum and Mytilene? The fairest towns that ever ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... substituted occasionally, but less frequently of late years, for the much older 'Dominion of the sea' or 'Sovereignty of the sea,' a legal term expressing a claim, if not a right. It has also been sometimes treated as though it were identical with the rhetorical expression 'Empire of the sea.' Mahan, instead of it, uses the term 'Control of the sea,' which has the merit of precision, and is not likely to be misunderstood or mixed up with a form of words meaning something ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... stain to this hour on most of the political writing and oratory of America, and may wish that the birth of a nation had not been screamed into the world after this fashion. Nothing could have been easier than, in the like rhetorical language, to draw up a list of lawlessness and utter outrage committed by the colonists. Some of the charges will not ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... me?" Littlejohn asked. The question was purely rhetorical, but he wanted to break the silence. Thurmon looked ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... Italians to understand how her boy's silence must have aggravated the Countess's grief. Precious as a message from a dying son would be to any mother, such signs of tenderness have to the Italians a peculiar significance. The Latin race is rhetorical: it possesses the gift of death-bed eloquence, the knack of saying the effective thing on momentous occasions. The letters which the Italian patriots sent home from their prisons or from the scaffold are not the halting farewells that anguish would have wrung from ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... was a favourite counsellor in three successive reigns, but he never meddled much in civil or temporal affairs. His learning made him the equal and the friend of Grotius, and of the foremost contemporary scholars. His preaching was a unique combination of rhetorical splendour and scholarly richness; his piety that of an ancient saint, semi-ascetic and unearthly in its self-denial. As a churchman he is typically Anglican, equally removed from the Puritan and the Roman positions. He stands in true succession ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 26th December, 1792, the King appeared a second time before the Convention. M. de Seze, labouring night and day, had completed his defence. The King insisted on excluding from it all that was too rhetorical, and confining it to the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... satisfaction, struts twice or thrice across the dingy room, as if he would show how far he has gained his equilibrium. "I shall go straight mad; yes, mad, if the whiskey be not brought in," he pursues, stopping short in one of his sallies, and with a rhetorical flourish, pointing at the piece of silver he so exultingly tossed upon the table. As if his brain were again seized by the destroyer's flame, his countenance becomes livid, his eyes glare wildly upon each object near him; then he draws himself ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... utterance which many people consider equally objectionable, overlooking, as he does, the existence through all the processes of nature of a principle of reserve and concealment. Amid much that is prosaic and rhetorical, however, it remains true that there is real poetic insight and an intense and singularly fresh sense of nature in the ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... similes too, though somewhat savouring of her condition. Had she but read Euphues, and forgotten that accursed mill and shieling-hill, it is my thought that her converse would be broidered with as many and as choice pearls of compliment, as that of the most rhetorical lady in the court of Feliciana. I trust she means to return to bear ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... several short sentences; and in this manner he seemed to go back to the ancients, who had not yet invented the period: but still there was a great difference between his style, in which the ancient simplicity was artificially restored, and the genuine ancient sentence formed without any rhetorical art. He wrote without periods, because he would not write otherwise, and not because he could not; he divided the rhetorical period into separate sentences, because it appeared to him advantageous in his animated description of minute ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... such touches of expression as characterise verse, or rhetorical prose. I find in one sermon the sentence, "Think you St Paul trembled at the prospect?" Please re-write this, and say, "Do you think St Paul was afraid?" For you certainly would not say, speaking however gravely, to your friend, "Think you that ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... and dances, and sharing in the sins connected with them. Thus Arianism had many affinities with heathenism, in its philosophical idea of the Supreme, in its worship of a demigod of the vulgar type, in its rhetorical methods, and in its generally lower moral tone. Heathen influences ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... progressively refined, became fixed in the writings of Kalidasa, Jayadeva, and other poets. A fourth period, including the tenth century A.D., may be added, distinguished by its erudition, grammatical, rhetorical, and scientific disquisitions, which, however, is not considered as belonging to the classical age. From the Hindu languages, originating in the Sanskrit, new literatures have sprung; but they are essentially founded on the ancient literature, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... displays great ability, and challenges careful attention. It is powerful, earnest, feeling, and eloquent; the production of a man acquainted with society, who has looked closely upon its various classes, and has the power of reading the signs of the times. He has a truthful vigor of description, a rhetorical rather than a dramatic power; or he sacrifices the latter to his habit of expressing his opinions in dialogue, where the author talks rather than the dramatis personae. There is a genial warmth of feeling in the book, and wide human sympathies, but with a tendency ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... the last item, the great variety of movements subordinating the line-unit, and running-on of verses into longer periods, for which his blank verse is famous. Every page of Paradise Lost contains examples; some of the finest occur in the rhetorical display of the Pandemonic Council in Book II. Note the position of the pauses in the following passage, and then compare the specimens of early ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... a life-time in studying stammering, stuttering and kindred speech defects. I have written this book out of the fullness of that experience—I might almost say out of my daily work. I have made no attempt at literary style or rhetorical excellence and while the work may be homely in expression the information it contains is definite and positive—and what is more ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... resorts to the puff direct, and never indulges in the puff figurative, so much practised by his renowned predecessor, the late knight of the hammer, Christie, the elder, who by the superabundancy of his rhetorical 18flurishes, was accustomed from his elevated rostrum to edify ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... a teacher, but as a writer, that Cicero demands a place in educational history. His writings furnish the finest examples of Latin style, and his orations are studied for their classic beauty and rhetorical finish. He wrote many philosophical works, in which are set forth advanced ideas on education. Especially was he in advance of his age in regard to the punishment of children. He held that corporal punishment should be resorted to only when all else has failed; that the child should ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... the Channel. Her temper was above all industrial. Men who were working hard and fast growing rich, who had the narrow and practical turn of men of business, looked angrily at this sudden disturbance of order, this restless and vague activity, these rhetorical appeals to human feeling, these abstract and often empty theories. In England it was a time of political content and social well-being, of steady economic progress, as well as of a powerful religious revival; and an insular lack of imaginative interest ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... went well, but from the very beginning of the visit he observed, or thought he observed, awkward phenomena. The country was thrilled with political excitement, and it vibrated with rhetorical resolutions which seemed to Ibsen very empty. He had a constitutional horror of purely theoretical questions, and these were occupying Norway from one end to the other. The King's veto, the consular difficulty, the Swedish emblem in the ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... with their bawling crowds and flaring lights, something of the same magical world that he had found them. Supposing that man were Ilbert? Well, supposing it were so, what business had he to resent it? But however he might ask himself rhetorical questions, the jealousy of the natural man swept over him in passion and fury. He said to himself that now he knew why he had always hated Ilbert. It was a prevision of ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... preferment,—and the universities on the other. The latter prided themselves on their closer approximation to the ancient rules and ancient regularity—taking the theatre of Greece, or rather its dim reflection, the rhetorical tragedies of the poet Seneca, as a perfect ideal, without any critical collation of the times, origin, or circumstances;—whilst, in the mean time, the popular writers, who could not and would not abandon what they had found to delight their countrymen sincerely, and not merely from inquiries ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... here I found I might set up my pillar; for although there was a door out of it to a back pair of stairs which led to it, yet that was kept locked. So that finding I had now followed my keeper's direction to the utmost point, beyond which I could not go, I sat down and considered that rhetorical saying, "That the way to Heaven lay by the gate of Hell;" the black room, through which I passed into this, bearing some resemblance to the latter, as this comparatively and by way of allusion might in some sort be thought to bear ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... them by their divine progenitor, the great Mana. They added passages, moreover, which assert the divine claims of Brahmans and the inferiority of the rest of mankind. Such assertions are little more than rhetorical flourishes, for Brahmans never were either so omnipotent or so unamiable as the Code would represent them; nor were the Sudras ever so degraded. In Sanskrit plays and poems, weak and indigent Brahmans are by no means unfrequent; and, ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... of the term "barbarism" is not merely rhetorical nor cheap invective. It is exact. One of the Olympian jests of this world tragedy has been the passionate verbal battles over the claims of respective "Kulturs" to the favor of survival. Why deny that the ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... Orator, or Rhetorical Descents by way of declamation upon some notable Themes, both ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... across the Rubicon, and Cicero after much irresolution threw in his lot with Pompey, who was overthrown the next year in the battle of Pharsalus and later murdered in Egypt. Cicero returned to Italy, where Caesar treated him magnanimously, and for some time he devoted himself to philosophical and rhetorical writing. In 46 B.C. he divorced his wife Terentia, to whom he had been married for thirty years and married the young and wealthy Publilia in order to relieve himself from financial difficulties; but her also he shortly divorced. Caesar, who had now become supreme ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... description, must have been about the size of our third-rates, contained as much corn as maintained all Attica for a twelvemonth; but, in the time of this author, Athens was not nearly so populous as it had been: and besides, as is justly remarked by Hume, it is not safe to trust to such loose rhetorical illustrations. ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... enjoyed the best of opportunities, and is a writer of rare taste and rhetorical force, and an eloquent and impressive speaker. As a preacher he is never speculative and theoretical, never dogmatic nor sectarian, but eminently spiritual and practical. But the strongest point in his character is ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... pronounce Johnson's failure in the production of dramatic effect, we will not withhold our tribute of admiration from Irene, as a moral piece. For, although a remark of Fox's on an unpublished tragedy of Burke's, that it was rather rhetorical than poetical, may be applied to the work under consideration; still it abounds, throughout, with the most elevated and dignified lessons of morality and virtue. The address of Demetrius to the aged Cali, on the ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... loved by large numbers of people, must appeal to no rich personal experience, no patience of study, no delicacy of sense; and if at rare moments some 'Memory of the Dead' can take its strength from one; at all other moments manner and matter will be rhetorical, conventional, sentimental; and language, because it is carried beyond life perpetually, will be as wasted as the thought, with unmeaning pedantries and silences, and a dread of all that has salt and savour. After a while, ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... one hand, or the goats on the other. His pages are the record of sentences passed, not the presentation of human characters in all their fulness and colour; and the consequence is that even now and so soon, in spite of all their rhetorical brilliance, their hold on men has grown slack. Contrast the dim depths into which his essay on Johnson is receding, with the vitality as of a fine dramatic creation which exists in Mr. Carlyle's essay on the same man. Mr. ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... insists on the impartiality of law and the equal admission of all citizens to office. The Declaration of 1793 is more emphatic about equality, and more rhetorical. Article III reads, "All men are equal by ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... this without any apparent effort after rhetorical effect; but the suddenness with which he had presented a very obvious truism in a fresh light to me made the conception of the vastness of space absolutely oppressive. In the hope of changing the subject ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... was rhetorical, because with its standard, the thing stood five feet high and weighed ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... an exceedingly recondite truth. I, Sir, think the Established Church of Ireland a bad institution. I will go farther. I am not speaking in anger, or with any wish to excite anger in others; I am not speaking with rhetorical exaggeration: I am calmly and deliberately expressing, in the only appropriate terms, an opinion which I formed many years ago, which all my observations and reflections have confirmed, and which I am prepared to support by reasons, when I say that, of all the institutions ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... process went even farther than secretiveness in its reaction from the large rhetorical forms of revolutionary Socialism. There arose even a repudiation of 'principles' of action, and a type of worker which proclaimed itself 'Opportunist-Socialist.' This conception of indifference to the forms of government, of accepting whatever governing bodies existed ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... children and the conduct of the disciples in Gethsemane, are met with frequently enough to this day, and in works of a more professedly critical character than Justin's. The description of the carpenter's trade and of the crowd at the Crucifixion may be merely rhetorical amplifications in the one case of the general Synoptic statement, in the other of the special statement in St. Mark. A certain fulness of style is characteristic of Justin. That he attributes the genealogy to Mary may be a natural ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... LIFE," by Dr. R. C. Flower, Spectator Publishing Co., Boston, 52 pages, 50 cents. This handsome brochure discusses many prevalent evils in a pungent and rhetorical style and gives a great amount of good advice in a sprightly ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... article is all that fancy can paint or bright hope inspire; that in every household made glad by its presence it will be regarded always and forever as a heaven-given boon!" Suddenly dropping his rhetorical tone and coming down to the tone of business, the man went on: "You'll buy one, won't ...
— Our Pirate Hoard - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... "consecutio aeternitatis"). Examples are to be found in Tertullian[283] adv. Marc. I. 28 and elsewhere; and Cyprian speaks of the "bath of regeneration and sanctification" ("lavacrum regenerationis et sanctificationis"). Moreover, we pretty frequently find rhetorical passages where, on the strength of New Testament texts, all possible blessings are associated with baptism.[284] The constant additions to the baptismal ritual, a process which had begun at a very early period, are partly due to the ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... position for a man of Bolingbroke's genius and ambition when he found himself thus compelled to put up with an empty office at a sham court. Bolingbroke's desire was to play on a great stage, with a vast admiring audience. He loved the heat and passion of debate; he enjoyed his own rhetorical triumphs. He must have been chilled and cramped indeed in a situation which allowed him no opportunity of displaying his most splendid and genuine qualities, while it constantly called on him for the exercise of the very qualities which he had least at hand. Nature ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... species always entertains, but never satiates. Even puns please, from the aptness and pleasantry of their conceits. His wit is so predominant, that, if we may be allowed the expression, it is discovered in his silence. A most striking example of this is where he uses the rhetorical figure called the Aposiopesis, or suppression, in displaying the head of a prostitute: he introduces it with saying, "This is the head of a woman of the town, or a ———; but, whatever other title the lady may have, we are not entitled ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens
... wings of happy mem'ry to that hour When we, amid the plaudits of the hosts, Did well proclaim to all the happy words Which Caesar to expectant ears did send. My heart doth overflow, when I recall The ecstasy that spoke in thunder tones And like to period rhetorical Did ever punctuate each proper pause. Quick did I note in what well ordered ranks Our party friends did form before the stand. Quezox: But, noble Sire, methought I in each eye Discovered greedy looks which portend ill. (Enters ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... always respected, and who discovered in him poetical power. He encouraged him to write, as a Thursday's night's task, a translation of the third Satire of Persius, a writer precisely of that vigorously rhetorical, rapidly satirical, and semi-poetical school, which Dryden was qualified to appreciate and to mirror; besides other pieces of a similar kind which are lost. During the last year of his residence at Westminster, and when only eighteen years ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... nevertheless certain, that many pains, as well as pleasures, are heightened by rhetorical affectation, and that the picture is, for the most part, bigger than ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... heard a new story, a rare thing, and began with the narration of it. Alongside the chairman sat Senator Thurston. He was a fine speaker, very ornate and highly rhetorical. He never indulged in humor or unbent his dignity and formality. I heard him say in a sepulchral voice to the chairman: "Great God, sir, the dignity and solemnity of this most important and historical occasion is to be ruined ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... friendship to be the jewell of humaine joye; yet whosoever shall see this amitie grounded upon a little affection, will soone conjecture that it shall be dissolved upon a light occasion.' Others of Lyly's affectations are rhetorical questions, hosts of allusions to classical history, and literature, and an unfailing succession of similes from all the recondite knowledge that he can command, especially from the fantastic collection of fables ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... things that were of any moment, and disposing them in the best and most natural order he could think of; having studied the strictness of a severe historian, without helping out things with his invention or setting them off by a rhetorical style of language. Nay, all that is contained in Mr. M. Ward's large letter concerning him, is told almost in his very words with a little variation of the order wherein he had placed the same, omitting the many long digressions on several subjects which ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... small herring or menhaden. He taught them the proper care of the soil, and the rotation of crops. This passionate love of the earth was an integral part of the man. As the force of his mind drew its power, not from mere rhetorical facility, but from fundamental principles, so his magnificent body, like that of the fabled Antaeus, seemed to draw perennial potency from contact with the earth. To acquire land—he owned nearly eighteen hundred acres at the ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... mental gift, it requires culture. But style is little helped from without. The most, as to the form of his utterance, that a writer can get from others—whether through study of the best masters or through direct rhetorical instruction—is in the mechanical portion of the art; that is, how to put sentences together according to relation of clauses, how by position of words and phrases to avoid obscurity and awkwardness, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... diversions were wholly speculative, tending to improve the mind and enlarge the understanding. In this manner he now spent five days at his Tusculan villa in discussing with his friends the several questions just mentioned. For, after employing the mornings in declaiming and rhetorical exercises, they used to retire in the afternoon into a gallery, called the Academy, which he had built for the purpose of philosophical conferences, where, after the manner of the Greeks, he held a school, as they called it, and invited the company to call for ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... as it were, between them, which characterize our recollections of this whole great field. The modern critics and comparers of English and French drama are fond of contrasting the full, rich, even prodigal characterization, rhetorical and lyrical beauty of the Shakespearean drama with the cold, clear, logical, but resistless movement of the French. Yet the contrast is not quite that between characterization and form; the essential form is common to both. In the first place, Elizabethan drama was platform ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer |
