"Satirist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... questions of law of the highest magnitude and importance. Nothing in his life was more remarkable than the new character in which he now appeared. The practiced statesman, the elegant scholar and the writer of graceful sketches, the satirist, the critic, the theologian, started up a profound jurist. During the four years in which he sat in this Court, he heard the arguments in nearly every case which came before it, and delivered seventy-one opinions—not simply his written conclusions, but ...
— A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin - Verplanck • William Cullen Bryant
... deep eyes Deepened and softened, when they spoke of Kit, For many a month thereafter) it was Nash That took the blow like steel into his heart. Nash, our "Piers Penniless," whom Rob Greene had called "Young Juvenal," the first satirist of our age, Nash, of the biting tongue and subtle sneer, Brooded upon it, till his grief became Sharp as a rapier, ready to lunge in hate At all the lies of ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... German horror, to appal every timid heart. Hence, we have been haunted by ghosts of all complexions; and "Cloud Kings," and "Water Kings," and "Fire Kings," have been crowned by this poetical magician, to rule with despotism in the realms of Fancy. A lively satirist, endowed with the gifts of Genius, easy in versification, pleasant in his humour, and inimitably successful in parody, has, in some of his "Tales of Terror" undertaken to mock the doleful tones of Mr. Lewis's muse, or shall we rather say the hoarse caw of the German raven. The midnight ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... admit so much even jestingly of himself, it is but legitimate to presume that there is no great exaggeration in the portrait of him in 1735, by the anonymous satirist of Seasonable Reproof:— ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... it? Age after age the few cast away their lives striving to raise and to ransom the many. What use? Juvenal scourged Rome, and the same vices that his stripes lashed then, laugh triumphant in Paris to-day! The satirist, and the poet, and the prophet strain their voices in vain as the crowds rush on; they are drowned in the chorus of mad sins and sweet falsehoods! O God! the waste of hope, the waste of travail, the waste of pure desire, the waste of high ambitions!—nothing endures but ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... all—of the qualifications required: a sharp judgment united with a distinct predilection for the marvellous, an unquestionable piety combined with man-of-the-worldliness, and a toleration of human infirmities. It is hardly necessary to point out the critical incompetence of those who say that a satirist like Map could not have written the Quest and the Mort. Such critics would make two Peacocks as the simultaneous authors of Nightmare Abbey and Rhododaphne—nay, two Shakespeares to father the Sonnets and the Merry Wives. If any one will turn to the stories of Gerbert and Meridiana, of ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... applauded. Says a British Review, with an admiration whose reservations are unfortunately too just to be disputed: 'All at once we have a batch of small satirists,—Mr. Bailey at their head,—in England, and one really powerful satirist in America, namely, Mr. J.R. Lowell, whose "Biglow Papers" we most gladly welcome as being not only the best volume of satires since the Anti-Jacobin, but also the first work of real and efficient poetical genius which has reached us from the United States. We have ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... anti-Socialist moralist and the social satirist would appeal to the Owner's sense of duty; he would declare in a platitudinous tone that property had its duties as well as its rights, and so forth. The Socialist, however, looks a little deeper, and puts the thing differently. He brings both rights and duties to a keener scrutiny. What underlies ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... the loyal old host, a well-known song of the Commonwealth time, which some puritanical wag had written in reprehension of the Cavaliers, and their dissolute courses, and in which his father came in for a lash of the satirist. ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... race. The licentious thinker and writer prejudices the liberty of thinking and writing. Those who excel in letters, and in the right use of letters, are sensitive to their misapplication. Hence arises a species of satire, or, if you will, satirist—THE SCRIBLERO-MASTIX. He must attack individuals. A heavily-resounding lash should scourge the immoral and the profane. Light stripes may suffice for quelling the less nocent dunces. In commonplace prose criticism, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... the Journal Pour Rire, but then he undertook to illustrate the work of Rabelais, the great satirist, whose text just suited Dore's pencil. After Rabelais he illustrated Balzac, also the "Wandering Jew," "Don Quixote," ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... Amsterdam merchant as the satirist sees him, the locus classicus is Multatuli's famous novel Max Havelaar, where he stands delightfully nude in the person of Mr. Drystubble, head of the firm of Last and Co., Coffee-brokers, No. 37 Laurier Canal. Max Havelaar was published in the early sixties to draw attention ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... worthless. Nor was Cooper well equipped by nature and temperament for depicting character and passion in social life. Even in his best romances his heroines and his "leading juveniles"—to borrow a term from the amateur stage—are insipid and conventional. He was no satirist, and his humor was not of a high order. He was a rapid and uneven writer, and, unlike Irving, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... pre-eminence as a satirist, Kielland resembles Thackeray. His satire, although keen, is always wholesome, ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... the man who gives out of his superfluity, but it has condemned him who keeps too much to himself. All literature, from the earliest times, is full of denunciation of such a character. The miserly and the stingy have been impaled over and over again on the sword of the satirist. ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... faith committed to her keeping. But our practical men forget there may be remedies worse than the disease; that latent heresy may be worse than a contest of "party;" and, in their treatment of the Church, they fulfil the satirist's ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... first place, La Bruyere was the name of the French satirist that I could not remember the other day. In the second place, I have a letter from Mr. Lowell, inviting me to deliver the second course of lectures, and the time fixed upon is the winter after next; I can't be prepared by next winter. As to the title, I think, after all, Herder's is the best: ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... manners, and of throwing into verse the very spirit of society as it existed around him; and he had imbued each line with a peculiar yet perfectly natural and homely humor. This excellent ballad compels me to regret, that, instead of becoming a satirist in politics and science, and wasting his strength on temporary and evanescent topics, he had not continued to be a rural poet. A volume of such sketches as "Jonathan's Courtship," describing various aspects of life among the yeomanry of New England, could not have failed ...
— Biographical Sketches - (From: "Fanshawe and Other Pieces") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... him, an "omnipresent creativeness." Whatever he could sympathize with, he could embody and vitally represent; but his sympathies, though wide, were far from being universal, and when he was indifferent or hostile, the dramatist was partially suspended in the satirist and caricaturist, and oversight took the place of insight. Indeed, his limitations are more easily indicated than his enlargements. We know what he has not done more surely than we know what he has done; for if we attempt to follow his genius ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... with vulgarity of the 'Close-Stool' and 'Clyster' variety" (p. 376). The reader need look no further than Namby Pamby to see that Carey satisfies Northrop Frye's very proper observation: "Genius seems to have led practically every great satirist to become what ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous
... ——, of Brooklyn, but, lo! a lot of people in full dress. We had a regular state dinner, course after course. Dr. —— sat next me and made himself very agreeable, except when he said I was the most subtle satirist he ever met (I did run him a little). Mrs. —— is a picture. She had a way of looking at me through her eyeglass till she put me out of countenance, and then smiling in a sweet, satisfied manner, and laying down her glass. We came home as soon as the gentlemen left the table, and got ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... value, and will be read for its intrinsic merit, consulted for its crowd of valuable references, quoted for its aid to one side of many a discussion, and opposed for its force against the other. Its author was also a wit and a satirist. I know of three classical satires of our day which are inimitable imitations: Mr. Malden's[283] Pragmatized Legends, Mr. Mansel's[284] Phrontisterion, and Sir G. Cornewall Lewis's Inscriptio Antiqua. In this last, HEYDIDDLEDIDDLETHECATANDTHEFIDDLE etc. is treated ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... Rossetti, Rabelais, Dumas, and about Shakespeare and his circle. In all the poems about books in this volume there is excellent characterisation, excellent criticism, and in the ode to Burns a very notable discrimination of the greater Burns, not the Burns of the love-poems but the fighter, the satirist, the poet of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... For years the Irish people had submitted to any and every imposition of foreign tyranny, taught to believe that forcible resistance to outrage on their national liberties was in itself immoral. The sneer of the satirist that the Irish were:— ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... and I have pleasure in reminding you that a female satirist by profession is yet an anomaly in the history of our literature, as a female schismatic is yet unknown in the history of our religion. But to what do you attribute the number of satirical women ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... touch with humanity. Our careful humanitarians, our charitable ones, never do, for they stick to their conservatism. How we do fashion our own fetters, from chains to corsets, and from gods to governments. Oh, how I wish I were a fine lean satirist!—with a great black-snake whip of sarcasm to scourge the smug and genial ones, the self-righteous, charitable, and respectable ones! How I would lay the lash on corpulent content and fat faith with folds in its belly; chin ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... of the Stuarts, and had returned to England, to join themselves with those whom we have classed generally as Cromwell's "subjects by compulsion." Leading cases were those of Hobbes, Sir William Davenant, and Abraham Cowley; with which, for convenience, may be associated that of the satirist Cleveland, though he had never gone into exile, but had remained in England, taking the risks.—HOBBES, who had been in Paris since 1641, to be out of the bustle of the English confusions, but who had come into central connexion with ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... their profuse expressions of homage. The festival of his coronation was celebrated with unparalleled pomp, August 26th. The Borgia arms, a grazing steer, was displayed so generally in the decorations, and was the subject of so many epigrams, that a satirist remarked that Rome was celebrating the discovery of the Sacred Apis. Subsequently the Borgia bull was frequently the object of the keenest satire; but at the beginning of Alexander's reign it was, naively enough, the ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... diametrically opposed to its spirit and to its letter, see, among other passages, Deut. v. 18. 19, (God) "loveth the stranger in giving him food and raiment. Love ye, therefore, the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." Comp. Lev. xxiii. 25. Juvenal is a satirist, whose strong expressions can hardly be received as historic evidence; and he wrote after the horrible cruelties of the Romans, which, during and after the war, might give some cause for the complete ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... answers Fer rogain, "unless it is Luchdonn the satirist in Emain Macha, who makes this hand-smiting when his food is taken from him perforce: or the scream of Luchdonn in Temair Luachra: or Mac cecht's striking a spark, when he kindles a fire before a king of Erin where he sleeps. Every spark and every shower which ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... of it as commonly used by sailors, not merely as the secret of the learned. "When they cannot see the sun clearly in cloudy weather, or at night, and cannot tell which way their prow is tending, they put a Needle above a Magnet which revolves till its point looks North and then stops." So the satirist, Guyot de Provins, in his Bible of about 1210, wishes the Pope were as safe a point to steer by in Faith as the North Star in sailing, "which mariners can keep ahead of them, without sight of it, only by the pointing of a needle floating on a straw in water, once touched ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... arose an objectionable class of men, who tried to ape the gentleman, but could not, and they went by the generic term of "Gents." Punch was death upon them, and I give one of the satirist's onslaughts, as it reproduces the costumes and amusements of the day. First let us see the "Gent" pictorially, and then, afterwards, read what manner of animal ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... the contrivance of an unknown and unfathomable malice? Balder, Lord of Heaven, instinct with the essence of Hell! A grim satire on his religious speculations! But what satirist had been bitter enough so to forestall the years?—for the painting must have been designed while Balder ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... Dacier making out that Ennius was the first satirist in that way of writing, which was of his invention—that is, satire abstracted from the stage and new modelled into papers of verses on several subjects. But he will have Ennius take the groundwork of satire from the first farces of the Romans ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... bow on the metal point designed to shut refractory windows. Helen Vane Baker, a contribution from Society to the art of fiction, with flowing hair and arrayed in a long nightgown over her dress, fortunately white, was assisted to the top of the bookcase on the west wall. Henry Church, a famous satirist, muffled in a fur cloak, a small black silk handkerchief pinned about his lively face, stumped heavily into the room, fell in a heap on the floor against the opposite wall, and in a magnificent bass growled out the resentment ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... arranged them in one large volume, he sought the assistance of Mr. Wright, who had just then published his History of the House of Hanover, illustrated by Caricatures, and Mr. R. H. Evans, the well-known bibliopole, towards an anecdotical catalogue of the works of this clever satirist: and the result of the labours of these gentlemen has just been published under the title of Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray, comprising a Political and Humorous History of the latter Part of the Reign of George III. The volume ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various
... did her feeble best to reply to them. But while strong in her organization and her legal powers, her internal condition was far from vigorous. Incredulity had become fashionable even before the attacks of Voltaire were dangerous. An earlier satirist has put into the mouth of a priest an account of the difficulties which beset the clergy in those days. "Men of the world," he says, "are astonishing. They can bear neither our approval nor our censure. If we wish to correct them, they think us ridiculous. If we approve ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... Interdiction of prophane Cursing and Swearing, Obscenity, Scurrility, Calumny, and Detraction, yet with a full Indulgence of proper Satire against such as merited popular Reprehension, or Contempt; the Satirist's Pen in those Days being as much dreaded, or rather more so, than the Magistrate's Rod, and consequently as diligently avoided by a Demeanour ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... room, however, they found a performer of much greater capacity—a man who possessed considerable powers as a musician, low comedian, and local satirist; he was noted for his delineations of native character, and succeeded in making the Parsees laugh heartily at his caricature of the Hindus, while he convulsed the Hindus with his clever skits on the Parsees. ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... has rested on its foundations. Now it is the supreme function of the philosopher of the grotesque to make the world stand on its head that people may look at it. If we say "a man is a man" we awaken no sense of the fantastic, however much we ought to, but if we say, in the language of the old satirist, "that man is a two-legged bird, without feathers," the phrase does, for a moment, make us look at man from the outside and gives us a thrill in his presence. When the author of the Book of Job insists upon the huge, ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... Mr. Bill Williams, Asquare!" simpered the little satirist. "Some folks call me Gentleman Bill, 'cause I'm so smart ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... literary legacy to Boethius, Dante, and Jean de Meung; it was incorporated by Frezzi in his strange allegorical composition the Quadriregio, and was thrice handled by Chaucer; it was dealt with humorously by Cervantes in Don Quixote, and became the prey of the satirist in the hands of Juvenal, Bertini, and Hall. The association of this ideal world with the simplicity of pastoral life was effected by Vergil, and in this form it was treated with loving minuteness by Tasso in his Aminta and by Browne in his Britannia's Pastorals[2]. ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... a great mistake," I said, "for Thackeray is a satirist pur et simple. Jerrold was a cynic, if you please, although he had a wonderful amount of kindly feeling even in his bitterest moods—indeed I would rather prefer calling him a one-sided advocate of the poor against the rich, than apply ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... to his readers the evil consequences of evil conduct. It was perhaps his chief fault as a writer that he could never abstain from that dash of satire which he felt to be demanded by the weaknesses which he saw around him. The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little,—or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives. I myself regard Esmond as the greatest novel in the English language, ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... Some railbird satirist near the wire bawled "Go!" as the unspeakable riot swept past in dust-clouds. The Honorable Bickford had early possessed himself of the bell-cord as his inalienable privilege. He did not ring the bell to call ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... strong spiritual assertion of Emerson with the purely negative attitude of the French satirist was a common mistake in those days, and the Lowell of 1838 needs small excuse for it. He must have been in a biting humor at this time, for there is a cut all round in his class poem, although it is the most vigorous and highly-finished ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... obsolescent, takes heavily from the realism of Jonson's methods, nor does his use of a careful vocabulary of contemporary colloquialism and slang save him from a certain dryness and tediousness to modern readers. The truth is he was less a satirist of contemporary manners than a satirist in the abstract who followed the models of classical writers in this style, and he found the vices and follies of his own day hardly adequate to the intricacy and elaborateness of the ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Eating of Oysters", is reputed to have rendered a still more signal service to literature, for in its two concluding paragraphs is contained the idea which, under the transforming hand of the master satirist, eventually took the world by storm when it appeared, fully developed, as ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... I thought, our satirist has just gone far enough into his neighbours to find that the outside is false, without caring to go farther and discover what is really true. He is content to find that things are not what they seem, and broadly generalises from it that they do not exist at all. He sees ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... — N. detractor, reprover; censor, censurer; cynic, critic, caviler, carper, word-catcher, frondeur; barracker[obs3]. defamer, backbiter, slanderer, Sir Benjamin Backbite, lampooner, satirist, traducer, libeler, calumniator, dawplucker[obs3], Thersites[obs3]; Zoilus; good-natured friend [satirically]; reviler, vituperator, castigator; shrew &c. 901; muckraker. disapprover, laudator temporis acti [Lat][Horace]. Adj. black-mouthed, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... hardly, indeed, a Latin author from which an attentive reader may not pick up some detail of Roman customs. Cicero's letters are themselves very prolific. But the pretty things of the poets are not quite facts, nor are the bitter things of the satirist; and though a man's letters to his friend may be true, such letters as come to us will have been the products of the greater minds, and will have come from a small and special class. I fear that the Newgate Calendar of the day would tell us more of the ways ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... who said, "The Irish are all right, but you must catch them young." When England wants a superbly strong man she has to send to Ireland for him. Note Burke, her greatest orator; Swift, her greatest satirist; Goldsmith, her sweetest poet; Arthur Wellesley, her greatest fighter—not to mention Lord Bobs—all awfully Irish. And to America comes Alexander Turney Stewart, aged twenty, very Irish, shy, pink, blue of eye, with downy whiskers, intending to teach school until ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... becomes a point of dispute capable of bringing gods, popes, emperors, kings, princes, cities, and whole nations into conflict. At the same time the satirist betrays his malice by departing as little as possible from the main current of actual events. History lends verisimilitude to the preposterous assumption that heaven and earth were drawn into a squabble about a bucket: and if there is any moral to ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... he must by nature possess the more essential characteristics of his author. Admitting this, Creech writes with a slight air of apology, "I cannot choose but smile to think that I, who have ... too little ill nature (for that is commonly thought a necessary ingredient) to be a satirist, should venture upon Horace."[415] Dryden finds by experience that he can more easily translate a poet akin to himself. His translations of Ovid please him. "Whether it be the partiality of an old man to his youngest child I ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... whose soul was deeply stirred by the sight of the new sufferings of an ancient people was the Russian satirist, Shchedrin-Saltykov, and he poured forth his, sentiments in the summer of 1882, after the completion of the first cycle of pogroms, in an article marked by a lyric strain, so different from his usual style. [1] But Shchedrin was the only Russian writer of prominence who responded ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... demand for his other writings. Among those which are well worthy of being read for their own sakes, I would assign a prominent place to the present volume. Much of the story element in it is admirable, and, further, it shows M. Zola as a genuine satirist and humorist. The Rougons' yellow drawing-room and its habitues, and many of the scenes between Pierre Rougon and his wife Felicite, are worthy of the pen of Douglas Jerrold. The whole account, indeed, of the ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... the whole course pursued by the miserable men who perpetrated it. The author of Hudibras unjustly—we hope not maliciously—in his witty doggerel, ascribes this transaction of the miscreants at Weymouth to the Pilgrims at Plymouth. The mirth-loving satirist seemed to rejoice at the chance of directing a shaft ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... course marked out by our great Satirist— And write about it, Goddess, and about it— more strictly followed, than in the compositions which the present Rowleiomania has produced. Mercy upon us! Two octavo volumes and a huge quarto, to prove the forgeries of an attorney's clerk at Bristol in 1769, the productions of a priest in ...
— Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782) • Edmond Malone
... Affectation is felt to be a disharmony between the pose and the inner values or an attempt to win superiority or "difference" of a superior kind by acting. In either case it excites ridicule, hatred or disgust, and shafts at it form part of the stock in trade of the satirist, humorist and indeed every portrayer of life. What men demand of each other is sincerity, and even where the insincerity is merely a habitual pose it arouses hostile feeling which expresses itself all the way from criticism to ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... requires no great acuteness to detect, or courage to expose, their consequences—the name of Choiseul, or Uzeda, or Buckingham, or Bruhl, or Kaunitz, may be applied to such descriptions with equal probability and equal justice. But when the Tiers Etat are portrayed, when the satirist enters into detail, when he enumerates circumstances, when local manners, national habits, and individual peculiarities fall under his notice; when he describes the specific disease engendered in the atmosphere by which his characters are surrounded; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... order, nor condition, Imperial, lowly, or patrician, Shall, when they see this volume, cry, "The satirist has pass'd us by:" But, with good humour, view our page Depict the manners of ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... reach'd a warrior-pair that stood In feigned strife upon a knoll of green, Their weapons clashing but unstained with blood, A satirist him besought to intervene, Whereat he slew them as he drave between— "Thy spear to me," the satirist cried the while, The hero answering, "Nay," ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... growing corruptions of the Church was made more systematically, and from the stand-point of a theologian rather than of a popular moralist and satirist, by John Wyclif, the rector of Lutterworth and professor of Divinity in Baliol College, Oxford. In a series of Latin and English tracts he made war against indulgences, pilgrimages, images, oblations, the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... have a quick eye for the foibles of people, and can detect their vanities, and meannesses, and laughable conceits. If you employ this gift to correct a bad habit, or expose a falsehood, it is well enough. But if it induces you to look upon things merely with the skill of a satirist, then let me say, there is no "ludicrous side" to life; there is nothing in human conduct that is simply absurd. The least transaction has a moral cast, and every word and act reveals spiritual relations. ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... themselves with expressing their opinions in essays, were driven to conceal their meaning under the guise of satire or allegory; which gave rise to a peculiar genre of literature, a sort of editorial or essay done into fiction, in which the satirist Saltykov, a contemporary of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, who wrote under the pseudonym of Shchedrin, achieved the greatest ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... sufficiently slight in construction, it must be confessed) considerably more compact and interesting than the irregular narration which serves Byron to string together the bitter beads of his satirical rosary; but, at the same time, the aim and scope of the English satirist is infinitely more vast and comprehensive. The Russian has also none of the terrible and deeply-thrilling pictures of passion and of war which so strangely and powerfully contrast with the bitter sneer and gay irony forming the basis of the Don; but, on ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... domestic humiliation did not transpire at Bourbonne; for M. de la Bruyere had arrived there with Monsieur le Prince, and that model satirist would unfailingly have made merry ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... "Histriomastix," a play revised by Marston in 1598, has been regarded as the one in which Jonson was thus "represented on the stage"; although the personage in question, Chrisogonus, a poet, satirist, and translator, poor but proud, and contemptuous of the common herd, seems rather a complimentary portrait of Jonson than a caricature. As to the personages actually ridiculed in "Every Man Out of His Humour," Carlo Buffone was formerly thought certainly to be Marston, as he ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... comparable to the work of Daniel Corkery, whose volume, "A Munster Twilight," has interested me more than any other volume of short stories published in America this year. The story is of particular interest because Mr. O'Brien's reputation as an artist has been based solely upon his work as a satirist and Irish fabulist. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Homer, Poet sovereign; He who comes next is Horace, the satirist; The third is Ovid, and ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... startling, which his character so often exhibited, as compared with itself. He who, at one moment, was seen intrenched in the most absolute self-will, would, at the very next, be found all that was docile and amenable. To-day, storming the world in its strong-holds, as a misanthrope and satirist—to-morrow, learning, with implicit obedience, to fold a shawl, as a Cavaliere—the same man who had so obstinately refused to surrender, either to friendly remonstrance or public outcry, a single line of Don Juan, at the mere request ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... indiscriminately admitted; and among the low Irish this duty is frequently performed in a cellar, upon which occasions the motley group of assembled Hibernians would form a subject for the pencil of the most able satirist. ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... reflection of the young moth hovering about the flame, let the satirist dip his pen in acid, and the pessimist in gall! There is enough folly and stupidity in the operations of the human mind to provoke the one to contempt and ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... published in 1764, and was soon followed by the "Vicar of Wakefield." He wrote in nearly all departments of literature, and always with purity, grace, and fluency. His fame as a poet is secured by the "Traveler" and the "Deserted Village;" as a dramatist, by "She Stoops to Conquer;" as a satirist, by the "Citizen of the World;" and as a novelist by the "Vicar of Wakefield." In his later years his writings were the source of a large income, but his gambling, careless generosity, and reckless extravagance always kept him in financial ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... his neighbour spreadeth a net for his feet." And now, before we leave the ancient world, if you would not think it beneath the dignity of the place we are in, I would like to read to you a passage out of a round-about paper written by a satirist of Greece about the time of Ezra and Nehemiah in Jerusalem. You will easily remark the difference of tone between the seriousness and pathos of the Hebrew prophet and the light and chaffing touch of Theophrastus. "The Flatterer is a person," says that satirist of Greek ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... master satirist; that is, he was constantly ridiculing people, things, or customs. Do you find any trace of satire ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... indeed no great central luminary like Shakespeare, but a constellation of lesser ones,—such as Addison, Defoe, and Pope. They shone with a splendor of their own. The lurid brilliancy of the half-mad satirist Dean Swift was beginning to command attention; on the other hand, the calm, clear light of the philosopher John Locke was ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... that. The American invention of "reversing" is admirable in its unexaggerated form, but requires both study and practice; and the reason that it was voted "bad form" in England was simply that the indolence of the gilded youth prevented him ever taking the trouble to master it. Our genial satirist Punch hit the nail on the head: "Shall we—eh—reverse, Miss Lilian?" "Reverse, indeed; it's as much as you can do to keep on ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... work out the problems of her developing life, but follows with keenest interest those Canadians who have gone abroad and made a name for themselves, and their country in other parts of the Empire or the world. Some of these are Judge Haliburton, Satirist; Roberts and Bliss Carman, Poets; Gilbert Parker, Grant Allen and Barr, Novelists; Romanes and Newcombe, Scientists; Girouard, Kennedy and Scott in the Army, and many others who have won laurels in the several walks of life. But Manitoba, or rather ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... formerly it was not so in the golden age of equality, before private property was known, when all men held in common the goods of the earth, and robber kings were evils of the future. The god of Love and his barons, with the hypocrite monk Faux-Semblant—a bitter satirist of the mendicant orders—besiege the tower in which Bel-Accueil is imprisoned, and by force and fraud an entrance is effected. The old beldame, who watches over the captive, is corrupted by promises and gifts, and frankly exposes her own iniquities and ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... scattered documentary vestiges are preserved) scarcely offers more points for the imagination to exercise itself upon than Burns's excisemanship or Wordsworth's collectorship of stamps (It is a curious circumstance that Dryden should have received as a reward for his political services as a satirist, an office almost identical with Chaucer's. But he held it for little more than a year.), though doubtless it must have brought him into constant contact with merchants and with shipmen, and may have suggested to him many a broad descriptive touch. ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... change of his style was scarcely less remarkable than the change of his fortunes. He was then no longer the hot and heady satirist; he had become the sly and subtle scorner. No man said so many cutting things, yet so few of which any one could take advantage: he anatomized human character without the appearance of inflicting a wound; he had all the pungency of wit without its peril, and reigned supreme by a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... filling a nominal post of bailiff to the estates, and launching forth verse of some satiric and sentimental quality; for being inclined to vice, and occasionally, and in a quiet way, practising it, he was of course a sentimentalist and a satirist, entitled to lash the Age and complain of human nature. His earlier poems, published under the pseudonym of Diaper Sandoe, were so pure and bloodless in their love passages, and at the same time so biting in their moral tone, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of feeling; and too stiff, and negligent of harmony for a His letters to John Poynes and Sir Francis Bryan deserve more notice, they argue him a man of great sense and honour, a critical observer of manners and well-qualified for an elegant and genteel satirist. These letters contain observations on the Courtier's Life, and I shall quote a few lines as a specimen, by which it will be seen how much he falls short of his noble cotemporary, lord Surry, and is above those writers that ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... visionary; but it is clear that what is "dramatic" in him exfoliates, as it were, from a root of character and thought which are altogether Browning's own. Browning is apparent in the vivacious critic and satirist of religious extravagances, standing a little aloof from all the constituted religions; but he is apparent also in the imaginative and sympathetic student of religion, who divines the informing spark of love in all sincere worship; and however far he may ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... the pride of the Romane Clergy, of whose fall he seemeth to be a very true Prophet, his verse is but loose meetre, and his termes hard and obscure, so as in them is litle pleasure to be taken. Skelton a sharpe Satirist, but with more rayling and scoffery then became a Poet Lawreat, such among the Greekes were called Pantomimi, with vs Buffons, altogether applying their wits to Scurrillities & other ridiculous matters. ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... stewardesses and nurses. From the fact that some of them were of masculine natures, or, in the vocabulary of the times, "strong-minded," they were the recipients of many coarse jests, and imputations were made upon both their modesty and their virtue. But I would that any satirist had watched with me the good offices of these Florence Nightingales of the West, as they tripped upon merciful errands, like good angels, and left paths of sunshine behind them. The soldiers had seen none of their ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... 7.—Can a ghost write poetry? You betcha, says Baron Maurice de Waleffe, the French satirist, who tells of a remarkable book of spirits' poems just published in Paris under the title of ...
— The Secret of Dreams • Yacki Raizizun
... plundered the temples of his own capital. His wife, Poppaea, died of a kick which she received from this monster, because she had petulantly reproved him. Longinus, an eminent lawyer, Lucan the poet, and Petronius the satirist, alike, were victims of his hatred. This last of the Caesars, allied by blood to the imperial house of Julius, killed himself in his thirty-first year, to prevent assassination, to the universal joy of the Roman world, without having done ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... particular home of German satire. The best German comic papers are published in Munich, and the most effective satirist of the present day is a Bavarian of the Bavarians, Ludwig Thoma. He is the son of a Head Forester and was born in 1867 at that Oberammergau where all the inhabitants every ten years dismiss the barber and let their long locks curl ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... say, is a fact that must be faced, but there is another side to the case, and it is this that the genius of Shakespeare discovered. What he did do, and what the medieval satirist did not do, was to attempt to understand Shylock; in the true sense to sympathise with Shylock the money-lender, as he sympathised with Macbeth the murderer. It was not to deny that the man was an usurer, but ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... incidental quarrels, full of sneering allusions, are left aside—is generally of such diminutive proportions that one may well ask, after the perusal of some of his dramas, whether they contain any action at all. No doubt the satirist, too, has his legitimate place in the dramatic art; but he must know how to hit the weaknesses of human nature in certain striking types. Jonson, however, is far from being able to lay a claim to such dramaturgic merit. ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... Boeotian; and this feeling was carried so far, that at last it provoked satire itself to turn round with scorn upon the very prejudice which the spirit of satire had originally kindled. Disgusted with this arrogant assumption of disgust, the Roman satirist reminded the scorners that men not inferior to the greatest of their own had been bred, or might be bred, amongst ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... were by far the worst of his works. In reality, let us not deny, that had Pope never written any thing else, his name would not have been known as a name even of promise, but would probably have been redeemed from oblivion by some satirist or writer of a Dunciad. Were a man to meet with such a nondescript monster as the following, viz.," Love out of Mount Mlna by Whirlwind"he would suppose himself reading the Racing Calendar. Yet this hybrid creature is one of the ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... strolling along the terrace which roofed the crypto-porticus of the Roman villa, beside the professor—the short coat, the summer hat, the smooth-shaven, finely cut face, now alive with talk and laughter, now shrewdly, one might say coldly, observant; the face of a satirist—but so human!—so alive to all that underworld of destiny through which move the weaknesses of men and women. We were sorry indeed when he left us. But there were many other happy meetings to come through the sixteen years that remained—meetings at Stocks and in London; letters ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... represent our own life, our manners, our customs, our ideas, our English types, our English world? Such a field for comedy, for tragedy, for portraiture, for satire, as they all make-such subjects as they would yield! Think of London alone—what a matchless hunting-ground for the satirist—the most magnificent that ever was. If the occasion always produced the man London would have produced an Aristophanes. ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... incessant and bitter attacks. That he might obtain Christian burial, he confessed and received absolution from the Abbe Gaultier; but, with his views, this was simply a sacrifice to the proprieties; he remained a heathen poet to the end, a born satirist and scoffer at all tradition and ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... this is really my name or an assumed one. If it is the first, it is a matter of some importance to take care of it and defend it; if it is a fictitious one, it is equally so to preserve my incognito. I may not choose to give my card, and may not desire to be known. A satirist, like an Irishman, finds it convenient sometimes to shoot from behind a shelter. Like him, too, he may occasionally miss his shot, and firing with intent to do bodily harm is almost as badly punished as if death had ensued. And besides, an anonymous ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... them without being struck with the truly historic character of the subjects and the handling, and without moralizing upon the age which they describe. Skelton, a contemporary of the French Rabelais, seems to us a weak English portrait of that great author; like him a priest, a buffoon, a satirist, and a lampooner, but unlike him in that he has given us no English Gargantua and Pantagruel to ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... the satirist advised rightly, when he directed us to resign ourselves to the hands of Heaven, and to leave to superior powers the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... his Don Carlos. [177] Shadwell cleared a hundred and thirty pounds by a single representation of the Squire of Alsatia. [178] The consequence was that every man who had to live by his wit wrote plays, whether he had any internal vocation to write plays or not. It was thus with Dryden. As a satirist he has rivalled Juvenal. As a didactic poet he perhaps might, with care and meditation, have rivalled Lucretius. Of lyric poets he is, if not the most sublime, the most brilliant and spiritstirring. But nature, profuse to him of many rare gifts, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... another canal in Greece which proved a sad stumbling-block to the Roman satirist Juvenal, whose unlucky accusation of "lying Greece," is founded on his own ignorance of a fact recorded by Herodotus ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... persuasions, was helpless in his wife's hands, and that honest men had been undone and scoundrels exalted at a nod of the beautiful Procuratessa. That lady, as famous in her way as her husband, was noted for quite different qualities; so that, according to one satirist, her hospitality began where his ended, and the Albergo Bra (the nickname their palace went by) was advertised in the lampoons of the day as furnishing both bed and board. In some respects, however, the tastes of the noble couple agreed, both delighting ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... equally strong on both sides and a persecuted scholar was as little apt to see the good qualities of his persecutors as they were to accept his satires. It would be interesting to know what the homely fathers thought of him, this dreadful freethinker and satirist committed to their care for instruction. He found them "entirely ignorant of religious questions," though evidently so much less hostile than he had expected, and occupied his enforced leisure in making his translation of the Psalms, a monument of elegant verse and fine Latinity, for which the quiet ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... Marlborough pilfered cloth and bread, So says that gentle satirist Squire Pope; And Peterborough's Earl upon this head, Affords us little room to hope, That what the Twitnam bard avowed, Might not be ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... the three justices—Crooke, Hoghton, and Doddridge—so admirably, that his hearers were wellnigh convulsed; and the three learned gentlemen, who sat near the King, though fully conscious of the ridicule applied to them, were obliged to laugh with the rest. But the unsparing satirist was not content with this, but went on, with most of the other attendants upon the King, and being intimately versed in court scandal, he directed his lash with telling effect. As a contrast to the malicious pleasantry ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... shows that if Spenser's genius had not found a less mongrel style to disport itself in, not merely would Donne, and Lodge, and Hall, and Marston have had to abandon their dispute for the post of first English satirist, but the attainment of really great satire in English might have been hastened by a hundred years, and Absalom and Achitophel have been but a second. Even here, however, the piece still keeps the Chaucerian ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury |
