"Epigrammatic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Here you might meet men who at that time, or since, have been known as mayors, alder-men, and councillors. Here, "Blue-brick Walker" first propounded his scheme for superseding the "petrified kidney" pavement. Here "Wedding-ring Edwards," in his quaint, sententious manner, growled out brief epigrammatic sentences, full of shrewdness and wisdom, most strangely seasoned with semi-contemptuous sarcasm. Here Isherwood Sutcliff, with his well-dressed, dapper figure, and his handsome Roman face, was wont to air his oratory; and here occasionally he, placing his right foot upon a spittoon, ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... youths at a University wine-party as "drinking bad wines, telling bad stories, singing bad songs over and over again. Milk punch—smoking—ghastly headache—frightful spectacle of dessert-table next morning, and smell of tobacco." But the satirist is often tempted to be epigrammatic at the expense of accuracy, and this picture is at least too highly coloured. In the recently published memoir of "J"—John Willis Clark—some reminiscences of the late Registrary are included; and "J" does not recognize Thackeray's ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... which runs through so much of the witty and epigrammatic fiction fashionable during the last eight or ten years, which runs through such works of a real though varying ingenuity as "Dodo," or "Concerning Isabel Carnaby," or even "Some Emotions and a Moral," may be expressed in various ways, but to most of us I think ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... abridge &c. 201; abstract &c. 596; come to the point. Adj. concise, brief, short, terse,close; to the point, exact; neat, compact; compressed, condensed, pointed; laconic, curt, pithy, trenchant, summary; pregnant; compendious &c. (compendium) 596; succinct; elliptical, epigrammatic, quaint, crisp; sententious. Adv. concisely &c. adj.; briefly, summarily; in brief, in short, in a word, in a few words; for shortness sake; to come to the point, to make a long story short, to cut the matter short, to be brief; it comes to this, the long and the short of it is. Phr. brevis ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes." This was too bad. The sentence was misquoted, quoted without its qualifying conditions, and frightened some of my worthy professional brethren as much as if I had told them to throw all physic to the dogs. But for the epigrammatic sting the sentiment would have been unnoticed as a harmless ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the giants of the Tory confederacy of wits. But little inferior to them in brilliance, if vastly less in intellectual size, was Pope, with his epigrammatic style, his compact sense—like stimulating essence contained in small smelling bottles—his pungent personalities, his elegant glitter, and his splendid simulation of moral indignation and moral purpose. Less known, but more ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... long-winded sentences, but the slow evolution of thought and the deliberation with which he works out his pictures of misery, make the general effect dull beside such books as 'Candide' or 'Gulliver's Travels.' A touch of epigrammatic exaggeration is very much needed; and yet anybody who has the courage to read it through will admit that Johnson is not an unworthy guide into those gloomy regions of imagination which we all visit sometimes, and which it is as well to visit ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... his time; he observes animals and nature, and departs as much as possible from the epigrammatic form common to most fabulists. The story of the "uplandis Mous and the burges Mous," so often related, has never been better told than by Henryson, and this can be affirmed without ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... objection to Fort Scott," said Winthrop, when one of his battalions was finally ordered thither, "is that it's too fashionable for my taste. What this regiment needs now is more drill and less dinners." He loved to be epigrammatic. The head-quarters, staff, band, and six troops had taken station at a big frontier post, two other troops went with the lieutenant-colonel to a second post, so that that officer could have a command, and two more with the senior major, but the ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... message in the garb of allegory song, and chiefly epigrammatic saying. Form is disregarded; the spirit is all-important, and suffices to cover up every fault of form. The Talmud, of course, does not yield a complete system of ethics, but its practical philosophy ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... have scarcely had their due weight with the general reader, nor secured their just meed of admiration. He was singularly careless, writes his editor, in distributing his pleasing illustrations of playfulness, or pathos, or epigrammatic expression. His 'mission' he considered to be that of an instructor and improver; and the flowers which, equally with more substantial things, were the produce of his vigorous intellect, he looked upon as scarcely worthy ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... 1861, Robert Toombs delivered his farewell speech to the United States Senate. It received profound attention. It was full of brief sentences and bristling points. In epigrammatic power, it was the strongest summary of the demands of the South. As Mr. Blaine said, it was the only speech made by a congressman from the seceding States which specified the grievances of the South and which ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... him. People had almost forgotten that great things had been expected of him; and some fancied, perhaps, that he had been spoiled by prosperity. Remembering him, as I did, as the most brilliant and notable personality among my university friends, I began to apply to him Malloch's epigrammatic damnation of the man of whom it was said at twenty that he would do great things, at thirty that he might do great things, and at forty that he might have ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... is evident, is padded with a good deal of farce, but though the construction never evinces any great power on the part of the author, it is not on the whole inadequate. The verse is in great part rimed in couplets, and there are frequent attempts at epigrammatic effect, which at times lead to some obscurity. The language betrays, as in the case of the author's eclogues, a pseudo-archaism, which points, particularly in such phrases as 'doe ycleape,' to a perhaps unfortunate ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... of Webster's statements occasionally reminds us of the epigrammatic point which characterizes so many of the statements of Burke. Thus, in presenting a memorial to Congress, signed by many prominent men of business, against President Jackson's system of finance, he saw at once that the Democrats would denounce it as another manifesto of the ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... While this criticism is rather severe, it cannot be denied that certain stories of the kind mentioned, featuring this star and others, have been far too dependent for their appeal to the spectator upon the humorous, epigrammatic sayings of the characters. True, it is usually after leaving the theatre, and reviewing the picture in retrospect, that the spectator realizes that the accent has been too definitely on the sub-titling and not enough upon the action, but when he does realize it, he feels disappointed—and ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... Neapolitan, in which there are so many charming songs. Their skill in improvisation, however, is not generally displayed in their serenades, but in the osterias, during the evenings of the festas in summer. There it is that their quickness and epigrammatic turn of expression are best seen. Two disputants will, when in good-humor and warmed with wine, string off verse after verse at each other's expense, full of point and fun,—the guitar burring along in the intervals, and a chorus of laughter saluting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... universalist; the finest lyrical poets (who only take short flights, compared with the narrators); the purely contemplative poets who have more thought than feeling; the descriptive, satirical, didactic, epigrammatic. It is to be borne in mind, however, that the first poet of an inferior class may be superior to followers in the train of a higher one, though the superiority is by no means to be taken for granted; otherwise Pope ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... how to listen as well as to talk, and gathered information in a manner highly complimentary to those from whom she sought it; her attention seemed far more the effect of respect than of curiosity. Her sentences were frequently epigrammatic; she more than once suggested to me the story of the good fairy from whose lips dropped diamonds and pearls whenever they were opened. She was ever neat and particular in her dress, her feet and hands were so delicate and small as to be almost childlike. In a word, Maria Edgeworth ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... the fashionable writer, and the court ladies even formed their conversation after the model of his Euphues. His comedy in prose, Campaspe, is a warning example of the impossibility of ever constructing, out of mere anecdotes and epigrammatic sallies, anything like a dramatic whole. The author was a learned witling, but in ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... epigrammatic," said Billy, snappishly; "but there is some truth in your contention. We will begin again. When we see Rita, we will formulate a plan and try to ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... 'It needs epigrammatic expression,' said Trent, rising from the table. 'If only it could be crystallized into some handy formula, like "No Popery", or "Tax the Foreigner", you would find multitudes to go to the stake for it. But you were planning to go to White Gables ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... been latent in him also appeared at once, confirming his modest suspicions. Certainly he was a wit! Was not this perfectly charming girl's responsive and delicious laughter proof enough? Certainly he was epigrammatic! Certainly he could be easy, polished, amusing, sympathetic, and vastly interesting all the while. Could he not divine it in her undivided attention, the quick, amused flicker of recognition animating her beautiful face ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... lively and amusing, and after the dinner was somewhat advanced he launched out into a series of stories and anecdotes which served very well to pass the time and to attract notice to himself. As Mr. Barker was generally not very talkative at table, though frequently epigrammatic, his sudden eloquence was calculated to engage the attention of the party. Claudius and Margaret were glad of the rattling talk that delivered them from the burden of saying anything especial, and they both laughed quite naturally at Barker's odd wit. They were grateful to him for ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... suspicions of the more thoughtful St. John. Clarence, wholly reconciled to Edward, gazed on him with eyes swimming with affection, and soon drank himself into uproarious joviality. The archbishop, more reserved, still animated the society by the dry and epigrammatic wit not uncommon to his learned and subtle mind. But Warwick in vain endeavoured to shake off an uneasy, ominous gloom. He was not satisfied with Edward's avoidance of discussion upon the grave matters involved in the earl's promise to the insurgents, ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was at the same time the brightest wit and most shameless punster of Westminster Hall; and such pride did he take in his reputation as a punster, that after the fashion of the wits of an earlier period he was often at considerable pains to give a pun a well-wrought epigrammatic setting. Bored with the long-winded speech of a prosy sergeant, he wrote on a slip of paper, which was in due course passed along the barristers' benches in the court where he ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... Clingman, who represented North Carolina, was alternately enlivened by epigrammatic wit or envenomed by scorching reply. Mr. Justin S. Morrill, of Vermont, was commencing a long and useful Congressional career. Mr. Schuyler Colfax, an editor- politician, represented an Indiana district. The veteran Mr. Charles ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... story of Corsica and Southern France during the Franco-Prussian war, having all the epigrammatic charm of ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... influence, for he was, as I have just said, one of the models on which Propertius and Ovid formed themselves; and some, indeed, call him the Father of the Latin elegy, with its terseness, grace, and clear epigrammatic form of thought, and, therefore, in a great degree, of our modern eighteenth century poets; not a useless excellence, seeing that it is, on the whole, good for him who writes to see clearly what he wants to say, and to be able to make his readers ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... high-sounding promise of its title; and at best its author's knowledge of the subject, notwithstanding his continental wanderings, can have been but that of an external spectator. Still in an age when critical utterance was more than ordinarily full-wigged and ponderous, it dared to be sprightly and epigrammatic. Some of its passages, besides, bear upon the writer's personal experiences, and serve to piece the imperfections of his biography. If it brought him no sudden wealth, it certainly raised his reputation with the book-selling world. A connexion already begun with Smollett's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... govern themselves as misgovern the Protestant minority,' cried Sir Asher, becoming almost epigrammatic in his excitement. 'Home Rule simply means ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... "The Lyon Campaign," by Eugene F. Ware, pp. 324-339.) I have read somewhere this saying of Bonaparte's: "An army of deer commanded by a lion is better than an army of lions commanded by a deer." While that statement is only figurative in its nature, it is, however, a strong epigrammatic expression of the fact that the commander of soldiers in battle should be, above all other things, a forcible, determined, and ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... out. Some of them are conceived in a vein of fine irony throughout. Others, like "The Journey to Brundusium," are mere narratives, relieved by humorous illustrations. But we do not find in them the epigrammatic force, the sternness of moral rebuke, or the scathing spirit of sarcasm, which are commonly associated with the idea of satire. Literary display appears never to be aimed at. The plainest phrases, the homeliest illustrations, the most everyday topics—if they come in the way—are made use of for ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... and superstition, his crude notions and erroneous observations, his ridiculous inferences and theories, with his grasp of method, his lofty views of the true scope of Medicine, his lucid statements, his incisive and epigrammatic criticisms of men and motives.[244:1] After remaining at Basle for about a year, he resumed his wanderings, frequenting taverns and spending whole nights in carousals, with the lowest company. ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... artlessness 'mongst the poor maidens of Leipzig, Witty simplicity come,—come, then, to glad us again! Comedy, oh repeat thy weekly visits so precious, Sigismund, lover so sweet,—Mascarill, valet jocose! Tragedy, full of salt and pungency epigrammatic,— And thou, minuet-step of our old buskin preserved! Philosophic romance, thou mannikin waiting with patience, When, 'gainst the pruner's attack, Nature defendeth herself! Ancient prose, oh return,—so nobly and boldly expressing All that thou thinkest and hast ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Writings of Goethe. Selected by Carrie Adelaide Cooke. With an Introduction by Kev. Alexander McKenzie, D.D. Boston: D. Lothrop & Co. Price $1.00. No other volume of the Spare Minute Series contains more real meat than this. Goethe was epigrammatic, and his ideas took the concentrated form of bullets, instead of scattering like shot. We doubt if there is another author, always excepting Shakespeare, from whose books so many noble and complete thoughts can be extracted. In the two hundred and fifty pages ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... cloaks and hoods, driving bullock-carts or carts drawn by dogs, six or eight of these inextricably harnessed together and panting for dear life; blue-bloused men in French caps, but bigger and blonder than Frenchmen, and less given to epigrammatic repartee, with mild, blue, beery eyes, a fleur de tete, and a look of health and stolid amiability; sturdy green-coated little soldiers with cock-feathered brigand hats of shiny black, the brim turned up over the right eye and ear that they might the more conveniently take a good aim at the foe ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... you as a personage of slender limb and deprecating glance, who stammers and makes a painful spectacle of himself when you ask him his opinion of "The Glees of the Gulches," by Popocatepetl Jones. The slender, dark-haired novelist of your imagination, with epigrammatic points to his mustache, suddenly takes the shape of a short, smoothly-shaven blond man, whose conversation does not sparkle at all, and you were on the lookout for the most brilliant of verbal fireworks. Perhaps it is a dramatist you have idealized. Fresh from witnessing his delightful ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... a few words, of necessity almost epigrammatic, upon his work and character. He dealt with life, and life with him was not merely this particular air-breathing phase of being, but the spiritual existence which included it like a parenthesis between the two infinities. He wanted ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... which he has placed at the gates of Hell. I 170 concluded by observing, that the poem was not calculated to excite passion in any mind, or to make any impression except on poetic readers; and that from the culpable levity betrayed at the close of the eclogue by the grotesque union of epigrammatic wit with allegoric personification, in the allusion to the 175 most fearful of thoughts, I should conjecture that the 'rantin' Bardie', instead of really believing, much less wishing, the fate spoken of in the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the worthy servitor's epigrammatic scolding, and feared that he had followed him beyond the wood of Chaumont; but he would not ask, lest he should have to give explanations or to tell a falsehood or to command silence, which would at once have ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... telling a story himself. If he starts in on a tale he'll make it a serial sure as fate, but if you make him the medium through which other story-tellers are introduced to the club he'll be finely epigrammatic. He can be very short and sharp when he's talking about somebody else. Personality is ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... your vaudeville audience is as elementary as a primer and as intricate as life. It is a bloodhound when it comes to detecting the false from the true. Take that little sketch, 'Trapped,' you sent me out to see last week. A more sophisticated audience might have mistaken its brittle epigrammatic quality for brilliancy and its flippancy for cleverness. But not your ten-twenty-thirty's. In real life a husband doesn't psychanalyze his wife's lover. He horsewhips him. And that lovely blank-verse fantasy that you attempted on your own. That is the sort of thing you ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... indulged in wit about laws. Reynal, to give an impetus to his history of commerce in the Indies, welded to it the declamation of Diderot. The Abbe Barthelemy covered over the realities of Greek manners and customs with his literary varnish. Science was expected to be either epigrammatic or oratorical; crude or technical details would have been objectionable to a public composed of people of the good society; correctness of style therefore drove out or falsified those small significant facts which give a peculiar sense and their original relief ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... over the tinsmith's shop, Sunday, I drew down from the shelf my Heinrich Heine ... in German ... one of the tasks I set myself, during that three months, was the making an intensive study of just how Heine had "swung" the lyric form to such conciseness, such effectiveness of epigrammatic expression. ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... which, seasoned with his own improving conversation, and terminating in a supper of cold roast beef and salad, beguiles the golden evening until pretty late. Mr. Sapsea's wisdom being, in its delivery to mortals, rather of the diffuse than the epigrammatic order, is by no means expended even then; but his visitor intimates that he will come back for more of the precious commodity on future occasions, and Mr. Sapsea lets him off for the present, to ponder on the instalment ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... Children" (194), and President Hall has written about "Children's Lies" (252a), but we are still without a correspondingly accurate and extensive compilation of "The Thoughts and Reasonings of Parents," and a plain, unbiassed register of the "white lies" and equivoques, the fictions and epigrammatic myths, with which parents are wont to answer, or attempt to answer, the manifold questions of their tender offspring. From time immemorial the communication between parent (and nurse) and child, between the old of both sexes and little children, far from being yea and nay, has been cast ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... The description of the "ancien regime" in France, "a despotism tempered by epigrams," like most epigrammatic sentences, contains some truth, with much fiction. The society of the last half of the seventeenth, and the whole of the eighteenth centuries, was doubtless greatly influenced by the precise and terse mode in which the popular writers of that date expressed ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... "What kind of a man was Mr. Pope in his conversation?" His Lordship answered, that if the conversation did not take something of a lively or epigrammatic turn, he fell asleep, or perhaps pretended to do so.' Johnson's Works (1787), xi. 200. Johnson in his Life of Pope (Works, viii. 309) says that 'when he wanted to sleep ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... almost entirely to prose, he speedily became known as a writer of brilliant epigrammatic essays and even more brilliant paradoxical plays such as An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. His aphorisms and flippancies were quoted everywhere; his fame as a wit was only surpassed by his notoriety as ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... speaker's own book, speech or poem. Of course, if the company meet especially for mutual enjoyment in elocution or recitation, this rule does not apply. It is applicable only for general society. Short, pungent, epigrammatic quotations, if suitable to the subject of conversation, may be occasionally introduced, but their use should be the exception, ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... on the relative attractions of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey;" her opinion differed from his, and she was well able to hold her ground. Her face was now both eloquent and attractive, her eyes were bright, her words terse and epigrammatic. She looked so different a girl from the cowed and miserable little Prissie of an hour ago that Rosalind Merton as she came up and tapped her on the shoulder, felt ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... their methods of presentation. The style of the English philosopher is sober, comprehensible, diffuse, and slightly wearisome. The French use a fluent, elegant, lucid style which entertains and dazzles by its epigrammatic phrases, in which not infrequently the epigram rules the thought. The German expresses his solid, thoughtful positions in a form which is at once ponderous and not easily understood; each writer constructs his own terminology, with ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... Epigrammatic writing is very clearly defined as "critical in a grammatical way." "Allegory is writing highly colored, as Pope's works"; "allegory is writing of something that never happened, but it is purely imaginary, often a wandering from the main point." A common ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... the two classes of painters in not so wide as that between the smooth and brilliant epigrammatic poets of Anne's and the ruggedly rich dramatists of Elizabeth's reign, neither was there the unmistakable preponderance of such a mighty genius as that of Shakespeare granted to the first decade, still the distinction was the ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... it all a faint light gleamed on the opposite wall and the reflection of the curtains in Alice Renwick's window was distinctly visible. Then a sturdy masculine shadow appeared, and there was a rustling above, and then, with exasperating, mysterious, and epigrammatic terseness, a deep voice propounded ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... and a Brazilian gentleman, whose luggage dropped to pieces and was scattered in the flood about the diligence, was looked upon as a very subtile humorist. Our own contribution to these witty passages was the epigrammatic display of a reeking trunk full of the pretty rubbish people bring away from Rome and Naples,—copies of Pompeian frescos more ruinous than the originals; photographs floating loose from their cards; little earthen busts reduced to the lumpishness of common clay; Roman ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... in easy deshabille, with a flask of good wine, iced water, and delicate cakes and confitures before him, a witty and licentious epigrammatic poem close under his hand, sat lazily enjoying the luxuries that it had been his daughter's satisfaction to procure for him ever since her marriage. He sprang up to meet her with a grace and deference that showed how ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the epigram which will be presented to Lord Auckland, or to the Duke of Bedford, as hereafter, according to circumstances, they may happen to represent this kingdom. Few can have so little imagination as not readily to conceive the nature of the boxes of epigrammatic lozenges that will ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... history, distinguished indeed among all administrations from the beginning, so pure has it been, so honorable and so successful—just as he closes this administration he makes here this statement of the principles on which are based the success of an American statesman, in a few fit words so epigrammatic that they will be cited as proverbs by our children and our children's children. I heard that masterly definition of the laws which have governed the New Englander, I took pride in remembering that the President also was a graduate of our law school. These ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... which a painful attention is paid to the expression in proportion as there is little to express, and the decomposition of prose is substituted for the composition of poetry. How much the sense and keeping in the ideas are sacrificed to a jingle of words and epigrammatic turn of expression, may be seen in such lines as the following:—one of the characters, an old invalid, wishes to ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... persecutions of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecot. This tale has long been propagated under two separate impulses. Chiefly, perhaps, under the vulgar love of pointed and glaring contrasts; the splendor of the man was in this instance brought into a sort of epigrammatic antithesis with the humility of his fortunes; secondly, under a baser impulse, the malicious pleasure of seeing a great man degraded. Accordingly, as in the case of Milton, [Endnote: 16] it has been affirmed that ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... conclusion should be a resultant summing the total of the suggestion in the preceding lines. . . . While the conclusion should leave a sense of finish and completeness, it is necessary to avoid anything like epigrammatic point." ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... words the soliloquy of a soul struggling with the problem of evil, sometimes borne down by a dismal skepticism, sometimes asserting his faith in the enduring righteousness. The writer's problem is the one to which Mr. Mallock has given an epigrammatic statement: "Is life worth living?" He greatly doubts, yet he strongly hopes. Much of the time it appears to him that the best thing a man can do is to enjoy the present good and let the world wag. But the outcome of all ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... pointless, or insipid in themselves, are painfully liable to become so in the hands of a translator. I have accordingly on various occasions aimed at epigram and pungency when there was nothing epigrammatic or pungent in the Latin, in full confidence that any trifling additions which may be made in this way to the general sum of liveliness will be far more than compensated by the heavy outgoings which must of necessity be the lot of every translator, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... of the quadrangle, and thus having no house opposite to it, faces a sheer fall of three thousand feet. A fountain splashes in the courtyard below, and a low wall forms a long seat where the devout pass the evening hours in that curt and epigrammatic conversation, which is more peaceful than the quick talk of Frenchmen, and deeper than ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... building which contains a Tintoretto, averring that the sight of Tintoretto's pictures would injure his carefully trained taste. It is probable that neither anecdote is strictly true. Yet there is a certain epigrammatic point in both; and I have often speculated whether even Venice could have so warped the genius of Poussin as to shed one ray of splendour on his canvases, or whether even Tintoretto could have so sublimed the prophet of Queen Anne as to make ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... talents, and fell by the strength of his passions. Burns was perfectly well aware of the passionate and quarrelsome nature of the man. He compared himself with such a companion to one travelling with a loaded blunderbuss at full-cock; and in his epigrammatic way he said of him to Mr. Walker, 'His mind is like his body; he has a confounded, strong, in-kneed sort of a soul.' The man, however, had some good qualities. He had a warm heart; never forgot the friends of his early years, and he hated vehemently low jealousy ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... turbulent and refractory enthusiast, John Lilburne, alias Free-born John, alias Lilburne the Trouble-world, there appeared the following epigrammatic epitaph:— ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 281, November 3, 1827 • Various
... publicity they get. Francesca probably reads your screeds at her Christian Endeavour meetings just as you cull extracts from Salemina's for your Current Events Club. In a word, the loosened leaf leads to the loosened tongue, and that's rather epigrammatic for ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... is not a brilliant play, as its dialogue lacks epigrammatic sparkle: neither is it an interesting play, as the plot, such as it is, is too weak for words,—which, by the way, at once accounts for the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... epigrammatic force which would make palatable a less interesting story of human lives or one less deftly told."—London Saturday Review. "Perfectly easy, graceful, humorous.... The author's skill in character-drawing ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... epigrammatic, harum-scarum Irish trooper, in the Indian service, whose adventures and sayings are narrated in Soldiers Three, The Courting of Dinah ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... time there was a Grecian epigrammatic poet, ALCAE'US, of Messe'ne, who was an ardent partisan of the Roman consul Flaminius, and who celebrated the defeat of Philip in some of his epigrams. He wrote the following on the ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... world, and seat himself in state, for a solemn pageant at Saint Peter's, with his daughter Lucrezia upon one side of his throne and his daughter-in-law Sancia upon the other! It was once said by a witty and epigrammatic Italian that Church affairs were so corrupt that the interests of morality demanded the marriage rather than the celibacy of the clergy, and it would appear that this remark has a certain pertinency anent the present situation. To illustrate in what way such delinquency was made ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... was affected by a slight stammer, which, in my opinion, but added piquancy to her epigrammatic sayings. She once remarked to me, "I shall never be c-c-cold until I'm dead." An impulse took possession of me which somehow, in spite of the great difference in our ages, I seemed unable to resist, and I retorted, "We are not all assured of our temperatures at that period." She regarded me for a ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... dreams of teaching a boy to get to the root of a matter; to think it out; to get quit of passion and desire in the process of thinking; or to fear no face of man in plainly asserting the ascertained result. But to say anything in a glib and graceful manner,—to give an epigrammatic turn to nothing,—to quench the dim perceptions of a feeble adversary, and parry cunningly the home thrusts of a strong one,—to invent blanknesses in speech for breathing time, and slipperinesses in speech for hiding time,—to polish malice to the deadliest ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... write a hundred essays on Balzac and not exhaust him. One might write a volume on his women, a volume to refute the charge that his bad men are better drawn than his good, a volume to discuss Mr. Henry James's epigrammatic declaration that a five-franc piece may be fairly called the protagonist of the 'Comedie humaine.' In short one might go on defending and praising and even criticizing Balzac for a lifetime, and be little further advanced ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... language as harmony; they know what notes to sound together and in succession; they can produce, by the marshalling of sounds and images, by the fugue of passion and the snap of wit, a thousand brilliant effects out of old materials. The Ciceronian orator, the epigrammatic, lyric, and elegiac poets, give examples of this art. The psychologists, on the other hand, gain their effect not by the intrinsic mastery of language, but by the closer adaptation of it to things. The dramatic ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... deep-toned voice, gave a remarkable impressiveness to all he said—even, indeed, to utterances which, if spoken by another, would sometimes have sounded commonplace or obvious. Sarcasm he could use with effect, and a telling point was often made by an epigrammatic phrase which delighted his hearers. And, more than all else, his meaning was never in doubt. In lucidity of statement he excelled many much greater orators, and was surpassed by none; and these qualities, added to his unmistakable sincerity and candour, made him one of ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... celebrated man, who is nameless, may be regarded as the master and maker of "Camille Maupin." He bought into order and shape the vast amount of knowledge already acquired by Felicite; increased it by study of the masterpieces with which Italy teems; gave her the frankness, freedom, and grace, epigrammatic, and intense, which is the character of his own talent (always rather fanciful as to form) which Camille Maupin modified by delicacy of sentiment and the softer terms of thought that are natural to a woman. ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... expressing his genuine feelings, and which is, in fact, a foretaste of The Task. Expostulation, a warning to England from the example of the Jews, is the best constructed: the rest are totally wanting in unity, and even in connexion. In all there are flashes of epigrammatic smartness. ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... between the eight lines and the six instead of Shakspeare's fourfold division, and especially by the interlocking of the rhymes in the second half of the sonnet as opposed to Shakspeare's isolated and half-epigrammatic final couplet. ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... respect of a work in which he was very much interested, and where he showed his knowledge of his countrymen so well. As a critic, I must say that his style is peculiarly unepigrammatic; and yet what collector of epigrams or epigrammatic stories has ever done what the Dean has done for Scotland? It seems as if the wilful excluding of point was acceptable, otherwise how to explain the popularity of that book? All over the world, wherever Scotch men and Scotch language have made their ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... his poems he touches the heart of truth; in others, even those of epigrammatic form, he must be allowed to fail in point as well as in meaning. As to his art-forms, he is guilty of great offences, the result of the same passion for lawless figures and similitudes which Dr. Donne so freely indulged. But his verses are brightened by a certain almost ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... "the Corn-law Rhymer." He was born and died in Yorkshire. He was the author of several pleasing poems, of a somewhat epigrammatic character. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... him, "that you have hit upon those admirable methods of deception which I was intending to describe in a Meditation entitled The Act of Putting Death into Life! Alas! I thought I was the first man to discover that science. The epigrammatic title was suggested to me by an account which a young doctor gave me of an excellent composition of Crabbe, as yet unpublished. In this work, the English poet has introduced a fantastic being called Life in Death. This personage crosses the oceans of the world in pursuit of a living skeleton ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... they had a cant saying that they had suffered nothing from the X or the K (Christ or Constantius). A celebrated school of rhetoric was established here, and no doubt some of the effusions penned at this time, abounded with rich and epigrammatic humour. ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... sacrifices. Victors would naturally spare such a priest on account of his sacred character; he regularly possessed the inviolability attaching also to heralds and envoys: and the proverb that represents him as being slain is (as Suidas notes) an effective bit of epigrammatic exaggeration. Other references to this proverb may be found (by those interested) in Rawlinson's note on the above passage of Herodotos, in one of the scholia on the Phoenician Maidens of Euripides (verse 1377), in Sturz's Xenophontean Lexicon, in Stobaios's ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... been used by Chaucer and the Elizabethans, and recently by Hookham Frere in The Monks and the Giants and by Byron in Don Juan. Compare Keats's use of the form with that of either of his contemporaries, and notice how he avoids the epigrammatic close, telling in satire and mock-heroic, but inappropriate to a serious ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... Throughout his whole life he suffered from this neglect of early instruction. His letters, particularly, though they always "displayed the goodness of his heart, and frequently the strength of his native genius, with a certain laconic mode of expression, and an unaffected epigrammatic turn," were "fearfully and wonderfully made," the despair of his correspondents and the ridicule ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... all probability the study of English metre will rapidly assume more importance in English schools. At present, very little is generally taught, and perhaps known, about this subject. In a recent elaborate edition of the works of Pope, the skill of that consummate master of the art of epigrammatic versification is impugned because in one of his lines he suffers the to receive the metrical accent. When one of the commonest customs (for it is in no sense a license) of English poets—a custom sanctioned by ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... in the latter are many times more numerous, as well as more precise, than in the former. Whole passages in Polycarp are made up of such quotations strung together, while in Ignatius they are very rare, being for the most part epigrammatic adaptations and isolated coincidences of language or thought. Nor indeed is their range coextensive. Thus the Epistle of Polycarp, as I pointed out in a former article [109:1], is pervaded with the language of St Peter's First Epistle, but ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... the sarcasm, especially as coming from such a quarter. He was not very ready at repartee; but he took his time, and in the interval of his various tasks concocted a series of epigrammatic sketches, under the title of Retaliation, in which the characters of his distinguished intimates were admirably hit off, with a mixture of generous praise and good-humored raillery. In fact, the poem ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... which contain such a strong colouring of naturalness that one's sense of reality is not outraged, but titillated. Hence it is that his humour, in its earlier form, does not lend itself readily to quotation. His early humour is not epigrammatic, but cumulative and extensive. Each scene is a unit and must appear as such. Andrew Lang not inaptly catches the note of Mark Twain's earlier manner, when he speaks of his "almost Mephistophelean coolness, an unwearying search after the comic ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... certainly viewed the sunny side of his character; and that too I am disposed to think, with a burning glass. I have passed many hours in his society, pleased with his wit and epigrammatic sallies, but strive in vain to call to my recollection "the spontaneous flow of his Latin, his quotations from the ancient and modern poets, and his masterly and eloquent developement of every subject that his acute intellect chose to dilate upon." His conversation ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... everything. No matter what knowledge, intellect, courage, or good qualities they may have, these men are unfit to command." It is possible that "tableau" should be construed rather in the sense of a pictorial composition, which, like an epigrammatic sentence, may be very complete and effective, but ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... withheld from its masters the legitimate name of poets. I saw that the excellence of this kind consisted in just and acute observations on men and manners in an artificial state of society, as its matter and substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as its form: that even when the subject was addressed to the fancy, or the intellect, as in the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man; nay, when it was a consecutive narration, as in that astonishing product of matchless talent and ingenuity Pope's Translation of the Iliad; ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... gracefully-dressed, conversationally dexterous, finally shallow Wedderburns, Bishops Wedderburn, Wedderburn M.P.'s, Professors Wedderburn, Wedderburn landlords, all with finger-bowl shibboleths and epigrammatic cities of refuge from a sturdy debater. And everyone ill-clothed or ill-dressed, from the cobbler to the cab-runner, was a man and a brother, a fellow-sufferer, to Hill's imagination. So that he became, as it were, a champion of the fallen and oppressed, albeit to outward seeming ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... "Oh, epigrammatic sentences expressive of moral feelings or virtues," replied my neighbour easily. "They are not quite as formal and hackneyed now as they were in the olden time, when some of the favourite toasts were 'May the pleasure of the evening bear ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... recall or to reconstruct; and when older people attempt to reconstruct it, they remember the emotions which underlay it, and the eager interests out of which it all sprang; and they make it something picturesque, epigrammatic, and vernacular which is wholly untrue to life. The fact is that the talk of schoolboys is very trivial and almost wholly symbolical; emotion reveals itself in glance and gesture, not in word at all. I suppose that most of us remember our boyish friendships, ardent ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Commons to take the chair; nor was the amusement less to listen to him, when he delivered his edicts, or the thanks of the House from the chair. His sonorous voice issuing from a diminutive person, and the epigrammatic points of empty sentences, formed with great artifice, were in very bad taste—though much admired by a House which consisted of so few men of a classical education. His rise was extraordinary, because his talents little exceeded mediocrity. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 554, Saturday, June 30, 1832 • Various |
