"Gibbon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that he had seen the salvaje with his own eyes. This wild legend, which the missionaries, the European planters, and the negroes of Africa, have no doubt embellished with many features taken from the description of the manners of the orang-otang,* the gibbon, the jocko or chimpanzee, and the pongo, followed us, during five years, from the northern to the southern hemisphere. (* Simia satyrus. We must not believe, notwithstanding the assertions of almost all zoological writers, that the word orang-otang is applied exclusively in the Malay language ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... you a song never before known, for your collection; the air by M'Gibbon, but I know not the author of the words, as I got it from ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... any length. It would be unfair to treat them as literary criticism, for which he cared as little as it deserves. He was very fond, indeed, of Sainte-Beuve, but almost as much for the information as for the criticism contained in the 'Causeries.' He had always a fancy for such books as Gibbon's great work which give a wide panoramic view of history, and defended his taste on principle. These articles deal with some historical books which interested him, but are chiefly concerned with French and English writers from Hooker ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... faculty of Song was concerning Loss, chiefly; and he has little more than faculty of Croak, concerning Gain; while Dante, though modern readers never go further with him than into the Pit, is stayed only by Casella in the ascent to the Rose of Heaven. So, Gibbon can write in his manner the Fall of Rome; but Virgil, in his manner, the rise of it; and finally Douglas, in his manner, bursts into such rymed passion of praise both of Rome and Virgil, as befits a Christian Bishop, and a good ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... passing days in the midst of the occurring events. Each day's paper opens a new act in the play, and what matters it that the 'news' is one year old? It is none the less news to me; and, besides, are not Gibbon, Shakespeare, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... said McNish, his tone indicating quiet satisfaction. At Gibbon's bench he paused. "Ye'll no pit onything past him, a doot," he said, with a grim smile, ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... at Lausanne, in the Hotel Gibbon, occupying the very parlor that the Ruskins had when we were here before. The day I left you I progressed prosperously to Paris. Reached there about one o'clock at night; could get no carriage, and finally had to turn in at a little hotel close ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... moral sympathy may be gratified by the idea, that now, in the present hour, he is imparting some degree of amusement or knowledge to his friends in a distant land; that one day his mind will be familiar to the grand-children of those who are yet unborn."—"Memoirs of my Life and Writings," by Edward Gibbon, ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... pair of windows, numbers 39 and 40, also removed in 1788, still offer, in their rose, the figure of a member of the Courtenay family. Gibbon was so much attracted by the romance of the Courtenays as to make an amusing digression on the subject which does not concern us or the cathedral except so far as it tells us that the Courtenays, like so many other benefactors of Chartres Cathedral, belonged to the royal blood. Louis-le-Gros, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... way, or who liked to talk about old authors or old books. In his love of books he was very catholic. "Shaftesbury is not too genteel, nor Jonathan Wild too low. But for books which are no books," such as "scientific treatises, and the histories of Hume, Smollett, and Gibbon," &c., he confesses that he becomes splenetic when he sees them perched up on shelves, "like false saints, who have usurped the true shrines" of the legitimate occupants. He loved old books and authors, indeed, beyond most other things. He used to say ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... foreign journals, which are perhaps even more valuable to the man of letters. Of these the variety is considerable; and many of their writers are now known. They delight our curiosity by opening new views, and light up in observing minds many projects of works, wanted in our own literature. GIBBON feasted on them; and while he turned them over with constant pleasure, derived accurate notions of works, which no student could himself have verified; of many works a ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Bosphorus have, from the dawn of letters, exercised the descriptive talents of the greatest historians of modern Europe. The truthful chronicle of Villehardouin, and the eloquent pictures of Gibbon and Sismondi of the siege of Constantinople, will immediately occur to every scholar. The following passage, however, will show that no subject can be worn out when it is handled by the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... Universities, the German of the people, and both distinctively Luther's. In the Latin there is added to the imperfection of the form, when measured by classical standards, the difficulty of expressing in an old language the new thoughts of the Reformation. German was regarded even by Gibbon, two hundred and fifty years later, as a barbarous idiom. Luther, especially in his earlier writings, struggled to give form to a language and to express the highest thoughts in it. Where Luther thus struggled with two languages, ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... intercalated exception, at man. Gods and women may sometimes do wrong things, but, except as regards the intrigue between Mars and Venus just referred to, they are never laughed at. The scepticism of the Iliad is that of Hume or Gibbon; that of the Odyssey (if any) is like the occasional mild irreverence of the Vicar's daughter. When Jove says he will do a thing, there is no uncertainty about his doing it. Juno hardly appears at all, and when she does she never quarrels with her husband. ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... work was likely to equal that of Gibbon both in length and the years necessary to its completion; also that from it could be expected no immediate pecuniary profits, Mr. Knight looked round to find some other way of occupying his leisure, and ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... new radicalism caused a sensation. Many genuine Garrisonian Abolitionists recoiled from a policy of disunion. Lydia Maria Child and James S. Gibbon of the Executive Committee of the National Society hastened to disavow for the society all responsibility for the disunion sentiment of the editor of the Liberator. His new departure seemed to them "foreign to the purpose for which it was organized." Like ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... European Morals," during the onset of Christianity again, is essentially sociology. Numerous works—Atkinson's "Primal Law," and Andrew Lang's "Social Origins," for example—may be considered, as it were, to be fragments to the same purport. In the great design of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," or Carlyle's "French Revolution," you have a greater insistence upon the dramatic and picturesque elements in history, but in other respects an altogether kindred endeavour to impose upon the vast confusions ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... has been noted that he was associated with Bonosus, who was as renowned in the field of Bacchus as was Proculus in that of Venus (Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire). The feat of Proculus is told in his own words, in Vopiscus, (Hist. Augustine, p. 246) where he recounts having captured one hundred Sarmatian virgins, and unmaidened ten of them in one night, together ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Fall of the Roman Empire. By Edward Gibbon. With notes by Rev. H.H. Milman. Standard edition. To which is added a complete Index of the work. A new edition from entirely new stereotype plates. With portrait on steel. 5 vols., 12mo. Cloth, extra, ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... its surroundings, but for its quaint and attractive architecture of the humbler sort. The Early English church has been well restored and beautified by the Earl of Sheffield, whose estate lies to the west. Gibbon the historian lies in the Sheffield mausoleum. Note the old glass in the small lancet windows; this was buried in the churchyard during some forgotten trouble and discovered and replaced during the restoration. ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... a general notion of the men, and of their time, will find all that they require (set forth from different points of view, though with the same honesty and learning) in Gibbon; in M. de Montalembert's "Moines d'Occident," in Dean Milman's "History of Christianity" and "Latin Christianity," and in Ozanam's "Etudes Germaniques." {17a} But the truest notion of the men is to be ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... settling their claims, the rows and squabbles amongst the candidates, and the subsequent decision of posterity! Dr. Beattie would have ranked as first poet, and twenty years after the sublime Mr. Hayley would, no doubt, have claimed the Grand Cross. Mr. Gibbon would not have been eligible, on account of his dangerous freethinking opinions; and her sex, as well as her republican sentiments, might have interfered with the knighthood of the immortal Mrs. Catharine Macaulay. How Goldsmith would have paraded ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... upon its beauties, fresh life bursts forth from every chapter, and we seem to have a nearer and more personal interest in its success. What a powerful sensation, for instance, is that which we experience when, after studying the 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,' Gibbon tells us how the thought of writing it came to him upon the Capitol, among the ruins of dead Rome, and within hearing of the mutter of the monks of Ara Coeli, and how he finished it one night by Lake Geneva, and laid his pen ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... missionary family resides, and carry on the work of female education. Even at the risk of offending the modesty of the persons concerned, I cannot refrain from putting on record my admiration of the course of Miss Wilson in Zahleh, Miss Gibbon in Hasbeiya, and Miss Williams in Tyre, in making homes for themselves, and carrying on their work far from European ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... and it was with such force that Johnson's almost superhuman personality inspired the art of his friends. Of this they were in some degree aware. Reynolds confessed that Johnson formed his mind, and 'brushed from it a great deal of rubbish.' Gibbon called Johnson 'Reynolds' oracle.' In one of his Discourses Sir Joshua, mindful no doubt of his own experience, recommends that young artists seek the companionship of such a man merely as a tonic to their art. Boswell often testifies to the stimulating ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... but has gone carefully through the entire series of the Byzantine writers who treat of the time, besides availing himself of the various modern works to which reference has been made above. If he has been sometimes obliged to draw conclusions from his authorities other than those drawn by Gibbon, and has deemed it right, in the interests of historic truth, to express occasionally his dissent from that writer's views, he must not be thought blind to the many and great excellencies which render the "Decline and Fall" one of the best, if not the best, of ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... for history, after finishing Rollin I began fingering other works of that kind: there was Whiston's Josephus, too ponderous a book to be held in the hands when read out of doors; and there was Gibbon in six stately volumes. I was not yet able to appreciate the lofty artificial style, and soon fell on something better suited to my boyish taste in letters—-a History of Christianity in, I think, sixteen or eighteen volumes of a convenient size. The simple natural diction attracted ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... published under the name of a person, one Rutherford, who had purchased the MS., were given to the world in "A View of Ancient History." But one highly-finished composition he had himself published; it is a philosophical review of Despotism: had the name of Gibbon been affixed to the title-page, its authenticity had ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... "Notitia utriusque Imperii," the fact that there were Saxon settlers in England before the arrival of Hengist and Horsa seems settled, by the appointment of a "Comes Littoris Saxonici in Britannica."[191] The date of this official and imperial Roman document is fixed by Gibbon between A.D. 395 and 407. About forty years earlier we have—what is more to our present purpose—a notice by Ammianus Marcellinus of Saxons being leagued with the Picts and Scots, and invading the territories south of the Forth, which were held by the Romans and their ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... difficult, indeed impossible, to recall who played what, after the cards are once out of sight. I could tell you, like the man in the story, that such and such a statement is on the ninety sixth page of the fifth volume of GIBBON, the page on the left, half-way down; useless things of that sort I remember: cards, not. As to calculation and inferences, I give it up. I just first play out all my kings, then all my aces, I lead trumps, if I ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 12, 1892 • Various
... for the amphitheatre of ancient Rome must have stimulated the capture of wild animals in Asia, Africa, and the then wild parts of Europe, to an extraordinary extent. I will quote one instance from Gibbon:— ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... Notes, Vol. III., Bohn's British Classics. The third volume of this cheap and excellent reprint of Gibbon extends from Julian's expedition against the Persians to the accession of Marcian.—The Book of the Axe, containing a Piscatorial Description of that Stream, &c., by George P. R. Pulman. A pleasant semi-piscatorial, semi-antiquarian, gossiping volume, welcome ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... been characteristic of most great men. They not only loved knowledge but they were willing to work hard to attain it. As examples of this: Gibbon was in his study every morning, winter and summer, at six o'clock. Milton is said to have stuck to the study of his books with the regularity of a paid bookkeeper. Raphael, the great artist, lived only to the ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... is slow, subject to many influences, and if you have read your history aright"—"Sir. I know it all—all! Norman Conquest, Magna Charta, Runnymede, Reformation, Tudors, Stuarts, Mr. Milton and Mr. Burke, and I have read something of Mr. Herbert Spencer and Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall,' Reynolds' Mysteries of the Court,'" and Pagett felt like one who had pulled the string of a shower-bath unawares, and hastened to stop the torrent with a question as to what particular grievances ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... are fixed, in the direction of the anthropoids; and this group in turn spreads into a number of types, some of which are the extinct apes of the Miocene, four become the gorilla, chimpanzee, orang, and gibbon of to-day, and one is the group that will become man. To put it still more precisely, if we found a whole series of remains of man's ancestors during the Tertiary, we should probably class them, broadly, as femur-remains in the Eocene, monkey-remains in the Oligocene, ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... little, dabbled with geometry some, read Gibbon a little, newspapers less, run some in the woods, and fooled away some of my time," answered Bart, ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... only practical expansions of arts that are in themselves unpractical. The greatest work of the imperial age must be sought in its provincial administration. The significance of this we have come to understand, as not even Gibbon understood it, through the researches of Mommsen. By his vast labours our horizon has broadened beyond the backstairs of the Palace and the benches of the Senate House in Rome to the wide lands north and east and south of the Mediterranean, and we have begun to realize the true achievements ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield
... some eminent animals were too strong for them: the Orang-outang's jaw dropped so as seriously to impair the vigour of his expression, the edifying Pelican screamed and flapped her wings, the Owl hissed again, the Macaw became loudly incoherent, and the Gibbon gave his hysterical laugh; while the Hyaena, after indulging in a more splenetic guffaw, agitated the question whether it would not be better to hush up the whole affair, instead of giving public recognition to an insect whose produce, it was now plain, had been ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... of the anthropoid apes. The last are of peculiar significance, since they are incapable of crossing even narrow channels of water, and must be regarded as products of a very late stage of biological evolution. Of these two anthropoid species, the gibbon (HYLOBATES MULLERI) is closely allied to species found in the mainland and in Sumatra, while the MAIAS or orang-utan (SIMIA SALYRUS) is found also in Sumatra and, though not now surviving on the continent, must be regarded as ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... Haskins says, "shall you have to beg for them?" But it means that to do so is the height of disgrace. (13) The scene is the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic. Here was Diocletian's palace. (Described in the 13th chapter of Gibbon.) (14) That is, night was at its shortest. (15) On the following passage see Dean Merivale's remarks, "History of the Roman Empire", chapter xvi. (16) That is, Sicilian. (17) For Phlegra, the scene of the battle between the giants and the gods, ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... 'AEsop's Fables,' most of the 'Anabasis,' the 'Memorabilia' of Xenophon, and the 'Lives of the Philosophers' by Diogenes Laertius, part of Lucian, and the 'Ad Demonicum' and 'Ad Nicoclem' of Isocrates." Besides these he had also read all of Plato, Plutarch, Gibbon, Hume and Rollin, and was formulating in his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... for the sciences and languages. Look at the course of instruction in the college of arts. During the first year the men study higher algebra, conic sections, plane trigonometry, German (Otto's) botany, Gibbon's Rome. In the college of letters the course is similar, but more attention is given to classical studies; to Livy, Xenophon and Horace. During the same years in the female college, they are studying higher arithmetic, elementary algebra, United States history, grammar, geography and map drawing. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... indeed, Gibbon's entire command, move up at the time when the Sixth Michigan cavalry was contending alone with a superior force directly in ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... race, as worshipping and upholding sun and moon faiths, were called after Meni, the moon." [151] Among the Arabians the moon was the great divinity, as may be learned from Pocock's Specimen Historiae Arabum; Prideaux's Connection; Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and Sale's Preliminary Discourse to his translation of the Koran. Tiele says: "The ancient religion of the Arabs rises little higher than animistic polydaemonism. ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... Bull Run to Appamatox, at page 266, says, "The best tactical moves at Antietam were made by Generals McLaws, A. P. Hill, Gibbon, and Patrick (Confederate) and Colonels Barlow and Cross (Union)." At page 252 he refers to Barlow as the "aggressive spirit of ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller
... each new generation is a continual surprise. The fates delight to contradict our most confident expectations. Gibbon believed that the era of conquerors was at an end. Had he lived out the full life of man, he would have seen Europe at the feet of Napoleon. But a few years ago we believed the world had grown too civilised ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... I seldom saw him. He recreated himself in the balcony, or with a book; and at night, when I went to bed, he was just thinking of setting to work with 'Don Juan.' His favorite reading was history and travels. His favorite authors were Bayle and Gibbon. His favorite recreation was boating." Byron had prodigious facility of composition. He was fond of suppers, and in London, after supping at Rogers's and eating heartily, he would go home and throw off sixty or eighty verses, which he would send ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... riches, position, and all that sort of thing—those kind of men don't want to get married—I am sick of going out; I won't go out any more. We never missed a tennis-party last year; we used to go sometimes ten miles to them, so eager was mamma after Captain Gibbon, and it did not come off; and ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... Gibbon refers to this ancient tradition, though not as accepting it for a part of ascertained history, yet in a spirit less sceptical than was usual to him. He writes thus: 'It is supposed that Odin was chief of a tribe of barbarians ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... Inhabitants to their being quartered there; Breck-road; Boundary-lane; Whitefield House; An Adventure; Mr. T. Lewis and his Carriage; West Derby-road; Zoological Gardens; Mr. Atkins; His good Taste and Enterprise; Lord Derby's Patronage; Plumpton's Hollow; Abduction of Miss Turner; Edward Gibbon Wakefield. ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... poorly prepared for war, the constancy of her citizens rendered her impregnable. The women of Aquileia cut off their hair to make ropes for the military engines. The small body of troops was directed by Chrispinus, a Lieutenant of the Senate. Apollo was the deity supposed to protect them. —Gibbon's ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... celebrated literary club founded by Dr. Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds were Burke, Goldsmith, Garrick, Fox, Gibbon, and Sheridan. Of these Gibbon is not the least distinguished. He is an illustrious example of what an ordinary personality can accomplish by reason of an extraordinary devotion to one purpose. Some few men achieve fame by ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... point M. Anatole France is again an historian. From being the Hakluyt of a saintly adventurer he turns (but more concisely) into the Gibbon of Imperial Penguins. Tracing the development of their civilisation, the absurdity of their desires, the pathos of their folly and the ridiculous littleness of their quarrels, his golden pen lightens by relevant but unpuritanical anecdotes ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... this was regarded by his first followers as a sufficient proof of his having risen from the dead? This would account for the rise of Christianity, and for all the other miracles. Take the following passage from Gibbon:- 'The grave and learned Augustine, whose understanding scarcely admits the excuse of credulity, has attested the innumerable prodigies which were worked in Africa by the relics of St. Stephen, and this marvellous narrative is inserted in the elaborate ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... not like her stepfather; and her mother, though very affectionate and gentle, was a person whose society was apt to become wearisome any time after the first half-hour of social intercourse. At Hyde Lodge Charlotte had a great deal more of Lingard and condensed and expurgated Gibbon than was quite agreeable; she had to get up at a preternatural hour in the morning and to devote herself to "studies of velocity," whose monotony became wearing as the drip, drip, drip of water on the skull of the tortured criminal. She was very tired of all the Hyde-Lodge lessons ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... know whether it be worth while to attempt to refute the opinion which has been founded on an erroneous passage in Eginhard, that Charlemagne could not write. Eginhard understood, as Gibbon says, the court and the world, and the Latin language, it is true; but, nevertheless, we may much more rationally believe that the secretary made use of a vague expression, than suppose that he wished to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... of the chapter I find many pages of information concerning Shakespeare's plays, Milton's works, and those of Bacon, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, De Foe, Locke, Pope, Swift, Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Byron, Coleridge, Hood, Scott, Macaulay, George Eliot, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, Browning, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, and Disraeli—a fact which shows that into the restricted stomach of the public-school pupil is shoveled every year the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... contributors, the late Thomas Seccombe, said, "will soon be regarded as a kind of Phoenix." But in this special department of Everyman's Library we have been eclectic enough to choose our history men from every school in turn. We have Grote, Gibbon, Finlay, Macaulay, Motley, Frescott. We have among earlier books the Venerable Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, have completed a Livy in an admirable new translation by Canon Roberts, while Caesar, Tacitus, Thucydides and Herodotus are not forgotten. "You only, O Books," said Richard de Bury, ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... Tommy was the number of books the engineer had in his cabin. A volume of Nat Gould, Ouida or "The Duchess" would be the largest library Tommy would have found in the other bunks; but here, before his wondering gaze, were Macaulay, Gibbon, Gorki, Conrad, Dickens, Zola, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Chaucer, Shaw, and what not. And what would Master Tommy have said had he known that his friend, even then, was working on a novel in which he, Tommy, would play an ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... an epistolary rebuff on another, the rebuff entirely fails if a single affected word is inserted. The most perfect example of a courteous snub with which I am acquainted was sent by a master of measured and ornamental prose. Gibbon, the historian, received a very lengthy and sarcastic letter from the famous Doctor Priestley, of Birmingham. Priestley blamed Gibbon for his covert mode of attacking Christianity, and observed that Servetus was more to be admired for his courage as a martyr ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... consists, we take it, of Merimee, Mme. de Sevigne, Horace Walpole, Byron, and whom else? But in that larger second class, the class of Gray and Julie de Lespinasse, Lady Mary Montagu, Swift, Flaubert, Leopardi, Charles Lamb, Gibbon, Fitzgerald, Voltaire, Cicero we suppose, and a good many more, she is entitled to a place. Jane Welsh, however, is by no means Mrs. Carlyle. She was but twenty-five when she married. Here we find her rather too conscious of her ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... too, from their historic interest, they have a literary value. Many prose selections from the best historians are also introduced, giving to the narrative a pleasing variety of style that can be found in no one writer, even if he be a Grote, a Gibbon, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... indeed, a rude strength, which, if it could have been supported by an equal health, would have given her the efficiency of the strongest men. As it was, she had great power of work. The account of her reading in Groton is at a rate like Gibbon's, and, later, that of her writing, considered with the fact that writing was not grateful to her, is incredible. She often proposed to her friends, in the progress of intimacy, to write every day. 'I think less than a daily offering of thought ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... movable head, and the above is a polite answer to inquiries. Not a bit of it! carriage is here conduct, and the head is a bust. The vehicles of the rich, at the time, were coaches, chariots, chaises, etc., never carriages, which were rather carts. Gibbon has the word for baggage-wagons. In Jane Austen's novels the word ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau [Footnote: Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was essentially a poet. The others, even Voltaire, were mere reasoners.], and their disciples, in favour of oppressed and deluded ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... answers were negative. In passing through Jerusalem and in coasting the Dead Sea I had been exceedingly struck by the present state of Judaea and the conformity of the fate of the Jewish nation to the predictions of our Saviour; I had likewise been reading Gibbon's eulogy of Julian, and his account of the attempts made by that Emperor to rebuild the temple: so that the dream at such a time and in such a place was not an unnatural occurrence. Yet it was so vivid, and the image of the subject of it so peculiar, that it long affected my imagination, ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... and came up from a new quarter, the sapless branches above rattled against one another like bones. The growing breeze seemed to clear the air and lighten it. He was passing the stile where a path led to old Mrs. Gibbon's desolate little cottage, in the middle of the fields, at some distance even from the lane, and he saw the light blue smoke of her chimney rise distinct above the gaunt greengage trees, against a pale band ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... violet, which was among the plants sacred to Aphrodite, was also appealing to this master poet, who was born this month, as were Wordsworth, George Herbert, John Keble, Anthony Trollope, David Hume, and Edward Gibbon, and who died this month as did Edward Young, who wrote Night Thoughts, and Abraham Lincoln, who freed a race and saved a nation. Who can ever forget the month of Lincoln's death after he has once read that exquisite description of an April day and the song of the hermit thrush, written by Whitman ...
— Some Spring Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... the opposite extreme, are merely convinced without being converted. They are appealed to by the idea of God, rather than led into actual fellowship of life with Him. A striking instance is the historian, Edward Gibbon, who, at the age of sixteen, unaided by the arguments of a priest and without the aesthetic enticements of the Mass, was brought by his reading to embrace Roman Catholicism, and had himself baptized by a Jesuit father in June, ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... average person. You do not approach the classics with gusto— anyhow, not with the same gusto as you would approach a new novel by a modern author who had taken your fancy. You never murmured to yourself, when reading Gibbon's *Decline and Fall* in bed: "Well, I really must read one more chapter before I go to sleep!" Speaking generally, the classics do not afford you a pleasure commensurate with their renown. You peruse them with a sense of duty, a sense of doing the right thing, a sense of "improving yourself," ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... They were found near Auch, in the Department of Gers, in latitude 43 degrees 39' N. About forty miles west of Toulouse. They were referred by MM. Lartet and Blainville to a genus closely allied to the Gibbon, to which they gave the name of Pliopithecus. Subsequently, in 1856, M. Lartet described another species of the same family of long-armed apes (Hylobates), which he obtained from strata of the same age at Saint-Gaudens, in the Haute Garonne. The fossil remains of this animal consisted of ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... the famous financier. He married Mdlle. Curchod, Gibbon's one attachment. Their only child became the celebrated Mme. de Stael. In 1790 he finally was forced to retire from office ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... the "History of the Romans Under the Empire." Merivale's purpose in writing this book was to fill in the interval between the unfinished history by Thomas Arnold and Gibbon.] ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... harder by a shrewish spouse. Lord Chesterfield tells us, "When I talked my best I quoted Horace." To Boileau and to Wordsworth he is equally dear. Condorcet dies in his dungeon with Horace open by his side; and in Gibbon's militia days, "on every march," he says, "in every journey, Horace was always in my pocket, and often in my hand." And as it has been, so it is. In many a pocket, where this might be least expected, lies a well-thumbed Horace; ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... fort, went to the brow of the bluff where the old bastion formerly stood, and while strolling around the home of our childhood were met by General Gibbon, then in command, who, learning who we were and what was our errand, took us to his quarters and showed us much kindness. I told him many things of the old fort which were never recorded, pointed out to him where the stones in the front ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... provinces of it, never illumined the mind of Daniel Webster. Upon coming of age, he joined the Congregational Church, and was accustomed to open his school with an extempore prayer. He used the word "Deist" as a term of reproach; he deemed it "criminal" in Gibbon to write his fifteenth and sixteenth chapters, and spoke of that author as a "learned, proud, ingenious, foppish, vain, self-deceived man," who "from Protestant connections deserted to the Church of Rome, and ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... Even Gibbon, with all his partiality for whatever was pre- or post- Christian, had indeed no better word than 'elegant' for the ancient mythologies of Greece and Rome, and he surely reflected no particularly advanced ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... marriage, cultivated her mind to the utmost; few women were so accomplished—it might be learned; her conversation flowed for ever in the same bright, flowery, adorned stream. There were times when Godolphin recollected how hard it is to read a volume of that Gibbon who in a page is so delightful. Her affection for him was intense, high, devoted; but it was wholly of the same intellectual spiritualised order; it seemed to Godolphin to want human warmth and fondness. In fact, there never was a woman who, both by original nature and ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Hildebrand and Michelangelo, and at one time or another about every one you ever heard of. And how many people came to get emotions they couldn't get anywhere else! There was Goethe. How he felt! He took it all in. And there was Shelley writing poetry in the Baths of Caracalla. And there was Gibbon." ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... started for the long vacations, a little group of five would vow that during the summer we would read all of Motley's "Dutch Republic" or, more ambitious still, all of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." When we returned at the opening of school and three of us announced we had finished the latter, each became skeptical of the other two. We fell upon each other in a sort of rough-and-tumble ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... lion and the unicorn; and forasmuch as no creature, Nelson not excepted, can truly boast of having never known fear, and no man also—from polite Voltaire, shrewd Hume, Leviathan Hobbes, and erudite Gibbon, down to the most stultified Van-Diemanite—can honestly swear himself free from the influence of some sort of faith, for thus much the marvellous and the terrible meet with universal popularity. Now, one or two curious matters connected with those "more ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of the surrender in England is thus described by Gibbon, the historian, who was then sitting in Parliament: "Dreadful news indeed! An English army of nearly ten thousand men laid down their arms, and surrendered, prisoners of war, on condition of being sent to England, and of never serving against ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake
... not as yet any good evidence that these organs are used by male mammals to charm the females. The American Mycetes caraya perhaps forms an exception, as does the Hylobates agilis, an ape allied to man. This gibbon has an extremely loud but musical voice. Mr. Waterhouse states (30. Given in W.C.L. Martin's 'General Introduction to Natural History of Mamm. Animals,' 1841, p. 432; Owen, 'Anatomy of Vertebrates,' vol. iii, p. 600.), ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... fall of the Spanish Empire does not challenge the imagination like the decline and fall of that other Empire with which alone it can be compared, possibly because no Gibbon has chronicled its greatness. Yet its dissolution affected profoundly the history of three continents. While the Floridas were slipping from the grasp of Spain, the provinces to the south were wrenching themselves ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... but the foot is a true foot, and the hand a true hand, in anatomical structure. The face, hands, and feet have mainly lost the covering of hair. They have no tail, or rather its rudiments are concealed beneath the skin. These include the gibbon, the orang, the gorilla, and ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... "Above the combats of the amphitheatre floated for the first time the awning of silk, the immense velarium of a thousand colors, woven from the rarest and richest products of the East, to protect the people from the sun" (Gibbon). ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... test of the greatest prose as of the finest poetry. Humor and pathos, tragedy and comedy, all find their place and glimpses of the pageant of human history flit through the pages. It would seem as if it were impossible to read extracts from Thucydides and Tacitus and Gibbon and not long to go to their histories and learn all that could be said by such men about the life of man upon earth, about Athens and Rome and the rise and fall of empires. Selections are unsatisfying and the better they are the more unsatisfying they become. But this is in reality their great ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... of Foot-Regiments: Lieutenant-General Fleetwood, Lambert, Robert Overton, Matthew Alured, John Hewson (with John Duckinfield for his Lieutenant-Colonel), John Biscoe, William Sydenham, Edward Salmon, Richard Mosse, Richard Ashfield, Sir Arthur Hasilrig, Thomas Kelsay, John Clerk, Robert Gibbon, Robert Barrow.—One finds, besides, certain Colonels appointed to garrison commands: e.g. Colonel Thomas Fitch to be Governor of the Tower, Colonel Nathaniel Whetham to be Governor of Portsmouth, Colonel Mark ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... of the once vast Roman dominions was "a corner of Thrace between the Propontis (Marmora) and the Black Sea, about fifty miles in length and thirty in breadth." [Footnote: Gibbon.] ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... of deciduous literature, or books which dealt with the history of decay. The business, unfortunately, closed before my plans were materialised; but there was a really brilliant series of works prepared for an ungrateful public. A cheap and abridged edition of Gibbon was to have heralded the 'Ruined Home' Library, as we only dealt with the decline and fall of things, and eschewed Motley in both senses of the word. 'Bad Taste in All Ages' (twelve volumes edited by myself) would ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... designated as the golden age of literature, was adorned by such distinguished orators, philosophers, historians, poets and naturalists as Cicero, Tacitus, Pliny, Horace and Virgil. In reference to this subject, Gibbon, in his history of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. I., chapter 2, says: "The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosophers as equally false and by the magistrate as equally useful. Both the ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... with those who admire Charlotte Bronte throughout her career. She altered greatly. She did, in fact, inherit a manner of English that had been strained beyond restoration, fatigued beyond recovery, by the "corrupt following" of Gibbon; and there was within her a sense of propriety that caused her to conform. Straitened and serious elder daughter of her time, she kept the house of literature. She practised those verbs, to evince, to reside, to intimate, to peruse. She wrote ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... Recollections, Domestic, Clerical, and Literary; in which are included letters of Charles II, Cromwell, Fairfax, Edgecumbe, Macaulay, Wolcot, Opie, Whitaker, Gibbon, Buller, Courtenay, Moore, Downman, Drewe, Seward, Darwin, Cowper, Hayley, Hardinge, Sir Walter Scott, and other distinguished characters. By ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... great, bold, and able ruler of France. Mrs. Browning shares it, I think; only she calls herself cool, which I don't; and another still more remarkable co-religionist in the L.N. faith is old Lady Shirley (of Alderley), the writer of that most interesting letter to Gibbon, dated 1792, published by her father, Lord Sheffield, in his edition of the great historian's posthumous works. She is eighty-two now, and as active and vigorous in body and mind, as sixty ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... no society in London so agreeable that Macaulay would have preferred it at breakfast or at dinner "to the company of Sterne or Fielding, Horace Walpole or Boswell." The love of reading which Gibbon declared he would not exchange for all the treasures of India was, in fact, with Macaulay "a main element of happiness in one of the happiest lives that it has ever fallen to the lot of the biographer ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... of a "Trade edition;" the meaning of which being, that the copyright, instead of being the exclusive property of one person, is divided into shares and held by several. There are Trade editions of such voluminous authors as Shakspeare, Gibbon, Hume, and Robertson, for instance; and Alison's Europe, if published half a century back, might in all probability have been added to the list. The difference between the ancient and the modern ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 4, Saturday, November 24, 1849 • Various
... (our feelings we needn't define) To a beastly slow book called the 'Fall and Decline' By a fellow called Gibbon, be d——d to him; then Comes the 'Esprit des lois et des moeurs,' from the pen Of a chap hight Voltaire—un pedant—qui je crois Ne se fichait pas mal et des moeurs et des lois. After which just to vary ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles
... points out that the great students are those who have combined the Teutonic thoroughness with the French comprehensiveness and lucidity. Gibbon and Mommsen are the great examples to which he points. England surely has been very rich in writers thorough and lucid, but we may observe that they follow rather the eighteenth-century tradition, ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... curiously enough, a prefiguration of the Forbes Mackenzie Act, in a decree that all taverns should be shut at nine o'clock. In the end of the year he determined on retiring to Perth, where (in the language of Gibbon, applied to Timour) 'he was expected by the Angel of Death.' It is said that, when about to cross the Frith of Forth, then called the Scottish Sea, a Highland woman, who claimed the character of a prophetess, like Meg Merrilees ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... my father had brought for his own use, my attention would be mostly attracted by a ten or twelve volume edition of Gibbon's Rome. They looked remarkably dry. "Being a boy," I thought, "I am helpless and read many books because I have to. But why should a grown up person, who need not read unless he pleases, bother ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... THEORY EXEMPLIFIED.—At the Zoo is now being exhibited "Three White-tailed Gnus,"—"The Latest Gnus." with the best possible intelligence,—"and a Black-capped Gibbon." This last is evidently a descendant of the great historian; though, if this exemplifies "the survival of the fittest," where are the others of the race? Then "Black-capped" sounds ominous, as if this particular Gibbon stood self-condemned, and was soon to disappear. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 13, 1893 • Various
... bore you very much in reading a MS. in a handwriting like mine?" I asked him one evening, on a sudden impulse at the end of a longish conversation whose subject was Gibbon's History. ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... pigs, droves of cattle, or flocks of sheep in the woods, they cut off the haunches of the men and the breasts of the women, and these they regard as great dainties;" in other words they prefer the shepherd to his flock. Gibbon who quotes this passage says on it: "If in the neighbourhood of the commercial and literary town of Glasgow, a race of cannibals has really existed, we may contemplate, in the period of the Scottish history, the opposite extremes of savage and civilized life. Such reflections ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... requested Emerson to give them a conversation on books, and tell them what they had better read; and he, remembering his own maxim, that the greatest prudence lies in concentration, limited himself purposely to a very few. He recommended Shakespeare and Milton of course; Gibbon's "Decline and Fall"; Boswell's "Life of Johnson"; Goethe's conversations with Eckermann and Goethe's autobiography. "Faust" he spoke of in rather a slighting manner; he did not think it possessed the eternal ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... rid of the Romans first. I confided my idea to a man the other day, and when he had floored me with the Romans as usual, I went and looked up Gibbon.' ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... J. Selby Watson, M.A., forms the new volume of the same publisher's Classical Library. Mr. Bohn has this month commenced a New Series under the title of Bohn's British Classics. The first work is an edition of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, with the notes of Guizot, Wenck, and other continental writers; and farther illustrations by an English Churchman. In thus choosing Gibbon, Mr. Bohn has not shown his usual tact. He may not mean his edition to be a rival to that published by Mr. Murray under ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... A splendid external deception Moral evils Imperial despotism Prostration of liberties Some good emperors Disproportionate fortunes Luxurious living General extravagance Pride and insolence of the aristocracy Gibbon's description of the nobles The plebeian class Hopelessness and disgrace of poverty Popular superstitions The slaves The curse of slavery Degradation of the female sex Bitter satires of Juvenal Games and festivals Gladiatorial shows ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... asset. In 1238, while Baldwin was in France trying to obtain aid, the French barons who carried on the government at Constantinople in his absence were obliged to pledge the crown of thorns to an Italian syndicate for 13,134 perpera, which Gibbon conjectures to have been besants. Baldwin was notified of the pledge and urged to arrange for its redemption. He met with no difficulty. He confidently addressed himself to Saint Louis and Queen Blanche, and "Although the king felt keen displeasure ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... perhaps had he not so clearly felt how much good he could do! But a poor Necker, who could do no good, and had even felt that he could do none, yet sitting broken-hearted because they had flung him out, and he was now quit of it, well might Gibbon mourn over him.—Nature, I say, has provided amply that the silent great man shall strive to speak withal; ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... excess of such things among priests in the past, then I fancy we must be laying up a fine crop of cant for our descendants to grow tired of. Probably the word "education" will some day seem honestly as old and objectless as the word "justification" now seems in a Puritan folio. Gibbon thought it frightfully funny that people should have fought about the difference between the "Homoousion" and the "Homoiousion." The time will come when somebody will laugh louder to think that men thundered against Sectarian Education and also against Secular ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... was subsequently married to Mr. Crosbie Moore, and she ran away with Colonel Fitz-Gibbon, ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... lucky possessors of such a capacity for acquiring knowledge. Wide reading may be good from an educational point of view, but unless we are able to assimilate what we read better a thousand times to restrict our reading. Gibbon's advice is bad, for it indicates merely the system he employed in compiling his monumental work. 'We ought not,' he remarks, 'to attend to the order of our books so much as (to the order) of our thoughts.' ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... corpus, are all lines along which his thought moves, not so much distancing as leading the practical statesmen of his generation. And there is a curious fitness in the dedication to him in 1649 of Edward Pococke's Arabic studies, which nearly a century and a half later were to form the basis of Gibbon's great chapters. But the year of Mare Clausum is at once the greatest in Selden's life, and the last months of greatness in the life ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... course of conduct: read books about composts, etc. I walk about in the fields also where the people are at work, and the more dirt accumulates on my shoes, the more I think I know. Is not this all funny? Gibbon might elegantly compare my retirement from the cares and splendours of the world to that of Diocletian. Have you read Thackeray's little book—the second Funeral of Napoleon? If not, pray do; and buy it, and ask others to buy it: as each copy sold puts ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... when it is done in a single word, it animates the prose; so it is more agreeable to read in Mr. Gibbon's History, "Germany was at this time over-shadowed with extensive forests;" than Germany was at this time full of extensive forests. But where this mode of expression occurs too frequently, the prose approaches to poetry: and in graver works, where we expect ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... that we Yankees, are filled with, and keep up that bold and daring spirit of liberty, which made England what she is; and the loss of which is now perceived by their surrendered ships, and beaten armies in America. All these things will hereafter be detailed by some future Gibbon, in the History of the Decline and ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... any pecuniary advantage gained. A little reading, also, as we have seen, sometimes gives an impulse to the mind in the direction of learning and renown. It was the reading of Echard's Roman History, which Gibbon met with while on a visit to Miltshire, that opened before him the historic ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... of the fourth century, the following state of things at Rome is described by Gibbon, quoting ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... much of his time to the instruction of her in the ancient life of the Eternal City. He had certain volumes of Livy, Niebuhr, and Gibbon, from which he read her extracts at night, shunning the scepticism and the irony of the moderns, so that there should be no jar on the awakening interest of his fair pupil and patient. A gentle cross-hauling ensued between them, that they grew conscious ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... they are presumably less trustworthy than those which are contemporary. Lyttelton remarked that a veneration for Shakespeare seems to be a part of the national religion, and the only part in which even men of sense are fanatics;(5) and Gibbon spoke of the "idolatry for the gigantic genius of Shakespeare, which is inculcated from our infancy as the first duty of an Englishman."(6) The present volume will show how the eighteenth century could almost lose itself in panegyric of Shakespeare. The evidence is ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... not like him, he did not read Marius to the end. The richness and complication of Pater's style annoyed him. He liked prose to be clear and stately; he liked it, in English, to be Addisonian. Even Gibbon-though he read The Decline and Fall over again, very carefully, so late as 1913—was not entirely to his taste. He enjoyed the limpidity and the irony, but the sustained roll of Gibbon's antitheses vexed him a little. He liked prose ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Spencer (only as much of him as I hope I understand and am afraid I do not), Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold, Thoreau, Lewis Carroll, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne, Wuthering Heights, Lamb's Essays, Johnson's Lives, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Gibbon, the immortal Pepys, the egregious Boswell, various American children's books that I loved as a child and read and love to this day; various French children's books, loved for the same reason; whole rows of German children's books, on which I was brought up, with their ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... the "settled and satisfactory opinions of the country upon the subject." We could never so appreciate as perfectly to admit the truth of the canon in criticism here involved, and to this day we cannot help agreeing with Gibbon, that "Truth is the first virtue of history." Mrs. George seems to concur with Gibbon and Cooper, and disregarding the poetry and romance woven about the name of Isabella the Catholic, has painted her according to the documents, which ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... exiled, the same thing may happen, and does happen in our waking hours. Therefore isolement must not be regarded as anything wonderful or mystic, but merely as a day-dream. I admit that this seems at first sight a plausible explanation. Yet I can say with Gibbon, "this statement is probable; but ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... which are no books—biblia a-biblia—I reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards bound and lettered at the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large; the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and, generally, all those volumes which "no gentleman's library should be without:" the Histories of Flavins Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley's Moral Philosophy. With these exceptions, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... herself—and her liberality soon made her salon the most celebrated in Paris; the encyclopedists, Diderot, D'Alembert, and Marmontel, received from her a liberal encouragement in their great undertaking; Walpole, Hume, and Gibbon were among her friends; and Stanislas Poniatowsky, who became king of Poland, acknowledged her generosity to him by styling himself her son and welcoming her royally to his ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... ("Dictionnaire Historique et Archeologique du Pas de Calais," vol. i, p. 22). The circuit of the present fortifications, about 700 yards square, present to-day the appearance pf the old Roman encampment. "The camp of a Roman legion," writes Gibbon, "presented all the appearance of a fortified city. As soon as the place was marked out, the pioneers carefully levelled the ground and removed every impediment that might interrupt its perfect regularity. It forms an exact quadrangle, ...
— Bolougne-Sur-Mer - St. Patrick's Native Town • Reverend William Canon Fleming
... and prologues to contain more of the matter and art of the modern English novel than the whole treasury of Mr. Mudie. Whether a narrative be written in blank verse or the Spenserian stanza, in the long period of Gibbon or the chipped phrase of Charles Reade, the principles of the art of narrative must be equally observed. The choice of a noble and swelling style in prose affects the problem of narration in the same way, if not to the same degree, as the choice of measured verse; for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of its interpretation is, as one of its interpreters confesses, the opprobrium of exegesis. But if one ceases to look among these symbols for a predictive outline of modern history, "a sort of anticipated Gibbon," and begins to read it in the light of the apocalyptic method, it may have rich and large meanings for him. He will not be able, indeed, to explain it all; to some of these riddles the clue has ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... themselves, and they crowded off toward the center to avoid the pressure. Many of them were killed or captured; many were driven back; but two of the brigades, headed by General Armistead, forced their way forward to the stone wall on the crest, where the Pennsylvania regiments were posted under Gibbon and Webb. ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... her guests, and assuring herself that the number of teacups would suffice. She had heard the lecture many times before, and with repetition its sonorous periods had lost hold upon her, although her brother had been at pains to model them upon Gibbon. ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch |
