"Laureate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you: Love's Goddess has oft to her parents complain'd, Of my favouring a bard who her empire disdain'd; That at my instigation, a poem you writ, Which to beauty and youth preferr'd judgment and wit; That, to make you a Laureate, I gave the first voice, Inspiring the Britons t'approve of my choice. Jove sent her to me, her power to try; The Goddess of Beauty what God can deny? She forbids your preferment; I grant her desire. Appease the fair Goddess: you then may rise ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... this voyage around England the Premier visited the Orkneys on a similar trip, in the "Pembroke Castle," the poet laureate being of the party on this occasion. From the Orkneys he sailed across to Denmark and suddenly appeared at Copenhagen, where Mr. Gladstone entertained the Czar and Czarina, the King of Greece, and the King and Queen of Denmark, and many others ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... of fine feelings, to set off rather than to mitigate these horrors. The society was founded in the fourteenth century, and it has held annual meetings ever since—meetings at which poems in the fine old langue d'oc are declaimed and a blushing laureate is chosen. This business takes place in the Capitol, before the chief magistrate of the town, who is known as the capitoul, and of all the pretty women as well—a class very numerous at Toulouse. It is unusual to ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... letter wrote that she had heard from Mrs. A. T. that the Laureate was still suffering. I judge from your Letter that he is better. . . . I never heard any of his coadjutor Sullivan's Music. Is there a Tune, or originally melodious phrase, in any of it? That is what I always missed in Mendelssohn, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... 'equable', but of course u remains long, as in 'mutable'. Longer words throw the stress further back, except mere negatives, like 'impl['a]cable', and words with heavy consonants such as 'delectable'. Examples are 'miserable', 'admirable', 'intolerable', 'despicable'. The Poet Laureate holds that in these words Milton kept the long Italian a of ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... what luck! A "run" unprecedented, Or almost so; and fodder With which the Laureate's Bird had been contented: Fortune has freaks far odder Than e'en a poet's whimsies, any ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... not enough to raise an author above the fear of dying in want of necessaries. The two great dictators of literature, Ben Jonson in the earlier and Dryden in the later part of the century, only kept their heads above water by help of the laureate's pittance, though reckless imprudence, encouraged by the precarious life, was the cause of much of their sufferings. Patronage gave but a fitful resource, and the author could hope at most but an occasional crust, flung to him from ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... of the Highland roads was in progress, the late Robert Southey, poet laureate, visited the Highlands in company with his friend the engineer, and left on record an interesting account of his visit, in a, manuscript now in the possession of Robert Rawlinson, C.E., to whom we are indebted for the extracts which are made from it ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... illegitimate in taking advantage of such an opportunity? Surely, he should remain his own master, and write nothing except what his own conscience approved. But would he not feel, even if no one else knew it, that he was the poet-laureate of a corporation? ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... truth in his accusations to render it inexpedient to prosecute him for libel. The punishment of what was false would have involved the public exposure of what was true. The official party realized the force of the laureate's dictum, ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... with a characteristic inscription. His house was ornamented with minarets, adorned with golden balls, and surmounted by a large gilt eagle. He equipped it with costly furniture, with paintings, and a library. He went so far as to procure the services of a poet laureate, whose business it seems to have been to sing his praises. Surrounded with splendors like these, the plain title of "Mr." Dexter would have been infinitely too mean and common. He therefore boldly took the step of self-ennobling, and gave himself forth—as he said, obeying ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... permission from the Laureate's publishers to reprint the following stanzas from "The ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... a common method of rewarding favourites of the crown. In the roll which contains this grant it is said to be conferred upon our beloved esquire." By way of comment on the grant of a pitcher of wine daily, he writes: [Footnote: 4 idem, p. 63.] "Though never graced with the title of poet laureate, Chaucer obtained at this same period what came to be one of the most distinguishing perquisites which attached itself to that office in later times." With regard to the offices: [Footnote: 5 idem, p. 66.] "Chaucer was constantly employed in civil offices at home and ...
— Chaucer's Official Life • James Root Hulbert
... part of Geography. And if you will look about you, you will note that Natural Beauty is having an increasing effect upon the movements of men. There is a very definite relationship between the Beauty of the Earth and her human inhabitants. The Poet Laureate builds his house on the top of Boar's Hill not because the soil is specially productive up there so that he may be able to grow food, for the soil is rather poor; not because water is easily available, for it is very difficult to get, ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... to poetry. In his thirty-third year he was nominated to an office equivalent to that of Poet Laureate. Seven years later he died, never having lost the favour of Akbar, who delighted in his society and revelled in his conversation. It is said that he composed a hundred and one books. His fine library, consisting of four thousand three hundred ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... the Quarto of 1691 the play is divided into acts, but not into scenes, though the first act is headed Actus Primus, Scaena Prima. The first systematic division into scenes was made by Nicholas Rowe, poet laureate to George I, in the edition which he issued in six octavo volumes in 1709. In this edition Rowe, an experienced playwright, marked the entrances and exits of the characters and introduced many stage directions and the list of dramatis personae ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... dead! Rites thy brown oaks would never dare Ev'n whisper to the idle air; Rites that have chain'd old Ocean on his bed. Shiver'd by thy piercing glance, Pointless falls the hero's lance. Thy magic bids the imperial eagle fly, [Footnote 18] And blasts the laureate wreath of victory. Hark, the bard's soul inspires the vocal string! At every pause dread Silence hovers o'er: While murky Night sails round on raven-wing, Deepening the tempest's howl, the torrent's roar; Chas'd by ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... poetry. Among the best I have ever seen. There are 81 in the list. I did not need them all, but I have knocked down 66 of them; which is a good bag, it seems to me, for a person not in the business. Perhaps a poet laureate could do better, but a poet laureate gets wages, and that is different. When I write poetry I do not get any wages; often I lose money by it. The best word in that list, and the most musical and gurgly, is Woolloomoolloo. It ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... The Evening News, "Why is the Poet Laureate so strangely silent?" Everyone else will remember Mr. BRIDGES' patriotic lines at the beginning of the War, and we begin to suspect that Mr. ASHTON'S well-known repugnance to writing for the papers has been extended ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... book; he ranked as a potentate in STYLE. But literary perfection, whether in prose or poetry, is a fragile quality, an afflatus irregular, independent, unamenable to orders; the official tributes of a Laureate we compliment at their best with the northern farmer's verdict on the ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... of how Roget on a great occasion played a match at football, "having scarce twenty Satyrs on his side," against some of "the best tried Ruffians in the land." Great Pan presided at that match by the banks of Thames, and though the satyrs and their laureate leader were worsted, the moral victory, as people call it, remained with the latter. All this is an allegory; and indeed we walk in the very shadow of innuendo all through ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... the antiquary, that these verses are intended to imitate the antique poetry of the Scalds—the minstrels of the old Scandinavians—the race, as the Laureate so happily terms them, ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... seems to be a poetry rapidly approaching state approval, there is in it the flavour of the budding laureate, it seems to me to be poetry already "in orders". Brooke was certainly in danger of becoming a good poet, like the several other poets who perished in the throes of heroism. Like them, he would, had he lived, have had to save himself from the evils of prosperity, poetically speaking. ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... return for Agmondesham in March 1627. He appears to have been in these years a silent senator, taking little interest or share in the debates, but retiring from them to offer the quit-rent of his versicles—a laureate without salary, and yet not probably much more sincere than laureates generally are; for although his loyalty was undoubted, his expressions of it in rhyme are often ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... 1703, Philips produced 'The Splendid Shilling,' which proved a hit, and seems to have diverted his aspirations from the domains of Aesculapius to those of Apollo. Bolingbroke sought him out, and employed him, after the battle of Blenheim, to sing it in opposition to Addison, the laureate of the Whigs. At the house of the magnificent but unprincipled St John, Philips wrote his 'Blenheim,' which was published in 1705. The year after, his 'Cider,' a poem in two books, appeared, and was received ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... Henry IV. had been succeeded by the stormy minority of Louis XIII., when Malherbe (1556-1628), the tyrant of words and syllables, appeared as the reformer of poetry. He attracted attention by ridiculing the style of Ronsard. He became the laureate of the court, and furnished for it that literature in which it was beginning to take delight. In the place of Latin and Greek French, he inaugurated the extreme of formality; the matter of his verse was made subordinate to the manner; he substituted ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... as his laureate Milton puts it, and yet be doomed to keep still hour after hour in a stuffy office, or to haggle over details of pork and cheese in a malodorous victualing yard. Trevennack knew his "Paradise Lost" by heart—it was there, indeed, ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... off from their historic antecedents and their costume of circumstance into the every-day aspect of the gentleman of common cultivated society. That is Sir Coeur de Lion Plantagenet in the mutton-chop whiskers and the plain gray suit; there is the Laureate in a frockcoat like your own, and the leader of the House of Commons in a necktie you do not envy. That is the kind of thing you want to take the nonsense out of you. If you are not decanted off from yourself every few days or weeks, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... himself. For instance, in a letter to the public to be set forth presently, he calls himself "poet of the Emperor Joseph II." He was in the habit of thus designating himself and it was small wonder that his biographers almost unanimously interpreted these words to mean that he was poet laureate, or Caesarian poet. After the mischief, small enough, except perhaps in an ethical sense, had been done, he tried to correct it in a foot note on one of the pages of his "Memorie," in which he says that he was not "Poeta Cesario," but "poet to the Imperial ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Waller's influence on Saint-Evremond) to make him the first English man of letters who was introduced by a great critic of the Continent to continental attention as a worker in the English vernacular. At last he was made Poet Laureate, and in 1618 he took a journey to Scotland, and stayed there for some time with Drummond of Hawthornden. The celebrated conversations noted by the host have been the very centre battle-ground of all fights about Ben Jonson's character. It is ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... fact, as recorded on the back of the original drawing, the eventful reading took place at 13 Dorset Street, Portman Square, on the 27th of September 1855, and those present, besides the Poet-Laureate, Browning, and Rossetti, were Mrs. E. Barrett Browning ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... coloured evening editions arranged in a stiff skirt, like that of a saltatrice, round the waist of the wearer) has many mysterious points. The attire of a person prepared to criticise the Poet Laureate is something so awful and striking that I dare not even begin to describe it; the one fact which I am willing to reveal, and to state seriously and responsibly, is that it buttons ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... way he managed to live on less than two hundred dollars a year, derived from the proceeds of poems, pamphlets and essays. At this time he was already an "Academy Laureate," having received honorable mention for a poem submitted in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... now. The bay was an emblem of victory in old Roman times, and victorious generals were crowned with it. A wreath of this laurel, with the berries on, was placed on the head of a favorite poet in the Middle Ages, and in this way came the title 'poet-laureate'—laureatus,' ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... Revolutionists, quickly cooled off their ardor, and as Taine cleverly puts it, "at the end of a few years, the three, brought back into the pale of State and Church, were, Coleridge, a Pittite journalist, Wordsworth, a distributor of stamps, and Southey, poet-laureate; all converted zealots, decided Anglicans, and intolerant conservatives." The "handful of silver" for which the patriot in the poem is supposed to have left the cause included besides the post of "distributor of stamps," ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... rejoiced more in him than in all the other wonders of the Exhibition." When I afterwards told Tennyson that the author whose "Twice-Told Tales" he happened to be then reading at Farringford had met him at Manchester, but did not make himself known, the Laureate said in his frank and hearty manner: "Why didn't he come up and let me shake hands with him? I am sure I should have been glad to meet ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... vivisector, for he concludes by a suggestion that 'all malefactors should be kept for experiments instead of being hanged.' In another number this periodical indulges in a criticism upon the new ode of the poet laureate (Colley Cibber), in the course of which the writer expresses an opinion that 'when a song is good sense, it must be made nonsense before it is made music; so when a song is nonsense, there is no other way but by singing it to make it seem tolerable sense'—a criticism which, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... consequence of that intelligence, he published, in 1747, The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, addressed to the right honourable Philip Dormer, earl of Chesterfield, one of his majesty's principal secretaries of state. Mr. Whitehead, afterwards poet laureate, undertook to convey the manuscript to his lordship: the consequence was an invitation from lord Chesterfield to the author. A stronger contrast of characters could not be brought together; the nobleman, celebrated for his wit, and all the graces of polite behaviour; ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... Malarius, the public teacher of Noroe, and laureate of the Botanical Society. It contained a check for one hundred kroners, and begged that he might be attached to the expedition as the assistant naturalist of ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... poetry was attributed to "men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations." Byron's revenge was complete. In his "Vision of Judgment" (published in The Liberal, No. I., October 15, 1822) the tables are turned. The laureate is brought before the hosts of heaven and rejected by devils and angels alike. In October Byron wrote Heaven and Earth, a Mystery (The Liberal, No. II., January 1, 1823), a lyrical drama based on the legend of the "Watchers," or fallen angels of the Book of Enoch. The countess ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... always humbled the professor hitherto (even in an age when kings were somebody), if he were a poor writer by making him more conspicuous, and if he were a good one by setting him at war with the little fry of his own profession, for there are poets little enough to envy even a poet laureate. ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... the well-attired woodbine, With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, And every flower that sad embroidery wears: Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffadillies fill their cups with tears, To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies. For, so to interpose a little ease, Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise; Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas Wash far away, where'er thy bones are hurled; Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides, ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... Robert Southey, poet laureate, and conservative Churchman, wrote the life of Nelson, wrote it on stolen time—sandwiched in between essays and epics. And now behold it is the one effort of Robert Southey that perennially survives, and is religiously read—his one great claim to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... seemed to be enjoying a period of kingly favor. He had been made a Knight of the Bedchamber and also Historiographer of France. The chief duty of the first office consisted in signing the monthly voucher for salary, and the other was about the same as Poet Laureate—with salary in inverse ratio to responsibility. It was considered, however, that the holder of these offices was one of the King's family, and therefore was bound to indulge ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... villains, not necessarily criminals; but the ordinary, every-day, picturesque worthies of good, honest scoundrelism and disreputableness is Sir Robert Louis Stevenson. You can afford conscientiously to stuff ballot boxes in order that his election may be secured as Poet Laureate of Rascals. Leaving out John Silver and Billy Bones and Alan Breck, whom every privately shriven rascal of us simply must honor and revere as giants of courage, cunning and controlled, conscience, Stevenson turned ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... filthy coenobites, of imbecile rulers and rampant robbers, of the threatened dissolution of every tie, legal, social, or political; an age of earthquake, war, and famine! Bacchus, who is known from Aristophanes not to have excelled in criticism, protested that his laureate was greater than Homer; and, though Homer could not go quite so far as this, he graciously conceded that if he had himself been an Egyptian of the fifth century, with a faint glimmering of the poetical art, and encumbered with more learning ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... Maeldune' is a magnificent allegorical expansion of this idea; and the laureate has also finely commemorated the old belief in the country of Lyonnesse, extending beyond ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... to being pointed out by the passer-by as the minstrel of the Roman lyre, or, in other words, as the laureate, that his satire provokes sufficient criticism to draw from him a defense and a justification of himself against the charge of cynicism, and that he finally records a greater freedom from the tooth of envy, are all indications of the prominence to which ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... is reported to have invented a machine to record communication with the other world. As a final experiment an attempt is to be made to get into touch with the POET LAUREATE. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... be so alarmingly outspoken when she sings our praises to strangers. She gave him to understand that I am a full-fledged author and playwright, the peer of any poet laureate who ever held a pen; that Lloyd is a combination of princess and angel and halo-crowned saint, and Joyce a model big sister and an all-round genius. How she managed in the short time they were alone to tell him as much as she did will always ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... dark herself, she admired golden hair more than anything) as bright as the sunshine. And in the light she caught the out-line of a pretty head, and of a nose slightly "tip-tilted," according to the model which the Laureate has brought into fashion. Where had she seen her before? She remembered all at once with a rush ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... domestic poet who wrote 'The Task', and invested even furniture with the glamour of poesy? Alas! to many people Cowper is merely a name, or is known only as the author of the delightfully quaint ballad of John Gilpin. Yet he was undoubtedly the Poet Laureate of domesticity, and every householder should possess a bust or picture of him—placed, not amid the frigid splendours of the drawing room, but occupying the place of honour in his own particular den, where everything ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... the marble breathe, Pour soft the verse, and twine the laureate wreath; From year to year let musing Memory shed Her tenderest tears, to grace the glorious dead. 'Tis ours with grateful ardour to sustain The wounded veteran on his bed of pain; To soothe the widow, sunk in anguish deep, Whose orphan weeps ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... Maecenas introduced him to Augustus, who, according to Suetonius, offered him a place in his own household, which the poet prudently declined. But as the unrivalled lyric poet of the time Horace gradually acquired the position of poet-laureate; and his ode written to command for the celebration of the Secular Games in 17 B.C., with the official odes which followed it on the victories of Tiberius and Drusus, and on the glories of the Augustan age, mark ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... poem entitled 'The Chronicle of England unto the Reign of King Edward the Fourth, in Verse.' It has no poetic merit, and little interest, except to the antiquary. In the reign of the above king we find the first mention of a Poet Laureate. John Kay was appointed by Edward, when he returned from Italy, Poet Laureate to the king, but has, perhaps fortunately for the world, left behind him no poems. Would that the same had been the case with some of his successors ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... in four battles had set him among the national heroes; he had been, in The Persians, the laureate of Salamis; by the sheer grandeur of his poetry he had won the prize thirteen times in succession.—And by the bye, it is to the eternal credit of Athenian intelligence that Athens, at one hearing of those obscure, lofty and tremendous poems, should have ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... workes of maister Skelton, Poete Laureate. Nowe collected and newly published. Anno 1568. Imprinted at London in Fletestreate, neare vnto saint ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... Fottrell and Sir Robert Hamilton were the only two men who counted in that city.] had had a two-hours interview with Randolph Churchill on Home Rule. I also informed Mr. Gladstone that O'Shea had shown me a letter from Alfred Austin,' (afterwards Poet Laureate) 'a hot Tory leader-writer on the Standard, asking to be introduced to Parnell for the benefit of the country. Lefevre having gone away, Chamberlain and I talked with Mr. Gladstone as to organization. It was decided that we should have an ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... on the prince during his last illness. I was supping with Veraci, the poet-laureate, on the eve of the prince's death, and in the course ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... obtained the patronage of Lord Halifax by a Latin version of his Lordship's poem on the Battle of the Boyne, in 1718. By the influence of the Duke of Newcastle, then Lord Chamberlain, he was made Poet-laureate, upon the death of Rowe. Eusden died, rector of Conington, Lincolnshire, in 1730, and his death was hastened by intemperance. Of the laurel left for Cibber ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... horse-shoe valley, and the river brimming out from the 'monarch of springs.' In these new lawns of Helicon he made a new home for his books, and tried to forget in their company the tumults that had driven him from Italy. In 1340 he received offers of a laureate's crown from Rome, the capital of the world, and from Paris, 'the birth-place of learning.' 'I start to-day,' he wrote to Colonna, 'to receive my reward over the graves of those who were the pride of ancient Rome, and in the very theatre of their exploits.' The Capitol resounded to such ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... grief at his not untimely death. The Queen deplored him as "our immortal hero"—a servant of the Crown "devoted, loyal, and faithful" beyond all example; the nation endeavoured by a funeral of unprecedented sumptuousness to show its sense of loss; the poet laureate devoted to his memory a majestic Ode, hardly surpassed by any in the language for its stately, mournful music, and finely faithful in its characterisation of ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... heard of Byron's 'Sardanapalus'?" exclaimed the actor, throwing up his hands. "Why, it's one of the finest things ever put upon the boards. Full of telling effects, and not too many bothering lengths, you know. The Poet Laureate, dear good man, worried my life out a year ago to let him write a play upon the subject especially for me. The part of Sardanapalus was to be devised so as to bring out all my particular—er—capabilities, and any little hints that might occur to me were to be ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... (died 728), and Muslim ibn al-Walid (died 828). But it is rather the Persian spirit which rules,—the spirit of the Shahnameh and Firdausi,—"charming elegance, servile court flattery, and graceful wit." In none are the characteristics so manifest as in Abu Nuwas (762-819), the Poet Laureate of Harun, the Imr-al-Kais of his time. His themes are wine and love. Everything else he casts to the wind; and like his modern counterpart, Heine, he drives the wit of his satire deep into the holiest feelings of his people. "I would that all which Religion and Law forbids were ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet laureate. ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... to live Past kingdoms, with his vivid brain! Who could such warmth to shadows give, By the mere magic of his pen, That Charles and England rose again! Well sleeps he 'mid the Abbey's dust: And, Laureate! thy funereal verse Shall have such echo as it must From hearts just wrung ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... terms and conditions; take them together into the recitation-room, where they recite side by side; require them to pursue the same course of study; and, when satisfactorily completed, give them degrees of the same rank and honor—Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Arts to gentlemen, Laureate of Science and Laureate of Arts to ladies. Both sexes are required to pursue the same course of study, with the exception of civil engineering and political economy, which are merely optional studies with ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... whole current of Mr R's ideas, and altered his plans for me. I was no longer to be the future poet-laureate; I was no more enticed to sing great deeds, but to do them. The sword was to displace the pen, the hero the poet. Verse was too effeminate, and rhyme was severely interdicted, and to be forgiven only when it was produced ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... HAYNE has been justly called the "Laureate of the South." He was born at Charleston, and being left an orphan by the death of his father, Lieutenant Hayne of the Navy, he was reared and educated by his uncle, Robert Young Hayne. His fortune was ample, but he studied law although ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... young versifiers, and deemed that in introducing poor White's remains to the polite world he was laying the first lucifer to a bonfire that would gloriously crackle for posterity. No less than Chatterton was the worthy laureate's estimate of his young foundling; but alas! Chatterton and Kirke White both seem thinnish gruel to us; and even Southey himself is down among the pinch hitters. Literary prognosis ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... our genial and many-sided poet-laureate, who is also a philosopher, in his "Life of Emerson," has finely worked out the theory that no man writes other than his own experience: that consciously or otherwise an author describes himself in the characters he draws; that when he loves the character he delineates, it is in some measure ...
— Shakespeare's Insomnia, And the Causes Thereof • Franklin H. Head
... authority over both birds and beasts, and in a Slovak story she bestows on the hero a magic horse" (520. 211). In Bulgaria we even find mother-months, and Miss Garnett has given an account of the superstition of "Mother March" among the women of that country (61.I. 330). William Miller, the poet-laureate of the ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... by all classes and in almost all places. It was smoked freely in the streets. In some verses prefixed to an edition of Skelton's "Elinour Rumming" which appeared in 1624, the ghost of Skelton, who was poet-laureate to King Henry VIII, was made to say that ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... concluded that if Coleridge and Lovell were good samples of socialism he would stick to individualism. So he joined the Church of England, became a Monarchist, sang the praises of royalty, got a pension, became Poet Laureate, and rich—passing rich. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... Journal, provoking endless parliamentary wrangles, and perhaps helping to develop later on an editor. Memorable were the Young People's Conventions of 1886 and 1887, and Lylians will never forget the patriot Kromm, Spoopendyke Shreve, the poet laureate and a dozen others. The Fourth of July picnics at Pamrapo and Nyack are happy memories ...
— The Kirk on Rutgers Farm • Frederick Bruckbauer
... SWINE: I have heard your Laureate sing, That pity was a royal thing; Under your mighty ancestors, we Pigs Were bless'd as nightingales on myrtle sprigs, 40 Or grasshoppers that live on noonday dew, And sung, old annals tell, as sweetly too; But now our sties are fallen in, we catch ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the Mermaid Inn Had dubbed our London laureate, hauled the cask Out of its ancient harbourage. "Ben," he cried, Bustling into the room with Dekker and Brome, "The prentices are up!" Ben raised his head Out of the chimney-corner where he drowsed, And listened, reaching slowly ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... freaked with jet, The glowing violet, The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine, With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, And every flower that sad embroidery wears: Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffodillies fill their cups with tears, To strow the laureate hearse where Lycid lies. For so to interpose a little ease, Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise. Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurled, Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides, ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... made to present in modern English the Ballad of Brunanburh, the most successful being that by the Poet Laureate. Our language is rather out of practice for kindling a poetic fervour around the sentiment of flinging scorn at a vanquished foe; but the following will serve to illustrate this heathenish element, or such relics of it as survived in the tenth century. The person ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... and Scratch. There should be a court-mourning in Catland, and if the Dragon (your pet cat) wear a black ribbon round his neck, or a band of crape a la militaire round one of his fore paws it will be but a becoming mark of respect." Then the poet-laureate adds, "I believe we are each and all, servants included, more sorry for his loss, or, rather, more affected by it, than any of us would like ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... would be eminently suitable under a female sovereign, but even expressed its opinion that 'there is no living poet of either sex who can prefer a higher claim than Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning.' No doubt there would have been a certain appropriateness in the post of Laureate to a Queen being held by a poetess, but the claims of Tennyson to the primacy of English poetry were rightly regarded as paramount. The fact that in Robert Browning there was a poet of equal calibre with Tennyson, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... a satire by Alexander Pope—written to revenge himself upon his literary enemies. The plot is this: Eusden the poet-laureate being dead, the goddess of Dulness elects Colley Cibber as his successor. The installation is celebrated by games, the most important being the "reading of two voluminous works, one in verse and the other in prose, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... monument to his memory has recently been erected, representing him in a recumbent position, and bearing an inscription from the pen of Wordsworth, his more than literary friend for many years, and his successor to the poet- laureate-ship. A new and beautiful church, erected at the eastern part of the town by the late John Marshall, Esq., adds much to the quiet repose of the scene. Mr. Marshall became Lord of the Manor by purchasing the forfeited ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... has an early determination—a first one—to follow some ennobling profession, once he has come to man's estate, such as being a policeman, or a performer on the high trapeze. The poet would not have been the "Peoples' Laureate," had his fairy god- mother granted his boy-wish, but the Greenfield baker. For to his childish mind it "seemed the acme of delight," using again his own happy expression, "to manufacture those snowy loaves of bread, those delicious tarts, those toothsome bon-bons. ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... special popularity, indeed, of lyric as opposed to epic verse is due to this habit of feeling. A good example maybe found in the work of Mr Swinburne: the latter is the better poetry, the earlier remains the more popular — because of its eloquence of margin. Mr Tupper might long ago have sat with laureate brow but for his neglect of this first principle. The song of Sigurd, our one epic of the century, is pitiably unmargined, and so has never won the full meed of glory it deserves; while the ingenious gentleman ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... The Laureate had read this, and yet considers it the language of a heart that 'never was hardened.' He says that 'the wickedness of the tinker has been greatly overcharged, and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally to pronounce of John Bunyan, that he was at any time depraved. The worst ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the man who runs may read The lesson with this lay entwined. (If Topsey-turvey thus succeed, The noble Laureate will not mind!) And liberal applications lie In this quaint Legend, good my friend. So, put the song and picture by, And hook it—to some ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 26, 1891 • Various
... most prominent man of letters in London. In 1670 he had been appointed Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal with a salary of two hundred pounds and a butt of sack. His connection with the stage had been a decided financial success, and he was in receipt of an income of about seven hundred pounds, which ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... me which of these four I should like best, I should say as the Laureate did when they gave him his choice of two kinds of cake, "Both's ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... majesty was present. But a far more picturesque account of the case is given by an ancestor of the present Lord Lonsdale's, whose memoirs (still in MS.) are alluded to in one of his Ecclesiastic Sonnets by Mr Wordsworth, our present illustrious laureate. One trait is of a nature so fine, and so inevitable under similar circumstances of interest, that, but for the intervention of the sea, we should certainly have witnessed its repetition on the termination of the Dublin trials. Lord Lowther (such ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... Pembroke, wife of that Philip Herbert who was the brother of Shakespeare's friend, showed how tenderly she remembered her old instructor, Daniel, the poet-laureate, by erecting a handsome monument to him in Beckington Church, bearing this inscription: "Here lies, expecting the second coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the dead body of Samuel Daniel, Esq., who was tutor to the Lady Anne Clifford in her youth. She was that daughter and heir ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... vidi, nati filii, alia cura. All gifts and invitations cease, no friend will esteem thee, and thou shalt be compelled to lament thy misery, and make thy moan with [5815]Bartholomeus Scheraeus, that famous poet laureate, and professor of Hebrew in Wittenberg: I had finished this work long since, but that inter alia dura et tristia quae misero mihi pene tergum fregerunt, (I use his own words) amongst many miseries which almost broke my back, [Greek: syzygia] ob Xantipismum, a shrew ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... Maronites, the Iambic poet, gave himself wholly to write impure and lascivious things: so SKELTON (I know not for what great worthiness, surnamed the Poet Laureate) applied his wit to scurrilities and ridiculous matters; such [as] among the Greeks were called Pantomimi, with ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine, With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, And every flower that sad embroidery wears; Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffadillies fill their cups with tears, To strew the laureate herse where Lycid lies. For so, to interpose a little ease, Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise, Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas Wash far away, where'er thy bones are hurled; Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides, Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide Visitest ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... Our young laureate passed three years in Italy, spending most of his time at Rome and Naples. The special result of his Italian studies was a requiem mass, which was performed with great approbation from its musical judges at Paris and Rome. After traveling ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... THE LITTLE PRUDY STORIES would be elected Aunty-laureate if the children had an opportunity, for the wonderful books she writes for their amusement. She is the Dickens of the nursery, and we do not hesitate to say develops the rarest sort of genius in the specialty of depicting ...
— Prudy Keeping House • Sophie May
... city popes, princes and international warriors lived in royal style; but they are virtually forgotten, while Petrarch, the poetic saint and laureate of Italy, is as fresh in the memory of man as the day he died—July 18th, 1374, at the ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... notable stirring of courage; not of abusing man's wit, but of strengthening man's wit; not banished, but honoured by Plato; let us rather plant more laurels for to ingarland the poets' heads (which honour of being laureate, as besides them only triumphant captains were, is a sufficient authority to show the price they ought to be held in) than suffer the ill-favoured breath of such wrong speakers once to blow upon the ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... Poet-Laureate, a writer of the best English— "a countryman of Robert Manning's, and a careful student of old Malory, has done much for the revival of pure English among ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... poet—Poet-laureate, And representative of all the race; Although 't is true that you turned out a Tory at Last,—yours has lately been a common case; And now, my Epic Renegade! what are ye at? With all the Lakers, in and out of place? A ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... circumstance? or, if the histories of that age are lost, by length of time, why was not so uncommon an excellence transmitted to posterity, in the more lasting colours of poetry? Was that unhappy age without a laureate? Was there then no Young [19] or Philips [20], no Ward [21] or Mitchell [22], to snatch such wonders from oblivion, and immortalize a prince of such capacities? If this was really the case, let us congratulate ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... News, lambs have already put in an appearance in Dorset. People who expect the POET LAUREATE to rush to the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... the eleventh century, and never recalls the masculine strength of the "Chanson de Roland" or "Raoul de Cambrai." Even his most charming story, "Erec et Enide," carries chiefly a moral of courtesy. His is poet-laureate's work, says M. Gaston Paris; the flower of a twelfth-century court and of twelfth-century French; the best example of an admirable language; but not lyric; neither strong, nor deep, nor deeply felt. What we ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... (1674-1718), dramatist and poet laureate, and one of the first editors of Shakespeare, was at this time under-secretary to the Duke of Queensberry, Secretary of ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... in which the nymphs may strew the laureate hearse, not only with all the flowers and fruits of earth, but with the Amaranth of paradise and the stars of heaven if the fancy takes them. Of a spirit compounded of these elements and of its quintessence are the 'Nymphals' of the Muses Elizium. There are portions of ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... you women." A wicked light snapped into his eyes. "Hear, dear lady, the Bard of the Congaree, the Poet Laureate of South Carolina, Coogle for your benefit," hissed The Author, ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... Which did prevail, these greatly did not care; } But headlong drove, without or wit or fear. } The Pharasees they curse, as Sons of Cham, And all dissenting Jews to Hell they damn. Shimei the Poet Laureate of that Age, The falling Glory of the Jewish Stage, Who scourg'd the Priest, and ridicul'd the Plot, Like common men must not be quite forgot. Sweet was the Muse that did his wit inspire, Had he not let his hackney Muse to hire: But variously his knowing Muse could sing, Could Doeg praise, ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... committees, the one for the prosecution and the other for the defence of Mr. Eyre, parade the names of distinguished persons who are enrolled as subscribers on either side. Mill is set against Carlyle, and to counterbalance the adhesion of the Laureate to the Defence Fund, the "Star" hastens to announce that Sir Charles Lyell and Professor Huxley have given their support to the Jamaica Committee. Everything, of course, depends on the ground on which the subscriptions are given. One can readily conceive that Mr. Tennyson ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... upon their shoulders in luxuriant curls; but one of those whom the proud and unfeeling style the dregs of the populace, a haggard, houseless, penniless man, in rags and tatters: I allude to Manuel, the—what shall I call him?—seller of lottery tickets, driver of death carts, or poet laureate in Gypsy songs? I wonder whether thou art still living, my friend Manuel; thou gentleman of Nature's forming- -honest, pure-minded, humble, yet dignified being! Art thou still wandering through the courts of beautiful ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... up! your bard inspire To write this—"by particular desire." Wet towels! Midnight oil! Here! Everything That can induce the singing bard to sing. Shake me, Ye Nine! I'm resolute, I'm bold! Come, Inspiration, lend thy furious hold! MORRIS on Pegasus! Plank money down! I'll back myself to win the Laureate's Crown! ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... condition of Spain and Portugal from the year 1807 up to our own immediate era. It is a case the more interesting, because two opposite verdicts have been pronounced upon it by men of the greatest ability amongst ourselves. Some, as the present and the late Laureate, have found in the Peninsular struggle with Napoleon, the very perfection of popular grandeur; others, agreeing with ourselves, have seen in this pretended struggle nothing but the last extravagance of thrasonic and impotent national arrogance. Language more ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... ain't an ordinary case. This chap's going to be the future Poet Laureate. Now, when the Prince of Wales invites him to dine at Marlborough 'ouse, 'e don't want to go there tacked on to a girl that carries aitches with her in a bag, and don't know which end of the spoon out of ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... briefly remark, in conclusion, that the dates and other circumstances favour the supposed interview at Padua, between Fraunceis Petrark the laureate poet, and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 187, May 28, 1853 • Various
... a writer in "The Argus" referred to him as "the prose laureate of pessimism." His philosophy may be summed up in a few phrases: Nothing matters, Whatever will be is, Everything is possible, and Since we live today let us make the best of it and live in Paris. And through all the opera of Saltus, through the rapes and murders, the religious, philosophical, ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... School for writing an essay against corporal punishment. He then entered one of the colleges of Oxford University, where he became an intimate friend of Coleridge. While residing at Lisbon he began a special study of Spanish and Portuguese literature. In 1813 he was appointed poet-laureate of England, and in 1835 received a pension from the government. He died in 1843. Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth are often called "The Lake Poets," because they lived together for years in the lake country of England, ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... striving, bleeding, dying, to keep from spreading itself over a continent a system which legalizes outrages almost too fearful to be told even to those who know all that is darkest in the record of English pauperism and crime? Where is the Laureate, so full of fine indignations and high aspirations? Has he, who holds so cheap those ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... lacking. Dodsley's "Collection" contains a satirical poem called "A Pipe of Tobacco," which was written in imitation of six different poets. The author was Isaac Hawkins Browne, and the poets imitated were the Laureate Cibber, Philips, Thomson, Young, Pope, and Swift. The first imitation is called "A New Year's Ode," and contains three recitatives, three airs and a chorus. One of the airs ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... of opinion, what is best worth seeing where all is beautiful and inspiring. If I had possessed a little foresight I should have avoided Wales, for, having proved apt at itinerary doggerel, I was solemnly created, immediately on arrival, Mistress of Rhymes and Travelling Laureate to the party—an office, however honourable, that is no sinecure since it obliges me to write rhymed eulogies or diatribes on Dolgelly, Tan-y-Bulch, Gyn-y-Coed, Llanrychwyn, and other Welsh hamlets whose names offer breakneck ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and highly penal to receive the Irish into religious houses. War was waged also against their Thomas Moores, Samuel Rogerses, and Walter Scotts, who went about the country harping and singing against English oppression. No such turbulent guests were to be received. The plan of making them poets-laureate, or converting them to loyalty by pensions of 100 pounds per annum, had not then been thought of. They debarred the Irish even from the pleasure of running away, and fixed them ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... stratum of the middle classes to live and thrive at all. This stratum was not to be found in R——, which rejoiced instead in the most squalid types of poverty and crime, types wherewith the mild shrivelled Unitarian minister had about as much power of grappling as a Poet Laureate ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... He entered Balliol College, Oxford, in 1793. In 1804 he established himself permanently at Greta Hall, near Keswick, Cumberland, in the "Lake Country," where he enjoyed the friendship and society of Wordsworth and Coleridge, other poets of the "Lake School." He was appointed poet laureate in 1813, and received a pension of 300 Pounds a year from the government in 1835. Mr. Southey was a voluminous writer in both prose and verse. As a poet, he can not be placed in the first rank, although some of his minor poems are very happy in thought and expression. ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... we all turned for a moment to catch a last glimpse of the University dome, towering over the treetops; and we felt very tenderly toward everyone there. But there were "sweet girl graduates" on board; and, as you know well enough, it required no laureate to sing their praises, though he has done so with all the gush and fervor ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... we have named enjoyed any share of the royal bounty, except W. Whitehead, who succeeded to the place of laureate at the death of Cibber; and some of them whose merit was the most universally acknowledged, remained exposed to all the storms of indigence, and all the stings of mortification. While the queen lived, some ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... being so few and unimportant. But of the specific excellence described in the quotation from Garve, I appear to find more, and more undoubted specimens in the works of others; for instance, among the minor poems of Mr. Thomas Moore, and of our illustrious Laureate. To me it will always remain a singular and noticeable fact; that a theory, which would establish this lingua communis, not only as the best, but as the only commendable style, should have proceeded from ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Mill. William Wordsworth (1770-1850), poet-laureate (1843-1850), is by many regarded as the third poet in English literature, after Shakspere and Milton, whose places are unassailable. Other candidates for the third place are Chaucer and Spenser. "The silence that is in the lonely hills" is loosely quoted from Wordsworth's Song at the Feast of ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Colley Cibber as poet-laureate, and dying in 1785 was followed by Thomas Warton. From Warton the line of succession is Pye, Southey, Wordsworth, Tennyson. See ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... Mount Acksbeck. Tennyson is a greater Calvinist in one sense than either of the Scotch poets we have named—he owes more to the general faith of others in his genius than to any special or strong works of his own; but let us be dumb, he is now Laureate—the crowned grasshopper of a summer day! Bailey of 'Festus' has a vast deal more power than Tennyson, who is only his delicate, consumptive brother; but 'Festus' seems either different from, or greater than, a work. We are reminded of one ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... heart of London. A few years after finishing his course at Cambridge University he went back to London, and lived there chiefly during the rest of his long and busy life. At the age of thirty-nine he was made poet-laureate and historiographer-royal, although his best work was not done until after he was fifty years old. From Milton's death, 1674, until his own in 1700, "Glorious John," as he was called, reigned without a rival in English letters; and one can picture him as a short, stout, somewhat ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... himself left no permanent contribution to literature—his hands were too full of public cares for that; and his entire literary remains consist of sacred poems and fugitive pieces of verse in Latin. But he was very ready with his pen, and served as a kind of unofficial poet-laureate. It is a curious fact that on every occasion in the King's reign that called for celebration, even at those times when Melville was on the worst terms with James, an appropriate ode was forthcoming. He was a clever satirist, and it was ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... Southey, Esq.—Sir T. Lawrence—We hope the president's portrait will please the laureate, for he has been rather tenacious about his "likenesses" which have been engraved. The present is, perhaps, one of the most intellectual portraits in the room, but is too energetic even for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 376, Saturday, June 20, 1829. • Various
... near at hand, is very narrow. Dean Swift, who lodged here, is perhaps one of the best-known names, and his friend Atterbury, who first had a house facing the Embankment, afterwards came and lived opposite to him. Thomas Shadwell, Poet Laureate, was associated with the place, and also Bowack, whose "Antiquities of Middlesex," incomplete though it is, remains a valuable book of reference. Bowack lived near the Rectory, and not far from him was the Old White Horse Inn, ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... strikes the keynote. He was pictured as a Christian priest denouncing charity, and proclaiming the necessity of vice and misery. He had the ill luck to be the centre upon which the antipathies of Jacobin and anti-Jacobin converged. Cobbett's language was rougher than Southey's; but the poet-laureate and the author of 'two-penny trash' were equally vehement in sentiment. Malthus, on the other hand, was accepted by the political economists, both Whig and Utilitarian. Horner and Mackintosh, lights of ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... Tennyson's biography of the laureate resents the opinion that his father was unsocial, but really leaves the commonly-received opinion unrefuted. Tennyson's reticence and love of contemplation and aloneness amounted to a passion. He was not a man ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... self-conscious airs and exhibit to us our follies. See what we have done instead! When our growing sense of priggish decorum and our dishonest ceremoniousness of speech made the jester a figure no longer possible, we substituted for him the poet-laureate!—not to persuade us of our follies, but to chant our undeserved praises. And alas, how much more ridiculous, at certain times, he has made us appear—nay, be! With what lecherous sweetness or ponderous grief he has put us to bed with our wives or our ancestors, with what maudlin sentiment ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... introduced to Pope Leo X., as a buffoon, but was promoted to the laurel. This laureate was ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... visitors can be traced in this period. John Alexander Brassicanus, poet laureate, came from Tubingen in September 1520 and saw Erasmus at Antwerp; whence in reply to a letter of self-introduction he bore away a complimentary letter that he afterwards printed, and the sound piece of advice, that if he wished to become learned, ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... that marvellous City of the West Would lift its towers and palace domes in view, And, to! at last its mystery is made known— Its only dwellers maidens fair and young, Its Princess such as England's Laureate sung; And safe from capture, save by love alone, It lends its beauty to the lake's green shore, And Norumbega is ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... time endures New Orleans will plume itself upon this dish which drew from Thackeray a world-famous tribute. "In New Orleans you can eat a Bouillabaisse, the like of which was never eaten in Marseilles or Paris." Which is much, very much, from the laureate of Bouillabaisse, as native to Marseilles. The reason of superiority is not far to seek—it lies in the excellence and flavor of the fish native to the Gulf of Mexico. Lacking Pompano, Red Snapper, and Redfish, even Milly could not quite do her knowledge justice. But ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... whom it was dedicated, a present of two hundred guineas. Tartuffe became an English Catholic priest who incited rebellion, and there is little doubt that the Whig principles expressed in the Nonjuror led to Cibber's appointment as poet laureate (1730). It also provoked the animosity of the Jacobite and Catholic factions, and was possibly one of the causes of Pope's hostility to Cibber. Numerous "keys" to the Nonjuror appeared in 1718. In 1720 Drury Lane was closed for three days by order of the duke of Newcastle, ostensibly on account ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... Royal Autumn! Poet King! The Laureate of the Seasons, whose rare songs Are such as lyrist never hoped to fling On the fine ear of an admiring world. Autumn, the Poet, Painter, and true King! His gorgeous Ideality ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... Laureate. So the boys are finding their way up here, are they? I'll wait an hour or two till that compendium of American humor has talked Dan to sleep. So you and Dan left your Uncle Morton all alone in gloomy splendor in ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... music attributed, perhaps wrongly, to Locke.) It was not for some time that he gained the supremacy at the theatre which he now held in the Church. That very trustworthy weathercock John Dryden, Poet Laureate, continued to flatter others for many long days to come. In this same year he composed the first of a long series of odes of welcome, congratulation or condolence for royal or great personages, and ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... modern war-ships already alluded to, and which indeed the whole course of our remarks upon this subject points to—the almost universal use of machinery in modern naval tactics. Most assuredly in modern sea-warfare it may be said, in the Laureate's words—used by him, of course, with a very different sense—that "the individual dwindles," so that the prediction, which some of our readers may remember was once made by a First Lord of the Admiralty, seems not unlikely one day to become sober fact—that the time will come when we ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... German," which was very like him. Next day he received from Windsor the offer of the Laureateship. He doubted, and hesitated, but accepted. Since Wordsworth's death there had, as usual, been a good deal of banter about the probable new Laureate: examples of competitive odes exist in Bon Gaultier. That by Tennyson is Anacreontic, but he was not really set on kissing the Maids of Honour, as he is made to sing. Rogers had declined, on the plea of extreme old age; but it was worthy ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... there the whole city was once thrown into excitement by the news that one of her sons had won the first prize in prose and verse in competition, before the emperor, with the assembled scholars of the empire—an [Page 21] an honour comparable to that of poet laureate or of a victor in the Olympic games. When that distinction falls to a city, it is believed that, in order to equalise matters, the event is sure to be followed by three years of dearth. In this instance, the highest mandarins escorted the wife of the literary athlete ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... the Installation Ode was performed in the presence of the new chancellor. Her majesty was present as a visitor. The ode was composed by Wordsworth, the poet-laureate, and set to music by Professor Walmisley. Flower-shows, public breakfasts, concerts, levees, grand university dinners, entertained the numerous visitors of rank during the stay of the royal party. Her majesty had seldom before been attended by so august and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... not yet rounded it out according to the standard which he had set for himself. Occupying the position almost of a court poet, he continued to work for Mahmud, and this son of a Turkish slave became a patron of letters. On February 25, 1010, his work was finished. As poet laureate, he had inserted many a verse in praise of his master. Yet the story goes, that though this master had covenanted for a gold dirhem a line, he sent Firdusi sixty thousand silver ones, which the poet spurned and distributed as largesses and hied him from ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... hopeful and cheerful man, lies in the fact that we place small premium in either honor or money on the business of teaching. As, in the olden times, barbers and scullions ranked with musicians, and the Master of the Hounds wore a bigger medal than the Poet Laureate, so do we pay our teachers the same as coachmen and coal-heavers, giving them a plentiful ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... the royal lovers have never seen each other only emphasizes its romantic quality. Their joy in beholding in actuality what they have for three long months cherished so dearly in imagination, is a theme for the poet laureate—who will, however, we fear, judging from his past performances, hardly do it justice. It is, as we have said, a love- match. The royal pair fell in love with what they had heard of each other—the Princess of Basque with the image she had formed in her mind from glowing ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... all at times must seek! The Lotos blows by many an English creek. Punch is no "mild-eyed melancholy" coon, Born, like the Laureate's islanders, to moon In lands in which 'tis always afternoon. No, TOBY, no! Yet stretch your tawny muzzle Upon these tawny sands! We will not puzzle, For a few happy hours, our weary pates With Burning Questions ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 29, 1891 • Various
... esteem But Virtue's patriot theme, You lov'd her hills, and led her laureate band; But staid to sing alone To one distinguish'd throne, And turn'd thy face, and ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... buying up quantities of the depreciated continental currency, which was ultimately redeemed by the Federal government at par. He assumed the title of Lord Dexter and built extraordinary houses at Newburyport, Mass., and Chester, New Hampshire. He maintained a poet laureate and collected inferior pictures, besides erecting in one of his gardens some forty colossal statues carved in wood to represent famous men. A statue of himself was included in the collection, and had for an inscription "I am the first in the East, the first in the West, and the greatest philosopher ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... as probable that the Poet Laureate,—Homer, will be invited to compose an epic poem commemorating the events of the raid. An edition of 20,000 copies will be issued, including 50 on India paper, with corruptions and emendations by ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... preferred to Congreve. Dorset was too practised a courtier not to study the tastes of his master to good purpose. A liking for the stage, or a lively sense of poetic excellence, was not among the preferences of King William. The Laureate was sub-purveyor of amusement for the court; but there was no longer a court to amuse, and the King himself never once in his reign entered a theatre. The piety of Queen Mary rendered her a rare attendant at the play-house. Plays were therefore no longer wanted. A playwright could not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... of the scholastic Aristotelian natural philosophy, he shewed a leaning towards the theory of development, for, according to him, the more highly organized structures proceed from those of lower organization, and these again form the inorganic under the influence of meteors and stars. The poet laureate Conrad Celtes (b. 1459), a singer of love and composer of four books about it, was a true poet. His incessant wandering, for he was always moving from place to place, was due in part to love of Nature and of novelty, ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... liberal cause by Wordsworth, Southey, and others, is the germinal idea of this poem. But Browning always strenuously insisted that the resemblance went no further; that The Lost Leader is no true portrait of Wordsworth, though he became poet-laureate. The Lost Leader is a purely ideal conception, developed by the process of idealization from an individual who serves as ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... of the descendants of the Puritans clung with affection to the more literal renderings of the "New England Psalm-Book," and thought the new verses were "tasteless, bombastic, and irreverent." The authors of the new book were certainly not great poets, though Nahum Tate was an English Poet-Laureate. It is said of him that he was so extremely modest that he was never able to make his fortune or to raise himself above necessity. He was not too modest, however, to dare to make a metrical version of the Psalms, to write an improvement of King Lear, and a continuation of Absalom ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... is reported in California, and a volume of poems by the POET LAUREATE is announced. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... to influence its hearers, to carry you indeed a little out of yourself by its variety of intonation, its fire and fervour, its languishing modulations, broken pauses, yearning melancholy of effect. The part of the neurotic hero of the—then—Laureate's poem, that somewhat pinch-beck Victorian Hamlet, suited our young friend, moreover, down to the ground. It offered sympathetic expression to his own nature and temperament; so that he wooed, scoffed, blasphemed, orated, drowned ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet |
