"Thackeray" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... night in these things. I always was more afraid of that than anything. Though he never would believe me when I said so. You don't know the names he called me. So I took a taxi and I went to the first hotel I could think of—the Thackeray. But I hadn't enough money with me, and they wouldn't take me in. Then I went and sat in the waiting-room at Euston Station till they closed. Then I sat outside on the platform and pretended to be waitin' for a train. He wouldn't believe me if I told him I'd ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... Perhaps Thackeray is right when he says, "The men who appreciate woman most are those who have felt the sharpness of her claws." That is to say, things show up best on the darkest background. If so, let us give Xantippe due credit. She ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... stanza the poet indicates the spirit in which romances are written, clearly indicating that those only that have ears will be able to hear. 'Phonanta sunetoisin' might be the watchword of all imaginative writers. Cp. Thackeray's 'Rebecca and Rowena.' ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... Second Bishop of Calcutta; died at Trichinopoly. Thackeray's "Good divine, charming poet, beloved parish priest." Milman's "Early friend, by the foot of whose statue I pass so often, not without emotion, to our services.... None was ever marked so strongly for a missionary bishop in the fabled and romantic East." A kneeling figure, and ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... to the character of George IV., though some in their immeasurable contempt have painted him worse than he really was, like Brougham and Thackeray. All are agreed that he was selfish and pleasure-seeking in his ordinary life, though courteous in his manners and kind to those who shared his revels. As dissipated habits obtained the mastery over him, and the unbounded ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... belongs also, like Mr. Wells, to the essentially English tradition of fiction. In spite of an admiration for French literature which has had a refreshing effect upon his style, he has written many of his novels as Fielding, Smollett, Dickens, and Thackeray wrote theirs—out of the abundance of his imagination, from an inordinate eagerness to reproduce human life in all its profusion, in its littleness and its greatness, a colossal whole out of which the reader rather than the artist makes ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... Lad," which comes very near to being the only true defence of marriage in the controversies of the nineteenth century. But when all this is allowed, no one will seriously rank Kingsley, in the really literary sense, on the level of Carlyle or Ruskin, Tennyson or Browning, Dickens or Thackeray: and if such a place cannot be given to him, it can be given even less to his lusty and pleasant friend, Tom Hughes, whose personality floats towards the frankness of the Boy's Own Paper; or to his deep, suggestive metaphysical friend Maurice, who floats rather towards The Hibbert ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... only Spanish things—I suppose I had overdone the castanet business; it's a nursery-disease we all go through—and I wanted to show that I had plenty more shot in my locker. Don't you get up every morning meaning to prove you're equal to Balzac or Thackeray? That's the way I felt then; only give me a chance, I wanted to shout out to them; and I saw at once that Vard ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... I had heard nothing about it before. Then I went through it breathlessly to the last word, which came all too soon. And now I am as eager for the next instalment as I was when a boy for the next chapter of my Dickens or Thackeray. Don't laugh, dear old fellow, over my enthusiasm or my illustration, but remember that I represent a considerable amount of average human nature, and that's what we all write for, and ought to write for, and be dashed to the critics ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... nineteenth and latter part of the eighteenth centuries, and include such writers as Arnold, the Brontes, the Brownings, Burns, Byron, Carlyle, Coleridge, Dickens, Keats, Lamb, Shelley, Stevenson, Swinburne, Tennyson, Thackeray, and other famous contemporaries. You may meet with their works continually, and many a prize may slip through your hands unless you are acquainted with the collector's desiderata regarding each of ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... describe them; and draw them more truly than any novelist in the language, except Miss Austen." The same sentiment with reference to dancing appears in many places in his immortal pages. In his younger days as attache of legation in Germany, Mr. Thackeray became a practiced waltzer. As a censor he thus possesses over Lord Byron whatever advantage may accrue from knowledge of the subject whereof ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... be seriously intended, but Homer was an acute writer, and if we had met with such a passage in Thackeray we should have taken him to mean that so long as a woman can get a new husband, she does not much care about losing the old one—a sentiment which I hope no one will imagine that I for one moment endorse or approve of, ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... comforts of repletion, and is, in consequence, considered a vantage point of desirability. We meet the same people, and we eat of the same dishes disguised in the same service, that daily play the routine of our fashion; for, as Thackeray says of his British, wherever we may go, we carry with us our pills and our prejudices. And there be times, too, when we almost echo those cravings of poor Becky Sharp who, having attained the summits of society, cries in the desperation of her ennui: "Oh, how much gayer it would ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... of Thackeray, when Thackeray is tender, and the world heard it first from this elderly, nameless minstrel, strolling with his viol and his singing boys, perhaps, like a blameless d'Assoucy, from castle to castle in "the ...
— Aucassin and Nicolete • Andrew Lang
... entered the East India Company's service, and had four sons by Emily, eldest daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray: (1a) John Dowdeswell Shakespear, Lieutenant-Colonel of the Bengal Artillery, who married Margaret, only daughter of Joseph Hodgson, F.R.S. He died without issue, April 6, 1867, aged sixty.[353] (2a) ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... to find him conversant with all kinds of English literature; he spoke with familiarity of Dickens, Thackeray, Shakespeare, twelve of whose plays, by the bye, have been translated into Finnish and performed at the theatre, and he was even acquainted with the works of Rudyard Kipling, Swinburne, Browning, and Mrs. Humphry Ward. With equal aptitude he discussed Daudet and Zola, Tolstoi and Tourgenieff, and, ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... simple but it is suffused with a love and sympathy that no one but Dickens or O. Henry could have given it. If "The Gold-Bug" is a triumph of the analytic intellect, this story is a triumph of the social impulses that make the world better. "It seems to me," said Thackeray, "a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it a personal kindness." While writing it Dickens said: "I wept and laughed and wept again." And yet the psychology of the plot is as soundly intellectual as the style is emotional. Dickens knew that a flint-hearted ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... content. We all expect to go somewhere before we die, and have a better time when we get there than we can have at home. The bane of our life is discontent. We say we will work so long, and then we will enjoy ourselves. But we find it just as Thackeray has expressed it. "When I was a boy," he said, "I wanted some taffy—it was a shilling—I hadn't one. When I was a man, I had a shilling, but I didn't want any ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... Poor Jennie, fitted to shine in any circle, yet doomed all her married life to domestic drudgery, with no associations with the great man for whose literary companionship she had sacrificed herself. It adds greatly to one's interest in Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Bulwer, James and George Eliot, to read them amidst the scenes where they lived and died. Thus in my leisure hours, after the fatigues of sight-seeing and visiting, I re-read many of these authors near the places where they spent ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... Gouda, I ran continually across Erasmus and for some unknown reason this great exponent of tolerance took hold of my intolerant self. Later I discovered Anatole France and my first experience with the English language came about through an accidental encounter with Thackeray's "Henry Esmond," a story which made more impression upon me than any other book in ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... like a wardrobe, with a couple of drawers at the bottom, receptacles that seemed less adapted to pamphlets than to goloshes. "How grand!" Jane was not exigent as regarded music, but her whole being went forth towards books. "Dickens and Thackeray and Bulwer; and Hume and Gibbon, and Johnson's Lives of ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... much at first by the cakes and pocket-money he brings with him. Till these are gone he must be a weak boy indeed who cannot (at a small school) find some one to fight his battles and fetch and carry for him. Thackeray has thought of this (what does he not think of?) in his little book, "Dr. Birch," where a young sycophant is represented saying to his friend, who has just received a hamper, "Hurrah, old fellow, I'LL LEND YOU MY KNIFE." This was considered ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... you any new novels? Send up Scribe and the 'Arabian Nights' and 'Robinson Crusoe' and the 'Three Guardsmen,' and Mrs. Whitney's books. We have Thackeray and Miss Austen." ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... "I do not think he [Arthur] knows anything. He can quote a verse of poetry, or a page from Dickens and Thackeray, but these are only leaves springing from a root out of dry ground. His vital forces are not fed, and very soon he has given out his all." Mrs. James G. Blaine, Letters (February 21, 1882), ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Speaking of THACKERAY, Messrs. CASSELL & Co. have just brought out a one-and-threepenny edition ("the threepence be demmed!") of the Yellowplush Papers, with a dainty canary-coloured Jeames on the cover. At the same time the same firm produce, in the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... by sincerity that any letter-writer can please other human creatures. Beauty of style counts for a great deal; I would not sacrifice the exquisite daintiness of epistolary style in Lamb or Coleridge or Thackeray or Macaulay for gold. But style is not everything, and the very best letter I ever read—the letter which stands first in my opinion as a model of what written communications should be—is without grammar or form or elegance. It is simply a document ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... power, in the absence of the sensational and exaggerated, and in keeping close to the level of real human life. They rely for success upon perfection of style and the most subtile analysis of human character; and therefore they are often painful,—just as Thackeray is painful,—because they look at artificial society, and paint what they see. Thus they dwell often on unhappy marriages, because such things grow naturally from the false social system in France. On the other hand, in France ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... lapsing to the condition where he would offer to introduce a man to the Prince of Wales or to Baron Rothschild, and then ask him for the loan of five pounds—or half a crown, as the case might be. He was a character for Thackeray. He haunted my father for a year or two more, and then vanished I ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... big footman, the little Princess could have rambled safely in the grounds which her predecessors had made for her, could have fed the ducks which swam in the round pond before her palace windows, could have drunk from the curious little mineral well, where, in Miss Thackeray's 'Old Kensington,' Frank Raban met Dolly Vanburgh, or peeped out of the little side gate where the same Dolly came face to face with the culprits George and Rhoda. The future owner of all could have easily strayed down the alleys among the Dutch elms which King William brought, ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... to-day is a charming and picturesque town. "The Pantiles," with its row of stately limes in the centre and the colonnade in front of its shops, is unique among English towns. Readers of Thackeray's Virginians will remember his description of the scene on the Pantiles in the time of powdered wigs, silver buckles, and the ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... feared was lost, as he saw nothing of it for some days after the mail was in; but he found it at Bath's Hotel. One must make some little allowance for a mother's partiality in your account of B. and H.; I hope your prejudice against novels does not prevent their reading those of Thackeray and Dickens, every one of whose works, especially the former, should be read by them, for they contain some of the best things, both in a moral and literary point of view, that we have in the English language. I shall be more careful in future about the postage; ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... his French Revolution and his Life of Schiller, but that's all. I only came home from school last summer, and at school we never read anything. I couldn't get many new books down in Galway. There were, of course, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot in the library, but that was all. I once got a beautiful book from Dungory Castle. I wonder if you ever read it? It is called Madame Gervaisais. From the descriptions of Rome it almost seems to me that I ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... bit of Thackeray, A little bit of Scott, A modicum of Dickens just To tangle up the plot, A paraphrase of Marryat, Another from Dumas— You ask me for a novel, sir, And I say, there ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... said. "Thirion's in the Boulevard St. Germain, Thirion's where Du Maurier used to go, and Thackeray, and all sorts of celebrated people; and where the host treats you like a friend, and the ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... historian of social manners, when dealing with the Victorian period, will perforce have recourse to the early volumes of Punch and to the novels of Thackeray, ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... Dobson; such, too, are those canvases where dexterity or even breadth of plastic style takes the place of pictorial nobility of design. So, it may be remarked, it was easier to begin to write "Esmond" than "Vanity Fair," since, in the first, the style was dictated by the nature of the plan; and Thackeray, a man probably of some indolence of mind, enjoyed and got good profit of this economy of effort. But the case is exceptional. Usually in all works of art that have been conceived from within outwards, and generously ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... we get, if we could blend into one picture the English descriptions of Paris left us by Thackeray, Sala, Du Maurier? Would it not show us that face as it is still, when we see it in spring? And drawn by loving hands too, obeying the eyes of genius. An empty square in Berlin suggests a possible regimental parade, in London a mass meeting; in Paris it is a playground ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... letters, with whom Sumner's acquaintance was very wide, were always among his most valued guests. A story is told of Thackeray's visit to Washington, which I distrust only for the reason that my ideas of Sumner's make-up do not assign him the special kind of humor which the story brings out. He was, however, quoted as saying, "Thackeray is one ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... was once pronounced by the London Times to be "The most eloquent man in Europe." Ruskin, Thackeray, Macaulay, and other men of renown joined in the crowd that thronged St. John's Church when they were in Edinburgh; and a highland drover was once so excited that in the middle of a powerful sermon he called out: "Naw, sirs, heard ye ever the like o' that?" My good wife made ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... method and their moral, partaking of that heroic and ideal element, which will make them live, I trust, long after thousands of mere novels have returned to their native dust. I mean Miss Muloch's "John Halifax, Gentleman," and Mr. Thackeray's "Esmond," two books which no man or woman ought to read without being the nobler ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... only in the middle years of the nineteenth century, after Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert, after Thackeray and George Eliot, and Hawthorne, that the novel found out its true field. And yet it was in the middle years of the seventeenth century that the ideal to which it was aspiring had been proclaimed frankly by the forgotten Furetiere in the preface to his "Roman Bourgeois." Furetiere ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... only in long novels one stops for refreshment. So go ahead, and—I say—do cut your interruptions a la Fielding and Thackeray. C'est vieux jeu." ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... admirers. So set in his anonymity was he that Charles Baudelaire, his critical discoverer, was forced to write a long essay about his work and only refer to the artist as C.G. The poet relates that once when Thackeray spoke to Guys in a London newspaper office and congratulated him on his bold sketches in the Illustrated London News, the fiery little man resented the praise as an outrage. Nor was this humility a pose. His life long he was morbidly nervous, as ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... of Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen, of Wordsworth and Byron, followed immediately upon his. Then we have the age of Thackeray and Tennyson and the great Mid-Victorians. Then finally at the end of the nineteenth century we have the epoch dominated in art by Aubrey Beardsley, and in literature by Swinburne and ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... 1893-4 saw Oscar Wilde at the very zenith of success. Thackeray, who always felt himself a monetary failure in comparison with Dickens, calls success "one of the greatest of a great man's qualities," and Oscar was not successful merely, he was triumphant. Not Sheridan the day after ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... no harm of these really fine fellows, who could do harm (by printing incorrect copies, and perhaps eking out the column by suppositious matter ... ex-gr. they strengthened and lengthened a book of Dickens', in Paris, by adding quant. suff. of Thackeray's 'Yellowplush Papers' ... as I discovered by a Parisian somebody praising the latter to me as Dickens' best work!)—and who do really a good straightforward un-American thing. You will encourage 'the day of small things'—though this is not small, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... cup for drinking. The word is not Australian. Webster refers to Marryat and Thackeray. The 'Century' quotes Blackmore. This diminutive of pan is exceedingly common in Australia, though not confined ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... that the true romance of America was not in the fortunes of the Indian, where Cooper sought it, nor in New England character, where Judd found it, nor in the social contrasts of Virginia planters, as Thackeray imagined, but in the story of the fugitive slaves. The observation is as true now as it was before War, with swift, gigantic hand, sketched the vast shadows, and dashed in the high lights in which romance loves ...
— Harriet, The Moses of Her People • Sarah H. Bradford
... however, at 148, that we should longest pause. This, for many rich years, was the home of James T. Fields, that delightful man of letters who was the friend of many men of letters; he who entertained Dickens and Thackeray, and practically every foreign writer of note who visited this country; he who encouraged Hawthorne to the completion of the "Scarlet Letter," and he, who, as an appreciative critic, publisher, and editor, probably did more to elevate, inspire, and sustain the general literary tone of the city ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... one had not lived quite so soon, and to long for a glimpse of the books, even the school-books, of one hundred years hence. A hundred years ago not only were books extremely expensive and cumbrous, but many of the most delightful were still uncreated—such as the works of Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer Lytton, and Trollope, not to mention living authors. How much more interesting science has become especially, if I were to mention only one name, through the genius of Darwin! Renan has characterized this as a most amusing century; I should rather have ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... Norway, and had killed salmon on the estate of my Lord Knowswho in Scotland, while guests of that nobleman. There were two Londoners in full suits of tweed, with Glengarry bonnets, who were bound to the Cascapediac: they tried to imitate the bearing of the military men; and why not? As Thackeray says, "Am I not a snob and a brother?" There was a party of Americans on their way to a Gaspe river—veteran anglers, who had frequented these rivers for some years. The rest of the company was made up of Canadians from Montreal and Quebec, many ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... him, indeed, was filled With a proud spirit-retinue. Greatness long since his guest he knew. Whom THACKERAY's manly tones had thrilled; Who heard keen JERROLD's sparkling speech, And marked the genial ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... people meet real men and women of history—Louis XI., Lazarus, Mary Queen of Scots, General Webbe, Moses, the Man in the Iron Mask, Marie Antoinette; the list is endless. But novelists, in spite of Mr. Thackeray's advice to Alexandre Dumas, and of his own example in "Rebecca and Rowena," have not introduced each other's characters. Dumas never pursued the fortunes of the Master of Ravenswood after he was picked up by ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... over the London period too lightly, it is because I judge it extraneous and external. If I have tried, cruelly, to take from Charlotte the little beige gown that she wore at Mr. Thackeray's dinner-party, it is because her home-made garments seem to suit her better. She is more herself in skirts that have brushed the moors and kept some of the soil of ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... minuet with the historical muse, have been careful to exclude everything that seemed beneath the dignity of the sceptred pall; biographers have as consciously studied the proprieties. 'The Muse of history,' says Thackeray, 'wears the mask and speaks to measure; she too in our age busies herself with the affairs only of kings. I wonder shall history ever pull off her periwig and cease to be Court-ridden? I would have History familiar rather than heroic, and think that Mr ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... admire rightly; the great pleasure of life is that. Note what the great men admired; they admired great things: narrow spirits admire basely, and worship meanly."—THACKERAY. ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... go down the ages as a companion of Scott's, Thackeray's, Hugo's and Dumas'; but read at any time by any fresh-minded person, it will afford that shock of pleasure which always comes of a good story enthusiastically told, and of a pretty love-drama frankly and joyously presented. ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... about the same time Mr. Dickens and Mr. Thackeray were giving readings from their works in England and America. Both readers were equally popular; but while they made a considerable addition to their fortunes,{1} Jasmin realised nothing for himself; all that was collected at his recitations was ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... and Stories, by S. Lover in his Legends and Stories, and by G. Griffin in his Tales of a Jury-Room. These all tell their tales in the manner of the stage Irishman. Chapbooks, Royal Fairy Tales and Hibernian Tales, also contained genuine folk-tales, and attracted Thackeray's attention in his Irish Sketch-Book. The Irish Grimm, however, was Patrick Kennedy, a Dublin bookseller, who believed in fairies, and in five years (1866- 71) printed about 100 folk- and hero-tales and drolls (classes 2, 3, and 4 above) in his Legendary Fictions of ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... called; and Farrell, arrested, turned slowly about on the stair. "Man, you're like the swain in Thackeray:" ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Thackeray's Pendennis, and was the home of the immortal Mrs. Partington, an old acquaintance of Sidney Smith; she is supposed to have lived in one of the cob cottages that used to be on the front. Like the Lords with Reform, so was Mrs. Partington with the Atlantic Ocean, which she ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... pastry-cook outside—even the ices were prepared at home. To these dinners any distinguished strangers who were passing through the city were sure to be invited. Malachi in his time had served many famous men—Charles Dickens, Ole Bull, Macready, and once the great Mr. Thackeray himself with a second glass of "that pale sherry, if you please," and at the great man's request, too. An appreciation which, in the case of Mr. Thackeray, had helped to mollify Malachi's righteous wrath over the immortal ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... not a complete set of the books introduced by him. The Fables of AEsop, the Book of Job, Matthew Arnold's Critical Essays, a book of children's poems by Margaret Arndt, Boswell's Johnson, a novel by Gorky, selections from Thackeray, a life of Mr. Will Crooks, and an anthology by young poets are but a few of the ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... the artists in the place were in love with her but she wouldn't look at 'the likes' of us. She was too proud—I grant you that; but she wasn't stuck up nor young ladyish; she was simple and frank and kind about it. She used to remind me of Thackeray's Ethel Newcome. She told me she must marry well: it was the one thing she could do for her family. I suppose you would say ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... casts somewhat of a shadow over the sentiment; yet I feel constrained to quote it, as representing my own feelings in regard to the question whether the artistic temperament is a curse or a blessing. Shakespeare had it; Dickens had it; and Thackeray confessed that he would have been glad to black Shakespeare's boots. One may well be convinced that it is a blessing by the penalties which Heaven exacts from its possessors. It means the capacity to enjoy and appreciate the beautiful; with the great poets and novelists ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... unrestrained pouring out of a warm, gentle, generous heart. If you love me, do, do, do come on Friday. I shall watch and wait for you; and, if you disappoint me, I shall weep." Few sayings are more touching than that which Thackeray heard a woman utter, that she would gladly have taken Swift's cruelty to have had his tenderness. Now, is it not true that the intenser need naturally implies the keener search and the more ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... And then it's a natural consequence, too, Of the classical culture he's just been put through. I'll explain: T'other day the maternal did say, 'You are sadly deficient in reading, Bill; nay Do not wrinkle your forehead and turn up your nose (That elegant feature of William Barlow's!) You've read Thackeray, Dickens, I know; but it's fit You should study the classical authors a bit. Heaven knows when your sight will be valid again, You may throw down the pencil and take up the pen, And you cannot have too many strings to your bow.' —'A-a-amen!' says ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles
... Scribner; an odd tale entitled, "The Phantom Portrait," in the Cornhill; which leaves the reader in doubt as to whether he has been egregiously "sold" or not; and, above all, the short and interesting—too short and most interesting—paper on THACKERAY, in Harper's Monthly, with fac-similes of some of the great humorist's most eccentric and most spirited illustrations, conceived in the broadly burlesquing spirit that was characteristic of GILRAY and ROWLANDSON. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., February 7, 1891 • Various
... Thackeray to me, thirty years ago, putting one of Charles Lamb's letters to his forehead.'—LETTERS ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... books are not all. I agree with our old friend, Montaigne, about that. By the way, which do you prefer, Dickens or Thackeray?" ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... has sometimes amused me to remember that some of the warmest admirers of Dumas fils have been among the most violent decriers of Thackeray—for preaching. I suppose they preferred ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... in the way that Miss A. indicated. Ruskin advised me to send an account of the affair to the "Cornhill," which I did; but it was rejected, as might have been expected in the state of public opinion at that time, and I can easily imagine Thackeray putting it into the ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... attended, likewise without playing, an evening party (May 6) at the house of the historian Grote. Sometimes ill-health prevented him from fulfilling his engagements; this, for instance, was the case on the occasion of a dinner which Macready is said to have given in his honour, and to which Thackeray, Mrs. Procter, Berlioz, and Julius Benedict were invited. On the other hand, Chopin was heard at the Countess of Blessington's (Gore House, Kensington) and the Duchess of Sutherland's (Stafford House). On the latter occasion Benedict played with him a duet of Mozart's. More than thirty years ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... despair, the scorn of himself, the rage with destiny, the bitter enmity against a world in which he was no longer to exist. Only Deleah felt in her heart the sorrow of it all—Deleah who was a reader of Thackeray, of Trollope, of Dickens, of Tennyson; whose eyes had wept for imaginary woes before these bitter drops had been wrung from them for her own; who had learnt that tears were not the only signs of an anguished ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... every corner of the hall before reaching their outlet in the lantern. Among the numerous portraits on the walls there are several of famous men. Among them we find Dryden, Vaughan, Thompson (by Herkomer), the Duke of Gloucester (by Sir Joshua Reynolds), Coke (the great lawyer), Thackeray, Tennyson (by G.F. Watts), Cowley and Bentley. On the other side of the entrance passage are the kitchens with the combination rooms above, where more notable portraits hang. The remainder of the court is composed of living-rooms broken by the Queen's ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... have had a thorough acquaintance with the whole range of the higher English literature. To have the music of Shakespeare or Milton echoing in your memory, or to have lingering in your ear the cadence and sweep of the sentences of Thackeray and De Quincey, will almost unawares give you a good style.[34] In reading over an old sermon of my own, I can almost tell whether or not, in the week of its composition, I was reading good literature. In the former case the language is apt to be full and harmonious, and ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... cast upon the barren primer commons of this cold world! And that reminds me to say that I have been reading the essays by Arnold and Brownell which you gave me, with no little animosity. Brownell's criticism of Thackeray is very suggestive, and brushes away a deal of trash that has been written about his lack of artistic method. But I never supposed such loose sentences would be characteristic of so acute a critic. They do not stick together naturally, but merely logically. And I am sure you ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... is a "Grammar of New Testament Greek" by the well-known and distinguished scholar, Dr. Blass, and is deserving of the fullest attention from every earnest student of the Greek Testament. It has been excellently translated by Mr. St. John Thackeray, of the Education Department {110b}. It is really hardly possible to speak too highly of this helpful and valuable work. Its value consists in this—that it has been written, on the one hand, by an accomplished classical scholar, and, on the other hand, by one who is thoroughly acquainted ...
— Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture • C. J. Ellicott
... with especial satisfaction. He evidently took pleasure in this proof of appreciation, and said that this was the class of readers he sought. "In fact, the young men," he said, "are the only readers of much value; it is they who shape the future." He said that Thackeray and Delane had told him he would find Boston very like England. He knows but few Bostonians. He had corresponded with Theodore Parker, whom he considered a remarkable man; he had preserved but one of his letters, which he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... one notes, in nearly all the great poets and novelists up to the middle of the last century, it was usually in the weakness of humanity that the artist sought the charm and pathos of his feminine figures. From Shakespeare's Ophelia to Thackeray's Amelia this is the rule, more emphatically expressed in the literature of England than of any other country. There had been no actual emancipation of women; though now they had entered the world of men, they were not yet, socially and legally, of that world. Even the ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... assured position of recognised greatness, are not only saturated in the personality of the author, but have in addition quite unaffected personal outbreaks. The least successful instance the one that is made the text against all such first-personal interventions, is, of course, Thackeray. But I think the trouble with Thackeray is not that he makes first-personal interventions, but that he does so with a curious touch of dishonesty. I agree with the late Mrs. Craigie that there was something profoundly vulgar about Thackeray. It was a sham thoughtful, sham man-of-the-world ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Paris. Cecil Spring-Rice, an old friend (subsequently British Ambassador at Washington), was his groomsman, and being married at St. George's, Theodore remarks, "made me feel as if I were living in one of Thackeray's novels." ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... "Dormant" "Drawings" Extending Folding Framed Kneehole Pier Side Joined Standing Wine Tables and Trestles Tadema, Mr. Alma, R.A., design by Tarsia Work, or Intarsia Tea Caddies Thackeray, quoted Theebaw, King, Bedstead of Thyine Wood "Times" Newspaper, The, quoted Titian Toms & Luscombe Town & Emanuel Trades Unionism Traditions, loss of old Transition ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... the page,—"I like Hood's life even better than his books, and I wish with all my heart, Monsieur et cher confrere, the same could be said for both of us when the ink-stream of our life hath ceased to run"? Only they who knew Thackeray out of his books can believe that this desire came earnestly from his heart to his readers. He was a man to be misunderstood continually; but his record will be found a noble one, when the true ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... is a single Becky Sharp the less, (poor Becky!) since Thackeray gave such terrible immortality to their great prototype. The satirist is not the reformer. The satirized do not see themselves in the exaggerated type. They go their way, and thank God that they are not ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... experiences before the mast and in the navy. The nautical accuracy of these tales of the sea could scarcely have been attained by a "landlubber". It has much practical significance, then, that Cooper chose material which he knew intimately and which gripped his own interest. His success came like Thackeray's and Stevenson's and Mark Twain's—without his having to reach to the other side of the ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... women. Any person who has worked among the insane, and done his duty by them, can testify to cases in point; and even casual observers have noted the fact that the insane are oftentimes appreciative. Consider the experience of Thackeray, as related by himself in "Vanity Fair" (Chapter LVII). "I recollect," he writes, "seeing, years ago, at the prison for idiots and madmen, at Bicetre, near Paris, a poor wretch bent down under the bondage of his imprisonment and his personal infirmity, to whom ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... has been said on the subject of reading, and of the distinctions which should be made. I may add, however, that the line before alluded to is to be drawn in novels. As, for instance, the girl is ready for Dickens before she ought to read Thackeray, as Dickens dwells more in the region of the simple emotions, while Thackeray has moved on into the sphere of emotion which is conscious of itself, or of the reflecting ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... throughout Lord Beaconsfield's life was continued to the end. He was one of those who, no matter how long he lived, would have been always growing: this is what makes his later novels so much better than those of Thackeray or Dickens. There was something of the child about him to the last. Earnestness was his greatest danger, but if he did not quite overcome it (as who indeed can? It is the last enemy that shall be subdued), he managed to ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... teacher in curing habits acquired either at home or at school. My pupils greatly enjoyed overcoming the habit of jumping or screaming after some sudden noise. I told them how, when a boy, my imagination had been very much impressed by one of Thackeray's characters, the last remnant of aristocratic traditions, almost a pauper, but possessing one attribute of nobility,—absolute self-control. When his house burned he stood with his ankles crossed, leaning on his cane, the only onlooker who was not excited. For months I imitated that pose, ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... Thackeray, has made the best part of his speech to himself—on the way home from the lecture hall. Presence of mind—it remained for Mark Twain to observe—is greatly promoted by absence of body. A hole in the memory is no less a common complaint than ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... passage in one of Victor Hugo's novels in which the writer affectionately apostrophizes the Paris of his youth—those quaint old streets of the Quartier Latin so redolent of the happy associations which cling to the springtide of life. Were Thackeray living now, he would, we fancy, experience emotions very similar to those of his French confrere should he try to find his beloved "Gray Friars," which lives enshrined in the most pathetic scene he ever penned, and is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... winter with them which she gratefully accepted, but insisted on paying for her board by doing a great deal of sewing for them. She says in her diary: "I sew for Mollie and others and write stories. C. gave me books to notice. Heard Thackeray. Anxious times; Anna very home-sick. Walpole very cold and dull, now the summer butterflies have gone. Got $5 for a tale and $12 for sewing; sent home a Christmas box to cheer the dear souls in ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... Their security was not so perfect that they had not a dread of falling towards the pit, they were always lashing themselves by new ropes, their cultivation of "connexions," of interests, their desire to confirm and improve their positions, was a constant ignoble preoccupation. You must read Thackeray to get the full flavor of their lives. Then the bacterium was apt to disregard class distinctions, and they were never really happy in their servants. Read their surviving books. Each generation bewails the decay of that "fidelity" of servants, no generation ever saw. A world ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... portrait of Thackeray by Robt. Blum is a careful delineation of the characteristic head of the novelist set on shoulders characteristically bent forward and the body characteristically tall. What more can be told of Thackeray's personality? Would the buttons ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... Edinburgh. Cathedral towns revisited. Sermons at Lichfield. The House of Commons; scene between the Irish leaders and Mr. Balfour. A political meeting in Holborn. Excursions to Rugby; to the home of Gilbert White; to the graves of Gray, Thackeray, and others. A critic of Carlyle at Brighton. Cambridge; interesting papers regarding the American Revolution. Lord Aberdare's story of Frederick the Great and a British minister. Hermit life in London; work at the British Museum. Journey ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... the eyes of the learned and wise; but if some Nepaulese Embassador or vagrant Camanche were to publish his "first impressions" of Great Britain or Italy, should we utterly refuse to open it because Baird or Thackeray could give us more accurate information on that identical theme? Would not the Camanche's criticisms possess some value as his, quite apart from their intrinsic worth or worthlessness? Might they not afford some insight into Indian modes of ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... older novelists (Dickens and Thackeray) will have to look to their laurels, for the new one is fast proving himself their equal. A higher quality of enjoyment than is derivable from the work of any other novelist now living and active in ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... said Newton was smoking under a tree in his garden when the historic apple fell. Scott, Campbell, Byron, Hood, and Lamb all smoked, and Carlyle and Tennyson were rarely without a pipe in their mouths. The great novelists, Thackeray, Dickens, and Bulwer were famous smokers; and so were the great soldiers, Napoleon, Bluecher, and Grant. While nearly all the poems here gathered together were written, and perhaps could only have ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... interesting story, a fine sentiment, a great thought: so since our national glory is understood to be the happy home, the happy home must be triumphant everywhere, even in satiric comedy. The best expression of this fallacy is in Thackeray. Concluding a most eloquent, and a somewhat patronising examination of Congreve, 'Ah!' he exclaims, 'it's a weary feast, that banquet of wit where no love is.' The answer is plain: comedy of manners is comedy of manners, and satire is satire; introduce 'love'—an appeal, one supposes, to sympathy ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... army of thousands of men. And yet the only "I" in these men is your own "I." These characters in your mind move and live and have their being, and yet there is nothing in them except "You!" The characters of Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac, and the rest, were such strong Mental Images that not only their creators were carried away by their power, and apparent ability, but even you who read of them, many years after, perhaps, feel the apparent reality, and weep, or ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... transliteration of Greek; pronunciation of Latin. Sunday opening of museums; of theatres. The English Sunday; Bank Holiday. Darwinism. Is there spontaneous creation? or spontaneous combustion? The germ theory; Pasteur's cures; Mattei's cures; Virchow's cell theory. Unity of Homer; of the Bible. Dickens v. Thackeray. Shall we ever fly? or steer balloons? The credit system; the discount system. Impressionism, decadence, Japanese art, the plein air school. Realism v. romance; Gothic v. Greek art. Russian fiction, Dutch, Bulgarian, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... Marneffe, whom also the same and other persons are fond of comparing with her contemporary Becky Sharp, not to the advantage of the latter. This is no place for a detailed examination of the comparison, as to which I shall only say that I do not think Thackeray has anything to fear from it. Valerie herself is, beyond all doubt, a powerful study of the "strange woman," enforcing the Biblical view of that personage with singular force and effectiveness. But her methods are coarser and more commonplace than Becky's; ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... called it his study, though it may be doubted if he ever studied anything but his Times, Spectator, and his three favourite authors, Thackeray, Dickens, and Kingsley; but his wife was a great reader, and there were few modern books that she ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... in Paris, and took great pride and pleasure in introducing to it their only brother. We were not only invited to our embassy and on visiting terms with all the English Colony (that colony whose annals at that period are written in The Adventures of Philip, and to which Thackeray's mother and nearest relatives, like ourselves, belonged), but we were, in virtue of some American connections, admitted to the American embassy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... accomplished work. One expects, my Baronite says, that in some leisure time the author will come back and finish it. It is well worth the labour, being full of living characters. Lady Warbeck in particular, is excellent, reminiscent of, and worthy of THACKERAY. The temptingly arranged pages glitter with shrewd thoughts admirably ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, March 4, 1893 • Various
... "Montaigne and 'Howell's Letters'," says Thackeray, in one of the "Roundabout Papers," "are my bedside books." Howell wrote this letter in ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... some correspondence lately about Bouillabaisse, and a writer in the Evening News (who misquotes THACKERAY) actually gives ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various
... perhaps been equaled or surpassed by one or another of her predecessors. As a painter of manners, of all that belongs to the surface of life, she is rivaled in fidelity, if not in breadth and force, by Fielding, Thackeray and Miss Austen. Her observation is less keen than theirs, her portraiture less vivid, her humor less cordial and abundant. Her conceptions have not the intensity of Charlotte Bronte's, nor her great scenes the dramatic ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... peat. After inquiries among the fair, I learn that of all romances, they best love not 'sociology,' not 'theology,' still less, open manslaughter, for a motive, but just love's young dream, chapter after chapter. From Mr. Crockett they get what they want, 'hot with,' as Thackeray admits that he liked it."—Mr. ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... good moment," says Thackeray. "That simile was pronounced to be the greatest ever produced in poetry. That angel, that good angel, flew off with Mr. Addison, and landed him in the place of Commissioner of Appeals—vice Mr. Locke, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... period a far easier matter to chronicle than the more obscure beginnings already recorded. If his own life did not supply enough material we could multiply our characters, as did Dickens, or journey sideways, into little essays, as did Thackeray. His life and his biographer's pen might fail to give interest to such devices, but the plea is now for "realism," which most writers take to mean microscopical examination of minutia. If the physical and psychical ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... country, the faculty of observing social man and his peculiarities has found its most popular instrument. The great novel, not of romance or adventure, but of character and manners, from the mighty Fielding, down, at a long interval, to Thackeray, covers the field that in France is held, and successfully held, against all comers, by her maxim-writers, like La Rochefoucauld, and her character-writers, like La Bruyere. But the literature of aphorism contains one English name of magnificent and immortal lustre—the name ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... might be a casual jest, hear what Thackeray reports of that period, the eighteenth century, which he knew ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... with their fellow-men; and a thousand other paltry weaknesses, morosenesses, self-indulgences, fastidiousnesses, vulgarities—for all this is essentially vulgar, and demands, not honour and sympathy, but a chapter in Mr. Thackeray's "Book of Snobs." Non sic itur ad astra. Self-indulgence and exclusiveness can only be a proof of weakness. It may accompany talent, but it proves that talent to be partial and defective. The brain may be large, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... library such as inquired after by MR. WELD TAYLOR. The late Mr. Thackeray, of the Priory, Lewisham (who died about two years ago), bequeathed to this school his valuable library of books on general literature for the use of the boys. Previously to this bequest the collection of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... Gray's "Elegy" fame; Windsor Castle; Knole House, with its magnificent galleries and furniture; Penshurst Place, the home of the Sidneys; John Milton's cottage at Chalfont St. Giles; the ancient town of Guildford in Surrey; Gad's Hill, Dickens' home, near Rochester; the vicarage where Thackeray's grandfather lived and the old church where he preached at Monken Hadley; and Whitchurch, with Handel's original organ, is also near the last-named village. These are only a few of the places that no one should miss. The motor car affords an unequalled ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... excellent in its discrimination of the strength and weakness of Hazlitt. A few years later came the implied compliment of Horne's New Spirit of the Age, which would hardly be worth mentioning were it not that Thackeray in reviewing it took occasion to pay an exquisite tribute to Hazlitt.[119] From this time forth he was not wanting in stout champions, though most people still maintained a cautious reserve in their judgments of him. So sound and penetrating a critic ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... reports were true that was also the hand which would write the valedictory next year, and which was now secretly at work upon a book which would some day place its owner in the ranks with George Eliot and Thackeray. ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... the impeccable master of style; and to the influence of these two men we may trace almost all contemporary French fiction. But in England we have had no schools worth speaking of. The fiery torch lit by the Brontes has not been passed on to other hands; Dickens has influenced only journalism; Thackeray's delightful superficial philosophy, superb narrative power, and clever social satire have found no echoes; nor has Trollope left any direct successors behind him—a fact which is not much to be regretted, however, as, admirable though Trollope undoubtedly is for rainy afternoons ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... know when Thackeray wrote 'Vanity Fair' as well as you do. I'm no Thackeray to begin with, and, besides, I am older at thirty-eight than he was when he died—yes, older than he would have been if he had lived twice as long. So far as feeling and all the rest of it go, ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... such a bold breaking of conventional chains; a few were startled into admiration. Much of the public amazement was due not only to the principles of the book, but to its warmth and earnestness. As Miss Thackeray says, the English authoresses of those days "kept their readers carefully at pen's length, and seemed for the most part to be so conscious of their surprising achievement in the way of literature, as never to forget ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Protestant; and sometimes seems to be almost anti-national in its acrid instinct for judging itself. Its nationalism only appears when it flings itself with even bitterer pleasure into judging the foreigner or the invader. The first and greatest of such figures was Swift. Thackeray simply denied that Swift was an Irishman, because he was not a stage Irishman. He was not (in the English novelist's opinion) winning and agreeable enough to be Irish. The truth is that Swift was much too harsh and disagreeable to be English. There is a great deal of Jonathan ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton |
