"Laureate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was considered to be rather abrupt; but when he sends an invoice of rhymes to the Governor of Fayal and another to the commander in chief and other dignitaries in Gibraltar with the compliments of the Laureate of the Ship, it is not ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... this journey he met at Padua Petrarch, whose residence was near by at Arqua. The statement of the "Clerk" in the "Canterbury Tales" that he learnt the story of patient Griseldis "at Padua of a worthy clerk...now dead," who was called "Francis Petrarch, the laureate poet," may of course merely imply that Chaucer borrowed the "Clerk's Tale" from Petrarch's Latin version of the original by Boccaccio. But the meeting which the expression suggests may have actually taken place, and may have been accompanied by the most suitable conversation ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... 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 murrain and the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... you opened your hoard Of truthful and tasteful tales— How you sat on the knees of the Laureate Lord, How you danced with the Prince of Wales— And we knew that the Sunday Times had scored In Literature ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... Casa Guidi Windows had the happiness of seeing her hero, M. le President, "in a cocked hat, and with a train of cavalry, passing like a rocket along the boulevards to an occasional yell from the Red." By a happy chance they lighted in Paris upon Tennyson, now Poet-laureate, whom Mrs. Browning had hitherto known only through his poems; he was in the friendliest mood, and urged that they should make use of his house and servants during their stay in England, an offer which was not ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... celebrated English poet, born 1774, who once held the honorable position of poet laureate. He wrote a great deal both in prose and verse. ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... in 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 ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... retires, The vision tarried; but somewhere we knew The beautiful gates must open to our quest, Somewhere 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 a myth ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... to your most useful "NOTES AND QUERIES" favour me with the title of any work which gives an account of the origin, office, emoluments, and privileges of Poet Laureate. Selden, in his Titles of Honour (Works, vol. iii. p. 451.), shows the Counts Palatine had the right of conferring the dignity claimed by the German Emperors. The first payment I am aware of is to Master Henry de Abrinces, the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 32, June 8, 1850 • Various
... Tennyson—she wasn't the daughter of Mr. Alfred Tennyson, the poet-laureate of England, but was as sweet as any one of that gentleman's poems—had been to the city; and she had brought home so many wondrous improvements that her two little bosom friends, Lu Medway and Kathie Dysart, were almost struck dumb to behold and to hear ...
— Lill's Travels in Santa Claus Land and other Stories • Ellis Towne, Sophie May and Ella Farman
... FitzGerald told Grout that Woodbridge should feel itself honoured. John had not quite understood, so presently took a chance of asking my father who that gentleman was Mr FitzGerald had been talking of. "Mr Tennyson," said my father, "the poet- laureate." "Dissay," {90} said John, warily; "anyhow he didn't fare to know much about hosses when I showed him ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... 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, you will think it sacrilege ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... sitting in the front row of the spectators of those heaven-darkening murders, with a red cap on his head, and a many-stringed harp in his hand, chanting the praises of the murderers, and exciting the drunken populace to greater horrors? Lebrun. Yes, the French Pindar is appointed poet-laureate to the guillotine, and has apartments assigned him at the national cost in the Louvre. Whenever an atrocity is to be committed, an ode is published, "by order of authority," to raise the passions of the people to the proper pitch. When the atrocity is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... explained Jarman, "this 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 which ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... 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 ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of Robert 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
... 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 ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... renderings of the Bible narrative. Our own Christmas hymn, "While shepherds watched their flocks by night," is precisely of this order; and, indeed, is of the very period when flourished the greatest of the Provencal noel writers: for the Poet Laureate Nahum Tate, whose laurel this hymn keeps green, was born in the year 1652 and had begun his mildly poetic career while ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... as "Poet Laureate of England"—the Laureate is poet to the King, and used to dine with the Master of the Hounds. Later he was allowed to choose his domicile and live in his own house, like Saint Paul, the prisoner at Rome. His yearly stipend is yet that tierce ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... soften their manners, and make them less of wild beasts. Some have thought it omnipotent for this; others have given it as a sign of the decline and fall of the nobler part of us. Neither is, and both are true. Art does, as our Laureate says, make nobler in us what is higher than the senses through which it passes; but it can only make nobler what is already noble; it cannot regenerate, neither can it of itself debase and emasculate and bedevil mankind; but it is a symptom, and a fatal one, when Art ministers to a nation's ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... 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 lack of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... was unfortunate for Henry Shirley that one of the same name should have been writing at the same time; for in such cases the weakest must go to the wall. Mr. Frederick Tennyson's fame has been eclipsed by the Laureate's; and there was little chance of a hearing for the author of the Martyr'd Souldier when James Shirley was at work. From the address To the Courteous Reader, it would seem that Henry Shirley did not seek for popularity: "his Muse," ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... Apollo. Nay, no more! 'Tis not to pipes like mine sing stars at morn, Nor stars at night dance in their solemn dance: Nay, stars! why tell of stars? the very thrush Putteth my daintiest cunning to the blush And boasteth him the hedgerow laureate. Yea, dimmest daisies lost amid the grass, One might have deemed blessed us for looking at, Would rather choose,—yea, so it is, alas!— The meanest bird that from its tiny throat Droppeth the pearl of one monotonous note, Than any music I can bring ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... 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 ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... bookseller that Mrs. Lessways had ever heard of did business at Oldcastle. Mrs. Lessways had journeyed twice over the Hillport ridge to Oldcastle, in the odd quest of a book called Maud by "Tennyson—the poet laureate"; the book had had to be sent from London; and on her second excursion to Oldcastle Mrs. Lessways had been caught by the rain in the middle of Hillport Marsh. No! Hilda could not easily demand the gift of another book, when all sorts of nice, really useful presents ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... Mr. Southey was spending a few weeks with his family at Harrowgate, when a letter reached him from John Jones, butler to a country gentleman in that district of Yorkshire, who, hearing that the poet laureate was so near him, had plucked up courage to submit to his notice some of his own "attempts in verse." He was touched by the modest address of this humble aspirant; and the inclosed specimen of his rhymes, however rude and ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 475 - Vol. XVII, No. 475. Saturday, February 5, 1831 • Various
... 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 ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... anent the United States are of the friendliest character. Her newspapers and magazines say flattering things about us. Her poet-laureate—unlike his great predecessor who unaffectedly detested us—began his official career by praising us with such fervour that we felt we ought in common honesty to tell him that we were nothing like so good as he thought us. An English text-book, published ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... Bandon man, have secured a certain sort of twin immortality by their authorized metrical version of the Psalms (1696), which gradually took the place of the older rendering by Sternhold and Hopkins. Tate became poet-laureate in 1690 in succession to Shadwell and was appointed historiographer-royal in 1702. He wrote the bulk of the second part of Absalom and Achitophel with a wonderfully close imitation of Dryden's manner, besides several dramatic pieces ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... the 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
... come after us will be more impressed than we are by the Laureate's versatility. He has touched so many strings, from "Will Waterproof's Monologue," so far above Praed, to the agony of "Rizpah," the invincible energy of "Ulysses," the languor and the fairy music ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... abuses of the time. There was always a sufficient substratum of 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 ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... 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
... fact opaque and repellent, while self-sacrificing thoughts are cosmetics that at last make the plainest face to be beautiful. In the calm of scholarship men have given up the thought that culture consists of an exquisite refinement in manners and dress, in language and equipage. The poet laureate makes Maud the type of polished perfection. She is "icily regular, splendidly null," for culture is more of the heart than of the mind. But as eloquence means that an orator has so mastered the laws of ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... 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," given to him by Lord Lonsdale in 1813, a ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... speaks two stanzas of the form used in the first eclogue of "The Shepherd's Calendar," and three stanzas of the form used in "The Faerie Queene." Thyrsis speaks in blank verse and is answered by the shade of Musaeus (Pope) in heroic couplets. Verbal travesties of "Lycidas" abound—"laureate hearse," "forego each vain excuse," "without the loan of some poetic woe," etc.; and the closing passage is ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... 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 ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... 1785 was Thomas Warton, and she corresponded with him, “our great Laureate,” as she ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... the Laureate obedient to an editor's decree Puts his verses in the columns of the Times; When the endless minor poet in an endless minor key Gives the public his unnecessary rhymes, When you're weary of the poems which they constantly compose, ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... a striking 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 ourselves ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... worse: a female laureate licensed by the Institute, Madame Augustus Craven, author of Recit d'une soeur, of Eliane and Fleaurange, puffed into reputation by the whole apostolic press. Never, no, never, had Des Esseintes ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... her letter to Southey was despatched; and from an excitement not unnatural in a girl who has worked herself up to the pitch of writing to a Poet Laureate and asking his opinion of her poems, she used some high-flown expressions which, probably, gave him the idea that she was a romantic young lady, unacquainted with ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... short syllables—as far as "long" and "short" can be definitely distinguished in English—correspond precisely to the rules of Roman prosody. The present Laureate, Robert Bridges, whose investigations in English and Roman prosody have been incessant, has recently published a book of experiments in writing English quantitative hexameters. [Footnote: Ibant Obscuri. New York, Oxford University Press, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... King exhorted this island to "wake up" in one of the most remarkable of British royal utterances, and Mr. Owen Seaman assures him in verse of an altogether laureate quality that we ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... at his house a cousin of Miss Martineau, who told us some good stories, especially about Tennyson. On this a brother of our host said that he was once travelling when he met with a party of tourists, among whom he recognized the Laureate. "Who is that gentleman?" said they. "He has been the life and soul of our party, and we cannot get a clue to his name, for he has baffled us in every way, tearing it off his luggage and out of the book he was reading." Mr. Sharpe betrayed the secret, not ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... close by, but in 1551 a devoted admirer, himself a versifier, Nicholas Brigham, placed an ancient tomb here in memory of the master, with a fancy painting of Chaucer at the back. Before this monument are the graves of the two most famous poets of our generation, the Laureate Tennyson and Robert Browning, side by side. Above them is the beautiful bust of another Poet Laureate, Dryden, and the less artistic portrait bust of ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... afar, Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore; Thy factions, in their worse than civil war, Proscribed the bard whose name for evermore Their children's children would in vain adore With the remorse of ages; and the crown Which Petrarch's laureate brow supremely wore, Upon a far and foreign soil had grown, His life, his fame, his ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... the east: it has again risen in the west. Two suns in one day, two triumphs of liberty in one age, is a miracle which I hope the laureate will hail in appropriate verse. Or may not Mr. Wordsworth give a different turn to the fine ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... Fauconberg. The Fauconbergs took revolutions calmly and, despite the disinterment of their great relative, accepted the Restoration gladly and lived to chuckle over the Revolution. The forgetfulness, no less than the vindictiveness, of men is often surprising. Marvell, who played the part of Laureate during the Protectorate, produced two songs for the conventionally joyful occasion. The second of the two is decidedly ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... mere love-carolers toward the authors of the metrical romances, the bards of Germany. It is at this point that he introduces some forcible criticisms on Tennyson's poetry of that character, and makes it evident that the Laureate might have improved his Idyls by extending his readings among the German chanters of Arthurian legend. The following seems practical and just: "If Tennyson was determined to make the love-passion the chief theme of his work, rather than the religious element ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... All these simple tastes, in which he found for a time a refuge and a sheltered happiness, are reflected in his best poem, The Task, 1785. Cowper is the poet of the family affections, of domestic life, and rural retirement; the laureate of the fireside, the tea-table, the evening lamp, the garden, the green-house, and the rabbit-coop. He draws with elegance and precision a chair, a clock, a harpsichord, a barometer, a piece of needle-work. But Cowper was an out-door as well as an ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Edward's poet laureate, Baston, a Carmelite friar, who had accompanied the army for the purpose of writing a poem on the English victory. His ransom was fixed at a poem on the Scotch victory at Bannockburn, which the friar was forced ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... 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
... 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 is a place near Sydney, and is a favorite pleasure-resort. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... names of Mr. Steer, Mr. John, Mr. Orpen and Mr. McEvoy, here only less familiar than those of Cabinet Ministers or County Cricketers, abroad are as obscure. Mr. Steer, to be sure, has his portrait in the Uffizi, but then, as likely as not, the Poet Laureate has his birthday ode in the Bibliotheque Nationale. If Mr. Steer and Sir Edward Poynter are treated civilly abroad, that may be because England is an important country rather than ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... king wept, among the tears of the lord chief justice, the poet laureate (who had been awfully frightened when he heard of the rattlesnakes), the maids of honour, the chaplain royal, and everyone but Colonel McDougal, a Scottish soldier of fortune, who maintained a ...
— Prince Prigio - From "His Own Fairy Book" • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... and, indeed, all the works of this king of northern poets, are greatly loved by all Scandinavians. Every young Dane delights in Oehlenschlaeger as we do in Shakespeare, and by reading his works the youths of Denmark lay the foundation of their education in poetry. This bard was crowned Laureate in Lund (Sweden) by the greatest of Swedish poets, Esaias Tegner, 1829. Buried by his own request at his birth-place, Frederiksberg, two Danish miles (which means eight English miles) from Copenhagen, his loving countrymen insisted on carrying him the whole distance, so great was their admiration ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... regain their sight, the paralyzed are alert and nimble, the trampers of every species jig in turn, or altogether, shaking their rags unto the jocund tune; and where is there a blither party? Burns has pictured the scene in his 'Jolly Beggars,' and he is the laureate of the night. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... unpropitious. He had, long before, during his student days in Moscow, written syllabic verses, an elegy on the death of Peter the Great, and a couple of dramas, which were acted by his fellow-students. In 1732 he became the court poet, or laureate and panegyrist, and wrote, to the order of the Empress Anna Ioannovna, speeches and laudatory addresses, which he presented to the grandees, receiving in return various gifts in accordance with the custom of the epoch. But neither his official post ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... 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. And then ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... in the art. Grainger quaintly remarks, that "the Duke of Newcastle was so attached to the Muses, that he could not leave them behind him, but carried them to the camp, and made Davenant the poet-laureate, his lieutenant-general of the ordnance." His second wife was Margaret, the imaginative Duchess of Newcastle, who never revised what she had written, lest it "should disturb her following conceptions," by which means she composed plays, poems, letters, philosophical discourses, orations, &c.; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... 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
... the general taste when he places his garden "near some fair town." Our present laureate, though a truly inspired poet, and a genuine lover of Nature even in her remotest retreats, has the garden of his preference, "not quite beyond the ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... seaside air of Baiae. 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 the highest level which this kind ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Heywood, whom 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 for ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... For which the gods, in theyr revengefull yre, Did her transforme into a laurell-tree. Then fly no more, fayre Love, from Phebus chace, But in your brest his leafe and love embrace. [* I. e. as poet-laureate.] ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... the Anglicized "renegade" were favourite terms of reprobation with politicians and others at the beginning of the century. When Southey's Wat Tyler was reprinted in 1817, William Smith, the Member for Norwich, denounced the Laureate as a "renegado," an attack which Coleridge did his best to parry by contributing articles to the Courier on "Apostasy and Renegadoism" (Letter to Murray, March 26, 1817, Memoir of John Murray, 1891, i. ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... ASHTON asks in 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
... 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 first ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... awful state maintaining evermore— The statesman, with no Burleigh nod, whate'er court tricks may be; The courtier, who, for no fair Queen, will rise up to his knee; The court-dame, who for no court tire will leave her shroud behind; The laureate, who no courtlier rhymes than "dust to dust" can find; The kings and queens who having ta'en that vow and worn that crown, Descended unto lower thrones and darker, deeper adown; "Dieu et mon Droit," what is't to them? what meaning can it have? The king of kings, the dust of dust—God's ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... made in a humorous poem of that time, called the Oxford Laureate; in which, after many claims had been made and rejected, Yalden is represented as demanding the laurel, and as being called to his trial, instead of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... King have been given the privilege of selecting his poet-laureate we may be sure he would have named Whittier. For they were both lovers of nature and of man. Both earnest abolitionists, intensely patriotic, loving liberty and the rights of the humblest of God's creatures, they were kindred spirits. So Whittier wrote not alone for New England, ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... 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 ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... dominates all his thinking, and has such peculiar features of its own, that even familiar quotations must be quoted here. You will find an exquisite translation of a typical passage in our Poet Laureate's Anthology, The Spirit of Man (No. 37). Specially to be noted here is the stress on the unchanging character of this eternal perfection and the suggestion that it cannot be fully realized in the world. At the same time, Plato is equally sure that it is only through the study ...
— Progress and History • Various
... this vein of humorous banter since Shakespeare died. One of the best pieces of Shakespeare criticism ever written is contained in four words of the present Poet Laureate's Ode for the Tercentenary of Shakespeare, 'London's laughter is thine'. The wit of our trenches in this war, especially perhaps among the Cockney and South country regiments, is pure Shakespeare. Falstaff would find himself at home ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... Land!" So sang the Laureate. Were that sole Landlord duty, you'd fulfil it! But land makes not a Land, nor soil a State. Loving your land, how sullenly you hate— The People—who've to till it! Of the earth, earthy is that love of soil Which for wide-acred wealth ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various
... employment to a great number of the friends of the government; and, I should think, instead of having immediate recourse to the deputy-licenser himself, it might be sufficient honour for any poet, except the laureate, to stand bareheaded in the presence of the deputy of the deputy's deputy in the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... alike, 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, and ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... only record of his genius is of a gloomy character, it is evident that his habits and life contributed to render him cheerful and happy." At last that awful chasm, the terrors, grandeurs, and moral lessons of which he had so powerfully sung, opened its jaws to receive him, and the Grave crowned its laureate with its cold and earthy crown. He was seized with fever, caught probably in the exercise of his pastoral functions, and expired on the 4th of February 1746, at the early age of forty-seven, when his body and mind were ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... could none 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, ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... Raticide, Waowhler 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 ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... had such a high opinion that he declared that there was "more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson's than in all Tom Jones"; the two Wartons, Joseph, the Headmaster of Winchester and editor of Pope, and Thomas the author of the history of English Poetry and himself Poet Laureate; both good scholars and critics who partly anticipated the poetic tastes of the nineteenth century: Paoli, the hero of Boswell and the Corsicans, with whom Johnson loved to dine: Douglas, Bishop of ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... But in lapse of time it became the pretext and cover for the grossest sensuality; and the associations which the unlearned reader has with the name are only strengthened by conversance with the literature to which it gave birth. Horace is its poet-laureate; and he was evidently as sincere in his philosophy as he was licentious in his life. There is a certain charm in good faith and honesty, even when on the side of wrong and vice; and it is his perfect frankness, ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... find ourselves recalling the Poet Laureate's modernized Ulysses, the great wanderer, insatiate of new experiences, as we read the story of the octogenarian traveller and his many friends in ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... him, who has been described as "unlocking the hidden treasures of nature, and explaining the various systems by which air, and earth, and fire, and water, counteract and sustain each other"[259]—to fix the laureate crown round the brows ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... 1757 succeeded 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
... open-air theatre of Dionysus. Here the comedians, the chief of whom was Aristophanes, moved hosts of spectators to inextinguishable laughter. Here the choicest lyric poets of Greece awoke admiration with their unequalled songs, at their head the noble Pindar, the laureate of the Olympic and Pythian games. Here the sophists and philosophers argued and lectured, and Socrates walked like a king at the head of the aristocracy of thought. Here the sculptors, headed by Phidias, filled temples, porticos, colonnades, and ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Alexander Henderson in the task of persuading the King to accept Presbytery! The person sent, however, was the one next to Hobbes in literary repute among the Royalist exiles, the one most liked by Hobbes, and oftenest in his company. He was no other than the laureate and dramatist Will Davenant, known on the London boards by that name for a good many years before the war, but now Sir William Davenant, knighted by the King in Sept. 1643 for his Army-plotting and ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... 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 of ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the column, bid 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 to ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... which he worked, indeed, is so good that there would be a difficulty in spoiling it completely; but the prose of the translation in the English Bible, faultless as it is, loses nothing in Bunyan's hands, and if we found these poems in the collected works of a poet laureate, we should consider that a difficult task had been accomplished successfully. Bunyan felt, like the translators of the preceding century, that the text was sacred, that his duty was to give the exact meaning ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... poet laureate to-day is Walt Mason ... and our State philosopher, the sage of Potato Hill, Ed Howe, is an honest-to-God stand-patter ... that's Kansas to-day for you, in spite ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... alluded to by Scott in the forty-first chapter of The Heart of Mid-Lothian, as "him of the laurel wreath," was Robert Southey, who was appointed poet laureate of England in 1813. The lines quoted are from Southey's poem of "Thalaba the Destroyer," eleventh ...
— Harper's Young People, September 21, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... those learned fathers once flourished, and see with your own eyes the evils their dissolution has caused; when you hear the inhabitants telling you how good, how clever, how charitable they were; what will you think of our poet laureate for calling them, in his History of Brazil, "Missioners whose zeal the most fanatical was directed by ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... sentiment never surges into passion, and where humour never overflows into boisterous merriment" should be conventionally called "society verse," or "occasional verse," is not very clear. To write "society verse" is to be the laureate of the cultured, leisured, pleasure-loving upper classes; but some poets satisfy the above requirements—Locker himself included—yet certainly do not write exclusively of or for "Society." Then again, what is "occasional"? Many serious poems are inspired by the transient ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... 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 ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... Chaplain to Lord Willoughby de Broke. He 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 Pope ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... manner of 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 call tragedy is unknown to it. Christian's ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... taste, for I can get more humor, more keen enjoyment, out of a census report or an etymological dictionary than from a novel. My favorite literary dissipation is to read the works of that distinguished statistician at Washington, Mr. O. P. Austin, the poet-laureate of industrial America, or the toilsome and exciting verbal journeys of the Rev. Mr. Skeat. The classic humorists do not compare with them, in my humble opinion, as sources of fantastic surprises. This, perhaps, accounts ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... first parts of The Faery Queen (1590) raised Spenser to the foremost place in English letters. He was made poet-laureate, and used every influence of patrons and of literary success to the end that he be allowed to remain in London, but the queen was flint-hearted, insisting that he must give up his estate or occupy it. So he returned sorrowfully to "exile," and wrote three more books ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... 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 the penultimate or ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... Our poet-laureate must be a close observer of natural history. In his "In Memoriam," xciv., he distinctly alludes to some very curious West African bats first described by the late amiable Edward T. Bennett, long the much-valued secretary of the ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... 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 ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... of the greatest of English poets, born in Lincolnshire in 1809. He was made poet-laureate in 1850. Many of his poems are well known to young readers' and very popular. ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... to Byron. The "Satanic School" of 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 and her ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... sou'wester crashed on the Welsh coast. Or in the roll of the Bay of Biscay, after a space watching the swinging fields of stars, to come down there was to drop into a welcoming circle of friends, to throw one's self down and pick up a book, the Laureate's "In Memoriam" or Mr. Thackeray's latest—and to glance from the pages of "Henry Esmond" to Prince Charlie's dagger lying peacefully on the desk.... How near! how near!... And up forward the lookout paced, or leaned over ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... and the pansy 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, Where thou, perhaps, under the whelming tide Visit'st the ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... those who are 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
... 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. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... of each is easily fixed: Darwin, whose principal work was called "Origin of Species;" Gladstone, noted for his vigorous eloquence; Lincoln, who was conspicuous as a binder together of separated States; Tennyson, who was chosen as Poet-Laureate, and who was born at Somersby, England; Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who early displayed a musical genius, and whose first oratorio was called "St. Paul;" Elizabeth Barrett Browning [nee Elizabeth ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... then it was known that he was again in need of sympathy, and the children of the city, headed by Tilsa and Tobene, would run out into the plain to meet him and join in a game, or if it was at night, and he came within the walls, the house-holders would join in the song of welcome which the Poet Laureate of Ule had written for such occasions. And soon the Flamp would return to the mountains ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... Browning has written. But when all is said and done—when these few freaks of a crowded brain are thrown overboard to the sharks of verbal criticism who feed on such things—Mr. Browning and his great poetical achievement remain behind to be dealt with and accounted for. We do not get rid of the Laureate ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... a brief adieu, the well-worn story of Tristram and Kind Mark came to my mind. He, Guido, like Tristram, would in a short space clasp the gemmed necklace round the throat of one as fair and false as the fabled Iseulte, and I—should I figure as the wronged king? How does the English laureate put it in his ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... of Indolence; and Mr. Southey's Joan of Arc no worse, although it might have taken up six months instead of weeks in the composition. I recommend also to the lovers of lyrics the perusal of the present laureate's odes by the side of Dryden's on Saint Cecilia, but let him be sure to read first those of ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... other, as in the operas of the Italian and French schools. 'Dido and AEneas' was written for performance at a young ladies' school kept by one Josias Priest in Leicester Fields and afterwards at Chelsea. The libretto was the work of Nahum Tate, the Poet Laureate of the time. The opera is in three short acts, and Virgil's version of the story is followed pretty closely save for the intrusion of a sorceress and a chorus of witches who have sworn Dido's destruction and send a messenger to AEneas, disguised ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... had sung, and wandered, and loved; who had been slighted, and imprisoned for a madman; who had escaped and hidden himself, and had yet been glorious; who had come to Rome at last to receive the laureate's crown in the Capitol, as Petrarch had been crowned before him. His life is a strange history, full of discordant passages that left little or no mark in his works, so that it is a wonder how a man so torn and harassed could labour unceasingly for ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... to the poplars in the 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 Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... to know, lowering his voice to make the inquiry, whether Lady Ringrose were not particularly so. He had heard of her very often, he said; and he observed that it was very interesting to see her: he could not have used a different tone if he had been speaking of the prime minister or the laureate. Laura was ignorant of what he had heard of Lady Ringrose; she doubted whether it could be the same as what she had heard from her brother-in-law: if this had been the case he never would have mentioned it. She foresaw that his friends in London would have a good deal to do ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... in" together, and fill the little boat. The baronet follows up his luck, and keeps close to Edith. How beautiful she is with the soft silver light on her face. He sits and watches her, and thinks of the laureate's lines: ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... pleasure to revolt or to regale his readers with grossness. He had too much of the Neapolitan's frank self-abandonment to nature for broad indecency in art to afford him special satisfaction; and the taste of his age demanded innuendo. The laureate of Courts and cities saturated with licentiousness knew well that Coan vestments are more provocative than nudity. It was his object to flatter the senses and seduce the understanding rather than to stimulate coarse appetite. Refinement was the aphrodisiac of a sated society, and millinery formed ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... course. What else would a young fool like her do? He inthrojooced her to the Poet Laureate, thinking ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... associated them with the heroic drama, which at the bottom of his heart he knew to be no better than an organized trick, done daily with a view to "elevate and surprise". Too far, because, in spite of his own candid and generous temper, it was well-nigh impossible for the Laureate of the Restoration to comprehend the highly strung nature of a man like Corneille, and his intense realization ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... motto in all our mountaineering, and we allowed no surmountable difficulties to daunt us. What birds select such steep places for a habitat? Here lived in happy domesticity the lyrical green-tailed towhee, the bird of the liquid voice, the poet laureate of the steep, bushy mountain sides, just as the water-ousel is the poet of the cascades far down in the canyons and gulches; here also thrived the spurred towhees, one of which had tucked a nest ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... dramas of Wagner. Any understanding of English civilization would be similarly incomplete without the semi-historic figure of King Arthur, glorified through the accumulated legends of the Middle Ages and made to live again in the melodic idylls of the great Victorian laureate. And so one might go on. In many ways the mythology and folklore of a country are a truer index to the life of its people than any of the pages of actual history; for through these channels the imagination and the heart ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... 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 ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... some sojourn afterward in England. The Boston publishing house of C. C. Little and Company (now Little, Brown, and Company) had written to Tennyson (under date of April 27, 1838) regarding a republishing of his volume, as the future laureate was already recognized for the musical quality and perfection of art in his work. Browning had published only "Pauline," "Paracelsus," and "Strafford." Shelley and Keats were dead, their mortal remains reposing in the beautiful ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... been," said Betty Jardine. "But Mrs. Forrester thinks of me as frivolity personified, I know, and doesn't care to admit anything lower than a cabinet minister or a poet laureate when she has her lion domiciled. She is an old darling; but, between ourselves, she does take her lions a little too seriously, doesn't she. Well, prepare for a coup de foudre, Gregory. You'll be sure to fall in love with her. Everybody falls in love ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... betterment of his own estate, and he was frequently found indulging in his undeniable passion for litigation. The purchase of a house in Blackfriars is recorded in 1613, and it led to the seemingly inevitable lawsuit some two years later. Nicholas Rowe, poet-laureate to King George I., wrote a life of Shakespeare in the early years of the eighteenth century, and we owe to him a statement, founded upon such information as a lapse of a century could validate, that Shakespeare spent the last years of his life enjoying "ease, retirement, and the ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... Shakespeare drew in Yorick. He was not only,—so the writer implied,—the maker of jibes and fantastic devices, but the bard of friendship and affection, of melodious lyrical conceits; he was the laureate of children—dear for his "Wynken, Blynken and Nod" and "Little Boy Blue"; the scholarly book-lover, withal, who relished and paraphrased his Horace, who wrote with delight a quaint archaic English of his special devising; who collected rare ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... headed by Professor Wilson, declared he was Burns's rival as a song-writer, and his superior in anything relating to external nature! indeed they wrote of him as unsurpassed by poet or painter in his fairy tales of ancient time, dubbing him Poet Laureate to the Queen of Elfland; and yet his unrefined manner tempted these friends to speak of him familiarly as the greatest hog in all Apollo's herd, or the Boar of the ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... was introduced to Pope Leo X., as a buffoon, but was promoted to the laurel. This laureate was called ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... starvelings of the world, known as poets, suggest many more wonders of the universe than may be at first apparent. Poets must always be prophets, or their calling is in vain. Put this standard of judgment to the verse-writers of the day, and where would they be? The English Laureate is no seer: he is a mere relater of pretty stories. Algernon Charles Swinburne has more fire in him, and more wealth of expression, but he does not prophesy; he has a clever way of combining Biblical similes with ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... new dramatic poem is before us in the elegant Boston typography of Ticknor & Field's worthy successors.[31] The poet laureate added little to his fame by his previous dramatic work, "Queen Mary"; he will gain less by this. It is good of course to a certain degree, but it is only "fair to middling" Tennysonian work. We find in it not a passage that stirs us, not one that charms. It puts the story ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... large or small, poor or rich, that has a child in it, is a Pinafore Palace, and we have borrowed the phrase from one of childhood's most whimsical and devoted poets-laureate, thinking no other words would so ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... devoted 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 choice manuscripts, was embodied ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... Tennyson in cases holding little volumes equal in number, but the binding various, and Mr. McLean reached his decision after one look. "That," said he, and laid a large muscular hand upon the Laureate. The young lady behind the counter spoke out acidly, and Lin pulled the abject hand away. His taste, however, happened to be sound, or, at least, it was at one with the Governor's; but now they learned that there was a distressing variance ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... realise the myth of the Inexhaustible Bottle; Mr. William Morris is nothing: if not fluent and copious; Mr. Swinburne has a facility that would seem impossible if it were not a living fact; even the Laureate is sometimes prodigal of unimportant details, of touches insignificant and superfluous, of words for words' sake, of cadences that have no reason of being save themselves. Matthew Arnold alone says only what is worth ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... open space between the trees. There were biscuits of wheaten flour, plates of honey-comb, and cream in tall glass ewers. That was the regulation lunch at the Bee Festival. The Bee Festival was nearly as old as the kingdom, and there was an ancient legend about it, which the Poet Laureate had put into an epic poem. The King had it in his royal library, printed in golden letters and bound ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... wouldn't 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 ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... 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. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... article to show that dialect is not a thing to be despised in any event —that its origin is oftentimes of as royal caste as that of any speech. Listening back, from the stand- point of to-day, even to the divine singing of that old classic master to whom England's late laureate refers as ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... 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. Among his most ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... obtained permission from the Laureate's publishers to reprint the following stanzas from "The Pale ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... those bards, were it only possible, the stores of traditionary lore of which they were the sole depositories! As it is, we can but lament the almost total absence of reliable information regarding their genius, perhaps also the jealous competition for the laureate's ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... high favour with the wits of London and the men about town. Pepys knew the house, of course, and so did Evelyn, and Swift dined there, and Steele, and many another genius of the eighteenth century. It was in the Apollo room, too, that the official court-day odes of the Poets Laureate were rehearsed, which explains the point ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... remarkable versatility. Because plays were in demand, he produced many that catered to the evil tastes of the Restoration stage,—plays that he afterwards condemned unsparingly. He was equally ready to write prose or verse, songs, criticisms, political satires. In 1670 he was made poet laureate under Charles II; his affairs prospered; he became a literary dictator in London, holding forth nightly in Will's Coffeehouse to an admiring circle of listeners. After the Revolution of 1688 he lost his offices, and with ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... a Thursday, and give alms to the poor in the name of God. He was a very learned and accomplished man; and his writings, both in prose and verse, were equal to those of Zahiri and Naziri. When he first came to India, he resided for some years at Delhi; but having had some dispute with the poet-laureate of the Emperor Mohammed Shah, he found himself under the necessity of retiring to Benares, where he lived in great privacy. As he was a stranger in the country, was engaged in no calling or profession, and received no allowance from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... the Poet Laureate during the visit of President Wilson?" asks a correspondent in a contemporary. We ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Kirk on Rutgers Farm • Frederick Bruckbauer
... Templars, sheepish lads from universities, translators and index makers in ragged coats of frieze. The great press was to get near the chair where John Dryden sate. In winter that chair was always in the warmest nook by the fire; in summer it stood in the balcony. To bow to the Laureate, and to hear his opinion of Racine's last tragedy, or of Bossu's treatise on epic poetry, was thought a privilege. A pinch from his snuff-box was an honour sufficient to turn the head of a ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... after 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 ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... at Cambridge University. He gave all his time to writing poetry and lived an uneventful life, surrounded by his family and friends, in the beautiful Lake District, in the North of England, which he describes in his poems. From 1843 till his death in 1850 he was Poet Laureate of England. ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... or not, he was a little later ordered to leave Milan. He took refuge in Piedmont, whose brave king, in spite of diplomatic remonstrances from his neighbors, made Prati his poeta cesareo, or poet laureate. This was in 1843; and five years later he took an active part in inciting with his verse the patriotic revolts which broke out all over Italy. But he was supposed by virtue of his office to be monarchical in his sympathies, ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... unusual for them, they spoke of the future, the dim, vague, but so happy future, when Albert was to be the nation's poet laureate and Madeline, as Mrs. Laureate, would share his glory and wear, so to speak, his second-best laurels. The disagreeable problems connected with the future they ignored, or casually dismissed with, "Never mind, dear, it will be all right by and by." ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... it was through the good offices of Hill that in May, 1708, Gay's poem, "Wine," was published by William Keble at the Black-Spread-eagle in Westminster Hall, who, about the same time, brought out a translation by Nahum Tate, the Poet Laureate, and Hill, of a portion of the thirteenth book of ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... book was written, Southey lived at Greta Hall, by Keswick, and had gathered a large library about him. He was Poet Laureate. He had a pension from the Civil List, worth less than 200 pounds a year, and he was living at peace upon a little income enlarged by his yearly earnings as a writer. In 1818 his whole private fortune was 400 pounds in consols. In 1821 he had added to that ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... He had organized a little choir of ladies of rank, remarkable for their intelligence and beauty, and had taught them to sing extempore to the guitar. He had had them instructed by the famous Gorilla, who was crowned poetess-laureate at the capitol by night, six years later. She was crowned where our great Italian poets were crowned; and though her merit was no doubt great, it was, nevertheless, more tinsel than gold, and not of that order to place her on a par with ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt |
