"Biographer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... no great historian after Tacitus, who should have belonged to the Ciceronian epoch. Suetonius, born about the year 70 A.D., shortly after Nero's death, was rather a biographer than an historian; nor as a biographer does he take a high rank. His "Lives of the Caesars," like Diogenes Laertius's "Lives of the Philosophers," are rather anecdotical than historical. L. Anneus Florus, who flourished during the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... enormous labor, was well under way; and other literary projects were actively planned; when, suddenly, the summons came which, in an instant, with the shears of fate, slit the strand of this activity. The rest of the story may be told in the words of the biographer appointed by the Medical Society of the County of Philadelphia to prepare a memoir of ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... and Shakespeare societies found out about Shakespeare? How did his contemporaries regard him? Explain: "Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare" (p. 198), and "He is the one person, in all modern history, known to ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... Theodoric's at the Golden Palm was listened to by an obscure African monk, whose emotions on the occasion are described to us by his biographer. Fulgentius, the grandson of a senator of Carthage, had forsaken what seemed a promising official career, and had accepted the solitude and the hardships of a monastic life, at a time when, owing to the severe persecution of the Catholics by the Vandal kings, there was no prospect of anything ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... Boaden, a journalist and the biographer of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, was the first to suggest the Pembroke theory in a letter to the Gentleman's Magazine in 1832. A few months later Mr. James Heywood Bright wrote to the magazine claiming to ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... naturalists in the unlimited sense, one of those folio copies of mankind, like Linnaeus and Cuvier, who aim at nothing less than an acquaintance with the whole of animated Nature. His genius for classifying was simply marvellous; and, as his latest biographer says, nowhere had a single person ever given so decisive an impulse ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... was not in camp with Henry Sharp (who had not only given him his freedom, but also taken up arms against the Revolutionists), he reported to Tybee Island to preach to the refugees there assembled. At any rate, when Liele appears in Savannah, Georgia, as a preacher of the Gospel, his biographer declares that "He came up to the city ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... observations on the meaning of the recognition. "It is observable, that the ancient writers almost always speak of our kings as elected. Edwy's grandmother in her charter, (Lye, App. iv.) says, "He was chosen, gecoren." The contemporary biographer of Dunstan, (apud Boll. tom. iv. Maii, 344.) says, "Ab ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... his friend and biographer, Earl Russell, "was the summary of his belief; that a man should love his neighbor as himself seems to have been the rule of his life." The Earl of Carlisle, inaugurating the statue of the poet,[O] bore testimony to his moral and social worth "in all the holy relations of life,—as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... him, in his midnight rambles through the city, in the dress of a servant; and nothing that youth, beauty, wealth, and elegance could do to throw a cloak over the grossness of vice and crime was forgotten by her. The biographer thought it waste of time to mention all Cleopatra's arts and Antony's follies, but the story of his fishing was not to be forgotten. One day, when sitting in the boat with her, he caught but little, and was vexed at her seeing his want of success. So he ordered one of his men to dive into ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... favoring ear, and despatched him to the Indies as general of the fleet and army. Here he found means to amass vast riches; and, in 1561, on his return to Spain, charges were brought against him of a nature which his too friendly biographer does not explain. The Council of the Indies arrested him. He was imprisoned and sentenced to a heavy fine; but, gaining his release, hastened to court to throw himself on the royal clemency. His petition was most graciously received. Philip restored his command, but remitted only half his fine, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... the infirmity of leaving works unfinished, and suffering reactions of disgust. But Coleridge taxed himself with that infirmity in verse before he could at all have commenced opium-eating. Besides, it is too much assumed by Coleridge and by his biographer, that to leave off opium was of course to regain juvenile health. But all opium-eaters make the mistake of supposing every pain or irritation which they suffer to be the product of opium. Whereas a wise man will say, suppose you do leave off opium, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... Richard Arkwright, the great mechanician. He was never at school in his life—never forced to do ridiculous sums, to spell correctly, to parse, to drill, to sing! His biographer said that the only education he ever received he gave himself—that he was fifty years of age when he set to work to learn grammar and to improve his hand-writing. He did not waste the precious hours of his youth over such things. When he was a boy he was ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... neglected by writers on the eighteenth century. He has no biographer. M. Walferdin wrote (in an edition of Diderot's Works, Paris, 1821, Vol. XII p. 115): "Nous nous occupons depuis longtemps a rassembler les materiaux qui doivent servir a venger la memoire du philosophe de la patrie de Leibnitz, et ...
— Baron d'Holbach • Max Pearson Cushing
... appear in the list of Babylonian sovereigns brought to light by the patience and the industry of the decipherers of cuneiform inscriptions in these later years; nor indeed am I aware that there is any other authority for his existence than that of the biographer of Zadig, one Arouet de Voltaire, among whose more conspicuous merits strict historical accuracy is perhaps ...
— On the Method of Zadig - Essay #1 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... expression of great decision, with firmness and activity to execute his well-digested plans. These were my remarks the first time I saw him, and his subsequent conduct soon proved I was right." His French biographer makes a remark, commonplace enough, which yet notes the essential difference in the lot of the two gallant men who thus casually met. "For the few who allow occasions to escape them, how many could justly complain that a chance has never been offered them? Admiral ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... Pope have been discussed in a literature more voluminous than that which exists in the case of almost any other English man of letters. No biographer, however, has produced a definitive or exhaustive work. It seems therefore desirable to indicate the main authorities upon which such a biographer would have to rely, and which have been consulted for the purpose ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... faculty, which has already given birth to so many pleasant fancies and happy studies, especially of young life? A glimpse is given in the following playful letter and postscript from herself and her sister to a would-be biographer. ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... a full description of his trial consult Macaulay's "Essays." Also his biographer, Montagu, whose judgment of Bacon is ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... a Whig of 1688. It is admitted that his personal prejudices were strong; but those who allow this maintain that he had no prejudice as to things, but examined all doctrines and theories with a strong common sense and a clear judgment. His painstaking to inquire after truth is much vaunted by his biographer; but his speeches as leader of the Protectionists do not reveal this quality,—for while no orator of the time, not even Sir Robert Peel, relied more upon statistics, or at least made a larger use of them, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... species. But unless that naturalist has already been in the field and has there gathered much material, he is likely to be hard put to it when the time comes for his story to be written, since then there may be no mountain sheep to observe or to write of. The sheep is not likely to be so happy in its biographer as was the buffalo, for Dr. Allen's monograph on the American bison is a classic among North American natural ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... who was already then and there meditating his method for teaching the American people to mispel, and Oliver Wolcott, afterward Secretary of the Treasury. Bound by the sweet influences of the Pleiades, Wolcott wrote a poem,—"The Judgment of Paris." His biographer, who has read it, has given his critical opinion that "it would be much worse than Barlow's epic, were it not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... friendship of Lothario? though perhaps, as to the time and place where those several persons lived, that good historian may be deplorably deficient. But the most known instance of this kind is in the true history of Gil Blas, where the inimitable biographer hath made a notorious blunder in the country of Dr Sangrado, who used his patients as a vintner doth his wine-vessels, by letting out their blood, and filling them up with water. Doth not every one, who is the least versed in physical ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... a subject of this realm was of the grandly passive kind which consists in the inheritance of land. Political and social movements touched him only through the wire of his rental, and his most careful biographer need not have read up on Schleswig-Holstein, the policy of Bismarck, trade-unions, household suffrage, or even the last commercial panic. He glanced over the best newspaper columns on these topics, and his views on them can hardly be said to have ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... a peculiar privilege, the origin of which is in some measure associated with the Culdees—the custody of the Brecbennach, or consecrated banner of St. Columba. The lands of Forglen, the church of which was dedicated to Adomnan the biographer of Columba, were gifted for the maintenance of the banner. The privilege was conferred on the Abbey by King William, but as it inferred the warlike service of following the banner to the King's host, ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... Muther, art-critic and biographer, calls our attention to the similarity between Wagner's music and Bocklin's painting. While Wagner was "luring the colours of sound from music," Bocklin's "symphonies of colour streamed forth like a crashing orchestra," ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... the father of just twenty children. His first wife was a woman with well-defined musical tastes, as was meet in one with such an illustrious musical pedigree. It wasn't fashion then to educate women, and one biographer expresses a doubt as to whether Bach's first wife was able to read and write. To read and write are rather cheap accomplishments, though. Last year I met several excellent specimens of manhood in the Tennessee Mountains who could do neither, yet ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... and execution, with grand draperies, a fur pelisse, and damask doublet with crimson sleeves. In the National Gallery we possess his own portrait by himself, in company with Cardinal de Medici. The faces are well contrasted, and we judge from Sebastian's that his biographer describes him justly, as fat, indolent, and given to self-indulgence, but genial and ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... son. Lamb, however, seems to have believed this episode to be in the first edition, 1724, and afterwards to have been removed at the entreaty of Southerne, Defoe's friend (see Lamb's letters to Walter Wilson, Defoe's biographer, of December 16, 1822, and February 24, 1823). But it is in reality the first edition which lacks the episode, and Mr. G.A. Aitken, Defoe's latest editor, doubts Southerne's interference altogether ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... let alone private readings. It is unique in plan and excellence, and I am greatly obliged to you for it. Apart from the pleasure of the book, the form of it has always interested me as a professional biographer. It certainly is novel; and in this case I am pretty sure that ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... proceeded from the author's fear that, if we were not told who their fathers were, they might be in danger, like prince Prettyman, of being supposed to have had none. Lastly, and perhaps more truly, I have conjectured that the design of the biographer hath been no more than to shew his great learning and knowledge of antiquity. A design to which the world hath probably owed many notable discoveries, and indeed most of the ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... of Chatham did not excite greater interest than the resignation of the meanest officer in the state. Even Thackeray, his admiring biographer, was obliged to make this confession:—"A greater contrast in the feelings of the cabinet and the nation upon the present resignation of Lord Chatham to those which were evinced upon his dismission from office in 1757, and upon his ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... that you should be that bit of colour. There, take my scarlet cloak, and perch yourself yonder on that low rock. A few minutes will do. Was there ever immortality so cheaply purchased! Your biographer shall tell that you were the figure in that famous sketch—what will be called in the cant of art, one of Nina Kostalergi's earliest and happiest efforts. There, now, dear Mr. Donogan, do ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... calls her; but particularly because he declined to acknowledge the king's ecclesiastical supremacy as head of the Reformed Church. There he remained until his execution the following year. "During his imprisonment," says his son-in-law and biographer, Roper, who married his favorite daughter Margaret, "one day, looking from his window, he saw four monks (who also had refused the oath of supremacy) going to their execution, and regretting that he could not bear them company, said: ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... says his biographer, "standing up at the nursery window by his father's side, looking at a cloud of black smoke pouring out of a tall chimney. He asked if that was hell: an inquiry that was received with great displeasure which at the time he could not understand. The kindly father must have been pained ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... I, "I am glad I am not an Englishman, or as true as the world, a chap like Lord John Russell would ruin me for ever. I am not a poet, and can't write poetry, but I am a Clockmaker, and write common sense. Now a biographer like that man, that knows as little of one as he does of the other, would ruin me for everlastingly. It ain't pleasant to have such a burr as that stick on to your tail, especially if you have no ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... been allowed to stand high. It, however, has not been submitted to recent tests. To be the first to 'smell a fault' is the pride of the modern biographer. Boswell's artless pages afford useful hints not lightly to be disregarded. During some portion of Johnson's married life he had lodgings, first at Greenwich, afterwards at Hampstead. But he did not always go home o' nights; ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... an ordinary love of display, and had he acted upon it with his inherent tact and skill, taking advantage of fair occasions to prove the power and substance that were in him, it would greatly have facilitated the task of his biographer. ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... going into a shop when the boy's Scotch nurse democratically stopped the new republican chief magistrate and said to him, "Please your honor, here's a bairn was named for you". The great man turned and looked kindly on his little namesake, laid his hand upon his head, and blessed his future biographer. ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... from India, equally, we may look for that mystically profound commentary on St. John's Gospel which Bishop Westcott declared he looked for from Japan. But to return. About Mr. Malabar! himself, his biographer writes: "If he could not accept the dogmas of Christianity, he had imbibed its true spirit," meaning the spirit of Christ Himself. "The cult of the Asiatic life" is the latest definition of Christianity given by a recent apologist of Hinduism, one of a small company of ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... at the results of his operations that he resolved to strike out in an offensive campaign which would restore all that was lost, and if successful accomplish still more. We have the authority of his son and biographer for saying that his plan was to attack the forces at Shiloh and crush them; then to cross the Tennessee and destroy the army of Buell, and push the war across the Ohio River. The design was a bold one; but we have the same authority for ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... "there is no reason to doubt that if Fuseli had been disengaged at the period of their acquaintance he would have been the man of her choice." As the little if is a very powerful word, of course this amounts to nothing, and it is scarcely the province of a biographer to say what might have taken place under other circumstances, and to criticise a character from that standpoint. If Mary was attracted by Fuseli's genius, and this would not have been surprising, and if she went to ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... with her." Edwards's printed works number thirty-six titles. A complete edition of them in ten volumes was published in 1829 by his great grandson, Sereno Dwight. The memoranda from Edwards's note-books, quoted by his editor and biographer, exhibit a remarkable precocity. Even as a school-boy and a college student he had made deep guesses in physics as well as metaphysics, and, as might have been predicted of a youth of his philosophical insight and ideal cast of mind, he had early anticipated Berkeley ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... Mrs. Craik, better known as Miss Muloch; Matthew Arnold, poet, educationalist, critic, whose verse should outlive his criticisms; the noble astronomer Richard Proctor; Gustave Masson, the careful biographer of Milton; Laurence Oliphant, gifted and eccentric visionary; the naturalist J. G. Wood; the explorer and orientalist Burton; the historians Kinglake, Froude, and Freeman; the great ecclesiastics Bishop Lightfoot, Canon Liddon, Archbishop Magee of York, Dean ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... James G. Blaine, published at Augusta, Maine, his home. By the renowned biographer and historian, Colonel Russell H. Conwell, whose Life of President Garfield outsold the twenty others by sixty thousand copies. Mr. Blaine, his friends and his relatives co-operated with the publishers in order that the volume might be most complete ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... with naked fists captured a blazing cannon. Falling at last by the dagger of a hired assassin, he exclaimed: "I commit my poor people to God and myself to God's great captain, Christ." When he died little children cried in the streets. He lost his life, said his biographer, but saved his fame. And what shall we more say of Italy's hero, who wore his fiery fagots like a crown of gold; of Germany's hero, who lost his priestly rites, but gained the hearts of all mankind; of England's hero, whose very ashes were cast by enemies upon the ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... well-known passage in one of his essays De Quincey enumerates the multiform attainments and powers of Coleridge, and the corresponding varieties of demand made by them on any one who should aspire to become this many-sided man's biographer. The description is slightly touched with the humorous hyperbole characteristic of its author; but it is in substance just, and I cannot but wish that it were possible, within the limits of a preface, to set out the whole of it in excuse for the many inevitable shortcomings of this ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... Columbus, according to the portrait of him given by his biographer Washington Irving, was a tall man, of robust and noble presence. His face was long, he had an aquiline nose, high cheek bones, eyes clear and full of fire; he had a bright complexion, and his face was ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... might have been given to the honour of Reynolds, he is "unconscious of having omitted any enquiry likely to lead him aright."—P. 320. He may have made the enquiry without using the information—a practice not inconsistent in such a biographer. For instance, when he assumes, that in the portrait of Beattie, the figures of Scepticism, Sophistry, and Infidelity, represent Hume, Voltaire, and Gibbon; remarking, that they have survived the "insult of Reynolds." An enquiry from Northcote ought to have led him to conclude otherwise, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... biographer of Pitt was a grandson of the Lord Mahon, afterwards Earl of Stanhope, who married, in 1774, the great statesman's eldest sister. Philip Henry Stanhope was born at Walmer on January 30, 1805, and entered the House of Commons as Lord Mahon in 1831. He took a prominent part in the foundation ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... the preface, where, instead of "1793," the misleading date "1790" is given as the year at whose close Paine completed Part First,—an error that spread far and wide and was fastened on by his calumnious American "biographer," Cheetham, to prove his inconsistency. The editors have been fairly demoralized by, and have altered in different ways, the following sentence of the preface in Symonds: "The intolerant spirit of religious persecution had transferred ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... next important case was that of a negro named Lewis. He 'had formerly,' says Mr Sharp's biographer, 'been a slave in possession of a Mr Stapylton, who now resided at Chelsea. Stapylton, with the aid of two watermen, whom he had hired for that purpose, in a dark night seized the person of Lewis, and, after a struggle, dragged him on his back into the water, and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... being then a man of somewhat advanced years—over 60 years of age, in fact—retired to the society of his brothers in and near London, and among them pursued his studies until the day of his death. Harvey's career is a life which offers no salient points of interest to the biographer. It was a life devoted to study and investigation; and it was a life the devotion of which was amply rewarded, as I shall have occasion to point out to you, by ...
— William Harvey And The Discovery Of The Circulation Of The Blood • Thomas H. Huxley
... far the fact of Harold's oath, whatever its nature, was known in England? On this point we have no trustworthy authority. The English writers say nothing about the whole matter; to the Norman writers this point was of no interest. No one mentions this point, except Harold's romantic biographer at the beginning of the thirteenth century. His statements are of no value, except as showing how long Harold's memory was cherished. According to him, Harold formally laid the matter before the Witan, and they unanimously voted that the oath—more, in his version, than a mere oath of ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... defamatory article against the magistrate of Port Louis. Ollier had always advocated the freedom of the press, and he protested against the law which suppressed free speech, and against the persecution of a fellow-journalist, although the latter was his political enemy. Ollier's biographer adds: "Ollier indeed was an ardent lover and a good hater. This noble heart and comprehensive mind made him understand his duty toward men. He forgot enmity when fundamental ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... turn with that "mace of death," which Carlyle has attributed to Dryasdust; and my two dull papers are, in the matter of dulness, worthy additions to the labours of M'Crie. Yet I believe they are worth reprinting in the interest of the next biographer of Knox. I trust his book may be a masterpiece; and I indulge the hope that my two studies may lend him a hint or perhaps spare him a delay in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... correspondence, and other papers, a detailed account of his life, adventures, and rise as an artist, and a discriminating sketch of his character, the peculiarities of which are happily illustrated by anecdotes. Many things of him, unknown even to his admirers, are here given to the world, and his biographer, fully appreciating the artist, has yet, not like a flatterer, but with true independence, spoken candidly of the faults of the ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... must refund to one Ocellus Lucanus —Virgil must make a cessio bonorum in favor of Pisander—the Metamorphoses of Ovid must be credited to the account of Parthenius of Nicaea, and (to come to a modern instance) Mr. Sheridan must, according to his biographer, Dr. Watkins, surrender the glory of having written the School for Scandal to a certain anonymous young lady, who died of ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... of our era, Plutarch, a Greek biographer, wrote the "Parallel Lives" of forty-six distinguished Greeks and Romans—a charming and instructive work, translated by John and William Langhorne in 1771, and by Arthur ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... may not be Walt Whitman's "secret," or, at any rate, the spiritual experience of which the poet's latest biographer, Mr. Emory Holloway, writes? His interesting account of Walt Whitman's Manuscript Note-Books is preceded by the ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... the time the book was written, I believe Forster was considered to be almost the best biographer living ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... investigation and adverse report by members of the Royal Society, his practice fell into disrepute, and he retired to his native land, where he sojourned in obscurity until his death, which is supposed to have occurred after the year 1682. One David Lloyd, a biographer, issued a tract entitled "Wonders no Miracles, or Mr. Valentine Greatrakes' Gift of Healing Examined," wherein he endeavored to show that the famous "Irish stroaker" was little better than an impostor. In reply to this, Greatrakes published a pamphlet, vindicating ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... smeared all the canvas. If he had any virtues, they are not to be found in the Doctor's picture of him, and it is well for Milton that some sourness in his temper is the only vice with which his memory has been charged; it is evident enough that if his biographer could have discovered more, he ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... mean when she was a little girl—wasted away, or something—I'm such a beastly idiot about expressing myself, that I wouldn't dare to write to you at all if you weren't really great. That is actually all I can tell you, and I am afraid the painter was their only biographer." ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... Watson, I do honestly believe that we are going to pull it off, after all." He slapped me on the shoulder with a sudden burst of hilarity. "I am going out now. It is only a reconnaissance. I will do nothing serious without my trusted comrade and biographer at my elbow. Do you stay here, and the odds are that you will see me again in an hour or two. If time hangs heavy get foolscap and a pen, and begin your narrative of ...
— The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans • Arthur Conan Doyle
... life and character without selecting and dwelling a moment on one or two of his traits, or virtues, or felicities, a little longer. There is a collective impression made by the whole of an eminent person's life, beyond, and other than, and apart from, that which the mere general biographer would afford the means of explaining. There is an influence of a great man derived from things indescribable, almost, or incapable of enumeration, or singly insufficient to account for it, but through which his spirit transpires, and ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... Latin by translating: there were few vocabularies, and only the crabbed grammar of old Priscian. Shaking himself free from the trammels we have enumerated, he invited learned men from abroad, such as his biographer, Asser, and together they attempted a complete version of the Bible. Some writers suppose the project was nearly completed, others, that it was interrupted by his early death. Still, translations were multiplied of the ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... chamberlain to stage-manage it, there are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human. The biographies of great people fall more or less readily into the histories of these two selves. The official biographer reproduces the public life, the revealing memoir the other. The Charnwood Lincoln, for example, is a noble portrait, not of an actual human being, but of an epic figure, replete with significance, who moves on much the same level of reality as Aeneas or St. George. Oliver's ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... the Red Cross in Italy. Disqualified both by age and health from joining the army of attack, he threw himself into the task—a labour of love—of tending the sick and wounded of that country which he knows so well and of whose greatest modern hero he is the classic biographer. That the eulogist of GARIBALDI should hasten to the succour of Italian soldiers was fitting, and how well he performed the task the records of the Villa Trenta Hospital, near Udine, and of the ambulance drivers ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... looking under them, his adverbs and qualifications, his shrewdness and carefulness for the things that Pierpont Morgan did not see. Pierpont Morgan himself would not have tried to hide them, and neither has his biographer. His whole book breathes throughout with a just-mindedness, a spirit of truth, a necessary and inevitable honesty, which of itself is not the least testimony to the essential validity and soundness of Morgan's career. Pierpont Morgan's attitude toward his ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... artist himself. The second-named MSS., from which extracts have been made, are dated 1823. These contain references to the principal makers of Cremona, combined with critical remarks on their works from the pen of Vincenzo Lancetti, a Cremonese poet and biographer. The information contained in these MSS. was chiefly received from Count Cozio di Salabue in the course of ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... one more illustration of the folly of entrusting the composition of biography to persons who have only the wholly irrelevant claim of intimate friendship, or kinship, or sympathy in public causes. The qualification for a biographer is not in the least that he is a virtuous person, or a second cousin, or a dear friend, or a trusty colleague; but that he knows how to write a book, has tact, style, taste, considerateness, sense of proportion, and a good eye for ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley
... attach to the soiled instrument by which our blessings were secured. A singular instance of the brutality of the Attorney-General, and of his overstrained duty to the Crown, occurred at the trial of the unfortunate and gallant Essex. Well may the present biographer exclaim, "This was a humiliating day for our order!" Essex had striven hard to obtain for Bacon the office then held by his accuser. The insurrection in the city might sooner be pardoned than that offense, which, indeed, received ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... steadfast to the last were then burned at the stake; they who in the last extremity renounced their faith were strangled before being thrown into the flames. Such was the Spanish inquisition—technically—so called: It was, according' to the biographer of Philip the Second, a "heavenly remedy, a guardian angel of Paradise, a lions' den in which Daniel and other just men could sustain no injury, but in which perverse sinners were torn to pieces." It was a tribunal superior to all human law, without ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... looked attentively in Mr Pecksniff's face, 'that is a remarkably curious and interesting trait in Mr Slyme's character; and whenever Slyme's life comes to be written, that trait must be thoroughly worked out by his biographer or society will not be satisfied. Observe me, society ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... supremely happy marriage, crowning an early manhood in which love of any kind had, for better or worse, played hardly any part at all. Yet almost nothing in these beautiful and often brilliant lyrics is in any strict sense personal. The biographer who searches them for traits quivering with intimate experience searches all but in vain. Browning's own single and supreme passion touched no fountain of song, such as love sets flowing in most poets and in many who are not ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... which she sailed from Sicily was commanded by one of the Lomellini, a noble family of Genoa, with whom Sofonisba fell so desperately in love that she offered him her hand—which, says her biographer, "he accepted like a generous man." Does this mean that she had been ungenerous in depriving him of the privilege of asking for what she so ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... was as great as his gallantry, soon suffered himself to be betrayed into an undisguised admiration of the French Queen, which led him to commit a thousand unbecoming follies; while Anne was on her side so imprudent that her most partial biographer deemed it necessary to advance an apology for her levity by declaring that "it should excite no astonishment if he had the happiness to make this beautiful Queen acknowledge that if a virtuous woman had been able to love another better than ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... upon the shelves of a Boston bookstore, two or three volumes of this "Cottonian Library." They are not there now. Perhaps the lucky purchaser of them may be a reader of this article. If so, let me congratulate him upon possessing such rare and interesting memorials of the famous and immortal biographer of Doctor Daniel ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Topham, brought up the set custom of "witty paragraphs," first in the "World." Boaden was a reigning paragraphist in his day, and succeeded poor Allen in the Oracle. But, as we said, the fashion of jokes passes away; and it would be difficult to discover in the Biographer of Mrs. Siddons, any traces of that vivacity and fancy which charmed the whole town at the commencement of the present century. Even the prelusive delicacies of the present writer—the curt "Astraean allusion"—would be thought pedantic, and out ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... Lespoisse's two sons also did very well at reversi and basset; their luck was invariably best at the more hazardous games. The play went on until late into the night. No one slept during these marvellous festivities, and as the earliest biographer of Bluebeard has said: "They spent the whole night in playing tricks on one another." These hours were the most delightful of the whole twenty-four; for then, under cover of jesting, and taking advantage of the darkness, ...
— The Seven Wives Of Bluebeard - 1920 • Anatole France
... many and complicated. Thus there is a family of graph (or write) words: graphic, lithograph, cerograph, cinematograph, stylograph, telegraph, multigraph, seismograph, dictograph, monograph, holograph, logograph, digraph, autograph, paragraph, stenographer, photographer, biographer, lexicographer, bibliography, typography, pyrography, orthography, chirography, calligraphy, cosmography, geography. There is also a family of phone (or sound) words: telephone, dictaphone, megaphone, audiphone, phonology, symphony, antiphony, euphonious, cacophonous, phonetic ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... an opera for the opening of the season, which generally consists of twenty or thirty nights, during which period seldom more than two operas are performed. The first night of one of these seasons is most amusingly described by the biographer of Rossini. "The theatre overflows, the people flock from ten leagues' distance; the curious form an encampment round the theatre in their calashes; all the inns are filled to excess, where insolence reigns at its ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... grateful to him than his own writings. Lockhart left little for his successors to do, and the more any one studies the Abbotsford manuscripts, the more must he admire the industry and tact of Scott's biographer. ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... by an inability to see any romance, or poetry, or grandeur, or beauty in the Indian character, at least till such traits were pointed out by others. I do abhor an Indian story. Yet no writer can be more secure of a permanent place in our literature than the biographer of the Indian chiefs. His subject, as referring to tribes which have mostly vanished from the earth, gives him a right to be placed on a classic shelf, apart from the merits ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... laird of Knockbrex made on the men of his day. With a quite Scriptural insight and terseness of expression, Livingstone simply says that Robert Gordon was the most 'single-hearted and painful' of all the Christian men known to his widely- acquainted and clear-sighted biographer. ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... of the biographer of Catherine Schuyler might truthfully have been applied to almost any girl in or near the quaint Dutch city: "Meanwhile [about 1740] the girl [Catherine Schuyler] was perfecting herself in the arts of housekeeping so dear to ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... to preserve this letter among your papers, that the biographer may light upon some evidence of "the good ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... called, too, by that lover of flowers, Walter Savage Landor, who, as his biographer says, followed a pronunciation "traditional in many ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... its aspect sweet. Tinted as fair as clouds that deck the sky, Or stainless as the snows that round us lie; Bright as the saffron tints of dawning light, Or darker than the stormy depths of night. A prince's bride; the treasure of a lad; And yet biographer it never had. For he who writes its life must ever use Volumes to celebrate each separate muse. Fierce, fond, and treacherous, full of songs and wails, The hero of a thousand fights and tales; The love of ladies and the scorn of men; ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... she is grubbing away dear knows where!" her biographer would say carelessly. "Absolutely, they might ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... Fourteen Hundred Eighty-three. Herman Grimm takes three chapters to prove that Raphael was not born in this house, and that nothing is so unreliable as a bronze tablet, except figures. Grimm is a painstaking biographer, but he fails to distinguish between fact and truth. Of this we are sure, Giovanni di Sanzio, the father of Raphael, lived in this house. There are church records to show that here other children of Giovanni were born, and this very naturally led to the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... Afterwards he was the prime mover in the construction of the Pekin-Hankow Railway. I do not think most persons know that Leopold at one time tried to establish a Belgian colony in Ethiopia. Another act in his life that has escaped the casual biographer was his effort to purchase the Philippines from Spain. Now you can see why he seized upon the Congo as a colonizing possibility the moment he read Henry M. Stanley's first article about it in the ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... to Lucius Brady, his biographer to be, that Stingaree confided the data of all the misdeeds recounted in these pages; but of his life during the quiet intervals, of his relations with confederates, and his more honest dealings with honest folk ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... absolute freedom to follow his artistic instinct and intelligence, the biographer is fettered by the subject-matter with which he proposes to deal. The former may hopefully pursue an ideal, the latter must rest satisfied with a compromise between the desirable and the necessary. No doubt, it ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... and biographer was born in 1705, and was killed by a fall from his horse, in 1765. Dr. Johnson said of him, "Tom Birch is as brisk as a bee in conversation; but no sooner does he take a pen in his hand, than it becomes a torpedo to him, and benumbs all ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... had no such scruples—some of them right here in Hannibal—and they attempted to gain a little reflected notoriety by asserting that they were the prototypes of the character. When Albert Bigelow Paine, Mr. Clemens's biographer, gathered the material for his life of the author, he found no fewer than twenty-five women, in Missouri and elsewhere, each of whom declared she was Becky Thatcher, but he settled the controversy for all time on Mr. Clemens's authority when the biography was published. In it you will find that ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... the makers of the Constitution had in the highest temper of statesmanship found a way round seemingly insuperable difficulties. The whole attitude of "the fathers" towards slavery is a question of some consequence to a biographer of Lincoln, and we shall return to it ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... clavecin, and sings like an angel; she is full of expressions that are at once ingenuous and piquant; she is exceedingly kind-hearted."[95] But he could not persuade her to take his philosophy on trust. Diderot is said, by the Princess's biographer, to have been a fervid proselytiser, eager to make people believe "his poems about eternally revolving atoms, through whose accidental encounter the present ordering of the world was developed." The Princess met his brilliant eloquence with a demand for proof. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... for what he himself called the delirium of the preceding session" (writes Burke's biographer)[13] "he would have seen that Pitt was in truth taking his first measures for the emancipation of Ireland from an unjust and oppressive subordination and for her installation as a corporate member of the Empire—the only ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... that there is not the least Foundation for any thing which is said of Lady Davers, or any of the other Ladies; all that is merely to be imputed to the Invention of the Biographer. I have particularly enquired after Lady Davers, and dont hear Mr. Booby hath such a Relation, or that there is indeed any ...
— An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews • Conny Keyber
... William Fitzstephen, the biographer of Thomas a Becket, in his Description of London, supposed to be written about the middle of the reign of Henry II, says of this city, "ennobled by her men, graced by her arms, and peopled by a multitude of inhabitants," that "in the wars under King Stephen ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... Here, therefore, the inscription should have ended, the latter part containing nothing but what is common to every man who is wise and good. The character of Fenton was so amiable, that I cannot forbear to wish for some poet or biographer to display it more fully for the advantage of posterity. If he did not stand in the first rank of genius, he may claim a place in the second; and, whatever criticism may object to his writings, censure could find very little to blame in ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... gave emphatic evidence of that devotedness to duty and friends which became her strongest trait. Her youngest sister, Marianne, was adopted and educated by her, and became her travelling companion, and long afterwards her modest biographer. Her sister Ellen married first, Mr. Home Purves, and afterwards, Viscount Canterbury, speaker of the ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... which the story makes him play, he would have deserved not only to be emasculated, but to be scourged with harp-strings in every market-town in Wales, and to be dismissed from the service of the Muse. But the writer repeats that he does not believe one tittle of the story, though Ab Gwilym's biographer, the learned and celebrated William Owen, not only seems to believe it, but rather chuckles over it. It is the opinion of the writer that the story is of Italian origin, and that it formed part of one of the many rascally ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... (besides the reason of state) was somewhat sweetened to him In a great confiscation." Excellent prince! This is the man in whose favour Richard the Third is represented as a monster. "For Lambert, the king would not take his life," continues Henry's biographer, "both out of magnanimitie" (a most proper picture of so mean a prince) "and likewise out of wisdom, thinking that if he suffered death he would be forgotten too soon; but being kept alive, he would be a continual spectacle, and a kind of remedy ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... Clarissa's agitations into the past and treating them as a historical matter. If they were to become the subject of a record, compiled by her biographer, something would be lost; there would be no longer the same sense of meeting Clarissa afresh, every morning, and of witnessing the new development of her wrongs and woes, already a little more poignant than they were last night. Even if he ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... of him we owe not to an admiring disciple, but to a clergyman, to whom his theories were detestable; and his biographer allows that the most malignant scrutiny had failed to detect a blemish in his character,—that except so far as his opinions were blameable, he had lived to all outward appearances free from fault. We desire, in ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... profession of the law; but, like our own inimitable Shakspere, he picked up "small Latin and less Greek." Having shown an early inclination for painting, they placed him under the tuition of Jacob Van Zwaanenburg, a painter unmentioned by any biographer; he afterwards entered the studio of Peter Lastman, and finally received instruction from Jacob Pinas. The two last had visited Rome, but, notwithstanding, could have given little instruction to Rembrandt, as their works show no proof of their having studied the Italian school to ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... where he married his first wife, Elizabeth Brants, and built a magnificent house, with a saloon in form of a rotunda, which he enriched with antique statues, busts, vases, and pictures, by the most celebrated masters; and here, surrounded by works of art, he carried, (says his biographer,) into execution those numberless productions of his prolific and rich invention, which once adorned his native country, but now are become the spoil of war, and the tokens of conquest and ambition, shining with equal lustre among super-eminent productions ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 579 - Volume 20, No. 579, December 8, 1832 • Various
... for lost. Wandering, however, down a certain adjacent 'Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey', I came to 'Marshalsea Place:' the houses in which I recognised, not only as the great block of the former prison, but as preserving the rooms that arose in my mind's-eye when I became Little Dorrit's biographer. The smallest boy I ever conversed with, carrying the largest baby I ever saw, offered a supernaturally intelligent explanation of the locality in its old uses, and was very nearly correct. How this ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... who is anxious to pursue the character still further, will be gratified with "a few particulars with which his biographer appears to be unacquainted,"—by a Correspondent of the Literary Gazette, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... than by authorship, he made his contemporary mark. When a tomb has been closed for centuries, the effaced lineaments of its tenant can be re-coloured only by the idealizing hand of genius, as Scott drew Claverhouse, and Carlyle drew Cromwell. But, to the biographer of the lately dead, men have a right to say, as Saul said to the Witch of Endor, "Call up Samuel!" In your study of a life so recent as Kinglake's, give us, if you choose, some critical synopsis of his monumental writings, some salvage ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... volume of "Beethoven, eine Kunststudie" is a "Leben des Meisters," a mere sketch, made up from the same works as the "Catalogue," with a very few additions from other sources. As a biographer, Lenz fails as signally as in his capacity of critic. Much original matter, from one living so far away, was not to be expected; but he has made no commendable use of the printed authorities which he had at hand. His style is bombastic and feeble; there is neither a logical nor a chronological ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the activities that papa's life was given to—all the ideals it aimed at and attained—yes, yes, attained,—whatever they may say. He has a very skilful pen, and is in touch with the public press. So, though I would, of course, have wished for a more adequate biographer, I was glad and proud to accept his offer; and I would have overlooked, revised, everything. We felt,—and by we, I mean not only Mr. and Mrs. Potts, but all his many, many friends, all those whose lives he loved and helped and lifted—that we owed it to the world he served not to let his ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... my liking, I should still have been glad of the glimpse of the older and statelier Boston which my slight acquaintance with George Ticknor gave me. The historian of Spanish literature, the friend and biographer of Prescott, and a leading figure of the intellectual society of an epoch already closed, dwelt in the fine old square brick mansion which yet stands at the corner of Park Street and Beacon, though sunk now to a variety of business uses, and lamentably changed in aspect. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... who had begun to do prosperously. John taught him some rudiments, and packed him off to Paris, where he studied for some four months in the Louvre and learned to idolize Bonaparte. This sojourn in Paris—writes his grandson and biographer—'was one long beau jour to him'. His allusions to it are constant. He returned to England in 1803, with formed tastes and predilections, very few of which he ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... after statute to suppress the tables at Tunbridge and Bath, thereby only driving the sharpers to new subterfuges. That the Beau was in alliance with sharpers, or, at least, that he was a sleeping partner in the firm, his biographer admits; but it is urged on his behalf that he was the most generous of winners, and again and again interfered to prevent the ruin of some gambler by whose folly he would himself have profited. His constant ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... as he entered, for he fell on his knees and kissed the hero's hand respectfully, pronouncing him the first and foremost warrior and knight of the age. Then he called down a blessing on the name of Cid Hamet Benengeli, his noble biographer, and on the worthy, learned man who had translated the work from the difficult Arabic into their pure Castilian for the edification of all the Spanish people who knew how to read ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... deemed the fit subject of a poem, the wittiest and most profligate for which literature has to blush. Our illustrious Don Juan hides his head when contrasted with Voltaire's Pucelle: Juan's biographer, with all his zeal, is but an innocent, and a novice, by ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... passed the later days of big anxious existence; here we may fancy him receiving Evelyn and Denham, the poets and men of letters of his troubled day, who found the disappointments of courtly life more than their philosophy could endure. Here his friendly biographer, Doctor Spratt, cheered his ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... interested him by their ever-changing shapes, and inspired in him his first ideas of meteorology. There were not wanting other objects to excite interest in a mind which had always been remarkably active and original. He then realized, to quote from his biographer, Cuvier, what Voltaire said of Condorcet, that solid enduring discoveries can shed a lustre quite different from that of a commander of a company of infantry. He resolved to study some profession. This last resolution was but little less courageous than the first. Reduced to ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... I lose my right hand in Vernon," he resumed, "and I am, it seems, inevitably to lose him, unless we contrive to fasten him down here. I think, my dear Miss Dale, you have my character. At least, I should recommend my future biographer to you—with a caution, of course. You would have to write selfishness with a dash under it. I cannot endure to lose a member of my household—not under any circumstances; and a change of feeling toward me on the part of any of my friends because of marriage, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of this dying injunction that the direct and authoritative sources of information contained in family papers are closed to the biographer. Still it is believed that no facts of importance in the record of an eventful and extraordinary career have been omitted or have even been passed over slightingly. A large part of the matter contained in this ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... were against the French, a successful commander-in-chief could do no wrong! Yet here, probably, the matter would have rested; but when, nine years afterwards, Stanier Clarke so little appreciated the duty of a biographer as to relate a transaction susceptible of no excuse, in terms unjustified by the facts, and sought to render his hero immaculate at the expense of others, the excellent officer whose feelings and character ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... snatched a kind of victory, and departed this life with dignity as one 'good at many things,' who had at last 'attained to be at rest.' You know, in a word, that he took his part in the general struggle for existence, and manfully did his best; and it is with something like a pang that you find his biographer insisting on the merits of the feat, and quoting approvingly the sentimentalists who gathered about his death- bed. To make eloquence about heroism is not the way to breed heroes; and it may be that Jefferies, had his last environment been less fluent and sonorous, would now seem ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... written at a time when the author was busying himself not only with other literary work, but also with semi-private theatricals. John Forster, Charles Dickens's biographer and friend, even had some sort of fear at that time that Dickens was in danger of adopting the stage as a profession. Domestic troubles, culminating a year later in the separation from his wife, also explain the restlessness and general dissatisfaction ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... nicknamed him; also to Padre Rocco, a popular preacher, and the idol of the lower classes of Neapolitans; and to Cardinal Perelli, remarkable for his simplicity, which quality, as may be supposed, loses nothing in passing through the hands of his present biographer. With his usual skill, M. Dumas glides from a ticklish story of which the cardinal is the hero, (a story that he does not tell, for which forbearance we give him due credit, since he is evidently sorely tempted thereto,) to an account of the Vardarelli, a band ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... biographer, exerted an influence upon his character only second to that of his father. She married her cousin, M. Périer, also of a Parliamentary family, and Counsellor of the Court of Aides at Clermont. She was alike beautiful and accomplished, ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... Aaron Burr is an admirable subject for a biographer. He belonged to a class of men, rare in America, who are remarkable, not so much for their talents or their achievements, as for their adventures and the vicissitudes of their fortunes. Europe has ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... progress towards a more perfect state, is the grand historical fact of modern times, and Paine's name is intimately connected with it. One is always ready to look with lenity on the partiality of a biographer,—whether he urge the claims of his hero to a niche in the Valhalla of great men, or act as the Advocatus Diaboli to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... Thackry! litary cove! Glad to see you, sir. How's Major Dobbings?' and likely enough would turn to the waiter, and bid him, 'Give this gent a glass of the same, and score it up to yours truly!' We have his biographer's word for it, that he would have winked at the Duke of Wellington, with just as ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... on September 25. The rejoicing of this day at Canterbury was not allowed to go on, however, without interruption by the king. Ranulf Flambard appeared in person and served a writ on the new archbishop, summoning him to answer in some suit in the king's court. The assurance of Anselm's friend and biographer, Eadmer, that this action concerned a matter wholly within the province of the Church, we can hardly accept as conclusive evidence of the fact; but Anselm was certainly right in regarding such an act on this day as foreboding greater troubles to come. On December 4, Anselm was consecrated ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... the authority of Mr. Sidney Lee, that Shakspere came to London in 1586,—that is, when he was twenty-two. Aubry, his oldest biographer, says in 1680 that "this William, being naturally inclined to poetry and acting, came to London, I guess about eighteen (i.e., in 1582), and was an actor at one of the playhouses, and did act exceeding well." ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... in every man's life, like the kernel in the shell of a hickory nut. I am ill acquainted with the arts of a biographer, but I seek to give in these pages little of the shell and the whole of the kernel of mine. 'Twould be unwise and tiresome to recount the journey over the bare mountains with my new friend and benefactor. He was a strange gentleman, now jolly enough to make me ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... memorial of thy virtues will be found in those pure records of thy public services which thy own hand has given to the world with all the amiable and affecting simplicity that distinguished thy character, and in the more comprehensive composition of some accomplished Biographer, who may have opportunities and ability to do ...
— The Eulogies of Howard • William Hayley
... Mr. Lake, another biographer of Byron, says, "I have frequently asked the country people what sort of a man Lord Byron was. The impression of his eccentric but energetic character was evident in the reply. 'He's the devil of a fellow for comical fancies—He flogs th' oud laird to nothing, but he's a ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... work, it is as well that the reader should understand M. Zola's aim in writing it, and his views—as distinct from those of his characters—upon Lourdes, its Grotto, and its cures. A short time before the book appeared M. Zola was interviewed upon the subject by his friend and biographer, Mr. Robert H. Sherard, to whom he spoke ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... diplomacy was impossible without it. Bacon said, "Tobacco-smoking is a secret delight serving only to steal away men's brains." Newton abstained from it: the contrary is often claimed, but thus says his biographer, Brewster,—saying that "he would make no necessities to himself." Franklin says he never used it, and never met with one of its votaries who advised him to follow the example. John Quincy Adams used it in early youth, and after thirty years of abstinence said, that, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... Society that he betook himself. So great, in fact, and so various were the plans which Marsden entertained for the welfare of the many races in which he was interested, that the grandiloquent words of his biographer seem not too strong: "As the obscure chaplain from Botany Bay paced the Strand, from the Colonial Office at Whitehall to the chambers in the city where a few pious men were laying plans for Christian missions in ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... it appears, "enlisted the Harts and others in an enterprise which his own genius planned," says Peck, the personal acquaintance and biographer of Boone, "and then encouraged several hunters to explore the country and learn where the best lands lay." Just why Henderson and his associates did not act sooner upon the reports brought back by the hunters—Boone ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... because it provides data of the utmost value to the student of the endocrine basis of human personality. In the conventional two-volume biography of this superwoman, she is pictured as an intellectual saint, stepped from a stained glass window upon her wonderful visit to a clay-smeared earth. The biographer, presenting all the ins and outs of her body and soul as he has, makes her live before us with a fresh ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... career falls into two clear-cut parts, almost as if it had been specially arranged for the biographer; there is the probationary period in Korea, and the executive in North China. The first is important only because of the moulding-power which early influences exerted on the man's character; but it is interesting in another way since it affords ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... the swagger is humility and civility itself. He knows, poor weary tramp, that on the favourable impression he makes upon the "boss," depends his night's lodging and food, as well as a job of work in the future. We will leave then the ideal swaggerer to some other biographer who may draw glowing word-pictures of him in all his jay's splendour, and we will confine ourselves to describing the real swagger, clad in flannel shirt, moleskin trowsers, and what were once thick boots, but might now be ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... great and important time to Abel when Jan learned to walk; but, as he was neither precocious nor behindhand in this respect, his biographer may be pardoned for not dwelling on it at ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... he had become bookkeeper in Bernhard's business. His biographer Kayserling tells us that at this period he was in a fair way to develop into "a true bel esprit"; he took lessons on the piano, went to the theatre and to concerts, and wrote poems. During the winter ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... the biographer of Froebel, and collector of Froebel's works (from whose collection the present translation has been made), and by his numerous articles one of the best friends to the advocacy of Froebel's educational principles, ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... very ready-witted. His biographer[2] records the following anecdote of him as very likely to be authentic. The great artist occasionally made sketches from an honest old tailor, of the name of Fowler, who had a picturesque countenance and silver-gray locks. On the chimney-piece of his painting-room, ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... the ever-varying perils of the wilderness. No life, it is true, can be fitly sketched in a chronological {3} abridgment, but history abounds with lives which, while important, do not exact from a biographer the kind of detail that for the actions of Champlain becomes priceless. Kant and Hegel were both great forces in human thought, yet throughout eighty years Kant was tethered to the little town of Koenigsberg, and Hegel did not know what the French were doing in ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... enter upon this great episode, truly the turning point in American history, without pausing for a glance at the character of Seward. The subject is elusive. His ablest biographer* plainly is so constantly on guard not to appear an apologist that he ends by reducing his portrait to a mere outline, wavering across a background of political details. The most recent study of Seward** surely reveals between the lines the ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... has been assigned to abler hands, and to a more suitable occasion. He will there be presented in other, though not less interesting lights. As the penetrating delineator of manners and character in the British Spy; as the biographer of Patrick Henry, dedicated to the young men of your native commonwealth; as the friend and delight of the social circle; as the husband and father in the bosom of a happy, but now most afflicted family;—in all these characters I have known, admired, and loved him; and now witnessing, ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... headquarters till the novelist, who was the eldest of the family, was about sixteen. He had two sisters (of whom the elder, Laure, afterwards Madame Surville, was his first confidante and his only authoritative biographer) and a younger brother, who seems to have been, if not a scapegrace, rather a burden to his friends, and ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... parallel to one another, beginning and ending at odd times. They mutually interlace and interfere at points, but we cannot unify them completely in our minds. In following your life-history, I must temporarily turn my attention from my own. Even a biographer of twins would have to press them alternately ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James |
