"Congreve" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... enjoyment," should find himself his own master, in London, almost presupposes a too liberal indulgence in the follies that must have so easily beset him. When the great and cold Mr Secretary Addison, no less than that "very merry Spirit," Dick Steele, and the splendid Congreve, drank more than was good for them, what chance would there be for a brilliant, ardent lad of twenty, suddenly plunged into the robust society of that age? If Fielding, like his elders, indisputably loved good wine, let us remember that none ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... pleasure; but its pleasures were often of a coarse and licentious description. Life in Hamburg was probably not much unlike that of Restoration London; but though Keiser may well be set beside Purcell, Hamburg had no dramatists to compare with Congreve, hardly even with Shadwell. Jeremy Collier, however, was far outdone in vituperation by the puritan clergy who, not altogether without reason, castigated the immorality ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... club, of the college, of society, even as they lived and moved. I see the gallant and unselfish men whom I have loved, and the snobs whom I have hated. I see strangely mingling with them, and now and then blending with their forms, our old friends Dick Steele, Addison, and Congreve. I observe, though, that these gentlemen have a habit of getting too much in the way. The royal standard of Queen Anne, not in itself a beautiful ornament, is rather too prominent in the picture. The long galleries of black oak, the formal furniture, the old portraits, ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... could live in the open by the guns. He sanctioned a series of gallant attempts being made by volunteers to withdraw them. Limber teams were collected for this purpose, in the rear donga. The first of these attempts was made by Captains Schofield and Congreve, both serving on Sir Redvers' staff, Lieut. the Hon. F. H. S. Roberts (who was acting as an extra A.D.C. to General Clery, until he could join Sir George White's staff), Corporal Nurse and others, gathered from the drivers of the 66th battery. Two guns ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... familiar names of strangely unfamiliar places. St. James's Park indeed has not altered out of all recognition since the days when Duke Belair and my Lady Betty and my Lady Rattle walked the Mall between the hours of twelve and two, and quoted from Congreve about laughing at the great world and the small. There were avenues of trees then as now. Instead of the ornamental water ran a long canal, populous with ducks, which joined a pond called—no one knows why—Rosamund's Pond. This pond was a favorite trysting-place for happy ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... integrity. He well knew the difficulties under which he laboured, being unused to speaking in public, and surrounded as he was in the community by the reverend gentlemen and the press, who were avowedly opposed to him, and who had thrown their bomb-shells and Congreve rockets liberally at the gambling fraternity, without mercy, but he regarded these weapons as harmless, for they had fallen at his feet ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... page but one, Boswell describes Thrale as presenting the character of a plain independent English squire, she writes: "No, no! Mr. Thrale's manners presented the character of a gay man of the town: like Millamant, in Congreve's comedy, he abhorred the country and everything ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... liked him, though I was always conscious of that flame and steel in his nature which made his psychology a world away from mine. He was hit hard—in what I think was the softest spot in his heart—by the death of one of his A. D. C.'s—young Congreve, who was the beau ideal of knighthood, wonderfully handsome, elegant even when covered from head to foot in wet mud (as I saw him one day), fearless, or at least scornful of danger, to the verge of recklessness. ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... weakness if she remained near his home. A triumph then it was to Fitzpiers, poor and hampered as he had become, to recognize his real conquest of this beauty, delayed so many years. His was the selfish passion of Congreve's Millamont, to whom love's supreme delight lay in "that heart which others bleed for, ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... Very plainly, Mr. Congreve did not know exactly what to say next. He hadn't expected this kind of a widow; his mind had pictured one in bushels of crape, with a drenched, woe-begone face, who would scream when she saw him, fall on his neck, in lieu of his purse, and gasp out dramatically: "Dear, ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... and stones assailed us from both banks. My friend Brooke's gun would not go off; so giving him the yoke-lines, he steered the boat while I kept up a rapid fire. Mr. Allen, in the second gig, quickly coming up, opened upon them, from a congreve-rocket tube, such a destructive fire as caused them to retire panic-struck behind the temporary barriers where they had concealed themselves previous to the attack upon Patingi Ali, and from whence they continued, for some twenty minutes, to hurl ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... mere cant, which the men themselves must have spoken tongue in cheek. It was as much an insincere cant in those days as it was when, two generations later, Jeremy Collier exposed its falsehood in the mouth of Congreve. If the poets had really intended to show vice its own deformity, they would have represented it (as Shakspeare always does) as punished, and not as triumphant. It is ridiculous to talk of moral purpose in works in which there is no moral justice. The ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... that its streets are paved with marble. It is in fact limestone, but none the worse for that. The snow did not improve them. So without going on a pilgrimage to the Kilkenny College, at which Swift, Congreve, and Farquhar,—an odd concatenation of celebrities—were more or less educated, we made our way to the Imperial Hotel for luncheon. The waiter was a delightful Celt. Upon my asking him whether the house could furnish anything distantly resembling good ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... get enthusiastic about Sir Thomas Browne are vain and conceited *poseurs*. After a year or so, when he has recovered from the discouragement caused by Sir Thomas Browne, he may, if he is young and hopeful, repeat the experiment with Congreve or Addison. Same sequel! And so on for perhaps a decade, until his commerce with the classics finally expires! That, magazines and newish fiction apart, is the literary history ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... and use of fireworks. But in making war rockets there was no marked progress until the late eighteenth century. About 1780, the British Army in India watched the Orientals use them; and within the next quarter century William Congreve, who set about the task of producing a rocket that would carry an incendiary or explosive charge as far as 2 miles, had achieved such promising results that English boats fired rocket salvos against Boulogne in 1806, The British Field Rocket Brigade used rockets effectively ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... in the doorway bowing gracefully, his hat held before him and his hand on his stick as though it were resting on a foil. He had the face and carriage of a gallant of the days of Congreve, and he wore his modern frock-coat with as much distinction as if it were of silk and lace. He was evidently amused. "I couldn't help overhearing the last line," he said, smiling. "It gives ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... Macaulay's blood warms with the mere prospect of a fight. "It is inspiriting to see how gallantly the solitary outlaw advances to attack enemies formidable separately, and, it might have been thought, irresistible when combined; distributes his swashing blows right and left among Wycherley, Congreve and Vanbrugh, treads the wretched D'Urfey down in the dirt beneath his feet; and strikes with all his strength full at the towering crest of Dryden." That is exactly where Macaulay is great; because he is almost Homeric. ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... assured its readers that Congreve has a 'niche in the Valhalla of Ben Jonson.' The remark is injudicious, of course, even for a literary American, and there is no apparent reason why it should ever have got itself uttered. It is probably the unluckiest thing that ever was said of Congreve, who—with some unimportant exceptions—has ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... contrast between the real and the affected character as severely as possible, and denying to those, who would impose on us for what they are not, even the merit which they have. This is the comedy of artificial life, of wit and satire, such as we see it in Congreve, Wycherley, Vanburgh, etc. To this succeeds a state of society from which the same sort of affectation and pretence are banished by a greater knowledge of the world or by their successful exposure on the stage; and which by neutralising the materials of comic character, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... of the present time; and, in this revision, paid no sort of regard to the reputation they had acquired — Milton was harsh and prosaic; Dryden, languid and verbose; Butler and Swift without humour; Congreve, without wit; and Pope destitute of any sort of poetical merit — As for his contemporaries, he could not bear to hear one of them mentioned with any degree of applause — They were all dunces, pedants, plagiaries, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... on the marble busts and tablets, yellow with time, that cover the three walls of the nook up to a height of about twenty feet. Prior's is the largest and richest monument. It is observable that the bust and monument of Congreve are in a distant part of the Abbey. His duchess probably thought it a degradation to bring a ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... glare of a scorching fire, and the smoke so baneful to the eyes and the complexion, are continual and inevitable dangers: and a cook must live in the midst of them, as a soldier on the field of battle surrounded by bullets, and bombs, and CONGREVE'S rockets; with this only difference, that for the first, every day is a fighting day, that her warfare is almost always without glory, and most praiseworthy achievements pass not only without reward, but frequently ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... net, 'tis ten to one but the sight of a new face will be sufficiently tempting to break the mesh—you're just as true as the smoke of your cannon, and you fly off at the sight of novelty in petticoats, like one of your Congreve rockets—No, I ...
— She Would Be a Soldier - The Plains of Chippewa • Mordecai Manuel Noah
... towards, and opinion of, his countrymen. Mutilation of the Hand. Native smokes seen. Move further to the North-East. Point Emeriau. Cape Leveque. Point Swan. Tide-races. Search for water. Encountered by Natives. Return to the Ship. The attempt renewed. Conduct of the Natives. Effect of a Congreve Rocket after dark. A successful haul. More Natives. Miago's Heroism. The plague of Flies. Dampier's description of it. Native Habitations. Underweigh. Wind and weather. Tidal Phenomenon. Natural History. Singular Kangaroo. Bustard. Cinnamon Kangaroo. Quails. Goanas and Lizards. ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... his friend. The humanity and frankness of Sir Samuel Garth are what I never knew wanting on any occasion. I must also acknowledge, with infinite pleasure, the many friendly offices, as well as sincere criticisms, of Mr. Congreve, who had led me the way in translating some parts of Homer. I must add the names of Mr. Rowe, and Dr. Parnell, though I shall take a further opportunity of doing justice to the last, whose good nature (to give it a great ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... Sir Roger de Coverley, and would never listen to the butler's account of his death. Mr. Carvel, too, had walked in Gray's Inn Gardens and met adventure at Fox Hall, and seen the great Marlborough himself. He had a fondness for Mr. Congreve's Comedies, many of which he had seen acted; and was partial to Mr. Gay's Trivia, which brought him many a recollection. He would also listen to Pope. But of the more modern poetry I think Mr. Gray's Elegy pleased him best. He would ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Cumberland Head, and at nine, bore down and engaged our flotilla at anchor in the bay off the town. At the same instant, the batteries were opened on us, and continued throwing bomb shells, shrapnels, balls, and congreve rockets until sunset, when the bombardment ceased, every battery of the enemy being silenced by the superiority of our fire. The naval engagement lasted but two hours, in full view of both armies. Three efforts were made by ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... grimaced and let it go at that; Pope came in for a visit, and the French poet crossed Twickenham ferry and offered a handmade sonnet in admiration of the "Essay on Man," which he had probably never read. Gay gave Voltaire "The Beggar's Opera," in private, and together they called on Congreve, who interrupted the Frenchman's flow of flattery long enough to say that he wished to be looked on as a gentleman, not a poet. And Voltaire replied that there were many gentlemen but few poets, and if Congreve had ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... that name, is "the undoubted prototype of that light, flippant, gay, and infinitely delightful class of character, of the professed men of wit and pleasure about town, which we have in such perfection in Wycherly and Congreve, such as Sparkish, Witwond, Petulant, &c., both in the sentiments and the style of writing"; and Tharsalio in "The Widow's Tears," and Ludovico in "May-Day," have the hard impudence and cynical distrust of virtue, the arrogant and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... Alphonso was brought as a captive. Here Alphonso, under the assumed name of Osmyn, was imprisoned, but made his escape, and at the head of an army invaded Granada, found Manuel dead, and "the mournful bride" became converted into the joyful wife.—W. Congreve, The ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... youth, who returned from driving by post-chaise through the principal towns of Europe in the company of a meek chaplain,[392] returned from his tour about as much refined, according to Congreve, "as a Dutch skipper from a whale-fishing."[393] The whole idea of the Grand Tour was thrown into disrepute after its adoption by crude and low-bred people, who thought it necessary to inform all their acquaintance where they had been, by a very unbecoming dress and a very ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... that certain strokes in his tragedy of Cato had been discovered which glanced at the porter of some man in power. Mr. Addison was raised to the post of Secretary of State in England. Sir Isaac Newton was made Master of the Royal Mint. Mr. Congreve had a considerable employment. Mr. Prior was Plenipotentiary. Dr. Swift is Dean of St. Patrick's in Dublin, and is more revered in Ireland than the Primate himself. The religion which Mr. Pope professes[42] excludes him, indeed, from preferments of every kind, but ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... CONGREVE, WILLIAM, English comic dramatist, born near Leeds; entered a student of the Middle Temple, but soon abandoned law for literature; the "Old Bachelor" first brought him into repute, and a commissionership of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... English ode, we must remember that a few scholars, like Ben Jonson, Congreve and Gray, took peculiar pleasure in reproducing the general effect of the Greek strophic arrangement of "turn," "counterturn" and "pause." Ben Jonson's "Ode to Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison" (Oxford, No. 194) has been thought to be the ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... time that Johnson was at school[144]. Then came Hague, of whom as much might be said, with the addition that he was an elegant poet. Hague was succeeded by Green, afterwards Bishop of Lincoln, whose character in the learned world is well known[145]. In the same form with Johnson was Congreve[146], who afterwards became chaplain to Archbishop Boulter, and by that connection obtained good preferment in Ireland. He was a younger son of the ancient family of Congreve, in Staffordshire, of which the poet was a branch. His brother ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... his "Golden lads and girls" in those superb comedies may soon fall a little faint and thin upon our ears. To the next generation it may seem as faded and old-fashioned as the wit of Congreve or Sheridan. Fashions of humour change more quickly than the fashions of manner or of dress. The only thing that gives immortality to human writing is the "eternal bronze" of a noble and imaginative style. Out ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... popularity; because, by this contrivance, he divided the town into two parties; and the irascibility and satire of Pope and Swift were not less serviceable to him than the partial panegyrics of Dryden and Congreve. Johnson revived him, for his minute attack on Addison; and Kippis, feebly voluminous, and with the cold affectation of candour, allows him to occupy a place in our literary history too large in the ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... merged in the land, and became English aristocrats; while the Levant decaying, the West Indies exhausted, and Hindostan plundered, the breeds died away, and now exist only in our English comedies from Wycherly and Congreve to Cumberland and Morton. The expenditure of the revolutionary war produced the Loanmonger, who succeeded the Nabob; and the application of science to industry developed the Manufacturer, who in turn aspires to be "large-acred," and always ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... artist, Congreve, inventor of the rockets which bear his name, and Abernethy, the eminent surgeon, were natives of Wolverhampton; Huskisson, who began the commercial reforms which Peel finished, was born at Oxley Hall, in ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... this variety of naval warfare,) at the time of the last Copenhagen expedition, and he obtained his wish; for the Prometheus had a very distinguished station assigned her on the great night of bombardment, and from her decks, I believe, was made almost the first effectual trial of the Congreve rockets. Soon after the Danish capital had fallen, and whilst the Prometheus was still cruising in the Baltic, Pink, in company with the purser of his ship, landed on the coast of Jutland, for the purpose of a morning's ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the "Wife of Bath" in hat and wimple, than—for instance—about Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman? Can we not hear "Madame Eglantine" lisping her "Stratford-atte-Bowe" French as if she were a personage in a comedy by Congreve or Sheridan? Is not the "Summoner" with his "fire-red cherubim's face" a worthy companion for Lieutenant Bardolph himself? And have not the humble "Parson" and his Brother the "Ploughman" that irresistible pathos which Dickens could find in the simple and the poor? ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... Pit-a-pat.—A word formed from pat, and particularly applied to the pulsations of the heart, when accelerated by emotion. Used by Ben Jonson and Dryden. Congreve writes ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... mind is essentially moral in cut; it is believing, certain, indignant; it is as incapable of skepticism, save as a passing coryza of the spirit, as it is of wit, which is skepticism's daughter. Time was when this was not true, as Congreve, Pope, Wycherley and even Thackeray show, but that time was before the Reform Bill of 1832, the great intellectual levelling, the emancipation of the chandala. In these our days the Englishman is an incurable foe of distinction, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... of sublime and serious art only. It is true of cynical, profligate, and concupiscent art as well. It is true of Congreve as it is true of Sophocles; it is true of Mademoiselle de Maupin as it is true of Measure for Measure. This art differs from the former in that the end presented in it as the object of struggle is not only not the morally right, but is also ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... that, among the stores sent with Parry, there would be a supply of Congreve rockets,—an instrument of warfare of which such wonders had been related to the Greeks as filled their imaginations with the most absurd ideas of its powers. Their disappointment, therefore, on finding that the engineer had come unprovided with these missiles ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... 'Mirror for Magistrates,' bankbill in Swift and Fielding, and as for that I might say passim. To cotton to is, I rather think, an Americanism. The nearest approach to it I have found is cotton together, in Congreve's 'Love for Love.' To cotton or cotten, in another sense, is old and common. Our word means to cling, and its origin, possibly, is to be sought in another direction, perhaps in A.S. cvead, which means mud, clay (both proverbially clinging), or better yet, in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell |
