"Corneille" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... situation? Hope there was none; sublime despair was all that their case allowed; and, considering the unrivalled splendors of their past history for more than one hundred and sixty years, perhaps most readers would reply, in the famous words of Corneille—Qu'ils mourussent. That was their own reply to the question now so imperatively forced upon them; and die they all did. It is an argument of some great original nobility in the minds of these poor people, that none disgraced themselves by useless submissions, and that all alike, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... beautified from time to time by its first occupant, who was ambitious to be more magnificently lodged than the nominal sovereign at the Louvre, was the most splendid royal residence of the time. Corneille, the greatest tragic poet of France, said of it in one of his poems, that "the entire universe cannot present the equal of the magnificent exterior of the Palais-Cardinal;" though, as the stranger looks upon it to-day, the praise of the French ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... has been the turn of "Polyeucte" and "La Morte de Pompee." Whatever one's objections may be, there is something grandiose in the style of Corneille which reconciles you at last even to his stiff, emphatic manner, and his over-ingenious rhetoric. But it is the dramatic genre which is false. His heroes are roles rather than men. They pose as magnanimity, virtue, glory, instead ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... always so good, and no matter what they say, so simple. People will recognize later (if they ever return seriously to literature), that he was a great poet. Meanwhile he is an absolutely unknown author. So indeed is Pierre Corneille. ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... after the rest of the household had retired, they read alone or discussed what stirred their hearts. Each gave the other what she could. The German governess went through our classic authors with her employer, and my mother read to her the works of Racine and Corneille, and urged her to speak French and English with her; for, like many natives of Holland, her mastery of both languages was as thorough as if she had grown up in Paris or London. The necessity of studying and sharing ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... as laughing a gorge deployee, a grossness which with us, equally on the stage or in real life, would be regarded with horror, amongst the French attracts no particular attention. Again, amidst the supposed refinements of French tragedy, and not observe the coarser tragedy of Corneille, but amidst the more feminine and polished tragedy of Racine, there is no recoil at all from saying of such or such a sentiment, 'Il me perce les entrailles'—it penetrates my bowels. The Greeks and Romans still more extensively use the several varieties ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... literature was cultivated by the French writers of this era, yet it was in the province of the Drama that the greatest number of eminent authors appeared. The three great names here are those of Corneille (1606-1684), Racine ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... heroic drama, rhymed couplet and all, was imported from France. Albovine, as we have seen, has every mark of the heroic drama, except the couplet; and Albovine was written seven years before the first masterpiece of Corneille, one year before his first attempt at tragedy. A superficial likeness to the drama of Corneille and, subsequently, of Racine may doubtless have given wings to the popularity of the new style both with Davenant ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... earlier gemeau, still used by Corneille, and earlier still gemel, Lat. gemellus, diminutive of geminus, twin. From one form we have the gimbals, or twin pivots, which keep the compass horizontal. Shakespeare ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... since, to have the better of materialism, it is sufficient to understand well what is one thought of the mind, one throb of the spiritual heart, one utterance of the conscience,—add boldly with Corneille's Medea: ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... theatre stirred to fury by an innovation in diction in a poetical drama, or to imagine anything comparable to the attitude of a Parisian audience at the cheap holiday performances at the Francais or the Odeon, where the severe classic tragedies of Racine, of Corneille, of Victor Hugo, or the well-worn comedies of Moliere or of Beaumarchais are played with small lure of stage upholstery, and listened to with close attention by a popular audience responsive to the exquisite rhythm and grace of phrasing, the delicate and restrained tragic ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... their warnings. They were jeered at by the vulgar, fined, imprisoned, or banished by Ministers and Magistrates. All that was good, noble, and generous in the nation withered in the uncongenial atmosphere. The language of Pascal and of Corneille became the medium of corrupting the minds of millions. The events of the day were some actress who had discovered a new way to outrage decency, or some new play which deified a prostitute or an adulteress. Paris became the world's ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... take upon himself to decide which is the right or wrong side. Everything is bi-lateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is a fable signifying criticism and the symbol of Genius. The Almighty alone is triform. What raises Moliere and Corneille above the rest of us but the faculty of saying one thing with an Alceste or an Octave, and another with a Philinte or a Cinna? Rousseau wrote a letter against dueling in the Nouvelle Heloise, and another in favor of it. Which of the two represented his own opinion? ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... in the new tower, and its circular form gave it a peculiar appearance. It was most appropriately compared to a temple. High glass cases around the walls contained the works of Voltaire, Racine, Moliere, and Corneille; those of Homer, Caesar, Cicero, and Ovid; also the Italian poets Dante, Petrarch, and Machiavel. All that had a good name in the literary world found its way into the library of the royal prince—all, excepting the works of ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... not have endured life, after enacting such a law, and seeing the ghastly work that it was doing. He could hardly have contented himself with drawing tears from the company in Madame Duplay's little parlour, by his pathetic recitations from Corneille and Racine, or with listening to melting notes from the violin of Le Bas. It is commonly said by Robespierre's defenders that he withdrew from the Committee of Public Safety, as soon as he found out that he was powerless to arrest ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... other marks than their names? nay, do we not find the same character placed by different poets in such different lights, that we can discover not the least sameness, or even likeness, in the features? The Sophonisba of Mairet and of Lee is a tender, passionate, amorous mistress of Massinissa: Corneille and Mr Thomson give her no other passion but the love of her country, and make her as cool in her affection to Massinissa as to Syphax. In the two latter she resembles the character of queen Elizabeth; in the two former she ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... of French reality. The new, bright, white marble figure of Joan in the cathedral of Notre-Dame is worth a prayer for France. One has met Joan in life, she is generally sixteen or seventeen, ardent, heroic, romantic, with the poetry of Corneille and Racine upon her lips. She is full of effervescent devotion, impetuous and entirely "pure." What happens to her in modern France it would be difficult to say. The English do not come and burn ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... those whose works were appearing and attracting notice during his school-days—Pigault-Lebrun, Ducray-Duminil, and that Guilbert de Pixerecourt who for a third of the nineteenth century was worshipped as the Corneille of melodrama. These men were favourite authors of the nascent democracy; and, in an age when reprints of older writers were much rarer than to-day, would be far more likely to appeal to a boy's taste than seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors. At an after-period only, when he ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... to her, and she had never been to any theatre, not even the Theatre Francais. She had not read Victor Hugo, Lamartine, or Musset, had not even dared to read Paul et Virginie, only knew expurgated editions of Corneille, Racine and Moliere. She was sincerely clerical, had early been somewhat influenced by her cousin, later the well-known Roman Catholic author, Ernest Hello, and in our conversations was always ready to take the part of the Jesuits against Pascal; what the latter had attacked ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... As Corneille, says father Brumoi in another place, after having opened to himself a path entirely new and unknown to the ancients, seems like an eagle towering in the clouds, from the sublimity, force, unbroken progress, and rapidity of his flight; and, as Racine, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... statecraft, this creator of despotic monarchy, had one unsatisfied ambition. He would have exchanged all his honors for the ability to write one play like those of Corneille. Hungering for literary distinction, he could not have gotten into his own Academy had he not created it. And jealous of his laurels, he hated Corneille as much as he did the ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... despotism has been denied; but facts are stubborn things, and I will relate to you an instance in which I saw it most wantonly exercised. Some years ago I was present at the Theatre Francais, when, in one of Corneille's pieces, Mademoiselle Raucourt, the tragic actress, was particularly negligent in the delivery of a passage, which, to do justice to the author, required the nicest discrimination. An amateur in the ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... abandoned the classes of the central school, where I was taught to admire Corneille, Racine, La Fontaine, Moliere, and attended only the mathematical course. This course was entrusted to a retired ecclesiastic, the Abbe Verdier, a very respectable man, but whose knowledge went no further than the elementary course of La Caille. ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... unformed and monstrous. I grant exceptions; and even in the New School, as it is called, I can admire the real genius, the vital and creative power of Victor Hugo. But oh, that a nation which has known a Corneille should ever spawn forth a ——-! And with these rickety and drivelling abortions—all having followers and adulators—your Public can still bear to be told that they have improved wonderfully on the ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... tragedies were good or bad, they were at least his own. This is true to a certain extent. And yet he was influenced more than he was willing to acknowledge by the French dramatists of the seventeenth century. In common with Corneille and Racine, he observed strictly the three unities of time, place, and action. But the courtliness of language, the grace and poetry of the French dramas, and especially the tender love of Racine, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the memory of Shakespeare, Germany could not be absent, for next to Goethe and Schiller there is no poet so truly loved by us, so thoroughly our own, as your Shakespeare. He is no stranger with us, no mere classic, like Homer, or Virgil, or Dante, or Corneille, whom we admire as we admire a marble statue. He has become one of ourselves, holding his own place in the history of our literature, applauded in our theatres, read in our cottages, studied, known, loved, "as far as sounds the German ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... under Prussia and Prussian kings. Frederick the Great deserves this particular encomium; for as Luther freed Germany, and all Christendom indeed, from the tyranny of tradition, as Lessing freed us from the tyranny of the letter, from the second-hand and half-baked Hellenism of a Racine and a Corneille, so Frederick the Great freed his countrymen at last from the puerile slavery to French fashions and traditions, which had made them self- conscious at home and ridiculous abroad. He first made a Prussian proud to be ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... in Mull. Addison's Remarks on Italy. Addison not much conversant with Italian literature. The French masters of the art of accommodating literature. Their Ana. Racine. Corneille. Moliere. Fenelon. Voltaire. Bossuet. Massillon. Bourdaloue. Virgil's description of the entrance into hell, compared to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... seems like a reminiscence of a tragedy of Corneille, so truly does it recall the energetic diction of the father of our modern theatre. Yet the poet was forced to sacrifice it to the essentially ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... was nine years old, as we have said, when he began to attend the College Henri IV. (now Corneille), on entering which he took his place in the sixth form, among boys for the most part of twelve or upward. He was sent to school on the first day with a deep scalloped collar and his long light curls falling upon his shoulders, and being greeted with jeers and yells by his schoolmates, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... had modelled his court very much on the plan of that of Louis XIV., which he had admired for its gaiety and spirit. Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Boileau, were encouraged by le Grand Monarque. Wycherley and Dryden were attracted by Charles to celebrate the festivities, and to amuse the great and the gay. In various points De Grammont found a resemblance. The queen-consort, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... "small Latin and less Greek," which probably contributed to it indirectly. Had Shakespeare been a classical scholar, he would almost certainly have modelled his plays on Seneca or Aeschylus, and the results would have been devastating. Addison's Cato, Johnson's Irene, and the dramas of Racine and Corneille are among the abysmal dullnesses mankind owes to its excessive estimation of the past. Men have always been too ready to forget that we inherit our ancestors' bad points as well as their good ones. Ancestor-worship has deprived the Chinese of the capacity ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... during his long reign of seventy-two years. His ideal was splendor, and he encouraged great men in the intellectual and artistic world to do their work, and shed their glory on the time. Conde, Turenne, Colbert, Moliere, Corneille, La Fontaine, Racine, Fenelon, Boulle, Le Brun, are a few among the long and wonderful list. He was indeed Louis ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... kinds. Latin verse was as great a confinement to the imagination as rhyme; yet Ovid's fancy was not limited by it, and Virgil needed it not to bind his. In our own language, Ben Jonson confined himself to what ought to be said, even in the liberty of blank verse; and Corneille, the most judicious of the French poets, is still varying the same sense a hundred ways, and dwelling eternally on the same subject, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... England, idem. Mrs Trollope played the Chesterfield and the deuce with the Yankees. Miss Martineau turned the head of the mighty Brougham. Mademoiselle d'Angeville ascended Mont Blanc, and Mademoiselle Rachel has replaced Corneille and Racine on their crumbling pedestals. I might waste hours of your precious time, sir, in perusing a list of the eminent women now competing with the rougher sex for the laurels of renown. But you know it all better than I can ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... not live to witness it. I only see the embryo where you see the full-grown author. We will talk further about it when we meet in the Elysian Fields; then we will see, when you present this Herr Johann Wolfgang Goethe, as a German classic writer, to Homer, Horace, Virgil, and Corneille, if they do not turn their backs upon him. Now adieu, Herzberg! So soon as circumstances permit, I shall send for you to go to Silesia, and then you can give me your German ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... a generation, and descend to the author's blood, were they permitted to live on their father's glory, as in all other property they do on his industry.[10] Something of this nature has been instituted in France, where the descendants of Corneille and Moliere retain a claim on the theatres whenever the dramas of their great ancestors are performed. In that country, literature has ever received peculiar honours—it was there decreed, in the affair of Crebillon, that literary productions are ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... la fontaine ou s'enyvre Boileau Le grand Corneille et le sacre troupeau De ces auteurs que l'on ne trouve guere Un bon rimeur doit boire a pleine eguyere, S'il veut donner un bon tour ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... to feel at peace with the grand pure works of the world. Something we ought all to know of the masterpieces of antiquity, and of the other nations of Europe. To understand a great national poet, such as Dante, Calderon, Corneille, or Goethe, is to know other types of human civilisation in ways which a library of histories does not sufficiently teach. The great masterpieces of the world are thus, quite apart from the charm and solace they give us, the master instruments of a ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... the Academy hold their sittings; the vestibules are adorned by marble statues of men whose intellectual powers have rendered their names renowned throughout the world, as Montesquieu, Moliere, Corneille, Racine, Sully, etc., etc. The Mazarine library is attached to this institution and contains 120,000 printed volumes besides 4,500 manuscripts. There is also under the same establishment the library ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... all with its crowds, and added whatever prestige might attend their own names through future ages to the already overshadowing prestige of that wonderful city. They point you there to the house where the great Corneille breathed his last; it is hard by the metropolitan church of St. Roche, and scarcely more than a bow-shot from the Tuilleries, as if the poet of Cinna and Polyeucte could not render up his breath in peace except in the neighborhood of those high dignitaries, into whose lips he had breathed ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... be complimented only by comparison with himself: all other eulogies are either heterogeneous, as when they are in reference to Spenser or Milton; or they are flat truisms, as when he is gravely preferred to Corneille, Racine, or even his own immediate successors, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger and the rest. The highest praise, or rather form of praise, of this play, which I can offer in my own mind, is the doubt which the perusal always occasions in me, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... there, and the Vice-Inquisitor and the Abbot of St. Corneille; also six others, among them that false Loyseleur. The guards were in their places, the rack was there, and by it stood the executioner and his aids in their crimson hose and doublets, meet color for their bloody trade. The picture of Joan rose before me stretched upon the rack, her feet ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the dice afforded them opportunities of saying a few words in whispers to one another, which at other times would have been overheard. In the evening the queen and the Princess Elizabeth read aloud, the books chosen being chiefly works of history, or the masterpieces of Corneille and Racine, as being most suitable to form the minds and tastes of the children; and sometimes Louis himself would seek to divert them from their sorrows by asking the children riddles, and finding some amusement in their attempts to solve them. At bed-time the queen herself made the dauphin say ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... Foote, Colman, or Sheridan. A good copy too of Moliere, in French, I much want. Any other good dramatic authors in that language I want also; but comic authors chiefly, though I should wish to have Racine, Corneille, and Voltaire too. I am in no hurry for all, or any of these, but if you accidentally meet with them very-cheap, get them ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... she said, with cold and stately emphasis, "but another time I will ask you to confine yourself to Racine and Corneille. In England we have to be very careful about French writers. There are, however, if I remember right, some fine passages ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... such a mind as hers, in which grandeur and finesse were almost equally blended—a grandeur allied to the romantic, and associated with a finesse frequently merging into subtilty, as indeed may be discerned in Corneille himself, the most perfect ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... behind the scenes; he was perfectly satisfied with taking up a story, so to speak, at the eleventh hour, without tracing it to its original causes or developing it through its various phases. In such matters Alfieri was as undramatic as Corneille or Racine. Nevertheless Alfieri had a distinct dramatic sense: an intense poseur himself, enjoying nothing so much as working himself up to produce a given effect upon his own mind or upon others, he had an extraordinary instinct for the theatrical, for the moral attitude which may ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... student come to study the humanities, or the pleasant art of amputation, cross the water forthwith, and proceed to the "Hotel Corneille," near the Odeon, or others of its species; there are many where you can live royally (until you economize by going into lodgings) on four francs a day; and where, if by any strange chance you are desirous for a while to get rid of your countrymen, you will find that they ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... question, his aristocratic instinct discerned plenty of difficulties of another kind, and he took alarm. A fine manner is not the invariable outcome of noble feeling; and while no man at court had a nobler air than Racine, Corneille looked very much like a cattle-dealer, and Descartes might have been taken for an honest Dutch merchant; and visitors to La Brede, meeting Montesquieu in a cotton nightcap, carrying a rake over his shoulder, mistook him for a gardener. A knowledge of ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... fatal, the absolute mistress of all the others; that is to say, a part is taken instead of the whole. At the same time the moral law which, in the ancient drama, (i.e. the drama of Racine and Corneille,) sustained also a struggle against the passions—this law which those even avowed who transgressed it, which had always its place in the piece, whether through virtue or remorse—this law also disappears before the ascendency of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... elsewhere was almost barren, should be the age of France. From the end of the reign of Louis XIV. to the commencement of the reign of Louis XVI., nature had been prodigal of men to France. This brilliancy continued by so many geniuses of the first order, from Corneille to Voltaire, from Bossuet to Rousseau, from Fenelon to Bernardin Saint Pierre, had accustomed the people to look on this side. The focus of the ideas of the world shed thence its brilliancy. The moral authority of the human mind was no longer at ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... polite and civilised people; but as there are no exceptions to this rule on the French stage, it leads them into absurdities almost as ridiculous as that which falls under our present censure. I remember in the famous play of Corneille, written upon the subject of the Horatii and Curiatii, the fierce young hero, who had overcome the Curiatii one after another (instead of being congratulated by his sister for his victory, being upbraided by her for having slain her lover), in the height of his passion and resentment ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... and English to some purpose; she could speak Spanish—her grandfather had taught her that; she understood Italian fairly—she had read it aloud on Sunday evenings with the Chevalier. Then there were Corneille, Shakespeare, Petrarch, Cervantes—she had read them all; and even Wace, the old Norman trouvere, whose Roman de Rou she knew almost by heart. Was she ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... believe that every married man, who is at all attached to his wife from honorable motives, can, in the words of the elder Corneille, seek a rope and a nail; foenum ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... Edinburgh he produced The Coquettes, or the Gallant in the Closet, by Lady Houston, but it was ruined on the third night, and found to be merely a translation of one of the feeblest plays of Thomas Corneille. This play was long believed to be by Boswell, but his part was merely the providing the translator with a prologue, nor was the fact revealed till long after by ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... the charms of poetic harmony. He had not even sufficient ear to feel the rhythm, of poetry, and he never could recite a verse without violating the metre; yet the grand ideas of poetry charmed him. He absolutely worshipped Corneille; and, one day, after having witnessed a performance of 'Cinna', he said to me, "If a man like Corneille were living in my time I would make him my Prime Minister. It is not his poetry that I most admire; it is his powerful understanding, his vast knowledge of the human heart, and his profound policy!" ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... subtlety of form, and with such high ethical purpose. The sense of responsibility wearies many readers, and at last crushed the writer; the form became "precious," and at last pedantic; and the ethical purpose was sometimes more visible than the ethical life. In the French drama Corneille had great conceptions, noble types of character, stately verse, and tragic situations; but English readers too often find him mannered, artificial, dull. Corneille, I freely admit, is not Shakespeare: I greatly prefer Shakespeare; but I ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... the audience. When these two had talked to each other and sung to each other, the applause was tripled, and when the scene changed from Piccadilly Circus at 4 a.m. to the interior of a Spanish palace inhabited by illustrious French actors and actresses who proceeded to play an act of a tragedy by Corneille, the applause was quintupled. At the end of the tragedy the applause was decupled. Then the Spanish palace dissolved into an Abyssinian harem, and Eliza Fiddle in Abyssinian costume was discovered lying upon two thousand cushions of two ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... subject, partly because of the more intense national belief in the hero, most of all, perhaps, because the countrymen of Cervantes already possessed that faculty of individual, not merely of typical, characterisation which has been, as a rule, denied to the countrymen of Corneille—the poem is far more alive than the not less heroic histories of Roncesvaux or of Aliscans. Even in the Nibelungenlied, to which it has been so often compared, the men (not the women—there the Teutonic genius bears its usual bell) are, with the exception, perhaps, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... in an Aristides, in a Cato: it will be thought abject, it will be viewed as despicable, it will be called corrupt, in a Claudius, in a Sejanus, in a Nero: its energies will be admired, we shall be delighted with its manner, fascinated with its efforts, in a Shakespeare, in a Corneille, in a Newton, in a Montesquieu: its baseness will be lamented, when we behold mean, contemptible men, who flatter tyranny, or who servilely cringe at the ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... opposition. To play the part of his wife, to hear him say to her, to respond with the affectionate and familiar 'toi', was so amusing! It was droll to see her cut out her husband in chemistry, history, and grammar, and make him confound La Fontaine with Corneille. She had such a little air while doing it! And at the close, when he said to her: "If I give you a pony to-morrow, and a good hearty kiss this very minute, shall you be willing to give up getting that degree?" she responded, with such ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... never to exceed them (for which Aristotle contends, and the Grecian stage has practised). Some longer space on some occasions, I think, may be allowed, especially for the English theatre, which requires more variety of incidents than the French. Corneille himself, after long practice, was inclined to think that the time allotted by the ancients was too short to raise and finish a great action; and better a mechanic rule were stretched or broken than a great beauty were omitted. To raise, and afterwards ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... he explains the state of his soul, as the coolest man would do, and always thinking of the effect he is making on others, he never lets nature pour forth freely. The kings, the princesses, and the heroes of Corneille or Voltaire never forget their rank even in the most violent excess of passion; and they part with their humanity much sooner than with their dignity. They are like those kings and emperors of our old picture-books, who go to bed ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Koran was to be included, together with a good book or two on mythology. One hundred and forty volumes were allotted to poetry. The epics were to embrace Homer, Lucan, Tasso, Telemachus, and the Henriade. In the dramatic portion Corneille and Racine were of course to be included, but of Corneille, said Napoleon, you shall print for me 'only what is vital' (ce qui est reste), and from Racine you shall omit 'Les Freres ennemis, the Alexandre, and Les Plaideurs. Of ...
— How to Form a Library, 2nd ed • H. B. Wheatley
... artificiality of the fashionable art of the day. But if too much has been made of Millet's peasant origin, perhaps hardly enough has been made of his race. It is at least interesting that the two Frenchmen whose art has most in common with his, Nicolas Poussin and Pierre Corneille, should have been Normans like himself. In the severely restrained, grandly simple, profoundly classical work of these three men, that hard-headed, strong-handed, austere, and manly race has found its ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... to witness this marvel. One of the subjects was a girl of seventeen. The magnetizer put her to sleep, 'and during this seance,' says Dr. Encausse, 'we were able to obtain in full light on a sheet of paper signed by twenty witnesses, the precipitation of a whole page of written verses signed "Corneille." I examined under the microscope the substance that formed the writing, and I was led to the conclusion that it consisted of globules of human blood, some scattered as if calcined, others quite distinct. I thus verified the theory of the occultists of 1850 that ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... regard this slaughter, they who'll live after us, to whom progress—which comes as sure as fate—will at last restore the poise of their conscience? How will they regard these exploits which even we who perform them don't know whether one should compare them with those of Plutarch's and Corneille's heroes or with those ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... necessarily opposed to high ethical ideals; it was not wholly an affair of the sensuous imagination; it brought with it the conception of Roman virtue, and this might well unite itself (as we see afterwards in Corneille) with Christian faith. Among the many translators of the sixteenth century was Montaigne's early friend—the friend in memory of all his life—ETIENNE DE LA BOETIE (1530-63). It is not, however, for his fragments of Plutarch or his graceful rendering of Xenophon's Economics (named by him the ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... as a patron of art and literature that Louis XIV gained much of his celebrity. Molire, who was at once a playwright and an actor, delighted the court with comedies in which he delicately satirized the foibles of his time. Corneille, who had gained renown by the great tragedy of The Cid in Richelieu's time, found a worthy successor in Racine, the most distinguished perhaps of French tragic poets. The charming letters of Madame de Svign are models of prose style ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... necessity, but the Union was not a Union. It was not intended to be one, and nobody has ever treated it as one. We have not only never succeeded in making Ireland English, as Burgundy has been made French, but we have never tried. Burgundy could boast of Corneille, though Corneille was a Norman, but we should smile if Ireland boasted of Shakespeare. Our vanity has involved us in a mere contradiction; we have tried to combine identification with superiority. It is simply weak-minded to sneer at an Irishman if he figures as an Englishman, ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... added, that the regent himself would be disgraced if a kinsman of his should die by the hands of a common executioner. The regent, to his credit, was proof against all their solicitations, and replied to their last argument in the words of Corneille: ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... knees, "this is citizen Heron, of whom you have heard me speak. My cousin Belhomme," she continued, once more turning to Heron, "is fresh from the country, citizen. He hails from Orleans, where he has played leading parts in the tragedies of the late citizen Corneille. But, ah me! I fear that he will find Paris audiences vastly more critical than the good Orleanese. Did you hear him, citizen, declaiming those beautiful verses just now? He was murdering them, say I—yes, ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... actress, arrived in England. She had already established her empire in Paris by her marvellous revival of Racine's and Corneille's masterpieces. She was now to exercise the same fascination over an alien people, to whom her speech was a foreign tongue. She made her first appearance in the part of Hermione in Racine's Andromaque at the Italian Opera-house. ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... society. Well-educated, his culture was that of a youth of the end of the last century. He had read everything, whether philosophy or belles lettres, which that age had produced in France, and loved to quote from Racine, Corneille, Boileau, Moliere, Montaigne, and Fenelon. Likewise he had gleaned much history from Segur, and much of the old classics from French translations of them; but for mathematics, natural philosophy, or contemporary literature he cared nothing whatever. ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... The Rival Queens, with the Humours of Alexander the Great (acted 1710), a comical tragedy; Damon and Phyllida (acted 1729), a ballad opera; and adaptations from Beaumont and Fletcher, Dryden, Moliere and Corneille. A bibliography of the numerous skits on Cibber is to be found in Lowe's Bibliographical ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... from another able authority: "The drama of 'Gli Orazi' is taken from Corneille's tragedy 'Les Horaces.' The music is full of noble simplicity, beautiful melody, and strong expression. In the airs dramatic truth is never sacrificed to vocal display, and the concerted pieces are grand, broad, and effective. Taken as a whole, the piece is free ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... sarcasm against the petitioners for literary property. "There are authors," he says, "who crave the privileges of authors, and who for that purpose point out the power of the melodrama. They speak of the niece of Corneille, begging at the door of a theatre which the works of her uncle had enriched.... To satisfy the avarice of literary people, it would be necessary to create literary majorats, and make a ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... have been much surprised by seeing the performers repeatedly laugh in the face of the spectators, a thing which I should least of all have expected in France, where usually, in similar cases, the whole nation is tremblingly alive to the slightest violations of decorum. And yet Corneille, the father of the French drama, was born in this city: the scene that is used for a curtain at the theatre bears his portrait, with the inscription, "P. Corneille, natif de Rouen;" and his apotheosis is painted upon ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... superior to the writer of 'The Physician of His Own Honor,' is unjust to Calderon; and it is as futile as are the ecstasies of Schultze to the coldness of Sismondi. Schultze compares Dante with him, and the French critics have only recently forgiven him for being less classical in form than Corneille, who in 'Le Cid' gave them all the Spanish poetry they wanted! Fortunately the student of Calderon need not take opinions. Good editions of Calderon are easily attainable. The best known are Heil's (Leipzig, 1827), and that by Harzenbusch (Madrid, 1848). The first ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... out. It went down the Rue Grand-Pont, crossed the Place des Arts, the Quai Napoleon, the Pont Neuf, and stopped short before the statue of Pierre Corneille. ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... plagiaries for building their tragedies on known fables. Thus, Augustus Caesar wrote an "Ajax," which was not the less his own, because Euripides had written a play before him on that subject. Thus, of late years, Corneille writ an "OEdipus" after Sophocles; and I have designed one after him, which I wrote with Mr Lee; yet neither the French poet stole from the Greek, nor we from the Frenchman. It is the contrivance, the new turn, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... Flanders and Holland, passed under the Austrian rule. This influence was continued by the taste and liberality of Margaret of Austria, who, being appointed "Governor" of the Low Countries in 1507, seems to have introduced Italian artists and to have encouraged native craftsmen. We are told that Corneille Floris introduced Italian ornamentation and grotesque borders; that Pierre Coech, architect and painter, adopted and popularised the designs of Vitruvius and Serlio. Wood carvers multiplied and embellished churches and palaces, the houses of the ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... oversimplicity of their prologues, and their tedious repetition of the obvious. Hence, also, their vulgarity, their horse-play, their obscenity. Here was fine dramatic genius led astray, because the time was out of joint. Similarly, the trouble with French tragedy, in the classicist period of Corneille and Racine, is that it was written only for the finest caste of society,—the patrician coterie of a patrician cardinal. Hence its over-niceness, and its appeal to the ear rather than to the eye. Terence aimed too low and Racine aimed too high. ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... of Corneille, hurried his poetical effusions in order to raise money for gambling. This man of genius was but a spoilt child in the matter of play. He once received two or three hundred louis, and mistrusting himself, went and hid them under some vine-branches, in order not to gamble all away at ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths. Grand, swelling sentiments of liberty I am sure I do not despise. They warm the heart; they enlarge and liberalize our minds; they animate our courage in a time of conflict. Old as I am, I read the fine raptures of Lucan and Corneille with pleasure. Neither do I wholly condemn the little arts and devices of popularity. They facilitate the carrying of many points of moment; they keep the people together; they refresh the mind in its exertions; and they diffuse occasional gayety over ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... first time enjoyed the pleasures of highly-polished society. Mrs. Courtenay was an admirable performer upon the harp; Miss Emma Courtenay, her niece, was a delightful pianist; and my host himself was no mean amateur upon the flute. Our evenings would pass quickly away, in reading Shakspeare, Corneille, Racine, Metastasio, or the modern writers of English literature: after which we would remain till the night had far advanced, enjoying the beautiful compositions of Beethoven, Gluck, and Mozart, or the brilliant overtures ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... the spirit of the age which he was the last to touch lived on in Dryden. He loved and studied Chaucer and Spenser even while he was copying Moliere and Corneille. His noblest panegyric was pronounced over Shakspere. At the time when Rymer, the accepted critic of the Restoration, declared "our poetry of the last age as rude as our architecture," and sneered at "that Paradise Lost ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... give him even the shortest notice, nay, merely to attempt the nomenclature, and furnish a "catalogue raisonne" of all that immense body, would be as wide of our purpose as it would wholly transcend our powers. Such a task would be as vain as—(but here, after the example of Boileau, Corneille, and Pope, let us give our paraphrase of the well-known passage ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... who had so magically turned the tempest into dead calm, as our old and dear Corneille puts it, had modestly retreated to the half-shadow of his pillar, and would, no doubt, have remained invisible there, motionless, and mute as before, had he not been plucked by the sleeve by two young women, who, standing ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... when the hour came, should thus depart thence without saying a word. However, in spite of all, the countess would gladly have given the queen the hackneys as a gift if they had been asked, and she sent them to her by one of her equerries named Corneille de la Barre, together with chariots and waggons. And thus the queen left the country just as her husband had done without saying a word either to the duke or the countess, and Corneille went with her on ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... made Duchesse D'Aiguillon that she might adorn the sphere in which the Cardinal moved so royally. She was a beautiful woman of simple tastes, and yearned for a life of conventual seclusion as she received the homage of Corneille or visited the salon of the ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... simplicity which a poet can indulge himself in, without being guilty of any blameable excess. All this interval may be filled with poets, who may differ from each other, but may be equally admirable, each in his peculiar style and manner. Corneille and Congreve, who carry their wit and refinement somewhat farther than Mr. Pope (if poets of so different a kind can be compared together), and Sophocles and Terence, who are more simple than Lucretius, seem to have gone out of that medium wherein the most perfect productions are to be found, ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... first year were French, German, history, English composition and English literature. In the French course I read some of the works of Corneille, Moliere, Racine, Alfred de Musset and Sainte-Beuve, and in the German those of Goethe and Schiller. I reviewed rapidly the whole period of history from the fall of the Roman Empire to the eighteenth century, and in ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... exactly an analogy. The analogy arises and grows possible when we compare such writers as Montaigne, Moliere, Corneille, or again, certain of the Elzevir series, with our corresponding foremost names. If we meet with the latter in vellum or in sheep, we only too gladly preserve them as we find them, provided that the outward garb is irreproachable. Of how many gems do we not know, in all the peerless glory of their ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... nothing figured save his relations with God. This twofold training elevated his soul and fortified his will, but wrenched him violently from all communion with Nature. This is the standpoint from which we must view the heroes of Corneille, if we would understand those extraordinary souls which, always at the highest degree of tension, deny themselves, as a weakness, everything that resembles tenderness or pity. Again, thus and thus alone can we explain how Descartes, and with him all the philosophers ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... of the time; that time has passed away; its image subsists in brilliant colors in its works, but can no more be reproduced." Our own literary monuments must rest on other ground. "This ground is not the ground of Corneille or Racine, nor is it that of Shakespeare; it is our own; but Shakespeare's system, as it appears to me, may furnish the plans according to which genius ought now to work. This system alone includes all those social conditions and those general and diverse feelings, the simultaneous ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... studying the law in Paris in 1836. I lived at that time in the Rue Corneille in a house where none but students came to lodge, one of those large houses where there is a winding staircase quite at the back lighted below from the street, higher up by borrowed lights, and at the top by a skylight. There were forty furnished rooms—furnished as students' ...
— Z. Marcas • Honore de Balzac
... Afflicted Father, of which the story appears to have been too shocking for representation. It was that a father had supplied his son, under sentence of death, with poison, and when too late found that he was pardoned. Another called the Syrian Queen, which he had imitated from the Rodogune of Corneille, was refused with more sincerity by Colman. A third met no better reception from Harris. "Persuaded," as he says, "by his own sensations that he had a considerable portion of native poetic fire in his mind, he resolved to display ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... poet himself, but he was fond of the poets, and had perused Milton, Shakspeare, Beattie, Cowper, and Keats with real pleasure, to say nothing of having read Corneille and Racine in the original. The steward, therefore, was prepared to appreciate the poet's sentiment, "Oft from apparent ills our blessings rise." His impatient gesture and his petulant exclamation when the board ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... born of Cadmus' line' who do not share his passion. Nobody is hurried or breathless. We listen to reports and discuss them, taking part as it were in a council of state. Nothing happens before our eyes. The dignity of Greek drama, and in a lesser degree of that of Corneille and Racine depends, as contrasted with the troubled life of Shakespearean drama, on an almost even speed of dialogue, and on a so continuous exclusion of the animation of common life, that thought remains lofty and language rich. Shakespeare, upon whose stage everything ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... France, in the reign of Louis XIV., was propitious to the cause of the Moderns. Men felt that it was a great age, comparable to the age of Augustus, and few would have preferred to have lived at any other time. Their literary artists, Corneille, and then Racine and Moliere, appealed so strongly to their taste that they could not assign to them any rank but the first. They were impatient of the claims to unattainable excellence advanced for the Greeks and Romans. "The ancients," said Moliere, "are ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... what was corrupting we corrected; what was local we generalized; what was excessive we brought down to the proportions of mankind. Have we not sometimes also lessened their grandeur and altered their purity? If Corneille has undoubtedly brought nearer to us the still somewhat barbaric heroes of Guillem de Castro, La Fontaine, when imitating the author of the Decameron, has made him more indecent than he is in his own language; and if the Italians have no ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... and acting in his divine atmosphere. It is strange and marvelous that he never wrote a line about the great men that lived and wrote in his day and age, although Cervantes, Rubens, Camoens, Bruno, Drake, Raleigh, Calderon, Corneille, Rembrandt, Kepler, Galileo, Montaigne, Beaumont and Fletcher, Sidney, Marlowe, Bacon and Ben Jonson were contemporaneous authors, poets, dramatists, ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... exalted pedestal which it has not ceased to occupy. It was in 1759, in a journal entitled 'Litteraturbriefe,' that Lessing first claimed for Shakespeare superiority, not only to the French dramatists Racine and Corneille, who hitherto had dominated European taste, but to all ancient or modern poets. Lessing's doctrine, which he developed in his 'Hamburgische Dramaturgie' (Hamburg, 1767, 2 vols. 8vo), was at once accepted by the poet Johann Gottfried ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... literature. The great school of French engravers which appeared at this time brought the art to a splendid perfection, which many think has not been equalled since, so that Masson, Nanteuil, Edelinck, and Drevet may claim fellowship in genius with their immortal contemporaries, Corneille, Racine, La Fontaine, ...
— The Best Portraits in Engraving • Charles Sumner
... herself well and superbly, often with some new and pretty conceit. In short, she had many charms in herself to make her well loved. I remember that at Lyons one day she went to see a painter named Corneille who had painted and exhibited in a spacious room portraits of all the great seigneurs, princes, cavaliers, queens, princesses, ladies and maids of honour of the Court, and she being in this room with us we ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... before us is no longer a plunge from heaven to hell; the entire life of these people is an Inferno. The terrible darkness and ignorance of these people, forced on them by the social misery of dull necessity, produces greater soul sensations in the spectator than the stilted tragedy of a Corneille. Those who witness a performance of Gerhart Hauptmann's "Hannele" and fail to be stirred by the grandeur and depth of that masterpiece, regardless of its petty poorhouse atmosphere, deserve to see nothing else than the "Wizard ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... choses sur l'histoire aux gens qui l'ignorent ou qui le savent mal. Ce merite historique a cause un grand plaisir: je ne le nie pas, mais c'est ce merite historique qui se fanera le premier. . . . Dans 146 ans, Sir Walter Scott ne sera pas a la hauteur ou Corneille nous apparait 146 ans apres sa mort." "To write a modern romance of chivalry." says Jeffrey, in his review of "Marmion" in the Edinburgh, "seems to be much such a phantasy as to build a modern abbey or an English pagoda. . . . [Scott's] genius, seconded ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... first, to your excellent lady, and after her, to madame B. and madame L., not forgetting the marquise de Chalret, whose wit is truly Attic; nor the marquise de P—s, who conceals beneath the graceful exterior of a Languedocian the soul of one of Corneille's Roman matrons. For yourself rely upon my warmest friendship and endeavours to serve you. My brother is most anxious to know you, after the flattering manner in which I have mentioned you to him. When will you gratify us both ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... with a vast delight, Is the poetic judge of sacred wit, Who does i' th' darkness of his glory sit; And as the moon who first receives the light, With which she makes these nether regions bright, So does he shine, reflecting from afar The rays he borrowed from a better star; For rules, which from Corneille and Rapin flow, Admired by all the scribbling herd below, From French tradition while he does dispense Unerring truths, 't is schism, a damned offense, To question his, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... as the French have it; at least Moliere and Corneille—whom I have been reading by and large of late, having read all the new things I could get hold of-are continually having their personages etonned. Or, I feel like Dominie Sampson, and say, "Pro-di-gi-ous!" Not as he said it to Meg Merrilies, but rather ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... figured in his list of courtiers; while for ladies he had Mesdames Deshoulieres, de Scudery, de la Sabliere, and de Sevigne, to say nothing of Ninon de Lenclos and Marion Delorme. (Cf. also Guizot, 'Corneille et ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... The Blue made use of the short, snappy English style of text-book, while Harvard pinned its faith to the more deliberate German seminar system. After the contest captains for the following year were elected. Yale chose Bridgman, who did splendid work on Corneille and the poets of the Pleiade, while Harvard's choice fell on Butterworth, probably the best intercollegiate expert on Cervantes. In the evening all the contestants attended a performance of 'The Prince and the ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... antique costume. She is not beautiful, but the animation of her visage takes the place of beauty. To aid the expression I wished to give her, I entreated her to recite tragic verses while I painted. She declaimed passages from Corneille and Racine. I find many persons established at Coppet: the beautiful Madame Recamier, the Comte de Sabran, a young English woman, Benjamin Constant, etc. Its society is continually renewed. They come to visit the illustrious exile who is pursued by the rancor of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... they witnessed seemed fate's own gesture to them. But yet, had they only possessed some fragment of Antigone's strength—the Antigone of Sophocles—would they not then have transformed the destinies of Hamlet and Faust as well as their own? And if Othello had taken Corneille's Pauline to wife and not Desdemona, would Desdemona's destiny then, all else remaining unchanged, have dared to come within reach of the enlightened love of Pauline? Where was it, in body or soul, that grim fatality lurked? ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... intellectual nation, like France, unites to applaud images and sentiments that are communicated through their own peculiar forms of speech, it becomes a stranger to distrust his own knowledge, rather than their taste. I dare say that were I more accustomed to the language, I might enjoy Corneille and Racine, and even Voltaire, for I can now greatly enjoy Moliere; but, to be honest in the matter, all reciters of heroic French poetry appear to me to depend on a pompous declamation, to compensate for the poverty ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the vanity of man has only to consider the causes and effects of love. The cause is a je ne sais quoi (Corneille),[76] and the effects are dreadful. This je ne sais quoi, so small an object that we cannot recognise it, agitates a whole country, princes, armies, ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... days, the Counts of Castille gave judgment, having been opened through the curiosity of these workmen, was found to contain the remains of Don Rodrigo Campeador, and his wife Chimena, immortalized in ancient legend, in the verses of Guilhen de Castro, of Corneille, and in our own days, in the graceful writings of Mrs. Hemans. The remains of the renowned hero and his beautiful spouse are to be removed to the church of San Gadeo, where a suitable monument will ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... and place he has shewn no regard, and perhaps a nearer view of the principles on which they stand will diminish their value, and withdraw from them the veneration which, from the time of Corneille, they have very generally received by discovering that they have given more trouble to the poet, than pleasure to ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... ancient and modern art. Let us suppose a statue of Corneille reading his works. To-day we should pose it with one leg and arm advanced. This is parallelism. Formerly the leg would have been opposed to this movement of the arm, because there should be here the expansion of the author toward his work, and this expansion results ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... selection of the works of the Fathers of the Church, works respecting the Aryans, Calvinists, of Mythology, &c. The epics are to be Homer, Lucan, Tasso, Telemachus, The Henriade, &c." Machiavelli, Fielding, Richardson, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Corneille, Racine, and Rousseau were also ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... with the herd he has shunned, not separate him in fame as he has been separated in soul. Some Frenchman, the oracle of his circle, said of the poet of the 'Phedre,' 'Racine and the other imitators of Corneille;' and Racine, in his wrath, nearly forswore tragedy forever. It is in vain to tell the author that the public is the judge of his works. The author believes himself above the public, or he would never have written; and," continued Trevylyan, with enthusiasm, "he is above ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... answer pretty satisfactory what he asked me; so that I did get off this meeting without any ground lost. Soon as dined, my wife and I out to the Duke's playhouse, and there saw "Heraclius," [A tragedy, by Lodowick Carlell, taken from Corneille.] an excellent play, to my extraordinary content; and the more from the house being very full, and great company; among others Mrs. Stewart, very fine, with her locks done up with puffes, as my wife calls them: and several ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... old college facade but had its history, or its legend. Here the voice of Abelard thundered new truths, and Rabelais jested, and Petrarch discoursed with the doctors. Here, in the Rue de l'Ancienne Comedie, walked the shades of Racine, of Moliere, of Corneille, of Voltaire. Dear, venerable, immortal old Quartier Latin! Thy streets were narrow, but they were the arteries through which, century after century, circulated all the wisdom and poetry, all the art, and science, and learning of France! Their gloom, their squalor, their very dirt was sacred. ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... and denounced as old-fashioned, because I sing as my nature as well as my training teaches me to do. It is very odd; there is such a cry for naturalism in other arts—we have Millet instead of Claude; we have Zola instead of Georges Sand; we have Dumas fils instead of Corneille; we have Mercie instead of Canova; but in music we have precisely the reverse, and we have the elephantine creations, the elaborate and pompous combinations of Baireuth, and the Tone school, instead of the old sweet strains of melody that went straight ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... historians are at work, the precursors of Bilderdyk and Tollens, the poet of the people. Bruges, in the eighteenth century, produces two writers of merit,—Smidts and Labare. In French Flanders, De Swaen adapts from Corneille, and publishes original dramas. Many songs are composed both in the northern and southern provinces, mostly of a religious character. Philologers seek to revive the neglected idiom with little success. But the century is blank of great names. The Academy of Sciences and Belles-Lettres, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the men who returned from this voyage: Jacob Heemskerke, clerk and captain, Peter Peterson Vos, Gerrit de Veer, mate, Jan Vos, surgeon, Jacob Jansen Sterrenburg, Leonard Henry, Laurence William, Jan Hillebrants, Jacob Jansen Hoochwout, Peter Corneille, Jacob de Buisen, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... too brave and honest a spirit for the perusal of the Dauphin and the French. I don't think that a good or bad taste in poetry is of so serious a nature, that I should be afraid of owning too, that, with that great judge Corneille, and with that, perhaps, no judge Heinsius, I prefer Lucan to Virgil. To speak fairly, I prefer great sense, to poetry with little sense. There are hemistichs in Lucan that go to one's soul and one's heart;—for ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... such notifications meet with more prompt attention than in the past, you must look for another tenant," etc., in the monotonous tone of supremacy, and in the French, not of Journel's dictionary, nor of the dictionary of any such as he, but in the French of Racine and Corneille; in the French of the above suggested circle, which inclosed the General's memory, if it had not inclosed—as he never tired ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King |
