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More "Epigram" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... contrast between the reality she beheld before her, and the dark, taciturn, sharp, elderly man of business who had lurked in her imagination—a man with clothes smelling of city smoke, skin sallow from want of sun, and talk flavoured with epigram—was such a relief to her that Elfride smiled, almost ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... back from the window). I don't think Prince Paul's nature is such a mystery. He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone, or experiencing a ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... splendour, Flashed the ready epigram, Thoughts we uttered, soft and tender, Ending in a smothered "——"; All the truths and lies of ages Compassed we in one short breath, Flouted whims of priests and sages, Lightly toyed with life ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... some of them are more brilliant than conscientious; they would rather point an epigram than sacrifice ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... illustrated in what was perhaps the keenest epigram he ever made. He was talking about people of the stage who constantly air themselves and their views to secure personal publicity. It moved him ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... Wilson did; but he was dangerous. You judge a man in high office by words and deeds. Lincoln was great in both. Lloyd George is great in either, but not always in both at once. Macdonald could thrill a crowd with a homely epigram and turn his hand to a vastly national piece of work. We have yet to be sure that Meighen can be as big in action as he ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... art and a broader outlook upon life meet us in the pages of LA BRUYERE. The instrument is still the same—the witty and searching epigram—but it is no longer being played upon a single string. La Bruyere's style is extremely supple; he throws his apothegms into an infinite variety of moulds, employing a wide and coloured vocabulary, and a complete mastery of the art of rhetorical effect. Among these short ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... Epigram on an Old Lady who had some Curious Notions respecting the 1 Soul. First published, Letters and Journals, 1830, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... played for the sake of pelf Where a button goes, 'twere an epigram To offer the stamp ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... numbers chosen are either lyrical or epigrammatic. Indeed I am mistaken if a single epigram included fails to preserve at least some faint thrill of the emotion through which it had to pass before the Muse's lips let it fall, with however exquisite deliberation. But the lyrical spirit is volatile and notoriously hard to bind with definitions; and seems to grow wilder with the years. ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... call his parlour, is a very antique cupboard; where, it is supposed, he deposited some precious part of his literary treasure. The ceiling is painted in a grotesque manner. A niche in the wall contains the skeleton of his favourite cat, with a Latin epigram beneath, of Petrarch's composition. It is good enough to deserve being copied; but the lateness of the hour did not allow me time. A little room, beyond this, is said to have been his study: the walls of it, from top to ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... 31, we set out in a post-chaise to pursue our ramble. It was a delightful day, and we rode through Blenheim park. When I looked at the magnificent bridge built by John Duke of Marlborough, over a small rivulet, and recollected the Epigram ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... imperceptible change of manner was observable first to the apprehensive eyes of Stuart Farquaharson himself. The Virginian's standards as to his bearing in the face of hostility were definite and could be summed up in the length of an epigram: Never to fail of courtesy, but never to surrender more than half of any roadway to aggression. Yet here was a situation of intricate bearings and a man whom he could not fight. A brain must be dealt with, too old for plasticity, like sculptor's clay hardened beyond amendment of form. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... early remarked; and in the latter part of the fifteenth century, long before the best of the Austrian matrimonial alliances were made, Matthias Corvinus, the greatest of Hungarian kings, wrote a Latin epigram on the subject, which was even more remarkable as a prediction than as a statement of fact; for it was as applicable to the marriage of Napoleon I. and Maria Louisa, and to that of Philip the Fair and Juana the Foolish, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... about the business: not in apprehension of the law, for she never thought of that too probable intrusion on the finder: but simply because her unsophisticated piety believed that God, for some wise end, had allowed the Evil One to tempt her father; she, indeed, did not know the epigram, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... so is a speech," said John Robinson of Leyden, the minister of the Pilgrim Fathers. The language of Jesus is simple and direct, the inevitable expression of a rich nature and a habit of truth. You feel he does not strain after effect—epigram, antithesis, or alliteration. Of course he uses such things—like all real speakers—but he does not go out of his way for them. No, and so much the more significant are such characteristic antitheses as: "Ye cannot serve God and mammon" (Luke 16:13), and "Whosoever will save his life shall ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... she quits the dock is, Is she sea-worthy? And with the fate of the Captain and the Vanguard in our memories, the question may well arise. The story of modern war-ships has, up to this, been one of mingled success and failure. Does not the epigram on our war-ships—our "sub-marine fleet"—owe its point and sting, in a measure, ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... stand first in the power of moving a popular assembly. Lord Beaconsfield said that he "wanted finish." The remark was more spiteful than true. Lord Salisbury could not rival his chief in the neatness and polish of an epigram, but just as little could Lord Beaconsfield rival him in the unstudied graces of oratory. His speeches have a freedom and a rhythmical flow which captivate the hearer. Though he gives full play to his imagination and recklessly faces the risks to which an impetuous speaker is exposed, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... decision to return to London earlier than he had first intended, Eric entered the drawing-room full of toleration and good-humour. Bending over Mrs. Nares' sofa, he atoned for his inattention during dinner with thirty seconds' belated sparkle and a simple epigram which he had already tried with effect on Mrs. Shelley. They were joined by Mrs. Waring, and, as he had hardly spoken to her all the evening, he consented to talk about his forthcoming play—which he enjoyed as little as a superstitious mother might enjoy ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... of Ariovistus and the Germans ('The Gallic Wars') On the Manners and Customs of Ancient Gauls and Germans (same) The Two Lieutenants (same) Epigram ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... kindly in action as he was caustic in speech. A sensitive man himself, he studied to be satirical to others. When Ward condemned 'Columbus' in the 'Quarterly Review', Rogers repaid his critic in the stinging epigram: ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... the political history of the country; to the history of American science belong his celebrated experiments in electricity, and his benefits to mankind in both of these departments were aptly summed up in the famous epigram of the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... delivered. Every thing else is a matter of indifference. Boys will come after girls.[2]" And the same feeling was shared by the Parisians in general, and embodied by M. Imbert, a courtly poet, whose odes were greatly in vogue in the fashionable circles, in an epigram which was set to music ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... entered, an empty one, some passenger had left a weekly periodical; Piers seized upon it gladly, and read to distract his thoughts. One article interested him; it was on the subject of national characteristics: cleverly written, what is called "smart" journalism, with grip and epigram, with hint of universal knowledge and the true air of British superiority. Having scanned the writer's comment on the Slavonic peoples, Piers laughed aloud; so evidently it was a report at second or third hand, ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... desperately in love with his schoolmaster's daughter, aged fifteen, and was hurt by the levity with which his passion was treated. At the same period he became a poet, composed hymns, and wrote an epigram upon one of his father's creditors. He accompanied his father to the King's Bench Prison, and there Christopher Smart and others petted the lad, lent him books, and encouraged his literary aspirations. During his father's later troubles he managed to keep up a subscription ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... smithery of school-learning. Does he know anything more of poetry? He knows the number of feet in a verse, and of acts in a play; but of the soul or spirit he knows nothing. He can turn a Greek ode into English, or a Latin epigram into Greek verse; but whether either is worth the trouble he leaves to the critics. Does he understand 'the act and practique part of life' better than 'the theorique'? No. He knows no liberal or mechanic art, no trade or occupation, no game of skill ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... lines prefixed to "Sion and Parnassus," and some complimentary stanzas which occur in a letter to his cousin Honor Driden,[31] would have been enough to assure us, even without his own testimony, that Cowley was the darling of his youth; and that he imitated his points of wit, and quirks of epigram, with a similar contempt for the propriety of their application. From these poems, we learn enough to be grateful, that Dryden was born at a later period in his century; for had not the road to fame been altered in consequence of the Restoration, his extensive information and ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... Russians, just then. An acquaintance with Peter, one of the handsomest of the whole batch of religious enthusiasts, had brought about her psychological conversion and altered her outlook upon life. Her heart was in the Urals. But that stupid, malicious epigram had impressed itself on the mind of Mr. Parker, who was hopelessly insensitive to the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... the great hunger which is here shown to me, a dish of eight verses seems but little; and I think that I should do well to join to the epigram, or rather to the madrigal, the ragout of a sonnet which, in the eyes of a princess, was thought to have a certain delicacy in it. It is throughout seasoned with Attic salt, and I think you will find the taste of it ...
— The Learned Women • Moliere (Poquelin)
... character; depict, with wise restraint, his political and public life: but also, and above all, re-clothe him "in his habit as he lived," as friends and associates knew him; recover his traits of voice and manner, his conversational wit or wisdom, epigram or paradox, his explosions of sarcasm and his eccentricities of reserve, his words of winningness and acts of kindness: and, since one half of his life was social, introduce us to the companions who shared his lighter hour and evoked his ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... usually affect length, one of his highest efforts being the four-line stanza, known as the "stop-short," in which "the words stop while the sense goes on," expanding in the mind of the reader by the suggestive art of the poet. The "stop-short" is the converse of the epigram, which ends in a satisfying turn of thought to which the rest of the composition is intended to lead up; it aims at producing an impression which, so far from being final, is merely the prelude to a long series of visions and of feelings. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... expression and profusion of wit. Analogies with him are as cheap as commonplaces are to other men. He has no hesitation in announcing his analysis in a witticism, and condensing a principle into an epigram. His page often blazes and burns with wit. South, Congreve, and Sheridan are hardly richer in the precious article. In Mr. Hudson, also, the quality has an individual character, and is the racier from its genuineness and from its root in his intellectual constitution. This wit is, perhaps, the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... But there is another Theocritus, the son of Praxagoras and Philinna (see Epigram XXIII), or as some say of Simichus. (This is plainly derived from the assumed name Simichidas in Idyl VII.) He was a Syracusan, or, as others say, a Coan settled in Syracuse. He wrote the so-called Bucolics in the Dorian dialect. Some attribute to ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... him to find employment in Paris, we are not told. One of the many stories to his prejudice which were current in his after-career describes Buchanan as dependent on Major and ungrateful to him, repaying with a cruel epigram the kindness shown him. But there seems absolutely no foundation for this accusation which was probably suggested to after-detractors anxious for evidence that ingratitude, as one of them says, "was the great and unpardonable blemish ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... principle of design is for the first time visible. With euphuism, antithesis and the use of balanced sentences came to stay. We may see them in the style of Johnson and Gibbon, while alliterative antithesis reappears to-day in the shape of the epigram. Doubtless Lyly abused the antithetical device; but his successors had only to discover a means of skilfully concealing the structure, an improvement which the early euphuists, with all the enthusiasm of inventors, ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... suppose thats an epigram. I dont understand epigrams. I'm only a silly soldier man. Ha! But I can put a plain question. Is Leo to be encouraged to be ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... unnecessary. The songs which I so much admired, and which so confirmed my impression of the youth of my mistress, were executed by Madame Stephanie Lalande. The eyeglass was presented by way of adding a reproof to the hoax—a sting to the epigram of the deception. Its presentation afforded an opportunity for the lecture upon affectation with which I was so especially edified. It is almost superfluous to add that the glasses of the instrument, as ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... in England is for Epigram, Turns of Wit, and forced Conceits, which have no manner of Influence, either for the bettering or enlarging the Mind of him who reads them, and have been carefully avoided by the greatest Writers, both among the Ancients and Moderns. I have ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... in which she was demonstrating to O'Flaherty the general's lineal descent from old Chattesworth—an army tailor in Queen Anne's time—and his cousinship to a live butter dealer in Cork—and spicing her little history with not a very nice epigram on his uncle, 'the counsellor,' by Dr. Swift, which she delivered with a vicious chuckle in the 'Fireworker's' ear, who also laughed, though he did not quite see the joke, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... places Science before Literature. I see, however, that it is quite right, for Literature is a member of our own family—our sister. [Cheers.] I am old enough to recollect that when Sir Morton Archer Shee, who united Art with Poetry, was elected President of the Academy, this epigram ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... drew his ill-composed cartoon of "Parliamentary Candidates under Different Heads," roughly done, but not ill-cut; and Mark Lemon, Henry Mayhew, Henry Grattan, Joseph Allen, F. G. Tomlins, Gilbert a Beckett, and W. H. Wills (the biting epigram "To the Black-balled of the United Service Club," i.e. Lord Cardigan, was his), all contributed to the first number. It is an axiom of newspaper conductors that "the first number is always the worst ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... leniency is extended to an individual who has already proved that he merits no special consideration, in the next round a bum rap will be given some lesser offender who is morally deserving of a real chance. The Italians have an epigram: "The first time a dog bites a man, it's the dog's fault; the second ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... man—his whitewashing the statue of Shakspeare, at Leamington or Stratford (?), and General Fitzpatrick's (Lord L.'s uncle) epigram ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 185, May 14, 1853 • Various
... both fresh and attractive. The plot is strong, and the action of the book goes with a rush. Political conspiracy and the secrets of an old tower of a castle in Sussex play an important part in the novel. The story is a bright comedy, full of humor, flashes of keen wit and clever epigram. It will hold the reader's attention from beginning to end. Altogether it is a good story exceedingly well told, and promises to be ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... to us to be little less than absurd.... He parodies a line from one of the productions of which he had been so plundered, to carry the point home, to leave no doubt as to the sting of his allusion. But, as has been most justly observed, the epigram would have wanted its sting if the line parodied had not been that of the ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... velvet, toasted the mole that raised the hill over which the horse had stumbled. As the beast had formerly belonged to sir John Fenwick, they insinuated that William's fate was a judgment upon him for his cruelty to that gentleman; and a Latin epigram was written ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... limousine, "I don't see why somebody, without your cognizance, shouldn't call Mr. Finn the spoiled minion of the Almighty's ante-chamber. That's a devilish good catch-phrase," he added, starting forward in the joy of his newborn epigram: "Devilish good. 'The spoiled minion of the Almighty's ante-chamber.' It'll ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... followed by Mr Drummond on the same subject in a telling epigram. Then Lord Palmerston, in reply to the charges of Mr Horsman, mild and graceful, with a sarcastic touch. The general impression of the House was very favourable to the Ministry; all seemed changed; the Debate had cleared the political atmosphere, ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... talents with which Providence has blest me; to scorn the little delicacies of art, which I execute so well, would, in my opinion, be as absurd as for an epic poet to disdain the composition of a perfect epigram, or a consummate musician, the ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... more about Halifax from his own elaborate study of Charles II. It is a prolonged analysis by a man of clear vision, and perfect balance of judgement, and no prepossessions; who was, moreover, master of the easy pellucid style that tends to maxim and epigram. A more impartial and convincing estimate of any king need never be expected. In method and purpose, it stands by itself. It is indeed not so much a character in the accepted sense of the word as ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... into that of complete acceptance. He ceased to satirize himself because time dulled the irony of the situation and the joke lost its humor with its sting. Even the sight of Haskett's hat on the hall table had ceased to touch the springs of epigram. The hat was often seen there now, for it had been decided that it was better for Lily's father to visit her than for the little girl to go to his boarding-house. Waythorn, having acquiesced in this arrangement, had been surprised to find how little difference it made. ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... name of Alexander, which for the second time seemed to promise the Romans the empire of the world; and the same evening, in the midst of brilliant illuminations and bonfires, which seemed to turn the town into a lake of flame, the following epigram was read, amid the acclamation ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and paper than all the silly criticisms on it, which proved no more than that the critic was not one of those, for whom the trifle was written; and than all the grave exhortations to a greater reverence for the public—as if the passive page of a book, by having an epigram or doggerel tale impressed on it, instantly assumed at once loco-motive power and a sort of ubiquity, so as to flutter and buz in the ear of the public to the sore annoyance of the said mysterious personage. ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... evidently sympathizes with modern romanticists and light literature in general, for we find "academicien" defined as "litterateur suranne." One is always inclined to suspect sour grapes of giving the flavor to French sarcasm concerning the Academy, and is reminded of Piron's epigram in the shape of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... elusive as the point of a half-formed epigram, and at the end of the five minutes he was no longer ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... thoughts astray, being, as he was, fonder of music than of work. As a matter of fact, it was in this little restaurant that he winnowed the day's ideas, revamped scenes, trimmed the rough edges of his climaxes, revised this epigram or rejected this or that line; all on the backs of envelopes and on the margins of newspapers. In his den at his bachelor apartments, he worked; but here he dreamed, usually behind the soothing, opalescent veil of ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... a quality, typical of San Francisco, which I can describe only as promiscuity. That promiscuity is in its best phase a frankness; a fearlessness; a gorgeous candor which made possible the epigram that San Francisco has every vice but hypocrisy. Civically, two cross currents cut through the city's life; one of, a high visioned enlightenment which astounds the visiting stranger by its force, its white-fire enthusiasm; the ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... something reprehensible in an artist's pleasing the public. This notion might seem to have some basis in view of the taste that is affected to-day—a predilection for all that is shocking and displeasing in all the arts, including poetry. Sorcieres's epigram—the ugly is beautiful and the beautiful ugly—has become a programme. People are no longer content with merely admiring atrocities, they even speak with contempt of beauties hallowed by time ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... exclaimed. "D'you know, Katharine, that ridiculous goose came to tea with me? Oh, how I wanted you! He tried to make epigrams all the time, and I got so nervous, expecting them, you know, that I spilt the tea—and he made an epigram about that!" ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... often eaten, and causeth fearful dreams, so doth all venison, and is condemned by a jury of physicians. Mizaldus and some others say, that hare is a merry meat, and that it will make one fair, as Martial's epigram testifies to Gellia; but this is per accidens, because of the good sport it makes, merry company and good discourse that is commonly at the eating of it, and ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... which chiefly has brought the modern drama to its present state of perfection. Without the stage cigarette many an epigram would pass unnoticed, many an actor's hands would be much more noticeable; and the man who works the fireproof safety curtain would lose even the small amount of excitement which at present attaches ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... anything like a real familiarity with Greek literature, but rather such superficial knowledge as would enable a reader of Latin books to understand allusions and quotations. Poliziano, it may be remarked, thought it worth while to flatter Guidobaldo in a Greek epigram. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... nearly a translation, in Ovid's poem of the same name. On the part of Apollonius there is a passage in the third book of the "Argonautica" (11. 927-947) which is of a polemical nature and stands out from the context, and the well-known savage epigram upon Callimachus. [1002] Various combinations have been attempted by scholars, notably by Couat, in his "Poesie Alexandrine", to give a connected account of the quarrel, but we have not data sufficient to determine the order of the attacks, and replies, and counter-attacks. ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... and Marigold do all the work. There is room for an epigram if you happen to have one about you, or even an ode, but they can get along without outside contributions. Enid does most of the writing and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... must, however, be admitted that Crabbe's careful study of Pope had not initiated him in some of his master's secrets. The worsted stockings were uncommonly thick. If Pope's brilliance of style savours too much of affectation, Crabbe never manages to hit off an epigram in the whole of his poetry. The language seldom soars above the style which would be intelligible to the merest clodhopper; and we can understand how, when in his later years Crabbe was introduced to wits and men ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... given up poetry, except now and then to write a drinking song, some gay sonnet or some innocent epigram; I compose ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... digestion is good he takes a cheerful view of things; but if he is full of bile, then he is sure that everybody is going to be lost except himself and his little set, and that's heresy. Apologetics is just dietetics; now there 's an epigram made for you on the spot, and you don't know what it means, so we ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... together with a host of other subjects of much apparent irrelevance to a statesman's life. So too in the case of his distinguished rival, whose death eclipsed the gaiety of politics and banished epigram from Parliament: keen must be the critical faculty which can nicely discern where the novelist ended and the statesman ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... to the qualities of nations is hurry," says the author of The Champagne Standard, and this has enough truth to let it pass as an epigram; but many Americans have a notion that their contribution is neither more nor less than All Progress. With their eyes turned chiefly upon themselves, they have seen beyond a doubt what a splendid, energetic, pushful people they are, and they have talked it all over one with another. Moreover, ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... a case of the stock rationalist trick of treating the NAME of a concrete phenomenal reality as an independent prior entity, and placing it behind the reality as its explanation. Professor Mach quotes somewhere an epigram of Lessing's: ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... brilliant idea; merry thought, bright thought, happy thought; sally; flash of wit, flash of merriment; scintillation; mot [Fr.], mot pour rire [Fr.]; witticism, smart saying, bon-mot, jeu d'esprit [Fr.], epigram; jest book; dry joke, quodlibet, cream of the jest. word-play, jeu de mots [Fr.]; play of words, play upon words; pun, punning; double entente, double entendre &c (ambiguity) 520 [Fr.]; quibble, verbal quibble; conundrum &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... This epigram is illustrated by the following conversation, which passed between Bouvart and a French marquis, whom he had attended during a long and severe indisposition. As he entered the chamber on a certain occasion, he was thus addressed by ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... differ greatly. The ancients knew this plague, of which Lucian speaks. Mr. Blades mentions a white book-worm, slain by the librarian of the Bodleian. In Byzantium the black sort prevailed. Evenus, the grammarian, wrote an epigram against the black ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... harmonized, if possible, with the demands of beauty and variety of sound as represented by the rhymes. It is not absurd to speak of the natural "size" of poetic thoughts. Pope, for instance, often works with ideas of couplet size, just as Martial sometimes amused himself with ideas of a still smaller epigram size, or Omar Khayyam with thoughts and fancies that came in quatrain sizes. Many sonnets fail of effectiveness because the contained thought is too scanty or too full to receive adequate expression in the fourteen lines demanded by ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... Fanny, blushing, "you are desperately gallant to-day, and just to shame you, and show how little of an angel I am, I will read the doctor's epigram:— ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... am in good earnest of late, too much a man of business to mind metaphors and similes. I find subscribing much superior to writing, and there is a sort of little epigram I more especially delight in, after the manner of rondeaus, which begin and end all in the same words, namely—"Received" and "A. Pope." These epigrams end smartly, and each of them is tagged with two guineas. Of these, as I have learnt, you have composed several ready for me to set ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... France in November, 1790. Paine immediately sat down in the Angel, Islington, and began his reply. He was not unqualified to answer Burke; he had fought a good fight between the years 1775 and 1784. Mr. Conway has some ground for his epigram, 'where Burke had dabbled, Paine had dived.' There is nothing in the Rights of Man which would now frighten, though some of its expressions might still shock, a lady-in-waiting; but to profess Republicanism in 1791 was no joke, and the book was proclaimed ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... a Helicon fountain upon it playing into a basin with four jets of Rhenish wine. On the top of the mountain sat Apollo with Calliope at his feet, and on either side the remaining Muses, holding lutes or harps, and singing each of them some "posy" or epigram in praise of the queen, which was presented, after it had been sung, written ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... supervision is not even altogether uncalled for among the officers of the new Army; one has been much struck with the slovenly, and at times grotesque, appearance of men who have suddenly assumed the position of officers and gentlemen. The somewhat apt epigram which is current to-day, is not wholly unmerited, "Temporary officers are expected ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... they'll stand like sheep and be slaughtered by the thousand." The essential difference between the German soldiers and our own is in the officering and training, and it is admirably expressed by Private Burrell, Northumberland Fusiliers. "We are led; they are driven,"[F] is Burrell's epigram. ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... depends on the kind of thought. A witty saying, for example, will not make a sonnet; in French or Italian it belongs to the domain of epigram." ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Europe had recently rediscovered imitation as the royal road to learning, and in their system of language teaching emphasized imitation of classical authors more than following the precepts of the grammarians or of the rhetoricians. The epigram of Seneca, "longum iter per praecepta, breve per exempla," was the popular catchword of the age. The ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... end while demanding as a means the immediate cessation of hostilities needs no demonstration. The resolution was thus translated: "Resolved that the war is a failure"; and the translation had that trenchant accuracy which is often found in American popular epigram. The candidate chosen was McClellan; McClellan in set terms repudiated the resolution that the war was a failure, and then accepted the candidature. He meant no harm to the cause of the Union, but he meant no definite and clearly ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... is of the spontaneous sort and rings true, and the lancet of her wit and epigram, tho keen, is never cruel.... An author whose novels may be said to make waste paper of most of the ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... free it from a blemish which diminished his beauty. Banished by his rival, he ran to meet death in battle, and returned with glory." Another pleasant little jest was that perpetrated by Suwarrow, who, after the bloody battle of Tourtourskaya, announced the result to his mistress in an epigram of two doggerel lines. This was the terrible warrior who used to sleep almost naked in a room of suffocating heat, and rush out to review his troops in a linen jacket, with the thermometer of Reaumur ten degrees below freezing point. Of the Emperor Paul, ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... the time; for in Lanyard's esteem Bourke's epigram had come to have the weight and force of an axiom: "The more trouble you make for yourself, the less the good public will make ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... hat which lay at his feet, "My friends, here is some mistake! this is not my hat; it has been changed whilst I was taken up with my story. Pray, gentlemen, find my hat amongst you; it was a remarkably good one, a present from a nobleman for an epigram I made. I would not lose my hat for twice its value. It has my name written withinside of it, Dominicho, Improvisatore. Pray, gentlemen, examine ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... George, his supplanter, he has lost the earnestness which brought him to the seats of power. A domestic circle, brilliant with the modern spirit and much occupied in sharpening the wits with epigram and audacity, has proved too much for his original stoicism. He has found recreation in the modern spirit. After the day's work there has been nothing so diverting for him as the society of young people; chatter rather than conversation has been as it ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... are covered with memorials of local celebrities; amongst them there is a tablet to Nash (S. wall near S. transept). The tomb of Lady Waller in S. transept, and Garrick's epitaph on Quin (N. aisle of choir) should perhaps also be noticed. As Dr Harington's sprightly epigram suggests, this portentous display of mortality is not an inspiring study for visitors who come to Bath to take ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... time of the Restoration Dr. John Fell was appointed Vice-Chancellor, and he not only made the examinations very severe, but he made the examiners keep up to his standard, and was cordially hated by some of the students on that account. An epigram made about him at that time has been handed ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... particular sounds from the gallery have given us sufficient warning. And since they have so openly declared themselves, I must only desire that they must not think they can put on the fine woman again just when they please, but content themselves with their skill in caterwauling." The following epigram was called out by the proceedings of the evening, which were mostly stimulated by the Pembroke ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... in a vernal Prospect of some Hill, Cave, Rock, or Fountain; which but for the interruption of other trivial Passages, might have made up none of the worst Poetick Landskips," and then he quotes, as a sample of Herrick, a tiresome" epigram," in the poet's worst style. This is not delicate or acute criticism, as we judge nowadays; but I would give a good deal to meet Winstanley at a coffee-house, and go through the Hesperides with him over a dish of chocolate. It would be wonderfully interesting to discover ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... ever forget it. The candidates are arranged according to their places in the school, and the lowest two boys first enter the arena. The lower of these two is the challenger. He calls upon his adversary to translate an epigram, to parse it, or to answer any grammatical question connected with the subject. Demand after demand is made, until there is an error. The Master is appealed to, and answers, "It was a mistake." Then the challenger ...
— Harper's Young People, April 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... nauseateing stomach, where there is nothing to cast up, strains and convulsions, and some astonishing bombast, which men only, till they understand, are scared with. A verse or some such work he may sometimes get up to, but seldom above the stature of an epigram, and that with some relief out of Martial, which is the ordinary companion of his pocket, and he reads him as he were inspired. Such men are commonly the trifling things of the world, good to make merry the company, and whom only men have to do withal when they have nothing ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... Dobson and I were so fond of. And if I did not soon learn to do something well, even were it only how to farm my five hundred acres to a profit, Kate's cooking would really require the miraculous aid suggested in her unintentional and, to me, biting epigram. I put the book down, and gave over the hunt for my Virgil. It would probably be useless in any case, since Kate had a cunning all her own, and had surely bestowed it far beyond any searching of mine. I contented myself with ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... on one of the Boulevards put up a sign having on it a portrait of Absalom dangling by his hair from a tree, and Joab piercing his body with a spear. Under the painting was the following terse epigram:— ...
— At the Sign of the Barber's Pole - Studies In Hirsute History • William Andrews
... telling thrust that his conception of art demanded could be given only by a very specious, not very profound, very forthright, kind of cynicism, like the half kindly, half contemptuous laugh of the man who tells a good story at the club. For him it was the point of the epigram. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... to was not passed tete-a-tete, but in a select company of which the present Lord Kilmorey was one. "Molly," says Dr. Johnson, "was a beauty and a scholar, and a wit and a whig; and she talked all in praise of liberty; and so I made this epigram upon her—She was the loveliest creature ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... buried at OEnoe; at a later date his bones were removed to Orchomenos." An unhappy ending for the instructor of Perses! But it may not be true. To be sure, these poets—I can only say that to me it sounds improbable, and so, I take it, it sounded to Alkaeus of Messene, who wrote this epigram upon ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... many grievances afflict this vast mass of buildings, buried under the Palais de Justice and the quay, like some antediluvian creature in the soil of Montmartre; but the worst affliction is that it is the Conciergerie. This epigram is intelligible. In the early days of the monarchy, noble criminals—for the villeins (a word signifying the peasantry in French and English alike) and the citizens came under the jurisdiction of the municipality or of their liege lord—the lords of ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... did not understand, but was afterwards told they were from Horace, and signified that it is a sweet and proper thing to Die for one's Country; at the which a Wag in one of the Gazettes of the time must needs turn this decorous Sentiment into Ridicule, and compose an Epigram insulting Misfortune, to ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... epigram must be somewhat later. Lord North became blind in 1787 [and the King's insanity was not publicly ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... it contained all the proverbs in the English language. "Bate me an ace, quoth Bolton," said the queen, implying that the assertion was too strong; and, in fact, that every proverb was not in the collection. See Nares' Glossary, who quotes the following epigram by H.P., to show the collection ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 55, November 16, 1850 • Various
... a final look at himself in the glass, adjusted his scimiter; and, well satisfied with himself and the conceit of his epigram unheard save by himself, he also departed, to take ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... had been in my day,' he said, 'some wit would have produced a neat epigram on Phoebus playing his old tricks out of jealousy of Will's verses, but dainty feats of scholarship are gone out of date. Well, Patroclus, when we have you back again, I think we shall none of us mourn over the effects ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... trickled sympathy when she told of the selfishness of the factory girls under her and the meanness of the superintendent over her, and he laughed several times as she remarked that the superintendent "ought to be boiled alive—that's what all lobsters ought to be," so she repeated the epigram with such increased jollity that they swung up to the theater in a gale; and, once facing the ennuied ticket-seller, he demanded dollar seats just as though he had not been doing sums all the way up to prove that seventy-five-cent seats were ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... it seemed as if there was nothing more to be discovered, as if the universe were now explored, and only a few fragments of truth remained for the gleaner. This is the attitude of mind expressed in Pope's famous epigram:— ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... doubt as to the iridescent brilliance of the book. Page after page—full of caustic satire, humorous sally and profound epigram—fairly bristles with merriment. The book is a compact mass of scintillating wit."—Philadelphia ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... to Paul for many reasons. There was not a great deal of the talk to carry away with one; but if it had not the solid brilliance of the diamond, it had the cheaper glitter of the sharded glass epigram which sparkles and cuts—an admirable substitute on most occasions, though it has the disadvantage of leaving dangerous fragments for people to tread upon. The conversation was carried on exclusively ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... of speculators and money-lenders; and then Parliament for a time closed its eyes and ears, and relied upon force alone to keep Ireland quiet. It rejected every suggestion of reform in the Land laws; and a great Minister, himself an Irish landlord, dismissed the whole subject in the flippant epigram that "tenant-right was landlord-wrong." Since then the Irish Church has been disestablished, and two Land Acts have been passed; yet we seem to be as far as ever from the pacification of Ireland. Surely it is time to inquire whether the evil is not inherent in our ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... of British Poetesses. (This epigram is generally ascribed to Chesterfield. See Campbell, "English Poets," ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... may not commend themselves as strictly accurate to a scientific reasoner, but which have as much truth as one can demand from an epigram. And besides many sayings which share in some degree their merit, there are occasional passages which rise, at least, to the height of graceful rhetoric if they are scarcely to be called poetical. One simile was long famous, and was called by Johnson ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... ruse of controversy through all the paces of paradox and persiflage. And, when the whim changes, it is most easy and delightfully disconcerting to play with the respectable and cowardly bourgeois fetishes and to laugh and epigram at the flitting god-ghosts and the debaucheries and ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... know from the number of her capes in the wash how the love-affairs of the wife of the prefect were going on. Though he guessed much from observations of this kind, the chevalier was discretion itself; he was never betrayed into an epigram (he had plenty of wit) which might have closed to him an agreeable salon. You are therefore to consider Monsieur de Valois as a man of superior manners, whose talents, like those of many others, were lost in a narrow sphere. ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... Ben. Flower, of Cambridge, at Mr. P.'s, and never saw so much coarse strength in a countenance. He repeated to me an epigram on the dollars which perhaps ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... appeared upon the scenes, and was, moreover, engaged to be married to Sneyd Edgeworth, one of the eldest sons of the family. In the story, says Mrs. Edgeworth, Miss Broadhurst selects from her lovers one who 'unites worth and wit,' and then she goes on to quote an old epigram of Mr. Edgeworth's on himself, which concluded with,'There's an Edge to his wit and ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... which Messer Galeazzo and his brother and all the most skilled jousters at court took part. And the Moro's accomplished friend, Ermolao Barbaro, the young Venetian patriarch, who had been once more sent as envoy to Milan, composed a wonderful Latin epigram in honour of the occasion, praying Pallas not to avert her face in sorrow at the sound and tumult of war, which is after all but a mimic display, and calling upon her, the goddess whose wisdom Lodovico honours above all ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... subsequently found, in a strange American book,[24] some descriptions which may be applied to his odd expression of eye. Monsieur Edmond About's mouth was sneering and sensual, and even then affected Voltaire's sarcastic grimace. His bitter and equivocal smile put you in mind of the grinding of an epigram-mill. One could detect in his attitude, his physiognomy, and his language, that obsequious malice, that familiarity, at the same time flattering and jeering, which Voltaire turned to such good account in his commerce with the great people of his day, and which his disciple was learning to practise ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... The O'Wilde.—The play? Oh, the play be zephyr'd! The play is not the thing. In other words, the play is nothing. Point is to prepare immense assortment of entirely irrelevant epigrams. "Epigram, my dear Duke, is the refuge of the dullard, who imagines that he obtains truth by inverting a truism." That sounds well; must lay it by for use. Take "Virtue," for instance. "Virtue" offers a fine field for paradox, brought strictly up to date. Must jot down stray thoughts. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... courage to pass on and refrain from explanation. He was not embarrassed in this society, because he read and judged the men; he could spy snobbery in a titled lord; and, as for the critics, he dismissed their system in an epigram. "These gentlemen," said he, "remind me of some spinsters in my country who spin their thread so fine that it is neither fit for weft nor woof." Ladies, on the other hand, surprised him; he was scarce ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... helpless to fall into this disaster. But this you will keep dark for fear they might injure you. Take care also—and it is on this account that I think you should cultivate Hortensius himself by means of Pomponius—that the epigram on the irs Aurelia attributed to you when candidate for the aedileship is not proved by false testimony to be yours. For there is nothing that I am so afraid of as that, when people understand how much pity for me your prayers and ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... the ragged edge of the firs. When they spoke again it was very simply, in broken sentences, as children speak. The poetry of their relation to one another and the scene about them were too full of meaning, too lovely, to call for polish of rhetoric, or pointing by epigram. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... relaxation I can remember, and my only solace for the slight weariness of such repose is the thought how much more tired the author, Mr. BASIL CREIGHTON, must be. With such a hail-storm of metaphor and epigram constantly dissolving in impalpable mist of mere words has he assaulted The History of an Attraction (CHATTO AND WINDUS) that the poor thing, atomised, vaporised and analysed to the bone, lies limp and lifeless between the covers, with hardly a decent rag of incident or story to cover it. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... a great writer we have raised a claim that needs some support. His exquisite style with its Tacitean flavour, the perfection of his lyrics, his wit, and that intellectual brilliancy which sparkles from all the facets of his satire, parody, and epigram, suffice to endear him to the small, fastidious world whose approval is best worth having, and also, perhaps, to justify our opinion. But, unless we mistake, the appeal of his novels goes farther than the frontiers of good taste. ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... own." Here it is well to note that St. Thomas in this single sentence teaches that private property, or the individual occupation of actual land or capital or instruments of wealth, is not contrary to the moral law. Consequently he would repudiate the famous epigram, "La Propriete c'est le vol." Man may hold and dispose of what belongs to him, may have private property, and in no way offend against the principles of justice, ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... what, prince; a college of witcrackers cannout flout me out of my humour. Dost thou think I care for a satire or an epigram? No; if man will be beaten with brains, a' shall wear nothing handsome about him. In brief, since I do purpose to marry, I will think nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it; and therefore never flout ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... little axiom and passed a whole week in delight, grouping around this harmless epigram the crowd of ideas which came to him unconsciously and which he was astonished to find that he possessed. His humorous mood yielded at last to the claims of serious investigation. Willing as he was to take a hint, the author returned to his habitual idleness. Nevertheless, ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... to have proceeded in a body to a meeting of the Royal Society, of which all were members except Muir and Rogers himself. Before going Mackenzie repeated an epigram which had been written on Smith sleeping at the meetings of this society, but the epigram has not been preserved. Only seven persons were present—Smith and his guests and the reader of the paper ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... afterwards he did what we are all inclined to do in such circumstances. He imagined himself much more valiant and much more ready to take a great man by the scruff of his neck and shake him, than he really was. We are all heroes in our memories. By the way, it was Callimachus who wrote the epigram on the death of Heraclitus which was made immortal by the translation of the author of "Ionica." It is, I hold, the best poetic translation in ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... recognized classics of English verse, the result would immediately be reflected in his own compositions. As yet, he claims to be independent of scholarly tradition, but we must remind him of the Latin epigram of Mr. Owen, which Mr. Cowper thus translated under the title ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... and loyal character Bossuet spoke so eloquently at her death. We catch pleasant glimpses of Mme. Deshoulieres, beautiful and a poet; of Mme. Cornuel, of whom it was said that "every sin she confessed was an epigram"; of Mme. de Choisy, witty and piquante; of Mme. de Doulanges, also a ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... looking over Mendelssohn's shoulder at his charming daughters in their Parisian toilettes. He saw them exchange a curious glance that raised their eyebrows sceptically. With a flash of insight he caught their meaning. Mendelssohn seeking an epigram had ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... formerly, and apparently one of the oldest in use. The manner in which it was played will appear from the following epigram of Sir John Harington, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... was only fair to insinuate that his friends must have had very long ears. Nevertheless, Dannevig's reviews were for about a month a very successful feature of our paper. They might be described as racy little essays, bristling with point and epigram, on some subject suggested by the title-pages of current volumes. At the end of that time, however, books began to grow scarce in our office, and before another month was at an end, we had no more need of a reviewer. My friend was then to have ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... man, stirred by the sight of so much foodstuff and moved to epigram by his mood, looked up ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... [This epigram was Tennyson's reply to an article by Professor Wilson—'Christopher North'—in Blackwood's Magazine for May 1832, dealing in sensible fashion with Tennyson's 1830 volume, and ridiculing the fulsome praise ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Forbes.—What are the two concluding lines of an epigram published ten or twelve years ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... enjoyment of each other's society. The ladies, and a few of the younger men, did not appear disposed to let the gravity of their elders interfere with their own pleasures. The song and the dance, the pointed epigram and witty repartee, all the varied resourccs which Spaniards know so well how to bring into play, and which render a Spanish tertulia so agreeable, had been in turn resorted to. When the seguidilla—during the continuance of which Luis had gained his post of observation—was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... seems to be some illusion in the common belief in the probative force of prediction. Prediction surprises us, puts us off our guard, and renders persuasion easy; in this it resembles the force of an epigram in rhetoric. But cases can be produced in which erroneous hypotheses have led to prediction; and Whewell himself produces them. Thus, he says that the Ptolemaic theory was confirmed by its predicting eclipses and other celestial phenomena, and by leading to the construction of Tables ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... slow horror before your eyes. It is always the unpleasant aspect of things that he seizes, but the intensity of his revolt from that unpleasantness brings a touch of the sublime into the very expression of his disgust. Every sentence is an epigram, and every epigram slaughters a reputation or an idea. He speaks with an accent as of pained surprise, an amused look of contempt, so profound that it becomes ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am." The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, "I am not; ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... have been. The popular idea that life is a shimmy is a dangerous illusion." Mr. Prohack felt the epigram to be third-rate, but he carried it ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... and to hear him, was an intense flattery, and he actually longed for the occasion of display. He had learned a good deal since he had left Ireland. He had less of that fluency which Irishmen cultivate, seldom ventured on an epigram, never on an anecdote, was guardedly circumspect as to statements of fact, and, on the whole, liked to understate his case, and affect distrust of his own opinion. Though there was not one of these which were not more or less restrictions on him, he could be brilliant and witty when occasion served, ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... Louvre; and six admirable pictures of Andrea del Sarto. But the one which most attracts and holds all those who regard the Faultless Painter with sympathy, and who admiring his genius regret his errors, is a portrait of his wife Lucrezia Fede, whose name, a French writer has said, is a double epigram. It was this capricious and wilful beauty who made poor Andrea break his word and embezzle the money King Francis had given him to spend for works of art. Yet this dangerous face is his best excuse,—the face of a man-snarer, subtle and passionate and cruel in its blind ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... eccentric author treats us to a dazzling flood of epigram, invective, and what appears to be argument; and finally leaves us without a single clear idea as to what he ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... (the cahiers) which the Deputies carried with them to the National Assembly. He forgot the famines, the exactions, the oppressive privileges which made revolt, and saw only the pathos of the Queen's helplessness before it. In Paine's immortal epigram, he "pitied the plumage and forgot the dying bird." But it is paradoxically true that while he pursued the friends of humanity, his real impulse was the hatred of cruelty which modern men call humanitarian. To that ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... his College to sit down in his presence. He kept his seat himself, and let the Queen's Ambassador stand. Such was the temper, not of a Vice-Chancellor, but of a simple Master of a College. I remember, by the way, an extempore epigram of Matt's on the reception he had there met with. We did not reckon in those days that he had a very happy turn for an epigram; but the occasion was tempting; and he struck it off as he was walking from St. ...
— St. John's College, Cambridge • Robert Forsyth Scott
... the tale of what he had seen. When the stricken Pope heard it, he ordered the bed of the river to be dragged foot by foot, with the result that the ill-starred Duke of Gandia was brought up in one of the nets, whereupon the heartless Sanazzaro coined his terrible epigram concerning that successor of Saint Peter, that Fisherman ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... phonology, symphony, antiphony, euphonious, cacophonous, phonetic spelling. It chances that both families are of Greek extraction. Related to the graphs—their cousins in fact—are the grams: telegram, radiogram, cryptogram, anagram, monogram, diagram, logogram, program, epigram, kilogram, ungrammatical. Now a representative of the graphs married into the phone family, and we have graphophone. A representative of the phones married into the graph family, and we have phonograph. A representative ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... common; and his manner of arranging a trite figure in a rich suit of verbiage, only makes its essential commonness and poverty more apparent. His style is not dotted over with any of those shining points, either of imagery or epigram, which illumine works of ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... translated into English, runs: "In a hundred ages of the gods I could not tell you of the glories of Himachal." This every writer on things Himalayan contrives to drag into his composition. Some begin with the quotation, while others reserve it for the last, and make it do duty for the epigram which stylists assure us ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... to listen to it. As she put it later to the red-haired girl and Molly, no unmarried woman could understand it and no married woman would want to, a simple statement which they persisted in treating as an epigram, ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... than the Disease Matthew Prior The Net of Law James Jeffrey Roche Cologne Samuel Taylor Coleridge Epitaph on Charles II John Wilmot Certain Maxims of Hafiz Rudyard Kipling A Baker's Duzzen uv Wise Sawz Edward Rowland Sill Epigram Samuel Taylor Coleridge Epigram Unknown Epigram Richard Garnett Epigram Richard Garnett Epigram Walter Savage Landor Epigram William Erskine Epigram Richard Brinsley Sheridan Epigram Alexander Pope Epigram Samuel Johnson Epigram John Gay Epigram Alexander ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... manifestations. His orders were strict that the servants should never retail ghost stories in our hearing; and he was obeyed by the elder negroes. Mam' Chloe, whatever may have been her reserved rights of private judgment, backed him up dutifully with the epigram:— ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... the favour of Murray, Principal of St. Leonard's College in St. Andrew's. Perhaps he fancied at times that "to-morrow was to be as to-day, and much more abundant;" that thenceforth he might read his folio, and write his epigram, and joke his joke, as a lazy comfortable pluralist, taking his morning stroll out to the corner where poor Wishart had been burned, above the blue sea and the yellow sands, and looking up to the castle tower from whence his enemy Beaton's ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... prepares himself for it; and the result is quite surprising. You will observe one odd custom,—the drinking of sentiments. It is quite extinct with us, but here everybody is expected to be prepared with an epigram ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... my own conception of the work of habit building in education no better than by paraphrasing Klesmer's epigram. To increase in our pupils the capacity to receive discipline; to show them, through concrete example, over and over again, how persistence and effort and concentration bring results that are worth while; to choose from their own childish experiences ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... associated with the idea of satire. Literary display appears never to be aimed at. The plainest phrases, the homeliest illustrations, the most everyday topics—if they come in the way—are made use of for the purpose of insinuating or enforcing some useful truth. Point and epigram are the last things thought of; and therefore it is that Pope's translations, admirable as in themselves they are, fail to give an idea of the lightness of touch, the shifting lights and shades, the carelessness alternating with force, the artless natural manner, which distinguish ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... luring his thoughts astray, being, as he was, fonder of music than of work. As a matter of fact, it was in this little restaurant that he winnowed the day's ideas, revamped scenes, trimmed the rough edges of his climaxes, revised this epigram or rejected this or that line; all on the backs of envelopes and on the margins of newspapers. In his den at his bachelor apartments, he worked; but here he dreamed, usually behind the soothing, opalescent veil of ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... and even a ridiculous spectacle, the men who had prided themselves on their common sense and reasonableness, whose literature had sparkled with wit and epigram, blubbering and crying like great children; but whatever we think of it, that is what happened. The first artist of the new type was a Frenchman, Marivaux, and his Vie de Marianne is a study of a young ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... the kind of thought. A witty saying, for example, will not make a sonnet; in French or Italian it belongs to the domain of epigram." ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... his engagement to Miss Broadhurst. It was singular that this was the name of the heroine in Miss Edgeworth's Absentee, who selected from her lovers the one who united worth and wit, in reminiscence of an epigram of ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... the artistry of the dainties and devices Jack Dobson and I were so fond of. And if I did not soon learn to do something well, even were it only how to farm my five hundred acres to a profit, Kate's cooking would really require the miraculous aid suggested in her unintentional and, to me, biting epigram. I put the book down, and gave over the hunt for my Virgil. It would probably be useless in any case, since Kate had a cunning all her own, and had surely bestowed it far beyond any searching of mine. I contented myself with a fair reprisal, stowing a stray ribbon of hers ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... and charm cannot do his arrogance and his effrontery assuredly will not do. And yet I said that this book gave me a wholesome shock. Far from deteriorating, Mr. Chesterton is improving. In spite of the awful tediousness of his mannerism of antithetical epigram, he does occasionally write finer epigrams than ever. His imagination is stronger, his fancy more delicate, and his sense of beauty widened. There are things in this book that really are very excellent indeed; things that, if they die, will die hard. For example, the essay: "In Topsy Turvy Land." ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... small joking and weak epigram I would also caution you to beware; they will have no success in the quarter to which you are going, and they will only damage other qualities which you might possibly ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... by he resumed his magazine with the pleased air of a man who has delivered himself of a brilliant epigram; it showed in his ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... to this spirit of blindness was the remark of the Greek to his slave during a terrible storm at sea. Seeing the latter weeping, he exclaimed, 'Why are you so troubled—I give you your freedom?' And allied to it is the well-known epigram: ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Maecenas, as the laureate said of his for the 'poet of the happy Tityrus,' 'I that loved thee since my day began.' It has been suggested that he owed to a clever farce-comedy of the early eighties the caption of the widely-read column of journalistic epigram and persiflage, which he filled with machine-like regularity and the versatility of the brightest French journalism for ten years. I prefer to think that he took it, or his cue for it, from a line of Dr. Phillips Francis's translation ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... in a hotel in Manchester, where he had served a friend of mine, to whom he now expressed his opinion on the folly of the war, and the criminality of his war lords, and things in general. Among these last he uttered an epigram which I remember for its brutal simplicity. It was when a staff-officer of ours, rather the worse for wine, had been making a scene with the head waiter, bullying him in ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... was Master of the Temple, the sees of Canterbury and London were vacant about the same time (1748); this occasioned an epigram ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... dares meddle with them now: the stately Times itself is alone sufficiently above suspicion to act as your chaperone; and even the Times must sometimes thank its stars that new plays are not produced every day, since after each such event its gravity is compromised, its platitude turned to epigram, its portentousness to wit, its propriety to elegance, and even its decorum into naughtiness by criticisms which the traditions of the paper do not allow you to sign at the end, but which you take care to sign with the most extravagant flourishes ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... deaf persons who have acquired fame in literature and the arts have been Dibil Alkoffay, an Arabian poet of the eighth century; the tactician, Folard; the German poet, Engelshall; Le Sage; La Condamine, who composed an epigram on his own infirmity; and Beethoven, the famous musician. Fernandez, a Spanish painter of the sixteenth century, was ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... as far as she could do so, views diametrically opposed to her own. So witty and so gracious was she, so much herself with this stranger, with whom she felt completely at ease, because she felt sure that they should never meet again, that, after some delicious epigram ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... "D'you know, Katharine, that ridiculous goose came to tea with me? Oh, how I wanted you! He tried to make epigrams all the time, and I got so nervous, expecting them, you know, that I spilt the tea—and he made an epigram about that!" ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... Manchester-by-the-Sea the day before to dine with the Curtises. Their truly romantic and lovely place had left a pleasant picture in his mind. Coming away by the train, he passed in Chelsea a new soldiers' monument which suggested an epigram to him that he said, laughingly, would suit any of the thousand of such monuments to be seen about the country. He began somewhat ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... luxurious limousine, "I don't see why somebody, without your cognizance, shouldn't call Mr. Finn the spoiled minion of the Almighty's ante-chamber. That's a devilish good catch-phrase," he added, starting forward in the joy of his newborn epigram: "Devilish good. 'The spoiled minion of the Almighty's ante-chamber.' It'll ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... be wondered at that Lincoln's single term in the House of Representatives at Washington added practically nothing to his reputation. He did not attempt to shine forth in debate by either a stinging retort or a witty epigram, or by a sudden burst of inspired eloquence. On the contrary, he took up his task as a quiet but earnest and patient apprentice in the great workshop of national legislation, and performed his share of duty with industry and intelligence, as well as with a ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... two hours and forty minutes. Avoiding flights of eloquence that were wont to entrance Gladstone's audience on Budget nights, resisting temptation to epigram that beset Mr. Chancellor Lowe, was content with plain business statement. The massive figures dealt with, the millions lightly scattered there and sedulously picked up here, left some passages obscure. Son Austen well advised in reserving criticism ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... river-water through their dining-rooms, so that the fish swam under the table, and it "was only necessary to stoop and pick them out the moment before eating them; and as they were often cooked on the table, their perfect freshness was thus insured. Martial (Lib. X., Epigram. XXX., vv. 16-25) alludes to this custom, as well as to the culture and taming of fish in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... better that he should take her away than that she should go away with a manager who would rob and beat her. But, if he were to take her away, he would be tied to her; it would be like marrying her. Far better stick to married women, and he remembered his epigram of last night. It was at Lady. Ascott's dinner-party, the conversation had turned on marriage, and its necessity had been questioned. "But, of course, marriage is necessary," he had answered. "You can't have husbands without ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... Fellow of his College to sit down in his presence. He kept his seat himself, and let the Queen's Ambassador stand. Such was the temper, not of a Vice-Chancellor, but of a simple Master of a College. I remember, by the way, an extempore epigram of Matt's on the reception he had there met with. We did not reckon in those days that he had a very happy turn for an epigram; but the occasion was tempting; and he struck it off as he was walking from St. John's College to the Rose, where we dined together. ...
— St. John's College, Cambridge • Robert Forsyth Scott
... the swifter current of affairs had also produced a keener or more active turn of mind, so that it was necessary not only to be short, but also pithy. It was not necessary to be humorous, but it was essential to be concise and interesting, and thus Martial gave to the epigram that character for point which it ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... in the tail of Lebrun's epigram struck home. Sieyes' acceptance of Crosne was, in fact, his acceptance of notice to quit public affairs, in which he had always moved with philosophic disdain. He lived on to the year 1836 in dignified ease, surveying with Olympian calm the storms ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... them occur in other documents such as the "Contest of Homer and Hesiod", or are quoted by various ancient authors. These poetic fragments clearly antedate the "Life" itself, which seems to have been so written round them as to supply appropriate occasions for their composition. Epigram iii on Midas of Larissa was otherwise attributed to Cleobulus of Lindus, one of the Seven Sages; the address to Glaucus (xi) is purely Hesiodic; xiii, according to MM. Croiset, is a fragment from a gnomic poem. Epigram xiv is a curious poem ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... even humor when it had a touch of cynical flavor. Wit he enjoyed, but did not produce. The turn of his mind was not to brevity and point and condensation. He sometimes struck off a telling phrase, but never polished an epigram. His conversation was luminous rather than sparkling; you were interested and instructed while you listened, but the words ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... the laurels which he had relinquished seized by a younger champion, and the daring, yet justified confidence of Grattan in his own admirable powers to win and wear them. Flood, in the bitterest pungency of political epigram, charged Grattan with having sold himself to the people, and then sold the people to the minister for prompt payment. (A vote of L50,000 had been passed to purchase an estate for Grattan.) Grattan retorted, that "Flood, after having sold himself to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... eyes were full of inconsiderate curiosity; their voices ranged above the low murmur which gives inimitable piquancy to the conversations of a ball-room; above all, they had none of that composed impertinence which contains the germs of epigram, nor the tranquil attitude which characterizes those who are accustomed to maintain empire over themselves. Thus Madame Rabourdin, Madame Jules, and Mademoiselle de Fontaine, who had expected much amusement from the ball of their perfumer, were detached ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... me free to prefer her in her less serious moments. Here she is irresistible with that delicate humour of hers that is always in the picture and never has to resort to the device of manufactured epigram. There is true artistry in her lightest touch. Her people are not galvanised puppets; they simply draw their breath and there they are. And she has the particular quality of charm that makes you yield your heart to her, even when your head ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 13, 1917 • Various
... that the city of Aberdeen has presented Dr Johnson with the freedom of that place, for he has sold his freedom on this side of the Tweed for a pension.' The definition of oats in the Dictionary is brought up against its author, and Bozzy is also attacked in a doggerel epigram on his Corsican Tour and his system of spelling. But the doctor easily maintained his conversational supremacy over his academic hosts, who 'started not a single mawkin ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... This last epigram was not inappropriate to an invalid about to begin the fifth act in a roystering night's adventure. And ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... over) I feel frightfully annoyed with myself for not getting to the point more quickly; but I had not enough leisure to be quick. There are several maddening cases in which I took two or three pages in attempting to describe an attitude of which the essence could be expressed in an epigram; only there was no time for epigrams. I do not repent of one shade of opinion here expressed; but I feel that they might have been expressed so much more briefly and precisely. For instance, these pages contain ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... military, literary, or scientific. Bayard Taylor said, "He lifted the 'occasional' into the 'classic'," and the phrase happily expresses the truth. The vivacious character of his nature readily lends itself to work of this sort, and though the printed page gives the reader the sparkling epigram and the graceful lines, clear-cut always and full of soul, the pleasure is not quite the same as seeing and hearing him recite his own poems, in the company of congenial friends. His songs are full of sunshine and heart, and his literary manner wins by its simplicity ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... current coin, or to decoration because it is "the thing." And—as to humour: though nothing is more precious than the genuine topsy-turvy feeling, nothing is more pitifully unhumorous than the dragged-in epigram or dismal knockabout, which has no connection with the persons or philosophy of ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... slenderness. Who read for me the sonnet swelling loudly Up to its climax and then dying proudly? Who found for me the grandeur of the ode, Growing, like Atlas, stronger from its load? Who let me taste that more than cordial dram, The sharp, the rapier-pointed epigram? Shew'd me that epic was of all the king, Round, vast, and spanning all like Saturn's ring? You too upheld the veil from Clio's beauty, And pointed out the patriot's stern duty; The might of Alfred, and the shaft of Tell; The hand of Brutus, that ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... it is ever change of service. Already one paragraph, and another, as we learned afterwards from a gentleman at the Treasury, had begun to be marked at that office, with a view of its being submitted at least to the attention of the proper Law Officers—when an unlucky, or rather lucky epigram from our pen, aimed at Sir J——s M——h, who was on the eve of departing for India to reap the fruits of his apostacy, as F. pronounced it, (it is hardly worth particularising), happening to offend the nice ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... all so abnormally normal," retorted Peter—which impressed me as being both clever and true. And when Lady Allie, worrying over that epigram, became as self-immured as a Belgian milk-dog, Peter cocked an eye at me as a robin cocks an eye at a fish-worm, and I had the audacity to murmur across the table at him, "Lady Barbarina." Whereupon he said back, without batting an eye: "Yes, ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... spontaneous and unbidden, but that they were carved, so to speak, with disproportionate labour by a potent man of letters whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is for these reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity and emotion which we usually associate with lyrical poetry. There are no such epitaphs as Ben Jonson's, witness the charming ones on his own children, ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... ameliorating the world, and leaving each other in peace, the millennium would be within reasonable distance. I heard a U.F. say to a Wee Free: "Donald, you'll no' gang to Heaven, because I'm bad." The sentence is good enough for an epigram. Unfortunately, too many of our sectaries think it the prime virtue of their faith to run ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... was overwhelmed with intellectual emotions when I saw that answer to my question; the question of why the garden did not belong to the gardener. No better epigram could be put in reply than simply putting the Spade Guinea beside the Spade. This was the only underground seed that I could understand. Only by having a little more of that dull, battered yellow substance could I manage to be idle while he was active. I am not altogether idle myself; but the ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... up Crime and Punishment as "Gaboriau with psychological sauce." He afterwards apologized for the epigram, but he insisted that all the same there is a certain amount of truth in it. ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... groaning under the oppression of these men. We would rather die than continue to endure it." On his return to Apia, he made haste to communicate his impressions to Brandeis. Brandeis replied in an epigram: "Where there has been anarchy in a country, there must be oppression for a time." But unfortunately the terms of the epigram may be reversed; and personal supervision would have been more in season ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as elusive as the point of a half-formed epigram, and at the end of the five minutes he ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... a few are born booted and spurred to ride, and that the many are born saddled and bridled to be ridden. The republican theory is that "Everybody is cleverer than anybody," to quote the epigram attributed to Talleyrand; and that government, in Lincoln's phrase, should be "of the people, by the people, and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... and made an end when he had enough. The connection or relation between his thoughts is always frail and often invisible; some compare it with the thread which holds the pearls of a necklace together; others quote with a smile the epigram of Goldwin Smith, who said that he found an Emersonian essay about as coherent as a bag of marbles. And that suggests a fair criticism of all Emerson's prose; namely, that it is a series of expressions excellent in themselves but having so little logical sequence that a paragraph from one essay ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... Susan supervised, scattered Train's rhymes and epigrams far and wide and carried a notice that the proceeds of all meetings would be turned over to the woman's rights cause. Susan also arranged for the printing of Train's widely distributed pamphlet, The Great Epigram Campaign of Kansas, with this jingle, so uncomplimentary to the eastern abolitionists, ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... the insolence of the noblesse, and the only compensation for the venality of the judges, was found in a recourse to the printer. A marquis was made to imitate the manners of a gentleman by fear of an epigram; a defeated party in a lawsuit consoled himself by satirizing the court; and from Voltaire down to Palissot, all the people who could write, and could borrow ink and paper, had pen in hand, ready to appeal from prejudiced ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... lauded by Erasmus as a very paragon, because "he got more compliance from his wife by jokes and blandishments than most husbands by imperious harshness." One of these jokes, a customary one, was that his wife was neither pretty nor young; one of the "blandishments," I suppose, was an epigram by Sir Thomas to the effect that though a wife was a heavy burden she might be useful if she would die and leave her husband money. In Utopia, he assures ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... side of severity, he was one of those instances in which we find acrimonious feeling associated with physical infirmity. "The Dunciad" is the principal example of this, but we have many others—such as the epigram: ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... May 28.-Ranelagh. Vauxhall. Mrs. Clive. "Miss Lucy in town." Garrick at Goodman's Fields: "a very good mimic; but nothing wonderful in his acting." Mrs. Bracegirdle. meeting at the Fountain. The Indemnity Bill flung out by the Lords. Epigram on Pulteney. Committee to examine the public accounts. Epigram on the Indemnity Bill. Kent ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... liberty, and went to London, where he speedily gathered a large and influential congregation, as much by the somewhat excessive fervour of his piety as by the vivacious illustrations which he frequently employed in his sermons. He was a master of epigram, and theologically inclined to Calvinism. The Sacheverell mob gutted his chapel in 1710, but the government repaired the building. Besides preaching, he gave instruction to private pupils, of whom the most distinguished was Henry St ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... EPIGRAM, n. A short, sharp saying in prose or verse, frequently characterize by acidity or acerbity and sometimes by wisdom. Following are some of the more notable epigrams of the learned and ingenious ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... The first quality which will strike the reader will be the author's opulence of expression and profusion of wit. Analogies with him are as cheap as commonplaces are to other men. He has no hesitation in announcing his analysis in a witticism, and condensing a principle into an epigram. His page often blazes and burns with wit. South, Congreve, and Sheridan are hardly richer in the precious article. In Mr. Hudson, also, the quality has an individual character, and is the racier from its genuineness ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... friendly epigram; but Arthur, who made one of the group, maintained a frigid imperturbability in his quality of an English gentleman who takes gravity for the very basis of his being. D'Aiglemont's eccentric confidence, no doubt, had kindled some kind of hope in Arthur, for he stood patiently ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... To illustrate the statue of Hercules, Mr. Harris quotes a Greek epigram, and engraves a beautiful gem, which does not, however, copy the attitude of the statue: in the latter, Hercules had not his club, and his right leg and arm ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... song neither, it's a sort of an epigram, or rather an epigrammatic sonnet; I don't know what to call it, but it's satire. ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... ancien regime a government without discussion: discussion abounded there, only, by reason of the bad form of the government, it was never sure with ease and certainty to affect political action. The despotism 'tempered by epigram,' was a government which permitted argument of licentious freedom within changing limits, and which was ruled by that argument spasmodically and practically, though not ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... what Rapin must have had in mind when he said that a man ought to be content if he succeeded in writing one really good epigram. ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... discovered that one could use the telephone on Sunday; I did not expect it to be cut off, but I expected it to buzz more than on ordinary days, to the advancement of our national religion. Through this instrument, in fewer words than usual, and with a comparative economy of epigram, I ordered a taxi-cab to take me to the railway station. I have not a word to say in general either against telephones or taxi-cabs; they seem to me two of the purest and most poetic of the creations of modern ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... one's criticism of them, "De l'esprit, encore de l'esprit, et toujours de l'esprit—trop d'esprit!" [10] No doubt, La Rochefoucauld has done his own reputation wrong by the bluster of his scepticism and also by the fact that he sometimes wraps his thoughts up in such a blaze of epigram that we are disconcerted to find, when we analyze them, that they are commonplaces. Contemporaries seemed to have smiled at the excessive subtlety into which their long conversations led Mme de La Fayette and her sublime companion. ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... howled, and vanished—the fat bishop waddled back under his brass plate—the dean flounced down into his family vault—and the canon Schidnischmidt, who was making a joke, as usual, on the bishop, was obliged to stop at the very point of his epigram, and to disappear into the void whence ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... brave and have pointed finger-nails. But still, in the back of our mind, the debilitating influence of fall fever was at work. We said to ourself, without the slightest thought of printing it (for it seemed to put us in a false light), that the one triumphant and unanswerable epigram of mankind, the grandest and most resolute utterance in the face of implacable ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... ruined palace of the Stuarts, broke out in some unloyal lines which he had the indiscretion to write with a diamond on the window of a public inn. At Carron, where he was refused a sight of the magnificent foundry, he avenged himself in epigram. At Inverary he resented some real or imaginary neglect on the part of his Grace of Argyll, by a stinging lampoon; nor can he be said to have fairly regained his serenity of temper, till he danced his wrath away with ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... fully satisfied the anti-scientific party, but as a rule their attacks upon him took the form not so much of abuse as of humorous disparagement. An epigram by Shuttleworth, afterward Bishop of Chichester, in imitation of Pope's famous lines ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... representative of his craft Eugene discovered a man who understood that his was a sort of paternal function for young men at their entrance into life, who regarded himself as a stepping-stone between a young man's present and future. And Rastignac in gratitude made the man's fortune by an epigram of a kind in which he excelled at a later period of ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... signers—and his residence in France as Embassador of the United Colonies, belong to the political history of the country; to the history of American science belong his celebrated experiments in electricity, and his benefits to mankind in both of these departments were aptly summed up in the famous epigram of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... represented by the rhymes. It is not absurd to speak of the natural "size" of poetic thoughts. Pope, for instance, often works with ideas of couplet size, just as Martial sometimes amused himself with ideas of a still smaller epigram size, or Omar Khayyam with thoughts and fancies that came in quatrain sizes. Many sonnets fail of effectiveness because the contained thought is too scanty or too full to receive adequate expression in the fourteen lines demanded by the traditional sonnet form. They are sometimes ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... will thus be acting an epigram for George of England," said Voltaire, laughing. "Two of his noblest rebels will be cementing the friendship of France and Prussia. Lord Tyrconnel, the Irishman, is ambassador from France to Prussia, and my Lord Marshal Keith is to be ambassador ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... and, on other subjects, inclined to be garrulous; for the world, viewed through a slight haze, of vinous origin, seemed a pleasant place, and inspired a kindly desire to say diverting things about the world's contents. He knew the Marquis to be patient, and even stolid, under a fusillade of epigram and paradox; in short, de Puysange knew the hour and the antagonist for midnight talk to be at hand. And a saturnalia of phrases whirled in his ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... cherished of an epic on King Arthur, and assured Manso that Britain was not wholly barbarous, for the Druids were really very considerable poets. He is silent on Chaucer and Shakespeare. Manso requited the eulogium with an epigram and two richly-wrought cups, and told Milton that he would have shown him more observance still if he could have abstained from religious controversy. Milton had not acted on Sir Henry Wootton's advice to him, ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... tongues, and the din and smithery of school-learning. Does he know anything more of poetry? He knows the number of feet in a verse, and of acts in a play; but of the soul or spirit he knows nothing. He can turn a Greek ode into English, or a Latin epigram into Greek verse; but whether either is worth the trouble he leaves to the critics. Does he understand 'the act and practique part of life' better than 'the theorique'? No. He knows no liberal or mechanic art, no trade or occupation, no game of ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... brother, and that man is Rogers.' Not that I would choose to be obliged to a man who hated me; but it is an illustration of the fact that if Rogers is bitter in his words, which we all know he is, he is always benevolent and generous in his deeds. He makes an epigram on a man, and gives him a thousand pounds; and the deed is the truer expression of his own nature. An uncommon development of character, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... the 27th March, 1625, and left his successor no very pleasant prospects in any part of his kingdom. He was pronounced by Sully to be "the wisest fool in Europe;" Henry IV. styled him "Captain of Arts and Clerk of Arms;" and a favourite epigram of ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... given to a man who is competent for the post. Generally the Minister of Education is a lawyer; the Minister of Commerce, an author; the War Minister, a doctor; the Minister for the Navy, a journalist. Beaumarchais' epigram "The post required a mathematician—it was given to a dancing master!" strikes the keynote much more of a democracy ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... with what was employed up to recent years was settled; Henning drew his ill-composed cartoon of "Parliamentary Candidates under Different Heads," roughly done, but not ill-cut; and Mark Lemon, Henry Mayhew, Henry Grattan, Joseph Allen, F. G. Tomlins, Gilbert a Beckett, and W. H. Wills (the biting epigram "To the Black-balled of the United Service Club," i.e. Lord Cardigan, was his), all contributed to the first number. It is an axiom of newspaper conductors that "the first number is always the worst number," and Punch did nothing to disprove the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... is concerned with Dr. Johnson's position apart from all this fund of anecdote, and this brilliant collection of unforgettable epigram in Boswell and elsewhere. As a writer, many will tell you, Dr. Johnson is dead. The thing is absurd on the face of it. There is room for some disagreement as to his position as a poet. On that question of poetry unanimity is ever hard to ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... stirring out on horseback. Read Spence's Anecdotes. Pope a fine fellow—always thought him so. Corrected blunders in nine apophthegms of Bacon—all historical—and read Mitford's Greece. Wrote an epigram. Turned to a passage in Guinguene—ditto in Lord Holland's Lope de Vega. Wrote a note on ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... thought when divested of that elegance of expression and harmony of numbers with which it is cloathed. If the merit of the composition lies in a point of wit, it may strike at first; but the mind anticipates the thought in the second perusal, and is no longer affected by it. When I read an epigram of Martial, the first line recalls the whole; and I have no pleasure in repeating to myself what I know already. But each line, each word in Catullus has its merit; and I am never tired with the perusal of him. It is sufficient to rim over Cowley once; ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... Fanny Mouchard. Countess Fanny, a friend of Dorat and Cubires, took much interest in literature and wrote many novels. She was a blue-stocking, and it was about her that Lebrun wrote the malicious epigram:— ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... there is another Theocritus, the son of Praxagoras and Philinna (see Epigram XXIII), or as some say of Simichus. (This is plainly derived from the assumed name Simichidas in Idyl VII.) He was a Syracusan, or, as others say, a Coan settled in Syracuse. He wrote the so-called Bucolics in the Dorian dialect. Some attribute to him the following ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... constructed, and a Helicon fountain upon it playing into a basin with four jets of Rhenish wine. On the top of the mountain sat Apollo with Calliope at his feet, and on either side the remaining Muses, holding lutes or harps, and singing each of them some "posy" or epigram in praise of the queen, which was presented, after it had been sung, written ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... the East, where I found paying audiences in the fall or autumn of the year. These lectures have been delivered many times in Australia; and, as the result of the Browning lecture given in the Unitarian Schoolroom in Wakefield street, Adelaide, I received from the pen of Mr. J. B. Mather a clever epigram. The room was large and sparsely filled, and to the modest back seat taken by my friend my voice scarcely penetrated. So he amused himself ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... of Achilles Tatius, with all its blemishes and defects, appears to have been highly popular among the Greeks of the lower empire. An epigram is still extant, attributed to the Emperor Leo, the philosopher,[8] in which it is landed as an example of chaste and faithful love: and it was esteemed as a model of romantic composition from the elegance of its style and diction, in which Heretius ranks the author above Heliodorus, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... is the source of all our actions, and humanity, etc. We must please those who have humane and tender feelings. That epigram about two one-eyed people is worthless,[15] for it does not console them, and only gives a point to the author's glory. All that is only for the sake of the author is worthless. Ambitiosa ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... 'though Lord Bolingbroke had no idea of wit, his satire was keener than any one's. Lord Chesterfield, on the other hand, would have a great deal of wit in them; but, in every page you see he intended to be witty: every paragraph would be an epigram. Polish, he declared, would be his bane;' and Lord Hervey was ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... Romeo to his new discovered beauty elicited universal applause, led by the "Virgin Queen," who imagined, no doubt, that his tribute to beauty was intended for herself. She never lost an opportunity to appropriate anything that came her way. An epigram of ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... day, to James Spedding the friend of Tennyson, he has not lacked eminent eulogists, who look up to him as not only the greatest and wisest, but as among the noblest and most worthy of mankind: while the famous epigram of Pope, expanded by Macaulay into a stately and eloquent essay, has impressed on the popular mind the lowest estimate of his moral nature; and even such careful scholars as Charles de Remusat and Dean Church, who have devoted ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... in scolding his nurse, dies with a magnificent apothegm on his lips, manufactured by a reporter. Addison gets up a tableau and utters an admirable sentiment,—or somebody makes the posthumous dying epigram for him. The incoherent babble of green fields is translated into the language of stately sentiment. One would think, all that dying men had to do was to say the prettiest thing they could,—to make their rhetorical point,—and then bow themselves politely ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Lloyd George, his supplanter, he has lost the earnestness which brought him to the seats of power. A domestic circle, brilliant with the modern spirit and much occupied in sharpening the wits with epigram and audacity, has proved too much for his original stoicism. He has found recreation in the modern spirit. After the day's work there has been nothing so diverting for him as the society of young people; chatter rather than conversation has been as it were prescribed for him, and when ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... double rows of arches, where the Brothers might not speak; benignant cedars blessing the turf with extended hands; fragrant limes waving their delicate leaves; an old rose garden with fantastic beds; a long yew walk where the Brothers might meditatively pace—turning, perhaps, an epigram, regretting, perhaps, the world. Nothing now remains of the Refectory, where, of old, forty monks fed like one, except the walls. It once had a noble roof of Irish oak, but that was taken to Cowdray and perished ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... half reverie. "Yes, we were distinct," said she; "but I must own, children, we were slow. Once, in the midst of a beautiful tirade, my lover went to sleep, and fell against me. A mighty pretty epigram, twenty lines, was writ on't by one of my gallants. Have ye as many ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... bully night,' says I, by way of epigram, unhooking the pair of bouncers. "'You wouldn't like me to take ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... of rendering yourself in prose, then you necessarily shredded your prose into very fine paragraphs of a sentence each, or of a very few words, or even of one word. I believe this fashion prevailed till very lately with some of the dramatic critics, who thought that it gave a quality of epigram to the style; and I suppose it was borrowed from the more spasmodic moments of Victor Hugo by the editor of the Press. He brought it back with him when he came home from one of those sojourns in Paris which possess one of the French accent rather than the French language; I long desired to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... am expressing myself with terrible obscurity—some of you, I know, are groaning over the logic-chopping. Be a pluralist or be a monist, you say, for heaven's sake, no matter which, so long as you stop arguing. It reminds one of Chesterton's epigram that the only thing that ever drives human beings insane is logic. But whether I be sane or insane, you cannot fail, even tho you be transcendentalists yourselves, to recognize to some degree by my trouble the difficulties that beset monistic idealism. What ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... erudition on the company. Salvator answered him in his own style, and having overturned all his arguments in favor of antiquity with more learning than they had been supported, ended with an impromptu epigram, in his usual way, which brought the laugher's on ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... Prospect of some Hill, Cave, Rock, or Fountain; which but for the interruption of other trivial Passages, might have made up none of the worst Poetick Landskips," and then he quotes, as a sample of Herrick, a tiresome" epigram," in the poet's worst style. This is not delicate or acute criticism, as we judge nowadays; but I would give a good deal to meet Winstanley at a coffee-house, and go through the Hesperides with him ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... present to the mind of critics who have called for plain, familiar, and concrete diction, as if that alone could claim to be simple; who have demanded a style unadorned by the artifices of involution, cadence, imagery, and epigram, as if Simplicity were incompatible with these; and have praised meagreness, mistaking it for Simplicity. Saxon words are words which in their homeliness have deep-seated power, and in some places they are the simplest because the most powerful words ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... removed to Orchomenos." An unhappy ending for the instructor of Perses! But it may not be true. To be sure, these poets—I can only say that to me it sounds improbable, and so, I take it, it sounded to Alkaeus of Messene, who wrote this epigram upon his dust: ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... having stolen the plot from him, and brought out a "Joueur" of his own. Regnard insisted that Dufresny was the pirate. The public decided in favor of Regnard. Dufresny's play was hopelessly damned, and no appeal ever taken from the first sentence. The verdict of the bel-esprits was recorded in an epigram, which ended thus:— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... fortunate in his attachments. La Valiere, the passion of Louis XIV., had an unsightly defect. The Princess of Eboli, the mistress of Philip II. of Spain, and Maugiron, the minion of Henry III. of France, had each of them lost an eye; and the famous Latin epigram was written upon them, which has, I believe, been either translated or ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... people is to a large extent but the crystallization of this persistent interest. Old saws and proverbs of every people transmit from generation to generation shrewd generalizations upon human behavior. In joke and in epigram, in caricature and in burlesque, in farce and in comedy, men of all races and times have enjoyed with keen relish the humor of the contrast between the conventional and the natural motives in behavior. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... England is for Epigram, Turns of Wit, and forced Conceits, which have no manner of Influence, either for the bettering or enlarging the Mind of him who reads them, and have been carefully avoided by the greatest Writers, both among the Ancients and Moderns. I have endeavoured in several of my Speculations ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
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