"Critic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had been wont to shine with the double radiance of artist and critic. Here he had talked pictures with the fashionable painters of the day; music with men and women of resonant name. The accomplished hostess was ever ready with that smile she bestowed only upon a few favourites, and her daughter—well, he had misunderstood, and ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... holiday with mirth and zest Lincoln's companions take their simple cheer. These are the scenes to be enacted here, Shown to you straightway in a simple guise. Youthful the scenes that we shall here devise On which the beads of history are strung. Remember that our players, too, are young. All critic-knowledge, then, behind you leave, And in the spirit of the day receive What we would give, and let there come to you The Joy of Youth, with purpose high ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... but full of reminiscences of the epic and tragic poets on the one hand, and of Plato on the other,[47] it gives a happy blending of prose and poetry, which admirably fits the devotional philosophy that forms its subject. And what was said of Plato by a Greek critic applies equally well to Philo: "He rises at times above the spirit of prose in such a way that he appears to be instinct, not with human understanding, but with a Divine oracle." From the study of literature ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... photograph you are working from, and preserve the same contrasts between the lights and shadows in order to produce satisfactory results. The best way of examining your work is by the use of a mirror. To the student the mirror is his best critic. It is before this silent observer that he submits his work with the certainty of receiving an honest criticism. At every step of your progress look at your work in a good mirror, as here it is changed about, the left ...
— Crayon Portraiture • Jerome A. Barhydt
... I thought myself the Prince of Art, By Phoebus, and the Muses set apart, To smite the critic with his own complaint, And teach the world the proper way to paint. But lo, a young maid trips out of a wood, And what ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... generosity, honesty, truth-speaking; their commonest faults were violence, combativeness, lax ways in business, intemperance, narrowness of mind. They hated foreigners and Indians, and were ready to fight any one who behaved like an enemy or a critic; they held in honor women, their country, and brave men. Shut off from the greater world to the eastward, and having few pleasures such as most Americans may now enjoy, they filled their leisure hours with such sports ...
— Andrew Jackson • William Garrott Brown
... "you must make the most of the time. The Yankees may not give us another chance. Across yonder, where you see that dim light trying to shine through the dirty window, Winthrop is printing his paper, which comes out this morning. As he is a critic of the Government, I suggest that we go over and see ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... higher level. Genius may be an orphan and a foundling, but taste is the child of taste. Genius is the crude, creative force; but the gentle sense of appreciation, neither creative nor crude, but receptive, is most often acquired at home and in childhood. A full-grown man may learn to be a judge and a critic, but he cannot learn to have taste after he is once a man. Taste belongs to education rather than to instruction, and it is the mother that educates, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... edits an article written by an anonymous critic should be held as immediately responsible for it as if he had written it himself; just as one holds a manager responsible for bad work done by his workmen. In this way the fellow would be treated as he deserves to be—namely, without ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... enthusiasm, wrote eulogistic articles about her in the papers that were copied far and wide. Indeed, she could thank him for all the success she had had. He was at the theatre every night, watching her from the front, taking the liveliest interest in her success, and promoting it in every possible way. A critic who ventured to find fault he threatened to horsewhip; he put her portrait in the papers and printed interesting stories concerning her that had only his imagination for foundation. He transacted business for her with the local manager, and acted in her behalf ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... justice upon the faults of this poet is easy for any sciolist: to do justice to his merits is less easy for the most competent scholar and the most appreciative critic. In despite of his rare occasional spurts or outbreaks of self-assertion or of satire, he seems to stand before us a man of gentle, modest, shiftless, and careless nature, irritable and placable, eager and unsteady, full of excitable kindliness and ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Professor now but a Pontifical Doctor,—for you might have inscribed upon him, as on a painting, Pontia fecit. [We see now the reason for keeping to the form 'Pontia.'] Doctor? Nay rather a codex in which his vengeful critic had scraped her adverse comments with a new stilus. You felt then, I think, Ulac's Tables of Tangents and Secants, to a radius of I know not how many painful ciphers, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... any need to say that I was accused of having got some one else to make this group for me? I sent a summons to one critic. He was no other than Jules Claretie, who had declared that this work, which was very interesting, could not have been done by me. Jules Claretie apologised very politely, and that was the end ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... Lacedaemonian commissioners conferred with Tissaphernes, who had come to meet them, upon the points which did not satisfy them in the past transactions, and upon the best and mutually most advantageous manner of conducting the war in future. The severest critic of the present proceedings was Lichas, who said that neither of the treaties could stand, neither that of Chalcideus, nor that of Therimenes; it being monstrous that the King should at this date pretend to the possession of all the country formerly ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... such as those with which, in days when there existed for me no critic less gentle than yourself, I brought to you my childish manuscripts; feelings only such as those which have, in later years, associated with your heart all that has moved or occupied my own,—lead me once ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... own people. The motto of to-day is, 'Let those now work who never worked before, And those who always worked now work the more.' Before the War we had a great national reputation for idleness—in this island, at least. I remember a friendly critic from Canada who, some five or six years ago, expressed to me, with much disquiet, his opinion that there was something very far wrong with the old country; that we had gone soft. As for our German critics, ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... through a perfumed and heavily-screened studio. He sang loudly (sometimes even too loudly) of the joy of living and the courage of the "unconquerable soul." He was a powerful influence not only as a poet but as a critic and editor. In the latter capacity he gathered about him such men as Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, W. B. Yeats, T. E. Brown, J. M. Barrie. None of these men were his disciples, but none of them came into contact with him without being influenced in some way ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... story is generally, but not always, read in silence; at Bethnal Green it is read aloud. You will perhaps observe the importance of this difference. It is because at the Royal Academy everybody has the feeling that he is present in the character of a critic, and must therefore affect, at least, to be considering the workmanship, and passing a judgment on the artist. But at Bethnal Green the visitors feel that they have been invited to be pleased, to wonder, and ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... compliment, it would be almost the same as ask you for another, if I shall make apology in case I have not find the correct idiotism of your language in this letter; so I shall not make none at all—only throw myself at your mercy, like a great critic. ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... Hamlet or Othello was produced? If these circumstances were better known to us, is it to be believed and will it be seriously asserted that our admiration for one or the other play would be augmented?" In penning this quirk, the eminent critic would seem to have wilfully overlooked the fact that a writer's life may have much or may have little to do with his works. In the case of Shakespeare it was comparatively little—and yet we should be glad to learn more of this little. In the case ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... to be. It can laugh at the phenomenal distinctions on which science is based, for it draws its vital breath from a region which—whether above or below—is at least altogether different from that in which science dwells. A critic, however, who cannot disprove the truth of the metaphysic creed, can at least raise his voice in protest against its disguising itself in 'scientific' plumes. I think that all who have had the patience to follow me thus far will agree that the spencerian 'philosophy' of social and ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... impotent to Bradley, was practically all the savage critic had to offer. Either go back to despotism or go ahead to ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... "To-day. The regular critic is busy with a domestic funeral, his grandmother, or step-mother, or something, and it lay between the devil and me to take his place. Strange to say, the Chief chose me; but he was morose enough to say the old lady shouldn't have died, ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... was the desire of the historical critic for accuracy of fact and portraiture, combined with vivid presentation of life, so fully satisfied. No wonder Browning was not read of old; but it is no wonder, when the new History was made, when ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... different result. Scientific theories seem unworthy of reliance because scientific men entertain for a long time rival doctrines. But in another and a worthier sense than as the words are used in the 'Critic,' when men of science do agree their agreement is wonderful. It is wonderful, worthy of all admiration, because before it has been attained errors long entertained have had to be honestly admitted; because the taunt of inconsistency is not more pleasant to ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... price of the boxes. But the soundness of this analogy we disputed. In the case of the theatre, it cannot be pretended that the inferior situations have any separate attractions, unless the pit may be supposed to have an advantage for the purposes of the critic or the dramatic reporter. But the critic or reporter is a rarity. For most people, the sole benefit is in the price. Now, on the contrary, the outside of the mail had its own incommunicable advantages. These we could not forego. The higher price we would willingly have paid, but ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... added a volume on Poland, by Monica M. Gardner. The more we know of Poland and the Polish people the better our understanding of the causes of the war. ... The book is as good reading as any fiction, and the most austere critic must admit its relevance to the task of 'getting on with ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... a distinct departure in the dramatist's literary progress. As a critic has well observed, it substitutes for situations produced by the mechanism of plot, characters which give rise to situations in accordance with the ordinary operations of human nature. Molire's method—the simple and only true one, ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... frankness, and does not hesitate to say that Gigadibs will consider his conversation with the bishop the greatest honor ever conferred upon him. The poet adds some lines, somewhat apologetic for the bishop, intimating that his arguments were suited to the calibre of his critic, and that with a profounder critic he would have made a more serious defence. Speaking of a review of this poem by Cardinal Wiseman (1801-1865), Browning says in a letter to a friend, printed in , May, 1896: ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... confidently hoped that the prophet would forget this theory, as he had apparently forgotten the many theories which had ere now proposed themselves to his excitable brain, and which he had found unworkable. His practical shrewdness acted as a critic on his visionary notions—never in thought, for he did not seem able to exercise the two phases of his mind at once, but always in practice—and Susannah could not conceive that a new order of marriage would appear feasible, even though it would certainly raise a new barrier around the fold, and ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... work of Kostes Palamas," says Eugene Clement, a French critic, in a recent article on the poet, "presents itself today with an imposing greatness. Without speaking about his early collections, in which already a talent of singular power is revealed, we may say that the four or five ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... to ask you to confer one more literary obligation on me by accepting the dedication of this book, as the earliest acknowledgment which it has been in my power to make of the debt I owe to my critic, to my ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... Critic of the craft, As stage tradition tells; And yet—perhaps 'twill only be The ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... him toppling back among his comrades. They closed on the white man with a yell; a passing group of their compatriots joined the affray; the whole mass surged in around the tall fellow. Harrigan's head went back and his eyes half closed like a critic listening to an ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... are naturally inclined to think it a caricature and an exaggeration; but it is only fair to remember that, since its appearance half a century ago, a great change has come over the temper of American society. The great fault of Mrs. Trollope is, that she is always a critic and never a judge. She looks at everything through the magnifying lens of a microscope. And, again, it must be admitted that she is often vulgar; whatever the want of refinement in American society, ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... to other provinces, we find that England was foremost in machinery, the United States, "the only rival," says a British critic, "from whom we had anything to fear," being feebly represented, as we were in other respects, thanks to certain irregularities in the management of our commissioners sufficiently discussed at the time. The British carpets out-shone ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... called upon for compositions, I coaxed Launa to go with me at the nooning to the shade of the old blacksmith shop, where I proposed that we should write them together. There sentence by sentence I made my little essay, covering one side of my slate, with Launa for inspirer and critic. My subject was the saw-mill, that one I knew best. There was a pricking of ears in the school-room when I named my humble subject, and an elder boy by my side whispered, "Now, give us some sawdust." I prospered this time and won a smile from Launa. Had I helped her at all ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... idle mind, Hides for a moment from the eyes of men; Or lightly opened by a critic wind, Affrightedly reviews ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... born in 1840, and received his musical education in the Conservatory at Milan, where he studied for nine years. In 1866 he became a musical critic for several Italian papers, and about the same time wrote several poems of more than ordinary merit. Both in literature and music his taste was diversified; and he combined the two talents in a remarkable degree in his opera of "Mephistopheles," the only work by which he is known to the ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... have a sort of religion in literature, believing that no author can justly intrude upon the public without feeling that his writings may be of some benefit to mankind, I beg leave to apologize for this little book. I know, no critic can tell me better than I know myself, how much it falls short of what might have been done by an abler pen. Yet it is something—an index, I should say, to something better. The French in America may sometime find a champion. For my own ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... are Saxon!—but this fault of race Fell not on me nor yet, I fear, your grace Of English speech, else had more smoothly run These echoes of Welsh Lyrics, and your son Need not have flinched before the critic's face. Such as they are, from your far Yorkshire home Perchance they may in fancy bid you come, Pondering past memories, to my native land, Once more to see fair Mawddach from the bridge, To mark how Cader rises, ridge on ridge, Or, where Llanaber ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... Sharsper was sitting nearly opposite to her, a real live novelist pecking observations out of life as a hen pecks seeds amidst scenery, and next beyond was a large-headed inattentive fluffy person who was Mr. Keystone the well-known critic. And there was Agatha Alimony under a rustling vast hat of green-black cock's feathers next to Sir Markham Crosby, with whom she had been having an abusive controversy in the Times and to whom quite elaborately she wouldn't speak, and ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... of the Creator cannot be less than the amount thereof manifested in His works is a self-evident proposition, which none will be hardy enough directly to dispute. There is, however, one critic, of great ability and yet greater daring, who appears to doubt whether the wisdom manifested in the universe is anything to speak of. Mr. Lewes' faculty of veneration is, I suspect, but imperfectly developed, since 'the succession ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... with the classics was most extensive and accurate, and by her translations from the Latin her reputation was to a great extent made. Wordsworth and Southey were her intimate friends, and intense admirers of her genius. In a review written by an eminent critic, it was remarked of her that "she was the inheritrix of her father's genius, and almost ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... alluding particularly to writers prominent in the late French Revolution, by a young American scholar, who has recently resided in France. The book, though deficient and sometimes incorrect in details, deserves much praise for its general correctness and accuracy. The author, though by no means a critic of the first class, is altogether above the herd of Grub street hacks who commonly undertake the popularizing of literary history. He is no Winstansley and no Cibber. The range of his reading appears to be extensive. His judgments are ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... falls on Everyman, and the artist who played this part seemed to me, though I am no dramatic critic, to have caught the atmosphere and the spirit of the play. His performance, indeed, was very wonderful from the moment when he offers Death a thousand boons if only the dread summons may be delayed, to that final tense scene, ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... was born in 1866. A poet of great mastery and a refined critic, his thought, is steeped in hellenism and in the most abstruse ...
— The Shield • Various
... amateur, was an extraordinarily clever mimic, acted better than most people who were not on the stage, and could write very entertaining verse with a pungent, sub-acid flavour. But he had no creative power and no perseverance. As a critic of the performances of others he was cruel but discerning, giving no quarter, but giving credit where it was due. He loathed a bad workman more than a criminal, and would rather have crushed an ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... editor was surprised and frightened. Like most cultivated men, he distrusted popularity: like all men who believe in their own individual judgment, he doubted collective wisdom. Yet now that his protegee had been accepted by others, he questioned that judgment and became her critic. It struck him that her sudden outburst was strained; it seemed to him that in this mere contortion of passion the sibyl's robe had become rudely disarranged. He spoke to Hamlin, and even ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... Free the critic from the idea that nature and the ancients are the same and that reason and the laws ascribed to the ancients are identical, and he is ready to look at modern literature with an independent judgment and to see what it is like and what it is worth in and by itself. Release the ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... of the rising generation. The master sees at a glance if a boy be clever, and takes pains with him accordingly. He is not a mere teacher of hexameters and sapphics. His learning embraces all literature, ancient and modern. He is a good writer and a fine critic; admires Wordsworth. He winks at fighting: his boys know how to use their fists; and they are not in the habit of signing post-obits before they are fifteen. Merton School is ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... were subject to strict surveillance; and, if he had taken the trouble to draw up a list of criticisms on his present training, most assuredly it would have been destroyed. Undoubtedly, however, he would have sympathized with the unknown critic in his complaint of the unsuitableness of sumptuous meals to youths who were destined for the hardships of the camp. At Brienne he had been dubbed "the Spartan," an instance of that almost uncanny faculty of schoolboys to dash off in a nickname the salient features of character. The phrase ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... fifteen years of his literary life Poe was connected with various newspapers and magazines in Richmond, Philadelphia and New York. He was faithful, punctual, industrious, thorough. N. P. Willis, who for some time employed Poe as critic and sub-editor on the "Evening Mirror," ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... that his very enemies love the man. His private character is the origin of this sentiment. The people of the North, no less than the people of the South, feel that Lee was truly great; and the harshest critic has been able to find nothing to detract from this view of him. The soldier was great, but the man himself was greater. No one was ever simpler, truer, or more honest. Those who knew him best loved him the most. Reserved and silent, with a bearing of almost austere dignity, he impressed ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... Gandish, at a great age—though he was not older than several industrious Academicans—withdrew from the active exercise of his art and employed his learning and experience as Art Critic of the "Newcome Independent." The following critique appears to show traces of declining mental vigour in ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... fully-developed novel, has been followed by Arthur Pendennis, completed in 1851. His Christmas-book, entitled The Kickleburies on the Rhine, was attacked by a writer in the Times; whereupon Mr Thackeray replied, in a very unmistakable way, in a preface to the second edition of the work. The critic fared very badly in the contest.' The charge made against Mr Thackeray is, that he abuses the characters of the literary class with a view apparently of catering to public prejudice. We believe that any such imputation is entirely unfounded; and that Mr Thackeray's observations on the infirmities ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... a German court, you said it was to be a French story," said the public prosecutor, disposed to play the critic toward the orator who had reduced ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... of libel in its various applications to sedition, obscenity, and blasphemy, could answer for the consequences of producing any play whatsoever as to which the smallest question could arise in the mind of any sane person. I have been a critic and an author in active service for thirty years; and though nothing I have written has ever been prosecuted in England or made the subject of legal proceedings, yet I have never published in my life an ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... these, his strength and weakness, his gifts and deficiencies, are amply shown. Here, then, we may pause, and, without pursuing his literary biography any farther, proceed to set down our estimate of his claims as a writer. Any critic who dips his pen in ink and not in gall would rather praise than blame; therefore we will dispose of the least gracious part of our task first, and begin with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... drab paint and riveted steel rooms of the city-dwelling Pyrrans. Wasn't it true that both ends of the artistic scale were dominated by simplicity? The untutored aborigine made a simple expression of a clear idea, and created beauty. At the other extreme, the sophisticated critic rejected over-elaboration and decoration and sought the truthful clarity of uncluttered art. At which end of the ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... until overcome by numbers, and subjected to treatment which left him insane. His insanity takes the form of harmless delusion, and the absurdity of his ways and talk enables the author to lighten the sombreness without weakening the moral, in a way that ought to win all boys to his side."—The Critic. ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... calmed down; and, its occupation being gone, it naturally gave up the ghost and died. Among other celebrities who now wrote for the newspapers are Porson, the accomplished but bibulous Greek scholar and critic; Tom Campbell, several of whose most beautiful poems first appeared in the columns of The Morning Chronicle, Charles Lamb, Southey, Wordsworth, and Mackintosh. These last five wrote for The Morning Post, and raised it, by their brilliant contributions, from the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... chose, Sound doctrine by example shows; For nothing by these tales is meant, So much as that the bad repent; And by the pattern that is set, Due diligence itself should whet. Wherefore, whatever arch conceit You in our narratives shall meet (If with the critic's ear it take, And for some special purpose make), Aspires by real use to fame, Rather than from an author's name. In fact, with all the care I can, I shall abide by Esop's plan: But if at times I intersperse My own materials in the verse, That sweet variety may please The fancy, ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... passed on. The verbal are by trance mediums, whose utterances appear to be controlled by outside intelligences. The written from automatic writers whose script is produced in the same way. At these words the critic naturally and reasonably shies, with a "What nonsense! How can you control the statement of this medium who is consciously or unconsciously pretending to inspiration?" This is a healthy scepticism, and should animate every experimenter who ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... "is the old hat of Claude Vignon, a great critic, in the days when he was a free man and a free-liver. He has lately come round to the ministry; they've made him a professor, a librarian; he writes now for the Debats only; they've appointed him Master of Petitions with a salary of sixteen thousand francs; he earns four thousand more out ...
— Unconscious Comedians • Honore de Balzac
... Lord Hailes:—'In his Annals of Scotland he has shewn himself a diligent collector and an accurate critic.' Gibbon's Misc. ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... a good deal of attention in its day, goes leisurely over the same ground, which had already been rapidly traversed by Dr. Copleston, and, though professedly employed upon Mr. Edgeworth, is really replying to the northern critic who had brought that writer's work into notice, and to a far greater author than either of them, who in a past age had argued on ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... the critic, 'at the very instant at which it should triumph. It is vague, unconvincing, wrong. You leave me unanswered for six whole weeks, and at the end you send me this incoherent sandheap, when your promises had given me the right to expect a solid piece of well-worked ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... the sentimentalists," answered the severe critic, "but that of exceeding feebleness. They have no bone and muscle in their genius—all is flaccid and rotund in its feminine symmetry. They seem to think that vigour consists in florid phrases and little ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... deserves for this wandering critic and no more, I will take the liberty of saying that there is art, and a great deal of art, in the site of the clean town; and that there is society, and good society, in that forest of spars in the roadstead, and in the fishing and shooting in the neighbourhood. ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... hardly fair to cite Everett's speech on the same occasion as a specimen of the opposite style, wherein ornate scholarship and the pride of talents dominate. Yet a stern critic would be obliged to say that, as an author, Everett allowed, for the most part, only the expurgated, complimenting, drawing-room man to speak; and that, considering the need of America to be kept virile and broad at all hazards, his ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... mean, lies latent in every one of us, and, except we stir ourselves up to the right, will gradually, from a possibility, become an energy. The wise man dares not yield to a temptation, were it only for the terror that, if he do, he will yield the more readily again. The commonplace critic, who recognizes life solely upon his own conscious level, mocks equally at the ideal and its antipode, incapable of recognizing the art of Shakespeare himself as true to the human nature that will not ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... of comparative health that I enjoyed between my two severest illnesses allowed me to try my strength as a critic and an editor. In Dr. Johnson: His Friends and his Critics, which I published in the year 1878, I reviewed the judgments passed on Johnson and Boswell by Lord Macaulay and Mr. Carlyle, I described Oxford as it was known to Johnson, and I threw light on more than one important passage in the Life. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... John was the guest of Mr. Fox at Stable Yard, the subject of Lord Melville's acquittal by the Peers came up for discussion. Next day the shrewd young critic wrote the following characteristic remark in his journal: 'What a pity that he who steals a penny loaf should be hung, whilst he who steals thousands of the public money should be acquitted!' The brilliant qualities of Fox made a great impression on the lad, and there can be little doubt ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... of Humphry Davy that he might have been the greatest poet of his time had he not chosen rather to be the greatest chemist, it is possible that the enthusiasm of the friend outweighed the caution of the critic. But however that may be, it is beyond dispute that the man who actually was the greatest poet of that time might easily have taken the very highest rank as a scientist had not the muse distracted his attention. Indeed, despite these distractions, Johann Wolfgang ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... and the French Ideologists. Of recent German speculation he was probably quite ignorant. I find indeed that Place had called his attention to the account of Kant, published by Wirgman in the Encyclopaedia Londinensis 1817. Mill about the same time tells Place that he has begun to read The Critic of Pure Reason. 'I see clearly enough,' he says, 'what poor Kant would be about, but it would require some time to give an account of him.' He wishes (December 6, 1817) that he had time to write a book which would 'make the human mind ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... the austere pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes he carefully explained to his readers that d'Annunzio's lewdness must not be confused with the obscenities of Zola, whereat Ouida protested that they were alike in their complacent preoccupation with mere filth. The Frenchman is the sounder critic, it must be said, for while d'Annunzio frequently parallels some of the most unclean—in the literal, not the moral sense—scenes and incidents in Zola, his attitude about sex is as unlike Zola's as that of the late W. D. Howells. Only in "Nana" did Zola describe the life and ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... girls who have not recited or at least heard her stirring Chanukkah recitations, "The Feast of Lights," and "The Banner of the Jew." Her poems had always been very beautiful, winning the praises of such a high critic as Ralph Waldo Emerson, but now they glowed with a new beauty, her love and new found kinship ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... accurate and useful, abridgment of the history of Italy, from the birth of Christ to the middle of the xviiith century. 5. Dell' Antichita Estense ed Italiane, ii. vols. in folio, Modena, 1717, 1740. In the history of this illustrious race, the parent of our Brunswick kings, the critic is not seduced by the loyalty or gratitude of the subject. In all his works, Muratori approves himself a diligent and laborious writer, who aspires above the prejudices of a Catholic priest. He was born in the year 1672, and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... separation of the utterance of whole truths from insistance upon accidents of detail, Reynolds was right, because he guarded the expression of his view with careful definitions of its limits. In the same way Boileau was right, as a critic of Literature, in demanding everywhere good sense, in condemning the paste brilliants of a style then in decay, and fixing attention upon the masterly simplicity of Roman poets in the time of Augustus. Critics ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... something of the spirit of the age which he was the last to touch lived on in Dryden. He loved and studied Chaucer and Spenser even while he was copying Moliere and Corneille. His noblest panegyric was pronounced over Shakspere. At the time when Rymer, the accepted critic of the Restoration, declared "our poetry of the last age as rude as our architecture," and sneered at "that Paradise Lost of Milton's which some are pleased to call a poem," Dryden saw in it "one of the greatest, most noble and sublime poems which either this age or nation ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... such things are usually managed,' he answered. 'A hundred years ago a publisher paid a critic to attack a book in order to make it succeed, but in finance abuse doesn't contribute to our success, which is always a question of credit. All these scurrilous articles have set the public very much against Van Torp, from Paris to San Francisco, and this man Feist is responsible ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... useless. Now I mean to get a cemetery attached to it; there is plenty of land; and then the chapel will become a chantry. But now, what will you say if we have a copy of these splendid medieval monuments round the burial-place, both sculpture and painting? Now, Sheffield, Mr. Critic, what do ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... occasion of the seventy-fifth birthday of Dr. Holmes The Critic of New York collected personal tributes from friends and admirers of that author. My own contribution was ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... in sentimental novels; the kind who are always just ready to step into heaven, but who count for little in the warfare and struggle of actual mundane existence. You get me? She isn't quite true to life, you know, as a book critic would say ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... state, thus highly distinguished, has already demonstrated itself worthy of the exalted name, so happily bestowed upon it, the most carping critic must admit. With a population now reaching up toward a million and a half, and with all the forces that make for industrial, commercial and agricultural supremacy in full swing, and gathering new momentum yearly, Washington is moving onward and upward ...
— A Review of the Resources and Industries of the State of Washington, 1909 • Ithamar Howell
... spring up in the way of its confident and eager quest. To start a new solution of some crucial problem, to track some new undercurrent of concealed significance in a passage hitherto neglected or misconstrued, is to a critic of this higher class a delight as keen as that of scientific discovery to students of another sort: the pity is that he can bring no such certain or immediate test to verify the value of his discovery as lies ready to the hand of the man of ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... in 1668, with the separately printed edition of Boileau's ninth satire; in the same year it was included in a collected edition of the satires. It was occasioned, evidently, by a critic's complaint that the modern satirist, departing from ancient practice, "offers insults ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... speaking or writing to different persons, and on different subjects, it is necessary to vary one's style with great nicety of address; and in nothing does true genius more conspicuously appear, than in the facility with which it adopts the most appropriate expressions, leaving the critic no fault to expose, no word to amend. Such facility of course supposes an intimate knowledge of all words in common use, and also of the principles on which they ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the birthright of every native of the parish to be a critic, and certain were allowed to be experts in special departments—Lachlan Campbell in doctrine and Jamie Soutar in logic—but as an old round practitioner Mrs. Macfadyen had a solitary reputation. It rested on a ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... been talking about Amias Keston's unfinished picture, and, as usual, Malcolm had been holding forth in his role of art critic, when one of those sudden pauses which seem to drop softly between intimate friends followed his concluding speech. Verity held up her finger with the hackneyed allusion to a passing angel, at which Malcolm ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... professional critic of life and letters, my principal business in the world is that of manufacturing platitudes for tomorrow, which is to say, ideas so novel that they will be instantly rejected as insane and outrageous by all right thinking men, and ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... all the Carolan beauty and charm, and was his most gracious and radiant self to-day. His sunny cordiality gave Mary no chance to remember that she had a little feared the writer and critic. But, after the first moment, her eye was irresistibly drawn to ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... festivities—strengthened his hold upon the city in an age devoted to culture and refined pleasure. Whatever was most brilliant in the spirit of the Italian Benaissance seemed to be incarnate in Lorenzo. Not merely as a patron and a dilettante, but as a poet and a critic, a philosopher and scholar, he proved himself adequate to the varied intellectual ambitions of his country. Penetrated with the passion for erudition which distinguished Florence in the fifteenth century, familiar with her painters and her sculptors, deeply ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... fronts have been constructed of cast iron. At some corner premises in Southwark, the piers as well as the windows are formed of cast iron, the former being made to assume the appearance of projecting pilasters. There is nothing to which the most captious critic could object in the treatment adopted here; the pilasters and other features have plain moulded members, and there is no principle of design in cast work which has been violated—the only question being the purely aesthetic one—is it justifiable ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... critic could not detest and abhor a pun, or the insinuation of a pun, more cordially than my father;—he would grow testy upon it at any time;—but to be broke in upon by one, in a serious discourse, was as bad, he would say, as a fillip upon the nose;—he ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... key to the greatest mystery of modern literature,' I answered; 'and I shall not rest till I have made you recognise, till I have made everybody recognise, that Cyril Graham was the most subtle Shakespearean critic ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... demeaned himself much like a first-rate critic of the present day at a new opera. He reclined back upon his seat, with his eyes half shut; now, folding his hands and twisting his thumbs, he seemed absorbed in attention, and anon, balancing his expanded palms, he gently flourished ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... how truly "Japanese" is this vase which was made in Japan—perhaps for the American market; or how intensely "Russian" is this melancholy tale by Turgenieff. This prompt deduction of racial qualities from works of art which themselves give the critic all the information he possesses about the races in question,—or, in other words, the enthusiastic assertion that a thing is like itself,—is one of the familiar notes of amateur criticism. It is travelling in a circle, and the corregiosity of ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... communicate to her husband the substance of a conversation which had ended so painfully. He had, in theory, a delicacy of tact, which, if he did not always exhibit it in practice, made him a very severe critic of its deficiency in others. Therefore, unconscious of the offence given, he made a point of calling at Isaura's apartments, and leaving word with her servant that "he was sure she would be pleased to hear M. Rameau was somewhat better, though still ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that a German critic has of late reminded us that the one test which the most authoritative and dramatic portrayal of the Day of Judgment offers, is the social test. The stern questions are not in regard to personal and family relations, but did ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... another group discussing the music: Blythe, the musical critic, and Lawson, who had the reputation of being a ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... think. I was then my own reader and my only critic. I lived in my writings, and thought them perfect. Since then I belong to the public, upon whose judgment my success depends, upon whose appreciation my reward lies. Do not imagine that I do not frequently suffer deeply, that I am not wounded, and that I do not ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... plain! if this is not sublime, then am I no critic; however, its lucky for the landed interest, that the breed of those horses is lost; they might do very well, I confess, in the Highlands of Scotland; but a dozen of them turned loose near Salisbury would be inconceivably hurtful. I'm tired of this stuff; if you think it ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... critic's words verbatim. I really looked at the young lady in astonishment, that she should see nothing but a want of liveliness in a picture, which most of us feel to be sublime. But Miss D——- had an old grudge against you, for not having made her papa's villa sufficiently prominent ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... of this history of Justus of Tiberias, the rival of our Josephus, which is now lost, with its only remaining fragment, are given us by a very able critic, Photius, who read that history. It is in the 33rd code of his Bibliotheca, and runs thus: "I have read [says Photius] the chronology of Justus of Tiberias, whose title is this, [Footnote The Chronology of] the Kings of Judah which succeeded ...
— The Life of Flavius Josephus • Flavius Josephus
... and abroad who had any knowledge of the facts. As for the alleged inconsistency of the letters with proven facts: the answer is, that whosoever wrote the letters would be more likely to know facts which were taking place around them than any critic could be one hundred or three hundred years afterwards. But if these mistakes as to facts actually exist in them, they are only a fresh argument for their authenticity. Mary, writing in agony and confusion, might ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... impatience began to show signs of strain. Cynical allusions appeared in the Press. "The only danger in making oneself liable for new schemes," wrote one captious critic, "arises from the possibility of their being proceeded with." Not even the "glorious news" of the fall of Sebastopol sufficed to deflect the local mind from the irritating habits of a dilatory directorate. After all, the Crimea was a long way ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... her youth up she suddenly suspected of age and absurdity. In short, she felt that fear which takes possession of nearly all authors when they read over a work they have hitherto thought proof against every exacting or blase critic: new situations seem timeworn; the best-turned and most highly polished phrases limp and squint; metaphors and images grin or contradict each other; whatsoever is false strikes the eye. In like manner this poor woman trembled lest she should see on the lips of Monsieur de Troisville a smile of ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... be provoked, but it inevitably proved abortive, inasmuch as there was a complete absence of data based upon actual experience. The novelist was without any theory: he avowedly depended upon the brilliance of his imagination. The critic could only theorise, and no matter how dogmatic his reasonings, they were certainly as unconvincing as those of ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... company; evidently he was not of the mentally capable. They will tell you at the prison that, under its discipline, eighty odd per cent are set upon their feet and make a fresh start. With due allowance for a friendly critic, there is still room for the three-fourths labelled normal, of "natural mental capacity." They came to their own with half a chance, even the chance of a prison. The Children's Aid Society will give you still ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... Runciman to the pages of The Family Herald. In the superfine circles of the Sniffy, this fact is sufficient to condemn them unread. For of all fools the most incorrigible is surely the conventional critic who judges literary wares not by their intrinsic merit or demerit, but by the periodical in which they first saw the light. The same author may write in the same day two articles, putting his best work and thought into each, but if he sends one to The Saturday ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... this book only superficially will at once see that it is not all fiction; and he who reads it more than superficially will as easily see that it is not all fact. In what proportions it is composed of either would probably require a very acute critic accurately to determine. As the Editor makes no pretensions to such acumen,—as he can lay claim to only an imperfect knowledge of the principal personage in the volume, and never had any personal acquaintance with the singular youth, ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... its comprehensiveness, seem to me to mark the author as a genuine critic of the broader ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... as story-teller, commentator, critic, jester, revived my childish ambition towards authorship. My first stirrings in this direction I cannot rightly place. I remember when very small falling into a sunk dust-bin—a deep hole, rather, into which the gardener shot his rubbish. The fall twisted ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... the closing scene of this eventful story? I will imagine nothing; I will exaggerate nothing; for, during the whole progress of the story, it has been my constant care not to give the most captious critic the opportunity of saying that I have exaggerated a single incident. I will relate faithfully what I saw in my dream, and that only; diminishing nothing, and ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... in Tuebingen, afterward famous as biblical critic and church-historian, said of Strauss' book, that through it was revealed in startling fashion to that generation of scholars, how little real knowledge they had of the problem which the Gospels present. To Baur it was clear that if advance was to be made beyond Strauss' negative results, ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... It was a mechanical response while Berta's eyes narrowed in the intensity of her application. "Now I wonder what that question-mark on the margin can mean. She is the vaguest critic I ever had. Suggestive, I ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... anything which in his own mind was in the least disloyal. And yet it was Stephens who, in the autumn of 1864, was singled out by artful men as a possible figurehead in the conduct of a separate peace negotiation with Sherman. A critic very hostile to Stephens and his faction might here raise the question as to what was at bottom the motive of Governor Brown, in the autumn of 1864, in withdrawing the Georgia militia from Hood's command. Was there something ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... that the officers had no lack of partners, and voted it great fun. There were many very pretty girls among them, and several with much more of the rose on their cheeks than usually falls to the share of West Indian damsels. Some censorious critic even ventured to hint that it was added by the hand of art. That this was false was evident, for the weather was so hot that had rouge been used it would have inevitably been detected; but the island damsels trusted to their good figures and features, and their lively ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... itself to non-slaveholding Southern whites, and was mainly made up of statistics, but contained occasional passages of intolerant and vindictive sentiment against slaveholders. Whether it could be considered "insurrectionary" depended altogether on the pro-slavery or anti-slavery bias of the critic. Besides, the author had agreed that the obnoxious passages should not be printed in the compendium which the Republicans recommended in their circular. When interrogated, Mr. Sherman replied that he had never seen the book, and that "I am opposed to any ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... of fiction has no such afflatus, no such high pitch of life, as to outward circumstance, in his representation of it, as the poet has; and therefore his may seem to the academic critic the lesser art—but it is nearer to the realities of common human existence. He deals with plain men and women, and the un-majestic moments ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... Penn.) for April contains an excellent portrait of John Vance Cheney, the popular poet and critic. ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... a critic in ground-glass spectacles (the same who grasps his statistics by the blade and strikes at his supposed antagonist with the handle) oddly confounds with the "bloated aristocracy;" whereas they are very commonly pallid, undervitalized, shy, sensitive creatures, ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... this the testimony of the British Critic. "Not one syllable penned by eight obscure authors of the Scriptures of the New Testament, received by the Church as canonical at the death of John, has been lost in the course of eighteen centuries. Yet of the historical works of Tacitus ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... very truth an atrocious thing), should she have looked on, while all that she saw would happen, if no one prevented it—all that she realized, it seems, at a distance—was actually taking place? {64} Nay, I should be glad to ask to-day the severest critic of my actions, which party he would have desired the city to join—the party which shares the responsibility for the misery and disgrace which has fallen upon the Hellenes (the party of the Thessalians and their supporters, one may call it), ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... Even that austere critic, Scaliger, made the principles of it so far his concern, that he was able personally to satisfy an Emperor's curiosity, as to the nature and meaning of the Pirrhic dance, by ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... almost the sine qua non of an individual destined to be famous or successful. Varieties of course existed, such as when combined with beetling brows and sunken eyes one recognized the professor or arch-critic of his generation. Or, when taken with the square forehead, thin mouth and visionary eyes of the military genius, one saw some great general. Or simply existing in some silly scion of good family, and meaning nothing whatever, in this case usually over-high at the thin bridge, and in profile ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... Karl (etc.) von Fuernberg, one of the old stamp of wealthy patrons of musicians. They loved to "discover" rising talent, did these ancient, obsolete types of amateurs of art. They were as proud of a brilliant protege as a modern literary critic is when he "discovers" a new minor poet. Von Fuernberg did his best for Haydn. He enabled him to write the first eighteen quartets; he helped him to get better terms for teaching—five florins a month instead of two. Through von Fuernberg or some one ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... the critic who will render the greatest gift to modern civilization is the one who will show us how to fuse the characters of Shakespeare and Swedenborg. One stands for intellect, the other for spirituality. We need both, but we tire ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... it with the air of a critic. "It is true," said he, perfectly serious, "there are not many such profiles, but I am not of your opinion that the gods fashioned it. Those sharp features look as if the joiner had cut them out of oak, and they lead me to infer ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... readers once again through this little work, greetings. For the many kind things said of my former works by my friends, my pupils, the critic and the profession, thanks! To those who have understood and appreciated the principles laid down in my last book, "Position and Action in Singing," I will say that this little work will be an additional help. To ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... appreciation of the classical past is an act of present perception, not a mere memory of popular verdicts. The classics live only because they still express the vital feeling of to-day. The new art must do more,—must speak for the morrow. And as the poet is a kind of seer, the true critic is his prophetic herald. ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... is agreeable, and its absence would be missed. Then as to sugar or milk: it is evidence of exaggerated personality (conceit, some call it), to declare that milk or cream or sugar injure the flavor of tea. As well insist upon a special spice being used for all viands because the critic likes it. To hold the Chinese up as examples of what is proper in tea drinking is to offer a limit to human progress. As milk or cream neutralize the tannin to a considerable extent, they are so far desirable, without regard ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... Earnest.' Clever as it was, it was his first really heartless play. In the others the chivalry of the eighteenth century Irishman and the romance of the disciple of Theophile Gautier (Oscar was really old-fashioned in the Irish way, except as a critic of morals) not only gave a certain kindness and gallantry to the serious passages and to the handling of the women, but provided that proximity of emotion without which laughter, however irresistible, is destructive and sinister. In 'The Importance of Being ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... society. A malicious eye, it is true, might have discovered by close inspection that the brush had been too familiar with his coat and worn it threadbare, that his silk hat had been doctored to preserve its lustre and smoothness, and that his gloves were elaborately darned. If an inquisitive critic could have pried into the bottom of the vehicle, he would have detected a large crack in the side of the left boot, beneath which a gray stocking had been carefully masked with ink. Still, all these signs of poverty were so artfully concealed, ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... disappointed. The others submitted to my failure good-naturedly, and made it the subject of many droll, but not unkindly, witicisms. For myself, I could have borne the severest infliction from the pen of the most formidable critic with more fortitude than I bore the cutting up of my first ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... study for an abstainer to look on at a midnight carousal, with a perfectly sober head, and to be the only audience and critic at this "divina comedia" where everyone ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... her elevated perch, says, "Her small dark crown looked pretty, and her mantle of cloth of gold very regal; she, herself, looked so small as to appear puny." (At a later stage of the proceedings the same keen critic notes that the enormous train borne by her ladies made the figure of the Queen look still less than it really was.) "The homage was as pretty a sight as any: trains of Peers touching her crown, and then kissing her hand. ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... is ignorant of anatomy can not appreciate either sculpture or painting! A knowledge of optics, of botany and of natural history, are necessary, equally to the artist or to the connoisseur; a knowledge of acoustics to the musician and musical critic. "No artist," says Mr. Spencer, "can produce a healthful work of whatever kind without he understands the laws of the phenomena he represents; he must also understand how the minds of the spectator ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... Mr. Max Muller as his adversary. He must strike, as it were, the shield of no Hospitaler of unsteady seat, but that of the Templar himself. And this is the cause of what seems to puzzle Mr. Max Muller, namely the attacks on his system and his results in particular. An English critic, writing for English readers, had to do with the scholar who chiefly represented the philological school of mythology in the ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... brought to see her. She saw them over a tea-table, judged them remorselessly, and eliminated gradually all but one or two. She watched her dignity and her reputation with the care of an ambitious woman trying to live down the past, and she succeeded measurably well. Now and then a critic spoke of her as a second Maude Adams, and those notices ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... defeated by Gottsched, professor at Leipzig. He exercised, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the same dictatorship as a poet and a critic which Opitz had exercised at the beginning of the seventeenth. Gottsched was the advocate of French models in art and poetry, and he used his wide-spread influence in recommending the correct and so-called ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... her mother's, which trailed ridiculously over the floor; jewels of value in her ears and on her hands and neck; and finally a lace scarf of Mrs. Lloyd's, which was very rich and extremely costly. Norton was absent on some business of his own; David was the only critic on hand. He objected. ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... Not only is the world informed of everything about you, but of a great deal more. Not long since the kind postman brought a paper containing a valuable piece of criticism, which stated—"This author states he was born in such and such a year. It is a lie. He was born in the year so and so." The critic knew better: of course he did. Another (and both came from the country which gave MULLIGAN birth) warned some friend, saying, "Don't speak of New South Wales to him. He has a brother there, and the family never mention his name." But this subject is too vast ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a Gilbertian tone about the whole piece which I should be rather more surprised at being the first to note, so far as I know, if I were not pretty well prepared to find that the study of the average dramatic critic is not much in Peacock. The choric trochees (which by the way is a tautology) are of the highest excellence, especially ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... Wilkie Collins. The actual writing is entirely his up to a certain point: from that point to the end it is partly his, but mainly mine. Where his writing ends and mine begins, I need not point out. The practised critic will, no doubt, at once lay his finger ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... free for the bound, of the artist for some jarring colour or sound which mars an otherwise entrancing harmony. And the smart of all this was, to him, doubly salted by the fact that he, after all, was a man, his critic merely a woman. The bitter mood of the earlier hours of the day returned upon him. He cursed himself for a doting fool. Who was he, indeed, to seek revelation of glad secrets, cherish ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... reads and writes a large book, and wears a great (not a big or bag) coat.' When Boswell came to publish The Life of Johnson, he took the opportunity to justify himself, though he did not care to refer directly to his anonymous critic. This explanation I discovered too late to insert ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... been for several years the most popular author of books on politics and economics in Germany. He is described by his translator as a "constructive optimist," one who, at the same time, is an incisive critic of those shortcomings which have kept Germany, as he thinks, from playing the great part to which she is called. In this volume Dr. Rohrbach gives a true insight into the character of the German people, ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... to me so thorough, or even so general as it was some years ago, and I think the book oftener comes to the buyer without the warrant of a critical estimate than it once did. That is never the case with material printed in a magazine of high class. A well-trained critic, who is bound by the strongest ties of honor and interest not to betray either his employer or his public, has judged it, and his practical approval is a ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... out of print and have not reached a second edition. Time however, will do them justice. As it is, your good Borrow lover has always appreciated their merits. Take Lionel Johnson for example, a good critic and a master of style. After saying that these 'lengthy and rich volumes are a monument of love's labour, but not of literary art or biographical skill,' he adds: 'Of his over eight hundred pages there is not one for which I am not grateful' and every ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... critic, you say that the true ghost story originated in the age of shadowy candle light and pine knot with their grotesqueries on the walls and in the unpenetrated darkness, that the electric bulb and the radiator have dispelled that very thing ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... Lessing went back to Wittenberg for another year, that he might complete the work for graduation; graduated in December of that year as Master of Arts, and then returned to his work in Berlin. He worked industriously, not only as critic, but also in translation from the classics, from French, English, and Italian; and he was soon able to send help towards providing education for the youngest of the household of twelve children in the Camenz parsonage. ...
— Nathan the Wise • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... treating in this chapter William Hogarth as a delineator of the comedy of life, not as an art critic, nor as a philosopher; and it is not my painful duty to drag the gentle reader through the verbose Preface to a no less verbose Introduction, to find ourselves at the end of these still in front of the author's main ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... accept the assertion of the French critic. These two pictures, though utterly different in character and type, too forcibly recall his previous works. And as according to the same author the altar-piece of the monks [55] of the Mugello resembles the other in colouring, technique, the freer ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... one of the Lantern Bearers describes Louis as he was then. "A slender, long legged boy in pepper and salt tweeds, with an undescribable influence that forced us to include him in our play as a looker on, critic and slave driver.... No one had the remotest intention of competing with R.L.S. in story making, and his tales, had we known it, were such as the world would listen to in ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton |
