"Diction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on "The Old Red Sandstone." To the scientific world, by opening up the fossil treasures of a formation hitherto understood to be peculiarly destitute of organic remains, this publication claimed an especial interest, which was enhanced by the elegance of the diction. His subsequent publications fully sustained his fame. A work on the physical and social aspects of the sister kingdom, entitled "First Impressions of England and its People," was followed by "The Footprints of the Creator," the latter being a powerful reply to the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... brilliant achievements. Neither the Records nor the Chronicles can be said to display such a propensity in any marked degree. The Chronicles do, indeed, draw upon the resources of Chinese history to construct ethical codes and scholarly diction for their Imperial figures, but the Records show no traces of adventitious colour nor make an attempt to minimize the evil ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... intimate school friend, to close the apothecary shop and to sell privately whatever it contained. But a small quantity of every drug was to be reserved for his own personal use. He also, in his carefully chosen diction begged the honourable notary to allow the Italian architect Olivetti, who would soon present himself, to rebuild the old house of "The Three Kings" throughout, according to the plan which they had agreed upon in Bologna. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... in silence for a few minutes. Mrs. Cullom had said but little, but John noticed that her diction was more conventional than in her talk with David and himself in the morning, and that her manner at the table was distinctly refined, although she ate with apparent appetite, not to say hunger. Presently she said, with an air of making conversation, "I suppose you've always ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... marvellous discourse. Theron's conquest was of exceptional dimensions. The majority, whose project he had defeated, were strangers who appreciated and admired his effort most. The little minority of his own flock, though less susceptible to the influence of graceful diction and delicately balanced rhetoric, were proud of the distinction he had reflected upon them, and delighted with him for having won their fight. The Presiding Elders wrung his hand with a significant grip. The extremists of his own charge beamed friendship upon him ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... citing them is a preposterous use of scholarship. Jonson's prose, both in his dramas, in the descriptive comments of his masques, and in the "Discoveries," is characterised by clarity and vigorous directness, nor is it wanting in a fine sense of form or in the subtler graces of diction. ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... is meditating a revised version of the story of JOSEPH and his Brethren, which in his opinion is sadly in need of re-writing, suffering as it does from an unsophisticated simplicity of diction and thought. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various
... clung to him, so that he even ripped you up with an air, and I have been told that he was a raconteur of repute. He was never more sinister than when he was most polite, which is probably the truest test of breeding; and the elegance of his diction, even when he was swearing, no less than the distinction of his demeanour, showed him one of a different caste from his crew. A man of indomitable courage, it was said of him that the only thing he shied at was the sight of his own blood, which was thick and of an unusual colour. In dress ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... over German literature at the beginning of the 18th century. He was one of the first German poets to substitute for the bombastic imitations of Marini, to which he himself had begun by contributing, a clear and simple diction. He was also a pioneer in directing the attention of his countrymen to the new poetry of nature which originated in England. His verses, artificial and crude as they often are, express a reverential attitude towards nature and a religious interpretation of natural phenomena ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... also disputations with him touching his indulging rather a flowing and redundant than a concise and stately diction in his prose exercitations. But notwithstanding these symptoms of inferior taste, and a humour of contradicting his betters upon passages of dubious construction in Latin authors, I did grievously lament when Peter Pattieson was removed from me by death, even as if he had been the offspring ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... Maior have generally assumed that Cicero attempted to give an antique coloring to the diction of the dialogue in order to remind readers of Cato's own style. It is only necessary to read a page or two of Cato's De Re Rustica to have this illusion dispelled. The only things actually alleged to be archaisms are (1) ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... ideal, with an ardour that was pitiably comical. He became an actor by the side of whom those comedians that played impromptus for his delectation were the merest bunglers with the art. He gathered that Madonna Paola loved the poets and their stately diction, and so, to please her better, he became a poet ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... was thought to be high praise: that Washington Irving had "added clarity to the English tongue." This was a service of which the language just then stood sadly in need. There are always men ready enough to make English turbid, to wreak their ingenuity upon oddities of phrase and diction. At that moment, certainly, the anxious courtier of words was not so much needed as the easy autocrat, whose style, however cavalier, should have grace and firmness and clarity to commend it. When ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... fever while he was writing, and the blood-and-thunder Magazine diction he adopted did not calm him. Two months afterward he was reported fit for duty, but, in spite of the fact that he was urgently needed to help an undermanned Commission stagger through a deficit, he preferred to die; vowing at the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... lean to; and not having of their own stuff wherewith to entertain us, they bring in the story to supply the defect of language. It is quite otherwise with my author; the elegance and perfection of his way of speaking makes us lose the appetite of his plot; his refined grace and elegance of diction everywhere occupy us: ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... in that year, according to one account: but the name recurs pretty positively in 1327-8, and about that time Randall Higgenet, a monk of Chester Abbey, wrote the plays. But in the text handed down they are of a much later style of diction, and no doubt later in date than ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... the ground. The campaign opened by the publication of an address, written by Mr. DAVIS, to the people of Maryland, which, I venture to say, is unsurpassed by any state paper published in this age of able state papers for the warmth and vigor of its diction, and the lucidity and conclusiveness of its argumentation. It is a pamphlet of twenty pages, glowing throughout with the unmistakable marks of his genius and patriotism, and closing with ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... appearance giving evidence of a clean, active ascetic life and a strong moral and physical make-up. He was inclined to keep the light of his conversational powers under a bushel, and at times spoke only when aroused from apparent self-centered thought. His voice was deep and pleasant, his diction and expression perfect, his thoughts, clothed in finished sentences, were entertainingly expressed and at times exhibited a rich vein of the choicest humor. He was the leading member of the conference—certainly ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... to them." (Hume's Hist. vol. i. p. 9.) In this passage Mr. Hume has given a summary of the Life of Agricola. It is extended by Tacitus in a style more open than the didactic form of the essay on the German Manners required, but still with the precision, both in sentiment and diction, peculiar to the author. In rich but subdued colors he gives a striking picture of Agricola, leaving to posterity a portion of history which it would be in vain to seek in the dry gazette style of Suetonius, or in the page of any ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... that kind. The next to follow is the quite plain, sensible, narrative inscription, with no pretension to fine diction, albeit in rhyme. Oddly enough the most perfect example I have found is in the churchyard at Kew, which seems too ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... thing in public speaking is neither the diction nor the voice. What is important is that the speaker should have the same predilections as the majority, and that his country's friends and foes should ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... luncheon-party on Thursday. These invitations were couched in Chesterfield-terms: Mr. Wyse said that he had met a mutual friend just now who had informed him that you were in residence, and had encouraged him to hope that you might give him the pleasure of your company, etc. This was alluring diction: it presented the image of Mr. Wyse stepping briskly home again, quite heartened up by this chance encounter, and no longer the prey to melancholy at the thought that you might not give him the joy. He was encouraged ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... ascended the patriarchal throne, and was alternately excommunicated and absolved by the synods of the East and West. By the confession even of priestly hatred, no art or science, except poetry, was foreign to this universal scholar, who was deep in thought, indefatigable in reading, and eloquent in diction. Whilst he exercised the office of protospathaire or captain of the guards, Photius was sent ambassador to the caliph of Bagdad. [108] The tedious hours of exile, perhaps of confinement, were beguiled by the hasty composition of his Library, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... WRITTEN. Such books as this should be read slowly and pondered well; but this book by its fascination will tempt one to read too rapidly. Its line of argument is logical; its diction is as pure as the bubbling stream; its truths are evident and compelling. It presents the purest psychology stripped of all mystifying technicalities, and clothed in language which even a child can understand. The reason for this is plain. It is the "Beaten ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... (a Pole) Some place on the whole At the top of the tree for his diction; But his style, I opine, Is a little too fine For ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... the early part of the last century an eccentric critic, whose Arian sympathies it seemed to favour, endeavoured to resuscitate its credit, and one or two others, at long intervals, have followed in his wake; but practically it may be regarded as dead. It abounds in anachronisms of fact or diction; its language diverges widely from the Ignatian quotations in the writers of the first five centuries. Our author places its date in the sixth century, with Ussher; I should myself ascribe it to the latter half of the fourth century. This however is a matter of little consequence. Only, before passing ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... memorable battles of Rossbach, Leuthen, Prague, Zorndorf, Hochkirch, and Torgau. Carlyle's great work has done much to familiarize older readers with the story; but its bulk, its fullness of detail, and still more the peculiarity of Carlyle's diction and style, place it altogether out of the category of books that can be ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... that the Madigans could keep peace among themselves long enough to make an onslaught in a body. But when they did, the lone victim of their attack knew better than to struggle against her fate. Poor Bep, her protests borne down, all her old sins of diction raked up and, joined to the new ones, marshaled against her, became sulky. She turned her back upon the enemy and retreated to a corner to find out what Santa Claus and her own particular patron saint had to offer for ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... spirit of it will approach to the ideal. An unwarrantable assumption, if there ever was one; and an assumption, as will be seen, that contains the seeds of the whole eighteenth-century theory of poetic diction. In the second place—but this is, in truth, only the deeper aspect of the former plea—Dryden comes perilously near to an acceptance of the doctrine that idealization in a work of art depends purely ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... all English books. And it was the same element that made the journey of Roderick Random to London, so ostensibly a narrative of coarse jokes and common experiences and burlesque manners, told in no very choice diction, essentially a wonderful vision of the eighteenth century, carrying to one's very nostrils the aroma of the Great North Road, iron-bound under black frost, darkened beneath shuddering woods, haunted by highwaymen, with an adventure waiting ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... only professional poets of the upper classes can produce. The Sicilian lyrics collected by Signor Pitre, still more the Tuscan poems of Tigri's charming volume, are, therefore, a curious mixture of high-flown sentiment, dainty imagery, and most artistic arrangements of metre and diction (especially in the rispetto, where metrical involution is accompanied by logical involution of the most refined mediaeval sort), with hopes and complaints such as only a farmer could frame, with similes and descriptions such as only the business of the field, vineyard, and dairy could ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... shows how definitely a reporter is restricted in the facts that he may include in his social items—how conventional social stories have become. This very restraint in the matter of facts makes it the more necessary for a reporter to exercise his originality in the diction of social items. He must guard against the use of certain set expressions, like "officiating," "performed the ceremony," and "solemnized." While restricted in the facts that he may give, he must try to present the same old facts in new and interesting ways—he may even resort to a moderate ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... creative work and take his thoughts from his compositions. Instances of bad grammar in his letters are frequent, when dealing with ordinary topics. In no sense a polished man, he could, however, when the occasion required it, assume in his grammar and diction the grace and elegance of the scholar, but it does not often come to the front. He was too rugged, too headstrong, to pay much attention to ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... place some great reliance On ancient and modern lore; He may count the stars in heaven, He may trace them in their course, And from data that is given He may prove creation's source; He may use the best of diction To portray his studied thought; He may draw from truth and fiction All the charm with which they're fraught; He may be a friend of Nature And may understand her laws; He may prove embryo creature Has within itself a "cause"; He may fathom all creation And dwell among the stars, Visit every ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... injurious with the moral ones. All natural clearness and distinctness of intellect becomes gradually obscured; the memory becomes perplexed; the very style of writing acquires the taint of the perverted mind. Truth is impressed upon every line of Dr. Arnold's vigorous diction, while other writers of equal, perhaps, but less respectable eminence, betray, even in their mode of expression, the habitual want of honesty in their character and ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... conscientious desire of truth predisposes towards the labour of written composition. He had too much cleverness to be in want of fluent period or ready commonplace,—the ordinary materials of oratorical impromptu; too little taste for the Beautiful to study what graces of diction will best adorn a noble sentiment; too obtuse a conscience to care if the popular argument were purified from the dross which the careless flow of a speech wholly extemporaneous rarely fails to leave around it. But this was no ordinary occasion. Elaborate study here was requisite, not for the orator, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... who is making a name for himself as a master of plain business diction, was told off to draft me an answer to the War Office which should remove as many beams as possible out of their optics. He overdid it: the whole tone of it indeed was despondent, so much so that, as I told Braithwaite, ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... shows here all the vigor of his early days. There is the same pungency of diction, the same picturesque power. Not a person is introduced without a touch of vigorous individuality.... The characters seem to start from ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... I think that people who read your magazine, as well as Science Fiction magazines in general, are people with the ingrained human love for wonder and mystery; but some of them are afraid to accept and enjoy anything—even a fairy tale—that is not couched in the diction of modern materialistic science, with a show of concern for verified credibilities. Probably, in most cases, they would like and prize the very stories that they condemn if the writer had used a different terminology, ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... portion, commencing with Arixina in which figure Julius Caesar, Cassfelyn, and Cymbaline, and extending to Edwin and Elgiva: the titles of the intervening pieces are the Imperial Pirate and the Dragon King. There is much wild and beautiful romance in the diction, but we take the most attractive portion to be the lyrical portion, as the Chants, Dirges, and Choruses. We recommend them as models for the play-wrights who do such things for the acting drama, and if the poetship to a patent theatre be worth ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... critical methods. He began them by giving in a sentence a summary of the common verdicts: "As Shakespeare is sometimes blamable for the conduct of his fables, which have no unity; and sometimes for his diction, which is obscure and turgid; so his characteristical excellences may possibly be reduced to these three general heads—his lively creative imagination, his strokes of nature and passion, and his preservation of the consistency of his characters." Warton himself believed in the dramatic ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... romance in its substitution of a "light and ridiculous" fable for a "grave and solemn" one, of inferior characters for those of superior rank, and of ludicrous for sublime sentiments. Sometimes in the diction he has admitted burlesque, but never in the sentiments and characters, where, he contends, it would be out of place. He further defines the only source of the ridiculous to be affectation, of which the chief causes are vanity and hypocrisy. Whether this ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... Zangwill, in his symbolic play, The War-God, has put blank verse to what I believe to be a new use, with noteworthy success. He writes in very strict measure, but without the least inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or conventionally poetic, diction. He is thus enabled to use the most modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity; while at the same time he can give rhetorical movement to the speeches of his symbolic personages, and, in passages ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... grace of God, glowing with love for his people, their religion, their language and their historic land, Ibn Daud leaves upon us the impression of a precise thinker, cold and analytical. He exhibits no graces of style, eloquence of diction or depths of enthusiasm and emotion. He passes systematically from one point to the next, uses few words and technical, and moves wholly in the Peripatetic philosophy of the day. In 1161, the same year in which the Emunah ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... groped in his polyglot vocabulary for words, debating over words he knew were fit but which he feared he could not pronounce, rejecting other words he knew would not be understood or would be raw and harsh. But all the time he was oppressed by the consciousness that this carefulness of diction was making a booby of him, preventing him from expressing what he had in him. Also, his love of freedom chafed against the restriction in much the same way his neck chafed against the starched fetter of a collar. Besides, he was confident that he could not keep it up. He ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... his sister Barbara, "how careless you are in your diction. 'Dumped ink!' One can only dump a powdered or granulated substance. By the way I've joined a new club. It's a Society for the Improvement of Advertisers' English, and we work in such a novel and ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... grief. Her adversary laughed at her, and in the intervals of rating Cecile for having inked her dress, flaunted some shrill controversy which left them all staring. Louie vindicating, the claims of the Holy See with much unction and an appropriate diction! It seemed to David, as he listened, that the irony of life could ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... reference to another of the copies, he arrived by degrees at a clear understanding of the whole matter. The story was set forth in rhyming doggerel. The poet was not blessed with a gift of melody or of style. Absence of scansion tortured the ear. Coarseness of diction offended the taste. And yet, as he read on, Julius reluctantly admitted that the cruel tale gained credibility and moral force from the very homeliness of the language in ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... that the followers of Wolf and Duparc and Moussorgsky are aiming at something different. They may not express the general mood of the poem more faithfully, but they certainly attach more importance to its lyrical structure and to flexibly expressive diction: they accept the poet as an equal colleague. The serious song-writer can hardly any longer, like Schumann in his setting of Heine's 'Das ist ein Floeten und Geigen', afford to stultify great poetry by quoting from memory and getting the adjectives deplorably wrong. Nor can he, like ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... such arguments," continued Ben, who sometimes spoke with a purity of diction that is much more common amongst seamen of the navy of to-day than it was in "the good old days" of our ancestors before education was much in vogue, "I hinted that nobody could say we might not pick up a slave-dhow down there on our own hook quite as good as the other ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson
... scarcely his cheeks. Tennyson's cheeks are wet. He is the music of winds in pine-trees in a lonely land, or as a sea breaking upon a shore of rock and wreck; but how passing sweet the music is, stealing your ruggedness away, so that to be harsh in thought or diction in ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... with affectation. A toilet is described with the solemnity of an altar raised to the goddess of vanity, and the history of a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction to set off the meanest things. . . . It is the ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... wild enthusiast, that spurned at the errors of the world, has now become the enlightened moralist, that laments their necessity, or endeavours to find out their remedy. A corresponding alteration is visible in the external form of the work, in its plot and diction. The plot is contrived with great ingenuity, embodying the result of much study, both dramatic and historical. The language is blank verse, not prose, as in the former works; it is more careful and regular, less ambitious in its object, but more certain of attaining it. Schiller's mind had ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... my head off! 'You must not think I was provoked with you,'" she mimicked Lemuel's dignity of diction in mincing falsetto. "'I will come to see you very soon.' Miserable, ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... offence a few little modifications of words have been made; but rather than give a false impression by tampering with any of the narrative, I have omitted the sequel of the last tale and given only an outline of it. The diction adopted has been the oldest that could be used without affectation when dealing with the early times. It has been purposely modified in the later tales; and in the last—which is of Ptolemaic authorship—a modern style has ...
— Egyptian Tales, First Series • ed. by W. M. Flinders Petrie
... Thomas Arnold of Rugby, was born at Laleham, England, December 24, 1822. He was educated at Rugby and Oxford. In 1857 he was elected professor of Poetry at Oxford. He is chiefly noted for his essays, though his poems are lofty in sentiment and polished in diction. "Sohrab and Rustum" is his most important ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... his really famous "obscurity." This obscurity is variously ascribed to a diction unduly learned, or almost unintelligibly colloquial, or grotesquely inventive; to figures of speech drawn from sources too unfamiliar or elaborated to the point of confusion; to sentences complicated by startling inversions, by double parentheses, by broken constructions, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... Eva Macleod, with an air of considerable importance, tapped at the door of her father's apartment. "Papa," she said, with that fondness for a choice diction observable in carefully reared young ladies at the beginning of their teens, "may I have a ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... gesture, speech. Sparing of gesture, sparing of emphasis, careless of mere rhetorical or oratorical art, he had, nevertheless, the secret of the highest art of all, whether in oratory or whatever else—he had simplicity. The force was in the thought and the diction, and he needed no other. The voice was rather deep, low, but quite audible; at times sonorous, and always full.... His manner here, in the presence of this select and rather limited audience—for the theatre of the Royal Institution holds, I ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... a model of incisive diction and of moving prose, conceived in the best Oxford manner, drew a terrible picture of what might occur in withdrawing troops from a foreshore in presence of a ferocious foe. Its polished periods portrayed a scene of horror and despair, of a bullet-swept beach, of drowning soldiers ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... finished. It takes in many places a high tone of passion, which I would gladly succeed in rendering. When I read Virgil in the original I am moved; but not so much so by the translation; and I cannot but think this owing to a defect in the diction, which I have endeavoured to supply, with what success you will easily be ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... the impurities of his style, who composed "Till Eulenspiegel" and "Don Quixote"; not easy, even though the contours of his idiom have not radically altered, and though in the sleepy facile periods of his later style one catches sight at times of the broad, simple diction of his earlier. For the later Strauss lacks pre-eminently and signally just the traits that made of the earlier so brilliant and engaging a figure. Behind the works of the earlier Strauss there was visible an intensely fierily experiencing being, a man who had powerful and poignant and beautiful ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... Montaigne are meant when Hamlet says that 'to make true diction of him, his semblable' must be 'his mirror; and, who else would trace him, his umbrage—nothing more.' That is, one must be Montaigne, or become his absolute admirer, 'his umbrage,' 'his semblable,' in order to do justice ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... average person see as clearly, feel as keenly, and understand as well as he does himself the persons and things that he is portraying and explaining, is obviously the sine qua non of success. Ease, fluency, and originality of diction, either natural or acquired, the writer must possess if his work ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... anecdotes for what they are worth, and that may perhaps be considered slight when they are anonymous. This anecdote, however, in the original Florentine diction, although it betrays a partiality for Lionardo, bears the aspect of truth to fact. Moreover, even Michelangelo's admirers are bound to acknowledge that he had a rasping tongue, and was not incapable of showing his bad temper by rudeness. From the period of his boyhood, when Torrigiano ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... pages with modern decorations, that I have studiously endeavoured to collect examples and authorities from the writers before the restoration, whose works I regard as the wells of English undefiled, as the pure sources of genuine diction. Our language, for almost a century, has, by the concurrence of many causes, been gradually departing from its original Teutonick character, and deviating towards a Gallick structure and phraseology, from which it ought to be our endeavour to recal it, by making our ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... is borrowed from Mr. Wordsworth, a Poet whose versification is occasionally harsh and his diction too frequently obscure; but whom I deem unrivalled among the writers of the present day in manly sentiment, novel imagery, and vivid colouring. Note, 1796, p. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... writing of my religion. The churches are now teaching that religion is action, not diction. There was a time when I could work with only one section of the Church of God. Thank God, it was a very brief period, but I weep for it just the same. Now I can not only work with any section, but worship with them also. If there is error in their intellectual ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... Jeremiah, Cunaeus (de repub. Hebr. i. 3, c. 7) pertinently remarks: "The whole majesty of Jeremiah lies in his negligent language; that rough diction becomes him exceedingly well." It is certainly very superficial in Jerome to seek the cause of that humilitas dictionis of the Prophet, whom he, at the same time, calls in majestate sensuum profundissimum, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... and Dyce prided themselves on the purity of their diction, and they usually abstained from plantation dialect; but when embarrassed, frightened or excited, they invariably relapsed into the lingo of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... commenting upon a speech delivered at Germiston on March 15th, 1905, the Johannesburg Star wrote on the day following: "Did ever a High Commissioner for South Africa speak in this wise before? But beneath the light words and unstudied diction there is the weight and sureness of the 'inevitable' thought. A man who has pursued a single task for eight years with unremitting effort and unswerving devotion can afford to put his mind into his words. And in all that Lord Milner says there is ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... conversation to such an extent that it is a great treat to listen to him. His language flows with such liquid, limpid beauty, his words are chosen with such exquisite delicacy, taste, and accuracy, there is such a refinement in his diction that he charms everyone who hears him speak. All his life he has been a reader of the finest prose and poetry, and has cultivated conversation ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... in good diction there, Mr. Forsythe," muttered the listening Denman. "Otherwise, ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... after application remedy the eccentricities of style, and even of grammar, which are apt to result from such early neglect. His letters, vigorous and direct as they are, present neither the polished diction of Collingwood, nor the usual even correctness of St. Vincent and Saumarez, but are, on the contrary, constantly disfigured by awkward expressions and bad English. There was rarely, however, danger of mistaking his meaning, as was sometimes ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... are all the thousand works of literary criticism called forth by, unless it be by that perpetual question which nags for an answer in all intelligent minds, the question "What is the gift which, behind all mere diction, behind all cadence and rhythm and rhyme, behind all mere lucidity, behind all mere intellect, and behind all variety of subject matter, makes writing everlastingly fresh, admirable, a thing of beauty ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... of schools, as well as of private gentlemen." A few moments' perusal of this work will satisfy the reader that it has not the slightest pretension to be considered a literal translation, while, by its departure from the strict letter of the author, it has gained nothing in elegance of diction. It is accompanied by "critical, historical, geographical, and classical notes in English, from the best Commentators, both ancient and modern, beside a great number of notes, entirely new;" but notwithstanding ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... this unattractive matter, Milton's manner is always and unmistakably "the grand manner." His imagination is lofty, his diction noble, and the epic of Paradise Lost is so filled with memorable lines, with gorgeous descriptions, with passages of unexampled majesty or harmony or eloquence, that the crude material which he injects into the Bible narrative is lost sight of in our wonder ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... the young reader, who finds out who all these poets were, when they lived, what they wrote, etc., will have learned no small amount of English literary history. If he studies the quotations merely as illustrations of style and expression, or as examples of the poetic diction of various periods, he will have learned some lessons in the history and ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... charm in Southey's style, as nearly always to read it with pleasure, even when Southey was talking nonsense. Now, take any page of the Life of Nelson or the Life of Wesley; consider how easy, smooth, natural, and winning is the diction and the rise and fall of the sentence, and yet how varied the rhythm and how nervous the phrases; and then turn to a page of Macaulay, and wince under its stamping emphasis, its over-coloured tropes, its exaggerated expressions, its unlovely staccato. Southey's History ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... conspicuous lapses of his predecessors Raymond with all his guile fell into another pitfall. He lauded the Rose, the Daisy, the Garland of Vine Leaves worn by Eleanor, Marguerite, and Beatrice in three canzonets so perfect in form, so exquisite in diction that they rivalled the ditties of Thibault of Champagne, who was hitherto accounted as having written "the most delightful and most melodious canzonets that at any ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... writer may, for obvious reasons, be most widely known by his 'Logic and 'Rhetoric,' the time will come when his Theological works will be, if not more widely read, still more highly prized. To great powers of argument and illustration, and delightful transparency of diction and style, he adds a higher quality still—and a very rare quality it is—an evident and intense honesty of purpose, an absorbing desire to arrive at the exact truth, and to state it with perfect fairness and with the just limitations. ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... began and continued her work in the Wallace nursery with complete satisfaction to all concerned. Esmeralda, it is true, had surpassed herself in violence of diction in the letter which came in answer to the one breaking the news; but while Bridgie shed tears of distress, and Jack frowned impatience, the person against whom the hurricane of invective was hurled, received it with ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... beautiful statue of Chac-Mool, which serve to determine the different types, may be a guide to discover whence man and civilization came to America, if the American races can be proved not to be autochthonous. Notwithstanding a few guttural sounds, the Maya is soft, pliant, rich in diction and expression; even every shade ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... had seemed to many to have fallen greatly short of the splendour of its opening. Jeffrey said however quite truly, claiming to be heard with authority as his "Critic-laureate," that of all his writings it was perhaps the most finished in diction, and that it equalled the best in the delicacy and fineness of its touches, "while it rises to higher and deeper passions, not resting, like most of the former, in sweet thoughtfulness, and thrilling and attractive tenderness, but boldly wielding all the lofty and terrible elements of tragedy, and ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... and rewards," showing that righteousness is inexorable; or it may interest us because of its solid realism, its pure strength of conception, its surpassing beauty, its vivid imaginative power, its perfection of diction "without superfluousness, without defect." Whatever be the reason of our interest in Dante, the study of his Divine Comedy will ever be both a discipline "not so much to elevate our thoughts," says Coleridge, "as to send them down deeper," and a delight calling forth ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... its predecessors. It presents the same command of metre and diction, the same contrasts of mood, the same grace and sweetness. It cannot be denied that he has won a definite position among contemporary ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... occasions of unbelief. "So long as Christian preachers and writers are limited so much to human creeds and systems, or to stereotyped phrases of any kind, and avail themselves so little of the popular diction of literature and of common life, so long must they repel many whom they might convince and win." Dr. Porter, ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... author in the spirit of accurate history, would be far below the meed of praise that is due. He has executed this part of the book in a style of animated and lively description, and with that flowing and finished diction, which can only be attained when the mind of a writer is perfectly familiar with the events, and when, by the force of imagination, he becomes himself as it were an actor instead of a spectator of ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... danger of detailed enumeration by which description so often loses all its power: for "of the greatest things the parts are little." Now he is incidentally laying down the true ideal of the translator: to "exhibit his author's thoughts in such a dress of diction as the author would have given them, had his language been English." Now he is discoursing at length on what it was Wordsworth's misfortune never fully to understand, the immense power of association upon words, so that the greatest thoughts and ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... MAN of him;" and ordered him a pension of 500 pounds. This story, however current, seems to have been made after the event. The King's answer implies a greater acquaintance with our proverbial and familiar diction than King William could ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... He is grotesque and droll in his manner, and above all always restrained. His literary life is full of sprites and gnomes that frolic before young children and once before mature people. The Griffin and the Minor Canon is a beautiful fairy story lifted from childhood's thought and diction into a mature realm. His humor is plain and simple, cool and keenly calculating. A friendly critic has said of one of his stories, "With a gentle, ceaseless murmur of amusement, and a flickering twinkle of smiles, the story moves steadily on in the calm triumph of its assured ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... him, only we must not expect in his youthful poems the philosophy of the nineteenth century, or the beauties of Pindar, or, with some again, the truths of Christianity. Few understand children, still fewer understand antiquity. If we look in the Veda for high poetical diction, for striking comparisons, for bold combinations, we shall be disappointed. These early poets thought more for themselves than for others. They sought rather, in their language, to be true to their own thought than to please ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... expositions of it. Although dramatic in form the poem is not continuously, directly, and compactly dramatic in movement. It cannot be converted into a play without being radically changed in structure and in the form of its diction. More disastrous still, in the eyes of those votaries, it cannot be and it never has been converted into a play without a considerable sacrifice of its contents, its comprehensive scope, its poetry, and its ethical significance. In the poem it is the Man who predominates; ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... of the Beauties too; as I think it became an Exact and Equal Critique to do. It seems strange that he should allow nothing Good in the whole: If the Fable and Incidents are not to his Taste, yet the Thoughts are almost every where very Noble, and the Diction manly and proper. These last, indeed, are Parts of Shakespear's Praise, which it would be very hard to Dispute with him. His Sentiments and Images of Things are Great and Natural; and his Expression (tho' perhaps in some Instances a little Irregular) ...
— Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) • Nicholas Rowe
... of growth and settled down. Work on his machine continued when he could afford to buy the parts, and his writing settled down into a comfortable channel once more. In his spare time James began to work on Martha's diction. ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... text, the student cannot but notice the contrast between the easy diction of modern philosophical writers and the rugged conciseness of the mediaeval Schoolman. On the other hand, disappointment awaits those who quit the pages of Cicero for the less elegant Latinity of the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... in beautiful style—so light and sure. I liked the instrumental part much better than the singing. French voices, the women's particularly, are thin, as a rule. I think they sacrifice too much to the "diction,"—don't bring out the voices enough—but the style and training are perfect of ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... When is our diction pure? When we use only such words as belong to the idiom of ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... original which, being narrative are exceedingly simple as to idea and style, have been invariably rendered in a manner the most liable to censure, exhibiting not only a slovenly carelessness in regard to diction, but not unfrequently a disregard of accuracy when the slightest particle of attention was only necessary to render the meaning which the sacred writer endeavours to convey. These are its greatest, and, it may perhaps ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... to Wales by contrary winds. And of this event a poem was made in the reign of James I, which is quoted by Westcote as written by a "modern poet," though he does not give us the name. The verse still retains a smack of the Elizabethan diction—not the Shakespeare magic, indeed, but the euphuistic, antithetical, fantastic balance ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... The tale was well sustained, and certainly circumstantial. After all, the boy might have really seen something. How was the poor man to know—though the chaste and lofty diction might have supplied a hint—that the whole yarn was a free adaptation from the last Penny Dreadful lent us by ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... inadvertently dipped their brush in their own experience, some of its color having fallen accidentally on the bare ideal outline which they wished to trace. We have simply a contour, a general sketch, filled up with the harmonious gray tone of correct diction.—Even in comedy, necessarily employing current habits, even with Moliere, so frank and so bold, the model is unfinished, all individual peculiarities being suppressed, the face becoming for a moment a theatrical mask, and the personage, especially when talking ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... single expression, that had not been used before. The second Silesian school is more ambitious; but its poetic flights are more disappointing even than the honest prose of Opitz. The "Shepherds of the Pegnitz" had tried to imitate the brilliant diction of the Italian poets; but the modern Meistersaenger of the old town of Nuernberg had produced nothing but wordy jingle. Hoffmannswaldau and Lohenstein, the chief heroes of the second Silesian school, followed in their track, and did not succeed better. Their compositions are bombastic ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... got it on his desk, sir," replied that youth, almost breathlessly. Speed in action had so demanded equivalent celerity in diction that often speech came badly second in endurance, causing him to sputter and ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... that has the poetic aroma about it, and is an example (of which we might adduce additional cases from the domain of 'poetic diction') of a word set aside from a prose use and devoted exclusively to poetry. It is, as we know, Saxon, signifying old or old age, and was formerly in constant use in this sense; as, for instance, in Chaucer's translation of Boethius de Consolatione ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... impossible for me to bring it at all before the public. My earnest effort has been to be as faithful to the poet as possible, and for this reason I have not attempted to render rime, a dangerous obstacle to a natural expression of the poet's thought and diction. But I hope that the critics will judge my work as that of a mere pioneer. I know there is value in the theme; and if this value is made sufficiently evident to arouse the interest of poetry lovers ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... derived. The beginning of the day was always devoted by her to the New Testament in Greek, after which she read select orations of Isocrates and the tragedies of Sophocles, which I judged best adapted to supply her tongue with the purest diction, her mind with the most excellent precepts, and her exalted station with a defence against the utmost power of fortune. For her religious instruction, she drew first from the fountains of Scripture, and ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... English, but I believe that if I had had none at all I should at any rate have congratulated Germany on a clever bit of plagiarism. By her voice, when she spoke, I knew that she must have talked German habitually from childhood; diction and accent were faultless, at least to my English ear; but the native constitutional ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... to give with accuracy the diction of those speeches which I did not myself correct within a week after they were delivered. Many expressions, and a few paragraphs, linger in my memory. But the rest, including much that had been carefully premeditated, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... schools see J.E. Congleton, "Theories of Pastoral Poetry in England, 1684-1717," SP, XLI, 1944, pp. 544-575.) Although Purney adopted a modification of Aristotle's critical divisions into Fable, Character, Sentiment, and Diction, and took for granted the doctrine of the distinction of genres, he otherwise rejected traditional formulae and critical tenets, and began with the premise that man is most delighted by the imaginative perception of the states of life for ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... stories, told with that felicitous simplicity and elegance of diction which characterize all Mr. Woodworth's efforts for ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank
... questions of proportion, of discreet silence, of full or cursory narration, of comment and connexion. Of all that, however, later on; for the present we deal with the vices to which bad writers are liable. As to those faults of diction, construction, meaning, and general amateurishness, which are common to every kind of composition, to discuss them is neither compatible with my space ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... Indeed, he had already produced beautiful poetry in his Oriental Eclogues, four years before his Odes appeared. These were, it is admitted, of a different cast from his Odes, and of a gentleness and chastity of thought and diction, which he himself was conscious, some years afterwards, did not very well represent the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins |
