"Rhetorical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... DEAR MEMBER—I send you a powerful petition, For absolute, instant, entire abolition. This question our Chamber is taking a lead in Composed, as you know, of the Flowers of Dunedin, Intelligent Druggists, rhetorical Quakers, Broad acres—a few—but no want of wiseacres. All are perfectly clear that these horrid restrictions Are the proximate cause of our present afflictions, Obstructing the bowels, as 'twere, of the nation, And entirely deranging ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... that the civilized world had had lessons enough, ever since that seventh century burning of the Alexandrian library by the Caliph Omar, with that famous but apocryphal rhetorical dilemma, put in his mouth perhaps by some nimble-witted reporter:—"If these books agree with the Koran, they are useless, and should be burned: if not, they are pernicious, and must not be spared." But the heedless world goes carelessly ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... Irish accent; but, when I listened maliciously, I detected certain Hibernian inflections; nothing of the vulgar Irish idiom, but something that was more interrogative, more exclamatory, and perhaps more rhetorical, than the common language of English ladies, accompanied with much animation of countenance and demonstrative gesture. This appeared to me peculiar and unusual, but not affected. She was uncommonly eloquent, and yet, without action, her words were not sufficiently rapid to express her ideas. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... gun on each hip, his arms folded, looking at the audience; fixing his gaze with instant intentness on any section of the house from which there came so much as a whisper. The audience listened to me with rapt attention. At the end, with a pride in my rhetorical powers which proceeded from a misunderstanding of the situation, I remarked to the chairman: "I held that audience well; there wasn't an interruption." To which the chairman replied: "Interruption? Well, I guess not! Seth had sent round word ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... Latin production was more widely known and studied from the beginning of the Italian Renaissance to the middle of the seventeenth century. In its style, however, it is far from classic. It is full of archaisms and rhetorical conceits. In striving to say things finely, the author frequently failed to say them well. This fault, however, largely disappears in the translation; and whatever may be the literary defects of the novel, it offers rich compensation in the liveliness, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... strengthened. All these writers extolled the Burgundian regime and supported the duke's policy, whether friendly or antagonistic to France. From a literary point of view, they are greatly inferior to their predecessors and often lapse into rhetorical eloquence. Their style, which appears to be overloaded with flowery images, excited great admiration at the time, especially in the case of Chastellain, who was hailed by his contemporaries as ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... The case for the State, hitherto ably managed, was now confided to Mr. John Holmes of Maine, and Mr. Wirt, the Attorney-General, who handled it very badly. Holmes, an active, fluent Democratic politician, made a noisy, rhetorical, political speech, which pleased his opponents and disgusted his clients and their friends. Mr. Wirt, loaded with business cares of every sort, came into court quite unprepared, and endeavored to make ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... English Poesie (1589). When we move to the latter part of the sixteenth century and then change the genre as exemplified in Day's The English Secretorie, we see a stylistic extension to the art of letter writing which borrowed rhetorical terms and rules and applied them to written correspondence. The emphasis in these rhetorics on style is the same: ornateness in communication is achieved ...
— A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes • Richard Sherry
... their own feet, and some from lack of restoratives. The mice, he avers, enjoyed the pleasures of the chase with composure. But if "Roman history is nine-tenths lying," we can hardly expect a smaller proportion of that rhetorical figure in the annals of a people capable of so incredible cruelty to a lovely women; for a hard heart ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... which had helped to send him to the East, for continual loyalty, Pompey had replied to Cicero with coldness. He would now let Pompey know what was his standing in Rome. "If ever," he says to Atticus, "I was strong with my grand rhythm, with my quick rhetorical passages, with enthusiasm, and with logic, I was so now. Oh, the noise that I made on the occasion! You know what my voice can do. I need say no more about it, as surely you must have heard me away there in Epirus." The reader, ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... rhetorical turn, but positively, he didn't. At first I could not believe it. He had not had the beginning of the inkling of an idea. This astonishing little man had been working on purely theoretical grounds the whole time! When he said it ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... sacredness, then, any longer in the miraculous tongue of man? Is his head become a wretched cracked pitcher, on which you jingle to frighten crows, and makes bees hive? He fills me with terror, this two-legged rhetorical phantasm! I could long for an Oliver without rhetoric at all. I could long for a Mahomet, whose persuasive eloquence, with wild-flashing heart and scimiter, is, 'Wretched moral, give up that; or by the Eternal, thy maker and mine, I will kill thee! Thou blasphemous scandalous ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... the great essential fact, unhappily, in gloating over the finale. Why didn't the woman say the butcher shop, and done with it, since she was so set upon a rhetorical slump of some sort? However, he smothered his interest in the detail, and went back again to the ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... never found themselves, never touched their power, until they forgot their rules for construction, their grammar, their rhetorical arrangement, by losing themselves in their subject. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... powerful animal sensibility; and I knew the one great secret for maintaining its equipoise, viz., by powerful daily exercise; and thus I lived in the light and presence, or, (if I should not be suspected of seeking rhetorical expressions, I would say,) in one eternal solstice of ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... secretly offering the Cabinet of St. Petersburg a guarantee of German support in case of an attack from Austria; but it does not appear that the Czar placed much trust in the assurance, especially when Bismarck made his rhetorical fanfare of February 6, 1888, in order to ensure the raising of a loan of 28,000,000 marks for buying munitions ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... desire to teach a lesson. She exhorts her sisters as a minister might appeal to his brethren, and this resemblance is made still more striking by the oratorical flights or prayers with which she interrupts her argument to address her Creator. Moreover, the book is throughout, as Leslie Stephen says, "rhetorical rather than speculative." It is unmistakably the creation of a zealous partisan, and not of a calm advocate. It reads more like an extempore declamation than a deliberately written essay. Godwin says, as if in praise, that it was begun ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... treasure in my heart for the "Old First" is due whatever of distinction attaches to the position of recorder of actions which prove the worth and heroism of each constituent part of the brigade. In accepting this trust I shall repress all desire for rhetorical display. I will not even attempt to do that justice, which is beyond the power of mortals; but shall simply try to be your faithful chronicler or recorder of facts as they appeared to me and others, ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... curious to compare the dry and business-like tone of the Arab style with the rhetorical luxuriance of the Persian: p.10 of Mr. Clouston's ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... expression borrowed from Quintilian. A plausible and a consolatory argument for the greater part of mankind! It, however, roused the indignation of Leland, the eloquent translator of Demosthenes, and the rhetorical professor at Trinity College, in Dublin, who has nobly defended the cause of classical taste and feeling by profounder principles. His classic anger produced his "Dissertation on the Principles of Human Eloquence;" ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... original, could vary from it so successfully. Most notable, probably, are the passages in which he intensified the expression of his source. They may indicate no more than the eternal "ham" in our author; but I think they probably indicate as well a new style of acting, more rhetorical in one way, more natural in another. A good example, in which the new rhetoric is not oppressive, is the account of the sea fight at the end of Act III. Even when Harris followed his original most closely, we seem to hear the actor, speaking in a new tongue, in ...
— The City Bride (1696) - Or The Merry Cuckold • Joseph Harris
... these notions are found in one of his juvenile productions, and illustrated by "a pretty story" out of Ariosto, we should not deem it worth while to notice them, if they had not been retained in the latest edition of his Miscellanies. But for this circumstance, we should pass them by as the rhetorical flourish of a young man who, in his most mature productions, is often more ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... the cloaths for that evening, to be returned when the play was over. But all arguments were fruitless; nothing but the Ready, or a pledge of full equal value. Such people would have despised a Demosthenes, or a Cicero, with all their rhetorical flourishes, if their oratorian gowns had been in pledge. Well! what must be done? The whole family in confusion and all at their wits-end; disgrace, with her glaring eyes and extended mouth, ready to ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... though she never spoke a word. She folded up her work; and going up to the good old man, took both his hands in hers and kissed him on both his cheeks. A fine piece of rhetorical action, wasn't it? And then they all crowded round him, and shook hands with him, and kissed him, and God-blessed him, for their kind, true, old friend; and prayed that every blessing might light upon his noble head, till he passed through them speechless ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... say to A Wonder Book, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, with pictures in color by Arthur Rackham? I do not know why I ask this rhetorical question, which, like most questions of the sort, should be followed by exclamation points! There will be exclamations, at any rate, over this book, surely the most beautiful of the year, perhaps of several years. ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... lover during the fortnight of her convalescence. But she knew that the two Poles had been to ask after her health during her illness. The first letter Grushenka got from them was a long one, written on large notepaper and with a big family crest on the seal. It was so obscure and rhetorical that Grushenka put it down before she had read half, unable to make head or tail of it. She could not attend to letters then. The first letter was followed next day by another in which Pan Mussyalovitch begged her for a loan of two thousand roubles for a very short ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... choice and disposition of his words, and, for want of variety, repeating them, especially the particles, in a manner very grating to an English ear. But I confine myself to this Introduction, as his last work, where endeavouring at rhetorical flowers, he gives us only bunches of thistles; of which I could present the reader with a plentiful crop; but I refer him to every page and line of the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... December, 1792, the King appeared a second time before the Convention. M. de Seze, labouring night and day, had completed his defence. The King insisted on excluding from it all that was too rhetorical, and confining it to the mere discussion of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... its evidences of a highly cultivated taste and wide historical research than for its inculcation of a high morality,—the demand for practical Christianity in nations as well as individuals. It burned no incense under the nostrils of an already inflated and vain people. It gratified them by no rhetorical falsehoods about "the land of the free and the home of the brave." It did not apostrophize military heroes, nor strut "red wat shod" over the plains of battle, nor call up, like another Ezekiel, from the valley of vision the dry bones thereof. It uttered none of the precious scoundrel ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... reaching the cave, and meanwhile Sturges restored the lost illusions of Pilar. Not only did he make love to her without any of the rhetorical nonsense of the caballero, but he was big and strong, and it was evident that he was afraid of nothing, not even of Dona Brigida. The dreams of her silent girlhood swirled in her imagination, but looked vague and shapeless before this vigorous reality. For some moments ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... Herd-Boy. Uhland wrote a poem on a very similar subject, The Boy's Mountain Song. But the contrast between Uhland's hardy, active, public-spirited youth and Heine's sleepy, amorous individualist is no more striking than the difference between Uhland's rhetorical and Heine's tropical method. Heine's poem is an elaboration of the single metaphor with which it begins: "Kingly is the herd-boy's calling." The poem Pine and Palm, in which Heine expresses his ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... personage than Hyperion himself,' replied Saturn, 'the favourite counsellor of Enceladus. He is a fine orator, and makes up by his round sentences and choice phrases for the rhetorical deficiencies of his chief, who, to speak the truth, is somewhat curt and husky. They have enough now to do to manage their comrades and keep a semblance of discipline in their routed ranks. Mark that ferocious Briareus there scowling in a corner! Didst ever see such ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... my rhetorical effusions short," remarked Spouter reproachfully. "Some day, when you are aching to have me make a speech, ...
— The Rover Boys on a Hunt - or The Mysterious House in the Woods • Arthur M. Winfield (Edward Stratemeyer)
... to stigmatize the most odious despotism, exercised in the most odious manner, and all other comparisons are found inadequate, the despots are said to be like slave-masters, or slave-drivers. What, by a rhetorical license, the worst oppressors of the human race, by way of stamping on them the most hateful character possible, are said to be, these men, in very truth, are. I do not mean that all of them are hateful personally, ...
— The Contest in America • John Stuart Mill
... chosen, in 1841, as member for Stockport. Almost immediately he exercised his gift as a speaker, securing at once the attention of his colleagues by his style of oratory, which, with little formal eloquence or rhetorical elaboration, was powerfully persuasive, enriched by many happy illustrations drawn from life, and infused with a pure and lofty spirit. Whatever the topic under discussion, he was always able to show its relation to the obnoxious tariff, ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... inner mystery be lost. That mystery, as once the secret and the glory of our English-speaking race, consists in nothing but two common habits, two inveterate habits carried into public life,—habits so homely that they lend themselves to no rhetorical expression, yet habits more precious, perhaps, than any that the human race has gained. They can never be too often pointed out or praised. One of them is the habit of trained and disciplined good temper towards the opposite party when it fairly wins its innings. It was by breaking away from this ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... Dr. R. C. Flower, Spectator Publishing Co., Boston, 52 pages, 50 cents. This handsome brochure discusses many prevalent evils in a pungent and rhetorical style and gives a great amount of good advice in a sprightly ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... possessed remarkable rhetorical ability and a highly cultivated mind. He rose rapidly at the Bar, until he became Chief Baron of Exchequer. He was the founder of the convivial order of St. Patrick, called "The Monks of the Screw," of which Curran, who wrote its charter song, ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... perversity, which is the ordinary note of ecclesiastical homilies on this subject, and which makes them look so supremely silly to men whose lives have been spent in wrestling with these questions. There is no attempt to hide away real stumbling-blocks under rhetorical stucco; no resort to the tu quoque device of setting scientific blunders against theological errors; no suggestion that an honest man may keep contradictory beliefs in separate pockets of his brain; no question that the method ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... a moment since," she said, ignoring a question she deemed purely rhetorical. "You spoke of yourself as 'Miss Lucy's man.' Just what did you mean, Bates? I know you don't use words just because you like the ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... of the game, which follows the introduction, requires little rhetorical skill. Each play is described in its proper place and order and should be so clear that a reader could make a diagram of the game from it. It must also be accurate in names and distances as well as ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... altogether disproportionate place to the individual, because it treated only of such individuals as were concerned in great events. It is but a step from realising the greatness of an event to believing that the persons concerned in it were equally great, and this belief, fostered by the somewhat rhetorical literature of Rome, met the new consciousness of personality more than half way, and led to that unlimited admiration for human genius and achievement which was so prominent a feature of the early Renaissance. ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... of the Psalms, Cassiodorus bears witness that all the splendor of rhetorical eloquence, all the melody of poetic speech, whatever variety there may be of pleasing pronunciation, have their ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... Freedom League—"freedom" being a question-begging synonym for "parliamentary franchise"—and everywhere in the literature of woman's suffrage we have talk of woman's "emancipation"; and we have women characterised as serfs, or slaves—the terms serfs and slaves supplying, of course, effective rhetorical synonyms ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... Committee, carried off his property, and vowed that he would resign his Associateship. He was indeed called upon to do so; and he signalised his withdrawal by a furious letter to the Times in which the rancours, grievances, and contempts of ten chequered and ambitious years found full and rhetorical expression. The letter naturally made a breach between the writer and England's official art. Watson, who was abroad when the whole thing happened, had heard of it with mingled feelings. 'It will either make him—or finish him!' was his own judgement, ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... originals, we see the difference between the verse of a poet, with a healthy vitality of spirit, and, through that healthy vitality of spirit, having secret dealings with things, and verse which is largely the product of the rhetorical or literary faculty. We do not feel, when reading the latter, that any unconscious might co-operated with the conscious powers of the writer. But we DO feel this when we ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... Serbian army," said the Italians, in the course of a long and rhetorical placard which in 1919 they pasted up throughout Rieka and the Adriatic lands they occupied, and which was not more convincing than the caravan of Dalmatian mayors whom, after the War, they very proudly exhibited in Paris, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... mental. His intellectual status was equally strong and massive. He excelled almost all men both in the patient accumulation of facts and in bold generalization. He had great power of logical analysis, and stood with the first in rhetorical exposition. He had the best instincts and habits of the scholar. He loved to roam in every field of knowledge. He delighted in the creations of the imagination—poetry, fiction, and art. He loved the deep ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... at the Democratic convention a week earlier were no better and no different. Their rhetorical stock-in-trade was the same old shop-worn figures of speech in which their predecessors have dealt for ages, and in which their successors will traffic to the end of—well, to the end of that imitative quality in the national ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... tell common tales in such enormous phrases, with such gigantic structure of rhetorical flourish, that the mere disproportion amounts to false-hood; and, the diseased appetite in listeners growing more and more diseased, feeding on such diseased food, it is impossible to predict what it will not be necessary for story-mongers ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... with spirit and power, needs a great deal of revision from a—from a rhetorical standpoint. It is, in fact, carelessly put together. That is a cardinal fault in a literary production, and one for which no amount of talent, or even of ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... him for his resolution, at the same time advising him not to give up his mind entirely to dog-fighting, as he had formerly done, but, when the present combat should be over, to return to his rhetorical studies, and above all to marry some rich and handsome lady on the first opportunity, as, with his person and expectations, he had only to sue for the hand of the daughter of a marquis to be successful, telling him, with a sigh, that all women were not ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... to have received an erroneous designation, than longer ones; and some kinds of composition, such as epistles or panegyrical orations, are more liable to suspicion than others; those, again, which have a taste of sophistry in them, or the ring of a later age, or the slighter character of a rhetorical exercise, or in which a motive or some affinity to spurious writings can be detected, or which seem to have originated in a name or statement really occurring in some classical author, are also of doubtful credit; while there is no instance of any ancient writing proved to be a forgery, which ...
— Menexenus • Plato
... truths dismiss the preamble as "theoretical," or, to use another term of derogation favored by reactionaries, "French." But if the preamble be French and philosophical, the specific charges against the King are very English and practical. Here are certain facts, presented no doubt with consummate rhetorical skill, but facts, undeniably. The Anglo-Saxon in Jefferson is basal, racial; the turn for academic philosophizing after the French fashion is personal, acquired; but the range and sweep and enduring vitality ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... therefore, uttered a few simple words of gratitude, very quietly,—much to the satisfaction of some of the guests, who had expected one of those elaborate effusions, with rolling up of the eyes and rhetorical accents, so frequent with eloquent divines when they address their Maker in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... arts, deriving its fundamentals from them, and depending upon them for its existence. In the first place, since argumentation is spoken or written discourse, it belongs to rhetoric, and the rules which govern composition apply to it as strongly as to any other kind of expression. In fact, perhaps rhetorical principles should be observed in argumentation more rigidly than elsewhere, for in the case of narration, description, or exposition, the reader or hearer, in an endeavor to derive pleasure or profit, is seeking the author, while ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... of God. Thus in his defence of the Amistad captives he began with defining justice in the language of Justinian, "Constans et perpetua voluntas jus SUUM cuique tribuendi." He quoted on the same occasion from the Declaration of Independence, not by way of rhetorical embellishment, and not even as a valid human ordinance, but as a truth of nature, of universal application, the memorable words, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... the poetry in question, Angelo Poliziano was indubitably the most successful. This giant of learning, who filled the lecture-rooms of Florence with students of all nations, and whose critical and rhetorical labours marked an epoch in the history of scholarship, was by temperament a poet, and a poet of the people. Nothing was easier for him than to throw aside his professor's mantle, and to improvise 'Ballate' for the girls to sing ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... then went on with one of those strange bursts of rhetorical eloquence that Zulus sometimes indulge in, which to my mind, full though they are of vain repetitions, show that the race is by no means devoid of poetic ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... important for Xenophon, Educationalist. Cyrus on the powerlessness of a speech to create valour in the soul of the untrained: there must be a physical, moral, and spiritual training there beforehand. The speech is in Xenophon's best earnest rhetorical style. ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... at the same time song, and my song declamation." Scaria's method also afforded an eloquent illustration of the wonderful manner in which, in Wagner's vocal style, the melodic accent always falls on the proper rhetorical accent of each word of the text, which is one of the secrets of clear enunciation. He emphasized important syllables by dwelling on them, thus producing that dramatic rubato which Wagner considered of such great importance in his operas that, when he brought out "Tannhaeuser" in Dresden, ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... Goldwin Smith's historic art, his lax criticism, his superficial acquaintance with foreign countries, his occasional proneness to sacrifice accuracy for the sake of rhetorical effect, his aversion for spiritual things, are all covered by one transcendent merit, which, in a man of so much ability, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... of the children and the conduct of the disciples in Gethsemane, are met with frequently enough to this day, and in works of a more professedly critical character than Justin's. The description of the carpenter's trade and of the crowd at the Crucifixion may be merely rhetorical amplifications in the one case of the general Synoptic statement, in the other of the special statement in St. Mark. A certain fulness of style is characteristic of Justin. That he attributes the genealogy to Mary may be a natural instance of reflection; the inconsistency in the Synoptic Gospels ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... to say that the translations hitherto made "have conveyed to us a faint notion of the compass, variety, solidity, and linguistic beauties of that literature." Such statements as these admit, unfortunately, of rhetorical support, sufficient to convince outsiders that at any rate there are two sides to the question, a conviction which could only be effectually dispelled by placing before them a few thousand volumes translated into English, and chosen by the writer of ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... a fine morning. Study this paragraph carefully with reference to the rhetorical effect. The entire scene is the product of De Quincey's imagination; do you ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... matter is too technical to be dealt with adequately here, it may serve at least to remind the reader that an appreciation of English prose rhythms, as they have been actually employed for many centuries, requires a sensitiveness to the rhetorical position of phrases and clauses, and to "the use of sonorous words in the places of rhetorical emphasis, which cannot be indicated by the bare symbols of prosody." [Footnote: New York Nation, February 27, 1913.] For that sonority and cadence and balance ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... ornament, all that the reader has any right to demand is that the decoration should be poetical and not rhetorical. Now, as a matter of fact, there is no surer sign of the amount of the poetical endowment of any poet than the insight he shows into the nature of poetry as distinguished from rhetoric when working on ornate poetry. It is a serious impeachment ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... The story of his conversion, and the joy which it caused in the Christian community, is told by St. Augustine[188]. He was a deep thinker of the speculative mystical type, but a clumsy and obscure writer, in spite of his rhetorical training. His importance lies in his position as the first Christian ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... it is no truism, but an exceedingly recondite truth. I, Sir, think the Established Church of Ireland a bad institution. I will go farther. I am not speaking in anger, or with any wish to excite anger in others; I am not speaking with rhetorical exaggeration: I am calmly and deliberately expressing, in the only appropriate terms, an opinion which I formed many years ago, which all my observations and reflections have confirmed, and which I am prepared to support by reasons, when I say that, of all the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... centuries from the fifth to the ninth after Christ. From its culmination in the tragedies of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and in the comedies of Aristophanes, the classic drama declined through the brilliantly realistic comedies of Menander to the coldly rhetorical tragedies of the Roman Seneca. The decay of culture, the barbarian invasions, and the attacks of the Christian Church caused a yet greater decadence, a fall so complete that, although the old traditions were kept alive ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... the moment all before him—his audience becoming like clay in the hands of the potter. But I must confess that the pregnant thoughts and serene self-possession of the young Boston minister had a greater charm for me than all the rhetorical splendours of Chalmers' ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... mean to hint that the Swiss, the German, and the Belgian preachers all used literally the same discourse; but I suppose that in the seminaries there are supplied certain skeleton discourses for the whole year, and these skeletons are dressed up sometimes in homely fustian, sometimes in rhetorical tinsel: yet they never ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... followed them: you were proud, and quite naturally so, of being the intimate friend of an artist so distinguished: but you could not understand the conditions requisite for the production of artistic work. I am not speaking in phrases of rhetorical exaggeration, but in terms of absolute truth to actual fact when I remind you that during the whole time we were together I never wrote one single line. Whether at Torquay, Goring, London, Florence, or ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... Church, is likely to obtain a very effective hold of that broad sequence and many-linked chain of events, to which Bossuet gave a right name, but whose real meaning he never was even near seizing. His merit is that he did in a small and rhetorical way what Montesquieu and Voltaire afterwards did in a truly comprehensive and philosophical way; he pressed forward general ideas in connection with the recorded movements of the chief races of mankind. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... tradition of virtuosity in his blood, he has before him the example of all contemporaries, and he has at hand an instrument of wonderful sonority and compass. Yet not once is Joao de Deus clamorous or rhetorical, not once does he indulge in idle ornament. His prevailing note is that of exquisite sweetness and of reverent purity; yet with all his caressing softness he is never sentimental, and, though he has not the strength for a long fight, emotion has ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... The speeches are still real speeches, intended to affect the audience addressed, and yet partly intended also for the reporters. When the audience becomes merely the pretext, and the real aim is to address the public, the speech tends to become a pamphlet in disguise and loses its rhetorical character. I may remark in passing that almost the only legal speeches which, so far as my knowledge goes, are still readable, were those of Erskine, who, after trying the careers of a sailor and a soldier, found the true ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... in the fullest sense of the word. I have no belief in God, in society, in happiness. Take a good look at me, father; for in a few hours' time life will be over for me. My last sun has risen," said Lucien; with a sort of rhetorical effect he waved his hand towards ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... and yet this keen-minded, stout person spoke his lines with such pertness and spontaneity that they rarely failed of their proper effect. As for Orlando, it seemed to me that Pedro de Cordoba was a little too rhetorical at times to fit in with the spirit of the performance, but Orlando at times does not fit into the play. For instance, when he utters ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... as a member in one of these societies. It may easily be inferred, therefore, that they had already become bodies of recognized importance. The rhetorical chambers existed in the most obscure villages. The number of yards of Flemish poetry annually manufactured and consumed throughout the provinces almost exceed belief. The societies had regular constitutions. Their presiding officers were called kings, princes, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... relief by the suppression of comparatively unimportant details.' He found no examples to follow, for Villani with all his merits was of a different order. Diarists and chroniclers there were in plenty, and works of the learned men led by Aretino, written in Latin and mainly rhetorical. The great work of Guicciardini was not published till years after the Secretary's death. Machiavelli broke away from the Chronicle or any other existing form. He deliberately applied philosophy to the ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... to assume another and a foreign dress, the corpus however remaining untouched. Under the hands of a host of editors, scribes and copyists, who have no scruples anent changing words, names and dates, abridging descriptions and attaching their own decorations, the florid and rhetorical Persian would readily be converted into the straight-forward, business-like, matter of fact Arabic. And what easier than to islamise the old Zoroasterism, to transform Ahriman into Iblis the Shaytan, Jan bin ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... few politicians of any day—would have dared to assert at once the existence of a power and the moral obligation not to use it? The instinctive American mode of limiting power is to deny its existence. Our politicians so deeply distrust our temperament that whatever they may say for rhetorical effect, they will not, whenever there is any danger of their being taken at their word, trust anything to moral law. Their minds are normally mechanical. The specific, statutory limitation is the only one that for them has reality. The truth that temper in politics ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... we see clearly formed in Catherine's mind that strange sense of responsibility for the sins of her time, so illogical to the natural, so inevitable to the spiritual vision. "I believe that I am the wretched woman who is the cause of so great evils!" Thus she cries, not in rhetorical figure of speech, but in deep conviction. It is a conviction destined to grow more intense till it leads direct ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... Moore began his literary career by writing his personal confessions; nor is there any harm in this if he had not continued them for the remainder of his life. He is a man of genuinely forcible mind and of great command over a kind of rhetorical and fugitive conviction which excites and pleases. He is in a perpetual state of temporary honesty. He has admired all the most admirable modern eccentrics until they could stand it no longer. Everything he writes, it is to be fully admitted, has a genuine ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... point out the exquisite beauty of the imagery or the pathos and peace that breathe in the majestic rhythm of the words. There is something more than poetical beauty or rhetorical amplification of a single thought in those three clauses. The 'hiding-place' and 'covert' refer to one class of wants; the 'rivers of water in a dry place' to yet another; and 'the shadow of a great rock in a weary land' to yet a third. And, though they are tinged and dyed ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... the vengeance of the Company, the premier, and the nobility and gentry of the British realm. The master-at-arms, finding he had no chance in argument, doused the glim—pitiable resource of a weak disputant—then basely fled the rhetorical consequences. ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... work had an immediate, continued, and deserved success. It was critically contrasted with Robertson's account of Columbus, and it is open to the charge of too much rhetorical color here and there, and it is at times too diffuse; but its substantial accuracy is not questioned, and the glow of the narrative springs legitimately from the romance of the theme. Irving understood, what our later historians have fully appreciated, the advantage ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... maintained, was felt as a reproach by the government. At last, four were carried down to Westminster Abbey, to hear the Bishop of Durham deliver his famous sermon against the pope; and when this rhetorical inanity had also failed, and as they were thought to confirm one another in their obstinacy, they were dispersed among other houses the temper of which could be depended upon. Some were sent to the north; others to Sion, ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... the prize rhetorical exercise is called by this name; the reason is not given. The students speak of "making a rush for moonlight," i.e. of attempting to ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... includes obvious expansions. These removed, we can fairly distinguish a continuous metrical form up to 29, with the exception perhaps of 25-27. The metre is sometimes irregular enough to raise the suggestion(530) that the whole is rhetorical prose, between which and metre proper it is often hard, as we have seen, to draw the line. But we have also learned how often and how naturally irregular, when the subject requires it, Jeremiah's metres ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... little above ordinary nature, the pauses longer and more frequent, the tones weightier, the action more forcible, and the expression more highly coloured. Speaking from memory admits of the application of every possible element of effectiveness, rhetorical and elocutionary, and in the delivery of a few great actors the highest excellence in this art has been exemplified. But speaking from memory requires the most minute and careful study, as well as high elocutionary ability, to guard the speaker against a merely mechanical ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... of Tarfe, whose marquisate did not go back half a century, with these rhetorical figures of an orator in the Senate and his promises of protection, convinced the haughty widow. She was the one who spoke to Renovales, to relieve him of an explanation that would be trying because of the timidity he felt in this society that ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... her speech on most occasions, that when she gets into a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I interrupt it. I could not help, however, smiling at the phantom of wealth which her dear imagination had conjured up out of a clear income of poor—hundred pounds a year. "It is true we were happier ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... of Paris applaud at the remembrance of Waterloo is perhaps one of the most brilliant triumphs of eloquence which the annals of history record. But this rhetorical success is not a triumph of truth. There were those who were conquered at Waterloo; and, to judge by what has been going on for some time past in Europe, it would seem that those who were conquered are bent on ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... dislike those writers or speakers who entitle themselves wise, but they welcome those who content themselves with saying that they are lovers of philosophy, and have made some progress, or use some such moderate language about themselves as that, which does not excite envy. But rhetorical sophists, who expect to hear "Divine, wonderful, grand," at their declamations, are not even welcomed with ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... cultivated classic literature with success; as an antiquary and an historian acquired reputation; wrote energetically and fluently; spoke in public with earnestness and force, but had none of the graces of the finished orator, and he despised all "rhetorical artifices." In conversation he was persuasive, but in public debate deficient in this quality; and while he possessed courage to confront mobs, or dictators, as he did also to meet an armed host in his country's service, he was not characterised by that presence of mind in ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the abolition of every form of authority" would seem to indicate that Lenine's ideal is that of the old Nihilists—or of Anarchists of the Bakuninist school. That is very far from the truth. The phrase in question is merely a rhetorical flourish. No man has more caustically criticized and ridiculed the Anarchists for their dream of organization without authority than Nikolai Lenine. Moreover, his conception of Soviet government provides for ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... opposition. No one else could have induced the king to give way on catholic emancipation, but the king had not forgiven him, and submitted to him out of fear rather than out of confidence. Though singularly deficient in rhetorical power, he still maintained his ascendency in the house of lords by the aid of more eloquent colleagues, but Peel was his only efficient lieutenant in the house of commons. The vacancy in the office of lord privy seal, occasioned by the transference of Ellenborough to the board of control, had ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... brother of W. D. Washburn, in the course of which the Illinois congressman published a letter in a St. Paul paper attacking Donnelly's personal character. Believing this to be part of the campaign against him, the choleric Minnesotan replied in the house with a remarkable rhetorical display which greatly entertained the members but did not increase their respect for him. His opponents at home made effective use of this affair, and the outcome of the contest was a divided convention, the nomination ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... the details of illness or the manner of death; don't quote endlessly from the poets and Scriptures. Remember that eyes filmed with tears and an aching heart can not follow rhetorical lengths of writing. The more nearly a note can express a hand-clasp, a thought of sympathy, above all, a genuine love or appreciation of the one who has gone, the greater ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... Careless or rhetorical writers use the words "slave" and "slavery" in a very lax way. Thus, when protesting against the so-called "Subjection of Women," they absurdly apply those terms to the condition of the wife in the modern society of the west—designations which are inappropriate even in the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... petition to the King, of 1774, (1 Journ. Cong. 67) to the pen of Richard Henry Lee. I think myself certain, it was not written by him, as well from what I recollect to have heard, as from the internal evidence of style. He was loose, vague, frothy, rhetorical. He was a poorer writer than his brother Arthur; and Arthur's standing may be seen in his Monitor's Letters, to insure the sale of which, they took the precaution of tacking to them a new edition of the Farmer's Letters; like Mezentius, who 'mortua jungebat corpora vivis.' You ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... sonnets at their face value. Shakespeare is merely practising his art, and we may be perfectly sure that these "sugared" sonnets (as Meres calls them), if they did circulate among the poet's private friends, were regarded as rhetorical exercises. They are intensely interesting, as showing the overpoweringly dramatic nature of Shakespeare's genius. Being impressed with the desirability of perpetuating beauty, he is driven to express ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... one of my father's—so naive an imitation of that subtle reasoner's use of the rhetorical figure called Antanaclasis (or repetition of the same words in a different sense)—that I laughed and my mother smiled. But she smiled reverently, not thinking of the Antanaclasis, as, laying her hand on Roland's arm, she replied in the yet ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Moor has been made immortal by Shakespeare: a line from one of his extraordinary speeches to his wife, Calipolis, in exile, is adapted by Pistol to his own rhetorical use (Second Part of Henry the Fourth, II. iv). To show the inconsistencies over which rant unblushingly careers, we give two consecutive speeches ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... rhetorical questions, the answer in each case, as it happens, is "No." The blush is not, of course, a bad sign in the box-office. But the chuckle of recognition is a better one. So is the glow of sentiment. So is the tear of sympathy. The smutty and the ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... held the two volumes of his folio Dictionary; and he carried in his hand a large English oak stick. Let me not be censured for mentioning such minute particulars. Every thing relative to so great a man is worth observing. I remember Dr. Adam Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow[31], told us he was glad to know that Milton wore latchets in his shoes, instead of buckles. When I mention the oak stick, it is but letting Hercules have his club; and, by-and-by, my readers will find this stick will bud, and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... be a quarry for the debates in either Congress, as they had been a quarry for centuries of rhetorical historians. And as for the "winged words," why should they have wings, if not to flit from character to character? A well-known scholar, at a loss for authentic details as to the life of Pindar, fell back on a lot of apophthegms attributed to his hero, and in so doing maintained the ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... being of a worldly importance, the barristers were well balanced; the prosecutor for the Crown was Sir Walter Cowdray, a heavy, but weighty advocate of the sort that knows how to seem English and trustworthy, and how to be rhetorical with reluctance. The prisoner was defended by Mr Patrick Butler, K.C., who was mistaken for a mere flaneur by those who misunderstood the Irish character—and those who had not been examined by him. The medical evidence involved no contradictions, the doctor, whom ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... entirely, we must mention two more characteristics of Lyly's prose which are very noticeable, but which come under the head of ornamental, rather than constructional, devices. The first of these is a peculiar use of the rhetorical interrogation. Lyly makes use of it when he wishes to portray his characters in distress or excitement, and it most frequently occurs in soliloquies. Sometimes we find a string of these interrogations, at others they are answered by sentences beginning "ay but," and ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... am committing the rhetorical error of comparing small things with great; but, if Virgil could bring in the Cyclops and their thunderbolts to illustrate his bees, and Demetrius Phalereus justify it, you will hardly count it a capital offence in me,—and I don't much care if you do, if I can only convince you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... Is a statesman of world-wide fame, With a notable knack at rhetorical bosh To glorify somebody's name— Somebody chosen by Tuckerton's masters To succor the country from divers disasters Portentous ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... orationes ferebantur. Lib. x. cap 1. He adds, in another part of the same chapter, that Domitius Afer and Julius Africanus were, of all the orators who flourished in his time, without comparison the best. But Afer stands distinguished by the splendour of his diction, and the rhetorical art which he has displayed in all his compositions. You would not scruple to rank him among the ancient orators. Eorum quos viderim, Domitius Afer et Julius Secundus longe praestantissimi. Verborum arte ille, et toto genere dicendi praeferendus, et quem ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... usual name for me was Untokarowits, derived from the dark red colour of my hair. Frank was a remarkably good man. He had been constantly devoted to the safety and welfare of the whites. A most fluent speaker in his native tongue, he would address his people with long flights of uninterrupted rhetorical skill. ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... time for glowing periods; it is no time for rhetorical flights; but it is a time for hard and steady work in trying to do what we are called here to do, and I would ask the honourable members to do their utmost by a calm self-suppression, by a close attention to the object which has brought us here, by mutual respect, mutual forbearance, ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... a quiet life he had led. Perhaps, to her, it would have even seemed dull. (This to him was rhetorical paradox, and to her an obvious truth.) She did not know, he said, what it meant to feel that the land belonged to you—to see your own flowers growing, your own calves being born—to feel yourself surrounded by your own people, for whose happiness ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... gentlemen—externally so deficient!—constituted the 'Forlorn Order of Very Red Republicans.' Here Monsieur turned to the forlorn order, as it, with one accord bowed, in confirmation of what he said. 'Gentlemen!' continued the speaker with a rhetorical flourish, 'you must not judge these men by their exteriors. We have here the rough bark covering the fine tree. Gentlemen! have not these men hearts of oak, nerves of steel, and bone that, like their souls, never breaks in ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... by it is singularly well and impressively conveyed by the whole make of the poem. It is also remarkable for its large and impressive style, its rich command of words, and the lofty beauty of its diction. One of its most striking qualities, as Mr. Henry James, Jr., suggests, "is its extraordinary rhetorical energy and eloquence," and "its splendid generosity of diction." The same writer says of the character of Don Silva, that "nowhere has her marvellous power of expression, the mingled dignity and pliancy of her style, obtained a greater triumph." The critics have almost ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... said Jacob judicially. "Let a man get drunk if he likes. That's Shakespeare, Cruttendon. I'm with you there. Shakespeare had more guts than all these damned frogs put together. 'Hang there like fruit my soul,'" he began quoting, in a musical rhetorical voice, flourishing his wine-glass. "The devil damn you black, you cream-faced loon!" he exclaimed as the ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... extreme. Unskilful interpreters separate texts from their contexts, or they found doctrines on obscure passages, explaining away those plain ones by which the more difficult should be expounded, and overlooking those cautions by which the Holy Spirit guards against exaggeration. By such men a rhetorical illustration, a poetical figure, a local or temporary instruction, are made to form points of faith or positive rules of practice. It is evident many, even of the moral precepts, given by our Saviour, cannot be literally obeyed[7]; and were ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... is the knowledge of principles or facts received by instruction or study; acquired knowledge or ideas in any branch of science or literature; erudition; literature; science; knowledge acquired by experience, experiment, or observation." Milton gives us a rhetorical definition in a negative form, which is of equal value, at least, with any authority yet cited. "And though a linguist," says Milton, "should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he have not studied the solid things in them, as ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... was rhetorical exaggeration about this; but Ned's arraignment was on the whole not devoid of justification. There are abundant means in the prison for carrying on useful and energetic work, but they are not properly employed. Neither the ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... witnessed unmoved. She might have been deaf, dumb, without any feeling as far as any expression of opinion went. Yet oft when her father had sought the refuge of the great dusty rooms of "Almayer's Folly," and her mother, exhausted by rhetorical efforts, squatted wearily on her heels with her back against the leg of the table, Nina would approach her curiously, guarding her skirts from betel juice besprinkling the floor, and gaze down upon her as one ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... persuade tribunals is almost all performed by a set of men, the great body of whom very seldom do anything else; but in Turkey this division of labour has never taken place, and every man is his own advocate. The importance of the rhetorical art is immense, for a bad speech may endanger the property of the speaker, as well as the soles of his feet and the free enjoyment of his throat. So it results that most of the Turks whom one sees have a lawyer-like habit ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... of an estate, or he had a commission on the returns."[796] Plutarch's whole philosophy of life is gentle and kindly. It is unemotional and nonstimulating. The neostoics had the character of an esoteric sect. We never are sure that their writings are any more than rhetorical exercises, or that they act or expect others to act by their precepts. Slavery was such a fact in the social order that no one could conceive of the abolition of it, or propose abolition as a thing within the scope ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... most plausible forms of rhetorical cant is the cant about the soul of average humanity expressing itself in art, in an art which has sloughed off like an outworn skin all ancient race-instincts ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Superintendent and the most conspicuous man in the community. It was sad to see his name disappear from the newspapers; sadder still to see it resurrected at intervals, shorn of its aforetime gaudy gear of compliments and clothed on with rhetorical ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... This rhetorical question, in fact, was not necessary, as we all, hearing the word "Proletariat" in the middle of Khokhriakov's speech had already started to make a noise and to applaud, the cheers densely hung in the room,—and even before ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... expression of Gladstone is, however, more rhetorical than accurate. The Constitution of the United States was not "struck off at a given time," but as declared by Bancroft, "the materials for its building were the gifts of the ages." In the words of Lieber, "What the ancients said of the avenging gods, that they were shod with wool, is true of ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... chapters it briefly discusses the diction, the various kinds of sentences, the use of figures of speech, and the different species of style as determined partly by the nature of the discourse and partly by the mental endowments of the writer. It is intended to embrace the rhetorical elements of form. ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... There was so much manly frankness in his manner, there was so much crafty subtlety in his mind! He complained, with proud and honest bitterness, of the construction that had been forced upon his words by the Opposition. "If," he added (and no man knew better the rhetorical effect of the tu quoque form of argument),—"if every sentence uttered by the noble lord opposite in his zeal for liberty had, in days now gone by, been construed with equal rigour, or perverted ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as Ralegh's keeper. In it he took up the only practicable ground, that he had simply obeyed the orders of the Crown. After Ralegh's execution he was stung by the obloquy he had incurred into the publication of a formal indictment of the memory of the dead. On November 26 appeared a rhetorical document, which he had retained the Rev. Dr. Sharpe to help him in drawing up. It was entitled the 'Humble Petition and Information of Sir Lewis Stukely, touching his own behaviour in the charge committed to him for the bringing up of Sir Walter Ralegh, and the scandalous ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... the warrantableness of this practice in some cases may be inferred from a parity of reason, in this manner. If it be lawful (as by the best authorities it plainly doth appear to be), in using rhetorical schemes, poetical strains, involutions of sense in allegories, fables, parables, and riddles, to discoast from the plain and simple way of speech, why may not facetiousness, issuing from the same principles, directed to the same ends, serving to like ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... more modern music; for fugue became, since the rise of the sonata-form, for some generations a contrast with the normal means of expression instead of being itself normal. And while this was so, there was considerable point in using every possible means to enhance the rhetorical force of its peculiar devices, as is shown by the astonishing modern fugues in Beethoven's last works. Nowadays, however, polyphony is universally recognized as a permanent type of musical texture, and there is no longer any reason why if it crystallizes into the fugue-form ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... other people's affairs. Diognetus taught me to bear freedom and plain dealing in others, and gave me a taste for philosophy. Rusticus first set me to improve my character, and prevented me from running after the vanity of the Sophists, and from concerning myself with rhetorical and poetic conceits, or with the affectations of a dandy. He taught me to read an author carefully, and gave me a copy of Epictetus. Apollonius showed me how to give my mind its due freedom, to disregard everything that was ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... seems at first sight hardly fair to bracket them together. But the "point of view" was imposed by Carlyle on the men he judged of in his writings with an austerity not only cruel but almost stupid. They are too often broken outright on the Procrustean bed; they are probably always disfigured. The rhetorical artifice of Macaulay is easily spied; it will take longer to appreciate the moral bias of Carlyle. So with all writers who insist on forcing some significance from all that comes before them; and the writer of short studies is bound, by the necessity of the case, to write entirely ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to the jealousy of the Crown, so deeply embedded in the very substance of constitutional authority; so many people are loth to admit the Queen, in spite of law and fact, to be the people's appointee and agent, that it is a good rhetorical emphasis to speak of her prerogative as something NON-popular, and therefore to be distrusted. By the very nature of our government our executive cannot be liked and trusted as the Swiss or the ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... Voyage," and in it the composer pictures the immensity of the sea by a sudden, extraordinary spreading out of his harmonies, which is musical, and dwelling a long time on the word "distance" (Weite) which is rhetorical: ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel |
