"Satirist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... see Carlyle's 'Latter Day Pamphlets'? They make the world laugh, and his friends rather sorry for him. But that is because people will still look for practical measures from him: one must be content with him as a great satirist who can make us feel when we are wrong though he cannot set us right. There is a bottom of truth in Carlyle's wildest rhapsodies. I have no news to tell you of books or music, for I scarce see or hear any. And moreover I must be up, and leave the mahogany coffee-room ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... Shakespeare and his circle. In all the poems about books in this volume there is excellent characterisation, excellent criticism, and in the ode to Burns a very notable discrimination of the greater Burns, not the Burns of the love-poems but the fighter, the satirist, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... inventive brain, and literature no masterpiece to his discrimination. Ariosto, the most brilliant poet of the Renaissance, returned in disappointment from the Vatican. "When I went to Rome and kissed the foot of Leo," writes the ironical satirist, "he bent down from the holy chair, and took my hand and saluted me on both cheeks. Besides, he made me free of half the stamp-dues I was bound to pay; and then, breast full of hope, but smirched with mud, I retired and took my ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... occasionally. Bettie is a friend of Mrs. Mundy. Owing to kinlessness and inability to care for herself, owing, also, to there being nowhere else to which she could go, she has been forced to enter the Home. Her caustic comments on its management are of a clear-cut variety. Bettie was born for a satirist and became an epileptic. The result at times is speech that is not guarded, a calling of things by names that ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... his poems from the Arabic, and added most interesting notes. This curious book is a fusion of the Arabian Nights, Ecclesiastes, and Rabelais. There is the magical unexpectedness of the Arabian Nights, the vanity of vanities, all is vanity, of the Preacher, and the humour of the French satirist. Wisdom is scattered about it; at one moment you acknowledge a great thought, the next you are reproached for a folly, and presently laugh at a ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... Oldham, the satirist, says in his satires upon the Jesuits, that had Cain been of this black fraternity, he had not been content with ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... had its day, but in a fiction destined to a day of longer duration,—Goethe's Faust,—the Satirist is himself most effectively satirised. There he is, in that strange yet beautiful temple, pinned to the wall in a ridiculous attitude, to be laughed at as long as the temple itself is visited and admired. This doom came upon him, not so much for his campaign against the Kanteans, as for his Joys ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Some railbird satirist near the wire bawled "Go!" as the unspeakable riot swept past in dust-clouds. The Honorable Bickford had early possessed himself of the bell-cord as his inalienable privilege. He did not ring the bell to call the field back. ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... of the alphabet at random, but in the form of words and sentences, and placing them before Lavender, asked him gravely, what language it was. "Italian," was the reply, to the infinite amusement of the little satirist, who burst into a triumphant laugh at the success of ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... Harding Davis. There was another window some blocks farther down, in the building occupying the point where Fifth Avenue and Broadway join. That window gave light to the workshop of James L. Ford, the obstinate satirist, who resents the charge of amiability, and who will not be pleased if you tell him that in the pages of "The Literary Shop" he did the best work of his life. At another corner, between the two already mentioned, the early riser of ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... great Flavian names in literature, we have Tacitus; Pliny the Younger, with his bright calm pictures of life; Juvenal, with his very dark ones: these were Italians. Juvenal was a satirist with a moral purpose; the Spaniard Martial, contemporary, was a satirist without one. Martial drew from life, and therefore his works, though coarse, are still interesting. We learn from him what enormous activity in letters was to be found in ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... song. This choice, thanks to the popular misconception, did him some harm. As a "monodramatic Idyll," a romance in many rich lyric measures, Maud was at first excessively unpopular. "Tennyson's Maud is Tennyson's Maudlin," said a satirist, and "morbid," "mad," "rampant," and "rabid bloodthirstiness of soul," were among the amenities of criticism. Tennyson hated war, but his hero, at least, hopes that national union in a national struggle will awake a nobler than the commercial spirit. Into the rights ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... most offensive specimen of the 'snob triumphant,' glorying in his shame. The picture is not ours, nor even the Puritan's. It is Bishop Hall's, Bishop Earle's, it is Beaumont's, Fletcher's, Jonson's, Shakspeare's,—the picture which every dramatist, as well as satirist, has drawn of the 'gallant' of the seventeenth century. No one can read those writers honestly without seeing that the Puritan, and not the Cavalier conception of what a British gentleman should be, is the one accepted by the whole nation at ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... what really exists. I could record to you facts that are strange, beyond the imagination of Dumas; so wonderful, that afterwards you could believe the stories told by your most renowned satirist, Dean Swift." ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... agreed-upon duty was paid. Then there was the Starch Monopoly, a very profitable one because starch was a new delight which soon enabled Elizabethan fops to wear ruffed collars big enough to make their heads—as one irreverent satirist exclaimed—'look like John Baptist's ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... up his defence, the review which he had just then taken of the ruins of the government which had been left to him by Mr. Hastings. You see here not the little paltry things which might deserve in their causes the animadversion of a rough satirist like Doctor Swift, whom I have just quoted, but you see things ten thousand times more serious, things that deserve the thunderbolt of vindictive justice upon the head of the prisoner at your bar. For you see, that, after he had ostensibly restored Mahomed Reza Khan, the man who could ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... loves to sup, And paragraph and picture feed the clown With the foul garbage that has gorged the town. "Vice is a monster of such hideous mien As to be hated needs but to be seen." So sang the waspish satirist long ago. Now Vice is sketched and Crime is made a show. A hundred eager scribes are at their heel To tell the public how they look and feel, How eat and drink, how sleep and smoke and play. Murder's itinerary for a day, Set ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... very letter of orthography; and to those accustomed to a more hurried utterance we may seem to drawl, when we are only giving a full expression to letters which, though etymologically important, the English habitually slur over, sputtering out, as a Swedish satirist says, one half of the word, and swallowing the other. The tendency to make the long vowels diphthongal is noticed by foreigners as a peculiarity of the orthoëpy of our language; and this tendency will, of course, be strengthened by any cause which produces greater slowness ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... * Note: It is diametrically opposed to its spirit and to its letter, see, among other passages, Deut. v. 18. 19, (God) "loveth the stranger in giving him food and raiment. Love ye, therefore, the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." Comp. Lev. xxiii. 25. Juvenal is a satirist, whose strong expressions can hardly be received as historic evidence; and he wrote after the horrible cruelties of the Romans, which, during and after the war, might give some cause for the complete isolation of the Jew from the rest of the world. The Jew was a bigot, but his religion was not ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... future wife, but keeping such feelings as he had for the most part to himself, Peacock slipped through all the critical stages of youth till in 1816 he published "Headlong Hall." Brains will not make a poet, but they made a superb satirist. ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... upon you!" "The very man upon earth I should like to know!" rejoined the lively and careless bard. The two individuals accordingly met, and have continued fast friends ever since. Lord Byron, too, wrote thus to Mr. Murray from Italy—"Tell him I forgive him, were he twenty times over our satirist." ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... the edge of ridicule, to see natural hilarity defy depression; and a whole nation laugh, sing, and dance, under burthens that would nearly break the firm-knit sinews of a Briton. Such was the picture of France at that period, but it was a picture which our English satirist could not contemplate with common patience. The swarms of grotesque figures who paraded the streets excited his indignation, and drew forth a torrent of coarse abusive ridicule, not much to the honour of his liberality. He compared them to Callot's beggars—Lazarus on the ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... various MS. tracts, e.g. Advis et Devis de l'ancienne et nouvelle Police de Geneve, 1865; Advis et Devis des Lengnes, etc., 1865, which were edited by the late J. J. Chaponniere, and, after his death, by M. Gustave Revilliod, has placed his reputation as historian, satirist, philosopher, beyond doubt or cavil. One quotation must suffice. He is contrasting the Protestants with the Catholics (Advis et Devis de la Source de Lidolatrie, Geneva, 1856, p. 159): "Et nous disons que les prebstres rongent les mortz et est vray; mais nous faisons bien pys, car ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... greatest offence. Laughing at the misconduct of the world will, in a great measure, ease us of any more disagreeable passion about it. One passion is more effectually driven out by another than by reason, whatever some teach." So wrote, and so of course thought, the lively and witty satirist at the grave age of almost fifty, who, many years earlier in life, wrote the "Last Day." After all, Swift pronounced of these Satires, that they should either have been ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... the principals of the quarrel are known. "Histriomastix," a play revised by Marston in 1598, has been regarded as the one in which Jonson was thus "represented on the stage"; although the personage in question, Chrisogonus, a poet, satirist, and translator, poor but proud, and contemptuous of the common herd, seems rather a complimentary portrait of Jonson than a caricature. As to the personages actually ridiculed in "Every Man Out of His Humour," Carlo Buffone was formerly ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... is a long time ago. Cavalotti—poet, orator, satirist, statesman, patriot—was a great man, and his death was deeply lamented by his countrymen: many monuments to his memory testify to this. In his duels he killed several of his antagonists and disabled the rest. By nature ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... object against a "devouring hand." But the survival of—at least—three fairly current citations from a practically forgotten minor Georgian satirist would certainly seem to warrant a few words upon the writer himself, and his chief ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... floor of a mean house standing in a court off the Strand. Groping his way up the dark and narrow staircase of the domicile, the great minister stumbled, and falling against a door, was precipitated into Marvell's apartment, head foremost. Surprised at his appearance, the satirist asked my Lord Danby if he had not mistaken his way. "No," said the courtier with a bow, "not since I have found Mr. Marvell." He then proceeded to tell him that the king, being impressed by a high ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... always control. His services to mankind were numerous and they were rendered with a devotion as ardent as that of a lover; for these he will be remembered, nor can any power rob him of his fame as a literary genius—a poet, a humorist and a satirist. ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... French gentleman were to call me out, I daresay I should go to the encounter twirling my moustache, bowing down to the ground, all smiles and compliments; and that I should select my rapier with a pleasant kind of feeling, like that experienced by the satirist about to write a brilliant article while picking out a pen with a suitable nib. On the other hand, if a murderous brute with truculent eyes and gnashing teeth attempts to disembowel me with a butcher's knife, the ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... that he used to listen with delight to the reading of the "Jack Downing" letters, laughing heartily sometimes, and declaring: "The Vice-President must have written that. Depend upon it Jack Downing is only Van Buren in masquerade." It is a curious fact that the satirist is already the better remembered of the two, although Van Buren was in his day so powerful as to preside over the official patronage of the nation and to be called the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... has drawn them with satire, at once pungent and good-humoured. Garrick is smartly chastised; Burke, the Dinner-bell of the House of Commons, is not let off; and of all the more distinguished names of the Club, Thomson, Cumberland, and Reynolds alone escape the lash of the satirist. The former is not mentioned, and the two latter are even dismissed with unqualified and ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... attacked him for this negative pole of his intellectual character overlooked the positive one. He had kindness and sympathy enough; but he always gave them first to those who wanted them most. And as humorist and satirist he had a natural tendency to attack power,—to play Pasquin against the world's Pope. In fact, his radicalism was that of a humorist. He never adopted the utilitarian, or, as it was called, "philosophical," radicalism ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... table-land were apparently pigmy villages, inhabited by pigmy men and pigmy women, surrounded with pigmy cattle, and garrisoned by pigmy soldiery. It is, by an optical illusion, Liliput in real life. Had the English satirist placed himself where we now stood, he would have more than realized the picture which his fancy painted. He might have seen the marshaled hosts of Liliput marching to the beat of drum, in ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... sovereign; He who comes next is Horace, the satirist; The third is Ovid, and the last ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... performing some office in which they are employed; but Massinger's 'Sylli' come forward to declare themselves fools 'ad arbitrium auctoris,' and so the diction always needs the 'subintelligitur' ('the man looks as if he thought so and so,') expressed in the language of the satirist, and not in that of the ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... were of masculine natures, or, in the vocabulary of the times, "strong-minded," they were the recipients of many coarse jests, and imputations were made upon both their modesty and their virtue. But I would that any satirist had watched with me the good offices of these Florence Nightingales of the West, as they tripped upon merciful errands, like good angels, and left paths of sunshine behind them. The soldiers had seen ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... the sharpest political darts that were fired at the time, and when the verses were collected and set forth, with a paraphernalia of introductions and notes professedly prepared by an old-fashioned, scholarly parson, Rev. Homer Wilbur, the book gave Mr. Lowell a distinct place as a wit and satirist, and was read with delight in England and America after the circumstance which called it out had become a matter of history ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... were bold in their ventures. The foundation of Constable's wealth was laid when he was publishing the Edinburgh Review. In 1809, Murray started the Quarterly Review, its great political rival, with the aid of Scott, who wrote many of its most valuable articles; and William Gilford, satirist and critic, became its first editor. Growing out of the quarrel between Scott and Constable was the establishment of John Ballantyne & Co. as publishers ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... an able biography of Fielding, in which the writer does justice to the great satirist's memory, and rescues it from the attacks which rivals, poetasters, and fine gentlemen ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... surreptitious edition, which it was dangerous (anywhere in Italy save in Tuscany) to possess, appeared, to be followed in after years by many an avowed one. These have given the name of Giusti a high and peculiar place on the roll of Italian poets. But the satirist's serpent scourge is changed for a somewhat contemptuously used foolscap when the Tuscan ruler is introduced in the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... a warrior-pair that stood In feigned strife upon a knoll of green, Their weapons clashing but unstained with blood, A satirist him besought to intervene, Whereat he slew them as he drave between— "Thy spear to me," the satirist cried the while, The hero answering, "Nay," he ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... virgin offered up to the devouring monster, Mammon, may see virgin after virgin given away, just as in the Soldan of Babylon's time, but with never a champion to come to the rescue.' We would by no means withhold from the modern satirist of manners the privilege of using forcibly figurative language or of putting a lash to his whip. Yet if his novels are, as we have suggested, to be regarded as historical, in the sense of recording impressions drawn from life for the benefit ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... went, and a full list was quickly drawn up. Mayhew undertook to communicate with Douglas Jerrold, who, then better known to the public as the successful dramatist than as the great satirist, was staying at Boulogne for the sake of his young family's education; and a charming picture has been drawn by his son of how, on the visit of a Beckett, Charles Dickens, and the rest, he would throw ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... and when Shakspeare portrays the blind movements of the people in a mass, he almost always gives himself up to his merry humour. To the plebeians, whose folly is certainly sufficiently conspicuous already, the original old satirist Menenius is added by way of abundance. Droll scenes arise of a description altogether peculiar, and which are compatible only with such a political drama; for instance, when Coriolanus, to obtain the consulate, must solicit the lower order of citizens whom he holds in contempt ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... considerable men of letters, after flourishing, turn to dust in their season, and other considerable or inconsiderable men of letters spring out of it. The true poets and even the true satirists abide, and both as a poet and a satirist Thomas Moore abides and ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... faith committed to her keeping. But our practical men forget there may be remedies worse than the disease; that latent heresy may be worse than a contest of "party;" and, in their treatment of the Church, they fulfil the satirist's well-known line:— ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... given us, there is ample provision made for both, and that he acts in perfect consistency with that constitution: And thus we may cordially join in the sentiment of Mr Gibbon (ay, Mr Gibbon!) on another occasion: "The satirist may laugh, the philosopher may preach; but reason herself will respect the prejudices and habits which have been consecrated by the experience of mankind." But Dr H., we see, is not content with the dictates of reason; he ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... sensitive weakness, a shrinking timidity. Courage, honour, truth, sincerity, independence—these were items in a male ideal. They were to a woman as unnecessary, nay, as harmful in the marriage market as a sturdy frame and well-knit muscles. Dean Swift, a sharp satirist, but a good friend of women, comments on the prevailing view. "There is one infirmity," he writes in his illuminating Letter to a very young lady on her marriage, "which is generally allowed ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... 1852, the Russians had to lament the loss of a keen and vigorous satirist. With a happy humour reminding us of Dickens in his best moods, he has sketched all classes of society in the Dead Souls, perhaps the cleverest of all Russian novels. No one, also has reproduced the scenery and habits of Little Russia, of which he was a native, more vigorously than Gogol, whether ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... indeed almost so ungrateful a one as to make us regret that the author's fellow-communists came off so easily. They certainly would not have done so if the author of Blithedale had been more of a satirist. Certainly, if Hawthorne was an observer, he was a very harmless one; and when one thinks of the queer specimens of the reforming genus with which he must have been surrounded, one almost wishes that, for our entertainment, he had given his old companions something ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... the republic of humanity has established for better assistance in the paths of virtue—as if, forsooth, such were vulgar because common, and to be despised by the mighty because useful to the feeble. This is not the proper spirit for the satirist. If he wields his pen in support of such a theory he will do more harm than good. A conventionality is not necessarily bad or contemptible merely as such. Not a promiscuous and indiscriminate slashing, but a careful pruning is ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... strange from the exercise of an inexhaustible imagination. Yet in his eyes, which formerly had sparkled with the wit of youth, there was more depth and a hint of somberness. He had become a celebrated satirist. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... king upon his throne, or the tramp by the wayside, saying "come" to the sick, "tarry not" to the well, is sure of the old, and revels like a reaper in the harvest of the young. It breaks the plans and disorganizes the relations of life; and then, like a coarse comedian or a heartless satirist, compels those who survive to turn away from the memory of their dead, reorganize their lives and live on as though those who once lived with them and formed an intimate part of their daily experience had ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... the three justices—Crooke, Hoghton, and Doddridge—so admirably, that his hearers were wellnigh convulsed; and the three learned gentlemen, who sat near the King, though fully conscious of the ridicule applied to them, were obliged to laugh with the rest. But the unsparing satirist was not content with this, but went on, with most of the other attendants upon the King, and being intimately versed in court scandal, he directed his lash with telling effect. As a contrast to the malicious pleasantry of the Cap Justice, were the gambols and jests of Robin Goodfellow—a merry ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... over-important; the affected, in a word. Affectation is felt to be a disharmony between the pose and the inner values or an attempt to win superiority or "difference" of a superior kind by acting. In either case it excites ridicule, hatred or disgust, and shafts at it form part of the stock in trade of the satirist, humorist and indeed every portrayer of life. What men demand of each other is sincerity, and even where the insincerity is merely a habitual pose it arouses hostile feeling which expresses itself all the way from ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... reading this sentence. An ounce of alcohol, or a few whiffs from an opium-pipe, may easily make a day memorable by bringing on this imaginative delirium, which is apt, if often repeated, to run into visions of rodents and reptiles. A coarser satirist than Emerson indulged his fancy in "Meditations on a Broomstick," which My Lady Berkeley heard seriously and to edification. Meditations on a "Shoe-box" are less promising, but no doubt something could be made of it. A poet must select, ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Shakespeare's contemporaries were silent about the then new fashion of smoking, we should not so much wonder at Shakespeare's taciturnity. But Decker's and Ben Jonson's works abound in allusions to tobacco, its uses and abuses. The humorist and satirist lost no opportunity of deriding the new fashion and its followers. The tobacco merchant was an important person in London of James the First's time—with his Winchester pipes, his maple cutting-blocks, his juniper-wood charcoal fires, and his silver tongs with which to hand the ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... of the small amount of brotherly tenderness which seems to exist in the literary brotherhood. He did, indeed, meet a degree of sincere helpfulness and friendliness from the members of the Turinese Literary Club; from Cesarotti, the translator of Ossian; from Parini, the great Milanese satirist, and from one or two other men of letters; which shows that there is more kindness in the world than he ever would admit, and confirms me in my remark that he was singularly well treated by fate and mankind. But all this was very lukewarm sympathy; ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... this feeling was carried so far, that at last it provoked satire itself to turn round with scorn upon the very prejudice which the spirit of satire had originally kindled. Disgusted with this arrogant assumption of disgust, the Roman satirist reminded the scorners that men not inferior to the greatest of their own had been bred, or might be bred, amongst those whom ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... to the throne, and was at that moment engaged upon the task of divorcing his wife, Caroline of Brunswick. The eighth line must be read probably with a medical eye. The concluding three lines refer to George III.'s insanity. As a political satirist Lamb ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... proverb some explained by alleging that Manius Egerius was the ancestor of a long and distinguished line, whereas others thought it meant that there were many ugly and deformed people at Aricia, and they derived the name Manius from Mania, a bogey or bugbear to frighten children. A Roman satirist uses the name Manius as typical of the beggars who lay in wait for pilgrims on the Arician slopes. These differences of opinion, together with the discrepancy between Manius Egerius of Aricia and Egerius Laevius of Tusculum, as well as the resemblance of both names to ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... is less famous for the Rev. Mr. Pope's incumbency than for the fact of Rob Donn, the satirical Gaelic bard, being a native of the district. The author of the Dunciad is the greatest satirist in British Literature; Rob Donn is supreme among Gaelic bards for the sharpness of his tongue and his clever way of showing up his contemporaries to ridicule. He was in the habit of giving praise to people in order to make his satire more biting. Praise on his ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... Vauvenargues, on the other hand, is remarkable for delicacy and half-reserved tenderness. Everything that he has said is coloured and warmed with feeling for the infirmities of men. He writes not merely as an analytical outsider. Hence, unlike most moralists, he is no satirist. He had borne the burdens. 'The looker-on,' runs one of his maxims, 'softly lying in a carpeted chamber, inveighs against the soldier, who passes winter nights on the river's edge, and keeps watch in silence over ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... it is like a broken-down gentleman, of little good to any one. Imitate the great masters as much as you will in classical literature, but when it comes to their slang, draw the line. Dean Swift, the great Irish satirist, coined the word "phiz" for face. Don't imitate him. If you are speaking or writing of the beauty of a lady's face don't call it her "phiz." The Dean, as an intellectual giant, had a license to do so—you haven't. Shakespeare ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... love from which it sprung! It is true that my manhood has been the undeceiver of my youth, and that the meditation upon the facts has disenthralled me from the visionary broodings over fiction; but what remuneration have I found in reality? If the line of the satirist be not true, "Souvent de tous nos maux la raison est le pire," [Boileau]—at least, like the madman of whom he speaks, I owe but little gratitude to the act which, "in drawing me from my error, has robbed me ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... if Spenser's genius had not found a less mongrel style to disport itself in, not merely would Donne, and Lodge, and Hall, and Marston have had to abandon their dispute for the post of first English satirist, but the attainment of really great satire in English might have been hastened by a hundred years, and Absalom and Achitophel have been but a second. Even here, however, the piece still keeps the Chaucerian form and manner, and is only a kind of ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... children, wives confined by their husbands, gentlemen of fortune sequestered by their relations, and innocent persons immured by the malice of their adversaries. He affirmed this was his own case; and asked if our hero had never heard of Dick Distich, the poet and satirist. "Ben Bullock and I," said he, "were confident against the world in arms—did you never see his ode to me beginning with 'Fair blooming youth'? We were sworn brothers, admired and praised, and quoted each other, sir. We denounced war against all the world, actors, authors, and critics; ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... This satirical power contributed to preclude the possession of depth of reflection. Ridicule has an office in criticism. It is the true punishment of folly. But it has been well observed,(527) that it is dangerous to him who employs it, as being directly opposed to humility. The satirist places himself above that which he ridicules, and makes himself the judge: the humility of the listener is laid aside; the selfish belief of his own infallibility is fostered; forbearance and sympathy are laid aside. The critic argues, the satirist only laughs. Pity may be compatible ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... capital of Europe; kept from its more dangerous vices partly by a proud sense of personal dignity, partly by a temperament which, regarding love as an ideal for all tender and sublime emotion, recoiled from low profligacy as being to love what the Yahoo of the mocking satirist was to man; absorbed much by the brooding ambition that takes youth out of the frivolous present into the serious future, and seeking companionship, not with contemporary idlers, but with the highest and maturest intellects that the free ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mistaken, I replied, 'Oh, indeed!' and viewed my late acquaintance with some curiosity. I am imaginative, but it was difficult, in truth, to connect this staid and sober personage with the idea of the American satirist, however proverbially dissimilar authors may be to their own creations. However, I am no hunter after celebrities, literary or otherwise, and I would not, in all likelihood, have taken any steps to further conversation ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... accordingly the particular home of German satire. The best German comic papers are published in Munich, and the most effective satirist of the present day is a Bavarian of the Bavarians, Ludwig Thoma. He is the son of a Head Forester and was born in 1867 at that Oberammergau where all the inhabitants every ten years dismiss the barber and let their long locks curl about their necks, in order ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... made Juvenal a poet.' The scholar needs no explanation; but the reader whose scholarship is yet amongst his futurities (which I conceive to be the civilest way of describing an ignoramus) must understand that Juvenal, the Roman satirist, who was in fact a predestined poet in virtue of his ebullient heart, that boiled over once or twice a day in anger that could not be expressed upon witnessing the enormities of domestic life in ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... and eloquent irony, in the best speech he probably ever delivered in parliament, reminded Mr. Disraeli of his taunts and abuse of Sir Robert Peel for changing his opinions on the subject of a corn-law, and invited the right honourable satirist to account for his own change, if it were effected by any other motive than to retain office. He went to the country advocating the re-imposition of a corn-tax, and on his return presented himself to the house a convert to the opinion that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... gives out of his superfluity, but it has condemned him who keeps too much to himself. All literature, from the earliest times, is full of denunciation of such a character. The miserly and the stingy have been impaled over and over again on the sword of the satirist. ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... See the anecdotes of Procopius, (c. 6,) with the notes of N. Alemannus. The satirist would not have sunk, in the vague and decent appellation of Zonaras. Yet why are those names disgraceful?—and what German baron would not be proud to descend from the Eumaeus of the Odyssey! Note: It is whimsical enough that, in our ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... is ubiquitous, on the stage as in everyday life. Horace painted him in his famous passage commencing Ibam forte via Sacra, and the French satirist, Regnier, has depicted ...
— The Bores • Moliere
... and satirist, known by the pseudonym of "Artemus Ward," born in Maine, U.S.; his first literary effort was as "showman" to an imaginary travelling menagerie; travelled over America lecturing, carrying with him a whimsical panorama as affording texts for his numerous jokes, which he brought with ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... while Germany is split up into little principalities, Dukedoms, Bishoprics, Palatinates, England has already won for herself the great boon of freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of religious and political opinion. The satirist could here find expression and appreciation. The birth of the pictorial satirist who is the subject of my first chapter coincides pretty closely with the creation of that Tale of a Tub, of which Dean Swift, in all the ripeness of his later talent, ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... distinct predilection for the marvellous, an unquestionable piety combined with man-of-the-worldliness, and a toleration of human infirmities. It is hardly necessary to point out the critical incompetence of those who say that a satirist like Map could not have written the Quest and the Mort. Such critics would make two Peacocks as the simultaneous authors of Nightmare Abbey and Rhododaphne—nay, two Shakespeares to father the Sonnets and the Merry Wives. If ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... always, as a later writer calls them, "the solecisms of luxury." Nero himself, or rather the ministers of the vulgar pleasures which he regarded as those of artistic genius, devised an abundance of such expensive follies and surprises, but we must not permit the professional satirist or Stoic moralist to delude us into believing them typical of Roman life. Praise of the "simple life" and the simple past is no new thing. It is extremely doubtful whether at an ordinary Roman dinner-party ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... Jew you may be sure it isn't his real name," laughed Sidney. It was characteristic of him that he never spared a shot even when himself hurt by the kick of the gun. Percy colored slightly, unmollified by being in the same boat with the satirist. ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... lady of her sense, and right cast of mind, must know that the end of satire is not to exasperate, but amend; and should never be personal. If it be, as my good father used to say, it may make an impartial person suspect that the satirist has a natural spleen to gratify; which may be as great a fault in him, as any of those which he pretends to censure and ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... his style was scarcely less remarkable than the change of his fortunes. He was then no longer the hot and heady satirist; he had become the sly and subtle scorner. No man said so many cutting things, yet so few of which any one could take advantage: he anatomized human character without the appearance of inflicting a wound; he had all the pungency of wit without its ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... humour, Mr. PETT RIDGE can say a hard thing now and then about humanity in general and point it with a touch of startling sarcasm. Possibly it is this combination which makes him the favourite author he is. While we get tired of the harsh satirist who is always up against us, and pay little attention to his teaching, we not only profit by the occasional home truths of the genial humourist, but thoroughly enjoy hearing them. Certainly it is not Mr. RIDGE'S plots which so attract ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... Hence, we have been haunted by ghosts of all complexions; and "Cloud Kings," and "Water Kings," and "Fire Kings," have been crowned by this poetical magician, to rule with despotism in the realms of Fancy. A lively satirist, endowed with the gifts of Genius, easy in versification, pleasant in his humour, and inimitably successful in parody, has, in some of his "Tales of Terror" undertaken to mock the doleful tones of Mr. Lewis's muse, or shall ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... is right, or would be right, if the savage surgeon did not seem so fiercely pleased with his work. Thackeray likes to dissect an ulcer or an aneurism; he has pleasure in putting his cruel knife or probe into quivering, living flesh. Thackeray would not like all the world to be good; no great satirist would like society to ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... nor discuver uncommon solicitude."—Webster's Essays, p. 403. "They put Minos to death, by detaining him so long in a bath, till he fainted."— Lempriere's Dict. "For who could be so hard-hearted to be severe?"— Cowley. "He must neither be a panegyrist nor a satirist."—Blair's Rhet., p. 353. "No man unbiassed by philosophical opinions, thinks that life, air, or motion, are precisely the same things."—Dr. Murray's Hist. of Lang., i, 426. "Which I had no sooner drank, but ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... He built it himself, and it is remarkable only for its plainness; with which the furniture so well agrees, that there is no one thing in it that may not be absolutely necessary, except books, and the prints of Mr. Hogarth, whom he calls a moral satirist. ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... satirist—she does not hate well enough to be that—Ada Cambridge has occasionally a neat and forcible way of describing character. Richard Delavel's first wife was 'a gentle and complaisant being, soft and smooth, apparently yielding to the touch, but dense, square, and solid as a ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... more mildly, he must by nature possess the more essential characteristics of his author. Admitting this, Creech writes with a slight air of apology, "I cannot choose but smile to think that I, who have ... too little ill nature (for that is commonly thought a necessary ingredient) to be a satirist, should venture upon Horace."[415] Dryden finds by experience that he can more easily translate a poet akin to himself. His translations of Ovid please him. "Whether it be the partiality of an old ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... authority over the clergy, and even over those who are themselves in charge of the people. The more power such women exercise over men, the more easily can they lead them into iniquitous desires, and in this way can lay a very heavy yoke upon their shoulders. It was with such things in mind that the satirist said: ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... satirist!" Clement said to himself. "I wonder if the old man reads other novelists.—Do tell me, Deacon, if you have read ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... on his part, and sacrificed them resolutely for his son's welfare. The young fellow, I dare say, gave his parent no more credit for his long self-denial, than many other children award to theirs. We take such life-offerings as our due commonly. The old French satirist avers that, in a love affair, there is usually one person who loves, and the other, qui se laisse aimer; it is only in later days, perhaps, when the treasures of love are spent, and the kind hand cold which ministered ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hated the Republican party, and probably have voted for it lest worse follow its defeat. He would have been, in short, a liberal of a species very much needed just now in America, a bad party man, destructive rather than constructive, no leader, but a satirist when, God knows, we need one for the ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... of oppression there were too many scattered instances; but we do not judge the civilisation of the British Empire by the choicest scandals of London, nor the good sense of the United States by the freak follies of New York. We do not take it that the modern satirist who vents his spleen on an individual or a class is describing each and all of his contemporaries, nor even that what he says is necessarily true of such individual or class. Nor is the professional ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... sentiment and beauty of expression. Horace is every man's companion. He has a word of advice and admonition for all. His criticisms constitute most approved canons of the rhetorician; his sage reflections adorn the page of the moralist; his humor and wit give point and force to the satirist, and his graver maxims are not despised by the Christian philosopher. Juvenal is fierce and denunciatory. His characteristics are energy, force, and indignation; his weapons are irony, wit and sarcasm; he is a decided character, and you must yield and ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... incision in one of them which looks very much like the matrix of a brass, or the seat of a sculptured panel, which has been removed. There is a traditional interest attaching to the font as that in which William Hogarth, the famous painter and satirist, was baptized. He was born in Bartholomew Close on 10th November, 1697, and his baptism is entered in the parish register on the 28th of the same month.[2] It is recorded that the font had a narrow escape in the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... without. But the people still retained, as a projection of their highest yearnings, that vision of a king who was at once a gallant warrior and an upright judge—a vision best visualized in the typical prophet (i. e., critic and satirist of the moment), Isaiah.—But every hope remained unfulfilled. The old god no longer could do what he used to do. He ought to have been abandoned. But what actually happened? Simply this: the conception of him was changed—the conception ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... rogain, "unless it is Luchdonn the satirist in Emain Macha, who makes this hand-smiting when his food is taken from him perforce: or the scream of Luchdonn in Temair Luachra: or Mac cecht's striking a spark, when he kindles a fire before a king of Erin where he sleeps. Every spark and every shower which his fire would ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... derived from Greece. Ennius, who commenced it, a man younger than Plautus and older than Terence, was himself half a Greek. He wrote epic poems and comedies, and also introduced this comic literature for private reading. Lucilius, who was the first eminent Roman satirist, is said to have imitated the old Greek comedies. His attacks are very severe and personal, reminding us a little of Archilochus, though apparently not written to gratify any private spleen. The tendency to personalities marked a time when the range of society and the tone of thought were equally ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... made an effort, but again her resolution abandoned her; when a tribune burst into the gardens, and plunging his sword into her body, she instantly expired. Thus perished a woman, the scandal of whose lewdness resounded throughout the empire, and of whom a great satirist, then living, has said, perhaps ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... satirist has just gone far enough into his neighbours to find that the outside is false, without caring to go farther and discover what is really true. He is content to find that things are not what they seem, and broadly generalises from it that they do not exist at all. He sees ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he was the loftiest and the most spontaneous singer of our language. In range of power he was also conspicuous above the rest. Not only did he write the best lyrics, but the best tragedy, the best translations, and the best familiar poems of his century. As a satirist and humourist, I cannot place him so high as some of his admirers do; and the purely polemical portions of his poems, those in which he puts forth his antagonism to tyrants and religions and custom in all its myriad ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... gibe, to jape. In the Psalter published by Spelman it is rendered: hi gremedon spraece godes. In Notker it is widersprachen, and in the two old Teutonic interlinear version of the Psalms, published by Graff, verbitterten and gebittert. Let us hear our own interesting old satirist, Piers Plouhman [Whitaker's ed. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... Bourgognone, the French gallantries of Watteau, and even beyond the exhibition of animal life, to the landscapes of Claude Lorraine, and the sea-views of Vandervelde. All these painters have, in general, the same right, in different degrees, to the name of a painter, which a satirist, an epigrammatist, a sonnetteer, a writer of pastorals, or descriptive poetry, has to ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... have been written by Anacreon; and it is undoubtedly rather a sublimer flight than the Teian wing is accustomed to soar. But in a poet of whose works so small a proportion has reached us, diversity of style is by no means a safe criterion. If we knew Horace but as a satirist, should we easily believe there could dwell such animation in his lyre? Suidas says that our poet wrote hymns, and this perhaps is one of them. We can perceive in what an altered and imperfect state his works are at present, when we find a scholiast upon Horace citing an ode ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... given in their halls. Kings and judges attended them, and many were the plays and songs and dances that then enlivened the dull routine of the law. The Inner Temple has for its device a winged horse, and the Middle Temple a lamb. Some satirist has written ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... reason to suppose that he would have suppressed his real name, or have taken for granted that Golias was a bona fide surname. On the theory that he knew Golias to be a mere nickname, and was aware that Walter of Lille was the actual satirist, we should have to explain his paragraph by the hypothesis that he chose to sneer at him under his nom de guerre instead of stigmatising him openly ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... wohl in den breiten Sangeswaeldern Valmikis, die Heldenlieder des goettlichen Ramo bewegen mein Herz wie ein bekanntes Weh, aus den Blumenliedern Kalidasas bluehen mir hervor die suessesten Erinnerungen" (Ideen, vol. v. p. 115)—these words, with some allowance perhaps for the manner of the satirist, may well be taken to characterize the poet's attitude towards India. Instinctively he appropriated to himself the most beautiful characteristics of Sanskrit poetry, its tender love for the objects of nature, for flowers and ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... satirist, who calls up all the misfortunes of the family, does not forget the fatal bridal of Baldoon. He seems, though his verses are as obscure as unpoetical, to intimate that the violence done to the ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... distinguished satirist and critic and his influence upon the taste and critical opinion of his day can only be compared with that of Holberg in ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... ceremony the reader may imagine who has already gathered some idea of the reckless irreverence of Roaring Camp. The master of ceremonies was one "Boston," a noted wag, and the occasion seemed to promise the greatest facetiousness. This ingenious satirist had spent two days in preparing a burlesque of the Church service, with pointed local allusions. The choir was properly trained, and Sandy Tipton was to stand godfather. But after the procession had marched to the grove with music and ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... but, as I think, entirely affected discrimination between the sources respectively of Persian virtues and vices, it might be sufficient answer to point out that in "Hajji Baba" Morier takes up the pen of the professional satirist, an instrument which no satirist worthy of the name from Juvenal to Swift has ever yet dipped in honey or in treacle alone. But a more candid and certainly a more amusing reply was that which Morier himself received, after the publication ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... was the course marked out by our great Satirist— And write about it, Goddess, and about it— more strictly followed, than in the compositions which the present Rowleiomania has produced. Mercy upon us! Two octavo volumes and a huge quarto, to prove ...
— Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782) • Edmond Malone
... the sensibility of youth, has lost the plaintive dignity he once possessed, for the unmeaning simper of a dangling coxcomb; and the only serious concern, that of a dowry, is settled, even amongst the beardless leaders of the dancing-school. The Frivolous and the Interested (might a satirist say) are the characteristical features of the age; they are visible even in the essays of our philosophers. They laugh at the pedantry of our fathers, who complained of the times in which they lived; they are at pains ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... their service to the state could not exist. The love of lucre, though sometimes carried to a ridiculous, sometimes to a vicious excess, is the grand cause of prosperity to all states. In this natural, this reasonable, this powerful, this prolific principle, it is for the satirist to expose the ridiculous: it is for the moralist to censure the vicious; it is for the sympathetic heart to reprobate the hard and cruel; it is for the judge to animadvert on the fraud, the extortion, and the oppression; but it ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... to remain. He came back with Charles II., and was Master of the Revels, or King's Jester, as the court considered him, though without any regular appointment, during his life: the butt, at once, and the satirist of Whitehall. ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton |
