"Contemporaries" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... instinct, the graceful exactness of the Latin in which his conclusions are expressed, or the delicate courtesy with which he touches the work even the most primitive, of those his predecessors or contemporaries. Nevertheless in our particular group even the determinations of Fries are not conclusive. He himself often confesses as much. The microscopic technique of that day did not yield the data needful for minute comparison among these ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... crimes than the unjust death of a single man. But as human nature stands, the less crime needs a worse man to do it. Crime, as ever, led to further crime and was itself the punishment of crime. In the eyes of William's contemporaries the death of Waltheof, the blackest act of William's life, was also its turning-point. From the day of the martyrdom on Saint Giles' hill the magic of William's name and William's arms passed away. ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... The contemporaries of Champlain did not perhaps appreciate his merits, or his heroic efforts as a founder. This is not altogether singular, for even in the physical world one cannot rightly estimate the altitude of a mountain by remaining close to its base, but at a distance a ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... history has been more unjust to me than my contemporaries were. Nobody has taken up my defence. I am accused of ambition—I, rich and a queen—I am accused of cruelty; and the most impartial judges consider me a riddle. Do you think that I was actuated by feelings of hatred; that I breathed nothing but vengeance ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... its venison and old wines, its handsomely-bound books and fiery-hearted jewels and sumptuous clothings, all its lovely things that can be touched and handled, and more especially its ear-tickling applause—were to be won, if ever, from one's contemporaries. And people were generous toward social, rather than literary, talents for the sensible reason that they derived more pleasure from an agreeable companion at dinner than from having a rainy ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... physical fatality which can be made the basis of specific and comely virtues; but it is not an end to pursue or a flag to flaunt or a privilege not balanced by a thousand incapacities. Yet of this distinction our contemporaries tend to make an idol, perhaps because it is the only distinction they ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... devoted and inviolable attachment, each viewing the other as the ornament of their country, each urging the other to write the history of their age, and each relying chiefly on the genius of the other for his own immortality (Plin. Epis. vii. 33). Their names were together identified by their contemporaries with the literature of the age of Trajan: "I never was touched with a more sensible pleasure," says Pliny, in one of his beautiful Letters [Eleven of these are addressed to Tacitus, and two or three are written expressly for the purpose ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... silly," Tommy had said from the first, "if I have to loaf about in a place like this when all my pals and school contemporaries have volunteered, or are in the thick ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... Socii have determined that it is a weapon of war, evidently of human manufacture. It has been found, with many others like it, among bones of mammoths and other extinct animals, and is therefore held to prove that men and mammoths were contemporaries.' ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... Blanche of Castille had the gratification of finding that her toil and her anxiety were not in vain. Lotus, indeed, was a model whom other princes, in their teens, would have done well to copy. His piety, and his eagerness to do what was right and to avoid what was wrong, raised the wonder of his contemporaries. He passed much of his time in devotional exercises, and, when not occupied with religious duties, ever conducted himself as if with a consciousness that the eye of his Maker was upon him, and that he would one day have to give a strict account of all his actions. Every morning he ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... restraint, that is possessed of wisdom, and that is desirous of prosperity, should carefully examine the merits and demerits of his ministers. A king desirous of prosperity and of shining in the midst of his contemporaries, should have for ministers persons connected with his trusted friends, possessed of high birth born in his own kingdom, incapable of being corrupted, unstained by adultery and similar vices, well tested, belonging to good families, possessed of learning, sprung ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... the region of logical conceptions and abstractions, which are not realities, but only, after all, symbols of our own, whereby we express to ourselves the processes of our own brain? May not his Christian contemporaries have been nearer scientific truth, as well as nearer the common sense and practical belief of mankind, in holding that that which is spiritual is personal, and can only be seen or conceived of as residing in persons; and that that which is personal is ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... packed very closely together up there in the gallery, where seventy years before an orchestra straight from Jane Austen's novels had played to the dancing of the contemporaries of Elizabeth Bennett, Emma Woodhouse, and the dear lady of "Persuasion." Another thirty-two years and that same gallery would be listening to recruiting appeals and echoing the drums and fifes of a martial band. The best times are always the old times. The huge lady in the seat next to Jeremy ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... added pleasure.' (To Peacock, 15 February, 1821.) 'Among your anathemas of the modern attempts in poetry do you include Keats's Hyperion? I think it very fine. His other poems are worth little; but, if the Hyperion be not grand poetry, none has been produced by our contemporaries.' There is also a phrase in a letter to Mr. Ollier, written on 14 May, 1820, before the actual publication of the Lamia volume: 'Keats, I hope, is going to show himself a great poet; like the sun, to burst through ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... here is not clear. Prince Eugene of Savoy, Marlborough's colleague, and Cardinal Mazarin were not contemporaries. ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... virtue of the written Constitution was not, however, a question in issue when Washington and his contemporaries set themselves to reorganize the Confederation. Those men had no choice but to draft some kind of a platform on which the states could agree to unite, if they were to unite peacefully at all, and accordingly they met in convention and drew the best form of agreement ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... were such. Athens was indeed of another and higher order; at least to us instructed moderns who know her and have been taught by her. But to the 'Philistines' of those days Athens was of a lower order. She was beaten; she lost the great visible game which is all that short-sighted contemporaries know. She was the great 'free failure' of the ancient world. She began, she announced, the good things that were to come; but she was too weak to display and enjoy them; she was trodden down by those of coarser make ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... much striving. But when, as must sometimes occur, this answer seems too cold, when we are almost maddened by the spectacle of sorrows to which we bring no help, then we may reflect that indirectly the mathematician often does more for human happiness than any of his more practically active contemporaries. The history of science abundantly proves that a body of abstract propositions—even if, as in the case of conic sections, it remains two thousand years without effect upon daily life—may yet, at any moment, be ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... of his predecessors in the same line of architectural ambition. Science has been called to his aid, and the patient ingenuity with which he has sought to make the latest discoveries subservient to his purpose challenges admiration, if not acquiescence. Some of our contemporaries have been warmed into almost theological aversion by the boldness of his conclusions, but we see little cause for fear, and none for bitterness or apprehension. More closely Nature is investigated and deeper the impression will become of ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... Press has its faults and its weaknesses. We can see them every day, in our miserable contemporaries, and we do not shirk the painful duty of pointing them out. We know that it has also virtues, manifold, and we do not deny them, when an appreciative audience compliments us upon them. A conscientious journalist never shrinks ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... the 11th of August, 1719. Walpole says that he knew him at eight years old, and as the two were at Eton about the same time, it is presumed that they were contemporaries there. In fact, a list of the boys there, in 1732, furnished to Eliot Warburton, contains the names of Walpole, Selwyn, Edgecumbe, and Conway, all in after-life intimate friends and correspondents. From ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... with not a few tears for poor Miss Smith-Waters's disappointment. That is the worst of living a life morally ahead of your contemporaries; what you do with profoundest conviction of its eternal rightness cannot fail to arouse hostile and painful feelings even in the souls of the most right-minded of your friends who still live in bondage to the conventional lies and the conventional injustices. ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... strongly how much the store of linguistic expression had diminished, partly on account of a violent and careless "working of the mine," which made prodigal use of the existing medium, as was the case in the prose of Luther and, above all, of Johann Fischart and his contemporaries; partly on account of a narrow confinement to a small number of ideas and words, as in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... unsatisfactory, and after some two or three attempts, I had abandoned, for the time being, all further endeavour; excusing my faint-heartedness by telling myself with sanctimonious air that smoking was bad for growing boys; attempting to delude myself by assuming, in presence of contemporaries of stronger stomach, fine pose of disapproval; yet in my heart knowing myself a young hypocrite, disguising physical cowardice in the robes of moral courage: a self-deception to which human ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... I have done something more than has been accomplished by my predecessors, or contemporaries, with the significant language under consideration. I have written a purely flash song; of which the great and peculiar merit consists in its being utterly incomprehensible to the uninformed understanding, while its meaning must be perfectly clear ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... Spitalfields, and S. Mary Woolnoth. He also designed the western towers of Westminster Abbey, often wrongly ascribed to Wren, and the second quadrangle of All Souls' College, Oxford. This architect, like the majority of his contemporaries, misunderstood and despised the Gothic style, with which he had little real sympathy; he drew out designs, which still exist, for converting Westminster Abbey into an Italian church, just as Inigo Jones ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... sixteenth century named the Amazons of the New World. La Condamine has produced many testimonies in favour of this tradition. Since my return from the Orinoco and the river Amazon, I have often been asked, at Paris, whether I embraced the opinion of that learned man, or believed, like several of his contemporaries, that he undertook the defence of the Cougnantainsecouima (the independent women who received men into their society only in the month of April), merely to fix, in a public sitting of the Academy, the attention of an audience somewhat eager for novelties. I may ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... were atheists at Rome when Cicero wrote,[90] that the opinion which recognizes gods appeared to him to come nearest to the resemblance of truth. A poet of the thirteenth century has expressed in a Latin verse the thoughts which are in vogue among a great many of our contemporaries: "He dares nothing great, who believes that there are gods."[91] There were atheists in the seventeenth century, when Descartes exerted himself to confound them, and they reckoned themselves the fine spirits of their time.[92] And who, again, does not know that in the eighteenth ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... my feeling very exhilarated or exultant during my earliest hours of freedom. It was pleasant though to meet an English face at the hotel where I meant to sleep. I had not seen Mr. Austin since we were contemporaries at Oxford; but on the 2d June I had received from him a very kind and courteous note, offering a visit, if it should be acceptable. I need scarcely say how welcome it would have been; but he did not get my written reply till ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... Of Poets and Poesie shows Drayton as a sane and sagacious critic, ready to see the good, but keen to discern the weakness also; perhaps the clearest evidence of his critical skill is the way in which nearly all of his judgements on his contemporaries coincide with the received ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... separation, the cloud had hardly fallen on these, but their departure had made a great hole in the hitherto unbroken family; and while Felix and Wilmet, by the loss of their contemporaries, seemed placed at a point far away from the others, Geraldine was conscious of much loneliness. The twins had always consorted together, and regarded her as a mere child, and her chief companions had been her father and Edgar, so that she seemed left at an equal distance both from the ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... therefore written only four hundred years before Christ; but the Chronicler must not be relied on unless there is other evidence in support of his narrative. Exodus could not have been written by Moses or any one of his contemporaries. It is very probable that the Pentateuch generally was composed in a later age than that of Moses or Joshua.[196] Samuel was most likely the author of the Elohistic legends, which he left at his death in an unfinished state, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... is interesting to find that though the author, like his contemporaries, believed in the inheritance of acquired characters, he excluded the ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... remarked in his loud unmodulated voice, 'During the Restoration, for reasons merely political, we turned out eleven members at once.' The patriarch gave the usual little attesting movement of the head, calling to witness his contemporaries of the period, white busts with vacant eyes standing in rows on ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... so many of the truths established by science, is contrary to that common sense in which most people have so much confidence, has been gradually growing clear since the days when Leeuwenhoeck and his contemporaries began to examine through lenses the minute structures of common plants and animals. Each improvement in the microscope, while it has widened our knowledge of those minute forms of life described above, has revealed further evidence of the fact that all the larger ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... on the whole, dealt somewhat harshly with the fascinating Madame de Montespan, perhaps taking their impressions from the judgments, often narrow and malicious, of her contemporaries. To help us to get a fairer estimate, her own "Memoirs," written by herself, and now first given to readers in an English dress, should surely serve. Avowedly compiled in a vague, desultory way, with no particular regard to chronological ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... and the strangers stopped. The old gentleman—Nancy called him in her own mind an old gentleman, though Senator Burton was by no means old in his own estimation or in that of his contemporaries—smiled a ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... hover about the dark old mansion on lower Fifth Avenue, incongruous enough among the ancient halls and portraits of Lamars dead and gone in a day when La Marana herself had darted like a meteor into the hearts of their contemporaries. ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... no doubt that Mary Zattiany would have, if she chose, as many suitors among men of his own age as among her former contemporaries. They would discuss the phenomenon furiously, joke about it, try to imagine her as she had been, back water, return out of curiosity, hesitate, speculate—and then ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... to receive the honour that his astonishing discoveries so justly merited, and though for many years of his life his renown was much greater than that of any of his contemporaries, yet it is not too much to say that, in the years which have since elapsed, Newton's fame has been ever steadily advancing, so that it never stood higher than it ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... Our contemporaries are, we perceive, somewhat divided as to the distinctness of the inscription; but we have given our opinion fairly—and, as the proverb runs, "seeing is believing." One of them describes the child as "a little boy, about two years old." This reminds us of the man ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 327, August 16, 1828 • Various
... Succeeding generations have outstripped their predecessors just in proportion to the superiority of their mental cultivation. When we compare different people or different generations with each other, the diversity is so great that all must behold it. But there is the same kind of difference between contemporaries, fellow-townsmen, and fellow-laborers. Though the uninstructed man works side by side with the intelligent, yet the mental difference between them places them in the same relation to each other that a past age bears to the present. If the ignorant man knows no more respecting any particular ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... wild scamper of natives as our flyers came down upon the smooth, hard sands of the beach. In this operation they had to use the utmost care to avoid striking the machine of their contemporaries, but it was accomplished without mishap, and the Sky-Bird came to a stop about ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... temple of Jerusalem was built. They occupy three or four acres on the mountain’s side, and many of them are gnarled in a way that implies great age, but except these signs I saw nothing in their appearance or conduct that tended to prove them contemporaries of the cedars employed in Solomon’s Temple. The final cause to which these aged survivors owed their preservation was explained to me in the evening by a glorious old fellow (a Christian chief), who made me welcome in the valley of Eden. In ancient times ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... somewhat later date is a highly interesting drawing by Calamatta, well-known by engravings; but of George Sand in her first youth no likeness unfortunately has been left to the world. She has been most diversely described by her different contemporaries. But that at this time she possessed real beauty is perfectly evident; for all that she denies it herself, and that, unlike most women, and nearly all French women, she scorned to enhance it by an elaborated toilette. Heine, though he never professed himself one of her personal adorers, ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... most of my contemporaries were apparently quite unaware of the problem that stirred me so deeply could not weaken my sense of its reality. This slumber of so many souls in face of the vital questions of modern life seemed to me merely a further symptom of the sickness of ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... increasing steadiness, and the steadier a golfer becomes the more frequently will he do his best scores when they are most wanted. And so I must leave it to time and practice and the proper cultivation of the best methods to bring the ambitious beginner along into the front rank of his contemporaries. But still there are some useful hints which I may offer him and which may facilitate his progress towards the acquisition of medals ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... belongs to clear and energetic thought and sense transfused with hot emotion. John Fiske goes so far as to say that "as a writer of English, John Adams in many respects surpassed all his American contemporaries." He was by no means without humor,—a characteristic which shows in some of his portraits,—and sometimes realized the humorous aspects of his own intense and exaggerative temperament. His remark about Timothy Pickering, that "under the simple appearance of a bald head and straight hair, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the progress illusion is not so very subtle. We begin by reading the satires of our fathers' contemporaries; and we conclude (usually quite ignorantly) that the abuses exposed by them are things of the past. We see also that reforms of crying evils are frequently produced by the sectional shifting of political power from oppressors to oppressed. The poor man is given a vote by ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... Grenville, was one of the most eminent statesmen of the reign of George III., and, surviving all his great contemporaries, died in 1834. "The endowments of his mind," observes Lord Brougham, "were all of a useful and commanding sort—sound sense, steady memory, vast industry. His acquirements were in the same proportion valuable and lasting—a thorough acquaintance ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... of Life existed in the mind of John Hunter I do not entertain the least doubt; but it may, perhaps, be doubted whether his incessant occupation, and his stupendous industry in the service, both of his contemporaries and of posterity, added to his comparatively slight acquaintance with the arts and aids of logical arrangement, permitted him fully to unfold and arrange it in distinct, clear, and communicable conceptions. Assuredly, however, ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... we have little opportunity of knowing, save from the scattered notices of contemporaries; but sufficient is left on record to prove him one of the best of men, and the very Corypheus of Deism. The twin questions of Necessity and Prophecy have been examined by him perhaps more ably than by ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... concerned his conduct in matters that are peculiarly shocking to the ears of Northern peoples, though Southern races have ears that are less delicate. It was in Somerset's power to explain James's conduct respecting some things that puzzled his contemporaries, and which have continued to puzzle their descendants; but the explanation would have ruined the monarch in the estimation of even the most vicious portion of his subjects, and probably would have given an impetus to the growing power of the Puritans that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... archives relating to them have been explored and when the confidential correspondence of the chief actors in them has been published. The biographical element in history is always the most uncertain. Even among contemporaries the judgment of character and motives depends largely on indications so slight and subtle that they rarely pass into books and are only fully felt by direct personal contact, and the smallest knowledge of life shows how quickly anecdotes and sayings are distorted, coloured, and misplaced when ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... excellent, and still more, what is characteristic of a particular type of mind, we must expect to meet with still less unanimity of judgment. The wits of the Restoration answered the question very differently from the way in which it would be answered now; even Pope and his contemporaries would not be accepted as quite infallible arbiters of social and colloquial refinement in an age like the present. Whether Horace is grave or gay in his familiar writings, his charm depends almost wholly on his manner: a modern who ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... and the days that followed it were blustery and rainy. On the next of them Larry Sullivan and Felix Morrough were seen passing through Lisconnel, evidently equipped for a journey. Larry, who had parted from no near friends, was apparently in good spirits; but Felix looked so much cast down that his contemporaries refrained from any references to the days of the week, and the pair went on their way unmolested amongst the lengthening shadows. They reported the storm to have been terrific altogether up at Laraghmena. The Widdy ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... am strong enough for such a fight, whether I can offer sufficient resistance; it may even be an honourable death to fall to the accompaniment of the mocking laughter of such enemies, whose seriousness has frequently seemed to us to be something ridiculous. When I think how my contemporaries prepared themselves for the highest posts in the scholastic profession, as I myself have done, then I know how we often laughed at the exact contrary, and grew serious over ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... mostly young people, whose death might have been prevented had proper care been taken,—who were seized with violent maladies, or caught sudden infections, or were cut down by accident; all which things seemed natural. Her own contemporaries were very few, and they were like herself—living on in something of the same way. At eighty-five all people under seventy are young; and one's ...
— Old Lady Mary - A Story of the Seen and the Unseen • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... leap into the dark, for which, when a man is in the blue devils, he has specially to harden his heart. That splendid scoundrel, Maxime de Trailles, took the news of marriages much as an old man hears the deaths of his contemporaries. "C'est desesperant," he cried, throwing himself down in the arm-chair at Madame Schontz's; "c'est desesperant, nous nous marions tous!" Every marriage was like another gray hair on his head; and the ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the description, should be silently forgotten, than that, by wanton merriment and unseasonable detection, a pang should be given to a widow, a daughter, a brother, or a friend. As the process of these narratives is now bringing me among my contemporaries, I begin to feel myself "walking upon ashes under which the fire is not extinguished," and coming to the time of which it will be proper rather to say "nothing that is false, than all that is true."' See ante, i. 9, ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... circumstances; they first act, and when too late, begin to examine. From a knowledge of this disposition, there are several here, who make it their business to frame new reports at every convenient interval, all tending to denounce ruin, both on their contemporaries and their posterity. This denunciation is eagerly caught up by the public: away they fling to propagate the distress; sell out at one place, buy in at another, grumble at their governors, shout in mobs, and when they have thus for some time behaved like fools, sit down coolly to argue ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... murdering her husband, and it is now the usual punishment for all sorts of treasons committed by those of the female sex." Not a suspicion seems to have crossed the great jurist's mind that the supposed barbarity of the Druids was not altogether a conclusive justification for the barbarity of his own contemporaries. So let us take warning from his example, and let the history of our practice of book-burning serve to help us to keep our minds open with regard to anomalies which may still exist amongst us, descended from as suspicious an origin, and ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... number of lesser mountains about, and drives and longer excursions unnumbered. A rifle perhaps most recommendable, though not always mentioned in the hand-books, is one that will bring us back again for a day to the times of our rascally acquaintance, Count Gaston Phoebus, and his contemporaries. This is to the castle of Mauvoisin before mentioned,—"Mauvais voisin,"—"bad neighbor," as it abundantly proved itself to Bigorre. It lies but ten miles away, in a northeast direction; it is reached best by the carriage-road, and the trip can readily be made in a half-day. ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... of affairs. Only entirely mischievous people could wish for the continuation of such a failure as our Commissioners of British rule have brought about on these Fields. We have formerly expressed ourselves openly about this matter, and our local contemporaries have ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... talents (and on his surprising diligence, for a man of pleasure) to compare himself to Julius Caesar; who performed great actions by day, and wrote them down at night; and valued himself, that he only wanted Caesar's out-setting, to make a figure among his contemporaries. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... the womb of the former, are enough to make any person sick that is not lost to all sense of delicacy. This obscene, whimsical, and disagreeable poem met with the neglect that it deserved at its first publication; and I only treat the author now as he was treated in his own country by his contemporaries." ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... conditions of atmosphere of which most of the European observatories cannot boast. It is to the honour of Schiaparelli, of Milan, that under comparatively unfavourable conditions and with a small instrument, he so far outstripped his contemporaries in the observation of the features of Mars that those contemporaries received much of his early discoveries with scepticism. Light and dark outlines and patches on the planet's surface had indeed been mapped by others, and even a couple of the canals sighted; but at the opposition ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... means of generating deference; and, by keeping to themselves the grounds and process of their skill, and presenting the results only, they were sure to excite the admiration and reverence of their contemporaries. This mode of proceeding further produced a re-action upon themselves. That which supplied and promised to supply to them so large a harvest of honour and fame, unavoidably became precious in their eyes. They pursued their discoveries with avidity, because few had access to ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... syllable. Apart from this, however, there is much to be said for Mr. STACPOOLE's vivid reconstruction of medival France, and the Paris that sheltered VILLON himself, TABARY, MONTIGNY and the others—that group of shadows whom we see only by the lightning of genius. They and their contemporaries pass before us here like a pageant woven upon tapestry. Occasionally indeed Mr. STACPOOLE looks suddenly round the tapestry, even (one might say) tears a hole in it and pushes his head through, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... importance. The principal omission, or abbreviation rather, on the present occasion, is the leaving out several controversial matters, inserted by Harris from the account of this voyage by Betagh; which might have sufficient interest among contemporaries, a few years after the unfortunate issue of this misconducted enterprise, but are now of no importance, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... have the seat of honour," old lady Chia shortly told Mrs. Yu and her contemporaries, "and mind be careful in doing the honours for me, for she is subjected to endless trouble from one ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... Cool it is, and of a pulverous smell, as a sacred place should be; a blessed benching goes round the walls, and you sit down and take unlimited comfort in the frescos. The gardener leaves you alone to the solitude and the silence, in which the talk of the painter and the exile is plain enough. Their contemporaries and yours are cordial in their gay companionship: through the half-open door falls, in a pause of the rain, the same sunshine that they saw lie there; the deathless birds that they heard sing out in the garden trees; it is the fresh sweetness ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... conservative views, was not, to say the least, one of its strongest admirers. Several years before the Civil War, at a time when the anti-slavery cauldron was at its boiling point, its editor, the elder James Gordon Bennett, dubbed its three journalistic contemporaries in New York, the World, the Flesh, and the Devil—the World, representing human life with all its pomps and vanities; the Times, as a sheet as vacillating as the flesh; and the Tribune, as the virulent champion of abolition, the counterpart ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... Shakespeare are full of instances of the same kind: Dante indeed more than any other poet, and with greater success. But the Greek poets, as writers to whom no resource of awakening the sympathy of their contemporaries was unknown, were in the habitual use of this power; and it is the study of their works (since a higher merit would probably be denied me) to which I am willing that my readers should ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the Panorama-Dramatique in 1821. Among her contemporaries were Coralie, Florine, and Bouffe, or Vignol. On the first night performance of "The Alcade," she played in a curtain-raiser, "Bertram." For a few days she was the mistress of a Russian prince who took her to Saint-Mande, paying her manager a good sum for her absence from the ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... altogether exaggerated. They are very indifferent compositions, which have not the slightest pretensions to rank with HENRY V or HENRY VIII. We suspect that the German critic was not very well acquainted with the dramatic contemporaries of Shakespeare, or aware of their general merits; and that he accordingly mistakes a resemblance in style and manner for an equal degree of excellence. Shakespeare differed from the other writers of his age not in the mode of treating his subjects, but in the grace and power which he displayed ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... the studies nor the discipline of the University. He has, indeed, in our own time been denied enough even of the common intellectual culture of his day to save him from ridicule as a blockhead. But there is no reason for this contemptuous statement. His own contemporaries, and others, who if not exactly contemporaries have at least as good right to be heard as a writer of our own time, have left very different testimony. Burnet, who, though connected by marriage with Claverhouse ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... more and more attracted by the gay side of life. It was typical of his growing enthusiasm for pleasure that he was the first man in the city of Baltimore to own and run an automobile. Meeting him on the street, his contemporaries would stare enviously at the picture he made of health ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... truth, although I have always been considered a better scholar of the language than most men, I found it rather difficult to follow, chiefly because of the change in the fall of the accent. Ayesha, of course, talked with the accent of her contemporaries, whereas we have only tradition and the modern accent to guide us as to the exact pronunciation. "My Holly, it cannot be. Were I to show mercy to those wolves, your lives would not be safe among this people for ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... that makes me wince most is that some of my contemporaries have managed to squeeze back: back into youth, Roger, though I guess they were a pretty tight fit in the turnstile. There is Coxon; he is in khaki now, with his hair dyed, and when he and I meet at the club ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... find least agreeing with the place; or else, by copsing the starvelings in the places where they are newly sown, cause them sometimes to overtake even their untouch'd contemporaries. ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... the critics "are the fellows who have failed," or have not succeeded. The persons who really can paint, or play, or compose seldom tell us how it is done, still less do they review the performances of their contemporaries. That invidious task they leave to the unsuccessful novelists. The instruction, the advice are offered by the persons who cannot achieve performance. It is thus that all things work together in favour of failure, ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... contemporary of Chaucer, who though he did not, like Wordsworth, read nature into human life with that spiritual insight for which he was so remarkable, yet as a poet of fancy, the vivid, delicate, sympathetic fancy of the Celt, still remains unmatched. Amongst Dafydd's contemporaries and successors, Iolo Goch's noble poem, "The Labourer," very appropriate to our breadless days, Lewis Glyn Cothi's touching elegy on his little son John, and Dr. Sion Cent's epigrammatic "The Noble's Grave" have been treated as far as possible ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... in its immediate results, Dante, while he began his poem in Latin, the learned language of the time, soon transposed and completed it in Italian, the corrupted Latin of his commoner contemporaries, the tongue of his daily life. That is, he wrote not for scholars like himself, but for a wider circle of more worldly friends. It is the first great work in any modern speech. It is in very truth the recognition of a new world of men, a new and more practical ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... what testimony would satisfy me of the existence of a live centaur. To put an extreme case, suppose the late Johannes Mueller, of Berlin, the greatest anatomist and physiologist among my contemporaries, had barely affirmed he had seen a live centaur, I should certainly have been staggered by the weight of an assertion coming from such an authority. But I could have got no further than a suspension of judgment. ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... Contemporaries were persuaded that the Huguenots had been flattered and their policy adopted only for their destruction, and that the murder of Coligny and his followers was a long premeditated crime. Catholics and Protestants vied with each other ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... of the plays of Voltaire and Alfieri, and above some plays of Racine. Be this as it may, we have little doubt that Cato did as much as the Tatlers, Spectators, and Freeholders united, to raise Addison's fame among his contemporaries. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that was the scene of the transaction. I cannot, of course, convey to others that particular kind of influence which is derived from my being so familiar with the locality, and with the very people whose grandfathers or fathers were contemporaries of the actors in the drama I shall transcribe. I must hardly expect, therefore, that to those who hear it thro' the medium of my pen, the narration will possess as life-like and interesting a character ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Leighton met in Rome were George Sand, Mrs. Kemble, George Mason the painter, of Harvest Moon fame, Gibson the sculptor, and Lord Lyons. Like Robert Browning, let us add, he was readily responsive to the quickening of his contemporaries, and vigorously studied the present in order that he might the better paint the past, and put live souls into the archaic raiment of Cimabue and ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... superiority of the moderns, but not on this account. In the first place, many arts and products of head and hands have been lost, but even those that remain are the envy and despair of modern competitors. Besides, every age must be judged by comparison with its contemporaries. Yet they have fallen; and antiquarian travellers search in vain for the ruins of the proudest and greatest cities of the past. The nation and people—the most gallant and accomplished of all antiquity—who engraved their names on the imperishable ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... Parisians endured starvation and all the attendant horrors of a siege, the incidents of which, as described by contemporaries, are so ghastly that the pen recoils from transcribing them. At length, when they were at the last extremity, the Duke of Parma arrived with a Spanish army, forced Henry to raise the siege, and revictualled the city. After war, anarchy. In November 1591 it was discovered that secret letters were ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... at an age when exactly those things that a certain small group of her contemporaries did, said, and thought, made all her world. She wished to be with these young people all the time; she wished for nothing else, to-day she was heartsick because there was to be a weekend house party to which she was not invited. ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... personal power without which it is hardly possible for any conqueror to obtain the material or moral successes that give him a place in history; that win for him the love, the respect, and sometimes the hatred, of his contemporaries. Sir Alfred Milner would have known how to make the work of Cecil Rhodes of permanent value to the British Empire. It was a thousand pities that when Sir Alfred Milner took office in South Africa the influence of Cecil Rhodes, at ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... has gained the esteem and goodwill of his contemporaries to a higher degree than Mr. Webb. His probity, his scrupulous good faith, his generosity, and the affable equality of his character, have gained for him the respect and affection of every one. Since I have had the honor of knowing him, which is already many years, ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... now living, and is still living, as most of her contemporaries and social equals are living, not quite free of care, but free of tiresome associations, cramped rooms, bad beds, and bad food, with an environment which you can perfectly control if you are willing to pay the price. The situation ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... believe there are no substitutes. You cannot always persuade the children of this generation to attack "Robinson Crusoe," and if they do they are too sophisticated to thrill properly when they come to Friday's footsteps in the sand. Think of it, my contemporaries: think of substituting for that intense moment some of the modern ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... find W.A. Becker, in 1837, writing a book: "De Comicis Romanorum Fabulis Maxime Plautinis Quaestiones." Herein, after deploring the neglect of Plautine criticism among his immediate predecessors and contemporaries, he attempts to prove that Plautus was a great "original" poet and dramatic artist. Surely no one today can be in sympathy with such a sentiment as the following (Becker, p. 95): "Et Trinummum, quae ita amabilibus lepidisque personis ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... constituents, not his industry only, but his judgment, and betrays instead of serving them, if he sacrifices it to their opinion." And in so saying he carried with him the concurrence and approval of all his contemporaries whose sentiments on such a question ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... astrologer, as were Virgil, Horace, Persius, and Manilius. Both writ with wonderful facility and clearness: neither were great inventors; for Ovid only copied the Grecian fables; and most of Chaucer's stones were taken from his Italian contemporaries, or their predecessors.[9] Boccace his Decameron was first publish'd; and from thence our Englishman has borrow'd many of his Canterbury Tales; yet that of Palamon and Arcite was written in all probability by some Italian wit in a former age, as I shall prove hereafter. The ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... then easily ahead of all its contemporaries in keeping the public informed of all the latest news in connection with the Marbury affair, contented itself with a brief announcement. For after Rathbury had left him, Spargo had sought his proprietor and his editor, and had sat long in consultation with them, and the ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... own relations on the mother's side had always some influence with her. Francis Knolles who had married into this family, and was appointed by the Queen treasurer of her household, won himself a good name with his contemporaries and with posterity by his religious zeal and openness of heart. A still more important figure in this circle is Thomas Sackville, who is also named with honour among the founders of English literature; the part of the 'Mirror for Magistrates' which was due to him witnesses ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... the teachings are concerned, we may briefly dismiss these first with the acknowledgment that most great Teachers have wrought works which, on the physical plane, appear as miracles in the sight of their contemporaries, but are known by occultists to be done by the exercise of powers possessed by all Initiates above a certain grade. The teachings He gave may also be acknowledged to be non-original; but where the student ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... to us in Leonardo's own life—he never married. Ventura suggests that "on account of his birth, he was indifferent to the divine institution of marriage." But this is pure conjecture. We know that his great contemporaries, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian and Giorgione, never married; and we know further that there was a sentiment in the air at that time, that an artist belonged to the Church, and his life, like that of the priest, was sacred to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... his horrified contemporaries termed "the great devil of all" the conspirators, but who was simply a single-eyed fanatic, owes his reputation chiefly to the fact that he was the one selected to set file to the powder. His responsibility was in reality less than that of Catesby, Percy, or Thomas Winter. His father, Edward Fawkes,—in ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... occasionally reaches a thousand pounds, while the enormous brown Kadiak bears, the largest carnivorous animals in the world, reach two thousand pounds; but the black bear usually averages about two hundred. Black Bruin had far outstripped all his contemporaries in size and prowess. In the fall of his seventh year he weighed upon the scales four hundred and two pounds, which fairly earned ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... figure came through the crowd amidst a storm of hand-clapping and of cheers. The maids of mediaeval France fluttered their long veils, and their young male contemporaries waved their velvet caps. ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... of the American Art Association, one finds the lower floor given up to the Barye bronzes, while the upper rooms are devoted to the "Angelus" and the paintings by Millet and other contemporaries of the great French sculptor. Passing on the left of the entrance the superb, large bronze of "Theseus battling with the Centaur," one is fronted by the great cast of the "Lion and Serpent," which from the centre of the gallery dominates the surrounding ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various |
