"Disquisition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Spanish scholar to the discussion between Don Quixote and his squire on the dismissal of 'regoldar', from the language of good society, and the substitution of 'erutar' in its room (Don Quixote, 4. 7. 43). In a letter of Cicero to Paetus (Fam. ix. 22) there is a subtle and interesting disquisition on forbidden words, ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... the "Itineraire" of Chateaubriand, and his "Genie du Christianisme;" the History of England by Sir James Mackintosh, volume first; and to Mills's History of the Crusades, volume first, chapter sixth. We may add Dr. Robertson's "Historical Disquisition concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... in mountain air. What that something is we are not prepared to say. Oxygen and ozone have undoubtedly something to do with it, but in what proportions we know not. Scientific men could give us a learned disquisition on the subject, no doubt; we therefore refer our readers to scientific men, and confine our observations to the simple statement of the fact, that there is something extremely invigorating in mountain air. Every mountaineer knows it; Mr Sudberry and family ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... alterations in the language, might be perfectly adapted to the capacity of children. But when the Abbe Condillac goes on to "Your highness knows what is meant by a system," he immediately forgets his pupils age. The reader's attention is presently deeply engaged by an abstract disquisition on the relative proportion, represented by various circles of different extent, of the wants, ideas, and language of savages, shepherds, commercial and polished nations, when he is suddenly awakened to the recollection, that all ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... JOHNSON. 'No, sir; witchcraft had ceased; and therefore an Act of Parliament was passed to prevent persecution for what was not witchcraft. Why it ceased, we cannot tell, as we cannot tell the reason of many other things.' Dr Cullen, to keep up the gratification of mysterious disquisition, with the grave address for which he is remarkable in his companionable as in his professional hours, talked, in a very entertaining manner, of people walking and conversing in their sleep. I am very sorry I have no note of this. ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... day, as a rule, may be spoken of in two classes. Either the preacher would read a passage of Scripture in Latin, and throw in here and there a few remarks by way of commentary, or else the sermon was a long and dry disquisition upon some of the (frequently very absurd) dogmas of the schoolmen; such as, whether angels were synonymous with spirits, which of the seven principal angels was the chief, how long it took Gabriel to fly from heaven to earth at the Annunciation, at what time of day he appeared, how he ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt
... forests, the enclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands and government, he shortly found himself arrived at politics; and from politics, it was an easy step to silence. The general pause which succeeded his short disquisition on the state of the nation was put an end to by Catherine, who, in rather a solemn tone of voice, uttered these words, "I have heard that something very shocking indeed will soon ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... herself Anna Ella Carroll. I commend her answer on the doctrine of the war power to those who have been following that phantom and misleading the people, and I recommend it to another individual, a friend of mine, who gave a most learned disquisition on the writ of habeas corpus and against the power of the President to imprison men. He will find that answered. I am not surprised at this. The French Revolution discovered great political minds in some of the ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell
... sonnets to a woman (cf. xxi. xlvi. xlvii.) Similarly, the sonnets in the second 'group' (cxxvii.-cliv.) have no uniform superscription. Six invoke no person at all. No. cxxviii. is an overstrained compliment on a lady playing on the virginals. No. cxxix. is a metaphysical disquisition on lust. No. cxlv. is a playful lyric in octosyllabics, like Lyly's song of 'Cupid and Campaspe,' and its tone has close affinity to that and other of Lyly's songs. No. cxlvi. invokes the soul of man. Nos. cliii. and cliv. soliloquise on an ancient Greek apologue ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... of the following production. In the execution of it much may be objectionable. The verse (particularly in the introduction of the ode) may be accused of unwarrantable liberties, but they are liberties equally homogeneal with the exactness of Mathematical disquisition, and the boldness of Pindaric daring. I have three strong champions to defend me against the attacks of Criticism: the Novelty, the Difficulty, and the Utility of the work. I may justly plume myself that I first have drawn the nymph Mathesis from the visionary caves of abstracted ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... for a disquisition which would have been intolerable to the unprincipled reader, when a very curious thing arrested the attention both of Moriarty and myself—the strangest coincidence, perhaps, within the personal experience of either of us—a conjuncture, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... in fact, without seeming to have done it, and this to avoid bringing on a too frequent discussion of matters which in a political view ought to be kept a little behind the curtain, and not to be made too much the subjects of disquisition. Time only can eradicate and overcome customs and prejudices of long standing—they must be got the better of by slow and ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... daresay it will be ready by supper!" But it was not: not a bit of it. Of course we searched in those delusive cookery books, but they only told us what sauces to serve with a roasted pig, or how to garnish it, entering minutely into a disquisition upon whether a lemon or an orange had better be stuck into its mouth. We wanted to know how to cook it, and why it would not get itself baked. About an hour before supper-time I grew desperate at the anticipation of the "chaff" Alice and I would certainly have to undergo ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... I should have to give you quite a disquisition to explain my conclusions, and I doubt if it would be practicable for you to consider the subject now. And you would have to surrender to public opinion anyhow. If you do put in force a new system of taxation you'll have to treat the married man easily. I am still a confirmed ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... in my mind, taking the brilliance out of the indirect but extraordinarily personal impact of the man himself. They embalmed the Cid and set him up in the church with his sword in his hand, for all men to see. What sort of legend would a technical disquisition by the archbishop on his theory of the angle of machicolations have generated in men's minds? And what can a saint or a soldier or a founder of institutions leave behind him but a legend? Certainly it is not for the Franciscans that one ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... qualifications of Miss Blair, whose property lay so convenient for the extension of the Boswell acres. This may have been the cause of the paternal anger and the separate marriages on the same day. The wives of literary men have ever been a fruitful source of disquisition to the admirers of their heroes, and Terentia, Gemma Donati, and Anne Hathaway, have divided the biographers of Cicero, Dante, and Shakespeare. To us it seems that, like his father, she had much to bear, hampered by their domestic ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... read an extremely interesting disquisition on the Oyster, which was divided into sections and literally devoured by the audience. He also exhibited some Specimens of Conchs, which were regular Sneezers in point ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 26, September 24, 1870 • Various
... wandering slowly up and down in search of vacant tables or of tables occupied by friends. One of these rovers interested me because I was sure he wanted to catch Rothenstein's eye. He had twice passed our table, with a hesitating look; but Rothenstein, in the thick of a disquisition on Puvis de Chavannes, had not seen him. He was a stooping, shambling person, rather tall, very pale, with longish and brownish hair. He had a thin, vague beard, or, rather, he had a chin on which a large ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm
... other biographies of Jesus and the impassioned pleadings of Paul. He is a pure and lofty soul, but he writes as if in seclusion from the world. His favorite words are abstract and general. The parable and precept of the early gospels give place to polemic and metaphysic disquisition. The Christian communities for which he writes have left behind them the sharp antagonisms of the first generation, and have drawn together into a harmonious society, strong in their mutual affection, their inspiring ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... our paper, purporteth to be, in some wise, a disquisition on Beaux, and, by our faith, we had well-nigh forgotten it. Retournons a nos moutons, as the ancient lawyers used to say (and many a tyro, in the interim, hath said the same) when they grew so entangled in the mazes of Jack Shepherd cases that they lost sight of their ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... quadrature of the circle) for your mathematical knowledge is not sufficient to make you know in what the problem consists,' you don't say in what it does consist according to your ideas, oh! no nothing of the sort, you enter into no disquisition upon the subject in order to show where you think Mr. —— is wrong and why you have not is simply—because you cannot—you know that he has done it and what is if I am not wrongly informed you have been heard to say ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... mind of a certain professor of chemistry, whose lectures on light and heat I once was rash enough to attend, who, after a long dry disquisition which had nearly put us all to sleep, used to arouse our attention to the "beautiful effects" produced by certain combinations, which he would proceed to illustrate, as he said, by a "little experiment." But, somehow or other, these little experiments always, or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... again. A fortnight after this magnificent fete, thousands of families wept over their banished fathers, forty-eight departments were deprived of their representatives, and forty editors of newspapers were forced to go and drink the waters of the Elbe, the Synamary or the Ohio! It would be a curious disquisition to seek to discover what really were at that time the Republic ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... very little way towards informing us of the nature of the thing defined; but let the virtue of a definition be what it will, in the order of things, it seems rather to follow than to precede our inquiry, of which it ought to be considered as the result. It must be acknowledged that the methods of disquisition and teaching may be sometimes different, and on very good reason undoubtedly; but, for my part, I am convinced that the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation is incomparably the best; since, not content with ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... those essays have been chosen which bear directly on Sir Roger or the Spectator Club: several have been omitted which refer to him only en passant or as a peg on which to hang some disquisition, and also one other which is wholly out of ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... subtlety of disquisition, the force of imagination, the perfect energy and elegance of expression, which characterize the great works of Athenian genius, we must pronounce them intrinsically most valuable; but what shall we say when we reflect that from these had sprung, directly or indirectly, all the noblest ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... to the disquisition on the Arbre Sol or Sec in vol. i., and to that on Mediaeval Military Engines in ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... discussed passage. It dealt with no present difficulties, though it did suggest an entertaining theory as to the authorship of such and such a psalm. It opened out no heart before its own vision. It neither created nor deepened nor satisfied a single desire. It might as well have been a disquisition on the fate of the lost ten tribes of Israel, or a treatise on the properties of the differential calculus, or a discussion of the politics of the planet Mars for any application it had to the need of any one person, young or old, in the congregation sitting there and providing that example ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... sort of people all their little subsistence, and conferring it on a set of stamp officers, distributors and their deputies.—But I must proceed no farther at present.—The sequel, whenever I shall find health and leisure to pursue it, will be a "disquisition of the policy of the stamp act."——In the mean time, however, let me add, These are not the vapours of a melancholy mind, nor the effusions of envy, disappointed ambition, nor of a spirit of opposition ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... could not stay when the countess was gone. So the bishop was searched for by the Revs. Messrs. Grey and Green and found in one corner of the tent enjoying himself thoroughly in a disquisition on the hebdomadal board. He obeyed, however, the behests of his lady without finishing the sentence in which he was promising to Dr. Gwynne that his authority at Oxford should remain unimpaired, and the ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... you to propose to yourself, you will be aware." He had visited Scott at Lasswade as early as 1803, and in recording his impressions notes that "his conversation was full of anecdote and averse from disquisition." The minstrel was a raconteur and lived in the past, the bard was a moralist and lived in ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... appearance at the present moment. It is the duty of those who have any means of contributing to the public stock of knowledge, not only to do so, but to do it at the time when it is most likely to be useful. If the nature of the disquisition should appear to the reader hardly to suit the form of a pamphlet, my apology must be, that it was not originally intended for so ephemeral ...
— Nature and Progress of Rent • Thomas Malthus
... not be led into a disquisition upon roofs further than in so far as they illustrate the subject of composition of line and form, and from the painter's point of view they frequently do in a very delightful ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... first person who applied the word essay in English to such writings: it meant, as the French word shows, a little trial-sketch, a suggestion, a few loose thoughts—a brief of something to be filled in by the reader. Now it means something far more—a long composition, dissertation, disquisition. The subjects of the essays, which number sixty-eight, are such as are of universal interest—fame, studies, atheism, beauty, ambition, death, empire, sedition, honor, adversity, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... is to be found in the number for October, 1849. It is nominally a review of Talvi's (Mrs. Robinson's) "Geschichte der Colonisation von New England," but in reality an essay on the Polity of the Puritans,—an historical disquisition on the principles of self-government evolved in New England, broad in its views, eloquent in its language. Its spirit is thoroughly American, and its estimate of the Puritan character is not narrowed by the nearsighted liberalism ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... grievances. My answer was, that the people of Ireland did suffer real misery, which, as was frequently the case, they would impute to Government, however little founded such an idea would be. This, he said, would lead us at length into a disquisition on the state of Ireland, on which subject he intended, before I went, to have a long conversation with me, but that he was ...
— 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
... theory of human life is first-rate poetry; it is an illuminating figure of poetic speech. But the simplicity with which the theme is presented, to the exclusion of many material issues, puts the statement out of the plane of metaphysical disquisition, which involves subtle conflict of argument and measured resolution of doubt, rather than imaginative certainty or unconditional assertion. Nor is Hamlet's famous soliloquy on the merits and demerits of suicide conceived in the spirit of the metaphysician. It is a dramatic description of a familiar ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... to remark that, according to this theory, the distinct personality of man is excluded, not less than the distinct personality of God. It is not easy, indeed, to explain this part of Spinoza's theory; for he has a subtle disquisition on the relation subsisting between the soul and the body, by means of which he attempts to explain the phenomena of self-consciousness, and to show that individual personality is not necessarily inconsistent with the ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... learned and ingenious tract, written originally for insertion in "N. & Q.," but which fact ought not to prevent our speaking of it in the terms which it deserves.—A Few Words in Reply to the Animadversions of the Rev. Mr. Dyce on Mr. Hunter's "Disquisition on the Tempest," 1839, and his "New Illustrations of the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shakspeare," 1845, &c. A short but interesting contribution to Shakspearian criticism, by one who has already done ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... flesh), [Greek: hopos sygkerasas to thneton hemon soma te heautou dunamei kai mixas] (Iren., Tertull.) [Greek: to aphtharto to phtharton kai to asthenes to ischuro sose ton apollumenon anthropon] (Iren.). The succeeding disquisition deserves particular note, because it shows that Hippolytus has also borrowed from Irenaeus the idea that the union of the Logos with humanity had already begun in a certain way in the prophets. Overbeck has rightly compared the [Greek: anaplassein ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... Paine,—Lincoln who began his first Douglas debate, not like his cultivated opponent with the conventional "Ladies and Gentlemen," but with the ominously intimate, "My Fellow Citizens,"—Lincoln is saying, "I am not master of language; I have not a fine education; I am not capable of entering into a disquisition upon dialectics, as I believe you call it; but I do not believe the language I employed bears any such construction as Judge Douglas puts upon it. But I don't care about a quibble in regard to words. I know what I meant, ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... restoration to offices in the provinces of natives and natives only; for these drawers of documents thought it possible, at that epoch, to recover by pedantry what their brethren of Holland and Zealand were maintaining with the sword. It was not the moment for historical disquisition, citations from Solomon, nor chopping of logic; yet with such lucubrations were reams of paper filled, and days and weeks occupied. The result was what might have been expected. The Grand Commander obtained ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... doubt, friend,' said Mr. Peebles; 'a Multiplepoinding is the safest REMEDIUM JURIS in the whole; form of process. I have known it conjoined with a declarator of marriage.—Your beef is excellent,' he said to my father, who in vain endeavoured to resume his legal disquisition; 'but something highly powdered—and the twopenny is undeniable; but it is small swipes—small swipes—more of hop than malt-with your leave, I'll try your ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... to an old female reprobate's disquisition on religion?" passed through Antony Dart's mind. "Why am I listening? I am doing it because here is a creature who BELIEVES—knowing no doctrine, knowing no church. She BELIEVES—she thinks she KNOWS her Deity is by her side. She is not afraid. To her simpleness the awful Unknown is ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of the time, the quick illustration which was so frequently borrowed from some characteristic or incident in the life of the person, or the person's ancestor, with whom he was conversing, the eloquent disquisition playful or profound, put the visitor at his ease, and hours flew like minutes in refreshing talk. It was a mistake to suppose that Mr. Tazewell arrogated all the talk to himself, and purposely kept others silent ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... meanings, the term "Biology" which denotes the whole of the sciences which deal with living things, whether they be animals or whether they be plants. Some little time ago—in the course of this year, I think—I was favoured by a learned classic, Dr. Field of Norwich, with a disquisition, in which he endeavourved to prove that, from a philological point of view, neither Treviranus nor Lamarck had any right to coin this new word "Biology" for their purpose; that, in fact, the Greek word "Bios" had relation only to human life and human ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... disappointed fiend, yet I was unable to overcome my repugnance to the task which was enjoined me. I found that I could not compose a female without again devoting several months to profound study and laborious disquisition. I had heard of some discoveries having been made by an English philosopher, the knowledge of which was material to my success, and I sometimes thought of obtaining my father's consent to visit England for this purpose; but I clung to every pretence of delay and shrank from taking the first ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... the Determination of the Relative Weight of Single Molecules," by E. Vogel, of San Francisco. This paper, which was taken as read, consists of a lengthy theoretical disquisition, in which the author maintains the following propositions: That the combining weights of all elements are one third of their present values; the assumption that equal volumes of gases contain equal numbers of molecules ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... here omitted a long, uninteresting, and inconclusive disquisition on the supposed Terra Australis, as altogether ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... be defiled, slashed to rags, burnt. And indeed why not? For the best use of a work of art as understood among the Prussian pundits is to make it the peg whereon to hang some ridiculous breach of statistics, some monstrous disquisition of bedevilled theory; and for such purposes a work no longer existing so as ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... story is a kind of mother-hen who gathers under her wings a numerous brood of biographical chicks. Quantities of recondite erudition are poured out on the slightest provocation. Nat's unquestioned superiority to his schoolmates evokes a disquisition for the encouragement of dull boys, in which we are told that "the great philosopher, Newton, was one of the dullest scholars in school when he was twelve years old. Doctor Isaac Barrow was such a dull, pugnacious, stupid fellow, etc., etc. The father of Doctor Adam ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... creating the historical novel, he was the first to throw a poetic glamour over European annals. In 1803 Wordsworth visited Scott at Lasswade, near Edinburgh; and Scott afterward returned the visit at Grasmere. Wordsworth noted that his guest was "full of anecdote and averse from disquisition." The Englishman was a moralist and much given to "disquisition," while the Scotchman was, above all things, a raconteur, and, perhaps, on the whole, the foremost of British story-tellers. Scott's Toryism, too, was of a different stripe from Wordsworth's, being rather the result ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... valuable scientific paper, issued from the press in pamphlet form, on the "Influence of Climate on Longevity, with special reference to Life Insurance." This paper, we may surmise, was produced in refutation of the attempt at a physiological disquisition on the part of Hon. John C. Calhoun, United States Senator, on the colored race, which met with considerable favor from some quarters, until the appearance of Dr. Smith's pamphlet—since when, we have heard nothing about Calhoun's learned argument. It may be well to ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... our friend has contrived to finish the bishop during his disquisition; the bowl's ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... and expressions, peculiar to the nation: Neither do I perceive that any person, either finds or acknowledges his wants upon this head, or in the least desires to have them supplied. Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style. But this would require too ample a disquisition to be now dwelt on: however, I shall venture to name one or two faults, which are easy to be remedied, with a very small portion ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... part of a supply, which can be easily done without the objection of a tack, the grantees might possibly then have much harder conditions given them; and I do not see how they could prevent it. Whether the resuming of royal grants be consistent with good policy or justice, would be too long a disquisition: besides, the profusion of kings is not like to be a grievance for the future, because there have been laws since made to provide against that evil, or, indeed, rather because the crown has nothing left to give away. But the objection ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... just been saying was necessary to my subject as far as it went, but for all that it was chiefly introductory to what I am now going to bring to your notice. But this is a matter rather for illustration and discussion than for mere disquisition. Therefore, to save your time as much as possible, I will proceed at once to the illustration, and then ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... "Hermin and Gunilde," which was not only exceedingly well reviewed, but received the honour of a parody entitled "Harlequin and Columbine." He also wrote translations of several of the poems of Ossian, and a disquisition upon their genuineness; and then with better inspiration he wrote a considerable treatise on "Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry," with metrical translations, being thus the first to call the attention of Germany to these ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... into a disquisition on whiskers, and Diana escaped from the task of describing her lover. She could not have described ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... this latter, and tried to point out that the former was closely cognate to it. In order to mask the difficulty, nay, the impossibility, of doing this successfully on the evidence which he possessed, he wandered off into a long and wordy disquisition on treasonable plots in general, ending abruptly with that of Edmund de la Pole. Then, for the first time, Coke faced the chief difficulty of the Government, namely, that there was but one witness against Raleigh. He did not allow, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... edition of Mariana contains in the Appendix the famous bull of Julius II. of Feb. 18th, 1512, the original of which is to be found in the royal archives of Barcelona. The editor, Don Francisco Ortiz y Sanz, has accompanied it with an elaborate disquisition, in which he makes the apostolic sentence the great authority for the conquest. It was a great triumph undoubtedly, to be able to produce the document, to which the Spanish historians had been so long challenged in vain by foreign ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... great power exercised by one branch of the Federal Government over another. By holding that the mandamus must issue from the District and not the Supreme Court, the case might have been dismissed briefly. The Republicans thought the long disquisition on the powers of the court and its relation to the executive branch a kind of defiance and entirely unwarranted. It was the beginning of a long list of similar ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... recourse to in consequence of the utter poverty of reason and argument, which could otherwise be presented against the principle of the address. But such an obligation led to a novel difficulty and bitterer conflict. A discussion involving principles of the greatest moment narrowed into a technical disquisition of abstract law. Mr. O'Hea was driven from his position by the unanimous and unqualified opinion of every barrister present, and even by his own silence, when dared to allow the address to pass in the negative, and assume the responsibility of its ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... epistle of Sappho to Phaon is next considered; but Sappho and Ovid are more the subjects of this disquisition, than Pope. We shall, therefore, pass over it to a piece of more importance, the epistle of Eloisa to Abelard, which may justly be regarded, as one of the works on which the reputation of Pope will stand ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... during this apparently aimless disquisition, had been drawn from his meal to the speaker. He saw an elderly gentleman, clothed in the black frock-coat and black tie of the rural lawyer of the old school. His eyes shot keen and kindly glances from the deep ambush of great white brows, ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... translation of "Luther's Way to Prayer," published by Mr. Pickering in 1846. Juncker's book is a very good repertory of the various representations of the great reformer, but the prints are generally but faithless copies. In 1750 Kirchmayer printed an especial disquisition upon the portrait by Lucas Cranach of 1523, under the following title:—"Disquisitio Historia de Martini Lutheri Oris et Vultus Habitu Hervieo ad vivum expresso in Imagine divine pencilli Lucae Cranachj patris ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various
... start out to write a disquisition on women as golfers, but only to offer some hints on ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... all human affairs, and consequently in all church movements," the Major replied, and the impulse of a disquisition straightened him into a posture more dignified, for he was fond of talking and at times he strove to be logical and impressive; but at this moment Bill arrived with mint from the spring; and with lighter talk two ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... counterpart would seem to have been the satyric drama.[106] The satyric element seems, however, never to have become really popular, the fabula saltica as we know it dealing mainly with tragic or highly emotional themes. Indeed, to judge from Lucian's disquisition on the art of dancing, the subjects seem to have been drawn from almost every conceivable source both of history and mythology.[107] Many of these salticae fabulae must have been mere adaptations of existing tragedies. Their literary value was, according ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... the dilettante New Zealander will edit this manuscript, I think I should write that lovely name over and over again for a page or so. If the New Zealander should exercise his editorial discretion, and delete my raptures, it wouldn't matter; but I might furnish him with the text for an elaborate disquisition on the manners and customs of English lovers. Let me be reasonable about my dear love, if I can. My dear love—do I dare to call her that already, when, for anything I know to the contrary, there may be another evangelical curate ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... home.' If he had lived in the last century, he would probably have gone back for his idols to an earlier one; and yet his remarks on taste and criticism are of a catholic nature, although his just application of their canons have this chronological boundary. We have no room, however, for his disquisition on these elegant subjects; neither can we follow our accomplished clergyman into his disquisitions on fiction, history, biography, philosophy, and its pleasures, nor the 'domestic interiors' of taste and learning. We had intended to quote some fine sentences on the consolations of poetry, but find ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... her head gravely, and entered forthwith into subtleties of disquisition on the art of dressmaking which had the desired effect of utterly bewildering the proprietor of the Oriental Cashmere Robe in ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... [Footnote: I mean the piece with this title in the collection of his works. There is an older King John, in two parts, of which the former is a re-cast:—perhaps a juvenile work of Shakspeare, though not hitherto acknowledged as such by the English critics. See the disquisition appended to this Lecture.] and Henry the Eighth at a later period, as ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... than among the Raptores, unless he be the discoverer of some new species of eagle characterized by traits very unlike those of other members of the genus. It were to be wished that he had left out the disquisition on Whitman, for it is a jarring chord in his little orchestra of lyric and ornithologic song. He might have kept it by him till the longer growing of his critical beard, and then, if still a devotee at that singular shrine, have expanded it into a volume or two explanatory ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... Laws" he takes the verse of the Bible not so much as a text to be amplified and interpreted, but as a pretext for a philosophical disquisition. The allegories indeed are only in form a commentary on the Bible; in one aspect they are a history of the human soul, which, if they had been completed, would have traced the upward progress from Adam to Moses. It is not ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... to the unaccustomed exercise, but probably to more sentimental reasons, Robert Vyner slept but poorly the night after his labours. He had explained his absence at the dinner-table by an airy reference to a long walk and a disquisition on the charms of the river by evening, an explanation which both Mr. Vyner and his wife had received with the silence it merited. It was evident that his absence had been the subject of some comment, but his father made no reference to it as ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... her face and neck had grown positively scarlet, and she could have kissed the well-disposed landlady for entering on a voluble disquisition as to the tricks played by the Wye on those unaware of its peculiarities, especially at night. A general conversation broke out, but Mrs. Devar, rapidly regaining her spirits after enduring long hours of the horrible obsession ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... as you suggested. I was present at the trial of the smugglers: I listened to Counsel's speech for the defence, but judged it useless to stay to the end. When Maitre Henri Robart began a disquisition on the facts, I left. Here is ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... scientific import have been published that so promptly and deeply fixed public attention as the Vestiges of Creation, or elicited more numerous replies and sharper critical analysis and disquisition. Upon so vast a question as the evolution of universal creation differences of opinion were natural and unavoidable. Many have disputed the accuracy of some of the author's facts, and the sequence and validity of his inductive inferences; ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... even from childhood. Well for us if we do not abuse this privilege, and mistake the familiarity of words which convey these truths for a clear understanding of the truths themselves! If the preceding disquisition, with all its subtlety and all its obscurity, should answer no other purpose, it will still have been neither purposeless, nor devoid of utility, should it only lead us to sympathize with the strivings of the human intellect, awakened to the infinite importance of ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... such a promising topic that they got out the encyclopaedia and found to their joy that there was quite a lengthy and learned disquisition on the subject. So they read it again and again, even learning the more abstruse sentences by heart. Next day they were observed to chuckle whenever they caught each other's eye, and at lunch they were unusually cheerful and more than ordinarily ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... and such men as Pascal, Rousseau, and Macaulay in our times,—although the pedants have always disdained those who write clearly and luminously, and lost reverence for genius the moment it is understood; since clear writing shows how little is truly original, and makes a disquisition on a bug, a comma, or a ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... Olive listened intently. From what she had heard of him as a highly intellectual man, from the faint indications of character which she had herself noticed in their conversation, Miss Rothesay expected that he would have dived deeply into theological disquisition. She had too much penetration to look to him for the Christianity of a St. John—it was evident that such was not his nature; but she thought he would surely employ his powerful mind in wrestling with those knotty points of theology which ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... Constitutionally timid, on taking the oath of office, he betrayed his own weakness, and foreshadowed the forthcoming decision of the Supreme Court. Under the wing of the Executive, Chief-Justice Taney gave his famed disquisition. The delivery of that opinion was an act of revolution. The truth of history was scorned; the voice of passion was put forward as the rule of law; doctrines were laid down which, if they are just, give a full sanction to the rebellion which ensued. The country was stung to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... upon his precarious means, and upon his chances of obtaining a future livelihood, a sudden idea struck him. Rigdon well knew his countrymen, and their avidity for the marvellous; he resolved to give to the world the "Manuscript found," not as a mere work of imagination or disquisition, as its writer had intended it to be, but as a new code of religion, sent down to man, as of yore, on awful Sinai, the tables were ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... to the Pentateuch are made the subject of a most thorough disquisition by Caspari, S. ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... method, introduce his own personality, intersperse abrupt disquisitions on food, illness, and Fleet Street? Is not that description of Iden's dinner a little—well, a little unusual? In short, is not the book a disquisition on life from the standpoint of Jefferies' personal experiences? And if this is so, how can the book be so fine an achievement?" Oh, candid reader, with the voice of authority sounding in your ears (and have we not Mr. Henley and Mr. Saintsbury ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... interesting, and even stimulating disquisition, full of a fine social enthusiasm, and marked, in many passages, by deep poetic feeling. But it is not a work of investigation into the springs of Being. Mr. Wells explicitly renounces from the outset any dealings with "cosmogony." It ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... world has always insisted upon accepting him as a thinker: and hence a great coil of misunderstanding. As a thinker, Emerson is difficult to classify. Before you begin to assign him a place, you must clear the ground by a disquisition as to what is meant by "a thinker", and how Emerson differs from other thinkers. As a man, Emerson is as ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... genealogical disquisition our eyes turned to a most attractive looking tea table which was set forth with superb silver, and thin slices of bread and butter and cake. With appetites sharpened by our long ride through the fresh air, I fear that we all gazed ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... said Kate. As a matter of fact the great throng and the novel sights were distracting her so much that she found it hard to attend to her companion's disquisition. ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... touching upon any part of the Edinburgh Review; not from a wish to conciliate the favour of its writers, or to cancel the remembrance of a syllable I have formerly published, but simply from a sense of the impropriety of mixing up private resentments with a disquisition of the present kind, and more particularly at this distance of time ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... history represents the real, art the possible. In connection with this definition and its proof, the philosopher recounts how he used to hold an opposite view. Doing everything thoroughly, he had prepared and written out a long disquisition on this thesis, which was already in type, when suddenly, from the midst of his meditations, the truth flashed upon him. He saw for the first time clearly that history cannot be a science, since, like art, it always deals with the particular. ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... academies are depressing in character. Rarely can be found a bright human book gleaming like a diamond in the dust. Score after score of decreta, decretales, Sextuses, and Clementines, and chestsful of the dreariest theological disquisition impress upon the weary searcher the fact that academic libraries were usually even more dryasdust than monastic collections, and he begins to understand how prosperous law may be as a calling, and to have an inkling of what is known, in classic ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... together looking out on to the garden. Presently their talk returned to the German disquisition, which was directed against the class of quasi-scientific authors attacked by Peak himself in his Critical article. In the end Godwin sat down and began to read the translation he had made, Mr. Warricombe listening with a thoughtful smile. From time to time the reader ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... improvement on its predecessor. It is written with profounder learning, and a more equitable spirit; and is indeed pre-eminently distinguished by the calmness, candour, and judge-like serenity that pervades it. In a style always lucid in disquisition, and always elegant in narrative, he appears to be solely anxious to communicate the fair result, whatever it may be, to which his extensive reading has conducted him. But, unfortunately, Dr Thirlwall ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... this biographical disquisition there appears a very strong symptom of Johnson's prejudice against players[485]; a prejudice which may be attributed to the following causes: first, the imperfection of his organs, which were so defective that he was not susceptible of the fine impressions which theatrical ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... temptation to toss in this most savory thing of all—this easy, graceful, philosophical disquisition, with his happy, chirping confidence. It ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... reflected, with much compunction, that this was highly improper. He ought to have asked about flower-shows, and inquired whether the princess of Wales was looking well of late. Some reference to the last Parisian comedy might have introduced a disquisition on the new grays and greens of the French milliners, with a passing mention made of the price paid for a pair of ponies by a certain marquise unattached. He had not spoken of one of these things: perhaps he could not if he had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... to tell me the difference between an infusion and decoction; and the history, the virtues, and the botanical or medical name of the bark. Chambers will tell you more perhaps than you will wish to read of it. Your little mercurial disquisition is ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... like Persephone on a coin of Syracuse, but it was plain that he was prepossessed in her favour, and there was a touch of the affectionate in his courtesy. After congratulating himself on recovering a kinswoman of a long-separated branch of his family, and after a good deal of genealogical disquisition, he explained the nature of the lady's historical tasks, and engaged her to visit him in the country at an early date. Miss Willoughby then said farewell, having an engagement at the Record Office, where, as the Earl gallantly observed, ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... rarefaction of the hydrogen in the air, so that, though no spirit could be photographed as such, a code and language might be established by means of the effect produced on the air by the spirit's mind. I am so interested in the subject of my disquisition that I had almost forgotten that your spirits are still subject to the requirements of the body. Last time I dined with you; let me now ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... character, I am morally assured, I should hazard little in stating a case to you, not as a party in the dispute,—but as a judge, and trusting my appeal upon it to your own good sense and candid disquisition in this matter;—you are a person free from as many narrow prejudices of education as most men;—and, if I may presume to penetrate farther into you,—of a liberality of genius above bearing down an opinion, merely because it wants ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... can have any kind of prison-discipline disquisition in "H. W." that does not start with the first great principle I have laid down, and that does not protest against Prisons being considered per se. Whatever chance is given to a man in a prison must be given to a man ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... disquisition upon names, there came in sight a small house, dark and discolored with age and neglect. He pointed this out to Paul with ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... interview with his father and mother. He informed them that a great joy had come into his life in being able to give a bankers' order for the payment of four pounds per month to them as long as they lived. The saintly couple's mental process became confused. They entered upon a long disquisition of how much affluence might affect their humility and endanger their religious life. The noble son urged that their faith in God was too strong to allow the possession of money to betray them into indifference. The father being spokesman replied on behalf of his wife that they accepted ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... Mantegna he pressed my arm and gave it a loving look. "He was not in a hurry," he murmured. "He knew nothing of 'raw Haste, half-sister to Delay!'" How sound a critic my friend was I am unable to say, but he was an extremely amusing one; overflowing with opinions, theories, and sympathies, with disquisition and gossip and anecdote. He was a shade too sentimental for my own sympathies, and I fancied he was rather too fond of superfine discriminations and of discovering subtle intentions in shallow places. At moments, too, he plunged into the sea of metaphysics, and ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... university assembled according to custom in the church of the Mathurins, to listen to an address delivered by the rector. But Nicholas Cop's discourse was not of the usual type. Under guise of a disquisition on "Christian Philosophy," the orator preached an evangelical sermon, with the First Beatitude for his text, and propounded the view that the forgiveness of sin and eternal life are simple gifts of God's grace that cannot be earned ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... for in your Papers, and have as often wondered to find my self disappointed; the rather, because I think it a Subject every way agreeable to your Design, and by being left unattempted by others, seems reserved as a proper Employment for you; I mean a Disquisition, from whence it proceeds, that Men of the brightest Parts, and most comprehensive Genius, compleatly furnished with Talents for any Province in humane Affairs; such as by their wise Lessons of Oeconomy to others have made it evident, that they have the justest Notions of ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... while the Doctor was delivering an impromptu disquisition upon the peculiarities of the one-horned rhinoceros and the slight resemblance given by the folds of its monstrous hide to the shell of a turtle, that Ramball followed the two boys and made signs to them to come to the other end of the great van-walled booth, when he asked ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... take wings and fly. You can scarcely believe how much I confide in your advice and wisdom, and above all in your affection and fidelity. The importance of the interests involved perhaps demands a long disquisition, but the close union of our hearts is contented with brevity. It is of very great importance to me that, if you can't be at Rome at the elections, you should at least be here after his election is declared.[272] Take ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... call it, who was in great reputation at that time in the heathen world, as we find by Diodonis, Justin, Longinus, and other authors; for the rest, the wisest among them laid aside all notions after a Deity, as a disquisition vain and fruitless, which indeed it was, upon unrevealed principles; and those who ventured to engage too far ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... with their followers, amused themselves with various pastimes, in which the joys of the shell, as Ossian has it, were not forgotten. 'Others apart sat on a hill retired;' probably as deeply engaged in the discussion of politics and news, as Milton's spirits in metaphysical disquisition. At length signals of the approach of the game were descried and heard. Distant shouts resounded from valley to valley, as the various parties of Highlanders, climbing rocks, struggling through copses, wading brooks, and traversing ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... indifference to the whole affair,—"and some time when you are in town drop in again. And now tell me about Ruth, as we must call her, I suppose. Your aunt just missed her at the Cosgroves' the other day." Then came a short disquisition on Garry and Corinne and their life at Elm Crest, followed by an embarrassing pause, during which the head of the house of Breen lowered the flow line on a black bottle which he took from a closet behind his desk,—"his digestion being a little out that morning," he ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... a regard for the dramatic order of development. There is, for instance, an episodical chapter of upwards of thirty pages, describing commercial England in a state of panic, which is very nearly as appropriate as a disquisition on the Primary Rocks, or an inquiry into the origin of the Cabala would be, but which is so palpably introduced for the purpose of displaying the author's financial erudition, that he feels himself called upon to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... marked; he is struck by this and his attention is arrested. Anger especially is so noisy in its rage that it is impossible not to perceive it if you are within reach. You need not ask yourself whether this is an opportunity for a pedagogue to frame a fine disquisition. What! no fine disquisition, nothing, not a word! Let the child come to you; impressed by what he has seen, he will not fail to ask you questions. The answer is easy; it is drawn from the very things which have appealed to his senses. He sees a flushed face, flashing eyes, a ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... contains no such discussion. The speeches in the 'Iliad,' which Mr. Gladstone, the most competent of living judges, maintains to be the finest ever composed by man, are not discussions of principle. There is no more tendency in them to critical disquisition than there is to political economy. In Herodotus you have the beginning of the age of discussion. He belongs in his essence to the age which is going out. He refers with reverence to established ordinance and fixed religion. Still, in his travels through Greece, he must have heard ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... "After the disquisition on myself above cited, you will be prepared to understand the changes through which this wonderful ego et me ipse ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... disquisition on the comparison between European and Japanese feudalism and chivalry, it is not the purpose of this paper to enter into it at length. My attempt is rather to relate, firstly, the origin and sources of our chivalry; secondly, ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... dissertation, treatise, essay; thesis, theme; monograph, tract, tractate[obs3], tractation[obs3]; discourse, memoir, disquisition, lecture, sermon, homily, pandect[obs3]; excursus. commentary, review, critique, criticism, article; leader, leading article; editorial; running commentary. investigation &c. (inquiry) 461; study &c. (consideration) 451; discussion &c. (reasoning) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... light and polished style. Popanilla, therefore, spoke of man in a savage state, the origin of society, and the elements of the social compact, in sentences which would not have disgraced the mellifluous pen of Bentham. From these he naturally digressed into an agreeable disquisition on the Anglo-Saxons; and, after a little badinage on the Bill of Rights, flew off to an airy aper u of the French Revolution. When he had arrived at the Isle of Fantaisie he begged to inform his Majesty that man was born ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... only keep him engaged, he would forget the blow that had descended upon him, and would regain his usual equanimity. A question as to whether he thought Achilles liked sage with his pork, cunningly led him on to a long disquisition, till, in a quarter of an hour, he was quite a changed man, and set out with great ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 8, 1890 • Various
... made her appearance at Pushkara for the sake of the Grandsire and for gratifying the Munis. (At another time), O king, many Munis, mustering together at Naimisha, took up their residence there. Delightful disquisition occurred among them, O king, about the Vedas. There where those Munis, conversant with diverse scriptures, took up their abode, there they thought of the Sarasvati. Thus thought of, O monarch, by those Rishis performing ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... disquisition quite patiently, and, when Richard concluded, he held out the basket which contained his specifics, indicating, by a gesture, that he might hold it. Mr. Jones was quite satisfied with this commission; and ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... attention too much from the luminous field of philosophic disquisition to the sterile regions of polemic divinity, and the still more thorny paths ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... desire, volition, memory, imagination, are found to be separated by such delicate shades and minute gradations that their boundaries have eluded the most subtle investigations, and remain a pregnant source of ingenious disquisition and controversy. The boundaries between the great kingdom of nature, and, still more, between the various provinces, and lesser portions, into which they are subdivided, afford another illustration of the same important truth. The most sagacious and laborious naturalists ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... has left us, as an episode of his great work, a disquisition on the probable effects that would have followed, if Alexander the Great had invaded Italy. Posterity has generally regarded that disquisition as proving Livy's patriotism more strongly than his impartiality or acuteness. Yet, right or wrong, the speculations of the Roman writer were ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... not how I can withdraw more satisfactorily from this long disquisition than by offering to the Reader as a farewell memorial the following Verses, suggested to me by a concise epitaph which I met with some time ago in one of the most retired vales among the mountains of Westmoreland. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... not understand this grave, philosophical disquisition very well, and he began to get pretty sleepy. He had, however, been somewhat amused, during the greater part of the time, in seeing the corks float about upon the water, with the needles upon them. So his father took the needles off, and let him have the two floats in one of the saucers to play with, ...
— Rollo's Experiments • Jacob Abbott
... concludes Najef-Kooli with heartfelt gratitude, "we never did dance. God protect the faithful from it!" Independent of the above recorded opinions on the singularity of quadrilles and waltzes, the khan takes this occasion to enter into a disquisition on the inconsistency (doubly incongruous to an Oriental eye) of the ladies having their necks, arms, and shoulders uncovered, while the men are clothed up to the chin, "and not even their hands are allowed to be seen bare," and returned from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... treats of all the great subjects of thought with which his age is conversant. It somewhat resembles Pope's "Essay on Man," in style and subject, but immeasurably superior in poetical genius. It is a lengthened disquisition, in seven thousand four hundred lines, of the great phenomena of the outward world. As a painter and worshiper of nature, he was superior to all the poets of antiquity. His skill in presenting abstruse speculations is marvelous, and his outbursts ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... had sat through this rather desultory disquisition with what patience she could command, breaking in upon it impulsively at various points, and seen that it was drifting nowhere—at least, that it was not drifting toward the object of her wishes. Then she took up the burden of talk, and carried it ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... damage the new deals and competition and our combination would do to 'em if they kept on sleeping on their stock certificates. Funny how hard it is to pry some folks loose from their par-value notions." Mr. Fogg delivered this little disquisition on the intractability of stockholders with reproachful vigor, staring blandly into the unwinking gaze of Mr. Marston. "I don't want to praise my own humble efforts too much," he went on, "but I truly believe that inside another thirty days ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... Mr Cupples found Trent little inclined to talk. He excused himself on the plea of a restless night. Mr Cupples, on the other hand, was in a state of bird-like alertness. The prospect of the inquest seemed to enliven him. He entertained Trent with a disquisition upon the history of that most ancient and once busy tribunal, the coroner's court, and remarked upon the enviable freedom of its procedure from the shackles of rule and precedent. From this he passed to the case that was to come ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... theory by the author, by which he conceives the Indian race to be descended from the ancient Cuthites, who are Hamitic. This is wrong. 2. A curious and valuable pictographic map of the migration of the Aztecs, not heretofore printed. This is an acquisition. 3. A disquisition of Dr. Lakey, of Cincinnati, on the superiority of the northern to the southern race of red men. This seems true. 4. A preface, by Bishop McIlvaine, showing the importance in all inquiries of the kind, of keeping the record of the Bible strictly in ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... 1564, Cardan lapses into a philosophizing strain, and opens his discourse with the ominous words, "Sed jam ad institutum revertamur, deque ipso vitae humanae genere aliquo dicamus." He begins with a disquisition on the worthlessness of life, and repeats somewhat tediously the story of his visit to Scotland. He gives a synopsis of all the sciences he had ever studied—Theology, Dialectics, Arithmetic, Music, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... to common chat, I have heard many a liberal and eloquent disquisition upon the state of Europe in general, and of Venice in particular, from several agreeable friends at their own Casino, who did not appear to have more fears upon them than myself, and I know not why they should. Chevalier Emo ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... got into a long disquisition on politics when I only meant to express my sympathy in the state of your health, and to tender you all the affections of public and private hospitality. I should be very happy indeed to see you here. I leave this about the 30th instant, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson |
