"Laureate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God's great, unflattering laureate, Nature.* ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... substratum of truth in his accusations to render it inexpedient to prosecute him for libel. The punishment of what was false would have involved the public exposure of what was true. The official party realized the force of the laureate's dictum, ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... Apulia, was introduced to Pope Leo X., as a buffoon, but was promoted to the laurel. This laureate was called ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... Colley Cibber as poet-laureate, and dying in 1785 was followed by Thomas Warton. From Warton the line of succession is Pye, Southey, Wordsworth, Tennyson. See post, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... after leaving the thorny way of matrimony, failed to carry out the laureate's metaphor. Having less of the fallen star in her than Mr. Rowe imagined, and perhaps more of the hen, she refused to set, but resolutely faced the world, and in spite of all rules of decorum, tried to earn a living for herself and her two children, if indeed as Pope's slander implies, ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... most prominent man of letters in London. In 1670 he had been appointed Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal with a salary of two hundred pounds and a butt of sack. His connection with the stage had been a decided financial success, and he was in receipt of an income of about seven hundred pounds, ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... she wouldn't be so alarmingly outspoken when she sings our praises to strangers. She gave him to understand that I am a full-fledged author and playwright, the peer of any poet laureate who ever held a pen; that Lloyd is a combination of princess and angel and halo-crowned saint, and Joyce a model big sister and an all-round genius. How she managed in the short time they were alone to tell him as much as she did will ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... need of sympathy, and the children of the city, headed by Tilsa and Tobene, would run out into the plain to meet him and join in a game, or if it was at night, and he came within the walls, the house-holders would join in the song of welcome which the Poet Laureate of Ule had written for such occasions. And soon the Flamp would return to ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... selected and set aside the proper and most suitable books for his own special deathbed. 'Read where I first cast my anchor,' said John Knox to his wife, sitting weeping at his bedside. At which she opened and read in the Gospel of John. Sir Thomas Browne is neither more nor less than the very prose-laureate of death. He writes as no other man has ever written about death. Death is everywhere in all Sir Thomas Browne's books. And yet it may be said of them all, that, like heaven itself, there is no death there. Death is swallowed up in Sir Thomas ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... had sung, and wandered, and loved; who had been slighted, and imprisoned for a madman; who had escaped and hidden himself, and had yet been glorious; who had come to Rome at last to receive the laureate's crown in the Capitol, as Petrarch had been crowned before him. His life is a strange history, full of discordant passages that left little or no mark in his works, so that it is a wonder how a man so torn and harassed could labour unceasingly for many years at a work so perfectly harmonious ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... although intimate, were not of the inner circle. This comprised Mr. and Mrs. Curtice, Mr. and Mrs. Todd, Mr. and Mrs. Banford, Mr. and Mrs. Viedler, and ourselves. Curtice was our poet laureate, and in a song he composed and sang at a dinner were included ...
— The Romance and Tragedy • William Ingraham Russell
... poet laureate of England, was born at Sornersby, Lincolnshire, April 9, 1810, and was the third of a large family of children, eight of whom were boys and three girls. His father was a clergyman, a man of remarkably fine abilities; his mother, as should be the mother ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... and fill the little boat. The baronet follows up his luck, and keeps close to Edith. How beautiful she is with the soft silver light on her face. He sits and watches her, and thinks of the laureate's lines: ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... was frequently found indulging in his undeniable passion for litigation. The purchase of a house in Blackfriars is recorded in 1613, and it led to the seemingly inevitable lawsuit some two years later. Nicholas Rowe, poet-laureate to King George I., wrote a life of Shakespeare in the early years of the eighteenth century, and we owe to him a statement, founded upon such information as a lapse of a century could validate, that Shakespeare spent the last years of his life enjoying "ease, retirement, ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... of maister Skelton, Poete Laureate. Nowe collected and newly published. Anno 1568. Imprinted at London in Fletestreate, neare vnto saint Dunstones churche ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... spirit which rules,—the spirit of the Shahnameh and Firdausi,—"charming elegance, servile court flattery, and graceful wit." In none are the characteristics so manifest as in Abu Nuwas (762-819), the Poet Laureate of Harun, the Imr-al-Kais of his time. His themes are wine and love. Everything else he casts to the wind; and like his modern counterpart, Heine, he drives the wit of his satire deep into the holiest feelings of his people. "I would that all ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... interesting of the Shepherd's friendships; both the poets were pleased with each other, and the closest intimacy ensued. It was on his way to visit Wilson, at Elleray, his seat in Cumberland, during the autumn of 1814, that the Shepherd formed the acquaintance of the Poet-laureate. He had notified to Southey his arrival at one of the hotels in Keswick, and begged the privilege of a visit. Southey promptly acknowledged his summons, and insisted on his remaining a couple of days at Greta Hall to share his hospitality. Two years could not have more firmly rivetted ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... to the antiquary, that these verses are intended to imitate the antique poetry of the Scalds—the minstrels of the old Scandinavians—the race, as the Laureate ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... many-sided poet-laureate, who is also a philosopher, in his "Life of Emerson," has finely worked out the theory that no man writes other than his own experience: that consciously or otherwise an author describes himself in the characters he draws; that when he ...
— Shakespeare's Insomnia, And the Causes Thereof • Franklin H. Head
... "Tennyson's Brook. Our laureate's description of a moving river is not so sombre as that of the American poet; and, besides, has more life and ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... The Laureate had read this, and yet considers it the language of a heart that 'never was hardened.' He says that 'the wickedness of the tinker has been greatly overcharged, and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally to pronounce of John Bunyan, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... vesper hymn, my lord of Surrey?" he cried with a laugh, as the other hastily thrust the tablets, which he had hitherto held in his hand, into his bosom. "You will rival Master Skelton, the poet laureate, and your friend Sir Thomas Wyat, too, ere long. But will it please your lord-ship to quit for a moment the society of the celestial Nine, and descend to earth, while I inform you that, acting as your representative, I have given all needful ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... (1659-1726), a Bandon man, have secured a certain sort of twin immortality by their authorized metrical version of the Psalms (1696), which gradually took the place of the older rendering by Sternhold and Hopkins. Tate became poet-laureate in 1690 in succession to Shadwell and was appointed historiographer-royal in 1702. He wrote the bulk of the second part of Absalom and Achitophel with a wonderfully close imitation of Dryden's manner, besides several dramatic pieces and poems. Between Tate, Shadwell, ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... by storm. It seemed so easy! "Westminster Abbey," wrote my friend to a correspondent; "if I live, I shall be buried there—so help me God!" "I mean, after Tennyson's death," I myself wrote to Philip Hamerton, "to be Poet-laureate!" From these samples of our callow speech, the modesty of our ambition may be inferred. Well, it all happened just as we planned, only otherwise! Through some blunder of arrangement we two started for London on the same day, but from different railway stations, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... of the greatest of English poets, born in Lincolnshire in 1809. He was made poet-laureate in 1850. Many of his poems are well known to young readers' and very popular. He died ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... 'equable', but of course u remains long, as in 'mutable'. Longer words throw the stress further back, except mere negatives, like 'impl['a]cable', and words with heavy consonants such as 'delectable'. Examples are 'miserable', 'admirable', 'intolerable', 'despicable'. The Poet Laureate holds that in these words Milton kept the long Italian a of the penultimate ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... inspiring. If I had possessed a little foresight I should have avoided Wales, for, having proved apt at itinerary doggerel, I was solemnly created, immediately on arrival, Mistress of Rhymes and Travelling Laureate to the party—an office, however honourable, that is no sinecure since it obliges me to write rhymed eulogies or diatribes on Dolgelly, Tan-y-Bulch, Gyn-y-Coed, Llanrychwyn, and other Welsh hamlets whose names offer breakneck ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... generations of phoneticians I know little. Among them towers the Poet Laureate, to whom perhaps Higgins may owe his Miltonic sympathies, though here again I must disclaim all portraiture. But if the play makes the public aware that there are such people as phoneticians, and that they are among the most important people in England ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... not of record that the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia ever discovered the junior laureate, the writer will ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... of Henry IV. had been succeeded by the stormy minority of Louis XIII., when Malherbe (1556-1628), the tyrant of words and syllables, appeared as the reformer of poetry. He attracted attention by ridiculing the style of Ronsard. He became the laureate of the court, and furnished for it that literature in which it was beginning to take delight. In the place of Latin and Greek French, he inaugurated the extreme of formality; the matter of his verse was made subordinate ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... desire." Wet towels! Midnight oil! Here! Everything That can induce the singing bard to sing. Shake me, Ye Nine! I'm resolute, I'm bold! Come, Inspiration, lend thy furious hold! MORRIS on Pegasus! Plank money down! I'll back myself to win the Laureate's Crown! ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... on the prince during his last illness. I was supping with Veraci, the poet-laureate, on the eve of the prince's death, and in the course ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... true Guise, and D'Este, newly arrived from Italy, and accompanied by the poet Tasso, wearing a "gabardine and a hood of satin." Catherine showed the Italian great favor, as was due a countryman, but there was another poet among them as well, Ronsard, the poet laureate of the time. The Duc de Guise had followed in the wake of Marguerite, unbeknown to Catherine, who frowned down any possibility of an alliance between the houses of Valois ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... this city popes, princes and international warriors lived in royal style; but they are virtually forgotten, while Petrarch, the poetic saint and laureate of Italy, is as fresh in the memory of man as the day he died—July 18th, 1374, at the age ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... explore the lands of former times, absorbed by his task, oblivious of days and months, is surprised on his return at beholding how the domain of the past has widened. To the past belongs Tennyson, the laureate; to the past belongs Browning, and that ruddy smiling face, manly and kind, which the traveller to realms beyond intended to describe from nature on his coming back among living men, has faded away, and the grey slab of Westminster covers it. A thing ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... Titus Flamininus, and Marcus Fulvius Nobilior, were inclined to promote the modern Hellenism and to reward the poet who sang their own and their ancestors' praises and even accompanied some of them to the field in the character, as it were, of a poet laureate nominated beforehand to celebrate the great deeds which they were to perform. He has himself elegantly described the client-like qualities requisite for such a calling.(43) From the outset and by virtue of the whole tenor of his life a cosmopolite, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... into excitement by the news that one of her sons had won the first prize in prose and verse in competition, before the emperor, with the assembled scholars of the empire—an [Page 21] an honour comparable to that of poet laureate or of a victor in the Olympic games. When that distinction falls to a city, it is believed that, in order to equalise matters, the event is sure to be followed by three years of dearth. In this instance, the highest mandarins escorted the wife ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... false judgments of those who came there. Basil was not strong. He was pleasant, idle, rather vain, and a little inclined to be dissipated. Mrs. Octagon did not know that Basil was fond of dissipation. She thought him a model young Oxford man, and hoped he would one day be Laureate of England. ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... of course. What else would a young fool like her do? He inthrojooced her to the Poet Laureate, thinking shed inspire him. ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... have been made to present in modern English the Ballad of Brunanburh, the most successful being that by the Poet Laureate. Our language is rather out of practice for kindling a poetic fervour around the sentiment of flinging scorn at a vanquished foe; but the following will serve to illustrate this heathenish element, or such relics of it as survived in the tenth century. ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... inferior to his Castle of Indolence; and Mr. Southey's Joan of Arc no worse, although it might have taken up six months instead of weeks in the composition. I recommend also to the lovers of lyrics the perusal of the present laureate's odes by the side of Dryden's on Saint Cecilia, but let him be sure to read first those of ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... established himself permanently at Greta Hall, near Keswick, Cumberland, in the "Lake Country," where he enjoyed the friendship and society of Wordsworth and Coleridge, other poets of the "Lake School." He was appointed poet laureate in 1813, and received a pension of 300 Pounds a year from the government in 1835. Mr. Southey was a voluminous writer in both prose and verse. As a poet, he can not be placed in the first rank, although some of his minor poems are very happy in thought and expression. Among ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... marriage as a means of escape from a hard and selfish grandfather in his anecdotage, it had not taken her long to find out how poor was the laborious peasant brain, how narrow the intelligence, concealed by the solemn manners of the Academic laureate and manufacturer of octavos, and by his voice with its ophicleide notes adapted to the sublimities of the lecture room. And yet when, by force of intrigue, bargaining, and begging, she had seated him at last in the Academie, she felt herself possessed by a certain ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... of chess in his works, some of his brother dramatists, and other writers who were contemporary with him, were fond of referring to it. Skelton, poet laureate to ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... that dialect is not a thing to be despised in any event —that its origin is oftentimes of as royal caste as that of any speech. Listening back, from the stand- point of to-day, even to the divine singing of that old classic master to whom England's late laureate refers as ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... his prize-poem about Petra, Lord John Manners (afterwards seventh Duke of Rutland), in his capacity as Poet Laureate of Young England, was writing chivalrous ditties about castles and banners, and merry peasants, and Holy Church. This kind of mediaeval romanticism, though glorified by Lord Beaconsfield in Coningsby, seemed purely laughable to Thackeray, and he made rather bitter fun of it in Lines upon my ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... with such a striking circumstance? or, if the histories of that age are lost, by length of time, why was not so uncommon an excellence transmitted to posterity, in the more lasting colours of poetry? Was that unhappy age without a laureate? Was there then no Young [19] or Philips [20], no Ward [21] or Mitchell [22], to snatch such wonders from oblivion, and immortalize a prince of such capacities? If this was really the case, let us congratulate ourselves upon being ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... twenty-four to be one of their four proctors, with a seat in the Lisbon Town Council. On February 4, 1513, he had become Master of the Lisbon Mint. For the departure of the fleet against Azamor he comes forward as the poet laureate of the nation and vehemently inveighs against sloth and luxury while he sings a hymn to the glories of Portugal. The play alludes to the gifts sent to the Pope in the following year and this probably led to the date of the rubric (1514), but it also refers to the ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... And made him this most tart reply — 'You steal from all and call it wit, But I prefer my simple "twit".'" But the latter view is espoused by most of the writers mentioned, notably and nobly by Drake, the Haynes, the Laniers, Lee, Meek, and Thompson, the poet-laureate of the mocking-bird, whose poems should be read by every lover of nature and especially of the mocking-bird. As Thompson's tributes are all too long for quotation, I give here Meek's, in the hope that I may rescue it from the long oblivion of an out-of-print. My ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... humor, more keen enjoyment, out of a census report or an etymological dictionary than from a novel. My favorite literary dissipation is to read the works of that distinguished statistician at Washington, Mr. O. P. Austin, the poet-laureate of industrial America, or the toilsome and exciting verbal journeys of the Rev. Mr. Skeat. The classic humorists do not compare with them, in my humble opinion, as sources of fantastic surprises. This, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... was too practised a courtier not to study the tastes of his master to good purpose. A liking for the stage, or a lively sense of poetic excellence, was not among the preferences of King William. The Laureate was sub-purveyor of amusement for the court; but there was no longer a court to amuse, and the King himself never once in his reign entered a theatre. The piety of Queen Mary rendered her a rare attendant at the play-house. Plays were therefore no longer wanted. A playwright could not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... Earl, Fauconberg. The Fauconbergs took revolutions calmly and, despite the disinterment of their great relative, accepted the Restoration gladly and lived to chuckle over the Revolution. The forgetfulness, no less than the vindictiveness, of men is often surprising. Marvell, who played the part of Laureate during the Protectorate, produced two songs for the conventionally joyful occasion. The second of the two is decidedly pretty for a ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... can be traced in this period. John Alexander Brassicanus, poet laureate, came from Tubingen in September 1520 and saw Erasmus at Antwerp; whence in reply to a letter of self-introduction he bore away a complimentary letter that he afterwards printed, and the sound piece of advice, ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... God. He was a very learned and accomplished man; and his writings, both in prose and verse, were equal to those of Zahiri and Naziri. When he first came to India, he resided for some years at Delhi; but having had some dispute with the poet-laureate of the Emperor Mohammed Shah, he found himself under the necessity of retiring to Benares, where he lived in great privacy. As he was a stranger in the country, was engaged in no calling or profession, and received no allowance from the Emperor, it was never known whence, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... for the Use of the Schools of Great Britain and Ireland." It is ingeniously recommended in a certificate by Sir Richard Steele, or the Tattler, under the fictitious name of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., and in a poem of forty-three lines, by Nahum Tate, poet laureate to her Majesty. It is a duodecimo volume of three hundred pages; a work of no inconsiderable merit and originality; and written in a style which, though not faultless, has scarcely been surpassed by ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... currency, which was ultimately redeemed by the Federal government at par. He assumed the title of Lord Dexter and built extraordinary houses at Newburyport, Mass., and Chester, New Hampshire. He maintained a poet laureate and collected inferior pictures, besides erecting in one of his gardens some forty colossal statues carved in wood to represent famous men. A statue of himself was included in the collection, and had for an inscription "I am the first in the East, the first in the West, and the greatest ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... rest of those we have named. Milton, at all events, has identified himself with Cromwell as thoroughly as one man ever identified himself with another, and whatever aspersion is cast on "Worcester's laureate wreath" must fall equally on the intermingling bays. We may say this without pretending to know what the exact meaning of "Philistine" now is. Originally, no doubt, it pointed to some specific defect on the part of those with regard to whom it was ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... he managed to live on less than two hundred dollars a year, derived from the proceeds of poems, pamphlets and essays. At this time he was already an "Academy Laureate," having received honorable mention for a poem submitted ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... and 3 Sisters.' But the actual authorship rests with the long gentleman in black whom you see leaning on the park fence yonder. His name is Bartholomew Storrs and he is the elegiac or mortuary or memorial laureate of ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... whose irregularities sometimes led him into unpleasant rencontres with these military conservators of public order, and who mentions them so often that he may be termed their poet laureate,* thus admonishes his readers, warned ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... fact, as recorded on the back of the original drawing, the eventful reading took place at 13 Dorset Street, Portman Square, on the 27th of September 1855, and those present, besides the Poet-Laureate, Browning, and Rossetti, were Mrs. E. Barrett Browning and Miss ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... into the speculations of kings. Masters of the destinies of others, mankind flatter them into a belief that their power can almost control fate itself. Accordingly, the visit of the butterfly did not produce much permanent inquietude. The poets-laureate and literati of the court turned it into numerous sentimental conceits; amongst others, that the insect had fastened on the princess's cheek mistaking it for a rose. This idea branched out into a hundred elegies, a thousand madrigals, and fifteen hundred songs, which were sung in ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... of the first parts of The Faery Queen (1590) raised Spenser to the foremost place in English letters. He was made poet-laureate, and used every influence of patrons and of literary success to the end that he be allowed to remain in London, but the queen was flint-hearted, insisting that he must give up his estate or occupy it. So he returned sorrowfully to "exile," and ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... instant, the fashion to admire and to pity a gentleman so talented and so unfortunate. Likenesses of Mr. Crauford appeared in every print-shop in town; the papers discovered that he was the very fac-simile of the great King of Prussia. The laureate made an ode upon him, which was set to music; and the public learned, with tears of compassionate regret at so romantic a circumstance, that pigeon-pies were sent daily to his prison, made by the delicate hands of ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the multitude. In most cases the timely ode is somehow apt to fade with the circumstance that inspired it, and becomes the yesterday's editorial of literature. Oblivion likes especially to get hold of occasional poems. That makes it hard for feeble poets laureate. ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... during which time he revised plays and composed songs, and grew closely in touch with the life of the Indiana farmer. About 1873 he first contributed verses, especially in the Hoosier dialect, to the papers, and before long had attained a recognized position as poet-laureate of the Western country folk. His materials are the incidents and aspects of village life, especially of the Indiana villages. These he interprets in a manner as acceptable to the na[:i]ve as to the sophisticated, ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... lyric as opposed to epic verse is due to this habit of feeling. A good example maybe found in the work of Mr Swinburne: the latter is the better poetry, the earlier remains the more popular — because of its eloquence of margin. Mr Tupper might long ago have sat with laureate brow but for his neglect of this first principle. The song of Sigurd, our one epic of the century, is pitiably unmargined, and so has never won the full meed of glory it deserves; while the ingenious gentleman who wrote "Beowulf,'' our other English epic, grasped the great ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... short syllables—as far as "long" and "short" can be definitely distinguished in English—correspond precisely to the rules of Roman prosody. The present Laureate, Robert Bridges, whose investigations in English and Roman prosody have been incessant, has recently published a book of experiments in writing English quantitative hexameters. [Footnote: Ibant Obscuri. New York, Oxford University Press, 1917.] ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... firstly, it is about a very English thing; secondly, the style of the writing is nothing short of delightful, a statement that is not true of all good poetry. It has been said that Chesterton might well be the Poet Laureate; at least, it is a matter for extreme joy that he is not, not because he is not worth that honour, but because anything that tended to reduce his poetical output would be a serious thing in these days when good poets are as scarce ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... dead with flowers, and here, too, the resting-places of those who have passed away from us will soon be gardens. From that old time when the Lord walked in the garden in the cool of the evening, down to the day when a Poet- Laureate sang - ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... EDISON is reported to have invented a machine to record communication with the other world. As a final experiment an attempt is to be made to get into touch with the POET LAUREATE. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... absurdities, the outworn platitudes again find their constant lover in Alfred Austin, Tennyson's successor as poet laureate. Austin brought the laureateship, which had been held by poets like Ben Jonson, Dryden, Southey and Wordsworth, to an incredibly low level; he took the thinning stream of garrulous poetic conventionality, reduced it to the merest ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... 17th concludes a long and very favourable review of "Heather Bells, &c."—"The 'Harp of the North,' so beautifully invoked by Sir Walter in his 'Lady of the Lake,' has been long asleep—her mountains are silent—and what if our Laureate of Calydon—our Modern Ossian—were destined to hail from Bonnie Dundee?" The Scotsman of Oct. 1st, says—"There is true pathos in many of the poems. Such a piece as 'Jessie's Leavin'' must find its way to the hearts in many a cottage home. Indeed, 'Heather Bells,' ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... incident that has just startled the world, must be more or less improvised, and must hit the right pitch of extraordinary popular emotion. It is the difficulty of turning out good work under such arduous conditions that has too often shipwrecked or stranded some unlucky laureate. ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... vulgar politicians, our enthusiast stood at bay, and at last turned on the pivot of a subtle casuistry to the unclean side: but his discursive reason would not let him trammel himself into a poet-laureate or stamp-distributor, and he stopped, ere he had quite passed that well-known "bourne from whence no traveller returns"—and so has sunk into torpid, uneasy repose, tantalized by useless resources, haunted by vain imaginings, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... it is apprehended, will be appointed laureate. The Athenaeum objects, and we think very properly urges, that if the office is to be continued, it should be given to the finest living poet of her Majesty's own sex, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. This appropriation of the ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... Laureate may, perhaps, like to hear that Dr. Patrick introduces into his parable a very tolerable edition of that legend of the roasted fowls recalled to life by St. James of Compostella, of which he himself has recently given us so lively and amusing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 469. Saturday January 1, 1831 • Various
... the Waist of the Ship" in the next, the transition was considered to be rather abrupt; but when he sends an invoice of rhymes to the Governor of Fayal and another to the commander in chief and other dignitaries in Gibraltar with the compliments of the Laureate of the Ship, it is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... alluded to by Scott in the forty-first chapter of The Heart of Mid-Lothian, as "him of the laurel wreath," was Robert Southey, who was appointed poet laureate of England in 1813. The lines quoted are from Southey's poem of "Thalaba the Destroyer," ...
— Harper's Young People, September 21, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... poet laureate, composed a serious and elaborate epithalamium of 340 lines; besides some gay Fescennines, which were sung, in a more licentious tone, on ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... endures New Orleans will plume itself upon this dish which drew from Thackeray a world-famous tribute. "In New Orleans you can eat a Bouillabaisse, the like of which was never eaten in Marseilles or Paris." Which is much, very much, from the laureate of Bouillabaisse, as native to Marseilles. The reason of superiority is not far to seek—it lies in the excellence and flavor of the fish native to the Gulf of Mexico. Lacking Pompano, Red Snapper, and Redfish, even Milly could not quite ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... IMMORTALITY. FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD. Wordsworth's sublime Ode. It was a happy thought which led to the presentation of this favorite masterpiece of England's former Poet Laureate, as it here appears with full-page illustrations, by Hassam, Garrett, Lungren, Miss Humphrey, Taylor, St. John Harper and Smedley. This immortal poem in its setting of beautiful pictures is adorned as with gems. 8vo, cloth, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... not encourage effusion.[192] Like certain other poets he affected the tone of a man of the world and deliberately avoided topics relative to his own art. The two themes on which he expanded were riding and skating—of which latter pastime he had indeed made himself the laureate. Goethe himself was passionately fond of both exercises, but from "the patriarch of German poetry" he might have expected discourse on higher themes. Apparently, however, their relations remained ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... usually devoted to ostentatious parade, and the compliments of office. Nor was he tempted, in the pride of success, to term that an expedition or a victory; which was only bridling the vanquished; nor even to announce his success in laureate despatches. [88] But this concealment of his glory served to augment it; since men were led to entertain a high idea of the grandeur of his future views, when such important services were ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... self-sacrificing thoughts are cosmetics that at last make the plainest face to be beautiful. In the calm of scholarship men have given up the thought that culture consists of an exquisite refinement in manners and dress, in language and equipage. The poet laureate makes Maud the type of polished perfection. She is "icily regular, splendidly null," for culture is more of the heart than of the mind. But as eloquence means that an orator has so mastered the laws of posture, and gesture and thought and speech that they ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... well-worn story of Tristram and Kind Mark came to my mind. He, Guido, like Tristram, would in a short space clasp the gemmed necklace round the throat of one as fair and false as the fabled Iseulte, and I—should I figure as the wronged king? How does the English laureate put it in his idyl ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... the Anglicized "renegade" were favourite terms of reprobation with politicians and others at the beginning of the century. When Southey's Wat Tyler was reprinted in 1817, William Smith, the Member for Norwich, denounced the Laureate as a "renegado," an attack which Coleridge did his best to parry by contributing articles to the Courier on "Apostasy and Renegadoism" (Letter to Murray, March 26, 1817, Memoir of John Murray, 1891, i. 306). Byron himself, in Don Juan ("Dedication," stanza i. line 5), hails Southey as ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... Laureate during the visit of President Wilson?" asks a correspondent in a contemporary. We do not share ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... year is ascribed a poem entitled the "Masquerade. Inscribed to C—t H—d—g—r. By Lemuel Gulliver, Poet Laureate to the King of Lilliput." In this Fielding made his satirical contribution to the attacks on those impure gatherings organised by the notorious Heidegger, which Hogarth had not long before stigmatised pictorially in the plate known to collectors as the "large ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean; and thus the ashes of Wiclif are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over;" or, in the more carefully selected words of an English laureate ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... heaven-darkening murders, with a red cap on his head, and a many-stringed harp in his hand, chanting the praises of the murderers, and exciting the drunken populace to greater horrors? Lebrun. Yes, the French Pindar is appointed poet-laureate to the guillotine, and has apartments assigned him at the national cost in the Louvre. Whenever an atrocity is to be committed, an ode is published, "by order of authority," to raise the passions of the people to the proper pitch. When the atrocity is over, another ode ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... 29th, her letter to Southey was despatched; and from an excitement not unnatural in a girl who has worked herself up to the pitch of writing to a Poet Laureate and asking his opinion of her poems, she used some high-flown expressions which, probably, gave him the idea that she was a romantic young lady, unacquainted ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... with justice, wisdom, and power, and lastly, obedient to his Sovereign's command, he died in the heroic attempt to save men, women, and children, from imminent and deadly peril." The nation felt that their Poet Laureate, Lord Tennyson, did but speak the simple truth when ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... doctor whenever he chose it: he was a master of arts, and according to his own account gave lectures in his college on the classics. He also did the duty and officiated as curate, occasionally, in some of the neighbouring villages. Going along the street we met the English poet laureate, Warton, now rather an elderly man; and yet he is still the fellow of a college. His greatest pleasure next to poetry is, as Mr. Maud told me, shooting ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... never have been," said Betty Jardine. "But Mrs. Forrester thinks of me as frivolity personified, I know, and doesn't care to admit anything lower than a cabinet minister or a poet laureate when she has her lion domiciled. She is an old darling; but, between ourselves, she does take her lions a little too seriously, doesn't she. Well, prepare for a coup de foudre, Gregory. You'll be sure to fall in ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... conceived that I was a poet of the first water; and had indeed corrected a great many mistakes in Wordsworth and other writers, and written fifty-six or fifty-seven sonnets before ever the club was thought of. And Stray himself, who was accounted our Laureate, had only written thirty-four, and they averaged quite a line less ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... in the army of the Loire. Arthur Papillon, who had shown such boisterous enthusiasm on the fourth of September, had been nominated prefet in a Pyrenean department, and having looked over his previous studies, the former laureate of the university examinations spent much of his time therein, far from the firing, in making great speeches and haranguing from the top of the balconies, in which speeches the three hundred heroes of antiquity in a certain mountain-pass were a great deal too often mentioned. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... more children in gutters, but the son of the woman at the mill, and testing him and assigning his career, first by school examinations, and then by his official performances, we will make him in time Poet Laureate or President of the Board of Trade, according to the bent of his genius." The astonished workman turns round upon the exhibitors of this fairy vision: "And pray who are You?" "Oh, you, we, the people, all of us together. Come put your shoulder to the wheel, and up ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... open-air theatre of Dionysus. Here the comedians, the chief of whom was Aristophanes, moved hosts of spectators to inextinguishable laughter. Here the choicest lyric poets of Greece awoke admiration with their unequalled songs, at their head the noble Pindar, the laureate of the Olympic and Pythian games. Here the sophists and philosophers argued and lectured, and Socrates walked like a king at the head of the aristocracy of thought. Here the sculptors, headed by Phidias, filled temples, porticos, colonnades, and public ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... is a magnificent allegorical expansion of this idea; and the laureate has also finely commemorated the old belief in the country of Lyonnesse, extending beyond the bounds ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... understanding of English civilization would be similarly incomplete without the semi-historic figure of King Arthur, glorified through the accumulated legends of the Middle Ages and made to live again in the melodic idylls of the great Victorian laureate. And so one might go on. In many ways the mythology and folklore of a country are a truer index to the life of its people than any of the pages of actual history; for through these channels the imagination and the heart speak. All the chronicles ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... come around to the verdict of the poet laureate. It is not probable that Thomas Carlyle would have made any woman happy as his wife, or that Jane Baillie Welsh would have made any ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... days when this book was written, Southey lived at Greta Hall, by Keswick, and had gathered a large library about him. He was Poet Laureate. He had a pension from the Civil List, worth less than 200 pounds a year, and he was living at peace upon a little income enlarged by his yearly earnings as a writer. In 1818 his whole private fortune was 400 pounds in consols. In 1821 he had added to that some savings, and gave ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... Bruce, and Queen Mary, his mind seems to have brooded with peculiar intensity—on the two former, because they were patriots; and on the latter, because she was a beautiful woman; and his allusions to them rank with the finest parts in his or any poetry. He seemed especially adapted to be the poet-laureate of Wallace—a modern edition, somewhat improved, of the broad, brawny, ragged bard who actually, it is probable, attended in the train of Scotland's patriot hero, and whose constant occupation it was to change the gold of his achievements into ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... readily complied, but subsequently suggested certain important alterations in the comedy as indispensable to its success; these were indignantly rejected by the author, but pertinaciously insisted on by the manager. Garrick proposed to leave the matter to the arbitration of Whitehead, the laureate, who officiated as his "reader" and elbow critic. Goldsmith was more indignant than ever, and a violent dispute ensued, which was only calmed by the interference of ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... quite sophisticated—even when the theme is ever so simple or rustic, (a shell, a bit of sedge, the commonest love-passage between a lad and lass,) the handling of the rhyme all showing the scholar and conventional gentleman; showing the laureate too, the attache of the throne, and most excellent, too; nothing better through the volumes than the dedication "to the Queen" at the beginning, and the other fine dedication, "these to his memory" (Prince Albert's,) preceding "Idylls ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... reckon among Babylonian professions that of the poet. It is true that a sort of poet-laureate existed at the court, and that we hear of a piece of land being given by the King to one of them for some verses which he had composed in honor of the sovereign. But poetry was not a separate profession, and the poet must be included in the class of scribes, ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... before, during his student days in Moscow, written syllabic verses, an elegy on the death of Peter the Great, and a couple of dramas, which were acted by his fellow-students. In 1732 he became the court poet, or laureate and panegyrist, and wrote, to the order of the Empress Anna Ioannovna, speeches and laudatory addresses, which he presented to the grandees, receiving in return various gifts in accordance with the custom of the epoch. But neither his official post nor his personal dignity prevented his receiving, ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... which was very like him. Next day he received from Windsor the offer of the Laureateship. He doubted, and hesitated, but accepted. Since Wordsworth's death there had, as usual, been a good deal of banter about the probable new Laureate: examples of competitive odes exist in Bon Gaultier. That by Tennyson is Anacreontic, but he was not really set on kissing the Maids of Honour, as he is made to sing. Rogers had declined, on the plea of extreme old age; but it was worthy of the great and ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... Whittier's poems that I ever saw. It was a small book, containing mostly Antislavery pieces. "The Yankee Girl" was one of them, fully to appreciate the spirit of which, it is necessary to have been a working-girl in slave-labor times. New England Womanhood crowned Whittier as her laureate from the day of his heroine's spirited response ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... habit clung to the ancient race, even until long after the times of which we now speak—their unconquerable prejudice against defensive armour. Gilbride McNamee, the laureate to King Brian O'Neil, gives due prominence to this fact in his poem on the death of his patron in the battle of Down (A.D. 1260). ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... introduced him to Augustus, who, according to Suetonius, offered him a place in his own household, which the poet prudently declined. But as the unrivalled lyric poet of the time Horace gradually acquired the position of poet-laureate; and his ode written to command for the celebration of the Secular Games in 17 B.C., with the official odes which followed it on the victories of Tiberius and Drusus, and on the glories of the Augustan age, mark the highest level which this kind of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... or lecture remembers the rare quality of Professor Phelps's voice. As a pulpit orator he was one of the few, and to hear him read in his own study was an absorbing experience. To this day I cannot put myself outside of certain pages of the laureate or the essayist. I do not read; I listen. The great ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... universities, translators and index makers in ragged coats of frieze. The great press was to get near the chair where John Dryden sate. In winter that chair was always in the warmest nook by the fire; in summer it stood in the balcony. To bow to the Laureate, and to hear his opinion of Racine's last tragedy, or of Bossu's treatise on epic poetry, was thought a privilege. A pinch from his snuff-box was an honour sufficient to turn the head ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... "what else? 'Jeremy Bentham,' a new work; Ricardo, another book on economy; Southey the Laureate, 'Life of Nelson.' Really, Mr. Young might have known that naval deeds have no joy for me, hardly more than for you, Renny," smiling grimly on his servant. "'Edinburgh Review,' a London magazine for the last six months; 'Rees's Cyclopaedia,' vols. 24-27; Wordsworth, 'The Recluse.' Ah, ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... Mr. Malarius, the public teacher of Noroe, and laureate of the Botanical Society. It contained a check for one hundred kroners, and begged that he might be attached to the expedition as the assistant naturalist of ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... of the fragrant weed which Raleigh taught our gallants to puff in capacious bowls; which a royal pedant denounced in a famous 'Counterblast,' which his flattering, laureate, Ben Jonson, ridiculed to please his master; which our wives and sisters protest gives rise to the dirtiest and most unsociable habit a man can indulge in; of which some fair flowers declare that they love the smell, and others that they will never marry an ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... the public to be set forth presently, he calls himself "poet of the Emperor Joseph II." He was in the habit of thus designating himself and it was small wonder that his biographers almost unanimously interpreted these words to mean that he was poet laureate, or Caesarian poet. After the mischief, small enough, except perhaps in an ethical sense, had been done, he tried to correct it in a foot note on one of the pages of his "Memorie," in which he says that he was ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... name of the writer. I can scarcely think that a later scene, apparently imitated from the most impudent idyl of Theocritus, can have been likely to elevate the moral tone of the young gentleman who must have taken the part of Callisto; but the honest laureate of the city, stern and straightforward as he was in the enforcement of domestic duties and contemporary morals, could be now and then as audacious in his plebeian fashion as even Fletcher himself in his more patrician style of realism. There is spirit of a quiet and steady kind in the scenes of ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the fine poem just quoted had been reserved as finish to the volume yet to come, which lacks a closing note, or even that the volume itself had not been published. The fourth Book of the Odes was written nearly ten years after the other three, and Horace wrote it not as Poet but as Laureate. His Secular Hymn appeared in B.C. 17, when he was forty-eight years old; and after it Augustus pressed him to celebrate the victories of his two stepsons, Drusus and Tiberius, over the tribes of the Eastern Alps. If he wrote unwillingly, his hand had not lost its ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... heterodox religious opinions, as happened in 1816. There is widespread toleration; and civilization in the sense in which Ruskin uses the word has much increased. Now it is possible for a Jew to become Prime Minister, and for a Roman Catholic to become England's Poet Laureate. ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... then, what luck! A "run" unprecedented, Or almost so; and fodder With which the Laureate's Bird had been contented: Fortune has freaks far odder Than e'en a poet's whimsies, any day, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... FitzGerald told Grout that Woodbridge should feel itself honoured. John had not quite understood, so presently took a chance of asking my father who that gentleman was Mr FitzGerald had been talking of. "Mr Tennyson," said my father, "the poet- laureate." "Dissay," {90} said John, warily; "anyhow he didn't fare to know much about hosses when I showed ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... good that there would be a difficulty in spoiling it completely; but the prose of the translation in the English Bible, faultless as it is, loses nothing in Bunyan's hands, and if we found these poems in the collected works of a poet laureate, we should consider that a difficult task had been accomplished successfully. Bunyan felt, like the translators of the preceding century, that the text was sacred, that his duty was to give the exact meaning of it, without epithets ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... almond blossom, where a well-fed thrush, ruffling its softly speckled breast, was singing a wild strophe concerning its mate, which, could human skill have languaged its meaning, might have given ideas to a nation's laureate. Yet John Walden found unalloyed happiness in this apparently vague and vacant way. There was an acute sense of joy for him in the repeated sweetness of the thrush's warbling,—the light breeze, stirring through a great bush of early flowering lilac near the edge of the lawn, sent ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... Crowned with leaves of the laurel. In England the Poet Laureate is an officer of the sovereign's court, acting as dancing skeleton at every royal feast and singing-mute at every royal funeral. Of all incumbents of that high office, Robert Southey had the most notable knack ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... effeminateness, but of notable stirring of courage; not of abusing man's wit, but of strengthening man's wit; not banished, but honoured by Plato; let us rather plant more laurels for to ingarland the poets' heads (which honour of being laureate, as besides them only triumphant captains were, is a sufficient authority to show the price they ought to be held in) than suffer the ill-favoured breath of such wrong speakers once to blow upon the ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... edition of his Poems sent to the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. This very tender, beautiful, and pathetic Poem will be found on the other side of this Dedication. It must 'for all time' take its place beside the living Laureate's imperishable ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... now needing amplifying a trifle. There is in him this-worldliness, but not other-worldliness, his characters not seeming to the full to have a sense of the invisible world. He is love's poet. His lovers are imperishable because real. He is love's laureate. Yet are his loves of this world. True, there are spurts of flight, as of an eagle with broken wing, when, as in Hamlet, he faults this world and aspires skyward, yet does not lose sight of the earth, and, like ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... Goddess has oft to her parents complain'd, Of my favouring a bard who her empire disdain'd; That at my instigation, a poem you writ, Which to beauty and youth preferr'd judgment and wit; That, to make you a Laureate, I gave the first voice, Inspiring the Britons t'approve of my choice. Jove sent her to me, her power to try; The Goddess of Beauty what God can deny? She forbids your preferment; I grant her desire. Appease the fair Goddess: ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... of the island witch-hanging or burning proceeded with only less vehemence than in Scotland. One of the most celebrated cases in the earlier half of the seventeenth century (upon which Thomas Shadwell the poet laureate, who, under the name of MacFlecknoe, is immortalised by the satire of Dryden, founded a play) is the story of the Lancashire Witches. This persecution raged at two separate periods; first in 1613, when nineteen prisoners were brought before Sir James Altham and Sir Edward Bromley, ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... which of these four I should like best, I should say as the Laureate did when they gave him his choice of two kinds of cake, "Both's ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... strike a match; and in another instant the door opened, and in the interstice appeared a homely nightcapped bourgeois pulling on his trousers. There flashed on me incongruously the thought of our English laureate's stately home by the sea, in which, jealously guarded by hedges and flunkeys, the poet chiselled his calm stanzas; and all the vagabond in me leapt out to meet the unpretentious child of Paris. He greeted me with simple cordiality; ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... Southey (1774-1843) was an English poet. From 1813 until his death he was Poet Laureate of England. Bell Rock, or Inchcape, is a reef of red sandstone near the Firth of Tay, on the east coast of Scotland. At the time of the spring tides part of the reef is uncovered to the height of four ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck |
