"Man of letters" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there could be no relations more respectable than angels. She wrote therefore in glowing terms of the paternal Kuhraeuber, "gegenwaertig mit Gott," as she put it, expatiating on his intellect and gifts (he was a man of letters, she said), while he yet dwelt upon earth. Manske, with all his inquiries, could find out nothing about her except that she was, as she said, an orphan, poor, friendless, and struggling; and Anna, just then impatient of the objections the princess made to every applicant, quickly decided to ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... welfare. He hated war, and failed to carry on his father's vigorous policy in Central Asia; nevertheless, by 1730, Chinese rule extended to the Laos border, and the Shan States paid tribute. He was a man of letters, and completed some ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... Coleridge had arrived in this city, he attracted some notice amongst the literati, as an English "Man of Letters." Cardinal Fesch, in particular, was civil, and sought his company; but that which was more remarkable, Jerome Buonaparte was then a resident at Rome, and Mr. C.'s reputation becoming known to him, he sent for him, and ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... of letters I say nought. They are the heritage, neither of us, nor you, but of the human race. The mere man of letters may well sleep in the very centre of that busy civilisation from which he drew his inspiration: but not the poet—not, at least, the poet of these days. He goes not to the town, but nature, for his inspirations, and to nature when he dies he should return. Such men—artificial, ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... no part in the gaiety of Howard and Joe. The serious man of letters was not easily led into paths of frivolity. Carl swore to himself: "Ben 's the only guy I know that's got any delicate feelings. He appreciates how Gertie feels when she's sick, poor girl. He don't make a goat of himself, like Joe.... Or maybe ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... spontaneity consistent with virtue and safety. He was in this as intense, persistent in his devotion, as Sydney, Locke, or old Hollis. For instance, his admiration of Lord Macaulay as a writer and a man of letters, an orator and a statesman, great as it was, was as nothing to his gratitude to him for having placed permanently on record, beyond all risk of obscuration or doubt, the doctrine of 1688—the right and power of the English people to be their own lawgivers, and to appoint ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... Vance's father was one of those clever men who have too many strings to their bow. He, too, was a painter; but he was also a man of letters, in a sort of a way—had a share in a journal, in which he wrote Criticisms on the Fine ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from me, not that I had any thing to write to you, especially when you were so close, but that I wished you to understand with what delight I anticipate your coming ... The day you arrive come to my house with all your party. You will find that Tyrannio" (a Greek man of letters) "has arranged my books marvelously well. What remains of them is much more satisfactory than I thought[10]. I should be glad if you would send me two of your library clerks, for Tullius to employ as binders ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... After a long struggle, and painful hesitation, he put the figure down onto the table. "No, it is too dear," he said. The shop-keeper's eloquence redoubled. "Oh! Monsieur Varin, too dear? It is worth two thousand francs, if it is worth a son." But the man of letters replied sadly, still looking at the figure with the enameled eyes: "I do not say it is not; but it is too dear for me." And thereupon, she, seized by a kind of mad audacity, came forward and said: "What shall you charge me for the figure?" The shop-keeper, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... man of letters, a real philosopher, retiring, industrious, and modest. He spends all his winters in Warsaw, and lives every summer in the country. He permits neither society nor coteries, nor interests of any sort, to snatch away time from him, or influence his convictions. He goes about as he chooses, ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... Many translations have been made of Pascal's "Thoughts"—one in 1680 by J. Walker, one in 1704 by Basil Kennet, one in 1825 by Edward Craig. A more modern one is by C. Kegan Paul, the London publisher, who was also a man of letters. Early translations from the older French, Italian and other Continental writers have frequently come down to us without mention of translators' names on title-pages or in ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... shouldn't I be? I might have been one myself any day these last ten years; I might now, if I chose; but there! Charles Lamb knew a man who wanted to be a tailor once, but hadn't got the spirit. I find I haven't got the spirit to be a noble lord. Even Barty might have been a lord—he, a mere man of letters!—but he refused every honor and distinction that was ever offered to him, either here or abroad—even ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... Now for the first time Venetian painters were brought in contact with men of letters. As they were already, fortunately for themselves, too well acquainted with the business of their own art to be taken in tow by learning or even by poetry, the relation of the man of letters to the painter became on the whole a stimulating and at any rate a profitable one, as in the instance of two of the greatest, where it took the form of a partnership for mutual advantage. It is not to our purpose to speak of Aretino's gain, but Titian would scarcely have acquired ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... 1904. Together with a fellow countryman, also a man of letters, I was travelling aboard a steamer of the Anglo-American Company, "Cunard." Our cabin was small and narrow. It was lighted by the dull light of an electric bull's-eye in the ceiling which served as a deck. There were three berths and a wash basin. My friend and I occupied two of ...
— The Shield • Various
... better fellow than Mr. Blank, too) has been using one of the arguments with which these precious experts attacked me; that because I sometimes write novels I cannot be supposed to think seriously on public affairs. My only wonder is that those who hold this cloistral view of the province of a man of letters consider ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... title-page. Nor, where lives of authors were written, were they written with the redundancy of particulars which is now allowed. Especially are the lives of the poets and dramatists obscure and meagrely recorded. Of Milton, however, we know more personal details than of any man of letters of that age. Edward Phillips, the poet's nephew, who was brought up by his uncle, and lived in habits of intercourse with him to the last, wrote a life, brief, inexact, superficial, but valuable from the nearness of the writer to ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... have been deceived by that dreamer, Robespierre, was most humiliating. But Robespierre would not dare to put him to death! Grave miscalculation! He was immolated like the rest; the crowd looking on with indifference. Along with him perished Camille Desmoulins, a young man of letters, and a Jacobin, but convicted of advocating clemency. Robespierre was one of Camille's private and most valued friends; he had been his instructor in politics, and had become one of the trustees under his marriage-settlement. Robespierre visited at the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 426 - Volume 17, New Series, February 28, 1852 • Various
... or rather, he can't make them; he can't supply the market. I—well, you may say that at present I do nothing; but that's a great mistake, I am learning my business. Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of goods begins to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetising. He knows perfectly all the possible sources of income. Whatever he has to sell he'll get payment for it from all sorts ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... that although Mary possessed the fire, the imagination, and the genius of a poet, she nevertheless had not the criticism, or erudition, of a man of letters. For example; she informs us, that before her fables were translated into English, they had already been turned from Greek into Latin by Aesop.[22] She then gives the fable of an ox that assisted at mass, of ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... earning what he could by the law, and what he could not by magazine writing, which paid poorly enough. Publishers had not then discovered that what the general public desires is not literature, but information on current topics, and this is the last thing which the true man of letters is able to provide. A magazine article, or a campaign biography of General Grant, could be written in a few weeks, but a solid historical biography of him, with a critical examination of his campaigns, has not yet been ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... the appearance of the first edition of this work, it has been stated on the authority of a distinguished man of letters that Conway shewed the late Charles Mathews a letter from Mrs. Piozzi, offering marriage.—New Monthly Magazine (edited by Mr. Harrison ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... che Io vi sia amico, e scrivetemi. Remember that I am your friend, and write to me." I said I hoped that when he honoured me with a letter, he would write not only as a commander, but as a philosopher and a man of letters. He took me by the hand, and said, "As a friend." I dare not transcribe from my private notes the feelings which I had at this interview. I should perhaps appear too enthusiastick. I took leave of Paoli with regret and agitation, not without some hopes of seeing him ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... variety of effort and production. Under a government which is confined to its proper field, the talents of each man may be freely used, and he will not be forced into relations for which he is unsuited. The absurd prejudice, that public employment is the most honorable, will pass away. The man of letters and the man of science, the poet, the artist, and the inventor, the financier, the navigator, the merchant, every one who performs beneficial service and displays great qualities, will be rewarded. Every one who is conscious that he possesses such ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... without the addition of some anecdotes, which may be useful. A man of letters finds solitude necessary, and for him solitude has its pleasures and its conveniences; but we shall find that it also has a ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... birthplace was the house pointed out in the Nordeinde Street. A commercial career had been chosen for his four older brothers. But Harmen, his means allowing the luxury, decided to make of his fifth son a man of letters and learning, and Rembrandt was sent to the University of Leyden. That letters, however, had small charm for him, was clear from the first. Better than his books he loved the engravings of Swanenburch, better still, the pictures of Lucas van Leyden, which he could look at to his heart's content ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... more fully to appreciate the weight of experience and the maturity of reflection which give value to his words, it will be worth while to consider Mr. Wilson's entire career as a scholar and man of letters, paying particular attention to the growth of his political ideals and to ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... Carlo and Francesco Respetti, Chevalier Mancini, scientist and man of letters, Luziano Salustri, poet and musician, and the fascinating Marchese Ippolito Gualdro, whose conversation, as you know, is more entrancing than the voice of Adelina Patti. I have only to add," and I smiled half mockingly, "the name of Signor Guido ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... now going to see the astronomer, the savant, the man of letters, struggling against passions of every kind, excited by the ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... was the son of a physician, and quite early in life became a man of letters. Following the profession of an artist, he became a very good marine painter. This poet loved the sea in all its moods, and was never happier than when at Skagen—the extreme northern point of Jutland—where he spent most of his summers. His painting was his favourite pastime, but poetry the ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... Tickell was the most loyal and the most attached. While still at Oxford he had expressed his admiration of Addison in extravagant terms: on arriving in London he made his acquaintance. Tickell was an accomplished poet and man of letters, and though not a profound a graceful scholar. Addison was pleased with a homage which was worth accepting. As he rose, his protege rose with him. On his appointment as Chief Secretary in Ireland he took Tickell with him. When he was appointed Secretary of State he chose him ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... The man of letters, usually unable to conceive loftier services to mankind or more attractive aims to persons of capacity than the composition of books, has treated these pretensions of Voltaire with a supercilious kind of censure, which teaches us nothing about Voltaire, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... are beginning to hold up our heads, as we have every reason to do; for the prosperity and well-being of the great nations of the world are attributable, perhaps, more to our efforts than to those of any other class. When, in the past, the man of letters, the poet, the orator, succeeded, by some fit expression, by some winged word, to engage the attention of the world concerning some subject he had at heart, the highest praise his fellow man could bestow was to cry out ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... seem to have been divided between the magnificent theatre which he had just built—fragments of which still remain to us—and the "circus maximus." This letter from Cicero is very interesting, as showing the estimation in which these games were held, or were supposed to be held, by a Roman man of letters, and as giving us some description of what was done on the occasion. Marius had not come to Rome to see them, and Cicero writes as though his friend had despised them. Cicero himself, having been in ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... fascinating Mrs. Rupert Duncan, who was lending her genius to one of Ibsen's heroines at that moment; Miss Medea Tring, one of the latest American beauties; Corporal, the portrait-painter; Richard Giles, critic and man of letters; Hereward Blenheim, a young and rising politician, who before the age of thirty had already risen higher than most men of sixty; Sir Horace Silvester, K.C.M.G., the brilliant financier, with his beautiful wife Lady Irene; Professor ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... coruscation round him; and it is such a blaze of spiritual sheet-lightnings,—wonderful to think of; Voltaire especially electric. Never, or seldom, were seen such suppers; such a life for a Supreme Man of Letters so fitted with the place due ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... greatly the man of letters, and, therefore, he also affected a passion for everything Greek; he ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... Public Instruction under Louis Philippe in 1833, this lover of true liberty simply got enacted into law the principles which had led him as a brilliant and rising young man of letters in 1812 to refuse to adulate the Emperor, and which he had plainly and fearlessly set forth as the necessary conditions of the constitutional government of France in his famous interview with Louis XVIII. ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... business in Willis's Rooms was to talk, not of Captain Shandy, but of the man Sterne, to whom his hearers were to feel themselves superior as members of society. I submit that this was not a worthy task for a man of letters who was also a man of genius. I submit that it was an inversion of the true critical method to wreck Sterne's Sentimental Journey at the outset by picking Sterne's life to pieces, holding up the shreds and warning the reader that any nobility ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... interesting picture of the time. 'In the Letters the character of the writer, its virtues and its weakness, is throughout unmistakeable. Pliny, the patriotic citizen,—Pliny, the munificent patron,—Pliny, the eminent man of letters,—Pliny, the affectionate husband and humane master,—Pliny, the man of principle, is in his various phases the real subject of ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... statute is beginning to prize the general weal, the legist is of high account, and the priest paramount. Higher civilization engenders the influence of the man of letters, the artist, the dramatist, the wit, the poet, and the orator. Or when, with a wisdom surpassing the philosophy of the schools, we tumble down to prose, and assume the leathern apron of the utilitarian—the civil engineer, or operative chemist, starts ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... our thoughts of him are tender, grateful, proud. We are glad of his friendship; glad that he expressed so richly one of the great elements in the temperament of America; glad that he has left such an honourable record as a man of letters; and glad also for his own sake that after many and deep sorrows he is at peace and, we trust, ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... worldly honours are objects of ambition, may have reason enough to acknowledge its applicability. But it will bear a happier application and with equal fitness: for, for whom is the purest honey hoarded that the bees of this world elaborate, if it be not for the man of letters? The exploits of the kings and heroes of old, serve now to fill story-books for his amusement and instruction. It was to delight his leisure and call forth his admiration that Homer sung and Alexander conquered. It is to gratify his curiosity that adventurers have traversed deserts and ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... eminent men, who belonged to an earlier and better age, were exempt from the general contagion. The verse of Waller still breathed the sentiments which had animated a more chivalrous generation. Cowley, distinguished as a loyalist and as a man of letters, raised his voice courageously against the immorality which disgraced both letters and loyalty. A mightier poet, tried at once by pain, danger, poverty, obloquy, and blindness, meditates, undisturbed ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... not dead long—when Wales actually did follow, less formidably, of course, in the path of Ireland, beginning with the Church, going on to the Land, and not distantly threatening the State. As usual he goes to his books. He quotes Goethe—a great man of letters, but perhaps the most pedantic of great men of letters except Milton—to prove that "the English are pedants." He quotes Burke—the unregenerate Irish Whig Burke, not the prophet whose tongue the ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... debated. Except by the anonymous Zealand chronicler, who calls him Saxo "the Long", thus giving us the one personal detail we have, he has been universally known as Saxo "Grammaticus" ever since the epitomator of 1431 headed his compilation with the words, "A certain notable man of letters ("grammaticus"), a Zealander by birth, named Saxo, wrote," etc. It is almost certain that this general term, given only to men of signal gifts and learning, became thus for the first time, and for good, attached to Saxo's name. Such a title, in the Middle Ages, usually implied that its owner ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... a square man in a round hole, while in the scriptorium of the Abbey he would be in his right place. Certainly the event proved that the Abbot was right, and it was to this judicious removal of a student and man of letters to his proper home that we owe so much of our knowledge of those interesting minutiae of English history which the writer has revealed. It was under the eye of Robert de Wendover that Matthew Paris grew up, rendering him every year more and more substantial assistance in the library ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... business of the day was the reply to the speech of the King, and the President called on the member who had been appointed to undertake this duty. A young Deputy, a man of letters, then made his way to a bar behind the chairs of the Ministers and read from a printed paper a florid ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... whom a settled abode is irksome, and to whom the notion of blessedness is that they shall be out in the free plains. 'Amplius,' the dying Xavier's word, 'further afield,' is the motto of all noble life—scientist, scholar, artist, man of letters, man of affairs; all come under the same law, that unless there is something before them which has dominated their hearts, and draws their whole being towards it, their lives want salt, want nobility, want freshness, and a ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... last. A circumstance which, when the mutual regard of the friends was in its first glow, would merely have been matter for laughter produced a violent explosion. Maupertuis enjoyed as much of Frederic's good will as any man of letters. He was President of the Academy of Berlin; and he stood second to Voltaire, though at an immense distance, in the literary society which had been assembled at the Prussian Court. Frederic had, by playing for his own amusement on ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... pen and the sword have been kept apart; the civilian and the soldier, the man of letters and the man of arms, have been distinct and separate. This was also true in old Loo Choo (now Riu Kiu), that part of Japan most like China. In Japan, however, the pen and the sword, letters and arms, the civilian and the soldier, have intermingled. The ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... Minister, to go round this exhibition and see the works of art that glorify your walls; but I am led by him to expect that I shall see the pictures of Liberal leaders, including M. Rochefort. I am not sure whether M. Rochefort will figure as a man of letters or as a Liberal leader, but I can understand that his portrait would attract the Prime Minister because M. Rochefort is a politician who was once a Liberal leader, and who has now seen occasion to lose his faith in Parliamentary government. Nor have I seen the picture of "The ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... which was not destined for himself, jealous of Dante as of the universe, a refined man of letters, Choulette continued: ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Luis de Leon was perhaps more esteemed as a theologian or a scholar than as a man of letters. This judgement has been reversed by posterity mainly on the strength of the Spanish poems which were little known during the author's lifetime beyond a small circle of his personal friends.[263] Experts tell us that as a theologian he ranks below his master Melchor Cano; and in the annals ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... "Cento Novelle Antiche," the story is told of a mule, which pretends that his name is written on the bottom of his hind foot. The wolf attempts to read it, the mule kills him with a kick in the forehead; and the fox, looking on, remarks that "every man of letters is not wise." A similar story is told in "Reynard ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... am straying from the question.'—That he actually was; nor could I for my life see how the creation of the world had any thing to do with the business I was talking of; but it was sufficient to shew me that he was a man of letters, and I now reverenced him the more. I was resolved therefore to bring him to the touch-stone; but he was too mild and too gentle to contend for victory. Whenever I made any observation that looked like a challenge to controversy, he would smile, shake his head, ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... on to the last pressing his uncle, Lord Burghley. He applied in the humblest terms, he made himself useful with his pen, he got his mother to write for him; but Lord Burghley, probably because he thought his nephew more of a man of letters than a sound lawyer and practical public servant, did not care to bring him forward. From his cousin, Robert Cecil, Bacon received polite words and friendly assurances. Cecil may have undervalued him, ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... not being a literary man, certain presumptuous persons will think that they may reasonably blame me; alleging that I am not a man of letters. Foolish folks! do they not know that I might retort as Marius did to the Roman Patricians [Footnote 21: Come Mario disse ai patriti Romani. "I am unable to find the words here attributed by Leonardo to Marius, ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... reversing the engine) depresses it, other sets drive it sideways. The theory is perfect, and the practice has been successfully attempted in models. Messieurs Ponton d'Amecourt and de la Laudelle, we are told—"the one a man of the world, and the other a man of letters"—engaged the services of two skilled mechanics, Messieurs Joseph of Arras and J. Richard, who constructed models of machines which ascended the atmosphere, carrying their motive power ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... a great man; you say to yourself, 'I will be a minister of state.' Well, then, you—painter, artist, man of letters, statesman of the future—you reckon upon your talents, you estimate their value, you rate them, let us say, at a hundred ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... nights. Whatever he may have seen and heard, the semblance of communion with a Higher Power unquestionably lent a prestige to his scheme of social reform which it could never have attained had he offered it on its inherent merits, as the project of a mere human legislator, or (still worse) of a man of letters. Moses, in fact, knew his Children of Israel. Does Mr. Wells know ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... discrimination at that of his least worthy productions, and the historical value of his work as a prime modeller of all kinds of new literary material is overlooked. Consider for a moment as not wholly unworthy of attention his mere versatility as a man of letters. Apart from Roderick Random and its successors, which gave him a European fame, he wrote a standard history, and a standard version of Don Quixote (both of which held their ground against all comers for over a century). He created both ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... where the usurper was mentioned as king. He was, I believe, more than once apprehended in the reign of King William, and once at the accession of George. He was the familiar friend of Hicks and Nelson; a man of letters, but injudicious; and very curious and inquisitive, but credulous. He lived in 1743, or 44, ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... trimeters, engaged (very much to his discomfiture) in a furious pamphlet war with Thomas Nash, and altogether presents one of the most characteristic though least favourable specimens of the Elizabethan man of letters. We may speak of him further when we come to the ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... in London as a professor of music. He published two good operas of sonatas for two violins and a bass, and joined Clayton and Dieupart in the service of the opera, until Handel's success superseded them. Haym was also a man of letters, who published two quartos upon Medals, a notice of rare Italian Books, an edition of Tasso's Gerusalemme, and two tragedies of his own. He wrote a History of Music in Italian, and issued proposals for its publication in English, but had no success. Finally he turned ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... ordinary copy of a volume much tangible interest, yet who are prepared to recognise the value, and even importance, of one with the autograph and memoranda of some illustrious personage, of some great warrior or statesman, or of a famous man of letters, artist, or sculptor. The accidental and secondary feature in the work takes precedence of the rest; he pays for the sentiment and association. The direct human interest resident in such a relic is apt, in the opinion of many, to surpass that of the finest binding; for one has here ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... were, to proclaim himself a professional satirist, and a mystifier who will do his best to leave you utterly in the dark with regard to his system of juggling. Is he a teleological theologian making fun of evolution? Is he an evolutionist making fun of teleology? Is he a man of letters making fun of science? Or is he a master of pure irony making fun of all three, and of his audience as well? For our part we decline to commit ourselves, and prefer to observe, as Mr. Butler observes of Von Hartmann, that if his meaning is anything like what ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... follow backward the careers of our homunculi and be reminded of our antenatal lives. Our conscious years are but a moment in the history of the elements that build us. Are you a bank-clerk, and do you live at Peckham? It was not always so. And though to-day I am only a man of letters, either tradition errs or I was present when there landed at St. Andrews a French barber-surgeon, to tend the health and the beard of the great Cardinal Beaton; I have shaken a spear in the Debateable Land and shouted the slogan of the Elliots; I was present when a skipper, plying from ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... much of. His appearance is Epic; and he is the only existing entire man of letters. All the others have some pursuit annexed to their authorship. His manners are mild, but not those of a man of the world, and his talents of the first order. His prose is perfect. Of his poetry there are various opinions: there is, perhaps, too much of it for the present generation;—posterity ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... unquestionably determined Cooper's vocation, and made him a man of letters. But he had not yet found where his true strength lay. His training and education had not been such as would seem to be a good preparation for a literary career. His reading had been desultory, and not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... Universities of Heidelberg, Munich, and Paris, in what was emphatically the prime of their quaint student-days; an account of my barricade experiences of the French Revolution of Forty-Eight, of which I missed no chief scene; my subsequent life in America as lawyer, man of letters, and journalist; my experiences in connection with the Civil War, and my work in the advancement of the signing the Emancipation by Abraham Lincoln; recollections of the Oil Region when the oil mania was at its height; a winter on the frontier in the debatable land (which ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... comparison that ought never to have been thrust upon us, we ask why it is that the reader of Boswell finds it as hard to help loving Johnson as the reader of Froude finds its hard to avoid disliking Carlyle, the answer must be that whilst the elder man of letters was full to overflowing with the milk of human kindness, the younger one was full to overflowing with something not nearly so nice; and that whilst Johnson was pre-eminently a reasonable man, reasonable in all his demands ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... the delightful bye-tasks: the works of supererogation, the excursions into side paths, the niggling with proofs, the toying with style, the potterings and polishings, the ruminations, and rewritings and refinements which make the joy of the man of letters. For five-and-twenty years he had been a busy Cambridge coach, tied year in and year out to the same strictness of hours, the same monotony of subjects, the same patient drumming on thick heads and dull brains. Now that was all over. A brother had left him a little ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... vanish, and his pen dashes off sentences, and even whole pages, which belong to the best in German prose. But even admitting that while he wrote such passages he was addressing friends, and that the shadow of his enemies had been removed for a while, all the friends and enemies that Wagner, as a man of letters, has, possess one factor in common, which differentiates them fundamentally from the "people" for whom he worked as an artist. Owing to the refining and fruitless nature of their education, they are quite devoid of the ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... as man of letters and individual, was misunderstood and persecuted during the greater part of his life, or else ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... old gentleman, and he had seen much of the world. He was a fine scholar; he had been a soldier, and then a man of letters; and he belonged to a ...
— Four Great Americans: Washington, Franklin, Webster, Lincoln - A Book for Young Americans • James Baldwin
... echo from the fears expressed by the East at the close of the eighteenth century come the words of an eminent Eastern man of letters[208:1] at the end of the nineteenth century, in warning against the West: "Materialized in their temper; with few ideals of an ennobling sort; little instructed in the lessons of history; safe from exposure to the direct calamities and physical ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... is not wholly a compound of intuition and ignorance. Take for example the profession of my hero, an Irish-American electrical engineer. That was by no means a flight of fancy. For you must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living. I began trying to commit that sin against my nature when I was fifteen, and persevered, from youthful timidity and diffidence, until I was twenty-three. My last attempt was in 1879, when ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... PASHA (1819-1891), Turkish statesman and man of letters, was born in Stambul in 1819. He was the son of Rouheddin Effendi, at one time charge d'affaires in Paris, an accomplished French scholar, who was, therefore, attached, in the capacity of secretary-interpreter, to Reshid Pasha's diplomatic mission to Paris in 1834. Reshid took Ahmed with him and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Tourgueneff in the Rue de Douai (toward Montmartre), Girardin and Dumas in the Champs Elysees, Feuillet in the Rue de Rivoli, etc. Feuillet's name is, I think, as well known in the United States as that of any French man of letters except Taine, and if his biography were written he would be as famous for his eccentricities as was Balzac. An old friend of his once told me that one day, in calling upon Madame Feuillet, he expressed his regret that she had no regular reception-day, as in that case he would be able to see her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... man of letters. Governor Long has achieved a reputation. Some years ago, he produced a scholarly translation, in blank verse, of Virgil's AEneid, which was published in 1879 in Boston. It has found many admirers among students of classical literature. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... talent, as well as by cultivation, Gianluca was admirably gifted for such a correspondence as he now attempted to begin. In other circumstances of fortune he might have become eminent as a man of letters. Without possessing any of that practical, masculine knowledge of women, which Taquisara so roughly expressed, Gianluca had a keen and sure understanding of the feminine mind. There is no contradiction in that, for the men who know something of ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... been made subservient, both the one and the other being totally unknown in the country. Their arithmetic is mechanical. To find the aggregate of numbers, a machine is in universal use, from the man of letters, to the meanest shopman behind his counter. By this machine, which is called a Swan-pan, arithmetical operations are rendered palpable. It consists of a frame of wood, divided into two compartments by a bar running down the middle: through this bar, at right angles, are inserted a number ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... resumed the first; his small eyes gleamed with a green light, his whole face had a look as if he gnawed himself. Though not a man of letters, Shelton could not help recognising from those eyes what joy it was to say those words: "These ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... in this city a Mexican gentleman, Don Manuel Najera, a man of letters, well skilled in the Mexican and other Indian languages of that country. He says they are all, as I call them, polysynthetic, and resemble in that respect those of the Indians of the United States. One only he excepts, the Othomi, and that, he says, is monosyllabic, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... his short though eventful life he took a leading part in State affairs, being much trusted by his Sovereign, King James VI. He was a man of varied talents—lawyer, statesman, man of business, scholar, man of letters, and a poet. He seems to have been familiar with Greek, and to have corresponded in the Latin language. Besides these he acquired a knowledge of French, Italian and Spanish. He accumulated many State papers and letters from distinguished persons ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... unfortunately for the honour of Welshmen, actually declined to let it to Robert Southey, fearing that a poet could not find security for the small annual rent of twenty-five pounds. This circumstance led the man of letters, who eventually became one of the most distinguished men of his day, to seek a home elsewhere, and the Lakes were at length chosen as his residence. Probably the picturesque beauties of Cumberland compensated the Laureate for the indignity put ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... to Emerson. Mr. Dallas has been Vice-President of the United States; Emerson is one of the few masters of the English tongue, and both by teaching and practical example has done more to make the life of the scholar beautiful, and the career of the man of letters a reproof to all low aims and an inspiration to all high ones, than any other man ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... passions; while the brotherhood, that collective mentor, had seemed to mortify them in the interests of tiresome virtues and work which began to look useless and hopeless in Lucien's eyes. Work! What is it but death to an eager pleasure-loving nature? And how easy it is for the man of letters to slide into a far niente existence of self-indulgence, into the luxurious ways of actresses and women of easy virtues! Lucien felt an overmastering desire to continue the reckless life ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... causes of American romance, the circumstances and qualities that have produced the romantic element in American life and character? Precisely as with the individual artist or man of letters, we touch first of all upon certain temperamental inclinations. It is a question again of the national mind, of the differentiation of the race under new climatic and physical conditions. We have to reckon ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... live he never escapes from its spacious shade; nor does he ever find that it speaks to him in vain or uses a voice that fails to reach him. Once the present writer was talking with a friend who has equal fame as a statesman and a man of letters, and he said, 'Every day I live, Politics, which are affairs of Man and Time, interest me less, while Theology, which is an affair of God and Eternity, interests me more.' As with him, so with many, though the many feel that their interest ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... had not only founded a great industry, but was a man of artistic taste, a patron of art, and a lover of science. Telford, the Eskdale shepherd, was a man of literary taste, and was especially friendly with the typical man of letters, Southey. Others, of course, were of a lower type. Arkwright combined the talents of an inventor with those of a man of business. He was a man, says Baines (the historian of the cotton trade), who was sure to come out of an enterprise with profit, whatever the result to his partners. He ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... modern society. The nobler and more enthusiastic spirits in the Northern States beheld in it a strife between Michael and Satan, the Spirit of Darkness hurling himself against the Spirit of Light in a vain and presumptuous hope to overpower him; and their irritation was great when an eminent English man of letters was found describing it scornfully as "the burning of a dirty chimney," and when English opinion, speaking through very many journalists and public men, appeared half hostile to the Northern cause. Indeed, it might have been thought that opinion in England—England, ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... and man of letters, has lived in many European countries and spent the year 1886-87 in Russian Poland. His books on "Impressions of Poland" and "Impressions of Russia" show his interest in the political and social conditions of the ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... bad poem by Hoccleve. The wasteful wars in France, and the turmoil of the Roses, on the other hand, had a great and most disastrous influence. After Lydgate's death about 1447, Capgrave was our leading man of letters, and on his death in 1464 the post was left vacant, unless Master Bennet Burgh can be considered as having held it. The Paston Letters, which begin in 1422 and cover the rest of the century (till 1507), offer some consolation for the lack of ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... Naudaeus, as he termed himself, was a perfect scholar and man of letters, busied during his whole life with assembling books together, and enjoying the office of librarian to several persons of high rank, amongst others, to Queen Christina of Sweden. He was, besides, ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... ascended the tribune as spokesman of the moderate party—the so-called Doctrinaires. Chateaubriand so offended the king by his book "La Monarchie selon la Charte" that his name was crossed from the list of the Council of State. Yet he remained the foremost man of letters ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... result. Was it, in fact, a reproduction of an antique song, or a mystification of a great modern, careless of fame and scornful of his time? Could it be possible that in the eleventh century, so far away as Khorasan, so accomplished a man of letters lived, with such distinction, such breadth, such insight, such calm disillusions, such cheerful and jocund despair? Was this "Weltschmerz," which we thought a malady of our day, endemic in Persia in 1100? My doubt only lasted until I ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... his time, for the last thirty years, has been devoted to his profession. Perhaps the value and validity of the conclusions he records in this volume may be questioned from the very circumstance that he expresses them in the lucid and vigorous style of an accomplished man of letters. "People," says Macaulay, "are loath to admit that the same man can unite very different kinds of excellence. It is soothing to envy to believe that what is splendid cannot be solid, that what is clear cannot be profound. Very slowly was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... surfeited with roses and praises and incense. He alone took precedence over Scott and Coleridge and Moore and Campbell. For a time his pre-eminence in literature was generally conceded. He was the foremost man of letters of his day, and the greatest popular idol. His rank added to his eclat, since not many noblemen were distinguished for genius or literary excellence. His singular beauty of face and person, despite his slight lameness, attracted ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... but he gave me one more chance. I am still 'is dear brother's child, and he cannot forget it. An acquaintance of his, a man of letters, a M. Paul Sartines, was in need of a secretary. The post was not well paid, but it was permanent. My uncle insist that I take it. What choice? I took it. It is the post which ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the Colonel, "I hope it is not your practice to measure and estimate gentlemen by such paltry standards as those. A man of letters follows the noblest calling which any man can pursue. I would rather be the author of a work of genius, than be Governor-General of India. I admire genius. I salute it wherever I meet it. I like my own profession better than any in ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... individuals, and at their pleasure was composed. {0f} The temper of the time was crudely critical. The Museum and the Libraries, with their hundreds of thousands of volumes, were hot-houses of grammarians and of learned poets. Callimachus, the head librarian, was also the most eminent man of letters. Unable, himself, to compose a poem of epic length and copiousness, he discouraged all long poems. He shone in epigrams, pedantic hymns, and didactic verses. He toyed with anagrams, and won court favour ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... before him, (Panegyr. Vet. ii. 8,) Mamertinus expresses a doubt, whether his hero, in imitating the conduct of Hannibal and Scipio, had ever heard of their names. From thence we may fairly infer, that Maximian was more desirous of being considered as a soldier than as a man of letters; and it is in this manner that we can often translate the language of flattery into that ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... clear that he was separated by a whole orb of thought from the great novelist, yet it was none the less evident that he took pride in him. He naturally considered Tolstoi as hopelessly wrong in all his fundamental ideas, and yet was himself too much of a man of letters not to recognize in his brilliant countryman one ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... looked lovingly at his books and noted those which he had evidently used most. She went to the writing-table where he had done his work, and noted the various pictures which hung around the room. It was not like the ordinary Lancashire manufacturer's house at all. It suggested the student, the man of letters, the lover of art. And how silent it was! Away in the distance was the hum of the busy town, but here, sheltered by the great hills which sloped away behind, all was peace. After sitting for a time, she went into Paul's mother's ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... literary effect or style. My too early desertion of home-life to graduate in the harsh and whimsical discipline of sailing-vessels in the days when they had still some years to live and "carry on" ere steam took the wind out of their sails, precluded such studies as are natural to the embryo man of letters. But the circumstances that told against mere study did not prevent my preserving many memories of my sojourns ashore and voyages in distant seas. I mention this fact, not as an apology, but as an explanation which I hope may commend itself to ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... at poverty and learning. He lived in a quiet chateau at Cirey, industrious and independent, though he looked toward the Marquise du Chatelet for that admiration which a literary man craves. It was the Marquise who shared with Frederick the Great the tribute paid by the witty man of letters, i.e. that there were but two great men in his time and one of them wore petticoats. She differed from the frivolous women of court life in her earnest pursuit of intellectual pleasures. Her whole day was given up to the ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... art; and the tendency dominant in them affected for evil all works written in Latin. Even the historians show a falling away from the example of William of Malmesbury or of Roger of Hoveden. The one English chronicler of the thirteenth century who is a considerable man of letters, Matthew Paris, belongs to the early half of it, before the academic tradition was fully established, and even with him prolixity impairs the art without injuring the colour of his work. The age of Edward I., the ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... beginning their good wine, and they fall back upon inferior brands only when the public, having well drunk of the potent vintage, will swallow anything from a favourite author. We may regret that Thackeray's start as a man of letters should have furnished an exception to this salutary rule; and in surveying, after the lapse of many years, his collected works, we are disposed to observe that no first-class writer has suffered more from the enduring ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Grammar.—I have lately been looking over the Diary of this very clever person, and I confess it has surprised me to find him, a graduate of Cambridge, and, in fact, I may say a man of letters, constantly employing such vulgar bad grammar as "he do say," and such like. I am the more surprised when, on looking at his letters, even the familiar ones to his cousin Roger and to W. Hewer, I can find nothing of the kind, they being as grammatical and as well ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 211, November 12, 1853 • Various
... voice is to prevail must be an optimist, and his voice often learns its message from his life. Stevenson's life has become a tradition only ten years after his death; he has taken his place among the heroes, the bravest man of letters since Johnson and Lamb. I remember an hour when I was discouraged and ready to falter. For days I had been pegging away at a task which refused to get itself accomplished. In the midst of my perplexity I read ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... to us in three great capacities: as a statesman, an advocate, and a man of letters. As the combination of such pursuits is common in our own days, so also was it in his. Caesar added them all to the great work of his life as a soldier. But it was given to Cicero to take a part in all those political struggles, from the resignation of ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... perceptible in 'Esther Waters.' Except on the distinct understanding that Thomas Hardy and George Moore are bracketed here, for the sake of convenience, as being both 'under French encouragement,' it would be a gross critical injustice to couple their names together at all. It is not one man of letters in a hundred who has Mr. Hardy's mere literary faculty, which is native and brilliant, whilst Mr. Moore's has been painstakingly hunted for and brought from afar, and is, after much polishing, still a trifle dull. Mr. Thomas Hardy is distinctly one of those men ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... sailors had taken me out to him in another boat the professor became quite indignant at my suggestion that we return at once to land. 'Why, Mr. Philander,' he said, 'I am surprised that you, sir, a man of letters yourself, should have the temerity so to interrupt the progress of science. I had about deduced from certain astronomic phenomena I have had under minute observation during the past several tropic nights an entirely new nebular hypothesis which ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... fear that the art of printing was not introduced into England, till several years after Lord Say's death; but of some of these meritorious crimes I should hope to find my ancestor guilty; and a man of letters may be proud of his descent from a patron and ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... us of a man of letters, of England, who had passed his life in constant study; and it was observed that he had written several folio volumes, which his modest fears would not permit him to expose to the eye even of his critical friends. He promised to leave his labours to posterity; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... born in 1790, died rabbi of Prague in 1867. Together with Zunz, he was the founder of modern Jewish science. A distinguished man of letters, he was known above all for his biographies of celebrated rabbis, for historic and archaeologic studies, ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber |
