"Modern English" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... put the weakness of law in words, the antique theological terminology of which should not prevent us from seeing the large truth in them? 'If there had been a law given which could have given life, then righteousness should have been by the law,' which being translated into modern English is just this, If Law could impart a power to obey its behests, then it is all that we want to make us right. But until it can do that it fails in two points. It deals with conduct, and we need to have character dealt with; and it does not lift ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... already explained in former sermons that the notion of 'Comforter,' as it is understood in modern English, is a great deal too restricted and narrow to cover the whole ground of this great and blessed promise. The Comforter whom Christ sends is no mere drier of men's tears and gentle Consoler of human sorrows, but He ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... Chapelle; but the poem which procured him the greatest reputation, was, that upon the Attributes of the Deity, of which we have already taken notice. He was employed by Mr. Ogle to translate some of Chaucer's Tales into modern English, which he performed with great spirit, and received at the rate of three pence a line for his trouble. Mr. Ogle published a complete edition of that old poet's Canterbury Tales Modernized; and Mr. Boyse's ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... the old, old question, What is Truth? And he answers himself, after the fashion of the wise Emperor of China, Truth hath not an unchanging name. A modern English writer says: I have long been convinced by the experience of my life, as a pioneer of various heterodoxies, which are rapidly becoming orthodoxies, that nearly all truth is temperamental to us, or given in the affections and intuitions; and that discussion ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... ordinary occupations. England has been exceptionally rich in great engineers and inventive geniuses of such humble origin—working men who have introduced great improvements in manufactures or communications; and our modern English civilization has been immensely influenced by the lives of these able and successful mechanical toilers. From Brindley, the constructor of the earliest great canal, to Joseph Gillott, the inventor of the very steel pen with ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... has been employed instead of verse, for two reasons. In the first place, no metrical form has yet been found which, in the writer's judgment, at all adequately represents in modern English the effect of the Old English alliterative verse, or stave-rime. And in the second place, to the writer's thinking, no one but a poet should attempt to write verse: and on that principle, translations would be few and far between, unless ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... passion-breeding philtre, as well as a whole world of magic and fairies. These epics will be noticed at greater length when we treat of the English versions of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, because many of the poems have been reworked in modern English and are hence most popular ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... engravings and of sketches resembles in no way what had been seen formerly. They no longer have the solemn air of classic composition, by which the drawings had been affected. A current of bold spontaneity has passed through here. In modern English illustration, it can be stated indisputably that nothing would be such as it can now be seen, if Morris, Rossetti and Crane had not imposed their vision, and yet many talented Englishmen resemble these initiators ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... group-spirit of the "Society" at this period. Whatever any individual could contribute was given for the common cause and went into the life of the whole. I have given the passages, which I have quoted from this "Epistle," in modern English. ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... have found a destiny in aesthetics or art, or what had been wanting in Princeton; that is, how the beautiful entered into life and was developed in history and made itself felt in all that was worth anything at all. Modern English writers on this subject—with exceptions like that of J. A. Symonds, whose Essays I cannot commend too highly—are in the same relation to its grand truth and higher inspiration as Emerson and Carlyle to Pantheism in its mightiest early forms. For ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... now, when we read them in the light of their world-wide results. From this silence some modern historians have carelessly inferred that the nascent Protestantism of the Lollards had been extinguished by persecution under the Lancastrian kings, and was in nowise continuous with modern English Protestantism. Nothing could be more erroneous. The extent to which the Lollard leaven had permeated all classes of English society was first clearly revealed when Henry VIII. made his domestic affairs the occasion for a revolt against ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... universally practised in England, is not an adulteration in the ordinary acceptation of the term. The thin beer which has taken the place of the strong ales of the past generation contains an insufficiency of alcohol to ensure keeping qualities, and it is difficult to see how modern English beers could be sold without the addition of some sort of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... being the present home of one of the most truthful of living painters, Mr. Henry La Thangue, whose scenes of peasants at work (in the manner of Barbizon) and studies of sunlight spattering through the trees are among the triumphs of modern English art. ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... both,—though lamenting a certain rustiness of memory at times. He could talk intelligently about Joseph Conrad, Arnold Bennet, Bernard Shaw, Galsworthy, Walpole, Mackenzie, Wells and others of the modern English school of novelists,—that is to say, he could differ or agree with you on almost anything they had written, notwithstanding the fact that he had never read a line by any one of them. He professed not to care for ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... Indeed, it was not English at all. I do not know what you would call it. It was not altogether his fault; he had learnt English from a Scotch lady. I understand Scotch fairly well—to keep abreast of modern English literature this is necessary,—but to understand broad Scotch talked with a Sclavonic accent, occasionally relieved by German modifications, taxes the intelligence. For the first hour it was difficult to rid one's self of the conviction that the man was choking. Every moment we expected him ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... wish to refer to super-terrestrial space, we have two expressions in modern English by which to describe it: we can speak of "the vault of heaven," or of "the canopy of heaven." "The vault of heaven" is most used, it has indeed been recently adopted as the title of a scientific work by a well-known astronomer. But the word vault certainly gives the suggestion ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... point I shall not rely on my own observation, but on the statements of Americans themselves, beginning with the semi-jocular assertion, which largely belongs to the order of true words spoken in jest, that "in old English football you kicked the ball; in modern English football you kick the man when you can't kick the ball; in American football you kick the ball when you can't kick the man." In Georgia, Indiana, Nebraska, and possibly some other States, bills to prohibit football have ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... in his "Modern English Literature," says: "This remarkable thought Alison the historian has turned to good account; it occurs so often in his disquisitions that he seems to have made it the staple of all wisdom and the ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... the student would carefully ascend to the first witnesses of every period, on whom modern writers (however eloquent or sagacious) must depend for their information. How lamentably devoid of authority and credit is the work of the most popular and celebrated of our modern English historians in consequence of his unhappy neglect of this fundamental principle, will be made palpably evident by the instances which could not be left unnoticed even within the narrow range of these Memoirs. ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... said that his wife's heart, which few knew, was greater than her intellect, which everybody knew; a woman whose inspiration had drawn from that husband, in the closing poem of his latest volume, the very highest strain which modern English poetry had struck, and the noblest utterance of emotion that ever man produced toward woman, in the speaker's judgment, since the world began. It also included Mary Howitt, whose beautiful union with her husband is a proof of what true marriage will be, when man ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the meaning of the whole. They were Polynesian, the Polynesian of the Samoans which is its most ancient form, but in some indefinable way—archaic. Later I was to know that the tongue bore the same relation to the Polynesian of today as does not that of Chaucer, but of the Venerable Bede, to modern English. Nor was this to be so astonishing, when with the knowledge came the certainty that it was from it the language we ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... it more gracefully, and no poet ever moved the breasts of his audience with stronger palpitations, than Lee. The excellent Mr. Addison, whose opinion in a matter of this sort, is of the greatest weight, speaking of the genius of Lee, thus proceeds[1]. "Among our modern English poets, there is none who was better turned for tragedy than our author; if instead of favouring the impetuosity of his genius, he had restrained it, and kept it within proper bounds. His thoughts are wonderfully suited for tragedy; ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... Eastern characters—Sanskrit, I believe, though I never had them in my hand.' And the boy proudly told me that he possessed just such a one, though he never wore it, because it would not be suitable with modern English costume. All a boy's romance, I suppose— ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... thereabout. Modern English polite society, my native sphere, seems to me as corrupt as consciousness of culture and absence of honesty can make it. A canting, lie-loving, fact-hating, scribbling, chattering, wealth-hunting, pleasure-hunting, celebrity-hunting mob, that, having lost the fear of hell, and not replaced ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... pleader's foible of verse: but Pliny bore no resemblance to that island barbarian Nevil Beauchamp: she could not realize the friend of Trajan, orator, lawyer, student, statesman, benefactor of his kind, and model of her own modern English gentleman, though he was. 'Yes!' she would reply encouragingly to Seymour Austin's fond brooding hum about his hero; and 'Yes!' conclusively: like an incarnation of stupidity dealing in monosyllables. She was unworthy of the society of a scholar. Nor could she kneel at the feet of her especial heroes: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of modern English divines there appeared one of eminence who declared against this theory: Dr. Shuckford, chaplain in ordinary to his Majesty George II, in the preface to his work on The Creation and Fall of Man, pronounced the whole theory ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... young gentlemen turned up their sleeves and steeped themselves to the elbow in gore. Moreover, they did it with a certain technical skill and a distinct sense of enjoyment. Truly, the modern English gentleman is a strange being. There is nothing his soul takes so much delight in as the process of getting hot and very dirty, and, if convenient, somewhat sanguinary. You cannot educate the manliness out of him, try as you will; and for such ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... point of historical etymology, it is probable that the word in question was suggested to those who first used it by the German Wasserscheide; but the spelling WATER-SCHED, proposed by Herschel, is objectionable, both because SCH is a combination of letters wholly unknown to modern English orthography, and properly representing no sound recognized in English orthoepy, and for the still better reason that WATER-SHED, in the sense of DIVISION-OF-THE-WATERS, has a legitimate English etymology. The Anglo-Saxon sceadan meant both to separate or divide, and ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... Yorkshire Dialect; Between an Awd Wife, a Lass, and a Butcher. This dialogue occupies the first place in our anthology, and it is, from several points of view, a significant work. It marks the beginning, not only of modern Yorkshire, but also of modern English, dialect poetry. It appeared just a thousand years after Caedmon had sung the Creator's praise in Whitby Abbey, and its dialect is that of northeast Yorkshire—in other words, the lineal descendant of that speech which was used by Caedmon in the seventh ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... speak excellent modern English when he liked, and usually did so, but, and in this he resembled others of his kind, in times of excitement he used the older form which is still the tongue of Lancashire. I made some haphazard answer, but it seemed appropriate, for Alice smiled upon us as we shook ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... translated the Annals of Tacitus, admits cautiously that his medium is "perchance not so fit to set out a piece drawn with so curious a pencil."[285] One cannot, indeed, help recognizing that as compared with modern English Elizabethan English was weak in resources, limited in vocabulary, and somewhat uncertain in sentence structure. These disadvantages probably account in part for such explanations of the relative difficulty of translation ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... some of the songs, plays, and stories of the natives, especially in the plays, for in them the hero is often a Christian prince who defeats a strong and wicked Mohammedan ruler, and releases an injured maiden. Change the names and the play becomes a modern English melodrama. In several of the islands, however, the impress of Spanish occupancy is slight, and customs are still in force that have existed for hundreds of years. On Mindanao are still to be found the politic devil-worshippers, ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... necessity of planning together the framework of their society and of building up their State out of chaos has imposed on them the necessity of more outspokenness. Certainly they have discarded, or have not assumed, the reticence of the modern English of England; and much of this freedom of utterance Europeans misinterpret, much (because the fashion of it is strange to themselves) they believe to be insincere. In which judgments they are quite wrong. The American people are profoundly ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... mind in two forms, for which there are in most languages, though not in modern English, two distinct expressions, connaitre and savoir, kennen and wissen. The former relates to knowledge through sensation, the latter through intellection; the former cannot be rendered in words, the latter can be; the former is reached through immediate perception, ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... prefer this to any other of his plays; as men in general prefer a triumph over difficulties to a triumph. A similar satisfaction, not in success but in the overcoming of difficulties, leads him to say of the modern play, The Sisters, that it is the only modern English play 'in which realism in the reproduction of natural dialogue and accuracy in the representation of natural intercourse between men and women of gentle birth and breeding have been found or made compatible with expression in genuine if simple blank ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... and many more in his train. He, more perfectly than any other, expressed the marriage of sense and soul in modern English poetry. He was the idealist of emotion, who, in the far-off dim borderlands between sense and spirit, still preserved the spiritual search, nor ever allowed himself to be completely drugged with the vapours of the region. There were others, however, ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... free liberty of judgment in this matter, I place two examples of the old and the Renaissance ornament side by side on the opposite page. That on the right is Romanesque, from St. Pietro of Pistoja; that on the left, modern English, from the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Mrs. Delarayne rejoined with gravity, "men no longer set fire to anything. Get that out of your mind at once. Modern English civilisation has entirely failed to produce men who can be at once gentlemen and fiery lovers. We have wanted things both ways, and that is why we have failed. We have wanted nice clean-minded men with ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... His state of mind notwithstanding, he glanced along a few shelves, discovering yet more unexpected things, to wit, philosophical works. Unfortunately the corners of the room showed busts of certain modern English statesmen: but one ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... turf on the breast of the Heaven-inspired poet who composed this glorious fragment! There is more of the fire of native genius in it than in half a dozen of modern English Bacchanalians! Now I am on my hobbyhorse, I cannot help inserting two other old ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... I am sure, just as complete in the writing of Mr. Boyle as in the acting of Miss Allgood and Mr. Sinclair. Both are, indeed, as finely imagined and as faithfully realized as any characters in modern English comedy. And you may have to go further afield than modern English comedy to find such a minute study of resentful and malevolent age as this portrait of Mrs. Grogan. We all know that perversity that will not allow its possessor to be satisfied with any effort to please. ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... stage for the first time. Early in the sixteenth century John Heywood invented a farcical composition called The Interlude to relieve the tiresome monotony of existing plays. But it was in 1540 that the first comedy appeared, and it is not too much to say that this play marks the beginning of modern English drama. Nicholas Udall, head master of Eton College, being accustomed to write Latin plays for his boys, concluded to try his hand at an English drama. The result was Ralph Royster Doyster, the first comedy. In 1562 Queen Elizabeth was entertained by the presentation of the first English ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... principal voices among the critical world when Miss Barrett first ventured into its midst; and she might well be satisfied with them. Two years later, the 'Quarterly Review'[42] included her name in a review of 'Modern English Poetesses,' along with Caroline Norton, 'V.,' and others whose names are even less remembered to-day. But though the reviewer speaks of her genius and learning in high terms of admiration, he cannot be said to treat her sympathetically. He objects to the dogmatic ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... confine himself entirely to such grave topics. The files of the Athenaeum contain many columns from his hand dealing with the lighter matters of topography (especially in France), travel, and fiction. The fiction was mainly French, modern English novels commending themselves little to his liking, though he was among the earliest and steadiest, if also among the more discriminating, admirers of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Prince Otto had a place with his favourite books. Another subject which ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... Especially in the factory districts and on the farm the child sooner or later begins to reestablish the balance, becomes a worker, and contributes to the family income as much as the cost of his support, and finally more. A student of modern English town life has traced the curve of poverty traversed by the average poor family as the children are first an economic burden, and later an aid to their parents. In the middle, or propertied, classes the children do not for many years ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... himself of an opportunity afforded for selecting striking passages from the English dramatic poets. "Specimens are becoming fashionable," he wrote. "We have 'Specimens of Ancient English Poets,' 'Specimens of Modern English Poets,' 'Specimens of Ancient English Prose Writers,' without end. They used to be called 'Beauties'! You have seen 'Beauties of Shakspeare'? so have many people that never saw any beauties in Shakspeare." Lamb was not by any means, however, an imitator of the unfortunate clerical forger, ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... highly; and there is a passage in "Dilemmas" which I have always thought very characteristic of his own tastes, as it refers to an "infinitesimal library, a few French novels, an Horace, and some well-thumbed volumes of the modern English poets in the familiar edition of Tauchnitz." He was Latin by all his affinities, and that very quality of slightness, of parsimony almost in his dealings with life and the substance of art, connects him with the artists of Latin races, who have always been so fastidious in ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... probable that the name had a much earlier origin. Kemp (Saxon Cempa) meant a soldier {173c} being connected with the Norman-French and modern English "Champion;" and although we might look back with pride to forefathers who suffered for their religion, it is pleasanter, if only in imagination, to regard them as having been a race of doughty warriors, sufficiently distinguished to win a name ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... a definite, formal pageant in honor of one who had been disserviceable to the enemies of the nation. A lesser "triumph." In modern English the word is improperly used to signify any loose and spontaneous expression of popular homage to the hero of the hour ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... only advance by means of observation and experiment, which constitute it one of the natural sciences; and this is abundantly proved by the modern English schools, and the experimental school in Germany. Yet observation of the states of consciousness taken alone is defective, unless it is enlarged by the comparative examination of a greater number of subjects; nor must ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... telling of his lamentable tale more easily than he could have supposed possible. Whilst walking up the stairs to his mother's room, he had tried to compose certain forms of speech that might let the whole affair "down easy," to quote from the modern English language, but had failed utterly. Yet, when on the spot, he had run glibly through it all—coldly—almost without feeling. And his mother had heard him as coldly, until she learned all hope was at an end—as far as Tita's ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford |
