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Bret   Listen
noun
Bret  n.  (Zool.) See Birt.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Bret" Quotes from Famous Books



... was published Luck of Roaring Camp, by Bret Harte. In this story and those that immediately followed, the author advanced the development of the short-story yet another step by introducing local color. Local color means the peculiar customs, scenery, or surroundings of any kind, which ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson

... b. Indiana. Came to California in early fifties. Wrote sketches and poems for newspapers and magazines. Made selection of poems to which Bret Harte's name was attached, known as "Outcroppings." Address: 1034 Vallejo ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various

... spent seven years as a pilot on a Mississippi steam-boat, and seven years more mining and journalizing in Nevada, where he conducted the Virginia City Enterprise; finally drifted to San Francisco, and was associated with Bret Harte on the Californian, and in 1867 published his first book, The Jumping Frog. This was succeeded by the Innocents Abroad, 1869; Roughing It, 1872; A Tramp Abroad, 1880, and by others ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers

... in the Abbey tradition, with moral purpose and unhumanity of its very essence, it was at least a newspaper leader on an Irish subject, but "The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet," a sort of sentimentalized travesty of Bret Harte preaching the usual Shavian evangel, has no more relation to Irish life than it has to literature. It marred the repertoire the Abbey Company brought to America, as would a camp-meeting hymn the music of ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... whose fame Searchest the grass with tongue of flame, Making all creatures seem thy game, When the whole woods before thee run, Asked but—when all is said and done— To lie, untrodden, in the sun!" —BRET HARTE. ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various

... it might be well to tell the pupils something of Bret Harte—his residence in California, his experience as a prospector in the goldfields, his stories of the mining camps, and his admiration of Dickens. (See Manual on The Ontario Readers, p. 315.) These facts ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education

... America the same opportunity to invent, to experiment, that we have already given journalism, there will be more legitimate successors to Irving, to Hawthorne, to Poe and Bret Harte. There will be more writers, like O. Henry, who write stories to please themselves, and thus please the majority. There will be fewer writers, like O. Henry, who stop short of the final touch of perfection because American taste (and the American editor) ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... wish I could lay my hands on the numbers of the REVIEW, for I know I wished to say something on that head more particularly than I can from memory; but where they have escaped to, only time or chance can show. However, I can tell you so far, that I was very much pleased with the article on Bret Harte; it seemed to me just, clear, and to the point. I agreed pretty well with all you said about George Eliot: a high, but, may we not add? - a rather dry lady. Did you - I forget - did you have a kick at the stern works of that melancholy puppy and humbug Daniel Deronda himself? - ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... "Since Bret Harte and the Forty-niner no one has written of California life with the vigor and accuracy of Mr. Norris. His 'McTeague' settled his right to a place in American literature; and he has now presented a third novel, 'Blix,' ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow

... best endeavour to immortalise in verse The gambling and the drink which are your country's greatest curse, While you glorify the bully and take the spieler's part — You're a clever southern writer, scarce inferior to Bret Harte. ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson

... the most delightful books Mr. Stockton has ever written. It is capital reading, and will more firmly establish Mr. Stockton in his place with Bret Harte among contemporary American writers. Mr. Frost's pictures are all ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton

... found your man in a railway car, and entered casually into conversation with him. Then you would probably get his real thoughts—the man as he is. But, of course, when a man is asked questions, and sees the answers taken down in shorthand, it is a very different thing.'"—Bret Harte. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... red flannel shirt and sombrero, and while missions and libraries abound, Judge Lynch and the crack of a six-shooter are almost unknown in these townships, the conventional security of which would certainly have amazed and disgusted the late Bret Harte. When last I travelled down the Yukon, Circle City (now called Silent City) was known as the "Paris of Alaska," and there was certainly more gaiety, or rather life, of a tawdry, disreputable kind here than at Forty Mile, the only other settlement of any ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... Bishop Morley, (London, 1683,) in a letter written whilst he was in exile at Breda, to J. Ulitius, refers to Cardinal Perron, "Replique a la Resp. du Roy de la Grande Bret." p. 1402 and 4, for this sentiment: "The Fathers do not always speak what they think, but conceal their real sentiments, and say that which best serves the cause which they sustain, so as to protect it against ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler

... share in contributing to modern slang. "The heathen Chinee," and "Ways that are dark, and tricks that are vain," are from Bret Harte's Truthful James. "Not for Joe," arose during the Civil War when one soldier refused to give a drink to another. "Not if I know myself" had its origin in Chicago. "What's the matter with——? ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin

... went around there often enough to have the men get accustomed to me and to have me get accustomed to them, so that we began to speak the same language, and so that each could begin to live down in the other's mind what Bret Harte has called "the defective moral quality of being a stranger." It is not often that a man can make opportunities for himself. But he can put himself in such shape that when or if the opportunities come he is ready to take advantage of them. This was what happened to me in connection ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... Bastard: A poem, inscribed with all due reverence to Mrs. Bret, once Countess of Macclesfield. By Richard Savage, son of the late Earl Rivers. London, printed for T. Worrall, 1728.' Fol. first edition. P. CUNNINGHAM. Between Savage's character, as drawn by Johnson, and Johnson ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... I cannot read the stories of your western men, the writings of Bret Harte, or Colonel John Hay, for instance, without feeling at every turn that there are the old Norse alive again, beyond the very ocean which they first ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... Constance (1891); Jacqueline (1893). We need not enter into the merits of style and composition if we mention that 'Un remords, Tony, and Constance' were crowned by the French Academy, and 'Jacqueline' in 1893. Madame Bentzon is likewise the translator of Aldrich, Bret Harte, Dickens, and Ouida. Some of her critical works are 'Litterature et Moeurs etrangeres', 1882, and 'Nouveaux ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon

... Pataneers: But his wife, the sister of the queen of Patane, refused to leave him, going back along with him and her sons, after having spent all she had instead of getting presents. On the 16th I had a letter from Thomas Bret at Macasser, complaining of a bad market, and informing me that John Parsons had become frantic: He said likewise that he had purchased a junk for the purpose of coming away; but that in the mean time the Darling ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr

... the Madison Square Theater. Frohman, who was then beginning his managerial career, was immediately taken with her talent. She appeared in some of his earlier companies. He now starred her in a play by Bret Harte called "Sue." He presented her both in New York ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman

... wit[h] a loke am yolde And haue no power to stryue thaug[h] I wolde Thus stonde I euer betwix lif and det[h] To loue and serue whyle I haue bret[h] In suche a place where I dar not pleyne Liche hym that is in torment and in peyne And knowet[h] not to whom to discure For ther that I haue holly set my aire I dar not wel for drede ne for daunger And for vnknowen tellen how the ...
— The Temple of Glass • John Lydgate

... the Albany Academy, built in 1813 by Philip Hooker, architect of the old State Capitol, Prof. Joseph Henry demonstrated (1831) the theory of the magnetic telegraph by ringing an electric bell at the end of a mile of wire strung around the room. Bret Harte, the writer, was born in 1839 in Albany, where his father was teacher of Greek in the ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous

... gaine small. [Sidenote: The earle of Cleremont in Gascoigne.] In the same verie season, Iohn earle of Cleremont sonne to the duke of Bourbon, wan in Gascoigne out of the Englishmens possession, the castels of saint Peter, saint Marie, and the New castell; and the lord de la Bret wan the castell of Carlassin, which was no small ...
— Chronicles (3 of 6): Historie of England (1 of 9) - Henrie IV • Raphael Holinshed

... the precious possessions of California is the most valuable, is best described by Bret Harte in the lines, "Half a year of clouds and flowers; half a year of dust and sky." Either half is enjoyable, for in the summer, or dry season, fogs or delightful westerly winds soon moderate a heated spell, and in nearly all parts of the state the nights are cool; while the rainy, ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini

... was presented to the inmates of Starved Camp during the next three days! It stormed incessantly. One who has not witnessed a storm on the Sierra can not imagine the situation. A quotation from Bret Harte's "Gabriel Conroy" will afford the best idea ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan

... hardly an old town in the whole Bret Harte country that has not its stories of the raiding during the winter of 1852-53. With the knowledge which he and his lieutenants had gained at Mokelumne Hill the chief directed operations, but as the weeks went by the influence of Three-Fingered Jack grew until his methods were employed in every ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt

... passable imitations of the Samurai. If he had any left at this point, he was free to dispose of it under the auspices of near-Hindoos in the Indian room, of merry Swiss peasants in the Swiss room, or in other appropriately furnished apartments of red-shirted, Bret Harte miners, fur-clad Esquimaux, or languorous Spaniards. He could then, if a man of spirit, who did not know when he was beaten, collect the family jewels, and proceed down the main hall, accompanied by the ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse

... Americans, if I may be frank, I prefer the verse of Mr. Bret Harte, verse with so many tunes and turns, as comic as the "Heathen Chinee," as tender as the lay of the ship with its crew of children that slipped its moorings in the fog. To me it seems that Mr. Bret Harte's poems have never (at least in this country) ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang

... perhaps fitting to recall the events which immediately preceded his death. Henry's wrathful exclamation, which stirred the four knights to set out on their bloodthirsty mission, is well known. Whatever we may think of the methods employed by these warriors—Fitzurse, de Moreville, de Tracy, and le Bret were their names—we must at least concede that they were gifted with undaunted courage. To slay an anointed archbishop in his own cathedral was to do a deed from which the boldest might well shrink, in the days when excommunication was held to be a living reality, and the Church was believed ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers

... of Mr. Bret Harte stands entirely alone ... marked on every page by distinction and quality.... Strength and delicacy, spirit and tenderness, go together in his ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat

... for the dialect to be found in these pages. There is no Californian dialect. At the time of the discovery of gold, the state was flooded with men from all parts of the world, and dialects became inextricably mixed. Not even Bret Harte was able to reproduce the talk of children whose fathers may have come from Kentucky or Massachusetts, and their mothers ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell

... Salmons. Shrimps. Tenches. Salmon-peels. Congers. Ombres. Dolphins. Porpoises. Fresh cods. Barn trouts. Bases. Dried melwels. Miller's-thumbs. Shads. Darefish. Precks. Murenes, a sort of Fausens, and grigs. Bret-fish. lampreys. Eel-pouts. Flounders. Graylings. Tortoises. Sea-nettles. Smys. Serpents, i.e. wood- Mullets. Turbots. eels. Gudgeons. Trout, not above a Dories. Dabs and sandings. foot long. Moor-game. Haddocks. Salmons. Perches. Carps. Meagers. Loaches. Pikes. Sea-breams. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... "Friends" from Little Aliens by Myra Kelly, and for the story, "American, Sir," by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews; to Booth Tarkington for "A Reward of Merit" from Penrod and Sam. The stories by Katherine Mayo, Bret Harte, and Nathaniel Hawthorne are used by permission of, and by special arrangement with, Houghton ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various

... Valley—wore the smartest frontier get-up of current year's vintage that the Chicago mail-order houses could turn out; if Little Nell's father, appearing contemporaneously, dressed according to the mode laid down for Forty-niners by such indubitable authorities as Bret Harte; if the sheriff stalked in and out of lens range attired as a Mississippi River gambler was popularly supposed to have been attired in the period 1860 to 1875; and if finally the cavalry troopers ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb

... Russell with the means to bestow unlimited largess, Field endowed him with the touch of Midas. He would report that the matchless exponent of "Shabby Genteel" bought lead mines, to be disappointed by finding tons of virgin gold in the quartz. Like Bret Harte's hero of Downs Flat, when Russell dug for water his luck was so contrary that he struck diamonds. When he ordered oysters each half shell had its bed of pearls. One specimen will do to illustrate the character of the gifts Field bestowed ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... wearing a long black coat or a tall black hat, would find life harassing at the diggings. But, at any rate, in New Zealand diggers did not use revolvers with the playful frequency of the Californians of Mr. Bret Harte. Nor did they shoe the horse of their first Member of Parliament with gold, or do a variety of the odd things done in Australian gold-fields. They laughed heartily when the Canterbury Provincial Government sent over the Alps an escort of strapping mounted policemen, ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... Polycarp coldly. 'You daren't. You aren't on the stage, and you aren't in Texas. And you aren't a bold Bret Harte villain. You're simply the creature of a private inquiry agency, as it's called, the most miserable of trades! Usually you spend your time in manufacturing divorces, but just now you're doing something more dangerous even than that, something that needed more pluck than you've got. ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett

... happiness. In a luxurious office up-stairs was another congenial spirit—a gifted, handsome fellow of twenty-four, who was secretary of the Mint, and who presently became editor of a new literary weekly, the Californian, which Charles Henry Webb had founded. This young man's name was Francis Bret Harte, originally from Albany, later a miner and school-teacher on the Stanislaus, still later a compositor, finally a contributor, on the Golden Era. His fame scarcely reached beyond San Francisco as yet; but among the little coterie of writing folk that clustered about ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... brought the stern gloom of the Puritan period and the uneasy theorizings of the present day into harmony with the universal and permanent elements of human nature. There was certainly nothing European visible in the crude but vigorous stories of Theodore Winthrop; and Bret Harte, the most brilliant figure among our later men, is not only American, but Californian,—as is, likewise, the Poet of the Sierras. It is not necessary to go any further. Mr. Henry James, having enjoyed early and singular opportunities of studying the effects of the recent ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne

... related directly to the life of the people. Men began to describe Southern scenery, not some fantastic world of dreamland; sentimentalism was superseded by a healthy realism. The writers fell in with contemporary tendencies and followed the lead of Bret Harte and Mark Twain, who had begun to write humorous local sketches and incidents. With them literature was not a diversion, but a business. They were willing to be known as men of letters who made their living by literature. They stood, ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... short story writers include Bret Harte, Edward Everett Hale, Frank Stockton, and Mary E. Wilkins. With these may be included Thomas Hardy's 'Life's Little Ironies,' ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various

... has done so much has a right to gratitude and goodwill. Possibly there never was a writer who gave the world all the essentials personal to his art so early, and yet so long survived in the race for popularity. Bret Harte's first book was something like a revelation. In workmanship he reminds the reader of Dickens, but his surroundings were wholly novel, and as delightful as they were strange. He bewitched the whole reading world with 'The Luck of Roaring Camp,' and 'The Outcasts of Poker Flat,' and ever since ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray

... to indulge in quotations from well-known parodies of prose, this chapter would soon overflow all proper limits. I forbear, therefore, to do more than remind my readers of Thackeray's Novels by Eminent Hands and Bret Harte's Sensation Novels, only remarking, with reference to the latter book, that "Miss Mix" is in places really indistinguishable from Jane Eyre. The sermon by Mr. Jowett in Mr. Mallock's New ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... is combined with perfection of style and of literary art. The novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe, especially those which relate to slavery and depict negro character, have had a world-wide currency. Among other novelists were Paulding and Sedgwick, and more recently, Howells, James, Bret Harte, Cable, and Aldrich. The most distinguished humorist has been S. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... to the ladies this morning to warn 'em, To order their chaise, and repair to Rathfarnam;[1] Where you shall be welcome to dine, if your deanship Can take up with me, and my friend Stella's leanship.[2] I've got you some soles, and a fresh bleeding bret, That's just disengaged from the toils of a net: An excellent loin of fat veal to be roasted, With lemons, and butter, and sippets well toasted: Some larks that descended, mistaking the skies, Which Stella brought down by the light of her eyes; And there, like Narcissus,[3] ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... "Heera Nund," by F.A. STEEL, in Macmillan. If "A First Family of Tasajara" is continued as well as it is commenced in the same above-mentioned Mac-azine, it will be about as good a tale as BRET HARTE has ever written, and that is saying a ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various

... he opened a rich vein of literature where many have followed him. He wrote not for the critics but for the great popular audience whom he had created, comprising all ages and classes, and world-wide in extent. The best answer to such criticism is to be found in the poem which Bret Harte dedicated to his memory in 1870, which beautifully describes how the pathos of his child-heroine could move the hearts of rough working men far away in the Sierras of the West. Nor did this same character of Little Nell fail to win special praise from literary critics ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... happened to form part of one of these troupes, in which he filled the role of "comic lead," if such a description can apply to any Chinese artiste. As a matter of fact they are so serious, even in their fun, that the Californian romancer, Bret Harte, has told us that he never saw a genuine Chinaman laugh, and has even confessed that he is unable to say whether one of the national pieces he witnessed was a ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne

... [Sidenote: Don't undo your girdle at table;] For that is a tacche / of vncurtesye But yf ye seme / ye be embraced streite 199 [Sidenote: if it's tight, let it out before you sit down.] Or then ye sytte / amende it secretly So couertly that no wight you espye Beware also / no bret[h] fro you rebounde [Sidenote: Don't break wind up or down.] Vp ne dou[n] / leste ye ...
— Caxton's Book of Curtesye • Frederick J. Furnivall

... discovered the Bully Boy. Jim humbly regarded this piece of luck as interposed for his reward, and I for one believed him. If it had been in mediaeval times you would have had a legend or a ballad. Bret Harte would have given you a tale. You see in me a mere recorder, for I know what is best for you; you shall blow out this bubble from your ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin

... Ridges is Frimley, with an old inn and a church to which Americans come often. Bret Harte lived his last years at a house on the hillside near, and is buried in the churchyard. But the Bret Harte of The Luck of Roaring Camp and The Heathen Chinee does not, of course, belong to Frimley; those were earlier successes which he ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... the Counsellor, which made its first appearance in this magazine in January, 1879. This sketch gained a quicker popularity than her longer novels, and drew forth warm eulogies from critics so far apart in standard as Ruskin, Leslie Stephen and Bret Harte. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various

... Franklin and Samuel Clemens Bret Harte Court exertion. I love work "Do you swear?" "Not for amusement; only under pressure." Doing things and reflecting afterward Dr. Holmes's Songs in Many Keys His estimation of his own work was always unsafe Income equal to ...
— Widger's Quotations from Albert Bigelow Paine on Mark Twain • David Widger

... stupidest small boy making faces or turning somersaults before the eyes of his pig-tailed inamorata, evidences his appreciation of the sentimental value of the ridiculous. When did we first grant some small corner in our hearts to the Chinese? It was when we were introduced to Bret Harte's gambler: ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... was first made, I have written little else quite of the kind, except the paper on Bret Harte, which was first printed shortly after his death; and the study of Mark Twain, which I had been preparing to make for forty years and more, and wrote in two weeks of the spring of 1910. Others of my time and place have now passed whither there is neither time ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... bludgeoning has gone out of fashion, and in its place we have the playful satiric wit, sparkling as of well-drawn Moet or Clicquot, of Mortimer Collins, H.S. Leigh, Arthur Locker and Frederick Locker-Lampson, W.S. Gilbert, Austin Dobson, Bret Harte, F. Anstey, Dr. Walter C. Smith, and many other graceful and delightful social satirists whose verses are household words amongst us. From week to week also there appear in the pages of that trenchant social censor, Punch, and the other ...
— English Satires • Various

... not elevated to the railing, rocked gently and smiled. Of course we planned to make the trip as easy as possible, and had engaged a spring wagon so that we could take more time than the stage, which naturally had to live up to a Bret Harte standard. We made an early start from Raymond after a rather troubled night at Leidig's Hotel. You hear strange sounds in a mining camp after dark. Every one in town saw us off, as Grandmother was already popular, and looked on as rather a sporting ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane

... genre pictures of peculiar types and places sketched by Mr. George W. Cable, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, Miss Wilkins, Miss Jewett, Mr. Garland, Miss French, Miss Murfree, Mr. Gilbert Parker, Mr. Owen Wister, and Bret Harte.... A pretty love story also adds to the attractiveness of the book, that will be appreciated at once by every one who enjoys real humor, strong character, true pictures of life, and work that is ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope

... Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edward Rowland Sill, Celia Thaxter, Caroline Atherton Mason, Edna Dean Proctor, Edmund Clarence Stedman, John Burroughs, John Hay, William Dean Howells, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lucy Larcom, Margaret E. Sangster, Francis Bret Harte, James Freeman Clarke, Samuel Longfellow, Samuel Johnson, Christopher Pearse Cranch, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various

... people began to flock to his standard. The duke of Norfolk, with Sir Henry Jernegan, was sent against him, at the head of the guards and some other troops, reenforced with five hundred Londoners commanded by Bret: and he came within sight of the rebels at Rochester, where they had fixed their head-quarters. Sir George Harper here pretended to desert from them; but having secretly gained Bret, these two malecontents so wrought on the Londoners, that the whole body deserted to Wiat, and declared that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume

... his attention to strengthening the fiction in his magazine. He sought Mark Twain, and bought his two new stories; he secured from Bret Harte a tale which he had just finished, and then ran the gamut of the best fiction writers of the day, and secured their best output. Marion Crawford, Conan Doyle, Sarah Orne Jewett, John Kendrick Bangs, Kate ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok

... Dear Bret Harte, I'm in tears, And the camp's in the dust, For with anguish it hears As poor William may bust, And the last of the Nyes is in danger of sleeping ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang

... XXIX. I. Letter of M. Briand-Delessart (Angouleme, August 1st).—Of M. Bret, Lieutenant-General of the provostship of Mardogne, September 5th.—Of the Chevalier de Castellas (Auvergue), September 15th (relating to the night between the 2nd and 3rd of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... teste. Onc n'i ot si hardie beste, Or ne sangler, que poor n'et Quant lor sire sospire et bret. Tel poor ot Coars li levres Que il en ot deus jors les fevres. Tote la cort fremist ensemble, Li plus hardis de peor tremble. Par mautalent sa coue drece, Si se debat par tel destrece Que tot en sone la meson, Et puis fu tele sa reson. Dame Pinte, fet l'emperere, Foi que doi ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... realism as vivid as Robinson Crusoe, that Mrs. Wood's Village Tragedy may rank with Silas Marner, that Howells and Besant, Ouida and Rhoda Broughton, Henry James and Mrs. Burnett, are as good reading as we need, that Bret Harte has struck a line as original as that of Dickens, and that George Meredith has an eye for character which reminds us not seldom of Thackeray and Fielding—I do not dispute it. I am no one-book ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison

... Both Greek and Latin authors differ in the mode of spelling the name of this place, the first syllable being written Beb, Bet, and Bret. It is now a small village called Labino, ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... outset of a career from which much was to be expected, a man, possessed of rare and original qualities of head and heart, sank out of the sphere in which at that time he was the most prominent figure. There was then no Mark Twain or Bret Harte. His rivals were such humorists as Orpheus C. Kerr, Nasby, Asa Hartz, The Fat Contributor, John Happy, Mrs. Partington, Bill Arp and the like, ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... Washington, when asked recently if he liked our American games, replied that he did not understand any of them. No doubt this is true of the majority of Chinamen in the United States. In thinking of the Chinese and gambling one always recalls Bret Harte's "Plain Language From Truthful James of Table Mountain," popularly known as "The Heathen Chinee," one of the best humorous poems in the English language. You can fairly see the merry eyes of the ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey

... in America twenty-two years ago, Chicago was the city that interested me least. Coming straight from San Francisco—which, in the eyes of a youthful student of Bret Harte, seemed the fitting metropolis of one of the great realms of romance—I saw in Chicago the negation of all that had charmed me on the Pacific slope. It was a flat and grimy abode of mere commerce, a rectilinear Glasgow; and to an Edinburgh man, or rather boy, no comparison could ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer

... trapped in stele, Covered with cloth of gold diapred wele, Came riding like the god of armes Mars. His cote-armure was of a cloth of Tars, Couched with perles, white, and round and grete. His sadel was of brent gold new ybete; A mantelet upon his shouldres hanging Bret-ful of rubies red, as fire sparkling. His crispe here like ringes was yronne, And that was yelwe, and glitered as the Sonne. His nose was high, his eyen bright citrin, His lippes round, his colour was sanguin, A fewe fraknes in his face yspreint, Betwixen ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt

... days of gold in San Francisco among the "Forty-niners" William Walker was one of the most famous, most picturesque and popular figures. Jack Oakhurst, gambler; Colonel Starbottle, duellist; Yuba Bill, stage-coach driver, were his contemporaries. Bret Harte was one of his keenest admirers, and in two of his stories, thinly disguised under a more appealing name, Walker is the hero. When, later, Walker came to New York City, in his honor Broadway from the Battery to Madison Square was bedecked with flags and arches. ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis

... of them Lord Wolseley), one admiral, four baronets, nine knights, a crowd of right honorable and honorable ladies (many of them peeresses), and a mob of other personages, among whom I find Mr. Howells, Bret Harte, and myself. ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... philosophers such as John Oliver Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Earl Spencer; the biting sarcasm of Hiny, the pathos of Peps, the oratorical master-strokes of such men as Gladstone, Demosthenes and Keir Hardie; the romance of Kipling, sir, of Bret Harte and Danty Rossini; the poetry of Kempis a Browning and of Elizabeth Thomas Barrett—all, all are there bound in Persian calf. Among these she seeks for solace. To these she ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens

... peculiarly his own,—as if the words were enclosed in a parenthesis,—as much as to say, "I do not approve of this, but I sing it just the same," and this made the performance all the more amusing. He sang Bret Harte's "Jim" in a very effective manner, and he often sang the epitaph on ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns

... your intelligence by any comment or even epithet of my own. I shall but ask you, Was not this man your kinsman? Does not the story sound, allowing for all change of manners as well as of time and place, like a scene out of your own Bret Harte or Colonel John Hay's writings; a scene of the dry humor, the rough heroism of your own far West? Yes, as long as you have your Jem Bludsos and Tom Flynns of Virginia City, the old Norse blood is surely not extinct, the old Norse ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby

... Land of Little Rain Water Trails of the Ceriso The Scavengers The Pocket Hunter Shoshone Land Jimville—A Bret Harte Town My Neighbor's Field The Mesa Trail The Basket Maker The Streets of the Mountains Water Borders Other Water Borders Nurslings of the Sky The Little Town ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin

... retorts, and how to cast the bullion into pigs; and finally I know how to screen tailings, and also how to hunt for something less robust to do, and find it. I know the argot of the quartz-mining and milling industry familiarly; and so whenever Bret Harte introduces that industry into a story, the first time one of his miners opens his mouth I recognize from his phrasing that Harte got the phrasing by listening—like Shakespeare—I mean the Stratford one—not by experience. No one can talk the quartz dialect correctly without ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain

... dialect for dynamite to blow the front off hypocrisy or to shatter the cotton commercialism in which the New England conscience was encysted. Robert H. Newell, mirth-maker and mystic, satirized military ignorance and pinchbeck bluster to an immortality of contempt. Bret Harte in verse and story touched the parallels of tragedy and of comedy, of pathos, of bathos, and of humor, which love of life and lust of gold opened up amid the unapprehended grandeurs and the coveted treasures of primeval ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... examples of his sculpture seen at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition are of pronounced virility and of fine composition. He is a man who excels in technique. He has done in San Francisco the Victory for the Dewey Monument in Union Square, the McKinley Monument, the Bret Harte Monument and the Hall-McAllister Monument. In the Metropolitan Museum of New York is "The Flame." At the Fine Arts Palace are a number of works from his chisel - The Gates of Silence, the Gates' memorial, being by ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James

... scouring the plain. As a parenthesis it should be noted that cowboys always scour the plain, just as sailors always scan the horizon. He knew how the cowboys looked, because he had seen Buffalo Bill's show; and he knew how they talked, because he had read accurate authors of the school of Bret Harte. He could even imagine ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White

... to read about the coaches would be in Doctor Lyon's Pony Express Museum, out from Pasadena, California. May it never perish! Old Monte drives up now and then in Alfred Henry Lewis' Wolfville tales, and Bret Harte made Yuba Bill crack the Whip; but, somehow, considering all the excellent expositions and reminiscing of stage-coaching in western America, the proud, insolent, glorious figure of the driver has not ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie

... notice that, any more than the smoke," said Bellingham, with a look of satisfaction in his hero for his other guests. "It's a sort of ecstasy. Do you remember that fellow of Bret Harte's, in How Christmas came to Simpson's Bar, who gets a shot in his leg, or something, when he's riding to get the sick boy a Christmas present, and doesn't know it till he drops off his horse in a faint when he gets ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells

... Hayne (1830-1886), who find a place rather by the affection in which they are held at the South than by positive merit. Lanier showed originality and a true poetic gift, but his talents were little effectual. From the West humorous poetry was produced by Francis Bret Harte (1839-1902), born in Albany, in The Heathen Chinee (1870) and similar verse, but he is better remembered as the artistic narrator of western mining life in his numerous stories and novels. Verse of a similar kind also first brought into literary notice John Hay ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... Westcott his true place in American letters—placing him as a humorist next to Mark Twain, as a master of dialect above Lowell, as a descriptive writer equal to Bret Harte, and, on the whole, as a novelist on a par with the best of those who live and have their being in the heart of hearts of American readers. If the author is dead—lamentable fact—his book ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

... Gods, Homer booth. Egypt's gift to America, Egyptian booth. Concepcion de Arguello. Banquet scene. Bret Harte booth. ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson

... wrote Bret Harte, "I took up Longman's Magazine* and began to lazily read something about the Spanish Armada. My knowledge of that historic event, I ought to say, is rather hazy; I remember a vague something about Drake ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... Cissa beset Andredescester, and slew all those that therein dwelt: there was not so much as one Bret remaining. ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle

... strong, and he asked us if we had enjoyed our trip in spite of the catastrophe last night, and we both said we had, and all the more on account of it, because it was lovely seeing the real thing. And he said it was a chance in a thousand, as all the camps were so orderly now, not as in Bret Harte, or as it was in his young days. And he said both Octavia and I would make splendid miners' wives not to be squeamish or silly over the "carrion" that was shot, and not to have trembling nerves today. We felt so pleased, and ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn

... represented as 'drunken roughs who couldn't speak the Queen's English.' As a matter of fact, a steadier, better behaved, better mannered class it would be difficult to find. There are exceptions, but not popular exceptions. Blackguardism and heroism very seldom go together, Bret Harte and other writers notwithstanding. The pluckiest and most reliable soldiers are not animated beer barrels, but sober, keen-eyed, sensible fellows, and of such the British ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie

... Ralph are adventurers with ample means for following up their interest in jewel clues. In this book they form a party of five, including Jimmy Stone and Bret Hartson, boys of Ralph's age, and a shrewd level-headed sailor named Stanley Greene. They find a valley of diamonds ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Camp - or The Water Fight at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker

... So long have we been separated from the other nations of the earth that one of our faults is a failure to appreciate the qualities of the people who are unlike us. I have often had occasion to quote something that Bret Harte said about the people of a frontier western camp, to whom came a stranger who was regarded by them as having "the defective moral quality of being a foreigner." Difference from us does not involve inferiority to us. It may involve our inferiority ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root

... has known found his inspiration and produced his best work in California. It is now nearly forty years since "The Luck of Roaring Camp" appeared, and a line of successors, more or less worthy, have been following along the trail blazed by Bret Harte. They have given us matter of many kinds, realistic, romantic, tragic, humorous, weird. In this mass of material much that was good has been lost. The columns of newspapers swallowed some; weeklies, that lived for a brief day, carried ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes

... universal idea of the native about his or her own heath, but I can assure you it isn't the case at all. Only just now, on my way here, I saw a scene and a character that might have been lifted bodily out of Bret Harte." ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung

... genius—rare and quaint presents itself is childlike simplicity. That he was a poet of keen perception, of rare discrimination, all will admit. He was a humorist as delicate and fanciful as Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, Bill Nye, James Whitcomb Riley, Opie Read, or Bret Harte in their happiest moods. Within him ran a poetic vein, capable of being worked in any direction, and from which he could, at will, extract that which his imagination saw and felt most. That he occasionally left the child-world, ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field

... shrapnel, both due to 19th-century inventors. The more recent maxim is named from one who, according to the late Lord Salisbury, has saved many of his fellow-men from dying of old age. Other benefactors are commemorated in derringer, first recorded in Bret Harte, and bowie, which occurs in Dickens' American Notes. Sandwich and spencer are ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley

... of a cheerfully scathing review of the book which may make my meaning clearer: "If we have said anything in this article which might cause a single pang to the poetically sensitive nature of the youthful individual calling himself Mr. Francis Bret Harte—but who, we believe, occasionally parts his name and his hair in the middle—we will feel that we have not labored in vain, and are ready to sing Nunc Dimittis, and hand in our checks. We have no doubt of the absolutely pellucid and lacteal purity ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... Tennyson's poems! On the other hand, very great poets have often not made a new form. The Yankee type, both as regards spirit and language, had become completely common and familiar in prose and poetry, before Lowell revived it in the clever Biglow Papers. Bret Harte's "Heathen Chinee," and several other poems, are, however, both original and admirable. Whatever the merits or demerits of mine were—and it was years ere I ever gave them a thought—the public, which is always eager for something new, ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... Fuller are particularly noted for their lucid English and literary style; Cable writes Creole stories of Louisiana; Mary Hartwell Catherwood, stories of French Canadians and the early French settlers in America; Bret Harte, stories of California mining camps; Mary Hallock Foote, civil engineering stories around the Rocky Mountains; Weir Mitchell, Quaker stories of Pennsylvania; and Charles Egbert Craddock lays her plots in the Tennessee mountains. Of all these authors, each has written at least two books ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell

... BRET, a native of Albany, N.Y., has written short stories and sketches of Californian life, and several poems in dialect, of which The Heathen Chinee, is the most celebrated. He possesses great wit and pathos, ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard

... only to find the most vile and fearful stories set in circulation about them. Four separate relief parties were sent from California, and their adventures were almost as tragic as those of the sufferers they sought to help. Bret Harte, in his Gabriel Conroy, has told much—though in the exaggerated and unjust form the stories were first circulated—of the Donner tragedy, and it has been made the subject of much newspaper and ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... in Harvard, and withal a man of business who will not pay more than a thing is worth. Ideal! Hence the letter and consequent trouble to good Jack Hallowell, who as per usual "done his damnedest for a friend," as Bret Harte says, in writing a perfect ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... gaily to his fate filled with high hopes of owning his own newspaper before long and ranking as the leading journalist in the great little city made famous by gold and Bret Harte. He was one of many in New York; he knew that with his brilliant gifts and the immediate prominence his new position would give him the future was his to mould. No man, then or since, has brought so rare an assortment of talents to the ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton

... he is called everywhere, is known as far as the States and England as one of the cattle kings. He is a Westerner of the Westerners, and an individuality even among them. Tall and loose-built, with an authentic Bret Harte quality in action and speech, he can flash a glance of shrewdness or humour from the deep eyes under their shaggy, pent-house brows. He is one of the biggest ranch owners in the West (perhaps the biggest); his judgment on cattle or horses is law, and ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton

... old Overland Monthly, when she worked side by side with Bret Harte and Charles Warren Stoddard, to the present moment, Miss. Coolbrith's name has formed a part of the literary history of ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... Illustrated with excellent likenesses of Chatham, Mirabeau, Webster, Demosthenes, Cicero, Grattan, Patrick Henry, Curran, Sheridan, Madame Roland, Victor Hugo, Calhoun, Hayne, Everett, Tennyson, Longfellow, O. W. Holmes, Bret Harte, Epes Sargent, Thackeray, Dickens, and ...
— The Nursery, No. 109, January, 1876, Vol. XIX. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Unknown

... Map of the "Bret Harte Country," Showing the Route Taken by the Writer, With the Towns, Important Rivers, and County ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley

... Hoffmann states that he derived his materials for this story from Le Bret's "History of Venice,"—a book which, unfortunately, up to the time of going to press, the translator had not ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... continual groups of slouching, slouch-hatted "Americans," these little weathered log cabins, falling streams, and pine trees reminded one of some tale of Bret Harte, and one found one's self expecting the sudden appearance of Broncho Billy or Jack Hamlin mounted upon a fiery mustang. But we cleared the top of the pass without meeting either, and started on our last long downhill to Andrievitza. Cheered by the rapidity of our motion the two ruffians on ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon

... of chess at 226, says the "Westminster Papers," (although the Indians claim we think with justice to have invented it about 108 B.C. Artaxerxes a Persian King is said to have been the inventor of a game which the Germans call Bret-spiel and chess was invented as ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird

... written by Charles Fenno Hoffman, James Hall, Timothy Flint, Thomas, and O'Connell. But none of these writers have given such original sketches of character, or have so graphically portrayed the spirit of life in the far West as Mr. Bret Harte. "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and the other stories of this talented writer have opened a vein of romance ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... way was inimitable; and during these later years, when the professional humorist has become one of our established institutions, no writer has arisen to wear the mantle which fell from the shoulders of Washington Irving. Bret Harte, doubtless, made us laugh more. Irving could by no possibility ever have written the "Heathen Chinee," or those other bits of compressed humor called Poems; but Bret Harte is not exactly a lineal descendant of Irving. Mark Twain also can ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... cited as evidence that God is no respecter of persons, and that the Bible holds woman as man's equal; nevertheless it is as worthy of belief as any of the rest of it, and its "Thus saith the Lord" and "as the Lord commanded Moses" are "frequent and painful and free," as Mr. Bret Harte might say. The chapter ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener

... was a realist in that he copied life. But his realism is that of Dickens and Bret Harte and Kipling rather than that of Mrs. Freeman and Arthur Morrison and the Russian story-tellers. He cared less for the accuracy of details than for the vividness of his general impressions and the force of his moral lessons. Like ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan

... Birkenhead, keeping their ranks to let the women and children escape, while they watched the sharks who in a few minutes would be tearing them limb from limb. Or, to go across the Atlantic—for there are heroes in the Far West—Mr. Bret Harte's "Flynn of Virginia," on the Central Pacific Railway— the place is shown to travellers—who sacrificed his life for ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... that this style, which retains a strong flavour of its American origin (it can hardly be dated earlier than Bret Harte), may be reckoned to be peculiar to the light literature of the English language. We are not aware that it prevails to any extent in other countries; for although the short story of love, intrigue, and manners in general has flourished from mediaeval times, and at this moment is almost ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... chiefly recollect (apart from personal reasons) for the sparkling freshness and vigour of the air; for the extent and variety of Golden Gate Park, where I found a bust of Beethoven, but no sign of Bret Harte; for the vast reading-room in the library at Berkeley, a university which is so enchantingly situated, beneath such a sun, and in sight of such a bay, that I marvel that any work can be done there at all; and for the miles and miles of perfect ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas

... Poe, and Hawthorne no one could give an adequate account of the landmarks of achievement in fiction, written in our common tongue. French critics have even gone so far as to canonize Poe. In a certain field he and Hawthorne occupy a unique place in the world's achievement. Again, men like Bret Harte and Mark Twain are not common in any literature. Foreigners have had American books translated into all the leading languages of the world. It is now more than one hundred years since Franklin, the great American philosopher ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... characters do not do what they ought to do, nor what they would do, nor, it might be said, such is the insanity of the atmosphere, not even what they intend to do. The conduct of Rochester is so primevally and superhumanly caddish that Bret Harte in his admirable travesty scarcely exaggerated it. 'Then, resuming his usual manner, he threw his boots at my head and withdrew,' does perhaps reach to something resembling caricature. The scene in which Rochester dresses up as an old gipsy has something ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton



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