"Johnsonian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... original contributions. And now commenced a period in Griffin's life, which, for exceptional want and misery, might claim a certain pre-eminence in the long list of hapless victims, who made up the literary hecatomb of the Johnsonian era. Without the grosser elements, which enter into their methods of living and disfigure their character, the abject squalor of vulgar surroundings, the love for pot-houses and low companionships, the utter disregard for ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... had very little inventive power; her best novel, Evelina, has no plot worth speaking of. She never wrote really well. Even the Diary derives its whole charm from the matter and the reportage. Evelina is tolerable style of the kind that has no style; Cecilia is pompous and Johnsonian; Camilla was stigmatised by the competent and affectionate judgment of Mrs. Delany as "Gallicised;" and The Wanderer is in a lingo which suggests the translation of an ill-written French original by a person who does not ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... and bibliographers of literature, history, and philology will find the publications valuable. The Johnsonian News Letter has said of them: "Excellent facsimiles, and cheap in price, these represent the triumph of modern scientific reproduction. Be sure to become a subscriber; and take it upon yourself to see that your college library is on ...
— The Fatal Jealousie (1673) • Henry Nevil Payne
... told me about him," writes the bishop, "I made an appointment to see him in Oxford, and there, as chance would have it, I met him standing at the corner of St. Mary's Entry, in a somewhat Johnsonian attitude, four-square, his hands deep in his pockets to keep himself still, and looking decidedly volcanic. We very soon came to terms, and I left him there under promise to come to Clifton as my colleague at the beginning of the following ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... get no further, because their mental parabola is complete. All that has happened since is to them unreal and unimportant. One man I know exemplifies this to a remarkable degree. His parabola starts at the seventeenth century, rises to its maximum somewhere about the Johnsonian period, continues with scarcely abated vigour as far as Thackeray and Carlyle, declines towards Trollope and—ends. To speak of Meredith and Tolstoi, Ibsen and Maeterlinck, is to beat the air. The energy is exhausted, the mind has completed ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... a pleasanter commentary been written on a literary masterpiece.... What its author has aimed at has been the reproduction of the atmosphere in which Johnson lived; and he has succeeded so well that we shall look with interest for other chapters of Johnsonian literature which he promises.... Throughout the author of this pleasant volume has spared no pains to enable the present generation to realise more completely the sphere, so near and so far from this latter half of the nineteenth century, in which Johnson talked and taught."—SATURDAY ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... giving a graceful wave with one of his long, shapely hands toward the door, after which he bowed with dignified grace to Sir Robert, and said, "Your decision gives us great satisfaction, sir." Mr. Gregory Aglonby confirmed this statement in Johnsonian periods before he left, and tiny Miss Aglonby expressed herself as became a lady who had been receiving guests in that very room for fifty years with stiff but genuine courtesy. The atmosphere was so familiar to Sir Robert that he could ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... of Middletown College, a florid, hearty old gentleman with more red blood than he knew what to do with, in spite of his seventy years. He was vastly amused at the inexperienced young fellow's simple-minded notion, and, clapping him on the shoulder, said with his cheerfully Johnsonian rotundity: "Why, my dear young sir, your recent sad bereavement must have temporarily deranged your mental faculties, that at your age you can contemplate adopting such a desiccated mode of existence. Your proposition is, however, a highly advantageous ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... of Thomas Mason were his most noticeable characteristics. As an orator, his eloquence was of the ore rotundo order; as a writer, his periods were singularly Johnsonian. He closed his ministerial labors in Northfield, February 28, 1830, on which occasion he delivered a farewell discourse, taking for his text, the words of Paul to Timothy: "The time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith; ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... biographers are due to Hake. It is here we read of his snub to Thackeray. 'Have you read my Snob Papers in Punch?' Thackeray asked him. 'In Punch?' Borrow replied. 'It is a periodical I never look at.' He was equally rude, or shall we say Johnsonian, according to Hake, when Miss Agnes Strickland asked him if she might send him her Queens of England. He exclaimed, 'for God's sake don't, madam; I should not know where to put them or what to do with them.' Hake is responsible also for that other story about ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... and the very familiarity and ease of manner which the story-teller must assume may lead her into colloquialisms and careless expressions. Of course, however, the language must be simple; the words, for the most part, Saxon. No ponderous, Johnsonian expressions should drag their slow length through the recital, entangling in their folds the comprehension of the child; nor, on the other hand, need we confine ourselves to monosyllables, adopting the bald style of Primers and First Readers. ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... of The Microcosm is a letter from Capel Lofft defending the "Middle Style" of Addison in contrast to the more modern Johnsonian eloquence. Robert Bell, The Life of the Rt. Hon. George Canning (London, 1846), pp. 48-54, in a helpful account of The Microcosm, stresses its general fidelity ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... similar quality—not un-Johnsonian—in the reply of At-Tirmidi the juriconsult to a question, as reported by Abu 't-Taiyib Ahmad Ibn Othman As-Simsar. "I was," said he, "at Abu Jaafar At-Tirmidi's when a person consulted him about the saying of the Prophet, that God descended to the heaven of the world (i.e. the lowest of ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... requirements of the average sentiment of the loyal nation, are still denounced by the new party of "Union" as the work of furious radicals, bent on destroying the rights of the States. Thus Governor James L. Orr of South Carolina, a leading Rebel, pardoned into a Johnsonian Union man, implores the people of that region to send delegates to the Philadelphia Convention, on the ground that its purpose is to organize "conservative" men of all sections and parties, "to drive from power that radical party who are daily trampling under foot ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... but excellently haberdashered surtout, was plainly a man of large frame, of a Sam Johnsonian mould, but, to the surprise of the calculating observer, it would be noted that his volume (or mass) was not what his bony structure implied. Spiritually, in deed, this interesting individual conveyed to the world a sensation of stoutness, of bulk and solidity, which (upon scrutiny) was not (or ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley |
