"Laureate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... when this book was written, Southey lived at Greta Hall, by Keswick, and had gathered a large library about him. He was Poet Laureate. He had a pension from the Civil List, worth less than 200 pounds a year, and he was living at peace upon a little income enlarged by his yearly earnings as a writer. In 1818 his whole private fortune was 400 pounds ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... that belongs to many of our dreams is a subjective emotional unity. This is the basis of harmony in lyrical poetry, where the succession of images turns mainly on their emotional colouring. Thus, the images that float before the mind of the Poet Laureate, in his In Memoriam, clearly have their link of connection in their common emotional tone, rather than in any logical continuity. Dreaming has been likened to poetic composition, and certainly many of our dreams are built upon a groundwork of ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... feeling. A good example maybe found in the work of Mr Swinburne: the latter is the better poetry, the earlier remains the more popular — because of its eloquence of margin. Mr Tupper might long ago have sat with laureate brow but for his neglect of this first principle. The song of Sigurd, our one epic of the century, is pitiably unmargined, and so has never won the full meed of glory it deserves; while the ingenious gentleman ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... Apulia, was introduced to Pope Leo X., as a buffoon, but was promoted to the laurel. This laureate was called ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... had acted against Wilde, curiously characteristic of English life and of the casual, contemptuous way Englishmen of the governing class regard letters. In the same spirit Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister made a journalist Poet Laureate simply because he had puffed him for years in the columns of The Standard. Lord Salisbury probably neither knew nor cared that Alfred Austin had never written a line that could live. One thing Mr. Brookfield's witnesses established: ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... indeed, that the Lake poets had little respect for their "superior" reviewers; whose opinions, on the other hand, were not subject to influences from high places. It will be noticed that Jefferey is even more severe on Southey's Laureate ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... at the time this part of the book had seemed to many to have fallen greatly short of the splendour of its opening. Jeffrey said however quite truly, claiming to be heard with authority as his "Critic-laureate," that of all his writings it was perhaps the most finished in diction, and that it equalled the best in the delicacy and fineness of its touches, "while it rises to higher and deeper passions, not resting, like most of the former, in sweet thoughtfulness, and thrilling and attractive ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... page, but on a spray of warmly- blushing almond blossom, where a well-fed thrush, ruffling its softly speckled breast, was singing a wild strophe concerning its mate, which, could human skill have languaged its meaning, might have given ideas to a nation's laureate. Yet John Walden found unalloyed happiness in this apparently vague and vacant way. There was an acute sense of joy for him in the repeated sweetness of the thrush's warbling,—the light breeze, stirring through a great bush of early flowering lilac near the edge of the lawn, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... written about him—we ask, can, at this day, be done with Chaucer? The true answer is—READ HIM. The late Laureate dared to think that every one might; and in his collection, or selection, of English poets, down to Habington inclusive, he has given the prologue, and half a dozen of the finest and most finished tales; believing that every earnest lover of English poetry would by degrees ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... a curious picture by 'Skelton, Laureate,' of an ignorant singer, who appears to have been throwing mud at the poet. Skelton gives us a sad account both of his ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... ago, literature was at a very low ebb. The press was in a miserable state. William Whitehead was Poet Laureate! Who knows of him now? Gibbon had not written his "Decline and Fall." Junius was the popular writer. Political corruption was scarified in his letters. The upper classes were coarse, drunken, and ill-mannered. Bribery and corruption on the grossest scale were the principal means for getting ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... the Laureate obedient to an editor's decree Puts his verses in the columns of the Times; When the endless minor poet in an endless minor key Gives the public his unnecessary rhymes, When you're weary of the poems ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... The substance with which he worked, indeed, is so good that there would be a difficulty in spoiling it completely; but the prose of the translation in the English Bible, faultless as it is, loses nothing in Bunyan's hands, and if we found these poems in the collected works of a poet laureate, we should consider that a difficult task had been accomplished successfully. Bunyan felt, like the translators of the preceding century, that the text was sacred, that his duty was to give the exact ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... him, of course. What else would a young fool like her do? He inthrojooced her to the Poet Laureate, thinking shed ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... southern part of the island witch-hanging or burning proceeded with only less vehemence than in Scotland. One of the most celebrated cases in the earlier half of the seventeenth century (upon which Thomas Shadwell the poet laureate, who, under the name of MacFlecknoe, is immortalised by the satire of Dryden, founded a play) is the story of the Lancashire Witches. This persecution raged at two separate periods; first in 1613, when nineteen prisoners were brought before Sir James Altham and ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... the north wall is painted on wooden panel, and is very old. She is flanked by Lord Keeper Williams, and by Sir Ralph Hare, K.C.B., both benefactors to the College. Other noteworthy portraits are those of Sir Noah Thomas, physician to King George III., by Romney; William Wordsworth, poet-laureate, by Pickersgill; Professor John E. B. Mayor, by Herkomer; Professor B. H. Kennedy, long headmaster of Shrewsbury School, by Ouless; Professor E. H. Palmer, Lord Almoner's Reader of Arabic in the University, and a famous oriental scholar, by the Hon. John Collier; and Professor G. D. Liveing, ...
— St. John's College, Cambridge • Robert Forsyth Scott
... omitted to embellish their accounts with such a striking circumstance? or, if the histories of that age are lost, by length of time, why was not so uncommon an excellence transmitted to posterity, in the more lasting colours of poetry? Was that unhappy age without a laureate? Was there then no Young [19] or Philips [20], no Ward [21] or Mitchell [22], to snatch such wonders from oblivion, and immortalize a prince of such capacities? If this was really the case, let us congratulate ourselves upon being reserved for better days; days so fruitful of happy writers, that ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... Shepherd's friendships; both the poets were pleased with each other, and the closest intimacy ensued. It was on his way to visit Wilson, at Elleray, his seat in Cumberland, during the autumn of 1814, that the Shepherd formed the acquaintance of the Poet-laureate. He had notified to Southey his arrival at one of the hotels in Keswick, and begged the privilege of a visit. Southey promptly acknowledged his summons, and insisted on his remaining a couple of days at Greta Hall to share his hospitality. Two years could not have more firmly rivetted their friendship. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... Our own Christmas hymn, "While shepherds watched their flocks by night," is precisely of this order; and, indeed, is of the very period when flourished the greatest of the Provencal noel writers: for the Poet Laureate Nahum Tate, whose laurel this hymn keeps green, was born in the year 1652 and had begun his mildly poetic career while Saboly ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... that he was a jester, but not of the kind that Shakespeare drew in Yorick. He was not only,—so the writer implied,—the maker of jibes and fantastic devices, but the bard of friendship and affection, of melodious lyrical conceits; he was the laureate of children—dear for his "Wynken, Blynken and Nod" and "Little Boy Blue"; the scholarly book-lover, withal, who relished and paraphrased his Horace, who wrote with delight a quaint archaic English of his special devising; who collected rare ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... Aristotle and Plato, and delivered three discourses on Heroic Poetry in the Academia degli Eterei, or the Ethereals—in which he developed the whole theory of his poetical design—which were afterwards published, the office of Laureate at the court of Ferrara was offered to him by Cardinal Lewis of Este, to whom, as I have said, he ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... at Cambridge, Massachusetts, so that he is some years younger than our own laureate, and we may hope to get out of him many another noble work, though we shall get no more "Biglow Papers"—at least I fear not; for the sort of inspiration which finds voice in this way comes, I take it, only once in a man's life. And moreover, this is his own ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... is spoken of with reverence among his countrymen: he was the laureate of the epoch of Catherine, and had a fresh ode for every new military glory. There is much fire and vigour in his productions and he could develop the strength and flexibility of his native language which can be made as expressive and concise as Greek. Perhaps, however, we get a little tired of his ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... I am reading Pindar now and then: I don't much care about him I must say: though I suppose he is the very best writer in the Poet Laureate style: that is, writing on occasion for so much money. I see great merits doubtless—a concise and simple way of saying great things, etc., but the subjects are not interesting enough to me. I suppose a good poet could have celebrated Dutch Sam ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... robbers, of the threatened dissolution of every tie, legal, social, or political; an age of earthquake, war, and famine! Bacchus, who is known from Aristophanes not to have excelled in criticism, protested that his laureate was greater than Homer; and, though Homer could not go quite so far as this, he graciously conceded that if he had himself been an Egyptian of the fifth century, with a faint glimmering of the poetical art, and encumbered with more learning than he knew how to use, he might have written ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... explained Jarman, "this ain't an ordinary case. This chap's going to be the future Poet Laureate. Now, when the Prince of Wales invites him to dine at Marlborough 'ouse, 'e don't want to go there tacked on to a girl that carries aitches with her in a bag, and don't know which end of the spoon out of ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... to be found in R——, which rejoiced instead in the most squalid types of poverty and crime, types wherewith the mild shrivelled Unitarian minister had about as much power of grappling as a Poet Laureate with a ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... well-worn story of Tristram and Kind Mark came to my mind. He, Guido, like Tristram, would in a short space clasp the gemmed necklace round the throat of one as fair and false as the fabled Iseulte, and I—should I figure as the wronged king? How does the English laureate put it in ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... re-elected in 1626, when the next parliament was summoned, but secured his return for Agmondesham in March 1627. He appears to have been in these years a silent senator, taking little interest or share in the debates, but retiring from them to offer the quit-rent of his versicles—a laureate without salary, and yet not probably much more sincere than laureates generally are; for although his loyalty was undoubted, his expressions of it in rhyme are often hyperbolical to ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... who have written books have been the most fortunate in this respect, because they possess an attraction for literary men which those whose lives have been embodied in deeds do not possess. Thus there have been lives written of Poets Laureate who were mere men of their time, and of their time only. Dr. Johnson includes some of them in his 'Lives of the Poets,' such as Edmund Smith and others, whose poems are now no longer known. The lives of some men of letters—such as Goldsmith, Swift, Sterne, and ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... most interesting poem is The Thistle and the Rose. This was written when Margaret, the daughter of King Henry VII of England, came to be the wife of King James IV of Scotland. Dunbar was the "Rhymer of Scotland," that is the poet-laureate of his day, and so, as was natural, he made a poem upon this great event. For a poet-laureate is the King's poet, and it is his duty to make poems on all the great things that may happen to the King. For this he ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... enjoying a period of kingly favor. He had been made a Knight of the Bedchamber and also Historiographer of France. The chief duty of the first office consisted in signing the monthly voucher for salary, and the other was about the same as Poet Laureate—with salary in inverse ratio to responsibility. It was considered, however, that the holder of these offices was one of the King's family, and therefore was bound to indulge in no ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... whole current of Mr R's ideas, and altered his plans for me. I was no longer to be the future poet-laureate; I was no more enticed to sing great deeds, but to do them. The sword was to displace the pen, the hero the poet. Verse was too effeminate, and rhyme was severely interdicted, and to be forgiven only when it was ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... state, That these are the specimens left at the gate Of Pinafore Palace, exact to date, In the hands of the porter, Curlypate, Who sits in his plush on a chair of state, By somebody who is a candidate For the office of Lilliput Laureate. William Brighty Rands. ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... year when imperative custom demanded his attendance at the Chapel. Consultation was had with John Wilson Croker, Secretary of the Admiralty. Croker's sharp common-sense at once suggested the abolition of the Laureate duties, but the retention of the office as a sinecure. Walter Scott, to whom the place was offered, as the most popular of living poets, seconded the counsel of Croker, but declined the appointment, as beneath the dignity of the intended founder of a long line of border knights. He recommended ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... mobbed, and desired to be called 'the other gentleman,' which straightway became convertible now and then into 'the old gentleman,' much to his vexation. But Mr. Prinsep is in the roses and lilies of youth, and comparatively speaking, of course, the great Laureate was an ancient. He is in considerable trouble, too by their building a fort in front of his house on the southern coast of the Isle of Wight. I couldn't help saying that he deserved it for having written 'Riflemen, arm!' It's a piece of ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... New Orleans will plume itself upon this dish which drew from Thackeray a world-famous tribute. "In New Orleans you can eat a Bouillabaisse, the like of which was never eaten in Marseilles or Paris." Which is much, very much, from the laureate of Bouillabaisse, as native to Marseilles. The reason of superiority is not far to seek—it lies in the excellence and flavor of the fish native to the Gulf of Mexico. Lacking Pompano, Red Snapper, and Redfish, even Milly could not quite do her knowledge justice. But she made shift with what ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... Emerson, who visited Landor in Florence and made some sojourn afterward in England. The Boston publishing house of C. C. Little and Company (now Little, Brown, and Company) had written to Tennyson (under date of April 27, 1838) regarding a republishing of his volume, as the future laureate was already recognized for the musical quality and perfection of art in his work. Browning had published only "Pauline," "Paracelsus," and "Strafford." Shelley and Keats were dead, their mortal remains reposing in the beautiful English cemetery in Rome, under the shadow of the tall cypresses, ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... rounded it out according to the standard which he had set for himself. Occupying the position almost of a court poet, he continued to work for Mahmud, and this son of a Turkish slave became a patron of letters. On February 25, 1010, his work was finished. As poet laureate, he had inserted many a verse in praise of his master. Yet the story goes, that though this master had covenanted for a gold dirhem a line, he sent Firdusi sixty thousand silver ones, which the poet spurned and ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... 1700): one of the greatest English poets. He was a supporter of the house of Stuart, and was made poet laureate. ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... accusations to render it inexpedient to prosecute him for libel. The punishment of what was false would have involved the public exposure of what was true. The official party realized the force of the laureate's ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... contribution to literature—his hands were too full of public cares for that; and his entire literary remains consist of sacred poems and fugitive pieces of verse in Latin. But he was very ready with his pen, and served as a kind of unofficial poet-laureate. It is a curious fact that on every occasion in the King's reign that called for celebration, even at those times when Melville was on the worst terms with James, an appropriate ode was forthcoming. He was a clever satirist, and it was ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... was not strong. He was pleasant, idle, rather vain, and a little inclined to be dissipated. Mrs. Octagon did not know that Basil was fond of dissipation. She thought him a model young Oxford man, and hoped he would one day be Laureate ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... epic"), a satire by Alexander Pope—written to revenge himself upon his literary enemies. The plot is this: Eusden the poet-laureate being dead, the goddess of Dulness elects Colley Cibber as his successor. The installation is celebrated by games, the most important being the "reading of two voluminous works, one in verse and the other in prose, without nodding." King ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... few freaks of a crowded brain are thrown overboard to the sharks of verbal criticism who feed on such things—Mr. Browning and his great poetical achievement remain behind to be dealt with and accounted for. We do not get rid of the Laureate by quoting:— ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Victorian poet-laureate Tennyson who gave the Arthurian Legend its latest and most artistic touches in "Idylls of the King." Some critics also claim as an example of the domestic epic his ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... literary research might be profitably followed by the student who should trace the footsteps of all the poets, dead and gone, that have held, in England, the office of laureate. John Kay was laureate in the reign of King Edward the Fourth; Andrew Bernard in that of King Henry the Seventh; John Skelton in that of King Henry the Eighth, and Edmund Spenser in that of Queen Elizabeth. Since then the succession has included the names of Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... to his drawing-room, there to be received by Simonetta herself, wearing the blanched draperies and tragic pearls of the labyrinth he had made for her. Grimshaw offered no apologies. He was the uncrowned laureate and kings can do no wrong. He was painted by the young Sargent, of course, and by the aging Whistler—you remember the butterfly's portrait of him in a yellow kimono leaning against a black mantel? I, for one, think he was vastly amused by all this fury of admiration; ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... readers with grossness. He had too much of the Neapolitan's frank self-abandonment to nature for broad indecency in art to afford him special satisfaction; and the taste of his age demanded innuendo. The laureate of Courts and cities saturated with licentiousness knew well that Coan vestments are more provocative than nudity. It was his object to flatter the senses and seduce the understanding rather than to stimulate coarse appetite. Refinement was the aphrodisiac ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... if she had set the seal of her approval upon her, and to be approved by her beautiful godmother,—ah, that meant more to the devoted little heart than any one could dream; far more, even, than if she had been made the proud laureate of a queen. ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... and call it wit, But I prefer my simple "twit".'" But the latter view is espoused by most of the writers mentioned, notably and nobly by Drake, the Haynes, the Laniers, Lee, Meek, and Thompson, the poet-laureate of the mocking-bird, whose poems should be read by every lover of nature and especially of the mocking-bird. As Thompson's tributes are all too long for quotation, I give here Meek's, in the hope that I may rescue it from the long oblivion of an out-of-print. My attention ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... thy brown oaks would never dare Ev'n whisper to the idle air; Rites that have chain'd old Ocean on his bed. Shiver'd by thy piercing glance, Pointless falls the hero's lance. Thy magic bids the imperial eagle fly, [Footnote 18] And blasts the laureate wreath of victory. Hark, the bard's soul inspires the vocal string! At every pause dread Silence hovers o'er: While murky Night sails round on raven-wing, Deepening the tempest's howl, the torrent's roar; Chas'd by the morn from Snowdon's awful ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... distinct, yet ideal, than his 'Devil's Dream upon Mount Acksbeck. Tennyson is a greater Calvinist in one sense than either of the Scotch poets we have named—he owes more to the general faith of others in his genius than to any special or strong works of his own; but let us be dumb, he is now Laureate—the crowned grasshopper of a summer day! Bailey of 'Festus' has a vast deal more power than Tennyson, who is only his delicate, consumptive brother; but 'Festus' seems either different from, or greater than, a work. We are reminded of one stage in ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... the Mermaid Inn Had dubbed our London laureate, hauled the cask Out of its ancient harbourage. "Ben," he cried, Bustling into the room with Dekker and Brome, "The prentices are up!" Ben raised his head Out of the chimney-corner where he drowsed, And listened, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... Beauty, too, in league with Vice and Shame, And lending all her light to gild a lie; Crowning with laureate-wreaths an impious name, Or lulling us with Siren minstrelsy To false repose when peril most is nigh; Decking things vile or vain with colours rare, Till what is false and foul seems ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... side as well. It is, in fact, a love-match. The fact that the royal lovers have never seen each other only emphasizes its romantic quality. Their joy in beholding in actuality what they have for three long months cherished so dearly in imagination, is a theme for the poet laureate—who will, however, we fear, judging from his past performances, hardly do it justice. It is, as we have said, a love- match. The royal pair fell in love with what they had heard of each other—the Princess of Basque with the image she had formed in her mind from glowing reports of the King's valour, ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... accomplished man; and his writings, both in prose and verse, were equal to those of Zahiri and Naziri. When he first came to India, he resided for some years at Delhi; but having had some dispute with the poet-laureate of the Emperor Mohammed Shah, he found himself under the necessity of retiring to Benares, where he lived in great privacy. As he was a stranger in the country, was engaged in no calling or profession, and received no allowance from the Emperor, it was never known whence, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... to be remembered, of whom the body and corpse lieth buried in the Abbey of Westminster beside London, to-fore the chapel of Saint Benedict, by whose sepulchre is written on a table hanging on a pillar his Epitaph, made by a Poet Laureate, whereof the copy ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... kindliest critics. Their summer visits to London (1851, 1852, 1855, 1856) brought them much more of intimate personal converse, tempered, however, inevitably, in a yet greater proportion, by pain, discomfort, and fatigue. Of himself, yet more than of the Laureate, might have been used the phrase in which he was to dedicate a later poem to Tennyson—"noble and sincere in friendship." The visitors who gathered about him in these London visits included friends who belonged to every ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureate. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... Skelton, Laureate," came from the press in 1504, having been played before the King at Woodstock on Palm Sunday. The piece is now lost; but a copy was seen by Warton, who gave an account of it. As the matter is very curious, I must add a few of its points. The persons are a Conjurer, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... the Government will not think just now about appointing a Poet Laureate. I hardly think they can be altogether in the right mood. The business just now before the country makes a very good detective story; but as a national epic it is a little depressing. Jingo literature always weakens ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... and incensed me long before. I knew, too, that Pye enjoyed his salary as poet laureate of the time, and Dibdin, the song writer, his pension of two hundred a-year, and I blushed ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... she wouldn't be so alarmingly outspoken when she sings our praises to strangers. She gave him to understand that I am a full-fledged author and playwright, the peer of any poet laureate who ever held a pen; that Lloyd is a combination of princess and angel and halo-crowned saint, and Joyce a model big sister and an all-round genius. How she managed in the short time they were alone to tell him as much as she did ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... take it by storm. It seemed so easy! "Westminster Abbey," wrote my friend to a correspondent; "if I live, I shall be buried there—so help me God!" "I mean, after Tennyson's death," I myself wrote to Philip Hamerton, "to be Poet-laureate!" From these samples of our callow speech, the modesty of our ambition may be inferred. Well, it all happened just as we planned, only otherwise! Through some blunder of arrangement we two started for London on the ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... names of Mr. Steer, Mr. John, Mr. Orpen and Mr. McEvoy, here only less familiar than those of Cabinet Ministers or County Cricketers, abroad are as obscure. Mr. Steer, to be sure, has his portrait in the Uffizi, but then, as likely as not, the Poet Laureate has his birthday ode in the Bibliotheque Nationale. If Mr. Steer and Sir Edward Poynter are treated civilly abroad, that may be because England is an important country rather than because they are ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... by at Arqua. The statement of the "Clerk" in the "Canterbury Tales" that he learnt the story of patient Griseldis "at Padua of a worthy clerk...now dead," who was called "Francis Petrarch, the laureate poet," may of course merely imply that Chaucer borrowed the "Clerk's Tale" from Petrarch's Latin version of the original by Boccaccio. But the meeting which the expression suggests may have actually taken place, and may have been accompanied by the ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... And if you will look about you, you will note that Natural Beauty is having an increasing effect upon the movements of men. There is a very definite relationship between the Beauty of the Earth and her human inhabitants. The Poet Laureate builds his house on the top of Boar's Hill not because the soil is specially productive up there so that he may be able to grow food, for the soil is rather poor; not because water is easily available, for it is very difficult to get, as he found when his house took fire; not ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... eminently suitable under a female sovereign, but even expressed its opinion that 'there is no living poet of either sex who can prefer a higher claim than Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning.' No doubt there would have been a certain appropriateness in the post of Laureate to a Queen being held by a poetess, but the claims of Tennyson to the primacy of English poetry were rightly regarded as paramount. The fact that in Robert Browning there was a poet of equal calibre with Tennyson, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... coast. Or in the roll of the Bay of Biscay, after a space watching the swinging fields of stars, to come down there was to drop into a welcoming circle of friends, to throw one's self down and pick up a book, the Laureate's "In Memoriam" or Mr. Thackeray's latest—and to glance from the pages of "Henry Esmond" to Prince Charlie's dagger lying peacefully on the desk.... How near! how near!... And up forward the lookout paced, or leaned over the bows, humming ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... incidents are brought, maliciously enough, together in some stanzas, written about that time on the choice of a laureate; a mode of satire, by which, since it was first introduced by Suckling, perhaps, every generation of ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... 1618 Scotland received a visit from the famous Ben Jonson. The burly Laureate walked all the way, among the motives for a journey then undertaken by few Englishmen, might be curiosity regarding a country from which he knew that his family was derived, his grandfather having been one of the Johnsons of Annandale. He had many friends too, particularly among the connections ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... hymn, my lord of Surrey?" he cried with a laugh, as the other hastily thrust the tablets, which he had hitherto held in his hand, into his bosom. "You will rival Master Skelton, the poet laureate, and your friend Sir Thomas Wyat, too, ere long. But will it please your lord-ship to quit for a moment the society of the celestial Nine, and descend to earth, while I inform you that, acting as your representative, ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... women." A wicked light snapped into his eyes. "Hear, dear lady, the Bard of the Congaree, the Poet Laureate of South Carolina, Coogle for your benefit," hissed The Author, and ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... places where those learned fathers once flourished, and see with your own eyes the evils their dissolution has caused; when you hear the inhabitants telling you how good, how clever, how charitable they were; what will you think of our poet laureate for calling them, in his History of Brazil, "Missioners whose zeal the most fanatical was ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... To write this—"by particular desire." Wet towels! Midnight oil! Here! Everything That can induce the singing bard to sing. Shake me, Ye Nine! I'm resolute, I'm bold! Come, Inspiration, lend thy furious hold! MORRIS on Pegasus! Plank money down! I'll back myself to win the Laureate's Crown! ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... measure, foot, numbers, strain, rhythm; accentuation &c. (voice) 580; dactyl, spondee, trochee, anapest &c.; hexameter, pentameter; Alexandrine; anacrusis[obs3], antispast[obs3], blank verse, ictus. elegiacs &c. adj.; elegiac verse, elegaic meter, elegaic poetry. poet, poet laureate; laureate; bard, lyrist[obs3], scald, skald[obs3], troubadour, trouvere[Fr]; minstrel; minnesinger, meistersinger[Ger]; improvisatore[obs3]; versifier, sonneteer; rhymer, rhymist[obs3], rhymester; ballad monger, runer[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... known Shakespeare is the fact, of which we have ample proof, that Strachey was well known to the men of letters of the day. To begin with, he was a friend of Ben Jonson and wrote a set of commendatory verses for the Laureate's "Sejanus." These appear in the folio edition of Jonson's works. Probably this sonnet—it has fourteen lines—is one of the most cryptic things in the whole of Elizabethan literature. No member of our family or any other family has ever been able to construe it. Yet ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... quality of Professor Phelps's voice. As a pulpit orator he was one of the few, and to hear him read in his own study was an absorbing experience. To this day I cannot put myself outside of certain pages of the laureate or the essayist. I do not read; I listen. The ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... an art of lies, but of true doctrine; not of effeminateness, but of notable stirring of courage; not of abusing man's wit, but of strengthening man's wit; not banished, but honoured by Plato; let us rather plant more laurels for to ingarland the poets' heads (which honour of being laureate, as besides them only triumphant captains were, is a sufficient authority to show the price they ought to be held in) than suffer the ill-favoured breath of such wrong speakers once to blow upon the clear springs ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... looked at the two rows of English people who were sitting at the table; at the row of white bottles of water and red bottles of wine that ran between the English people; at the portraits of the late Queen and the late Poet Laureate that hung behind the English people, heavily framed; at the notice of the English church (Rev. Cuthbert Eager, M. A. Oxon.), that was the only other decoration of the wall. "Charlotte, don't you ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... rewarding favourites of the crown. In the roll which contains this grant it is said to be conferred upon our beloved esquire." By way of comment on the grant of a pitcher of wine daily, he writes: [Footnote: 4 idem, p. 63.] "Though never graced with the title of poet laureate, Chaucer obtained at this same period what came to be one of the most distinguishing perquisites which attached itself to that office in later times." With regard to the offices: [Footnote: 5 idem, p. 66.] "Chaucer was constantly employed in civil offices at home and ...
— Chaucer's Official Life • James Root Hulbert
... lese-majeste, a local laureate described the incident in stirring verse. An extract from this effort, translated by Professor J. G. Legge, in his Rhyme and Revolution in Germany, ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... the pangs of Purgatory, the Requiem, the Miserere, the De Profundis—these are the golden stairs upon which the soul of the redeemed ascends into everlasting joy. Even the Protestant laureate of England has confessed the poetical justice and truth of this, and into the mouth of the dying Arthur—that worthy ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... nought / experte in this scyence Compyle suche bokes / to deuoyde ydlenes Besechynge the reders / with all my delygence Where as I offende / for to correct doubtles Submyttynge me to theyr grete gentylnes As none hystoryagraffe / nor poete laureate But gladly wolde folowe / ...
— The coforte of louers - The Comfort of Lovers • Stephen Hawes
... despite the disinterment of their great relative, accepted the Restoration gladly and lived to chuckle over the Revolution. The forgetfulness, no less than the vindictiveness, of men is often surprising. Marvell, who played the part of Laureate during the Protectorate, produced two songs for the conventionally joyful occasion. The second of the two is decidedly pretty ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... come after us will be more impressed than we are by the Laureate's versatility. He has touched so many strings, from "Will Waterproof's Monologue," so far above Praed, to the agony of "Rizpah," the invincible energy of "Ulysses," the languor and the fairy music of the "Lotus Eaters," the grace as of a Greek epigram which inspires the lines ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... Its half-dozen beds were so many cantos. Nature crowded them for him with imagery such as no Laureate could copy in the cold mosaic of language. The rhythm of alternating dawn and sunset, the strophe and antistrophe still perceptible through all the sudden shifts of our dithyrambic seasons and echoed in corresponding floral harmonies, made melody in the soul of Abel, the plain serving-man. ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... only read a few of his lines and they were not poetic. The office of Poet Laureate should be abolished. Men cannot write poems to order as they could deliver cabbages or beer. By poems I do not mean jingles of words. I mean great ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the antiquary, that these verses are intended to imitate the antique poetry of the Scalds—the minstrels of the old Scandinavians—the race, as the Laureate so ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... decanted off from their historic antecedents and their costume of circumstance into the every-day aspect of the gentleman of common cultivated society. That is Sir Coeur de Lion Plantagenet in the mutton-chop whiskers and the plain gray suit; there is the Laureate in a frockcoat like your own, and the leader of the House of Commons in a necktie you do not envy. That is the kind of thing you want to take the nonsense out of you. If you are not decanted off from yourself every few days or weeks, you will think it ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the poet laureate, composed a serious and elaborate epithalamium of 340 lines; besides some gay Fescennines, which were sung, in a more licentious tone, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... Hamilton were the only two men who counted in that city.] had had a two-hours interview with Randolph Churchill on Home Rule. I also informed Mr. Gladstone that O'Shea had shown me a letter from Alfred Austin,' (afterwards Poet Laureate) 'a hot Tory leader-writer on the Standard, asking to be introduced to Parnell for the benefit of the country. Lefevre having gone away, Chamberlain and I talked with Mr. Gladstone as to organization. It was decided that we should have an interview ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... forget, the theme is a forbidden one; and I see, Constance, you do not like my poet, and I have a mind not to admire yours! Ah! poor Lovelace! he might have been my laureate." ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... another reason why Tate was preferred to Congreve. Dorset was too practised a courtier not to study the tastes of his master to good purpose. A liking for the stage, or a lively sense of poetic excellence, was not among the preferences of King William. The Laureate was sub-purveyor of amusement for the court; but there was no longer a court to amuse, and the King himself never once in his reign entered a theatre. The piety of Queen Mary rendered her a rare attendant at the play-house. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... gloomy character, it is evident that his habits and life contributed to render him cheerful and happy." At last that awful chasm, the terrors, grandeurs, and moral lessons of which he had so powerfully sung, opened its jaws to receive him, and the Grave crowned its laureate with its cold and earthy crown. He was seized with fever, caught probably in the exercise of his pastoral functions, and expired on the 4th of February 1746, at the early age of forty-seven, when his body and mind ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... Britain and Ireland." It is ingeniously recommended in a certificate by Sir Richard Steele, or the Tattler, under the fictitious name of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., and in a poem of forty-three lines, by Nahum Tate, poet laureate to her Majesty. It is a duodecimo volume of three hundred pages; a work of no inconsiderable merit and originality; and written in a style which, though not faultless, has scarcely been surpassed by any English grammarian since. I quote it as Brightland's:[78] who were the real authors, does ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... permanently at Greta Hall, near Keswick, Cumberland, in the "Lake Country," where he enjoyed the friendship and society of Wordsworth and Coleridge, other poets of the "Lake School." He was appointed poet laureate in 1813, and received a pension of 300 Pounds a year from the government in 1835. Mr. Southey was a voluminous writer in both prose and verse. As a poet, he can not be placed in the first rank, although some ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... had attended on the prince during his last illness. I was supping with Veraci, the poet-laureate, on the eve of the prince's death, and in the course ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... extreme to another, out-Paining Paine, out- Castlereaghing Castlereagh, Pantisocratists, Ultra-Tories, heretics, persecutors, breaking the old laws against sedition, calling for new and sharper laws against sedition, writing democratic dramas, writing Laureate odes panegyrising Marten, panegyrising Laud, consistent in nothing but an intolerance which in any person would be censurable, but which is altogether unpardonable in men who, by their own confession, have had such ample experience of their own ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... where the poet Chatterton received his education. His memorial is in the churchyard of St Mary, and in the church a chest contains the records among which he claimed to have discovered some of the manuscripts which were in reality his own. A house in Wine Street was the birthplace of the poet-laureate Robert Southey (1744). ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... their notes: 450 As if all day, precluding to the fight, They only had rehearsed, to sing by night. The banquet ended, and the battle done, They danced by star-light and the friendly moon: And when they were to part, the laureate queen Supplied with steeds the lady of the green, Her and her train conducting on the way, The moon to ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... headed by Professor Wilson, declared he was Burns's rival as a song-writer, and his superior in anything relating to external nature! indeed they wrote of him as unsurpassed by poet or painter in his fairy tales of ancient time, dubbing him Poet Laureate to the Queen of Elfland; and yet his unrefined manner tempted these friends to speak of him familiarly as the greatest hog in all Apollo's herd, or the Boar ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... the fact that we place small premium in either honor or money on the business of teaching. As, in the olden times, barbers and scullions ranked with musicians, and the Master of the Hounds wore a bigger medal than the Poet Laureate, so do we pay our teachers the same as coachmen and coal-heavers, giving them a plentiful ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... now, as he did in 1883 and 1884, the employment of women and children, lest he show how much worse their condition has become during the intervening years, and thereby forfeit forever his position of laureate to the powers ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... the poet laureate of England, was born at Sornersby, Lincolnshire, April 9, 1810, and was the third of a large family of children, eight of whom were boys and three girls. His father was a clergyman, a man of remarkably fine abilities; his mother, as should be the mother ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... Louis Frechette, Poet Laureate, has as a French-Canadian, kindly written an "Introductory" in his own graceful language, and I have to thank him above all for his recognition of the spirit which has actuated me in ...
— The Habitant and Other French-Canadian Poems • William Henry Drummond
... from universities, translators and index makers in ragged coats of frieze. The great press was to get near the chair where John Dryden sate. In winter that chair was always in the warmest nook by the fire; in summer it stood in the balcony. To bow to the Laureate, and to hear his opinion of Racine's last tragedy, or of Bossu's treatise on epic poetry, was thought a privilege. A pinch from his snuff-box was an honour sufficient to turn the head of ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... considerable wealth by buying up quantities of the depreciated continental currency, which was ultimately redeemed by the Federal government at par. He assumed the title of Lord Dexter and built extraordinary houses at Newburyport, Mass., and Chester, New Hampshire. He maintained a poet laureate and collected inferior pictures, besides erecting in one of his gardens some forty colossal statues carved in wood to represent famous men. A statue of himself was included in the collection, and had for an inscription "I am the first in the East, the first in the West, and the greatest philosopher ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... manners, and make them less of wild beasts. Some have thought it omnipotent for this; others have given it as a sign of the decline and fall of the nobler part of us. Neither is, and both are true. Art does, as our Laureate says, make nobler in us what is higher than the senses through which it passes; but it can only make nobler what is already noble; it cannot regenerate, neither can it of itself debase and emasculate and bedevil ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... [5814]Duxi uxorem, quam ibi miseriam vidi, nati filii, alia cura. All gifts and invitations cease, no friend will esteem thee, and thou shalt be compelled to lament thy misery, and make thy moan with [5815]Bartholomeus Scheraeus, that famous poet laureate, and professor of Hebrew in Wittenberg: I had finished this work long since, but that inter alia dura et tristia quae misero mihi pene tergum fregerunt, (I use his own words) amongst many miseries which almost broke my back, [Greek: syzygia] ob Xantipismum, a shrew ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... can be traced in this period. John Alexander Brassicanus, poet laureate, came from Tubingen in September 1520 and saw Erasmus at Antwerp; whence in reply to a letter of self-introduction he bore away a complimentary letter that he afterwards printed, and the sound piece of advice, that if he ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... to bed when he comes in from a dinner-party at eleven o'clock. Colds, Brighton, praise from Sainte-Beuve, critical attacks in the English papers, and (not quite unprovoked) from F.W. Newman, reflections on the Age of Wisdom (forty), and a meeting with Thackeray, the Laureate of that age, diversify the history agreeably. Then we come to a dead, and now rather more than dull, controversy over the Revised Code, of which we need not say much. Official etiquette on such matters, especially in England, is very loose, though he himself seems ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... people remember a Nottinghamshire poet of an earlier day who fulfilled with much conscientiousness the duties of local laureate. It was the age of Notts's pre-eminence in cricket, and that, with other reasons, inspired the bard to write some verses which opened with the line, "Is there a county to compare with Notts?" The county of Derby was jealous of its neighbour in ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... among the tears of the lord chief justice, the poet laureate (who had been awfully frightened when he heard of the rattlesnakes), the maids of honour, the chaplain royal, and everyone but Colonel McDougal, a Scottish soldier of fortune, who maintained a ...
— Prince Prigio - From "His Own Fairy Book" • Andrew Lang
... with a smile of pleased surprise. "Thanks, cousin; it is you who should be the laureate of the garden. ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... old warship, and it gave Holmes a hold on public attention which he never afterward lost. During the next twenty-five years he wrote poetry, and was so much in demand to furnish verses for special occasions that he was a kind of poet-laureate of his college and city. He was almost fifty when the Atlantic Monthly was projected and Lowell demanded, as a condition of his editorship, that Holmes be engaged as the first contributor. Feeling in the mood for talk, as he commonly did, Holmes responded with The Autocrat. Thereafter ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long |
