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Peroration   Listen
noun
Peroration  n.  (Rhet.) The concluding part of an oration; especially, a final summing up and enforcement of an argument.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Peroration" Quotes from Famous Books



... loved so well. He told of his recent trip to his boyhood home, and how he had stood with John Briggs on Holliday's Hill and they had pointed out the haunts of their youth. Then at the end he paid a tribute to the companion of his home, who could not be there to share his evening's triumph. This peroration—a beautiful heart-offering to her and to those that had ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... Judge, never you mind what the stars do in their divorces! Get down to earth of the present day. Rufus Choate and Daniel Webster are dead. You must be modern. You must let peroration and poetry alone! Come along now. Why shouldn't I give ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell

... etchings the life stories of the heroes of Faith who in their day held their generation steady and pointed the way to duty and victory. As he read his face became alight, his dark eyes glowed, his voice thrilled under the noble passion of the words he read. Then he came to this stately peroration: ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor

... We are blown against forever by the curse Which breathes through Nature. Oh, the world is weak; The effluence of each is false to all; Add what we best conceive, we fail to speak! Wait, soul, until thine ashen garments fall, And then resume thy broken strains, and seek Fit peroration ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... single speech in Great Britain, but it was delivered piecemeal in different places. Its exordium was uttered on the ninth of October at Manchester, and its peroration was pronounced on the twentieth of the same month in Exeter Hall. He has himself furnished us an analysis of the train of representations and arguments of which this protracted and many-jointed oration was made up. At Manchester ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various

... those of the first movements of Brahms's First Symphony and of Tchaikowsky's Fifth. It also became customary to prolong the end of the movement by what is termed a Coda; the same tendency being operative that is found in the peroration to a speech or in the spire of a cathedral, i.e., the human instinct to end whatever we attempt as impressively and completely as possible. This Coda, which, in Haydn and Mozart, was often a mere iteration of trite chords—a ceasing to go—was so expanded by Beethoven ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... local "councilman" for the Round Hill Scouts, he brought his guest to a camp-fire meeting to talk to them. In deference to his audience, Gould told them of the boy scouts he had seen in Belgium and of the part they were playing in the great war. It was his peroration that made trouble. ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis

... wondered how it was that the people did not perceive a discrepancy between Father Murphy's appearance and the theories he propounded. "The idealism of the Irish people," said the priest, "was inveterate," and he settled himself on his short legs and began his peroration. ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore

... wood; and, as Lord Shaftesbury had expressed his obligations to him on the subject, he did not doubt that if the matter came before the House of Lords, he would bestow the degree of attention on it which his lordship bestowed on all matters of importance. Working himself us as he drew near his peroration, he broke out into a blaze of eloquence which put the Lord Mayor into some fear on account of the Thames, of which he is official conservator. "The thing cannot last!" he exclaimed; "and if you don't, in less than two years from this time, say I am a true prophet, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... and he pauses to deplore that "not all who are zealous in this cause are as conspicuous for purity of morals as for ability." He cannot reconcile himself to the idea of an immoral patriot, and begs that they will at least hide their vices. The old man finds his peroration in Simeon's prayer. He had seen the great salvation. "I have lived to see thirty millions of people indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice, their king ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford

... passionate conviction. His "manner" in the pulpit was, it is true, far from graceful. His principal gesture was a jerking of the right arm towards the left shoulder, accompanied sometimes by a bending forward of the upper part of the body; and when he came to his peroration, which he usually delivered with his eyes closed and in lowered tones, he would clasp his hands and move them up and down in front of him. But all these things seemed to fit in naturally to his style of oratory; there was not the faintest trace of affectation in any ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns

... a little after twelve, ate his dinner, and fell to work on his manuscript. By half-past three he had finished all but the peroration. Gilbart prided himself on his perorations; and knowing from experience that it helped him to ideas and phrases he caught up his hat and went ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... religious, they say, and charitable, but his early education unfortunately was neglected. His sermons never hang well together; he frequently omits the exordium, and often winds them up without the peroration at all. Then he mispronounces shockingly, and is full of false quantities. It was only on last Sunday that he laid the accent on i in Dalilah. Such a man's sermons, I am sorry to say, can do any educated man little good. Her's a ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... and monsters, with so savage a virility that Jacob Kent was paralyzed. He shrank back, his arms lifted as though to ward off physical violence. So utterly unnerved was he that the other paused in the mid-swing of a gorgeous peroration and burst ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London

... Plancus, who did not venture to put himself in competition with him. This bringing him into notice, he collected an audience of his own, and it was his custom to open the question proposed for debate, sitting; but as he warmed with the subject, he stood up, and made his peroration in that posture. His declamations were of different kinds; sometimes brilliant and polished, at others, that they might not be thought to savour too much of the schools, he curtailed them of all ornament, and used only familiar phrases. He also pleaded causes, but rarely, being employed in such ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... he goes on to deduce the startling corollary that all oaths of allegiance must be incontinently broken. If it was sin thus to have sworn even in ignorance, it were obstinate sin to continue to respect them after fuller knowledge. Then comes the peroration, in which he cries aloud against the cruelties of that cursed Jezebel of England—that horrible monster Jezebel of England; and after having predicted sudden destruction to her rule and to the rule of all crowned women, and warned all men that if they presume ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... in the doorway, well knowing the philippics that were coming. But he was not prepared for the peroration of Jackson's address to him; which consisted of the two bullock hearts, snatched bodily off the dish, and flung at his head, by way of a recapitulation of the preceding arguments. The company then broke up in ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... most eagerly welcomed, such, for example, as the learned Serjeant's final allusion to Pickwick's coming before the court that day with "his heartless tomato-sauce and warming-pans," and the sonorous close of the impassioned peroration with the plaintiff's appeal to "an enlightened, a high-minded, a right-feeling, a conscientious, a dispassionate, a sympathising, a contemplative jury of her civilised countrymen." It was after this, however, that the ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... mundo entiero"—reached even the packed steps of the cathedral with a feeble clear ring, thin as the buzzing of a mosquito. But the orator struck his breast; he seemed to prance between his two supporters. It was the supreme effort of his peroration. Then the two smaller figures disappeared from the public gaze and the enormous Gamacho, left alone, advanced, raising his hat high above his head. Then he covered himself proudly and yelled out, "Ciudadanos!" A dull roar greeted Senor Gamacho, ex-pedlar ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... apron around his neck as a concession to the popular prejudice against "the altogether." The gravity of the missionary circle was so thoroughly demoralized that it was impossible to restore order; and Miss Bascom, in the excess of her mortification, stuffed the rest of her manuscript, its eloquent peroration ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott

... Jorian wrote, 'My best wishes to you. Be careful of your heads. The habit of the Anglo-Saxon is to conclude his burlesques with a play of cudgels. It is his notion of freedom, and at once the exordium and peroration of his eloquence. Spare me the Sussex ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... and a half were passed. The peroration was upon the speaker's tongue, closing with an exhortation to old men and old women, young men and maidens, each in his kind and degree, to come as the waves come when navies are stranded—to come as the ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis

... was the breath of the worthy, if pompous, physician's nostrils, and Bowers had shrewdly judged that to offer him the chairmanship would clinch his wavering allegiance. The crowd which always relished his grandiloquence, voted him into office with a shout, and cheered his soaring periods to their peroration. A quartet of young voters now proceeded in catchy doggerel to laud the virtues of the party and the commanding genius of its candidates, thereby giving the blown doctor a much-needed respite. He came up in ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther

... fewer indications of conciliation and equity than were to be discovered when we entered into our last at Paris. Any of the slightest pretences, any of the most loose, formal, equivocating expressions, would justify us, under the peroration of this piece, in again sending the last or some other Lord ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... heroism over the ramparts of tongue-tied shyness. That was what he had essayed this morning, aided and abetted by the tuneful fragrance of June in Virginia. The stage had been set—his courage had mounted—and before he had reached his magnificent peroration, she had laughed at him. Ye Gods! She had affronted the erstwhile Confederate States of America ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... Anastasia, all is finished! No more hope! There is no longer any justice in France! I am atrociously sacrificed!" and by way of peroration, Pipelet threw, with all his strength, the portrait and sign to the end of the alley. Rudolph and Rigolette had, in the obscurity, slightly smiled at Pipelet's despair. After having addressed some words of consolation to Alfred, whom Anastasia was calming ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue

... Pixie calmly. Esmeralda had paused just long enough to draw that short eloquent breath which adds so largely to the eloquence of a peroration, and was preparing to roll out a tragic "despair," when that tiresome child must needs interfere and spoil everything by her suggestion. Esmeralda's anger was quickly roused, but fortunately even quicker still was her sense of humour. For a moment ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... sermon of Bishop Horsley once produced an effect which would hardly be possible except under circumstances of great public excitement. When he preached in Westminster Abbey, before the House of Lords, on January 30, 1793, the whole assembly, stirred by his peroration, rose with one impulse, and remained ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... the preacher and the ploughman be likened together: first, for their labour at all seasons of the year; for there is no time of the year in which the ploughman hath not some special work to do." He says that Satan "is ever busy in following his plough;" and he winds up his peroration by the somewhat startling words, "the devil shall go for my money, for he applieth to his business. Therefore, ye unpreaching prelates, learn of the devil: to be diligent in doing your office learn of the devil: and if you will not learn of God, nor ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... pointed to what remained of his nose, the end of which had been nipped off by cold, and consequent mortification, in the anti-arctic regions. As Riprapton flourished his wooden index, in the midst of his brilliant peroration, he told the honest seaman that he had not a leg to stand upon; and all the ladies, and some of the gentlemen, too, cried out with one accord, "O fie, Captain Headman, now don't be so obstinate—surely you are quite mistaken." And the arch-master of impudence looked round with modest suavity, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... The peroration of "Le Tigre" is worthy of the great Roman orator himself. The circumstance that, on account of the limited number of copies of M. Read's edition, the "Tigre" must necessarily be accessible to very few readers, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird

... that the colony had never given up its right to be governed by its own laws respecting taxation, and that it had been constantly recognized by England; and that any attempt to vest such power in other persons tended to destroy British as well as American freedom. In a passionate peroration he warned George III. to remember the fate of other tyrants who had trampled on popular liberties. Otis in Massachusetts suggested the novel idea of summoning a congress from all the colonies to deliberate on the situation. In ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne

... convince her of the immensity of my passion, 'twas without the twitch of an eyelash she endured the volley of my sighs and the fusillade of my respectful protestations; and candor compels me to admit that toward the end her silvery laughter disrupted the periods of a most elegant and sensible peroration. And when the affair was concluded, and for the seventh time I had implored her to make me the happiest of men, the rogue merely observed: "But I don't want to marry you. ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... rightly served for not having publicly availed himself of his bishop's dispensation (renewed peals of merriment). By this foolish delicacy (more of that detestable horse-laughter), he had got himself into a false position; and so on, till the ad misericordiam peroration addressed to 'Captain Devereux, dear,' and 'Toole, my honey.' Well, they quizzed him unmercifully; they sat down and eat all that was left of the hare-pie, under his wistful ogle. They made him narrate minutely every circumstance connected with the smuggling of the ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... of no good reason for staying away. To her inward surprise she soon found her attention absorbed by the debate going on in the Senate, and when one of the distinguished lawmakers commenced a characteristic speech she became unconscious of the flight of time. As the Senator ended his fiery peroration, she raised her head and, glancing toward the Diplomats' Gallery, recognized Captain Charles Miller sitting in the ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln

... tranquil happiness by the government of party, and the mode in which they diffused such happiness throughout the community by preferring, for the exercise of power and the acquisition of honours, the lowliest citizens in point of property, education, and character. Fortunately recollecting the peroration of a speech, on the purifying influences of American democracy and their destined spread over the world, made by a certain eloquent senator (for whose vote in the Senate a Railway Company, to which my two brothers belonged, had just ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... lecture came to an end—I am inclined to think that it was a premature one, as the peroration was hurried and disconnected. The thread of the argument had been rudely broken, and the audience was restless and expectant. Waldron sat down, and, after a chirrup from the chairman, Professor Challenger rose and advanced to the edge of the platform. In the interests of my paper I took ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle

... minutes. At the quarter of an hour mark he was looking at me like a lost dog that's just found its owner. By the half-hour he was making little bleating noises and massaging my coat-sleeve. And when, after perhaps an hour and a half, I came to my peroration and suggested a rise, he choked back a sob, gave me double what I had asked, and invited me to dine at his club next Tuesday. I'm a little sorry now I cut the thing so short. A few minutes more, and I fancy he would have given me his sock-suspenders ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse

... traitor," saying "that no subject should speak so audaciously to his prince:" he "commended" Henry's intended marriage, "thereby to establish his seed in his seat for ever;" and having won, as he supposed, his facile victory, he proceeded with his peroration, addressing his absent antagonist. "I speak to thee, Peto," he exclaimed, "to thee, Peto, which makest thyself Micaiah, that thou mayest speak evil of kings; but now art not to be found, being fled for fear and shame, as unable to answer my argument." In the royal chapel at Greenwich there ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... touching peroration Mr. Ames closed his remarkable speech, and sat down. For a brief moment there was perfect silence in the house. "Judge Iredell and I happened to sit together," wrote Vice-President Adams, describing the scene. "Our ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing

... implacable foe it was indeed a case of "Roses, roses, all the way. Thus I enter, and thus I go." Twenty-four hours after that peroration he awaited his doom, an object of ruthless execration. And visitors are still occasionally shown in the Hotel des Archives the table on which was endured ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... distinctly as if he had transfixed him with an arrow, while the slowly pronounced syllables, voiced in a sliding, descending key, gave the title a cartoon effect. Referring to the parallel in Curtis's peroration, he laid his hand on his heart, bowed toward his antagonist with mock reverence, and distorted his face with an expression of ludicrous scorn. In repelling the innuendo as to his "personal integrity," the suppressed anger and slowly spoken ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... brilliant peroration the Prime Minister warned his hearers that a nation was known by its soul and not by its asses."—South ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various

... a trance paper—I did not know there were such things—dictated to Mrs. Cora Tappan by invisible guides, and was read by Miss—I mean by the fair incognita above-mentioned. Not a manifestation—literally not the ghost of one—only this very glowing peroration:—"But it is in a larger sense of social, mental, political, and even religious renovation, that Spiritualism is destined to work its chief results. The abrogation of the primal terror of mankind, the most ancient spectre in the world of thought, grim and ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... terminus, extremity, limit, bound; close, finale, conclusion, finis, cessation; issue, result, consequence, sequel, conclusion, peroration; purpose, intention, design, aim, goal, object, intent; remnant, fragment; extermination, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... With this peroration, Mr. Bucket, buttoned up, goes quietly out, looking steadily before him as if he were already piercing the night in ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... never reaches his conclusion. While he is still in the midst of his proof, his allotment of time expires, and he is forced to sit down, leaving his speech hanging in the air. Such an experience is both awkward and disastrous; a skillful debater never allows it to happen. The peroration is the most important part of an argument, and on it the debater should lavish his greatest care. To omit it is almost the same as to have made no speech at all. As soon as the debater perceives that he has but a short time left, he should at once bring this main speech to a close, and ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee

... had opened Parliament in person; the Prime Minister took the unusual course of speaking immediately after the seconder of the Address, and in his peroration, after laying stress on the responsibilities he was incurring, proceeded: "I do not desire to be Minister of England; but while I am Minister of England I will hold office by no servile tenure; I will hold office unshackled by ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria

... a lecture he was as punctilious as Portia about the pound of flesh. His utterance was deliberate and spaced with not infrequent slight delays. Exactly at the end of the hour the lecture stopped. Suddenly, abruptly, but quietly, without peroration of any sort, always with "a gentle shock of mild surprise" to the unprepared listener. He had weighed out the full measure to his audience with ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... nature of a joke ever known on this planet, though whether it was the one that made the original Hyena laugh I have not been able to ascertain. It is a joke that has appeared in modified form many times since. Even that illustrious pundit, Senator Chauncey M. DeMagog uses it as his most effective peroration at this season's public banquets. I heard him myself get it off at The Egyptian Society Dinner last month, as well as at the Annual Banquet of The Sons and Daughters of the Pre-Adamite Evolution, the month before, changing the answer, however, to "when it's a jar"—which ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs

... his words; than he recovered and, with his hand still on his side, raised his voice again. But the logical mind of the elderly barrister seemed to detect a lacuna in the reasoning; the speaker had skipped something and flown straight to his peroration. He gave it now in tones firm but slower than before, with a pause here and there, yet in the end summoning his forces to a last flood of impassioned words. Then he sat down, not straight, but falling just a little ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope

... who in his closing days thought that the law of marriage had been drawn up less in the interest of husbands than of children? I also wish it very much. Would you rather desire that this book should serve as proof to the peroration of the Capuchin, who preached before Anne of Austria, and when he saw the queen and her ladies overwhelmed by his triumphant arguments against their frailty, said as he came down from the pulpit of truth, "Now you are all honorable women, ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac

... do?' and on my speaking in high terms, answered, that 'he had been to dine with his friend the Duke, that some conversation had passed on the subject, he was afraid it was not the thing, it was not the true sostenuto style; but as I had written the article' (holding my peroration on the Beggar's Opera carelessly in his hand), 'it might pass!' I could perceive that the rogue licked his lips at it, and had already in imagination 'bought golden opinions of all sorts of people' by this very criticism, and I had the satisfaction the ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... now passed since Charles had breathed a prayer. There was something in everything around her that softened her heart; she buried her face in her hands and wept. An eloquent panegyric was preached by a Dominican Father. The peroration was an appeal to the assembled thousands to kneel and implore the blessing of the saint on the city and on themselves. Few sent a more fervent appeal than the poor, sinful girls who shunned the gaze of the crowd. The prayer of Charles was heard, and God, who works wonders in the ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly

... implored Shirley to come and see things for himself. Shirley came. He arrived at the end of August accompanied both by his own wife and by Warren's. He delivered a patriotic speech, in which he did not stint his praise of what had really been a great and notable achievement. His peroration called forth some genuine enthusiasm. It began with a promise to raise the pay of the Massachusetts contingent by fifteen shillings a month, and ended with free rum all round and three cheers for the king. The prospect thereupon brightened a little. The mutineers kept quiet for several days, and ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood

... Pee-eye-em. Here a great council was held, and the proposed attempt at negotiations for peace with their ancient enemies fully discussed. While they were thus engaged, and just as Pee-eye-em had, in the energy of an enthusiastic peroration burst the blue surtout almost up to the collar, a distant rushing sound was heard, which caused every man to spring to his feet, run out of the tent, and seize ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne

... is a Godlike patience in Nature,-in her mists, her trees, her mountains—as if she had a more abiding faith and a clearer vision than man of the resurrection and immortality! There comes to memory an old yellow-papered composition of school-boy days whose peroration closed with "Poor Thoreau; he communed with nature for forty odd years, and then died." "The forty odd years,"—we'll still grant that part, but he is over a hundred now, and maybe, Mr. Lowell, he is more lovable, kindlier, and more radiant with human sympathy ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... to this eloquent address, with its touching peroration. My mother hung down her pretty head and looked ashamed. My uncle retreated quite into the corner and drew the dumb-waiter after him, so as to establish a complete fortification. Mr. Squills seized the pen that Roland had thrown down, and began mending ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... taken out of bed and wrapped up carefully, I was carried up the hill to hear them. All the speeches were fine; but, just at the close, Curtis burst into a peroration which, in my weak physical condition, utterly unmanned me. He compared the new university to a newly launched ship—"all its sails set, its rigging full and complete from stem to stern, its crew embarked, its passengers on board; and,'' he added, "even ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... Count Lacy with his Austrians is waiting an opportunity to give battle to our king. Thus, as I said, I can safely exhort the good citizens of Berlin to defend themselves heroically against the infamous spoiler. How beautifully this peroration sounds: 'People of Berlin! rather let yourselves be buried under the ruins of your burning city than submit to an incendiary enemy!'—Incendiary," repeated he thoughtfully, "that is rather a strong expression, and ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach

... and cast about in his mind how he might retort upon Spencer. I do not know that my conjecture is right; but it has always seemed to me that his reason for introducing his repartee to Spencer in the odd place where he did, just after a most eloquent and pathetic peroration, was something as follows—'I have now constructed and arranged my argument, and the thread of it must not be broken by the intervention of any such extraneous matter. Neither will it do to separate my peroration from the main body of my argument. I must, then, give up the opportunity of retorting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various

... own "Memoirs." Before he had concluded his speech, it became obvious that the Jury had arrived at the conclusion to which he wished to lead them; but he went on to drive the conclusion home by a splendid peroration. [Footnote: Given in Sir Theodore Martin's "Life of Lord Lyudhurst," p. 170.] The Jury intimated that they were all agreed; but the Judge, as a matter of precaution, proceeded to charge them on the evidence placed before them; and as soon ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles

... Bullinger, after a lengthy and elaborately learned argument as to the particular day in the week of creation upon which it was most probable that God called the angels into being, says, by way of peroration, "Let us lead a holy and angel-like life in the sight of God's holy angels. Let us watch, lest he that transfigureth and turneth himself into an angel of light under a good show and likeness deceive us."[1] They even went so far, according to Cranmer,[2] as to appear in ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding

... Everett before me. To insert the whole of it would be inconvenient; but I do most unequivocally deny this, as I must, I am afraid, to many of Miss Martineau's assertions. To prove, in this one instance alone, the very contrary to what she states, I will merely quote the peroration of ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... telegrams in orange envelopes. Each sub-editor is bent over his little lot of news. One sorts out the speeches from bundles of flimsy. The middle of Lloyd George's speech has got mixed up with Balfour's peroration. If he left them mixed, would anyone be the less wise? Perhaps the speakers might notice it, and that man from Wiltshire would be sure to write saying he had always supported Mr. Balfour, and heartily welcomed this fresh evidence ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... to be confirmed and ratified by all that took place before his departure. The dinners he had to eat, the speeches he had to make and to listen to, were really terrific! One speech at the Rabelais Club had, it was said, the longest peroration on record. It was this kind of thing: "Where is our friend Irving going? He is not going like Nares to face the perils of the far North. He is not going like A—— to face something else. He is not going to China," etc.—and so on. After about the hundredth "he is not going," Lord Houghton, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various

... of that masterly power over an audience, that deep humanity, with which Mark Twain was endowed. At the banquet presided over by the Lord Mayor of Liverpool, which was the signal of Mark Twain's farewell to the English people, his peroration was as follows: ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... months to come. I've noticed your variations, however, and can see the effort wearies you. But say, Dinksy, tonight is the night and Lenox is the place. After that, if you like, I'll take up the thread of your famous ghost story, and you may refer all inquiries to me." The last word of this peroration was all but lost on stone walls, for the oncoming horde seized Jane and, exactly as she feared, demanded further ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft

... Boscawen in 1835, and Carleton's father became an ardent friend of the slaves. In the Webster meeting-house the boy attended a gathering at which a theological student gave an address, using an illustration in the peroration which made a lasting impression upon the youthful mind. At a country barn-raising, the frame was partly up, but the strength of the raisers was gone. "It won't go, it won't go," was the cry. An old man who was making pins threw down ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis

... understanding; and yet, after the manner of children, they were secreting a seed here and there, to germinate in their dark little minds later on, as in due time Hester discovered. She herself, seated at the harmonium, felt a lift of the heart and mist gathering over her sight at the close of his quiet peroration, and a tear fell as she stretched out her hands over the opening chords of the 'Old Hundredth.' All sang it with a will, and Parson Endicott with an unction he usually reserved ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... Greek models. I use poor illustrations in giving my own experience, but I do assure you that both in courts and Parliament, and even to mobs, I have never made so much play (to use a very modern phrase) as when I was almost translating from the Greek. I composed the peroration of my speech for the Queen, in the Lords, after reading and repeating Demosthenes ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... This peroration was hailed with a boisterous shout of laughter; by degrees the promenaders had been attracted by the exclamations of the two disputants around the arbor under which they were arguing. The discussion had been religiously listened to, and Fouquet himself, scarcely able to suppress ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... syllable—of striking a balance in a top-heavy period by lengthening out a word into a melancholy quaver. Withal, they never cease to hope. Even at last, even when they have exhausted all their ideas, even after the would-be peroration has finally refused to perorate, they remain upon their feet with their mouths open, waiting for some further inspiration, like Chaucer's widow's son in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... on his head—when in a long crescendo fugued fragments of the march theme keep reappearing, interrupted by drum-beats like distant cannonading, Gunsbourg's battalions halt, and there is a solemn benediction of the standards. Then, to the peroration, the soldiers run, not as if eager to get into battle, but as if in ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... carried his thread of luminous speech, without ever losing his audience for an instant. At every point he addressed himself to the smoothing of difficulties, to the propitiation of fears; and when, after the long and masterly handling of detail, he came to his peroration, to the bantering of capitalist terrors, to the vindication of the workman's claim to fix the conditions of his labour, and to the vision lightly and simply touched of the regenerate working home of the future, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... regular heads, called thoy, and usually specify the number they mean to enlarge upon; saying Epu thoygei tamen piavin, "what I am going to say is divided into two heads." Their speeches are not deficient in a suitable exordium, a clear narrative, a well-founded argument, and a pathetic peroration; and usually abound in parables and apologues; which sometimes furnish the main substance ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr

... But his peroration was suddenly cut short by a rush from behind, one man tumbling over another on the road to the forecastle. Dennis himself was thrown against Alister, and his hand came heavily down on the ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... the murderous Syrians?" continued Jasher, with yet fiercer action; "who but Abishai, the brave, the faithful, he who had denounced the viper, and had sought, but in vain, to crush it—it was he who fell at last a victim to its treacherous sting!" Jasher ended his peroration with a hissing sound from between his clinched teeth, and the caldron of human feelings around him began, as it were, to seethe and boil. Fanaticism stops not to weigh evidence, or to listen to reason. Joab could hardly make his voice heard amidst the roar of angry voices ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker

... I. "Good night, dearest; think of—" The slam of the street door in my face spoiled the peroration, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)

... his duty to attend the usual Sabbath service, if he could. He went. The occasion was of unusual solemnity, as a revival was in progress. The minister preached a sermon, well calculated for effect. His peroration was a climax of great beauty. Assuming the attitude of one intently listening, he recited to ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various

... depicted as having cut down the tree to check the deleterious spread of cherry bounce), dazzling them by his erudite allusions and apt quotations (he confessed to Undine that he had sat up half the night over Bartlett), and winding up with a peroration that drew tears from the Grand Army pensioners in the front row and caused the minister's wife to say that many a sermon from that platform had ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton

... rolls up the cloth, emphasizing his phrases by the steps of the process.) One man is like another (fold): one country is like another (fold): one battle is like another. (At the last fold, he slaps the cloth on the table and deftly rolls it up, adding, by way of peroration) Conquer one: conquer all. (He takes the cloth to the sideboard, and puts it ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw

... He pronounced this peroration with an appearance of strong emotion. But even stronger emotions were manifesting themselves on the other side of the table. Dr. Warner had leaned his large body quite across the little figure of ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton

... statement of the "six dangers" to which the country is exposed, an appeal to the Assembly to act more reasonably and competently, and then the following peroration: ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... for public services. We were often surprised at the indifference of the citizens of Paris with regard to their Marshals, whom they seldom knew by name, and did not seem to care for knowing. The peroration of an old lady, who had delivered a long speech to a friend of ours, then a prisoner at Verdun, lamenting the reverses of the French arms, and the miseries of France, was characteristic of the nation: "Mais, ce m'est egal. Je ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison

... musical sweep of a master of platform oratory. When he spoke of war his voice choked; in speaking of peace he paused for an appreciable moment, casting his eyes up as though he could discern the angel of national tranquillity hovering overhead. Although this opening peroration seemed scarcely germane to the occasion, the audience listened in absorbed silence, spell-bound by the magnetism of his delivery. They felt sure that he had a point in reserve to which these splendid and agreeable ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant

... in a drama did not use the same rhetorical art as do the characters of actual life. The poets justly carry over rhetoric when the scene demands it, and have often proved themselves excellent rhetoricians. Quintilian praises the peroration of Priam's speech begging Achilles for the body of Hector,[78] and Cicero gives a rhetorical analysis of the speech of the old man in the Andria of Terence, where the arrangement is especially appropriate to the character of the speaker.[79] Norden, therefore, ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark

... He sat down without peroration, and almost immediately afterwards left the House. The first reading of the bishop's Bill was ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... in the provinces, and it would be difficult for the advocates of Coercion to find a more appropriate or a more characteristic peroration ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... a generation prior to the Civil War, schoolboys had been declaiming the peroration of his greatest speech, his Reply ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... thy sagacity, my brother," the other replied. "His peroration was redolent of the Koran—A wonderful ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... of his, however, was complete without a peroration, and on this evening he surpassed himself. "You," he began, "who buy books without a thought of what you are buying, who are guided in your taste for fiction by the advertisements and buy a novel with as little care as you would buy a pair ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley

... on the one side and subordination on the other, where every concomitant circumstance might tempt the one to overbearing arrogance, while the other could not escape a feeling of humiliation. It was rather—to quote the eloquent peroration of Pitt, when, in the preceding year, he first introduced the subject to the consideration of the House of Commons—"a free and voluntary association of two great countries, joining for their common benefit in ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge

... somewhat lengthy speech after the awkwardness wore off, so long that his audience was nodding and yawning by the time he reached his peroration, in which he abjured Bronson, Bonner and Peterson to study his plan of a new kind of rural school,—in which the work of the school should be correlated with the life of the home and the farm—a school which would ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick

... and the still unanimating repose of public prosperity. The preacher found them all in the French Revolution. This inspires a juvenile warmth through his whole frame. His enthusiasm kindles as he advances; and when he arrives at his peroration, it is in a full blaze. Then viewing, from the Pisgah of his pulpit, the free, moral, happy, flourishing, and glorious state of France, as in a bird-eye landscape of a promised land, he breaks out into the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... the young editor for the surprise and consequent temptation to profanity which in a few years he may experience when he finds that the name of the Deity in his double-leaded editorial is spelled with a little "g," and the peroration of the article is locked up between a death notice and the advertisement of a patent moustache coaxer, which is to follow pure reading matter every day in the week and occupy the top of column ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... and ecclesiastical... he knew about the old pewter communion service imported from England in 1769, she supposed? And it was so important, in a wealthy materialistic age, to set the example of reverting to the old ideals, the family and the homestead, and so on. This peroration usually carried her half-way back across the hall, leaving the girls to return to their ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton

... head, and went on. So did fragments of audience, the latter towards the door, till, almost in solitude, there rolled forth the treasured peroration. This bad, but worse followed, when immediately succeeded an obscure Irishman, whom CHAPLIN vaguely remembers a few years back as a Committee Clerk, or something of that kind. Benches swiftly filled up, and an assembly that vaunts ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various

... postillion; "I treated you to a per—per—peroration some time ago, so that I have contrived to put the cart before the horse, as the Irish orators frequently do in the honourable House, in whose speeches, especially those who have taken lessons in ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... turned and gazed boldly into the carriage of the president. His arm remained extended aloft as if to sustain his peroration. The president was listening, aghast, at this remarkable address of welcome. He was sunk back upon his seat, trembling with rage and dumb surprise, his dark hands tightly gripping the ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry

... whom he pleaded, insisted that the legislature never had refused women anything they asked, declared the suffrage advocates represented only an "insignificant minority,"[98] and closed with the eloquent peroration: "I vote, not because I am intelligent, not because I am moral, but solely and simply because I am a man." Rev. Clarence A. Walworth, Hon. Matthew Hale and J. Newton Fiero were the other speakers. The first individual ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... at the conclusion of his lame peroration, a voice of strange delicacy of intonation proceeding from the figure: "An Englishman, I presume." The accent was a little affected, but the speaker was evidently more English than Persian by training: "Not only English," said ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson

... to this peroration, turning round his ear in a sensible attitude, and advancing his nose to the apples. As Beranger held them out to him, the other boy clutched his shaggy forelock so effectually that the start back did not shake him off, and the next moment Beranger ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... black clerical garb held the next group together. He was in some trouble, owing to a pig-headed and quarrelsome Scotchman in the front rank, who objected to each statement that fell from his lips, thus interfering seriously with the effect of his peroration. If the Irishman had been more convincing, I suppose the crowd would have silenced the scoffer, for these little matters of discipline are always attended to by the audience; but the Scotchman's points were too well taken; he was so trenchant, in fact, at times, that a voice would cry, ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... immortality. T. is very modest and delicate in the manner of intimating his expectations. But the sentiment of these last words is substantially the same with the line of Horace: Exegi monumentum aere perennius. The whole peroration of this Biography is one of singular beauty and moral elevation. Pathetic, yet calm, rich in noble sentiments and animated by the purest and loftiest spirit, it is a fit topstone to that monument, in respect to which T. felt so well founded ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus

... Troubert followed the body of his friend to the grave; at the verge of which he delivered a discourse in which, thanks to his eloquence, the narrow life the old maid had lived was enlarged to monumental proportions. Those present took particular note of the following words in the peroration:— ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac



Words linked to "Peroration" :   conclusion, end, closing, oration, ending



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