"Critic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... conceit is far from me. Nor do I send letters to you under the idea of making you acquainted with what is thoroughly known to you before; but because I am fond of supporting myself by your name, and because also I consider you the most candid critic and judge of those studies which both you and I apply ourselves to in common. I know, therefore, that you will pay careful attention to what I write, as is your wont, and that you will decide on the dispute which took place between your ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... chief of contemporary rationalists, Semler, who so far forgot himself as to declare that Lessing, for what he had done, deserved to be sent to the madhouse. But with all Goetze's orthodox valour, he was no match for the antagonist whom he had excited to activity. The great critic replied with pamphlet after pamphlet, invincible in logic and erudition, sparkling with wit, and irritating in their utter coolness. Such pamphlets had not been seen since Pascal published the "Provincial Letters." Goetze found that ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... he would tell that he had once been pointed out to him in a railway station, therefore he was emboldened to ask his correspondent to ask his Publisher, to get at the Editor of the Times, and recommend him, SAUNDERS, as Musical Critic, or Sub-editor, or Society Reporter. Nor did SAUNDERS neglect Professorships, and vacant Chairs. His testimonials went in for all of them. He was equally ready and qualified to be Professor of Greek, Metaphysics, Etruscan, Chemistry, or the Use of the Globes, while Biblical criticism ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... figures seem as subordinate as those in Corot's landscapes. And yet these human struggles are intensely real, the human drama intensely genuine. Whatever may be thought of the wisdom of presenting the sex problem so frankly, Mr. Allen's sharpest critic must confess that in no other American book is atmosphere so pervasive, so potential, so charged with ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... ground for mitigation of judgment; and the kindliness with which Mr. Darwin speaks of his assailant, Bishop Wilberforce, is so striking an exemplification of his singular gentleness and modesty, that it rather increases one's indignation against the presumption of his critic." ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... sneers that we often hear about Christian 'philanthropists taking tracts to people when they want soup,' and the like, are excessively shallow sneers, and indicate nothing more than this, that the critic has superficially diagnosed the disease, and is wofully wrong about the remedy. God forbid that I should say one word that would seem to depreciate the value of other forms of beneficence, or to cast doubt upon the purity of motives, or even to be lacking in admiration for the enthusiasm that fills ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... fragrance their own.—Oh! that all round the domains of genius should lie thus unhedged, for such cattle to uproot! Oh! that an eagle should be stabbed by a goose-quill! But at best, the greatest reviewers but prey on my leavings. For I am critic and creator; and as critic, in cruelty surpass all critics merely, as a tiger, jackals. For ere Mardi sees aught of mine, I scrutinize it myself, remorseless as a surgeon. I cut right and left; I probe, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... be handed down to posterity as "blinking Sam." It seems that habits of minute attention atoned in some degree for this natural defect. Boswell tells us how Johnson once corrected him as to the precise shape of a mountain; and Mrs. Thrale says that he was a close and exacting critic of ladies' dress, even to the accidental position of a riband. He could even lay down aesthetical canons upon such matters. He reproved her for wearing a dark dress as unsuitable to a "little creature." "What," ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... favourite of the queen, she was, it seems, superior to admonition, and persisted in her misplaced shrieks, till it became evident that she set the audience at defiance: other persons then joined the former in expressing their disapprobation. Instantly the major singled out the leading critic: two grenadiers forced their way to the place where he was seated, and conveyed him to prison for having had the audacity to reprove an actress in favour at court. From such improper exercise of authority, the following verse ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... "the caution exercised by the Court in such cases as these might have given you, in any other judge, a perhaps less indulgent critic than I am.—And do you suppose that M. d'Espard's lawyer will show you any great consideration? Will he not be suspicious of motives which may be perfectly pure and disinterested? Your life will be at his mercy; he will inquire ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... others, mostly names I did not recollect ever having heard before, and she often used the word "decadent," which she pronounced in the French way and which I did not then understand. Now and then she would quote some critic, or some remark heard from a friend or from her father, and once she dwelt on an argument of her oldest brother, who seemed to be well versed in Russian literature and to have clear-cut opinions on literature ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... no blind faith in the conclusions arrived at by the learned critic, we would yet add to the considerations on which he relies another, viz. that it is most improbable that Louis XIV should ever have considered it necessary to take such rigorous measures against the Duc de Beaufort. Truculent and self-confident as he was, he never acted against the royal ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... in heaven. "Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven."—Luke 10:20. The critic will say that this was said of the seventy and not of the twelve. Well, it was said of the seventy, but how could it be less true of the twelve whom he had previously chosen and sent out to preach the kingdom of God, to cast out devils, and to heal the sick? It is likely that ...
— Sanctification • J. W. Byers
... Herman Grimm, a German critic of great influence in his own country, did much to obtain a hearing for Emerson's works in Germany. At first the Germans could not understand the unusual English, the unaccustomed turns of phrase which are ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... fifteen years of his literary life Poe was connected with various newspapers and magazines in Richmond, Philadelphia and New York. He was faithful, punctual, industrious, thorough. N. P. Willis, who for some time employed Poe as critic and sub-editor on the "Evening Mirror," ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... portion, while his companion placed himself on the sofa, beside Mrs. Penniman. Catherine had hitherto not been a harsh critic; she was easy to please—she liked to talk with young men. But Marian's betrothed, this evening, made her feel vaguely fastidious; he sat looking at the fire and rubbing his knees with his hands. As for Catherine, she scarcely even pretended ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... were moments indeed when, if it appeared to lack volume or vehemence, he was ready himself to supply what was deficient." Mr. CARR has in his time played many parts. He made a start at the Bar, but did not get further than the position of a Junior, which suited him admirably. As a critic, he cannot plead in extenuation the dictum of DISRAELI that critics are those who have failed in Literature and Art. He has written several successful plays, was English editor of L'Art, was among the founders of the New Gallery, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 28, 1914 • Various
... literary novelties of the day is a theme of public marvel. The German, in which these volumes are written, is said by competent judges, to be very pure and powerful: and indeed we may rest assured that if the case were otherwise, a critic of such high reputation as MUNDT would never have spoken of SEATSFIELD in such enthusiastic terms. The publisher, we understand, obtained several of the works from the library of Columbia College, through ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... idle mind, Hides for a moment from the eyes of men; Or lightly opened by a critic wind, ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... has fame come to him, his first prophet being the French critic Thore (who wrote as "W. Burger"), and his second Mr. Henri Havard, the author of very pleasant books on Holland from which I shall occasionally quote. Both these enthusiasts wrote before the picture ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... years after Stevenson's death, in 1896, when it was included in the Miscellanies (Edinburgh Edition, Miscellanies, Vol. IV, pp. 131-142). The editor of the Portfolio was the well-known art critic, Philip Gilbert Hamerton (1834-1894), author of the Intellectual Life (1873). Just one year before, Stevenson had had printed in the Portfolio his first contribution to any periodical, Roads. Although The Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places attracted scarcely any attention on its ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this masquing age Maketh Unknowns so many and so shy? What but the critic's page? One hath a cast, he hides from the world's eye; Another hath a wen,—he won't show where; A third has sandy hair, A hunch upon his back, or legs awry, Things for a vile reviewer to espy! Another hath a mangel-wurzel nose,— Finally, this is dimpled, Like a pale crumpet ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... authorized amateur critics deal far too roughly with the half-formed products of the young author, while most unofficial and inexperienced reviewers fairly run mad with promiscuous condemnation. The fancied brilliancy of the critic is always greatest when he censures most, so that the temptations of the tribe are many. We are at best but literary parasites, and need now and then just such a restraining word as our counter-critic gives us. Mr. Fritter's style is here, as usual, highly ornamented with metaphor. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... there can be any uncertainty as to the work being completed. Not to mention his own deep disappointment, Mr. B. would almost consider it a crime if a work possessing so much interest and useful instruction were not given to the world. The author is the only critic of whom Mr. B. is afraid, and after what he has said, he anxiously hopes that this censor of the press will very speedily affix ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... silly pride. Chip after chip must fall from vain desires, And the sharp corners of my discontent Be rounded into symmetry, and lent Great harmony by faith that never tires. Unfinished still, I must toil on and on, Till the pale critic, Death, shall ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... circulation in England. Their republication in America he was powerless to prevent. He therefore revised and abbreviated them, "conscious," as he said himself in a preface, "of a hundred defects which the most careful revision cannot eliminate." He was perhaps then, as he was ever, too severe a critic of his own works. But though these four early books have, added to youthful failings, the youthful merits of freshness, vigour and imagination, their author was undoubtedly right to suppress them. By writing them he learnt, it is true, the technique of his art: but no author wishes—or ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... is the critic in this matter of fielding! and how delightfully simple the bowling looks from that admirably safe vantage-ground, the pavilion! Just as to a man comfortably stationed in the grand-stand at Aintree nothing looks easier than the way ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... Delicate taste depends solely upon the physical construction; and a man who has it not in cookery, must want it in literature. Fried sole and potatoes!! If I had written a volume, whose merit was in elegance, I would not show it to such a man!—but he might be an admirable critic upon 'Cobbett's Register,' or 'Every Man ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... The others submitted to my failure good-naturedly, and made it the subject of many droll, but not unkindly, witicisms. For myself, I could have borne the severest infliction from the pen of the most formidable critic with more fortitude than I bore the cutting up of my ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... read before you turn critic," said Joe, taking up the baskets that had been brought out of the house. He then led the way, quarrelling all the time with Sneak, while Glenn, placing Mary's arm in his, and William imitating the example, ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... critic may smile at the conceit of a fat Hamlet, but I am satisfied that my theory is amply sustained by the text, as well as by the true solution of the alleged knotty points of Shakspeare's mental character, over which the ponderous ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of a purely personal nature, was of an occurrence in 1866, when he was dramatic critic of the Morning Call at the time I was doing a little reporting on the same paper. It happened that a benefit was arranged for some charity. "Nan, the Good-for-Nothing," was to be given by a number of amateurs. The Nan asked me to play Tom, and I had ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... representatives had begun to put brush to canvas. Without going so far back as the famous picture in the British Museum, by an artist of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., the point may perhaps be emphasized by quotation from the words of a leading art-critic, referring to painters of the tenth and eleventh centuries:—"To the Sung artists and poets, mountains were a passion, as to Wordsworth. The landscape art thus founded, and continued by the Japanese in the fifteenth century, must rank as the greatest school of ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... was to deal fully with the capitals of all the countries of Europe, the great seaports, the pleasure resorts, and the "show places." The most acute critic will not be more fully aware how far we have fallen short of our ideal than we are, and no critic can have any idea of the difficulty of making such a book as we hope this will some day be when complete. At all events we have always gone to ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... Writers of the South" has made his name well known as a critic and student of literature, and his labors in behalf of Southern letters entitle ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... to criticism just as any author listens to his friends or his editor. Miss Sullivan, who is an excellent critic, made suggestions at many points in the course of composition and revision. One newspaper suggested that Miss Keller had been led into writing the book and had been influenced to put certain things into it by zealous friends. As a matter of fact, most of the advice she has received and heeded ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... description of the constant efforts to increase it both in ships and men, and his quietly confident prophecy that with this sure shield we might face the future in cheerful serenity, there were little sidethrusts at an imaginary critic. Some people had been silly enough to suggest that the new Board of Admiralty was so content with what had been done by "my right hon. and learned—I beg his pardon—gallant friend" that it had adopted a policy of "rest and be thankful". But there was no justification ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... of conviction but on the pressure of party discipline. Political feeling ran high. The "Caucus" was called into more active operation. Political parties began to invent programmes to capture the groundlings. The conservative party, relinquishing its useful function of critic, revived the old policy of eleemosynary doles, and, in an unlucky moment for its future, has encumbered itself with an advocacy of the policy of protection. For strangely enough the democracy, the bestower of power, though developing ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... as an enlightened statesman, a philosopher, and a philanthropist. He excelled all the great men with whom he was associated, in the variety of his powers; he was a poet even while a boy; a penetrating philosopher, critic, and historian before the age of thirty; a statesman of unrivalled moral wisdom; an orator whose speeches have been read with increasing admiration in every succeeding age; a judge of the fine arts to whose opinions Reynolds submitted; and a writer on various subjects, in which he displayed not ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... to the libraries of the Continent, he happened upon an unpublished document of the seventeenth century by what he modestly called 'a lucky chance.' We know, however, that these happy finds come only to those who have the genius of the literary discoverer, and characteristic of the textual critic is his parting message to us in his delightful description of his new-found treasure given in a magazine article under the prophetic title—'A ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... orchestra to the balcony. Hers was such startling, such radiant fairness! Her musical, fluting voice acted like as a strange enchantment on the astonished audience. From the first moment the public was hers. The critic touched his neighbour's elbow. "Look at Count Albert, ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... stands now—and I'm speaking as a friend, young man, and not as a captious critic—you have set this Italian camp all askew by giving them countenance in the first place. They haven't any regulators in their heads, you see! When you're feeding charity to that kind of ruck you've got to be careful Parker, ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... the germ of responsible government. At first sight a critic might exclaim: "Why, here is democracy pushed to a point unknown even in Great Britain, where Government Departments are wholly independent of Local Councils." That is in a limited sense true, and it is quite arguable ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... Husbands marks a distinct departure in the dramatist's literary progress. As a critic has well observed, it substitutes for situations produced by the mechanism of plot, characters which give rise to situations in accordance with the ordinary operations of human nature. Molire's method—the simple ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... surprising that this philosophy, when compared with that of a critic like Mr. Mill, should stand out in clear and sharp antagonism. Mr. Mill is one of the most distinguished representatives of that school of Materialism which Sir W. Hamilton denounces as virtual Atheism. We do not ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... passed since the broad, sensuous work of Turner, big in conception and big in treatment, was followed by the more exact painters of the English school, many of whom are still at work, notably Leader and Alfred Parsons, both Royal Academicians, and of whom some contemporaneous critic insisted that they had counted the leaves on their elm-trees fringing the polished water of the Thames. They, of course, had only been eclipsed by the broader brushes of more recent time, men like Frank Brangwyn and Colin Hunter, who have yielded to the pressure ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... Her acquaintance with the classics was most extensive and accurate, and by her translations from the Latin her reputation was to a great extent made. Wordsworth and Southey were her intimate friends, and intense admirers of her genius. In a review written by an eminent critic, it was remarked of her that "she was the inheritrix of her father's genius, and almost ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... method of instruction employed by Miss Edgeworth and her followers. In "Garden Amusements" the conversation was interrupted by a note criticising a quotation from Milton as savoring too much of poetic license. Cowper also gained the anonymous critic's disapproval, although it was his point of view and not his style that ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... critics of broad knowledge and experience." But unfortunately almost anybody does it—any one about the office who is willing to give up his evening to go to the theater. To be sure, many metropolitan papers employ skilled critics to write their dramatic copy and run the theatrical news over the critic's name. Some editors of smaller papers have the decency to do the work themselves. But in most cases the work is given to an ordinary reporter—and not infrequently to the greenest reporter on the staff. Worse than that, the work is seldom given to the same reporter ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... earliest periods, may be nothing more than historical superstition, yet it has its historical importance. Supposing it were possible to prove that none of the persons mentioned in the Bible from Adam down to the Apostles ever lived, even the most sceptical critic would still have to admit that the history of a great portion of the human race has been materially affected by the belief in the examples of their alleged lives. Something similar may be said of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... among the second rank of writers, and drew the conclusion that, though indeed the merits of French poetry are many and great, it is not among the pages of Racine that they are to be found. Within a few months of the appearance of Mr. Bailey's book, the distinguished French writer and brilliant critic, M. Lemaitre, published a series of lectures on Racine, in which the highest note of unqualified panegyric sounded uninterruptedly from beginning to end. The contrast is remarkable, and the conflicting criticisms seem to represent, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... Assuming a threatening air, he demanded how I dared to play such monkey tricks. Officially the governor was a hot member and enforced an iron discipline both with wardens and the men, but personally he was not a bad fellow, so I merely laughed and asked him if he was a critic and reviser of petitions; therefore, a local Home Secretary. He saw I was not to be intimidated, and almost begged of me not to do so any more. As he was a pretty good fellow, and I had no wish to cause him any embarrassment, ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... literature. A typical example is the famous melodrama by Dennery entitled The Two Orphans. This play has deservedly held the stage for nearly a century, and bids fair still to be applauded after the youngest critic has died. It is undeniably a very good play. It tells a thrilling story in a series of carefully graded theatric situations. It presents nearly a dozen acting parts which, though scarcely real as characters, are yet drawn with sufficient fidelity to fact to allow the performers to ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... time and attention that prevents the scientific investigator from attaining to a clear conception of what is meant by scientific method. This has something to do with it, but I think we may also maintain that the work of the investigator and that of the critic are somewhat different in kind, and require somewhat different powers of mind. We find a parallel to this elsewhere. Both in literature and in art men may be in the best sense productive, and yet may be poor critics. We are often wofully disappointed when ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... a lounger on the pavement of Pall Mall filled him with a sudden anger. The man was wearing gloves, an article of dress which Trent ignored, and smoking a cigarette, which he loathed. Trent was carelessly dressed in a tweed suit and red tie, his critic wore a silk hat and frock coat, patent-leather boots, and a dark tie of invisible pattern. Yet Trent knew that he was a type of that class which would look upon him as an outsider, and a black sheep, until he had bought his standing. They would ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... critical judgement of the parties who furnished them. You know how that is, yourself, from reading the newspaper notices of your own books. They gratify a body, but they always leave a small pang behind in the shape of a fear that the critic's good words could not safely be depended upon as authority. Yours is the recognized critical Court of Last Resort in this country; from its decision there is no appeal; and so, to have gained this decree of yours before I am forty years ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... seemed necessary, he dug. After he had finished helping every one, Wally said that the turkey looked as if a dog had been at it, and the ham was worse, which remarks Jim meekly accepted as his due. Nor did the inartistic appearance of the turkey prevent the critic from coming ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... an appointment which he had with several wits, (for he was then in town,) one of whom was a noted critic, who, according to him, had more merit than good fortune; for all the little nibblers in wit, whose writings would not stand the test of criticism, made it, he said, a common cause to run him down, as men would ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... burst out emphatically with, "Eh, man, did ye ever see such glorious buttery touches as on these clouds!" His joking friends clubbed him "Director-General of the Fine Arts for Scotland," a title which he complacently accepted. Besides showing off his pictures, Davie was an art critic, and wrote articles for the newspapers and magazines. Unfortunately, however, his attention to pictures prevented him from attending to his shop, and his customers (who were not artists) forsook him, and bought their clothes elsewhere. He ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... sort of religion in literature, believing that no author can justly intrude upon the public without feeling that his writings may be of some benefit to mankind, I beg leave to apologize for this little book. I know, no critic can tell me better than I know myself, how much it falls short of what might have been done by an abler pen. Yet it is something—an index, I should say, to something better. The French in America may sometime find a champion. For my own part, I would that the gentler ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... is one fytte[109] of Harold's pilgrimage: Ye who of him may further seek to know, Shall find some tidings in a future page, If he that rhymeth now may scribble moe. Is this too much? stern Critic! say not so: Patience! and ye shall hear what he beheld In other lands, where he was doomed to go: Lands that contain the monuments of Eld, Ere Greece and Grecian arts by ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... mental certainty, he was not intimate with her as Arnaud had hoped and predicted. It seemed to Linda that he instinctively penetrated her inner doubt and regarded it without sympathy. In this he was her son. Lowrie was a confident and unsympathetic critic of humanity. ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... connected with the doctrine of nature in general. It does not strike to those universal original principles, those simple powers which determine the actual historic laws and make the nature of things itself. This is the criticism, therefore, with which this critic of the learning of the world as he finds it, is ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... sleigh-bells. Good feeling helps society to make liars of most of us,—not absolute liars, but such careless handlers of truth that its sharp corners get terribly rounded. I love truth as chiefest among the virtues; I trust it runs in my blood; but I would never be a critic, because I know I could not always tell it. I might write a criticism of a book that happened to please me; that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... ought to have hired a safe-opening expert or a burglar from Colchester. She had accomplished neither of these downright things. With absolute power, she had done nothing but postpone. She wondered at herself, for up to her father's death she had been a great critic of ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... be argued that the defects of his great qualities, the over-ideality, the haste, the incoherence, and the want of grasp on narrative, are glaringly apparent in these early works. But while this is true, the qualities themselves are absent. A cautious critic will only find food in "Zastrozzi" and "St. Irvyne" for wondering how such flowers and fruits of genius could have lain concealed within a germ apparently so barren. There is even less of the real Shelley discernible in these ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... combine to suggest that, occurring in a corrupt text, they are probably corruptions; and corruptions in lieu of some very common and even prosaic phrases, such as the corrector substitutes for them, and such as no conjectural critic would venture on. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... in order to a man's obtaining these two rights, it is clearly needful that the worth of him should be approximately known; as well as the want of worth, which has, unhappily, been usually the principal subject of study for critic law, careful hitherto only to mark degrees of de-merit, instead of merit;—assigning, indeed, to the Deficiencies (not always, alas! even to these) just estimate, fine, or penalty; but to the Efficiencies, on the other side, which are by much the more interesting, as well as ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... which bordered the large and voluptuous eyelids. She was more than a woman; she was a masterpiece! In that unhoped-for creation there was love enough to enrapture all mankind, and beauties calculated to satisfy the most exacting critic. ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... here, nor is any one of them so indispensable to our object as that close familiarity with the plays, that native strength and justice of perception, and that habit of reading with an eager mind, which make many an unscholarly lover of Shakespeare a far better critic than many ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... Alexander, Prince of Rhodes, which is said to have extended to four thousand lines, and its versification was so finished that he used some of the couplets long afterward for maturer work. His earliest critic was his father, who would sit in judgment on his son's performances, ruthlessly "sending him down" when the Muse proved unusually stubborn, "These be good rhymes," he would ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... of the agreeable and beautiful manners that are the ornament and charm of the well-behaved girl? First we should place gentleness, quietness, and serenity or self-possession. It has been well said by an observing social critic, that the person who has no manners at all has good manners. What is meant by this, and there is a deep truth in it, is that gentle and quiet manners do not attract attention at all. Their greatest charm is their unobtrusiveness, ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... are continually collecting instances, like our friend the French critic of Virgil, of the beauty of finished language, or the origin of unfinished, in the imitation of natural sounds. But such collections give an entirely false idea of the real power of language, unless they are balanced by an opponent list of the words which signally fail of any such imitative ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... of Marie, indeed, only tends to increase the admiration of a dispassionate critic for the ill-requited Leonora; to whom it would appear, after a close analysis of her character, that ample justice has never yet been done; for ambitious as she was, it is certain that this unfortunate woman ever sought the welfare of the Queen, to whom she owed her advancement ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... containing the earliest reference to the compilation of books. It is stated that in the year A.D. 403 "local recorders were appointed for the first time in the various provinces, who noted down statements and communicated the writings of the four quarters." An eminent critic—Mr. W. G. Aston—regards this as an anachronism, since the coming of the Korean scholar, Wani (vide sup.), did not take place until the year 405, which date probably preceded by many years the appointment ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... a critic! Knowing nothing of sunshine except that it warms you, and never having touched paint, you are going to tell about them to a man who spends his life studying them! You look up in the night and the truth you see is that the moon and stars are crossing the ocean. You will tell that to ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... PUNCHINELLO'S critic, always the friend of fair-play, resents the insinuation that Mr. CARL ROSA has been a careless director of Opera. The truth is that Mr. ROSA has not produced the smallest work without ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... a separate form. One day, however, during his last illness, the talk happened to turn on George Eliot's Works, and he mentioned his long-forgotten paper. One of the friends then present—a competent critic and high literary authority—expressed a wish to see it, and his opinion was so favourable that its publication was determined on. The author then proposed to complete his work by taking up 'Middlemarch' and 'Deronda'; and if any trace of failing vigour is discernible ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... youths, remarks an acute critic of modern life (Hellpach, Nervositaet und Kultur, p. 175), are merely actuated by traditional principles, or by shyness, fear of venereal infections, lack of self-confidence, want of money, very seldom by any consideration for a future wife, and that indeed would be a tragi-comic ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... I am getting old now, and I have ceased to attend very much to this cry of "wolf." When one does read any of these productions, what one finds generally, on the face of it, is that the brilliant critic is devoid of even the elements of biological knowledge, and that his brilliancy is like the light given out by the crackling of thorns under a pot of which Solomon speaks. So far as I recollect, Solomon makes use of the image for purposes ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... sealed the fate of the youth recommended and of his mother, who were cut to pieces before the fallen monarch's eyes, while at the same time the rage of the assembly was vented in part upon Hormisdas himself, who was blinded, to make his restoration impossible. But a judicious critic will doubt the likelihood of rebels, committed as were Bindoes and Bostam, consenting to allow such an appeal as is described by Theophylact; and a perusal of the speeches assigned to the occasion will certainly not diminish his scepticism. The probability ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... its comprehensiveness, seem to me to mark the author as a genuine critic of the broader and the ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... undertakes to study the type as it has existed during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Readers of both volumes may note that in this later volume criticism has tended to supplant history. Only in writing of dead authors can the critic feel that any considerable portion of his task is done when he has arranged them in what he thinks their proper categories and their true perspective. In the case of living authors he has regularly to remember that he works with shifting materials, with figures ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... the senate was a piece of oratory worthy the attention of the critic and the senator. In the recital of his "feats of broils and battles," the courage of the soldier was seen in all the charms of gallantry and heroism; but when he came to those ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... instruct her understanding; for by a kind of intuition she could appreciate all that was beautiful and elevated. Her unvitiated and guileless taste had a logic of its own: no schoolman had ever a quicker penetration into truth, no critic ever more readily detected the meretricious and the false. The book that Evelyn could admire was sure to be stamped with the impress of the noble, the lovely, or ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book II • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... little, and think new thought, or let new thought flow into them, from the gentle air of some new place, where nobody has heard of them—a place whose cares, being felt by proxy, almost seem romantic, and where the eyes spare brain and heart with a critic's self-complacence? If any such place yet remains, the happy soul may seek it in ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... are an illiterate whore. He is my lord now; and, though you call him fool, it is well known he is a critic, gentlewoman. You never read a play in all your life; and I gained him by my wit, and ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... critic bold enough to place even the finest of these exquisite productions on the same level as Le Jeune Homme au Gant and L'Homme en Noir of the Louvre, the Ippolito de' Medici, the Bella di Tiziano, the Aretino of the Pitti, ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... PARIS, a novel by Sir W. Scott, after the wreck of his fortune and repeated strokes of paralysis (1831). The critic can afford to be indulgent, and those who read this story must remember that the sun of the great wizard was hastening to its set. The time of the novel is the reign of Rufus. COUNTRY (Father of his). Cicero was so called by the Roman senate (B.C. 106-43). Julius Caesar ...
— 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.
... critic, born in Lichfield, son of preceding; long associated with the book department of the British Museum; an admirer of Shelley, and biographer of Carlyle and Emerson; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... occupied by his work in the life of such a man is not too easy to define. He earned an income by it, but he was not dependent on that income. As poet, critic, writer of essays, he had made himself a certain name—not a great name, but enough to swear by. Whether his fastidiousness could have stood the conditions of literary existence without private means was now and then debated by his friends; it could probably have done so better than was ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... great masters of music as one of the most brilliant metropolitan reviewers. A music critic in the fullest sense. His opinions are distinguished alike for their soundness and the wit with which they are expressed. Irving Weil has reviewed for Evening Journal readers all the great and near great musical events for over fifteen years. He has the ...
— What's in the New York Evening Journal - America's Greatest Evening Newspaper • New York Evening Journal
... of tune, you see, Master Ned." He was evidently looked upon as something of a critic in music. He rather liked to be so considered, and thought it unnecessary to assure them he knew nothing about it. The old piano sounded to him very much like the bottom of two tin pans mildly banged together; but if it had been a much better instrument, it would ...
— Harper's Young People, June 29, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... on the conduct of some of the fables, which he has subjoined to the different plays. In other respects he is not superior to the rest; in some, particularly in illustrating his author from antecedent or contemporary writers, he is inferior to them. A German critic of our own days, Schlegel, has surpassed him even in that ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... acting, where there is no representative material; where, that is, the man is his own material, and there is nothing between. With the actor the style is the man, in another, a more immediate, and a more obvious sense than was ever intended by that saying. Therefore we may allow the critic—and not accuse him of reaction—to speak of the division between art and Nature in the painting of a landscape, but we cannot let him say the same things of acting. Acting has ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... others, who have no old-standing acquaintance with these memorable songs, have somehow got attracted to them by the mere quaintness of their speech and the simplicity of their airs. Master Harry Trelyon was no great critic of music. When Wenna Rosewarne sang that night "She wore a wreath of roses," he fancied he had never listened to anything so pathetic. When she sang "Meet me by moonlight alone," he was delighted with the spirit and half-humorous, half-tender grace of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... growing all the while. This is the real antithesis of tragedy, where things get blacker and blacker and end in hopeless woe. Smiles has not grasped my grand idea, and only shows a bitter struggle followed by a little respite before death. Some feeble critic might say my new idea was not true to nature. I'm sick of this old-fashioned notion of art. Hold a mirror up, indeed! Let's paint a picture of how things ought to be, and hold that up to nature, and perhaps ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had to hide himself under some disguise, a name, 'Elia,' taken literally as a pen name, or some more roundabout borrowing, as of an old fierce critic's, Joseph Ritson's, to heighten and soften the energy of marginal annotations on a pedant scholar. In the letter in which he announces the first essays of Elia, he writes to Barron Field: 'You shall soon have a tissue of truth and fiction, impossible ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... of his lack of even such slender commercial success in letters as was really necessary to a man who liked 'plain living and high thinking.' He fell early in love with a city, with a place—he lost his heart to St. Andrews. Here, at all events, his critic can sympathise with him. His 'dear St. Andrews Bay,' beautiful alike in winter mists and in the crystal days of still winter sunshine; the quiet brown streets brightened by the scarlet gowns; the long limitless sands; the dark blue distant hills, and ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... eyes of the company furtively wandered to the face of the duchess, anxious to know what so powerful a personage and so keen and outspoken a critic thought of the performance. But the serene face of ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... and will probably continue to supply posterity, with a very vast and various body of authentic history. For even the briefest epistle in the ordinary chirography is dangerous. There is scarce any style so compressed that superfluous words may not be detected in it. A severe critic might curtail that famous brevity of Caesar's by two thirds, drawing his pen through the supererogatory veni and vidi. Perhaps, after all, the surest footing of hope is to be found in the rapidly increasing tendency to demand less and less of qualification ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... studies among the Italian poets; musings in a golden granary full to the brim with good things.... We venture to say that no acute and penetrating critic surpasses Mr. Howells in true insight, in polished irony, in effective and yet graceful treatment of his theme, in that light and indescribable touch that lifts you over a whole sea of froth and foam, and fixes your eye, not on the froth and foam, but on the solid objects, the true ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... grease, and the female servants uncivil, impudent, dirty, slow, and provoking. Occasionally they are a little slow, it must be confessed; but I never met with one, male or female, who was uncivil, impudent, or provoking. If I supposed it possible that my voice should ever reach our late critic, whose good sense and good spirit Americans appreciate, and whose name they would be glad to honor if everything English had not become suspicious to us, the possible synonyme of Pharisaism or stupidity, I should recommend ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... alluring road; There gaunt-eyed Want asserts her iron reign, There, as in vengeance of the world's disdain, This half-flesh'd hag midst Wit's bright blossoms stalks, And, breathing winter, withers where she walks; Though there, long outlaw'd, desp'rate with disgrace, Invidious Dulness wields the critic mace, And sworn in hate, exerts his ruffian might Where'er young genius meditates his flight. Erewhile, when WHITE, by this fell fiend oppress'd, Felt Hope's fine fervours languish in his breast, When shrunk with scorn, and trembling to aspire, He dropp'd desponding his ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... Ship-board, etc., how angry one is with the Life, Commentary, etc., which takes up half the first volume. This we don't complain of in George III. because he is not a Classic, and your Athenaeum Critic admits that yours is the best Part of the ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... French, German, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, and with four or five of these languages at least he had an intimate, scholarly acquaintance. His judgment of men and things may not always have been sound, but he was a shrewd observer of contemporary events. "The cleverest critic of the life of his time" is the verdict of Mr. Reginald Poole. {3} He changed his opinions often: he was never ashamed of being inconsistent. In early life he was, perhaps naturally, an admirer of the Angevin dynasty; he lived to draw the most terrible picture extant of their lives and characters. ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... is a subjective phenomenon, and the inner aspect of it one can only observe in oneself. But since the process of dreaming is the same in all men, every reader can, I think, judge Karelin by his own standards, and every critic is bound to be subjective. From my own personal experience this is how I can formulate ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... too epic, and I must cut down (In copying) this long canto into two; They'll never find it out, unless I own The fact, excepting some experienced few; And then as an improvement 't will be shown: I'll prove that such the opinion of the critic is From Aristotle ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... acknowledgments; but if a critical captain asked him how it was that, though the ship was sailing before the wind, yet her colours were all flying aft, or inquired whether it was grass or cabbages she sailed upon, Oliver was less eager to claim any artistic ability, and hurried the critic into the house lest he should also discover that the shrouds had been omitted ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... attracted a good deal of attention in its day, goes leisurely over the same ground, which had already been rapidly traversed by Dr. Copleston, and, though professedly employed upon Mr. Edgeworth, is really replying to the northern critic who had brought that writer's work into notice, and to a far greater author than either of them, who in a past age had argued on the ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... scarcely separate from their father, seeing through his eyes, and touching life only through him. They were separate individuals, living souls, with a personality of their own, the more free from his influence because of his long absence and supposed death. It was a young man he must meet in Felix, a critic and a judge like other men; but with a known interest in the criticism and the judgment he had to pass upon his father, and less apt to pass it lightly. His son would ponder deeply over any account he might give of himself. ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... have passed on. The verbal are by trance mediums, whose utterances appear to be controlled by outside intelligences. The written from automatic writers whose script is produced in the same way. At these words the critic naturally and reasonably shies, with a "What nonsense! How can you control the statement of this medium who is consciously or unconsciously pretending to inspiration?" This is a healthy scepticism, and should animate every experimenter who tests a new medium. The proofs must lie in ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... participle of [Hebrew: YSHN], for that verb has a participle in the usual form, not wanting the initial [Hebrew: Y], which occurs in several places in the Old Testament, and is used by Mendelsohn in the very sentence MR. MARGOLIOUTH has quoted from that Jewish expositor. The critic who will not acknowledge [Hebrew: SHN'] to be a noun in this clause, is therefore tied up to translating it as either the participle or the preterite of [Hebrew: SHN'], to change, or to repeal, and would thus make the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... impossible and in the mouths of the Communists themselves. At the second congress of the Third International, Trotsky remarked. "A party as such, in the course of the development of a revolution, becomes identical with the revolution." Lenin, on the same occasion, replying to a critic who said that he differed from, the Communists in his understanding of what was meant by the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, said, "He says that we understand by the words 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... the time. The Yankees may not give us another chance. Across yonder, where you see that dim light trying to shine through the dirty window, Winthrop is printing his paper, which comes out this morning. As he is a critic of the Government, I suggest that we go over and see the task ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... in the Pilgrim's Progress, than by a long discourse upon the will and the intellect, and simple and complex ideas.' Nothing short of extraordinary merit could have called for such a eulogy from so severe a critic. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... reconstruct that atmosphere to-day. A foreign critic [Dr. George Brandes, in vol. iv. of his 'Main Currents of Nineteenth Century Literature'] has summed it up by saying that England was then pre-eminently the home of cant; while in politics her ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... of Tegel, by the side of the pine forest, on the shore of the charming lake, near the beautiful city of Berlin, the great Humboldt, one hundred years ago to-day, was born, and there he was educated after the method suggested by Rousseau—Campe, the philologist and critic, and the intellectual Kunth being his tutors. There he received the impressions that determined his career; there the great idea that the universe is governed by law took possession of his mind, and there he dedicated his life to the demonstration of ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... terse, humorous, glowing, vigorous, convincing way, all sides of this chameleon-hued question; now analyzing the amendment and the laws to enforce it, turning aside here to answer the cavil of some carping critic, then to demolish and bury some blatant political defender of the whisky element; arraigning the Governor, Senate and House of Representatives for their gingerly treatment of the great question, and sending a trumpet-call to the ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... some morning; but, unluckily, she chanced to open it towards the end, and happened to see some animadversions upon Racine, by which she was so astonished and disgusted that she could read no more. She threw down the book, defying any good critic to point out a single bad line in Racine. "This is a defiance I have heard made by men of letters of the highest reputation in Paris," added la comtesse: ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... the scrutiny of the critic, and he will not find anyone now to support the theory of Roman origin with Sainte-Marie, or that of the Arabian origin with Beaumont. There only remains to explain in this place the term knight (chevalier), but it is well known to be derived from caballus, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... investiture with the duchy of Sung, as the representative of the line of the Shang kings, is also related in the Sh, V, viii. With the dynasty of Shang white had been the esteemed and sacred colour, as red was with Ku, and hence the duke had his carriage drawn by white horses. 'The language,' says one critic, 'is all in praise of the visitor, but it was sung in the temple, and is rightly placed therefore among the Sung.' There is, in the last line, an indication of ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... true," said the Knight, "that I have heard the songs of many countries, warbled by beauty to the accompanying sounds of divers instruments, from Spain to Persia, from the Andalusian guitar to the Turkish lute. But fear me not. I am no supercilious critic. Thy modesty hides merit. I will be bound now that thy performance will ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... tourists engaged on pleasure excursions, but men and women intent on the business of life. They are moving up and down looking for fortune and in search of new homes. Of course they carry with them all their household goods. Do not let any critic say that I grudge these young travelers their right to locomotion. Neither their right to locomotion is grudged by me, nor any of those privileges which are accorded in America to the rising generation. The habits of their country and the choice of their parents give to them full dominion over ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... have to go further in daring and painful attempts than the sensitive and pampered taste of a democratic century can approve of?—There is no doubt these coming ones will be least able to dispense with the serious and not unscrupulous qualities which distinguish the critic from the skeptic I mean the certainty as to standards of worth, the conscious employment of a unity of method, the wary courage, the standing-alone, and the capacity for self-responsibility, indeed, they will avow among themselves ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... bird which appeared in Ch'ia and died, shot through with a remarkable arrow. Confucius knew all about them. 4 d. 5 Z. 6 This ia related by Sze-ma ch'ien դl@a, p. 7, and also in the 'Narratives of the School.' I would fain believe it is not true. The wonder is, that no Chinese critic should have set about disproving it. 7 Ana. XII. x. ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... circumstances. As for Wade and Brent, they are persons whom we all recognize as the old heroes of romance, though the conditions under which they act are changed. Helen, the heroine of the story, is a more puzzling character to the critic; but, on the whole, we are bound to say that she is a new development of womanhood. The author exhausts all the resources of his genius in giving a "local habitation and a name" to this fond creation of his imagination, and he has succeeded. Helen Clitheroe ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... count for much in an artistic way," said Adams, with the brutal frankness of a friendly critic, "but they will serve to show you that I wasn't all kinds of an embroiderer when I was telling you about Winton's ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... cheese, taking the currants (or the holes) as they come. Or it can be divided as one cuts wood—along the grain: if one thinks that there is a grain. But the two are never the same: the names never come in the same order in actual time as they come in any serious study of a spirit or a tendency. The critic who wishes to move onward with the life of an epoch, must be always running backwards and forwards among its mere dates; just as a branch bends back and forth continually; yet the grain in the branch runs true like an ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... the critic, Fancher, looking at me, "I understand that in Ireland the chastity of the women is so great that no child is born without a birthmark in the shape of the initials of the ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... principally entrusted to him."* (* Naval Chronicle Volume 32 180.) These facts indicate that he was applying himself seriously to the scientific side of his profession, and that he had won the confidence of a captain who was certainly no over-indulgent critic of subordinates. ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... my own studies and concert work fill all my days. I do not think that one can both teach and play successfully. If I were teaching I should no doubt acquire the habit of analyzing and criticizing the work of others; of explaining and showing just how a thing should be done. But I am not a critic nor a teacher, so I do not always know how I produce effects. I play 'as the bird sings,' to quote ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... a review of Wyandotte which appeared in Graham's Magazine for November, 1843. As notices of Cooper's novels then went, this may be regarded as a favorable one, though in it the critic took occasion to divide works of fiction into two classes: one of a popular sort which anybody could write, and the other of a kind intrinsically more worthy and artistic, and capable of being produced only by the few. At the head of the former class he placed ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... black frock-coat—I hear him perhaps still more than I see him deliver himself on the then great subject of Jenny Lind, whom he seemed to have emerged from the wilderness to listen to and as to whom I remember thinking it (strange small critic that I must have begun to be) a note of the wilderness in him that he spoke of her as "Miss Lind"; albeit I scarce know, and must even less have known then, what other form he could have used. The rest of my sense of him is tinged with the ancient ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... exclaimed the critic Carlyle. "It is the cipher-key wherewith we decipher the whole man. Some men wear an everlasting barren simper; in the smile of others lies the cold glitter, as of ice; the fewest are able to laugh what can be called laughing, but only sniff and titter and snicker from the throat outward, or ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... drinking," replied the great critic with perfect indifference, as he pushed the thin, gray hair from his high brow with his slender hand. "By subtle drinking I mean the drinking of choice wine, and did you ever taste anything more delicate than this juice of the vines of Anthylla ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... art of investigating it, of discerning truth from falsehood and certainty from doubt. It is by solidity of criticism more than by the plenitude of erudition, that the study of history strengthens, and straightens, and extends the mind 60. And the accession of the critic in the place of the indefatigable compiler, of the artist in coloured narrative, the skilled limner of character, the persuasive advocate of good, or other, causes, amounts to a transfer of government, to a change of dynasty, in the historic realm. For the critic is ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... have asked—how was it that this untutored little savage from leafy Warwickshire, with no training and little education, came into London with "Venus and Adonis" in manuscript in his pocket? It is quite evident that the critic fraternity have no Sherlock Holmes in their midst. It would not take much of an eye, a true detective's eye, to see the milk in that cocoanut, for it is but a simple tale after all. The way of it was this: On my way from Stratford to London I walked through Coventry, ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... were still "scrapping" in their own peculiar way. The beauty accused Neale again of being a harsh critic. ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... intention, he was persistent, as the hours crept on, to leave all the inevitable details of life at least in order, in equation. And all his singularities appeared to be summed up in his refusal to take his place in the life-sized family group (tres distingue et tres soigne remarks a modern critic of the work) painted about this time. His mother expostulated with him on the matter:—she must needs feel, a little icily, the emptiness of hope, and something more than the due measure of cold in things for a woman of her age, ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... military critic, says of this battle: "It would be hard to find a better instance of that masterly comprehension of the actual condition of things which marks a great general than was exhibited in General Lee's allowing our formidable attack, in which more than half the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... severely criticizes him for want of originality, accusing him of having borrowed all the interesting passages in his work from the Ethiopics. In common with Heliodorus, Tatius has found a host of followers among the later Greeks, some of whom (as the learned critic just quoted, observes) have transcribed, rather than imitated him. In the "Hysminias and Hysmine" of Eumathius, a wretched production of the twelfth century, not only many of the incidents, but even of the names, as Sostratus, Sosthenes, and Anthia, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... Violette had a college friend upon whom all the good marks had been showered, who, having been successively schoolmaster, journalist, theatrical critic, a boarder in Mazas prison, insurance agent, director of an athletic ring—he quoted Homer in his harangue—at present pushed back the curtains at the entrance to the Ambigu, and waited for his ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... strengthened by collateral evidence, we should have no choice but to assign to the composition of the poem a date later than that of the Second Isaiah who wrote between 546 and 535 B.C. The ingenious and learned German critic, Dr. Cornill, holds it to be no less than two or three hundred years younger still, and bases his opinion principally upon the last verse of the last chapter of the Book of Job, where the expression (Job died) "old and full of days," is, in his opinion, borrowed from the Priests' ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... surely, the Lowlands of Scotland were more in his thoughts than the Zephyrean promontory, and the hard visage of John Knox peered from behind the mask of Zaleucus, when this passage left his pen. Nay, might not an acute German critic discern therein a reminiscence of that eminently Scottish institution, a "Holy Fair"? where ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... of Wigand was received by the non-christian press a quarter of a century ago. It was either ridiculed or ignored. The two methods of treatment were applied to his writings which are always readily employed when the critic has nothing pertinent to say. It is interesting to note that Darwin himself employed this method. Wigand once told me that he had sent Darwin a copy of his work and had addressed a letter to him at the same ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... wonder that he was embittered by his failure! The reviews were far from favourable, although Mr. Elwin wrote not unkindly in an article in the Quarterly Review called 'Roving Life in England.' No critic, however, was as severe as The Athenaeum, which had called Lavengro 'balderdash' and referred to The Romany Rye as the 'literary dough' of an author 'whose dullest gypsy preparation we have now read.' In later years, when, alas! it was too late, The Athenaeum, through the eloquent pen of ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... that. I've had tickets given me. I've been doing odd bits of journalism lately, and a dramatic critic I know has given me ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... cause, was consistently on the side of the North. Moreover, it realised that the North was going to win, and ought to win, and so would abolish slavery. There is a special tradition at the "Spectator" office of which we are very proud. It is that the military critic of "The Spectator," at that time Mr. Hooper, a civilian but with an extraordinary flair for strategy, divined exactly what Sherman was doing when he started on his famous march. Many years afterwards General Sherman, either ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... the whole a bright, alert and sympathetic company. Here and there, of course, there was some friction; human nature, under the strain put upon it by the length of the cruise and the number of people, could not be expected by the most exacting critic to behave better. The unimportant differences of opinion and misunderstandings that arose under trying circumstances will fade with the years as they fly by, and leave only bright, pleasant, interesting memories of all the wonderful things ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... This severe critic could not read, but he had very clear views on the ethics of his master and mistress, agreeing with Scripture concerning ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... partners, and voted it great fun. There were many very pretty girls among them, and several with much more of the rose on their cheeks than usually falls to the share of West Indian damsels. Some censorious critic even ventured to hint that it was added by the hand of art. That this was false was evident, for the weather was so hot that had rouge been used it would have inevitably been detected; but the island damsels trusted to their good figures and features, ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... World seemeth to be as the Statue of Polyphemus with his eye out; that part being wanting which doth most shew the spirit and life of the person." From this point of view the historian of literature learns to value what to the critic would seem unmeaning and tedious, and he is loath to miss the works even of mediocre poets, where they throw light on the times in which they lived, and serve to connect the otherwise disjointed productions of men of the highest genius, separated, as these necessarily are, by long intervals ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller |
