"Masterpiece" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... penny-a-lining, and scraps of news for the papers. They become booksellers' hacks for the clear-headed dealers in printed paper, who would sooner take the rubbish that goes off in a fortnight than a masterpiece which requires time to sell. The life is crushed out of the grubs before they reach the butterfly stage. They live by shame and dishonor. They are ready to write down a rising genius or to praise him to the skies at a word from the pasha of the Constitutionnel, the Quotidienne, ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... be Bentham's masterpiece. It occupied his chief attention from his return to England until the peace of Amiens. His brother had returned from Russia in 1791. Their father died 28th March 1792, dividing his property equally between his sons. Jeremy's ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... possibility, Sarpi was obliged to show from the Scriptures, the Fathers, the Councils, the early Popes, that the appeal to a Council was a matter of right. With wonderful breadth of knowledge and clearness of statement he made his points and answered objections. To this day, his letter remains a masterpiece.[1] ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... catastrophe. Borrow could not translate Phillips's great masterpiece, Twelve Essays on the Proximate Causes, into German with any real effectiveness although the testimonial of the enthusiastic Taylor had led Phillips to assume that he could. Borrow, as we shall see, knew many languages, and knew them well colloquially, but he was ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... Villon's masterpiece, the matchless Ballad of the Ladies of Old Time, so incomparably rendered in the marvellous version of D. G. Rossetti; followed in its turn by the succeeding poem, as inferior to its companion as is my attempt at translation of it to his triumph ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... with which his childish hands were playing. When on the eve of the battle of Moskowa, Napoleon was giving his final orders for the tremendous struggle of the next day, a courier, M. de Bausset, arrived suddenly from Paris, bringing with him this masterpiece of Gerard's; at once the General forgot his anxieties in his paternal joy. "Gentlemen," said Napoleon to his officers, "if my son were fifteen years old, you may be sure that he would be here among this multitude of brave men, and not merely ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... only the usufruct. To me the play owes nothing but the stiffening of civistic conscience that has been crammed in. Modest? Not a bit of it. It is my civistic conscience that makes a man of me and (incidentally) makes this play a masterpiece. ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... serial form, that masterpiece perhaps of all Dickens' shorter stories, "A Christmas Carol,"—the first ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... "The King, which is in many respects Bjoernson's greatest modern masterpiece in dramatic form. He had by this time become a convinced republican, but he was also an evolutionist, and he knew that republics are not created by fiat. He believed the tendency toward republicanism to be irresistible, but he believed also that ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... who was right, the Arabian king went to see Moses, and he could not but admit that the portrait painted for him was a masterpiece. Moses as he beheld him in the flesh was the Moses upon the canvas. There could be no doubt but that the highly extolled knowledge of his physiognomy experts was empty twaddle. He told Moses what had happened, and what he thought of it. He replied: ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... is rare and beautiful to dispose of. Before one column stands a Jew with antiquities raked from the ruins of Babylon or Thebes—displaying their coins, their mutilated statuary, or half legible inscriptions. At another, you see a Greek with some masterpiece of Zeuxis—nobody less—which he swears is genuine, and to his oaths adds a parchment containing its history, with names of men in Athens, Antioch and Alexandria, who attest it all. At the foot of another, sits a dealer in manuscripts, remarkable either as being the complete works ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... retribution followed him no further. Extracts from one of these "Lives" are, for what they are worth, printed in the Appendix, together with his posthumous Account of the Poisoning of the late Mr. Francis Blandy, a counterblast to Mary's masterpiece. This tract includes the text of three letters, alleged to have been written by her to her lover, and dated respectively 30th June, 16th July, and 1st August, 1751; but as, after his death, all his papers were, by order of Lord Cranstoun, sealed up and sent to his lordship in Scotland, ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... more contrary to Christophe's mind than such pretentious, degenerate, Ostrogothic stuff, in Greek dress. It was hailed as a masterpiece by everybody about him. He was cowardly and was overpersuaded. In truth, he was bursting with music and thinking much more of his music than of the text. The text was a new bed into which to let loose the flood of his passions. He was as far as possible from the state of abnegation and intelligent ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... the article, and allow them to see whether their judgment coincides with that of my chiefs at The Spectator on a matter which was for me fraught with the decrees of Destiny. This is how I began my review of Swift and his masterpiece: ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... hearers to the utmost pitch. Following Mr. Hewitt came the Rev. Richard S. Storrs, D.D., who delivered the oration on behalf of Brooklyn. Never did the distinguished preacher appear to better advantage, and his oration, which was punctuated with applause, was characterized as a masterpiece by all who heard it. Upon the conclusion of his address the presiding officer declared the exercises at an end, and the ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley
... but this horror is with skilful simplicity of treatment preserved from passing into disgust. In pure poetry, in sublime and splendid imagination, this tragedy is excelled by "Doctor Faustus"; in dramatic power and positive impression of natural effect it is as certainly the masterpiece of Marlowe. It was almost inevitable, in the hands of any poet but Shakespeare, that none of the characters represented should be capable of securing or even exciting any finer sympathy or more serious ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... "I have taken some pains to make it my masterpiece in English." Preface to Second Miscellany. Fox said that it "was better than the original." J.C. Scaliger said of Erasmus: "Ex alieno ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... willing to risk everything in their behalf. It seemed to him that such a presentation of Philippine conditions would certainly arouse Spain, but his modesty forbade his saying that he was going to write a book like the French masterpiece. Still, from this time his recollections of his youth and the stories which he could get from his companions were written down and revised, till finally the half had been prepared of what was finally the novel ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... child of absolute ignorance, he summoned what little learning he had, and began to blunder out something about the Celtic languages and literature, and asked the Lion who he conceived Finn-Ma-Coul to be? and whether he did not consider the "Ode to the Fox," by Red Rhys of Eryry, to be a masterpiece of pleasantry? Receiving no answer to these questions from the Lion, who, singular enough, would frequently, when the writer put a question to him, look across the table, and flatly contradict some one who was talking to some other person, the writer dropped the Celtic languages ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... with France? Did it dare pass over without protest the establishment of monarchy on American soil by foreign arms? Between these horns of a dilemma, the Government maintained its precarious position during another year. Seward's correspondence with Paris was a masterpiece of evasion. He neither protested against the intervention of Napoleon nor acknowledged the authority of Maximilian. Apparently, both he and Lincoln were divided between fear of a French alliance with the Confederacy and fear of premature action ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... over the breathless pews, entangling the hearts and souls of his listeners in a mesh of subtle emotion. Many of the women began to cry softly. Fervent amens broke from some of the members. When the evangelist sat down, after a closing appeal which, in its way, was a masterpiece, an audible sigh of relieved tension passed like ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... talked over money matters—that is to say, the abbe borrowed a few pistoles from Gourville; Pelisson, seated with his legs crossed, was engaged in finishing the peroration of a speech with which Fouquet was to open the parliament; and this speech was a masterpiece, because Pelisson wrote it for his friend—that is to say, he inserted all kinds of clever things the latter would most certainly never have taken the trouble to say of his own accord. Presently Loret and La Fontaine would enter from the garden, engaged in a dispute about the art of making verses. ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... "beautiful, though," as Lord Normanby says, "somewhat slight cabinet picture of the Princess Doria and the Pilgrims[1]" has been finely executed by Heath; and a View of Venice, from a drawing by Prout, is a masterpiece of Freebairne. Equal to either of these is The Faithful Servant, engraved by Goodyear, after Cooper, and Dorothea, the title-page plate. Of The Bride, engraved by Charles Heath, from a picture by Leslie, it is impossible to speak in terms of sufficient praise, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various
... was created a Baronet on the 2nd of September 1650.] which was safely sent after him, after the happy restoration of the King. You may read your father's demeanour of himself in this affair, wrote by his own hand, in a book by itself amongst your books, and it is a great masterpiece, as ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... Burns said "Bravo!" he smiled as if he understood the word, and lifted his instrument again to his shoulder. This time his bow descended upon the strings with a full note of triumph, and he burst into the brilliant performance of a great masterpiece, playing with a spirit and dash which seemed to transform him. Often his lips parted to show his white teeth, often he swung his whole body into the rhythm of his music, until he seemed a very part of the splendid harmonies he made. His thin ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... full of little pins that represented armies and divisions. Their fingers had been itching for days to move those pins along the crooked line of the Yalu. They did so now; and in words of fire Ames translated Calloway's brief message into a front page masterpiece that set the world talking. He told of the secret councils of the Japanese officers; gave Kuroki's flaming speeches in full; counted the cavalry and infantry to a man and a horse; described the quick and silent building, of the bridge at Suikauchen, across which ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... or so, and written afresh, or, at least, largely revised. Perhaps this would have been expecting too much from so unmethodical a worker as Clarke. The far finer dramatic taste and literary form of his masterpiece, issued five years later, showed how little indicative of his talent was the ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... through the assembled natives. The ngob-burn boye, koom-bur bomb-gur, or exceedingly big-stone, extremely hard hit, was evidently regarded by them as a masterpiece of eloquence; and the contrast between this and the neyp bomb-gur, very gently struck, of Mr. Taalwurt, undoubtedly evinced its superiority in their estimation; but as Taalwurt was a stout able fellow, and one by ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... in this partnership message adds a simple bold touch of colouring that makes the picture a masterpiece, the masterpiece. This King who serves, and is nearest of kin to us, is also nearest of kin to God. He is not only of the blood royal, and the blood human, but of the blood divine. He was with God before calendars ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... day, Khalid asked the child to show her how to dance and die, and Najib begins to whirl like a dervish until he falls in the grave; thereupon he folds his arms, closes his eyes, and smiles a pathetic smile. This by far is the masterpiece of all his feats. And one evening, when he was repeating this strange and weird antic, which in Khalid's strange mind might be made to symbolise something stranger than both, he saw, as he lay in the grave, a star in the sky. It was the first time he saw a star; and he jumped out of his ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... picture was shown the technique of it would take visitors by storm. Well, they did acclaim him; they could hardly help that, with such a masterpiece before them; but their commendations were all in the style of those given to me the other night; it was the strangeness of the idea, the fresh unhackneyed sentiment of the picture, and so on. Zeuxis saw that they were preoccupied ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... beauty of the colossal equestrian statue in bronze of Charles IV, placed on a pedestal of Mexican marble, which stands in the court of the University, but formerly adorned the middle of the square. It is a magnificent picture of sculpture, the masterpiece of Tolosa, remarkable for the noble simplicity and purity of its style, and was made at the expense of an ex-viceroy, the Marquis of Branciforte. We also saw the goddess of war lying in a corner of the court, beside the stone of sacrifices, which ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... general thing, we are struck with the ingenuity and felicity of Hawthorne's analogies and correspondences; the idea appears to have made itself at home in them easily. Nothing could be better in this respect than The Snow-Image (a little masterpiece), or The Great Carbuncle, or Doctor Heidegger's Experiment, or Rappacini's Daughter. But in such things as The Birth-Mark and The Bosom-Serpent, we are struck with something stiff and mechanical, slightly incongruous, as if the kernel had not assimilated its envelope. ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... read that story of his about a painter who was always striving to attain perfection, could never let a picture alone, was for ever adding new touches, painting details out and other details in? One day he called in his friends to see his masterpiece. When they came they found a mere mess ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... made his report of the affair the work of art which he boasted should come from his hand. It was really a space-man's masterpiece; and it appealed to every nerve in the reader's body, with its sensations repeated through many columns, and continued from page to page with a recurrent efflorescence of scare-heads and catch-lines. In the ardor of production, all scruples and ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... you think of it?" said Ernest, who regarded the pamphlet as a masterpiece of wit ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... published a most interesting narrative of his early struggles and experiences, with the title, "My Schools and Schoolmasters." "The Testimony of the Rocks," a work on which he bestowed intense labour, and which may be regarded as his masterpiece, was published in March 1857, about three months subsequent to his demise; but all the sheets ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... "was my rogue's masterpiece. Having pocketed his two thousand crowns, he sold us in the end by raising the alarm before my troops were ready. In that way he will stand well with his party, while making a clear gain all round. But, ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... place if you don't regard the 'shalt nots,' but isn't it long enough to live the allotted time? What do we want to do it all over again for, that is, provided we do all the pleasant things while we have the chance? I don't want to see any play twice, even a masterpiece. I wouldn't want to live again unless I had been a Christian in this life and felt that I wanted to come back and do a lot of the things I had just heard about ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... greatest things in verse takes up by nature exact and thoughtful words and finds that their rhythm, their combination, and their sound turn under his hand to something greater than he himself at first intended; he becomes a creator, and his name is linked with the name of a masterpiece. The material in which he has worked is hard; the price he has paid is an exceeding effect; the reward ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... the college may throw their caps at me: I have made a soap-boiler costive; it was my masterpiece. ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster
... That, of course, was part of the Bolshevist plan of campaign. So Kerensky, wearied by his tremendous efforts to perform the task assigned him by the workers, answered Lenine. His reply was a forensic masterpiece. He took the message of the commander-in-chief of the German eastern front and hurled it at Lenine's head, figuratively speaking, showing how Lenine's reasoning was paralleled in the German propaganda. ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... looking at the young engineers for an instant. "The report is written in English, as I desired it written so. But I will read the most interesting parts in Spanish to you, chiquita. You will observe that this report is a masterpiece of business composition." ...
— The Young Engineers in Mexico • H. Irving Hancock
... friends. One of the men who had suffered from Poe's too caustic pen was Rufus W. Griswold, but friendly relations had been nominally established and Poe had authorized Griswold to edit his works. This Griswold did, including a biography which Poe's friends declared a masterpiece of malicious distortion and misrepresentation; it certainly was grossly unfair and inaccurate. Poe's friends retorted, and a long war of words followed, in which hatred or prejudice on the one side and ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... the ecstasies I threw her into, she rose for a natural purpose, and advised me to do the same, and we would then both lave ourselves with cold water to restore our nerves. She laved me and I her. She then insisted on my lying down on my back, while she admired what she called the masterpiece of Nature. From seeing and feeling, she soon came to sucking. Up he got in a moment. Playing the ignoramus, I asked if it was not possible that we could both ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... massive gold and the most delicate workmanship, were also gifts. They were too numerous to be counted, they studded the nave with stars of great price. Immediately in front of the tabernacle there was one, a masterpiece of chasing, offered by Ireland. Others—one from Lille, one from Valence, one from Macao in far-off China—were veritable jewels, sparkling with precious stones. And how great was the resplendency when the choir's score of chandeliers was illumined, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... searchlight through the storm of nineteenth century pedagogical obscurity. The optimist sings a new, glad song; the pessimist is confounded; the searcher after educational truth uncovers reverently before this masterpiece of educational organization, this practical demonstration of the wonders that may be accomplished where head and heart work together through the schools, ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... excellency shall be thoroughly informed, your justice and compassion for an injured people, will force you to employ your credit for their relief." Swift waited for more than a month, and on receiving no reply, sent a second letter, which Sir Henry Craik justly calls, "a masterpiece of its kind." It was ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... delicacy of style is needed as in those sane and suggestive, atmospheric, critical or introspective studies, such as By the Ionian Sea, the unrivalled presentment of Charles Dickens, and that gentle masterpiece of softened autobiography, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (its resignation and autumnal calm, its finer note of wistfulness and wide human compassion, fully deserve comparison with the priceless work of Silvio Pellico) ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... to destroy thee. And yet, it is not my fault, after all. Blame me not, but rather blame the Creator who made me as I am. And I exclaimed: Blame him! nay, rather worship and adore him, for the wonder of his work: as thou art very certainly his masterpiece. What! wouldst thou have me blame him, for producing a thing that I could worship, instead of himself? And she shook her head slowly as I spoke, and she said: Thou seest: it is exactly as I said. I am a poison to thee. And I looked at her, trembling with sheer ecstasy to look at her ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... Moscow to Syzran, upon reaching Syzran, crosses the Volga on an iron bridge, one verst and a half, or one English mile, in length, and high enough to allow the largest steamer pass without lowering its funnel—a masterpiece of engineering greatly admired by the people here, who describe it as the longest bridge in Russia ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... living. Besides, what a horror! Imagine a "grand passion" in a petty environment such as they were in, a tiny world of gossip-mongers and evil tongues! Imagine having to hide like a criminal to express a noble emotion! No, when she loved, she loved in the open, with the sublime immodesty of the masterpiece that scandalizes bumpkins with its naked beauty! How impossible it would be, finding herself nibbled at constantly by gossiping fools, quite beneath her contempt. She would feel the scorn and the indignation of a whole town about her. They would accuse her of leading an innocent boy astray, alienating ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... men's souls? His reason revolted against it. If so, the warm sunlight and radiant sky and air, the flowers and the purple hills, his weary eyes strained out to must be also the devil's work, for all these things were akin, and the woman passing amongst them was but the masterpiece made by ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... people, Bambi was bored with her masterpiece at the end of a week, and abandoned it without a sigh. She decided that literature was not to be enriched by her. In fact, she never gave a thought to her first-born child until a month after its birth, when a New York magazine fell into her hands offering a prize of $500 for a short ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... of furniture was the same Riesener whose masterpiece is the magnificent Bureau du Roi which we have already alluded to in the Louvre. This celebrated ebeniste continued to work for Marie Antoinette for about twenty years, until she quitted Versailles, and he probably lived quite to the end of the century, ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... our baggage to Teniet. At the hotel, there was a very celebrated picture by Horace Vernet, for which one of the Dutchmen offered a thousand francs, but the offer was declined by Madame Gerard. In my opinion, the picture was far from being a masterpiece. ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... half French at any rate," said the little artist triumphantly, "and I know he studied in Paris. Well, this is a masterpiece I know, no matter ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... style the work is a masterpiece of vivid, forceful, sinewy, Anglo-Saxon. The story never halts, one is never irritated ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... Himself, his ideal self—independent, fond of whisky, fonder of the lassies; you are the true representative of him and of his nation. Next year will be the hundredth since the press of Kilmarnock brought to light its solitary masterpiece, your Poems; and next year, therefore, methinks, the revenue will receive a welcome accession from the abundance of whisky drunk in your honour. It is a cruel thing for any of your countrymen to feel that, where all the rest love, he ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... world through in whatsoever part, And scan each best known masterpiece of art, In Phidias or Praxiteles or Apelles, You will find nothing that done ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... the gods and heroes of the North. Many of these old sagas have been translated into various other European languages; but Tegner, a Swedish writer of this century, has done most to revive a taste for them by making one of them the basis of a poem which is generally considered a masterpiece. ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... advocating Wilson's presidential candidacy has already been set forth; and many phases of the Wilson administration had aroused his admiration. The President's handling of domestic problems Page regarded as a masterpiece in reconciling statesmanship with practical politics, and his energetic attitude on the Panama Tolls had introduced new standards into American foreign relations. Page could not sympathize with all the details of the Wilsonian Mexican policy, yet he saw in it a high-minded purpose and a genuine ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... compositions, I never was lucky enough to hit on, and despair of ever doing so again; you have cast her rather in the shades of life; there is a certain Poet of my making; among your frolics it would not be amiss to attach him to this masterpiece of my hand, to give her that immortality among mankind, which no woman, of any age, ever more deserved, and which few rhymsters of this age are better able ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... did not look as classic under the laurel wreath as had his uncle's, nor had his work the blinding splendor nor the fineness of texture of his great model. But then, an imitation never has. It was a marble masterpiece, done in plaster! But what a clever reproduction it was! And how, by sheer audacity, it compelled recognition and homage, and at last even adulation in Europe!—and what a clever stroke it was, for this ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... about calling the page 'Annual Exodus of Social Leaders.' He wants to print that painting of you by that new foreign artist in the center of the page." And Matilda pointed above the fireplace to a gold-framed likeness of Mrs. De Peyster—stately, aloof, remote, of an ineffable composure, a masterpiece ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... decorated our kitchen and pantry, and provided for the refrigeration and partial disposal of our food, suppose we turn our attention to the fascinating task of selecting the different parts of the machinery which turns out that finished masterpiece—a perfect meal—bearing in mind in the meantime that the saying, "Art is the expression of joy in one's work," applies to nothing more truly than to the art of cookery, and that no tools necessary to its perfect success nor to her comfort and convenience should be denied that master artist, ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... Kepler, how he was able—by observations taken from a moving platform, the earth, of the directions of a moving object, Mars—to deduce the exact shape of the path of each of these planets, and their actual positions on these paths at any time. Kepler's masterpiece is one of the most interesting books that was ever written, combining wit, imagination, ingenuity, ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... incredible, awful, unreal! In the hospital at Rouen, they called me 'The Kaiser's Masterpiece.' Some of the most hardened surgeons couldn't look at me, or dress my—wound, let us call it—without a shudder. Ordinary men would find me intolerable, if they could ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... masterpiece of a weather vane made by one of his fellow workers which included a Greek column, a sheaf of wheat, a basket of fruit, and a flag, all beautifully worked out of nothing but strips of zinc shaped ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... for humanity. Applying this test to the club, this work, which might be said to represent all that the Bodleian stood for, was in itself sufficient to justify the club's existence. If the Bodleian had done nothing else, if it should do nothing more, it had produced a masterpiece. ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... were no signs of a crowd. People passed to and fro, just as though there had not been a masterpiece within ten thousand miles of them. Once a servant girl, a loaf of bread in her red arms, stopped to glance at the window, but in an instant she was ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... end, and so complete what he had begun so well.[124] Before a month had passed Vasari was summoned from Florence to decorate the hall of kings with paintings of the massacre.[125] The work was pronounced his masterpiece; and the shameful scene may still be traced upon the wall, where, for three centuries, it has insulted every pontiff that entered ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... their marvellous sense of justice, produced that noble masterpiece, the negotiorum gestio. When the property of an oppressed person is in danger, any man may step forward to save it. This man is the gestor, the director of affairs not strictly his own. He has received no warrant—that ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... is an original and brilliant creation, compact of charm and life. She is a flirt, and a flirt not only adorable, but worthy of adoration. Did Mrs. Inchbald take the suggestion of a heroine with imperfections from the little masterpiece which, on more sides than one, closely touches her's—Manon Lescaut? Perhaps; and yet, if this was so, the borrowing was of the slightest, for it is only in the fact that she is imperfect that Miss Milner bears to Manon ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... Aurora, who is fleeing before the sun of love. And remember always that marble, though most precious, is nothing of itself, and acquires real value only when the sculptor's hand turns it into a masterpiece. Be thou such a sculptor, carissime! To love is not sufficient; one must know how to love; one must know how to teach love. Though the plebs, too, and even animals, experience pleasure, a genuine man differs from them in this especially, that he makes love ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... this is a grand triumph. I regret only one thing, that is the unpleasant symbolism that you have concealed in your masterpiece." ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... apart from this conversion of human energy and emotion into enduring forms they perceive in the weltering procession of transient human lives no more significance or value than in the endless fluctuation of the waves of the sea. For them, therefore, the creation of one masterpiece of genius has more meaning than the physical or mental welfare of a whole generation; they can, indeed, discern no genuine intellectual welfare of a people except in so far as the people look up reverently to the products of the higher imagination. There are others ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... at all what you expected it to be; and your illusions were dissipated; and games and hobbies had an unpleasant core of tedium and futility; and the ideal tobacco-mixture did not exist; and one literary masterpiece resembled another; and all the days that are to come will more or less resemble the present day, until you die; and in an illuminating flash you understood what all those people were driving at when they wrote such unconscionably long ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... good building which had been used as the post-office. From this time no one entered the palace except the servants, who had orders to clean it from time to time; not a piece of furniture even, not a book, was moved. The portrait of Napoleon on Mont St. Bernard, David's masterpiece, remained hanging in the grand reception hall, and the queen's portrait opposite, exactly as the king had placed them; and even the cellars were religiously respected. The apartments of King Charles had also remained untouched, and not one of the watches ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... lends itself only too readily to fancifulness and unreality, which were among the most besetting sins of Miss Barrett's genius. The minor poems were incomparably more popular, and the favourite of all was that masterpiece of rhetorical sentimentality, 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship.' It must have been a little mortifying to the authoress to find this piece, a large part of which had been dashed off at a single heat in ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... his cough, become unendurable. People who cough in clubs are generally amateurs of the art. They are huskier, more wheezing, more pertinacious in working away at a cough till they have made it a masterpiece than any other mortals. We believe that club Asthmats (it is quite as good a word as "AEsthetes") practise in the Reading Room of the British Museum, where they acquire their extraordinary compass and mastery of various notes. Be this ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... prisons from the frequent descriptions given to them by John Adams, and especially from a drawing made by him, years ago, on the back of an old letter, representing a full-rigged man-of-war. This masterpiece of fine art had been nailed up on the walls of John Adams's hut, and had been fully expounded to each child in succession, as soon after its birth as was consistent ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... past sixty and had a Michael Angelo's Moses beard curling down from the head of a satyr along the body of an imp. Behrman was a failure in art. Forty years he had wielded the brush without getting near enough to touch the hem of his Mistress's robe. He had been always about to paint a masterpiece, but had never yet begun it. For several years he had painted nothing except now and then a daub in the line of commerce or advertising. He earned a little by serving as a model to those young artists in the colony who could not pay the ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... made, upon the table. The good man knew not what to say or think at such an odd thing happening. He looked at the workmanship; there was not one false stitch in the whole job; all was so neat and true, that it was quite a masterpiece. ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... chambermaid, fourpence; for which she very civilly thanked me, and gave me a written recommendation to an inn at Lichfield, where I should be well lodged, as the people in Lichfield were, in general, she said, very proud. This written recommendation was a masterpiece of orthography, and showed that in England, as well as elsewhere, there are people who write entirely from the ear, and as they pronounce. In English, however, it seems to look particularly odd, but perhaps that may be the case in all ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... young visitor is introduced, consciously or not, to this end: that Mr. James, true to his method, might avoid the scene of passion. I trust no reader will suppose me guilty of undervaluing this little masterpiece. I mean merely that it belongs to one marked class of novel, and that it would have been very differently conceived and treated had it belonged to that other marked class, of which I now ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tragedies breathe the spirit of patriotism and freedom, and for this, even independently of their intrinsic merit, Alfieri is considered as the reviver of the national character in modern times, as Dante was in the fourteenth century. "Saul" is regarded as his masterpiece; it represents a noble character suffering under those weaknesses which sometimes accompany great virtues, and are governed by the fatality, not of destiny, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... was a masterpiece of fine art! His father was the original founder of the importing trade graft. He was the first man to discover that a colossal fortune could be made over night by swindling the United States Government at the port of New York. His people have been noted for their ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... long they came to the frontier, And King met King. The folk of Kembajat Were all astonished at the young King's face, As beautiful as painter's masterpiece. The old King looked with smiles on all. His joy Was great. The King of Indrapura bowed Respectfully, and made them bring to him The elephant that bore 'neath gay payong His consort's father. "Son, where goest ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... their meannesses, their rancours, their dishonesty—all these personages, after voting for the Constitution, now striving to destroy it; and they got into a state of great agitation, and launched forth manifestoes, pamphlets, and biographies. Hussonnet's biography of Fumichon was a masterpiece. Nonancourt devoted himself to the work of propagandism in the country districts; M. de Gremonville worked up the clergy; and Martinon brought together the young men of the wealthy class. Each exerted himself according to his resources, ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... to wear, was equally distinguished for gallantry; he was genteel, of a fine mien, valiant, generous, and all these qualities he possessed in a very uncommon degree; in short, if anyone could be compared to the Duke de Nemours, it was he. The Duke de Nemours was a masterpiece of Nature; the beauty of his person, inimitable as it was, was his least perfection; what placed him above other men, was a certain agreeableness in his discourse, his actions, his looks, which was observable in none beside himself: he had in his behaviour ...
— The Princess of Cleves • Madame de La Fayette
... ancients prove Responsive to your spell, Or, riveted to Reason's groove, Against your charms rebel. And yet some senator obese, In Rome long years ago, May have misnamed a masterpiece De Gallo bellico. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 15, 1917 • Various
... was bound to continue to defend the prisoner, whose case would have been hopeless if his own counsel abandoned him, and in defending him he was bound to use all fair arguments arising out of the evidence. The speech of Phillips was a masterpiece of eloquence under circumstances of extraordinary difficulty. Much of it was devoted to impugning the veracity of the witnesses for the prosecution. He solemnly declared that it was not his business to say who committed the murder, and that ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... sort of musical grandeur from its sharp, heavy, rectangular, rhythmically powerful melodic line. It voices through it a bold, naked, immense language. With Baudelaire, Berlioz could have said, "L'energie c'est le grace supreme." For the beauty of this his masterpiece lies in just the delineating power, the characteristic of this crude, vigorous, unadorned melody. Doubtless to those still baffled by its nudity, his music appears thin. But if it is at all thin, its thinness is that ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... hues, and set with elegant and curious trifles—fans on the mantelshelf, an antique lamp upon a bracket, and on the table a silver-mounted bowl of cocoa-nut about half full of unset jewels. The fair Cuban, herself a gem of colour and the fit masterpiece for that rich frame, motioned Harry to a seat, and, sinking herself into another, thus began ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the steps of Boileau and Horace. Roscommon selected for a poem the lively topic of "translated verse," and Sheffield had written with Dryden an essay upon satire, and afterwards a more elaborate essay upon poetry. To these masterpieces, said Addison, another masterpiece was now added by Pope's Essay upon Criticism. Not only did Addison applaud, but later critics have spoken of their wonder at the penetration, learning, and taste exhibited by so young a man. The essay was carefully finished. Written apparently ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... lady whose enthusiasm for the genius of Dante has made it a chief pleasure of her life to dwell on it by translating, not his Divine Comedy only, but also the whole body of his other works. Among those works the Vita Nuova and the Convito have a distinct place, as leading up to the great masterpiece. In the New Life, Man starts on his career with human love that points to the divine. In the Banquet, he passes to mature life and to love of knowledge that declares the power and the love of God in the material and moral world about us and within us. In the Divine Comedy, the ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... of the style of "Pinto,"—a period when the classic reigned supreme. The Odeon was so violently agitated for three nights that the play was forbidden by the censor. This second piece was considered by many a masterpiece, and won him more real reputation than all his productive little pieces done with collaborators,—but only among a class to whom little attention is paid, that of connoisseurs ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... Only genius could have invented John Silver, that terribly smooth-spoken mariner. Nothing but genius could have drawn that simple yokel on the island, with his craving for cheese as a Christian dainty. The blustering Billy Bones is a little masterpiece: the blind Pew, with his tapping stick (there are three such blind tappers in Mr. Stevenson's books), strikes terror into the boldest. Then, the treasure is thoroughly satisfactory in kind, and there is plenty of it. The landscape, ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... the old carpenter considered his chef d'oeuvre, and a curious affair this same masterpiece was. In the first place it was forty—two feet long over all, and only three and a half feet beam—the planking was not much above an eighth of an inch in thickness, so that if one of the crew had slipped his foot ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... whether, if the stream of prosperity had continued to flow, on which the bark of Chaucer's fortunes had for some years been borne along, he might not have found leisure and impulse sufficient for completing his masterpiece, or at all events for advancing it near to completion? That his powers declined with his years is a conjecture which it would be difficult to support by satisfactory evidence; though it seems natural enough to assume that he wrote the best of his "Canterbury Tales" in his best days. Troubled ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... succeeds only by the number of his characters and the variety of his situations; and there are few examples of novels having but two or three dramatis personae depending on a single situation. Of such a kind, Caleb Williams, the celebrated Godwin's masterpiece, is in our time the only work known, and ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... Review of Soame Jennings's Essay on the Origin of Evil; a masterpiece of composition, both for vigour of style ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... Captain, the officers and Mr. Grady were when Warren Shannon presented them with the beautiful gifts purchased by our party. Everyone was coaxed to display their "parlor tricks." Warren Shannon gave his masterpiece "Tiger Fat," Reese Lewellyn sang, followed by Mrs. Schwabacker's charming rendition of "What Irishmen Mean by McCree," Dr. Thomas Hill recited cleverly, Mrs. Brandeis read the farewell poem she had written, Mrs. Brown sang beautifully. Will we ever see a Korean ...
— The Log of the Empire State • Geneve L.A. Shaffer
... READER.—What this book wants is not a simple Preface but an apology, and a very brilliant and convincing one at that. Recognising this fully, and feeling quite incompetent to write such a masterpiece, I have asked several literary friends to write one for me, but they have kindly but firmly declined, stating that it is impossible satisfactorily to apologise for my liberties with Lindley Murray and the Queen's English. I am therefore left to make a ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... masterpiece of diplomacy, and revealed his long practice in the art of oratory in that best of all training schools, the labour union of the Old Land. He began by expressing entire sympathy with the spirit of the opposition. The opposition, however, had completely misunderstood the intent and purport of ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... childlike innocence of face was said to be the most interesting and pathetic monument in England. It is reputed to be the masterpiece of the English sculptor Thomas Banks, whose work was almost entirely executed abroad, where he was better known than in England. The inscriptions on it were in four different languages, English, Italian, French, and Latin, that in ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... the manner of Peter Pan," said the other. "With all reverence for the author of that masterpiece I should say he had a wonderful and tender insight into the child mind and knew nothing whatever about boys. To make only one criticism on that particular work, can you imagine a lot of British boys, or ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... illustrious names in literature and art: DANTE, and PETRARCH, the celebrated Italian poets; and CANOVA, whose labours have all the freshness and finish of yesterday's chisel. Lord Byron, whose enthusiasm breathes and lives in words that "can never die," has enshrined these memorials in the masterpiece of his genius. Associating Dante and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... shall come when Chanticleer shall wish His words unsaid, and hate his boasted bliss: The crested bird shall by experience know, Jove made not him his masterpiece below; 470 And learn the latter end of joy is woe. The vessel of his bliss to dregs is run, And Heaven will have him ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... a masterpiece of interpretative history. Every phase of the struggle for the continent is described in minute detail and with the intimate touch of perfect knowledge; every actor in the great drama is presented with incomparable vividness, and its scenes ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... magnificently, and so belauded, that anybody but a young man of two-and-twenty would have shrewdly suspected a hoax. After dinner, Chatelet drew his rival on to recite The Dying Sardanapalus, the masterpiece of the hour; and the headmaster of the school, a man of a phlegmatic temperament, applauded with both hands, and vowed that Jean-Baptiste Rousseau had done nothing finer. Sixte, Baron du Chatelet, thought in his heart that this slip of a rhymster ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... back against a tree trunk with her knees drawn up to her chin, and blew out clouds of smoke, and looked more than usually grey and dishevelled and in need of a bath. "In a way it's like that with Jeffries. He rubs his beastly old thumb over my rottenest charcoal sketch, and it's a masterpiece." ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... Michael, that it carries so much of man's handiwork up into the blue fields of the air; this achievement alone would mark it as unique among hills. It appears as if for once man and nature had agreed to work in concert to produce a masterpiece in stone. The hill and the architectural beauties it carries aloft, are like a taunt flung out to sea and to the upper heights of air; for centuries they appear to have been crying aloud, "See what we can do, against your tempests and your futile ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... pictures and architectural effects day after day, I did watch Margaret very closely and store a thousand memories of her. I can see her now, her long body drooping a little forward, her sweet face upraised to some discovered familiar masterpiece and shining with a delicate enthusiasm. I can hear again the soft cadences of her voice murmuring commonplace comments, for she had no gift of expressing the shapeless satisfaction these ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... Renaissance; from Giotto onwards all the painters had been preparing for that, Florence herself had been preparing for it. It makes no difference that for centuries it has been a shadow on the wall; it is still the most famous painting in the world because it is the masterpiece of Leonardo. There was a fate against the survival of his masterpieces, but he has survived them and they are remembered because of him. We accept him for himself, like the people of his own time, who, when he said he could perform impossibilities, ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... mastery refers usually and mainly to thoughts of world creation. The egg-shaped receptacle in which the master work was to be accomplished was also known as the "philosophical egg" in which the great masterpiece is produced. This vessel was sealed with the magic seal of Hermes; therefore ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... delicacy and richness of ornament, this window is perfectly unrivaled. There is a play of line in the mullions, which, considering their size and strength, may be pronounced quite a masterpiece of art. You approach, regretting the neglected state of the lateral towers, and enter through the large and completely opened center doors, the nave of the abbey. It was toward sunset when we made our first entrance. The evening was beautiful; and the variegated tints of sunbeam, admitted through ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... to speak of nothing else, there are thirteen s-s to five in the original. Even Crashaw, whose translation of Strada's "Music's Duel" is a masterpiece for litheness of phrase and sinuous suppleness of rhythm, quails before the "Dies Ir," and contents himself with a largely watered paraphrase. No one has ever yet succeeded more than tolerably ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... to melt a little at about the second or third course. Forgetting discretion, he actually smiled. The meal, which had been prepared in anticipation of his coming, was a much more splendid entertainment than would have been got up for me had I been alone. The cook's masterpiece was a very cunningly contrived pasty—a work of local genius that I was quite unprepared for. Even M. le controleur, had he not checked himself in time, would have beamed at this achievement; but he would never have forgiven himself such ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... Ha-yo-went-ha miraculously disappeared in a white canoe, which arose with him in the air and bore him out of their sight. Other prodigies, according to this tradition, attended and signalized the formation of the confederacy, which is still celebrated among them as a masterpiece of Indian wisdom. Such in truth it was; and it will remain in history as a monument of their genius in developing gentile institutions. It will also be remembered as an illustration of what tribes of mankind have been able to accomplish in the art of government while in ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... masterpiece. It was a rare stroke of art to get an old dotard of a member of Congress to publish, twelve days before the election, that Mr. Clay had agreed to vote for Mr. Adams, and that Mr. Adams had agreed to reward him by the office of Secretary of State. When the vote ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... report was a little masterpiece of concise information. Not a word in it that was not dry, exact, meaningful. This was the more to the writer's credit in that his brain was seething with impressions, luminous with pictures, aflash with odds and ends of minor but significant things heard and seen and felt. It ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... masterpiece," said Thomsett ungrudgingly. "I will say this of you, you're a masterpiece. Mind this is all to be ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
... for which our age has lost the taste. The vestibule contains a superb mosaic, brought home from Venice, in 1798, by one of the Boiscorans, who had degenerated, and followed the fortunes of Napoleon. The balusters of the great staircase are a masterpiece of iron work; and the wainscoting in the dining-room has ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... found. Aram was arrested at Lynn, where he was an usher in a school, and was esteemed alike by pupils and parents. He stoutly protested his innocence, and undertook his own defence. He read it in court, and it was regarded as a masterpiece of reasoning. It was, however, made clear from the statements of Houseman, who was admitted as king's evidence, that Aram had murdered Clarke for gain when he was in indigent circumstances. The jury returned a verdict of ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... granted, and the company, being incorporated by Act of Parliament, assumed the title by which it has ever since been known. The minister took great credit to himself for his share in this transaction, and the scheme was always called by his flatterers "the Earl of Oxford's masterpiece." ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... The poet Cowper, it is well known, produced that masterpiece of humour, John Gilpin, during one of his fits of morbid dejection; and he himself says, "Strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines I ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood, and but for that saddest ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... Tea is the beverage—the masterpiece—of every meal, even if it be nothing but boiled rice. Every artisan and laborer, going to work, carries with him his rice-box of lacquered wood, a kettle, a tea-caddy, a tea-pot, a cup, and his chop-sticks. Milk and sugar are generally eschewed. The Japs ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... considered the masterpiece of the firm of Becquet, is six feet in height and four and a half in width, made entirely of wrought iron, with triple sides, and divided into isolated ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... and down hill, through city and through wilderness, to the Black River and the Shining Gate. He had found out—as most people would have said, by accident; as he would doubtless have said, by the guidance of Providence—where his powers lay. He had no suspicion, indeed, that he was producing a masterpiece. He could not guess what place his allegory would occupy in English literature, for of English literature he knew nothing. Those who suppose him to have studied the "Fairy Queen," might easily be confuted, if this were the proper place for a detailed examination of the ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... sprinted back down the hill, the girl screaming pointlessly meanwhile. There was just time—you'll have to take my word for this; Ferguson explained it all to me in the most meticulous detail, but I can't repeat that masterpiece of exposition—for Ferguson to decide. To decide again, you understand, precisely as he had decided on the Argentina. Rotten luck, wasn't it? He could just have flung tow-head out of the way by getting under the engine himself. He grabbed for tow-head, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... is true of verse is more obviously true of prose. Of all prose works which have captured attention by their mere merits as literature, no better example can be given than the great masterpiece of Gibbon. But though Gibbon may be read by many for the sake of his mere literary charm, his place in the world as a great writer depends but in a secondary way on this charm in itself. He lives because this charm was used by him to convey ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... poet—author also of one lovely lyric—who treated our rivers after the fashion of his day, which ran to length and tedious excess. Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis is by pages too long; but that is nothing to Drayton's masterpiece. With the best dispositions in the world I have never been able to get right through the Polyolbion. His anthropomorphism is surprising, and a ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... second "Iphigenia," produced in 1779, was such a masterpiece that his rival shut his own score in his portfolio, and kept it two years. All Paris was enraptured with this great work, and Gluck's detractors were silenced in the wave of enthusiasm which swept the public. Abbe Arnaud's ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... from one end of Europe to the other. The examples which I have given of the way in which such an occurrence would have been treated in classic times may not suit the ideas of honorable people; so let me recommend to their notice, as a kind of antidote, the story of Monsieur Desglands in Diderot's masterpiece, Jacques le fataliste. It is an excellent specimen of modern knightly honor, which, no doubt, they will find ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... now. The masterpiece was a jealous god. Jealous and, I sometimes thought, apt to be a little tiresome. It had to be referred to so very deferentially, with such carefully serious respect. Also, it cast a shadow of gravity over Delancey—Delancey who was never meant to be ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... of man's salvation by Jesus Christ is the masterpiece of all the works of God, wherein He would have His love and mercy to be magnified. As the creation declareth. His goodness and power, so doth redemption His goodness and mercy; He hath contrived the very frame of His worship so that it shall much consist in the magnifying of this ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... be inclined to quarrel with Gray's way of passing his life, and the poet who had produced so exquisite a masterpiece as the Elegy had a fair right to spend the rest of his days as he pleased. But the temptations to confound a finicking dilettantism with the 'art to live' are so strong, that it is worth while to correct the Rector's admiration for Gray by looking on another picture—one ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... from the study of the antique in Italy. The works he left are almost innumerable, and some of them will have lasting reputation. The finest perhaps is his medallion of Night, "launched with infinite lightness into space, carrying in her arms her two children, Sleep and Death." This masterpiece is said to have been conceived during a sleepless night in 1815, and modeled in one day. His Lion at Lucerne, made to commemorate the Swiss guards at Paris who fell in defending the Tuileries, August 10, 1792, is known to every tourist: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... This masterpiece of Defoe is before its time by a hundred years; nothing can be found in the realm of the English prose short-story to approach it in symmetry until the Ettrick Shepherd commenced ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... which leads into the garden is a masterpiece. I stood before it for a long time amazed. The enormous building is raised upon a stone terrace, which is approached by broad steps; the gate is lofty, and is surmounted by an imposing dome. At the four corners are minarets of white marble three stories high; unfortunately, their upper parts are ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... above I have looked through the proof-sheets of this book, and found, with some access of respect for my youth, that it is a fiction of the first order. By this I do not mean that it is a masterpiece in that order, or even a pleasant example of it, but simply that, such as it is, it is one of those fictions in which the morality is original and not readymade. Now this quality is the true diagnostic of the first order in literature, and indeed in all the arts, including ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... of its kind (the second part in particular is full of marvellous beauty); but it must be accepted for what it is. It makes no sort of pretence to display those constructive and inventive artifices which are indispensable to a great masterpiece of impersonal fiction. It is not fiction. It is the exquisite expression of a temperament. ...
— Marie Claire • Marguerite Audoux
... of this belt of verdure, on which none but public buildings may be erected, dividing the working part of the town from the residential part, has always seemed to me a masterpiece of wisdom in city planning, and hardly less admirable are the five open reserves inside the city which serve as its lungs. Ultimately the city proper will probably be almost entirely reserved for business purposes. Already very few people live within ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... knowing whether the author received adequate remuneration for his work. Literature is not a commercial venture. The man who says, "Go to, now I shall make money by my pen!" is not the one who achieves a masterpiece. Nevertheless we are glad to know that genius is rewarded. It is more comforting to learn that Pope received $45,000 for his translations of Homer than that Milton got $25 for his Paradise Lost; that Scott received over $40,000 for Woodstock, a novel written in three months, than that the author ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... was instantaneously merged in a flash of honest pleasure and admiration, such as only an artist may feel in the presence of a little masterpiece ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... path to life and freedom we had stepped glanced from the line of lowered steel to the open gates and the forest beyond, and understood. For a full minute he waited, moving not a muscle, still and stately as some noble masterpiece in bronze. Then he stepped from the shadow of the wall and moved past us through the sunshine that turned the eagle feather in his scalp lock to gold. His eyes were fixed upon the forest; there was no change in the superb calm of his ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... I consider, due to the public, but whether I have been justified by results or whether, under the sacred mask of Drama, I have erred unpardonably, are points which, so long as this revival draws attention to a forgotten masterpiece, can be of no ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay
... indeed, the fact that the patrons of the Comedie Francaise strictly warned the adapter against revolting their feelings by reproducing the "barbarities" that characterised the close of Shakespeare's tragic masterpiece. ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... that I had received Eumolpus as a comrade, a rival more formidable than Ascyltos, and that thought tortured me. But reason soon put my uneasiness to flight.) "It is unfortunate," (said I to myself,) "that the lad has so taken our friend's fancy, but what of it? Is not nature's every masterpiece common to all? The sun shines upon all alike! The moon with her innumerable train of stars lights even the wild beasts to their food. What can be ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... at the mere mention of the word "tulban," which (as we are assured by the "Floriste Francaise," the most highly considered authority in matters relating to this flower) is the first word in the Cingalese tongue which was ever used to designate that masterpiece of floriculture which is now ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... "Babes in the Wood" by Crawford, and the statue of Lincoln by Ball. In the picture-gallery on the east are a hundred and fifty subjects. On the south wall hangs a canvas which is at once recognized as the masterpiece. It is Munkacsy's "Blind Milton dictating 'Paradise Lost' to his Daughters." This painting is fitly supported on one side by a portrait of Milton owned for many years by Charles Lamb, and on the other by a copy of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... be said that there are only two genuine specimens of him in the world, and that both of these are by his pupils. What Mary Logan would say to these Rembrandts and Rubenses I know not; but there is much of indisputable value in this collection, to say nothing of Flaxman's masterpiece—the statue of Pitt,—or the recent accessions, such as the Whistler, or David Murray's "Fir Faggots," or the bust ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... with play-actor Thunder-barrels (always an itinerant Theatre attends), with gasconading talk, with orgies, debaucheries,—busy service of the Devil, AND pleasant consciousness that we are Heaven's masterpiece, and are in perfect readiness to die at any moment;—our ELASTICITY and agility ("ELAN" as we call it) well kept up, in that manner, for the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... her beauty all to herself when it might delight future generations," he said, taking the newly filled cup from Flamby. "Besides, it really is a compliment, kid, to ask you to pose for a big thing like The Dreaming Keats. It's going to be my masterpiece." ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... are beautifully drawn, and this little book is quite a masterpiece. It was published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, and must have been within their guidelines, without being excessively pious. Do read it—it won't take ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn
... Fop was acted with applause, and the following year Mrs. Behn was very busy producing two comedies (of which one is a masterpiece) and one tragedy. The Debauchee, which was brought out this year at the Duke's House, a somewhat superficial though clever alteration of Brome's Mad Couple Well Match'd, is no doubt from her pen. It was published anonymously, 4to, 1677, and all the best critics with ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... language, its spirit, and the traditions of its thought. Exactly for this reason it is particularly important to explain how such an outcome was brought about, and by what historic forces. From the propensity to consider every great historical event as wholly a masterpiece of human genius, many historians have attributed also this accomplishment to a prodigious, well-nigh divine wisdom on the part of the Romans, and Julius Caesar is regarded as a demigod who had fixed his gaze upon the far, far distant future. However, it is not difficult, studying the ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... Dialogus, "A Dialogue on the several Divisions of Rhetoric," a sort of catechism of rhetoric. 3. De Oratore, "On the True Orator," a systematic work on the art of oratory. This is one of his most brilliant efforts, and so accurately finished in its minute parts, that it may be regarded as a masterpiece of skill in all that relates to the graces of style and composition. 4. Brutus: de claris Oratoribus. This is in the form of a dialogue, and contains a complete critical history of Roman eloquence. 5. Orator, "The Orator," addressed to Marcus Brutus, giving his views as to what constitutes ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... "Spacehounds of IPC," that travel in the great spaces is not already an established fact. Dr. Smith, as a professional chemist, is kept fairly busy. As a writer, he is satisfied with nothing less than perfection. For that reason, a masterpiece from his pen has become almost an annual event. We know you will like "Spacehounds" even better than ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith |
