"Characterisation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... succeeded in 1817 by Manuel, and in 1819 by Fredolfo. Meanwhile Maturin had returned to novel-writing. Women, or Pour et Contre, with its lifelike sketches of Puritanical society and clever characterisation, appeared in 1818, and was favourably reviewed by Scott.[59] Melmoth the Wanderer, Maturin's masterpiece, was published in 1820, and was succeeded in 1824 by his last work, The Albigenses, a historical romance, following Scott's design ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... a cafe to—and while it was being mixed I asked the man who grabs up your hot Scotch spoon as soon as you lay it down what he understood by the term, epithet, description, designation, characterisation or appellation, viz.: a "Man ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... the companion of his voyage as far as Kamchatka, has left a brief but striking characterisation of him. "He was," says this witness, "an accomplished gentleman, perfectly urbane and full of wit, and possessed of those charming manners which pertained to the eighteenth century. He was always agreeable in his relations with subordinates and officers alike." The same ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... dollar American prize play. From thousands of manuscripts submitted to Mr. Ames of the Little Theatre, Miss Brown's was chosen as being the most notable, both in theme and characterisation. ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... to have been a man of worth and culture, honest of purpose, charitable in judgment, attentive to duty, and endowed with a good share of prudence and commonsense. In support of this characterisation may be advanced that among his friends he counted many men of distinction in literature, science, and art; that between him and the parents of his pupils as well as the pupils themselves there existed a friendly relation; that he was on intimate terms with several of his colleagues; ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Northumberland; and there are poems of books, poems about Burns, Christina Rossetti, Rabelais, Dumas, and about Shakespeare and his circle. In all the poems about books in this volume there is excellent characterisation, excellent criticism, and in the ode to Burns a very notable discrimination of the greater Burns, not the Burns of the love-poems but the fighter, the satirist, the ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... descriptions and the characterisation, the remaining important features of the poem are its marked practical irony and its episodes. Marmion, despite his many excellences, is throughout- -and for obvious reasons—the victim of a persistent Nemesis. ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... his worship in spite of rebuffs and snubbings innumerable. Macaulay speaks of Boswell as an altogether contemptible person—as a coxcomb and a bore—weak, vain, pushing, curious, garrulous; and without wit, humour, or eloquence. But Carlyle is doubtless more just in his characterisation of the biographer, in whom—vain and foolish though he was in many respects—he sees a man penetrated by the old reverent feeling of discipleship, full of love and admiration for true wisdom and excellence. ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... taste for pictures and a love for music. He must have hated violence and uproar, and liked the finer shades of life. He wore the mode of his day, and was free from the superficial protests of the narrow- minded. Possibly not a very 'definite portrait,' possibly a very negative characterisation. Possibly, also, a tolerably sure foundation for a ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... man's brief and uncertain life which is the finest breath of all poetry that seeks to touch the human heart. The marks of rude or crude workmanship which disfigure much Epic have nearly all disappeared from the Iliad. The characterisation of many of the figures of the poem is masterly, their very natures being hit off in a few lines—and it is important to remember that it is not really the business of Epic to attempt analysis of character at all except very briefly; the story ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... This characterisation of men as Rosalie, in sequent development of her attitude towards men, had come to regard them was delivered to the girl with whom (for cheapness) her room in the boarding house was shared. Rosalie went from Aunt Belle's to this boarding house to assert and to achieve her ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... finish. There's not a judge in the world would say the words you're putting into that one's mouth. It isn't the way judges talk, nor the least like it. You oughtn't to try and invent things, Callaghan. You can't do it. You haven't got any faculty for dramatic probability in characterisation. That story of yours wouldn't go down with Major Kent, and what's the good of your offering it to me? You may not know it, Callaghan, but I'm something of an expert in textual criticism. I can separate ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... had wrought a miracle on the audience, destroying the stage-illusion, and rousing its dormant light of intelligence. Its capacity for being profoundly played upon and emotionally excited by the inartistic unrealities of absurd characterisation and of absurd combinations of circumstance had been rendered unresponsive. In vain did the play appeal to its ethical sense, striving to enlist its hope for the ultimate triumph of the Good, the True, and the Wronged. It had ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... beautiful German rejoices me extremely. Hearty thanks for it. I will soon send the revised (French) copy, and I hope the work will be easy and pleasant to you. In the 3rd edition of "Musikalische Studienkopfe" I lately read "Berlioz"—an excellent characterisation and recognition of this extraordinarily great master, who perhaps hovers more in the untrodden regions of ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... due reserve and after due consideration. But the fact that the author with whose work we are instinctively impelled to compare the novel of Ringan Gilhaize is the great chief of the French "Naturalistic" School would appear, at least so far, to support that characterisation. It is, of course, undeniable that, at the outset, there confront us several striking points of contrast or divergence between the two authors. For example, of that triste amour du laid, which, with its concomitants, was for so long, and perhaps is even yet, regarded by the general public ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... in this last one he gives special emphasis to them. 'Their voices prevailed.' What a condemnation for a judge! He 'gave sentence that what they asked for should be done.' Baseness in a judge could go no farther. The repetition of the characterisation of Barabbas brings up once more the hideousness of the people's choice, and the tragic words 'to their will' sets in a ghastly light the flagrant injustice of the judge, and yet greater crime of the Jews. To deliver Jesus to their will was base; to entertain ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... epoch of material advance only paralleled, if at all, in magnitude and significance by those of prehistory with its shadowy Promethean figures. Our own advance from a lower industrial civilisation towards a higher thus no less demands definite characterisation, and this may be broadly expressed as from an earlier or Paleotechnic phase, towards a later or more advanced Neotechnic one. If definition be needed, this may be broadly given as from a comparatively crude and wasteful technic age, characterised ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... names in English literature, was one of the freest adapters of Shakespearean drama to the depraved taste of the day. Yet even he assigned to the master playwright unrivalled insight into the darkest mysteries of human nature, and an absolute mastery of the faculty of accurate characterisation. For once, Tate's literary judgment ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... i.e., by an enumeration of the "complex components" or elementary functions which all living beings manifest, even down to the very simplest. "Living beings," writes Roux, "can at present be defined with any approach to completeness only functionally, that is to say, through characterisation of their activities, for we have an adequate acquaintance with their functions in a general way, though our knowledge of particulars is by no means complete" (p. 105, 1905). Defined in the most general and abstract way, living things ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... 3. A COMPLETE CHARACTERISATION of all maxims by means of that formula, namely, that all maxims ought by their own legislation to harmonise with a possible kingdom of ends as with a kingdom of nature. [Footnote: Teleology considers nature as a kingdom of ends; Ethics regards a possible ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... alone may be found a parallel to his poignant pathos and gloomy imaginings and shuddering climaxes. What is more wonderful than Chapter I of The Idiot with its adumbration of the entire plot and characterisation of the book, or Chapter XV and ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... reputation now rests mainly on his letters. Mr. Austin Dobson, in his delightful Memoir of Walpole, says of them that 'for diversity of interest and perpetual entertainment, for the constant surprises of an unique species of wit, for happy and unexpected turns of phrase, for graphic characterisation and clever anecdote, for playfulness, pungency, irony, persiflage, there is nothing like his letters in English.' A collected edition of his works, edited by Mary Berry, under the name of her father, Robert Berry, was published in 1798 in ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... was made, not inexcusably, at the characterisation of Launfal as "libellous." The fault was only one of phrasing, or rather of incompleteness. That beautiful story of a knight and his fairy love is one which I should be the last man in the world to abuse as such. But it contains a libel on Guinevere ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury |
