"Corneille" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... should transcribe the whole of this colloquy, as it deserves repetition; but we can only give a small specimen of it for the amusement of our readers. The gentleman having informed Miladi, that Racine, Corneille, and Voltaire, are "dethroned monarchs," and no longer tolerated at the Theatre, she asks him what is to be seen or heard ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... rescue, and set his reputation, in the estimation of the German public, on that exalted pedestal which it has not ceased to occupy. It was in 1759, in a journal entitled 'Litteraturbriefe,' that Lessing first claimed for Shakespeare superiority, not only to the French dramatists Racine and Corneille, who hitherto had dominated European taste, but to all ancient or modern poets. Lessing's doctrine, which he developed in his 'Hamburgische Dramaturgie' (Hamburg, 1767, 2 vols. 8vo), was at once accepted by the poet Johann ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... set out. It went down the Rue Grand-Pont, crossed the Place des Arts, the Quai Napoleon, the Pont Neuf, and stopped short before the statue of Pierre Corneille. ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... drove in chars-a-bancs to St. Corneille, a lovely excursion through the woods. The carriages spun along over the smooth roads, the postilions cracked their whips and tooted their horns, the air was cold and deliciously invigorating, and we were the gayest party imaginable. One would have ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... classical scholar, he would almost certainly have modelled his plays on Seneca or Aeschylus, and the results would have been devastating. Addison's Cato, Johnson's Irene, and the dramas of Racine and Corneille are among the abysmal dullnesses mankind owes to its excessive estimation of the past. Men have always been too ready to forget that we inherit our ancestors' bad points as well as their good ones. Ancestor-worship has deprived the Chinese of the capacity to create, it has ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... superior of St. Cyr, loved verse and the drama; and in default of the pieces of Corneille and Racine, which she did not dare to have represented, she composed plays herself. It is to her, and her taste for the stage, that the world owes Esther and Athalie, which Racine wrote for the ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... Christian education, in which nothing figured save his relations with God. This twofold training elevated his soul and fortified his will, but wrenched him violently from all communion with Nature. This is the standpoint from which we must view the heroes of Corneille, if we would understand those extraordinary souls which, always at the highest degree of tension, deny themselves, as a weakness, everything that resembles tenderness or pity. Again, thus and thus alone can we explain how Descartes, and with ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... of highly-polished society. Mrs. Courtenay was an admirable performer upon the harp; Miss Emma Courtenay, her niece, was a delightful pianist; and my host himself was no mean amateur upon the flute. Our evenings would pass quickly away, in reading Shakspeare, Corneille, Racine, Metastasio, or the modern writers of English literature: after which we would remain till the night had far advanced, enjoying the beautiful compositions of Beethoven, Gluck, and Mozart, or the brilliant overtures of Donizetti, ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... as in literature. The great school of French engravers which appeared at this time brought the art to a splendid perfection, which many think has not been equalled since, so that Masson, Nanteuil, Edelinck, and Drevet may claim fellowship in genius with their immortal contemporaries, Corneille, Racine, La ...
— The Best Portraits in Engraving • Charles Sumner
... imagining the "sequel." For instance, after the Cid, there would be the marriage of Rodrigue and Chimene for us. As a continuation of L'Ecole des Femmes, there is the result of the marriage of the young Horace with the tiresome little Agnes. Corneille gave a sequel to the Menteur himself. Fabre d'Eglantine wrote the sequel to Le Misanthrope, and called it Le Philinte de Moliere. George Sand gives us here the sequel of Sedaine's chef-d'oeuvre (that is, a chef-d'oeuvre for Sedaine), ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... As Corneille, says father Brumoi in another place, after having opened to himself a path entirely new and unknown to the ancients, seems like an eagle towering in the clouds, from the sublimity, force, unbroken progress, and rapidity of his flight; and, as Racine, in copying the ancients in a manner entirely ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... and human strife and aspiration,—Milton, Beowulf, Caedmon, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, ballads, sagas, the Arthur-Saga, the Nibelungenlied, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Herbert, Tennyson, Browning, Dante and Christina Rossetti, Whittier, Lowell, Longfellow, to say nothing of Goethe, Corneille, and the Greek, Roman, Persian, Egyptian, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... other marks than their names? nay, do we not find the same character placed by different poets in such different lights, that we can discover not the least sameness, or even likeness, in the features? The Sophonisba of Mairet and of Lee is a tender, passionate, amorous mistress of Massinissa: Corneille and Mr Thomson give her no other passion but the love of her country, and make her as cool in her affection to Massinissa as to Syphax. In the two latter she resembles the character of queen Elizabeth; in the two former she is the picture of Mary queen of Scotland. ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... aspects of the question, his aristocratic instinct discerned plenty of difficulties of another kind, and he took alarm. A fine manner is not the invariable outcome of noble feeling; and while no man at court had a nobler air than Racine, Corneille looked very much like a cattle-dealer, and Descartes might have been taken for an honest Dutch merchant; and visitors to La Brede, meeting Montesquieu in a cotton nightcap, carrying a rake over his shoulder, mistook him for a ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... quelques petites choses sur l'histoire aux gens qui l'ignorent ou qui le savent mal. Ce merite historique a cause un grand plaisir: je ne le nie pas, mais c'est ce merite historique qui se fanera le premier. . . . Dans 146 ans, Sir Walter Scott ne sera pas a la hauteur ou Corneille nous apparait 146 ans apres sa mort." "To write a modern romance of chivalry." says Jeffrey, in his review of "Marmion" in the Edinburgh, "seems to be much such a phantasy as to build a modern abbey or an English pagoda. . . . [Scott's] genius, seconded by the omnipotence of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... complimented only by comparison with himself: all other eulogies are either heterogeneous, as when they are in reference to Spenser or Milton; or they are flat truisms, as when he is gravely preferred to Corneille, Racine, or even his own immediate successors, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger and the rest. The highest praise, or rather form of praise, of this play, which I can offer in my own mind, is the ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... who have given a brilliance to these alleyed walks and corridors are to be recalled Corneille, Conde, Saint Vincent de Paul, Moliere, Turenne, Madame de Longueville, De Thou, Cinq-Mars, Richelieu, D'Ormesson, the Prince de Talmon, the Marquis de Tesse and ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... shelves. High up they were: there was a concession. In the lower shelves lived Bousset, and other Catholic writers; the modern spirit in religion being represented by Chateaubriand's five volumes of Le Gene du Christianisme and two volumes of Les Martyrs. Corneille and Racine, among poets, had the honour of accessibility. When Monsieur Urbain wanted one of his own books, he had to fetch a little ladder from a cupboard in the hall. Angelot, from a child, was forbidden to use that ladder. The prohibition ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... a poet himself, but he was fond of the poets, and had perused Milton, Shakspeare, Beattie, Cowper, and Keats with real pleasure, to say nothing of having read Corneille and Racine in the original. The steward, therefore, was prepared to appreciate the poet's sentiment, "Oft from apparent ills our blessings rise." His impatient gesture and his petulant exclamation when the board scratched his head, indicated that he regarded the accident as ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... while in the utterance of tenderness, whether in love or sorrow, she appears comparatively less successful; I am not, however, perhaps competent to pronounce upon this point, for Hermione and Emilie, in Corneille's "Cinna," are not characters abounding in tenderness. Lady M—— saw her the other day in "Marie Stuart," and cried her eyes almost out, so she must have some pathetic power. —— was so enchanted with her, both on and off the stage, that he took ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... poor translations of Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet appeared, and J. C. Gottsched severely criticized Shakespeare's art. In 1759, in a journal, "Litteraturbriefe," Lessing began a warm defense of Shakespeare and declared his superiority to Racine and Corneille. His Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767) went far in directing the change of taste from French classicism and in establishing Shakespeare in German thought as the greatest of poets, whether ancient or modern. A prose translation was begun by Wieland in 1762 and completed ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... There is not only nothing so good (in my judgment) as Hamlet, or Lear, or Othello, or Macbeth, but there is nothing like Hamlet, or Lear, or Othello, or Macbeth. There is nothing, I believe, in the majestic Corneille, equal to the stern pride of Coriolanus, or which gives such an idea of the crumbling in pieces of the Roman grandeur, 'like an unsubstantial pageant faded,' as the Antony and Cleopatra. But to match the best serious comedies, such as Moliere's Misanthrope and his Tartuffe, we must go to ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... attempt the nomenclature, and furnish a "catalogue raisonne" of all that immense body, would be as wide of our purpose as it would wholly transcend our powers. Such a task would be as vain as—(but here, after the example of Boileau, Corneille, and Pope, let us give our paraphrase of the well-known passage of the bard ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... Amongst the milder forms of entertainment was my impersonation of Rachel. That grand actress I had often seen in Paris, and had, more than once, shivered in my shoes as she annihilated the Tyrant, pouring forth the vials of her wrath and indignation in the classical language of Racine and Corneille. With those accents still ringing in my ears I came to Antwerp, and there, when surrounded by sympathetic friends, the spirit would sometimes move me, and I would feel—excuse the conceit of youth—as if I too could have been a great female ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles
... a verse of Corneille, whose application is exceedingly appropriate, and which should be upon the frontispiece of all ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... forth from slime and mud,—fetid and crawling, unformed and monstrous. I grant exceptions; and even in the New School, as it is called, I can admire the real genius, the vital and creative power of Victor Hugo. But oh, that a nation which has known a Corneille should ever spawn forth a ——-! And with these rickety and drivelling abortions—all having followers and adulators—your Public can still bear to be told that they have improved wonderfully on the day when they gave laws and models ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the rest of the household had retired, they read alone or discussed what stirred their hearts. Each gave the other what she could. The German governess went through our classic authors with her employer, and my mother read to her the works of Racine and Corneille, and urged her to speak French and English with her; for, like many natives of Holland, her mastery of both languages was as thorough as if she had grown up in Paris or London. The necessity of studying and sharing her own rich intellectual ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... notifications meet with more prompt attention than in the past, you must look for another tenant," etc., in the monotonous tone of supremacy, and in the French, not of Journel's dictionary, nor of the dictionary of any such as he, but in the French of Racine and Corneille; in the French of the above suggested circle, which inclosed the General's memory, if it had not inclosed—as he never ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... ill-disposed to me; I had never said anything evil of apple sugar, I had treated M. Barbet with respect during his entire term as mayor, and, when a delegate from the Society of Letters at the unveiling of the statue of the great Corneille, I was the only one who thought to bow to him before beginning my speech. There was nothing in that which could have reasonably incurred the hatred ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... the pack'd audience from their posts retir'd, And Julius in a general hiss expir'd, Sage Booth to Cibber cried, "Compute your gains; These Egypt dogs, and their old dowdy queens, But ill requite these habits and these scenes! To rob Corneille for such a motley piece— His geese were swans, but, zounds, thy swans are geese." Rubbing his firm, invulnerable brow, The bard replied, "The critics must allow, 'Twas ne'er in Caesar's destiny to run." Wils bow'd, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various
... 1863.—To-day it has been the turn of "Polyeucte" and "La Morte de Pompee." Whatever one's objections may be, there is something grandiose in the style of Corneille which reconciles you at last even to his stiff, emphatic manner, and his over-ingenious rhetoric. But it is the dramatic genre which is false. His heroes are roles rather than men. They pose ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the first edition, I received from one of the ablest Pali scholars of Ceylon, the late L. Corneille Wijesinha, Esq., Mudaliar of Matale, what seems a better rendering of Dhammacakka-ppavattana than the one previously given; he makes it "The Establishment of the Reign of Law". Professor Rhys-Davids prefers, "The Foundation of the Kingdom of Righteousness". Mr. Wijesinha ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... show of opposition. To play the part of his wife, to hear him say to her, to respond with the affectionate and familiar 'toi', was so amusing! It was droll to see her cut out her husband in chemistry, history, and grammar, and make him confound La Fontaine with Corneille. She had such a little air while doing it! And at the close, when he said to her: "If I give you a pony to-morrow, and a good hearty kiss this very minute, shall you be willing to give up getting that degree?" she ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... of those judges, for I see them continually walking hand-in-hand, and engaged in the most friendly conversation with Corneille, Racine, and Moliere. Our dramatic writers seem, in general, not so fond of their company; they sometimes shove rudely by them, and give themselves airs of superiority. They slight their reprimands, and laugh at their precepts—in short, they ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... of intelligence; less can be immediately learned and appropriated from their product; they are less direct and stringent intellectual agencies, though they may be more beautiful and divine. Shakespeare and our great Elizabethan group were certainly more gifted writers than Corneille and his group; but what was the sequel to this great literature, this literature of genius, as we may call it, stretching from Marlowe to Milton? What did it lead up to in English literature? To our provincial and second-rate literature of the eighteenth century. What, on the other hand, was ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... diese zum Schlafen bestimmet ist: Es wre denn dass die Handlung entweder in der Nacht vorgegangen wre, oder erst nach Mittag anfienge, und sich bis in die spte Nacht verzge; oder umgekehrt frhmorgens angienge, und bis zu Mittage daurete. Der berhmte Cid des Corneille luft in diesem Stcke wieder die Regeln, denn er dauret eine ganze Nacht durch, nebst dem vorigen und folgenden Tage, and braucht wenigstens volle vier und zwanzig Stunden: Welches schon viel zu viel ist, und unertrglich seyn wrde, wenn das Stck ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... white marble figure of Joan in the cathedral of Notre-Dame is worth a prayer for France. One has met Joan in life, she is generally sixteen or seventeen, ardent, heroic, romantic, with the poetry of Corneille and Racine upon her lips. She is full of effervescent devotion, impetuous and entirely "pure." What happens to her in modern France it would be difficult to say. The English do not come and burn ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... derived from social necessities that the moralist must judge the men of the past. Praising those which were useful and blaming the rest, he thus helps to form the moral types which are indispensable to the progress of civilisation and which may serve others as models. Poets such as Corneille, for example, create heroes superior to the majority of men, and possibly inimitable; but they thereby help greatly to stimulate our efforts. The example of heroes must always be set before a people in order to ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... place. Besides he was always so good, and no matter what they say, so simple. People will recognize later (if they ever return seriously to literature), that he was a great poet. Meanwhile he is an absolutely unknown author. So indeed is Pierre Corneille. ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... will of iron and made it absolute law during his long reign of seventy-two years. His ideal was splendor, and he encouraged great men in the intellectual and artistic world to do their work, and shed their glory on the time. Conde, Turenne, Colbert, Moliere, Corneille, La Fontaine, Racine, Fenelon, Boulle, Le Brun, are a few among the long and wonderful list. He was indeed Louis ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... he had studied in the authors of antiquity in his third volume, beginning in this with the episode of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius; then following up, through the moderns, the expression of Ingenuous Love in Corneille, La Fontaine, Sedaine, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Milton, Gessner, Voss, Andre Chenier, and Chateaubriand. For the last he finds more blame than praise. Indeed, this effect-seeking writer, with all his genius, seemed less fitted than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... this period were strongly influenced by the contemporary literature of France, by the comedies of Moliere, the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, and the satires, epistles, and versified essays of Boileau. Many of the Restoration writers—Waller, Cowley, Davenant, Wycherley, Villiers, and others—had been in France during the exile, and brought back with them French tastes. John Dryden (1631-1700), who is ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... line, } The long majestic march, and energy divine. } Though still some traces of our rustic vein And splay-foot verse, remained, and will remain. Late, very late, correctness grew our care, When the tired nation breathed from civil war. Exact Racine, and Corneille's noble fire, Showed us that France had something to admire. Not but the tragic spirit was our own, And full in Shakespeare, fair in Otway shone: But Otway failed to polish or refine, And fluent Shakespeare scarce effaced ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... it and is kept informed of what goes on in it. He does not approve of the comments on the "Dialogue de Sylla et d'Eucrate," by Montesquieu, on the "Eloge de Marc Aurele," by Thomas, on the "Annales" of Tacitus: "Let the young read Caesar's commentaries... Corneille, Bossuet, are the masters worth having; these, under the full sail of obedience, enter into the established order of things of their time; they strengthen it, they illustrate it," they are the literary coadjutors of public authority. Let the spirit of the Normal School conform ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of the most sumptuous courts that has ever existed, and of reviewing splendors all the more brilliant for their brevity. To this court of Napoleon and Josephine, to this majestic court, resplendent with glory, wealth, and fame, may well be applied Corneille's lines:— ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... grief. Faithful after death, his wife had his body embalmed and carried to his native place, on the high altar of which it lay enthroned for 10 years; his real name was Don Rodrigo Diaz of Bivar, and the story of his love for Ximena is the subject of Corneille's masterpiece, "The Cid." ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... talked to each other and sung to each other, the applause was tripled, and when the scene changed from Piccadilly Circus at 4 a.m. to the interior of a Spanish palace inhabited by illustrious French actors and actresses who proceeded to play an act of a tragedy by Corneille, the applause was quintupled. At the end of the tragedy the applause was decupled. Then the Spanish palace dissolved into an Abyssinian harem, and Eliza Fiddle in Abyssinian costume was discovered lying upon two thousand cushions of two thousand colours, and the ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... power; and it was followed up in 1771 by a noteworthy dissertation Sur les inegalites de la lumiere des satellites de Jupiter. Meantime, he had gained a high literary reputation by his Eloges of Charles V., Lacaille, Moliere, Corneille and Leibnitz, which were issued in a collected form in 1770 and 1790; he was admitted to the French Academy (February 26, 1784), and to the Academie des Inscriptions in 1785, when Fontenelle's simultaneous ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... They were jeered at by the vulgar, fined, imprisoned, or banished by Ministers and Magistrates. All that was good, noble, and generous in the nation withered in the uncongenial atmosphere. The language of Pascal and of Corneille became the medium of corrupting the minds of millions. The events of the day were some actress who had discovered a new way to outrage decency, or some new play which deified a prostitute or an adulteress. Paris became the world's fair, to which flocked ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... troubadours had borne melody into the domain of sentiment, and laid a solid foundation for musical growth. Adam de la Halle's pastoral, "Robin et Marion," was an actual prototype of the opera. During the seventeenth century Corneille and Moliere refined the dramatic taste of their compatriots. Attempts to introduce Italian opera only resulted in arousing a desire for an opera ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... deployee, a grossness which with us, equally on the stage or in real life, would be regarded with horror, amongst the French attracts no particular attention. Again, amidst the supposed refinements of French tragedy, and not observe the coarser tragedy of Corneille, but amidst the more feminine and polished tragedy of Racine, there is no recoil at all from saying of such or such a sentiment, 'Il me perce les entrailles'—it penetrates my bowels. The Greeks and ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... souls, great minds, their works, their deeds, all must serve to complement his victory. Bossuet, Newton, Dante, Shakspeare, Corneille, Byron, all have erred. If he despises them, if he blames them, it is only to show that they have not been able to discover the logical conclusions which M. Taine at last reveals to us,—conclusions which are to transform and change the soul as well as the understanding. ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... desire was painfully felt by me, I discovered therein more means and chances than I had at first foreseen of succeeding in making my young audience comprehend the history of France in its complication and its grandeur. When Corneille observed,— ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Mole; and so to other matters, ordered as against next meeting. This done we broke up, and I to the Cockpitt, with much crowding and waiting, where I saw "The Valiant Cidd"—[Translated from the "Cid" of Corneille]—acted, a play I have read with great delight, but is a most dull thing acted, which I never understood before, there being no pleasure in it, though done by Betterton and by Ianthe, And another fine wench that is come in the room of Roxalana nor did the King or queen once smile all the whole ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... as great a confinement to the imagination as rhyme; yet Ovid's fancy was not limited by it, and Virgil needed it not to bind his. In our own language, Ben Jonson confined himself to what ought to be said, even in the liberty of blank verse; and Corneille, the most judicious of the French poets, is still varying the same sense a hundred ways, and dwelling eternally on the same subject, though confined ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... seemed fate's own gesture to them. But yet, had they only possessed some fragment of Antigone's strength—the Antigone of Sophocles—would they not then have transformed the destinies of Hamlet and Faust as well as their own? And if Othello had taken Corneille's Pauline to wife and not Desdemona, would Desdemona's destiny then, all else remaining unchanged, have dared to come within reach of the enlightened love of Pauline? Where was it, in body or soul, that grim fatality lurked? And though the body may often be powerless to add to its strength, can ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the short, snappy English style of text-book, while Harvard pinned its faith to the more deliberate German seminar system. After the contest captains for the following year were elected. Yale chose Bridgman, who did splendid work on Corneille and the poets of the Pleiade, while Harvard's choice fell on Butterworth, probably the best intercollegiate expert on Cervantes. In the evening all the contestants attended a performance of 'The Prince and the Peach' at the Gaiety. It is reported that no less than nine ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... and instruct him to do justice to the volume. Let old English books, as More's "Utopia," have a cover of stamped and blazoned calf. Let the binder clothe an early Rabelais or Marot in the style favoured by Grolier, in leather tooled with geometrical patterns. Let a Moliere or Corneille be bound in the graceful contemporary style of Le Gascon, where the lace-like pattern of the gilding resembles the Venetian point-lace, for which La Fontaine liked to ruin himself. Let a binding, a la fanfare, ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... upon those points where they wish to excel, and yet are doubtful whether they do or not. As, for example, Cardinal Richelieu, who was undoubtedly the ablest statesman of his time, or perhaps of any other, had the idle vanity of being thought the best poet too; he envied the great Corneille his reputation, and ordered a criticism to be written upon the "Cid." Those, therefore, who flattered skillfully, said little to him of his abilities in state affairs, or at least but 'en passant,' and as it might naturally occur. But the incense which ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... to the theatre since I have been here. The Salle de Spectacle is indifferent, but they have an excellent company of comedians. The representations are in French. I saw the Festin de Pierre of Corneille exceedingly well performed. The actors who did the parts of Don Juan and Sganarelle were excellent, and the scene with M. Dimanche, wherein he demands payment of his bill, was admirably given. I have also ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... behind the scenes; he was perfectly satisfied with taking up a story, so to speak, at the eleventh hour, without tracing it to its original causes or developing it through its various phases. In such matters Alfieri was as undramatic as Corneille or Racine. Nevertheless Alfieri had a distinct dramatic sense: an intense poseur himself, enjoying nothing so much as working himself up to produce a given effect upon his own mind or upon others, he had an ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... may know it to be the same, the Stage is so supplied with persons, that it is never empty all the time. He that enters the second has business with him, who was on before; and before the second quits the stage, a third appears, who has business with him. This CORNEILLE calls La Liaison des Scenes,'the Continuity or Joining of the Scenes': and it is a good mark of a well contrived Play, when all the persons are known to each other, and every one of them has some affairs ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... Don Rodrigo, widely known as the Cid, many marvellous tales have been told, and it is a matter for regret that so many of them are purely legendary. According to one of the traditions, which was followed by the French dramatic poet Pierre Corneille when he wrote his famous play, Le Cid, in 1636, Ximena is given a much more prominent place in the story than that accorded to her in history. According to this version, Don Diego, father of Don Rodrigo, is given a mortal insult by the braggart Don ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... tragedie-ballet. Moliere had sketched the plan, written the prologue, the first act, and the first scenes of the second and third acts, when the King asked him to have the play finished before Lent. Pierre Corneille, then sixty years old, helped him, and wrote the other scenes in a fortnight. Quinault wrote the words of ...
— Psyche • Moliere
... and intelligent than this in her pursuit of French culture. She had begun with the books in which most of the salt of old France was to be found, with Rabelais, Scarron, Montaigne; she cherished Moliere and Corneille; and of the writers of the eighteenth century, apart from Voltaire, the author of Gil Blas was her favourite. Such a list tells its own tale of a mind turned to what is masculine, racy, pungent, and thoroughly sapid. "I am a Gauloise of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... the Vice-Inquisitor and the Abbot of St. Corneille; also six others, among them that false Loyseleur. The guards were in their places, the rack was there, and by it stood the executioner and his aids in their crimson hose and doublets, meet color for their bloody trade. The picture of Joan rose before me stretched ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and in Sophocles still more; but they have many more defects. One dares say that the beautiful scenes of Corneille and the touching tragedies of Racine surpass the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides as much as these two Greeks surpass Thespis. Racine was quite conscious of his great superiority over Euripides; but he praised the Greek poet in order to ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... the imagination of Dante had conceived of the terrible. Sir Joshua Reynolds has exerted his highest genius in depicting the frightful scene described by him, when Ugolino perished of hunger in the tower of Pisa. Alfieri, Metastasio, Corneille, Lope de Vega, and all the great masters of the tragic muse, have sought in his works the germs of their finest conceptions. The first of these tragedians marked two-thirds of the Inferno and Paradiso as worthy of being committed to memory. Modern novelists have found in his prolific ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... Victor Hugo in another, some poor modern verse in yet another. But in all there was the same attempt: to treat verse in the spirit of rhetoric, that is to say, to over-emphasise it consistently and for effect. In a tirade from Corneille's "Cinna," he followed the angry reasoning of the lines by counting on his fingers: one, two, three, as if he were underlining the important words of each clause. The danger of this method is that it is apt to turn poetry into a kind of bad logic. There, precisely, is the danger ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... my training teaches me to do. It is very odd; there is such a cry for naturalism in other arts—we have Millet instead of Claude; we have Zola instead of Georges Sand; we have Dumas fils instead of Corneille; we have Mercie instead of Canova; but in music we have precisely the reverse, and we have the elephantine creations, the elaborate and pompous combinations of Baireuth, and the Tone school, instead of the old sweet strains of melody that went straight and clear to the ear and the heart of man. Sometimes ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... gabble of a man, who is every day lessening that splendour of character which once illuminated the kingdom, then dazzled, and afterwards inflamed it; and for whom it will be happy if the nation shall, at last, dismiss him to nameless obscurity, with that equipoise of blame and praise which Corneille allows to Richelieu, a man who, I think, had much of his merit, and many ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... which in general is very agreeable to the manners of a polite and civilised people; but as there are no exceptions to this rule on the French stage, it leads them into absurdities almost as ridiculous as that which falls under our present censure. I remember in the famous play of Corneille, written upon the subject of the Horatii and Curiatii, the fierce young hero, who had overcome the Curiatii one after another (instead of being congratulated by his sister for his victory, being upbraided by her for having slain her lover), ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... greatest extremes of refinement and simplicity which a poet can indulge himself in, without being guilty of any blameable excess. All this interval may be filled with poets, who may differ from each other, but may be equally admirable, each in his peculiar style and manner. Corneille and Congreve, who carry their wit and refinement somewhat farther than Mr. Pope (if poets of so different a kind can be compared together), and Sophocles and Terence, who are more simple than Lucretius, seem to have gone out of that medium wherein the most perfect productions are to be found, ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... principles, measures not men, breathing and acting in his divine atmosphere. It is strange and marvelous that he never wrote a line about the great men that lived and wrote in his day and age, although Cervantes, Rubens, Camoens, Bruno, Drake, Raleigh, Calderon, Corneille, Rembrandt, Kepler, Galileo, Montaigne, Beaumont and Fletcher, Sidney, Marlowe, Bacon and Ben Jonson were contemporaneous authors, poets, dramatists, ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... and historians are at work, the precursors of Bilderdyk and Tollens, the poet of the people. Bruges, in the eighteenth century, produces two writers of merit,—Smidts and Labare. In French Flanders, De Swaen adapts from Corneille, and publishes original dramas. Many songs are composed both in the northern and southern provinces, mostly of a religious character. Philologers seek to revive the neglected idiom with little success. But ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a man as Danton—could not have endured life, after enacting such a law, and seeing the ghastly work that it was doing. He could hardly have contented himself with drawing tears from the company in Madame Duplay's little parlour, by his pathetic recitations from Corneille and Racine, or with listening to melting notes from the violin of Le Bas. It is commonly said by Robespierre's defenders that he withdrew from the Committee of Public Safety, as soon as he found out that he was powerless to arrest the daily shedding of blood. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... she had read French and English to some purpose; she could speak Spanish—her grandfather had taught her that; she understood Italian fairly—she had read it aloud on Sunday evenings with the Chevalier. Then there were Corneille, Shakespeare, Petrarch, Cervantes—she had read them all; and even Wace, the old Norman trouvere, whose Roman de Rou she knew almost by heart. Was she so ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... consciousness of the unusual character of her attainments. She spoke easily and naturally of what she knew, as if it were a matter of course that the teacher of a primary school should have read Corneille, and should be able to combat Saint Simonism. As the dinner drew to a close, Leston lifted his chair round to where his wife sat and interpreted the bright talk at the other ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... any Dramatic Works of the more modern Macklin, Garrick, Foote, Colman, or Sheridan. A good copy too of Moliere, in French, I much want. Any other good dramatic authors in that language I want also; but comic authors chiefly, though I should wish to have Racine, Corneille, and Voltaire too. I am in no hurry for all, or any of these, but if you accidentally meet with them very-cheap, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... that we lose sight of the mild deity behind her. Compare, in this, Corneille's "Polyeucte," with the "Hamlet." In the first an equal calamity befalls the good, but in their calamity they are blessed. The death of the martyr is the triumph of his creed. But when we have put down the English tragedy,—when ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... vulgarity, their horse-play, their obscenity. Here was fine dramatic genius led astray, because the time was out of joint. Similarly, the trouble with French tragedy, in the classicist period of Corneille and Racine, is that it was written only for the finest caste of society,—the patrician coterie of a patrician cardinal. Hence its over-niceness, and its appeal to the ear rather than to the eye. Terence aimed too low and Racine aimed too high. Each of them, therefore, shot wide of the mark; while ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... Flanders and Holland, passed under the Austrian rule. This influence was continued by the taste and liberality of Margaret of Austria, who, being appointed "Governor" of the Low Countries in 1507, seems to have introduced Italian artists and to have encouraged native craftsmen. We are told that Corneille Floris introduced Italian ornamentation and grotesque borders; that Pierre Coech, architect and painter, adopted and popularised the designs of Vitruvius and Serlio. Wood carvers multiplied and embellished churches and palaces, the houses of the ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... speak of these matters as though I had no personal interest in them. This is not so difficult as the public might imagine. Few works conduce to much vanity; much labor conduces to great diffidence. This observation accounts for the study of their own works made by Corneille, Moliere, and other great writers; if it is impossible to equal them in their fine conceptions, we may try to imitate ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... his "Men of Genius," quite a list—Corneille, Descartes, Virgil, Addison, La Fontaine, Dryden, Manzoni, and Newton—of those who could not express themselves in public. Whatever part self-consciousness played in the individual case, we must class the peculiarity ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... pleasures, of highly-polished society. Mrs Courtenay was an admirable performer upon the harp; Miss Emma Courtenay, her niece, was a delightful pianist; and my host himself was no mean amateur upon the flute. Our evenings would pass quickly away, in reading Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, Metastasio, or the modern writers of English literature after which we would remain till the night had far advanced, enjoying the beautiful compositions of Beethoven, Gluck, and Mozart, or the brilliant overtures ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... more lies than the "Menteur" of Corneille, but not such innocent ones, he went down to Gravesend, all in deep mourning, with ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... the classic drama the characters are few and dignified; in the romantic drama, as first developed in the age of Shakespeare, the characters are numerous and drawn from every class of society. The same difference is found in the classic school of France, represented by Corneille, Moliere, and Racine, and the romantic school founded ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... Trieste. In the "Atlante Storico e Geografico della Terra Santa, esposto in 14 Tavole e 14 Quadri storici della Palestina," republished (without date) by Francesco Pagnoni of Milan, appears an annexed commentary by Cornelius a Lapide. The latter, Cornelius Van den Steen (Corneille de la Pierre), born near Liege, a learned Jesuit, profound theologian, and accomplished historian, was famous as a Hebraist and lecturer on Holy Writ. He died at Rome March 12, 1637; and a collected edition of his works in sixteen volumes, folio, ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... saying with a smile and a sigh as he looked at her radiant youth: 'Et rose, elle a vecu ce que vivent les roses, l'espace d'un matin; for,' he said, 'the flowers of the world fade quickly, and thou art surely a flower, my little one.' He read her the works of Racine, Corneille, Moliere, all of which learning she assimilated rapidly, and with an accuracy which delighted the old scholar. Sometimes, of an evening, he would keep her with him long after school hours, and one winter he took it into his head that she must learn to dance. He tied an inky tablecloth ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... admirable marble lines of Corneille. For three hours they were absorbed by the classics, and, when they returned, a crowd, now enormous, was surging all over the Boulevard, stopping the traffic and filled with a noise like the sea. Policemen were attacking ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... poetry is to me, in brief, what Wordsworth's was to his generation. He has not that inspired greatness of Wordsworth, when nature does for him what his "lutin" did for Corneille, "takes the pen from his hand and writes for him." But he has none of the creeping prose which, to my poor mind, invades even "Tintern Abbey." He is, as Mr. Swinburne says, "the surest-footed" of our poets. He can give a natural ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... Marche, where cheap prices always prevail. Most of the afternoon was spent in the Louvre, a vast palace of art, and the evening at the Theatre Francais, the ceiling of which represents France, bestowing laurels upon her three great children, Moliere, Corneille, and Racine. The Theatre Francais occupies the highest rank. Its plays are usually of a high class, and the acting is admirable. The government grants this theatre an annual subsidy of about ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... drama, rhymed couplet and all, was imported from France. Albovine, as we have seen, has every mark of the heroic drama, except the couplet; and Albovine was written seven years before the first masterpiece of Corneille, one year before his first attempt at tragedy. A superficial likeness to the drama of Corneille and, subsequently, of Racine may doubtless have given wings to the popularity of the new style both with Davenant and ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... Charles had modelled his court very much on the plan of that of Louis XIV., which he had admired for its gaiety and spirit. Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Boileau, were encouraged by le Grand Monarque. Wycherley and Dryden were attracted by Charles to celebrate the festivities, and to amuse the great and the gay. In various points De Grammont found a resemblance. The queen-consort, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... responsibility wearies many readers, and at last crushed the writer; the form became "precious," and at last pedantic; and the ethical purpose was sometimes more visible than the ethical life. In the French drama Corneille had great conceptions, noble types of character, stately verse, and tragic situations; but English readers too often find him mannered, artificial, dull. Corneille, I freely admit, is not Shakespeare: I greatly prefer Shakespeare; but I prefer Corneille to Ibsen. We have plenty of ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... as these Corneille received six thousand livres, and the admiration of the French court and people during the Augustan age of French literature. But an Italian is not content with killing by halves. Here is a man from Italy who goes on fighting, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... wonderful sentence in Mrs. Humphry Ward's "Marriage of William Ashe," which subtly and strongly protests against the blight of mental isolation. Lady Kitty Bristol is reciting Corneille in Lady Grosville's drawing-room. "Her audience," says Mrs. Ward, "looked on at first with the embarrassed or hostile air which is the Englishman's natural protection against the great things of art." To write a sentence at once so caustic and so ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... completed from Vanbrugh's unfinished Journey to London; The Rival Queens, with the Humours of Alexander the Great (acted 1710), a comical tragedy; Damon and Phyllida (acted 1729), a ballad opera; and adaptations from Beaumont and Fletcher, Dryden, Moliere and Corneille. A bibliography of the numerous skits on Cibber is to be found in Lowe's Bibliographical Account ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... guard it, and the peasants of the vicinity, Jacques Bonhomme (Jack Goodfellow) as they were called, undertook its defence. This was no unauthorized action. The lord-regent of France and the abbot of the monastery of St. Corneille-de-Compiegne, near by, gave them permission, glad, doubtless, to have even their poor aid, in the absence of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... but the Union was not a Union. It was not intended to be one, and nobody has ever treated it as one. We have not only never succeeded in making Ireland English, as Burgundy has been made French, but we have never tried. Burgundy could boast of Corneille, though Corneille was a Norman, but we should smile if Ireland boasted of Shakespeare. Our vanity has involved us in a mere contradiction; we have tried to combine identification with superiority. It is ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... than Corneille, owes a still increasing reputation to his unfailing elegance, correctness, and truth; he carried the tender harmonies of poetry and the graces of language to their highest possible perfection. These men taught the nation to think, to feel, and to express itself. It ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... mix him with the herd he has shunned, not separate him in fame as he has been separated in soul. Some Frenchman, the oracle of his circle, said of the poet of the 'Phedre,' 'Racine and the other imitators of Corneille;' and Racine, in his wrath, nearly forswore tragedy forever. It is in vain to tell the author that the public is the judge of his works. The author believes himself above the public, or he would never have written; and," continued Trevylyan, with enthusiasm, "he is above ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... this creator of despotic monarchy, had one unsatisfied ambition. He would have exchanged all his honors for the ability to write one play like those of Corneille. Hungering for literary distinction, he could not have gotten into his own Academy had he not created it. And jealous of his laurels, he hated Corneille as much as he did ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... condescension of a man well accustomed to move in the highest circles of society. Well-educated, his culture was that of a youth of the end of the last century. He had read everything, whether philosophy or belles lettres, which that age had produced in France, and loved to quote from Racine, Corneille, Boileau, Moliere, Montaigne, and Fenelon. Likewise he had gleaned much history from Segur, and much of the old classics from French translations of them; but for mathematics, natural philosophy, or contemporary literature he cared nothing whatever. However, he knew ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... the embryo where you see the full-grown author. We will talk further about it when we meet in the Elysian Fields; then we will see, when you present this Herr Johann Wolfgang Goethe, as a German classic writer, to Homer, Horace, Virgil, and Corneille, if they do not turn their backs upon him. Now adieu, Herzberg! So soon as circumstances permit, I shall send for you to go to Silesia, and then you can give me your ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... poet. He had the audacity to speak of the golden era of literature which bloomed in the time of my grandfather, Frederick I., in Germany, and he was so foolhardy as to mention some German scribblers of that time, whose barbarous names no one knows, as the equals of Racine, and Corneille, and even of Virgil. Repeat to me, once more, the names of those departed geniuses, that I may know the rivals of the great writers ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... are derived from foreign originals, they have often been prepared from those originals rather than from any existing translations of them, as in the fine translation of Catullus by Professor Wight Duff, or the condensations from Euripides, Corneille, Kant, Tacitus, and very many more. In other cases, again, the selections have been specially prepared for THE WORLD'S GREATEST BOOKS by their authors or their agents, such as the two selections by Major Martin Hume in History, by Dr. Bramwell and Sir Francis ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... faultless is the tender and exact Racine: but he was ever ready to acknowledge, that his capital beauties were borrowed from his favourite Euripides; which, indeed, cannot escape the observation of those who read with attention his Phaedra and Andromache. The pompous and truly Roman sentiments of Corneille are chiefly drawn from Luoan and Tacitus; the former of whom, by a strange perversion of taste, he is known to have preferred to Virgil. His diction is not so pure and mellifluous, his characters not so various and just, ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... dressed herself well and superbly, often with some new and pretty conceit. In short, she had many charms in herself to make her well loved. I remember that at Lyons one day she went to see a painter named Corneille who had painted and exhibited in a spacious room portraits of all the great seigneurs, princes, cavaliers, queens, princesses, ladies and maids of honour of the Court, and she being in this room with us we all saw there her portrait painted true to life, showing her in all her ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... Of this nature is the affirmation that Triaquero is meant for Voltaire; and the still more intrepid declaration, that Lope de Vega and Calderon de la Barca are cited, not as Spanish authors, but as types by which Corneille and Racine are shadowed out. It is true that the passage is exactly applicable to Calderon and Lope de Vega; and for that reason, as they are great comic writers, can hardly apply equally well to Corneille and Racine. But such trifling difficulties are as dust when placed in the balance ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... and the dessert was prepared in the adjoining apartment, where coffee was served up and conversation commenced. Scenes were read from Moliere, Racine, and Voltaire; and regret was always expressed at their not having a copy of Corneille. They then played at 'reversis', which had been Bonaparte's favourite game in his youth. The recollection was agreeable to him, and he thought he could amuse himself at it for any length of time, but was ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... are communicated through their own peculiar forms of speech, it becomes a stranger to distrust his own knowledge, rather than their taste. I dare say that were I more accustomed to the language, I might enjoy Corneille and Racine, and even Voltaire, for I can now greatly enjoy Moliere; but, to be honest in the matter, all reciters of heroic French poetry appear to me to depend on a pompous declamation, to compensate for the poverty of the idioms, and the want of nobleness in the expressions. I never heard ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... scientific studies in regard to it. Mathematics, the science of war, geometry, and finally politics, were the objects of his zeal; but alongside of these he read and studied earnestly the works of Voltaire, Corneille, Racine, Montaigne, the Abbe Raynal, and, above all, the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose passionate and enthusiastic disciple Napoleon Bonaparte was at that time. [Footnote: "Memoires du Roi Joseph," vol. ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... I come to the married life which began in 1872—my first sight of Taine, the great French historian, in the spring of 1871. He had come over at the invitation of the Curators of the Taylorian Institution to give a series of lectures on Corneille and Racine. The lectures were arranged immediately after the surrender of Paris to the German troops, when it might have been hoped that the worst calamities of France were over. But before M. Taine crossed to England the insurrection of the Commune had broken out, ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... her horror of war, her pity for the victims, for all the victims; a woman who refuses to add her voice to the chorus of murderous passions; a woman genuinely French who does not endeavour to ape the heroines of Corneille. What a solace! ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... him to Clermont, where her husband was appointed a Counsellor in the Court of Aides. Jacqueline was absorbed in her own poetical studies, which received a special impetus from the friendship of Corneille, who had returned at this time to his native town. The illustrious dramatist speedily sought out the Pascal family, and became one of their most intimate associates. A prize being given every year for ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... favourite was Virgil; Corneille's was Lucan; Schiller's was Shakspeare; Gray's was Spenser; whilst Coleridge admired Collins and Bowles. Dante himself was a favourite with most great poets, from Chaucer to Byron and Tennyson. Lord Brougham, Macaulay, and Carlyle have alike admired and eulogized ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... partly, if not mainly, achieved by another—the novelty of style. Chateaubriand had set out to give—has, indeed, as far as his intention goes, maintained throughout—an effort at le style noble, the already familiar rhetoric, of which, in French, Corneille had been the Dryden and Racine the Pope, while it had, in his own youth, sunk to the artifice of Delille in verse and the "emphasis" of Thomas in prose. He has sometimes achieved the best, and not seldom something ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... of Athalie (Athaliah), flourished in the latter half of the 17th century. At his appearance, Corneille, the great French Dramatist, was in the full splendour of his fame, whose rival he was afterwards recognised to be. Athalie is a Tragedy in rhyme, consisting of six Iambic feet, similar to the Alexandrine verse found occasionally in our English poets at the termination of a sentence or paragraph. ...
— Athaliah • J. Donkersley
... translators, imitators, and enthusiasts in France is as numerous as that of other countries. The list of great authors inspired by Horace includes such names as Montaigne, "The French Horace," Malherbe, Regnier, Boileau, La Fontaine, Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Voltaire, Jean Baptiste Rousseau, Le ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... his own eccentric judgment quite as much as he followed traditional estimate. Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton of course had undisputed possession of the department devoted to the "Kings of Epic," as he styled them. Sophocles, Calderon, Corneille, and Shakespeare were all that he admitted to his list of "Kings of Tragedy." Lope he rejected on literary grounds, and Goethe because he thought his moral tendency bad. He rejected Rabelais from his chief humorists, but accepted Cervantes, Le Sage, Moliere, Swift, Hood, ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... Cardinal Richelieu it delivered a futile attack upon the one writer who stood out head and shoulders above his contemporaries, and whose works bore all the marks of unmistakable genius—the great CORNEILLE. With the production, in 1636, of Corneille's tragedy, Le Cid, modern French drama came into existence. Previous to that date, two main movements are discernible in French dramatic art—one carrying on the medieval traditions of the mystery-and miracle-play, and culminating, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... next to Racine and Corneille, but as an epic poet he is a failure. His romances are probably the best evidences of his versatile and wonderful powers. They embody all the hate and really noble anger of his soul against the evils which were crushing the life of the French people. Their wit never fails, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Richelieu's time, to substitute French. His pupil, Mazarine, had repeated the attempt; and Cromwell had resolutely resisted it. But how? Because, at that period, the resistance was easy. Historians are apt to forget that, in 1653, there was no French literature. Corneille, it is true, was already known; but the impression which he had as yet made, even upon Paris, did not merit the name of a popular impression—and for this decisive reason, that, as yet, Louis XIV. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... would be dark; their moon was in conjunction, and would not be seen; the stars would only give something of that "pale radiance" which the poet Corneille ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... character of man—such a subject must necessarily fix the attention and excite the interest of men, who cannot behold with indifference those memorable epochs, during which, in the fine language of Corneille— ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... is a statue of Corneille holding a roll in his hand, on which are inscribed the titles of his principal works. The task of incising these names it appears had been given to an illiterate young apprentice, who thought proper to spell avare with two r's. A wit, observing this, ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... of nicknames is that of which we may take Shakespeare as the type. Incidentally we should be thankful that our greatest poet bore a name so much more picturesque than Corneille, crow, or Racine, root. It is agreed among all competent scholars that in compounds of this formation the verb was originally an imperative. This is shown by the form; cf. ne'er-do-well, Fr. vaurien, Ger. Taugenichts, ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... Calderon; and it is as futile as are the ecstasies of Schultze to the coldness of Sismondi. Schultze compares Dante with him, and the French critics have only recently forgiven him for being less classical in form than Corneille, who in 'Le Cid' gave them all the Spanish poetry they wanted! Fortunately the student of Calderon need not take opinions. Good editions of Calderon are easily attainable. The best known are Heil's (Leipzig, 1827), and that ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... years covers the whole of the literary age of Louis XIV. Before 1660 the French had no literature worth preserving, except Rabelais, Montaigne, a few odes of Malherbe, a page or two of Marot, and the tragedies of Corneille. Pascal published the "Provincial Letters" in the year of Regnard's birth. La Fontaine had written a few indifferent verses; Moliere was almost unknown. In 1686, when Regnard became an author, the Voitures, Balzacs, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... their example, the moderns seem to have been enamoured with those two Grecian heroes. Racine has displayed the former, in his tragedy of Iphigenia, and the late Mr. Thomson in a performance of great merit, entitled Agamemnon. Corneille, and, the late Mr. Glover, thought Jason and Medea worthy of ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus |
