"Modern English" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it safe to assume, as many do, that tobacco predisposes very powerfully to more dangerous dissipations. The non-smoking Saxons were probably far more intemperate in drinking than the modern English; and Lane, the best authority, points out that wine is now far less used by the Orientals than at the time of the "Arabian Nights," when tobacco had not been introduced. And in respect to yet more ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... 1920. The last number of the Chapbook, containing "Three Critical Essays on Modern English Poetry," by three well-known critics of literature, I read with suspiciously eager attention, for I will confess that I have no handy rule, not one that I can describe, which can be run over new work in poetry or prose with unfailing confidence. My credentials as a literary critic would not, ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... form of it embodied in the French prose "Lancelot" that Sir Thomas Malory drew the chapters of his "Morte d'Arthur" which are here reprinted, and which, more than the earlier versions, are the source from which the legend has passed into modern English poetry. ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... Elizabeth's time, if not obsolete, yet in his diction, very far removed from the living language of the day. Even Milton, in his boyish compositions, wrote after Spenser and Shakespeare, with their contemporaries, had created modern English poetry. Whatever there was in Spenser's early verses of grace and music was of his own finding: no one of his own time, except in occasional and fitful snatches, like stanzas of Sackville's, had shown him the way. Thus equipped, he entered the student ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... been a reproach against Henry Irving in some mouths that he neglected the modern English playwright; and of course the reproach included me to a certain extent. I was glad, then, to show that I could act in the new plays when Mr. Barrie wrote "Alice-sit-by-the-Fire" for me, and after some ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... the old, old question, What is Truth? And he answers himself, after the fashion of the wise Emperor of China, Truth hath not an unchanging name. A modern English writer says: I have long been convinced by the experience of my life, as a pioneer of various heterodoxies, which are rapidly becoming orthodoxies, that nearly all truth is temperamental to us, or given in the affections and intuitions; and that ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... best friends, alas! do not return umbrellas. Your poet writes in white kid gloves, and thinks in them too. Imagine the magnificent rush and struggle of those ancient days, the ecstasy of battle, the intensity of life, and then read your Tennyson's milk-and-water tales, with their modern English-menage feelings. Arthur would have been much more likely to give his wife a beating, as did the hero of the Nibelungen Lied, than that high-flown lecture; and it would have done the Guinevere of that time ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... should be glad to see recorded, rather in the memoirs of strangers who have visited our country, and were the proper objects and judges of such hospitality, than in the discourse and lucubrations of the modern English, who seem to describe it from theory and conjecture. Certain it is, we are generally looked upon by foreigners, as a people totally destitute of this virtue; and I never was in any country abroad, where I did not meet ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... personages dear to litterateurs had lived there, from the landscape painter Claude Lorrain to the poet Francois Coppee. A few paces distant, almost opposite, lived Poussin, and one of the greatest among modern English poets, Keats, died quite near by, the John Keats whose tomb is to be seen in Rome, with that melancholy epitaph ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... He did not, of course, invent them; he had doubtless both read of them and heard tales of them; but he invested them with a delicate and graceful fancy that has held the popular imagination ever since. Thanks to him, the modern English conception of the fairies is different from the conceptions prevalent in other countries, and infinitely more ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... the modern English character by the latest stocks which have been united in it have been indicated by Matthew Arnold in a famous passage ('On the Study of Celtic Literature'): 'The Germanic [Anglo-Saxon and 'Danish'] genius has steadiness as its main basis, with commonness and humdrum for its defect, fidelity to ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... then been not long published, and were much in the hands of poetical readers, he was tempted to try his own skill in giving Chaucer a more fashionable appearance, and put "January and May" and the "Prologue of the Wife of Bath" into modern English. He translated likewise the Epistle of "Sappho to Phaon" from Ovid, to complete the version, which was before imperfect, and wrote some other small pieces, which he afterwards printed. He sometimes ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... constitution to the first moment of the English settlement in Britain. But it is with these as with our language. The tongue of AElfred is the very tongue we speak, but in spite of its identity with modern English it has to be learned like the tongue of a stranger. On the other hand, the English of Chaucer is almost as intelligible as our own. In the first the historian and philologer can study the origin and developement ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... in his "Modern English Literature," says: "This remarkable thought Alison the historian has turned to good account; it occurs so often in his disquisitions that he seems to have made it the staple of all wisdom and the ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... their own story: In that department of his labour, his only object has been to assume the character of interpreter between them and the readers, by translating foreign or antiquated language into modern English. Sometimes, indeed, where no record remains of particular voyages and travels, as written by the persons who performed them, the Editor has necessarily had recourse to their historians. But, on every such occasion, the most ancient and most authentic accessible sources have been anxiously ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... word, and in only a few lines gives us the spirit of the Italian Renaissance. Ruskin said that Browning is "unerring in every sentence he writes about the Middle Ages, always vital, right, and profound." He added, "I know no other piece of modern English, prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit." Yet Browning had never seen Rome until a few months before this poem was published. It is an example, not of careful study, but of the inexplicable ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... on his Irish estates;—an acceptable however inelegant luxury was discovered in the use of tobacco; and somewhat later, the introduction of tea gradually brought sobriety and refinement into the system of modern English manners. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... a tired, worn man, unfashionably dressed, eager-eyed and wistful. Instead, the tall fellow who came forth was attired in the most modern English garments; he was brown, fresh-faced, keen-eyed and prosperous looking. The same old Harry Green grown stronger, handsomer, more polished. His black eyes were sweeping the street anxiously as if in search of some one. He did not see Betty Carrithers, ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... to refer to super-terrestrial space, we have two expressions in modern English by which to describe it: we can speak of "the vault of heaven," or of "the canopy of heaven." "The vault of heaven" is most used, it has indeed been recently adopted as the title of a scientific work by a well-known astronomer. But the word vault certainly gives the suggestion ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... but Pliny bore no resemblance to that island barbarian Nevil Beauchamp: she could not realize the friend of Trajan, orator, lawyer, student, statesman, benefactor of his kind, and model of her own modern English gentleman, though he was. 'Yes!' she would reply encouragingly to Seymour Austin's fond brooding hum about his hero; and 'Yes!' conclusively: like an incarnation of stupidity dealing in monosyllables. She was unworthy of the society of a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Britain they found that the natives had a breed of large fierce dogs, who would fight bravely for their masters; these animals they called pugnaces, or fighting dogs, and from them the modern English mastiff is descended. ...
— Fun And Frolic • Various
... know no other piece of modern English prose or poetry in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit,—its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... B.C. the inscription is uncouth and scarcely legible, and even their shape is rude and the material very inferior, those of the later Babylonian period (600 B.C.) are handsome and neatly made. As to the quality, all explorers agree in saying it is fully equal to that of the best modern English bricks. The excellence of these bricks for building purposes is a fact so well known that for now two thousand years—ever since the destruction of Babylon—its walls, temples and palaces have been used as quarries for the construction of cities and villages. The little town of HILLAH, situated ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... of Browning's vocabulary made by Professor C. H. Herford [Footnote: Robert Browning, Modern English Writers, pp. 244-66. Blackwood & Sons. 1905.] emphasizes that poet's acute tactual and muscular sensibilities, his quick and eager ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... Richard Greenway, who translated the Annals of Tacitus, admits cautiously that his medium is "perchance not so fit to set out a piece drawn with so curious a pencil."[285] One cannot, indeed, help recognizing that as compared with modern English Elizabethan English was weak in resources, limited in vocabulary, and somewhat uncertain in sentence structure. These disadvantages probably account in part for such explanations of the relative difficulty of translation as that ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... introduction of Christianity the Latin alphabet, from which our modern English alphabet is derived, took the place of the runic characters, which bore some resemblance to Greek, and English literature began with the coming of ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... Wizard turned out to be a recent and spurious imitation of the original historical wizard. She was ultra-modern English, with a French flavor. The time was to-morrow, and the scene the terrace of Shepherd's Hotel. She wore long, clinging robes of chiffon and gold cut in the style of Cleopatra along Parisian lines. Her rose-tinted ears were enhanced by drooping earrings, ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster |
