"Rhetoric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and urge their own opinions—the very right which each insists upon claiming for itself. It has been held 'dangerous' to discuss questions which, though in one sense pertaining only to particular States, nevertheless bear upon the whole country. It has been considered 'heresy' to urge with rhetoric and declamation, even in our halls of Congress, certain principles for and against Slavery, for example, lest mischief result from the agitation of those topics. But in such remonstrance we have forgotten ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a man behaves towards those who have worked in the same field with himself, and, again, than his style. A man's style, as Buffon long since said, is the man himself. By style, I do not, of course, mean grammar or rhetoric, but that style of which Buffon again said that it is like happiness, and vient de la douceur de l'ame. When we find a man concealing worse than nullity of meaning under sentences that sound plausibly enough, we should distrust him much as we ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... [Footnote 14: Rhetoric, iii. ch. II, where he cites such verbal jokes as, You wish him [Greek: persai] (i.e. to side with Persia—to ruin him), and the saying of Isocrates concerning Athens, that its sovereignty [Greek: archae] was to the city a beginning [Greek: archae] of evils. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... three years after his father's death, Tycho was sent to the University of Copenhagen, to study rhetoric and philosophy, with the view of preparing for the study of the law, and qualifying himself for some of those political offices which his rank entitled him to expect. In this situation he contracted no ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... the beginning of the sixteenth century consisted of what was called the Trivium, Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric. The Quadrivium or Music, Arithmetic, Geometry and Astronomy, was relegated to the Universities and only pursued by very few. In 1535 Henry VIII wished "laten, greken, and hebrewe to be by my people applied and larned." Latin was not in those days a mere ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... which he intended to provide for the October number of the Edinburgh Review. While he was still at Paris, this arrangement was rescinded by Mr. Napier in compliance with the wish, or the whim, of Brougham; and Macaulay's surprise and annoyance vented itself in a burst of indignant rhetoric strong enough to have upset a Government. [See on page 142 the letter to Mr. Napier of September 16, 1831.] His wrath,—or that part of it, at least, which was directed against the editor,—did not survive an interchange ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... to consider this question in the light of rhetoric and made no reply. He wasn't going to give Estelle away by saying there was nothing the matter with her, and on the other hand a lie would have been pounced upon and torn to pieces. "Marriage don't seem to have agreed with either of you particularly well," ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... journeys westward from the Missouri River imagines that he is coming to a new country. "The New West" is a favorite term with the agents of land—companies and the writers of alluring railway-guides. These enterprising advocates sometimes indulge in flights of rhetoric that scorn the trammels of grammar and dictionary. Witness the following impassioned utterances concerning the lands of a certain Western railroad: "They comprise a section of country whose possibilities are simply infinitesimal, and whose developments will be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... This is no idle rhetoric. Dissent in the Republic has come upon hard ways. Ten years ago the name of Mencken would have stood against the world. Today no college freshman, no lowly professor, no charity worker, or local alderman too ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... the stars, and they who can may read them. The astronomers forever comment on and observe them. They are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... freedom than was fitting. I am sure, Heraclides went away disgusted with us, for handling Epicurus and Aletrodorus more roughly than they deserved. Yet you may remember, replied Theon, how you told them that Colotes himself, compared with the rhetoric of those two gentlemen, would appear the complaisantest man alive; for when they have raked together the lewdest terms of ignominy the tongue of man ever used, as buffooneries, trollings, arrogancies, whorings, assassinations, whining counterfeits, black-guards, and blockheads, they faintly throw ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... began to be followed with success in the Netherlands, in the Dutch, Flemish, and French languages; and even before the institution of the Floral Games in France, Belgium possessed its chambers of rhetoric (rederykkamers) which labored to keep alive the sacred flame of poetry with more zeal than success. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, these societies were established in almost every burgh of Flanders and Brabant; the principal towns ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... first Scherzo in B minor? You play it, but do you understand its ferocious irony? [Oh, author of Chopin: the Man and his Music, what sins of rhetoric must be placed at your door!] And what of the E-flat minor Scherzo? Is it merely an excuse for blacksmith art and is the following finale only a study in unisons? There is the C-sharp minor Prelude. In it Brahms ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... H. CHAPIN, whose effective elocution and brilliant rhetoric attract crowds to his ordinary discourses at the Universalist Church in Murray-street, has in the press of Mr. J. S. Redfield, a volume upon "Womanhood, Illustrated by the Women of the New Testament"—not treating of these characters in the offensive style of the small rhetoricians, but rather ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... in the plan of the "Great Instauration." To his friend Toby Matthews, at Florence, he sent in manuscript the great attack on the old teachers of knowledge, which is perhaps the most brilliant, and also the most insolently unjust and unthinking piece of rhetoric ever composed by him—the ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... all very well done. We were merry as I could be in that company, and the more because I would not seem otherwise to Sir W. Pen, he being within a day or two to go for Ireland. After dinner he and his son went away, and Mr. Creed would, with all his rhetoric, have persuaded me to have gone to a play; and in good earnest I find my nature desirous to have gone, notwithstanding my promise and my business, to which I have lately kept myself so close, but I did refuse it, and I hope shall ever do so, and above all things it is considerable ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... expression as a weakness, a possible deterrent to action. The last year has not confirmed that view. It has rather shown that eloquence is a supplementary weapon. By "eloquence" I naturally do not mean public speaking, nor yet the rhetorical writing too often associated with the word. Rhetoric is the dressing-up of conventional sentiment, eloquence the fearless expression of real emotion. And this gift of the fearless expression of emotion—fearless, that is, of ridicule, or of indifference in the hearer—has been an inestimable strength to France. It is a ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... and he even testifies his interest at a later stage by one or two occasional remarks. When attacked by Glaucon he is humorously protected by Socrates 'as one who has never been his enemy and is now his friend.' From Cicero and Quintilian and from Aristotle's Rhetoric we learn that the Sophist whom Plato has made so ridiculous was a man of note whose writings were preserved in later ages. The play on his name which was made by his contemporary Herodicus (Aris. Rhet.), 'thou wast ever bold in battle,' ...
— The Republic • Plato
... men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... the gentleman, who declaimed against the bill with such fluency and rhetoric, and such vehemence of gesture; who charged the advocates for the expedients now proposed, with having no regard to any interests but their own, and with making laws only to consume paper, and threatened them with the defection of ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... Although there are certain things, such as pauses, breathing, and pitch of voice, that are very important, none of these can take the place of soul in an address. When I have an address to deliver, I like to forget all about the rules for the proper use of the English language, and all about rhetoric and that sort of thing, and I like to make the audience forget all ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... old world seems to have gone wild—Oscar Wilde! How the Oscars have thriven there since the first of them went to jail!—a degenerate dynasty!—hiding the stench of spiritual rot with the perfume of faultless rhetoric, speaking the unspeakable with the tongues of angels and of prophets! And mostly, my boy, they have thriven on the dollars of American women under the leadership of modern culture. And, you know, the maiden follows mama. She is an apologist of sublime lewdness, of emancipated ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... of the new proposal fired the imagination of a man, whose support was of the utmost importance for the success of a measure which was to be submitted to a popular body that was divided in its allegiance, uncertain in its views, and therefore open to conviction by rhetoric if not by argument. It was characteristic of the past career of the young orator Lucius Crassus that he should now have thrown himself wholly on the side of Caepio and the progressive members of the senate.[1212] His past career had committed him to no extremes. He had impeached Carbo, ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... well acquainted with Geography and the use of the globes. He went through Watts' 'Logic' last winter, but having no taste for that study, or rather an aversion to it, he is not so well skilled in that as in some other parts of learning. About a year ago he went through so much of rhetoric as is contained in the 'Preceptor,' but suppose he has forgot the most of it. Upon the whole, though he may not, perhaps, be so well versed in some parts of learning as the class which he proposes to enter, yet ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... When I got here, I found an unclerical-looking gentleman in a blue great-coat and sandy moustache erecting his rostrum in the shape of a small deal stool, from whence I could see he was preparing to pour forth the floods of his rhetoric by diligent study of some exceedingly greasy notes which he held in his hand and perused at what I feel sure must have been the windiest street corner procurable outside the cave of AEolus. I fell back into the small but very far from select crowd which had already begun to gather, and ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... self-sacrificing industry" ran to nearly a column. "It will be observed," said the Meteor, "that there is a good deal of blank space in Mr. PATTLE's comparative career; but this no doubt recommends him to his Conservative friends, who are quite equal to filling it brilliantly with their imaginative rhetoric about ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various
... me, O auspicious King, that the cause of Miriam the Girdle-girl leaving her father and mother was a wondrous and thereby hangeth a marvellous tale. She was reared with her father and mother in honour and indulgence and learnt rhetoric and penmanship and arithmetic and cavalarice and all manner crafts, such as broidery and sewing and weaving and girdle-making and silk-cord making and damascening gold on silver and silver on gold, brief all the arts both of men and women, till she ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... that contentious atmosphere with which Mr. Gladstone expresses and laments his familiarity, in the atmosphere of science it really is of no avail whatever to shut one's eyes to facts, or to try to bury them out of sight under a tumulus of rhetoric. That is my experience of the "Elysian regions of Science," wherein it is a pleasure to me to think that a man of Mr. Gladstone's intimate knowledge of English life, during the last quarter of a century, believes ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... controlled by the greatness of our object. Thus, if a man should go to see the place where (as they say) St. Peter met our Lord on the Appian Way at dawn, he will not care very much for the niggling of pedants about this or that building, or for the rhetoric of posers about this or that beautiful picture. If a thing in his way seem to him frankly ugly he will easily treat it as a neutral, forget it and pass it by. If, on the contrary, he find a beautiful thing, whether done ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... right hand on his heart, Bent down his head, and cast his eyes full low, And reverence made with courtly grace and art, For all that humble lore to him was know; His sober lips then did he softly part, Whence of pure rhetoric, whole streams outflow, And thus he said, while on the Christian lords Down fell the mildew ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... protector of the miserable, it is a prime agent in the promotion of decadence—pity persuades to extinction.... Of course, one doesn't say "extinction": one says "the other world," or "God," or "the true life," or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness.... This innocent rhetoric, from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appears a good deal less innocent when one reflects upon the tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the tendency to destroy life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why pity appeared to him as a virtue.... ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... every other woman, and the bare idea of your working in a shop sickens me. I always think of you as apart from the workaday world. I always think of you as a star shining serenely above the sordid struggle—" Overwhelmed by the glowing train of his rhetoric, he broke down suddenly and caught passionately at the ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... the friars, and declared that only St. Francis could undo what St. Francis himself had bound up. Nor was this all, for in the pursuance of their zeal for poverty they passed quickly from denunciations of the Pope and the wealthy clergy (in which their rhetoric found very effective matter for argument) into abstract reasoning on the whole question of the private possession of property. The treatises which they have left in crabbed Latin and involved methods of argument make ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... other. In writing we did better work together than either could do alone. While she is slow and analytical in composition, I am rapid and synthetic. I am the better writer, she the better critic. She supplied the facts and statistics, I the philosophy and rhetoric, and together we made arguments which have stood unshaken by the storms ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... and machine skill has been waged incessantly during the last century. Step by step all along the line the machine has ousted the skilled manual worker, either rendering his office superfluous, or retaining him to play the part of servant to the new machine. A good deal of thoughtless rhetoric has been consumed upon the subject of this new serfdom of the worker to machinery. There is no reason in the nature of things why the work of attendance on machinery should not be more dignified, more pleasant, and more remunerative to the working-man than the work it displaces. To shift ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... remember a young wife who had to part with her husband for a time. She did not write a mournful poem; indeed, she was a silent person, and perhaps hardly said a word about it; but she quietly turned of a deep orange color with jaundice. A great many people in this world have but one form of rhetoric for their profoundest experiences,—namely, to waste away and die. When a man can READ, his paroxysm of feeling is passing. When he can READ, his thought has slackened its hold.—You talk about reading Shakspeare, using him as an expression for the highest intellect, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... sophist who taught rhetoric at Rome in the time of Hadrian. He is the author of a collection ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... while Abraham works down to its lowest point the diminishing ratio of the just to be found there, or of David's appearing before the Pater Coelestis as the great judge, of dramatic or tragic emotion there is little indeed. But Bayle's rhetoric easily ran to the edge of suspense, as in the opening of his seventh act, where he puts the dramatic question in the ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... freest upon earth." He assumed that his government was "terrible to its enemies, but generous to its allies," and prefaced his summary of alleged violations of the international compact, by a flourish of rhetoric intended to ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... ripple through the whiteness of her skin—"Think no more of such folly— thou wilt anger me. That a doting graybeard like Khosrul should trouble the peace of Al-Kyris the Magnificent, ... by the gods— the whole thing is absurd! Let me hear no more of mobs or riots, or road-rhetoric,—my soul abhors even the suggestion of discord. Tranquillity! ... Divinest calm, disturbed only by the flutterings of winged thoughts hovering over the cloudless heaven of fancy! ... this, this alone is the sum and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... name Restoring what has been lent us, wit usury and accession Revenge more wounds our children than it heals us Revenge, which afterwards produces a series of new cruelties Reverse of truth has a hundred thousand forms Rhetoric: an art to flatter and deceive Rhetoric: to govern a disorderly and tumultuous rabble Richer than we think we are; but we are taught to borrow Ridiculous desire of riches when we have lost the use of them Right of command appertains to the beautiful-Aristotle Rome was more valiant before she ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Michel De Montaigne • Michel De Montaigne
... and Roman common-places, Socrates and the hemlock, Brutus and his dagger, classic metaphors like "the flambeaux of discord," and "the vessel of State,"[3197]s coupled together and beauties of style which a pupil in rhetoric aims at on the college bench;[3198]times a grand bravura air, so essential for parade in public;[3199] centimes a delicate strain of the flute, for, in those days, one must have a tender heart;[31100] in short, Marmontel's method in "Belisarius," or that of Thomas in his ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... English; and our wonder increases when we remember that it was written by a man ignorant of literary models. But he had read his Bible daily until its style and imagery had taken possession of him; also he had a vivid imagination, a sincere purpose to help his fellows, and his simple rule of rhetoric was to forget himself and deliver his message. In one of his poems he gives us his rule of expression, which is an excellent one ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... then, must give some account of language, it seems desirable to explain how its treatment of language differs from that of Grammar and from that of Rhetoric. ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... His rhetoric was set forth with an ear-piercing elocution, and a voice that sometimes crashed like cannon. Such as it was, it was the gift of all hill-preachers, to a singular degree of likeness or identity. Their images scarce ranged beyond the red ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... And so keenly did men feel the human interests of such things as were now taught, that we have come to call grammar, rhetoric, poetry, Greek and Latin the Humanities, and the professor who teaches these thing the professor ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... between two very eminent and powerful financiers, against both of whom charges of considerable defalcation were brought. The case was long and complex; the advocates were long and eloquent; but at last, after weeks of work and rhetoric, the time came for the great judge to give a summing-up; and one of his celebrated masterpieces of lucidity and pulverizing logic was eagerly looked for. He had spoken very little during the prolonged affair, and he looked sad and lowering at the end of it. He was silent for ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... foh, your dumb rhetoric is more ridiculous than your talking impertinence, as an ape is a much more troublesome animal than ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... Prince of Wallachia, in 1716, a comparison of the authorities (Engel, Wilkinson, Neigebaur, &c.) shows that he had already ruled in Moldavia since 1712. Vaillant is, as usual, vague, and supplies the place of precise facts by abundant rhetoric.] ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... climb above the ragged edge of the firs. When they spoke again it was very simply, in broken sentences, as children speak. The poetry of their relation to one another and the scene about them were too full of meaning, too lovely, to call for polish of rhetoric, or ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... spirit to such a place, he would not tolerate it—least of all a combative fellow like Lamennais—it would be a perpetual solitary confinement. Such a cry is merely a theatrical way of saying that he felt tired. Yet it is such sayings which impress people, because men love rhetoric." ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... did not arm his philosophy with the weapons of logic, he adorned her profusely with all the richest decorations of rhetoric. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a subtle, but, it seemed, ineradicable antagonism between them, though that perhaps is too strong a word for it. A difference there was, anyway, in the grain of their two minds, that hindered unreserved confidences, no matter how hard they might try for them. Portia's brusk disdain of rhetoric, her habit of reducing questions to their least denominator of common sense, carried a constant and perfectly involuntary criticism of her mother's ampler and more emotional style—made her suspect that Portia regarded ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... thoughts or emotions that are but vaguely perceived, which is the characteristic of the best sensational writing. Indeed, there is little poetry by the eminent contemporary masters which is so ripe and racy as his. He does not make rhetoric stand for passion, nor vagueness for profundity; nor, on the other hand, is he such a voluntary and malicious "Bohemian" as to conceive that either in life or letters a man is released from the plain rules of morality. Indeed, he used to be accused ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind," &c. Coleridge was at that time only five and twenty years of age; yet he seems even then to have been able to decide on many writers in logic and rhetoric, philosophy and poetry. Of course he was familiar with the works of his friend Wordsworth, of whom he cleverly observed, in reply to the depreciating opinion of Mackintosh, "He strides on so far before you, that he dwindles ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... possessed myself of a copy of the Prince of Schwartzenberg's proclamation, and identified the wooden rhetoric at once. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... melody. Outside the garden scene in the second act and the balcony scene in the third, there is much that is fanciful and graceful, much of elegiac pathos and fervid if fantastic passion; much also of superfluous rhetoric and (as it were) of wordy melody, which flows and foams hither and thither into something of extravagance and excess; but in these two there is no flaw, no outbreak, no superflux, and no failure. Throughout certain scenes of the third and fourth acts I think it may be reasonably and reverently ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... do justice to the sumptuous phraseology of the work, to its opulence of carefully selected adjective, or to the involved rhetoric which seemed to defeat and set at naught all your petty rules of syntax and prosody. Still less can I impart a notion of the exhaustive raking up of ancient examples and modern instances, mostly worn bright by familiarity with the popular mind, but ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... excellent Poet, R. Garnier, and translated into English by Thomas Kyd." This translation was printed in 1595. The play is thus summarized: It is "a piece which is constructed upon a misunderstood model of the ancients; it is altogether devoid of dramatic action, in reality merely lyrics and rhetoric in dialogue. The whole of the first act consists of one emphatic jeremiad by Cicero, about the desperate condition of Rome as it then was, its factiousness, its servility,—a jeremiad which is continued at the end of the act, by the chorus, in rhymed stanzas. In this tone it proceeds without a trace ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... period he was in a wretched state of health, being constantly attacked by various extraordinary diseases. He describes himself as not growing at all, and as resembling a very delicate and pale wax taper. In 1760 he passed in the class of rhetoric, and succeeded, moreover, in recovering his Ariosto, but read very little of it, partly from the difficulty he found in understanding it, and partly because the continued breaks in the story disgusted him. As to Tasso, he had never even heard his name. He obtained a few of Metastasio's plays ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... we find the theme reproduced by Tasso;[119] and it had doubtless been freely used by Shakspere's English predecessors and contemporaries. What he did was but to set the familiar theme to a rhetoric whose superb sonority must have left theirs tame, as it leaves Seneca's stilted in comparison. Marston did his best with it, in a play which may have been written before, ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... the same gifted captain who had crushed the Taeping rebellion twenty years before. What he did for the Soudan and its people during six years' residence, at a personal sacrifice that never can be appreciated, has been told at length; but pages of rhetoric would not give as perfect a picture as the spontaneous cry of the blacks: "If we only had a governor like Gordon Pasha, then the country would indeed ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... [Footnote: "The speech of the debate was that of Sir Charles Dilke. It was close, cogent, and to the point throughout. His facts were admirably marshalled, so as to strengthen without obscuring his arguments. There was no fencing, no rhetoric, ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... professor to his card. The art of cheating, ingannazione, seems to be at present the only one in Italy irrepresented, eo nomine, by a teacher. Whether it be that there is properly no such art, but, as was formerly alleged of rhetoric, that every man persuades best in the subject of his own craft, the principles of cheating in like manner vary with the occupation of the cheater; or because, where all men are more or less proficients, the instructions ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... you do not like him," d'Hebonville replied. "If, now, it were a supper to the history teacher, you would agree, I am sure. For de l'Equille praises you on 'the profundity of your reflections and the sagacity of your judgment.' Oh, I've read his notes; or you would agree if it were Domaisen, the rhetoric teacher, who is much impressed—those are his very words, are they not, gentlemen?—with 'your powers of generalization, which' he says, are even 'as granite heated at a volcano.' But as it is only dear old Bauer"—and d'Hebonville ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... up and prayed, and read a chapter of God's Word, after which he preached—ay, preached in a way that drew tears from some, and hearty exclamations of thankfulness from others. It was not the power of rhetoric or of eloquence though he possessed both, so much as that mighty power, which consists in being thoroughly and intensely earnest in what one says, and in ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... knowledge, and a violent passion for study and retirement, inclined him to enter the congregation of the Chanoines Reguliers—distinguished for men of literature; and, agreeably to form, he went through a course of rhetoric and philosophy, before he passed into divinity, as a resident in the Abbey de Chatrices in the diocese of Chalons sur Marne. It was there that he laid the foundation of his future celebrity as a literary bibliographer. He met there the venerable ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... was only overridden by a gesture from the Judge. Tennessee laughed. And apparently oblivious of the excitement, Tennessee's Partner improved the opportunity to mop his face again with his handkerchief. When order was restored, and the man was made to understand, by the use of forcible figures and rhetoric, that Tennessee's offense could not be condoned by money, his face took a more serious and sanguinary hue, and those who were nearest to him noticed that his rough hand trembled slightly on the table. He hesitated ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... Never consulted, always immolated, thrust into war, forced into crimes which they have never wished to commit. Any chance adventurer or braggart arrogantly claims the right to cloak with the name of the people the follies of his murderous rhetoric or the sordid interests he wishes to satisfy. The masses are everlastingly duped, everlastingly martyred; they pay for others' misdeeds. Above their heads are exchanged challenges for causes of which they know nothing and for stakes which are of no interest to them. Across their backs, bleeding ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... find it, be it ever so rough in the bark, they catch upon it. And instances are not wanting of those who have turned away from the flattery of admirers to prostrate themselves at the feet of a genuine hero who never wooed them, except by heroic deeds and the rhetoric of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... spoke. I did not pretend to unfold the scheme. I did not attempt any rhetoric. But I did not make any apologies. I told them simply of the dangers of lee-shores. I told them when they were most dangerous,— when seamen came upon them unawares. I explained to them that, though the costly chronometer, frequently adjusted, made a delusive guide ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... what feelings it is only too easy to conjecture, that a great party, a party which, despite its many political blunders, has at least a record for honourable if mistaken statesmanship in the past, has now stooped to the final and abysmal folly. Disguise the fact with what specious rhetoric they may, the truth remains that our opponents have deliberately endeavoured to tamper with a great national possession, and to make the British Army a tool in the game ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... a special dialect, a distinct jargon of its own. This vocabulary is the hell of rhetoric and the paradise ...
— La Boheme • Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica
... almost doubled; its commerce quadrupled; every individual in the kingdom lifted to a high level of comfort and intelligence—the speed quickening every year; the advance so enormous, the increase so splendid, that language turns to rhetoric in describing it.' When due allowance is made for the rhetoric of such a description—for alas! the 'high level of comfort' for every individual in the kingdom is still unattained—the substantial truth of such a statement cannot ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are also in transition. We have avoided both the acts and the rhetoric of the cold war. When we have differed with the Soviet Union, or other nations, for that matter, I have tried to differ quietly and with courtesy, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Lyndon B. Johnson • Lyndon B. Johnson
... a high place in the Seven Sciences, as that use of regulated numbers which expressed the harmonies of the created world. The Seven Sciences were divided into three of the Trivium, and four of the Quadrivium. The three of the Trivium concerned the use of speech; they were Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic. The four of the Quadrivium concerned number and measure; they were Arithmetic, Geometry, Music; and Astronomy, which led up straight to God. Advance to Music might be represented in the student's mind by his reaching to a sense of the harmonious relation ...
— Essays on Mankind and Political Arithmetic • Sir William Petty
... the opinion that this question was merely exclamatory, ejaculatory in its nature, of the kind orators employ to garnish and embellish their discourse and which all books of rhetoric state do not expect or require an answer, accordingly made no answer. He was, nevertheless, somewhat disturbed by the poor lady's grief and wished that it were possible to restore her husband ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... {30} a mythical British subject and written in English blank verse, did not appear until 1562, nearly a quarter of a century later. Seneca's tragedies had little action, slight characterization, and many extremely long speeches, which often display, however, much brilliant rhetoric. Gorboduc has all these qualities except the brilliance. The history, the third of the types into which the editors of the First Folio were to divide Shakespeare's plays, was also affected by Senecan influence. We have already seen how the historical figure of King John ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... king or the foibles of some noted politician or rich man were things of magnitude and were much expatiated upon, while the common man, singly or in mass, was of absolutely no importance. The finely turned rhetoric of the orators, pleasing as it was to that generation, is, judged by modern standards, well nigh meaningless and worthless. In that highflown oratory, with its carefully studied exordiums, periods and perorations can be clearly discerned the reverence given to power as embodied by possession ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... wilderness of prejudice and ridicule for forty years feel a peculiar tenderness for the young women on whose shoulders we are about to leave our burdens. Although we have opened a pathway to the promised land and cleared up much of the underbrush of false sentiment, logic and rhetoric intertwisted with law and custom, which blocked all avenues in starting, yet there are still many obstacles to be encountered before the rough journey is ended. The younger women are starting with great advantages over us. They have the results of our experience; ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... to prove that he who was small to look at might yet have a considerable amount of bigness about him. I used also to recite to her the scraps of poetry used as illustrations in the chapter on prosody or rhetoric of our Bengali grammar. Now I retailed at her evening gatherings the astronomical tit-bits I had gleaned ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... he had left it. It would be for the jury to decide, under such directions as his lordship might be pleased to give them, how far that evidence brought the guilt home to the prisoner. He would use no rhetoric in pushing the case against the prisoner; but he must submit to them that his learned friend had not shown that acquaintance with human nature which the gentleman undoubtedly possessed in arguing that there had lacked time for the conception and execution of ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... Bob led in prayer, and what the old man lacked in grammer and rhetoric was fully made up ...
— Diddie, Dumps, and Tot • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... consists in the mistake of an accidental and occasional symbol for an universal one," then, in speaking to the psycho-analyst, the psychologist should echo Emerson further, and say: "Let us have a little algebra instead of this trite rhetoric— universal signs instead of these village symbols—and ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... herself for the sake of a little excitement or amusement. Violet could only shut her eyes to restrain the burning tears, and listen, without one word in vindication, until Lady Elizabeth had exhausted her rhetoric, and, rising, with some coolness told her she still hoped that she would think better of it, but that she wished her ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the novels of Guerrazzi, and the tender melody of Bellini. Recent literature has exhibited the conditions under which Italian Liberals strive, and the method of expiating their self-devotion. The novels of Ruffini, the letters of the Countess d'Ossoli, the rhetoric of Gavazzi, and the parliamentary reports of Gladstone, the leading reviews, the daily journals, intercourse with political refugees, and the personal observations of travel, have, more or less definitely, caused the problem called the "Italian ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... Min and Landis were nearest her own. She stopped there first. She found the girls busy, Landis at the study-table, putting the last touches to a composition for the following day's rhetoric. Min was sitting on a low chair by the window, sewing braid on the bottom of a dress-skirt. Unconsciously, Elizabeth gave the article in Min's hand a second glance, and recognized it as the skirt ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... it like that? But a heady rhetoric is not inconsistent with sobriety of thought, as many a Victorian page we have read together testifies. The style tames with the spirit; and wild blood is not the worst of faults in poets or boys. But I will change ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... things, and when the logic becomes perplexing, we are apt to grow rhetorical about them. But rhetoric is only misleading. Whatever the truth may be, it is best that we should know it; and for truth of any kind we should keep our heads and hearts as cool ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... intellectual states to extol the institutions of which they saw only from afar and through a glass the apparent benefits, without examining the concomitant defects. An Athenian might laud the Spartan austerity, as Tacitus might laud the German barbarism; it was the panegyric of rhetoric and satire, of wounded patriotism or disappointed ambition. Although the ephors made the government really and latently democratic, yet the concentration of its action made it seemingly oligarchic; and in its secrecy, caution, vigilance, and energy, it exhibited the best ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from their own. The doctrine of the inherent and necessary disability of mankind for self-government should be regarded not simply with denial, but with abhorrence; not with disproof only, but with execration. To sweep so foul a creed from the precincts of truth, and utterly to consume it, rhetoric should become a whirlwind, and logic fire. Indeed, I have never known a man who desired the establishment of monarchical and aristocratical institutions among us, who had not a mental reservation that, in such case, he and his family should ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... one misses. Call it coldness, call it indifference, call it cowardice—the matter is not mended. If one is cold, one does not grow hot by pretending to perspire; if one is indifferent, one does not become enthusiastic by indulging in hollow rhetoric. If one is cowardly, one can only improve by facing a necessary danger, not by thrusting oneself into perilous situations. To marry without love, for the sake of the discipline, is as if a dizzy man should adventure himself alone upon the Matterhorn; the rashness of proved incapacity is not courage, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... As a stump-speaker Col. Gibson was then without a rival in the West. His oratory was an irresistible fascination, and no audience could ever grow tired of him. The speeches of Mr. Bingham were always admirable. His rhetoric was singularly charming. He was an artist in his work, but seldom repeated himself, while gathering fresh inspiration, and following some new line of thought at every meeting. After our work was done in the Toledo district I accompanied Mr. Ashley to Jefferson, ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... sermons full of the grandest philosophy and theology, and of the highest, most exact, science; you may chain men by your logic, thrill them by your rhetoric, and move them to tears by your eloquence, and they will go home as dead and cold as they came. What they need is power, life. But preach "Christ and him crucified"—not merely dead two thousand years ago—but risen and alive for evermore, and with us to the end of the world, the grandest, most ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... a determined effort made to place a famous "right tackle" in the chair of Assistant Professor of Rhetoric. The plan was only given over with great reluctance, when it was discovered that the "right tackle" was beautifully ignorant of the subject he would have to tackle. Even then it was argued he could "cram"—keeping one lesson in advance ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... more, while Peake, intoxicated by his own rhetoric, began actually to imagine that his commercial condition ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... with the exuberant rhetoric of his race, he revealed his ambitions. He was writing a novel which he hoped would make his name. He was under the influence of Zola, and he had set his scene in Paris. He told Philip the story at length. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... (1) the Koran and its interpretation comprehending the sacred ancient history of the creation and prophets (Chapters iii., iv., v. and vi.), (2) the traditions and legends connected with early Moslem History and (3) some auxiliary sciences as grammar, syntax and prosody; logic, rhetoric and philosophy. See p. 18 of "El-Mas'udi's Historical Encyclopaedia etc.," By my friend Prof. Aloys Springer, London 1841. This fine fragment printed by the Oriental Translation Fund has been left unfinished whilst the Asiatic Society of Paris has printed ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... imagine one does not write to a Moorish lady as one might to a little shop-girl in Beaucaire. Happily our hero was able to cull from his reading many phrases of oriental rhetoric and combining these with some distant memories of the "Song of Songs" he was able to compose the most flowery epistle you could wish for, full of unlikely similes and improbable metaphors. With this romantic missive Tartarin would have liked to combine a bouquet of flowers ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... start. The Peace Society has the argument its own way. The bloody field, the mangled dying, hoof-trampled into the reeking sod, the groans, and cries, and curses, the wrath, and hate, and madness, the horror and the hell of a great battle, are things no rhetoric can ever make lovely. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Devil was in him;—and at Venice gave such proofs of his knowledge and goodness, that the monks imagined he was Antichrist, or nothing.—Others were masters of fourteen languages at ten,—finished the course of their rhetoric, poetry, logic, and ethics, at eleven,—put forth their commentaries upon Servius and Martianus Capella at twelve,—and at thirteen received their degrees in philosophy, laws, and divinity:—but you forget the great Lipsius, quoth Yorick, who composed a work (Nous aurions quelque interet, ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... therefore he adopted vague insinuations, that allowed of no possible refutation, a method which, we may remark by the way, has not been without imitators. Marat exclaimed every day: "Let Bailly send in his accounts!" and the most powerful figure of rhetoric, as Napoleon said, repetition, finally inspires doubts in a stupid portion of the public, in some feeble, ignorant, and credulous minds in the Council of the Commune; and the scrupulous magistrate wished, in fact, to send in his accounts. Here they are in two lines: Bailly never had the handling ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... with nice flexibility to the exact form and pressure of observable facts. It is the limitation of moderate men to be much governed by observable facts; and if the majority could not at once rise to the rhetoric of Samuel Adams, it was doubtless because they had not his instinctive sense of the Arch Conspirator's truly implacable enmity to America. The full measure of this enmity Mr. Adams lived in the hope of some ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... to attempt to give them practice in speaking when they have nothing to say, to expect to make them feel, at their school desks, the vigour of the language of passion and all the force of the arts of persuasion when they have nothing and nobody to persuade! All the rules of rhetoric are mere waste of words to those who do not know how to use them for their own purposes. How does it concern a schoolboy to know how Hannibal encouraged his soldiers to cross the Alps? If instead of these grand speeches you showed him how to induce his prefect to give him ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... 'Rhetoric all this?' No, my brother, very singular to say, it is Fact all this. Cocker's Arithmetic is not truer. Forgotten in these days, it is old as the foundations of the Universe, and will endure till the Universe cease. ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... for such impassioned rhetoric. The swan-maiden had not the faintest idea of offering resistance. She slipped with a soft and charming suppleness into his embrace and received his ecstatic kisses without a murmur of protest. It was ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... a lively contest—rhetoric and corruption on both sides reinforced by terrorism, to which the Allies' military authorities in Macedonia, and their Secret Service at Athens, whose efficiency had been greatly increased by the dismissal of many policemen obnoxious to them, and by other changes brought about through ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... is the character that actually marks the American—that is, in chief? If he is not the exalted monopolist of liberty that he thinks he is nor the noble altruist and idealist he slaps upon the chest when he is full of rhetoric, nor the degraded dollar-chaser of European legend, then what is he? We offer an answer in all humility, for the problem is complex and there is but little illumination of it in the literature; nevertheless, we offer it in the firm conviction, born of twenty years' incessant meditation, ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... authority. The Athenians and Megarians, contending for the possession of the island of Salamis, the home of the hero Aias, are said to have laid their differences before the Spartans (cir. 600-580 B.C.). Each party quoted Homer as evidence. Aristotle, who, as we saw, mentions the tale (Rhetoric, i. 15), merely says that the Athenians cited Iliad, II. 558: "Aias led and stationed his men where the phalanxes of the Athenians were posted." Aristarchus condemned this line, not (as far as evidence goes) because there was a tradition that ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... aside all useless rhetoric, That is superfluous between us two, I come at once unto the point and say, You know my outward life, my rank and fortune; Countess of Fondi, Duchess of Trajetto, A widow rich and flattered, for whose hand In marriage princes ask, and ask it only To be rejected. All the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the starch of propriety and elegance. The more spontaneous and genuine it became, the closer it approached this language. DELAVIGNE won great applause by his Messniennes (1815-19), but the lyric impulse was not strong enough in him to make him independent of the traditional rhetoric. MME. DESBORDES-VALMORE, less influenced by literary training and more mastered by the emotion that prompted her, found the real lyric note. But it was especially LAMARTINE whose poetic utterance was most spontaneous and who recovered for France the gift of lyric expression. His ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... knots under the porticoes, eagerly discussing the questions of the day, were the philosophers, in the garb of their several sects, ready for any new question on which they might exercise their subtlety or display their rhetoric." If there were any in that motley group who cherished the principles and retained the spirit of the true Platonic school, we may presume they felt an inward intellectual sympathy with the doctrine enounced by Paul. With Plato, "philosophy was only another name for religion: philosophy ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... studies intermitted: whilst after my return from Madaura (a neighbour city, whither I had journeyed to learn grammar and rhetoric), the expenses for a further journey to Carthage were being provided for me; and that rather by the resolution than the means of my father, who was but a poor freeman of Thagaste. To whom tell I this? not to Thee, my God; but before Thee to mine own kind, even to that small portion ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... with half a dozen quotations from syntax or Greek grammar, he uniformly came down upon the father for a coat, the cloth of which was finer in proportion to the web of logic he wove during the disputation. Whenever he seated himself in the chair of rhetoric, or gave an edifying homily on prayer, with such eloquence as rendered the father's admiration altogether inexpressible, he applied for a pair of smallclothes; and if, in the excursiveness of his vigorous imagination he travelled anywhere beyond the ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... self-appreciation; and that the second, in the repetitions and the sentences which are never finished, is concerning himself solely with him. The pupil feels that not want of facility or awkwardness, but the earnest eagerness of the teacher, is the principal thing, and that this latter uses rhetoric only as a means.— ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... naturalistic drama. Rose Bernd follows Henry of Aue, and Griselda immediately preceded The Rats. Nor is this all. The methods of naturalism have followed him into the domains of poetry and of the past. His verse is scrupulously devoid of rhetoric; the psychology of his historic plays is sober and human. Hence it is clear that an analysis of the consistent naturalism of German literature is, with whatever modifications, an analysis of Hauptmann's work in its totality. Like nearly all the greater dramatists ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... 1779. Reared by the Fathers of the Oratory. He went as far as rhetoric, at school, and was then put in a bank by his aunt, Jacqueline Collin. Accused, however, of a crime probably committed by Franchessini, he fled the country. Later he was sent to the galleys where he remained from 1810 to 1815, when he ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... bankruptcy of her father, the bitter struggle amid the Apuan Alps to keep themselves and their wretched invalid alive—she described them, as they had been told to her, not rhetorically, for neither she nor Netta Melrose was capable of rhetoric, but with the touches and plain ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the Church Parentage and birth Education and youthful follies Influence of the Manicheans on him Teacher of rhetoric Visits Rome Teaches rhetoric at Milan Influence of Ambrose on him Conversion; Christian experience Retreat to Lake Como Death of Monica his mother Return to Africa Made Bishop of Hippo; his influence as Bishop His greatness as a theologian; his vast studies Contest with Manicheans,—their ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... and is, as it were, the architect of all science, having rule over all, are attached to Wisdom. Hoh is ashamed to be ignorant of any possible thing. Under Wisdom therefore are Grammar, Logic, Physics, Medicine, Astrology, Astronomy, Geometry, Cosmography, Music, Perspective, Arithmetic, Poetry, Rhetoric, Painting, Sculpture. Under the triumvir Love are Breeding, Agriculture, Education, Medicine, ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... monasteries and cathedral churches without exception, and that children of all ranks, both noble and servile, should be received into them. Also that the larger monasteries should open major schools in which the seven sciences of mathematics, astronomy, arithmetic, music, rhetoric, dialectics, and geography, were to be taught—and this in two ways. There were to be two sorts of schools—interior or claustral, intended for monastics only, and exterior or canonical, intended for secular students. These schools were under separate scholastics or masters, and lay students ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... Sheridan attempted to controvert his statements, they could not be proved fallacious. Of all men in the house, indeed, Sheridan was the most unfit to enter into financial computations, for his genius rather lay in rhetoric than in figures. In the supplies, 18,000 seamen were voted, and about 29,000 land-forces, beside those that were on ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... confessor, Guillaume Parvi, and the famous Grecian, Guillaume Bude, who in 1530 was himself induced to undertake the task which Erasmus had declined. Twelve professors were appointed in Greek, Hebrew, mathematics, philosophy, rhetoric and medicine, each of the twelve with a salary of two hundred gold crowns (about L80), and the dignity of royal councillors. The king's vast scheme of a great college and magnificent chapel, with a revenue of 50,000 crowns for the maintenance ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... found at the prince's charge (and that very largely) fine professors and readers, that is to say, of divinity, of the civil law, physic, the Hebrew and the Greek tongues. And for the other lectures, as of philosophy, logic, rhetoric, and the quadrivials (although the latter, I mean arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy, and with them all skill in the perspectives, are now smally regarded in either of them), the universities themselves ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... feared her were also fond of her; the fear and the fondness being perhaps both heightened by what may be called the iridescence of her character—the play of various, nay, contrary tendencies. For Macbeth's rhetoric about the impossibility of being many opposite things in the same moment, referred to the clumsy necessities of action and not to the subtler possibilities of feeling. We cannot speak a loyal word and be meanly silent; we cannot kill and not kill in the ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... theology. In treatises compiled as text-books for his scholars, Baeda threw together all that the world had then accumulated in astronomy and meteorology, in physics and music, in philosophy, grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, medicine. But the encyclopaedic character of his researches left him in heart a simple Englishman. He loved his own English tongue, he was skilled in English song, his last work was a translation into English of the gospel of St. John, and almost the last words that broke from ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... his rhetoric, must, in all probability, have retired in confusion, if Amene had not taken his part, and said to Zobeide and Safie, "My dear sisters, I conjure you to let him remain; I need not tell you that he ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... that surround the throne of Omnipotence, ascended to the bosom of his God." There can be no doubt of the deep sincerity of this tribute, whatever question there may be of its grammatical construction and its rhetoric, and although the date is erroneous. The ratification of the Constitution of the United States by the Virginia Convention was on June 25, not on June 28. It is the misfortune of our time that we have no living great men held in such universal veneration that their dying ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... we have irrefragable testimony to the position he had already taken, alike in the world of letters as in the social life of Stratford. In the autumn of that year appeared the perennial advertisement of Meres, the Professor of Rhetoric at Oxford, Master of Arts of both Universities, who ranks him among the first of his day, as an epic and lyric poet, and as a writer of both tragedy and comedy. "As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... would have talked to a party of three or six. His style was simple, natural, unstrained; the lucid statement and cogent argument now and again irradiated by a salient passage of satire or a burst of not too eloquent rhetoric. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... referred to as "the celebrated Lorenzo Daponte, who after having been Jew, Christian, priest, and poet in Italy and Germany found himself to be a layman, husband, and ass in London." It remained for Professor Marchesan, his successor in the chair of rhetoric in the University of Treviso, to give the world the facts concerning his origin and early family history. From Marchesan's book ("Della Vita e delle Opere di Lorenzo da Ponte") published in Treviso in 1900 we learn that the poet's father was in truth a Hebrew leather dealer, and also that the ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... from school on that day to practise a little roller-skating. For humility and gratitude should not blind us to the fact that few writers in English of Ruskin's reputation have ever considered such a rosy cloud of rhetoric as is his lecture on war, in which a reasonable shape no sooner looms than it is lost again, to be worth preserving. The subject of war is of importance, inflammable humanity being what it is, and the results of war being what we know; and the quality of the critical attention we give to ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... Acquired Art. Criticism is an art that may in large measure be acquired. The requisite faculties may be developed by a course of study. The principles that are to guide the critical judgment are provided in grammar, rhetoric, logic, aesthetics, and moral science. Wide reading in various departments will banish narrowness and provincialism. Study and experience will bring a cosmopolitan culture. Though few are capable of attaining to eminence ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... Rhetoric.—Ethica.—A poem, as I have told you, is the work of the poet; the end and fruit of his labour and study. Poesy is his skill or craft of making; the very fiction itself, the reason or form of the work. And these three voices differ, as the thing done, the doing, and the ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... and cried, and tore her hair, as if she had been distracted — Sir Thomas had already ordered his people to bring a long ladder which was applied to the captain's, window, and now he exhorted him earnestly to descend. — There was no need of much rhetoric to persuade Lismahago, who forthwith made his exit by the window, roaring all the time to the people below to hold fast ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... influence in mere language, in mere system of arrangement and expression, will remain valid. If, at the outset of the career of modern languages, men had thought with the looseness of modern thought, had indulged in the haphazard slovenliness of modern logic, had popularised theology and vulgarised rhetoric, as we have seen both popularised and vulgarised since, we should indeed have been in evil case. It used to be thought clever to moralise and to felicitate mankind over the rejection of the stays, the fetters, the prison in which its thought was mediaevally kept. The justice or the injustice, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... desperate energy, and the whole attitude of the man was that of one in awful wrath. Yet his voice was not raised above the common current of the evening's address—if anything, it was lower. While the mature mind cannot endure Ingersoll's rhetoric, it must be acknowledged that his manner of delivery (except when his levity made him coarse) was nearly equal to that of Wendell Phillips. Still, in his intense passages Ingersoll was almost fiercely earnest. And Plutarch tells us that Cicero's friends feared he would kill himself by bursting ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... ignored; too many people have harsh personal experience of the wastefulness of its production, the injustice of its distribution; of its sweating, its unemployment and slums. And when the attempt is made to plaster over evils, such as these with obsequious rhetoric about the majesty of economic law, it is not surprising that the spirit of many men should revolt and that they should retort by denying the existence of order in the business world, by declaring that the spectacle which they see ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... dramatic ring in those lines; the words come straight from the heart and strike home. The swift sudden menace in the last line is more effective than pages of rhetoric. ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... quietly smiling at this discreet coat-turning rhetoric. With his drawn sword he motioned to his soldiers to lower their weapons, and return to the barracks, simply leaving the usual ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... Winthrop's newspaper, during which he stood haughtily erect, his feet rather wide apart, his arms folded indignantly across his breast, and a look of righteous wrath on his face. When the clerk finished, he spat plentifully in a spittoon at his feet, cleared his throat, and let loose the flood of rhetoric which was threatening already to ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... congratulating the crown attorney on his statement of the case. He called it masterly; he said that in its presentations it was irrefutable; as a precis of evidence purely circumstantial it was— useful and interesting. But, speech-making aside, and ability—and rhetoric—aside, and even personal conviction aside, the case should stand or fall by its total, not its comparative, soundness. Since the evidence was purely circumstantial, there must be no flaw in its cable of assumption, it must be logically ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... she should have to be alone most of the time. She went to the window again, and saw the two V's climbing in; then there was a great shouting and waving of handkerchiefs, and they drove away. Peggy sighed, and sat down once more to her task. It was rhetoric, and her whole nature cried out against it; but the study was prescribed, and the teacher, Miss Pugsley, was reported to be very strict. Peggy put her elbows on the table, and her head on her hands, and bent in good earnest ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... feast it was to answer you by becoming more and more august, more and more gracious, more and more ancient and mellow! But this lad has seen how to bowl me out. He has answered me back, vaunt for vaunt, rhetoric for rhetoric. He has lifted the only shield I cannot break, the shield of an impenetrable pomposity. Listen to him. You have come, my ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton |
