"Rhetorical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... humdrum ordinary life again after being a General Superintendent and the most conspicuous man in the community. It was sad to see his name disappear from the newspapers; sadder still to see it resurrected at intervals, shorn of its aforetime gaudy gear of compliments and clothed on with rhetorical tar ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... OF LIFE," by Dr. R. C. Flower, Spectator Publishing Co., Boston, 52 pages, 50 cents. This handsome brochure discusses many prevalent evils in a pungent and rhetorical style and gives a great amount of good advice in ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... could be more rhetorical than this perfectly common word of controversy. The comic dramatist is well aware of the spent violence of this phrase, with which every serious Frenchman will reply to opponents, especially in public matters. But not even the comic dramatist is aware ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... Euripides makes so immoderate and arbitrary use of this poetical device that very frequently one-half of his lines might be left out without detriment to the sense. At another time he pours himself out in endless speeches, where he sets himself to shew off his rhetorical powers in ingenious arguments, or in pathetic appeals. Many of his scenes have altogether the appearance of a lawsuit, where two persons, as the parties in the litigation, (with sometimes a third for a judge,) do not confine themselves to the matter in ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... contains a copious selection of those passages in the works of JEREMY BENTHAM which appear to be chiefly distinguished for merit of a simply rhetorical character; which, appearing often in the midst of long and arduous processes of reasoning, or in the course of elaborate descriptions of minute practical arrangements, demanding from an active mind severe thought and unflagging attention, have scarcely had their due weight ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... this mode of patching up his argument is more important. The 'vices of mankind,' he says in an unusually rhetorical summary of his historical inquiry,[236] 'are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in the war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... historically important, as being the earliest Christian attempt to reduce to a science daemonology and the temptation of daemons: but its involved and rhetorical form proves sufficiently that it could not have been delivered by an unlettered man like Antony. Neither is it, probably, even composed by St. Athanasius; it seems rather, like several other passages in this biography, the interpolation ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... that believeth upon Him shall never hunger, and he that cometh unto Him shall never thirst.' God is the divine and unfathomable ocean; Christ the Son is the stream that brings salvation to every man's lips. All wants are supplied there. Take it as a piece of the simplest prose, with no rhetorical exaggeration about it, that Christ is everything, everything that a man can want. We are made to require, and to be restless until we possess, perfect truth—there it is! We are made to want, and to be restless until we get, perfect, infinite unchangeable love—there it is! ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... translator becomes doubly hazardous in case of translating a European language into Japanese, or vice versa. Between any of the European languages and Japanese there is no visible kinship in word-form, significance, grammatical system, rhetorical arrangements. It may be said that the inspiration of the two languages is totally different. A want of similarity of customs, habits, traditions, national sentiments and traits makes the work of translation ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... miniature-painting, by touch applied to touch, and were often monuments of industry, but they were apt to lack personal interest, and to suffer from a general and deplorable frigidity. They were infected with the faults which accompany an artificial style; they were monotonous, rhetorical and symmetrical, while the uniformity of treatment which was inevitable to their plan rendered them hopelessly tedious, if they were prolonged to any ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... may be made in the realm of Christian literature. Minucius Felix, calmly and logically arguing the case of Christianity against paganism, Tertullian the fiery preacher, Cyprian the enthusiast and martyr, Arnobius the rhetorical, contain no indications of familiarity with Horace, though this is not conclusive proof that they did not know and admire him; but Lactantius, the Christian Cicero, Jerome, the sympathetic, the sensitive, the ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... figures is by no means confined to highly-educated persons. Those who are illiterate, as Boone certainly was, often indulge in this style. Even the Indians are remarkably fond of bold metaphors and other rhetorical figures, as is abundantly proved ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... a happy man. But it was now, when he had reached his fifty-second year, that he in truth began that career in literature which has made him second to no Roman in reputation. There are some early rhetorical essays, which were taken from the Greek, of doubtful authenticity; there are the few lines which are preserved of his poetry; there are the speeches which he wrote as well as spoke for the Rome of the day; and there are his letters, which ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... Johnson of having made criticism 'a kind of Procrustes' bed of genius, where he might cut down imagination to matter-of-fact, regulate the passions according to reason, and translate the whole into logical diagrams and rhetorical declamation'. ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... was the most popular of English poets in his day. His fame has since declined, although his fiery, impetuous nature, expressing itself in rapid verse of great rhetorical and satiric power, still reaches kindred spirits. His "Prisoner of Chillon" is often studied in the upper grades. It is full of the passion for freedom which was the dominating idea in Byron's work as it was in his life. He gave ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... Yes, all this stilted, rhetorical stuff is quite foreign to my nature. That's the very reason why I abandoned theology. The preacher's tone is repulsive ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... more widely known and studied from the beginning of the Italian Renaissance to the middle of the seventeenth century. In its style, however, it is far from classic. It is full of archaisms and rhetorical conceits. In striving to say things finely, the author frequently failed to say them well. This fault, however, largely disappears in the translation; and whatever may be the literary defects of the novel, it offers rich ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... English poetry such as we have outlined above would involve a knowledge of the history of the English people and of the various circumstances and events which from time to time influenced our language and literature. It would also embrace many other topics, biographical, philological, rhetorical, and speculative, which have only a secondary relationship to the central idea of poetry. In fact, it would be a study not of poetry, but about poetry,—of the circumstances which suggested it, of the men who produced it, ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... discussed in 1898-9 will be: Canons of rhetorical propriety (first half-year); the teaching of formal rhetoric in the secondary school (second ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... sensational, the gesture so calculated, so theatrical, that much of the truly impressive material, the quantities of original ideas, lose all substantiality, and become indistinct components of these vast mountains of ennui, these wastes of rhetorical and bombastic instruments, these loud and prancing concertos of circus-music. There is something almost insulting to the intelligence in these over-emphasized works, these pretentious facades, these vast, pompous frescoes by Kaulbach, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... annual musical and rhetorical entertainment. A large audience is always expected on this occasion, but this year it was larger than ever. Before eight o'clock, the chapel with the adjoining halls and recitation rooms were filled, and notwithstanding the efforts of the ushers to find room for ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 9, September, 1889 • Various
... the reflection of their own condition in Nature. Among heathen writers who were influenced, without being entirely swayed, by Christian teaching, and imitated the rhetorical Roman style in describing Nature, Apollonius Sidonius takes a prominent place. In spite of many empty phrases and a stilted style, difficult to understand as well as to translate, his poems, and still more his letters, give many interesting pictures of the culture of his part of the fifth ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... into several short sentences; and in this manner he seemed to go back to the ancients, who had not yet invented the period: but still there was a great difference between his style, in which the ancient simplicity was artificially restored, and the genuine ancient sentence formed without any rhetorical art. He wrote without periods, because he would not write otherwise, and not because he could not; he divided the rhetorical period into separate sentences, because it appeared to him advantageous in his animated description of minute details; and he wrote ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... feasts, their diversions were wholly speculative, tending to improve the mind and enlarge the understanding. In this manner he now spent five days at his Tusculan villa in discussing with his friends the several questions just mentioned. For, after employing the mornings in declaiming and rhetorical exercises, they used to retire in the afternoon into a gallery, called the Academy, which he had built for the purpose of philosophical conferences, where, after the manner of the Greeks, he held a school, as they called it, and invited the company to call for any subject ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... or facts received by instruction or study; acquired knowledge or ideas in any branch of science or literature; erudition; literature; science; knowledge acquired by experience, experiment, or observation." Milton gives us a rhetorical definition in a negative form, which is of equal value, at least, with any authority yet cited. "And though a linguist," says Milton, "should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he have ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... washing glasses; the others were watching him, more or less amused by the present ineffectiveness of the assertive method. Goaded by the Torres Vedras tactics of Mr. Beamish, Mr. Fotheringay determined to make an unusual rhetorical effort. "Looky here, Mr. Beamish," said Mr. Fotheringay. "Let us clearly understand what a miracle is. It's something contrariwise to the course of nature, done by power of will, something what couldn't happen without ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... as if they had been cloven tongues, but especially that of the preacher, whose ears were usually of the prime magnitude, which upon that account he was very frequent and exact in exposing with all advantages to the people in his rhetorical paroxysms, turning sometimes to hold forth the one, and sometimes to hold forth the other; from which custom the whole operation of preaching is to this very day among their professors styled by ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... details of illness or the manner of death; don't quote endlessly from the poets and Scriptures. Remember that eyes filmed with tears and an aching heart can not follow rhetorical lengths of writing. The more nearly a note can express a hand-clasp, a thought of sympathy, above all, a genuine love or appreciation of the one who has gone, the greater ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... were not quite spontaneous and unbidden, but that they were carved, so to speak, with disproportionate labour by a potent man of letters whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is for these reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity and emotion which we usually associate with lyrical poetry. There are no such epitaphs as Ben Jonson's, witness the charming ones on his own children, on Salathiel Pavy, the child-actor, and many more; and this even though the rigid ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... before the word "louder", or by the poetical contraction of "sympathy" into "symp'thy". The third line of the fourth stanza possesses only four feet. This may be an intentional shortening to give rhetorical effect, yet it mars none the less ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... not entirely to his satisfaction; for he had spoken with too distinct a sincerity to please his own critical taste, which had been educated to delight in acute antithesis and culminating sentences—the grand Biscayan billows of rhetorical utterance, in comparison wherewith his talk was like the little chopping waves of a wind-blown lake. But he had, as he could see, produced an impression. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... impatient, precipitate, kind temper, excellent in colloquial attractions, caressing the young, not courting rulers; conception, perception, and demonstration quick and clear, with logical precision arguing paradoxes, and carrying home conviction beyond rhetorical illustration; his own impressions so intense as to discredit, scarcely listen to, any other suggestions; ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... wistful mortality is inherently endowed with immortality, had electrified this symposium. Though it was fashionable, so to speak, in this remote cove among the Great Smoky Mountains, to be repentant in rhetorical involutions and a self-accuser in finespun interpretations of sin, doubt, or more properly an eager questioning, a desire to possess the sacred mysteries of religion, was unprecedented. Kennedy was a proud man, ...
— The Christmas Miracle - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... although the published account was correct, it was not as full as it might have been. Perhaps the tendency of modern journalism is to epitomize too much. In the hurry of daily newspaper work and the press of matter upon our pages, very likely we are fatally brief, and sacrifice rhetorical beauty to naked and ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... after, if not during, the persecution of the Jews in Egypt under Ptolemy Philopator. This hypothesis would give a particular point to the bitter exposure of idolatry, to the comparison between the sufferings of the Jews, and those of idolatrous nations, to the long rehearsal and rhetorical declaration of the plagues of Egypt, and to the reward of 'the just man' after a death of martyrdom; and would besides help to explain the putting together of the first ten chapters, and the fragment contained in the remaining chapters. They were works written at the ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... precluded under a longer working day.[208] So far as machinery has converted handicraftsmen into machine-tenders, it is extremely doubtful whether it has lessened the strain upon their energies, though we should hesitate to give an explicit endorsement to Mill's somewhat rhetorical verdict. "It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being." At any rate we have as yet no security that machinery, owned by individuals ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... the pause was rhetorical, and he knew it; he could see the light behind her eyes that was more than visionary; it was the light of practical Scots enthusiasm, unquenched and undiscouraged after a battle with fear itself. She began to be beautiful again as ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... regards Amanda and my mother and every one. A necessary unavoidable priggishness...." I do not see how certain things can be done without prigs, people, that is to say, so concentrated and specialized in interest as to be a trifle inhuman, so resolved as to be rather rhetorical and forced.... All things must begin with clumsiness, there is no ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... On a fine morning. Study this paragraph carefully with reference to the rhetorical effect. The entire scene is the product of De Quincey's imagination; do you consider ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... of the rhetorical school of writing popular in Spanish newspapers; but all that is written is not gospel. From personal observation it was evident to me that these Republicans of the Spanish towns of the north were not so scrupulous in the outward ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... what will confer more interest on the following specimens selected from it is that it was an attempt to rouse the nation to action at this perilous and momentous crisis, and succeeded only in drawing attention and admiration as a fine specimen of rhetorical art: ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... by the minister, who was surrounded on the dais by some dozen girls. I noticed that few were very good-looking; but in their faces was religious fervour. Yet they kept their eyes on the man. The prayer was long, intolerably and trickily eloquent and rhetorical, very self-conscious. The man posed before the throne. But I listened to every word, half absorbed though I was in myself. He was followed in prayer by ambitious and emotional people in the seats. One woman prayed for those ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... to advantage; and yet he rarely resorts to the puff direct, and never indulges in the puff figurative, so much practised by his renowned predecessor, the late knight of the hammer, Christie, the elder, who by the superabundancy of his rhetorical 18flurishes, was accustomed from his elevated rostrum to edify and amuse ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... a fine example of elevated and impassioned oratory. Judge Story here lauds the American Republic, and employs to advantage the rhetorical ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... an innate appreciation of good literature which she told me with her own lips. I asked her once, when I was a lad, what she thought of "Junius," who had begun to exercise a great influence over my rhetorical instincts. It was as natural to consult her on a point of literature as on one of domestic surgery. Her reply was perhaps the strangest ever made by a woman over sixty to a boy of undergraduate age. It ran in this way, for I ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... illustrated by "a pretty story" out of Ariosto, we should not deem it worth while to notice them, if they had not been retained in the latest edition of his Miscellanies. But for this circumstance, we should pass them by as the rhetorical flourish of a young man who, in his most mature productions, is often more ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... got Horvin working for us," said Senator Cannon. "Whether I need him or not may be a point of argument. Whether Matthew Fisher needs him or not is a rhetorical question." ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... unhappy in his choice and disposition of his words, and, for want of variety, repeating them, especially the particles, in a manner very grating to an English ear. But I confine myself to this Introduction, as his last work, where endeavouring at rhetorical flowers, he gives us only bunches of thistles; of which I could present the reader with a plentiful crop; but I refer him to every page and line ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... monotonous repetition of sentence structure. To give variety to successive sentences: (1) vary the length, (2) vary the beginnings, (3) avoid a series of similar compound sentences, (4) interchange loose with periodic structure, (5) use rhetorical question, exclamation, direct discourse, (6) avoid an excessive ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... awoke on it, was that ever realised? The day's-wages of John Milton's day's-work, named Paradise Lost and Milton's Works, were Ten Pounds paid by instalments, and a rather close escape from death on the gallows. Consider that: it is no rhetorical flourish; it is an authentic, altogether quiet fact,—emblematic, quietly documentary of a whole world of such, ever since human history began. Oliver Cromwell quitted his farming; undertook a Hercules' Labour and lifelong wrestle ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... by the Sophists with the best motives. They were not always prompted by an earnest desire to know the truth, and an earnest purpose to embrace and do the right. They talked and argued for mere effect—to display their dialectic subtilty, or their rhetorical power. They taught virtue for mere emolument and pay. They delighted, as Cicero tells us, to plead the opposite sides of a cause with equal effect. And they found exquisite pleasure in raising difficulties, maintaining paradoxes, and ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... sparing of her speech on most occasions, that when she gets into a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I interrupt it. I could not help, however, smiling at the phantom of wealth which her dear imagination had conjured up out of a clear income of poor—hundred pounds a year. "It is true we were happier when we were poorer, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... Rhetorical questions, although the equivalent of affirmative or negative statements, nevertheless retain enough of their interrogative effect to be used advantageously for the beginning of ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... bias towards the prisoner. Cardan himself stood up to defend his son; but with a full confession staring him in the face, he was sorely puzzled to fix upon a line of defence. This he perceived must of necessity be largely rhetorical; and, after he had grasped the entire situation, he set to work to convince the Court on two main points, first, that Gian Battista was a youth of simple guileless character; and, second, there was no proof that Brandonia had died of poison. A physician of good repute, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... The inversion of reference in these lines is an illustration of the rhetorical figure 'chiasmus.' Cp. the arrangement of the demonstrative pronouns in these sentences from 'Kenilworth':—'Your eyes contradict your tongue. That speaks of a protector, willing and able to watch over you; but these tell me you ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... of Heaven in our State churches: these monstrous threnodies have been sung from time immemorial over kings and queens, good, bad, wicked, licentious. The State parson must bring out his commonplaces; his apparatus of rhetorical black-hangings. Dead king or live king, the clergyman must flatter him—announce his piety whilst living, and when dead, perform the obsequies of "our most religious and ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fancied himself a madman? Who sought to climb over his senses and found himself impaled by a tower of Babel? Where are his angers, his disgusts that were the noble shadows thrown by his egoism to blot out a world? Ballad of rhetorical questions. My vanity preens itself with reminiscences. I smile. I am depressed and content. Answers whisper. Mallare is on his feet. His experiments are ended. His mania to possess himself is a snow that falls forgotten in his past. Vale, the lunatic. Vale, the man in the ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... art, the same system of government, even the very same proper names, at the end of the period, as had been in use at its beginning. One cannot but think that the bouleversement which Egypt underwent has been somewhat exaggerated by the native historian for the sake of rhetorical effect, to enhance by contrast the splendour of ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... prairies at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour, in order, first of all, to be ahead of his rivals, this seemed a joke. In after-years of calm and leisure, when writing his books, he painted word pictures and finished his chapters, giving them a rhetorical gloss impossible when writing in haste against the pressure of rushing time. Although Boston was two hundred miles farther from Cairo than New York, yet all New England had read Carleton's account in the Journal before any correspondent's letters from Fort Donelson ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... of a recent French critic, who has made careful study of his subject, that the new school was founded by Chateaubriand, who first, at the last century's end, laid an axe to the root of all this rhetorical artifice, these frigid and grotesque incongruities, and filled his romances with local colour, stamping them with the impress of reality and conformity to nature, by picturesque reproduction of the landscape, costumes, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... question was a rhetorical one; but Hal took it in good faith. "If I could have some beefsteak and ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... the broad outlines and masses of character for which the French divines were famous; indeed, even Bossuet, to an English reader fresh from Fuller and Taylor, seems with all his magnificence too abstract and too rhetorical. La Bruyere determined to be less exacting and yet more exact; he would sink to describing emotions less tremendous and to designing figures of more trifling value, but he would paint them with a vivid detail hitherto unsolicited. The consequence was that the public instantly responded ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... surprises of the campaign to those who had known him as an orator of classic eloquence was the comparative infrequency of rhetorical periods. It was as if he were now too deeply engaged with actualities to chisel and polish his sentences. Of the many anecdotes which he told during the campaign one of his favourites was of the Irishman digging a cellar, who when asked what he was doing said: "I'm letting the darkness ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... reaching the cave, and meanwhile Sturges restored the lost illusions of Pilar. Not only did he make love to her without any of the rhetorical nonsense of the caballero, but he was big and strong, and it was evident that he was afraid of nothing, not even of Dona Brigida. The dreams of her silent girlhood swirled in her imagination, but looked vague and shapeless before this vigorous reality. For some moments ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... the street knows. No tautology is to be found and no attempt at ornate expression. It is a model of simplicity, and as it flows through the reaches of history it will always excite the admiration of those who love clarity and not rhetorical excesses. One can say of it as Horace ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... the Burgundian regime and supported the duke's policy, whether friendly or antagonistic to France. From a literary point of view, they are greatly inferior to their predecessors and often lapse into rhetorical eloquence. Their style, which appears to be overloaded with flowery images, excited great admiration at the time, especially in the case of Chastellain, who was hailed by his ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... believe, as to the Jews and Gentiles. Neither could I conceive that a particular part of the epistle represents an actual dialogue between a Jew and Gentile, since the form of question and answer appears to me there simply rhetorical. The Apostle Paul was learned in rhetoric; and I think he described so, by a rhetorical and vivacious form, that struggle between the flesh and the spirit common to all Christians; the spirit being triumphant ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... our author enumerates, explains and exemplifies all the rhetorical figures of the Greeks; adding, for the benefit of courtiers and ladies, to whom his work is principally addressed, translations of their names; several of which would require to be retranslated for the benefit of the modern reader, as for example the three ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... with such a magical pen, he felt himself with an unmatched keenness. They mastered his whole frame with an intensity surpassing all romance. His descriptions of the passions, descriptions which have been the wonder of thousands, such is their fire and temper, were not rhetorical studies, but the ebullition of a soul sensitive to their lightest breath, and not ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... that he had just cleared 100o, and I went home a beaten man. I had not felt the heat before, save as a beautiful exaggeration of sunshine; but now it oppressed me with the prosaic vulgarity of an oven. What had been poetic intensity became all at once rhetorical hyperbole. I might suspect his thermometer (as indeed I did, for we Harvard men are apt to think ill of any graduation but our own); but it was a poor consolation. The fact remained that his herald Mercury, standing a tiptoe, could look ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... pockets which might have almost held the two volumes of his folio dictionary; and he carried in his hand a large English oak stick. Let me not be censured for mentioning such minute particulars. Every thing relative to so great a man is worth observing. I remember Dr Adam Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow, told us he was glad to know that Milton wore latchets in his shoes, instead of buckles. When I mention the oak stick, it is but letting Hercules have his club; and, by-and-by, my readers will find this stick will bud, ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... writers never found themselves, never touched their power, until they forgot their rules for construction, their grammar, their rhetorical arrangement, by losing themselves in their subject. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... the original thoughts of the preacher from the teachings of revelation. He found much to assent to ethically, but, compared with the revelation in his laboratory when the pure light of heaven shone upon the pages of John's Gospel, the rhetorical utterances of Doctor Schoolman were as water unto wine. They were not so commanding but that he at last found time to glance at his neighbors to see how they were taking the sermon. Winifred was too near him to be looked at, likewise his father; but he could see his mother. Very elegant, very ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... be of use not only to myself (which I have already in good measure experienced) but also to others in future voyages; and likewise to such readers at home as are more desirous of a plain and just account of the true nature and state of the things described than of a polite and rhetorical narrative: I hope all the defects in my style will meet with an ...
— A Voyage to New Holland • William Dampier
... diplomat at a private dinner is the truest defence and explanation of America's delay in coming into the war that I remember to have read. The scene is set in the high light of excitement, and the rhetorical phrasing of the speech would do credit to a ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... contains few things more interesting than these confessions. They relate to railroad accidents, and the confessor is manifestly a man not only of remarkable discernment, but likewise of rhetorical skill."—Stone and ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... mee to reuise and correct it."] This revision by the judge who presided at the trial gives a singular and unique value and authority to the work. We have no other report of any witch trial which has an equal stamp of authenticity. How many of the rhetorical flourishes interspersed in the book are the property of Thomas Potts, Esquier, and how many are the interpolation of the "excellent care" of the worthy Baron, it is scarcely worth while to investigate. Certainly never were ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... not smoke whether she objects to it or not. He should have in mind what he wants to say before he begins speaking, and then he should pronounce his words evenly and distinctly. He should not bang on the desk with his fist, flourish his arms in the air, talk in rhetorical rushes with long pauses between the phrases, or raise his voice to a thunderous pitch and then let it sink to a cooing murmur. These things have not the slightest effect on the typewritten page, and they make it very hard for ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... to a proper understanding of the true nature of language has been and still is Rhetoric, with the modern form it has assumed, as style. The rhetorical categories are still mentioned in treatises and often referred to, as having definite existence among the parts of speech. Side by side with such phrases goes that of the double form, or metaphor, which implies that there are two ways of saying ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... of educating the electors to be accomplished? Not, I maintain, by furious speeches and rhetorical displays; not by bribery, baits and banter; but by patient, never-ceasing labour, by lectures on history and science, by individual instruction, is the great work to be accomplished upon which the security and stability ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... They do not save themselves up for their speeches or their books; but they give their best energies to them, and have little current coin of high thought left for ordinary life. The mischief is that these interviews are generally conducted by inquisitive and rhetorical strangers, not distinguished for social tact or overburdened with good taste; and so the whole occasion tends to wear a melodramatic air, which is fatal both to artistic effect as well as ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... ability, and challenges careful attention. It is powerful, earnest, feeling, and eloquent; the production of a man acquainted with society, who has looked closely upon its various classes, and has the power of reading the signs of the times. He has a truthful vigor of description, a rhetorical rather than a dramatic power; or he sacrifices the latter to his habit of expressing his opinions in dialogue, where the author talks rather than the dramatis personae. There is a genial warmth of feeling in the book, and wide human sympathies, but with a tendency to ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... the future the world and our brotherhood shall do for him. This is the sentiment, and this the purpose, for the sake of which I venture to entreat a gracious hearing; and if what I shall say from an affection tested for almost forty years rather than for mere rhetorical effect—by no means well composed, but rather in brief sentences, and even in desultory fashion—may seem worthy neither of him who is honored nor of them who honor, then I must remark that here you may expect only a preliminary outline, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... [The statements in this paragraph are somewhat rhetorical. Massinger, for instance, was still at Oxford when James ascended the throne, and though he began to write a few years later, his earliest published play now extant appeared nearly twenty years afterwards. But the ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... was now in the frame of mind of a Sioux on the war-path, and in corresponding alertness and acuteness of every faculty. The little glove was swiftly put where it would furnish a spot of light to no one else; and in breathless readiness for action, though that is rhetorical, for Rollo's breath was as regular and as calm as cool nerves could make it, he subsided again into the utter inaction which is all eye and ear. And then in a few minutes, from across the road again, and near where he was at first, came these ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... its inculcation of a high morality,—the demand for practical Christianity in nations as well as individuals. It burned no incense under the nostrils of an already inflated and vain people. It gratified them by no rhetorical falsehoods about "the land of the free and the home of the brave." It did not apostrophize military heroes, nor strut "red wat shod" over the plains of battle, nor call up, like another Ezekiel, from the valley of vision the dry bones thereof. It uttered none of the precious scoundrel ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... fundamentals from them, and depending upon them for its existence. In the first place, since argumentation is spoken or written discourse, it belongs to rhetoric, and the rules which govern composition apply to it as strongly as to any other kind of expression. In fact, perhaps rhetorical principles should be observed in argumentation more rigidly than elsewhere, for in the case of narration, description, or exposition, the reader or hearer, in an endeavor to derive pleasure or profit, ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... essential fact, unhappily, in gloating over the finale. Why didn't the woman say the butcher shop, and done with it, since she was so set upon a rhetorical slump of some sort? However, he smothered his interest in the detail, and went back again ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... the slightest attempt at rhetorical display, but only an endeavor to tell in plain, simple language the story of the life and work of one who was born into the simplicity and straightforwardness of the Society of Friends and never departed from them. The constant aim has been to condense, but it has not been an easy task to crowd ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... of the disciples in Gethsemane, are met with frequently enough to this day, and in works of a more professedly critical character than Justin's. The description of the carpenter's trade and of the crowd at the Crucifixion may be merely rhetorical amplifications in the one case of the general Synoptic statement, in the other of the special statement in St. Mark. A certain fulness of style is characteristic of Justin. That he attributes the genealogy ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... down to the time at which the character of Socrates had disappeared, and we have the latest reflections of Plato's own mind upon Hellas and upon philosophy. He, who was 'the last of the poets,' in his book of Laws writes prose only; he has himself partly fallen under the rhetorical influences which in his earlier dialogues he was combating. The progress of his writings is also the history of his life; we have no other authentic life of him. They are the true self of the philosopher, stripped ...
— Laws • Plato
... "Rhetorical questions, Evie. Shall we come to business? How did your soon-to-be-deceased lover come on board? Who brought him? What ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... it left leg foremost; this is unbecoming in a great officer at the President's levee. Now, because he is so unfortunate as not to be so good a dancer as he is a worthy officer, he must be removed." These rhetorical flourishes, which are significant of the undercurrent of sentiment, hardly do justice to the general quality of the debate which was marked by legal acuteness on both sides. Madison pressed home the sensible argument that the President ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... Moore began his literary career by writing his personal confessions; nor is there any harm in this if he had not continued them for the remainder of his life. He is a man of genuinely forcible mind and of great command over a kind of rhetorical and fugitive conviction which excites and pleases. He is in a perpetual state of temporary honesty. He has admired all the most admirable modern eccentrics until they could stand it no longer. Everything he writes, it is to be fully ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the House to-night it was with no thought of being called upon to address you;" i.e., "I should have been mad if I'd missed the chance of letting off my long-stored rhetorical fireworks!" ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 19 April 1890 • Various
... so like one of my father's—so naive an imitation of that subtle reasoner's use of the rhetorical figure called Antanaclasis (or repetition of the same words in a different sense)—that I laughed and my mother smiled. But she smiled reverently, not thinking of the Antanaclasis, as, laying her hand on Roland's arm, she replied in the yet more formidable figure of speech called Epiphonema ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... himself as a member in one of these societies. It may easily be inferred, therefore, that they had already become bodies of recognized importance. The rhetorical chambers existed in the most obscure villages. The number of yards of Flemish poetry annually manufactured and consumed throughout the provinces almost exceed belief. The societies had regular constitutions. Their presiding ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... a festivity within, but yet bespeaking, as it were, some prolonged though subdued excitement. The sober servant who took the despatch, and receipted for it as gravely as if witnessing a last will and testament, respectfully paused before the entrance of the drawing-room. The sound of measured and rhetorical speech, through which the occasional catarrhal cough of the New-England coast struggled, as the only effort of nature not wholly repressed, came from its heavily-curtained recesses; for the occasion of the evening had been the reception and entertainment of various distinguished persons, and, ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... sentence passed against Mytilene; and when the question was brought forward again, he made a vehement harangue, the substance of which has been preserved by Thucydides. In this speech he appears as a practised rhetorical bravo, whose one object is to vilify his opponents, and throw contempt on their arguments, by an unscrupulous use of the weapons of ridicule, calumny, and invective. He reproaches the magistrates for ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... poetry was not his major concern, numbering only twenty-four original pieces and eighteen translations, it had a surprising effect upon his followers. It marked a point of departure, a reaction against both the too-polished and over-rhetorical verse of his immediate predecessors and the dehumanized mysticism of many of his associates. In that memorable preface to his Poems he wrote what was a slogan, a manifesto and at the same time a classic credo ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... roots, and so compel him to make open confession of the terrible deed. The more I reflected upon the matter, the clearer it grew in my own mind that Krespel must be a villain, and in the same proportion did my intended reproach, which assumed of itself the form of a real rhetorical masterpiece, wax more fiery and more impressive. Thus equipped and mightily incensed, I hurried to his house. I found him with a calm smiling countenance making playthings. "How can peace," I burst out—"how can peace find lodgment even ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... Bell, a talented elocutionist of Lincoln, devoted some months to lecturing. Her great intellectual and rhetorical gifts made her ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... Cushing falls into the blunder that was once so common in our American state papers as to give good cause for that happy phrase of Nicholas Biddle—"Western Orientalisms." The tone of the book, which ought to be a simple story, is stilted and rhetorical. The result of all the long discussions is the best praise of our American statesmen who were its authors, but it is dwarfed and lessened by the fulsome praise given to the foreign representatives who brought it about. Of "bad language," in keeping ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... the sins against Relativity can be traced to rhetorical exaggeration. Some remarkable instances of this can ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... that they were unfamiliar and uncongenial to Bacon; for a man reminds himself of what he is apt to forget. But a man reminds himself also of what seems to him, at the moment, most important, and what he lays most stress upon. And it is clear that these are the rules, rhetorical and ethical, which Bacon laid down for himself in pursuing the second great object of his life—his official advancement; and that, whatever we think of them, they were the ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... found I might set up my pillar; for although there was a door out of it to a back pair of stairs which led to it, yet that was kept locked. So that finding I had now followed my keeper's direction to the utmost point, beyond which I could not go, I sat down and considered that rhetorical saying, "That the way to Heaven lay by the gate of Hell;" the black room, through which I passed into this, bearing some resemblance to the latter, as this comparatively and by way of allusion might in some sort be thought to bear to ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... Spain and Italy; those in the latter country probably being selected with reference to the audiences before whom they were acted. The diction is easy and correct, without much affectation of refinement or rhetorical ornament. The dialogue, especially in the lower parts, is sustained with much comic vivacity; indeed, Naharro seems to have had a nicer perception of character as it is found in lower life, than as it exists in the higher; and more ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... form no uninteresting article to gather a few of the rhetorical weeds, for flowers we cannot well call them, with which they mutually presented each other. Their rancour was at least equal to their erudition,—the two most learned antagonists of a ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... it and other teachings of the kind has been signed by some hundreds of pastors and some thousands of laymen, but so far it has produced no effect whatever on the professors of Bonn, and there is no prospect of its doing so. It is fortunate for the faith thus assailed that the critical and rhetorical style of the ordinary German professor is too heavy for export or general circulation. So that the theories of Messrs. Graef and Meinhold are not likely to do the faith of the Fatherland any particular ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... the Democratic convention a week earlier were no better and no different. Their rhetorical stock-in-trade was the same old shop-worn figures of speech in which their predecessors have dealt for ages, and in which their successors will traffic to the end of—well, to the end of that imitative quality in the national ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... 1822. He soon afterwards entered the Theological Seminary at Andover, where he remained three years, giving much of his tune to literature, and writing, besides various moral and critical dissertations, a Sacred Drama, which was acted by the students at one of their rhetorical exhibitions, and an elaborate poem pronounced when his class received their diplomas. On being ordained an evangelist, according to the usage of the Congregational Church, he became Professor of Moral Philosophy and Belles-Lettres in the Scientific and Military Academy ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... the Peruvian port of Mollendo to the Bolivian interior, which the writer made in the year stated, are here transcribed. No rhetorical merit is claimed, facts only are related, and the compiler of the manuscript only hopes that his efforts may, in part at least, justify a cursory perusal, without exhausting the patience of the readers, or overtaxing their indulgence. These notes are transcribed nearly ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... is not to produce critical readers of literature, nor to prepare the pupil to answer questions about rhetorical theory, but to enable every pupil to express in writing, freely, clearly, and forcibly, whatever he may find within him ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... which is observed in the other cases recommends the order followed in the text. Besides, since, like several other Tales, the Monk's tragedies were cut short by the impatience of the auditors, it is more natural that the Tale should close abruptly, than by such a rhetorical ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... ou la Creation en Sept Journees, appeared in 1578, and within a few years had passed through thirty editions. Du Bartas is always copious, sometimes brilliant, sometimes majestic; but laboured and rhetorical description, never ending and still beginning, fatigues the mind; an encyclopaedia of the works of creation weighs heavily upon the imagination; we sigh for the arrival of ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... surface. A careful study of any of these three famous speeches reveals certain admirable qualities which account for the important place they are given in the study of English. First, as showing the stateliness and the rhetorical power of our language, these speeches are almost unrivaled. Second, though Burke speaks in prose, he is essentially a poet, whose imagery, like that of Milton's prose works, is more remarkable than ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... House of Commons was singularly well adapted to the situation. When the Irish members insulted him, he turned a deaf ear. When they pelted him with controversial questions, he replied with brevity. When they lashed themselves into rhetorical fury, he smiled and "sat tight" till the storm was over. He was not a good speaker, and he had no special skill in debate; but he invariably mastered the facts of his case. He neither overstated nor understated, and he was blessed ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... place, and it is remembered mainly on account of its many felicitous passages. It lacks real dramatic unity and vitality; the character of Cato is essentially an abstraction; there is little dramatic necessity in the situations and incidents. It is rhetorical rather than poetic, declamatory rather than dramatic. Johnson aptly described it as "rather a poem in dialogue than a drama, rather a succession of just sentiments in elegant language than a representation ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... all remember, set English teeth on edge. David devoured the papers day by day, and his antagonism grew, partly because, in spite of that strong gravitation of his mind towards things expansive, emotional, and rhetorical, the essential paste of him was not French but English—but mostly because of other and stronger reasons of which he was hardly conscious. During that fortnight of his agony in Paris all that sympathetic bond between the great city and himself which had been the source of so much pleasure ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... one another, whilst others are put upon establishing some truth by way of illustration. Some sophists endeavour to apply, on feigned topics, avast heap and flow of words, others to impose upon you with false conclusions. As to the orators, some with their rhetorical harangues employ all the powers of persuasion, taking care to observe the precepts of art, and to omit nothing opposite to the subject. The boys of different schools wrangle with one another in verse; contending about the principles of Grammar, or the rules of the Perfect ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... which is formed by the centuries from the fifth to the ninth after Christ. From its culmination in the tragedies of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and in the comedies of Aristophanes, the classic drama declined through the brilliantly realistic comedies of Menander to the coldly rhetorical tragedies of the Roman Seneca. The decay of culture, the barbarian invasions, and the attacks of the Christian Church caused a yet greater decadence, a fall so complete that, although the old traditions were kept alive for some time at the Byzantine court, the drama, as ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... "harbinger of the abolition of every form of authority" would seem to indicate that Lenine's ideal is that of the old Nihilists—or of Anarchists of the Bakuninist school. That is very far from the truth. The phrase in question is merely a rhetorical flourish. No man has more caustically criticized and ridiculed the Anarchists for their dream of organization without authority than Nikolai Lenine. Moreover, his conception of Soviet government provides for a very ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... only at last concedes to the argument such a qualified approval as is consistent with the feebleness of the human faculties. Cebes is the deeper and more consecutive thinker, Simmias more superficial and rhetorical; they are distinguished in much the same manner as Adeimantus ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... "delicious," coming to us with "serenades"? Does death "lave us in a flood of bliss"? Does "the body gratefully nestle close to death"? Do we go forth to meet death "with dances and chants of fullest welcome"? It is vain to attempt to hide the direst fact of all under plausible metaphors and rhetorical artifice. It is in defiance of all history that man so write. It is in contradiction of the universal instinct. It is mockery to the dying. It is an outrage upon the mourners. The Elizabethan masters were far truer to the fact; so is the modern ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... Ausbreitung des Christentums, ii. Chrysostom (Hom. in Joh. 2. 2) writing at the end of the fourth century speaks of Syrians, Egyptians, Persians and ten thousand other nations learning Christianity from translations into their languages, but one cannot expect geographical accuracy in so rhetorical a passage.] ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... Lucca librarian, after Platina's death, he says distinctly that the library has been got together "for the use of all men of letters, both of our own age, or of subsequent time[410]"; and that these are not rhetorical expressions, to round a phrase in a formal letter of appointment, is proved by the way in which manuscripts were lent out of the library, during the whole time that Platina was in office. The Register of Loans, beginning with his own appointment and ending in 1485, has been ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... in brilliant declamation and sparkling wit, and his speech in relation to the Princesses of Oude produced an impression almost without a parallel in ancient or modern times. Mr. Burke's admiration was sincere and unbounded, but Fox thought it too florid and rhetorical. His fame now rests on his dramas. But his life was the shipwreck of genius, in consequence of his extravagance, his recklessness in incurring debts, and his dissipated habits, which disorganized his moral character and undermined ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... was shot straight into the celestial ear at short range. It produced no effect. The gentleman's patience and rhetorical vigilance were now completely exhausted. He walked round, and planting himself defiantly in front of the vicarious mourner, he stuck his hands doggedly into his pockets and delivered the following rebuke, like the desultory explosions of a bunch ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... him, and I used to stay on his farm for two or three days at a time. I liked his house, and his park, and his big fruit garden, and the river—and his philosophy, which was clear, though rather spiritless and rhetorical. I suppose I was fond of him on his own account, though I can't say that for certain, as I have not up to now succeeded in analysing my feelings at that time. He was an intelligent, kind-hearted, genuine man, ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... and grew rather long behind, yet the length did not suggest, as it often does, effeminacy. He was masculine in everything—look, gesture, speech. Sparing of gesture, sparing of emphasis, careless of mere rhetorical or oratorical art, he had nevertheless the secret of the highest art of all, whether in oratory ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... a genuine drama. The very highest literary works that have been successfully produced in Italy, divine poems like Dante's Commedia, and historical treatises such as those of Sallust and Macchiavelli, of Tacitus and Colletta, are pervaded by a passion more rhetorical than spontaneous. Even in music, both in ancient and modern times, really creative talent has been far less conspicuous than the accomplishment which speedily assumes the character of virtuosoship, and ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... first sight hardly fair to bracket them together. But the "point of view" was imposed by Carlyle on the men he judged of in his writings with an austerity not only cruel but almost stupid. They are too often broken outright on the Procrustean bed; they are probably always disfigured. The rhetorical artifice of Macaulay is easily spied; it will take longer to appreciate the moral bias of Carlyle. So with all writers who insist on forcing some significance from all that comes before them; and the writer of short studies is bound, by ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he had ever concealed what religion was to him, he now paid the price. If they had made light of him, he now made war on them. This meed they could hardly withhold from him, that he understood most other things quite as well as they, and religion much better than they. The rhetorical form is a fiction. The addresses were never delivered. Their tension and straining after effect is palpable. They are a cry of pain on the part of one who sees that assailed which is sacred to him, of triumph as he feels himself able to repel the assault, ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... diction, the various kinds of sentences, the use of figures of speech, and the different species of style as determined partly by the nature of the discourse and partly by the mental endowments of the writer. It is intended to embrace the rhetorical elements ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... that he finds respect in his heart also for the laws of the realm in which he is privileged to trade. Let him not stand, as the priest in the Orthodox Church, a looming hierophant. Let him avoid any rhetorical pose, any hint of the grand manner. Above all, let him not wear the smirk of the conjuror when he prepares with flourishes to whip the handkerchief away from his guinea-pig. Here is one who condescends ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... as closely and with as much certainty as Greek or Roman antiquity. It is indeed known that, up to a somewhat late period, the bards continued to compose pieces under the names—which had become popular—of Aneurin, Taliessin, and Liwarc'h Hen; but no confusion can be made between these insipid rhetorical exercises and the really ancient fragments which bear the names of the poets cited— fragments full of personal traits, local circumstances, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... the fact that the defeated minority knows that it has a free hand, and that nothing less than eight hundred men could prevent it from using its physical power, were it so inclined. Only a force and supremacy that was real, and not nominal, could make it to submit. The rhetorical trick of belittling the matter by speaking of it as "fisticuffs" will not pass in this discussion. When the South Carolina negroes on election day looked into the rifle-barrels of the Red-shirt clubs, it was no matter ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson |
