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More "Epigram" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hideous clamour of indecent jibe, of brutal vituperation, of senseless accusation, of every form of words which furious hatred can assume, whose echoes reached even countries like Tuscany, where serfdom was well nigh unknown, and have reached even to us in the scraps of epigram still bandied about by the townsfolk against the peasants, nay, by the peasants against themselves.[1] A monstrous rag doll, dressed up in shreds of many-coloured villainy without a recognizable human ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... the mind? People say they have read, but, when questioned, they show that they have got merely a glimmering of the real action, the faintest hint of style and characterization, have perhaps noted some stray epigram which they quote with evidently faulty ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... the power of moving a popular assembly. Lord Beaconsfield said that he "wanted finish." The remark was more spiteful than true. Lord Salisbury could not rival his chief in the neatness and polish of an epigram, but just as little could Lord Beaconsfield rival him in the unstudied graces of oratory. His speeches have a freedom and a rhythmical flow which captivate the hearer. Though he gives full play to his imagination ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... Goethe's attention was turned seriously to Eastern literature was in 1791, when, through Herder's efforts, he made the acquaintance of Kalidasa's dramatic masterpiece Sakuntala, which inspired the well known epigram "Willst du die Bluete des fruehen," etc., an extravagant eulogy rather than an appreciative criticism. That the impression was not merely momentary is proved by the fact that five years later the poet took the inspiration for his Faust prologue ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... was an epigram. It was in almost the final lucid interval between periods of insanity that he was riding in the park with his physician. As they drove along, Swift saw, for the first time, a building that ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... world"—not an unreasonable desire, he indicated, but one which would not be permanently realised by strikes directed against the whole community. Mr. SEDDON, of the National Democratic Party, compressed the same argument into an epigram. If the miners' full demands were conceded they would have "an El Dorado for one minute and disaster ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... source of all our actions, and humanity, etc. We must please those who have humane and tender feelings. That epigram about two one-eyed people is worthless,[15] for it does not console them, and only gives a point to the author's glory. All that is only for the sake of the author ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... Hall had spent the most of his time in reading Hume (that was Satan's lackey) and after taking his degree did a little in the way of Imperial Finance. Of him it was that Lord Abraham Hart, that far-seeing statesman, said, "This young man has the root of the matter in him." I quote the epigram rather for its perfect form than for its truth. For once, Lord Abraham was deceived. But it must be remembered that he was at this time being plagued almost out of his wits by the vile (though cleverly engineered) agitation for the compulsory winding-up of the Rondoosdop Development ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... Dionysius, and Pisistratus, and—and a thousand others, who never knew what it was to have a soul during the latter part of their lives; yet, sir, these men adorned society. Why possession of his faculties, mental and corporeal? Who writes a keener epigram? Who reasons more wittily? Who—but stay! I have his agreement ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... breeds incubus, often eaten, and causeth fearful dreams, so doth all venison, and is condemned by a jury of physicians. Mizaldus and some others say, that hare is a merry meat, and that it will make one fair, as Martial's epigram testifies to Gellia; but this is per accidens, because of the good sport it makes, merry company and good discourse that is commonly at the eating of it, and not ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... to say—putting an epic in an epigram—"She seen her duty and she done it!" but the space and time covered are generally as far beyond our plans as the estimates of an amateur mountain climber ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... to illustrate all the notes to which Hazlitt's voice responds—the pithy epigram of the Characteristics, the Chesterfieldian grace in his advice "On the Conduct of Life," the palpitating movement with which he gives expression to his keen enjoyment of his sensual or intellectual existence, and the subdued solemnity of his reveries which sometimes remind ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... her fault, and continued by his. She did not choose to know her own mind, and, in spite of secret warnings from her better judgment, she was driven by curiosity, or by the unhappy restlessness to which her sex are peculiarly subject at odd times, to sound Hazel as to the meaning of a certain epigram that rankled in her. And she did it in the most feminine way, that is to say, in the least direct; whereas the safest way would have been to grasp the nettle, if she could not let ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... with a silvery ripple of laughter. "Do be careful. An epigram from you? My dear boy, you'll be down with brain-fever if you don't ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... chosen so as to produce an agreeable harmony. Never put on a dark-coloured bonnet with a light spring costume. Avoid uniting colours which will suggest an epigram; such as a straw-coloured ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... satisfactory idea of its loveliness, the purity of the material of which it is made, the perfection of its proportions, the richness of its decorations and the exquisite accuracy achieved by its builders. Some one has said that the Moguls designed like giants and finished like jewelers, and that epigram is emphasized in the Taj Mahal. Any portion of it, any feature, if taken individually, would be enough to immortalize the architect, for every part is equally perfect, equally chaste, ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... shaped the development of his character; depict, with wise restraint, his political and public life: but also, and above all, re-clothe him "in his habit as he lived," as friends and associates knew him; recover his traits of voice and manner, his conversational wit or wisdom, epigram or paradox, his explosions of sarcasm and his eccentricities of reserve, his words of winningness and acts of kindness: and, since one half of his life was social, introduce us to the companions who shared his lighter hour and evoked his finer fancies; take us to the Athenaeum ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... may be applied to his odd expression of eye. Monsieur Edmond About's mouth was sneering and sensual, and even then affected Voltaire's sarcastic grimace. His bitter and equivocal smile put you in mind of the grinding of an epigram-mill. One could detect in his attitude, his physiognomy, and his language, that obsequious malice, that familiarity, at the same time flattering and jeering, which Voltaire turned to such good account in his commerce with the great people of his day, and which his disciple was learning to practise ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... carved marble. The sculptor who worked there, whoever he may have been, had profited doubtless by the study of Myron's famous work. For what purpose he made it, does not appear;—as [286] an architectural ornament; or a votive offering; perhaps only because he liked making it. In hyperbolic epigram, at any rate, the animal breathes, explaining sufficiently the point of Pliny's phrase regarding Myron—Corporum curiosus. And when he came to his main business with the quoit-player, the wrestler, the runner, he did not for a moment forget that they too were animals, young animals, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... to insinuate that his friends must have had very long ears. Nevertheless, Dannevig's reviews were for about a month a very successful feature of our paper. They might be described as racy little essays, bristling with point and epigram, on some subject suggested by the title-pages of current volumes. At the end of that time, however, books began to grow scarce in our office, and before another month was at an end, we had no more ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... in with ordinary opinion (however well founded this opinion may be) earns for itself no credit with the mob. The mass of the people regard as profound only him who suggests pungent contradictions of the general idea. In ratiocination, not less than in literature, it is the epigram which is the most immediately and the most universally appreciated. In both, it is of the lowest order ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... writing epigrams was preserved until a very late period. Seneca, Pliny the younger, Hadrian, and many others, were fond of composing them; and in modern times the epigram has been a favorite kind of ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... Paine immediately sat down in the Angel, Islington, and began his reply. He was not unqualified to answer Burke; he had fought a good fight between the years 1775 and 1784. Mr. Conway has some ground for his epigram, 'where Burke had dabbled, Paine had dived.' There is nothing in the Rights of Man which would now frighten, though some of its expressions might still shock, a lady-in-waiting; but to profess Republicanism in 1791 was no joke, and the book was proclaimed and Paine prosecuted. Acting upon ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... "D'you know, Katharine, that ridiculous goose came to tea with me? Oh, how I wanted you! He tried to make epigrams all the time, and I got so nervous, expecting them, you know, that I spilt the tea—and he made an epigram about that!" ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... not the equal of even a police court lawyer. The spectators seemed to know that something was wrong, though they could not tell just what it was. Kahn's colleagues whispered among themselves. He made his points, but they lacked the fire and dash and audacity that once had caused the epigram that Kahn's appearance in court indicated two things—the guilt of the accused and a verdict ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... read, and so don't lisp in criticism; Nor write, and so they don't affect the Muse; Were never caught in epigram or witticism, Have no romances, sermons, plays, reviews,— In Harams learning soon would make a pretty schism, But luckily these Beauties are no "Blues;" No bustling Botherby[229] have they to show 'em "That charming passage in the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... cell with Koran balanced on head, crying to his Prophet to save him, and defying Englishes to touch him. Of course they cooked his geese, Koran or not. One warder does more than many Prophets in Gungapur Jail. (He! He! Quite good epigram and nice cynicality of educated man.) The degraded and unpolished fellow decoyed two little girls into empty house to steal their jewellery, and cut off fingers and noses and ears to get rings and nose-jewels and ear-drops, and left to die. Holy Fakir, gentleman of course! ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... never can be loved. To you there is nothing serious in the purest feelings. But never mind; when you cheat us you still are our dupes!'—'I see that plainly,' said I, with a stricken air; 'you have far too much wit in your anger for your heart to suffer from it.'—This modest epigram increased her rage; she found some tears of vexation. 'You disgust me with the world and with life.' she said; 'you snatch away all my ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... am expressing myself with terrible obscurity—some of you, I know, are groaning over the logic-chopping. Be a pluralist or be a monist, you say, for heaven's sake, no matter which, so long as you stop arguing. It reminds one of Chesterton's epigram that the only thing that ever drives human beings insane is logic. But whether I be sane or insane, you cannot fail, even tho you be transcendentalists yourselves, to recognize to some degree by my trouble the difficulties that beset monistic ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... speech and a lecture. He loosed on us from the cold spigot of his intellect a steady flow of literary allusion—a practice which he professes to hold in scorn—and wit and epigram. He seemed torn from the page of Meredith. He talked like ink. I had believed before that only people in books could talk as he did, and then only when their author had blotted and scratched their performance for a ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... their welfare, their good education, and the salvation of their souls. Several of his daughters became nuns. He feared above everything to see his eldest son devote himself to poetry, dreading for him the dangers he considered he himself had run. "As for your epigram, I wish you had not written it," he wrote to him; "independently of its being commonplace, I cannot too earnestly recommend you not to let yourself give way to the temptation of writing French verses which would serve no purpose but to distract your mind; above all, you should not write ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... allowed fashion to take its own course, both with regard to the chin and the upper lip. This fashion varied continually; for we find that, in little more than a century after the time of Richard I., when beards were short, that they had again become so long as to be mentioned in the famous epigram made by the Scots who visited London in 1327, when David, son of Robert Bruce, was married to Joan, the sister of King Edward. This epigram, which was stuck on the church-door of St. Peter ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... turn in the conversation as to dispute the superiority of Irishwomen's lips, eyes, noses, and eyebrows, to anything under heaven. We'll not talk of gay fellows; egad, we needn't. I'll give you the garrison,—a decent present,—and I'll back the Irish bar for more genuine drollery, more wit, more epigram, more ready sparkling fun, than the whole rest of the empire—ay, and all ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... That excellent divine, Schleiermacher, exalted this document of the Rights of the Flesh as "a paean of Love, in all its completeness," but it is a feeble, tiresome performance, absolutely without structure, quite deserving the saucy epigram on which it was pilloried by ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... me as much as they deserve to—that is to say not at all; but the leisure which they leave me—it is not poetry, but idleness, which makes away with it." On a certain occasion, in the earlier part of his life, when pressed in regard to his improvidence, he gaily produced the following epigram, which has commonly been appended to his fables as "The Epitaph of ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... swept by he resumed his magazine with the pleased air of a man who has delivered himself of a brilliant epigram; it showed in his ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... I pray bid the Scoffer put this Epigram into his pocket, and read it every morning for his breakfast (for I wish him no better;) Hee shall finde it fix'd before the Dialogues of Lucian (who may be justly accounted the father of the Family of all Scoffers:) ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton
... little; nothing is so pleasant, as I have known later, as to display your worldly wisdom in epigram and dissertation, but it is a trifle tedious to hear ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... sleeves. Defiance, pride, and patriotism in the high collar, tempered by regret in the soft ruche.... She would have been a problem and a poem; while I, in my cheerful reds, my dazzling white, my decisive short skirts, my piquant shoes, my audacious apron, am a conundrum, a pleasantry, an epigram." This would be very pretty on the stage, but a waiting-maid who calls herself an "epigram" passes our imagination under any other circumstances. In fact, Miss Howard seems to us to be altogether on a false tack in this novel,—to have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... There is another brief epigram which—if we are right in thinking Pompey the subject of the lines—seems to date from Vergil's soldier days, ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... lifeless objects; he renders all the sensuous impressions so masterfully that the reader often has the feeling of a physical experience; and it is but natural that up to his thirty-fifth year, before he discovered his literary talent, he had dreamed of being a landscape painter. Hebbel's epigram, "Know ye why ye are such past masters in painting beetles and buttercups? 'Tis because ye know not man; 'tis because ye see not the stars," utterly fails to do justice to Stifter's poetic individuality. But in avoiding the great tempests ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... Caumartin. He needed no dressing-gown and slippers to feel himself at home there. Madame Canmartin had really taken a showy house in a genteel street. Her own appearance was eminently what the French call distingue; dressed to perfection from head to foot; neat and finished as an epigram; her face in shape like a thoroughbred cobra-capella,—low smooth frontal widening at the summit, chin tapering but jaw strong, teeth marvellously white, small, and with points sharp as those in the maw of the fish called the "Sea Devil;" eyes like dark emeralds, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Drama.[145] He was evidently well acquainted with that poet, and admired him without liking him. Somewhere he calls him "the dry and dogged Jonson,"[146] and again he speaks of his genius in very high terms. The contrast between Shakspere and Jonson moved him even to epigram:[147] "In reading Shakespeare we often meet passages so congenial to our nature and feelings that, beautiful as they are, we can hardly help wondering they did not occur to ourselves; in studying Jonson, we have often ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... her as he answered, smiling and underlining each of his words as though he were making an epigram: "You ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... of a paragraph in the last Moniteur, which has stated, among other symptoms of rebellion, some particulars of the sensation occasioned in all our government gazettes by the 'tear' lines,—only amplifying, in its re-statement, an epigram (by the by, no epigram except in the Greek acceptation of the word) into a roman. I wonder the Couriers, &c. &c., have not translated that part of the Moniteur, with ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Jack Wilson than Ben Jonson, or we should never have seen Mr. Shakspeare's 'Rime' at the 'Mitre,' in Fleet Street, seriously referred to as a genuine composition. It is a mere clumsy adaptation, from Ben's interesting epigram 'Inviting ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 237, May 13, 1854 • Various
... on Man" ought to have been called an "Epigram on Man," or, better still, should have been propounded as a riddle, to which the word "Man" was to supply the solution. But an antithesis, epigram, or riddle on man of 1300 lines, is rather long. It seems so especially as there is no real ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... the others had time to smile their appreciation of the vicomte's epigram, Pierre again broke into the conversation, and though Anna Pavlovna felt sure he would say something inappropriate, she was unable ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... of his own day. They make his bodyguard. They open to him the gates of the House of Fame. But if the divine power is really his, it soon frees itself from the shackles of Time and Circumstance. The true poet becomes, in the language of the Greek epigram on Homer, "the ageless mouth of all the world." And if, "The Strayed Reveller," and the Sonnet "To Shakespeare," and "Resignation," delighted those who were young in 1849, that same generation, as the years passed ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... after the battle of Cynos Cephalas (the Dog-heads), was the following epigram, composed by Alcaeus in mockery of Philip, exaggerating the number ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... jeweled vases worth hundreds of pounds, and feasting on the brains of peacocks and the tongues of nightingales." The frivolity of the social and political leaders of Rome, the insane thirst for lust and luxury, the absence of seriousness in the face of frightful, impending ruin, almost justify the epigram of Silvianus, "Rome was ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... forbade Mr. Burl to allude to the subject in any speech which he might make. Burl shrugged his shoulders and confided his doubts to Captain Le Mesurier. Said the Captain, 'I think he's wise; a speech might offend. What's wanted is an epigram—a good stinging epigram. We could set it about, and, if it's sharp enough, no need to fear it won't travel.' He paused dubiously. 'After all, though, it's a bit unfair on Cranston. Hang it, I've been a married man myself,' and he chuckled in unregenerate enjoyment. 'However, ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... glorified in the cauliflower; that lecture-room literature of adjectives, that declamatory exaggeration, that splendid show of erudition borrowed from D'Israeli, and credited to Lord Bacon and the rest, which have suggested to our friends of the Medical Journals an occasional epigram at our expense. Hence the tendency in these productions, and in medical lectures generally, to overstate the efficacy of favorite methods of cure, and hence the premium offered for showy talkers rather than sagacious observers, for the men of adjectives ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... been perfectly cool about it, and had criticised her poems exactly as if they had referred not to a man of flesh and blood but to some statue or god. This epigram he would praise, the next he would disparage, a third condemn. Her confession that she had been in the habit of complimenting Antinous with flowers and fruit he heard with a shrug of the shoulders, saying ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... learned afterwards from a gentleman at the Treasury, had begun to be marked at that office, with a view of its being submitted at least to the attention of the proper Law Officers—when an unlucky, or rather lucky epigram from our pen, aimed at Sir J——s M——h, who was on the eve of departing for India to reap the fruits of his apostacy, as F. pronounced it, (it is hardly worth particularising), happening to offend the nice sense of Lord, or, as he then delighted to ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... The O'Wilde.—The play? Oh, the play be zephyr'd! The play is not the thing. In other words, the play is nothing. Point is to prepare immense assortment of entirely irrelevant epigrams. "Epigram, my dear Duke, is the refuge of the dullard, who imagines that he obtains truth by inverting a truism." That sounds well; must lay it by for use. Take "Virtue," for instance. "Virtue" offers a fine field for paradox, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... epigram was duly relished, and the sage was turning his toasted side from the fire to present the other, when the clatter of a horse coming up the hillside sent the group scouring toward their guns, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... the protege of Maecenas, as the laureate said of his for the 'poet of the happy Tityrus,' 'I that loved thee since my day began.' It has been suggested that he owed to a clever farce-comedy of the early eighties the caption of the widely-read column of journalistic epigram and persiflage, which he filled with machine-like regularity and the versatility of the brightest French journalism for ten years. I prefer to think that he took it, or his cue for it, from a line of Dr. Phillips Francis's translation of ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... which even, repulsive as it must always be, a something breaks forth from time to time which no man can define and account for except in ways more incredible than miracle—so is the rest of the world. Why has this logical, sceptical, doubting country, so able to quench with an epigram, or blow away with a breath of ridicule the finest vision—become the special sphere and birthplace of these spotless infant-saints? This is one of the wonders which nobody attempts to account for. Yet Bernadette is as Jeanne, though there are ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... simply "reckless." "What have you got there?—I call," said Tennessee, quietly. "Two bowers and an ace," said the stranger, as quietly, showing two revolvers and a bowie knife. "That takes me," returned Tennessee; and with this gamblers' epigram, he threw away his useless pistol, and rode back with ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... antique cupboard; where, it is supposed, he deposited some precious part of his literary treasure. The ceiling is painted in a grotesque manner. A niche in the wall contains the skeleton of his favourite cat, with a Latin epigram beneath, of Petrarch's composition. It is good enough to deserve being copied; but the lateness of the hour did not allow me time. A little room, beyond this, is said to have been his study: the walls of it, from top to bottom, are scribbled over with ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... procurable, to an ostrich; then, the mass having been properly stewed, the superincumbent envelopes are all thrown away, and the essences of the whole are supposed to be embodied in the original nucleus. So the perfect epigram, at which Pope is constantly aiming, should be the quintessence of a whole volume of reflection. Such literary cookery, however, implies not only labour, but an unwearied vividness of thought and feeling. The poet must put his soul into the work as well as ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... utter. The living girl's part was played and ended. Their lives had crossed at right angles and would never meet again. "Nature makes a glorious present to Art, and I am privileged to execute the deed of gift," thought Barron; "that is the position in an epigram." He felt very grateful to Joan. He knew her arm must have ached often enough, but whether her heart would presently do so he hardly felt qualified to judge. The incidents of that stormy day might have been buried ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... point is concerned with Dr. Johnson's position apart from all this fund of anecdote, and this brilliant collection of unforgettable epigram in Boswell and elsewhere. As a writer, many will tell you, Dr. Johnson is dead. The thing is absurd on the face of it. There is room for some disagreement as to his position as a poet. On that question of poetry unanimity is ever hard to seek; so many mistake rhetoric for ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... gay society. His style was remarkably felicitous, and it is said that he adorned all that he touched. Most of his poems are quite short, and their subjects range from a touching outburst of genuine grief for a brother's death to a fugitive epigram of the most voluptuous triviality. His verses display ease and impetuosity, tumultuous merriment and wild passion, playful grace and slashing invective, vigorous simplicity and ingenious imitation of the learned stiffness and affectation of the Alexandrian school. They ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... to Paris by way of Montreuil, Amiens, and Clermont, about one hundred and fifty-six miles from Boulogne, the last thirty-six over a paved road, was favourable to superficial observation and the normal corollary of epigram. Smollett was much impressed by the mortifying indifference of the French innkeepers to their clients. "It is a very odd contrast between France and England. In the former all the people are complaisant but the publicans; in the latter there is hardly any complaisance but ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... the instant she quits the dock is, Is she sea-worthy? And with the fate of the Captain and the Vanguard in our memories, the question may well arise. The story of modern war-ships has, up to this, been one of mingled success and failure. Does not the epigram on our war-ships—our "sub-marine fleet"—owe its point and sting, in a ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... who described the present Parliamentary situation as "a cabal every afternoon and a crisis every second day" is justified of his epigram. The lobbies this afternoon were full of agitated whisperers, with much talk of a divided Cabinet and this and that Minister on the brink of resignation, because they cannot agree upon the number of men they want for the Army or the best method of obtaining them. All of which must ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... turning another way, affected not to hear her: and Mr. Coverley, bowing to Lady Louisa, said, "Her Ladyship is well acquainted with my devotion;-but, egad, I don't know how it is,-I had always an unlucky turn at an epigram, and never could resist a smart play ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... the battle waxed exceedingly hot. The newspapers took it up, and very soon nothing else was talked about but the rival merits of the two composers. Numerous verses were composed on either side, as well as others which poked fun at both parties. Amongst the latter was an epigram written by John Byrom, the Lancashire poet, which, without the knowledge of the author, got into all the papers, and was considered to hit off the situation more neatly than any which had gone ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... I suspect this epigram not to be quite original, but it served to give me for the nonce a high opinion of the pundit who read with me Cornelius Nepos and Caesar and some portions of that hopeless grammar, the Eton Greek, in the midst of his hard-breathing consumption ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... from a book in which the principle of design is for the first time visible. With euphuism, antithesis and the use of balanced sentences came to stay. We may see them in the style of Johnson and Gibbon, while alliterative antithesis reappears to-day in the shape of the epigram. Doubtless Lyly abused the antithetical device; but his successors had only to discover a means of skilfully concealing the structure, an improvement which the early euphuists, with all the enthusiasm of inventors, could ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... the insolence of the noblesse, and the only compensation for the venality of the judges, was found in a recourse to the printer. A marquis was made to imitate the manners of a gentleman by fear of an epigram; a defeated party in a lawsuit consoled himself by satirizing the court; and from Voltaire down to Palissot, all the people who could write, and could borrow ink and paper, had pen in hand, ready to appeal from prejudiced juries, overbearing nobles, or even lettres ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... responsibilities which belong to one of a great community. From the individual he passed to the nation, sketching in a few nervous but brilliant phrases the exact possibilities of socialistic legislation; and he wound up with a parodied epigram: Government, he declared, was philosophy teaching by failures. In the end, Miller led fourteen of his once numerous followers into the Government lobby to find himself by forty votes upon the ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and I think Sanscrit, Arabic, and Celtic too, ever (except by manifest accident, now intentionally ignored) stumbled upon the good idea of terminating their metres with rhyme? Where is there any ode of Horace, or Anacreon,—where any psalm of David; any epigram of Martial, any heroic verse of Virgil, or philosophic argument of Lucretius,—decorated, enlivened, and brightened by the now only too frequent ornament ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... arrested a narrative in which she was demonstrating to O'Flaherty the general's lineal descent from old Chattesworth—an army tailor in Queen Anne's time—and his cousinship to a live butter dealer in Cork—and spicing her little history with not a very nice epigram on his uncle, 'the counsellor,' by Dr. Swift, which she delivered with a vicious chuckle in the 'Fireworker's' ear, who also laughed, though he did not quite see the joke, and ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... "That's an epigram with some truth in it," replied Lydia coolly. "Oh, I'm as much a U. S. A. article as anything else. We hung out our shingle in Wyoming, Wis., for a considerable time, and a girl who tickets herself Yankee this side flies high. ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... composed the mandates (the cahiers) which the Deputies carried with them to the National Assembly. He forgot the famines, the exactions, the oppressive privileges which made revolt, and saw only the pathos of the Queen's helplessness before it. In Paine's immortal epigram, he "pitied the plumage and forgot the dying bird." But it is paradoxically true that while he pursued the friends of humanity, his real impulse was the hatred of cruelty which modern men call humanitarian. To that hatred he ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... whom I quoted above, was a teacher of Koranic readings, a grammarian and a philologer, who taught in Baghdad in the ninth century. He was also a famous satirist; but satire seems to have been easier then than now. So at least I gather from the epigram which Al-Yazidi wrote upon Al-Asmai Al-Bahili: You who pretend to draw your origin from Asma, tell me how you are connected with that noble race. Are you not a man whose genealogy, if verified, proves that you descend from Bahila? "This last verse," said Ibn Al-Munajjim, "is one of the most satirical ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... loftier realms, to catch the vision not revealed to mortals. The artist is, by virtue of his high calling, a co-worker with God. An English wit has declared that life copies art rather than that art copies life. In this he expresses a truth rather than a merely clever epigram. It is the artist's business to lead, not to follow. Only as he leads does he fulfil his divinely appointed destiny. "I maintain that life is not a form of energy," writes Sir Oliver Lodge; "that it is not included ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... one) unexpected powers of going when wound up. The knowing eye could not fail to detect considerable disparity between the lads; Chanticleer being, as Mrs. Cratchit said of Tiny Tim, 'very light to carry,' and Rossius promising fair to attain the rotundity of the Anonymous Cove in the Epigram:— ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... thee what, prince; a college of witcrackers cannout flout me out of my humour. Dost thou think I care for a satire or an epigram? No; if man will be beaten with brains, a' shall wear nothing handsome about him. In brief, since I do purpose to marry, I will think nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it; and therefore never flout at me for what I have said against it, for man ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... fall short of what I have known experimented by you my worthy Country men. Howsoever, the French by their Insinuations, not without enough of Ignorance, have bewitcht some of the Gallants of our Nation with Epigram Dishes, smoakt rather than drest, so strangely to captivate the Gusto, their Mushroom'd Experiences for Sauce rather than Diet, for the generality howsoever called A-la-mode, not worthy of being taken notice on. As I live in France, and had ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... said, conscious of perpetrating an epigram, "that from time immemorial the fellow who wants to make up to a young woman has always had to begin by getting round ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... speech, sparkling with matchless richness of illustration, with apt allusion and happy anecdote and historic parallel, with wit and pitiless invective, with melodious pathos, with stinging satire, with crackling epigram and limpid humor, like the bright ripples that play around the sure and steady prow of the resistless ship. Like an illuminated vase of odors, he glowed with concentrated and perfumed fire. The divine energy of his conviction utterly ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... around Palestine. Now and then a man appears who makes his way straight into the Promised Land, by sea if necessary, and takes you with him. It is not meant to be a full, precise treatment of the subject. It is history seen in a vision. Theology expressed in a lyric. Criticism condensed into an epigram."—DR. HENRY VAN ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... wishes to enter the Capitol, goes first to Paterclius' privies and farts ten or twenty times. Yet, in spite of this precautionary crepitation, he salutes Jove with constricted buttocks." Martial also (Book IV, Epigram LXXX), ridicules a woman who was subject to ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... taken away my appetite. I stopped occasionally to cry a little, wiped my eyes, and sat down again. It was more than two hours before I laid down my knife, and not until strong symptoms of suffocation played round the regions of my trachea did I cry out, "Hold, enough." Somebody has made an epigram about the vast ideas which a miser's horse must have had of corn. I doubt, if such ideas were existent, whether they were at all equal to my astonishment at a leg of mutton. I never had seen such a piece of meat before, and wondered if it were fresh or otherwise. After such reflection ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... to the company by the "teacher" and those joining in the game are each to define the subject in as terse a manner as possible, in epigram or verse, written on a slip of paper. The cards are then signed, turned in and the "teacher" reads the definitions. Then the company are to decide which one of the definitions has the greatest merit. For ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... a little nosegay of conceits, a very lump of salt: every verse has something in it that piques; and then the dart in the last line is certainly as pretty a sting in the tail of an epigram, for so I think you critics call it, as ever entered into the thought of a poet." "Dear Mr. Bickerstaff," says he, shaking me by the hand, "everybody knows you to be a judge of these things; and, to tell you truly, I read over Roscommon's translation of Horace's 'Art of Poetry' three several ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... of them, "De l'esprit, encore de l'esprit, et toujours de l'esprit—trop d'esprit!" [10] No doubt, La Rochefoucauld has done his own reputation wrong by the bluster of his scepticism and also by the fact that he sometimes wraps his thoughts up in such a blaze of epigram that we are disconcerted to find, when we analyze them, that they are commonplaces. Contemporaries seemed to have smiled at the excessive subtlety into which their long conversations led Mme de La Fayette and her sublime companion. Mme de Sevigne describes ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... of the manifesto itself. The German, with all his craft, has an almost unlimited capacity for giving himself away. It would seem that, after all, humour is the best gift of the gods.... Our commentator ends with an epigram to the general effect that "until they adopt, in common with us, the ideal of the Gentleman, in contradistinction to that of the Superman," we must continue to strafe them in war or peace. His book ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... Academy places Science before Literature. I see, however, that it is quite right, for Literature is a member of our own family—our sister. [Cheers.] I am old enough to recollect that when Sir Morton Archer Shee, who united Art with Poetry, was elected President of the Academy, this epigram appeared ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... and eminence, if not of titular rank; but before he quitted the stage, barristers had relinquished the ground in favor of opulent shopkeepers. When an ironmonger became the occupant of a house in Red Lion Square on the removal of a distinguished counsel, Erskine wrote the epigram— ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... their works to his decision; and so penetrating was he, that he could tell the merit of a book by looking on the cover. He made epic poems, tragedies, and pastorals, with surprising facility; song, epigram, or rebus, was all one to him; though, it is observed, he could never finish an acrostick. In short, the fairy who presided at his birth had endowed him with almost every perfection; or, what was just ...
— The Story of the White Mouse • Unknown
... spirit of blindness was the remark of the Greek to his slave during a terrible storm at sea. Seeing the latter weeping, he exclaimed, 'Why are you so troubled—I give you your freedom?' And allied to it is the well-known epigram: ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... powerful eloquence, and seeming as if at every moment he would annihilate his antagonist; Disraeli, with marvellous skill and exquisite adroitness, bringing the rapier of his wit to bear upon his opponent, and again and again pinking him with some stinging epigram or smart retort that set all the Tory benches roaring with delight. It made one's young blood grow warmer to watch the struggle from the impartial height of ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... conceived for all eye-witnesses from my own brief experience of their testimonies! What an impulse did it lend me to study the nature and the temperament of narrator, as indicative of the peculiar coloring he might lend his narrative; and how it taught me to know the force of the French epigram that has declared how it was entirely the alternating popularity of Marshal Soult that decided whether he won or lost the ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... descend to the level of his audience; eloquent, but with no trace of the empty rhetoric which so often does duty for that quality; full of a high seriousness, but with no suspicion of pedantry; lightened by an occasional epigram or flashes of caustic humour, but with none of the small jocularity in which it is such a temptation to a lecturer to indulge. As one listened to him one felt that comparative anatomy was indeed worthy of ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... parts of my friend's discourse, though he has so much command of himself as not directly to mention her, yet according to that of Martial, which one knows not how to render into English, Dum tacet hanc loquitur. I shall end this paper with that whole epigram, which represents with much ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... he pretended to affect in his familiar correspondence, though his letters show that he lacked the rudiments alike of logic and of grammar. His religious opinions might be summed up in Clough's epigram:— ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... performances on the stage, he felt so proud of the commendation, that he doubted whether "Alexander himself, or Charles XII., when at the head of their first victorious armies, could feel a greater transport in their bosoms." After reading this, some may perhaps think that Pope's epigram on Cibber[14] was not unmerited; but when they consider that thieves feel a similar exultation, they may rather be inclined to pity poor human nature. In exemplification of what we have advanced, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... naturally selected it when he concluded to set up shop. If Sam had ever in his life displayed any symptoms of business sagacity, Radville would never have recovered from the shock. I believe it was Legrand Gunn, our only really certificated village wit, who coined the epigram: "As useless as to take a prescription to Graham's." The implication being that Graham didn't carry sufficient stock to fill any prescription; which was largely true; he couldn't; he hadn't the money to stock up with. What little he took in from ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... human Felicity. Tully has Epistles full of affectionate Pleasure, when he writes to his Wife, or speaks of his Children. But above all the Hints of this kind I have met with in Writers of ancient date, I am pleas'd with an Epigram of Martial [1] in honour of the Beauty of his Wife Cleopatra. Commentators say it was written the day after his Wedding-Night. When his Spouse was retir'd to the Bathing-room in the Heat of the Day, he, it seems, came in upon her when she was just going into the Water. To her Beauty and ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... from bashfulness or affectation. If he made a slip, he had the social courage to pass on and refrain from explanation. He was not embarrassed in this society, because he read and judged the men; he could spy snobbery in a titled lord; and, as for the critics, he dismissed their system in an epigram. "These gentlemen," said he, "remind me of some spinsters in my country who spin their thread so fine that it is neither fit for weft nor woof." Ladies, on the other hand, surprised him; he was scarce commander of himself in their society; ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Revolution was the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding. A misunderstanding it was, sure enough, in one sense; but if by misunderstanding is meant lack of information there is more truth in the famous epigram which has it that Grenville lost the colonies because he read the American dispatches, which none of his predecessors had done. In the decade before the Declaration of Independence every exchange ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... on Henry had given Veronica a little epigram: 'When a man has to stand on his dignity, you may be sure his moral stature ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... answers the rather flippant curiosity of the local press interviewer. Uncle Piper, on the other hand, is introduced, as all of Tasma's characters are, in sundry solid-looking pages of direct narrative. It is true that their humour and epigram make bright reading, but they are necessarily without the power of pithy dialogue to create ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... Parisian hairdresser on one of the Boulevards put up a sign having on it a portrait of Absalom dangling by his hair from a tree, and Joab piercing his body with a spear. Under the painting was the following terse epigram:— ...
— At the Sign of the Barber's Pole - Studies In Hirsute History • William Andrews
... mind to make an epigram," Mr. Waverton announced. "The arrogance of the vulgar, the—the uninstructed—perhaps I lack the mot juste, but quand meme—the mansuetude of the loftier mind. A fine antithesis that, I think." He stood up, walked to the ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... of one of his paper-books I find an Epigram written at this time, which, though not perhaps particularly good, I consider myself ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Ariovistus and the Germans ('The Gallic Wars') On the Manners and Customs of Ancient Gauls and Germans (same) The Two Lieutenants (same) Epigram on Terentius ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Maynard, who, though assigned to the Stock Exchange, is probably the "childlike, pastoral M——" of a later paragraph. Small politics are for the most part kept out of Man's volumes, which are high-spirited rather than witty, but this punning epigram (of which Lamb was an admirer) on Lord Spencer and ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... romanticists and light literature in general, for we find "academicien" defined as "litterateur suranne." One is always inclined to suspect sour grapes of giving the flavor to French sarcasm concerning the Academy, and is reminded of Piron's epigram in the shape of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... which Messer Galeazzo and his brother and all the most skilled jousters at court took part. And the Moro's accomplished friend, Ermolao Barbaro, the young Venetian patriarch, who had been once more sent as envoy to Milan, composed a wonderful Latin epigram in honour of the occasion, praying Pallas not to avert her face in sorrow at the sound and tumult of war, which is after all but a mimic display, and calling upon her, the goddess whose wisdom Lodovico honours above all the thunders of Jove, to bless the great house of Sforza, illustrious ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... 175. But according to Epigram 4 in the Anthologia Graeca epigrammatum (Stadt-Mueller, 1894) Studius became consul after the erection of the church and as a reward for its erection. Under the heading [Greek: eis ton naon tou Prodromou en tois Stoudiou] ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... le Russe—et cetera. You are mighty fond, J.B., Of quoting that stale epigram. You fancy it riles me. Not a bit of it, my Briton; Tartars have a thickish skin, And your foe and I are neighbours, nay a distant sort ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 17, 1891 • Various
... cried, "am I really like that? No wonder Jim ..." She paused. "Why it's just as lovely as he's good!" she cried: an epigram which was appreciated, and repeated as we made our salutations, and called out after the retreating couple as they passed away under the ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... though tangled with many other and even opposite things of the Middle Ages, ramify through all the changes we have now to consider. The connection can hardly be stated better than by taking Pope's easy epigram and pointing out that it is, after all, very weak in philosophy. "The right divine of kings to govern wrong," considered as a sneer, really evades all that we mean by "a right." To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... been with you," Miss Tita rejoined very mildly, and evidently with no intention of making an epigram. ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... Milton borrowed. Like Izaak Walton Vondel combined haberdashery with literature. Spiegel was a wealthy patron of the arts, and a president, with Visscher, of the Eglantine Chamber with the painfully sentimental name. Constantin Huyghens wrote light verse with intricate metres, and an occasional epigram. Here is one:— ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... in fact both ways: he preserved everything of Catullus and Martial except the cheapest odds and ends and filthiest obscenities, and he applied strict standards of judgement to the rest so that, unless an epigram had literary merit or contained something worth knowing, he felt there was no reason to burden the ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... to end, our eccentric author treats us to a dazzling flood of epigram, invective, and what appears to be argument; and finally leaves us without a single clear idea as to what ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... Marten, or some fearless sarcasm from Lucy Carlisle. But the Cavaliers softened labor and sweetened care with their little jokes. It was rather consoling to cover some ignominious retreat with a new epigram on Cromwell's red nose, that irresistible member which kindled in its day as much wit as Bardolph's,—to hail it as "Nose Immortal," a beacon, a glow-worm, a bird of prey,—to make it stand as a personification of the rebel cause, till even the stately Montrose asked newcomers ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... 1657, the Thames bore a solemn funeral procession, which moved slowly, amid salvos of artillery, to Westminster, where a new vault had been prepared in the noble abbey. The tears of a nation made it hallowed ground. A prince, of whom the epigram declares that, if he never said a foolish thing, he never did a wise one—saw fit to disturb the hero's grave, drag out the embalmed body, and cast it into a pit in the abbey-yard. One of Charles Stuart's most witless performances! ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... which the epigram is founded is of two Irishmen, one of whom challenged the other to a duel. But when the eventful hour arrived one sat down and wrote that, were it only his honour at stake he would meet his opponent, but his wife depended on him, so he begged to decline. The other individual sent a ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... as well as the most important and those oftenest used are, Simile, Metaphor, Personification, Allegory, Synechdoche, Metonymy, Exclamation, Hyperbole, Apostrophe, Vision, Antithesis, Climax, Epigram, Interrogation and Irony. ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... Reflections on the Revolution in France in November, 1790. Paine immediately sat down in the Angel, Islington, and began his reply. He was not unqualified to answer Burke; he had fought a good fight between the years 1775 and 1784. Mr. Conway has some ground for his epigram, 'where Burke had dabbled, Paine had dived.' There is nothing in the Rights of Man which would now frighten, though some of its expressions might still shock, a lady-in-waiting; but to profess Republicanism in 1791 was no joke, and the book ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... flogged in the hall of his college, and to receive one lash for each line in his satire. Never, surely, was a poet so sharply taught the merit of brevity. How Edward Anne must have regretted that he had not knocked off an epigram, a biting couplet, or a smart quatrain with the sting of the wit in ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... Juvenal, that they were indebted for their gardens, their palaces, their tables, and their fine old plate. The day was portioned out in the public places, in the bath, the banquet. Martial indignantly rebukes these extravagances, as unable to purchase happiness, in his Epigram to Quintus: "Because you purchase slaves at two hundred thousand sesterces; because you drink wines stored during the reign of Numa; because your furniture costs you a million; because a pound weight ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... are in our own cities and amongst our own people, we accept them with a sort of placid satisfaction. You, Lord Redford, speak of character and enunciate social laws, and Borrowdean will argue that after all the trade of the country is not so bad as it might be, and will make an epigram on the importation of sentimentality into politics. In plain words, Lord Redford, we, as a party, are asleep to what is going on. One statesman has recognized it, and proposed a startling and drastic remedy. We attack the remedy tooth and nail, but we place forward no counter proposition. It ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of Racine; Voltaire, has been wrong in accusing me of having criticized that tragedy, and in attributing to me an epigram, the author of which has never been known, and which ends with two ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... imaginative insight into the failings and the virtues of his brothers; only he could have a tolerant attitude toward the stupidities of his fellows, to say nothing of his own. And humour with him assumed various shades; now it would flash in an epigram, or smile indulgently at a passing human weakness; now and then it would break out into genial mockery; occasionally it would manifest itself as sheer horse-play; and less frequently it would become sardonic or even savage. It was in this latter spirit ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... "common verse" to this effect:—"Occasion turneth a bald noddle after she hath presented her locks in front, and no hold taken." As no reference is given, some readers may be glad to see the original, which occurs in an epigram on [Greek: Kairos] (Brunck's Analecta, ii. 49.; Posidippi Epigr. 13. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 27. Saturday, May 4, 1850 • Various
... This epigram is illustrated by the following conversation, which passed between Bouvart and a French marquis, whom he had attended during a long and severe indisposition. As he entered the chamber on a certain occasion, he was thus addressed by his patient: "Good day to you, Mr. Bouvart; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... difficult as Sanscrit or Persian, neither of which languages has ever been thoroughly acquired by any European, though at first acquaintance they flatter the student with their deceitful simplicity. I take the liberty of sending you a short original epigram in rhymed Mandchou, which if it answers no other purpose will afford you some idea of my running Mandchou hand, which, as I now write perpendicularly, is very different from that hand which I wrote previously ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... patriotism in the high collar, tempered by regret in the soft ruche.... She would have been a problem and a poem; while I, in my cheerful reds, my dazzling white, my decisive short skirts, my piquant shoes, my audacious apron, am a conundrum, a pleasantry, an epigram." This would be very pretty on the stage, but a waiting-maid who calls herself an "epigram" passes our imagination under any other circumstances. In fact, Miss Howard seems to us to be altogether on a false tack in this novel,—to have utterly abandoned realism, and in its place ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... remain so; it is not fair play to require them to be like other human people. Their deepest feeling is for the arts; and, as everyone had declared, they are farceurs in their tragedies, tragic in their comedies. They prepare the last epigram in the tumbril; they drown themselves with enthusiasm about the alliance with Russia. In death they are witty; in war they have poetic spasms; in love they ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... the mind and memory of man. Of such a question it is difficult to take broad views, and dangerous to generalise. Still less is it possible, as many people appear to imagine, to settle it with a phrase or an epigram. A point is reached where all relation between detail and proportion is lost. It is a picture of such great size that to see it all, it is necessary to stand so far off that neither colours nor figures are distinguishable. By constantly changing the point of view, ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... fabric was reared,—all these qualities of the orator demand and receive our sincere applause. In an age when indolence or the study of French models has reduced our sentences to the economic curtness of telegraphic despatches, to the dimension of the epigram without its point, Mr. Choate is one of the few whose paragraphs echo with the long-resounding pace of Dryden's coursers, and who can drive a predicate and six without danger ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... of nature, a sweet undercurrent of life, stays alive in them and is handed down to those who write of them, and the most worthless man that walks the streets of an Ohio or Iowa town may be the father of an epigram that colours all the life of the men about him. In a mining town or deep in the entrails of one of our cities life is different. There the disorder and aimlessness of our American lives becomes a crime for which men pay heavily. Losing step with one another, men lose also a sense of their ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... appearance and custom. Allow that it would be a pity to suffer pride to stand in the way of the talents with which Providence has blest me; to scorn the little delicacies of art, which I execute so well, would, in my opinion, be as absurd as for an epic poet to disdain the composition of a perfect epigram, or a consummate musician, the melody of a ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... There is an epigram on Dennis by Savage, which Johnson has preserved in his Life; and I feel it to be a very correct likeness, although Johnson censures Savage for writing an epigram against Dennis, while he was living in great ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... second choice. The young man was therefore duly articled with a firm of advocates and sent to hear lectures on jurisprudence. But his godfather introduced him into the Society of the Temple, a group of wits, of all ages, who could take snuff and throw off an epigram on any subject. The bright young man, flashing, dashing and daring, made friends at once through his skill in writing scurrilous verse upon any one whose name might be mentioned. This habit had been begun in college, where it was much applauded by the underlings, who delighted to see their unpopular ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... cynicism, and he hated cynicism so heartily as to dislike even humor when it had a touch of cynical flavor. Wit he enjoyed, but did not produce. The turn of his mind was not to brevity and point and condensation. He sometimes struck off a telling phrase, but never polished an epigram. His conversation was luminous rather than sparkling; you were interested and instructed while you listened, but the words seldom dwelt ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... since, one of its most decided and irreconcilable assailants. Nor do I think that Mr Arnold would have much relished the apology made, I think, by Mr Leslie Stephen since his death, that its critics "mistake an epigram for a philosophical definition." In the first place, the epigrammatic quality is not clearly apparent; and in the second place, an epigram would in the particular place have been anything but appropriate, while a philosophical definition ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... to Harun and Yahia The Ruin of Barmecides To Taher Ben Hosien The Adieu To My Mistress To a Female Cup-bearer Mashdud on the Monks of Khabbet Rakeek to His Female Companions Dialogue by Rais To a Lady Weeping On a Valetudinarian On a Miser To Cassim Obio Allah A Friend's Birthday To a Cat An Epigram upon Ebn Naphta-Wah Fire To a Lady Blushing On the Vicissitudes of Life To a Dove On a Thunder Storm To My Favorite Mistress Crucifixion of Ebn Bakiah Caprices of Fortune On Life Extempore Verses On the Death of a Son To Leila On Moderation in ...
— Oriental Literature - The Literature of Arabia • Anonymous
... was one of those women who claim to exercise a sort of sway over fashions and society in Paris; she issued her decrees, saw them received in her own circle, and it seemed to her that all the world obeyed them. She aspired to epigram, she set up for an authority in matters of taste. Literature, politics, men and women, all alike were submitted to her censorship, and the lady herself appeared to defy the censorship of others. Her house was in every respect a model ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... leaning over to look along the line of fragrant, fresh young beauty, "Art is an art." With which epigram he slowly ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... things—money and liberty—the two things which the European peasant (and often prince as well) lacks and wants. Necessity at home pushes; opportunity in America pulls. Commissioner Robert Watchorn, of the port of New York, packs the explanation into an epigram: "American wages are the honey-pot that brings the alien flies." He says further: "If a steel mill were to start in a Mississippi swamp paying wages of $2 a day, the news would hum through foreign lands in a month, and that swamp would become a beehive ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... have been, had profited doubtless by the study of Myron's famous work. For what purpose he made it, does not appear;—as [286] an architectural ornament; or a votive offering; perhaps only because he liked making it. In hyperbolic epigram, at any rate, the animal breathes, explaining sufficiently the point of Pliny's phrase regarding Myron—Corporum curiosus. And when he came to his main business with the quoit-player, the wrestler, the runner, he did not for a moment forget that they too were animals, young animals, delighting ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... v. 1. Politian, commenting on Catullus, held in common with Lampridius, Turnebus and Vossius that Lesbia's sparrow was an indecent allegory, like the "grey duck" in Pope's imitation of Chaucer. Sannazarius wrote an Epigram smartly castigating Politian, the closing lines of which were to the effect that the critic would like to devour ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... her astonished head an article from the Encyclopedia Brittanica. An American divorcee swooned when I poured into her shell-like ear a few facts about the McKinley Tariff. These are only my serious efforts. I need not tell you how often I have evaded a flash of the eyes by an epigram, or ignored a sigh by an apt quotation ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... concetto[obs3], plaisanterie[Fr], brilliant idea; merry thought, bright thought, happy thought; sally; flash of wit, flash of merriment; scintillation; mot[Fr], mot pour rire [French]; witticism, smart saying, bon-mot,jeu d'esprit[Fr],epigram; jest book; dry joke, quodlibet, cream of the jest. word-play, jeu de mots[Fr]; play of words, play upon words; pun, punning; double entente, double entendre &c. (ambiguity) 520[Fr]; quibble, verbal quibble; conundrum ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... laughter and a jest: But as for them which scorning shall reprove[457] thee, Disdain their wits, and think thine own the best. But if thou find any so gross and dull, That thinks I do to private taxing[458] lean, 10 Bid him go hang, for he is but a gull, And knows not what an epigram doth[459] mean, Which taxeth,[460] under a particular name, A general vice which merits ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... upon the old Banker, whom it is only paying off in his own Coin. Spedding (of course) used to deny that R. deserved his ill Reputation: but I never heard any one else deny it. All his little malignities, unless the epigram on Ward be his, are dead along with his little sentimentalities; while Byron's Scourge hangs over his Memory. The only one who, so far as I have seen, has given any idea of his little cavilling style, is Mrs. Trench in her Letters; her excellent Letters, so far as I can see and ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... The Doctor's epigram hardly deserves its fame. It embodies a very meagre fraction of the truth. While it ignores the beneficent effects of the patriotic instinct, it does not exhaust its evil propensities. It is not only the moral obliquity of place-hunters ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... obtained in this world"—not an unreasonable desire, he indicated, but one which would not be permanently realised by strikes directed against the whole community. Mr. SEDDON, of the National Democratic Party, compressed the same argument into an epigram. If the miners' full demands were conceded they would have "an El Dorado for one minute ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... the ceremony he was about to encounter before he ate his dinner? He did not walk long, for at two o'clock he bathed, and heard "that story about Mamurra" without moving a muscle. Turn to your Catullus, the 57th Epigram, and read what Caesar had read to him on this occasion, without showing by his face the slightest feeling. It is short enough, but I cannot quote it even in a note, even in Latin. Who told Caesar of the foul words, and why were they ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... murmured cynically. "We wear our sentiments on our sleeves for publishers to peck at." (he made a mental note of this epigram for future use.) "I've an idea! Suppose you run home with me now and try over some of my songs, will you? There's a lot of stuff that might interest you. I've got one of Farwell's machines down ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... forces. 'Tis a resplendent conflict, and young blood cannot but stir and exult as paradoxes, marching and countermarching at the command of their gay generalissimo, make way for one another in iridescent squadrons, while through the steady musketry of epigram one hears the clash of contending repartees, or the cry of a wailing sonnet. But this lord of laughter may be served by the young alone; and by and by each veteran—scarred, it may be, but not maimed, dear lady—is well content to relinquish ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... OEnoe; at a later date his bones were removed to Orchomenos." An unhappy ending for the instructor of Perses! But it may not be true. To be sure, these poets—I can only say that to me it sounds improbable, and so, I take it, it sounded to Alkaeus of Messene, who wrote this epigram ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... circumstances, it is likewise necessary to leave off in time, and end smartly; so that there is a kind of drama in the forming of a story; and the manner of conducting and pointing it is the same as in an epigram. It is a miserable thing, after one hath raised the expectation of the company by humorous characters and a pretty conceit, to pursue the matter too far. There is no retreating; and how poor is it for a story-teller to end his ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... not to have been. The popular idea that life is a shimmy is a dangerous illusion." Mr. Prohack felt the epigram to be third-rate, but ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... audiences in the fall or autumn of the year. These lectures have been delivered many times in Australia; and, as the result of the Browning lecture given in the Unitarian Schoolroom in Wakefield street, Adelaide, I received from the pen of Mr. J. B. Mather a clever epigram. The room was large and sparsely filled, and to the modest back seat taken by my friend my voice scarcely penetrated. So he amused himself and me ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... I think they call his parlour, is a very antique cupboard; where, it is supposed, he deposited some precious part of his literary treasure. The ceiling is painted in a grotesque manner. A niche in the wall contains the skeleton of his favourite cat, with a Latin epigram beneath, of Petrarch's composition. It is good enough to deserve being copied; but the lateness of the hour did not allow me time. A little room, beyond this, is said to have been his study: the walls of it, from top to bottom, are scribbled over with sonnets, and poetical eulogies ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... enjoy a quaintness or a neat literary allusion even at a moment of the bitterest personal disappointment. He could solace himself for a minute for the loss of Edie by choosing a text for his Sunday's sermon with a prettily-turned epigram on his ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... authoritative definition of Democracy. Then we shall know where, collectively, we are. Of course you may say that it has been defined for all time by Abraham Lincoln. But thrilling in its clear simplicity as his slogan epigram may be, a complex political and social system cannot be fully dealt with in fifteen words. I thought I knew what it was until a tidy few millions of friends and myself were knocked silly by recent events in Russia. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... practice is one of life's eternal compromises. And the best thing we can do for it now is to make it clean. We have far too much of the other kind. The essential difference has never been more shrewdly put than in the caustic epigram, that there is the same difference between a sportsman and a "sport" as there is between a gentleman and a "gent." I believe that the enforcement of laws and the establishment of sanctuaries will raise our sport ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... oppressors called George." Moore immortalized his "nothingness" as a "sick epicure's dream, incoherent and gross." Leigh Hunt went to prison for calling him a "fat Adonis of fifty." Landor, in an epigram on himself and his royal namesakes as bitter as four biting lines could be, could find nothing more bitter than to record his descent from earth, and thankfulness to Heaven that with him the Georges had come to an end. Thackeray abandoned in despair the task of doing ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... in a single epigram most of the ornaments with which rolls could be decorated. This I will quote next, premising that the oil of cedar, or arbor-vitae, mentioned in the second line not only imparted an agreeable yellow colour, but was held to ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... a fictitious and vicious form of connection, is, it would appear, forever opposed to "connection" of a just and proper kind. If it were attempted to sum up the issue of the American Revolution in an epigram, would not that epigram be: "Colony,"—or "Free State"? "Dependence,"—or "Just ...
— "Colony,"—or "Free State"? "Dependence,"—or "Just Connection"? • Alpheus H. Snow
... literature. Spiegel was a wealthy patron of the arts, and a president, with Visscher, of the Eglantine Chamber with the painfully sentimental name. Constantin Huyghens wrote light verse with intricate metres, and an occasional epigram. Here ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... "Politics for Young Americans," written with most pious and orthodox intent by the late Charles Nordhoff, the discussion of government begins with the epigram,—by no means original with Nordhoff,—"Governments are ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... one of the Boulevards put up a sign having on it a portrait of Absalom dangling by his hair from a tree, and Joab piercing his body with a spear. Under the painting was the following terse epigram:— ...
— At the Sign of the Barber's Pole - Studies In Hirsute History • William Andrews
... received, although two lines in an epigram "On a Cock at Rochester," by the witty Sir Charles Sedley, imply that the cock suffered this annual barbarity by way of punishment for St. Peter's crime, in denying his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 470 - Volume XVII, No. 470, Saturday, January 8, 1831 • Various
... The word medica for a woman physician was very commonly used at Rome. Martial, whose epigrams have been a source of so much information in medical history, especially on subjects with regard to which information was scanty, mentions a medica in an epigram. Apuleius also uses the word. There are a number of inscriptions in which women physicians are mentioned. Among the Christians we find women physicians, and Theodosia, the mother of St. Procopius, the martyr, is said to have been very successful ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... his taste!" said Harriet, who always delivered a platitude as if it was an epigram. She was curiously virulent about Italy, which she had never visited, her only experience of the Continent being an occasional six weeks in ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... Lloyd George, his supplanter, he has lost the earnestness which brought him to the seats of power. A domestic circle, brilliant with the modern spirit and much occupied in sharpening the wits with epigram and audacity, has proved too much for his original stoicism. He has found recreation in the modern spirit. After the day's work there has been nothing so diverting for him as the society of young people; chatter rather ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... that Goethe's attention was turned seriously to Eastern literature was in 1791, when, through Herder's efforts, he made the acquaintance of Kalidasa's dramatic masterpiece Sakuntala, which inspired the well known epigram "Willst du die Bluete des fruehen," etc., an extravagant eulogy rather than an appreciative criticism. That the impression was not merely momentary is proved by the fact that five years later the poet took the inspiration for his Faust ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... said little—'twas the rest that broke Forth into universal epigram; But then 'twas to the purpose what she spoke: Like Addison's "faint praise,"[806] so wont to damn, Her own but served to set off every joke, As music chimes in with a melodrame. How sweet the task to shield an absent friend! I ask but this of mine, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... stirred by the sight of so much foodstuff and moved to epigram by his mood, looked up and down ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... composition, had even more; while the collection pure and simple, resembling the miscellanies in absence of special character, but the work of one, not of many writers, was also plentifully represented. Satirical allegory, epigram, and other kinds, had numerous examples. But there were two classes of verse which were both sufficiently interesting in themselves and were cultivated by persons of sufficient individual repute to deserve separate and detailed mention. These were the historical poem or history—a kind of companion ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... learning without virtue is a pearl on a dunghill. He spends the whole day in settling whether Homer expressed himself correctly or not in such and such a line of the Iliad, whether Martial was indecent or not in such and such an epigram, whether such and such lines of Virgil are to be understood in this way or in that; in short, all his talk is of the works of these poets, and those of Horace, Perseus, Juvenal, and Tibullus; for of the moderns in our own ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... understand! [He glances at his watch] Yes, I understand. [He kisses IVANOFF] Good-bye, I must go to the blessing of the school now. [He goes as far as the door, then stops] She is so clever! Sasha and I were talking about gossiping yesterday, and she flashed out this epigram: "Father," she said, "fire-flies shine at night so that the night-birds may make them their prey, and good people are made to be preyed upon by gossips and slanderers." What do you think of that? She is ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... representation of the debased manners of the day in gay society. His style was remarkably felicitous, and it is said that he adorned all that he touched. Most of his poems are quite short, and their subjects range from a touching outburst of genuine grief for a brother's death to a fugitive epigram of the most voluptuous triviality. His verses display ease and impetuosity, tumultuous merriment and wild passion, playful grace and slashing invective, vigorous simplicity and ingenious imitation of the learned stiffness and affectation of the Alexandrian school. They are strongly national, ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... it's true—I back him at a Rebus or a Charade against the best Rhymer in the Kingdom—has your Ladyship heard the Epigram he wrote last week on Lady Frizzle's Feather catching Fire—Do Benjamin repeat it—or the Charade you made last Night extempore at Mrs. Drowzie's conversazione—Come now your first is the Name of a Fish, your second a great ...
— The School For Scandal • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... bankruptcy of Russia in every relation before the great minds of Europe, but as regards himself, no, he is at a higher level than all the great minds of Europe; they are only material for his jests. He takes another man's idea, tacks on to it its antithesis, and the epigram is made. There is such a thing as crime, there is no such thing as crime; there is no such thing as justice, there are no just men; atheism, Darwinism, the Moscow bells.... But alas, he no longer believes in the Moscow ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Epigrammata, Basel, 1529. The Greek lines relate, as in Shakespeare's sonnets, how a nymph who sought to quench love's torch in a fountain only succeeded in heating the water. An added detail Shakespeare borrowed from a very recent adaptation of the epigram in Giles Fletcher's Licia, 1593 (Sonnet xxvii.), where the poet's Love bathes in the fountain, with the result not only that 'she touched the water and it burnt with Love,' ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... is a mere delusion of words. It is not properly a rule, but in itself the great end not only of the drama, but of the epic poem, the lyric ode, of all poetry, down to the candle-flame cone of an epigram,—nay of poesy in general, as the proper generic term inclusive of all the fine arts as its species. But of the unities of time and place, which alone are entitled to the name of rules, the history of their origin will be their best criterion. You might take the Greek chorus to a place, but ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... Halifax from his own elaborate study of Charles II. It is a prolonged analysis by a man of clear vision, and perfect balance of judgement, and no prepossessions; who was, moreover, master of the easy pellucid style that tends to maxim and epigram. A more impartial and convincing estimate of any king need never be expected. In method and purpose, it stands by itself. It is indeed not so much a character in the accepted sense of the word as a scientific investigation ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... her own. So witty and so gracious was she, so much herself with this stranger, with whom she felt completely at ease, because she felt sure that they should never meet again, that, after some delicious epigram ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... makes thee my friendship fly, Or take an Epigram so fearfully, As't were a challenge, or a borrower's letter? The world must know your greatness is my debtor. IMPRIMIS, Grand, you owe me for a jest I lent you, on mere acquaintance, at a feast. ITEM, a tale or two some ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... That the mutual salutation by hat was probably a fact; that, for certain, there was some slight preliminary talk and gesticulation, but in the Homeric style, by no means in the Espagnac-French,—not chivalrous epigram at all, mere rough banter, and what is called "chaffing;"—and in short, that the French Mess-rooms (with their eloquent talent that way) had rounded off the thing into the current epigrammatic redaction; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... space to illustrate all the notes to which Hazlitt's voice responds—the pithy epigram of the Characteristics, the Chesterfieldian grace in his advice "On the Conduct of Life," the palpitating movement with which he gives expression to his keen enjoyment of his sensual or intellectual existence, and the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... of the average—packed with epigram; worthy of all we've ever believed or asked of him. It takes a master of technique, of style, to ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... our eccentric author treats us to a dazzling flood of epigram, invective, and what appears to be argument; and finally leaves us without a single clear idea as to what he ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... the large and rapidly increasing number of these youths of mixed blood in Alaska. It is common to hear them spoken of slightingly and contemptuously. There is what my mind always regards as a damnable epigram current in the country to the effect that the half-breed inherits the vices of both races and the virtues of neither. The white man who utters this saying with a chuckle at his second-hand wit has generally ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... discovered a man who understood that his was a sort of paternal function for young men at their entrance into life, who regarded himself as a stepping-stone between a young man's present and future. And Rastignac in gratitude made the man's fortune by an epigram of a kind in which he excelled at a later period of ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... of rendering yourself in prose, then you necessarily shredded your prose into very fine paragraphs of a sentence each, or of a very few words, or even of one word. I believe this fashion prevailed till very lately with some of the dramatic critics, who thought that it gave a quality of epigram to the style; and I suppose it was borrowed from the more spasmodic moments of Victor Hugo by the editor of the Press. He brought it back with him when he came home from one of those sojourns in Paris which possess one of the French accent rather than the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... preference to Bolingbroke; stating as his reason, that 'though Lord Bolingbroke had no idea of wit, his satire was keener than any one's. Lord Chesterfield, on the other hand, would have a great deal of wit in them; but, in every page you see he intended to be witty: every paragraph would be an epigram. Polish, he declared, would be his bane;' and Lord ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... side, that it is very rare for any high office to be given to a man who is competent for the post. Generally the Minister of Education is a lawyer; the Minister of Commerce, an author; the War Minister, a doctor; the Minister for the Navy, a journalist. Beaumarchais' epigram "The post required a mathematician—it was given to a dancing master!" strikes the keynote much more of a democracy than of ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... is so pleasant, as I have known later, as to display your worldly wisdom in epigram and dissertation, but it is a trifle tedious to hear another person ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... given as September 21st, 1626, whereas Dr. Andrewes is known to have died on September 25th. The grammatical error is unimportant, while the gist of the sentence sums up the life and character of the departed in the brief form of an epigram: "Lumen Orbis Christiani." The inscription at the foot simply refers to the restorations of the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... we are not to look to the writings of such a man for tricks of rhetoric, the free play of imagination, or the unscrupulousness of epigram and antithesis. He wrote as he lived, conscious of "the great Task-master's eye." With the wise heathen Marcus Aurelius Antoninus he had learned to "wipe out imaginations, to check desire, and let the spirit that is the gift ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... others had time to smile their appreciation of the vicomte's epigram, Pierre again broke into the conversation, and though Anna Pavlovna felt sure he would say something inappropriate, she was ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Cooper, who was created bishop of Galloway. This recreant Mass John was a hypochondriac, and conceived his lower extremities to be composed of glass; hence, on his court advancement, the following epigram was composed: ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... wrote was an epigram. It was in almost the final lucid interval between periods of insanity that he was riding in the park with his physician. As they drove along, Swift saw, for the first time, a building that had ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... for an epigram; the lady's husband was jealous, he thought; he reddened under it, looked in the glass and tried to give himself ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... to this spirit of blindness was the remark of the Greek to his slave during a terrible storm at sea. Seeing the latter weeping, he exclaimed, 'Why are you so troubled—I give you your freedom?' And allied to it is the well-known epigram: ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and epigrams far and wide and carried a notice that the proceeds of all meetings would be turned over to the woman's rights cause. Susan also arranged for the printing of Train's widely distributed pamphlet, The Great Epigram Campaign of Kansas, with this jingle, so uncomplimentary to the eastern abolitionists, on ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... the information which has been elicited in connexion with the so-called "Unpublished Epigram by Sir W. Scott," "N. & Q.," Vol. vii., p. 498., sufficiently curious to justify an additional reference to the sentiment in question; the more so as I have to mention the name of its putative author. In Montgomery's ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... lines recurred to my memory after reading in your last number the translation of the epigram by Pasidippus in the article on "Fronte capillata," &c.; it is many years since I read them, but have forgotten where. Can you or any of your correspondents inform me who is ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... Mallock too seriously: he has not written in earnest. But, as his uncle, Mr. Froude, said, when reading "The New Republic,"—"The rogue is clever!" He has read a good deal, he has an active mind, a smooth redundancy of expression, a talent for caricature, a fondness for epigram and paradox, a useful shallowness, and an amusing impudence. He has no practical knowledge of mankind, no experience of life, no commanding point of view, and no depth of insight. He has no conception of the meaning and quality of the problems with whose exterior ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... impressions so masterfully that the reader often has the feeling of a physical experience; and it is but natural that up to his thirty-fifth year, before he discovered his literary talent, he had dreamed of being a landscape painter. Hebbel's epigram, "Know ye why ye are such past masters in painting beetles and buttercups? 'Tis because ye know not man; 'tis because ye see not the stars," utterly fails to do justice to Stifter's poetic individuality. But in avoiding the great tempests and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... with Koran balanced on head, crying to his Prophet to save him, and defying Englishes to touch him. Of course they cooked his geese, Koran or not. One warder does more than many Prophets in Gungapur Jail. (He! He! Quite good epigram and nice cynicality of educated man.) The degraded and unpolished fellow decoyed two little girls into empty house to steal their jewellery, and cut off fingers and noses and ears to get rings and nose-jewels and ear-drops, and left ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... place, a genius and instinct for style.... Brilliant and powerful passages in a man's writings do not prove his possession of it. Emerson has passages of noble and pathetic eloquence; he has passages of shrewd and felicitous wit; he has crisp epigram; he has passages of exquisitely touched observation of nature. Yet he is not a great writer.... Carlyle formulates perfectly the defects of his friend's poetic and literary productions when he says: 'For me it is too ethereal, speculative, theoretic; I will have all things condense themselves, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... by a coral wall, commanded by a gate that bears a Latin epigram. The graves, as indicated by the mounds of dirt, are never very deep, and while a few are guarded by a wooden cross, forlornly decorated by a withered bunch of flowers, most of the graves receive no care at all. There may be one or two ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... Delille. What you call epigram gives life and spirit to grave works, and seems principally wanted to relieve a long poem. I do not see why what pleases us in a star should not ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... I bring you, for the bad drawings with which I ornament your album, and so on, and so on. I may do all that, and yet be an egotist. I venture to think that I do not bore you, and that you do not think me a bad man; but yet you suppose that I—how shall I say it?—for the sake of an epigram would not spare my friend, my ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... me with it. A few days before his death I was twenty-seven years old, and the most innocent youth, I suppose, on the continent. After he died I missed him greatly," Pickering continued, evidently with no intention of making an epigram. "I stayed at home, in a sort of dull stupor. It seemed as if life offered itself to me for the first time, and yet as if I didn't know how to take hold ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... thou Benedicke the married man? Bene. Ile tell thee what Prince: a Colledge of witte-crackers cannot flout mee out of my humour, dost thou think I care for a Satyre or an Epigram? no, if a man will be beaten with braines, a shall weare nothing handsome about him: in briefe, since I do purpose to marry, I will thinke nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it, and therefore neuer flout at me, for I haue said against it: for man is a giddy thing, and this ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... to return to London earlier than he had first intended, Eric entered the drawing-room full of toleration and good-humour. Bending over Mrs. Nares' sofa, he atoned for his inattention during dinner with thirty seconds' belated sparkle and a simple epigram which he had already tried with effect on Mrs. Shelley. They were joined by Mrs. Waring, and, as he had hardly spoken to her all the evening, he consented to talk about his forthcoming play—which he enjoyed as little as a superstitious mother might enjoy describing her unborn ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... the idea that Major's interest as a doctor of the Sorbonne might help him to find employment in Paris, we are not told. One of the many stories to his prejudice which were current in his after-career describes Buchanan as dependent on Major and ungrateful to him, repaying with a cruel epigram the kindness shown him. But there seems absolutely no foundation for this accusation which was probably suggested to after-detractors anxious for evidence that ingratitude, as one of them says, "was the great and unpardonable blemish of his life"—by the epigram in ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... an epic in an epigram—"She seen her duty and she done it!" but the space and time covered are generally as far beyond our plans as the estimates of an amateur mountain climber exceed ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... of conversation with him, when I was posting him on the latest developments in America, his comments upon the leading characters of the time were most racy and witty. Many of them would have embalmed a statesman, if the epigram had been preserved, like a fly in amber. He had officially a very difficult task during the Spanish War. The sympathies of all European governments were with Spain. This was especially true of the Kaiser and the German Government. It was Mr. Hay's task to ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... But there is another Theocritus, the son of Praxagoras and Philinna (see Epigram XXIII), or as some say of Simichus. (This is plainly derived from the assumed name Simichidas in Idyl VII.) He was a Syracusan, or, as others say, a Coan settled in Syracuse. He wrote the so-called Bucolics in the Dorian dialect. Some ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... and the Government recognised that the acquisition of the Straits must be indefinitely postponed. Then history repeated itself. After the Crimean War, in accordance with Prince Gortchakoff's famous epigram, La Russie ne boude pas elle se recueille, the Government had for some years abandoned an active policy in Europe, and devoted itself to the work of internal reorganisation; whilst the military party had turned their attention to making new acquisitions of territory and influence ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... That's understood. I shan't do it often, however—that I can tell them!" And justified by this Spartan temper as to the future, he wrote a charming note, accepting the delights of the present, so full of epigram that the Cabinet Minister to whom it was addressed had no sooner read it than he consigned it instanter to his wife's ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
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