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More "Man of letters" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... extensive. His cleverness and wit had made him famed far and wide. His occasional poems, written for sport and festivals, showed a genuine talent, almost a genius, for the poetic art. He was considered by all the very life and spirit of the younger Court set. A great future as a statesman and man of letters was ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... open to him. He was surfeited with roses and praises and incense. He alone took precedence over Scott and Coleridge and Moore and Campbell. For a time his pre-eminence in literature was generally conceded. He was the foremost man of letters of his day, and the greatest popular idol. His rank added to his eclat, since not many noblemen were distinguished for genius or literary excellence. His singular beauty of face and person, despite his slight lameness, attracted the admiring ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... extended their migrations to the Eastern base of the "Blue Ridge," and selected locations on the head-waters of the Yadkin and Catawba rivers. In 1734, Gabriel Johnston was appointed Governor of North Carolina. He was a Scotchman by birth, a man of letters and of liberal views. He was by profession a physician, and held the appointment of Professor of Oriental Languages in the University of Saint Andrews. His addresses to the Legislature show that he fully appreciated the lamentable condition of the colony through the imprudence and vicious ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... commercial schemers. They describe the capitalist's brain of steel and heart of gold in a way that Englishmen hitherto have been at least in the habit of reserving for romantic figures like Garibaldi or Gordon. In one excellent magazine Mr. T. P. O'Connor, who, when he likes, can write on letters like a man of letters, has some purple pages of praise of Sir Joseph Lyons—the man who runs those teashop places. He incidentally brought in a delightful passage about the beautiful souls possessed by some people called Salmon and Gluckstein. I think I like best the passage where he said that Lyons's ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... a schoolmaster was visited by a man of letters who entered a school and, sitting down by the host's side, entered into discourse with him and found him an accomplished theologian, poet grammarian, philologist and poet; intelligent, well bred and pleasant spoken; whereat ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... poet is generally more attentive to character than to history; and I much fear that the art of printing was not introduced into England, till several years after Lord Say's death; but of some of these meritorious crimes I should hope to find my ancestor guilty; and a man of letters may be proud of his descent from a ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... the defiant heyday of adolescence, set more than a tentative foot across the outer precincts of the Romantic Bohemia. His "individualism" was not of the type which overflows in easy affectations; he was too original to be eccentric, too profoundly a man of letters to look "like a damned literary man." In his poetry this animus took a less equivocal shape. Not a little, both of its vividness and of its obscurity, flows from the undisciplined exuberance of his ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... prince,—a vain, avaricious, and cold-hearted individual; luxurious by temperament, temperate in practice; a selfish epicurean, and affecting the harshness of the cynic;—peacefully disposed, and cultivating the arts of peace, yet exercising the arts of war in their direst form;—a man of letters, ignorant of the beauties, and disdaining the language of his country;—magnificent and mean; the builder of palaces, theatres, libraries and museums, and dying, literally, without a whole shirt in which he could be buried;—and, lastly, the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... men. Into what companies will he hereafter go with an unembarrassed face, or the honest intrepidity of virtue? Men will watch him with a jealous eye; they will hide their papers from him, and lock up their escrutoires; he will henceforth esteem it a libel to be called a man of letters; homo trium literarum! He not only took away the letters from one brother, but kept himself concealed till he nearly occasioned the murder of the other. It is impossible to read his account, expressive of the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... think, in this respect the work of an eminent American, Mr. N. P. Willis is eminently valuable and impartial. In his 'History of Ernest Clay,' a crack magazine-writer, the reader will get an exact account of the life of a popular man of letters in England. He is always ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Colonel, "I hope it is not your practice to measure and estimate gentlemen by such paltry standards as those. A man of letters follows the noblest calling which any man can pursue. I would rather be the author of a work of genius, than be Governor-General of India. I admire genius. I salute it wherever I meet it. I like my own profession better than any in the world, but then it is because I am suited to it. I ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the sun. The last great master of Attic eloquence and Attic wit has left us a forcible and touching description of the misery of a man of letters, who, lulled by hopes similar to those of Frances, had entered the service of one of the magnates of Rome. "Unhappy that I am," cries the victim of his own childish ambition: "would nothing content me but that I must leave mine old pursuits and mine old companions, and the life which was without ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... which is the orthography, if I may call bad spelling ORTHOGRAPHY. You spell induce, ENDUCE; and grandeur, you spell grandURE; two faults of which few of my housemaids would have been guilty. I must tell you that orthography, in the true sense of the word, is so absolutely necessary for a man of letters; or a gentleman, that one false spelling may fix ridicule upon him for the rest of his life; and I know a man of quality, who never recovered the ridicule of having spelled ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... from their really harmonious milieu. The process of segregation is deprived to a large extent of the disagreeableness consequent upon a rigid table of precedence. Nothing surprises an American more in London society than the uneasy sense of inferiority that many a distinguished man of letters will show in the presence of a noble lord. No amount of philosophy enables one to rise entirely superior to the trammels of early training and hoary association. Even when the great novelist feels himself as at least on a level ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... be difficult to find in these days a more competent and sympathetic editor of Scott than his countryman, the brilliant and versatile man of letters who has undertaken the task, and if any proof were wanted either of his qualifications or of his skill and discretion in displaying them, Mr. Lang has furnished it abundantly in his charming Introduction to 'Waverley.' The editor's own notes ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... master-passion of his life—liberty in its greatest sense, the largest extent of individual and public spontaneity consistent with virtue and safety. He was in this as intense, persistent in his devotion, as Sydney, Locke, or old Hollis. For instance, his admiration of Lord Macaulay as a writer and a man of letters, an orator and a statesman, great as it was, was as nothing to his gratitude to him for having placed permanently on record, beyond all risk of obscuration or doubt, the doctrine of 1688—the right and power of the English people to be their own lawgivers, and ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... amusement to myself and perhaps others, by enumerating the absurdities of L'Homme Qui Rit. As far as I remember, when the book appeared, divers good people (the bad people merely sneered) took immense pains to discover how and why this great man of letters made so much greater a fool of himself. This was quite lost labour; and without attempting the explanation at all, a very small selection of the facts, being in a ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... fact, a reproduction of an antique song, or a mystification of a great modern, careless of fame and scornful of his time? Could it be possible that in the eleventh century, so far away as Khorasan, so accomplished a man of letters lived, with such distinction, such breadth, such insight, such calm disillusions, such cheerful and jocund despair? Was this "Weltschmerz," which we thought a malady of our day, endemic in Persia in 1100? My doubt only lasted until I came ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... the nineteenth century, the most eminent man of letters in Colombia has been Miguel Antonio Caro (1843-1909), a son of J.E. Caro. A neo-Catholic and "traditionalist," a learned literary critic and a poet, the younger Caro, like Bello before him and like his distinguished contemporary Rufino Jose Cuervo, ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... of a man of worth, A man of letters, and of manners too! Of manners sweet as Virtue always wears When gay Good-nature ...
— Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom • William and Ellen Craft
... name of a more illustrious renegade, John Dryden. Dryden was now approaching the decline of life. After many successes and many failures, he had at length attained, by general consent, the first place among living English poets. His claims on the gratitude of James were superior to those of any man of letters in the kingdom. But James cared little for verses and much for money. From the day of his accession he set himself to make small economical reforms, such as bring on a government the reproach of meanness without producing any perceptible relief to the finances. One of the victims ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... clear and cool, We'll ride before it's time for school. Holloa, there John! you lazy cuss! Bring forth my horse, Bucephalus!" So spake the man of letters. Straight Black John went through the stable gate, But soon returned with hair on end, While terror wings his speed did lend, And out he sent his piteous wail: "O boss! ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... sob beside me — you, upon whose golden head Many rains of many sorrows have from day to day been shed; Who, because your love was noble, faced with me the lot austere Ever pressing with its hardship on the man of letters here — Let me feel that you are near me, lay your hand within mine own; You are all I have to live for, now that we are left alone. Three there were, but one has vanished. Sins of mine have made you ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... calling. If a man lives in fear and trembling lest he should fail in these respects, if he finds these considerations alone weigh with him, if he never writes without thinking how he shall best serve good causes and damage bad ones, then he is a genuine man of letters. If in addition to this he succeeds in making his manner attractive, he will become a classic. He knows this. He knows, although the Greeks in their mythology forgot to say so, that Conceit was saved to mankind as well as ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... as in all essential points, the first witness to be called is Dante. He strove for the poet's garland with all the power of his soul.33 As publicist and man of letters, he laid stress on the fact that what he did was new, and that he wished not only to be, but to be esteemed the first in his own walks.34 But in his prose writings he touches also on the inconveniences ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... we have been able to collect of this profound scholar and antiquary. But the life of a man of letters appears, and must be chiefly sought for in his works, of which we subjoin ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... concentrated itself on certain happy days, happy hours, happy moments. The rest was a void. She had read that a man of letters must lose many days, to work well in one. Much more must a Sappho or a sibyl. The capacity of pleasure was balanced by the capacity of pain. 'If I had wist!—' she writes, 'I am a worse self-tormentor than Rousseau, and all my riches are fuel to the fire. My beautiful lore, like the tropic ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... may congratulate himself upon being the only man of letters in England who has had the originality or the insight or the temperamental courage to adopt a definitely reactionary philosophy; whereas in France we have Huysmans, Barres, Bourget, Bordeaux, and many others, whose persuasive and romantic role it is to prop up tottering altars; in England ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... very sensitive organization might find acceptable. The Master does not seem to like him much, for some reason or other,—perhaps he has a special aversion to the odor of tobacco. As his forefinger shows a little too distinctly that he uses a pen, I shall compliment him by calling him the Man of Letters, until I find ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... who is a man of letters and a philosopher, said to me one day, as if between jest and earnest,—" Fancy! since we last met, I have discovered a haunted house ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... the beginning of 1475, however, a new impulse was given to the work by the appointment of Bartolommeo Platina as Librarian (28 February)[367]; and from that date until Platina's death in 1481 it went forward without let or hindrance. This distinguished man of letters seems to have enjoyed the full confidence of the Pope, to have been liberally supplied with funds, and to have had a free hand in the employment of craftsmen and artists to furnish and decorate his Library. It is pleasant to be able to record that he lived to see his work completed, and ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... no mere abstract penitence which leads me to beg a corner of your paper - it is the desire to defend the honour of a man of letters equally known in America and England, of a man who could afford to lend to me and yet be none the poorer; and who, if he would so far condescend, has my free permission to borrow from me all that ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stated the newsman's simple case. I leave it in your hands. Within the last year the institution has had the good fortune to attract the sympathy and gain the support of the eminent man of letters I am proud to call my friend, {24} who now represents the great Republic of America at the British Court. Also it has the honour of enrolling upon its list of donors and vice-presidents the great name of Longfellow. I beg to propose to you to drink "Prosperity to the ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... price in your estimation? That, toy may be purchased by steady application, and long solitary study and reflection. Bestow these, and you shall be learned. "But," says the man of letters, "what a hardship is it, that many an illiterate fellow, who cannot construe the motto of the arms on his coach, shall raise a fortune and make a figure, while I have little more than the common conveniences of life!" Was it, then, to raise a fortune, that you consumed ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... which the French language was (fondly and vainly) supposed to be thus ascertained, sifted, and fixed for ever. England had no Academy; but it was thought that what had been done in France by the Forty Immortals might perhaps be done here by some leading man of letters. The idea had, it appears, been put before Alexander Pope, and approved by him; he is said even to have drawn up a list of the authors whose writings might be taken as authorities for such a dictionary; but he died in 1744, before anything ...
— The evolution of English lexicography • James Augustus Henry Murray
... richly than most women's with the memories of history and literature, for in her impatient way she had been at all times a quick, omnivorous reader—awoke to the peculiar conditions, the special thrill, attaching to the place and its performers. The philosopher derides it; the man of letters out of the House talks of it with a smile as a "Ship of Fools"; both, when occasion offers, passionately desire a seat in it; each would give his right hand ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the lyrics of Jonson a certain stiffness and formality, a suspicion that they were not quite spontaneous and unbidden, but that they were carved, so to speak, with disproportionate labour by a potent man of letters whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is for these reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity and emotion which we usually associate with lyrical poetry. There ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... spent whole afternoons at the feet of that man of letters, he now failed to notice tio Gori at all. Respectfully and obediently, he advanced, instead, directly toward his uncle, who had gone so far as to take the pipe out of his mouth to call to his nephews with an: "Hey there, boys!" and motion to them to take the chairs he had been ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... that the success of the "History of New York" did not make Irving a professional man of letters at once. The profits on the first edition were three thousand dollars, and several other editions were to follow steadily. But though he wished to be a literary man, and now knew that he might make a fair living by his writings, there was still lacking the force to compel him to work. ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... voice is to prevail must be an optimist, and his voice often learns its message from his life. Stevenson's life has become a tradition only ten years after his death; he has taken his place among the heroes, the bravest man of letters since Johnson and Lamb. I remember an hour when I was discouraged and ready to falter. For days I had been pegging away at a task which refused to get itself accomplished. In the midst of my perplexity I ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... until they are in motion, to whom a settled abode is irksome, and to whom the notion of blessedness is that they shall be out in the free plains. 'Amplius,' the dying Xavier's word, 'further afield,' is the motto of all noble life—scientist, scholar, artist, man of letters, man of affairs; all come under the same law, that unless there is something before them which has dominated their hearts, and draws their whole being towards it, their lives want salt, want nobility, want freshness, and a green scum comes over the pool. We all know that. To live is to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... lawyer, he served an apprenticeship in the office of a Writer to the Signet. He became a member of that honourable body, but almost immediately relinquished legal pursuits, and proceeded to London, resolved to commence the career of a man of letters. In the metropolis his literary aspirations were encouraged by Allan Cunningham and Mr and Mrs S. C. Hall. In 1829, he accepted an appointment in Jamaica; but, his health suffering from the climate ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... told. The establishment of Plymouth Plantation was his life work. He was a far bigger man than most of his contemporaries, with a broader outlook upon life and deeper resources within himself. One of these was a literary culture which fairly sets him apart as the first American man of letters. He wrote an entertaining history of his colony, as well as a number of philosophical and theological works, all marked with a style and ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... he had the greatest dislike of acting as a professor and teacher in a regular post, he soon tried to make a meagre livelihood by literary work. He had certain social gifts, and especially a fine tenor voice, and appears in his youth to have been welcome as a man of letters among a fairly wide circle ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... many years assistant librarian of the library of Parliament, should have selected for his theme the struggles of a man of action in a new country; for no subject could apparently be more foreign to the tastes of the genial, scholarly man of letters, who, seemingly overcome by the torpor of official life in a small city, or the slight encouragement given to Canadian books, never brought to full fruition the intellectual powers which his early efforts so clearly showed ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... a book of solid value, such as a clear-headed business man will appreciate, yet it is such a book as only an accomplished man of letters could write. We commend it to all who wish further knowledge of a region too little known ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... position recommend her no less than her talents. Camille Maupin, who knew her Genoa down to its smallest chapels, had left her landscape painter to the care of the diplomate and the two Genoese marquises, and was miserly of her minutes. Though the ambassador was a distinguished man of letters, the celebrated lady had refused to yield to his advances, dreading what the English call an exhibition; but she had drawn in the claws of her refusals when it was proposed that they should spend a farewell day at the Consul's ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... he may live he never escapes from its spacious shade; nor does he ever find that it speaks to him in vain or uses a voice that fails to reach him. Once the present writer was talking with a friend who has equal fame as a statesman and a man of letters, and he said, 'Every day I live, Politics, which are affairs of Man and Time, interest me less, while Theology, which is an affair of God and Eternity, interests me more.' As with him, so with many, though the many feel that their interest is in theology and not in dogma. Dogma, they know, ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... but he gave me one more chance. I am still 'is dear brother's child, and he cannot forget it. An acquaintance of his, a man of letters, a M. Paul Sartines, was in need of a secretary. The post was not well paid, but it was permanent. My uncle insist that I take it. What choice? I took it. It is the post which ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... university. The person whom she employed to effect this was an adroit man who had succeeded in deceiving the government. Francis I based his glory upon the patronage and encouragement which he accorded to learning, and Calvin, as a man of letters, merited consideration. The King needed some forgiveness for serious political faults, and, with reason, he believed that the humanists would redeem his character before the people. He was at once the protector and the slave ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... For though it is only by reason of the opposition of letters in the function of signs, to sounds in the function of signs, that the study of books is called "literature," and that a man versed in it is called, by the consent of nations, a man of letters instead of a man of books, or of words, you may yet connect with that accidental nomenclature this real fact:- that you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough), and remain an utterly "illiterate," uneducated person; but that if you read ten pages ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... income in Paris; that he could not contrive to give an entertainment that cost him money enough. What can he do better than commence amateur?—then he might throw away money as fast as his heart could wish. M. l'abbe, why do not you, or some man of letters, write directly, and advise him to this, for the good of his country? What a figure those prints would make in Petersburgh!—and how they would polish the Russians! But, as a good Frenchwoman, I ought to wish them to remain at Paris: they certainly cannot be better ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... evening as best one can in a provincial town on a coronation day when one doesn't go to the ball. We formed quite a little club. There was an academician, M. Roger; a man of letters, M. d'Eckstein; M. de Marcellus, friend and country neighbour of my father, who poked fun at his royalism and mine; good old Marquis d'Herbouville, and M. Hemonin, donor of the book that ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... announcement was made of the pension conferred upon him "in consideration of his literary merits," not one of the literary journals, not even the Athenaeum, was able to tell who the recipient was; but all declared that they knew of no man of letters bearing that name. This fund amounts to L1200, and the lion's share of it, the remaining L1000, is appropriated in a singular manner. It has been bestowed upon the wife of the new Lord Chancellor, Lord Truro, lately Mr. Solicitor Wilde. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... Munich, and Paris, in what was emphatically the prime of their quaint student-days; an account of my barricade experiences of the French Revolution of Forty-Eight, of which I missed no chief scene; my subsequent life in America as lawyer, man of letters, and journalist; my experiences in connection with the Civil War, and my work in the advancement of the signing the Emancipation by Abraham Lincoln; recollections of the Oil Region when the oil mania was at its height; a winter on the frontier in the debatable land (which was indeed not devoid of ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... affecting its literature, though the burning of Oldcastle called forth a bad poem by Hoccleve. The wasteful wars in France, and the turmoil of the Roses, on the other hand, had a great and most disastrous influence. After Lydgate's death about 1447, Capgrave was our leading man of letters, and on his death in 1464 the post was left vacant, unless Master Bennet Burgh can be considered as having held it. The Paston Letters, which begin in 1422 and cover the rest of the century (till 1507), offer some consolation for the lack of more formal ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... that could be due from a woman to a man. He had come within her ken, and had loved her without speaking of his love. He had seen her condition, and had sympathised with her fully. He had gone out, with his life in his hand,—he, a clergyman, a quiet man of letters,—to ascertain whether she was free; and finding her, as he believed, to be free, he had returned to take her to his heart, and to give her all that happiness which other women enjoy, but which she had hitherto only seen from a distance. Then the blow had come. It was necessary, ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... man of fifty-four. He was acknowledged as the greatest man of letters of his day, yet he was still poor. Three hundred pounds seemed to him wealth, but he hesitated to accept it. He was an ardent Tory and hated the House of Hanover. In his dictionary he had called a pension "an allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... world, and a packed house to listen to it, people applauding all the time. I didn't realise your success when we talked this evening. I am just beginning to understand. I've been reading some of these extracts from the newspapers. You're Merton Ware, the great dramatist, the coming man of letters. You've won, Philip. Can't you see that it's puling cowardice to grumble at ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... few literary men of his day who was not above using the Italian tongue, treating it seriously as a language and not merely as a debased form of Latin. He was eminent as a juris-consult, and, being a man of action as well as a man of letters, he had filled the office of Podesta in various cities; he had found employment under Lorenzo dei Medici, and latterly under Ercole d'Este, whom we now ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... a great industry, but was a man of artistic taste, a patron of art, and a lover of science. Telford, the Eskdale shepherd, was a man of literary taste, and was especially friendly with the typical man of letters, Southey. Others, of course, were of a lower type. Arkwright combined the talents of an inventor with those of a man of business. He was a man, says Baines (the historian of the cotton trade), who was sure to come out of an enterprise ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... "A sick man of letters never married into a family so well fitted to help him make the most of his powers. Mrs. Stevenson and both of her children were gifted; the whole family could write. When Stevenson was ill, one of them ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... Lopez de Villalobos is said to have been a man of letters, licentiate in law, and born of a distinguished family in Malaga; he was brother-in-law of Antonio de Mendoza, who (then viceroy of New Spain) appointed him commander of the expedition here described. Departing ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume II, 1521-1569 • Emma Helen Blair
... intelligent farmer plants his crop in the ground, rather than in the moon, and looks for his harvest to the seed and the toil. The intelligent merchant locates his business on the street of largest travel and makes the buying of his goods his best salesman. The intelligent man of letters thrives at first by making friends of poverty and want, until one day his genius places his name in the temple of honor. So it is with the artist, the musician, the inventor, the architect. To be happy and useful in one's lot, one ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... memory; and while some doubted the expediency of the course, and others stood aside fearing a failure, you did not hesitate boldly to come forward as a public advocate of the enterprise. Yourself a man of letters, you were among the foremost who took an interest in the establishment of the Scottish Literary Institute, of which you are now the President—a society having for its main object the relief, in circumstances of virtuous indigence, of those men of genius and learning who have contributed ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... set afoot. The same practical spirit which drove him into the strife, guided him in the midst of it. He never wrung his hands, nor wept, nor bewailed the unreason of the multitudes to whom in vain he preached reason. Unlike the typical man of letters—for he was without vanity—he did not abandon the cause of the Revolution because his suggestions were often repulsed. 'It would be better,' he said to the Girondins, 'if you cared less for personal matters and attended only to public interests.' Years ago, in his eloge on L'Hopital, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... is gone, and our thoughts of him are tender, grateful, proud. We are glad of his friendship; glad that he expressed so richly one of the great elements in the temperament of America; glad that he has left such an honourable record as a man of letters; and glad also for his own sake that after many and deep sorrows he is at peace and, we trust, happy in ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... illustrious Spanish family and you remember that he was one of the first followers of saint Ignatius. They met in Paris where Francis Xavier was professor of philosophy at the university. This young and brilliant nobleman and man of letters entered heart and soul into the ideas of our glorious founder and you know that he, at his own desire, was sent by saint Ignatius to preach to the Indians. He is called, as you know, the apostle of the Indies. He went from country to ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... presently conveyed to me something that, as I afterwards knew, he had never uttered to any one. I have always done justice to the generous impulse that made him speak; it was simply compunction for a snub unconsciously administered to a man of letters in a position inferior to his own, a man of letters moreover in the very act of praising him. To make the thing right he talked to me exactly as an equal and on the ground of what we both loved best. The hour, the place, the unexpectedness ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... of any complicacy which a man, especially a man of letters, gets to handle, are his Class-books. On this portion of his History, Teufelsdrockh looks down professedly as indifferent. Reading he "cannot remember ever to have learned;" so perhaps had it by nature. He says generally: "Of the insignificant portion of my Education, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... outstanding merit can quite be compared to it; for it was the product of what has always been, in France, an extremely rare phenomenon—an amateur in literature who was also a genius. Saint-Simon was so far from being a professional man of letters that he would have been shocked to hear himself described as a man of letters at all; indeed, it might be said with justice that his only profession was that of a duke. It was as a duke—or, more correctly, as a Duc et Pair—that, in his own eyes at any rate, he lived and moved and ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... order of students seeking only the liberalization, and not the profits, of academic life. In arguing upon their case, it is not the fair logic to say: These pursuits taint the decorum of the studious character; it is not fair to calculate how much is lost to the man of letters by such addiction to fox-hunting; but, on the contrary, what is gained to the fox-hunter, who would, at any rate, be such, by so considerable a homage paid to letters, and so inevitable a commerce with men of learning. Anything whatsoever attained in this direction, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... obligatory achievements of a man of taste." The honest Englishman takes the liberty to judge and to condemn men who have made so pernicious a use of their talents. This pretension to make the conscience speak is in the eyes of the French man of letters a gothic prejudice. Listen how he expresses himself on the subject: "Criticism in France has freer methods.—When we try to give an account of the life, or to describe the character, of a man, we are quite willing to consider him simply as an object of painting ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... University; Dr. Charles H. Ross, of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute; and my colleagues in the School of English in the University of Texas, Mr. L. R. Hamberlin and Professor Leslie Waggener. Chief-justice Logan E. Bleckley, of Georgia, a man of letters as well as of law, very kindly put at my use his correspondence with the poet, the original draft of 'Corn', and his criticisms upon the same. My chief indebtedness, however, is to Mrs. Sidney Lanier, who has been most generous with her time and ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... the absence of literary self-consciousness is itself pleasant; indeed, much of the charm of these stories is the charm of their unpremeditated art. But, though he did not write for the critics, Leamy was in spite of himself a man of letters. He was so genuinely an artist that he could not do the thing ill. Any one of these stories will prove his capacity: the first, for instance, about that princess on the "bare, brown, lonely moor" who was ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... relatively accurate. Of him, in this respect, we may say, what he said of Erasmus. 'Erasmus, though justly styled by Muretus, eruditus sane vir ac multae lectionis, was not a learned man in the special sense of the word—not an erudit. He was the man of letters. He did not make a study a part of antiquity for its own sake, but used it as an instrument of culture.' The result of culture in Pattison's actual life was not by any means ideal. For instance, he was head of a college for nearly ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... portrait hostess is found, the wife of the Colonel Harrison who presides in the drawing-room. She was the granddaughter of the noted colonial exquisite and man of letters, Colonel William Byrd, whose old home, Westover, we should soon visit on our way up the river. It was through her marriage to Colonel Harrison that there were added to the Brandon collection many of the paintings and other art treasures of the Byrd family, including a certain, well-known canvas ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... From the "Autobiography," as translated in 1822 by William Roscoe, the Liverpool banker and man of letters, who wrote a well-known "Life of Leo X," and of whom Irving, in his "Sketch Book," has left a pathetic personal account. The earliest English translation of Cellini appears to have been made by Thomas Nugent and published in 1771. The latest ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... man of letters was still many years in the future. After seven years in the London office, he went to Ireland as assistant surveyor, and thenceforward he began to enjoy his business, and to get on in it. He was paid sixpence a mile, and he ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... satirist of the abolition movement. With biting scorn and irony he laughed men out of narrowness, ignorance, and selfishness. During the last epoch in his career Lowell achieved world-wide fame as a diplomat, and was universally admired as the all round man of letters. But now that he has gone, in retrospect, the historian perceives that the first era of Lowell's career was the influential era. He was the Milton of the anti-slavery epoch, as Lincoln was its Cromwell. His influence in ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... tongues shall meet. Here shall be a more perfect civilization, a more thorough intellectual development, a firmer faith, a more reverent worship. Perhaps, as we look back to the struggle of an earlier age, and mark the steps of our ancestors in the career we have traced, some thoughtful man of letters in ages yet to come may bring light the history of this shore or of this day. I am sure, Ludlow citizens, that whoever shall hereafter read it will perceive that our pride and joy are dimmed by no stain of selfishness. Our pride is for humanity; our joy is for the world; and amid all the ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis
... after a course in present-day popular fiction, reads very much like a piece of literature. In this respect, he seems full of flavor, distinctly of the major breed: there is an effect of passing from attenuated parlor tricks into the open, when you take him up. Here, you can but feel, is a masculine man of letters, even if it is his fate to play ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... It was Jean Varin himself, Jean Varin. After a long struggle, and painful hesitation, he put the figure down onto the table. "No, it is too dear," he said. The shop-keeper's eloquence redoubled. "Oh! Monsieur Varin, too dear? It is worth two thousand francs, if it is worth a son." But the man of letters replied sadly, still looking at the figure with the enameled eyes: "I do not say it is not; but it is too dear for me." And thereupon, she, seized by a kind of mad audacity, came forward and said: "What shall you charge me for the figure?" The shop-keeper, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... short time, at 164, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and at 131—also for a short time—Thomas Bailey Aldrich. It is, however, at 148, that we should longest pause. This, for many rich years, was the home of James T. Fields, that delightful man of letters who was the friend of many men of letters; he who entertained Dickens and Thackeray, and practically every foreign writer of note who visited this country; he who encouraged Hawthorne to the completion of the "Scarlet Letter," and he, who, as an appreciative critic, publisher, and ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... one of the leading lights in that new sect which prides itself upon the cultivation of abstract beauty, and occasionally touches the verge of concrete ugliness. There were a newspaper man—the editor of a fashionable journal—and a middle-aged man of letters, playwright, critic, humourist, a man whose society was in demand everywhere, and who said sharp things with the most supreme good-nature. The only ladies whose society Mr. Smithson had deemed worthy the occasion were ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... any worship where the usurper was mentioned as king. He was, I believe, more than once apprehended in the reign of King William, and once at the accession of George. He was the familiar friend of Hicks and Nelson; a man of letters, but injudicious; and very curious and inquisitive, but credulous. He lived in 1743, or ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... broad and flat, it can be used as a ladder of two high steps, when one wants to reach a book on a lofty shelf. A kind of square revolving bookcase, an American invention, manufactured by Messrs. Trubner, is useful to the working man of letters. Made in oak, stained green, it is not unsightly. As to ornaments, every man to his taste. You may have a "pallid bust of Pallas" above your classical collection, or fill the niches in a shrine of old French light literature, pastoral and comedy, with delicate shepherdesses in Chelsea china. ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... a part of the last week to the debate of the suit brought against MM. Leon Laurent-Pichat and Auguste-Alexis Pillet, the first the director, the second the printer of a periodical publication called the Revue de Paris, and M. Gustave Flaubert, a man of letters, all three implicated: 1st, Laurent-Pichat, for having, in 1856, published in the numbers of the 1st and the 15th of December of the Revue de Paris, some fragments of a romance entitled, Madame Bovary and, notably, divers fragments contained in ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... Nugent, a celebrated politician, poet, and man of letters. The title was Irish, and became ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of Public Instruction under Louis Philippe in 1833, this lover of true liberty simply got enacted into law the principles which had led him as a brilliant and rising young man of letters in 1812 to refuse to adulate the Emperor, and which he had plainly and fearlessly set forth as the necessary conditions of the constitutional government of France in his famous interview with Louis XVIII. three ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... went out after dinner for a walk in the gardens? That was Mr. Johnson, an author, whom he had met at Tunbridge Wells. "Take the advice of a man of the world, sir," says Mr. Draper, eyeing the shabby man of letters very superciliously; "the less you have to do with that kind of person, the better. The business we have into our office about them literary men is not very pleasant, I can tell you." "Indeed!" says Mr. Warrington. He did not like his new friend the more ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... not so sure of that," replied Mr. Cardross. "He loves books; he may turn out a thoroughly educated and accomplished student—perhaps even a man of letters. To have a thirst for knowledge, and unlimited means to gratify it, is not such a bad thing. Why," continued the minister, glancing round on his own poorly-furnished shelves, where every book was bought almost at the sacrifice of a meal, "he will be rich enough to stock from end to ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... for the first time under the title of La Folle Journee, was written by one Caron de Beaumarchais—a man of wit, a man of letters, a man of the people, a man of nothing—and was destined to achieve immortality under its later title of ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... was then nothing of disorder discernible in his mind by any but himself; but he had withdrawn from study, and travelled with no other book than an English Testament, such as children carry to the school: when his friend took it into his hand, out of curiosity to see what companion a man of letters had chosen, 'I have but one book,' said Collins, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... subsequent books, it was not so much Disraeli's notable skill as a novelist but rather his portrayal of the social and political life of the day that made him one of the most popular writers of his generation, and earned for him a lasting fame as a man of letters. In "Vivian Grey" is narrated the career of an ambitious young man of rank; and in this story the brilliant author has preserved to us the exact tone of the English drawing-room, as he so well knew it, sketching with sure and ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... resource furnished an instantaneous vehicle for expectorating the wrath. Look, for example, at Cicero's orations against Mark Antony, or Catiline, or against Piso. This last person was a senator of the very highest rank, family, connections; yet, in the course of a few pages, does Cicero, a man of letters, polished to the extreme standard of Rome, address him by the elegant appellations of 'filth,' 'mud,' 'carrion,' (projectum cadaver.) How could Piso have complained? It would have been said-'Oh, there's an end of republican simplicity, if plain speaking is to ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... Grammar.—I have lately been looking over the Diary of this very clever person, and I confess it has surprised me to find him, a graduate of Cambridge, and, in fact, I may say a man of letters, constantly employing such vulgar bad grammar as "he do say," and such like. I am the more surprised when, on looking at his letters, even the familiar ones to his cousin Roger and to W. Hewer, I can find nothing of the kind, they being as grammatical and as ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 211, November 12, 1853 • Various
... was the most loyal and the most attached. While still at Oxford he had expressed his admiration of Addison in extravagant terms: on arriving in London he made his acquaintance. Tickell was an accomplished poet and man of letters, and though not a profound a graceful scholar. Addison was pleased with a homage which was worth accepting. As he rose, his protege rose with him. On his appointment as Chief Secretary in Ireland he took Tickell with him. When he was appointed Secretary of State he chose ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... them an admirable painting by Sully—and the library, with its tall book-shelves, now empty, and engravings and autographs hanging on the walls. The lady in black was rather sad; for her father, a distinguished publicist and man of letters, had built this house; and her grandfather, a great iron-master, had owned most of the land hereabouts; and the roots and tendrils of her memory were all entwined about the place; but now she was dismantling it and closing it up, preparatory to going away, ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... universities, whose Latinity was unexceptionable, and his erudition immense, and to whom verses were addressed and books dedicated in every centre of letters. One of the most distinguished of these scholars was George Buchanan, and there could be no better type of the man of letters of his time, in whom the liberality of the cosmopolitan was united with the exclusiveness of the member of a very strait and limited caste. He had his correspondents in all the cities of the Continent, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... principal church of Pistoia, the body of the sarcophagus of which is full of small figures, with some larger ones above. In this tomb rests the body of M. Cino d'Angibolgi, doctor of laws, and a very famous man of letters in his day, as M. Francesco Petrarca ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... of course all proportion is lost. Macaulay lashed this vice in his celebrated essay on Robert Montgomery's poems. "We expect some reserve," he says, "some decent pride in our hatter and our bootmaker. But no artifice by which notoriety can be obtained is thought too abject for a man of letters. Extreme poverty may indeed in some degree be an excuse for employing these shifts as it may be an excuse for stealing ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... accepted the invitation. He even bought a new frock coat, as his own was too much worn to make a good appearance. He was terribly afraid of saying something foolish either to the artist or to the man of letters, as do people who speak of an art which they ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... least possible cost. In fact it forms part of the Series known as "Knight's Weekly Volume." To find a strictly original work of so much ability given to the world in this form, proves that the publisher and the man of letters are, in this mercantile age, second to none in the activity and enterprise with which they render ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... asked] is Blennerhassett? A native of Ireland, a man of letters, who fled from the storms of his own country to find quiet in ours.... Possessing himself of a beautiful island in the Ohio he rears upon it a palace and decorates it with every romantic embellishment of fancy. [Then] in the midst of all this ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... is steeped in science; it has made its way into the works of our best poets, and even the mere man of letters, who affects to ignore and despise science, is unconsciously impregnated with her spirit, and indebted for his best products to her methods. I believe that the greatest intellectual revolution mankind has yet seen is now slowly taking place by ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... a man of letters, of England, who had passed his life in constant study; and it was observed that he had written several folio volumes, which his modest fears would not permit him to expose to the eye even of his critical friends. He promised to leave his labours to posterity; and he seemed sometimes, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... fire? Do I deserve anything but evil? Is it not the Power, the Mighty Power of the only Strong, the only Merciful, the grace of Emmanuel, which has changed and won me? If He can change me, an old man, could He not change a child like you? I, a proud, stern Roman; I, a lover of pleasure, a man of letters, of political station, with formed habits, and life-long associations, and complicated relations; was it I who wrought this great change in me, who gained for myself the power of hating what I once loved, of unlearning what I once knew, nay, of even forgetting what once I was? Who has made you ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... How long you think it take M. de Winterset to learn that speech after he write it out? It is a mix of what is true and the mos' chaste art. Monsieur has become a man of letters. Perhaps he may enjoy that more than the wars. ...
— Monsieur Beaucaire • Booth Tarkington
... a learned Broad Church theologian and man of letters; wrote, besides other works, a volume of sermons "Through Nature to Christ"; esteemed insistence on miracles injurious to faith; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... did he love them, that the four boys from the beginning he forbade from seeing him work, and planned gentler careers for them. John, the oldest, in Yale, had elected to become a man of letters, and, in the meantime, ran his own automobile with the corresponding standard of living such ownership connoted in the college town of New Haven. Harold and Frederick were down at a millionaires' sons' academy ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... dark. No veluti in speculum. Nothing in the dead languages, properly so called, for they ought to die, ay and be DAMNED to boot! The Covent Garden manager tried that, and a pretty business he made of it! When a man says veluti in speculum, he is called a man of letters. Very well, and is not a man who cries O. P. a man of letters too? You ran your O. P. against his veluti in speculum, and pray which beat? I prophesied that, though I never told any body. I take it for granted, that every intelligent man, woman, and child, to whom I address myself, ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... man; you say to yourself, 'I will be a minister of state.' Well, then, you—painter, artist, man of letters, statesman of the future—you reckon upon your talents, you estimate their value, you rate them, let us say, ...
— The Illustrious Gaudissart • Honore de Balzac
... porter, the man of letters of the establishment, and with his aid drew Mr. Jorrocks out a bill, which he described as "reaching down each side of his body and round his waist," commencing with 2 francs for savon, and then proceeding in the daily routine of cafe, 1 franc; dejeuner a la fourchette, 5 francs; diner ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... pedigrees, that we can follow backward the careers of our HOMUNCULOS and be reminded of our antenatal lives. Our conscious years are but a moment in the history of the elements that build us. Are you a bank-clerk, and do you live at Peckham? It was not always so. And though to-day I am only a man of letters, either tradition errs or I was present when there landed at St. Andrews a French barber- surgeon, to tend the health and the beard of the great Cardinal Beaton; I have shaken a spear in the Debateable Land and shouted the slogan of the Elliots; I was present when a ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with his design to leave the monastery. He himself afterwards declared that he had but rarely read mass. He got his chance to leave the monastery when offered the post of secretary to the Bishop of Cambray, Henry of Bergen. Erasmus owed this preferment to his fame as a Latinist and a man of letters; for it was with a view to a journey to Rome, where the bishop hoped to obtain a cardinal's hat, that Erasmus entered his service. The authorization of the Bishop of Utrecht had been obtained, and also that of ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... mind and use of his powers that earned him his immortality. His fortieth year is the date given by himself for his abandonment of Rhetoric and, as he calls it, taking up with Dialogue, or, as we might say, becoming a man of letters. Between Rhetoric and Dialogue there was a feud, which had begun when Socrates five centuries before had fought his battles with the sophists. Rhetoric appeals to the emotions and obscures the issues (such had been Socrates's position); ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... afternoon in November, Brian was as usual making his way down Gower Street, his umbrella held low to shelter him from the driving rain which seemed to come in all directions. The milkman's shrill voice was still far in the distance, the man of letters was still at work upon knockers some way off, it was not yet time for his little girl to make her appearance, and he was not even thinking of her, when suddenly his umbrella was nearly knocked out of his hand by coming violently into collision ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... Twain," was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835. He was one of the foremost American philosophers of his day; he was the world's most famous humorist of any day. During the later years of his life he ranked not only as America's chief man of letters, but likewise as her best known ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... bee at his ear and an itch to transfer the buzzer's attentions and tease his darling; for she had betrayed herself as right good game. Nor is there happier promise of life-long domestic enlivenment for a prescient man of Letters than he has in the contemplation of a pretty face showing the sensitiveness to the sting, which is not allowed to poison her temper, and is short of fetching tears. The dear innocent girl gave this pleasing promise; moreover, she could be twisted-to laugh at ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... union with a man of his attainments of intellect, his kind temper, his great experience, and his high position? In this manner they travelled, side by side, lovingly together. Monsieur Peytel was not a lawyer merely, but a man of letters and varied learning; of the noble and sublime science of geology he was, especially, an ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... profusion of passports and safe-conducts. During the rest of the journey this mandarin, Ching, led the way in his cart drawn by a fine black mule, and on arriving at the villages on the route displayed his function, as a man of letters, by putting on an immense pair of spectacles, the glasses of which were about three inches in diameter. At Ho-Chi-Wou the procession halted during the middle of the day, and was photographed by ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... and his correspondence columns were crowded with appeals for guidance in questions of dress and etiquette. He was also a favourite in general society, though he is said to have been, next to Fenimore Cooper, the best-abused man of letters in America. One of his most pleasing characteristics was his ready appreciation and encouragement of young writers, for he was totally free from professional jealousy. He was the literary sponsor of Aldrich, Bayard Taylor, and Lowell, among others, and the last-named alludes to Willis ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... jollity productive of results eminently interesting to students of character and manners. A battle at the polls brought out all which was most characteristic in the Englishmen of the times, and to describe such a conflict was naturally the aim of many a man of letters. ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... first made the nation conscious of its gift and opportunity, and that he first announced to trans-Atlantic readers the entrance of America upon the literary field. For some time he was our only man of letters who had a reputation ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... bye-tasks: the works of supererogation, the excursions into side paths, the niggling with proofs, the toying with style, the potterings and polishings, the ruminations, and rewritings and refinements which make the joy of the man of letters. For five-and-twenty years he had been a busy Cambridge coach, tied year in and year out to the same strictness of hours, the same monotony of subjects, the same patient drumming on thick heads and dull brains. Now that was all over. A brother had left him a little money; he had saved ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and the same success. His only faults as a speaker were committed when, under the inebriating influence of popular applause, he was led away by the heat and passion of the moment. A warm friend, a placable adversary, a scholar, a man of letters, kind in his nature, affable in his manners, easy of access, playful in conversation, delightful in society—rarely have the brilliant promises of boyhood been so richly fulfilled as in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... enough to be a man of letters," they insinuated, "and don't you know the common saying that: 'if the Prince of Hell call upon you to die at the third watch, who can presume to retain you, a human being, up to the fifth watch?' In our abode, in the unseen, high as well as low, have all alike ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... pretensions, and let the vapor out; in short, to show the conqueror, that the pen was mightier than his magic sword. Beethoven purposed writing a pamphlet memorial, involving the bombastic pretensions, the gigantic extravagance and arrogant ambition of Bonaparte. The man of letters well knew the ground upon which he was to tread, the danger of ambushed foes, involving such a brochure, and the caution necessary with which he was to produce his work. But Beethoven felt the necessity of the production; he possessed the power to execute a great benefit to his fellow man, ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... contains but a selection front the titles of Goethe's best known writings, it suffices to show the extraordinary fertility and versatility of his genius. Rarely has a man of letters had so full and varied a life, or been capable of so many-sided a development. His political and scientific activities, though dwarfed in the eyes of our generation by his artistic production, yet showed ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... a delightful little dinner at the Rocher de Cancale; three guests only were asked to meet Victurnien—de Marsay, Rastignac, and Blondet. Emile Blondet, the young Count's fellow-townsman, was a man of letters on the outskirts of society to which he had been introduced by a charming woman from the same province. This was one of the Vicomte de Troisville's daughters, now married to the Comte de Montcornet, one of those of Napoleon's generals who went over ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... Ross, of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute; and my colleagues in the School of English in the University of Texas, Mr. L. R. Hamberlin and Professor Leslie Waggener. Chief-justice Logan E. Bleckley, of Georgia, a man of letters as well as of law, very kindly put at my use his correspondence with the poet, the original draft of 'Corn', and his criticisms upon the same. My chief indebtedness, however, is to Mrs. Sidney Lanier, who has been most generous with her time ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... your shake of the head, my good Vernon! You see, human nature comes round again, try as we may to upset it, and the French only differ from us in wading through blood to discover that they are at their old trick once more; 'I am your equal, sir, your born equal. Oh! you are a man of letters? Allow me to be in a bubble about you!' Yes, Vernon, and I believe the fellow looks up to you as the head of the establishment. I am not jealous. Provided he attends to his functions! There's a French philosopher who's for naming the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... has been the fate of students, every man of letters can declare; and, perhaps, there are very few who have not sometimes valued as new discoveries, made by themselves, those observations, which have long since been published, and of which the world, therefore, will refuse them the praise; nor can the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... known full well A man of letters now doth dwell, One of our Lord's most useful men, He is so clever with his pen, And others knows so well to hit, And make ridiculous with wit; And he has made a jest of me, Because I made some ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... in England with the object of carrying out certain literary pursuits in which he was engaged within the British Museum. He was an American who had nothing to do with politics and nothing to do with trade. He was a man of wealth and a man of letters. And he had a daughter who was said to be the prettiest young woman either in Europe or in ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... Fogazzaro has dwelt in his native Vicenza, the most honoured of her citizens, round whom has grown up a band of eager disciples, who look to him for guidance not merely in matters intellectual or aesthetic, but in the conduct of life. He has conceived of the career of man of letters as a great opportunity, not as a mere trade. Nothing could show better his high seriousness than his waiting until the age of thirty-nine before publishing his first novel, unless it be the restraint which led him, after having embarked on the career of novelist ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... take pleasure in sneering at the quality of entertainment given by our aristocracy, merely because it is composed of men who have got rich by the very republican business of sailing ships and selling eatables. Now I by no means underrate the man of letters who truly represents genius, or learning; but that every dabbler in small satire should dub himself a man of letters, and therefore set up for an idol before whom better men must bow, or have their social affairs battered to pieces, is something I cannot condescend to admit. By all means, if the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... settling down here and there to carry on their trade, had not only founded a great industry, but was a man of artistic taste, a patron of art, and a lover of science. Telford, the Eskdale shepherd, was a man of literary taste, and was especially friendly with the typical man of letters, Southey. Others, of course, were of a lower type. Arkwright combined the talents of an inventor with those of a man of business. He was a man, says Baines (the historian of the cotton trade), who was sure to come out of an enterprise with profit, whatever ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... house there for all learned men who came into his neighborhood. Gesner was not only the best naturalist among the scholars of his day, but of all men of that century he was the pattern man of letters. He was faultless in private life, assiduous in study, diligent in maintaining correspondence and good-will with learned men in all countries, hospitable—though his means were small—to every scholar that came into Zurich. Prompt to serve all, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... 1806) we can gather some idea of his character. The obvious thing about him is his cleverness. The question is, What will he make of it? He tries business for a short time; the sea for an even shorter; and then he settles down in the country to a life of study and composition: he will be a man of letters. His poems are what we should expect a clever lad to write. Had they been written at the end of the nineteenth century doubtless they would have been as fashionably decadent as, written at the beginning, they are fashionably pompous. It was clear from the first that Peacock would not be a poet; ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... do you expect or wish for?" said the German man of letters, after he and Dr. Bucher had talked through a great part of the night, and the German had listened to the Alsatian with an evident wish to understand ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... against the charge of unkindness to his wife, or to believe that in the matter of their domestic unhappiness she was the more responsible of the two.* Yet Carlyle had never rendered him that service, easy as it appears, which one man of letters most justly values from another: that of proclaiming the admiration which he privately expresses for his works. The fact was incomprehensible to Mr. Browning—it was so foreign to his own nature; and ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... because these effective plays were immediately followed by wearisome productions which made us realise, to our astonishment, that he himself could not have been aware of the skill he had previously displayed. It was, however, precisely these abstract qualities of the genuine man of letters which, in the eyes of many, cast over him the halo of literary greatness; and when Luttichau, thinking more of a showy reputation than of permanent benefit to his theatre, decided to give the preference to Gutzkow, he thought ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... were a Brahmin: which is to say, a theological student, or a man of letters, a teacher or what not of the kind—you were not even called up for physical examination. If you were a merchant, you went on quietly with your 'business as usual.' A mere patch of garden, or a peddler's tray, saved you from all the horrors of a questionnaire. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Mamertinus expresses a doubt, whether his hero, in imitating the conduct of Hannibal and Scipio, had ever heard of their names. From thence we may fairly infer, that Maximian was more desirous of being considered as a soldier than as a man of letters; and it is in this manner that we can often translate the language of flattery into ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... an almost imperceptible shake. Then some one in the audience called for the popular poem in which he had so vigorously denounced Macaulay's unjust estimate of Byron a few years since, holding up to scorn the brain of the mere man of letters who dared to criticise or even to attempt to understand the abnormal brain and temperament of a great poet. He recited it from memory and then retired followed by a tumult of approval that he well knew he ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... she wanted to advance. He went on to the last pressing his uncle, Lord Burghley. He applied in the humblest terms, he made himself useful with his pen, he got his mother to write for him; but Lord Burghley, probably because he thought his nephew more of a man of letters than a sound lawyer and practical public servant, did not care to bring him forward. From his cousin, Robert Cecil, Bacon received polite words and friendly assurances. Cecil may have undervalued him, or have ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... the performance there were five persons in our box—the beautiful Miranda, and her husband, a celebrated English man of letters; a German professor of biology; a young Milanese gentleman, whom we called Edoardo; and myself. Edoardo and the professor had joined us just before the ballet. I had occupied a seat behind Miranda and my friend the critic from the commencement. We had ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... was angry, but he gave me one more chance. I am still 'is dear brother's child, and he cannot forget it. An acquaintance of his, a man of letters, a M. Paul Sartines, was in need of a secretary. The post was not well paid, but it was permanent. My uncle insist that I take it. What choice? I took it. It is the post which I ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... years. In the beginning of 1475, however, a new impulse was given to the work by the appointment of Bartolommeo Platina as Librarian (28 February)[367]; and from that date until Platina's death in 1481 it went forward without let or hindrance. This distinguished man of letters seems to have enjoyed the full confidence of the Pope, to have been liberally supplied with funds, and to have had a free hand in the employment of craftsmen and artists to furnish and decorate his Library. It is pleasant to be ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... lived by the production of literature in Australia is not a matter for surprise. No one, indeed, would seriously think of attempting to do so. Gordon was a mounted policeman, a horse-breaker, a steeplechase-rider—anything but a professional man of letters; Marcus Clarke was a journalist and playwright, and wrote only two novels in fourteen years; Rolf Boldrewood's books were written in spare hours before and after his daily duties as a country magistrate; ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... made by a poet of the Sierra upon the bears he has met! Perhaps no bear ever met a poet of the Sierra, but mere unacquaintance with the subject should be no more of a disadvantage to a bear than to a man of letters. ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... notion that the life of a man of letters is necessarily deficient in incident, appears to have originated in a misconception of the essential nature of human action. The life of every man is full of incidents, but the incidents are insignificant, because they do not affect ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... that Rembrandt's birthplace was the house pointed out in the Nordeinde Street. A commercial career had been chosen for his four older brothers. But Harmen, his means allowing the luxury, decided to make of his fifth son a man of letters and learning, and Rembrandt was sent to the University of Leyden. That letters, however, had small charm for him, was clear from the first. Better than his books he loved the engravings of Swanenburch, better still, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... us in three great capacities: as a statesman, an advocate, and a man of letters. As the combination of such pursuits is common in our own days, so also was it in his. Caesar added them all to the great work of his life as a soldier. But it was given to Cicero to take a part in all those political struggles, from the resignation of Sylla ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... space,—and, O reader, and O author, forgive the anticlimax!—at the least possible cost. In fact it forms part of the Series known as "Knight's Weekly Volume." To find a strictly original work of so much ability given to the world in this form, proves that the publisher and the man of letters are, in this mercantile age, second to none in the activity and enterprise with which they render ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... courage and address for half a century before Barrington saw the light, it was his own incomparable genius that raised thievery from the dangerous valley of experiment, and set it, secure and honoured, upon the mountain height of perfection. To a natural habit of depredation, which, being a man of letters, he was wont to justify, he added a sureness of hand, a fertility of resource, a recklessness of courage which drove his contemporaries to an amazed respect, and from which none but the Philistine will withhold his admiration. An accident discovered his taste and talent. At ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... writer had he appeared in person to testify of what he had seen. Certainly the Cavalier predominated in him, the type to which he belonged being of the noble one "of which the Elizabethan age produced so many examples—the man of action who was also the man of letters; the man of letters who was also a man of action; the wholesomest type of manhood anywhere to be found; body and brain both active, both cultivated; the mind not made fastidious and morbid by too much ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... learned Broad Church theologian and man of letters; wrote, besides other works, a volume of sermons "Through Nature to Christ"; esteemed insistence on miracles injurious ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... on his own account in a series of Jewish Worthies, since neither as man of action nor as man of letters did he deserve particularly well of his nation. It is not his personal worthiness, but the worth of his work, that recommends him to the attention of the Jewish people. He was not a loyal general, and he was not a faithful chronicler of the struggle with Rome; ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... the last sentence has hardly yet been fulfilled; but I saw, many years ago, a distinguished man of letters, the late Mr. Francis Turner Palgrave, of "Golden Treasury" fame, who was an inveterate smoker, sitting on one of the cane benches by the door of the Athenaeum Club, smoking a ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... from the fears expressed by the East at the close of the eighteenth century come the words of an eminent Eastern man of letters[208:1] at the end of the nineteenth century, in warning against the West: "Materialized in their temper; with few ideals of an ennobling sort; little instructed in the lessons of history; safe from exposure to the direct calamities and physical horrors of war; with undeveloped imaginations and ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... but the letters and words of this art. A writing-master is one who teaches the mechanical part of forming letters. A mere dancing-master is an artist who teaches to form steps. But the first is not more different from what we call a man of letters, or a writer, than the second is from what may deserve on the theatre, the ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... Thiers' chapter on St. Helena, M. Sainte-Beuve, after expressing his admiration of the commentaries of Napoleon on the campaigns of Turenne, Frederic, and Caesar, adds: "A man of letters smiles at first involuntarily to see Napoleon apply to each of these famous campaigns a methodical criticism, just as we would proceed with a work of the mind, with an epic or tragic poem. But is not a campaign of a great captain equally a work ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... the "Thoughts." Many translations have been made of Pascal's "Thoughts"—one in 1680 by J. Walker, one in 1704 by Basil Kennet, one in 1825 by Edward Craig. A more modern one is by C. Kegan Paul, the London publisher, who was also a man of letters. Early translations from the older French, Italian and other Continental writers have frequently come down to us without mention of translators' names on title-pages ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... the dream was realized by an accident, or rather, to speak advisedly, by a good Providence. He became known—known at once—blazed forth; something he had written attracted the town's attention, and ladies in crowded drawing-rooms stood upon chairs to see that poor, worn, pale man of letters: and magazines, and grave reviews, and gayly-bound albums, all waited for his contributions—charge what he pleased; and flushed with fame, and weighed down with money—money paid for the very articles that had been rejected without one civil line of ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... personal points that I was recommended to notice, I will forsake the immediate object of this Preface; and, leaving Late Lyrics to whatever fate it deserves, digress for a few moments to more general considerations. The thoughts of any man of letters concerned to keep poetry alive cannot but run uncomfortably on the precarious prospects of English verse at the present day. Verily the hazards and casualties surrounding the birth and setting forth of almost every modern creation in numbers are ominously like those of one of ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... of Hagley. To think of their kindred spirits haunting its groves, and their imaginative contrivances of votive temples, urns, and tablets, and to combine them with these enchanting scenes of Nature, is to realize all that Poets have sung of Arcadia of old. Happy! happy life for the man of letters; what a retreat must your bowers have afforded from the common-place perplexities of every-day life: Alas! the picture is almost too sunny ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... career is studied the plainer it becomes that his experiences and fortunes were identical with those of all who followed in his day his profession of dramatist, and that his conscious aims and ambitions and practices were those of every contemporary man of letters. The difference between the results of his endeavours and those of his fellows was due to the magical and involuntary working of genius, which, since the birth of poetry, has exercised "as large a charter as the wind, to blow on whom it pleases." Speculation ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... Petrarch was an eminent jurist, and he desired his son to adopt his profession, but Petrarch had neither taste nor capacity for Roman law. He was determined to be a man of letters. Like Dante, he too mixed in politics, and several important diplomatic positions were given to him. Though he succeeded in learning a little Greek late in life, Petrarch was not a Greek scholar. This did not hinder him from being a warm advocate of the claims of the ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... which belong to the best in German prose. But even admitting that while he wrote such passages he was addressing friends, and that the shadow of his enemies had been removed for a while, all the friends and enemies that Wagner, as a man of letters, has, possess one factor in common, which differentiates them fundamentally from the "people" for whom he worked as an artist. Owing to the refining and fruitless nature of their education, they are quite devoid of the ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... versa; but the subject of this memoir, besides winning a great success as a merchant, and that in one of the most hazardous branches of mercantile life, has also won an enviable reputation as a man of letters. His poems have made him well known, both in this country and in England. Besides the poems recited before various literary associations, he has published two volumes of fugitive pieces. The first appeared in 1843, while ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... the Quatrains in the Teheran, as in the Calcutta, Copies, are spurious; such Rubaiyat being the common form of Epigram in Persia. But this, at best, tells as much one way as another; nay, the Sufi, who may be considered the Scholar and Man of Letters in Persia, would be far more likely than the careless Epicure to interpolate what favours his own view of the Poet. I observed that very few of the more mystical Quatrains are in the Bodleian MS., which must be one of the oldest, as dated at Shiraz, A.H. 865, A.D. ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... schemers. They describe the capitalist's brain of steel and heart of gold in a way that Englishmen hitherto have been at least in the habit of reserving for romantic figures like Garibaldi or Gordon. In one excellent magazine Mr. T. P. O'Connor, who, when he likes, can write on letters like a man of letters, has some purple pages of praise of Sir Joseph Lyons—the man who runs those teashop places. He incidentally brought in a delightful passage about the beautiful souls possessed by some people called Salmon and Gluckstein. I think I like best the passage ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... rank adultery among the elegant fashions and obligatory achievements of a man of taste." The honest Englishman takes the liberty to judge and to condemn men who have made so pernicious a use of their talents. This pretension to make the conscience speak is in the eyes of the French man of letters a gothic prejudice. Listen how he expresses himself on the subject: "Criticism in France has freer methods.—When we try to give an account of the life, or to describe the character, of a man, we are quite willing to consider him simply as an object of painting or of science.... ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... contributions to the North American Review and the Christian Examiner, and his tales, sketches, essays, and poems, printed under various signatures, have entitled him to a desirable reputation as a man of letters. These are all to be collected and edited ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... my comrade, sir," said Morhange, stepping forward. "He is not a man of letters, as you are. These young lieutenants are hot-headed, you know. And besides, you can understand why both of us are not as calm ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... unfinished. His portrait of ERASMUS is justly famous, and is conspicuous among the prints exhibited in the British Museum. It is dated 1526, two years before the death of Duerer, and has helped to extend the fame of the universal scholar and approved man of letters, who in his own age filled a sphere not unlike that of Voltaire in a later century. There is another portrait of Erasmus by Holbein, often repeated, so that two great artists have contributed to his renown. That by Duerer is admired. The ...
— The Best Portraits in Engraving • Charles Sumner
... as a player that Mr. Booth excelled; he was a man of letters also, and an author in more languages than one. He had a taste for poetry which we have observed discovered itself when he was very young, in translations of some Odes of Horace; and in his riper years he wrote several songs, and other original poems, which did him honour. He was also the ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... in Paris; that he could not contrive to give an entertainment that cost him money enough. What can he do better than commence amateur?—then he might throw away money as fast as his heart could wish. M. l'abbe, why do not you, or some man of letters, write directly, and advise him to this, for the good of his country? What a figure those prints would make in Petersburgh!—and how they would polish the Russians! But, as a good Frenchwoman, I ought ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... cherished the Inquisition. Now for the first time Venetian painters were brought in contact with men of letters. As they were already, fortunately for themselves, too well acquainted with the business of their own art to be taken in tow by learning or even by poetry, the relation of the man of letters to the painter became on the whole a stimulating and at any rate a profitable one, as in the instance of two of the greatest, where it took the form of a partnership for mutual advantage. It is not ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... the sword have been kept apart; the civilian and the soldier, the man of letters and the man of arms, have been distinct and separate. This was also true in old Loo Choo (now Riu Kiu), that part of Japan most like China. In Japan, however, the pen and the sword, letters and arms, the civilian and the soldier, have ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... merit can quite be compared to it; for it was the product of what has always been, in France, an extremely rare phenomenon—an amateur in literature who was also a genius. Saint-Simon was so far from being a professional man of letters that he would have been shocked to hear himself described as a man of letters at all; indeed, it might be said with justice that his only profession was that of a duke. It was as a duke—or, more correctly, as a Duc et Pair—that, in his own eyes at any rate, he lived and moved and ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... good to get a letter from some well known author or public person recommending your work to the publisher; and it will often do harm. Matter from novices is accepted on its merits alone, and no amount of praise from a man of letters or an influential friend will make your story one whit better than it was when you gave it the finishing touches. The most such intercession can accomplish is a perusal of your MS., and that you can yourself ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... thoughts of love, vigils, and patience. They have a power of suggestion which goes beyond all that we may dream. Just as a man shows in himself traces of a long-dead ancestry, so words have the power to revive emotions of past generations and the experiences of former years. The man of letters, the Thinker, strews a handful of words into the air, breathes a little song. The words spring up and bring forth fruit. Their seed is human progress and a larger life for men. Think, for instance, who first flung the word freedom into space!—gravitation, evolution, atom, soul! There ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... great figure in the last age, as an author, a statesman, and a soldier; was born about the year 1650. He lost his father when he was about nine years of age, and his mother soon after marrying lord Ossulton; the care of his education was left entirely to a governor, who though a man of letters, did not much improve him in his studies [1]. Having parted with his governor, with whom he travelled into France; he soon found by conversing with men of genius, that he was much deficient in many parts of literature, and that while ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... A.D.) sprung from a line of distinguished jurists, was celebrated by Martial as the Tibullus of his time,[443] and is praised by the younger Pliny for the excellence of his light verses.[444] Trajan, his successor (98-117 A.D.), though a man of war, rather than a man of letters, wrote a history of the Dacian wars,[445] and possessed—as his letters to Pliny testify—a remarkable power of expressing himself tersely and clearly. He was, like Vespasian, a generous patron to rhetoric and education,[446] and the founder of the important ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... He talks finely, seems to love the broad Scotch, and I loved him very much at once. I am afraid he finds his entire solitude tedious, but I could not help congratulating him upon his treasure in his wife, and I hope he will not leave the moors; 't is so much better for a man of letters to nurse himself in seclusion than to be filed down to the common level by the compliances and imitations ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... retreat at Arenemberg, that he might be prepared for the high destiny which he believed awaited him. He published several very important treatises, which attracted the attention of Europe, and which gave him a high position, not merely as a man of letters, but as a statesman of profound views. The Spectateur Militaire, in the review of the "Manual of Artillery," by Prince ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... is Blennerhassett? A native of Ireland, a man of letters, who fled from the storms of his own country to find quiet in ours.... Possessing himself of a beautiful island in the Ohio he rears upon it a palace and decorates it with every romantic embellishment ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... of educator. Moreover, the schoolmaster revealed, with all gentleness, his preference for the English tongue, and to this many could only give ear. Only two or three times did the conversation rise to a pitch that kindled even the ready ardor of the young man of letters. Once, after a prolonged silence, the host, having gazed long upon ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... the placets at full length. Even in this simple process he displayed abundant cautiousness. For, having forgotten what little of the humanities he had mastered in his youth, he would hand the paper to a secretary whose business it was to read it out before him; after which operation the man of letters was sent into an inner room, and the petition was placed in the hands of a second scribe. Once it so happened by the bungling of the deceitful kayasths(clerks) that an important difference was found to occur in the same sheet. So upon strict inquiry one secretary lost his ears and the ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... to Rome" will learn with gladness that Mr Hilaire Belloc has written another book in the same sunny temper, dealing with the oldest highway in Britain. It is a subject that brings into play all those high faculties which make Mr Belloc the most genuine man of letters now alive. The record of the journey makes one of the most exhilarating books of our time, and the series of Mr Muirhead's sixteen pictures painted for this book sets the glittering river itself flowing swiftly past before the eye. 200 pp. Buckram, ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... in its greatest sense, the largest extent of individual and public spontaneity consistent with virtue and safety. He was in this as intense, persistent in his devotion, as Sydney, Locke, or old Hollis. For instance, his admiration of Lord Macaulay as a writer and a man of letters, an orator and a statesman, great as it was, was as nothing to his gratitude to him for having placed permanently on record, beyond all risk of obscuration or doubt, the doctrine of 1688—the right and power of the English people to be their own lawgivers, and to appoint their own magistrates, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... Oxford but for the fact that the Trewinion heir was forbidden by the laws of the family to leave the house for six months together. In my case it did not matter so much, as Mr. Polperrow had given me all the advantages of his University education; and as I was not to be a man of letters like my brother Wilfred, I had all the learning that was necessary for filling the position of ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... the causes of American romance, the circumstances and qualities that have produced the romantic element in American life and character? Precisely as with the individual artist or man of letters, we touch first of all upon certain temperamental inclinations. It is a question again of the national mind, of the differentiation of the race under new climatic and physical conditions. We have to reckon with the headiness and excitability of youth. ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... from the country to the town, the true scene for a man of letters. In 1752 were published at Edinburgh, where I then lived, my Political Discourses, the only work of mine that was successful on the first publication. It was well received at home and abroad. In the same year was published, in London, ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... many years before, Johnson had denied that it was possible for a working man of letters to earn even six guineas a sheet (the Edinburgh began at ten and proceeded to a minimum of sixteen), 'communibus sheetibus,' as he put it jocularly to Boswell. Southey, in the year of Scott's marriage, seems to have thought about ten shillings (certainly not more) 'not amiss' ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... of his executors, leaving him a small legacy; and Johnson took, it seems, a rather simple-minded pleasure in dealing with important commercial affairs and signing cheques for large sums of money. The old man of letters, to whom three hundred a year had been superabundant wealth, was amused at finding himself in the position of a man of business, regulating what was then regarded as a princely fortune. The brewery was sold after a ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... have stated the newsman's simple case. I leave it in your hands. Within the last year the institution has had the good fortune to attract the sympathy and gain the support of the eminent man of letters I am proud to call my friend, {24} who now represents the great Republic of America at the British Court. Also it has the honour of enrolling upon its list of donors and vice-presidents the great name of Longfellow. I beg to propose to you to ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... dealing sanely with legend in one connection, and, in another, will insist on confounding it with history proper, cannot do so any longer without losing caste, without falling ipso facto out of court with men of education. It is enough for a man of letters if he has helped ever so little in the final staking out of the boundaries between ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 1904. Together with a fellow countryman, also a man of letters, I was travelling aboard a steamer of the Anglo-American Company, "Cunard." Our cabin was small and narrow. It was lighted by the dull light of an electric bull's-eye in the ceiling which served as a deck. There were three berths and a wash basin. My ...
— The Shield • Various
... before one of those difficult positions unavoidable to a man of letters. My visitor must have some answer. He had come back for the manuscript of his memoir and for my opinion. It was the twilight of an early Washington winter. The lights in the great library, softened with delicate shades, had been turned on. Outside, Sheridan Circle was almost ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... self-educated man; he had worked at I know not how many impossible occupations, and labored in the night-time like the heroes one reads about. He taught himself to read five languages, and at the time when I saw him last he knew more great poetry by heart than any man of letters that I have ever met. He was the author of one book, a tragedy in blank verse, called The Captive; that drama forms the chief theme of this journal. For the rest, it seems to me enough to quote this notice, which appeared in the New York Times ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... dislike my prose—and there are a great many of them, I believe—will dislike this work most" This was the first time I had heard him allude to the people who couldn't read him,—a class which is supposed always to sit heavy upon the consciousness of the man of letters. A man organized for literature, as Mark Ambient was, must certainly have had the normal proportion of sensitiveness, of irritability; the artistic ego, capable in some cases of such monstrous development, ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... Rochefoucauld and Madame de Sevigne were of the court; Lebrun, Rigaud, Mignard, painted for the king; Perrault and Mansard constructed the Louvre and Versailles; the learned of all countries considered it an honor to correspond with the new academies founded in France. Louis XIV. was even less a man of letters or an artist than an administrator or a soldier; but literature and art, as well as the superintendents and the generals, found in him the King. The puissant unity of the reign is everywhere the same. The king and the nation ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... all his moral fervor, and religious spirit were conspicuous. Some men would have been contented with political power, or classical learning, or literary distinction, but he excelled in all these—not only as a statesman, but as a man of letters and a classical scholar. Neither has held him exclusively as its own—he belongs to all, or rather they belong to him—for he explored and conquered them. His literary productions equal in merit his papers of State, while his knowledge ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... talent, as well as by cultivation, Gianluca was admirably gifted for such a correspondence as he now attempted to begin. In other circumstances of fortune he might have become eminent as a man of letters. Without possessing any of that practical, masculine knowledge of women, which Taquisara so roughly expressed, Gianluca had a keen and sure understanding of the feminine mind. There is no contradiction in that, for the men who know something ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... painful hesitation, he put the figure down onto the table. "No, it is too dear," he said. The shop-keeper's eloquence redoubled. "Oh! Monsieur Varin, too dear? It is worth two thousand francs, if it is worth a son." But the man of letters replied sadly, still looking at the figure with the enameled eyes: "I do not say it is not; but it is too dear for me." And thereupon, she, seized by a kind of mad audacity, came forward and said: "What shall you charge me for the figure?" The shop-keeper, in surprise, replied: "Fifteen ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... literature and from those who hold that it should be nothing more than a scientific narrative. The disciples of Macaulay and Carlyle, of Stubbs and Gardiner, would be found voting in unison in my imaginary Congress. Gibbon, writes Bury, is "the historian and the man of letters," thus ranking with Thucydides and Tacitus. These three are put in the highest class, exemplifying that "brilliance of style and accuracy of statement are perfectly compatible in an historian."[52] ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... that of Vittorio Alfieri, who began to educate himself late in life, overcoming the drudgery of the rudiments by a great effort. He, who had hitherto been a man of the world, set to work to study the Latin grammar, and persevered until he became a man of letters, and, in virtue of his ardent genius, one of our greatest poets. The phrase by which he explained his transformation is just the phrase every child in Italy has heard quoted by his teachers: "I willed, perpetually I willed, with ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... button, sent by the governor of the province of Tien-Tsin, Tchoung-Hao, with a profusion of passports and safe-conducts. During the rest of the journey this mandarin, Ching, led the way in his cart drawn by a fine black mule, and on arriving at the villages on the route displayed his function, as a man of letters, by putting on an immense pair of spectacles, the glasses of which were about three inches in diameter. At Ho-Chi-Wou the procession halted during the middle of the day, and was photographed by one of its members. The curious crowd of spectators ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... vagabond, and it's better than stealing, as some young brigands of my acquaintance advised me to do. One day I met by luck, Dom Claude Frollo, the reverend archdeacon of Notre-Dame. He took an interest in me, and it is to him that I to-day owe it that I am a veritable man of letters, who knows Latin from the de Officiis of Cicero to the mortuology of the Celestine Fathers, and a barbarian neither in scholastics, nor in politics, nor in rhythmics, that sophism of sophisms. I am the author of the Mystery which was presented to-day with great triumph and a great ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... speak it with a due respect for the commission of the Continental Congress—nor an inconsiderate captain, who regards his own life as little as that of his enemies. I am only, sir, a poor humble man of letters, a mere doctor of medicine, an unworthy graduate of Edinburgh, and a surgeon of dragoons; nothing more, I do assure you, Captain John Lawton." So saying, he turned his horse's head towards the cottage, and ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... there is no other Elizabethan man of letters whose personality is an island with a crooked shore, inviting us into a thousand bays and creeks and river-mouths, to the same degree as the personality that expressed itself in the poems, sermons, and life of John Donne. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... conversed for half an hour with Mademoiselle Baptistine and Madame Magloire; then he retired to his own room and set to writing, sometimes on loose sheets, and again on the margin of some folio. He was a man of letters and rather learned. He left behind him five or six very curious manuscripts; among others, a dissertation on this verse in Genesis, In the beginning, the spirit of God floated upon the waters. With this verse he compares three texts: the Arabic ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... fellowship, secured the leisure which was necessary for the development of his powers. I confess to believing in strenuous work at the classics, as offering, apart from all material reward, the best and most solid basis, especially where there is no exuberant original genius, for the career of a man of letters. The mental discipline is invaluable, the training in accuracy is invaluable, and invaluable is the life led in the society of the greatest minds, the noblest poets, the most faultless artists of the world. To descend to ordinary truths, scholarship is, at lowest, an honourable gagne-pain. ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... of the nineteenth century, the most eminent man of letters in Colombia has been Miguel Antonio Caro (1843-1909), a son of J.E. Caro. A neo-Catholic and "traditionalist," a learned literary critic and a poet, the younger Caro, like Bello before him and like his distinguished contemporary Rufino Jose Cuervo, has ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... schoolmaster was visited by a man of letters who entered a school and, sitting down by the host's side, entered into discourse with him and found him an accomplished theologian, poet grammarian, philologist and poet; intelligent, well bred and pleasant spoken; whereat he wondered, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... was taking no part in the gaiety of Howard and Joe. The serious man of letters was not easily led into paths of frivolity. Carl swore to himself: "Ben 's the only guy I know that's got any delicate feelings. He appreciates how Gertie feels when she's sick, poor girl. He don't make a goat of himself, like Joe.... Or maybe he's ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... volume reducing the fine arts to a single principle, and another volume attempting a systematic classification of them. The first of these was the occasion of Diderot's Letter on Deaf Mutes, and Diderot described their author as a good man of letters, but without taste, without criticism, and without philosophy; a ces bagatelles pres, le plus ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... unseen as well as of those seen, Tolstoy has exhausted Nature. He has plunged into her nethermost depths, like Schiller's diver, and lo! forth he comes from the abyss with her swallowed-up treasure. Verily, here Tolstoy is unapproachable. Only one other man of letters hath here even distant fellowship with him, and this is ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... All Citizens." In spite of this pompous eulogium, however, poor Erasmus, planted there like a municipal guard in the market-place, makes but a pitiful figure. I do not believe that there is in the world another statue of a man of letters that is, like this, neglected by the passer-by, despised by those about it, commiserated by those who look at it. But who knows whether Erasmus, acute philosopher as he was, and must be still, be not contented with his corner, the more that ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... seem that whenever Nature had a man of letters up her sleeve, the first gift with which she has felt necessary to dower him has been a ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... except on paper, he never possessed business capacity, he failed and went under; but by his defeat he paved the way to future triumph. He passed through an experience possibly unique in the career of a man of letters, one which imparts the peculiar flavour of business, money, and affairs to his books, and which fixed on him for all his days the impression of restless, passionate, thronging humanity which he pictures in ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... odor. But in the end he had to dump it out, and clean the kettle, and fasten the paper to the lathes with "bongie cowtoos". As the strips of paper did not correspond with the studding, he found himself driving nails into springy laths, an operation most trying to the temper of any man of letters. One of the trials of this house forever after was that upon the least jar a corner of the ceiling was liable to fall loose; and then one would have to get a ladder, and climb up into a hot region, and pound nails into a broken lath, with dust sifting down into one's eyes, and the hammer hitting ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... morning is so clear and cool, We'll ride before it's time for school. Holloa, there John! you lazy cuss! Bring forth my horse, Bucephalus!" So spake the man of letters. Straight Black John went through the stable gate, But soon returned with hair on end, While terror wings his speed did lend, And out he sent his piteous wail: "O boss! Old Bucky's ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... About this period he took a long journey, in which he saw many of the European capitals, and formed, among the learned of foreign lands, friendships which he afterward kept up through constant correspondence. The world already began to speak of Petrarch as a rising man of letters. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Stein, became his friend, and pointed out to him a life braver than that of a priest, more noble than that of a knight, the life of a scholar. To Hutten's father Eitelwolf wrote: "Would you bury a genius like that in the cloister? He must be a man of letters." But the father had decided once for all. Ulrich must never return to Steckelberg unless he came back as a priest. And the son took his fate in his own hands, and fled from Fulda, to make his way as a scholar in a world in which scholarship received ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... uncle Toby, interrupting the corporal, is no more exempt from saying a foolish thing, Trim, than a man of letters—But not so often, an' please your honour, replied the corporal—my ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... priesthood and to remain with him as an adviser; and four years later he was consecrated as colleague or coadjutor in the episcopate. Thus he entered on a busy public life of thirty-five years, which called for the exercise of all his powers as a Christian, a metaphysician, a man of letters, a theologian, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... with a reckless jollity productive of results eminently interesting to students of character and manners. A battle at the polls brought out all which was most characteristic in the Englishmen of the times, and to describe such a conflict was naturally the aim of many a man of letters. ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... unexceptionable, and his erudition immense, and to whom verses were addressed and books dedicated in every centre of letters. One of the most distinguished of these scholars was George Buchanan, and there could be no better type of the man of letters of his time, in whom the liberality of the cosmopolitan was united with the exclusiveness of the member of a very strait and limited caste. He had his correspondents in all the cities of the Continent, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... should have been profoundly immoral. A few eminent men, who belonged to an earlier and better age, were exempt from the general contagion. The verse of Waller still breathed the sentiments which had animated a more chivalrous generation. Cowley, distinguished as a loyalist and as a man of letters, raised his voice courageously against the immorality which disgraced both letters and loyalty. A mightier poet, tried at once by pain, danger, poverty, obloquy, and blindness, meditates, undisturbed by the obscene tumult which raged ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... refused to communicate with the Church of England, or to be present at any worship where the usurper was mentioned as king. He was, I believe, more than once apprehended in the reign of King William, and once at the accession of George. He was the familiar friend of Hicks and Nelson; a man of letters, but injudicious; and very curious and inquisitive, but credulous. He lived in 1743, or 44, about 75 ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... of Tolstoy as a man of letters forms a separate page of his biography, and one into which it is not possible to enter in the brief compass of this introduction. It requires, however, a passing allusion. Tolstoy even in his early days never seems to have approached near to that manner of life which the literary man leads: ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... from the mass of human beings. He liked the huge machine. Each keeps its own round. The baker's boy brings muffins to the window at a fixt hour every day, and that is all the Londoner knows or wishes to know on the subject. But it turned out good men. He named certain individuals, especially one man of letters, his friend, the best mind he knew, whom London ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... writings, the first to develop anything in the nature of a complete Jewish philosophy. He had essentially the literary gift, the capacity of giving lasting expression to his own thought and the thought of his generation. Treating him merely as a man of letters, he is one of the chief figures in Greek literature of the first century. We have extant over forty books of his composition, and nearly as many again have disappeared. His works are one and all expositions of Judaism, but they fall into six ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... that is authentic about the Graeco-Egyptian Sophist or man of letters, Athenaeus, author of the 'Deipnosophistae' or Feast of the Learned, except his literary bequest. It is recorded that he was born at Naucratis, a city of the Nile Delta; and that after living at Alexandria he migrated to Rome. His date is ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... scientific lines, and its alliance with biology, suggest one thought which applies generally to an age of science and may be found to throw some illumination even on the future. Which of all types of modern men is the most habitually hopeful, the man of letters, the politician, the business man, or the man of science? There can be no question of the answer. The typical man of science is sure of the greatness and solidity of the work he shares, and confident that the future will ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... of the few literary men of his day who was not above using the Italian tongue, treating it seriously as a language and not merely as a debased form of Latin. He was eminent as a juris-consult, and, being a man of action as well as a man of letters, he had filled the office of Podesta in various cities; he had found employment under Lorenzo dei Medici, and latterly under Ercole d'Este, whom we now see ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... at the christening of William Wetmore Story—sculptor, musician, poet and painter, jurist and man of letters, and the friend whose social relationships made life a ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... have been able to collect of this profound scholar and antiquary. But the life of a man of letters appears, and must be chiefly sought for in his works, of which we subjoin ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... shine in the grand monde: And every shepherd was undone To see her cloister'd like a nun. This was a visionary scheme: He waked, and found it but a dream; A project far above his skill: For nature must be nature still. If he were bolder than became A scholar to a courtly dame, She might excuse a man of letters; Thus tutors often treat their better; And, since his talk offensive grew, He came to take his last adieu. Vanessa, fill'd with just disdain, Would still her dignity maintain, Instructed from her early years ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... success Darrell was no less jealous and contemptuous than Lady Tranmore, though for quite other reasons. But he knew better than she the intellectual quality of the man, and his disdain for the journalist was tempered by his considerable though reluctant respect for the man of letters. ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Dante, and like him a native of Florence, has been called the first modern scholar and man of letters. He devoted himself with tireless energy to classical studies. Writing to a friend, Petrarch declares that he has read Vergil, Horace, Livy, and Cicero, "not once, but a thousand times, not cursorily but studiously and intently, bringing to them the best powers of my ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... the perils of war. His present connexion subsisted three years; but Macneill sickened in the discharge of duties wholly unsuitable for him, and longed for the comforts of home. His resources were still limited, but he flattered himself in the expectation that he might earn a subsistence as a man of letters. He fixed his residence at a farm-house in the vicinity of Stirling; and, amidst the pursuits of literature, the composition of verses, and the cultivation of friendship, he contrived, for a time, to ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... have no employment equal to his ambition or genius; it is therefore my custom to apply my attention to the objects before me, and as I cannot think any place wholly unworthy of notice that affords a habitation to a man of letters, I have collected the history and antiquities of the several garrets ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... Basseville, agent of the republic at Rome M R General Marquis de la Fayette, ex-constituent I R General Winphen, ex-constituent P L The Marquis d'Angremont G L De Blackmann, major of the Swiss guards G L De Cazotte, a man of letters, upwards of 80 years of age G R General Montesquieu, ex-constituent P R The celebrated Count Mirabeau, expelled from the pantheon. (Depantheonise.) R Chabroud, advocate to the Duke of Orleans, ex-constituent ...
— Historical Epochs of the French Revolution • H. Goudemetz
... hack editorial work on the local newspaper a living for his large family. As for me, I would have been repaid for the labor of writing a thousand books by witnessing the pride he took in mine. There was at last a man of letters in the family, though he came by a road not down on the ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... his place completely in the management of a turbulent and really hostile Christian population, with whom his very best qualities were a disqualification. Eshref was a poet, a dreamer, and, I was told, the second man of letters in the empire. He laughingly asked me if I had been at Podgoritza, and I as good-humoredly replied that I had not come to complain of my treatment there, but to pay my compliments to a fellow man of letters. His broad, good-natured face lighted up with pleasure, and, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... 'Esther Waters.' Except on the distinct understanding that Thomas Hardy and George Moore are bracketed here, for the sake of convenience, as being both 'under French encouragement,' it would be a gross critical injustice to couple their names together at all. It is not one man of letters in a hundred who has Mr. Hardy's mere literary faculty, which is native and brilliant, whilst Mr. Moore's has been painstakingly hunted for and brought from afar, and is, after much polishing, still a trifle dull. Mr. Thomas Hardy is distinctly one of those men who see things ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... principle. We do not suppose that when The Bible in Spain appeared he was one of those who were captivated by its extraordinary qualities. When Borrow crossed his path in later life he received no special consideration, such as would be given very promptly in our day by a Cabinet minister to a man of letters of like distinction. We find him on one occasion writing to the ex-minister, now Lord Clarendon, asking his help for a consulship. Clarendon replied kindly enough, but sheltered himself behind the statement that the Prime Minister was overwhelmed with applications ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... likewise for a friend Madam de Crequi, who, having become devout, no longer received D'Alembert, Marmontel, nor a single man of letters, except, I believe the Abbe Trublet, half a hypocrite, of whom she was weary. I, whose acquaintance she had sought lost neither her good wishes nor intercourse. She sent me young fat pullets from Mons, and her intention was to come and see me the year following had not a journey, upon ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... A man of letters, he had struggled from obscure poverty to success and ample means; at three-and-thirty he was still hard pressed to make both ends meet, but the ten subsequent years had built for him this pleasant home and banished his long familiar anxieties to the land of nightmare. 'It ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... moreover, that Scribe never wished to be anything but a man of letters. There could be applied to him the words said by him of his confrere, ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... in order of merit was not even then settled. The little reputation I had acquired was mixed with plenty of doubt and not a little of condescension. It was then the fashion in Bengal to assign each man of letters a place in comparison with a supposed compeer in the West. Thus one was the Byron of Bengal, another the Emerson and so forth. I began to be styled by some the Bengal Shelley. This was insulting to Shelley and only likely ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... patron of your college. He came of an old and illustrious Spanish family and you remember that he was one of the first followers of saint Ignatius. They met in Paris where Francis Xavier was professor of philosophy at the university. This young and brilliant nobleman and man of letters entered heart and soul into the ideas of our glorious founder and you know that he, at his own desire, was sent by saint Ignatius to preach to the Indians. He is called, as you know, the apostle of the Indies. He went from country to country in the east, from Africa ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... noble calling. If a man lives in fear and trembling lest he should fail in these respects, if he finds these considerations alone weigh with him, if he never writes without thinking how he shall best serve good causes and damage bad ones, then he is a genuine man of letters. If in addition to this he succeeds in making his manner attractive, he will become a classic. He knows this. He knows, although the Greeks in their mythology forgot to say so, that Conceit was saved to mankind as well as Hope when Pandora clapped ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... a man of science has no raison d'etre at all unless he is willing to face much greater risks than these for the sake of that which he believes to be true; and further, that to a man of science such risks do not count for much—they are by no means so serious as they are to a man of letters, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... survey of English literature. He is one of the most powerfully intellectual of all English writers, and the clear force of his work is admirable; but being first a man of affairs and only secondarily a man of letters, he stands only on the outskirts of real literature. In his character the elements were greatly mingled, and in our final judgment of him there must be combined something of disgust, something of admiration, and not a little ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... the decline of life. After many successes and many failures, he had at length attained, by general consent, the first place among living English poets. His claims on the gratitude of James were superior to those of any man of letters in the kingdom. But James cared little for verses and much for money. From the day of his accession he set himself to make small economical reforms, such as bring on a government the reproach of meanness without producing any perceptible relief ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Under a government which is confined to its proper field, the talents of each man may be freely used, and he will not be forced into relations for which he is unsuited. The absurd prejudice, that public employment is the most honorable, will pass away. The man of letters and the man of science, the poet, the artist, and the inventor, the financier, the navigator, the merchant, every one who performs beneficial service and displays great qualities, will be rewarded. Every one who is conscious that he possesses such qualities ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... late sale in Pall Mall, of one of the choicest and most elegant libraries ever collected by a man of letters ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, translated from the Spanish by Mariano J. Lorente, with a preface by R. B. Cunninghame Graham (The Four Seas Co.). This is an excellent translation by a Spanish man of letters of what is perhaps the best exemplary Novel by Cervantes. As Mr. Cunninghame Graham points out in his delightful introduction, "Rinconete and Cortadillo" is perhaps the best sketch of Spanish low-life that has come down to ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... being only one of the legitimate forms of human activity has no value but on the condition of not excluding the fullest recognition of all the more distinct forms of action. This condition is sometimes forgotten by the man of letters, who often, especially in his youth, is inclined to lay a claim of exclusive superiority for his own amongst all the other tasks of the human mind. The mass of verse and prose may glimmer here and there with the glow of a divine spark, but in the sum of human effort it has no special ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... Hubert Baldwin, the immensely popular novelist; the fascinating Mrs. Rupert Duncan, who was lending her genius to one of Ibsen's heroines at that moment; Miss Medea Tring, one of the latest American beauties; Corporal, the portrait-painter; Richard Giles, critic and man of letters; Hereward Blenheim, a young and rising politician, who before the age of thirty had already risen higher than most men of sixty; Sir Horace Silvester, K.C.M.G., the brilliant financier, with his ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... of the house was lounging on a sofa, looking over a late review—for he was a man of leisure, taste, and reading—but, then, as to reading the Bible!—that forms, we suppose, no part of the pretensions of a man of letters. The Bible—certainly he considered it a very respectable book—a fine specimen of ancient literature—an admirable book of moral precepts; but, then, as to its divine origin, he had not exactly made up his mind: some parts appeared strange and inconsistent ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... not a word too much or one that bears not its part in the total effect, there is yet about the lyrics of Jonson a certain stiffness and formality, a suspicion that they were not quite spontaneous and unbidden, but that they were carved, so to speak, with disproportionate labour by a potent man of letters whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is for these reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity and emotion ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... person whom she employed to effect this was an adroit man who had succeeded in deceiving the government. Francis I based his glory upon the patronage and encouragement which he accorded to learning, and Calvin, as a man of letters, merited consideration. The King needed some forgiveness for serious political faults, and, with reason, he believed that the humanists would redeem his character before the people. He was at once the protector and the slave of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... of man, in his eternal right of Truth, finds expression in the following song, composed, not by a theologian or a man of letters, but by one who belongs to that ninety per cent of the population of British India whose education has been far less than elementary, in fact ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... sense of creative activity belongs only to genuine creation; in literature we must never forget that. But what true man of letters ever can forget it? It is no such common matter for a gifted nature to come into possession of a current of true and living ideas, and to produce amidst the inspiration of them, that we are likely to underrate ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... that head that even the proudest of the neighboring squirearchs always spoke of us as a very ancient family. But all my father ever said, to evince pride of ancestry, was in honor of William Caxton, citizen and printer in the reign of Edward IV.,—Clarum et venerabile nomen! an ancestor a man of letters ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... foregoing observations, I may quote the following narrative, written by a man of letters: "From puberty to the age of 30 (when I married), I lived in virgin continence, in accord with my principle. During these years I worked exceedingly hard—chiefly at art (music and poetry). My days being spent earning ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Maupin, who knew her Genoa down to its smallest chapels, had left her landscape painter to the care of the diplomate and the two Genoese marquises, and was miserly of her minutes. Though the ambassador was a distinguished man of letters, the celebrated lady had refused to yield to his advances, dreading what the English call an exhibition; but she had drawn in the claws of her refusals when it was proposed that they should spend a farewell day at the Consul's ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... is a true man of letters, a real philosopher, retiring, industrious, and modest. He spends all his winters in Warsaw, and lives every summer in the country. He permits neither society nor coteries, nor interests of any sort, to snatch away ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... literary world, that when the announcement was made of the pension conferred upon him "in consideration of his literary merits," not one of the literary journals, not even the Athenaeum, was able to tell who the recipient was; but all declared that they knew of no man of letters bearing that name. This fund amounts to L1200, and the lion's share of it, the remaining L1000, is appropriated in a singular manner. It has been bestowed upon the wife of the new Lord Chancellor, Lord Truro, lately Mr. Solicitor Wilde. This lady is the daughter of the late Duke of Sussex, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... may prefer the one style, one the other—'tis an affair of character, perhaps of mood; but no expert can fail to see that the one is much more difficult, and the other much easier to maintain. It seems as though a full-grown experienced man of letters might engage to turn out "Treasure Island" at so many pages a day, and keep his pipe alight. But alas! this was not my case. Fifteen days I stuck to it, and turned out fifteen chapters; and then, in the early paragraphs of the sixteenth, ignominiously lost hold. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
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