"Rhetoric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... leader, he was still the same gifted captain who had crushed the Taeping rebellion twenty years before. What he did for the Soudan and its people during six years' residence, at a personal sacrifice that never can be appreciated, has been told at length; but pages of rhetoric would not give as perfect a picture as the spontaneous cry of the blacks: "If we only had a governor like Gordon Pasha, then the country ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... won't be made to appear," said Jenny, settling herself at her knitting, "only in some transcendental, poetic sense, such as papa can always make out. Papa is more than half a poet, and his truths turn out to be figures of rhetoric when one comes to apply them ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... was wonderful. He spoke to an audience of five or ten thousand as he would have talked to a party of three or six. His style was simple, natural, unstrained; the lucid statement and cogent argument now and again irradiated by a salient passage of satire or a burst of not too eloquent rhetoric. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... futile attempt to establish Fruitlands on a solid basis. To use his own words in a letter now at our hand, though referring to another of Mr. Alcott's schemes, his little fortune was "buried in the same grave of flowery rhetoric in which so many other notions ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... is used as a sort of interjection, as in French. The partitive article is used precisely as in French. We meet the narrative infinitive with de. In short, the French reader feels at home in the Provencal sentence; it is the same syntax and, to a great degree, the same rhetoric. Only in the vocabulary does he feel himself ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... at the moment war calls for action; and when the fathers are summoned thou art there the first. But we need no words to fill our senate-house, safely as thou wingest them while the mounded walls keep off the enemy, and the trenches swim not yet with blood. Thunder on in rhetoric, thy wonted way: accuse thou me of fear, Drances, since thine hand hath heaped so many Teucrians in slaughter, and thy glorious trophies dot the fields. Trial is open of what live valour can do; nor indeed is ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... dissatisfied, not just with the situation in Iraq but with the state of our political debate regarding Iraq. Our political leaders must build a bipartisan approach to bring a responsible conclusion to what is now a lengthy and costly war. Our country deserves a debate that prizes substance over rhetoric, and a policy that is adequately funded and sustainable. The President and Congress must work together. Our leaders must be candid and forthright with the American people in order ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... intellectual action is exhibited in a more serious and elevated strain in many other parts of this play. Biron's speech at the end of the Fourth Act is an excellent specimen of it. It is logic clothed in rhetoric;—but observe how Shakespeare, in his two-fold being of poet and philosopher, avails himself of it to convey profound truths in the most lively images,—the whole remaining faithful to the character supposed to utter the lines, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... these last words, he seemed to rise before me, pale as the night when the camellias told their story and he knew his offering was accepted. These words, in their humility, were clearly something quite different from the usual flowery rhetoric of lovers, and a wave of feeling broke over me; it was the ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... the swift. Atrides! Agamemnon! passing all In glory! King of men! recompense just By gifts to make me, or to make me none, That rests with thee. But let us to the fight 175 Incontinent. It is no time to play The game of rhetoric, and to waste the hours In speeches. Much remains yet unperform'd. Achilles must go forth. He must be seen Once more in front of battle, wasting wide 180 With brazen spear, the crowded ranks of Troy. Mark him—and as he fights, fight also ye. To whom Ulysses ever-wise replied. ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... compare this order of mind with a mind like Lord Leverhulme's to perceive how it is that politics in our country tend more and more in the American direction. The big men are outside. Politics are little more than a platform for a pugilistic kind of rhetoric. He who can talk glibly and with occasional touches of such sentimentalism as one finds in a Penny Reciter is assured of the ear of the House of Commons, and may fairly count on one day becoming a Minister of State. But the field for the ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... allowed to have their own way. "At three o'clock that afternoon," the letter goes on to say, "we met at Guildhall, sat with them in the Court of Common Council, and according to our instructions acquainted them with the proceedings of the Assembly of Peers, and used the best rhetoric, which was plain remonstrance of all the passages at York, not concealing the admirable grace and freeness shown by your majesty in this great council, to the infinite content of all the Peers, nor the true affection shown to you by the Peers." ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... the people will be of great benefit to the Senate, the prerogative, and the whole nation. To the Senate, because they will not only teach your Senators elocution, but keep the system of the government in their memories. Elocution is of great use to your Senators, for if they do not understand rhetoric (giving it at this time for granted that the art were not otherwise good) and come to treat with, or vindicate the cause of the commonwealth against some other nation that is good at it, the advantage will be subject to remain upon the merit of the art, and not upon ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... year; she was not merely her rival as queen, then, but as woman. As regards education, she could sustain comparison with advantage; for if she had less charm of mind, she had more solidity of judgment: versed in politics, philosophy, history; rhetoric, poetry and music, besides English, her maternal tongue, she spoke and wrote to perfection Greek, Latin, French, Italian and Spanish; but while Elizabeth excelled Mary on this point, in her turn Mary was more beautiful, and above all more attractive, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to succeed in their intentions; and therefore, in their first visits, the one appeared in state, and the other was the spokesman. But they found the ladies in England of a far different taste from those who had rendered them famous in France: the rhetoric of the one had no effect on the fair sex, and the fine mien of the other distinguished him only in a minuet, which he first introduced into England, and which he danced with tolerable success. The English court had been too long accustomed to the solid ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... others, for she was here before me, and these old walls have been witnesses, I am sure, of many groanings of the soul.... Let us be cautious, nevertheless, and repress within ourselves the thoughts which would come forth. A wise precept. It was a precept of my master of rhetoric. Yes, let us be cautious; in spite of this woman's appearance of devotion, who would trust to such marks of affection? The servant's enemy is his master; and I clearly see that independently of my dignity, I must not make the least false step; what torments ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... was that fed the fire—small blame to them that heard The "bhoys" get drunk on rhetoric, and madden at the word— They knew whom they were talking at, if they were Irish too, The gentlemen that lied in Court, they knew and well ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... employment. Augustin, a professor of eloquence or a celebrated pleader, might be the saviour and the benefactor of his family. The town councils, and even the Imperial treasury, paid large salaries to rhetoricians. In those days, rhetoric led to everything. Some of the professors who went from town to town giving lectures made considerable fortunes. At Thagaste they pointed with admiration to the example of the rhetorician Victorinus, an African, a fellow-countryman, who had made a big reputation ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... and exegesis and sacred rhetoric retreated from the foreground of that scholastic drama. The great Presence that is called War swept up and filled ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... born of English parents, in the most beautiful city of London, was, in, my early youth, placed for my education first at Westminster, and afterwards prosecuted my studies at Oxford. Having excelled many of my fellow students in learning Aristotle, I entered upon the study of the first and second rhetoric of Tully. As I grew up towards manhood, I disdained the low estate of my parents, and quitting the dwelling of my father, I much affected to visit the courts of kings, delighting in fine garments and costly attire, And behold ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... writer seems to be so overpowered in the effort of thought as to impair his style; at least his gift of expression does not keep up with the increasing difficulty of his theme. The idea of the king or statesman and the illustration of method are connected, not like the love and rhetoric of the Phaedrus, by 'little invisible pegs,' but in a confused and inartistic manner, which fails to produce any impression of a whole on the mind of the reader. Plato apologizes for his tediousness, and acknowledges that the improvement of his audience has been his only aim in some of his digressions. ...
— Statesman • Plato
... George Brown, denouncing the Fugitive Slave Law before a Toronto audience, "I used to think that if I ever had to speak before such an audience as this, I would choose African Slavery as my theme in preference to any other topic. The subject seemed to afford the widest scope for rhetoric and for fervid appeals to the best of human sympathies. These thoughts arose far from here, while slavery was a thing at a distance, while the horrors of the system were unrealized, while the mind ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... "Without the restraint and worry of apprenticeship no one can ever rise to happy and independent creativeness; and in the schools of rhetoric or in hunting or fighting no one can study drawing. It is not till a pupil has learned to sit steady and worry himself over his work for six hours on end that I begin to believe he will ever do any good work. Have you any of you seen the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... different may be the practice in that contentious atmosphere with which Mr. Gladstone expresses and laments his familiarity, in the atmosphere of science it really is of no avail whatever to shut one's eyes to facts, or to try to bury them out of sight under a tumulus of rhetoric. That is my experience of the "Elysian regions of Science," wherein it is a pleasure to me to think that a man of Mr. Gladstone's intimate knowledge of English life, during the last quarter of a century, believes my philosophic existence to have been rounded ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... besides many volumes of poetry on various subjects, about three thousand hymns and songs. Among much that is excellent in this vast production there are also dreary stretches of rambling loquacity, hollow rhetoric and unintelligible jumbles of words and phrases. He could be insupportably dull and again express more in a single stanza, couplet or phrase than many have said in a whole book. A study of his poetry is, therefore, not unlike a journey through a vast ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... was violent, but it may possibly have been indispensable. At any rate, it bears but a very far off relation to the events of to-day. Dr. Kuyper in resuscitating, and laying stress upon it, follows a method well known in rhetoric; he begins by discrediting his adversary. However, despite his good intentions, he has not increased our admiration for the Boers by pointing out to us that the most serious grievances they can allege against the English are the protection accorded by the latter to ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... the theme reproduced by Tasso;[119] and it had doubtless been freely used by Shakspere's English predecessors and contemporaries. What he did was but to set the familiar theme to a rhetoric whose superb sonority must have left theirs tame, as it leaves Seneca's stilted in comparison. Marston did his best with it, in a play which may have been written before, though published ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... soon, and puzzle, strain, and load them with words and rules; to know grammar and rhetoric, and a strange tongue or two, that it is ten to one may never be useful to them; leaving their natural genius to mechanical and physical, or natural knowledge uncultivated and neglected; which would ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... the British Cabinet, whether the royal veto on Irish legislation shall be exercised on the advice of the English or of the Irish Ministry, are matters which do not in reality greatly affect the happiness of ordinary Irishmen. But they give room for management, for diplomacy, for rhetoric, and are certain on occasions to arouse both the interest and the passions of the Irish people. We may take it for granted that the character of the Irish representation at Westminster will govern the character of the Parliament ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... continued, the more he should be embarrassed; he put an end to it, by appearing to acquiesce in what HAMET had proposed. HAMET withdrew, charmed with the candour and flexibility which he imagined he had discovered in his brother; and not without some exultation in his own rhetoric, which, he supposed had gained no inconsiderable victory. ALMORAN, in the mean time, applauded himself for having thus far practised the arts of dissimulation with success; fortified himself in the resolutions he had before taken; and conceived new malevolence ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... explosion of the doctor's rhetoric; but I should have remembered, that he was under the double inspiration of new-born ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... moreover, a new school of rhetoric declared that we should write as we speak, and that all would be well so long as we felt ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... no preparation made in the foregoing image for that which was to follow. She used no rhetoric in her passion; or it was nature's own rhetoric, most legitimate then, when it seemed ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... in a recent article in the North American Review, pays a tribute to the virtues of the founders of New England which has been rarely excelled in fervor of rhetoric and laudatory statement by the most gifted of after-dinner orators among the ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... The Monk lighted his lamp, and went on with his writing. As he recounted each several marvel he had made acquaintance with, he carefully expounded its literal, and its spiritual, signification, all according to the rules of rhetoric and theology. And just as men fence about cities with walls and towers to make them strong, so he supported all his arguments with texts of Scripture. He concluded from the singular revelations he had received: ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... preached by us, under penalty of the awful condemnation pronounced on the watchman who seeth the sword coming and gives no warning. It is not becoming to make such a solemn message the opportunity for pictorial rhetoric, which vulgarises its greatness and weakens its power. But it is worse than an offence against taste; it is unfaithfulness to the preaching which God bids us, treason to our King, and cruelty to our hearers, to suppress the warning—'The day of the Lord cometh.' There are many temptations ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... and turned away, apparently uninfluenced by it. Indeed, I remained, if anything, more loyal to the grand manner of Hawthorne, but my love of realism was growing. I recall a rebuke from my teacher in rhetoric, condemning, in my essay on Mark Twain, an over praise of Roughing It. It is evident, therefore that I was even then a lover of the modern when ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... rhetorical study than can here be ventured. It is, however, of the utmost importance that you should be aware of precisely how wording bears upon force in a sentence. Study "The Working Principles of Rhetoric," by John Franklin Genung, or the rhetorical treatises of Adams Sherman Hill, of Charles Sears Baldwin, or any others whose names may easily be learned ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... so closely with Warner (Charles D.), the cultured and cosmopolitan, that every wave seems to murmur his name, and the immense hotel lives and flourishes under the magic of his rhetoric and commendation. Just as Philadelphia is to me Wanamakerville and Terrapin, so Coronado Beach is permeated and lastingly magnetized by Warner's sojourn here and what he ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... his Latin compositions showed such facility that they attracted the special attention of those who examined them. The Professor also remembers that Hawthorne's English compositions elicited from Professor Newman (author of the work on Rhetoric) high commendations. ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... no alms to satisfy the hunger of my brother, but to fulfill and accomplish the will and command of my God: I draw not my purse for his sake that demands it, but His that enjoined it; I believe no man upon the rhetoric of his miseries, nor to content mine own commiserating disposition; for this is still but moral charity, and an act that oweth more to passion than reason. He that relieves another upon the bare suggestion ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... alternative, though dictated by a commendable motive, is likely to prove ineffectual. The Dilemma is a form of reasoning which rarely persuades. Its object is rather to silence than to convince. It is more a trick of rhetoric than an argument of logic. It may make a person pause by showing him his apparent position; but the heart, if not the head, can always find means to escape from an alternative which it dislikes. And in this particular ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... living waters were tainted in their source. Instead of health they spread abroad infection—instead of giving nourishment to the poor, they were the narcotics which drenched in slumber the consciences of the rich. Wretched forms, ridiculous legends, the insipid rhetoric of the Fathers, were the substitutes for all generous learning. The nobles enslaved the body; the hierarchy put its fetters on the soul. The growth of the public mind was checked and stunted and the misery of Europe was complete. The sufferer was taught ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... art was reached and the greatest pleasure was given when, most paradoxically, sexual immorality and Corneillian heroics could be combined. In that way every need of the Parisian public was satisfied: mind, senses, rhetoric. But it is only just to say that the public was fonder even of words than of lewdness. Eloquence could send it into ecstasies. It would have suffered anything for a fine tirade. Virtue or vice, heroics hobnobbing with ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... that transept—a stranger and an outcast—watching a liturgy which was strange to him, listening to music, lovely indeed to the ear, yet wholly foreign in this home of monks and prayer. Surely great statues had stood before them—statesmen in perukes who silently declaimed secular rhetoric in the house of God, swooning women, impossible pagan personifications of grief, medallions, heathen wreaths, and broken columns. Yet here as he looked there was nothing but the decent furniture of a monastic church—tall stalls, altars, images ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... heart-rending, soul-stirring tropes and figures, which I cannot enumerate; neither, indeed, need I, for they were of the kind which even to the present day form the style of popular harangues and patriotic orations, and may be classed in rhetoric under the ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... itself in magnificent and hazardous speculations, attaches itself to certain and universal facts discovered to us by our own consciousness, by language, literature, history and society."(26) Before taking the professorship of philosophy, Adam Smith had taught belleslettres and rhetoric in Edinburgh, in 1748. He had written a work on the origin and formation of languages; and it was because he had profoundly studied the moral sciences that it was given to him to inaugurate a new science and to become a great economist. Mr. ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... Shou'd they, Colonel Smith and Major Pitcairn have my orders to make use of all their rhetoric and the ...
— The Fall of British Tyranny - American Liberty Triumphant • John Leacock
... the language which did it. It was the Italian passion for rhetoric, for the speech which appeals to the senses and makes no demand on the mind. When an Englishman listens to a speech he wants at least to imagine that he understands thoroughly and impersonally what ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... Alemanni, one of the most powerful tribes of Germany. He seems to have hoped that, if the unadorned language of the two statesmen failed to move Sapor, he might be won over by the persuasive eloquence of the professor of rhetoric. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... for a moment subjected to the test of maintaining the economic life of the nation, Trotzky saw the ideal proletarian government. He once described the Soviet as "a true, unadulterated democracy," but, unless we are to dismiss the description as idle and vain rhetoric, we must assume that the word "democracy" was used in an entirely new sense, utterly incompatible with its etymological and historical meaning. Democracy has always meant absence of class rule; proletarian dictatorship ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... stars is behind the clouds. There are the stars, and they who can may read them. The astronomers forever comment on and observe them. They are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... there was something pungent, something quotable; but many pages of such writing became tiresome. Yet it did much to form the hitherto loose structure of English prose, by lending it point and polish. His carefully balanced periods were valuable lessons in rhetoric, and his book became a manual of polite conversation and introduced that fashion of witty repartee, which is evident enough in Shakspere's comic dialogue. In 1580 appeared the second part, Euphues and his England, and six editions of the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... audience. His voice, though musical, was not of great power. He was often impeded by a slight stammer, especially at the end of a session. He was not naturally an eloquent man, and attempted no flights of rhetoric. But it seems impossible to deny the possession of special ability to a man who consistently drew such large audiences throughout a long career; and if it was the matter rather than the manner which wove the spell, surely that is just the kind of good speaking ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... these, apart from their beauty, are in the best manner of English poetic style. So, in many minor ways, he shuffled contrast and climax, and the like, adept in the handling of poetic rhetoric that he had come to be; but in three ways he was conspicuously ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... considered sound rhetoric to speak of the statue as existing in the block of marble before the sculptor touches it. How easy to fall into such false analogies! Can we say that the music existed in the flute or in the violin before the musician touches them? The statue in the form of an idea or a conception ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... the seemliest shadow, and mask self-interest under the fairest pretext,—all these skills we teach definitely, as the main arts of business and life. There is a strange significance in the admission of Aristotle's Rhetoric at our universities as a class-book. Cheating at cards is a base profession enough, but truly it would be wiser to print a code of gambler's legerdemain, and give that for a class-book, than to make the legerdemain of human speech, and the clever shuffling of the ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... and urge their own opinions—the very right which each insists upon claiming for itself. It has been held 'dangerous' to discuss questions which, though in one sense pertaining only to particular States, nevertheless bear upon the whole country. It has been considered 'heresy' to urge with rhetoric and declamation, even in our halls of Congress, certain principles for and against Slavery, for example, lest mischief result from the agitation of those topics. But in such remonstrance we have forgotten that the very principle of democratic institutions involves the right of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... filled with these dismantled stories of Rome, and we should be presented with the spectacle of one continuous city, stretching its labyrinthine pomp to the shores of the Adriatic." This is so far from being meant as a piece of rhetoric, that, on the very contrary, the whole purpose is to substitute for a vague and rhetorical expression of the Roman grandeur one of a more definite character—viz., by presenting its dimensions in a new form, and supposing the city to be uncrested, as ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... and the man was made to understand, by the use of forcible figures and rhetoric, that Tennessee's offense could not be condoned by money, his face took a more serious and sanguinary hue, and those who were nearest to him noticed that his rough hand trembled slightly on the table. He hesitated a moment as he slowly returned the gold to the carpetbag, as if he had not yet entirely ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... to hear you say it; those doubts prove to me that you recognise the power of your pen. They are fools who hold that a ton of high-explosive is worth all the rhetoric of Cicero. It was not Krupps who plunged the Central Empires into the pit, Paul, but Bernhardi, Nietzsche and What's-his-name. Wagner's music has done more to form the German character than Bismarck's diplomacy. Shakespeare's ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... I disliked public speaking, and had a firm conviction that I should break down every time I opened my mouth. I believe I had every fault a speaker could have (except talking at random or indulging in rhetoric), when I spoke to the first important audience I ever addressed, on a Friday evening at the Royal Institution, in 1852. Yet, I must confess to having been guilty, malgre moi, of as much public speaking as most ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... good Duchess, so French and so Neapolitan at once, half Vesuvius, half school-girl, whom nothing must prevent us from honoring and loving." The chivalric and sentimental rhetoric of the time, the elegies of the poets, the noble prose of Chateaubriand, the tearful articles of the royalist journals, have condemned her to appear forever solemn and sublime. It was sought to confine her youth between a tomb and a cradle. But ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... he found out, as the examinations went on, that he was decidedly unprepared in some of the required lines such as grammar, rhetoric, etc. And even in mathematics, his favorite study and the one in which he made his best showing, he had not been able to cover, in his limited time for study, the whole ground required for college entrance. He seemed doomed to be refused ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... jackknife, cord, and perseverance, manufactures a fishing-rod, which he courteously offers to me, which I succinctly decline, informing him in no ambiguous phrase that I consider nothing beneath the best as good enough for me. Halicarnassus is convinced by my logic, overpowered by my rhetoric, and meekly yields up the best rod, though the natural man rebels. The bank of the river is rocky, steep, shrubby, and difficult of ascent or descent. Halicarnassus bids me tarry on the bridge, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... studying without restraint. I never deserved to be chastised; but, in spite of my usual gentleness, it would have been dangerous to have attempted to do so; and I recollect with pleasure that, when I was to described in rhetoric a perfect courser, I sacrificed the hope of obtaining a premium, and described the one who, on perceiving the whip, threw down his rider. Republican anecdotes always delighted me, and when my new connexions wished to obtain for me a place at court, I did not hesitate displeasing them to ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... tender melody of Bellini. Recent literature has exhibited the conditions under which Italian Liberals strive, and the method of expiating their self-devotion. The novels of Ruffini, the letters of the Countess d'Ossoli, the rhetoric of Gavazzi, and the parliamentary reports of Gladstone, the leading reviews, the daily journals, intercourse with political refugees, and the personal observations of travel, have, more or less definitely, caused the problem called the "Italian Question" to come nearer to our ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... again and El Abbas said to him, "Fear not for me, for thou knowest my prowess and my puissance in returning answers in the assemblies of the land and my good breeding[FN63] and skill in rhetoric; and indeed he whose father thou art and whom thou hast reared and bred and in whom thou hast united praiseworthy qualities, the repute whereof hath traversed the East and the West, thou needest not fear for him, more by token that I purpose but to seek diversion[FN64] and return to thee, if it ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... no more. The scandalous spectacle of that political mountebank, who sacrificed eternal principles to the interests of the day, recalled to my memory the tent of the acrobats. The cold rhetoric of that harangue, vibrating with neither truth nor emotion, recalled to me the patter, learned by heart, of the powdered clown on the stage. The superb air which the orator assumed under the rain of reproaches and insults singularly resembled the indifference of the ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... Agora, and gathered in knots under the porticoes, eagerly discussing the questions of the day, were the philosophers, in the garb of their several sects, ready for any new question on which they might exercise their subtlety or display their rhetoric." If there were any in that motley group who cherished the principles and retained the spirit of the true Platonic school, we may presume they felt an inward intellectual sympathy with the doctrine enounced ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... intellectual delinquencies, but only of moral. The "organs" of the "opposing party" will not take the trouble to point out—even to observe—that the "debasing sentiments" and "criminal views" uttered in speech and platform are expressed in sickening syntax and offensive rhetoric. Doubtless an American politician, statesman, what you will, could go into a political convention and signify his views with simple, unpretentious common sense, ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... allowed to follow his bent and go to Ionia. Great Ionian cities like Smyrna and Ephesus were full of admired sophists or teachers of rhetoric. But it is unlikely that Lucian's means would have enabled him to become the pupil of these. He probably acquired his skill to a great extent by the laborious method, which he ironically deprecates in The Rhetorician's Vade ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... the latter part of 1857. The anti-slavery conflict was at its zenith. This controversy, as do all moral controversies, had brought forth many able men; had furnished abundant material for satire and rhetoric. This era presented a large and brilliant galaxy of Colored orators. There were Frederick Douglass—confessedly the historic Negro of America,—Charles L. Remond, Charles L. Reason, William Wells Brown, Henry Highland Garnett, Martin R. Delany, James W. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... figure of rhetoric, which he had learned from a famous preacher in Manila, Padre Damaso wished to startle his audience, and in fact his holy ghost was so fascinated with such great truths that it was necessary to kick him to remind him ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... long habituated him to this taste of liberty, before he began to be impatient for the return of the time when he might enjoy it. He would invite me to the garden by drumming upon my knee, and by a look of such expression as it was not possible to misinterpret. If this rhetoric did not immediately succeed, he would take the skirt of my coat between his teeth, and pull at it with all his force. Thus Puss might be said to be perfectly tamed; the shyness of his nature was done away, and on the whole it was visible, by many symptoms which I have not room to ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... Clara her troth, and even recommending her, with very strong logic and unanswerable arguments of worldly sense, to regard their union as unwise and even impossible; but nevertheless there protruded through all his sense and all his rhetoric, evidences of love and of a desire for love returned, which were much more unanswerable than his arguments, and much stronger than his logic. Clara read his letter, not as he would have advised her to read it, but certainly ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... things, and when the logic becomes perplexing, we are apt to grow rhetorical about them. But rhetoric is only misleading. Whatever the truth may be, it is best that we should know it; and for truth of any kind we should keep our heads and hearts as cool ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Carthage,[409] and finding himself puzzled concerning the sense of a passage in the books of the Rhetoric of Cicero, which he was to explain the next day to his scholars, was much disquieted when he went to bed, and could hardly get to sleep. During his sleep he fancied he saw St. Augustine, who was then at Milan, a great way ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... historians and philosophers. Herodotus and Thucydides have never been surpassed as historians, while the Sophists who succeeded the more earnest philosophers of a previous age, gave to Athenian youth a severe intellectual training. Rhetoric, mathematics and natural history supplanted speculation, led to the practice of eloquence as an art, and gave to society polish and culture. The Sophists can not indeed be compared with those great men who preceded ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... All this rhetoric, impatient friend—and be a friend still, whether writer, reviewer, or unauthorial—serves at my most expeditious pace, opposing notions considered, to introduce what is (till to-morrow, or perhaps the next coming minute, but at any rate ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the Cafe de la Source, when Fil de Fer had been treating him to brandy and trying to get him to tell his story; I remember his suddenly turning his one eye in the direction of us men, and launching himself upon a long flight of rhetoric. I can see him still—his unwashed red hand toying with the stem of his liqueur-glass, or rising from time to time to push his hair from his forehead, over which it dangled in soggy wisps, while, in a dinner-table tone of voice, he ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... their overthrow; and for their own sake, and for the sake of the institution itself of which he meant to be an illustrious ornament, he not only supported the Manilian proposition, but supported it in a speech more effective than the wildest outpourings of democratic rhetoric. ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... the employment of foreign phrases, the allusions to Milton and the Bible, the structure of paragraphs, the treatment of incident, the development of feeling, the impressiveness of a present personality; all this, however, is with the purpose, not of mechanic exercise, nor merely to illustrate "rhetoric," but to illuminate De Quincey. It is with this intention, presumably, that the text is prescribed. There is little attractiveness, after all, in the idea of a style so colorless and so impersonal that the individuality of its victim is lost in its own perfection; this was certainly ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... the wall below are the Seven Sciences, with their names and with those figures below them that are appropriate to each. Grammar, in the guise of a woman, with a door, teaching a child, has the writer Donato seated below her. After Grammar follows Rhetoric, and at her feet is a figure that has two hands on books, while it draws a third hand from below its mantle and holds it to its mouth. Logic has the serpent in her hand below a veil, and at her feet Zeno of Elea, who is reading. Arithmetic is holding the ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... this country has ever produced. His command of strong, idiomatic, controversial English was unrivaled. His faculty of lucid statement and compact reasoning has never been surpassed. Without the graces of fancy or the arts of rhetoric, he was incomparable in direct, pungent, forceful discussion. A keen observer and an omnivorous reader, he had acquired an immense fund of varied knowledge, and he marshaled facts with ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... be depended on, I more than merely dubitate. He was always distinguished for a tendency to exaggeration,—it might almost be qualified by a stronger term. Fortiter mentire, aliquid haeret seemed to be his favorite rule of rhetoric. That he is actually where he says he is the postmark would seem to confirm; that he was received with the publick demonstrations he describes would appear consonant with what we know of the habits of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... had never learned more himself; but it is certain that he would not have imparted merely polite learning, had his own training enabled him to do so: for he had, constitutionally, a high contempt for all "flimsy" things, and, moreover, he was not employed or paid to teach rhetoric or belles-lettres, and, "on principle," he never gave more in return than the value of ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... to a party, and they insisted that I should go with them. It would give their friends such monstrous pleasure, and they should all be so immense happy, that go I must. But their rhetoric was vain. I was upon thorns; there were no hopes that the party would listen to my manuscript; and as I could not read it to others, I must go home and read ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... and grammars of logic are among the most useless furniture of a shelf. Give a boy Robinson Crusoe. That is worth all the grammars of rhetoric and logic in the world.... Who ever reasoned better for having been taught the difference between a syllogism and an enthymeme? Who ever composed with greater spirit and elegance because he could define an oxymoron or an aposiopesis?" THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. Trevelyan's ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... of the past. Four hundred years had elapsed since its golden age, and in the course of these centuries it had experienced a sad decline. Philosophy had degenerated into sophistry, art into dilettanteism, oratory into rhetoric, poetry into versemaking. It was a city living on its past. Yet it still had a great name and was full of culture and learning of a kind. It swarmed with so-called philosophers of different schools, and with teachers ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... luncheon with the magnates at the club to-day, of his coming to dinner informally, like one of the family, at the Allisons' to-night. It would be comfort to watch her sensitive face, thought Elmendorf, and he meant to make the successive announcements as humorous and lingering as his command of rhetoric would permit. His step was light, his smile significant, his bearing quite debonair, as he turned into the private hall-way and encountered the janitor at the first turn. The janitor was Irish. "Misther Wells is gone—if it's him ye want, sorr," ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... whom it was addressed, is mere self-banter. Sydney's preaching attracted some of the keenest minds in Edinburgh. It was fresh, practical, pungent; and, though rich in a vigorous and resounding eloquence, was poles asunder from the rhetoric of which "O Virtue!" is ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... she said, but among all his memories of that evening she remained prominent, because she had spoken sincerely, warmly, enthusiastically. Others thanked him—the Colonel's little speech at the end was a piece of studied rhetoric, but it left him cold where her thanks had left him ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... hand with all the ardour of a youthful admirer. I unfortunately congratulated him on having such a pretty young gentleman to his son. He answered, sighing, that the boy had talents, but did not put them to a proper use—"Long before I attained his age (said he) I had finished my rhetoric." Captain B—, who had eaten himself black in the face, and, with the napkin under his chin, was no bad representation of Sancho Panza in the suds, with the dishclout about his neck, when the duke's scullions insisted upon ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... revolution once in four years, which has contrived the Bowie-knife and the revolver, which has chewed the juice out of all the superlatives in the language in Fourth of July orations, and so used up its epithets in the rhetoric of abuse that it takes two great quarto dictionaries to supply the demand; which insists in sending out yachts and horses and boys to out-sail, out-run, out-fight, and checkmate all the rest of creation; ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... It sounded ludicrous. 'They are educating themselves differently.' Were they? 'They wish to take their part in the work of the world.' That was nearer the proper tone, though it had a ring of claptrap rhetoric hateful to her: she had read it and shrunk from it in reports of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... opinion really distinct from knowledge? The difference between these he seeks to establish by an argument, which to us appears singular and unsatisfactory. The existence of true opinion is proved by the rhetoric of the law courts, which cannot give knowledge, but may give true opinion. The rhetorician cannot put the judge or juror in possession of all the facts which prove an act of violence, but he may truly persuade them of the commission ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... vivacity of Mademoiselle, resolved to leave no argument untried, which he thought might prevail on her to be the companion of their intended voyage; and he made no doubt but her example, added to the rhetoric of Montraville, would persuade Charlotte to go ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... demolishes an antagonist and an argument is not rhetoric, but truth. This accumulation of "bad names" and ingenious combination of scurrility is merely rhetoric. It serves the rhetorical purpose, but it does not convince. It does not show the hearer or reader that one course is more expedient than another, ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... was the general title of a didactic work containing rules for medicine, husbandry, and rhetoric (e.g. 'Rem tene, verba sequentur'). Cf. Quint. iii. 1, 19, 'Romanorum primus, quantum ego quidem sciam, condidit aliqua in hanc materiam ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... dictated the last few pages of When Valmond Came to Pontiac. It was practically my only experience of dictation of fiction. I had never been able to do it, and have not been able to do it since, and I am glad that it is so, for I should have a fear of being led into mere rhetoric. It did not, however, seem to matter with this book. It wrote itself anywhere. The proofs of the first quarter of the book were in my hands before I had finished ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the gentleman, who declaimed against the bill with such fluency and rhetoric, and such vehemence of gesture; who charged the advocates for the expedients now proposed, with having no regard to any interests but their own, and with making laws only to consume paper, and threatened them with the defection of their adherents, and the loss of their ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... the British Museum, with an illuminated portrait of Brunetto in his study prefixed. Mus. Brit. MSS. 17, E. 1. Tesor. It is divided into four books, the first, on Cosmogony and Theology, the second, a translation of Aristotle's Ethics; the third on Virtues and Vices; the fourth, on Rhetoric. For an interesting memoir relating to this work, see Hist. de l'Acad. des Inscriptions, tom. vii. 296. His Tesoretto, one of the earliest productions of Italian poetry, is a curious work, not unlike the writings of Chaucer in style and numbers, though Bembo remarks, that his pupil, however ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... which, despite its many political blunders, has at least a record for honourable if mistaken statesmanship in the past, has now stooped to the final and abysmal folly. Disguise the fact with what specious rhetoric they may, the truth remains that our opponents have deliberately endeavoured to tamper with a great national possession, and to make the British Army a tool in the game ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... and carefully educated. At the age of thirty appointed professor of rhetoric in his native University, where he became so famous that he was appointed tutor to Gratian, son of the Emperor Valentinian (364-375 A.D.), and was afterwards raised to the highest honours of the State (Consul, 379 ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... fellowship if verbal exhortations and arguments could have done it. The only kind of fresh attempt, which after the failure of those two experiments could fairly lay claim to universal sympathy, was one which should withdraw the proposed politico-social rearrangement from the domain alike of rhetoric and of empiricism and substitute a thorough systematic reform covering all the aspects of international intercourse, including all the civilized peoples on the globe, harmonizing the vital interests of these and setting up adequate machinery ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... well confess that I have preached this kind of sermon lo! these many years ad infinitum and I doubt not ad nauseam. We have all used in this way the flaming rhetoric of the Hebrew prophets until we think of them chiefly as indicters of a social order. They were not chiefly this but something quite different and more valuable, namely, religious geniuses. First-rate preaching would deal with Amos as the pioneer in ethical monotheism, with Hosea ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... and scorn, but by positive and stimulating suggestion. The imagination of the reader is touched by every device which can awake the admiration for heroism, the consciousness of moral courage. Wit, quotation, anecdote, eloquence, exhortation, rhetoric, sarcasm, and very rarely denunciation, are launched at the reader, till he feels little lambent flames beginning to kindle in him. He is perhaps unable to see the exact logical connection between two paragraphs of an essay, yet he feels they are germane. He takes up Emerson tired and apathetic, ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... Sir,' cried Mahony, forgetting his rhetoric in his enthusiasm; 'be the hole in the wall, Sir, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... He went through Watts' 'Logic' last winter, but having no taste for that study, or rather an aversion to it, he is not so well skilled in that as in some other parts of learning. About a year ago he went through so much of rhetoric as is contained in the 'Preceptor,' but suppose he has forgot the most of it. Upon the whole, though he may not, perhaps, be so well versed in some parts of learning as the class which he proposes to enter, yet if he applies himself to his studies with proper diligence, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... of the monarchist institutions of Europe, we should, in the event of an overwhelming victory, destroy both the Hohenzollern and Hapsburg Imperialisms, and that means, if it means anything at all and is not mere lying rhetoric, that we should insist upon Germany becoming free and democratic, that is to say, in effect if not in form republican, and upon a series of national republics, Polish, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, and the like, ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... himself to have been a critical student of the Bible, and his remarks were extremely interesting along the line of his own views. His rhetoric was flawless, his figures apt and beautiful, his points well made, and he held the undivided attention of everyone to ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... RHETORIC, the science or art of persuasive or effective speech, written as well as spoken, and that both in theory and practice was cultivated to great perfection among the ancient Greeks and Romans, and to some extent in the Middle Ages and later, but is much less cultivated ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... is; a villain not by habit or by passion, but by principle; a cool-blooded, systematic villain; yet she will give him affluence and the means of depraving thousands by his example and his rhetoric, on condition that he refuses to marry the woman whom he has made an adulteress; who has imbibed, from the contagion of his discourse, all the practical and speculative turpitude which ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... public schools of both the universities, there are found at the prince's charge (and that very largely) fine professors and readers, that is to say, of divinity, of the civil law, physic, the Hebrew and the Greek tongues. And for the other lectures, as of philosophy, logic, rhetoric, and the quadrivials (although the latter, I mean arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy, and with them all skill in the perspectives, are now smally regarded in either of them), the universities themselves ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... was twenty-four years old, and able to bear arms. The war was put up to our generation. I don't know what for; the sins of our fathers, probably. Certainly not to make the world safe for Democracy, or any rhetoric of that sort. When I was doing stretcher work, I had to tell myself over and over that nothing would come of it, but that it had to be. Sometimes, though, I think something must.... Nothing we expect, but something unforeseen." He paused and shut his eyes. "You ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... Cassiodorus established there a brotherhood, which, for a time at least, must have been a formidable rival to that of S. Benedict. A library held a prominent place in his conception of what was needed for their common life. He says little about its size or composition, but much rhetoric is expended on the contrivances by which its usefulness and attractiveness were to be increased. A staff of bookbinders was to clothe the manuscripts in decorous attire; self-supplying lamps were to light nocturnal workers; sundials by day, and ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... print characters. Most of these had been crossed out in favor of other words or sentences, which in turn had been "scratched." Evidently the writer had been toilfully experimenting toward some elegance or emphasis of expression, which persistently eluded him. Amidst the wreck and ruin of rhetoric, however, one phrase stood ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of the most sacred union between two people, the freest upon earth." He assumed that his government was "terrible to its enemies, but generous to its allies," and prefaced his summary of alleged violations of the international compact, by a flourish of rhetoric intended to impress ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... the line of the presidency. Not only was it received with unbounded enthusiasm by the mass of the people, but it was a revelation to the more intellectual and cultivated. Lincoln afterwards told of a professor of rhetoric at Yale College who was present. He made an abstract of the speech and the next day presented it to the class as a model of cogency and finish. This professor followed Lincoln to Meriden to hear him again. ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... the general, who was a native Egyptian, and Theodotus of Chios, who was the prince's tutor in rhetoric, were the men by whom the fate of this great Roman was decided. "By putting him to death," said Theodotus, "you will oblige Caesar, and have nothing to fear from Pompey;" and he added with a smile, "Dead men do ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... that I do not greatly admire the English style of the gentleman who composes the War Office placards that one sees at railway stations in the north. These are meant to allure country labourers to join the army, but the following piece of fatuous rhetoric must surely act rather as a deterrent than otherwise:—"Are you, the descendants of those who conquered India and carried the colours of the Gordon Highlanders through the Peninsula and at Waterloo, content to sit at home, or be satisfied with dull labours ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... splendidly this morning," I said, feeling that an ounce of flattery is often worth a pound of rhetoric. "If," I added, "you will allow ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... great chorus in the same play,[11] where Sophocles is dealing with a subject that he really cares about, it sounds almost artificial. And in Euripides, psychology occupies the whole of the interest that is not already preoccupied by logic and rhetoric; these were the arts of life, and with these serious writing dealt; with the heroism of Macaria, even with the devotion of Alcestis, personal passion ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... must be given away, See it be given with a sense Of most uncanvassed innocence. Alas!—but few there be that know't— How grave a thing it is to vote! For most men's votes are given, I hear, Either for rhetoric or—beer. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... scheme were the king's confessor, Guillaume Parvi, and the famous Grecian, Guillaume Bude, who in 1530 was himself induced to undertake the task which Erasmus had declined. Twelve professors were appointed in Greek, Hebrew, mathematics, philosophy, rhetoric and medicine, each of the twelve with a salary of two hundred gold crowns (about L80), and the dignity of royal councillors. The king's vast scheme of a great college and magnificent chapel, with a revenue of 50,000 crowns for the maintenance (nourriture) of six hundred scholars, ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... country. The Winter of 1837, was passed in Kentucky, the abolitionist living among slaveholders, and officiating as the minister in the church of his father. The next Spring he accepted a call to the chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in Oberlin college, and in September following was married to Miss Ann T. Allen, daughter of John Gould Allen, Esq., of Fairfield, Connecticut. After ten years of professorial labors, in association with men of great worth, most of whom still ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... without having the additional stumbling-block cast in our way, of being told that truly there is nothing real there for us to feel. As for the following eloquent passage, in which our author subsequently returns to the justification of his great doctrine, no more need be said than that it is rhetoric, not logic:— ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... that Order. The course of instruction among the Dominicans was as follows:—After two years, during which the novice laid the foundations of a good general education, he devoted the next two years to grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, and then the same amount of time to what was called the Quadrivium, which consisted of "arithmetic, mathematics, astronomy, and music." Theology, the queen of the sciences, occupied three years; and at the end of the course, at the age of twenty-five, the ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... voice will be submissive, timid, equal trembling, weak, suppliant. The words will be brought out with a visible anxiety and diffidence, approaching to hesitation; few and slow; nothing of vain repetition, haranguing, flowers of rhetoric, or affected figures of speech; all simplicity, humility, and lowliness, such as becomes a reptile of the dust, when presuming to address Him, whose greatness is tremenduous beyond all created conception. In intercession for ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... Company. These public bodies were jointly to nominate seven professors, who should lecture successively, one on every day of the week, on the seven sciences of Divinity, Astronomy, Music, Geometry, Law, Medicine, and Rhetoric. The salaries of the lecturers were defrayed by the profits arising from the Royal Exchange, and were very liberal. The wisdom of my patron is shown by the sciences he directed should be taught. He considered Divinity ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... Of the place of last resort, The smiler and the snarler And the guests of every sort— The elocution chap With rhetoric on tap; The mimic and the funny dog; The social sponge; the money-hog; Vulgarian and dude; And the prude; The adiposing dame With pimply face aflame; The kitten-playful virgin— Vergin' on to fifty years; The solemn-looking sturgeon Of ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... a very different opinion of the origin of laughter, and, for my part, I think his doctrine, in great measure, though not altogether—true.—See Hobbes on Human Nature, and the answer to him in Campbell's Rhetoric.] ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... his sweet sake, I will have him, say no more, contra gentes, I am resolved, I will have him." Gobrias,[5377] the captain, when, he had espied Rhodanthe, the fair captive maid, fell upon his knees before Mystilus, the general, with tears, vows, and all the rhetoric he could, by the scars he had formerly received, the good service he had done, or whatsoever else was dear unto him, besought his governor he might have the captive virgin to be his wife, virtutis ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... No general theory of expression seems yet to have been enunciated. The maxims contained in works on composition and rhetoric, are presented in an unorganized form. Standing as isolated dogmas—as empirical generalizations, they are neither so clearly apprehended, nor so much respected, as they would be were they deduced from some simple first principle. We are told that "brevity is the soul of wit." We hear styles condemned ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... Greek and Latin are accomplishments chiefly, and a classical scholar, if unacquainted with modern science and literature, is hopelessly ignorant. "If any one," said Hegius, the teacher of Erasmus, "wishes to learn grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, history, or holy scripture, let him read Greek;" and in his day this was as true as it is false and absurd in our own. In the Middle Ages, Latin was made the groundwork of the educational system, not on account of ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... a few miles from the city, and in secret continued his studies and observations. The Grand Duke supplied him a small pension and suggested that it would be increased if Galileo would give lectures on Poetry and Rhetoric, which were not forbidden themes, and try to make ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... Arcadia was for many years after his death one of the most popular books in the country. His prose, as prose, is not equal to his friend Raleigh's, being less condensed and stately. It is too full of fancy in thought and freak in rhetoric to find now-a-days more than a very limited number of readers; and a good deal of the verse that is set in it, is obscure and uninteresting, partly from some false notions of poetic composition which he and his friend Spenser entertained when young; but there ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... topics usually treated in college courses in rhetoric. These have been included for three reasons: first, because comparatively few high school pupils go to college; second, because the increased amount of time now given to composition enables the high school to cover a wider field than formerly; ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... uproar being at once converted to applause, he invited Chromatistes, the leader of the Sedition, into the centre of the hall, to receive in the name of his followers the submission of the Hierarchy. Then followed a speech, a masterpiece of rhetoric, which occupied nearly a day in the delivery, and to which no ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... and one hundred and six colossi, among them the famous statue of the sun, one hundred and five feet high, one of the seven wonders of the world, containing 3000 talents—more than 3,000,000 dollars. Its school of rhetoric was so celebrated that Cicero resorted to it ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... high as some of his admirers do; and the purely polemical portions of his poems, those in which he puts forth his antagonism to tyrants and religions and custom in all its myriad forms, seem to me to degenerate at intervals into poor rhetoric. ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... all he said: there he began To shew the fulness of his heart; there ended. Some short excursions of a broken vow He made indeed, but flat insipid stuff; But, when he made his loss the theme, he flourished, Relieved his fainting rhetoric with new figures, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... language. (85) Where is such knowledge to be obtained? (86) The men of old who employed the Hebrew tongue have left none of the principles and bases of their language to posterity; we have from them absolutely nothing in the way of dictionary, grammar, or rhetoric. ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... moment to fill the space with original matter that is readable. There is the sacred space, and it must be filled. The London journals are perfect types of this custom. The result is often a wearisome page of words and rhetoric. It may be good rhetoric; but life is too short for so much of it. The necessity of filling this space causes the writer, instead of stating his idea in the shortest compass in which it can be made perspicuous and telling, to beat it ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner |
