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More "Fiction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at Government House,—we exiles of the Temperate Zone,—keeping up to the last the fiction that New Year's Day under a tropic sky and within sound of the tiger's wail was really January first. But every remembrance and association was, in our homesick thoughts, grouped about an open arch fire, with the sharp, crisp creak of ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... another example. Let us suppose some Walter Scott had compiled some purely fictitious history, professedly laid in the Middle Ages (and surely even miraculous occurrences cannot be more unreal than these products of sheer imagination); and suppose some critic had engaged to prove it fiction from internal evidence supplied by contradictions and discrepancies, and so on, would you not think it strange if he were to enforce that argument by saying, 'And besides all this, what is more suspicious is, that they occur in a work of imagination!' Would ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... Cooper. He not only has to compete against the best English authors, but as almost all the English works are published without any sum being paid for the copyright, it is evident that he must sell his work at a higher price if he is to obtain any profit. An English work of fiction, for instance, is sold at a dollar and a quarter, while an American one costs ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... I remember right, and even there Lucian laughingly said, that he spread his garments in vain to catch the valuable distillation which poetry had taught him to expect; and Strabo (worse news still!) said that there were no Electrides neither; so as we knew before—fiction is false: and had I not discovered it by any other means, I might have recollected a comical contest enough between a literary lady once, and Doctor Johnson, to which I was myself a witness;—when ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... to describe the mode and working of their professional careers. Had I done the latter I could hardly have steered clear of subjects on which it has not been my intention to pronounce an opinion, and I should either have laden my fiction with sermons or I should have degraded my sermons into fiction. Therefore I have said but little in my narrative of this man's feelings or doings as a clergyman. But I must protest against its being on this account considered that Mr. Robarts was indifferent to the duties of his clerical ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... girl, eighteen years of age, a few years ago escaped from slavery in the South. Through scenes of adventure and peril, almost more strange than fiction can create, she found her way to Boston. She obtained employment, secured friends, and became a consistent member of the Methodist church. She became interested in a very worthy young man of her own complexion, who was a member of the same church. They were soon married. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... permission to feast at the table of the rich, has to entertain the guests with drolleries and charades, or, according to circumstances, to let the potsherds be flung at his head. This was at that time a formal trade in Athens; and it is certainly no mere poetical fiction which represents such a parasite as expressly preparing himself for his work by means of his books of witticisms and anecdotes. Favourite parts, moreover, are those of the cook, who understands not only how to boast of ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... said Steve, who looked hard at Johannes, as if ready to think that the man was telling him a travellers' tale. But the Norseman was the last man who could be expected to indulge in fiction, and the boy hastened to ask ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... can not, put faith in!—Allegations, so preposterous, that they may be disproved in a moment—"Captain de Camp, alias Boultoff, &c., &c., and three other persons, names unknown, now incarcerated in Dover Jail, for the robbery of John Brown, of Mizzlington"—a mistake—a foul plot—a base fiction!—At least, so thought the worthy gentleman, who was as ignorant of any wrong done him as the lunatic that resides in the moon. Had the sea-serpent been discovered in the back pond, a gold-mine been found in the dust-bin, or a Sphinx and Centaur been captured in Lincoln's Inn ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... Resurrection The Voices of the City If Christ came Questioning England, Awake! Be not attached An Episode The Voice of the Voiceless Time's Defeat The Hymn of the Republic The Radiant Christ At Bay The Birth of Jealousy Summer's Farewell The Goal Christ Crucified The Trip to Mars Fiction and Fact Progress How the White Rose Came I look to Science Appreciation The Awakening Most blest is he Nirvana Life Two men Only be still Pardoned Out The Tides Progression Acquaintance Attainment The tower-room Father The new ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... novel, written during his illness, and published in 1864. It has gone through numerous editions, and has been translated into most European languages. It was followed by several other similar works of fiction, of which "Serapis" achieved wide popularity. Ebers died on ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... with vast good-nature and a profuse smile, which she seems to throw all over everybody. A German duchess or two follow her. The curtsies of these German princesses are indeed quite wonderful. After entering the hall one of them will espy (such, I suppose, is the fiction) some persons to whom she wishes to bow, and she then proceeds to execute a performance of some minutes' duration. Before curtsying, she stops and seems to "shy," and looks at the ladies as a frightened horse ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... Voyage. the Contract is not Determined. th'o the taken[6] by the Enemy divested the Property out of the Owners, Yet by the Law of War the Possession was defeazable, and being Recovered by battle Afterwards, the Owners became Reinvested, so the Contract by [fiction] of Law became as if she never had been taken and so the ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... walter-scottistas, although they were inspired as much by George Sand as by the author of Waverley. These writers were of a romantic order, and Fernan Caballero, whose earliest novel dates from 1849, was at their head. The Revolution of September, 1868, marked an advance in Spanish fiction, and Valera came forward as the leader of a more national and more healthily vitalised species of imaginative work. The pure and exquisite style of Valera is, doubtless, only to be appreciated by a Castilian. Something of its charm may be divined, however, even in the ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... in which role he now showed himself, differed in some respects from the conventional blackmailer of fiction. It may be that he was doubtful as to how much James would stand, or it may be that his soul as a general rule was above money. At any rate, in actual specie he took very little from his victim. He seemed to wish to be sent to the village oftener than before, but that was all. Half ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... 14, 1811). I had known him ten years, the better half of his life, and the happiest part of mine. In the short space of one month I have lost her who gave me being, and most of those who had made that being tolerable. To me the lines of Young are no fiction— ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... her body. It was the first intimation he had had that she was dead, and the surprise and horror of the sight so converted him that immediately afterwards he retired from the world. There is nothing true in all this except the foundation upon which the fiction arose. I have frankly asked M. de La Trappe upon this matter, and from him I have learned that he was one of the friends of Madame de Montbazon, but that so far from being ignorant of the time of her death, he was by her ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... output was a few precious essays and a few scraggy poems, who had never schemed out a novel before, not even, as far as I am aware, a short story; who had never, in any way, tested his imaginative capacity, setting out, in insane self-conceit, to write, not merely a commercial work of fiction, but a novel which would outrival a universally proclaimed work of genius. And he had no imaginative capacity. His mind was essentially critical; and the critical mind is not creative. He was a clever man. All critics are ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... all this prodigious deal of love-making? These are questions which await a reply in the interests of ethics and of art. Meanwhile an editor of enterprise has selected five-and-thirty separate examples of "popping the question," as he calls it, from the tomes of British fiction. To begin with an early case—when Tom Jones returned to his tolerant Sophia, he called her "Madam," and she called him "Mr. Jones," not Tom. She asked Thomas how she could rely on his constancy, when the lover of Miss Segrim drew a mirror ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... in a decade. So will the critical occurrences of a day fill chapters, after those of a year have failed to yield more material than will eke out a paragraph. Experience proceeds by fits and starts. Only in fiction does a career run in an unbroken line of adventures or ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... with nothing to do except to be beautiful and gracious, as befitted a well-born woman. It pleased him, in a lofty, generous way, that his father (whom she had taught him to reverence as the most chivalric of gentlemen) had left him wholly dependent upon her. It was a legal fiction, of course. He was the heir—the crown prince. He had always been liberally supplied with money at school and at Harvard. Her income was large. No doubt the dear soul mismanaged the estates fearfully, but now he would have leisure to ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... covers every Grosset & Dunlap book. When you feel in the mood for a good romance, refer to the carefully selected list of modern fiction comprising most of the successes by prominent writers of the day which is printed on the back of every Grosset ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... piece of work we have had in this country since 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' and its exquisite finish of style is beyond that classic." "The book is truly an American novel," says the Boston Advertiser. "Ramona is one of the most charming creations of modern fiction," says Charles D. Warner. "The romance of the story is irresistibly ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... said Scaliger, "qui ab omnibus discere volo; neque tam malum librum esse puto, ex quo non aliquem fructum colligere possum." I think myself repaid, in a monkish legend, for examining a mass of inane fiction, if I discover a single passage which elucidates the real history or manners of its age. In old poets of the third and fourth order we are contented with a little ore, and a great deal of dross. And so in publications of this kind, prejudicial as they are to taste and public feeling, ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... had every man the power of making the best of his own personality, and arranging his own destiny according to his private goodwill and pleasure.[9] The greatest of Richardson's successors in the history of English fiction adds to this explanation. "Those," says Sir Walter Scott, "who with patience had studied rant and bombast in the folios of Scuderi, could not readily tire of nature, sense, and genius in the octavos of Richardson." The old French romances in which Europe had found a dreary ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... than fiction, eh?" mused Mr. Bingle. "But, my dear sir, it's such an old story, this yarn about me. The newspapers have worn it to shreds. Suppose we leave out all reference to the Hooper millions. If the public ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... been roused in East Anglia over the fine of one hundred pounds inflicted by the Bench upon a local bookseller, found guilty of the Conditional Sale of Fiction. The chief witness, a retired stockbroker, proved that defendant refused to supply his order for a shilling's worth of O. HENRY unless he also purchased a remainder copy of Wanderings Round Widnes (published at twelve-and-six net). The Chairman, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 19, 1917 • Various
... pp. 53-54): Perses, it is urged, is clearly a mere dummy, set up to be the target for the poet's exhortations. On such a matter precise evidence is naturally not forthcoming; but all probability is against the sceptical view. For 1) if the quarrel between the brothers were a fiction, we should expect it to be detailed at length and not noticed allusively and rather obscurely—as we find it; 2) as MM. Croiset remark, if the poet needed a lay-figure the ordinary practice was to introduce some mythological person—as, in fact, is done in the "Precepts ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... humour showed her the kind of lurid drama that Pamela no doubt was concocting about her—perhaps with the help of Beryl—the two little innocents! Elizabeth recalled the intriguing French 'companion' in War and Peace who inveigles the old Squire. And as for the mean and mercenary stepmothers of fiction, they can be collected by the score. That, no doubt, was how Pamela thought of her. So that, after her involuntary tears, Elizabeth ended in a laughter that ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... objects, is the creation of nominal and fictitious voters, by conferring on the friends of a political party an apparent, but not a real interest in a landed estate; and this is practised and justified by a legal fiction, and a little casuistry, with which political agents are quite familiar. The ordinary mode in these cases, is to confer such parchment franchises on dependents and personal connections of the great man who needs their support—and the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... went on Sally, flushed and excited, forgetting the man in his story. "Why, he's my hero of all fiction! Think of it, Cousin Mary—there are men near here who are his great—half-a-dozen greats—grandchildren! Cousin Mary," she stopped and looked at me impressively, oblivious of the man so near her, "if I could lay my hands on one of those young Leighs of Burrough I'd marry him in ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... fixed the day and parted from him tenderly, full of satisfaction at the success of her clever fiction. The accident which had occasioned the bruise had been of the commonest, but ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... is the other way. It is Sir Henry who is making all the trouble. He is attacking one of the oldest and dearest platitudes I know." He paused for the general to speak, but the older man nodded his head for him to go on. "He has just said that fiction is stranger than truth," continued the novelist. "He says that I—that people who write could never interest people who read if they wrote of things as they really are. They select, he says—they take the critical moment in a man's life and the ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... always attaches to humour. There is no quality of the human mind about which its possessor is more sensitive than the sense of humour. A man will freely confess that he has no ear for music, or no taste for fiction, or even no interest in religion. But I have yet to see the man who announces that he has no sense of humour. In point of fact, every man is apt to think himself possessed of an exceptional gift in this direction, and that even if his humour does not ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... Besides which, they are already accused of having sold themselves to Mr. Pitt. Very often I have heard my dear father talking of universal suffrage as the bulwark of liberty; well then, we have now, and here, an universal suffrage that is neither a fraud nor a fiction; and as Athanase says, "it is expressing itself every minute, in the crimes of ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... that civil war had risen a new nation, mighty in the vastness of its limitless resources, the realities within its reach surpassing the dreams of fiction, and eclipsing the fancy of fable—a new nation, yet rosy in the flesh, with the bloom of youth upon its cheeks and the gleam of morning in its eyes. No one questioned that commercial and geographic union had been effected. So had Rome re-united its ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... from the room to ask for this thing or that, keeping up the fiction that his comrade was sick; and each time he did so he found some person or another guarding the door—at least watching hard by—though apparently bent upon some private errand. He came to the conclusion at last that their movements were most certainly spied upon, and that to ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... on this subject, may I be allowed to say that at Tonbridge School, where I was educated, there is a very good general library, consisting of the best classical works in our own language, travels, chronicles, histories, and the best works of fiction and poetry, and I believe all ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various
... not, it is true, an eye for the fine shades of character. But every marked peculiarity instantly caught her notice and remained engraven on her imagination. Thus while still a girl, she had laid up such a store of materials for fiction as few of those who mix much in the world are able to accumulate during a long life. She had watched and listened to people of every class, from princes and great officers of state down to artists living in garrets, and poets familiar with subterranean cookshops. Hundreds ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... plays or books, the name of the work may be quoted and the name of a character italicized. This is done to avoid confusion between the play, the character, and the real person portrayed. "William Tell" is a play. William Tell is a character in fiction. William Tell is ...
— Punctuation - A Primer of Information about the Marks of Punctuation and - their Use Both Grammatically and Typographically • Frederick W. Hamilton
... This is no fiction that I am relating, but a reality that happened to myself, and which it would be impossible to exaggerate. Never shall I forget the last tremendous wave that came down upon me, impelled by a maddening ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... once suspicions how little he's got before him the game's up. He's not a fool and he knows that this is the short road to Amiens, but he imagines we're holding it in strength. If we keep up the fiction for another two days the thing's done. You say he's pushing ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... said it would; for, on the seventh day after his wife's death, he died also. This is not a fiction, but perfectly true. ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... years a college of artillery. In one of its rooms Alonso the Wise studied the heavens more than was good for his orthodoxy, and from one of its windows a lady of the court once dropped a royal baby, of the bad blood of Trasta-mara. Henry of Trastamara will seem more real if we connect him with fiction. He was the son of "La Favorita," who will outlast all legitimate princesses, in the deathless ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... anxious times during these journeys in the boat. All was going well, but at any moment the fiction of the watchers by the fires might have been discovered, and the enemy come on to the attack upon a force weakened first by one-fourth, then by half, and later on by three-fourths of its number, the danger increasing at a terrific ratio for those ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... dip. But the romance which fell upon the figures of great writers and illumined their pages was no false radiance in her case. She carried her pocket Shakespeare about with her, and met life fortified by the words of the poets. How far she saw Denham, and how far she confused him with some hero of fiction, it would be hard to say. Literature had taken possession even of her memories. She was matching him, presumably, with certain characters in the old novels, for she came out, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... redivide the soil of Attica, seems utterly incredible; nor is it confirmed by any passage now remaining of the Solonian poems. Plutarch conceives the poor debtors as having in their minds the comparison with Lycurgus and the equality of property at Sparta, which, in my opinion, is clearly a matter of fiction; and even had it been true as a matter of history long past and antiquated, would not have been likely to work upon the minds of the multitude of Attica in the forcible way that the biographer supposes. The Seisachtheia must have exasperated the feelings and diminished the fortunes ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... precisely for that reason that I don't choose to hear it. There is quite enough of the grim and hideous in reality without hunting it up in pages of fiction. When I read I desire to relax my mind, not put it on the rack, as your favorite books invariably do. Absolutely, Beulah, after listening to some of your pet authors, I feel as if I had been standing on my head. You need not look so coolly incredulous; it is a positive fact. As for that ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... brave, day of the Yesterdays! Brave birthdays of the long ago when Death was not a fact but a fiction! When the years were ages apart, and the farthest reach of one's imagination carried only to being ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... aristocratic class keeps a private servant; yet this happens also to Commoners, and is, besides, no properly college expense. Tutorage is charged double to a Gentleman Commoner—namely, twenty guineas a year: this is done upon a fiction (as it sometimes turns out) of separate attention, or aid given in a private way to his scholastic pursuits. Finally, there arises naturally another and peculiar source of expense to the "Gentleman Commoner," from a fact implied in his Cambridge ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... constructive power bears its part in the author's triumph. A peculiar end was to be reached in that narrative,—an end in which the writer had a deep personal interest. What is an opium-eater? Says a character in a recent work of fiction, of a social wreck: "If it isn't whisky with him, it's opium; if it isn't opium, it's whisky." This speech establishes the popular category in which De Quincey's habit had placed him. Our attention was to be drawn from these degrading connections. And this is done not merely ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... sampler up to the epic, has now, by way of recreation, or rather by way of opening a necessary safety-valve to ease his restless energies, invented a system of poetic socialism and expounded it in a brand-new kind of prose fiction? ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... nightly charming all London. At last the opposition of Linley was overcome, and on April 13, 1773, the most brilliant man and most beautiful woman of their day were for the second time and more formally married, and a series of adventures more romantic than fiction came ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... contains works of standard quality, on a variety of subjects—history, biography, fiction, science, and poetry—carefully chosen to meet the needs and interests ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... pleasure, will receive no delight from the present publication. The editor apprehends that, in the judgment of those best qualified to decide upon the comparison, these Letters will be admitted to have the superiority over the fiction of Goethe. They are the offspring of a glowing imagination, and a heart penetrated with the passion it essays ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... resist the strange charm of Miss Carol's manner. She was obviously a lady by instinct, and she had also been educated after a sort. She had read widely if not altogether wisely, and she seemed just as familiar with the literature, or, at any rate, with the fiction of France and Italy as she was with ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... the fatness of other soils—the historical works of Orosius and of Bede; nay, it is said the Fables of Aesop, and the Psalms of David—desirous, it would seem, to teach his people morality and religion, through the fine medium, of fiction and poetry. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... of the picaresque tale written in English before the days of Defoe. He shows that expressions put in the mouth of Nash's hero, which had been carelessly treated as autobiographical confessions of foreign travel and the like, on the part of the author, were but features of a carefully planned fiction. "Jack Wilton" describes the career of an adventurer, from his early youth as a page in the royal camp of Henry VIII. at the siege of Tournay, to his attainment of wealth, position, and a beautiful ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... the Imperial policy eventually tended to damage. There is in point of fact no logical escape from a theory of popular Sovereignty—once the theory of divinely appointed royal Sovereignty is rejected. An escape can be made, of course, as in England, by means of a compromise and a legal fiction; and such an escape can be fully justified from the English national point of view; but countries which have rejected the royal and aristocratic tradition are forbidden this means of escape—if escape it is. They are obliged to admit the doctrine of popular ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... time, money, hanging not at all, would prove agreeable and acceptable. Cranston's father loved those books, and had grouped them on his shelves according to their subjects, history, art, science, the drama, the classics, standard fiction, and modern literature having received each its allotted space, and not for a heavy reward would the son have changed them; but here already were more than half these prized possessions tumbled promiscuously ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... fellow-creatures, Mr. Mathews was certainly right; we also believe him to have been right in the main, in the general tenor of his opinion; for this country, in its ordinary aspects, probably presents as barren a field to the writer of fiction, and to the dramatist, as any other on earth; we are not certain that we might not say the most barren. We believe that no attempt to delineate ordinary American life, either on the stage, or in the pages of a novel, has been rewarded with success. Even ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... her "Castle of Otranto"; and after her came Sir Walter Scott who frankly surrendered to the power and charm of the theme. The line of succession has been continuous. The ghost has held his own with his human fellow in fiction, and his tale has been told with increasing skill as the art of the writer has developed. To-day the case for the ghost as an element in fiction is an exceedingly strong one. There has indeed sprung into being within a couple of decades a new school of ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... unaware of the number of works of fiction which have been rewritten after publication. I was rather surprised myself when I came to recapitulate them. I wouldn't go so far as to say that second editions, like second thoughts, are the best, because I at once think of "The Light that ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... especial—in the renouncement of one pretension. If so much had sprung to the surface, I scarce put it too strongly in saying that what had perhaps sprung highest was the absurdity of our prolonging the fiction that I had anything more to teach him. It sufficiently stuck out that, by tacit little tricks in which even more than myself he carried out the care for my dignity, I had had to appeal to him to let me off straining ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... quiet, reserved, self-intrenched school of modern English manners. With his beauty and his title, though with little or no estate, he had easily married a lady of fortune—the only daughter of a retired banker. And this heiress, Lady ——, is the one whose story I would have told through a veil of fiction. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... place several inquisitive gentlemen received from his own mouth the confirmation of those particulars which seemed dubious, or carried with them the air of romance." The period was certainly unpropitious for any but a writer of fiction, and Drury seems to have anticipated no higher rank for his Treatise, in point of authenticity, than that occupied by the several members of the Robinson Crusoe school. He, however, positively affirms it to be "a plain ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... visitors will take a deeper interest in the residence of Sir A. T. Quiller-Couch, the "Haven," standing pleasantly by the waterside, facing the mouth of the harbour. Thousands of readers have made the acquaintance of "Troy Town" through the romances of "Q"; and Mr. Couch is not only the writer of fiction that is often delightful, he is also a fine ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... enumerating the qualifications necessary to a writer of fiction, observes, "When he introduces his ideal personage to the public, he enters upon his task with a preconception of the qualities that belong to this being, the principle of his actions, and its necessary concomitants, &c, &c." That such preparation ought to be made, I will not deny; but were I ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... gest^, geste^, extravaganza; air drawn dagger, bugbear, nightmare. flying Dutchman, great sea serpent, man in the moon, castle in the air, pipe dream, pie-in-the-sky, chateau en Espagne [Fr.]; Utopia, Atlantis^, happy valley, millennium, fairyland; land of Prester John, kindgom of Micomicon; work of fiction &c (novel) 594; Arabian nights^; le pot au lait [Fr.]; dream of Alnashar &c (hope) 858 [Obs.]. illusion &c (error) 495; phantom &c (fallacy of vision) 443; Fata Morgana &c (ignis fatuus) 423 [Lat.]; vapor &c (cloud) 353; stretch of the imagination &c (exaggeration) 549; mythogenesis^. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... fiction comprise only a selection from a very large number of books suitable for supplementary reading. For extended bibliographies see E. A. Baker, A Guide to Historical Fiction (new ed., N. Y., 1914, Macmillan, $6.00) and Jonathan Nield, A Guide to the ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... Porter's pen had been laid aside for some time, when suddenly she came before the world as the editor of "Sir Edward Seward's Narrative," and set people hunting over old atlases to find out the island where he resided. The whole was a clever fiction; yet Miss Porter never confided its authorship, we believe, beyond her family circle; perhaps the correspondence and documents, which are in the hands of one of her kindest friends (her executor), Mr. Shepherd, may throw some light upon a subject which the "Quarterly" honored ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... this is carping. There are young girls and old girls. Perhaps it is as well to have it in black and white; she was young. She was an American young girl. There is but one American young girl in English fiction. We know by heart the unconventional things that she will do, the startlingly original things that she will say, the fresh illuminating thoughts that will come to her as, clad in a loose robe of some soft clinging stuff, she sits before ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... was preparing an ice-bag in the kitchen, Miles answered a knock. At the front door she saw Vida Sherwin, Maud Dyer, and Mrs. Zitterel, wife of the Baptist pastor. They were carrying grapes, and women's-magazines, magazines with high-colored pictures and optimistic fiction. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... night, between the 18th and the 19th of May, 1864. Like Thackeray and Dickens, he was touched by death's "petrific mace" before he had had time to do more than lay the groundwork and begin the main structure of the fiction he had in hand; and, as in the case of Thackeray, the suddenness of his decease has never been clearly accounted for. The precise nature of his malady was not known, since with quiet hopelessness he had refused to take medical advice. His friend Dr. ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... benediction, and now the Pope made a pilgrimage to Paris to crown the French emperor, and acknowledge the son of the Revolution as the consecrated son of the Church. All France was intoxicated with delight at this intelligence; all France adored the hero, who made of the wonders of fiction a reality, and converted even the holy chair at Rome into the footstool of his grandeur. Napoleon's journey with Josephine through France, undertaken while they awaited the Pope's coming, was, therefore, a single, continuous triumph. It was ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... history has of late years received much attention. One excellent method is to read, in connection with the text-book, good works of fiction, dramas, poetry, and historical novels, bearing upon the different epochs, and also to read the works of the authors themselves of these different periods. We thus make history and literature illustrate and beautify each other. The dry dates become covered ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... insensibly into saint or scoundrel, sage or fool, man or blackleg. He runs in all shapes, and in all degrees of definiteness. Our subject is that insult to common sense, that childish slap in the face of honest manhood, the 'gentleman' of fiction, and ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... LITERATURE. The vagrant heroes of Petronius are the originals from whom directly, or indirectly, later authors drew that inspiration which resulted in the great mass of picaresque fiction; but, great as this is, it is not to this that the Satyricon owes its powerful influence upon the literature of the world. It is to the author's recognition of the importance of environment, of the vital role of inanimate surroundings as a means for bringing out character and imbuing his episodes ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... the foremost theological list of all the publishing houses; its educational list was exceptionally strong; its musical list excelled; its fiction represented the leading writers of the day; its general list was particularly noteworthy; and its foreign department, importing the leading books brought out in Great Britain and Europe, was an outstanding feature of the ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... is wholly a fiction, "founded on fact." The facts on which it is founded are these,—that Aaron Burr sailed down the Mississippi River in 1805, again in 1806, and was tried for treason in 1807. The rest, with one exception to be noticed, is ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... Man. 'No. I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie—or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... and did soften and condone the deserved censure of the strictures that not envy, but mercy, made him utter. Criticism in its true sense was hardly known. In enlarging the message of poetry, the motive of the drama and the functions of fiction, Goldsmith fulfilled the responsibilities of higher criticism, and that power of inspiration and heightening of expression and perceptivity which are its first duty and its highest honour. Whilst in the elevation of criticism and ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... towards the one spoken of. Nevertheless I must tell you that your tendency to dreaminess, and your exalted ideas of sentiment, are what mostly constitute the modern young lady. Take those elements out of human life, and one-third of our fiction volumes crumble on the shelf. Society limps into retirement, for her most prominent limbs have been amputated. The curtain must drop for good on the stage, for there is no other part for actors to play in the nineteenth ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... Maria's Bay, "in honor of our governor-general and his lady." That a daughter of the same name existed is not improbable, but who can tell whether the Maria Island of Tasmania's coast was named in complaisance to the daughter, or to conciliate the mother! In hope to confirm the agreeable fiction the journal of Tasman has been examined, but ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... from Analog Science Fact & Fiction June 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this ...
— Novice • James H. Schmitz
... least, there can be no supposition of dramatic fiction; the book from which I have made this extract was written by Arthur Hopton, a distinguished mathematician, a scholar of Oxford, a student in the Temple; and the volume itself is dedicated to "The Right Honourable Sir Edward Coke, Knight, Lord Chiefe ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... (Hone's) Sixty Curious and Authentic Narratives, pp. 138-140., from the Recreations of a Man of Feeling. The peerage and the pedigree of the Stair family alike prove that there is little foundation for this ingenious fiction.] ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... NOVELS" has become an institution, a reliable and unfailing recreative resource essential to the comfort of countless readers. The most available entertainment of modern times is fiction: from the cares of busy life, from the monotonous routine of a special vocation, in the intervals of business and in hours of depression, a good story, with faithful descriptions of nature, with true pictures of life, with authentic characterization, ...
— Publisher's Advertising (1872) • Anonymous
... of the negro than any which could be adduced by one not himself a freedman; for it is the argument of facts, and facts are the most powerful logic. Therefore, if I were to imbed these facts in the mud of fiction, I should simply oblige the reader to dredge for the oyster, which in this narrative he has without the trouble of dredging, fresh and juicy as it came from the hand of Nature,—or rather, from the hand of one of Nature's noblemen,—and who, until he was thirty years of age, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... which ensues resembles more the fiction of a poem or romance than an event in true history. The prodigious popularity of Warwick,[*] the zeal of the Lancastrian party, the spirit of discontent with which many were infected, and the general instability of the English nation, occasioned by the late frequent revolutions, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... and signed by the bishops of the provinces of Rheims and Rouen, (Baronius, Annal. Eccles. A.D. 741. Fleury, Hist. Eccles. tom. x. p. 514-516.) Yet Baronius himself, and the French critics, reject with contempt this episcopal fiction.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... that "the seemingly impossible of the fiction of today becomes outdone by the facts of tomorrow," as the author aptly ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... to the pages of the poets, to the pictures of the painters, to the melodies of the composers, when in fact we look upon life with the eye of the artist, we have the impression that we are passing from death to life, from the abstract to the concrete, from fiction to reality. We are inclined to proclaim that only in art and in aesthetic contemplation is truth, and that science is either charlatanesque pedantry, or a modest practical expedient. And certainly art has the superiority of its own ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... already that I had not come here to preserve the polite fictions, Mrs. Manderson. The theory that no reputable person, being on oath, could withhold a part of the truth under any circumstances is a polite fiction." He still stood as awaiting dismissal; but she was silent. She walked to the window, and he stood miserably watching the slight movement of her shoulders until it subsided. Then with face averted, looking out on the dismal weather, she ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... phenomenon in the natural world on this farm, which perhaps will be regarded as a fiction of fancy by many a reader. It was a large field of barley grown from oats! We have recently dwelt upon some of the co-workings of Nature and Art in the development of flowers and of several useful plants. But here is something stranger still, that seems to diverge from the line of any law hitherto ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... and charm of the first. Marie de France and Ruteboeuf. Drama. Adam de la Halle. Robin et Marion. The Jeu de la Feuillie. Comparison of them. Early French prose. Laws and sermons. Villehardouin. William of Tyre. Joinville. Fiction. ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... and honesty, as an ape compares with a man. It was not that, and Dolores knew it, as every maiden knows it; for the honour of woman is the fact on which the whole world turns, and has turned and will turn to the end of things; but what is called the honour of society has been a fiction these many centuries, and though it came first of a high parentage, of honest thought wedded to brave deed, and though there are honourable men yet, these are for the most part the few who talk least loudly about honour's code, and the belief they hold has come to be ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... Spread out on a table on the sidewalk in front of this second-hand store was a lot of books, a hundred or more—books of all kind—school books, history, fiction, all of them in good condition, some only a little shopworn, others just like new. Dorian Trent eagerly looked them over. Here were books he had read about, but had not read—and the prices! Dickens' "David Copperfield", "Tale of Two Cities", "Dombey and Son", ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... Ward's latest novel. It has been hailed as undoubtedly her best, while Julie Le Breton, the heroine, has been called "the most appealing type of heroine in English fiction." ...
— The Damsel and the Sage - A Woman's Whimsies • Elinor Glyn
... woman in most of our States could not control her own person, property or earnings; now in most of them these laws have been largely amended or repealed and it is only in regard to the ballot that the fiction of woman's perpetual minority is ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... chimed more nearly with his state of unrest. Then there are the galleries, the painted ceilings,—angels, saints, martyrs, holy families,—can art have been leashed through so many ages with a pleasant fiction? Is there not somewhere at bottom an earnest, vital truth, which men must needs cling by if they be healthful and earnest themselves? Even the meretricious adornments of the churches of Genoa afford new evidence of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... touched upon but briefly in the short space of four acts. All this is narrated in the novel with a wealth of fascinating and absorbing detail, making it one of the most powerfully written and exciting works of fiction given to ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... a certain patriotic society of which he was an enthusiastic member, and he felt that he must attend it. After he had gone Pen tried to study, but he could not keep his thought on his work. Then he took up a stirring piece of fiction and began to read: but the most exciting scenes depicted in it floated hazily across his mind. His Aunt Millicent tried to engage him in conversation, but he either could not or did not wish to talk. At nine o'clock he said good-night to his aunt, and retired to his room. At half ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... these foreseen events are brought about. In trying this new ground, I am not turning my back in doubt on the ground which I have passed over already. My one object in following a new course is to enlarge the range of my studies in the art of writing fiction, and to vary the form in which I make my appeal to the reader, as ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... hitherto happened served so well to blacken the rulers of Greece in the eyes of the Entente publics, and the mystery which enveloped the affair facilitated the propagation of fiction. It was asserted that the surrendered troops amounted to 25,000—even to 40,000: figures which were presently reduced to "some 8,000: three divisions, each composed of three regiments of 800 men each." The surrender was represented as made by ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... in fiction so piteous as the words that tell of his dreary, mortal sorrow. "Then, Sir Launcelot never after ate but little meat, nor drank, but continually mourned until he was dead; and then he sickened more and more, and dried and dwined away; for the bishop nor none of his fellows ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... the serpent him. One from the wound, the other from the mouth Breath'd a thick smoke, whose vap'ry columns join'd. Lucan in mute attention now may hear, Nor thy disastrous fate, Sabellus! tell, Nor shine, Nasidius! Ovid now be mute. What if in warbling fiction he record Cadmus and Arethusa, to a snake Him chang'd, and her into a fountain clear, I envy not; for never face to face Two natures thus transmuted did he sing, Wherein both shapes were ready to assume The other's substance. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... stories in HARPER'S YOUNG PEOPLE have all the dramatic interest that juvenile fiction can possess, while they are wholly free from what is pernicious or vulgarly sensational. The humorous stories and pictures are full of innocent fun, and the papers on natural history and science, travel and the facts of life, are by writers whose names give the best assurance of accuracy and ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... of Fiction he would have to do a little Sherlocking and finally locate Katisha in one of those Places where they ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... between outside and inside, I beg of you, my dear sir. I hold that the ship is, at this identical moment, in the United States of America in a positive sense, as well as by a legal fiction; and I think Vattel will ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... what they wrote at the dictation of the Holy Spirit when on earth. They deny the divine origin of the Bible, and thus tear away the foundation of the Christian's hope, and put out the light that reveals the way to heaven. Satan is making the world believe that the Bible is a mere fiction, or at least a book suited to the infancy of the race, but now to be lightly regarded, or cast aside as obsolete. And to take the place of the word of God he holds out spiritual manifestations. Here is a channel wholly ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... pioneers. At missionary gatherings held in England the statement is often made to-day that the first Englishman to go out as a foreign missionary was William Carey, the leader of the immortal "Serampore Three." It is time to explode that fiction. For some years before William Carey was heard of a number of English Moravian Brethren had gone out from these shores as foreign missionaries. In Antigua laboured Samuel Isles, Joseph Newby, and Samuel Watson; in Jamaica, George ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... sublimated by his fiction that for the first time the jury was impressed in his favor. And when Ira Beasley limped across the room, and, extending his maimed hand to the prisoner, said, "Shake!" there was ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... alighted at a very comfortable hotel at Rochester. The amiable Morpheus soon claimed me as his own, nor was I well pleased when ruthlessly dragged from his soft embrace at 6-1/2 A.M. the following morning; but railways will not wait for Morpheus or any other deity of fancy or fiction; so, making the best use I could of a tub of water and a beefsteak, and calming my temper with a fragrant weed, I was soon ensconced in one of their cars, a passenger ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... a little fiction of mine, which seemed warranted by the circumstances, and had Penelope pressed me and asked me when her father had made such a definite statement I was ready to go to any extent with like imaginings if only I could keep her with me. She did not, and her cheerier ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... learning, even when the thing learned is uninteresting... yet... means should be taken of making it interesting and instructive and rhythmical.... It seems to me that we want what I may call a Latin novel or romance; that is, a pleasing tale of fiction, which shall convey numerous Latin words, which do not easily find a place in poetry, history, or philosophy.... If anyone had genius to produce, in Terentian style, Latin comedies worthy of engaging the minds and hearts of youth ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... first, when conquering York arose, To Henry meek she gave repose, Till late, with wonder, grief, and awe, Great Bourbon's relics, sad she saw. Truce to these thoughts!—for, as they rise, How gladly I avert mine eyes, Bodings, or true or false, to change, For Fiction's fair romantic range, Or for tradition's dubious light, That hovers 'twixt the day and night: Dazzling alternately and dim, Her wavering lamp I'd rather trim, Knights, squires, and lovely dames, to see Creation of my ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... interesting prisoner now in custody are, the Pilgrim's Progress, an Australian Summary of the Newgate Calendar, and the poetry of the late Dr. Watts. He has also expressed himself as pleased with Mrs. Humphrey Ward's latest work of fiction, though he does not quite approve of the theological ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 30, 1892 • Various
... ago the Clayton Magazines presented to lovers of Science Fiction everywhere a new magazine with a brand-new policy—Astounding Stories—and now it is the Editor's great pleasure to announce to our thousands of friends that this new magazine ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... much, Mr. Devitt, for this very intriguing story. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. And we want to keep in touch with you, and we want to keep hearing from you, because you have got a big ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... spoke her hand rested upon the little sack of tobacco, which responded accusingly to the touch of her restless fingers; and she found time to wonder why she was building up this fiction for Mr. Arthur Russell. His discovery of Walter's device for whiling away the dull evening had shamed and distressed her; but she would have suffered no less if almost any other had been the discoverer. In this gentleman, after hearing that he was Mildred's Mr. Arthur ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... the 'Correspondence of John, fourth Duke of Bedford,' and prefaced the letters with a biographical sketch. Quite early in his career he also tried his hand at fiction in 'The Nun of Arrouca,' a story founded on a romantic incident which occurred during his travels in the Peninsula. The book appeared in 1822, and in the same year—he was restless and ambitious of literary distinction ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... has the leisure at his disposal to ascertain the true facts of that period before the war, would present to the world a history so interesting and fascinating that he would be accused of having indulged in fiction in his narrative of events. It would be out of place in this book, however, to enter into these historical events, and we must confine ourselves to the details of the period with which this ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... restoration. For myself, I have no hesitation; I prefer in every case the ruined, however ruined, to the reconstructed, however splendid. What is left is more precious than what is added; the one is history, the other is fiction; and I like the former the better of the two—it is so much more romantic. One is positive, so far as it goes; the other fills up the void with things more dead than the void itself, inasmuch as they have never ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... imposition. There are some circumstances, which are sufficient to raise a question, but I think none of them are conclusive, and upon the whole I have little doubt of its authenticity. I shall be much mortified if it proves a fiction, not on account of the importance of the letter, but the stain that a practice so disingenuous will bring upon America. When I first left America, such a fiction, with all its ingenuity, would have ruined ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... Hentz too sincerely for the high and ennobling morality and Christian grace, which not only pervade her entire writings, but which shine forth with undimmed beauty in the new novel, Robert Graham. It sustains the character which is very difficult to well delineate in a work of fiction—a religious missionary. All who read the work will bear testimony to the entire success of ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... wanderings, too, Ned and Tom learned to know experimentally that truth is indeed stranger than fiction, and that if the writers of fairy-tales had travelled more they would have saved their imaginations a deal of trouble, ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... The Edinburgh Review: Jeffrey, Brougham, Smith The Ballantynes "Marmion" Jeffrey as a critic Quarrels of author and publishers; Quarterly Review Scott's poetry Duration of poetic fame Clerk of Sessions; Abbotsford bought "Lord of the Isles;" "Rokeby" Fiction; fame of great authors "Waverley" "Guy Mannering" Great popularity of Scott "The Antiquary" "Old Mortality;" comparisons "Rob Roy" Scotland's debt to Scott Prosperity; rank; correspondence Personal habits Life ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... called the Cytheria of the southern hemisphere, not only from the beauty and elegance of the women, but their being so deeply versed in, and so passionately fond of the Eleusinian mysteries; and what poetic fiction has painted of Eden, or Arcadia, is here realized, where the earth without tillage produces both food and cloathing, the trees loaded with the richest of fruit, the carpet of nature spread with the most odoriferous flowers, ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... mysterious picture. A boy of quick and enthusiastic temper grows up into youth in a dream of love. The lady of his mystic passion dies early. He dreams of her still, not as a wonder of earth, but as a saint in paradise, and relieves his heart in an autobiography, a strange and perplexing work of fiction—quaint and subtle enough for a metaphysical conceit; but, on the other hand, with far too much of genuine and deep feeling. It is a first essay; he closes it abruptly as if dissatisfied with his work, but with the resolution of raising at a future day a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... a nun once myself," she said, and began in a mixture of truth and fiction to prattle of a year she had spent in a convent. "I wanted to turn good, but didn't get very far. I am religious. Really I am. I can say so with a clear conscience. Anybody with whom I don't feel I could pray to God, is disgusting to me. Perhaps, after all, I shall end by being a nun, ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... pages claim no interest on the score of authenticity. They are no fiction founded on facts. They profess to be nothing but fiction, used as a vehicle for illustrating certain broad and fundamental truths in ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... much truth which the world has insisted was fiction, and so much fiction which has been received as truth, that, in the present instance, he is resolved to say nothing on the subject. Each of his readers is at liberty to believe just as much, or as little, of the matter here laid before him, or her, as may ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... just about the necklace." Then Lady Eustace explained the nature of her late husband's will, as far as it regarded chattels to be found in the Castle of Portray at the time of his death; and added the fiction, which had now become common to her, as to the necklace having been ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... Corsican lawyer, becoming in early manhood the master of the world, what could inflame youthful fiction more than this ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... her away, your majesty obliged me to turn fiction into fact, for I only knew her by speaking to her in various public places, and I had never ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... so amusing to the imagination, that the poets have personified her; and in their hands she has been the occasion of many a beautiful fiction. Nor need the gravest man be ashamed to appear taken with such a phenomenon, since it may become the subject ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... he considered, that, first of all, awe of the gods should be instilled into them, a principle of the greatest efficacy in dealing with the multitude, ignorant and uncivilized as it was in those times. But as this fear could not sink deeply into their minds without some fiction of a miracle, he pretended that he held nightly interviews with the goddess Egeria; that by her direction he instituted sacred rites such as would be most acceptable to the gods, and appointed their own priests for each of the deities. And, first ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... measure of public sympathy, and were warned or concealed by the population, even when they were not actively supported. The traditional outlaw who spared the poor and levied tribute on the rich was, no doubt, always a creature of fiction. The ballad which tells us how "Rich, wealthy misers were abhorred, By brave, free-hearted Bliss" (a rascal hanged for highway robbery at Salisbury in 1695) must have been a mere echo of the Robin Hood songs. But there have been times and countries in which the law and its administration have ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... MS. may prove to be Russell's original, as Mr Davenport has most kindly promised to let me copy and print it for the Society. Meantime it is possible to consider John Russell's Book of Norture as his own. For early poets and writers of verse seem to have liked this fiction of attributing their books to other people, and it is seldom that you find them acknowledging that they have imagined their Poems on their own heads, as Hampole has it in his Pricke of Conscience, p. 239, l. 8874 (ed. Morris, Philol. Soc.). Even Mr Tennyson makes believe that Everard Hall ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... Egypt was, to outward appearances, preserved, through the nominal possession by Smendes of the suzerainty; but, as a matter of fact, it had ceased to exist, and the fiction of the two kingdoms had become a reality for the first time within the range of history. Henceforward there were two Egypts, governed by different constitutions and from widely remote centres. Theban Egypt was, before all things, a community recognizing ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... with faire warnings might have beene reform'd, Not these unmanly rages. You have heard The fiction of the north winde and the sunne, 80 Both working on a traveller, and contending Which had most power to take his cloake from him: Which when the winde attempted, hee roar'd out Outragious blasts at him to force it off, That wrapt it closer on: when the calme ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... the "real thing," and therefore not at all the kind of Hudson's Bay officer that one ever meets in fiction. For instead of being a big, burly, "red-blooded brute," of the "he-man" type of factor—the kind that springs from nowhere save the wild imaginations of the authors who have never lived in the wilderness . . . he was just a real man . . . just a fine type ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... I! I only know that I love you so dearly that if you were the blackest villain to be found in fiction, it would make no difference ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... A slight fiction; but the boat had turned into the bay, and was following the curve of its shores, which certainly led down deep into the land from ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... of bread-fruit trees and wild plantains, whose sea of greenery was starred with the golden balls of innumerable orange trees; the whole place must really have been lifted bodily out of some boy's book, and put here to prove that writers of fiction occasionally tell the truth, for it seemed perfectly familiar to both of us. Certainly, the oranges were of the bitter Seville variety and were uneatable, and wild plantains are but an indifferent article of diet; still, they satisfied the ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... representation of Alfieri's Mirra, the two last acts of which threw me into convulsions. I do not mean by that word a lady's hysterics, but the agony of reluctant tears, and the choking shudder, which I do not often undergo for fiction. This is but the second time for any thing under reality: the first was on seeing Kean's Sir Giles Overreach. The worst was, that the 'Dama' in whose box I was, went off in the same way, I really believe more from fright than any other sympathy—at least ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... earlier than he did, he would not have dared to offer any excuse for not leading them in the pursuit, and he meant to avert all possibility of that. The reader understands by this time why the guide formulated such an astounding fiction when attempting to explain the cause of his delay. Had his listeners been in cooler mood, they might have tangled him up with a few questions, but their exasperation and ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... remorseless war which he waged against the innocent conjunction car, never to be admitted into polite literature, than for his encyclopaedic romance Polexandre, in which geography is illustrated by fiction, as copious as it is fantastic; yet it was something to annex for the first time the ocean, with all its marvels, to the scenery of adventure. Gombauld, the Beau Tenebreux of the Hotel de Rambouillet, secured a reading for his unreadable ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... education, but with respect to the progress made in science, and the prevailing manner of thinking. The degree of aesthetic culture, as displayed in architecture, sculpture, painting, dress, music, poetry, and fiction, should be described. Nor should there be omitted a sketch of the daily lives of the people—their food, their homes, and their amusements. And lastly, to connect the whole, should be exhibited ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... hands and leafed through the pages of a most attractive magazine, Everybody's Home. It was devoted to poetry, good fiction, and everything concerning home life from beef to biscuits, and ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... while the skirt showed a persistent tendency to sag at the back. When I fastened the last button of the horror and surveyed myself in the glass, I chuckled sardonically at the remembrance of heroines of fiction whose exquisite grace of outline refused to be concealed by the roughest of country garments. Certainly my grace did not survive the ordeal. What good looks I possessed suffered a serious eclipse even ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... work consists of a series of short chapters on books, authors, the circumstances in which they wrote, the moods in which they should be read to be appreciated, the nature and specific qualities of taste, poetry, fiction, the drama, history, and philosophy. The author's turn of mind is chiefly retrospective: he writes more in the spirit of the last age than of the present. Indeed, he seems too much inclined to ignore the value of our later literature; almost the only modern ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... better than human imbecility, were it not that humanity is, a more sacred thing than royalty. A satire upon such an embodiment of kingship is impossible, the simple and truthful characteristics being more effective than fiction or exaggeration. It would be unjust to exhume a private character after the lapse of two centuries merely to excite derision, but if history be not powerless to instruct, it certainly cannot be unprofitable to ponder the merits of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... for the prisoner: this offer also was peremptorily refused by the police inspector just as Ross's offer of night clothes had been refused. It is a common belief that in England a man is treated as innocent until he has been proved guilty, but those who believe this pleasant fiction, have never been in the hands of the English police. As soon as a man is arrested on any charge he is at once treated as if he were a dangerous criminal; he is searched, for instance, with every circumstance of indignity. Before his conviction a man is allowed ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... only chance to keep our wits is, that there are so few natural chords between others' voices and this string in our souls, and that those which at first may have jarred a little by and by come into harmony with it.— But I tell you this is no fiction. You may call the story of Ulysses and the Sirens a fable, but what will you say to Mario and the poor lady who ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... were twin sisters;' and again, 'There is always a certain quantity of fable in history, and there is always an element of history in one particular sort of fable.' The reviews of English and Anglo-Indian fiction, and of 'Heroic Poetry' in the present work, give opportunities of further illustrations from fiction of his views: which reappear from another standpoint in the 'Remarks on the Reading of History'—a ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... as it may appear (but truth, remember, is quite as fantastic as fiction), had proved another link in the chain of suspicious occurrences in which I had been mixed up prior to M. Zola's exile. Other curious little incidents had followed, and thus for many months I had been living—even as we lived long ago ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... grafted on this stock the notion of giants, enchanters, dragons, spells [f], and a thousand wonders, which still multiplied during the time of the crusades; when men, returning from so great a distance, used the liberty of imposing every fiction on their believing audience. These ideas of chivalry infected the writings, conversation, and behaviour of men, during some ages; and even after they were, in a great measure, banished by the revival of learning, they left modern GALLANTRY and the POINT OF HONOUR, which still ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... and earth to prevent his marrying Miss Light, and they have sent us word that he forfeits his property if he takes his wife out of a certain line. I have investigated the question minutely, and I find this is but a fiction to frighten us. He is perfectly free; but the estates are such that it is no wonder they wish to keep them in their own hands. For Italy, it is an extraordinary case of unincumbered property. The prince has been an orphan from his third year; he has therefore had a long minority and made no inroads ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... as the offspring of FICTION and LOVE. Men of learning have amused themselves with tracing the epocha of romances; but the erudition is desperate which would fix on the inventor of the first romance: for what originates in nature, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... read, she studied; going over a paragraph several times, until she had fully comprehended its subtleties of thought, and stored them away in her retentive memory for future use. During that year, I never knew her to read a work of fiction; but philosophy or science formed her daily nourishment; whilst brother, whenever he had a free evening, read aloud to Mary and I from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, sweetened now and then with a selection from Lord Byron or Mrs. Hemans—the two ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... Chronicle, our great historical novelist. When I first came to Reisenburg, now eight years ago, the popular writer of fiction was a man, the most probable of whose numerous romances was one in which the hero sold his shadow to a demon over the dice-box; then married an unknown woman in a churchyard; afterwards wedded a river nymph; and, having committed bigamy, finally ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... adventures or thrilling romance, is established at once by the very remarkable character of the Reverend Thomas Grey. The duty upon you to read them depends, as the prologue hints, upon whether you are greatly interested in life and not exclusively intent on fiction. When I realised that I must expect no more than an account, without climax, of years spent as a tale that is told, I accepted the conditions subject to certain terms of my own. The family must ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... of fiction said to me lately: "Did you ever think of the vital American way we live? We are always going after mental gymnastics." Now the mystery story is mental gymnastics. By the time the reader has followed a chain ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... of these lists present some diversity; and Credner supposes the Damasus-list a fiction. But Thiel has vindicated its authenticity. It is possible that some interpolations may exist in the last two; the first, which is the shortest, may well belong to the ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... and artistic study of striking power and literary quality which may well remain the high-water mark in American fiction for the year.... Mr. Harrison definitely takes his place as the one among our younger American novelists of whom the most enduring work may be hoped ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... terms. Otherwise our Spanish tour was, so far as we then knew, absolutely without incident; but when we got too far away to return we found that we had been among brigands as well as beggars, and all the Spanish picaresque fiction seemed to come true in the theft of a black chudda shawl, which had indeed been so often lost in duplicate that it was time it was entirely lost. Whether it was secretly confiscated by the customs, or was ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... on which this is related, is a model of skill in Fiction, properly so called. In Fictile art, in Fictile history, it is equally exemplary. 'Feigning' or 'affecting' in the most exquisite way by fastening intensely on ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... Dorothy might have prepared a harmless fiction with which his answers might not correspond. He assumed a calm and deliberation he was far from ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... romances containing several of the old favorites in the field of historical fiction, replete with powerful romances of love and diplomacy that excel in thrilling and ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... also furnish a most interesting example of how fiction may forestall and pre-figure actual scientific discovery. Dr. Swift made Gulliver, in his wonderful travels, discover two moons of Mars, revolving at a speed which he must have thought ridiculously fast. Many years afterward the American telescopes really ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... practical consequences which it produces, or which are expected from it. M. Comte can point to little of the nature of metaphysics in English politics, except "la metaphysique constitutionnelle," a name he chooses to give to the conventional fiction by which the occupant of the throne is supposed to be the source from whence all power emanates, while nothing can be further from the belief or intention of anybody than that such should really be the case. Apart from this, which is a matter of forms and words, and has no ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... "is an anachronism of which we must get rid. Among people who are proof against the suggestions of romantic fiction there can no longer be any question of the fact that military service produces moral imbecility, ferocity, and cowardice.... For permanent work the soldier is worse than useless; such efficiency as he has is the result of dehumanization and disablement. ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... historical authorship has said even of Walter Scott, who is so strong when he stands on Scottish soil, that in his Ivanhoe "there is a mistake in every line." With regard, however, to historical fiction, including poems, as well as novels and tales, the student will find in Mr. Justin Winsor's very learned and elaborate monograph (forming a distinct section of the catalogue of the Boston Public Library), the most full information up to the date of its publication. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... utterly unsuspected state of things: the—Magazine had already sold the proof sheets of the story to a third American house, and an expos of the situation showed that English publishers had been in the practice of selling the advance proofs of their most popular works of fiction to the American houses, and recouping the half of the price paid ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... the police will tell you nowadays that the old debt system has been abolished, and that girls are not allowed to be in debt to the house where they are kept, and it may be that a sort of fiction is maintained, by which, if an investigation were forced, the divekeeper would pretend to be an agent for the storekeeper that sells the supplies. But the condition of debt is none the less real, although as always it be fraudulent. The divekeeper, ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... little curious—sometimes to the verge of indiscretion. For his curiosity and inquiring interest in his fellow-men was easily aroused—particularly when they were less fortunately situated than he in a world where it is a favorite fiction that all are created equal. He was, in fact, that particular species of human nuisance known as a humanitarian; but he never dreamed he was a nuisance, and certainly ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers
... boy is represented in history by the youthful George Washington, who suffered through his inability to invent a plausible fiction, and by Benjamin Franklin, whose abnormal simplicity in the purchase of musical instruments has become proverbial. But history is not taken down in shorthand as it occurs, and it sometimes lags a little. The modern ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Devil lying in wait for the traveller, but there was Doubting Castle to pass, and Giant Despair, and the lions. We have in The Pilgrim's Progress almost every property of romantic adventure and terror. We want only a map in order to bring home to us the fact that it belongs to the same school of fiction as Treasure Island. There may be theological contentions here and there that interrupt the action of the story as they interrupt the interest of Grace Abounding. But the tedious passages are extraordinarily few, considering ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... find themselves in time pursuing mechanical work. Fate here, as in the matter of specialization, works her hand. A prominent publisher of technical magazines in New York took the degree of Arts in Cornell in his younger days; and more writers of fiction than you can shake a stick at once labored over civil-engineering plans as their chosen career. Herbert Hoover is a mining man who best revealed his capabilities in the field of traffic management—if the work which he supervised in Belgium may be so termed. ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... yet from your lover's wish retire; Doubt, yet discern; deny, and yet desire. Such, Polly, are your sex—part truth, part fiction, Some thought, much whim, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the eyes of the reader to the charm, the beauty, the mystery to be found in common life and in every-day objects. So alert and forceful an intelligence rarely applies its energy to fiction. The result is that he makes an almost hopelessly high standard. The exceptional man who comes after him may be a rival, but the majority of writing gentlemen can do little more than enviously admire. He seems to have established for himself such a rule as this, that he will write no page ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... request to aid her chauffeur in changing a tire: "I'll do it for you, Darling." And listening to that dominant voice in the next room, she slowly grew crimson before a vision of herself in the middle of a country road, appealing to a stranger for succor, like the heroine of melodramatic fiction. Decidedly, she would never see Lestrange, never let ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... the Narrative of Alvar Nunez Cabeca de Vaca, where for nearly three hundred years it had lain, musty and begrimed with the dust of ages, an unread and forgotten story of suffering that has no parallel in fiction. The distinguished antiquarian unearthed the valuable manuscript from its grave of oblivion, translated it into English, and gave it to the world of letters; conferring honour upon whom honour was due, and tearing the laurels from such grand voyageurs and discoverers as De Soto, ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... my private affairs. Thus I am quite unfettered by any former assertions of my own; and I may tell any story I please—with the one drawback hinted at already in the shape of a restraint. Whatever I may invent in the way of pure fiction, I must preserve the character in which I have appeared at Thorpe Ambrose; for, with the notoriety that is attached to my other name, I have no other choice but to marry Midwinter in my maiden name as ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... Anne Procter, a carefully expurgated edition of Shakespeare, with an inscription in the rector's handwriting on the flyleaf; Miss Strickland's "Lives of the Queens of England"; and several works of fiction belonging to the class which Mrs. Pendleton vaguely characterized as "sweet stories." Among the more prominent of these were "Thaddeus of Warsaw," a complete set of Miss Yonge's novels, with a conspicuously tear-stained volume of "The Heir of Redclyffe," and a romance or two by obscure but innocuous ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... fuchsia, be only partly fact and partly fiction I shall not pretend to determine; but the best authorities acknowledge that Mr. Lee, one of the founders of the Hammersmith Nursery, was the first to make the plant generally known in England and that he for some time got ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... notice that the cold-blooded, Crustacean and Batrachian books will sneer at sentiment; and the warm-blooded, human books, at sin. Then, in general, the more you can restrain your serious reading to reflective or lyric poetry, history, and natural history, avoiding fiction and the drama, the healthier your mind will become. Of modern poetry, keep to Scott, Wordsworth, Keats, Crabbe, Tennyson, the two Brownings, Thomas Hood, Lowell, Longfellow, and Coventry Patmore, whose "Angel in the House" is ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... blue, and the leaves of so bright a green, where the imagination is worked upon by Oriental scenery and magnificence, and the very air one breathes is laden with perfumes from the flower-fields and spice-groves of Araby the Blest, here is the land of fiction and reverie, and here I at times think that my new and most agreeable friend has laid me under a spell equally pleasant and potent in its effects—a spell from which I have neither wish nor ability to emancipate ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... to be a fiction, Mrs. Goodman made no remark, and hearing a slight noise behind, turned her head. Seeing her aunt's action, Paula also looked round. The door had been left ajar, and De Stancy was standing in the room. The last words of Mrs. Goodman, and Paula's ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... of it to the poor wretches, if we are to suppose it true? and what to the world—except, indeed, as a poetic study and a warning against degrading notions of God—if we are to take it simply as a fiction? Theology, disdaining both questions, has an answer confessedly incomprehensible. Humanity replies: Assume not premises for which you have worse ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... of artists of every description in England are not unapt to have such opening chapters as this; but the calling of a player alone has the grotesque element of fiction, with all the fantastic accompaniments of sham splendor thrust into close companionship with the sordid details of poverty; for the actor alone the livery of labor is a harlequin's jerkin lined with tatters, and the jester's ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... property of the conqueror, and being property, he could beget only property, which would accrue only to his owner. But there is no power in heaven or earth that can make a person a thing, a mere piece of merchandise, and it is only by a clumsy fiction, or rather by a bare-faced lie, that the law denies the slave his personality and treats him as a thing. I the unity of all men had been clearly seen and vividly felt, the law would never have attempted to justify perpetual slavery on the ground of its ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... "Fiction, however wild and fanciful, Is but the copy memory draws from truth. 'Tis not in human genius to create: The mind is but a mirror that reflects Realities that are, or the dim shadows Left by the past upon its placid ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the populace is never anything of the sort. It is dogged, slow, conservative, hard to move; it advances step by step, a patient, sure-footed beast of burden; and when once it has done a thing, it never goes back upon it. I believe this silly fiction of the "fickleness" of the mob is mainly due to the equally silly fictions of prejudiced Greek oligarchs about the Athenian assembly—which was an assembly of well-to-do and cultivated slave-owners. I do not swallow ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... awful physical visitations which have ever befallen the country must have long lingered; and, after all has been said, it is wonderful that the traces of them should be so exceedingly scanty in Chaucer's pages. Twice only in his poems does he refer to the Plague:—once in an allegorical fiction which is of Italian if not of French origin, and where, therefore, no special reference to the ravages of the disease IN ENGLAND may be intended when Death is said to have "a thousand ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... of the misers who, in life or in fiction, have been despoiled. Three only do I remember: Melanippus of Sicyon, Pierre Baudouin of Limoux, Silas Marner. Melanippus died of a broken heart. Pierre Baudouin hanged himself. The case of Silas Marner is more cheerful. He, coming into his cottage one night, saw by the dim light of the ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... listed in our catalogue books on every topic: Poetry, Fiction, Romance, Travel, Adventure, Humor, Science, History, Religion, Biography, Drama, etc., besides Dictionaries and Manuals, Bibles, Recitation and Hand Books, Sets, Octavos, Presentation Books and Juvenile and Nursery Literature in ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... It is neither dream nor fiction; though I love you dearly, or I would not have come. Absence and distance do nothing towards wearing out real affection; so you shall always find it in ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... recalled a sickening story of a man who was negligently buried alive. He had always believed that this was only a fireside fiction invented in the security of the chimney corner; but was it to have a strange confirmation in his own fate? He was pierced with pity for himself, as he heard the despair in his voice when he sent forth a wild, hoarse cry. What ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... pence per week each, for the improving opportunity of seeing her do it. She rented a small cottage, and Mr. Wopsle had the room up stairs, where we students used to overhear him reading aloud in a most dignified and terrific manner, and occasionally bumping on the ceiling. There was a fiction that Mr. Wopsle "examined" the scholars once a quarter. What he did on those occasions was to turn up his cuffs, stick up his hair, and give us Mark Antony's oration over the body of Caesar. This was always followed by Collins's Ode on the Passions, wherein I particularly ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... those days that far away from the dust of the grimy shelves, in the very middle of the room, there was a table with all the latest works of fiction in their gaudy bindings, a few volumes of poetry and a few memoirs. Close to this table Miss Milton sat, wrapped, in the warmest weather, in a thick shawl and knitting endless stockings. She hated children, myself in particular. She was also ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... handled a difficult theme with great skill, and produced a narrative of absorbing interest to scientist as well as layman. It reads like fiction, but it is not fiction; and this I state emphatically, knowing how prone the uninitiated are to doubt the truthfulness of descriptions ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... fine hand of the Iron Heel was apparent in every column. Glimmerings of weakness in the armor of the Oligarchy were given. Of course, there was nothing definite. It was intended that the reader should feel his way to these glimmerings. It was cleverly done. As fiction, those morning papers ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... that a grant is an executed contract over and done with—functus officio. This difficulty he meets by asserting that every grant is attended by an implied contract on the part of the grantor not to reassert his right to the thing granted. This, of course, is a palpable fiction on Marshall's part, though certainly not an unreasonable one. For undoubtedly when a grant is made without stipulation to the contrary, both parties assume ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... But works of fiction, as we all know, if only well gotten up, have always their advantages in the hearts of listeners over plain, homely truth; and so Captain Kittridge's yarns were marketable fireside commodities still, despite the skepticisms which ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... "This very sprightly novel on the stamp-collecting mania is most amusing, and might be just the thing for a present to young folks who are ardent collectors and readers of cheery, harmless fiction. It is excellently 'got up,' the illustrations are very good, and the story itself is quite exciting. All people who love (or loathe) stamp collecting are honestly advised to read the racy ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... copiously as orators; the writers of The Spirit of the Nation, that admirable collection of stirring poems, are journalists working in verse; and Carleton, falling under their influence, became a journalist working in fiction. In his pages, even when the debater ceases to argue and harangue, the style is still journalistic, except in those passages where his dramatic instinct puts living speech into the mouths of men and women. Politics so monopolise the minds of Irishmen, newspapers so make up ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... which Constantine most solemnly affirmed he saw in the heavens, near midday, is a subject involved in the greatest obscurities and difficulties. It is, however, an easy thing to refute those who regard this prodigy as a cunning fiction of the Emperor, or who rank it among fables; and also those who refer the phenomenon to natural causes, ingeniously conjecturing that the form of a cross appeared in a solar halo, or in the moon; and likewise those who ascribe the transaction to the power of God, who intended ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... as Ludwig Fulda with Rostand. The translations of Pushkin and of Lermontov have never impressed foreign readers in the superlative degree. The glory of English literature is its poetry; the glory of Russian literature is its prose fiction. ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... the inflictions upon slaves, are not hap-hazard assertions, nor the exaggerations of fiction conjured up to carry a point; nor are they the rhapsodies of enthusiasm, nor crude conclusions, jumped at by hasty and imperfect investigation, nor the aimless outpourings either of sympathy or poetry; but they are proclamations of deliberate, well-weighed convictions, produced by accumulations ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... expectancy, and read, with an absorbing interest, the truth that now seemed stranger than any fiction. ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline: Which for that I conceived shoulde be most plausible and pleasing, being coloured with an historicall fiction, the which the most part of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter then for profite of the ensample, I chose the historye of King Arthure, as most fitte for the excellency of his person, being made famous by many mens former ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... Street. The populace followed the vehicle closely, but evinced no active desire to effect a rescue. Rumors of the story soon circulated all over the city. Nor were they exaggerated, as is usually the case. For once, reality surpassed the wildest thought of fiction. ...
— The Fugitive Slave Law and Its Victims - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 18 • American Anti-Slavery Society
... mankind. But the dialogue of this authour is often so evidently determined by the incident which produces it, and is pursued with so much ease and simplicity, that it seems scarcely to claim the merit of fiction, but to have been gleaned by diligent selection out of common ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... a corner of the veranda he was surprised that the interview had made so little impression on him, and had so little altered his conviction. His discovery that the announcement of his betrothed's death was a fiction did not affect the fact that though living she was yet dead to him, and apparently by her own consent. The contrast between her life and his during those five years had been covertly accented by Mrs. Van Loo, whether intentionally ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... capitulation, a fast frigate left for England, bearing the news of victory, together with the embalmed body of the gallant general to whom it was due. Though the event was celebrated there with bonfires and shouts of triumph, yet the nation's tears could not be restrained. "The incidents of dramatic fiction," writes Walpole in his Memoirs of George II., "could not be conducted with more address to lead an audience from despondency to sudden exultation, than accident prepared to excite the passions of a whole people. They despaired, they triumphed, and they ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... interest might be compiled upon the origin of popular fiction, and the transmission of similar tales from age to age, and from country to country. The mythology of one period would then appear to pass into the romance of the next century—and that, into the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... State agents; nor the bloody oaths and forfeitures by which the members are bound together; nor the places of their annual meetings; nor a thousand other particulars, more startling than anything in fiction or history. Nor will I enumerate the great number of convictions of members of this gang for various offences through Mr. Sidney's efforts. Prosecuting no other parties than these,—thwarting them in those defences ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... familiar friends; there they would give festivals of delicious fruit; there they would hear lightsome music intermingled with the strains of pathos which make joy more sweet; there they would read poetry and fiction and permit their own minds to flit away in day-dreams and romance; there, in short—for why should we shape out the vague sunshine of their hopes?—there all pure delights were to cluster like roses among the pillars of the edifice and ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... as might be expected, deficient both in correctness and extent, resting, as it did, on the statements of classical and patristic writers, on hearsay and on oral communication. In the accounts of the classic writers, especially in those of Pliny, Strabo, Ptolemy, truth and fiction were already strangely blended. Still more was this the case with such compilers and encyclopaedists as Solinus, Cassiodorus and Isidorus of Sevilla, on whom the mediaeval scholar depended largely for information. ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... the same historical level as Les Borgias, much of which it supplied. Like Crimes Celebres, Tommasi's book is invested with a certain air of being a narrative of sober fact; but like Crimes Celebres, it is none the less a work of fiction. ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... Neptune in Master Harry's blood preserved him from these doctrines, and before long indeed removed him out of the way of hearing them. Soon after his fifteenth birthday he sailed to learn his profession shipping (by a fiction of the service), as "cabin boy" under his mother's brother. Lord Robert Soules, ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... he settled down to the manufacture of mercantile fiction, had ideas of a nobler sort, which bore their fruit in a slender book of poems. In subject they are either erotic, mythologic, or descriptive of nature. So polished are they that the mind seems to slide over them: so faultless in form that the critics hailed ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... he is only writing about himself. But the disclosure is not complete. He remains, to a certain extent, a figure behind the veil; a suspected rather than a seen presence—a movement and a voice behind the draperies of fiction. In these personal notes there is no such veil. And I cannot help thinking of a passage in the "Imitation of Christ" where the ascetic author, who knew life so profoundly, says that "there are persons esteemed on their reputation who by showing themselves ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... of romances came to an end (1719), and Jean Jacques and his father fell back on the more solid and moderated fiction of history and biography. The romances had been the possession of the mother; the more serious books were inherited from the old minister, her father. Such books as Nani's History of Venice, and Le Sueur's History of the ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... ago, when the noble activities of science and its inspiring discoveries were taking possession of the minds of men and revealing possibilities of power of which they had not dreamed, the prediction was freely made that poetry and fiction had had their day, and that henceforth men would be educated upon facts and get their inspirations from what are called real things. So engrossing and so marvellous were the results of investigation, the achievements of experiment, that it seemed to many as if the ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... in the first part of this tale should be of peculiar interest to the student of Shakspeare as well as to those engaged in tracing the genealogy of popular fiction. Jonathan Scott has given—for reasons of his own—a meagre abstract of a similar tale which occurs in the "Bahar-i- Danish" (vol. iii. App., p. 291), ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... led into the error of supposing that the first edition of the "Amadis" was printed at Seville, in 1526, from detached fragments appearing in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, and subsequently by Montalvo, at Salamanca, in 1547. See History of Prose Fiction, vol. ii. chap. 10. ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... this contempt for the dandyism and dilettantism of an earlier generation Moussorgsky strove to give expression in his music, as Perov expressed it in painting, as Tchernichevsky, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoi expressed it in fiction. We may disagree with his aesthetic principles, but we must confess that he carried out with logical sequence and conviction a considerable portion of his programme. In his sincere efforts to attain great ends he undoubtedly overlooked the means. He could never submit to the discipline of a ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... indeed, to guard against such a supposition; and has been as scrupulously correct in the citation of his authorities, as if he were the compiler of a true history, and thought his reputation would be ruined by the imputation of a single fiction. There is not a prodigy, accordingly, or a description, for which he does not fairly produce his vouchers, and generally lays before his readers the whole original passage from which his imitation has been taken. In this way, it turns out, that the book is entirely composed of scraps, borrowed ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... those whom he met had heard of the bird. So he returned to the emperor, and said that it must be a fable, invented by those who had written the book. "Your imperial majesty," said he, "cannot believe everything contained in books; sometimes they are only fiction, or what is called ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... a fiction; she was better walking—such aches, and cramps, and pains in every joint! She would get up and push on, and yet minute after minute went by, and she ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... hold communion With all that is divine, To feel that there is union 'Twixt nature's heart and mine; To profit by affliction, Reap truth from fields of fiction, Grow wiser ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... that led him to vote for Buchanan. Others shrank from trusting the helm in a tempest to hands as untried as Fremont's. The mob who hated "niggers" swelled the opposition vote. Taking advantage of the Know-nothing feeling, the fiction was persistently circulated that Fremont was a Catholic. The disorder in Kansas was pacified by the dispatch of a new Governor, Geary, to reassure the North. Finally, money was spent on a scale unknown before to defeat the ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... "Oh, not fiction, not by any means. Work that requires the exercise of the merely intellectual powers, not that fatal creative-spot. But will you promise, Miss Percy? Will you permit me to make sure that ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... himself. He was born in Raleigh, in North Carolina, in 1868, studied law at the State University, and went to the Bahamas in 1885 with the members of a government coast survey commission. Gave up the practice of law and "went in" for fiction and the study of the ethnology of North America about 1887. He ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... discountenance of this marriage, and charged with wilfully falsifying facts, because we insisted that this affair was in contemplation, and would yet go off. Prof. Allen denied it, and others thought that they had the most positive assurance from his statements that the amalgamation wedding was a fiction. But now, after he and his white brethren have liberally impugned our motives, charged falsehood upon us, and made solemn asseverations designed to make the public believe that no such thing was in contemplation, in two brief months, the thing ...
— The American Prejudice Against Color - An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily The Nation Got - Into An Uproar. • William G. Allen
... "real thing," and therefore not at all the kind of Hudson's Bay officer that one ever meets in fiction. For instead of being a big, burly, "red-blooded brute," of the "he-man" type of factor—the kind that springs from nowhere save the wild imaginations of the authors who have never lived in the wilderness . . . he was just a real man . . . just a fine type of Hudson's Bay ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... article, would have us believe that the causes which led up to his retirement from active life whilst yet in the enjoyment of his vigorous intellect, are due partly to the change which has befallen "the literature of fiction during the last thirty years," but principally to the fact of his embracing the temperance movement with more zeal than discretion. As a matter of fact, however, long before this step had been taken, there had been causes equally potent at work ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... can equally excel E'en in this noble part, This shining branch of thy expressive art, To it's own happy labour we appeal, To that rich piece whose pleasing fiction And splendid tints with full conviction Strike the spectator, while he views THALIA and the tragick muse, Each eager on her side t' engage Th' unrivall'd Roscius of the British ...
— A Pindarick Ode on Painting - Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq. • Thomas Morrison
... Canadian delegation was Mr., afterwards Sir, Alexander Galt, the son of the creator of that original character in fiction, Laurie Todd, who had been a resident for many years in Western Canada, where a pretty city perpetuates his name. His able son had been for a long time a prominent figure in Canadian politics, and was distinguished ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... powers under the patent which enabled the first lord to take immediate action in matters that concerned the public safety. It is not surprising that this peculiar feature of admiralty administration should have attracted adverse criticism, and have led some minds to regard the Board as "a fiction not worth keeping ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... choicest themes from the field of our sentiments. The sentiment of friendship has given us our David and Jonathan, our Damon and Pythias, and our Tennyson and Hallam. The sentiment of love has inspired countless masterpieces; without its aid most of our fiction would lose its plot, and most of our poetry its charm. Religious sentiment inspired Milton to write the world's greatest epic, "Paradise Lost." The sentiment of patriotism has furnished an inexhaustible theme for the writer and the orator. Likewise if we go into the field of music and art, ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... a very delightful fiction, which may have blossomed from fact, which used to be found in schoolbooks, under the title of "The Story of Franklin's Return to his ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... longer say that this famous axiom "No one is supposed to be ignorant of the law" is a fiction. Let us ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... thinking very intent and busy, still that toy runs in their mind, that fear, that suspicion, that abuse, that jealousy, that agony, that vexation, that cross, that castle in the air, that crotchet, that whimsy, that fiction, that pleasant waking dream, whatsoever it is. Nec interrogant (saith [2523]Fracastorius) nec interrogatis recte respondent. They do not much heed what you say, their mind is on another matter; ask what you will, they do not attend, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... hurried home with it beneath her rokelay. This year the dashing banker's choice was a lady's novel called "I Love My Love with an A," and it was a frivolous tale, those being before the days of the new fiction, with its grand discovery that women have an equal right with men to grow beards. The hero had such a way with him and was so young (Miss Ailie could not stand them a day more than twenty) that the school-mistress was enraptured and scared at every page, ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... did not live to finish. The character of Pickle, indeed, like that of the Master of Ballantrae, is alluring to writers of historical romance. Resisting the temptation to use Pickle as the villain of fiction, I have tried to tell his story with fidelity. The secret, so long kept, of Prince Charles's incognito, is divulged no less by his own correspondence in the Stuart MSS. than by ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... greatest French monarch of them all. The scene in which D'Artagnan goes to the scene of the duel between De Wardes and De Guiche, and from the forensic evidence manages to piece together the details exactly, predates the classic detective fiction that was becoming popular in the States with Edgar Allen Poe's murders in the Rue Morgue. He has learned to maneuver in royal circles with infinite grace and delicacy, and until the end he boasts that he can always make the king do what ...
— Dumas Commentary • John Bursey
... single combats, leaped from cliffs into space or across bridgeless chasms, took part in dozens of sets illustrating scenes of frontier life as Billy Threewit conceived these. Sometimes Steve smiled. The director's ideas had largely been absorbed in New York from reading Western fiction. But so long as he drew down his two-fifty a day and had plenty of fun doing it, Steve was no stickler for naked realism. The "bad men" of Yeager's acquaintance had usually been quiet, soft-spoken citizens, notable chiefly for a certain chilliness of the ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... will do nothing as long as I possibly can. With David Balfour I am very well pleased; in fact these labours of the last year—I mean Falesa and D. B., not Samoa, of course—seem to me to be nearer what I mean than anything I have ever done; nearer what I mean by fiction; the nearest thing before was Kidnapped. I am not forgetting the Master of Ballantrae, but that lacked all pleasurableness, and hence was imperfect in essence. So you see, if I am a little ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is, "Shall we read novels?" I reply, there are novels that are pure, good, Christian, elevating to the heart, and ennobling to the life. But I have still further to say, that I believe three-fourths of the novels in this day are baneful and destructive to the last degree. A pure work of fiction is history and poetry combined. It is a history of things around us, with the licenses and the assumed names of poetry. The world can never repay the debt which it owes to such fictitious writers as Hawthorne, Mackenzie, and Landor and Hunt, and others whose names are ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... off the little band in the boats. Drake heard these conversations, and saw his young men getting out of hand, and "thought it best to put these conceits out of their heads." As the moon rose he persuaded them "that it was the day dawning"—a fiction made the more easy by the intervention of the high land between the watchers and the horizon. By the growing light the boats stole farther in, arriving "at the towne, a large hower sooner than first was purposed. For wee ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... objection is to the narrowness attributed in the tale to the river St. Clair. This was done in the license usually accorded to a writer of fiction, in order to give greater effect to the scene represented as having occurred there, and, of course, in no way intended as a geographical description of the river, nor was it necessary. In the same spirit and for the same purpose it ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... the slightest chance of its becoming a "classic") written by G. STUART OGILVIE, entitled Hypatia, and "founded on KINGSLEY'S celebrated Novel," which "celebrated Novel" is, for me at least, not only "celebrated," but "remarkable," as being one of the very few works of fiction (excepting always the majority of KINGSLEY'S works) completely baffling my powers ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various
... passion; for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. Passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of rough "satyrs and fauns with cloven heel." Where there is leisure for fiction, there is ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... friends of the family I have been told that Mr. Browning had a strong liking for children, with whom his really remarkable faculty of impromptu fiction made him a particular favourite. Sometimes he would supplement his tales by illustrations with pencil or brush. Miss Alice Corkran has shown me an illustrated coloured map, depictive of the main incidents and ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... oil. A castor was a sort of title of nobility, and this one always lifted me in the opinions of every one that sat down at my table. Magnus said he was sure Christina would be tickled yust plumb to death with it. Ah! Christina was a wonderful legal fiction, as N.V. calls it. How many times Virginia's ears must have burned as we tenderly discussed the poor yellow-haired peasant girl far off there by the ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... well; and seemed to suffer even less than did her aunt. She had done nothing to spread abroad among the public of Hadley that fiction as to Sir Omicron's opinion which her lord had been sedulous to disseminate in London. She had said very little about herself, but she had at any rate said nothing false. Nor had she acted falsely; or ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... dishonest literary men, dishonest publicans, dishonest tradesmen. But we must believe that in all occupations honesty is the rule, and dishonesty the exception. At all events, it is better that we should know what the manufacturers really are,—from fact rather than from fiction. ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... In fiction it is difficult to avoid giving children false ideas of virtue, and still more difficult to keep the different virtues in their due proportions. This should be attended to with care in all books for young people; nor should we sacrifice the understanding to the enthusiasm ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... subconscious was not present in the effort, and thereby no memory was retained. This may seem to be the plot of an unimaginative writer to escape the use of that faculty, but as these are nothing but my written memories, and I make no claims of producing good fiction, I will leave that hall primarily to ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... entrance, and the great Jeffersonian stood up, bowing, bowing. The green light on one side and the red on the other gave to his face a Gargantuan aspect rather than that of a Quixote, to whom he was more often likened than to any other character in fiction. The police cleared a pathway for the great man, and he hurried up the steps. Another cheer, and another blast from the band. Great is ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... says Douglas Jerrold on the subject? "There are three things that no man but a fool lends, or, having lent, is not in the most helpless state of mental crassitude if he ever hopes to get back again. These three things, my son, are—BOOKS, UMBRELLAS, and MONEY! I believe a certain fiction of the law assumes a remedy to the borrower; but I know of no case in which any man, being sufficiently dastard to gibbet his reputation as plaintiff in such a suit, ever fairly succeeded against the wholesome prejudices of society. Umbrellas may be ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... because being of a merely instantaneous nature?—No, we reply. Since its nature, its origination, and its destruction are all alike fictitious, we have clearly to search for another agency capable of destroying that avidya which is the cause of the fiction of its destruction!—Let us then say that the essential nature of Brahman itself is the destruction of that cognition!—From this it would follow, we reply, that such 'terminating' knowledge would not arise at all; for that the destruction of what is something permanent can clearly ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... George Eliot's more elaborate works, the illustrations of the great moral purpose we have assigned to her are so numerous and varied, that it is not easy to select from among them. On the one hand, Dinah Morris—one of the most exquisitely serene and beautiful creations of fiction—and Seth and Adam Bede present to us, variously modified, the aspect of that life which is aiming toward the highest good. On the other hand, Arthur Donnithorne and Hetty Sorrel—poor little vain and shallow-hearted ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... no ill of all this, as of course he ought to have thought. He was not the ravening lion of fiction—so rarely, if ever, to be met with in real life—going about seeking whom he might devour. He had absolutely no designs on Beatrice's affections, any more than she had on his, and he had forgotten that first fell prescience of evil to come. Once or twice, ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... amiable and excellent was drawn out. I was as recluse as ever I had been at the convent, but how different was my seclusion. My time was spent in storing my mind with lofty and poetical ideas; in meditating on all that was striking and noble in history or fiction; in studying and tracing all that was sublime and beautiful in nature. I was always a visionary, imaginative being, but now my reveries and imaginings all ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... apprehension. In 1680 Lo-zang died but his death was a state secret. It was apparently known in Tibet and an infant successor was selected but the Desi continued to rule in Lo-zang's name and even the Emperor of China had no certain knowledge of his suspected demise but probably thought that the fiction of his existence was the best means of keeping the Mongols in order. It was not until 1696 that his death and the accession of a youth named ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... believe thy story, Cannot trust thy tale of wonder, Till I see the blooming fir-tree, With its many emerald branches, With its Bear and golden moonlight." This is Wainamoinen's answer: "Wilt thou not believe my story? Come with me and I will show thee If my lips speak fact or fiction." Quick they journey to discover, Haste to view the wondrous fir-tree; Wainamoinen leads the journey, Ilmarinen closely follows. As they near the Osmo-borders, Ilmarinen hastens forward That be may behold the wonder, Spies the Bear Within the fir-top, ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... conclusion that the average musical Boswell is a fraud, a snare, a pitfall, and a delusion. The way to go about being one is simple. First acquaint yourself with a few facts in the lives of great musicians, then, on a slim framework, plaster with fiction till the structure fairly trembles. Never fear. The publishers will print it, the public will devour it, especially if it be anecdotage. Let me reveal the working of the musical fiction mill. Here, for example, is something in the ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... in India. But, politically, Scotland, till the Reform Bill, had scarcely a recognisable existence. The electorate was tiny, and great landholders controlled the votes, whether genuine or created by legal fiction—"faggot votes." Municipal administration in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was terribly corrupt, and reform was demanded, but the French Revolution, producing associations of Friends of the People, who were prosecuted and grievously punished in trials for sedition, did not afford ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... bugbear, nightmare. flying Dutchman, great sea serpent, man in the moon, castle in the air, pipe dream, pie-in-the-sky, chateau en Espagne [Fr.]; Utopia, Atlantis^, happy valley, millennium, fairyland; land of Prester John, kindgom of Micomicon; work of fiction &c (novel) 594; Arabian nights^; le pot au lait [Fr.]; dream of Alnashar &c (hope) 858 [Obs.]. illusion &c (error) 495; phantom &c (fallacy of vision) 443; Fata Morgana &c (ignis fatuus) 423 [Lat.]; vapor &c (cloud) 353; stretch of the imagination ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... seek all that the student requires—they have still made laudable progress. The paintings of Washington Allston are the most noteworthy lions in Boston; the statues of Powers command admiration even in London. In prose fiction, the sweet sketches of Irving have acquired a renown second only to that of the agreeable essayists whom he took for his models, while the Indian and naval romances of Cooper are purchased at liberal prices by the chary bibliopoles of England, and introduced to the Parisian public ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... justified, since it is a regrettable fact that the taxi-cab driver's wife made "Hermione" rhyme with "bone," and laid no stress on the second syllable. Strong in her superior knowledge, for she was an omnivorous reader of fiction—and Greek names were fashionable last November—she ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... metaphorically speaking, the axe falls, some added strength is given to the spirit which, granted bodily health, can fight and go on fighting an apparently overwhelming foe. This is one of the most wonderful miracles of Human Life, and I have myself seen so many instances of it that I know it to be no mere fiction of an optimistic desire, but an acknowledged fact. And this miracle applies to nations as well as to individuals. In Maurice Maeterlinck's new volume of essays there is one on "The Power of the Dead." "Our memories are to-day," he writes, "peopled by a multitude of ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... it is not strange," said I to the Councillor, for when there was no one in sight or very near us I rode with him instead of behind him, "that the man who shakes at every breeze among the aspens should take such pains to create the fiction and shadow of terror about him, when the substance and reality is dominant all the while in ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... stones of the quay. Her good-natured, plain face lit up as she realized the delight of the scene upon which her eyes rested; and it was with a little pang, her mind aglow with characters and events from history and from fiction, that she turned away to enter Dr ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... was, to outward appearances, preserved, through the nominal possession by Smendes of the suzerainty; but, as a matter of fact, it had ceased to exist, and the fiction of the two kingdoms had become a reality for the first time within the range of history. Henceforward there were two Egypts, governed by different constitutions and from widely remote centres. Theban Egypt was, before ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... description will surpass All fiction, painting, or dumb shew of horror, That ever ears yet ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... continent, and to every great city; it lights up our streets and public halls; it drives our engines and propels our trains. But the powers of imagination, the great literary powers of poetry, and of eloquent prose,— especially in the domain of fiction,— have not decreased because science has grown. They have rather shown stronger developments. We must, at the same time, remember that a great deal of the literary work published by the writers who lived, or ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... or usual, and it may be that it never will become a custom. On the other hand, it surely will be a pleasure to a young author, if, after a perusal of his thoughts, they who are his co-workers and successful precursors in the wide domain of poetry, fiction, or of history, should see fit to award him an expression of thanks for his contribution to the intellectual delight or to the knowledge of his time. They only, whose labours have met with the best reward—the praise of their contemporaries—can take the ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... Merritt's letters were published in the Rochester Democrat, and the city took sides in the conflict, some papers claiming that his letters were fiction. Susan wrote Merritt, "How much rather would I have you at my side tonight than to think of your daring and enduring greater hardships even than our Revolutionary heroes. Words cannot tell how often we think of you or how sadly we feel that the terrible crime of ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... said Albert, "to hear such words proceed from the mouth of any one but an actress on the stage, and one needs constantly to be saying to one's self, 'This is no fiction, it is all reality,' in order to believe it. And how does France appear in your eyes, accustomed as they have been to gaze on such ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... gave may be a fiction, but it is admitted by those who know the native Scotch and Irish tongues, and have dwelt where no other language is spoken, that there are poems which have been transmitted from generation to generation (orally it must be, since letters are ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... relations of father and son; the unjust oppression of the people by the officials in a land where the citizen is without the legal rights fundamental in American government; and, lastly, the "Arabian Nights" like flavor of this typically Chinese piece of fiction. ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... being a Critical Account of the most Celebrated Prose Works of Fiction, from the Earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Day. 3 vols. crown 8vo. Calf, gilt, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 19, Saturday, March 9, 1850 • Various
... all. Of their distinguished author the Saturday Review, London, says, "He enjoys the greatest celebrity among living Swedish writers;" and R. H. Stoddard has styled them "the most important and certainly the most readable series of foreign fiction that has been translated into English for many years." They should stand on the shelves of every library, public and private, beside the works of Sir ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... found in this book, which is recommended and esteemed by the leaders of society, both in the Four Hundred and out. Or I read a good book, a list of five hundred of which may be found on page 336, 'The Reader's Guide,' giving advice in selecting fiction, history, philosophy, religious works, poetry, et cetery, the whole selected by eight of the most eminent professors of literature in our colleges and universities, both at home and abroad. Or I indulge in conversation, in which what better guide than is ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... first who opposed it, seeing no way of avoiding the meaning of the words in Rev. 20th, denied the authenticity of the Apocalypse, and claimed that it was written by one Cerenthus, a heretic, for the very purpose of sustaining what they called "his fiction of the reign of Christ on earth." This doctrine is not now evaded in this way, but by spiritualizing the language of the Apocalypse, and thus finding a meaning in it which is not expressed by any of ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... inspire imagination, whether in truth or fiction; that elevate the thoughts, are the right kind to read. Our emotions are simply the vibrations ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... friend walking, must dismount before venturing to salute him. However to obviate the constant inconvenience of so doing, the foot-passenger is in duty bound to screen his face as above; and thus, by a fiction which deceives nobody, much unnecessary ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... a Paradise Press, at which all the valuable publications of Mr. Murray and Mr. Colburn are reprinted as regularly as at Philadelphia; and delicately insinuates that Thalaba and the Curse of Kehama are among the number. What a contrast does this absurd fiction present to those charming narratives which Plato and Cicero prefixed to their dialogues! What cost in machinery, yet what poverty of effect! A ghost brought in to say what any man might have said! The glorified spirit of a great statesman and philosopher ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... other lacks to make an interesting narrative having for background the introduction of the Inquisition to Castile. The denouement I supply is entirely fictitious, and the introduction of Torquemada is quite arbitrary. Ojeda was the inquisitor who dealt with both cases. But if there I stray into fiction, at least I claim to have sketched a faithful portrait of the Grand Inquisitor as I know him from fairly exhaustive researches ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... that are held up to admiration, whether in fiction or biography, will be found to possess these domestic accomplishments; and, if they are considered indispensable in the Old World, how much more are they needed, in this land of independence, where riches cannot exempt the mistress of a family from ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... periodicals as "Household Words" and the "Family Herald" contain scientific matters, treated in a manner to popularize science, all real lovers of philosophy must feel gratified; a little fiction, a little metaphor, is expected, and is accepted with the good intention with which it is given, in such popular prints; but when the "Journal of the Society of Arts" reprints quotations from such sources, without modifying or correcting their expressions, it conveys to its readers a tissue ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... whispered in his daughter's ear. She rose from her seat, but her light figure swayed to and fro like a slender tree before the advancing storm, and her lovely face was pale as that of a statue, just leaving the hand of the sculptor. Therese's fear of lightning was no fiction, and she almost sank to the floor as a livid flash glanced across the form of the emperor, and enveloped him in a sheet of living flame. Unheeding it, he moved on toward the unhappy girl, and without a word or a look extended his hand. Therese, ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... reply, assured me that the dedication was written by Lord Byron himself, and showed it me in his own hand. I wrote to Rose to mention the thing to Bankes, as it might have made mischief had the story got into the circle. Byron was disposed to think all men of imagination were addicted to mix fiction (or poetry) with their prose. He used to say he dared believe the celebrated courtezan of Venice, about whom Rousseau makes so piquante a story, was, if one could see her, a draggle-tailed wench enough. I believe that he embellished his own amours considerably, and that ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... which was not, on that account, the less gladly received. Do believe how much it pleases me always to see and read dear Mrs. Martin's handwriting. But I must try to tell you some less ancient truths. We are still in the ruinous house. Without any poetical fiction, the walls are too frail for even me, who enjoy the situation in a most particularly particular manner, to have any desire to pass the winter within them. One wind we have had the privilege of hearing ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... sportsman, there was nothing to induce people to penetrate into the fastnesses of the great snowy range. No more, therefore, being heard of Erewhon, my father's book came to be regarded as a mere work of fiction, and I have heard quite recently of its having been seen on a second-hand ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... expected them, and so forth. This defence is enough, but it is easy to amplify and reintrench it. It is not by any means the fact that the Picaresque novel of adventure is the only or the chief form of fiction which prescribes or admits these episodic excursions. All the classical epics have them; many eastern and other stories present them; they are common, if not invariable, in the abundant mediaeval ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... teaching. After his resumption of French citizenship he was elected a member of the Academy (1881), and having received the Legion of Honour in 1870, he was promoted to be officer of the order in 1892. He died on the 1st of July 1899. Cherbuliez was a voluminous and successful writer of fiction. His first book, originally published in 1860, reappeared in 1864 under the title of Un Cheval de Phidias: it is a romantic study of art in the golden age of Athens. He went on to produce a series of novels, of which the following are the best known:—Le Comte ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... which killed a moose with seven-foot horns. There never was a black bear ever killed any moose, and there never was any moose with horns that wide. Such things are nonsense—like a great part of the magazine animal fiction." ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... is incapable of affording pleasure, will receive no delight from the present publication. The editor apprehends that, in the judgment of those best qualified to decide upon the comparison, these Letters will be admitted to have the superiority over the fiction of Goethe. They are the offspring of a glowing imagination, and a heart penetrated with the passion ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... sounded beautiful in your voice, and I'm sure it is. In fact I know it is. But I simply don't understand that type of fiction; I have no key to it. So my mind wandered a little. I listened to the lovely sounds your voice made, and watched the firelight on your hair. You were like a Dutch interior—quite a new aspect, as I said—and I got ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
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