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More "Rhetoric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hearty letter. I spent many hours over the few paragraphs I sent to "Nature," in trying to express what all who thoroughly knew and therefore loved Darwin, must feel in language which should be absolutely free from rhetoric or exaggeration. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... ridicule? The Academie is above the fear of it; and as for me, a butt and a beggar as I must be, I shall have the proud satisfaction of having protected my personal honour and the dignity of history. I ask no more.' Honest Crocodilus! In the beat of his rhetoric was a sound of pure probity, which rang strangely where all around was padded with compromise and concealment. Suddenly the usher announced, 'Four o'clock, gentlemen.' Four o'clock! and they had not finished the arrangements ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... it—least of all a combative fellow like Lamennais—it would be a perpetual solitary confinement. Such a cry is merely a theatrical way of saying that he felt tired. Yet it is such sayings which impress people, because men love rhetoric." ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sophist who taught rhetoric at Rome in the time of Hadrian. He is the author of a collection of proverbs in ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... Filium was the general title of a didactic work containing rules for medicine, husbandry, and rhetoric (e.g. 'Rem tene, verba sequentur'). Cf. Quint. iii. 1, 19, 'Romanorum primus, quantum ego quidem sciam, condidit aliqua in hanc materiam (rhetoric) ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... experimental philosopher. The task assigned to Charles Boyle was to prepare a new edition of one of the most worthless books in existence. It was a fashion, among those Greeks and Romans who cultivated rhetoric as an art, to compose epistles and harangues in the names of eminent men. Some of these counterfeits are fabricated with such exquisite taste and skill that it is the highest achievement of criticism to distinguish them from originals. Others are so feebly and rudely executed that ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... succeeded Bibracte as capital of the Aedui when Gaul was reorganized by Augustus. Under the Romans, it was a flourishing town, covering double its present extent and renowned for its schools of rhetoric. In the succeeding centuries its prosperity drew upon it the attacks of the barbarians, the Saracens and the Normans. The counts of Autun in 880 became dukes of Burgundy, and the town was the residence of the latter till 1276. It was ravaged by the English in 1379, and, in 1591, owing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... pauses, breathing, and pitch of voice, that are very important, none of these can take the place of soul in an address. When I have an address to deliver, I like to forget all about the rules for the proper use of the English language, and all about rhetoric and that sort of thing, and I like to make the audience forget ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... Harold's talk with Rose, and he made the fatal mistake of concluding, from her remarks, that Eleanor had changed her mind after sending the telegram and had not come to Chicago. He therefore gave free rein to his imagination, describing in burning rhetoric how he had received her message Saturday night just as he was retiring, how he tossed impatiently on his bed all night, and rose at dawn to be at the station when the train came in. He pictured vividly his ecstasy ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... soul. Again the sentiments of Bezoni were opposed to mine. He was a believer in the dark doctrine which teaches that man is dust and that all things are forgotten in the grave. He expressed his opinions with a clearness and precision the more impressive because totally devoid of cavil and of rhetoric. I listened in silence, but with a deep and most chilling dismay. Even now I think I see the man as he sat before me, the light of the lamp falling on his high forehead and dark features; even now I think I ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in words she made up in tears. She said less than Martha, but wept more; and tears of devout affection have a voice, a loud prevailing voice—no rhetoric like ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... which France regarded as the pledge of the most sacred union between two people, the freest upon earth." He assumed that his government was "terrible to its enemies, but generous to its allies," and prefaced his summary of alleged violations of the international compact, by a flourish of rhetoric intended to impress the ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... great historians and philosophers. Herodotus and Thucydides have never been surpassed as historians, while the Sophists who succeeded the more earnest philosophers of a previous age, gave to Athenian youth a severe intellectual training. Rhetoric, mathematics and natural history supplanted speculation, led to the practice of eloquence as an art, and gave to society polish and culture. The Sophists can not indeed be compared with those great men who preceded or succeeded them in philosophical wisdom, but their influence in educating ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... Eugene entered the sophomore class at Knox College, Galesburg, Ill., where Professor John William Burgess, who had been chosen as his guardian, held the chair of logic, rhetoric, English literature, and political science. But his career at Knox was practically a repetition of that at Williams. He chafed under the restraint of set rules and the requirement of attention to studies in ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... life and in His quiet way irons out difficulties and makes rough paths smooth. His philosophy is easily comprehended and readily applied. His words need no interpretation; they are the words of the people, the language of the masses. If He were a teacher of rhetoric He would surpass all other teachers because the art of discourse reaches its maximum in His sentences. The learned sometimes speak over the heads of their hearers, using words that are unusual and long-drawn-out. Jesus talked to the multitude and they not only understood Him but "the common ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... dimensions, a spacious theatre for lectures, &c, a library, committee-room, with a commodious residence in the front for the head master and his family. The lectures, founded by Sir Thomas Gresham, on divinity, astronomy, music, geometry, law, physics, and rhetoric, which upon the demolition of Gresham College had been delivered at the Royal Exchange from the year 1773, were after the destruction of that building by fire, in January, 1838, read in the theatre of the City of London School until ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... time-consumer for Alexander's purpose. The wily Italian listened with profound attention to the wise saws in which the excellent diplomatist revelled, and his fine eyes often filled with tears at the Doctor's rhetoric. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the Messenians and containing the sentiment that "all are by nature free''; a Eulogy of Death, in consideration of the wide extent of human sufferings; a Techne or instruction-book in the art of rhetoric; and a Fusikos lolos. Lastly, his Mouseion (a word of doubtful meaning) contained the narrative of the contest between Homer and Hesiod, two fragments of which are found in the 'Agon 'Omerou kai 'Esiodou, the work of a grammarian in the time of Hadrian. A 3rd-century papyrus (Flinders Petrie, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... vividly enough. We have surrounded Jesus Christ with a halo of mystery and of remoteness which neither lets us think of Him as being really man or really God. And I press on you this as a plain fact, no piece of pulpit rhetoric, that His relation to us as Christians hinges upon our surrender to Him. Of course, there is a love with which He pours Himself out over the unworthy and the sinful—blessed be His name!—and the more sinful and the more unworthy, the deeper the tenderness and the more yearning ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... have I listened to his accents bland, And owned the magic of his silvery voice, In all the graces which life's arts demand, Delighted by the justness of his choice. Not his the stream of lavish, fervid thought,— The rhetoric by passion's magic wrought; Not his the massive style, the lion port, Which with the granite class of mind assort; But, in a range of excellence his own, With all the charms to soft persuasion known, Amid our busy people we admire ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... present, where its elders are so obviously powerful, and no cause seems lost if it seem to threaten that power. Does cultivated youth ever really love the future, where the eye can discover no persecuted Royalty hidden among oak leaves, though from it certainly does come so much proletarian rhetoric? I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only. I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... memory too soon, and puzzle, strain, and load them with words and rules; to know grammar and rhetoric, and a strange tongue or two, that it is ten to one may never be useful to them; leaving their natural genius to mechanical and physical, or natural knowledge uncultivated and neglected; which would be of exceeding use and pleasure to them through the whole course ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... discussed in 1898-9 will be: Canons of rhetorical propriety (first half-year); the teaching of formal rhetoric in the secondary school (second ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... to the highest position in the French literary world of the age of Napoleon. In 1802, Chateaubriand published a work of still greater importance—at least, from a social point of view—"The Genius of Christianity"—which magnificent and gorgeous piece of rhetoric produced a profound change in the general attitude of Frenchmen in regard to religion, undid to some extent the destructive work of Voltaire, and was instrumental in inducing Napoleon to come to terms with the Pope. But it is on "Atala" ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... such large portions of her domain, or of the United States in stipulating for their protection. I felt the force of what Judge Grier had expressed in his opinion in the case of The United States vs. Sutherland, in the 19th of Howard, that the rhetoric which denounced the grants as enormous monopolies and princedoms might have a just influence when urged to those who had a right to give or refuse; but as the United States had bound themselves by ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... with a kind of rhetoric, makes speeches every time we stop. We explained to such citizens as we happened to step on that we were celebrating the dawn of our own private brand of liberty, and to please enter such inhumanities as we might commit on ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... arrangement and expression, will remain valid. If, at the outset of the career of modern languages, men had thought with the looseness of modern thought, had indulged in the haphazard slovenliness of modern logic, had popularised theology and vulgarised rhetoric, as we have seen both popularised and vulgarised since, we should indeed have been in evil case. It used to be thought clever to moralise and to felicitate mankind over the rejection of the stays, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... readers need not be afraid that they are to be led through a labyrinth of metaphysical distinctions between wit and humour. I have read Dr. Campbell's dissertation on the difference, in his Philosophy of Rhetoric; I have read Sydney Smith's own two lectures; but I confess I am not much the wiser. Professors of rhetoric, no doubt, must have such discussions; but when you wish to be amused by the thing itself, ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... return, for I was eager to learn more of rhetoric from his lips; and in the course of our many arguments on various matters, I compelled him by most potent reasoning first to alter his former opinion on the subject of the universals, and finally to abandon it altogether. Now, ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... by supporting at least three teachers in every town of any considerable importance. They taught rhetoric and oratory and explained the works of the great writers. The Romans, who had no marked literary or artistic ability, had adopted the culture of the Greeks. This was spread abroad by the government teachers so that an educated man was pretty sure to find, even in the ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... dramatic ring in those lines; the words come straight from the heart and strike home. The swift sudden menace in the last line is more effective than pages of rhetoric. ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... quicksands rose an edifice that aped the securities of material science, developed a technical jargon and professed the discovery of "laws." Our liberation from these false presumptions through the rhetoric of Carlyle and Ruskin and the activities of the Socialists, is more apparent than real. The old edifice oppresses us still, repaired and altered by indifferent builders, underpinned in places, and ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... through page after page full of nice and subtile discrimination, without over-refinement, and of illustrations apt and luminous, yet without a touch of false brilliancy or mere smartness; which is saying a good deal, in these days of high-pressure rhetoric. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... A more wandering, blundering piece of dreary repetition never bemused an audience. In fairness to the priest, however, it must be admitted that a Government reporter is on the platform, and that the presence of that official may perhaps exercise a blighting influence on the budding flowers of rhetoric. All that the speaker—a handsome man, with a very fine voice—said, amounted to a statement, repeated over and over again with slight variations, that the people of Tiernaur were placed by the Almighty on the spot intended for them to live upon; that they were between the mountains ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... hue of every age. In 1822 love is a doctrinaire. Instead of proving love by deeds, as in times past, we have taken to argument and rhetoric and debate. Women's tactics are reduced to three shifts. In the first place, they declare that we cannot love as they love. (Coquetry! the Marquise simply threw it at me, like a challenge, this evening!) Next they grow pathetic, to appeal to our natural generosity or self-love; for does it ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... 'Rhetoric all this?' No, my brother, very singular to say, it is Fact all this. Cocker's Arithmetic is not truer. Forgotten in these days, it is old as the foundations of the Universe, and will endure till the Universe cease. It is forgotten now; and the first mention of it puckers ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... forsake. M are the Ministry whom I revile; N are the Noodles my speeches beguile. O is the Office I mean to refuse: P is the Premier—I long for his shoes. Q are the Qualms of my conscience refined; R is the Rhetoric nothing can bind, S is Herr Schliemann who loves much to walk about T ancient Troy, which I love much to talk about. U is the Union of Church and State; V are my former Views, now out of date. W is William, ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... another one, and then he himself would at last take the reins of power in hand, like a reformer who would know how to pacify the nation. As outside Socialists often declared, it was evident that the blood of a dictator flowed in that sectarian's veins. His feverish, stubborn rhetoric ended by exhausting his interrupters, who were compelled to listen to him. When he at last decided to leave the tribune, loud applause arose from a few ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... said the other, "that much as I admire your rhetoric and the rhetoric of your school, from a purely verbal point of view, such little study of you and your school in human history as I have been enabled to make has led me to—er—rather singular conclusion, which I find great difficulty in expressing, ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... Those who heard His words stood ravished. It was all as one As though Minerva, hid in Mercury's jaws, Had counselled some divinest utterance Of honeyed wisdom. So profound, so true, So meet for the occasion, and so—short. The king sat studying rhetoric as he spoke, While the lord Abbot heaved half-envious sighs And hung suspended on his accents. CLAUD. But will it pay, Horatio? HOR. Let Shylock see to that, but yet I trust He's no great loser. CLAUD. Which side went in first? HOR. We did, And scored a ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... then, but as woman. As regards education, she could sustain comparison with advantage; for if she had less charm of mind, she had more solidity of judgment: versed in politics, philosophy, history; rhetoric, poetry and music, besides English, her maternal tongue, she spoke and wrote to perfection Greek, Latin, French, Italian and Spanish; but while Elizabeth excelled Mary on this point, in her turn Mary was more beautiful, and above all more attractive, than her ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... their thoughts and passions? How wicked and shallow and feeble and foolish would Hamlet appear, if represented, not in the light of Shakespeare's imagination, but in the light of Macaulay's epigrams! How the historian would "play the dazzling fence" of his rhetoric on the indecision of the prince, his brutality to Ophelia, his cowardice, his impotence between contending motives, and the chaos of blunders and crimes in which he sinks from view! The subject would be even a better one for him than that of James II.; yet the very supposition of such ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... Rhetoric at this period was a study much followed and admired, but the logic of Saint-Louis, I suspect, was the most forcible and best calculated to remove all doubts, having a great objection to language that was what some ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... the end of a different bench, and rather stiffly sat gazing into the shadowy severity of the big room. Sounding from the front of the Court House they heard rather vaguely the deep-chested, sonorous rhetoric ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... scarcely portable, neither, if they should take the pains to export it, would it pass amongst the other Greeks, who ridiculed it so there was now no more means of purchasing foreign goods and small wares; merchants sent no shiploads into Laconian ports; no rhetoric-master, no itinerant fortune-teller, or gold or silversmith, engraver, or jeweler, set foot in a country which had no money; so that luxury, deprived little by little of that which fed and fomented it, wasted to nothing, and ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... or Gladstones - and to hear how one beardless gentleman would call another beardless gentleman his "honourable friend," and appeal "to the sense of the House," and address himself to "Mr. Speaker;" and how they would all juggle the same tricks of rhetoric as their fathers were doing in certain other debates in a certain other House. And it was curious, too, to mark the points of resemblance between the two Houses; and how the smaller one ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... Father Payne. "I gathered that he had no such intention—but he desired to investigate ours. He was full of compliments, of information, even of rhetoric. I have seldom heard a simple case stated more emphatically, or with such continuous emphasis. My mind simply reeled before it. He pursued me as a harpooner might pursue a whale. He had the whole thing out of me in no time. ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a teacher of rhetoric, an Assyrian by birth, who was converted to Christianity by Justin Martyr, but after his death fell into heresy, leaning towards the Valentinian Gnosticism, and combining with ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... and, whether we consider the merits of the original or of the translation, the world has but little to regret in the loss. Aristaenetus is one of those weak, florid sophists, who flourished in the decline and degradation of ancient literature, and strewed their gaudy flowers of rhetoric over the dead muse of Greece. He is evidently of a much later period than Alciphron, to whom he is also very inferior in purity of diction, variety of subject, and playfulness of irony. But neither of them ever deserved to be wakened from that sleep, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... whose study of the habits and habitats of fishes gives him a kind of shrewdness of observation, just as dealing in horses is an education of certain faculties, and breeds a race of men peculiarly cunning, suspicious, wary, and wide awake, with a rhetoric of appreciation and depreciation ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... sentences of excited rhetoric. Borrow forgot while he wrote that he had a book to review—a book, moreover, issued by the publishing house which issued the periodical in which his review was to appear. And this book was a book in ten thousand—a veritable mine of information and out of the ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... shall we say?" Unattackable, Loudon will not consent to think him, though Butturlin has quite consented. "Difficult, murderous," thinks Loudon; "but possible, certain, could Butturlin but be persuaded!" And tries all his rhetoric on Butturlin: "Shame on us!" urges the ardent Loudon: "Imperial and Czarish Majesties; Kriegshofrath, Russian Senate; Vienna, Petersburg, Versailles and all the world,—what are they expecting ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... a complete course of philosophy, as that science was then understood. It dealt, in the first place, with the laws and forms of thought and knowledge, with language, in which Latin formed the basis, or with grammar and rhetoric, as also with the highest problems and most abstruse questions of physics, and comprised even a general knowledge of natural science and astronomy. A complete study of all these subjects was not merely requisite for learned theologians, but frequently ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... is a literary form invented by teachers of rhetoric for the education of students in the art of writing. It does not exist outside the world of school and college. No editor ever accepted a "theme." No "theme" was ever delivered from a rostrum, or spoken at a dinner, or bound between the covers of a book in the hope ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... use of the college. Dr. Humphreys also secured cabinets and philosophical apparatus for the college and gave instruction in Political Economy, Latin and Greek, Chemistry, Geology, Natural Philosophy, Astronomy, Composition, Elocution, Evidences of Christianity, Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Logic. Verily, an encyclopaedic man of vast industry! Only four years after Dr. Humphreys' death the War of the Rebellion broke out, and St. John's, unlike the temple of Janus, closed its doors at the rumors of war. The buildings were used as an hospital, and not until ...
— The History Of University Education In Maryland • Bernard Christian Steiner
... life of the poorer classes, and while they can sing or paint the Roman or the military hero in conventional surroundings, they can neither sing nor paint impressively the hero who acts in those modest surroundings which they ignore. If they venture to do so, they produce a mere piece of rhetoric.(14) ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... (1764-1811) published in Berlin a Manual of the Hebrew Language (Talmud Leshon 'Ibri), planned on modern lines, a work contributing greatly toward spreading a knowledge of philology and rhetoric among the Jews. His Hebrew-German Dictionary and his Hebrew version of Ben Sira are ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... which inferred in its consequences, which of the litter should be drowned, which saved. Besides, the Laird himself delayed our young lover's departure for a considerable time, endeavouring, with long and superfluous rhetoric, to insinuate to Sir Robert Hazlewood, through the medium of his son, his own particular ideas respecting the line of a meditated turnpike road. It is greatly to the shame of our young lover's apprehension, that after the tenth reiterated account ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... chaste. His style was perspicuous, energetic, concise, and withal highly elegant. He never loaded his sentences with meretricious finery, or high-sounding, supernumerary words. When he did use the jewelry of rhetoric, he would quietly set a metaphor in his page or throw a comparison into his speech which would serve to light up with startling distinctness the colossal proportions of his argument. Of humor he had none; but his wit and sarcasm at times would ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... rhetoric! We simply don't agree. It's happened before." Chantry laughed scornfully. "I tell you I respect him; but God Almighty wouldn't make ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... geographical, or economic. The old arrangement a humbug; as inconvenient as a fifth wheel of a coach; costs the State thousands of greenbacks every year. Figure it all up statistically and dab it over with your shiniest rhetoric and make a big thing of it every way. That's what you've got to do; that's your little biz. I'll tend to ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... next day skimmed lightly over the leader on organ-boys in their ordinary casual fashion, without even thinking what hopes and fears and doubts and terrors had gone to the making of that very commonplace bit of newspaper rhetoric. For if the truth must be told, Edie's first admiring criticism was perfectly correct, and Ernest Le Breton's leader was just for all the world exactly the same as ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... Shall. Proficiency in the use of these apparently troublesome words must be sought in text-books on grammar and rhetoric, where the subject will be found treated with a more particular attention, and at greater length, than is possible in a book of the character of this. Briefly and generally, in the first person, a mere intention is indicated by shall, ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... difficulty is that each of his orators is described in terms which a cool person might hesitate in applying to Demosthenes and Cicero. Mr. Magoon writes too much on the high-pressure principle. As we move down the Mississippi stream of his rhetoric, we are pleased with the rapidity of the motion, and the chivalrous feeling of the captain of the boat, but we look occasionally at the boiler and the engine with some fear ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... vegetative apparatus is the most deeply rooted core of our being. What warrant is there for the grandiloquence of the phrase: the Oldest part of the Mind? There is, indeed, room for rhetoric, even poetry, here. For all the evidence points to it as the rightful occupant of the throne upon which Shelley placed his Brownie as the Soul of the Soul. Or to put it in another way, we think and feel primarily with the vegetative apparatus, with our muscles, especially ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... clouds. There are the stars, and they who can may read them. The astronomers forever comment on and observe them. They are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... the bland spirit and the prime cause of his guilt is full of the energy of passion, and the rhetoric of the conversation has a masculine beauty of which Mrs. Brooks alone of all the poets of her ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... in Collier's Weekly, admits that Socialism is now a movement. But as the writer, like so many others, conceives of Socialism as having been, in its inception, a "theory," a "doctrine" promoted by "Utopian dreaming," "incendiary rhetoric," an "anti-civic jargon," he naturally views it with little real sympathy and understanding even in its present form. The same Socialism that was accused of all this narrowness is suddenly and completely transformed into a movement of such breadth ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... threw back her head and laughed scornfully. "A caballero!" she cried: "who will serenade you at two o'clock in the morning when you are dying with sleep, and lie in a hammock smoking cigaritos all day; who will roll out rhetoric by the yard, and look like an idiot when you talk common-sense to him; who is too lazy to walk across the plaza, and too proud to work, and too silly to keep the Americans from grabbing all he's got. I met a few dilapidated specimens ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... consciousness of power, masculine ability in grappling with complicated questions, and that species of eloquence, the effect of which arises rather from earnestness, straightforwardness, and elevation of sentiment, than from sparkling or elaborate rhetoric, give a man a position in the House of Commons which leaves him little in need of such other gifts as we ...
— M. P.'s in Session - From Mr. Punch's Parliamentary Portrait Gallery • Harry Furniss
... Science: A Compendium of Psychology;" "The Senses and the Intellect;" "The Emotions and the Will;" "A Manual ooof Rhetoric;" Professor of Logic in the University of ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... certainly written by one Quintus Cornificius, an older contemporary of Cicero, to whom the work was long ascribed. It, no doubt, owes its preservation to this erroneous tradition. The first two books were largely used by Cicero in his own treatise De Inventione, part of a work on the principles of rhetoric which he began ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... the advocacy of free silver and the denunciation of President Cleveland. William J. Bryan of Nebraska was then displaying in the House the oratorical accomplishments and dauntless energy of character which soon thereafter gained him the party leadership. With prolific rhetoric, he likened President Cleveland to a guardian who had squandered the estate of a confiding ward and to a trainman who opened a switch and caused a wreck, and he declared that the President in trying to inoculate the ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... arrow from a bow. While technically she is guilty; while according to the facts she is a criminal according to the motive and the intent of her actions, she is as innocent as the whitest soul among us." He could not repress the youthful Southerner's love for this little bit of rhetoric. ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... of the public mind that Milton persistently poured pamphlet after pamphlet, successive vials of apocalyptic wrath. He exhausts all the resources of rhetoric, and plays upon every note in the gamut of public feeling; that he may rouse the apathetic, confirm the wavering, dumbfound the malignant; where there was zeal, to fan it into flame; where there was opposition, to sow and ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... observations I have already had occasion to express my appreciation of the copious and perfervid eloquence which enriches the Duke of Argyll's pages. I am almost ashamed that a constitutional insensibility to the Sirenian charms of rhetoric has permitted me in wandering through these flowery meads, to be attracted, almost exclusively, to the bare places of fallacy and the stony grounds of deficient information, which are disguised, though not concealed, by these floral decorations. But, in his concluding ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... jocose vindictiveness with which Browning returns again and again to the assault of the bad grammar and worse rhetoric of Byron's once so much belauded address to the ocean is very amusing. The above is only one out of four ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... dictated the last few pages of When Valmond Came to Pontiac. It was practically my only experience of dictation of fiction. I had never been able to do it, and have not been able to do it since, and I am glad that it is so, for I should have a fear of being led into mere rhetoric. It did not, however, seem to matter with this book. It wrote itself anywhere. The proofs of the first quarter of the book were in my hands before I had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... leaves his geology and botany, his grammar and rhetoric on the shelf when he makes his word picture. After he has expressed his thought however he may have occasion to call on the books of science, the grammar and rhetoric and these may very seriously interfere with the spontaneous product. So do the sentries posted on the ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... down Hester street and up Chrystie, and down Delancey to where he lived. And there his women folk, a bibulous mother and three dingy sisters, pounced upon him for his wages. And at his confession they shrieked and objurgated him in the pithy rhetoric of the locality. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... and he and Reid, his factotum commander, made eloquent speeches "calculated to produce submission to the legal demands made upon them."[14] Some of the lesser captains, however, were mutinous, and treated the Governor to choice bits of Border-Ruffian rhetoric. Law and violence vibrated in uncertain balance, when Colonel Cooke, commanding the Federal troops, took the floor and cut the knot of discussion in a summary way. "I felt called upon to say some words myself," he ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... his Northern opponents was open and bold, although insolent and overbearing, and not like Hunter, Davis, and Benjamin, using ingenious sophistry and hidden sarcasm, cautiously smoothing over their real purpose, by rhetoric and elegant sentiment. Mr. Toombs became early an object of peculiar dislike to Northern men, by the rude ingenuousness with which he announced the last conclusions of his political creed, and the intolerable insolence with which, not ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... he taught geometry in the same way, and had even extended it to grammar, logic, rhetoric, and the art of composition. The rules of syntax were discovered by pieces of wood, interlocking with each other in squares, dovetails, &c., after the manner of geographical cards; and as they chanced ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric? They had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry. That was very far away. First came the vacation and then the next term and then vacation again and then again another term and then again the vacation. It was like a train ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... Snake-bit Bob led in prayer, and what the old man lacked in grammar and rhetoric was fully made up for ...
— Diddie, Dumps & Tot - or, Plantation child-life • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... he might be better prepared for his prolonged vigils, study, and prayers. In fine, he employed so well the short time that he spent in the religious life that I am sure that it was equivalent to a service of many years. He lectured on rhetoric in our college of Avila and was able to give instruction in theology. He fulfilled this office most satisfactorily and profitably to his students, for his intellect and erudition were very profound. On holidays and feast-days he rested by going from village to village, preaching ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... Bob led in prayer, and what the old man lacked in grammer and rhetoric was fully made up ...
— Diddie, Dumps, and Tot • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... sinking-fund. This he proved by a statement of figures, and although Sheridan attempted to controvert his statements, they could not be proved fallacious. Of all men in the house, indeed, Sheridan was the most unfit to enter into financial computations, for his genius rather lay in rhetoric than in figures. In the supplies, 18,000 seamen were voted, and about 29,000 land-forces, beside those ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Language," which says: "Nonsense; shall we dignify that with a place on our list? Assuredly will vote for doing so every one who hath at all duly noticed what admirable and wise uses it can be, and often is, put to, though never before in rhetoric has it been so highly honored. How deeply does clever or quaint nonsense abide in the memory, and for how many a decade—from earliest youth ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... in Tacitus, nor the author of the Annals, the strength and sublimity of expression found in that great master of rhetoric, Cicero. The eloquence of Tacitus is grave and majestic, his language copious and florid. The language of the author of the Annals is cramped; and he maintains a dignified composure, rather than majesty; occasionally he has an inward laugh in a mood of irony, as when commending Claudius for "clemency," ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... saw a determined effort made to place a famous "right tackle" in the chair of Assistant Professor of Rhetoric. The plan was only given over with great reluctance, when it was discovered that the "right tackle" was beautifully ignorant of the subject he would have to tackle. Even then it was argued he could "cram"—keeping one lesson ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... by Min and Landis were nearest her own. She stopped there first. She found the girls busy, Landis at the study-table, putting the last touches to a composition for the following day's rhetoric. Min was sitting on a low chair by the window, sewing braid on the bottom of a dress-skirt. Unconsciously, Elizabeth gave the article in Min's hand a second glance, and recognized it as the skirt Landis generally ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... Greek grammar, he uniformly came down upon the father for a coat, the cloth of which was finer in proportion to the web of logic he wove during the disputation. Whenever he seated himself in the chair of rhetoric, or gave an edifying homily on prayer, with such eloquence as rendered the father's admiration altogether inexpressible, he applied for a pair of smallclothes; and if, in the excursiveness of his ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... or may not have been a gifted soldier. History is silent on the point. But the surviving records of the court-martial with which we are concerned go to show that he was certainly not a gifted speaker. His vocabulary was limited, his rhetoric clumsy, and Major Carruthers denounces his delivery as halting, his very voice dull and monotonous; also his manner, reflecting his mind on this occasion, appears to have been perfectly unimpassioned. ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... Clinch, the coolest head at a late supper,—he, the American, who had repeatedly drunk Frenchmen and Englishmen under the table—could be transformed into a sentimental, stagey idiot by a single glass of wine? He was conscious, too, of asking himself these very questions in a stilted sort of rhetoric, and with a rising brutality of anger that was new to him. And then everything swam before him, and he seemed to ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... our young hero not only lend his rhetoric, which few people care to do without a fee, but his money too (a sum which many a good man would have made fifty excuses before he would have parted with), to his friend, and procured him ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... the poverty of the resources upon which he depended seems almost ludicrous. Even in the vocal part of 'Alceste' he was so careful to avoid anything like the sensuous beauty of the Italian style, that sometimes he fell into the opposite extreme and wrote merely arid rhetoric. Yet he held so consistently before him his ideal of dramatic truth, that his music has survived all changes of taste and fashion, and still delights connoisseurs as fully as on the day it was produced. 'Paride ed Elena,' Gluck's ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... the blunders I unintentionally make in history, in mathematics, in names, in rhetoric, in exegesis, and yet see that God uses even blunders to save men—I sink back into the humblest place before Him and say, 'If God can use such preaching as that, blunders and mistakes like these; if He can take them ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... RHETORIC. Revised and enlarged edition. Supplementing the development of the science with exhaustive practice in composition. A course of practical lessons adapted for use in high schools, academies, and lower classes of colleges. 345 pages, ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... the greatest of the novelists in the delineation of feeling and the analysis of motives. In "uncovering certain human lots, and seeing how they are woven and interwoven," some marvellous work has been done by this master in the two arts of rhetoric and fiction. ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... respect between the tendencies of different branches of knowledge; it being a sure rule that exactly in proportion as they are inferior, nugatory, or limited in scope, their power of feeding pride is greater. Thus philology, logic, rhetoric, and the other sciences of the schools, being for the most part ridiculous and trifling, have so pestilent an effect upon those who are devoted to them, that their students cannot conceive of any higher sciences than these, but fancy that all education ends in the knowledge of words: ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... outside world as the author of a number of scholarly books of essays, most of them on Roman subjects. Born at Nimes in 1823, his life has been devoted entirely to literature. Soon after his graduation from the Ecole Normale he was made professor of rhetoric at Angouleme, and later held the same position at Nimes. He has received the degree of Doctor, and occupied a number of high positions, culminating in that of professor of Latin poetry in the College de France, which he ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... tables of the rich, have in mind nothing except what will, in their opinion, be most acceptable to their audience —for in no other way can they secure their ends, save by setting snares for the ears—so it is with the teachers of rhetoric, they might be compared with the fisherman, who, unless he baits his hook with what he knows is most appetizing to the little fish, may wait all day upon some rock, without the hope ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... of his genial, ironical temperament, eminently clear brain, and undying achievements, belongs to the great poets of the ages. We to-day do not approve the timbre of his epoch: that impertinent, somewhat irritant mask, that redundant rhetoric, that occasional disdain for the metre. Yet he remains the greatest poete de l'amour, the most spontaneous, the most sincere, the most emotional singer of the tender passion that modern times ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... they are vigorous and profitable yet. Their author's unfailing capacity for saying things worth heeding and remembering is proved in every one of them. It is not easy to open either of Mr. Kebbel's volumes without lighting upon something—a string of epigrams, a polished gibe, a burst of rhetoric, an effective collocation of words—that proclaims the artist. In this connection the perorations are especially instructive, even if you consider them simply as arrangements of sonorous and suggestive words: as oratorical impressions carefully prepared, as effects of what may be ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... house finished: the part over the sitting-rooms, which you did not wish to have many gables, now slopes gracefully towards the roof of the lower colonnade. Our boy, in my absence, did not cease working with his rhetoric master. You have no reason for being anxious about his education, for you know his ability, and I see his application. Everything else I take it upon myself to guarantee, with full consciousness that I am bound ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... part of the human race plunged into a new era of myth-making and fetish worship—the homage to the fetish of law. Even the great minds do not altogether escape. 'Fact I know and law I know,' says Huxley, with a faint suggestion of sacred rhetoric. But surely we do not know law in the same sense in which we know fact. If there are no causes among our facts, then we do not know anything about the laws. If we do know laws it is because we assume causes. If, in the language ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... M. Renault, "you remind me of a college commencement. We have listened to your dissertation just as they listen to the Latin discourse of the professor of rhetoric; there are always in the audience a majority which learns nothing from it, and a minority which understands nothing of it. But every body listens patiently, on account of the sensations which are to come by and by. M. Martout and I are acquainted with Meiser's works, and those ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... him to this taste of liberty, before he began to be impatient for the return of the time when he might enjoy it. He would invite me to the garden by drumming upon my knee, and by a look of such expression as it was not possible to misinterpret. If this rhetoric did not immediately succeed, he would take the skirt of my coat between his teeth, and pull at it with all his force. Thus Puss might be said to be perfectly tamed; the shyness of his nature was done away, and on the whole it was visible, by many symptoms which I have not ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... Renaissance we find the theme reproduced by Tasso;[119] and it had doubtless been freely used by Shakspere's English predecessors and contemporaries. What he did was but to set the familiar theme to a rhetoric whose superb sonority must have left theirs tame, as it leaves Seneca's stilted in comparison. Marston did his best with it, in a play which may have been written before, though ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... eighteenth century so long as we suppose that rhetoric is artificial because it is artistic. We do not fall into this folly about any of the other arts. We talk of a man picking out notes arranged in ivory on a wooden piano "with much feeling," or of his pouring ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... of affording an adequate knowledge of the issues involved in, and the consequences of, the present great crisis in the affairs of the Jews of Russia than reams of rhetoric.—Hebrew Journal. ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... parlor Of the place of last resort, The smiler and the snarler And the guests of every sort— The elocution chap With rhetoric on tap; The mimic and the funny dog; The social sponge; the money-hog; Vulgarian and dude; And the prude; The adiposing dame With pimply face aflame; The kitten-playful virgin— Vergin' on to fifty years; The solemn-looking sturgeon Of a firm of auctioneers; The widower flirtatious; ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... can I? I am but a beginner, and to-day I feel that to sit at the feet of these dear women who have borne the heat and burden of this contest, and to learn of them is the attitude I should assume. It is not the time for argument or rhetoric. It is the time for introspection and prayer. We have come from Independence Square, where the nation is celebrating its centennial birthday of a masculine freedom. You have just heard from Mrs. Stanton the reading of Woman's Declaration of Rights; that document has already ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... which each insists upon claiming for itself. It has been held 'dangerous' to discuss questions which, though in one sense pertaining only to particular States, nevertheless bear upon the whole country. It has been considered 'heresy' to urge with rhetoric and declamation, even in our halls of Congress, certain principles for and against Slavery, for example, lest mischief result from the agitation of those topics. But in such remonstrance we have forgotten that the very principle of democratic institutions involves ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Friendship's call (thus oft, with traitorous aim, Men void of faith usurp Faith's sacred name) 80 At Friendship's call I come, by Murphy sent, Who thus by me develops his intent: But lest, transfused, the spirit should be lost, That spirit which, in storms of rhetoric toss'd, Bounces about, and flies like bottled beer, In his own words his own intentions hear. Thanks to my friends; but to vile fortunes born, No robes of fur these shoulders must adorn. Vain your applause, no aid from thence I draw; Vain all ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... gimcrack, tinsel, spangle, clinquant[obs3], pinchbeck, paste; excess of ornament &c. (vulgarity) 851; gaud, pride. [ornamentation of text] illustration, illumination, vignette. fleuron[obs3]; head piece[Fr], tail piece[Fr]; cul-de-lampe[Fr]; flowers of rhetoric &c. 577; work of art. V. ornament, embellish, enrich, decorate, adorn, bead, beautify, adonize[obs3]. smarten, furbish, polish, gild, varnish, whitewash, enamel, japan, lacquer, paint, grain. garnish, trim, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... furnishing a rich client with subtleties to confound the plainest truths, and with arguments to color the most unjustifiable pretensions. The splendid and popular class was composed of the advocates, who filled the Forum with the sound of their turgid and loquacious rhetoric. Careless of fame and of justice, they are described, for the most part, as ignorant and rapacious guides, who conducted their clients through a maze of expense, of delay, and of disappointment; from whence, after a tedious series of years, they were at length ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... morning, with what feelings it is only too easy to conjecture, that a great party, a party which, despite its many political blunders, has at least a record for honourable if mistaken statesmanship in the past, has now stooped to the final and abysmal folly. Disguise the fact with what specious rhetoric they may, the truth remains that our opponents have deliberately endeavoured to tamper with a great national possession, and to make the British Army a tool ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... of expression seems yet to have been enunciated. The maxims contained in works on composition and rhetoric, are presented in an unorganized form. Standing as isolated dogmas—as empirical generalizations, they are neither so clearly apprehended, nor so much respected, as they would be were they deduced from some simple first principle. We are told that "brevity is the soul of wit." We hear ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... characters of Byron and Shelley, and is amusing reading. The high-flown language incrusted with the gems of rhetoric excites our risibilities, but it is not safe to laugh at Disraeli; in his most diverting aspects he has a deep sense of humor, and he who would mock at him is apt to get a whip across the face at an unguarded moment. Mr. Disraeli laughs in his sleeve at many ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... very well, and begs to be remembered in the old way to you. I used all my eloquence, all the persuasive flourishes of the hand, and heart-melting modulation of periods in my power, to urge her out to Harvieston, but all in vain. My rhetoric seems quite to have lost its effect on the lovely half of mankind. I have seen the day—but this is "a tale of other years." In my conscience I believe that my heart has been so oft on fire that it is absolutely ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... of wandering . . . this might even, through the example of the Real Unfearing, become a craze! Yes—we must refuse to be dazzled by rhetoric. These lovers also had their falling-short—they could not ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... respect for the refinements of speech or for literary polish. He could not endure Mr. Sumner's piling precedent upon precedent and quotation upon quotation, and disliked his lofty and somewhat pompous rhetoric. He used sometimes to leave his seat and make known his disgust in the cloak room, or in the rear of the desks, to visitors who happened to be in the Senate Chamber. But he was strong as a rock, true as steel, fearless and brave, ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... her tears, Bettina fixed her beautiful eyes upon mine, thinking that she could discern in them evident signs of her victory; but I surprised her much by alluding to one point which, with all her cunning, she had neglected to mention in her defence. Rhetoric makes use of nature's secrets in the same way as painters who try to imitate it: their most beautiful work is false. This young girl, whose mind had not been refined by study, aimed at being considered innocent ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... English words that went much further to allay the Risaldar's anxiety than any amount of rhetoric would have done. "But—d'you mean to tell me that the men don't understand ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... father was a man of some family. That he was at least possessed of ample means, is evident from the care and expense bestowed upon our poet's education. Under the tutorship of Anaxagoras, Prodicus, and Protagoras, he had studied both natural philosophy and rhetoric in its sophistical form. In gymnastic exercises he exhibited a successful prowess, being twice victorious in the Eleusinian and Thesean games. Of his skill in painting, some specimens were ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... contemplation of God is the best cure. How admirable Jeremy Taylor is on those points! Oh that he had not overlaid it all with such superabundant ornamentation of style and rhetoric. But it is the manner of the age. Many persons I suppose get over it, perhaps like it; but I long for the same thoughts, the same tenderness and truthfulness, and faithful searching words with a clear, simple, not unimaginative ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Northern States averages $28.07 an acre in value, and in the Southern States it is $5.34. The difference measures the robbery committed on a community of 10,000,000 by the 350,000 slave-holders. These "chevaliers of the lash" he arraigns with a rhetoric compared to which Sumner's and Phillip's words were pale. The slave-holders are worse, he declares, than thieves, for they steal from all. They are worse than common murderers, for they issue to themselves licenses to murder; the ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... must be made for what is said in the gaiety or ambition of rhetoric. We cannot suppose that any one can really mean to exclude all imitation of others. A position so wild would scarce deserve a serious answer, for it is apparent, if we were forbid to make use of the advantages which our predecessors afford us, the art would be always to begin, and ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... him professor of rhetoric at Messina, and Canisius wrote to his friends at Cologne: "As I am useless for any spiritual office I am entrusted with the insipid department of belles lettres. I teach rhetoric for which I have little aptitude, but I take pains to form these good youths, ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... expressing thought, these two generals contrasted quite as strongly as in their other characteristics. General Scott was precise in language, cultivated a style peculiarly his own; was proud of his rhetoric; not averse to speaking of himself, often in the third person, and he could bestow praise upon the person he was talking about without the least embarrassment. Taylor was not a conversationalist, but on paper he could put his meaning so plainly that there could ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... there were also some who clearly were eminent authorities. The most illustrious were Protagoras, Gorgias, and Prodicus of Ceos. Protagoras seems to have been the most philosophical of them all, Gorgias the best orator and the chief professor of rhetoric, Prodicus the most eminent moralist and poet. Protagoras rejected all metaphysics—that is, all investigation of first causes and of the universe—and reduced all philosophy to the science of self-control with a view to happiness, ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... Macaulay, who knew his Boswell so well, could have accused him of 'speaking of foreign travel with the fierce and boisterous contempt of ignorance' would be a puzzle indeed, did we not know how often this great rhetorician was by the stream of his own mighty rhetoric swept far away from the unadorned strand of naked truth. To his unjust and insulting attack I shall content myself with opposing the following extracts which with some trouble I ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... book: The Art or crafte of Rhetoryke was originally published c. 1530; the second edition was published in 1532. It is considered the first book on rhetoric in English. ...
— The Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke • Leonard Cox
... promotion of decadence—pity persuades to extinction.... Of course, one doesn't say "extinction": one says "the other world," or "God," or "the true life," or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness.... This innocent rhetoric, from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appears a good deal less innocent when one reflects upon the tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the tendency to destroy life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why pity appeared to him as ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... of a youthful admirer. I unfortunately congratulated him on having such a pretty young gentleman to his son. He answered, sighing, that the boy had talents, but did not put them to a proper use—"Long before I attained his age (said he) I had finished my rhetoric." Captain B—, who had eaten himself black in the face, and, with the napkin under his chin, was no bad representation of Sancho Panza in the suds, with the dishclout about his neck, when the duke's scullions insisted upon shaving him; ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... A citizen of Athens, named Aristion, whose mother was an Egyptian slave, and who was the son or adopted son of one Athenion, had been sent by the Athenians as ambassador to Mithridates. He had been a schoolmaster and teacher of rhetoric, and professed the philosophy of Epicurus. He gained the ear of Mithridates, and sent home flaming accounts of the king's power, and of his intention of restoring the democracy at Athens. The Athenians sent some ships of war to bring him home from Euboea, with a present of a silver-footed litter; ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... poetry he has always returned to the naturalistic drama. Rose Bernd follows Henry of Aue, and Griselda immediately preceded The Rats. Nor is this all. The methods of naturalism have followed him into the domains of poetry and of the past. His verse is scrupulously devoid of rhetoric; the psychology of his historic plays is sober and human. Hence it is clear that an analysis of the consistent naturalism of German literature is, with whatever modifications, an analysis of Hauptmann's work ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... only to sue for the hand of the daughter of a marquis to be successful, telling him, with a sigh, that all women were not Annettes, and that upon the whole there was nothing like them. To which advice he answered, that he intended to return to rhetoric as soon as the lion fight should be over, but that he never intended to marry, having had enough of women; adding, that he was glad he had no sister, as, with the feelings which he entertained with respect ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... watchful eyes In silence, for the tongue cannot avail. Vex not his wounds with rhetoric, nor the stale Worn truths, that are but maddening mockeries To him whose grief outmasters all replies. Only watch near him gently; do but bring The piteous help of silent ministering, Watchful and tender. ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... finds not the heavens bluer and the waves more musical in maturity than in childhood. Time is a severe alembic of youthful joys, no doubt; we exhaust book after book and leave Shakespeare unopened; we grow fastidious in men and women; all the rhetoric, all the logic, we fancy we have heard before; we have seen the pictures, we have listened to the symphonies: but what has been done by all the art and literature of the world towards describing one summer ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... The rhapsode belongs to the realm of imitation and of opinion: he professes to have all knowledge, which is derived by him from Homer, just as the sophist professes to have all wisdom, which is contained in his art of rhetoric. Even more than the sophist he is incapable of appreciating the commonest logical distinctions; he cannot explain the nature of his own art; his great memory contrasts with his inability to follow the steps of the argument. And in his highest moments of inspiration ...
— Ion • Plato
... attained by it. Its subtleties and obscurities were equally inevitable. Analytical thinking takes on an analytical phraseology. It is a striking instance of a mental habit creating a vocabulary. The method of thought produces the form of rhetoric. Some of the sentences are mental landscapes. The meaning seems to be in motion on the page. It is elusive from its very subtlety. It is more our analyst than her character of Rufus Lyon, who "would ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... miraculous tongue of man? Is his head become a wretched cracked pitcher, on which you jingle to frighten crows, and makes bees hive? He fills me with terror, this two-legged rhetorical phantasm! I could long for an Oliver without rhetoric at all. I could long for a Mahomet, whose persuasive eloquence, with wild-flashing heart and scimiter, is, 'Wretched moral, give up that; or by the Eternal, thy maker and mine, I will kill thee! Thou blasphemous scandalous misbirth ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... of a man, whose support was of the utmost importance for the success of a measure which was to be submitted to a popular body that was divided in its allegiance, uncertain in its views, and therefore open to conviction by rhetoric if not by argument. It was characteristic of the past career of the young orator Lucius Crassus that he should now have thrown himself wholly on the side of Caepio and the progressive members of the senate.[1212] His past career ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... audience or the prejudices of his readers. He could play the role of the judge or the professor almost as well as that of the impassioned fanatic convinced that behind him were arrayed all the powers of Heaven. In dealing with men of education, who were not likely to be captivated by rhetoric, he could be calm and argumentative; but when he addressed himself to the masses of the people he appeared in his true character as a popular demagogue, hesitating at nothing that was likely to arouse their indignation against the Roman ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... teachers both at Rome and at Athens. Of his subsequent life nothing is known except that he held some judicial post at Rome. His work, the Noctes Atticae in twenty Books (of Book viii. only the headings of chapters are preserved), is a miscellany of information on philology, philosophy, rhetoric, history, biography, literary criticism, natural science, and antiquities. The title is due to the fact that the book was commenced in the winter evenings during the author's residence at Athens. The arrangement of the contents ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtle; natural philosophy deep; morals grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend." ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... In short, he came amid general execration, and departed amid universal regret. I had heard Mr. Douglas before, but never when he gave any evidence of the wonderful power which he exhibited on this occasion. With few tricks of rhetoric, with no extraordinary bursts of eloquence, he accomplished all the results of the most impassioned oratory. The qualities of a great debater—unshaken presence of mind, tact in adapting himself to his audience, the power of arranging ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the overwhelmed Mrs. Macleuchar, totally exhausted at having been so long the butt of his rhetoric, "take back your three shillings, and ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... watchman told him that he saw a man running alone, David concluded out of that circumstance, that if he came alone, he brought good news?[100] I see the grammar, the word signifies so, and is so ever accepted, good news; but I see not the logic nor the rhetoric, how David would prove or persuade that his news was good because he was alone, except a greater company might have made great impressions of danger, by imploring and importuning present supplies. Howsoever that be, I am sure that that ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... were some excuses for the neglect, the best perhaps being that English criticism at the time was at nearly as low an ebb as English poetry. A really acute critic could hardly have mistaken the difference between Scott's verse and the fustian or tinsel of the Della Cruscans, the frigid rhetoric of Darwin, or the drivel of Hayley. Only Southey had as yet written ballad verses with equal vigour and facility; and, I think, he had not yet published any of them. It is Scott who tells us ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... leave-taking originated among the officers and men in the field, but you hear it on all sides now, uttered with a sincerity and earnestness that is peculiarly impressive. The new style of saying "good-bye" has at least the merit of being no longer a perfunctory piece of rhetoric. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... complemented each other. In writing we did better work together than either could do alone. While she is slow and analytical in composition, I am rapid and synthetic. I am the better writer, she the better critic. She supplied the facts and statistics, I the philosophy and rhetoric, and together we made arguments which have stood unshaken by the storms of ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... theory as a lecturer with the chuckle or the shrug of mere amusement or amazement. Moreover, if considered as a joke, a mere joke, and nothing but a joke, this gospel of the grin has hardly matter or meaning enough in it to support so elaborate a structure of paradoxical rhetoric. It must be taken, therefore, as something serious in the main; and if so taken, and read by the light reflected from Mr. Whistler's more characteristically brilliant canvases, it may not improbably recall a certain phrase of Moliere's ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... oblivious of the excitement, Tennessee's Partner improved the opportunity to mop his face again with his handkerchief. When order was restored, and the man was made to understand, by the use of forcible figures and rhetoric, that Tennessee's offense could not be condoned by money, his face took a more serious and sanguinary hue, and those who were nearest to him noticed that his rough hand trembled slightly on the table. He hesitated ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... every other woman, and the bare idea of your working in a shop sickens me. I always think of you as apart from the workaday world. I always think of you as a star shining serenely above the sordid struggle—" Overwhelmed by the glowing train of his rhetoric, he broke down suddenly and caught passionately at ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... to-day comes down to us from 1730, and was designed in obedient imitation of English masters. There, too, were enacted many scenes in the drama of revolution; there it was that the famous tea-party was proposed; and thence it was that the Mohawks, drunk with the rhetoric of liberty, found their way to the harbour, that they might see how tea mixed with salt-water. If the sentiment be sometimes exaggerated, the purpose is admirable, and it is a pleasant reflection that, in a country of quick changes and historical indifference, at least ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... study. Each beneficiary was to enjoy his scholarship for eight consecutive years, dating from his entrance into the third class. If he had got beyond the third class when he secured his nomination the difference was to run against him. For example, a scholar ready to enter the class of rhetoric who received a nomination was to hold his scholarship for six years only; if he was ready to enter upon the study of theology, law or medicine, for three years only; after the expiration of which another must be appointed to enjoy it. Provisions ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... of power may have belonged to French generals and commissioners; but, however insincerely uttered, the call to freedom excited hopes and aspirations which were not insincere themselves. The Italian festivals of emancipation, the trees of liberty, the rhetoric of patriotic assemblies, had betrayed little enough of the instinct for self-government; but they marked a separation from the past; and the period between the years 1796 and 1799 was in fact the birth-time of those ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... wonder the Sphinx does not rise from the other side of the world and eat you," she said with derision. "Anybody who loved anybody could answer such a poor little excuse for a riddle as that; besides, it sounds like an extract from somebody's 'First Easy Lessons in Rhetoric.' Don't you see that I can disagree with you, while I must differ from you? That is too disgracefully easy. Indeed, Adam, that riddle of yours brings back every doubt, for they say—scientists and ologists and ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... in the year 1916, I shall not indulge in any rhetoric. The pertinence of the experience was entirely in the fact that I was taking the aerial ferry which sent twenty planes a day to France on an average and perhaps fifty when the weather had held up traffic the previous day. I was to buffet the clouds instead of the waves on a crowded ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... proved utterly unintelligible to his younger listeners, with the exception of the few offensive terms, already sufficiently distinguished, and though Ellen better comprehended the meaning of the herald, she appeared as little moved by his rhetoric as her companions. At those passages which he intended should be tender and affecting, the intelligent girl, though tortured by painful feelings, had even manifested a disposition to laugh, while to the threats she turned an ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... them point towards what object he pleases; he interprets them figuratively, typically, analogically, hyperbolically; he calls in the aid of emendation, transposition, ellipsis, metonymy, and every other figure of rhetoric; the name of one man is taken for another, one place for another, days and weeks for months and years; and finally he avails himself of all his advantage over his adversaries by his superior knowledge of the Hebrew, speaking in the very language of the divine communication, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... commemorative orations and enriched his arguments before the courts by the splendor of his style. He united the strong, passionate nature of his backwoods father with a mind brought under the influences of the cultured society of Boston. John Quincy Adams, also, had been professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard, and he found in the classics a solace when the political world grew dark around him. Edward Everett represented even more clearly the union of the man of letters with the political leader. If we except ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... members now seemed to be the advocacy of free silver and the denunciation of President Cleveland. William J. Bryan of Nebraska was then displaying in the House the oratorical accomplishments and dauntless energy of character which soon thereafter gained him the party leadership. With prolific rhetoric, he likened President Cleveland to a guardian who had squandered the estate of a confiding ward and to a trainman who opened a switch and caused a wreck, and he declared that the President in trying to inoculate the Democratic party ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... Greek and Latin are accomplishments chiefly, and a classical scholar, if unacquainted with modern science and literature, is hopelessly ignorant. "If any one," said Hegius, the teacher of Erasmus, "wishes to learn grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, history, or holy scripture, let him read Greek;" and in his day this was as true as it is false and absurd in our own. In the Middle Ages, Latin was made the groundwork of the educational system, not on account of any ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... did I return, for I was eager to learn more of rhetoric from his lips; and in the course of our many arguments on various matters, I compelled him by most potent reasoning first to alter his former opinion on the subject of the universals, and finally to abandon it altogether. Now, the basis of this ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... undo what St. Francis himself had bound up. Nor was this all, for in the pursuance of their zeal for poverty they passed quickly from denunciations of the Pope and the wealthy clergy (in which their rhetoric found very effective matter for argument) into abstract reasoning on the whole question of the private possession of property. The treatises which they have left in crabbed Latin and involved methods of argument make wearisome and irritating reading. Most are exceedingly ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... he had not the same weight, deepened the impression the other had made by his brilliance and rhetoric. He too told the story of the English Ambassador in Berlin who was asked whether England would go to war for "a ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... and agoreuein, to speak), a figurative representation conveying a meaning other than and in addition to the literal. It is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric, but the medium of representation is not necessarily language. An allegory may be addressed to the eye, and is often embodied in painting, sculpture or some form of mimetic art. The etymological meaning of the word is wider ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Augustine Washington, at Bridges Creek, and enjoy the benefit of a superior school in that neighborhood, kept by a Mr. Williams. His education, however, was plain and practical. He never attempted the learned languages, nor manifested any inclination for rhetoric or belles-lettres. His object, or the object of his friends, seems to have been confined to fitting him for ordinary business. His manuscript school books still exist, and are models of neatness and accuracy. One of ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... of his responsibility counteracted the Captain's natural elation. It lifted, however, at the next Corporation dinner, when the Doctor made public announcement of his discovery in a glowing speech, supporting his rhetoric by extracts from a handful of statistics and calculations, and ending, "Gentlemen, we know the motto of the East and West Looe Volunteer Artillery to be 'Never Say Die!' but seeing, after five years' trial of them, that they never do die, what man (I ask) will not rejoice to belong ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 'Morning Intelligence' next day skimmed lightly over the leader on organ-boys in their ordinary casual fashion, without even thinking what hopes and fears and doubts and terrors had gone to the making of that very commonplace bit of newspaper rhetoric. For if the truth must be told, Edie's first admiring criticism was perfectly correct, and Ernest Le Breton's leader was just for all the world exactly the ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... held lightly, and be very willingly translated into the equivalent terms which others use. And the mystic must be steadily told,—All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,—universal signs, instead of these village symbols,—and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... early years of the nineteenth century the Unitarian pulpits of Boston were adorned with every literary grace known to the rhetoric of that period. The luster of Channing's fame has outshone and outlasted that of his associates; and yet these were stars of hardly less magnitude. The two Wares, father and son, the younger Buckminster, whose singular power as a preacher was known not only to wondering hearers, but to readers ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... account of the flight of the lads when they were hailed, and resolved it into an act of rebellion on the part of his son. At dinner he drank the young heir's health in ominous silence. Adrian Harley stood up in his place to propose the health. His speech was a fine piece of rhetoric. He warmed in it till, after the Ciceronic model, inanimate objects were personified, and Richard's table-napkin and vacant chair were invoked to follow the steps of a peerless father, and uphold with his dignity ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... accentually. The services and music of the Church introduced new systems of prosody. Rhymes, both single and double, were added to the verse; and the extraordinary flexibility of medieval Latin—that sonorous instrument of varied rhetoric used by Augustine in the prose of the Confessions, and gifted with poetic inspiration in such hymns as the Dies Irae or the Stabat Mater—rendered this new vehicle of literary utterance adequate to all the tasks imposed on it by ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... about the market price of tumbledown ruins, and the number of such eligible family mausoleums just then for sale in the immediate neighbourhood. Cesarine returned with a full, true, and particular list, adorned with flowers of rhetoric which would have delighted the soul of good old John Robins. They were all picturesque, all Romanesque, all richly ivy-clad, all commodious, all historical, and all the property of high well-born Grafs and very honourable ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... vast cafe. Conversation in France was at its zenith. There were less eloquence and rhetoric than in '89. With the exception of Rousseau, there was no orator to cite. The intangible flow of wit was as spontaneous as possible. For this sparkling outburst there is no doubt that honor should be ascribed in part to the auspicious revolution of the times, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... No general theory of expression seems yet to have been enunciated. The maxims contained in works on composition and rhetoric, are presented in an unorganized form. Standing as isolated dogmas—as empirical generalizations, they are neither so clearly apprehended, nor so much respected, as they would be were they deduced from some simple first principle. We are told that ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... differences in vital energy, differences in the point of culture attained, differences in capacity to rise. As a consequence, the Declaration of Independence is treated by many as an obsolete document, and its assertions as mere bombast and rhetoric; unjustly so, because the truth which it attempts to convey is valid, though the form in which the truth is expressed and the grounds on which it is put are no ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... called bleeding Kansas. John Tom Little Bear, in full Indian chief's costume, drew crowds away from the parchesi sociables and government ownership conversaziones. While at the football college in the East he had acquired quantities of rhetoric and the art of calisthenics and sophistry in his classes, and when he stood up in the red wagon and explained to the farmers, eloquent, about chilblains and hyperaesthesia of the cranium, Jeff couldn't hand out the Indian Remedy ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... learn this of me; to have is to have; for it is a great figure in Gladstonian rhetoric, that votes being deducted from one Party and added to another, by putting the one Out do put the other In; for all your writers do consent that ipse is he: now you are not ipse, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... antagonist once did work Heroical, one of our strong. His gold to retain and his dross reject, Engage him, but humour, not aiming to quash. Detest the dead squat of the Turk, And suffice it to move him along. Drink of faith in the brains a full draught Before the oration: beware Lest rhetoric moonily waft Whither horrid activities snare. Rhetoric, juice for the mob Despising more luminous grape, Oft at its fount has it laughed In the cataracts rolling for rape Of a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... evil. We may confess that, at the start. The Peace Society has the argument its own way. The bloody field, the mangled dying, hoof-trampled into the reeking sod, the groans, and cries, and curses, the wrath, and hate, and madness, the horror and the hell of a great battle, are things no rhetoric ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Far better, gentle sage, to have it smell of the pines and resound with the hum of insects than to have it sound of the rules that a smaller type of man gets by studying the works of a few great, fearless writers like yourself, and formulating from what he thus gains a handbook of rhetoric. "Of no use are the men who study to do exactly as was done before, who can never understand that ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... religion proved to be no more exacting than its "High and Dry" rival. It gave a gentle stimulus to tempers which required to be excited by novelty. It recommended itself by gifts of flowing words or high-pitched rhetoric to those who expected some demands to be made on them, so that these demands were not too strict. Yet Evangelical religion had not been unfruitful, especially in public results. It had led Howard and Elizabeth Fry to assail ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... of a painter than ever, was delighted with the turn of events, and entreated his mother to let him go to Monsieur Regnauld, promising to earn his own living. He declared he was quite sufficiently advanced in the second class to get on without rhetoric. Philippe, a captain at nineteen and decorated, who had, moreover, served the Emperor as an aide-de-camp in two battles, flattered the mother's vanity immensely. Coarse, blustering, and without real merit beyond the vulgar bravery of a cavalry officer, he was to her mind a man of genius; whereas ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... One of my classmates—since known as a grave and respected judge—was especially gifted in imitating these petitions, with the very intonations of their authors, and these parodies were in great demand on festive occasions. The pet phrases, the choice rhetoric, and the impressive oratory of these prayers were thus made so familiar to us in caricatures that the originals were little conducive ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... the second he struck in the face and ill-used. He did no work himself. There was a clear space near the fires in which he would walk up and down, sometimes for two hours together, with arms folded, muttering to himself of Patience and his destiny. At times these mutterings broke out into rhetoric, into shouts and gestures that would arrest the workers; they would stare at him until they perceived that his blue eyes glared and his waving hand addressed itself always to the southward hills. ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... Garnier, and translated into English by Thomas Kyd." This translation was printed in 1595. The play is thus summarized: It is "a piece which is constructed upon a misunderstood model of the ancients; it is altogether devoid of dramatic action, in reality merely lyrics and rhetoric in dialogue. The whole of the first act consists of one emphatic jeremiad by Cicero, about the desperate condition of Rome as it then was, its factiousness, its servility,—a jeremiad which is continued at the end of the act, by the chorus, in rhymed stanzas. In this tone ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... syllable expresses Silence; there each thought a guess is; In whose rhetoric's cosmic runes Roll ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... consigning him gracefully to the infernal regions; accentuating a fictitious and harmonious anger; drying his forehead without disarranging his hair; suffocating with the emotions he evoked; displaying real tears, and with them a knowledge, not only of law, rhetoric, philosophy, but of geometry, astronomy, ethics and the fine arts; blinding his hearers with the coruscations of his erudition; stirring them with his tongue, as with the point of a sword, until, as though abruptly possessed by an access of fury, he seized the plaintiff ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... men were widely different. Raeburn was a true son of his fathers, possessed by natural inheritance of the finer instincts of aristocratic rule, including a deep contempt for mob-reason and all the vulgarities of popular rhetoric; steeped, too, in a number of subtle prejudices, and in a silent but intense pride of family of the nobler sort. He followed with disquiet and distrust the quick motions and conclusions of Hallin's intellect. Temperament and the Cambridge discipline made him a fastidious thinker and ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and moccasins. The Indian could not have received his suggestion for a colour scheme from the tinted leaves of autumn for they are dull in comparison. He may have had a hint from the glowing sunsets that in that western land fill earth and sky with a glory so transcendent that mere rhetoric is a profanation. More likely is it that when free and unrestrained he roamed over plain and hill his soul became enamoured with the dazzling array of colours, beyond the genius of the proudest palette, to be found in the marvellous formations that surround the great geysers of the ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... room one beautiful afternoon about a week after her arrival at the school, and, unconsciously doing profitable examples in rhetoric by drawing nice contrasts between her present surroundings and her former ones. Presently a tap came upon her door, and ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... Sedley put the needle somewhat slowly through the velvet, her fancy busy with other embroidery, not so much listening to the spoken words as pursuing in her mind a sweet and passionate rhetoric ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... that he was no common boy. Was he not a sophomore, or rather a junior-elect, of Euclid college? Did he not possess a knowledge more or less extensive of Latin, Greek and mathematics, with a smattering of French and German, not to speak of logic, rhetoric, etc.? For one of his age he considered himself quite accomplished, and he persuaded himself that the world would receive him at his own estimate. It would be very strange if he could not earn a living, when hundreds and thousands of his age, without ...
— Walter Sherwood's Probation • Horatio Alger
... for what is said in the gaiety or ambition of rhetoric. We cannot suppose that any one can really mean to exclude all imitation of others. A position so wild would scarce deserve a serious answer, for it is apparent, if we were forbid to make use of the advantages which our predecessors afford us, the art ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; morals, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend. —BACON. ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... Criticism is an art that may in large measure be acquired. The requisite faculties may be developed by a course of study. The principles that are to guide the critical judgment are provided in grammar, rhetoric, logic, aesthetics, and moral science. Wide reading in various departments will banish narrowness and provincialism. Study and experience will bring a cosmopolitan culture. Though few are capable of attaining to eminence as critics, ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... with emphasis, for the language was strong, and uttered with intense vigour, and that quite accorded with their tastes, so they agreed with the sentiment without regard to its signification. This species of rhetoric, and its effects, are sometimes observed ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... about these very lapses is that they remain purely exceptional. They do not affect either the tone of his writing or the value and intricacy of his argument. They may be compared to those undignified and valueless chips of conversational English that pop up in the best rhetoric if it be the rhetoric of an ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... no demands upon our intelligence. That is art indeed, we cry: and we intoxicate ourselves with it because it is merely art. "The quality of mercy is not strained" is far more popular than Lear's speech, "No, no, no! Come, let's away to prison," because it is professional rhetoric; it is what Shakespeare could write at any moment, whereas the speech of Lear is what Lear said at one particular moment. The contrast between the two is the contrast well put in the epigram about Barry and Garrick in their renderings of ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... Fithian speaks of him as a good scholar, even in classical learning, and a remarkable one in English grammar. Frequently the gentlemen of this period spent much time in the study of such matters as astronomy, the ancient languages, rhetoric, history, etc. ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... remark that "Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and occasional symbol for an universal one," then, in speaking to the psycho-analyst, the psychologist should echo Emerson further, and say: "Let us have a little algebra instead of this trite rhetoric— universal signs instead of these village symbols—and we shall ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... contortions of limbs and body. Let Paul Boriskoff of Minsk be the orator and they knew that the red flag would fly. But never before has Boriskoff been seen in tears and the spectacle enchained their attention as no mere rhetoric ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... long before his death. And Fox, it will be remembered, had exerted all his eloquence to induce the English Government to demand the liberation of Lafayette from Olmuetz,—an act which called down upon him at the time the bitterest invectives of party rhetoric, but which the historian of England now records as a bright page in the life of one of her greatest men. Ah, how different would our record be, if we could always follow our instinct of immortality, and in all our actions ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... scrupulous independence which had originally prompted Mr Sharnall to refuse to have anything to do with Lord Blandamer's offer. If Mr Sharnall had scruples in the matter, ought not he, Westray, to have respected those scruples? Was it not tampering with rectitude to have overcome them by a too persuasive rhetoric? ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... Isaiah, Daniel, and Revelation, Geometry, Natural Philosophy, and Astronomy, Rhetoric in Ancient Armenian, Evidences of ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... a few miles from the city, and in secret continued his studies and observations. The Grand Duke supplied him a small pension and suggested that it would be increased if Galileo would give lectures on Poetry and Rhetoric, which were not forbidden themes, and try to make himself either commonplace ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... come to the Professor of Logic and Rhetoric, and tell him they want to be taught to preach like Mr. Spurgeon, or the ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... in those few days he had gained the liking of well-nigh all of the teachers by the hearty way in which he pursued knowledge; for he went at Caesar as though he were trying for a touch-down, and tackled the Foundations of Rhetoric as though that study was an opponent on the gridiron. Even Professor Durkee, known familiarly among the disrespectful as "Turkey," lowered his tones and spoke with something approaching to mildness when addressing Joel March. Altogether, the world looked very bright ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... not only lend his rhetoric, which few people care to do without a fee, but his money too (a sum which many a good man would have made fifty excuses before he would have parted with), to his friend, ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... long gone home when the Marechal d'Estrees and M. Senneterre came, furnished with all the flowers of rhetoric, to persuade me that degradation was honourable; and finding me immovable, they insinuated that my obstinacy might oblige his Highness to use force, and order his guards to carry me, in spite of myself, to Notre-Dame, and place me there on a ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... &c. Nor did the essay on the Greek language stop here. It savagely sneered at "K. B.'s" vanity at having been educated in an English university, and made the most cutting remarks on his criticisms in general. Such flowers of rhetoric as "literary scavenger," "purse-proud fop," "half-educated boy," &c., were thrown around as thickly as though the Flower Girl of the Fejee Islands herself had crossed the path ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... who clearly were eminent authorities. The most illustrious were Protagoras, Gorgias, and Prodicus of Ceos. Protagoras seems to have been the most philosophical of them all, Gorgias the best orator and the chief professor of rhetoric, Prodicus the most eminent moralist and poet. Protagoras rejected all metaphysics—that is, all investigation of first causes and of the universe—and reduced all philosophy to the science of self-control with a view to happiness, and control of others with a view to their happiness. Like ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... first Caesar has perhaps never been worse appreciated than by him who in one sense described it best—that is, with most force and eloquence wherever he really did comprehend it. This was Lucan, who has nowhere exhibited more brilliant rhetoric, nor wandered more from the truth, than in the contrasted portraits of Caesar and Pompey. The famous line, "Nil actum reputans si quid superesset agendum," is a fine feature of the real character, finely expressed. But if it had been ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... benevolence for saving themselves. The Burdwan translator misunderstands vihinsa and makes nonsense of the idea. Altogether, though highly ornate, the metaphors are original. Of course, the idea is eminently oriental. Eastern rhetoric being fond of spinning out metaphors and similes, which, in the hands of Eastern ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... long reveries in view of the boundless ocean, whence he had acquired a mystical habit of mind.... Dumas certainly would never have placed this pardon in the mouth of a stockbroker." So far so good; but "preparation," in the sense of the word, is a device of rhetoric or of propaganda rather than of dramatic craftsmanship. It is a method of astutely undermining or outflanking prejudice. Desiring to enforce a general principle, you invent a case which is specially favourable to your argument, and insinuate it into the acceptance of the audience by ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... for some time mere figures of rhetoric," replied Petronius, carelessly. "But since Greek rhetoricians taught us, it is easier for me even to ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... rule, all we find in literature on this subject are a few incidental remarks and passing allusions. History is incredibly poor in that respect. This poverty of information was caused in the first place by a narrowness of view characteristic of the rhetoric cultivated by historians of the classical period and especially of the empire. Politics and the wars of the rulers, the dramas, the intrigues and even the gossip of the courts and of the official world were of much higher interest to them than the great economic ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... would rather give him twice as many full-grown men, so much did they value the loss of their country's education. When Agesilaus courted Xenophon to send his children to Sparta to be bred, "it is not," said he, "there to learn logic or rhetoric, but to be instructed in the noblest of all sciences, namely, the science to obey and to command."—[Plutarch, Life of Agesilaus, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... has and never will discuss the subject. Yet Mr. Clay, from 1839 down to his death, hardly made a remarkable speech of any kind, except on slavery. Mr. Webster, having indulged now and then in a little easy rhetoric, as at Niblo's and elsewhere, opens his mouth in 1840, generously contributing his aid to both sides, and stops talking about it only when death closes his lips. Mr. Benton's six or eight speeches in the United States Senate ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... the eleventh chapter of his book of rhetoric, describes two or three kinds of puns, which he calls paragrams, among the beauties of good writing, and produces instances of them out of some of the greatest authors in the Greek tongue. Cicero has sprinkled ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... and there can be but the one, that the false in each kind do so exceedingly abound, that none can be taken as genuine without such special certificate. The widespread confusion with the poet of the rhetorician and sentimentalist in verse, and again of the mere rhymer without even rhetoric, not to refer to finer differentiation of error, is also a fruitful source of bewilderment. The misuse of the word has parallels: for instance, the spurious generic use of the word 'man' for 'male,' the substitution of 'artist' for 'painter.' ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... write a mournful poem; indeed, she was a silent person, and perhaps hardly said a word about it; but she quietly turned of a deep orange color with jaundice. A great many people in this world have but one form of rhetoric for their profoundest experiences,—namely, to waste away and die. When a man can READ, his paroxysm of feeling is passing. When he can READ, his thought has slackened its hold.—You talk about reading Shakspeare, using him as an expression for the highest intellect, and you wonder that any common ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... mouth and eyes as open as the mill-door and the two windows, showing teeth as white as her father's bolted flour, and endeavouring to secure a word or two for her own future use out of the pearls of rhetoric which Sir Piercie Shafton scattered around him with such ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... of ignorance, in that, of pride, And smiles delighted with the eternal poise. Dire is the frequent curse and its twin sound The cheek-distending oath, not to be praised As ornamental, musical, polite, Like those which modern senators employ, Whose oath is rhetoric, and who swear for fame. Behold the schools in which plebeian minds, Once simple, are initiated in arts Which some may practise with politer grace, But none with readier skill! 'Tis here they learn The road that leads from competence ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... occasion, and to follow the dear saint who has just spoken; how can I? I am but a beginner, and to-day I feel that to sit at the feet of these dear women who have borne the heat and burden of this contest, and to learn of them is the attitude I should assume. It is not the time for argument or rhetoric. It is the time for introspection and prayer. We have come from Independence Square, where the nation is celebrating its centennial birthday of a masculine freedom. You have just heard from Mrs. Stanton the reading of Woman's Declaration ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... referred to, but in another part of his compilation, termed Natalis invicti solis, or birthday of the unconquered Sun. Cyprian (de orat. dom. 35) calls Christ Sol verus, Ambrose Sol novus noster (Sermo vii. 13), and such rhetoric was widespread. The Syrians and Armenians, who clung to the 6th of January, accused the Romans of sun-worship and idolatry, contending with great probability that the feast of the 25th of December had been invented ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... and rejoicing. The addresses which contain these expressions of satisfaction have been produced at your bar, and have been read to your Lordships. You must have heard with disgust, at least, these flowers of Oriental rhetoric, penned at ease by dirty hireling moonshees at Calcutta, who make these people put their seals, not to declarations of their ruin, but to expressions of their satisfaction. You have heard what he himself says of the country; you have heard ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... inhabitants—such studies cannot fail to elevate the mind, and only prejudice will disparage them. They promote also a fine respect for truth and fact, for order and outline, as the Greeks said, with a wholesome dislike of sophistry and rhetoric. The air which blows about scientific studies is like the air of a mountain top—thin, but pure and bracing. And as a subject of education science has a further advantage which can hardly be overestimated. It is ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... list of studies that came to be adopted everywhere comprised seven nominal branches, divided into two groups—the so-called quadrivium, comprising music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy; and the trivium comprising grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The vagueness of implication of some of these branches gave opportunity to the teacher for the promulgation of almost any knowledge of which he might be possessed, but there can be no doubt that, in general, science had but meagre share in the curriculum. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... fervor, and eloquent of revolutionary heroes. The great difficulty is that each of his orators is described in terms which a cool person might hesitate in applying to Demosthenes and Cicero. Mr. Magoon writes too much on the high-pressure principle. As we move down the Mississippi stream of his rhetoric, we are pleased with the rapidity of the motion, and the chivalrous feeling of the captain of the boat, but we look occasionally at the boiler and the engine with some fear ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... title has been created by an Act of Parliament, and sometimes it is a title recognised by the general laws and customs of the realm, but a legal title it has got to be. Titles are never matters of rhetoric, nor are they jure divino, or conferred in answer to prayer; they are strictly legal matters, and it is the very particular business of courts of law, when properly invoked, ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... decadence—pity persuades to extinction.... Of course, one doesn't say "extinction": one says "the other world," or "God," or "the true life," or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness.... This innocent rhetoric, from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appears a good deal less innocent when one reflects upon the tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the tendency to destroy life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... action is exhibited in a more serious and elevated strain in many other parts of this play. Biron's speech at the end of the Fourth Act is an excellent specimen of it. It is logic clothed in rhetoric;—but observe how Shakespeare, in his two-fold being of poet and philosopher, avails himself of it to convey profound truths in the most lively images,—the whole remaining faithful to the character supposed to utter the lines, and ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... outset what this book does not attempt to do. It does not, save to the extent that its own special purpose requires, concern itself with the many and intricate problems of grammar, rhetoric, spelling, punctuation, and the like; or clarify the thousands of individual difficulties regarding correct usage. All these matters are important. Concise treatment of them may be found in THE CENTURY HANDBOOK OF WRITING and THE ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... schoolmen, arguing from an accepted brief; the man of genius, the man of a vast industry, intense but futile, the man of captivating presence and a perfect rhetoric— history, with its patient burrowings, has surely undermined the work of all three, sparing only that element in the work of one of them— Newman—which is the preserving salt of all literature—i.e., the magic of personality. And some of the most efficacious burrowers have been ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... blaspheming, malignant persecutor. He says he was "exceedingly mad" against God's saint. It is said that he "breathed out threatening and slaughter." He said that he was the "chief of sinners." Possibly that was no mere rhetoric. He may actually have been the ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... succeeded by men who possessed better literary opportunities and were more devoted to general culture than had been these two able and accomplished lawyers. Moseley, with every requirement, could never bring to any of his many controversies with Governor Pollok and others such flowers of rhetoric as Judge Maurice Moore lavished ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... her National Anthem, "My Country, 'tis of thee," dating from 1832, fixes the date when America, soon after the second war with England, which ended in 1814, consciously felt herself as a Holy Land; far as visitors like Dickens felt her from the perfection implied in her soaring Spread-Eagle rhetoric. The Pilgrim Fathers went to America merely for their own freedom of religious worship: they were actually intolerant to others. From a sectarian patriotism developed what I have called "The Melting Pot," with its high universal ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... of God abounded for us, by so much was this unsearchable love of Christ made manifest. Nor can they that would, before the people, pare away, and make but little these infinite sufferings of our Lord, make his love to be so great as they ought, let them use what rhetoric they can. For their objecting the odious names and place of hell, accounting it not to be fit to say, That so holy a person as the Son of God was there. I answer, though I have not asserted it, yet let me ask, which is more odious, hell or sin? Or ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... perfect Godhead of the Lord Jesus, and her attitude preserved Italy both for Catholicism and for the Empire. Gregory was taught as a Catholic, but he was taught also in classical grammar, composition, rhetoric, and the writings of the great Romans—pre-Christian, as well as of later days. He began his life's work as a Roman official, and by the year 573 he is found as prefect of the city. A year later, it would seem, he became a monk, giving up all his property, all his ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... books of chivalry, of which Aristotle never dreamt, nor St. Basil said a word, nor Cicero had any knowledge; nor do the niceties of truth nor the observations of astrology come within the range of its fanciful vagaries; nor have geometrical measurements or refutations of the arguments used in rhetoric anything to do with it; nor does it mean to preach to anybody, mixing up things human and divine, a sort of motley in which no Christian understanding should dress itself. It has only to avail itself of truth to nature in its composition, and the more perfect the imitation ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... whose kind (friendly, shy, woodland things, half bears or half dogs, frequent in mediaeval legend), is the satyr of Fletcher's "Faithful Shepherdess," the only poetic conception in that gross and insipid piece of magnificent rhetoric. The perfection of the style must naturally be sought from Botticelli, and in his Birth of Venus (but who may speak of that after the writer of most subtle fancy, of most exquisite language, among living Englishman?)[10] ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... oratory was wonderful. He spoke to an audience of five or ten thousand as he would have talked to a party of three or six. His style was simple, natural, unstrained; the lucid statement and cogent argument now and again irradiated by a salient passage of satire or a burst of not too eloquent rhetoric. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... precisely the same doctrine in a University Sermon preached by an Archbishop; but there its point was confused by pietistic rhetoric: the point being that in life, which is a struggle, success has in itself something divine, by virtue of which it can be to itself a law of right and wrong; and (inferentially) that a man is relieved of the noble obligation to command himself so soon and in so far as he is rich enough or strong ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Nonconformist, a preacher, an astrologer and an alchemist, whose library contained works in fifteen languages but no copy of Shakespeare or Milton. He left a treatise on the Elixir of Life. The second, at the age of nineteen, was "somewhat acquainted with the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, rhetoric, logic, poetry, natural philosophy, arithmetic, geometry, cosmography, astronomy, astrology, geography, theology, physics, dialling, navigation, caligraphy, stenography, drawing, heraldry and history." He also drew horoscopes, wrote treatises on astrology and other sciences, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... is found in the Vatican manuscript, I am much inclined to agree in this argument against its authenticity: for though the dawnings of the art of rhetoric might already have appeared, the first who gave it any celebrity was. Corax of Syracuse, and he flourished in ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... come. I drink eternally. This is to me an eternity of drinking, and drinking of eternity. Let us sing, let us drink, and tune up our roundelays. Where is my funnel? What, it seems I do not drink but by an attorney? Do you wet yourselves to dry, or do you dry to wet you? Pish, I understand not the rhetoric (theoric, I should say), but I help myself somewhat by the practice. Baste! enough! I sup, I wet, I humect, I moisten my gullet, I drink, and all for fear of dying. Drink always and you shall never die. If I drink not, I am a-ground, dry, gravelled and spent. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... gasp or two do more Than e'er my rhetoric could before: Persuade the world to trouble me ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... that way before the multitude, he departed from them, and separated the disciples, disputing daily in the school of one Tyrannus." [118:5] This Tyrannus was, in all probability, a Gentile convert, and a teacher of rhetoric—a department of education very much cultivated at that period by all youths anxious to attain social distinction. What is here called his "school," appears to have been a spacious lecture-room sufficient ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... of the most eminent schools and most distinguished philosophers was confined, was limited to what were then called the liberal arts and sciences, and consisted of two branches, the trivium and the quadrivium.[154] The trivium included grammar, rhetoric, and logic; the quadrivium comprehended ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... would seek to see true companions of Socrates, one must look to Crito, (24) and Chaerephon, and Chaerecrates, to Hermogenes, to Simmias and Cebes, to Phaedondes and others, who clung to him not to excel in the rhetoric of the Assembly or the law-courts, but with the nobler ambition of attaining to such beauty and goodliness of soul as would enable them to discharge the various duties of life to house and family, to relatives and ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... and neurotic grown-ups. The cap-and-bells element is largely represented in Chapman's select company of German-American talent: the confetti of foolishness is thrown at us—we dodge, laugh, listen and no one has time to think, weigh, sift or analyze. There are the boom of rhetoric, the crack of confession, the interspersed rebel-yell of triumph, the groans of despair, the cries of victory. Then come songs by paid singers, the pealing of the organ—rise and sing, kneel and pray, entreaty, condemnation, misery, tears, threats, promise, joy, happiness, ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... called all the people together upon the deck, and after taking some pains to explain his crime, with all its aggravations, I ordered that he should be whipt with nettles, while he ran the gauntlet thrice round the deck: My rhetoric, however, had very little effect, for most of the crew being equally criminal with himself, he was handled so tenderly, that others were rather encouraged to repeat the offence by the hope of impunity, than deterred by the fear of punishment. To preserve the ship, therefore, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... reluctance, but soon with apparent good-will, and he even testifies his interest at a later stage by one or two occasional remarks. When attacked by Glaucon he is humorously protected by Socrates 'as one who has never been his enemy and is now his friend.' From Cicero and Quintilian and from Aristotle's Rhetoric we learn that the Sophist whom Plato has made so ridiculous was a man of note whose writings were preserved in later ages. The play on his name which was made by his contemporary Herodicus (Aris. Rhet.), 'thou wast ever bold in battle,' seems ...
— The Republic • Plato
... more practical, more and more bustling and rational. Oh, what a feast it was to answer you by becoming more and more august, more and more gracious, more and more ancient and mellow! But this lad has seen how to bowl me out. He has answered me back, vaunt for vaunt, rhetoric for rhetoric. He has lifted the only shield I cannot break, the shield of an impenetrable pomposity. Listen to him. You have come, my ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... of debate which in intensity resembles a physical combat, he had no equal. He spoke with extraordinary readiness. There was no halting in his phrase. He used good English, terse, vigorous, pointed. He disregarded the adornments of rhetoric—rarely used a simile. He was utterly destitute of humor, and had slight appreciation of wit. He never cited historical precedents except from the domain of American politics. Inside that field his knowledge was comprehensive, minute, critical; beyond it his learning ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... the rhetoric in the world, the plastic art teaches those who study it the gradation of proportions, the fusion of planes, in a word, harmony. The ancient races, through the very fact of their existence, left the mark ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... you can, you false-hearted crocodile!" said Rhoda, poetically, in distant imitation of the flowers of rhetoric of her friend Molly. "I shan't sleep to-night. ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... at length, with pauses to get his breath and with pretensions to rhetoric, and his speech was boring and unpleasant. He several times referred to certain enemies of his, tried to drop hints, repeated himself, coughed, and flourished his fingers unbecomingly. At last he was exhausted and ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... for learning, that his family aided him in preparing for the Maronite college at Ain Warka, the most noted seminary on the mountains. He entered the college at the age of sixteen, and remained nearly three years, applying himself diligently to rhetoric, and to natural and theological science, all of which were taught in the ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... twenty-four years old, and able to bear arms. The war was put up to our generation. I don't know what for; the sins of our fathers, probably. Certainly not to make the world safe for Democracy, or any rhetoric of that sort. When I was doing stretcher work, I had to tell myself over and over that nothing would come of it, but that it had to be. Sometimes, though, I think something must.... Nothing we expect, ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... in Numidia, Africa, in 354 A.D., died in 430; educated at Carthage; taught rhetoric at Carthage; removed to Rome in 383; going thence to Milan in 384, where he became a friend of St. Ambrose; converted from Manicheanism to Christianity by his mother Monica, and baptized by St. Ambrose in 387; made Bishop of Hippo in North Africa in 395; became a champion of orthodoxy ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... me this story of Mr. Webster's remarkable memory. Once he said to Mr. Webster: "You never use notes and apparently have made no preparation, yet you are the only speaker I report whose speeches are perfect in structure, language, and rhetoric. How is this possible?" Webster replied: "It is my memory. I can prepare a speech, revise and correct it in my memory, and then deliver the corrected speech exactly as finished." I have known most of the great orators of ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... "simple and rude"; in the preface to Charles the Great he says that he uses "no gay terms, nor subtle, nor new eloquence"; and in the preface to Blanchardyn and Eglantine he declares that he does not know "the art of rhetoric nor of such gay terms as now be said in these days and used," and that his only desire is to be understood by his readers. The prologue to the Eneydos, however, tells a different story. According to this he has been blamed for expressing himself in "over curious terms which could not be understood ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... venture to make the same assertion to you as Quintilian made respecting Cicero,—that a man may know himself no mean proficient in the business of History who enjoys his Sallust. As for that precept of Aristotle's in the Third Book of his Rhetoric [Chap. XVII] which you would like explained—'Use is to be made of maxims both in the narrative of a case and in the pleading, for it has a moral effect'—I see not what it has in it that much needs ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... threatened with the Alemanni, one of the most powerful tribes of Germany. He seems to have hoped that, if the unadorned language of the two statesmen failed to move Sapor, he might be won over by the persuasive eloquence of the professor of rhetoric. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... inclined to regret the step rendered necessary by my devotion to my sex, for use has made me quite at home in the—ah—divided skirt! How many lovely girls have I danced with through the rosy hours who will never more smile on me as they were wont to smile! How many flowers of rhetoric have been wasted on me by the irony of fate! How many billets-doux, so perfumed and pretty, lie in my desk addressed to my nether garment! And how many mammas have encouraged Mr. Christopher, who will forever taboo Miss Bloggs! And then the parties and the picnics! Ah, my ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... general description of the rainy season which is not found in the Bengal recension and appears to have been interpolated by a far inferior and much later hand than Valmiki's. It is composed in a metre different from that of the rest of the Canto, and contains figures of poetical rhetoric and common-places which are the delight of more ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... purpose of stifling raucous and untimely mirth. As for Dr. Fooss, his small, porcine eyes snapped and twinkled madly behind his spectacles, but he seemed rather inclined to approve my flowers of rhetoric. ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... grotesque little figure, his eccentric action, and his strangely cadenced sentences rather surprised than attracted attention, but as he warmed with the march of ideas, men of both parties warmed to the genial and enlarged philosophy, embodied in the interfused rhetoric and logic of the orator; Pitt was seen to beat time with his hand to every curiously proportioned period, and at length both sides of the House broke into hearty acknowledgments of the genius of the new member for Malton. But as yet their cheers were not followed by their ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... gray. The cry for progress, for material advancement, for moral and social betterment, is stifled, that everybody may have breath to shout for a flapping trouser's leg worn by a degraded old sot. All that your Southern statesmen have had to give a people who were stripped to the bone is fulsome rhetoric about the Wounded Warrior of Wahoo, or some other inflated nonentity, whereupon the mesmerized population have loyally fallen on their faces and shouted, 'Praise the Lord.' And all the while they were ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... revival of letters in England, apart from its moral influence, took two contradictory and opposing forms. In the curricula of schools, logic, which in the Middle Ages had been the groundwork of thought and letters, gave place to rhetoric. The reading of the ancients awakened new delight in the melody and beauty of language: men became intoxicated with words. The practice of rhetoric was universal and it quickly coloured all literature. It was the habit of the rhetoricians ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... has a revolution once in four years, which has contrived the Bowie-knife and the revolver, which has chewed the juice out of all the superlatives in the language in Fourth of July orations, and so used up its epithets in the rhetoric of abuse that it takes two great quarto dictionaries to supply the demand; which insists in sending out yachts and horses and boys to out-sail, out-run, out-fight, and checkmate all the rest of creation; ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... hears. The Symposium of Plato is a work of this character, and can with difficulty be rendered in any words but the writer's own. There are so many half-lights and cross-lights, so much of the colour of mythology, and of the manner of sophistry adhering—rhetoric and poetry, the playful and the serious, are so subtly intermingled in it, and vestiges of old philosophy so curiously blend with germs of future knowledge, that agreement among interpreters is not to be expected. The expression 'poema magis putandum quam comicorum poetarum,' which has been ...
— Symposium • Plato
... writers, whose unpruned vigour was distasteful to one who had already begun to appreciate the purer and not less vigorous style of Homer and other Greek authors. Horace's father took care that he should acquire all the accomplishments of a Roman gentleman, in which music and rhetoric were, as a matter of course, included. But, what was of still more importance during this critical period of the future poet's first introduction to the seductions of the capital, he enjoyed the advantages of his ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... eight twenties of heads from Ath Airthir Midi; hence is Ath Fene. They were there watching the host. And eight twenties of women, that was their share of the spoil. Their heads were brought there, and Conchobar and Celtchar sent them to the camp. It is there that Celtchar said to Conchobar: [Note: Rhetoric.] ...
— The Cattle-Raid of Cualnge (Tain Bo Cualnge) • Unknown
... by Sir Thomas Gresham in 1575, and managed by the Mercer's Company, London, where lectures are delivered, twelve each year, by successive lecturers on physics, rhetoric, astronomy, law, geometry, music, and divinity, to form part of the teaching of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... make them ourselves." "Yes—and quicker!" Mr. Lloyd George had already said, with a sharp emphasis, meant to "hustle" that portion of the nation which still required hustling; overpainting his picture, no doubt, but with quite legitimate rhetoric, in order ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the speech, when divested of all its flowers of rhetoric, was that Maslova, having gained the merchant's confidence, hypnotised him and went to his lodgings with his key meaning to take all the money herself, but having been caught in the act by Simeon and Euphemia had to share it with them. Then, in order to hide the traces of the crime, she had ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... not meet with the approval of Signor d'Annunzio. He made numerous pronouncements with regard to his inflexible desires, saying that, if necessary, he would offer up his bleeding corpse. And his resistance to the Italian Government did not confine itself to rhetoric. During his usurpation of Rieka this man had done his country grievous harm. It was not only that he held her up to the smiles of the malicious who said that she could not keep order in her own house, but he was guiding the people back to barbarism. ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... studied contrivances of speech, shock and disgust men, when their own lives, and the fate of their wives, their children, and their country hang on the decision of the hour. Then words have lost their power, rhetoric is vain, and all elaborate oratory contemptible. Even genius itself then feels rebuked and subdued, as in the presence of higher qualities. Then patriotism is eloquent; then self-devotion is eloquent. The clear conception, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... imaginations are controlled by the greatness of our object. Thus, if a man should go to see the place where (as they say) St. Peter met our Lord on the Appian Way at dawn, he will not care very much for the niggling of pedants about this or that building, or for the rhetoric of posers about this or that beautiful picture. If a thing in his way seem to him frankly ugly he will easily treat it as a neutral, forget it and pass it by. If, on the contrary, he find a beautiful thing, whether done by God or by man, he will remember and ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... the zeal and industry with which Miss M—-T—-has prosecuted the prescribed course of studies in the Cincinnati Female Institution, and the honourable proficiency which she has attained in penmanship, arithmetic, English grammar, rhetoric, belles-lettres, composition, ancient and modern geography, ancient and modern history, chemistry, natural philosophy, astronomy, etcetera. etcetera. etcetera, of which she has given ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... more or less shook by the late bullets buzzin' an' hummin' like a passel of bloo-bottle flies about my office. But now will be different. I'll be ready, an' I'll be in a cool frenzy, the same bein' a mood which is excellent, partic'lar if a gent is out to break records for rhetoric. I shore regyards them malefactors as so many rungs for my clamberin' up the ladder of fame." An' with that this Easy Aaron goes pirootin' forth upon the plains ag'in to resoome his ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... habitats of fishes gives him a kind of shrewdness of observation, just as dealing in horses is an education of certain faculties, and breeds a race of men peculiarly cunning, suspicious, wary, and wide awake, with a rhetoric of appreciation and depreciation all ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... satirist stirred, and he put on a longer drawl as he said, "No, no; not a Ganymede—an oracle, my Judah. A few lessons from my teacher of rhetoric hard by the Forum—I will give you a letter to him when you become wise enough to accept a suggestion which I am reminded to make you—a little practise of the art of mystery, and Delphi will receive you as Apollo himself. At the sound of your solemn voice, the Pythia will come ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... the classical and early mediaeval fortifications of Rome is brought to a close, is described by one document only: an inscription above the gate of the castle, which was copied first by Cola di Rienzo, and later by Pietro Sabino, professor of rhetoric in the Roman archigymnasium (Sapienza), towards the end of the fifteenth century. A few fragments of this remarkable document are still preserved in the cloister of the monastery. It states that Pope John VIII. raised a wall for the defence of the basilica of S. Paul's ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... universities which have adhered to the old method of testing proficiency, it does not appear that these theses were ever defended in public. They related to a variety of subjects in Technology, Logic, Grammar, Rhetoric, Mathematics, Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, and afterwards Theology. The candidates for a Master's degree also published theses at this time, which were called Quaestiones magistrales. The syllogistic disputes were held between an affirmant and respondent, who stood in the side galleries ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... ravenous strangers, and especially in these Spaniards, who more greedily thirst after English blood than after the lives of any other people in Europe;' 'whose weakness we have discovered to the world.' Historians, with whom Ralegh has never been a favourite, treat as merely dishonest rhetoric the compassion he now and again expressed for the millions of innocent men, women, and children, branded, roasted, mangled, ripped alive, by Spaniards, though as free by nature as any Christians. There is no just reason to think ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
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