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Biography   Listen
noun
Biography  n.  (pl. biographies)  
1.
The written history of a person's life.
2.
Biographical writings in general.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Biography" Quotes from Famous Books



... Urge the pupils to use originality of thought and pen in producing them. The aim of the device is to impress by a simple picture the contents of the book as a whole. Under No. 2 the kind of literature may be described, as history, law, discourse, biography, etc. Secure answers to Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5 in Bible Dictionary. As a rule, Nos. 7, 8, 9, 11, 12 will be given. Under No. 10 part of the chapters will be named, and part are to be read and named by the pupils. After the pupils present ...
— A Bird's-Eye View of the Bible - Second Edition • Frank Nelson Palmer

... James Allan Park, a highly successful barrister, who was judge from 1816 to his death in 1838. "As judge, though not eminent, he was sound, fair and sensible, a little irascible, but highly esteemed." He was also the author of a religious work. And that is all the particular Liar who wrote his biography in the D.N.B. can tell us ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson

... it, there would only remain to add that the difficulties with which De Quincey confronts an intending biographer of Coleridge must necessarily be multiplied many-fold by the conditions under which this work is here attempted. No complete biography of Coleridge, at least on any important scale of dimensions, is in existence; no critical appreciation of his work as a whole, and as correlated with the circumstances and affected by the changes of his life, has, so far as I am aware, ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill

... cavaliers cut after the same pattern as the first. Their stern, harsh faces, red beards, and broad, square military shoulders told that by swordthrusts and broken lances they had founded the nobility of their race. An heroic preface to this family biography! A rough and warlike page of the Middle Ages! After these proud men-of-arms came several figures of a less ferocious aspect, but not so imposing. In these portraits of the fifteenth century beards had disappeared with the sword. In those wearing caps and velvet toques, ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard

... melted into cheerless gray smoke, as so much of the rest is—to Mr. Mackinsy and us. I have made, in the Scotch Mackenzie circles, what inquiry was due; find no evidence, but various likelihoods, that this of the Barberina and him is fact, and a piece of his biography. As to the inference deduced from it, in regard to Friedrich and the Earl of Bute, on a critical occasion,—that rests entirely with Zimmermann; and the candid mind inclines to admit that, probably, it is but rumor and conjecture; street-dust sticking to the Doctor's shoes, and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... lives before him, but he begins to discriminate and to analyze it only through reading; souls are revealed where the purpose of the writer is that the reader may see the springs of action in the character portrayed. Fiction, biography, travel, and adventure soon pass from the merely exterior happenings to the ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope

... Avonlea seemed very dull without him. He never wrote to her, and Anne missed the letters that never came. To be sure, Roy wrote twice a week; his letters were exquisite compositions which would have read beautifully in a memoir or biography. Anne felt herself more deeply in love with him than ever when she read them; but her heart never gave the queer, quick, painful bound at sight of his letters which it had given one day when Mrs. Hiram Sloane had handed her out an envelope addressed ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... years have elapsed since Mr. Froude's death, no biography of him has, so far as I know, appeared. This book is an attempt to tell the public something about a man whose writings have a permanent place in the ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... this biography, was born on the 2d of November, 1755. Few of the inhabitants of this world have commenced life under circumstances of greater splendor, or with more brilliant prospects of a life replete with happiness. She ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

... John that I am in receipt of his favor of yesterday prox., and also your message, saying am I sure it is a football I want. I have to inform you that I have changed my mind and think I'll stick to a book (or two books according to price), after all. Dickson Secundus has seen a newspaper biography of "Dead Man's Rock" and it is ripping, but, unfortunately, there is a lot in it about a girl. So don't buy "Dead Man's Rock" for me. I told Fox about Hope's two books and he advises me to get one ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie

... still dying, he had had an answer to give to all pipers. But that answer would suffice him no longer. Every clause in that will would be in the "Daily Jupiter" of the day after to-morrow—the "Daily Jupiter" which had already given a wonderfully correct biography of the ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope

... a biography, it is a sketch; possibly I might say it is an outline. At any rate the life of our subject can not be written till other chapters are added, and the end comes. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... of the bird. But how should we like to be inventoried in such a style? "His name was John Smith; he lived in Boston, in a three-story brick house; he had a baritone voice, but was not a good singer." All true enough; but do you call that a man's biography? ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey

... until now they have preserved the house where he spent his last days and have kept his grave sacred, a place of pilgrimages and miracles. The former dynasty of Romanoff was deeply interested in the biography of Feodor Kusmitch and this interest fixed the opinion that Kusmitch was really the Czar Alexander I, who had voluntarily taken upon ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski

... Next, it set up Democracy as the ideal for all peoples to live by. Finally, it revealed that the economic, industrial, social, and moral concerns of men are deeper than the political. When I came to review Roosevelt's career consecutively, for the purpose of this biography, I saw that many of his acts and policies, which had been misunderstood or misjudged at the time, were all the inevitable expressions of the principle which was the master-motive of his life. What we had imagined to be shrewd devices for winning a partisan advantage, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... was, the great grim man, whom I've feared more than anybody on earth. When I stuck, he lifted me, just as if I'd been a little child. And he seemed to know all I'd felt, and to have gone through it all." This tenderness and charm of a strong man, which in Stanley's biography is specially mentioned as growing more and more visible in the last months of his life, was always there for his children. In a letter written in 1828 to his sister, when my father as a small child not yet five was supposed to be dying, Arnold ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Perhaps, however, the assertion of two of his contemporaries, one of whom was personally acquainted with him, is more entitled to credit in this respect. Joh. Manlius and Joh. Wier—the latter in his biography of Cornelius Agrippa—name Kundlingen, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... a newspaper are wrong and criminal. Thus, though you meant to be complimentary in your sketch of my career, you make more than a dozen mistakes of fact, which I need not correct, as I don't desire my biography to be written till I am dead. It is enough for the world to know that I live and am a soldier, bound to obey the orders of my superiors, the laws of my country, and to venerate its Constitution; and that, when discretion ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman

... curious that no extended account of this historic event exists. Forster, in his biography of the novelist, beyond saying that "everybody in hearty good-humour with every other body," and that "our friend Ainsworth was of the company," is otherwise silent over the event. There is certainly a reference to the dinner in ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz

... ideas. Notions dormant since years ago. Phrases, ironies remembered out of conversations themselves forgotten. The book was finished towards the middle of March—a history of the post-war Germany; with a biography between the lines of Erik Dorn. Von Stinnes had forthwith produced two German scholars who, under his direction, accomplished the translation with astonishing speed. Excerpts from the thin red-and black-covered volume found their way overnight into the press ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht

... dictionary, running in alphabetical order. The first volume extends to the letter I, and is illustrated with scraps from newspapers, and a few portraits. It is written pretty fully in double columns. The portrait and biography of Bouzard form an admirable specimen of biographical literary memoirs. The second volume goes to Z. The third volume is entitled "Les trois Siecles palinodiques, ou Histoire Generale des Palinods ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... Biography; by M.H. Schleiden, M.D., Professor of Botany in the University of Jena. English translation, ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... of S. T. Coleridge (Vol. vii., p. 282.).—There can be but one opinion and feeling as to the want which exists for a really good biography of this intellectual giant; but there will be many dissentients as to the proposed biographer, whose life of Hartley Coleridge cannot be regarded as a happy example of this class of composition. A life from the pen of Judge Coleridge, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 180, April 9, 1853 • Various

... with all the reasons for revolution and counter-revolution involved in the complicated civil disorders, the Wars of the Roses, affected Charles's policy but they can only be suggested in his biography. It must be remembered that the modern impression of English stability and French fickleness in political institutions, an impression casting reflections direct and indirect upon literature as well as history, is based on ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam

... in Greece about the year 100 A.D., nine hundred years after the subject of his biography, relates the forming and imposing of those laws with the utmost faith, and the most implicit innocence; which goes to prove that the Grecian idea of government, with all its knowledge, had not advanced much, at least up to ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)

... haggard and wild of aspect; the cry of the world, "Take a position!" rang in his ears day and night. The springs of book-reviews had dried up entirely, and by sheer starvation he was forced to a stage lower yet. A former college friend was editing a work of "contemporary biography", and offered Thyrsis some hack-writing. It meant the carrying home of huge bundles of correspondence from the world's most brightly-shining lights, and the making up of biographical sketches from their eulogies of themselves. With every light there came a portrait, showing what ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... and the guest were strangers to each other, turned upon the topics of the day, and the objects in the room, some of which, as we know, were sufficiently remarkable. At Charley's request Mrs. Basil once more narrated the story of the skull; and then epitomized, with caustic tongue, the biography of poor Joanna. Up stairs, she said, she had one of that lady's "seals"—a passport to eternal bliss—which she would bestow as a present upon the young gentleman opposite. Her cynical humor delighted Charley, and won the approbation of his father—not the less so, perhaps, ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn

... Simile Song I would my Love Death in Life Song of the Strike Nature's Heroes: the Rhondda Valley Disaster Elegy on the Death of a Little Child Magdalene Love Walks with Humanity Yet The Two Trees Stanzas Verses, written after Reading a Biography of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort A Simile The Two Sparrows Floating Away A Floral Fable Ring Down the Curtain The Telegraph Post Breaking on the Shore Hurrah! for the Rifle Corps Be Careful when you Find a Friend Brotherly Love England and France Against ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning

... Johnson's melancholy piety or his abounding humour and love of fun and nonsense. His Prayers and Meditations are full of the one, Boswell and Mrs. Thrale and Madame D'Arblay are full of the other. Boswell's Johnson has superseded the 'authorized biography' by Sir John Hawkins, and Dr. Hill did well to include in these Miscellanies Hawkins' inimitable description of the memorable banquet given at the Devil Tavern, near Temple Bar, in the spring of 1751, to celebrate the publication ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell

... his ancestry to find the elder Adams of Massachusetts who was a great orator. When he drove a nail and made a creditable bobsled, they saw in him a future architect and stored the incident for the Romance that was to be biography. When he organized a baseball club, they saw in him the budding leadership that should make him a ruler of men. Even Grant's odd mania to take up the cause of the weak—often foolish causes that revealed ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,—must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know. What the former age has epitomized into a formula or rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good of verifying for ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... is not the point of the story, which is that on that island of Adole, Ngouta, the interpreter, first saw the light. Why he ever did—there or anywhere—Heaven only knows! I know I shall never want to write his biography. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... a biography of Lanier rather than a critical study of his work. So far as possible, I have told the story in his own words, or in the words of those who knew him most intimately. If I have erred in placing undue emphasis on the early part of his career, it was intentional, for that is the part of his life ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... his death there was printed a book which purported to be his biography. It was the work of a bank-clerk who had been discharged by Girard. This man had been close enough to his employer to lend plausibility to much that he had to say, and as the author called himself ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard

... with him personally. A year made him collared and cravatted, short-cropped of hair, mighty in high-school frays, and with a new ambition stirring him, of a quality to compare with that of one Lucifer of unbounded reputation and doubtful biography. There was something beyond all shooting and riding and wrestling fame and the breath of growing things. There was another world with reachable prizes and much to feed upon. He must wear medals, metaphorically, and eat his fill, ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo

... not blunt his steel when he proceeded to operate upon himself. He did not spare himself, but dug the knife in and turned it round. It was, indeed, a singularly curious piece of biography, written with all the pungency and point its writer could command, and it need hardly be said that such a sketch silenced the guns of some of his foes and made something of a sensation ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton

... to go back a good way for that!" said Howard. "People can't afford now to know more than a manual of a couple of hundred pages can tell them about a subject. I can tell you some good historical books, and some books of literary criticism and biography. I can't do much about poetry or novels; and philosophy, science, and theology I am no use at all for. But I could get you some advice if you like. That's the best of Cambridge, there are so many people about who are able to tell ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson

... the bottle, he had himself helped her to the first dose, and had then begun to talk about the creature comforts before described, the very mention of which seemed to cheer the old lady's heart, and to interest her at least as much as the biography of the travelling quack. ...
— Aunt Judy's Tales • Mrs Alfred Gatty

... surroundings among which Bunyan passed the earliest and most impressionable years of his life, we pass to the subject of our biography himself. The notion that Bunyan was of gipsy descent, which was not entirely rejected by Sir Walter Scott, and which has more recently received elaborate support from writers on the other side of the Atlantic, may be pronounced absolutely baseless. Even if Bunyan's inquiry of his father ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables

... know in biography anywhere more beautiful, more striking, than the contrast between the two halves of the character and demeanour of the Baptist; how, on the one side, he fronts all men undaunted and recognises no superior, and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... and Proper Names Index to the Variants and Analogues Index to the Notes of W. A. Clouston and W. F. Kirby Alphabetical Table of Notes (Anthropological, &c.) Additional Notes on the Bibliography of the Thousand and One Nights, by W. F. Kirby The Biography of the Book and Its Reviewers ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... seated in a large arm-chair by one side of the hearth. Marquis d'Aigrigny was standing before the fire. Dr. Baleinier seated near a bureau, was again turning over the leaves of Baron Tripeaud's biography, whilst the baron appeared to be very attentively examining one of the pictures of sacred subjects suspended from ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... seeing that I don't know Mr. Lovell." "Don't know Frank Lovell!" exclaimed John. "The greatest friend I have in the world." (Men's friends always are the greatest in the world.) "I'll introduce him to you; there he is—no he isn't. I saw him a moment ago." And forthwith John launched into a long biography of his friend Frank Lovell—how that gentleman was the nicest fellow and the finest rider and the best shot in the universe; how he knew more about racing than any man of his age, and had been in more difficulties, and got out of them better, and robbed the public ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville

... "wonder-worker." His success gave rise to envy, and he was afraid of being poisoned by his less successful rivals. The reason why he left Rome is not certain, and the possible causes of his departure are discussed by Dr. Greenhill in the "Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology." A pestilence raged in Rome at this time, but it is unlikely that Galen would have deserted his patients for that reason. Probably he disliked Rome, and longed for his native place. He had been in Pergamos only a very short time when he was summoned ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott

... up, first in volume Aus to Bis of the encyclopedia, without finding him, and then successfully in the National Biography—Bell, John, was a London bookseller. He was born in 1745, published his edition of Shakespeare in 1774, and after this assault, with the blood upon him, lived fifty years. This was reassuring. It was then but a bit of ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks

... NEW YORK.—Being personal incidents, interesting sketches, bits of biography, and gossipy events in the life of nearly every leading merchant in New York City. Three series 12mo. cloth, ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie

... same disproportion there is, though in a different way, between any quarrel that may have divided us from a man in his life-time and the savage revenge of pursuing the quarrel after his death through a malicious biography. Yet, if you hated him through no quarrel, but simply (as we all hate many men that died a thousand years ago) for something vicious, or which you think vicious, in his modes of thinking, why must you, of all men, be the one to undertake ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... the best-read men I have met. He seems to know something about everything. He ranges from Joseph Conrad to Kant, from Booker Washington to Tolstoi. History, fiction, travel, biography, have all come within his ken. I told him I proposed to go from Capetown to the Congo and possibly to Angola. His face lighted up. "Ah, yes," he said, "I have read all about those countries. I can see them before ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson

... indicated American parentage, while all but three of the non-jokers had foreign names. Abraham Lincoln is, of course, the great example of this tendency to introduce the element of humour into the graver concerns of life; and his biography narrates many instances of its most happy effect. All the newspapers, including the religious weeklies, have a ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... looking at the captain at times reflectively. Carg, feeling his biography had not been appreciated, had lapsed into silence. At length the wounded man began feeling in his breast pocket—an awkward operation because the least action disturbed the swathed limb—and presently drew out a leather card case. With much ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne

... that had been sent him the previous day, was greeted in this fashion: "Followed your prescription? No. Egad, if I had, I should have broken my neck, for I flung it out of the two pair of stairs window." For the rest, this diverting biography contains some excellent warnings against the vice of gambling; with a particular account of the manner in which the Government of the day tried by statute after statute to suppress the tables at Tunbridge and Bath, ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black

... Clarendon Park—and billiards always. The political conferences were held in Lord Davenant's apartment: to what these conferences tended we never knew and never shall; we consider them as matters of history, and leave them with due deference to the historian; we have to do only with biography. Far be it from us to meddle with politics—we have quite enough to do ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth

... writing an autobiography are because I am the only person in the world who knows enough about my history to give a truthful account of it, and because I dread the possibility of falling into the hands of some writer who might attempt a biography with inadequate materials. I have already been selected as a subject by two or three biographers with very friendly intentions, but their friendliness did not always ensure accuracy. When the materials are not supplied in abundance, ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... offended at or above criticism or correction? I do not know who ought to be; I am sure, no author. I am a private man, of no consequence, and at best an author of very moderate abilities. In a work that comprehends so much biography as my Anecdotes of Painting, it would have been impossible, even with much more diligence than I employed, not to make numberless mistakes. It is kind to me to point out those errors; to the world it is justice. Nor have i a reason to be displeased even with ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... of Mozart's admirers, but also to professional musicians; for in them alone is strikingly set forth how Mozart lived and labored, enjoyed and suffered, and this with a degree of vivid and graphic reality which no biography, however complete, could ever succeed in giving. Who does not know the varied riches of Mozart's life? All that agitated the minds of men in that day—nay, all that now moves, and ever will move, the heart of man—vibrated with ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

... to the bishop, didn't you?' 'Yes. He brought a letter of introduction to me from the Vicar of St Ann's in Kensington, but his biography ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume

... bureau, by which every man, President or private, has his lot apportioned him,—one mulcted in a folio, the other in a paragraph. If we examine somewhat closely the features of this peculiar institution, we shall learn that a distinguishing characteristic of the new school of biography is the astonishing familiarity shown by the narrator with the circumstances, the conversations, and the very thoughts of remarkable boys in their early life. The incidents of childhood are usually forgotten before the man's renown has given them any importance; the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... which are nevertheless two different notions, we place the Ego in the consciousness of the muscular effort struggling against something which resists. Or, finally and still more frequently, we represent the subject to ourselves by confusing it with our own personality; it is a part of our biography, our name, our profession, our social status, our body, our past life foreshortened, our character, or, in a word, our civil personality, which becomes the subject of the relation subject-object. We artificially ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... the school room, the teacher instinct still strong within her, she argued if she could teach out of books written by others, why not out of books of her own? Then followed poems, short stories, biography, textbooks, the editing of Crane Classics, "One Hundred Kansas ...
— Kansas Women in Literature • Nettie Garmer Barker

... cut a convict figure, The very Botany Bay in moral geography; Their loyal treason, renegado rigour, Are good manure for their more bare biography. Wordsworth's last quarto, by the way, is bigger Than any since the birthday of typography; A drowsy frowzy poem, call'd the 'Excursion.' Writ in a manner which ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... I have done with you; it only remains to pay my Acknowledgments to an Author, whose Stile I have exactly followed in this Life, it being the properest for Biography. The Reader, I believe, easily guesses, I mean Euclid's Elements; it was Euclid who taught me to write. It is you, Madam, who pay me for Writing. Therefore I am ...
— An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews • Conny Keyber

... when critical utterance was more than ordinarily full-wigged and ponderous, it dared to be sprightly and epigrammatic. Some of its passages, besides, bear upon the writer's personal experiences, and serve to piece the imperfections of his biography. If it brought him no sudden wealth, it certainly raised his reputation with the book-selling world. A connexion already begun with Smollett's 'Critical Review' was drawn closer; and the shrewd ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith

... winding them and explain to him their uses. At length, yielding to my ardent insistence, he brought me two big books, the large leaves of which were of paper yellow with age, and from them read to me the biography of Issa, which I carefully transcribed in my travelling notebook according to the translation made by the interpreter. This curious document is compiled under the form of isolated verses, which, as placed, very often had no apparent connection with, or ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch

... rising herself, and following me languidly. The books were arranged in groups—science, history, biography, travels, poetry, fiction; with bound volumes of such periodicals as the Contemporary Review, The Nineteenth Century, and the Westminster. I read the titles of the volumes in the science divisions with surprise, for she had ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... friendship with Sebastian Dundas, and came to the conclusion that they must know something more definite now about this person calling herself Madame la Marquise de Montfort. As a stranger it was all very well to overlook the vagueness of her biography—they were not committed to anything really dangerous by simply visiting a householder among them—but it was another matter if she was to be married to one of themselves. Then they must learn who she really was, and Mr. Dundas must satisfy them scrupulously, else they ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various

... greatly trusted and found worthy of trust, who knows the world by having long taken a leading part in its affairs, and has outlived illusions only to get a firmer footing in realities. This, indeed, is a liberal education; and this was the happiness of Henry Clay. Nothing in biography is so strange as the certainty with which a superior youth, in the most improbable circumstances, finds the mental nourishment he needs. Here, in the swampy region of Hanover County, Virginia, was a barefooted, ungainly urchin, a poor widow's son, without one ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton

... recognition for a great event, or a great personality, has not been reached. The swelling of the breast under strong emotion uplifts understanding. Under such influence a writer is to the extent of his faculties on the level of his theme. As for biography, I would no more attempt to write that of a man for whom I felt no warm admiration, than I would maintain friendship with one for ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan

... intended to show how he illuminated the lightest and most ephemeral topics of the day with a literary touch at once acute and humorous, and certainly unconventional. In the Appendix to these volumes the reader will find a review of the fictitious biography of Miss Emma Abbott, the once noted opera singer. It is an ingenious piece of work and will repay reading as a satire on current reviewing, besides illustrating the daring liberty Field could take with anyone whom he ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... to say that I was plunged, still breathing, in the tomb. I do get carried away so. Sometimes I form plans. I think I will leave this business and write my biography. It would be a record, not of the facts that are, but of the facts as I ...
— If Winter Don't - A B C D E F Notsomuchinson • Barry Pain

... of the World is the Biography of Great Men." He might have added, that in primitive times much of the History of the World is the Biography of Great Children. Andrew Lang, in his edition of Perrault's Tales, speaking of Le Petit Poucet (Hop o' My Thumb), says: "While ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... their contents are very expensive and mostly rare works, each of a size that suggests a packing-case rather than a coat-pocket. The 'Cathedral Series' are important compilations concerning history, architecture, and biography, and quite popular enough for such as take any sincere interest ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley

... the book, the biography famous, And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life? And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life? (As if any man really knew aught of my life, Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman

... to him, and now—now he jeers at me! Even if I did cross myself, and pray for the repose of the soul of the Comtesse du Barry, what does it matter? Three days ago, for the first time in my life, I read her biography in an historical dictionary. Do you know who she was? You there!" addressing his ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... Murphy, Croker, J. B. Nichols, Macaulay, Carlyle, Rogers, Fitzgerald, Dr Hill and others, it may appear hazardous to venture upon such a well-ploughed field where the pitfalls are so numerous and the materials so scattered. I cannot, however, refrain from the expression of the belief that in this biography of Boswell will be found something that is new to professed students of the period, and much to the class of general readers that may lead them to reconsider the verdict at which they may have arrived ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask

... and positive scientific knowledge, are really of less advantage to me than any others, because of their making no appeal to what I should call my emotional memory, and so they only profit me for the moment in which I read them. Works of imagination, of criticism, of history, and biography (even of metaphysical speculation), leave more with me than treatises of positive knowledge or scientific facts. From the others, a spirit, an animus, a general impression, a mental, moral, or intellectual ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... one of the leading witnesses and one to whom the prosecutor attached great significance. It appeared that he knew everything; his knowledge was amazing, he had been everywhere, seen everything, talked to everybody, knew every detail of the biography of Fyodor Pavlovitch and all the Karamazovs. Of the envelope, it is true, he had only heard from Mitya himself. But he described minutely Mitya's exploits in the "Metropolis," all his compromising doings and sayings, and told the story of Captain Snegiryov's "wisp of ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... His son, also a Quaker, heard of the imprisonment mentioned in this poem and attempted to rescue his father. During the years between this trouble in 1676 and his death in 1686, the persecution seems to have been directed largely against his son. (See Dictionary of National Biography for details.) Whinier naturally felt keenly on this subject, as ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various

... and hotels, are brilliant. The opera is over, and carriages are whirling away toward Fifth Avenue, and tramcars crawling along in procession, packed to the platforms with gayly dressed passengers. Across the way from Macy's huge dark store, the Herald presses are rushing off the biography of the day in sight of everybody, and no philosopher moralizes on that awful, tremendous record of four-and-twenty hours of a whole world's work, play, crime, suffering, ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various

... passed largely in her father's excellent library, which was well stocked with classic works, both history, biography, philosophy, and poetry, and her education was ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell

... man's career. A good many critical and controversial books and articles of varying power and bitterness have appeared about him. A short Life of him by myself, was published in a supplementary volume of the Dictionary of National Biography in 1912. The people who knew him in Ireland, and some who have followed in his tracks there have set down or collected facts about him. The student will no doubt meet with more of these as time goes by. For those which have already ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield

... of his friends, their book learning, and their experience of public affairs; and his work on the dukes of Burgundy was praised, in the infancy of those studies, beyond its merit in early life he had assisted Madame de la Rochejaquelein to bring out her Memoirs. His short biography of Saint Priest, Minister of the Interior in the first revolutionary year, is a singularly just and weighty narrative. After 1848 he published nine volumes on the Convention and the Directory. Like the rest of his party, Barante had always acknowledged the original spirit ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... Biography is a telescope of life, through which we can see the extremes and excesses of the varied properties of the human heart. Wisdom and folly, refinement and vulgarity, love and hatred, tenderness and cruelty, happiness and misery, piety and infidelity, commingled with every ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver

... started for Buffalo to your Institution. Still uninformed as to the cause of my trouble, I submitted to a searching examination, as to my habits, constitution, parentage, the age and cause of death of my parents, and other facts, from which a tolerable biography could have been prepared. All was kindly intended. Their aim was to locate my ailment and then to determine my ability to undergo an operation. Having found a stone in the bladder, they advised that it be crushed and extracted. By a ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... will return it to him from my privy purse." [Footnote: Palm's widow received large sums of money, which were subscribed for her everywhere in Germany, England, and Russia. In St. Petersburg the emperor and empress headed the list.—Vide "Biography of John ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach

... literature since Don Quixote are life-size gentlemen, and these are Colonel Newcome and King Arthur, as drawn by Thackeray and Tennyson, men of one era and pure souls. In these characters is evident deliberation of intent to create gentlemen. This article has given no heed to biography or history, because these concern themselves with truth as observed, and are therefore not imaginative. What we are considering is an ideal person, fashioned after the pattern discovered in good lives, which happily grow more and more plentiful as years multiply. Besides, biography ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... returned to the spot and they were gone. We had seen them at the very moment when beauty was complete and animation dormant. I have since found nearly a similar account of this curious process in Mr. Bingley's very entertaining work, called 'Animal Biography.' ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford

... library, you will find much information about Wales in Social England, the Dictionary of National Biography, the publications of the Cymmrodorion and other societies. You will find articles of great value and interest over the names of F. H. Haverfield, J. W. Willis-Bund, Egerton Phillimore, the Honourable Mrs Bulkeley Owen (Gwenrhian Gwynedd), Henry Owen, the late David Lewis, T. F. ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards

... more regret, because, like all their catalogues of autographs, it was drawn up with amateur-like intelligence and care; so as to make it worth preserving as a valuable record of materials for our history and biography. ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.04.06 • Various

... not more valuable possessions than dollars, stocks, and bonds? Every one is more or less fascinated, drawn, and won by beauty, and to the beautiful the most sacred thoughts and feelings of the heart are continually intrusted. History and biography show that beautiful women, if true, gentle, and unselfish, have great power with their own sex, and almost unbounded influence over men. Your power, therefore, is subtle, penetrating, and reaches the inner life, the very warp and woof of character. If a beautiful statue can ennoble and refine, ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe

... life; but an art has its seat at the centre of the artist's doings and sufferings, deals directly with his experiences, teaches him the lessons of his own fortunes and mishaps, and becomes a part of his biography. So says Goethe: ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... and lighting a cigarette, "is better than the newspapers. Go on, Colonel! Your biography may not be sympathetic, but it ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... eels being viviparous, it may be added (if the argument of analogy applies in this case), that the animalculae of paste eels are decidedly viviparous. Mr. Bingley also, in his animal biography, says that eels are viviparous. Blumenbach says, too, that 'according to the most correct observations they are certainly viviparous.' He adds also, that, the eel is so tenacious of life, that its heart, when removed from ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 543, Saturday, April 21, 1832. • Various

... the reading consists mostly of light fiction, the mind is directed away from the really important things of life. The reading of children should be thoughtfully controlled, both as to quality and quantity. Exciting stories should, as a rule, be excluded, but a taste for biography, historical and scientific writings, and for the great works of literature should be cultivated. Simple fairy tales which have a recognized value in developing the imagination of the child need not be omitted, but it is of vital importance that the ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.

... childhood he had possessed the quick perception, the instinct, which could read in people's characters their tendencies toward good and evil, and throughout his life he valued this ability above literary skill and finish. Mr. Forster makes a point of this in his biography, speaking of the noticeable traits in him: "What I had most, indeed, to notice in him at the very outset of his career, was his indifference to any praise of his performances on their merely literary merit, compared with the higher recognition of them as bits of actual life, with ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens

... the operation of political forces through successive generations, to contrast the action of individuals with the evolution of causes over which they had but little control, and to bring the salient features of the national biography into relief by the suppression of comparatively unimportant details.' He found no examples to follow, for Villani with all his merits was of a different order. Diarists and chroniclers there were in plenty, ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli

... The Craftsman: Beside the stature of this book, the ordinary novel and biography are curiously dwarfed. You read it with a poignant interest and close it with wonder, reverence and gratitude. There is something strangely touching about words so candid, and a draught of philosophy that has been pressed from such wild and bitter-sweet ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort

... that I exaggerated the importance of the Nougat Incident; that my weakness is a tendency to dwell with a morbid concentration on small, inessential details. When I tell her that if I succeed in surviving Jimmy I shall write his biography, she tilts her chin and says I'm the last person who should ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair

... only, and then is gone. Of other people, we can know still less; we can observe something, we can get more from hearsay; but that is a chaos of impressions; the larger part is inference and construction, a work of the imagination, which may or may not be true. Even the biography, carefully made from all available data in the way of personal recollections, letters, and diaries, although it may approach to wholeness, remains, nevertheless, very largely a construction, a work of ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker

... explanation, or where we wished to compare the assertions of the Princess with other testimonies. The Princess, in the salons of the Palais Royal, wrote in a style not very unlike that which might be expected in the present day from the tenants of its garrets. A more complete biography than any which has hitherto been drawn up is likewise added to the present edition. In other respects we have faithfully followed the original Strasburg edition. The style of the Duchess will be sometimes found a little singular, and her chit-chat indiscreet and often audacious; ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... taught, and made them read the Scriptures to him day by day for many years. He was blessed with a very retentive memory and with good common sense, so that he had a very fair acquaintance with the history, the biography, and the doctrinal teaching of both the Old and the New Testament. And now, to this knowledge, there was added that special working of the Holy Spirit, which produced deep conviction of sin, and an anxious desire to escape eternal punishment. He says, "I regularly attended the preaching ...
— Old Daniel • Thomas Hodson

... first edition was exhausted, and a second, with illustrations, was called for. In two more, it became necessary to issue a third, with a biography of the author, in which it was shown that Mien-yaun was the worst-abused individual in the world, and that Pekin had forever dishonored itself by ill-treating the greatest genius that city had ever ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various

... to write a biography of Alexander Hamilton in a more flexible manner than is customary with that method of reintroducing the dead to the living, but without impinging upon the territory of fiction. But after a visit to the British and Danish West Indies in search of the truth regarding his birth ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... expected that a Life of the Author should have been prefixed to this volume. The Life of Knox, by DR. M'CRIE, is however a work so universally known, and of so much historical value, as to supersede any attempt that might be made for a detailed biography; and none of the earlier sketches of his life is sufficiently minute or accurate to answer the purpose intended. In order to obviate the necessity of the reader having recourse to other authorities, ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox

... exhortation which accompanied these narratives was always the same: "You, too, should try to become famous; would not you, too, like to be famous?" "Oh, no!" I answered one day, drily; "I shall never do so. I care too much for the children of the future to add yet another biography to the list." ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... in. I organized a Sunday School and taught them ethics and religion. I got up little entertainments for them. I procured a stereopticon, gave them lectures on my experience in Egypt, and lectures on art, biography and history. I had a peculiar method of advertising these lectures. I informed the little cripple boy on the corner. He whispered the information to a section of the huts, at the farthest end of which a golden-haired courier ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine

... worth while to spend a few minutes of the recitation in characterizing the epoch in which the events of the lesson take place or in listening to a brief character sketch of the men contributing to these events. Care should of course be taken that biography does not usurp the place of history, but it materially adds to the interest of the recitation if the kings, generals, and statesmen cease to be merely historical characters and become ...
— The Teaching of History • Ernest C. Hartwell

... advance sheets of Miss Abbott's biography have been sent to us by the publishers. This volume, consisting of 868 pages, is entitled, "Ten Years a Song Bird: Memoirs of a Busy Life, by Emma Abbott." It will be put upon the market in time to catch what is called the holiday trade, and we hope it will have that enormous ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... in upon the eastern frontiers of the now helpless and amorphous empire of Charlemagne, all the way from the Baltic to the Danube; of the quarrel between Henry IV and that Jupiter Ecclesiasticus, Hildebrand, or Gregory VII, who has left us his biography in the single phrase, "To go to Canossa"; of Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes; of the long fight between popes and emperors over the right of investiture; of Rudolph of Hapsburg; of the throwing off of their allegiance ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... proved perfectly faithful soldiers of the Queen. The perversion of morals, however, which looks on such violations of military duty as praiseworthy, has not been confined to writers of the stamp of Mr. O'Brien. A striking instance of it is furnished by a recent American biography. Among the early Fenian conspirators was a young man named John Boyle O'Reilly. He was a genuine enthusiast, with a real vein of literary talent; in the closing years of his life he won the affection and admiration of very honourable men, and I should certainly have no wish to look too harshly ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... largest part of the sixth volume of his more extensive "History of the British Navy." [Footnote: A new edition, London, 1826.] Two other British writers, Lieutenant Marshall [Footnote: "Royal Naval Biography," by John Marshall (London, 1823-1835).] and Captain Brenton, [Footnote: "Naval History of Great Britain," by Edward Pelham Brenton (new edition, London, 1837).] wrote histories of the same events, about the same time; but neither of these naval officers produced ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt

... a writing-master, published in 1763, "The Origin and Progress of Letters." The great singularity of this volume is "a new species of biography never attempted before in English." This consists of the lives of "English Penmen," otherwise writing-masters! If some have foolishly enough imagined that the sedentary lives of authors are void of interest from deficient incident and interesting ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... Long ere noon, in the distance toward which he was heading, Blair detected a brown dot against the white. Steadily, as he advanced, it resolved itself into the thing he had expected, and stood revealed before him, the centre of a horribly legible page, the last page in the biography of a noble horse. Let us pass it by: Ben did, looking the other way. But a new and terrible vitality possessed him. His weariness left him, as pain passes under an opiate. He did not pause to eat, to drink. Tireless as a waterfall, watchful as a hawk, he jogged on, on, ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge

... marked Hindenburg. Babies, fishing boats, race horses, cafes, avenues and squares, a city of 60,000, a whole county, are being named after him, and minor poets are taking his name in vain daily, "Hindenburg Marches" are being composed in endless procession, a younger brother is about to publish his biography, and legends are already thickly clustering about his name. He laid the Russian bugaboo before it had a chance to make its debut; there is not today the slightest nervousness about the possible coming of the Cossacks, and there will not be, so long as the Commander in Chief of all the armies ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... appear in the modern editions of "Who's Who," which are become less discriminate than the earlier ones. "Noteworthiness" is ascribed, without exception, to all whose names appear in the "Dictionary of National Biography," but all of these were dead before the date of the publication of that work and its supplement. Noteworthiness is also ascribed to those whose biographies appear in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" (which includes many who are now alive), and, in ...
— Noteworthy Families (Modern Science) • Francis Galton and Edgar Schuster

... conception of the character of their author, a conception which will be found fully realized in the excellent Life given us by George Ticknor. If no one is qualified to write the Life of a man, save one who has familiarly lived with him, who but Mr. Ticknor could have given us such a biography of Prescott? This advantage, together with the similarity of literary tastes, the common nationality in which their spheres of labor lay, their long friendship, their congeniality of spirit, with ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... was the most notable. The evidence is partly derived from testimonies collected with a view to his canonisation, within two years after his death. There is a full account of his life and adventures in Acta Sanctorum. {102} St. Joseph died, as we saw, in 1663, but the earliest biography of him, in Italian, was not published till fifteen years later, in 1678. Unluckily the compiler of his legend in the Acta Sanctorum was unable to procure this work, by Nutius, which might contain a comparatively slight accretion of myths. The next life is of 1722, and the author made use of the ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang

... most interesting biography of the cats of Greta Hall, and on the demise of one wrote to an old friend: "Alas! Grosvenor, this day poor old Rumpel was found dead, after as long and as happy a life as cat could wish for—if cats form wishes on that subject. There should be a court mourning in Cat-land, and ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn

... teachers. A boarding-school was also established, where some forty boys have received instruction. At the college the students go through a course of theology, church history, Biblical exposition, biography, geography, grammar, and composition of essays and sermons. For three hours in the morning they are employed in the workshop, and in the afternoon in ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston

... learned and illegible Germans—in one word, the vast scaffolding that was first built up and then knocked down, to while away an hour for him in a railway train! Thus I might begin this tale with a biography of Tonti—birthplace, parentage, genius probably inherited from his mother, remarkable instance of precocity, etc.—and a complete treatise on the system to which he bequeathed his name. The material is all beside me in a pigeon-hole, but I scorn to appear vainglorious. Tonti is dead, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... word might be added concerning the relation between fasting and mental activity. Prolonged abstinence from food frequently results in highly sharpened intellectual powers. Numerous examples of this are found in the literature of history and biography; many actors, speakers and singers habitually fast before public performances. There are some disadvantages to fasting, especially loss of weight and weakness, but when done under the direction of a physician, fasting has been known to produce very beneficial effects. ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson

... enveloped her small angular person in a garb of sombre severity. Even the modest bird that adorned her hat was replaced by an uncompromising band. She foreswore meat and became a vegetarian. She stopped reading novels and devoted her spare time to essays and biography. In fact she and Miss Joe Hill became one and that ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice

... master was pursuing and turn it back; and he would guard any object he was desired to "watch" with unflinching constancy. But it would occupy too much space and time to enumerate all Crusoe's qualities and powers. His biography will unfold them. ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne

... often pressed, he never contests a constituency, feeling, perhaps, that it is impossible to serve both Society and the Caucus. In time his name becomes the common property of all Society journals—his biography is published in one, his discreet service is extolled in another, while a third goes so far as to hint that, if the truth were known, it would be found that the various departments of the State could not possibly carry on their affairs ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, Sept. 27, 1890 • Various

... omnipresent in his Plays. But I can find no Shakespeare in 'Titus Andronicus'. Are we not certain what manner of man Shakespeare was from his Works (notwithstanding that critics are ever asserting their impersonality) —far more certain than if his biography had been written by one who knew him all his life, and sustained to him the most intimate relations? We know Shakespeare—or he CAN be known, if the requisite conditions are met, better, perhaps, than any other great author that ever lived—know, in the deepest ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... he can carnally satisfy her. Moreover he must distribute his honours equally and each wife has a right to her night unless she herself give it up. This was the case even with the spouses of the Prophet; and his biography notices several occasions when his wives waived their rights in favour of one another M. Riche kindly provides the King with la piquante francaise ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... perhaps imagine that the value of biography depends upon the judgment and taste of the biographer; but on the contrary it may be maintained, that the merits of a biographer are inversely as the extent of his intellectual powers and of his literary ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth

... little of the Italian patriot. In his life time he had been despised and rejected, but he was now dead; his biography a well-written one was in all the circulating libraries, and even those who were far from agreeing with his political views, had learned something of the nobility of his character. So there was both surprise and envy in Lady Caroline's tone; she ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall

... good governments seek to avoid or, in the rare occasions when this is impossible, aim to punish. Here was the Spanish shortcoming, for these were the defects which made possible so strange a story as this biography unfolds. "Jose Rizal," said a recent Spanish writer, "was the living indictment of ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig

... to edit and illustrate them. Father Ward died in the early part of the undertaking, but Father Colgan spent twenty years in prosecuting the original design, so far as concerned our ecclesiastical biography. ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... enfantillage upon the unmarried reader would be an act of wanton cruelty. So I pass over that part of Andy's biography, and, for the same reason, make no record of the next four or five interviews I had with Mr. Jaffrey. It will be sufficient to state that Andy glided from extreme infancy to early youth with astonishing celerity—at the rate of one year per night, if I remember correctly; and—must ...
— Miss Mehetabel's Son • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... the First Consul for some urgent reason," says Dr. Stevens in his charming biography of Madame de Stael, "she went to the villa of Madame de Montessan, whither he frequently resorted. She was alone in one of the salles when he arrived, accompanied by the consular court of brilliant young women. The latter knew the growing hostility of their master toward her, and passed, ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton

... it appears, was formerly a soldier in the French Army, and quite recently he received from thence a medal of the order of St. Helena, an account of which appeared in the Herald. Prior to his death he was engaged in writing his biography (in French) and had it nearly ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini

... the picture of the personal qualities of Gautama, afforded by the legendary anecdotes which rapidly grew into a biography of the Buddha; and by the birth stories, which coalesced with the current folk-lore, and were intelligible to all the world, doubtless played a great part. Further, although Gautama appears not to have meddled with the caste system, he refused to ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... Introduction. Biography: Few Events. One predominant. His Devotion to it. Tendency to Literature. First Studies. Influence of Antique Dwellings. Early Friends. Humor. Qualities of Mind. Sympathy for neglected Objects. A Nonconformist. ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall

... especially relating to the War of 1812 and the battle of New Orleans. A list of all the works in this library which Mr. Beer placed at my disposal would be too long for insertion here, but the following may be mentioned: Claiborne's Notes on the War in the South, Goodwin's Biography of Andrew Jackson, Reid and Easten's Life of General Jackson, Nolte's Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres, Report of Committee on Jackson's Warrant for Closing the Halls of the Legislature of Louisiana, ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith

... champion as you are in right of this book." "As a picture of the time I really think it is impossible to give it too much praise. It seems to me to be the very essence of all about the time that I have ever seen in biography or fiction, presented in most wise and humane lights. I have never liked him so well. And as to Goldsmith himself and his life, and the manful and dignified assertion of him, without any sobs, whines, or convulsions of any sort, ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald

... put it to sleep forever. She never read another book of travel, of history, biography, memoirs, essays, poetry—romance she had never read, and although some novels came to California in time she never opened them. It was peace she wanted, not the growing mind and the roving imagination. ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... poets, Shakspeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. Many of the greatest men that have ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. His was talent, and uncommon talent, and to Jemmy Boswell we indeed owe many hours of ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey

... metropolis was passing through a crisis. Since March, 1169, Saladin had virtually become the ruler of Egypt, although nominally he acted as Vizier to the Caliph El-Adid, who was the last of the Fatimite line, and who died Sept. 13, 1171, three days after his deposition. The student is referred to the biography of Saladin by Mr. Stanley Lane Poole, 1878. Chap, viii gives a full account of Cairo as at 1170 and is accompanied by a map. The well-known citadel of Cairo, standing on the spurs of the Mukattam Hills, was erected by Saladin ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela

... of this work is made up of the account given by Josephine herself of the events of her life; and that part contributed by M'lle. Le Normand, completes a biography of the gifted, the fortunate and unfortunate queen of Napoleon. The Memoirs of Josephine sparkle with French sprightliness, and abound with French sentiment. Her style is eminently graceful, and the turn of thought such as we would expect from the most accomplished ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various

... arts of music and painting and sculpture, one may find not only professional satisfaction, but the strength that comes from higher living and more lofty feeling. In the study of history as biography, the acquaintance with the men and women of other times, those who have felt and thought and acted and suffered to make a freer world for you and me, like inspiration may be found. History is more than its incidents. It is the movement of man. It is the movement of individual ...
— Life's Enthusiasms • David Starr Jordan

... thought, suffered too much from Russell to admit any plea in his favor; but he came to doubt whether this admission really favored him. Not until long after Earl Russell's death was the question reopened. Russell had quitted office in 1866; he died in 1878; the biography was published in 1889. During the Alabama controversy and the Geneva Conference in 1872, his course as Foreign Secretary had been sharply criticised, and he had been compelled to see England pay more than L3,000,000 ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... prince of critics. With Berlioz it is otherwise. If you are no musician he appeals to you as a student of life; if you are interested in life and music both he is irresistible. The Memoires is one of the two or three essays in artistic biography which may claim equal honours with Benvenuto's story of himself and his own doings; the two volumes of correspondence rank with the most interesting epistolary matter of these times; in the Grotesques, the A Travers Chants, the Soirees de l'Orchestre there is ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... a more important personage than even Lady Hercules, which is my mother. They say "like master, like man," and I may add, "like lady, like maid." Lady Hercules was fine, but her maid was still finer. Most people when they write their biography, if their parents were poor, inform you that they left them a good name and nothing else. Some parents cannot even do that; but all parents can at all events leave their children a pretty name, by taking a little trouble at their baptism. My mother's name was Araminta, ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat

... the Child (HUTCHINSON) Mr. PHILIP GIBBS has chosen a difficult theme—the story of a broken home, told from the child's point of view, and he has handled it like an artist. Of the three books into which this biography of Nicholas Barton is divided, the first is so much the best that the second seems a little tame. This was, of course, inevitable, for the first book is the thunderstorm, the second the gentle rain which follows ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various

... afterwards published; settled in London, and was called to the English bar; succeeded, in 1782, to his father's estate, Auchinleck, in Ayrshire, with an income of L1600 a year. Johnson dying in 1784, Boswell's "Life" of him appeared five years after, a work unique in biography, and such as no man could have written who was not a hero-worshipper to the backbone. He succumbed in the end to intemperate habits, aggravated by the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... now held alike by Romanists, Greeks, and Protestants, did, by his publication of the life of Antony, establish the hermit life as the ideal (in his opinion) of Christian excellence; and lastly, because that biography exercised a most potent influence on the conversion of St. Augustine, the greatest thinker (always excepting St. Paul) whom the world had seen since Plato, whom the world was to see again till Lord Bacon; the theologian and philosopher (for he was the latter, as well as the ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley

... to history, including biography, politics and geography, is the great defect of Indian literature. Not only are there few historical treatises[107] but even historical allusions are rare and this curious vagueness is not peculiar to any age or district. It is as noticeable among the Dravidians of the south as among ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... of his race and time; inheritance and training shape him to these larger conditions. Then his ideal is modified by his special individuality. A study of the artist's character as revealed in his biography leads to a fuller understanding of the intention and scope of his work. The events of his life become significant as they are seen to be the causes or the results of his total personality, that which ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes

... in small compass, the most noteworthy essays, orations, fiction and poems on Lincoln, together with some fiction, with characteristic anecdotes and "yarns" and his most famous speeches and writings. Taken in conjunction with a good biography, it presents the first succinct yet comprehensive view of "the first American." The Introduction gives some account of the celebration of Lincoln's Birthday and ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various

... had the gift of letter-writing we shall be able to judge when his biography appears; though we may anticipate that it will contain some things worthy of a great master in the art of language. The publication of letters deriving their sole or principal interest from the general reputation of the writer is indeed quite legitimate and intelligible. ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... History of the Life and Voyages of Columbus, in four vols. 8vo., which appeared in the year 1828. Mr. Irving, at the time this work was first suggested to him, in the winter of 1825-6, was at Bordeaux; and, being informed that a biography was about to appear at Madrid, containing many important and some new documents relative to Columbus, he set off for the Spanish capital, to undertake the translation of the work. Mr. Irving, however, meeting with numerous aids at Madrid, resolved on producing an original history, which ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 584 - Vol. 20, No. 584. (Supplement to Vol. 20) • Various

... of antiquity. No book has been more generally sought after or read with greater avidity than "Plutarch's Lives." However ancient, either Greek or Latin, none has received such a universal popularity. But the character of Plutarch himself, not less than his method of writing biography, explains his universal popularity, and gives its special charm and value to his book. He was a man of large and generous nature, of strong feeling, of refined tastes, of quick perceptions. His mind had been ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy



Words linked to "Biography" :   life history, life, life story, account, biographical, story, autobiography, Parallel Lives



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