"Reviewer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... author of things told in this record, was taken lately to see a fellow author of somewhat different standing from her own, inasmuch as he is, among other things, a Saturday Reviewer. As he dwelt in a part of the South-west of the town unknown to her, she noted with interest the shops of the neighbourhood as she went, for they might be those of the fournisseurs of her friend. "That is his bread shop, and that is his book shop. And ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... Wrecker and The Ebb-Tide. Faults may be found in these, apart from the criticism that they are freaks in the development of Mr. Stevenson's genius. Nobody denies that they are splendid tales: nobody (I imagine) can deny that they are tales of a singular and original pattern. Yet no reviewer praises them on their own merits or points out their own defects. They are judged always in relation to Mr. Stevenson's previous work, and the reviewers concentrate their censure upon the point that they are freaks in Mr. Stevenson's development—that he is not continuing ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review in ...
— Men Called Him Master • Elwyn Allen Smith
... quid pro quo. I believe at that time authors were much in the habit of publishing at their own expense. All the poetry which I reviewed appeared to be published at the expense of the authors. If I am asked how I comported myself, under all circumstances, as a reviewer—I answer,—I did not forget that I was connected with a Review established on Oxford principles, the editor of which had translated Quintilian. All the publications which fell under my notice I treated in a gentlemanly ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... the reviewer becomes a pleasant one when such works as the one before us is forced upon his perusal. We must once more commend the taste and talent of the author of ...
— The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition • Anonymous
... romances, (in which we are not sure that one or two may not after all have been omitted,) it will be seen that Heliodorus had a tolerably numerous progeny, even in his own language, to answer for; though we fear we must concur in the sweeping censure of a Quarterly Reviewer, (vol. x. p. 301,) who condemns then en masse, with the single exception of the "Ethiopics" of the last-named author, as "a few tiresome stories, absolutely void of taste, invention, or interest; without influence even upon the declining literature of their own age, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... Indeed, not a few of his pages, in their graphic account of ingenious adaptation of means to ends, are agreeably reminiscent—unintentionally reminiscent, no doubt—of that classic of our childhood, 'The Swiss Family Robinson.' Could a reviewer bestow ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... Reviewers, he had alluded, with provoking pleasantry, to a meeting which had taken place at Chalk Farm some years before, between Mr Jeffrey, the Edinburgh reviewer, and Mr Moore, without recollecting, indeed without having heard, that Mr Moore had explained, through the newspapers, what was alleged to have been ridiculous in the affair. This revival of the subject, especially as it called in question the truth of Mr Moore's statement, obliged that ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... story." The point of these remarks is apparent when we note that Desargues introduced some seventy new terms in his little book, of which only one, involution, has survived. Curiously enough, this is the one term singled out for the sharpest criticism and ridicule by his reviewer, De Beaugrand.(9) That Descartes knew the character of Desargues's audience better than he did is also evidenced by the fact that De Beaugrand exhausted his patience in reading the first ten pages of ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... far removed from yesterday, there lived a poor book reviewer named Abner Skipp. He was a kindly man and an excellent husband and a most congenial soul to chat with, for he possessed a store of information on the most remote and bootless subjects drawn from ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... of man and the life and spirituality of nature grows much better defined, and is grasped more completely and intelligently, as we come upon it over and over again, put in many different ways and with great variety of illustration. It is a humiliating confession for a reviewer to make, but, to say the truth, I do not know what to make of this book. If its author should succeed in indoctrinating the race with his views, he will produce an intellectual revolution. Every man who thinks at all will ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... and what an incredible and varied power that man acquires who masters it. He who can lead himself, or others, into a habit can do anything. Even Religion is, in fact, nothing else. "Religion," said the reviewer of "The Evolution of the Idea of God," by GRANT ALLEN, "he defines as Custom or Practice—not theory, not theology, not ethics, not spiritual aspirations, but a certain set of more or less similar observances: ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... to suppose it so in regard to this country, in which there are now found ten persons for every one ever imported, and all advancing by gradual steps toward civilization and freedom; and yet were the reviewer discoursing of the conduct of the Spanish settlers of Hispaniola, he could scarcely speak more disparagingly of them than he does in regard to a people that alone has so treated the negro race as to enable it to increase in numbers, and improve in its physical, ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... taste and clear intellect. This humorous and clever production was printed in a former edition of these Reminiscences, and in a very flattering notice of the book which appeared in the North British Review, the reviewer—himself, as is well known, a distinguished member of the Scottish judicial bench—remarks: "We are glad that the whole of the 'Diamond Beetle' by Cranstoun has been given; for nothing can be more graphic, spirited, and ludicrous, ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... it is no undue praise to say, that in this book we have the completest defence of the Federal cause and the most effective onslaught on the Slave Power which any writer has thus far placed on record; and we cordially agree with the vigorous reviewer of the Westminster, in believing that a work more needed could scarcely have been produced at the present time, 'since,' as he adds, 'it contains more than enough to give a new turn to English feeling on the subject, if those who guide and sway public opinion ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... [FN404] A certain reviewer proposes "stained her eyes with Kohl," showing that he had never seen the Kohl-powder ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... lace—light-blue velvet hat and feather, with an aigrette of sapphires and diamonds. Voila! Lord Jeffrey came up to me, and we had such a flirtation! When he comes to Ireland we are to go to Donnybrook Fair together: in short, having cut me down with his tomahawk as a reviewer, he smothers me with roses as a man. I always say of my enemies before we meet, 'Let me at them!'" Of the same soiree she writes again: "There was Miss Jane Porter, looking like a shabby canoness. There was Mrs. Somerville in an astronomical cap. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... book was prompted by the fact that with the season 1907-08 the Metropolitan Opera House in New York completed an existence of twenty-five years. Through all this period at public representations I have occupied stall D-15 on the ground floor as reviewer of musical affairs for The New York Tribune newspaper. I have, therefore, been a witness of the vicissitudes through which the institution has passed in a quarter-century, and a chronicler of all significant ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... reviewer. In the 'Monthly Review' I wrote some articles which were inserted. This was in the latter part of 1811. In 1807, in a Magazine called 'Monthly Literary Recreations', I reviewed Wordsworth's trash of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... said my orthodox reviewer, 'might be excused in an alderman of London, but not in a Fellow elect of Oriel,' or something to the same purpose, evidently designing to recall to memory the most painful passage of a life not over happy. But perhaps ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... it were my paper, I could not either tell a man to find a book good when he found it bad, or sack him for a point of taste which has nothing in the world to do with the principles of the paper. For the rest, Haynes represents the New Witness much more than a reviewer does, being both on the board and the staff; and he has put your view in the paper—I cannot help thinking with a more convincing logic. Don't you sometimes find it convenient, even in my case, that your friends are ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... every new piece and to the actors who interpret it? Criticism, if it is to be worth anything, should surely be criticism, but nowadays the writing of a picturesque article, replete with eulogy, or the reverse, seems to be the aim of the theatrical reviewer. Of course, the influence of the Press upon the stage is very powerful, but it will cease to be so if playgoers find that their mentors, the critics, are not trustworthy guides. The public must, after all, decide the fate of a new play. If it be bad, the Englishman of to-day ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... persuaded that the accounts contained in these official and printed Papers could not have been published at Leipzig itself, without being acknowledged by all as authentic, as they would otherwise have been liable to the censure of every reader and reviewer; and therefore, comparing them also with various similar accounts, received from other places, they feel no hesitation in expressing their opinion, that the Narrative published by Mr. Ackermann is a true and faithful representation of such facts ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)
... laws of parentage. The intermarriage of those related by blood is no uncommon cause of mental deterioration. Dr. Ray thinks that the facts collected in France and America upon this point are much more conclusive than a recent Westminster reviewer will allow. We are told that in this country the mingling of common blood in marriage is more frequent than is generally supposed, and that, of all agencies which have to do with the prevalence of insanity ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... of Danton. Robespierre was published in 1901, and The Path to Rome in 1902; Emmanuel Burden was published in 1904, and Esto Perpetua in 1906. By this time Mr. Belloc's literary reputation was so firmly established that he was offered, and accepted, the post of chief reviewer on the staff of the Morning Post. During the time he was connected with this paper he not only attracted attention to it by his own essays, but undoubtedly rendered it solid service by introducing to its somewhat ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... turning-point in Shaw's life (after the early things of which I have spoken, the taint of drink in the teetotal home, or the first fight with poverty) was the deadly illness which fell upon him, at the end of his first flashing career as a Saturday Reviewer. I know it would goad Shaw to madness to suggest that sickness could have softened him. That is why I suggest it. But I say for his comfort that I think it hardened him also; if that can be called hardening ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... am afraid lest that substitution of a shell (a flat falsification of the history) for the household implement, as it stood at first, was a kind of tub thrown out to the beast" [i. e. the reviewer!] "or rather thrown out for him. The tub was a good honest tub in its place, and nothing could fairly be said against it. You say you made the alteration for the 'friendly reader,' but the 'malicious' will take ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... long words, now," growled Tipping. (Boys hate long words as much as even a Saturday Reviewer.) "Why haven't you brought ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... the best she has yet put forth, and quite too deliciously torturing to the reviewer, whose only garden is in Spain.... The delightful humor which pervaded the earlier books, and without which Barbara would not be Barbara, has ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... considerable extent of the ancient country, he clean forgot it in after-life, and had only such a vague remembrance of his early classic course as a man has in the House of Commons, let us say, who still keeps up two or three quotations; or a reviewer who, just for decency's sake, hints at a little Greek. Our people are the most prosaic in the world, but the most faithful; and with curious reverence we keep up and transmit, from generation to generation, the superstition of what we call ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... grand Sonata" for the piano-forte, composed by J. B. Cramer, fame speaks largely. An eminent connoisseur and reviewer speaks of it in these words: "We here recognise the genuine style of J. B. Cramer—this is really a grand sonata. It consists of three different movements, each so excellent in its kind, that it is difficult to decide ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... germane to our subject can hardly go without notice. Alluding to a certain question, which seems to have greatly bothered Mr. Allen and likewise Mr. Clodd, who, it would appear, was associated with him in this performance, the reviewer says: "The puzzle was solved completely long ago, in the clearest possible manner, and the 'Principia' is the witness to it; but it is still felt to be a difficulty by beginners, and I suppose there is no offence in applying this harmless epithet to both Mr. Grant ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... American novelists, Mr. [Wilkie] Collins might see the mode in which the moral lesson from examples of error and crime ought to be drawn. There is a tale of sin, and its inevitable consequences, from which the most pure need not turn away." In another paper in the same number the reviewer speaks of some one who "writes with the pure poetry of Nathaniel Hawthorne." As I have entered upon the subject of glorification, I will continue a little. From London an American traveler writes to Mr. Hawthorne: "A great day I spent with Sir William Hamilton, and two blessed evenings ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... Newland Sanders. He was just out of college, a reviewer, a poet, and once, momentarily, an atheist. It was Newland who was present and said such a remarkable thing when Julia had the accident to her thumb-nail in closing the double doors between the living-room and the library, where her peculiar ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... to notify Miss Austen, through his chaplain, Mr. Clarke, that if she had any new novel in hand, she was at liberty to dedicate it to his Royal Highness. "Emma" was accordingly dedicated to the Prince. It was reviewed, along with its author's other novels, in the "Quarterly," and the anonymous reviewer, who took no notice of "Mansfield Park," turns out to have been none other than Sir Walter Scott. In his Diary for March 14, 1826, Sir Walter further praised Miss Austen's exquisite touch and her gift ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... number of years ago." This is the well-known review by Owen, to which references occur in the "Life and Letters," II., page 300. The amende to the "Vestiges" is not so full as the author felt it to be; but it was clearly in place in a paper intended to belittle the "Origin"; it also gave the reviewer (page 511) an opportunity for a hit at Sedgwick ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... as students arose naturally from the fact that we were both from Nordland. He was three or four years older than I, and his being the trusted though anonymous theatrical reviewer on the H—— paper, was enough of itself to give him, in my eyes, an official ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... The London Reviewer, my friend, is not the stupid, "serious" creature he pretends to be, I think; but, on the contrary, has a keep appreciation and enjoyment of your book. As I read his article in THE GALAXY, I could imagine him giving vent to many a hearty laugh. ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... appendix of "Critical Notices" kindly at the advent of humbler merit, treated "Merry-Mount" with the distinction implied in a review of nearly twenty pages. This was a great contrast to the brief and slighting notice of "Morton's Hope." The reviewer thinks the author's descriptive power wholly exceeds his conception of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... is a reprint of two 'Edinburgh Review' articles on Bacon and Raleigh. The first, a learned statement of facts in answer to some unwisdom of a 'Quarterly' reviewer (possibly an Oxford Aristotelian; for 'we think we do know that sweet Roman hand'). It is clear, accurate, convincing, complete. There is no more to be said about the matter, save that facts are ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... that Jeffrey, the reviewer, is gone to America in pursuit of a lady, or, as some say, to take possession of an estate left to him by an uncle: he is to be back in time for the Edinburgh Review ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... talked about Tom Campbell, and Tom Hood, and Sydney Smith, and this and the other, as if he had been their most intimate friend. As they passed by Brompton, this gentleman pointed out to Pen Mr. Hurtle, the reviewer, walking with his umbrella. Pen craned over the coach to have a long look at the great Hurtle. He was a Boniface man, said Pen. And Mr. Doolan, of the Star newspaper (for such was the gentleman's name and address upon the card which he handed to Pen), said ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... literature, Macaulay has conferred most memorable services on the readers of English throughout the world. He stands between philosophic historians and the public very much as journals and periodicals stand between the masses and great libraries. Macaulay is a glorified journalist and reviewer, who brings the matured results of scholars to the man in the street in a form that he can remember and enjoy, when he could not make use of a merely learned book. He performs the office of the ballad-maker or story-teller in an age before ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... easy flow of tasteful handwriting. "Allan Cunningham," observes the reviewer, "has raised himself like Hogg; but, instead of the plough, he has handled the chisel; and there is in his constitution an inherent love of the fine arts, which brings his thoughts into more grateful channels. We are well aware ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 478, Saturday, February 26, 1831 • Various
... he can inoculate himself only by irony. The more extreme his case, the more devouring the hunger to love and be loved, the more extreme the irony, and in Butler it reached the absolute maximum, which is to interpret the professions of the world as their exact opposite. As a reviewer of the Note-Books in The Athenaeum recently said, Butler's method was to stand propositions on their heads. He universalised his method; he applied it not merely to scientific propositions of fact, but, even more ruthlessly, to the converse of daily life. He divided ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... for the mere purpose of making money or procuring places. So they are not only useless; they do positive mischief. Nine-tenths of the whole of our present literature has no other aim than to get a few shillings out of the pockets of the public; and to this end author, publisher and reviewer are in league. ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... the superintendence of such dishes as we had to set before Herr Grosse. It was high time I relieved Zillah if we were to pass successfully through the ordeal of the great surgeon's criticism, as reviewer ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... the legends of the Saints formerly enjoyed is considered it becomes matter of surprise that they should not have been more frequently consulted for illustrations of our folk-lore and popular observances. The Edinburgh Reviewer of Mrs. Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art has, with great judgement, extracted from that work a legend, in which, as he shows very clearly[A], we have the real, although hitherto unnoticed, origin of the Three Balls which still form ...
— Notes And Queries,(Series 1, Vol. 2, Issue 1), - Saturday, November 3, 1849. • Various
... mind that if ever I met a man who had been at school with him I would question him on this point. During one of my earlier visits to Fryston I found that George Venables, the well-known Parliamentary counsel and Saturday Reviewer, was staying there. Venables was one of the most distinguished men of his day. His ripe judgment commanded universal confidence, whilst the somewhat austere manner which veiled a warm heart inspired chance acquaintances with a certain ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... Question—and last, though not least, "the Bill" itself. We have endeavoured to adopt from the first paper, some particulars of a spot which bears high interest for every lover of adventure; the reviewer's observations connecting the extracts from Captain Beechey's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 492 - Vol. 17, No. 492. Saturday, June 4, 1831 • Various
... under the salutary discipline of the Church. They wished to be rid of her yoke. They desired to be governed by no law except the law of their licentious passions and boundless ambitions. And as a Protestant American reviewer(302) well said about forty years ago, it was a blessing of Providence that there was a spiritual Power on earth that could stand like a wall of brass against the tyranny of earthly sovereigns and say to them: "Thus far you shall go, and no farther, ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... not with the club and tomahawk. But it is a different matter with the submerged reputation—down in the deep water; once a favorite there, always a favorite; once beloved, always beloved; once respected, always respected, honored, and believed in. For, what the reviewer says never finds its way down into those placid deeps; nor the newspaper sneers, nor any breath of the winds of slander blowing above. Down there they never hear of these things. Their idol may be painted clay, up then at the surface, and ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... this piece our literary reviewer has expressed himself unable to unravel. We are in the same condition; all we can promise is some account of the scenes as they followed each other; of the characters, the sentiments, the poetry, and the rest of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... who had caught him in a net woven of mingled fascination, and envy, and hate, had, oh, bitter!—while generously applauding him as a critic and reviewer—as a compiler and preserver of other men's work—had ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... middle of the meal, a splendour the more glorious, being brief. She was waiting for the delightful moment when she would explain to the visitor that the gentleman who had just left the room was Mr. Rickman, "the reviewer and dramatic critic." She would say it, as she had said it many times before, with the easy accomplished smile of ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... too bad to be charged with ignorance unjustly. I have on my shelves the works of glorious Ben, three times over: in folio 1616-31; in folio, 1692; and in nine volumes octave (Gifford's edition), 1816; all of which I will freely give to the "reviewer," if he can prove that one line of "Shakspeare's Rime at the Mytre" is taken from the aforesaid epigram. I heartily agree with him in admiration of Jonson's spirited imitation of Martial, which I have transcribed as a pleasant relish towards ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 237, May 13, 1854 • Various
... a crown, when luckily for him his challenge was not accepted; so that, as I once observed to Dr. Johnson, he disputed his passage through Europe[1210]. He then came to England, and was employed successively in the capacities of an usher to an academy, a corrector of the press, a reviewer, and a writer for a news-paper. He had sagacity enough to cultivate assiduously the acquaintance of Johnson, and his faculties were gradually enlarged by the contemplation of such a model. To me and many others it appeared that he studiously copied the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... most respectable tradition. Even now, when the realistic capering of free verse has emboldened the ordinary man to speak his mind freely, a reviewer hesitates to apply even to bad poetry so undignified a word as trash. The essay family is equally respectable, to be noticed, when noticed at all, with some of the reverence due to an ancient and dignified art. The sermon family, still numerous to a degree incredible ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... direction towards which this reviewer points was actually passed by the General Convention of our own Church at its late ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... poison or calumny; and his taste has little in common with that which cannot tolerate the hardy details of a prize-fight, but which luxuriates on descriptions of the murder dens of modern England. But prize-fighters and pugilists are blackguards, a reviewer has said; and blackguards they would be provided they employed their skill and their prowess for purposes of brutality and oppression; but prize-fighters and pugilists are seldom friends to brutality and oppression; and which is the blackguard, the writer would ask, he who uses his fists ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... To the reviewer of books fell the task of criticizing Mr H.B. Irving's book, "Occasional Papers," as literature. The dramatic critic has the right of considering the views expressed in it concerning the stage. There are two ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... writer of the time ready to defend her against a reviewer who had brought a charge of “accumulating in her dramatic characters glaring metaphors,” and of aiming “to ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... his study of the assembled biographies of twenty-four fallen heroes of this War with a feeling of disappointment and some annoyance argues a fault in the biographer or in the reviewer. I invite the reader to be the judge between us, for The New Elizabethans (LANE) must certainly be read, if only to understand clearly that there is no fault in the heroes, at any rate. Mr. E.B. OSBORN describes them as "these golden lads ... who first conquered their easier selves and secondly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... spoken with pride, is seen only in Germany, perhaps only in Weissnichtwo. Issuing from the hitherto irreproachable Firm of Stillschweigen and Company, with every external furtherance, it is of such internal quality as to set Neglect at defiance.... A work," concludes the well-nigh enthusiastic Reviewer, "interesting alike to the antiquary, the historian, and the philosophic thinker; a masterpiece of boldness, lynx-eyed acuteness, and rugged independent Germanism and Philanthropy (derber Kerndeutschheit und Menschenliebe); which will not, assuredly, pass current without ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... combats as 'disgraceful and brutalizing exhibitions,' but in the Appendix to 'The Romany Rye' we find that he now considers such language to be cant. This is one of the cases in which second thoughts are worst." Another reviewer deprecates Borrow's glorifying attitude towards "the very worst amongst the bad, such as David Haggart and John Thurtell; and not content with turning away the edge of an instinctive condemnation of crime, actually entitles the prize-fighters, the brutality ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... unreasonable to expect that a few seeds of improvement, planted by my hand, may germinate and grow and ripen into valuable fruit, when my remains shall be mingled with the dust." A note is added, in which Webster with grave banter offers a suit of clothes to any English or American reviewer who will find a man capable of explaining the little word by, stating its primary signification and its true sense in its ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... a Quaker family, who fled from England to seek a new life in America in the late 1600s. It's a short book, and it makes a very good read, or of course a good audiobook. As reviewer ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... the infallibility of the Pope. To refuse to employ him is to impose an extraneous penalty on his convictions. It is not illiberal for an editor to decline the services of a member of the opposite party as a leader writer, or even as a political reviewer or in any capacity in which his opinions would affect his work. It is illiberal to reject him as a compositor or as a clerk, or in any capacity in which his opinions would not affect his work for the paper. It is not illiberal to refuse a position of trust to the man whose record ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... very elite of the seniors, added not a little force. We were mysterious. Hitherto a Freshman had been the greenest of the green, a creature created for ridicule, a sort of "leathery fox" or mere tyro (ty—not a ty-pographical error—pace my kind and courteous reviewer in the Saturday)—and here were Freshmen of a new kind rising ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... the King is a masterpiece; there is a picturesqueness, a sincerity which will catch all readers in an agreeable storm of emotion, and even leave a hardened reviewer impressed ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... to the reviews. I find them gracious, respectful, laudatory. They are to be taken cum grano, of course. When an enthusiastic reviewer says that I have passed at one stride into the very first class of contemporary writers, I do not feel particularly elated, though I am undeniably pleased. I find my conception, my structure, my style, my ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... in his dreams he saw a hundred highly-educated men, who had given their lives to the study of fiction, bending anxiously over the tome and seeking with conscientious care the precise phrases in which most accurately to express their expert appreciation of it. He dreamt much of the reviewer of the Daily Tribune, his favourite morning paper, whom he pictured as a man of forty-five or so, with gold-rimmed spectacles and an air of generous enthusiasm. He hoped great things from the article ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... smiled half-amused and half in scorn as he listened. Acton was sewing, no emotion ever stirs him to loquacity, so he only smiled too, dropping at the same time a single word of calm amazement to hear his character so darkly portrayed. I wonder what the reviewer would have thought of his own sagacity could he have beheld the pair as I did. Vainly, too, might he have looked round for the masculine partner in the firm of "Bell & Co." How I laugh in my sleeve when I read the solemn ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... they "were written for a much earlier age than any of the others, and with such a perfect simplicity of expression as, to many, may appear insipid and ridiculous." The six volumes of the third edition came out successively on the first day of the first six months of 1800. The Monthly Reviewer of the first edition, it may be added, was highly laudatory; and his commendations show that the early critics of the author were fully alive to her distinctive qualities, "The moral and prudential lessons of these volumes," says the writer, "are judiciously chosen; and the stories ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... detestable logic that much of Elmer's treatise on Eugenics was based on evidence that must be viewed with the gravest suspicion. Not that Grossmann had directly attacked that treatise; he had made no kind of reference to it in his own book; but his irrefutable statements had been quoted by every reviewer of "Eugenics" who chanced to have come across the English translation of "Heredity and Human Development," to the confounding of Elmer's somewhat too optimistic prophecies concerning the possibility of breeding ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... decree; findings of fact; findings of law; res judicata [Lat.]. plebiscite, voice, casting vote; vote &c (choice) 609; opinion &c (belief) 484; good judgment &c (wisdom) 498. judge, umpire; arbiter, arbitrator; asessor, referee. censor, reviewer, critic; connoisseur; commentator &c 524; inspector, inspecting officer. twenty-twenty hindsight [judgment after the fact]; armchair general, monday morning quarterback. V. judge, conclude; come to a conclusion, draw a conclusion, arrive at a conclusion; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... door was thrown open. "Ah yes, here's your reviewer!" Drayton Deane was there with his long legs and his tall forehead: he had come to see what she thought of "The Right of Way," and to bring news which was singularly relevant. The evening papers were just out with a telegram on the author of that work, who, in Rome, had been ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... vapid panegyric, or gross invective; weary by uniform dulness, or tantalise by superficial knowledge. Sometimes merely written to catch the public attention, a malignity is indulged against authors, to season the caustic leaves. A reviewer has admired those works in private, which he has condemned in his official capacity. But good sense, good temper, and good taste, will ever form an estimable journalist, who will inspire confidence, and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... eulogy." The subjects upon which Mr. Hope had previously written were not calculated to call forth his eloquent feeling; and, such excellence was not expected from him, who, to use the harmless satire of the Edinburgh reviewer, "meditated muffineers and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... passive. She was once roused to the action of destroying the manuscript of a novel, in which the writer, the man who didn't propose, had too faithfully revealed his perception of herself. But though, as a reviewer, I may applaud this achievement on general grounds, it provided no kind of solution for the problem of her existence. This was left to be settled, very much offhand, by a detached iceberg, which sank the ship in which Mary was emigrating. I thought that iceberg rather an ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... through the greater part of this work I have been anxious, to use his own expression, to creep along the ground. No doubt there is danger in all this, the danger of triviality, pertness, and occasional vulgarity. Gifford's own work was attacked on its first appearance by a reviewer of the day precisely on those grounds: and though he seems to have made a vehement reply to his assailant, the changes which he made in his second edition showed that the censure was not without its effect. Still, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... pointed out to me an article headed 'Jasmin a Londres,' being a translation of certain notices of himself which had appeared in a leading English literary journal the Athenaeum.... I enjoyed his surprise, while I informed him that I knew who was the reviewer and translator; and explained the reason for the verses giving pleasure in an English dress, to the superior simplicity of the English language over modern French, for which he had a great contempt, as unfitted ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... house in Oxford-street as they could to a house in any other quarter of London. Meantime, I had sufficiently indicated that, whatsoever street was concerned in that affair, Oxford-street was not; and it is remarkable enough, as illustrating this amiable reviewer's veracity, that no one street in London was absolutely excluded but one; and that one, Oxford-street. For I happened to mention that, on such a day (my birth-day), I had turned aside from Oxford-street to look ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Rev. Byron Sunderland. In your numbers of Wednesday and Thursday I found an able and respectful Review of that discourse—a Review which, in some points, is unanswerable, especially in the matter of Scripture and female dress. The dominie appealed to Scripture, and the reviewer "has him fast." I have heard it more than once intimated that the writer of this able, and in some instances most eloquent, review, is a lady of this city. Are we to understand that it is an article in the code of anti-progressive ethics, that the same article written by a man, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... confusion worse confounded; the confusion was already there, even in the mind of the more practical literary men, who ought, one would have thought, also to have been the most deep-sighted. But no. The reviewer turns the strange thing over and over, and inside out—and some fifteen years after it has vanished out of the world, having said out its say and done all that it had to do, he still finds it too utterly abnormal to make up his mind ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... "The Young Men" in a recent Contemporary Review. What a chance for a much-needed onslaught on our minor prophets! It might have been "English bards and Scotch reviewers" over again. But no! the Scotch reviewer's weapon is merely a rose-water squirt. The only thing that perturbates him (as Mr. Francis Thompson would say) is my assertion that a ray of hopefulness is stealing again into English poetry. Since the ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... a valuable truth," says the reviewer, "has been sent undulating through the air by men who have lived and died unknown. At this moment the rising generation are supplied with the best of their mental aliment by writers whose names are a dead letter to the mass; and among the most remarkable of these is ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... marche des evenements." Matter finds the same merits which are applauded by the Italians: "Il a plus innove pour la liberte que pour le despotisme, car autour de lui la liberte etait inconnue, tandis que le despotisme lui posait partout." And his reviewer, Longperier, pronounces the doctrine "parfaitement appropriee aux etats d'Italie." Nourrisson, with Fehr, one of the few religious men who still have a good word for the Secretary, admires his sincerity: ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... He never asked a reviewer to dinner in his life. I have told him over and over again that this is madness, and find that this is the only thing I can say to him which makes ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... to have been deficient in the decorum of his manners, and he complained that he was represented as a drunkard, merely because his name rhymed to Cabaret. Murphy, no doubt, felicitated himself in his literary quarrel with Dr. Franklin, the poet and critical reviewer, by adopting the singular rhyme of "envy rankling" to his ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... with boats, fish, seaweed, and visiting various interesting places, some of which they find to be a con! They travel to the Isle of Wight, just a few miles across the Solent, and even visit Seaview where I, the reviewer, was brought up. Many of the interesting things they did were what we as boys fifty years later ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... hoping for a decadence of the craze for historical romances so long as the public is fed on books like this? Such a story has zest for the most jaded palate; nay, it can hold the interest even of a book reviewer. From the first page to the last there is not a moment when one's desire to finish the book weakens. Along with the ordinary interest of curiosity there goes that of a delightful and unique love story involving no little skill ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... to me that perhaps it would be a good plan to put a set of notes . . . to the 'Origin,' which now has none, exclusively devoted to the errors of my reviewers. It has occurred to me that where a reviewer has erred a common reader might err. Secondly, it will show the reader that we must not trust implicitly to reviewers."—DARWIN'S LIFE. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... the junior reporter, buckling up his sleeves to enjoy himself, and feeling himself born to be a "Saturday Reviewer." ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... that as it may, Lamb was then of opinion that his old Tory friend was the enemy. In a letter to Bernard Barton (July, 1823) he writes, "Southey has attacked 'Elia' on the score of infidelity. He might have spared an old friend. I hate his Review, and his being a Reviewer;" but he adds, "I love and respect Southey, and will not retort." However, in the end, irritated by the calumny, or (which is more probable) resenting compliments bestowed on himself at the expense of his friends, he sat down and ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... beautiful old "Irish Melodies." That Mrs. Haughton's talent has descended to the second generation is well proven by Edna M. Haughton's "Review of the Literary Work of the Quarter." Miss Haughton is a polished and scholarly reviewer, and her criticisms are in every instance just and helpful. The editorial on "Miss United" is very well written, and should be carefully perused by those in danger of succumbing to the autumnal advances of that sour old maid, ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... had long been in the custom of setting himself to sleep with tales, and so had his father before him; but these were irresponsible inventions, told for the teller's pleasure, with no eye to the crass public or the thwart reviewer: tales where a thread might be dropped, or one adventure quitted for another, on fancy's least suggestion. So that the little people who manage man's internal theatre had not as yet received a very rigorous training; and played upon their stage like children who should have slipped into the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "the publisher, editor, or reviewer who does not send sheets to the author for correction, will inevitably perish, in the end, from the tortures ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... on "Ugliness in Fiction." Probably the author of it has read "Liza of Lambeth," and said Faugh! The article, peculiarly inept, is one of those outpourings which every generation of artists has to suffer with what tranquillity it can. According to the Reviewer, ugliness is specially rife "just now." It is always "just now." It was "just now" when George Eliot wrote "Adam Bede," when George Moore wrote "A Mummer's Wife," when Thomas Hardy wrote "Jude the Obscure." As sure ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... described himself as penetrated with raptures of fierce joy at having shaken himself free from the world and its puling insincerities to dwell amid "Unpitying shapes of death's dread twin despair," where "Rapine and slaughter raged, and none rebuked." Another reviewer observed that "The soul of ARCHER's, the tavern-brawler's glorious victim, KIT MARLOWE, has taken again a habitation of clay. She speaks trumpet-tongued by the mouth of Mr. CHEPSTOWE. We note in these outpourings ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... and said that in order to prosecute her enquiry she had dressed as a man and been taken for a reviewer. ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... Charta"? They are gone with the red curtain, the brown tree, the storm in the background. Art is revolutionary, like everything else in these times, when Treason itself, in the form of a hoary apostate and reviewer of contemporary fiction, glares from the walls, and is painted by Royal—mark ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... the pieces in "170 Chinese Poems" aimed at literary form in English, others did no more than give the sense of the Chinese in almost as crude a way as the two examples above. It was probably because of this inconsistency that no reviewer treated the book as an experiment in English unrhymed verse, though this was the aspect of it which most interested ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various
... works. You will, of course, never read the books you review, and you will be exhaustively ignorant of the subjects which they treat. But you can always find fault with the title of the story which comes into your hands, a stupid reviewer never fails to do this. You can also copy out as much of the preface as will fill your eighth of a column, and add, that the performance is not equal to the promise. You must never feel nor shew the faintest interest in the work reviewed, ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... BELLE. Born at Mt. Morris, N.Y. Graduate of Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, Lima, N.Y.; teacher of Latin and English in a private school at Cairo, Ill., and at Ackley Institute for Girls, Grand Haven, Mich., 1893-4; active newspaper work and reviewer until 1900; contributor to New York Times Review of Books and The Bookman; lecturer on modern poetry in extension courses of Columbia University. Her books are "The Little Book of Modern Verse," "The Little Book ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... to make an undoubted sensation, than as the story of a sober, matter-of-fact observer who tells what he has seen with his own eyes, and exaggerates nothing. Dr. Holland, one of the editors of that magazine, sent to me a number of uncomplimentary criticisms of my article. One reviewer said: "This Langford must be the champion liar of the Northwest." Resting for a time under this imputation, I confess to a feeling of satisfaction in reading from a published letter, written later in the summer of 1871 from the Upper Geyser basin by a member of the U.S. Geological Survey, ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... published my "English Gypsies and their Language," a reviewer declared that I "had added nothing to our" (that is, his) "knowledge on the subject." As it is always pleasant to meet with a man of superior information, I said nothing. And as I had carefully read everything ever printed on the Romany, and had given a very ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... The reviewer of "Evolution Old and New" in the Saturday Review (March 31, 1879), of whom all I can venture to say is that he or she is a person whose name carries weight in matters connected with biology, though he (for brevity) was in ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... of our pages to "France in 1829-30," could we for a moment be persuaded that our readers would credit the assertion. It seems to us, that we already behold every one of them smiling in derision, and giving an incredulous shake of the head, at the bare idea of a cold-blooded reviewer being actuated by indignant feelings to place his critical lance in rest, and run a course against an unfortunate author. We must, nevertheless, be permitted to protest, that we do feel a considerable quantity ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... Conrady existed, or was invented or adapted by Lamb to prove his point, I have not been able to discover. But the evidence of Lamb's "reverence for the sex," to use Procter's phrase, is against her existence. The Athenaeum reviewer on February 16, 1833, says, however, quoting the fallacy: "Here is a portrait of Mrs. Conrady. We agree with the writer that 'no one that has looked on her can pretend to forget the lady.'" The point ought ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... face-to-face element. Only by admitting this aesthetic moment of arrest can we allow dramatic value to such a play as "Les Affaires sont les Affaires"—a truly static drama. The hero of this is, in the words of a reviewer, "essentially the same force in magnitude and direction from the rise to the fall of the curtain. It does not move; it is we who are taken around it so that we may see its various facets. It is not moulded ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... pure sorrow-drops with glad exclaim—such lines were to him a constant and exhilarating excitement. In the very simplicity and unsophistication of his approach to the poet was a virgin naivete of discernment that an Edinburgh Reviewer would rarely attain. Here, he dimly ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... hitherto been exemplified in the professional criticism of his metrical romances. The defects which both point out are, I presume, but too completely explained by the preceding statement of the rapidity with which this, the last of those great performances, had been thrown off; nor do I see that either Reviewer has failed to do sufficient justice to the beauties which redeem the imperfections of The Lord of the Isles—except as regards the whole character of Bruce, its real hero, and the picture of the battle of Bannockburn, which, now that one can compare these works ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... papers of a British naval officer, on his return from a voyage of discovery," who, I would ask, plundered and destroyed the fine botanical collection made at risk of health and life, during fifteen months of hard labour, by the learned Palisot de Beauvois, author of the "Flore d'Oware?" The "Reviewer" of Douville (p. 177) as sensibly declares that cannibalism "has hitherto continually retired before the investigation of sober-minded, enlightened men," when, after a century or two of intercourse with ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... cry at Marocco, the editor, or reviewer, impresses his reader with an idea that this funeral cry is that of the Moors, whereas it is no such thing: it is the practice of the Jews only in West Barbary to cry "Ah! Ah!" and lacerate their faces 465 with their finger nails; after which they wash, drink brandy, and ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... to the philosophical and theological objections which have been elaborately urged, almost exclusively by the American reviewers. The North British reviewer, indeed, roundly denounces the book as atheistical, but evidently deems the case too clear for argument. The Edinburgh reviewer, on the contrary, scouts all such objections—as well he may, since he records his belief in "a continuous creative operation," a constantly operating ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... in some manner, giving it twice as good a chance of life as that of the other individuals, yet the chances would be strongly against its survival. Supposing it to survive and to breed, and that half its young inherited the favourable variation; still, as the Reviewer goes onto show, the young would have only a slightly better chance of surviving and breeding; and this chance would go on decreasing in the succeeding generations. The justice of these remarks cannot, I think, be disputed. If, for instance, a bird of some kind could procure its food more easily ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... his wife's copy of the Investigator with a kind of impersonal curiosity. The review was a long one, full of extracts: he saw, as he glanced over them, how well they would look in a volume of "Selections." The reviewer began by thanking his author "for sounding with no uncertain voice that note of ringing optimism, of faith in man's destiny and the supremacy of good, which has too long been silenced by the whining chorus of a decadent ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... reviewer who wanted to find some fault with this work has hit the truth better, perhaps, than he thought, when he says that no new principle of morality is set forth in it, but only a new formula. But who would think of introducing a new principle of all morality and making himself as it ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... us in time for the close reading which it demands, and our "Notes" from it at present are consequently few. The first in the number is a powerful paper on Dr. Southey's Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society—"a beautiful book," says the reviewer, "full of wisdom and devotion—of poetry and feeling; conceived altogether in the spirit of other times, such as the wise men of our own day may scoff at, but such as Evelyn, or Isaak Walton, or Herbert would have delighted to honour." The work ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... velvet, and my heroes with long swords were "scrapped." As one book reviewer put it, "To expect the public of to-day to read the novels of Fletcher Farrell is like asking people to give up the bunny hug and go back to ...
— The Log of The "Jolly Polly" • Richard Harding Davis
... geometry, and allied in its military character to military architecture, it simplified our plan to place both under the same head. These views are so obvious, that I am sure they would have required but a second thought to reconcile the reviewer to their location under the head of pure mathematics. For this word location, see Bailey, Johnson, Sheridan, Walker, &c. But if dictionaries are to be the arbiters of language, in which of them shall we ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... just read a review on my book in the "Athenaeum" (November 19, 1859.), and it excites my curiosity much who is the author. If you should hear who writes in the "Athenaeum" I wish you would tell me. It seems to me well done, but the reviewer gives no new objections, and, being hostile, passes over every single argument in favour of the doctrine,...I fear from the tone of the review, that I have written in a conceited and cocksure style (The Reviewer speaks of ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... Scott have put out his poetry, and the blazing star of Byron himself is receding from its place of pride." Of the poets of the early part of this century, Lord John Russell thought Byron the greatest, then Scott, then Moore. "Such an opinion," wrote a National reviewer, in 1860, "is not worth a refutation; we only smile at it." Nothing in the history of literature is more curious than the shifting of the standard of excellence, which so perplexes criticism. But the most ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... inquire after your pure hand, or your pure foot.' 'Their temper,' he observed, 'stands anything but an attack on their climate; even Jeffrey cannot shake off the illusion that myrtles flourish at Craig Crook.' The sharp reviewer stuck to his myrtle allusions, and treated Smith's attempts with as much contempt as if he had been a 'wild visionary, who had never breathed his caller air,' nor suffered under the rigours of his climate, nor spent five years in 'discussing ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... Angel bring the News Of Critic who reads Books that he Reviews, And make the stern Reviewer do as well Himself, before ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... me that the advice was good and should be followed. I needed a change of air. London may have suited Doctor Johnson, but in the summer time it is not for the ordinary man. What I wanted, to enable me to give the public of my best (as the reviewer of a weekly paper, dealing with my last work, had expressed a polite hope that I would continue to do) was a little haven ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... to our criticisms. He would not allow harshness or abruptness in what we said. "We don't want your conclusions or your impressions—we want your reasons." Or he would say: "That is a fair criticism, but unsympathetic. It is in the spirit of a reviewer who wants to smash a man. We don't want Stephen to be stoned here, we want him confuted." I remember once how he said with indignation: "That is simply throwing a rotten egg! And its maturity shows that it was kept for that ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... by Mr. W. Gore Ouseley, who was several years British Charge d'Affaires at Rio, as such conducted a voluminous correspondence on the subject with the government of Brazil, and might have been expected to have there learned something on the slave-trade worth telling. According to his reviewer he appears, however, to be one of that class of persons described by Sterne, who, traveling from Dan to Beersheba, found all to be barren; and no amount of observation can in any human being supply defective reasoning faculties. So, says the Times, he has little or nothing ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... arid life of the book-reviewer there is sometimes found the oasis of opportunity to recommend to a (comparatively) less suffering community a book worth reading. My Baronite has by chance come upon such an one in Timothy's Quest, by KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... it will either waste your time or mislead you. If you want to understand any subject whatever, read the best book upon it you can hear of; not a review of the book. If you don't like the first book you try, seek for another; but do not hope ever to understand the subject without pains, by a reviewer's help. Avoid especially that class of literature which has a knowing tone; it is the most poisonous of all. Every good book, or piece of book, is full of admiration and awe; it may contain firm assertion or stern satire, but it never sneers coldly, nor asserts haughtily, and it always leads ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... essay, however, was in itself ample reason to call the pamphlet a "new edition." The reviewer for the Gentleman's Magazine might assure readers that "great part of this pamphlet" had already appeared there,[21] but there were also "great" additions. What Malone came to consider Bryant's "most plausible argument" ("that every author must know his own meaning—that Chatterton did not know ...
— Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782) • Edmond Malone
... write a three-volumed novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature. The difficulty that I should fancy the reviewer feels is the difficulty of sustaining any standard. Where there is no style a standard must be impossible. The poor reviewers are apparently reduced to be the reporters of the police-court of literature, ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... author practically unknown even to the critics. A noticeable feature was the frankness with which experienced bookmen laid aside stock phrases, and dealt with this book as in response to a strong personal appeal. To the reviewer, aged with much knowledge, hardened by much handling of mediocrity, it is a relief to meet with a book that can and ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... has no reason, I think, to complain of her treatment in it, except in the total omission of Mansfield Park. I cannot but be sorry that so clever a man as the Reviewer of Emma should consider it as unworthy of being noticed. You will be pleased to hear that I have received the Prince's thanks for the handsome copy I sent him of Emma. Whatever he may think of my share of the work, yours seems to have ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... is bantered with the name of Isaiah; Miss Landon by a comparison with La Rochefoucault; and Don Trueba, with Pigault le Brun. This is a refinement in cruelty. It is twining the rack with flowers; and hanging a man with a cord of gold. The sentence of the reviewer should be "Yea, yea; and nay, nay!" A Barmecide's feast of fame is a supererogation of malice. We hold that all authors so derided have a right to call upon their critics to make good their words; and build up the visionary castles of their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 564, September 1, 1832 • Various
... been a reviewer. In 1807, in a Magazine called "Monthly Literary Recreations," I reviewed Wordsworth's trash of that time. In the Monthly Review I wrote some articles which were inserted. This was in the latter part ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... person and work of One on whom God cannot but look with approval. The boldest expression of this I have ever seen occurs in some remarks in the Primitive Methodist Quarterly Review on the doctrine of St. Paul. The reviewer is far from saying that a writer who finds a substitutionary doctrine throughout the New Testament is altogether wrong. He goes so far as to admit that 'if we look at the matter from what may be called an external point of view, no doubt we may speak of the death of Christ as in a ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... best in the human condition. Being little attracted by excellences of form and rhythm apart from content, he sometimes, when feeling outran his artistic speed, perpetrated sonnets in the loosely rhymed Elizabethan fashion, which every right-minded reviewer said he ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... Your reviewer, Sir, while admitting that the story in question is 'plainly the work of a man of letters,' the work of one who has 'brains, and art, and style,' yet suggests, and apparently in all seriousness, that I have written it in order that it should be read by the most depraved members of the ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... English reviewer are fulfilled already. The prescribed century has not elapsed, and in a decade the 'Yankee satires' are comprehended as perhaps even their author failed to comprehend as he created them. There is something positively startling and uncanny ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... a cross-grained reviewer should treat thy cherished book with scorn, and presume to ridicule thy sentiment and scoff at thy style (which Heaven forfend!), console thyself that thou livest in peaceable and enlightened times, and ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... peasants of Europe and Asia. But in the end, at some cost to the form of the work, I managed to get through it without compromise, and so it was put into type. There is no need to add that my ideational abstinence went unrecognized and unrewarded. In fact, not a single American reviewer noticed it, and most of them slated the book violently as a mass of heresies and contumacies, a deliberate attack upon all the known and revered truths about the woman question, a headlong assault upon the national decencies. ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... says he, "Field's inclinations led him to the society of the green-room. Of western critics and reviewers he was the first favorite among dramatic people. Helpful, kind, and enthusiastic, he was rarely severe and never captious. Though in no sense an analyst, he was an amusing reviewer and a great advertiser. Once he conceived an attachment for an actor or actress, his generous mind set about bringing such fortunate person more conspicuously into public notice. Emma Abbott's baby, which she ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... be no need," says the Editor, "at this day to enter upon any lengthened criticism of Theodore Hook's merits as a novelist; they have been discussed over and over again, with little variety of opinion, by every reviewer of the kingdom. Indeed, both his faults and his excellencies lie on the surface, and are obvious and patent to the most superficial reader; his fables, for the most part ill knit and insufficient, disappoint as they are unfolded; repetitions ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... seem to contemplate the possibility of there being any fighting on Southern soil. But his numbers—I think he made each of the opposing forces number some one hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand men; and a sharp reviewer broke out into a loud guffaw over the impossibility that any such number of men could ever be arrayed against each other, on the soil of the United States, by any possible convulsion. Only a few years have passed, and we have three or four times ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... extract, was inserted by the writer (a man little given to praise) of his own accord. Murray sent him your book, and that was all. No addition or modification was made by myself, and it is therefore the unbiassed judgment of a very critical reviewer. Whenever you appear again before the public I shall endeavour to do ample justice to your past and present merits, and there is one point in which you could aid those who understand you and your books in bringing over general readers to your ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... head of this, the mock marriage shook Clara's reason. This was the original plan; it declares itself in the scene between Tyrrel and Clara (vol. i. chap, ix.): "Wherefore should not sorrow be the end of sin and folly?" The reviewer in the "Monthly Review" (1824) says "there is a hint of some deeper cause of grief (see the confession to the brother), but it is highly problematical." For all this the delicacy of James Ballantyne is to blame—his delicacy, and Scott's concessions to a respectable ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... comparison of his definitions with those of Dr. Webster; and here, again, the assumption has been, that number was of more importance than concise completeness. In the case of a quarto dictionary, we suppose an honest reviewer may confess that he has not read through the subject of his criticism. We have opened Dr. Webster's volume at random, and have found some of his definitions as extraordinarily inaccurate as many of his etymologies. They quite justify a double-entendre of Daniel Webster's, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... some of the greatest minds of the country during the distraction and alarm of the French Revolution. Coleridge conducted a newspaper; Sir James Mackintosh wrote for one; Canning contributed to the Anti-Jacobin; Robert Hall of Leicester became a reviewer; Southey, Jeffrey, Brougham, Scott, Giffard, all men in the first rank, appeared in the character of contributors to ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... "He is a reviewer, et proeterea nihil. Some twenty years ago he wrote two or three novels, but people wouldn't look at them, and so he became morose about the public taste and modern literature. In fact, there has been no English ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... and Catholic catechisms, the teachings in all three of which are that faith in Christ and sorrow for and renunciation of sin alone can open the gates of heaven. We regard it as the duty of a conscientious reviewer to point out an erroneous statement wherever it occurs, whether in regard to the faith of Protestants, Catholics, Hebrews, Mohammedans, Fire Worshippers, or any other classes of men whatsoever. Misstatement has caused ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the pleasant paper in which an agreeable writer, Fontenelle, describes Aristotle and Anacreon contending for the prize of wisdom; and may decide with the essayist, giving the prize to the generous old toper of Scios, as we should have done, or to the beetlebrowed Reviewer, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... its lowest floor, or basement, from an adjacent house. This plot was hatched by a number of Catholic gentlemen, and was quite ingenious. These people came from a wide area of England, and numbered about thirty. One point of interest to your reviewer is that one of the places where they met, or retreated to when not personally involved in mining, was a house called White Webbs, just on what is now the northern limit of London. This house is now in use as a very nice and popular restaurant, well known to me. It ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... mon home, ce que n'estoit pas devant." And Joinville says with regard to the king, "Je ne voz faire point de serement, car je n'estoie pas son home" (being a vassal of Champagne). A famous Saturday Reviewer quotes the term applied to a lady: "Eddeva puella homo Stigandi Archiepiscopi." (Theatre Francais au Moyen Age, p. 145; Joinville, pp. 21, 37; S. R., 6th September, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... book is recommended as "carrying on its front the stamp of plain dealing, truth and candor, and entitled, from internal evidence, to the highest authority amid the conflicting statements and opinions respecting emigration to America." The reviewer adds:—"From a country so destitute of moral beauty as the author depicts it, so disgusting in its human externals, and so low in the scale, not merely of refinement, but of good principles, we are happy to withdraw." As Mr. Welby ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... may appear in the 'Pulpit' respecting my 'Criminal Queens.' I venture to think that the book,—though I wrote it myself,—has an importance of its own which will secure for it some notice. That my inaccuracy will be laid bare and presumption scourged I do not in the least doubt, but I think your reviewer will be able to certify that the sketches are lifelike and the portraits well considered. You will not hear me told, at any rate, that I had better sit at home and darn my stockings, as you said the other day of that ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... the prices he can command are much lower, and the two branches of the novelist's trade are not to be compared in a business way. As for the essayist, the poet, the traveller, the popular scientist, they are nowhere in the competition for the favor of readers. The reviewer, indeed, has a pretty steady call for his work, but I fancy the reviewers who get a hundred dollars a thousand words could all stand upon the point of a needle without crowding one another; I should rather like to see them doing it. Another gratifying fact of the situation is that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... tells me that it is no longer the fashion to refer to persons or things as being "simon-pure"; the fashion, as he says, passed out some years ago when a writer in a German paper "was led into an amusing blunder by an English review. The reviewer, having occasion to draw a distinction between George and Robert Cruikshank, spoke of the former as the real Simon Pure. The German, not understanding the allusion, gravely told his readers that George Cruikshank was a pseudonym, the author's ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... case and the remark he makes on Mr. Britton's theory (as to Col. Barre) may equally well apply to his own, namely, that it affords "a [another] curious instance of the delusion to which ingenious men may resign themselves, when they have a favourite opinion to uphold!" The reviewer, indeed, admits that he has "traced the parallel from the scantiest materials;" and in another passage repeats, that but "few materials exist for a sketch of Thomas Lyttelton's life." Of these materials used by the reviewer, the principal portion ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... number, drenched me with vitriolic acid, and brought me to a lower level altogether; and finally the Morning Herald blew a loud blast to my praise and glory—that last notice, I believe, having been written by my old friend Sir Edward Clarke, then a very young reviewer on the Herald staff, with no dreams of becoming Her Majesty's Solicitor-General just then! And the "House of Elmore" actually paid its publishers' expenses, and left a balance, and brought me in a little cheque, and thus my writing life ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... [Footnote: E. g. cf. Edmond Locard, L'Enqute Criminelle et les Mthodes Scientifiques. A great deal of interesting material has been gathered in late years on the credibility of the witness, which shows, as an able reviewer of Dr. Locard's book says in The Times (London) Literary Supplement (August 18, 1921), that credibility varies as to classes of witnesses and classes of events, and also as to type of perception. ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... popular, especially being printed by the Reviewer of that Country, that the Lord of the Isles could make nothing of his Design whenever he talk'd of the good Design of the Party; he was only laugh'd at, and bid remember his Grandfathers Hangman; so ...
— Atalantis Major • Daniel Defoe
... were the ladies in the earlier day, when Addison wrote his paper on party patches. There were seats of Moral Philosophy to be handed out, under-secretaryships, consular appointments. It is not enough to say that Francis Jeffrey was a reviewer, he was as well a Whig and was running a Review that was Whig from the front cover to the back. Leigh Hunt was not merely a poet, for he was also a radical, and therefore in the opinions of Tories, a believer in immorality and indecency. No matter how innocent a ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks |
