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Literary   /lˈɪtərˌɛri/   Listen
Literary

adjective
1.
Of or relating to or characteristic of literature.
2.
Knowledgeable about literature.
3.
Appropriate to literature rather than everyday speech or writing.



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"Literary" Quotes from Famous Books



... perceive from the following specimen, that the accounts of the Battles are not arranged in chronological order; neither do they boast of any great pretensions to literary merit; but they will be found to have a recommendation more valuable than either—AUTHENTICITY. The Editor was less solicitous about the style of the work, than the truth of it, and where, upon investigation, the matter conveyed to him proved ...
— An Impartial Narrative of the Most Important Engagements Which Took Place Between His Majesty's Forces and the Rebels, During the Irish Rebellion, 1798. • John Jones

... of the Siamese peninsula was a race of black dwarfs, remnants of whom still dwell in caves and nests of palm leaves, so shy that it is almost impossible to catch a glimpse of them. The literary and religious culture of Siam comes mainly from southern India. Buddhism is the dominant religion, but there ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... poetry, with a sense of beauty and gladness and sometimes withal an under-note of sadness for the brief joys of life. But when we look carefully into it we notice a curious thing: all this hymn-singing to Ushas is purely literary and artistic, and there is practically no religion at all at the back of it. A few stories are told of her, but they seem to convince no one, and she certainly has no ritual worship apart from these hymns, which are really poetical essays more ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett

... struggles seems to me to apply to all struggles—political, religious, social, commercial, and even literary. Let those who love to fight, fight; but let others who are fond of quiet work go on undisturbed in their own special callings. That was, as far as we can see, the old Indian idea, or at all events the ideal which the Brahmans wished to see ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller

... education, and devotes his life, and, in a degree, his fortune, to this object. The building in which we found him was a large school, or rather college, founded by himself, and carried on in a great measure through his efforts. This college is upon the same literary footing as the University of Havana; and Don Pepe's graduates pass examinations and receive diplomas in the last-named institution. He himself rarely leaves its walls; and though he has house and wife elsewhere, and the great world is everywhere open to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... devoid of any patriotic feelings, De Retz hoped during the coming troubles to become the practical ruler of Paris. For five years Paris read little else but mazarinades, which, with very rare exceptions, were utterly devoid of literary merit. These attacks on his authority and position implied, in Mazarin's opinion, the growth of revolutionary views, and he warned the Queen-mother that the situation in France resembled that in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various

... may be called the civil and religious storm-and-stress period through which the Middle passed into the modern age, there came a great literary foregleam of the new life upon which the world was about to enter. From Italy, where the European ferment, both in its political and its spiritual character, mainly centred, came the prophecy of the new day, in a poet's "vision of the invisible world"—Dante's ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... Electric Company, and for twenty years Professor of Electro-physics at Union University. Besides several authoritative volumes on subjects within his field, he is the author of America and the New Epoch (1906) and is a frequent contributor to literary as well as to ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent

... August of the present year my brother wrote the first chapter of "The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac." At that time he was in an exhausted physical condition and apparently unfit for any protracted literary labor. But the prospect of gratifying a long-cherished ambition, the delight of beginning the story he had planned so hopefully, seemed to give him new strength, and he threw himself into the work with an ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field

... of the special qualities that have made Freytag's literary work so enduring, so dear to the Teuton heart, so successful in every sense of the word? For one thing, there are a clearness, conciseness and elegance of style, joined to a sort of musical rhythm, that hold one captive from the beginning. So evident is his meaning in every sentence ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... quotas of bedbugs, but leave may be had to decorate our cells with souvenirs of art and domesticity, to soften our sitting-down appliances with cushions, to drape the curtain of modesty before the grating of restriction, to carpet our stone flooring, to supply our leisure hours with literary nourishment, to secrete stealthy cakes and apples for bodily solace, to enjoy surreptitious and not over-hazardous corridor outings when others are locked up, to write and receive any sort of letters at any times, without having them first read ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... and the character of the poetry which was then in vogue in Southern Europe. Among these travellers during the reign of Henry the Eighth were Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey. These courtiers possessed the poetical faculty, and therefore paid special attention to literary form. As a result they introduced the Sonnet of the Petrarchan type into England. The amorous verse of the inhabitants of these sunny climes took hold of the young Englishmen. Many men of rank and education, who did not regard themselves as of the world of letters, penned ...
— Tudor and Stuart Love Songs • Various

... of manufactures, particularly those of luxury, are peculiar to the metropolis, and one of the most prominent of this class is public amusement. Every season has its novelty, whether the opera of a great foreign composer, or the lectures of a literary lion; besides endless panoramas, dioramas, cosmoramas, and cycloramas, which bring home to John Bull the wonders of the habitable globe, and annihilate time and space for his delectation. We see the Paris of the Huguenots to the sound of Meyerbeer's blood-stirring ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various

... see it all since this morning. Take my father, for instance. There was no more generous or liberal a Pa up to a certain point. He wanted me to have a comfortable room and vast quantities of good food, and he was glad to pay literary society dues, and he would stand for frat dues; but when it came to paying cab hire, you could jam an appropriation for a post-office in an enemy's district past Joe Cannon in Congress more easily than you could ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch

... is scarcely a middle-aged native to whom it is not the mother-tongue. The common dialect is not quite the same throughout Guyenne and Languedoc; but the local variations are much less marked than one would expect, considering that the langue d'oc has been virtually abandoned as a literary vehicle for centuries. The word oc (yes), which was once the most convenient sound to distinguish the dialect from that of the northern half of France, is not easy to recognise nowadays in the conversation of the people. The c in the word is not pronounced—perhaps ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... self-centred. His chief purpose in life was not to know himself, but to give pleasure to his friends. If he was bored by Montaigne, it was because he had little introspective curiosity. Like Montaigne himself, however, he was much the servant of whim in his literary tastes. That he was no sceptic but a disciple as regards Shakespeare and Milton and Pope and Gray suggests, on the other hand, how foolish it is to regard him as being critically ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... his migration to California, includes all that is permanently valuable of Harte's literary output. Arriving in California in 1854, he was, successively, a school-teacher, drug-store clerk, express messenger, typesetter, and itinerant journalist. He worked for a while on the NORTHERN CALIFORNIA (from which he was dismissed for objecting editorially to the contemporary ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... they could get to do. Because of the lack of proper direction of the Negro's education, some good friends of his, North and South, have not taken that interest in it that they otherwise would have taken. In too many cases where merely literary education alone has been given the Negro youth, it has resulted in an exaggerated estimate of his importance in the world, and an increase of wants which his education has ...
— The Future of the American Negro • Booker T. Washington

... of literary friends were out in the country. In the course of their walk they stopped to notice the gambols of an ass's foal. A very sentimental poet present vowed that he should like to send the little thing as a present to his mother. ...
— Heads and Tales • Various

... the worth of that solicitude which a peep into the third volume can utterly dissipate? What the value of those literary charms which are absolutely destroyed by their enjoyment? When we have once learnt what was the picture before which was hung Mrs Radcliffe's solemn curtain, we feel no further interest about either the frame or the veil. ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... poet has very happily versified the spirit of the legend, to which he has appended a fitting moral, doubtless suggested by the warning of his own approaching sad fate.[Footnote: This gifted poet, Mortimer Collins, died in 1876, at the age of forty-nine, a victim to excessive literary labor ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... she met with a silent contempt. In musical chit-chat, she took no interest whatever, and pretended to none, openly indeed "detested music," and was unable to distinguish Mendelssohn from Wagner, "except by the noise;" while if a bolder man than the rest rashly ventured on the literary ground that was her special demesne, she either smiled at what he said, in a disagreeably sarcastic way, or flatly contradicted him. She was the thorn in the flesh of these young men; and after having dutifully spent a few awkward moments at her side, they stole back, one by one, to the opposite ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... and party. They are distributed by hundreds and thousands over the whole surface of the territory. They write apart, without being able to consult each other, and without even knowing each other. No one is so well placed for collecting and transmitting accurate information. None of them seek literary effect, or even imagine that what they write will ever be published. They draw up their statements at once, under the direct impression of local events. Testimony of this character, of the highest order, and at first hand, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... leaders are not meanly instructed or insufficiently furnished. In the French Revolution everything is new, and, from want of preparation to meet so unlooked-for an evil, everything is dangerous. Never before this time was a set of literary men converted into a gang of robbers and assassins; never before did a den of bravoes and banditti assume the garb and tone of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... put aside modern sensationalism, and commence WALTER SCOTT as a study. The Baron knows personally one man of mature years, who has read neither Waverley nor several others of the series, and him he envies, for, as the student in question has already set himself to the task, he has the greatest literary pleasure of his life yet to come. Type, size of book, excellent as a library edition; and the illustrations, so far as they have gone, are good, and not too distracting. And so, after this unequivocal expression of his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 8, 1893 • Various

... obliged to fill my empty purse, for a little while, by means of a bit of stamped paper. And how shall I meet my liabilities when the note falls due? Let time answer the question; for the present the evil day is put off. In the meanwhile, if that literary speculation of yours is answering no better than my newspaper, I can lend you a few pounds to get on with. What do you say (on second thoughts) to coming back to your old quarters at Passy, and giving me your valuable advice by word of ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins

... libraries and reading societies of the kingdom; but how many thousands would neither have seen nor heard of his most successful works, had not the gusto been previously created by the caducei of these literary Mercuries. Again, sift any one of them, with higher pretensions to originality than our economical sheet will admit of, and you shall find it, in quantity, at least, to resemble Gratiano's three grains. But we are not inclined to quarrel ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 282, November 10, 1827 • Various

... Roumania is almost too well known in Europe, through her literary attainments, to need any description here; still a few particulars concerning her may be of interest to our readers. She is of the middle height, has an amiable face and still more affable manner. She, too, might pass for a lady of any western country, ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson

... of Madras, with a station on the South Indian railway. Pop. (1901) 10,893. Formerly a military cantonment, it is now only the civil headquarters of the district. It has an English church, mission chapel, and Roman Catholic chapel, a high school, and several literary institutes. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... the robe of taciturnity which she inherited from her Teutonic ancestors, and with few, diplomatically chosen words, make the hearer feel his immeasurable inferiority to the "Lady of the Kingdoms". A woman with a mind thus richly stored with the literary treasure of Greece and Rome was likely to look with impatient scorn on the barren and barbarous annals of her people. We in whose ears the notes of the Teutonic minstrelsy of the Middle Ages are still sounding, ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin

... obvious modes of advertising, you'll agree that this is the age of all ages for the man who can write puffs. 'Good wine needs no bush' has become a trade paradox, 'Judge by appearances,' a commercial platitude. The man who is ambitious and industrious turns his trick of writing into purely literary channels, and becomes a novelist. The man who is not ambitious and not industrious, and who does not relish the prospect of becoming a loafer in Strand wine-shops, writes advertisements. The gold-bearing area is always growing. It's a Tom Tiddler's ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse

... His story of the winter he passed at Port Royal is quite unlike other narratives of colonial experience at this period. Champlain was a geographer and preoccupied with exploration. The Jesuits were missionaries and preoccupied with the conversion of the savages. Lescarbot had a literary education, which Champlain lacked, and, unlike the Jesuits, he approached life in America from the standpoint of a layman. His prolixity often serves as a foil to the terseness of Champlain, and suggests that he must have been ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby

... an independent or an endowed student. The fact is that he was a born man of letters, and that he could not help turning whatsoever he touched into literature, whether it was criticism on books or on pictures, a fight or a supper, a game at marbles, a political diatribe, or the report of a literary conversation. He doubtless had favourite subjects; but I do not know that it can be said that he treated one class of subjects better than another, with the exception that I must hold him to have been first of ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... answered, "that the deliberation is lacking. I have no fear of anything of the sort. I expect to get some pupils in the neighbourhood, and also some literary work. For the moment I am a little hard up, and I thought perhaps that I might make a few shillings by ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... beautiful rural scenery than may here be found. We had seven or eight hours of perfect delight upon our ride; and when we reached the White Hart, at Windsor, we were well prepared for doing justice to an excellent dinner. Our pleasure at Windsor was much increased by the company of a gentleman of high literary reputation, and who is distinguished as the author ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various

... England three years before, secreted in an immense pocket in the lining of a great motor-coat. Not that she had seen very much of him since that memorable occasion. In fact, until the present summer they had scarcely met again. He was a celebrated man in the literary world, and he travelled far and wide. He was also immensely wealthy. Men said of him that whatever he touched turned to gold. And fame, wealth, and a certain unobtrusive strength of personality had combined to make him ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell

... by my own hand, of the events of my life, and of my participation in our great struggle for national existence, human liberty, and political equality, I make no pretension to literary merit; the importance of the subject-matter of my narrative is my only ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan

... us as to his literary taste and standard, and to meet any suspicion we might feel had there been no address of any sort accompanying the poem. No one we knew had ever heard of a Shakespeare Debating Club in New York city. But we gave him the benefit of the doubt until we found that this poem, like the first, ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis

... air of half-truth that I have breathed so long. I am going to read these books, and say what I think of 'em, and five hundred dollars is dirt cheap for the privilege. I had sooner that every 'New Publications' ad. should die out of my newspaper than that my literary columns should be contaminated with a Lie! Never mind the change, sir. If anything is left over, send it to the proprietor of the new penny paper that is struggling to keep its head above water. Don't say that ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II. No. 38, Saturday, December 17, 1870. • Various

... noticed. The virtue on which Pope prided himself was correctness; and I have interpreted this to mean the quality which is gained by incessant labour, guided by quick feeling, and always under the strict supervision of common sense. The next literary revolution led to a depreciation of this quality. Warton (like Macaulay long afterwards) argued that in a higher sense, the Elizabethan poets were really as correct as Pope. Their poetry embodied a higher and more complex law, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen

... the Most Distinguished Literary Man of the Philippines, Writer of History, Poetry, Political Pamphlets, and Novels, Shot on the Luneta of Manila—A Likeness of the Martyr—The Scene of His Execution, from a Photograph—His Wife Married the Day Before His Death—Poem Giving His Farewell Thoughts, Written in His ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead

... Villon to a school-fellow named Barnes. Barnes tried to extract unpleasantness from the text during preparation, and rioted in his place, owing to his incapacity for the language. The matter was a serious one; the headmaster had never heard of Villon, and the culprit gave up the name of his literary admirer without remorse. Hence, sorrow for Lucian, and complete immunity for the miserable illiterate Barnes, who resolved to confine his researches to the Old Testament, a book which the headmaster knew well. As for Lucian, he plodded on, learning his work ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen

... in London, it probably soon made its way to this country, where Bunyan was already so well known. "This little octavo volume," writes Mrs. Field in "The Child and his Book," "was considered a perfect child's book, but was in fact only the literary milk of the unfortunate babes of the period." In the light of modern views upon juvenile reading and entertainment, the Puritan ideal of mental pabulum for little ones is worth recording in an extract from the preface. The following lines set ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey

... then. And sometimes," said St. George contentedly, "when we are at dinner I shall look down the table at you sitting beside some one who is expounding some baneful literary theory, and I shall think: What do I care? He doesn't know that she is really the Princess of Far-Away. But ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale

... study of striking power and literary quality which may well remain the high-water mark in American fiction for the year.... Mr. Harrison definitely takes his place as the one among our younger American novelists of whom the most enduring work may be hoped ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... think, one of the most important of Chesterton's books. The lasting importance of a book depends not so much on its literary qualities or on its popularity, but ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke

... who knowingly or unknowingly suppress the essential truth that their world of equality will be a world of the bitterest poverty, treat the situation just as lightly. Before them, in the future State, hovers the vision of some exceptional literary or political appointment. The others may console themselves with the thought that in spite of a still deeper degree of poverty, towards which they are sinking by their own inactivity, the hell of mechanical work, by no means abolished, will probably be a little reduced, so far ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau

... Zvenigorod played an important part in Chekhov's life as a writer; a whole series of his tales is founded on his experiences there, besides which it was his first introduction to the society of literary and artistic people. Three or four miles from Voskresensk was the estate of a landowner, A. S. Kiselyov, whose wife was the daughter of Begitchev, the director of the Moscow Imperial Theatre. The Chekhovs made the acquaintance of the Kiselyovs, and spent three summers in succession ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov

... after lunch, catching trout for dinner; inviting swagger friends down to 'my little place in Berkshire' for a few days' trout- fishing. There is a man I once knew who is now a baronet. He used to be keen on fishing. I thought maybe I'd get him. It would have looked well in the Literary Gossip column: 'Among the other distinguished guests'—you know the sort of thing. I had the paragraph already in my mind. The wonder is ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome

... retirement, as well as another play, Artemise, that was acted in February, 1720. Other plays followed. In December, 1721, Voltaire visited Lord Bolingbroke, who was then an exile from England, at the Chateau of La Source. There was now constant literary activity. From July to October, 1722, Voltaire visited Holland with Madame de Rupelmonde. After a serious attack of small-pox in November, 1723, Voltaire was active as a poet about the Court. He was then in receipt of a pension ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire

... inscriptions. On the whole for its extent and historical information relating to the early history of Assyria this inscription is one of the most important of the series showing the gradual advance and rise of Assyria, while as one of the first interpreted it presents considerable literary interest in respect to the details of the progress of Assyrian interpretation. It is also nearly the oldest Assyrian text of any length which has been hitherto discovered and is very interesting from its account of the construction of the temples ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous

... flout public opinion. Nor may we receive instruction from schools controlled by Government and aided by it. Emptying of the schools will constitute a demonstration of the will of the middle class of India. It is far better for the nation even to neglect the literary instruction of the children than to co-operate with a Government that has striven to maintain an injustice and untruth on the Khilafat and Punjab matters. Similarly have I ventured to suggest a complete boycott of reformed ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi

... entitled "Il Magno Enrico III., difensore di Santa Chiesa, di Francia e di Polonia Re christianissimo." Here was also preserved that still more curious allegorical drama which had been given at the grand fete at the Ducal Palace in honor of this over-adulated monarch. It was natural that some of these literary curiosities, of which the visit of Henry III. had been prolific, should have remained in possession of the masters of the palace which had been tendered for his residence. The volume, bound in azure velvet, embroidered with golden fleurs-de-lis ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... Dean has grown extremely reticent—almost surly; and never answers any questions concerning his Scientific Theory of Ghosts, a work which, when published, created a great deal of excitement, owing to its singularity and novelty of treatment. There was the usual "hee-hawing" from the donkeys in the literary pasture, who fondly imagined their brayings deserved to be considered in the light of serious opinion;—and then after a while the book fell into the hands of scientists only,—men who are beginning to understand ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli

... To be a literary artist, a writer must possess a constructive imagination. He must be a man of feeling and have the gift of imparting to others some share of his own emotions. On almost every page of President Wilson's writings, as in almost all his ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson

... romance. Against a Malay background, and blended with native pagan elements, are presented chains of episodes, characteristic personalities, methods for securing a magical control of the situation, that suggest vividly parallel literary forms in the Sanscrit saga. Still more, one is conscious of a prevailing Indian atmosphere, that may sometimes elude analysis, yet none the less fails not to make itself felt. But as to the line of ethnic contacts which has ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,

... that the decorative subject must be designed in organic relation to the space which it is to occupy, and be so treated that the design will primarily fulfil a purely ornamental function. That is to say, whatever of dramatic or literary interest the decorative design may possess must be, as it were, woven into it, so that the general effect shall please as instantly, as directly, and as independently of the meaning, as the pattern of an ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis

... never been able to take an interest in the poet and the lady. I was sure that I had known many women as charming and as handsome as she, about whom much less noise had been made; and I was convinced that her singer was factitious and literary, and that there are half a dozen stanzas in Wordsworth that speak more to the soul than the whole collection of his fioriture. This was the crude state of mind in which I determined to go, at any risk, to Vaucluse. Now that I think it over, I seem to remember that I had hoped, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... through a great year in college, his third, the greatest in many ways of the college course. His class had thrust him into a man's place of leadership in that world where only manhood counts, and he had "made good." In the literary, in the gym, on the campus he had made and held high place, and on the class lists, in spite of his many distractions, he had ranked a double first. Best of all, it filled him with warm gratitude to remember that none of his fellows ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor

... neither very wise, nor I believe entirely true," returned Glenalmond. "Before you are done you will find some of these expressions rise on you like a remorse. They are merely literary and decorative; they do not aptly express your thought, nor is your thought clearly apprehended, and no doubt your father (if he were here) would ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... resentment, was it in disdain? thinking of him in his true aspect as a false lover, believing him to have worn a false semblance, justly despising him for an attempt to play upon her. Was this possible? He thought (with that oblique sort of literary tendency of his) of Hamlet with the recorder. Can you play upon this pipe?—and yet you think you can play upon me! As a matter of fact there could nothing have been found in heaven or earth less like Hamlet than Chatty Warrender; but a lover has strange misperceptions. ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

... cover to cover the book is readable, and every word is intelligible to the layman. Dr. Dolmage displays literary powers of a very high order. Those who read it without any previous knowledge of astronomy will find that a new interest has been added to their lives, and that in a matter of 350 pages they have gained a true conception of the ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage

... nobody had paid for my poems—yet. I was coming to that, of course, but in the mean time I could not pay the rent with my writing. To be sure, my acquaintance with men of letters gave me an opening. A friend of mine introduced me to a slightly literary lady who introduced me to the editor of the "Boston Searchlight," who offered me a generous commission for ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin

... Editor.—As a reporter's acquaintance grows, he will come to know other editors in the city room,—the news, telegraph, state, market, sporting, literary, dramatic, and other editors. Of these the news editor, sometimes known also as the make-up or the assistant managing editor, is most important. He handles all the telegraph and cable copy and much of what is sent in by mail. He decides what position the stories shall ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer

... judgment upon his own case. Yet it is by no means certain that this view is correct. Introspective analysis on the part of the poet might reasonably be expected to be as productive of aesthetic revelation as the more objective criticism of the mere observer of literary phenomena. Moreover, aside from its intrinsic merits, the poet's self-exposition must have interest for all students of Platonic philosophy, inasmuch as Plato's famous challenge was directed only incidentally to critics of poetry; primarily it was to Poetry herself, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... notes. Such as the book is, in spite of its abruptness, we are thankful for it; in spite, too, of our bad conscience. What we mean by our bad conscience is the feeling with which we see the last remnant of charm, of the graceful and the agreeable, removed from Balzac's literary physiognomy. His works had not left much of this favoring shadow, but the present publication has let in the garish light of full publicity. The grossly, inveterately professional character of all his activity, ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various

... along with their owner, one Sampey. A thumpy little heart in a round, plump body knew that it was he; knew, therefore, that her destiny was come, and, most extraordinary of all, in the shape of her good father's literary bureau! Yet what shock there was next day, when the hero of her dreams came to her with his ordinary pale-gray eyes, blurred ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow

... AND WINDUS have published, in handy form, cloth bound, and handsomely printed, an edition of JUSTIN MCCARTHY'S novels. There are, ten in all, going at half-a-crown a-piece, and well worth the money. The literary style is excellent—not a matter of course in the writing of novels—the tone wholesome, whilst on every page gleams the light of genuine, if gentle humour. In looking through the pages of this charming little library, my Baronite is inclined to regret that Mr. MCCARTHY should, to some extent, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 18, 1893 • Various

... emptiness of American annals during the eighteenth century make for our cherishing all that they offer of the vivid and the significant? Professor Moses Coit Tyler long ago suggested what was the literary influence of the American Farmer, whose "idealised treatment of rural life in America wrought quite traceable effects upon the imaginations of Campbell, Byron, Southey, Coleridge, and furnished not a few materials for such captivating and airy schemes of literary colonisation in America as that ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

... quarter of a century since Miss McKeen came to Abbot Academy, besides these imperatively needed houses, and these greatly prized acres, many valuable collections scientific, artistic and literary have been added; but, as ever, the great want is room, that the pupils may have the benefit of their use, which is impossible in their present scattered condition. The school observed its Semi-Centennial in June, 1879, and extended a hearty welcome to nearly ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various

... it was strongly urged by some scientists that a religion based on faith was untenable. Man, it was contended, should accept only what could be proved by reasoning from observed facts. Once again there emerged, particularly in scientific and literary circles, the belief that there could be a code of morals ...
— Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents - The Mazengarb Report (1954) • Oswald Chettle Mazengarb et al.

... portrait, so lifelike and vigorous an impression of the personality of the poet and the man, as the picture the author has given of himself in his own writings. Burns's poems from first to last are, almost without exception, the literary embodiment of his feelings at a particular moment. He is for ever revealing himself to the reader, even in poems that might with propriety be said to be purely objective. His writings in a greater degree ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun

... interest that it seems surprising that none of Washington's biographers or editors should have given them to the world. Washington Irving, in his "Life of Washington," excites interest in them by a tribute, but does not quote even one. Sparks quotes 57, but inexactly, and with his usual literary manipulation; these were reprinted (1886, 16 deg.) by W.O. Stoddard, at Denver, Colorado; and in Hale's "Washington" (1888). I suspect that the old biographers, more eulogistic than critical, feared ...
— George Washington's Rules of Civility - Traced to their Sources and Restored by Moncure D. Conway • Moncure D. Conway

... of course, be accounted for by the delicious and irresistible attractiveness, for literary purposes, of this type of invalid. Genuine, serious illness, inseparable from suffering and ending in death, is neither a cheerful, an interesting, nor a dramatic episode, except in very small doses, like a well-staged ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... At first she contributes to a local paper, but soon she aspires to larger things, and comes in contact with the editor of a popular magazine. This man becomes her warm friend, and not only aids her in a literary way but also helps in a hunt for ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe

... was merely thinking aloud; a foolish habit I have contracted since I began to aspire to literary laurels. Go to sleep again, and finish ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... her over before she knew what she was thinking about. He could not have been such a reprobate, after all,—this Griffith Donne, who had so often roused her indignation. Perhaps he could not help being literary and wearing a shabby coat and a questionable hat. And Dolly had in the end begun to see how her long-fixed opinion had softened and changed. So she had courage to plead for Grif this afternoon. She wanted to be sure that if he ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... its gardens and fields would cause "the desert to blossom as the rose," and around would soon gather a "Christian neighborhood." The school-house would no longer hold the multiplying worshipers. A central church would soon appear, with its appended accommodations for literary and social gatherings and its appliances for safe ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe

... Literature between 1700 and 1785—eighty-five years. Next comes a paper on passages from selected English verse and prose writings —the Statute discreetly avoids calling them literature—between 1200 and 1500, exclusive of Chaucer; with questions on language, metre, literary history and literary criticism: then a paper on Chaucer with questions on language, metre, literary history and literary criticism: lastly a paper on writing in the Wessex dialect of Old English, with questions on the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... the last century, Tom Warren. The chart ran thus: "Tom Warren had for pupil Sergeant Runnington, who instructed in the mysteries of special pleading the learned Tidd, who was the teacher of John Campbell." With honest pride and pleasant vanity the literary Chancellor maintained that he had given the genealogical tree another generation of forensic honor, as Solicitor General Dundas and Vaughan Williams, of the Common ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson

... endeavored to conform my life to what I read, no sooner enthralled by one than I found another more enchanting. I formed a taste for reading that has lasted all my life, in which, if there be any education, any mental discipline, is the only consistent part of my development. Our critics and literary mentors extol such books as are fit to be read a second time. I have a still better reason for a second reading, because I forget the first. When I strictly examine myself I cannot say that the contents of any book remain long ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee

... managed the jest with far greater verve and spirit. Honest Tom D'Urfey is in fact one of the least read and most maligned of all our dramatists. He had the merriest comic gifts, and perhaps when the critics and literary historians deign to read his plays he will attain a higher position in ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn

... sat stunned. It was thus that her hero had turned out. Could she tell the other girls in the store with any degree of pride that she was keeping company with a butler? She had received a good literary education in the high school at Muncie, Indiana, and was a young woman of taste and refinement. Could she marry a butler? To be near her hero, she herself had just now been willing to undertake ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis

... heaven-directed founder, had seen in some religious journals my account of the good work wrought by the Young People's Association of the Lafayette Avenue Church, and he recognized the fact that its chief purpose was not mere sociality or literary advancement, but the spiritual profit of its members. He examined its constitution and reports, and when he constructed his first Christian Endeavor Society in the Williston Church of Portland, Maine, he adopted ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... Nevertheless this is one of the least of the evils of talkativeness, and we ought even to try and divert it into such channels as these, for prating is less of a nuisance when it is on some literary subject. We ought also to try and get some persons to write on some topic, and so discuss it by themselves. For Antipater the Stoic philosopher,[607] not being able or willing it seems to dispute with Carneades, who inveighed vehemently against the Stoic philosophy, writing and filling many books ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch

... moonlight is to commit literary harikiri; but as that terminates life, so may I end this. And I choose the morning and the midnight of the sixth of August, for reasons both greater and less than cosmic. Early that morning, looking out from the beach over the Mazacuni, as we called the union of the two great ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... urge that there be included in whatever reduction is made the legacy tax on bequests for public uses of a literary, educational, or charitable character. ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley

... old—in the English language—many miles away from any literary assistance, and fifty miles from the Boston Public Library, where I could derive many testimonies and opinions of undisputable authorities to strengthen my religious opinions and actions, which are tested ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden

... way she was a link between him and the small world of Danecross down below; and in spite of his literary pursuits Joshua by no means despised news of his neighbour's affairs, though he often received it with a look of indifference. Besides this, her visits gave him an opportunity for talking, which was a great pleasure to him, and one in ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton

... I hope, for having employed the terms "malaria" and "malarial districts" in place of the more commonly used expressions "paludal miasm" (miasme paludeen) and "marshy regions" (contrees marecageuses). The substitution is not a happy one from a literary point of view, but I have made it deliberately and for the following reason: The idea that intermittent and pernicious fevers are engendered by putrid emanations from swamps and marshes is one of those semi-scientific ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various

... regiment having its own range. The routine of camp life is the same as in the other camps we have been quartered in. There is a small theatre in the camp where the troops give performances weekly. Each corps has its own amateurs and takes turns to furnish programmes, theatrical, literary, vocal and musical. There was good talent to be found in the camp. The Prince would occasionally attend a performance, and no doubt ...
— A Soldier's Life - Being the Personal Reminiscences of Edwin G. Rundle • Edwin G. Rundle

... with fragments of the globe, and Byrne stepped quickly to one side. The door flew open and Sergeant Flannagan dove headlong into the darkened room. A foot shot out from behind the opened door, and Flannagan, striking it, sprawled upon his face amidst the legs of the literary lights who held dog-eared magazines rightside up or upside down, as they chanced to have picked ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... go on with her literary composition was the difficulty. It was hard to snatch even an occasional half-hour during the day. Where there is a will, however, there is generally also a way, and Ulyth hit upon the plan of getting up ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil

... rhetorical tragedies of the Roman Seneca. The decay of culture, the barbarian invasions, and the attacks of the Christian Church caused a yet greater decadence, a fall so complete that, although the old traditions were kept alive for some time at the Byzantine court, the drama, as a literary form, had practically disappeared from western Europe before the middle of the sixth century. For this reason the modern drama is commonly regarded as a new birth, as an independent creation entirely distinct from the art which had preceded it. A new birth and an independent ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken

... crusade against the converts to Hasidism. But even he could not stem the current. In their despair, the Lithuanian Jews turned to their coreligionists in Germany, and implored their assistance in eradicating, or at least suppressing, the threatened invasion. The great learning and literary ability of the "divine philosopher, Rabbi Moses ben Menahem" (Mendelssohn, 1729-1786), were appealed to for help. Not a stone was left unturned to crush the new sect (kat), so called. Volumes of the Toledot Ya'akob ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin

... pedestal. Unfortunately, while great numbers of these inscribed pedestals have been preserved for us, it is very rarely that we have the statues which once belonged on them. Moreover, the artists' names which we meet on the pedestals are in a large proportion of cases names not even mentioned by our literary sources. In fact, there is only one indisputable case where we possess both a statue and the pedestal belonging to it, the latter inscribed with the name of an artist known to us from literary tradition. (See ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell

... acclaimed by a crowd of enthusiasts who had read his story as a gold nugget picked up from a desert of literary mediocrity. Randy, not knowing himself. Randy, modest beyond belief. Randy, in his hotel at midnight, walking the floor with his head held high, and saying to himself, "I've ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey

... years since it suddenly struck the gay world of comic dramatists and other literary wits, that the Nineteenth Century was drawing to an end, and regarding it as an event they began to make merry over it, at first in Paris, and then in London and New York, as the fin-de-siecle. Unto them it was the going-out of old fashions in small things, such ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland

... about out of their proper places when the city was captured by the Medes about B.C. 609. The tablets were kept on shelves.... When I was digging at Derr some years ago we found the what I call 'Record Chamber,' and we saw the tablets lying in situ on slate shelves. There were, however, not many literary tablets there, for the chamber was meant to hold the commercial documents relating to the local temple...." Dr Budge concludes his letter with this very important sentence: "We have no definite proof of what I am going to say now, but I believe ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark

... all, that I have read all your tracts, and weighed most carefully all that they contain. The matter of them bears on what for me has been the study of many years, and all I can say is that I regard your methods of reasoning as unsound, and your conclusions as wholly false. I have been a literary man from my youth as well as a theologian, and I completely dissent from your literary judgments. I believe that if you had not been already possessed by a hostile philosophy—which will allow no space for miracle and revelation—you would not have arrived at them. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... of these memoirs gives interesting notice of the friendships which surrounded Madame Dupin during her married life. These embraced various celebrities, historical and literary. Her husband was the congenial friend of the best minds of the day, and was able, among other things, to procure her the difficult pleasure of an interview with Jean Jacques Rousseau, then living near her in great spleen and retirement. We cannot do better ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various



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