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More "Criticise" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... every Scot—secured to him by the Treaty of Union and confirmed by the Disruption—to criticise his minister with much freedom, but this privilege is exercised with a delicate charity. When it is not possible for a conscientious hearer to approve a sermon, he is not compelled to condemnation. "There wes naething wrang wi' the text," affords an excellent ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... of an ecclesiastical character, and he probably cultivated with new diligence his blossoms of poetry, which, however, were in some danger of a blast; for, submitting his productions to some who thought themselves qualified to criticise, he heard of nothing but faults; but, finding other judges more favourable, he did not suffer himself to sink into despondence. He easily discovered that the only stage on which a poet could appear with any hope of advantage was London; a place too ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... spent in their studios where, seated in the most comfortable chair he could find, he would smoke lazily and watch them at work and criticise freely. Men grumbled and laughed at his presumption, but were ready to acknowledge the justice of his criticism. He had an excellent eye for color and effect and for the contrast of light and shade, and ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... The marriage law is too arbitrary; it allows no scope for individual action, and yet the subject is so delicate, so intricate, that none but the keenest and nicest balanced minds dare attempt to criticise, much less improve it. The misconstructions of a person's motives are so great that many who see its errors, tremble and fear to speak of them. But if we are to bring any good to the covenant, so sacred in its offices, ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... I am so tired of being tied to a book,' he said passionately. 'Tied? I am a book. Everyone I meet sees in me, not a man to be judged and liked for himself, but something to criticise and flatter and compare with the ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... food—considering the cost of provisions and the charge she made for her table—was very good. Only it had become a habit for certain of the boarders, led by the jester, Crackit, to criticise ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... skepticism of the Revolution. The reaction had taken place, the Goddess of Reason was dethroned, and the burning words and vivid eloquence of Chateaubriand appealed at once to the heart and the imagination of his countrymen. They did not criticise, they only admired. Politically he was also a rising man. The world, or at least the French world, expected great things from the writer of the pamphlet, "De Buonaparte et des Bourbons." His manners were courtly and distinguished, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... they can be justified by these tests but that it is not by these tests that they are judged even to-day, by the professors of the chief religions of the world. It is the temper and not the conclusions of the religious bodies that I would criticise. These sexual questions are guarded by a holy irascibility, and the most violent efforts are made—with a sense of complete righteousness—to prohibit their discussion. That fury about sexual things is only to ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... such attitude. Not he! The city's great names had scant respect from him! Not for an instant did he hesitate to criticise or analyze the most renowned. It was not long before he learned all about the Cora trial and Keith's subsequent efforts to discipline McDougall and ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... seriously to criticise such abuses of language? Yes, for very seriously are they put forth in our books and journals. Nor can we flatter ourselves that they are the careless expressions of uneducated writers, ignorant even of the terms of their own language. They are current ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... was liberty of conscience to criticise the pastor, he was autocrat of Longmeadow. One who preceded Pastor Storrs had it told about him that two of his deacons wanted him to appoint Ruling Elders. He appointed them; and asked them what they thought the duties were. ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... AEneas, and succeeding too for a while in raising the more than equivocal character of his hero, by placing him in the picture-gallery of the Queen of Carthage, and giving him leisure to contemplate and to criticise, and poetically to describe to his silent and spiritless lounger-friend many noble and many touching works. In this passage we also obtain the great Latin poet's opinion of the ameliorating effect of "collections." The hero of the AEneid knew immediately he was among an amiable people. The ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... brave and experienced young officer who would have done all this?" said a cold sarcastic voice, which Syd recognised directly. "No: stop. Don't tell me, but tell him that it is a great mistake for young gentlemen in the midshipmen's berth to criticise the actions of their superior officers, who may be entirely wrong, but whether or no, their ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... heard something like it before. But there had been strength, and the power to do, and the will to act in every intonation of his speech. She remembered every word San Miniato had spoken, far better than he would remember it himself in a day or two, and she was ready to analyse and criticise now what had charmed and pleased her a moment earlier. Why was he going over it all to her mother, like a lesson learnt and repeated? She was so glad to be alone—she would have been so glad to think alone of what she had taken for the most ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... the self-conscious stage, and unfolding with unparalleled freshness and power all the various activities of the human mind. We can only point out a few of the lines of development which become prominent at this period. And firstly we notice the rise of rationalism, that is of the impulse to criticise belief and to ask for that element in it which approves itself to the reflecting mind. Reason asserts its right to judge of tradition; the doubter suggests emendations in the legend; the piously inclined turn their attention to those parts only which are capable of lofty treatment. ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... know; but you must consider the silly way that he's been reared. I don't like his taking upon himself to criticise what we choose to do; but no doubt Goldsworthy IS a pretty big pill to swallow—to a chap like him, always so faddy about breeding and manners, ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... cove on the truck with Robin Hood. He had struck up a friendship with the stranger and liked him, as every one did. The young man was quiet, industrious, intelligent. He did not encourage questions about himself, but Tom was the last one to criticise reticence. ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... had held himself in readiness to attend the bedside of all who might call upon him to speak cheering, hopeful words to the dying. But now our little community has become educated and they are able to criticise. As we look around the church we are lost in wonder as to what has come to the people. The older ones are sadder and a spirit of unrest seems to have seized upon the middle aged, while the very children have lost ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... little police force hustled vehicles out of the way and even stopped tram-cars when necessary; while the band tortured selections from Handel and Beethoven to the intense delight of passers-by, many of whom paused to criticise shortcomings in the procession among themselves. In about an hour it reached its destination, where Kumodini Babu's uncle received the guests. The family barber carried Samarendra in his arms to ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... Torquemada, Alexander Sixtus and other most religious brethren, he was ready to set up the stake and fagot and cauterize sin with fire. One thing you can say about the religious folks that are big with cocksureness and a mission—they may make mistakes, but the mistake doesn't talk and criticise. ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... is not to be too severely blamed, since it is a question of pavilions which are to disappear after an existence of six months. Economical reasons are always worthy of respect, and the modesty of the Municipal Council on this occasion ought to be praised. But what one has a right to criticise is the unhappy idea which placed these pavilions in such a manner as to completely obstruct the view of the exterior porticos of the palaces and industrial sections when one stands before the central dome in the centre of the garden. This criticism once made, there only remains to give ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... hard-bitten, tough band of veterans, weather beaten, scarred in numerous fights or by the backwoods scourge of small-pox, compact, muscular, fearless, loyal, cynically aloof from those not of their cult, out-spoken and free to criticise—in short, men to do great things under the strong leader, and to mutiny at the end of three days under the weak. They piled off the train at Sawyer's, stamped their feet on the board platform of the station, shouldered their "turkeys," and straggled off down the tote-road. ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... aware that those who criticise an existing state of things ought to be prepared with some constructive legislation which would remedy the evils they denounce. Though it is unlikely that the Government of India will take my advice, either wholly or in good part, I hereby exhort them to quit the folly ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... my province to criticise the Nicene Creed, which is virtually the old Apostles' Creed, with the addition of the Trinity, as defined by Athanasius. The subject is too complicated and metaphysical. It is allied with questions concerning which men have always differed and ever will differ. Although the Alexandrian ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... to me, even now, as I read it again, it is charged with the inspiration of that wonderful art, so true, so tender, that made its last act a miracle. I saw old men sob, and young men bow their heads to hide the emotion which they could not check. I saw that audience which had come to criticise, tremble and break into tumultuous weeping. Beside me, a greyheaded man was crying as any child. Yet why do I go on? No one who saw Clarissa Lambert can ever forget—no one who saw her not can ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... she said disgustedly. "I ought to be kicked. Why do you let me talk so much? It's awful cheek of me to dare to criticise you. I'll never do it again. He may be an angel for all I know. Esther, if you don't stop crying I shall cry too, and then there'll be ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... have inconceivable prejudices against the connubial state. If it be permitted to a member of the Established Church to cavil at any sentence written by Saint Paul,—and I think that liberty may be permitted to a simple layman, since eminent members of the clergy criticise the whole Bible as freely as if it were the history of Queen Elizabeth by Mr. Froude,—I should demur at the doctrine that it is better to marry than to burn: I myself should prefer burning. With these sentiments it would ill become any one entitled ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... publication of the Official Papers, on reviewing the whole facts of the case, in a debate upon it in parliament, declared "that he found much to criticise in almost all the parties concerned, except Mr. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... he must be saved by faith in the Person and Work of the Mediator. The very disposition to quarrel with this method implies arrogance in dealing with the Most High. The least inclination to alter the conditions shows that the creature is attempting to criticise the Creator, and, what is yet more, that the criminal has no true perception of his crime, no sense of his exposed and helpless situation, and presumes to dictate the terms of his ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... Agelastes," said the Princess; "we should not criticise the animal which kneels to take us up.—Come, lady of a foreign land," she continued, turning to the Frank Count, and especially his Countess— "and you her gallant lord! When you return to your native country, you shall say you have seen the imperial ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... granted he aims to live the Christian life in every act, in every thought. The superstructure—the practices of the Catholic Church to-day, the failures and sins of clerical society, the rigid ecclesiasticism—these he must in loyalty to fundamental truth, criticise, and if need be, condemn, where they interfere with the exercise of pure religion. But Benedetto engages very little in controversy; his method is to glorify the good, sure that the good requires only to be revealed in all its beauty and charm ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... that "the demand for commodities, which can only be got by labor, is as much a demand for labor as a demand for beef is a demand for bullocks." Criticise this position. ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... who brought matters to a climax. "I refuse to listen," said she, with something very like a stamp of her plump little foot. "Mr. Elmendorf forgets himself entirely when he attempts to—to criticise my conduct." ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Dryden, Pope, Johnson—looked upon Shakespeare with an indulgent eye, as a great but irregular genius, after much the same fashion as did the old sea-dogs of Nelson's day regard the hero of Trafalgar. 'Do not criticise him too harshly,' said Lord St. Vincent; 'there can only ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... rate, he said, almost cheerfully, "I'll read you what I wrote this morning," and she had to let him, though she felt that it was taking her at a moment when her wish to console him was so great that she would not be able to criticise him. But she found that he had done it so well there was no ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... picture, would listen to the criticisms. . . . Under these circumstances, they say that he was censured by a shoemaker for having represented the shoes with one latchet too few. The next day, the shoemaker, quite proud at seeing the former error corrected, thanks to his advice, began to criticise the leg; upon which Apelles, full of indignation, popped his head out and reminded him that a shoemaker should give no opinion beyond the shoes,[721-1]—a piece of advice which has equally passed ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... far away from the card-players. There was nothing at all remarkable in this, as Mr. Furnival and one or two others who did not play commerce were also there; but nevertheless they were separated from those of the party who were most inclined to criticise their conduct. ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... because he had been drunk, but because he had taken advantage of the young girl's position to abuse her fiance in his stupid jealousy, knowing nothing of their mutual relations and obligations and next to nothing of the man himself. And what right had he to criticise him in that hasty and unguarded manner? Who had asked for his opinion? Was it thinkable that such a creature as Avdotya Romanovna would be marrying an unworthy man for money? So there must be something in him. The lodgings? But after all how could ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of that, mother!" exclaimed the young man, patience at last ceasing to be a virtue. "Criticise me if you wish to; but I will hear nothing ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... jacket, that warned him not to imagine his back view, and held him constantly a little to the rear of Lady Camper, lest she should be troubled by it;—and he knew the habit of the second rank to criticise the front—how consent to face the outer world in such style side by side ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the Great Pyramid, made to the Royal Society 16th December 1867, Professor Smyth most unexpectedly, and quite out of his way, took occasion to criticise severely the remarks contained in the ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... the ball-room," she said. "By the way, you have not told me if you like my dress?" she added, anxious to bring him to the one subject she had at heart. "Do you remember that when we were children, Norman, you used to criticise my dress?" ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... other, is not without its difficulties. Why, for instance, should the promontories be a mile awry? There is, however, yet another mode of accounting for their formation, which I am not in the least disposed to criticise. ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... though they may not be strictly true, they illustrate the stern virtues for which he was celebrated among the Corsicans, and show what kind of men this harsh and gloomy nation loved to celebrate as heroes. This is not the place either to criticise these legends or to recount them at full length. The most famous and the most characteristic may, however, be briefly told. On one occasion, after a victory over the Genoese, he sent a message that the captives in his hands should be released if their wives and sisters came to ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... neither height, nor proportion, nor design. Yet the doorway taken by itself, or together with the bay on either side, is a very successful composition, and on a brilliantly sunny day so blue is the sky and so white the stone that hardly any one would venture to criticise it for being too elaborate and over-charged, though no doubt it might seem so were the stone dingy and the ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... you are not English. It isn't so much your pronunciation, but you put words in odd places in the sentence and some of your expressions are most unusual," she ended apologetically. "I like them. It is interesting to hear things called by new names. Just now Fran said 'poke fun' when she meant 'criticise,' and Roger says a thing is 'fine and dandy' when I should call it 'top-hole.' That is the difference, is ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... the match. So far, however, the prospect of the young people coming together was not encouraging. Martha was somewhat given to flirtation. George was as jealous as ever, and was unable to conceal his feelings, which, as he had now no right to criticise her conduct, so angered the girl that she not unfrequently gave encouragement to others solely to show her ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... from London was in our office the other day, signifying a desire to make some arrangement to bring it out there. I have heard almost no unfavorable criticism of the story—nothing which you could make serviceable in its revision. I have heard Dr. P. criticise Ernest—of course the character and not your portrayal. For myself I consider the character a natural and consistent one. Perhaps few men are found who are quite so blind to a wife's wants and yet so devoted, but—I don't know what the wives might say. We have had hundreds ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... legitimate to criticise Berkeley, but it is not legitimate to misunderstand him; and yet the history of his doctrine may almost be called a chronicle of misconceptions. It has been assumed that he drew no distinction between real things ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... your pen who will just possess quantum enough of mathematical knowledge to be able to read the first chapter without being able to follow you into its application, and as these, moreover, are the very people who will think themselves privileged to criticise and use their privilege with the least discretion, I cannot recommend too much clearness, fulness, and order in the expose of the principles. Were I you, I would devote to this first part at least double the space you have done. Your familiarity with the results and formulae ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... celebrity as a poet, he is one of the most elegant scholars which America has produced, and, until recently, held the professorship of modern languages at the neighbouring university of Cambridge. It would be out of place here to criticise his poetry. Although it is very unequal and occasionally fantastic, and though in one of his greatest poems the English language appears to dance in chains in the hexameter, many of his shorter pieces well upwards from the heart, ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... threefold: (1) They rebuke his over-accentuated individualism. (2) They reveal the fundamental contrast between the infinite God and finite man. In the light of this revelation Job plainly recognizes his presumption and folly in attempting, with his limited outlook, to comprehend, much less to criticise, the mighty ruler of all the universe. (3) After Job had thus been led out of himself into personal companionship with God he was content to trust his all-wise guide, even though he recognized his own inability to fathom ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... spirit, it seemed to her repellent that the man she was engaged to marry should be displaying such a craven spirit. At that moment she despised and hated Bream Mortimer. I think she was wrong, mind you. It is not my place to criticise the little group of people whose simple annals I am relating—my position is merely that of a reporter—: but personally I think highly of Bream's sturdy common-sense. If somebody loosed off an elephant gun at me in a dark corridor, I would climb on to the roof and ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... chancel, where Dora Meadows was already ensconced. Lady Latimer presently arrived alone: Mr. Logger had committed himself to an opinion that it was a shame to waste such a glorious morning in church, and had declined, at the last moment, to come. He preferred to criticise preachers without ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... of not reading the works which they affected to criticise. On the present occasion we shall anticipate the author's complaint, and honestly confess that we have not read his work. Not that we have been wanting in our duty—far from it—indeed, we have made efforts almost as superhuman as the story itself ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... rich men who can scarcely put together a grammatical sentence; of poorer men who are, in church affairs, unscrupulous politicians; of women who carp and gossip; and of all sorts of men and women who desire to rule, criticise, hinder, and distrain. They, too, are the very people who, in the ears of God and of the community, have vowed to love him and to uphold his work! The more intellectual and spiritual he is, the more he is troubled ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... exceedingly narrow, and that the gossip applies itself therefore to a much smaller number of persons and things. But it is as venomous, the backbiting as severe and merciless among Indians as among us; and there is the same disposition to criticise everything that does not strictly pertain to us and to our favourites, the same propensity to slander the absent and to be of the same opinion as those present so long as ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... notice a young person, Isabelle by name, and with a playfulness that I, for my part, do not consider criminal, you endeavoured to place an assassine for her, just above her white bosom, complimenting her upon its fairness as you did so. This proceeding, which I do not criticise, greatly shocked and incensed a certain actor standing by, called Captain Fracasse, who rushed forward and ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... "mix up ideas as much as you please, and make fun of them,—I'm accustomed to that; but don't criticise a work of which you know ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... president, "I must remind you that you are not here to serve as counsel for the prisoner, or to criticise the decisions of this court. You must confine yourself to a statement of facts, and not express your opinion ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... This is not to be denied. For good or for evil such a result has come about; and we live in times of unquiet thought, which form a real and painful trial to many minds. It is not my intention at present to deplore or to criticise this modern tendency, but rather to point out how it may be accepted, and yet religion in the highest sense saved to us, if not without struggle (for that is always impossible in the nature of religion), yet without that intellectual conflict for which ...
— Religion and Theology: A Sermon for the Times • John Tulloch
... and Chattanooga. This is one of the effects of the discharge of spies captured in Western Virginia and East Tennessee. A military police, if properly directed, composed of honest men, true Southern men, might do much good, or prevent much evil; but I must not criticise Gen. Winder's inefficiency, for he acts under the instructions ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... hireling Hessians roll their drums through ports and towns; the wily Indian joins the invader; his army is famine-smitten and thinned with fever, and drill in rags, while Congress meets in secret halls but to impede his plans and criticise; and while he holds the scales and looks toward the end, and makes retreat best serve the cause, what rivals rise! See brilliant Gates appear! Does he not know this rivalry and hear the plaudits that surround the name of Saratoga? I've shared ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... those books which we cannot criticise. The author of a book which we could criticise would have ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... an air of reserve (although there are times when I let myself go); quite correctly dressed; nothing to criticise and nothing ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... assent—"and I could or would find nothing good in it. To me it seemed atheistic, fallacious, heretical. You perceive I am not sparing myself in these admissions," he interposed, "but I have been doing some serious thinking during my return voyage, and now I am going to read that book again; not to criticise, but to get at its true ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... the empirical side, by Descartes from the intellectual, created as great a revolution in knowledge as the Renaissance had produced in literature or the Reformation in religion; and a body of materials was presented from which philosophers ventured to criticise the Bible and the dogmatic teaching of the Church. This fourth great period of free thought, which extends to the present time, has been marked by more striking events than former ones.(70) Though the movement relates to a similar sphere, the history is ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... represent the architecture or sculpture of modern England. You may urge that I ought rather to describe the qualities of the refined sculpture which is executed in large quantities for private persons belonging to the upper classes, and for sepulchral and memorial purposes. But I could not now criticise that sculpture with any power of conviction to you, because I have not yet stated to you the principles of good sculpture in general. I will, however, in some points, tell you the ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... relations. The science of tastes has yet to be founded. Till then, chefs de cuisine and the clever caterers for banquets will remain isolated geniuses or empirics; while, as regards wine-tasters and gastronomists, they approve or they criticise, but they do not establish any rules. It would be a curious collection that would comprise all the expressions used by wine-tasters, wine-merchants, commercial travellers, amateurs (by far, indeed, the most numerous class), ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... correspond once a month. There were no events to chronicle in the Haworth letters. Quiet days, occupied in reaching, and feminine occupations in the house, did not present much to write about; and Charlotte was naturally driven to criticise books. ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... had reached the oasis where the first night was to be passed an hour before, and found the camp already established, tents pitched, and everything so ordered that Sir Aubrey could find nothing to criticise; even Stephens, his servant, who had travelled with him since Diana was a baby, and who was as critical as his master on the subject of camps, ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... less funny perhaps but decidedly more brilliant jests, until at last we retire one by one from the conversation and watch him with savage, weary eyes over our pipes. He invariably beats me at chess, invariably. People talk about him and ask my opinion of him, and if I venture to criticise him they begin to look as though they thought I was jealous. Grossly favourable notices of his books and his pictures crop up in the most unlikely places; indeed I have almost given up newspapers on account of him. Yet, ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... returning from some church ceremony, Flora said to me, "Oh, Aleister" (we were already engaged secretly), "papa is going to ask you next winter to stay at Hootawa. Before I forget, I want to warn you never to criticise the pictures. They are mostly of the Dutch and English School, and I dare say you will find a great many of the names wrong; but, you know, papa is irritable, and it would offend him if you said that the 'Terborch' was really by Pieter de Hooghe. You can easily avoid saying anything—and then, ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... of The Golden Bough, I asked my neighbour, who had read it, if to a Japanese who got its penetrating view some things could ever be the same again. He answered frankly, "There are things in our life which are too near to criticise. Do you know that there are parts of Japan where ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... wins—who will dare to criticise the wisdom of his policy fifty years from to-day? If we lose, who will give us credit for our high ideals of Civil Law in times of war? You have the chance to-day to win. Leap into the saddle and command the obedience of every man, woman ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... this graceful and classic compliment; but strange to say, does not feel disposed to criticise it. Jacques has never seemed to her so intellectual a man, so true a gentleman as at this moment. The reason is that Belle-bouche has caught a portion of her visitor's disease—a paraphrase which we are compelled to make use of, from the well-known fact that damsels are never ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... period that most young fellows go through," I said. "They then make sonnets to the moon, become pessimistic, criticise everything, and feel certain that they will become the hub of the universe one day. They prefer vegetable food to ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... back into his breeding—drew deeper and more manifest. If he could have spoken at such times, he would have said: "I have been a long time alone, and I cannot always be asleep; but you know best, and I must not criticise." ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... that grew everywhere hereabouts; for the common, so far from being barren, was a perfect sheet of greenest, softest turf, sowed with minute and rare flowers. Often a square foot of ground presented me with enough of beauty and variety in colour and form to criticise and contemplate for ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... should I? There will be nobody there to criticise me. There are no preparations to make, so I needn't fuss. Biddy's right. It's the best ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... addition, as a rule, of facetious allusions to torture and the knout! My ignorance, however, of Finland as she really is was probably unsurpassed before my eyes were opened by a personal inspection, so I cannot afford to criticise. ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... and the constitution might have emerged from his head completely armed, like the Minerva of Jupiter, or the legislation of the ancients, were it not that in our days every one sought to be engaged in the task, or to criticise it. Yet, with the exception of some modifications, his plans were generally adopted, and he had in the committees more ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... think it a little presumptuous of me to criticise one of the operations of a great captain, but I cannot refrain from commenting that the sending of Mortier to the left bank was a move which had not been sufficiently considered, and was an error which could have had ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... were known to resent the familiar tone in which Mr Sparks had been heard to criticise the pomps and vanities exhibited at Lexley Hall by the Althams of the olden time, was a certain General Stanley, who, inhabiting a fine seat of his own at about ten miles' distance, was fond of bringing over his visitors to visit the old Hall, as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... extremely difficult in the atmosphere of that home to criticise one whom he knew to be considered as a friend of ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... off badly when asked why he had come to this sudden decision. He could not equivocate; and when Mrs. Wilson asked him point-blank if Berenice had been treating him badly, he could only take refuge in the reply that it was not for him to criticise what Miss Morison chose to do. He persisted in his resolution to return to Boston, feeling obstinately that he could not with dignity remain where he was while Berenice was there. A man of the world would at once have seen ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... criticise their sleek juniors, with a round assertion that if these youngsters had had to fight their way on a crust, as the veteran said he did, they would be vastly better men for it. I do not believe it. Hard work, and even disappointment ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... another, making a scene picturesque whether or no. I cannot rid myself of the feeling that there is something false, a kind of humbug, in all this. At any rate, the traces of it do not contribute to my enjoyment, and, indeed, it ought to be done so exquisitely as to leave no trace. But I ought not to criticise in any way a spot which gave me so much pleasure, and where it is good to think of Wordsworth in quiet, past days, walking in his home-shadow of trees which he knew, and training flowers, and trimming shrubs, and chanting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... divined, and when she told him what he had long suspected, that his mother's name was unknown to the Hamiltons of Grange, he accepted the fact as but one more obstacle to be overthrown in the battle with life which he had long known he was to fight unaided. To criticise his mother never occurred to him; her control of his heart and imagination was too absolute. His only regret was that she could not live until he was able to justify her. The audacity and boldness of his ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... pictures and music, we cannot criticise justly without taking more into consideration than is actually before us. We feel almost inclined to say that if the passage is by Buffon it is probably right, and if by M. Gueneau de Montbeillard, probably wrong. It must also be remembered that, as we learn from the preface already ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... husband had in the long run done most for herself; and the warm confidence with which he had laid his length upon them was a pressure gentle compared with her stiffer persuadability. I'm bound to say he didn't criticise his benefactors, though practically he got tired of them; she, however, had the highest standards about eleemosynary forms. She offered the odd spectacle of a spirit puffed up by dependence, and indeed it had introduced her to some excellent society. She pitied me for not knowing certain ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... postpone the Duma, then the peril will be upon thine own head!" I heard Rasputin shout. "Why allow these revolutionary deputies to criticise thy policy and undermine thy popularity with the nation? It is folly! Such policy is suicidal, and if thou wilt persist I shall withdraw and return to my home, well knowing that to-morrow the day of ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... not concern me, and I presume neither to criticise nor to advise. Please be so good as to detain me no longer, and believe me when I repeat that I have no intention whatever of meddling with any of your affairs, or ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... have impell'd Your princely Highness in this wise to act Toward your Sovereign Lord and Emperor, Beseems not us to expound or criticise. The Swede is fighting for his good old cause, With his good sword and conscience. This concurrence, This opportunity, is in our favor, And all advantages in war are lawful. We take what offers without questioning; And if all have ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... any kind without first discussing them with the Council of State. This Council, composed of the most enlightened and learned men of France, prepared laws, which were then presented to the Legislative Corps, which could criticise them very freely, since voting was secret. Presided over by Bonaparte, the Council of State was a kind of sovereign tribunal, judging even ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... together and make things hum. Now here's a bit of advice. Old Tom Sayers likes plain, practical statements that he can weigh and consider. Put all your proposed plans into writing. Put down hard, concrete facts in terse English. Make it as brief as possible. Don't be afraid to criticise if you can suggest improvements. Don't mince words. He loves simplicity and frankness. And if you do as I say in that regard, and make plain to him the ideas you've made plain to me—you'll get the job, and we'll ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... must begin by quoting you at large: I shall then proceed to criticise your utterance from several points of view, divine and human, in the course of which I shall attempt to draw again, and with more specification, the character of the dead saint whom it has pleased ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... deny the truth of Nero's words. "That is true, Caesar, and therefore I do not presume to criticise or even to have an opinion upon acts of state policy. These are matters utterly beyond me. I know nothing of the history of the families of Rome. I know not who may, with or without reason, deem ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... my countryman, he will much oblige all scientific antiquarians, and me, though not a Dr. Heavybottom, especially. I need not make apologies for my bad English, and hope none of your many readers will criticise ...
— Notes & Queries,No. 31., Saturday, June 1, 1850 • Various
... But the child had no care about those questions. Now God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost are in perpetual session in regard to this world and kindred worlds. Shall you, His child, rush in to criticise or arraign or condemn the divine government? No; the Cabinet of the Eternal Three can govern and will govern in the wisest and best way, and there never will be a mistake, and like razor skillfully swung, shall cut that which ought to be cut, and avoid that which ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... that he has heard one of the audience criticise severely this wisdom,—not sparing Socrates himself for countenancing such an exhibition. Socrates asks what manner of man was this censorious critic. 'Not an orator, but a great composer of speeches.' Socrates understands ...
— Euthydemus • Plato
... over and digest my past experiences. Then it was that the truth of a very ancient adage struck upon my mind, namely, that money is power. Had I sufficient money I could laugh at unjust critics for example; indeed they or their papers would scarcely dare to criticise me for fear lest it should be in my power to do them a bad turn. Again I could follow my own ideas in life and perhaps work good in the world, and live in such surroundings as commended themselves to me. It was as clear as daylight, but—how ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... measured by the laws I gave; and, consequently, to set up some little judges, who, not understanding thoroughly, would be sure to fall upon the faults, and not to acknowledge any of the beauties; an hard measure, which I have often found from false critics. Here, therefore, if they will criticise, they shall do it out of their own fond; but let them first be assured that their ears are nice; for there is neither writing nor judgment on this subject without that good quality. It is no easy matter, in our language, to make words so smooth, and numbers so harmonious, that they ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... his way up from the ranks. Perhaps his long fight against the practise of flogging unruly sailors helped to add to the number of his enemies, for those in authority were outraged that this Jewish upstart should criticise a custom so deeply rooted in the traditions of the navy. Another man of quieter temper might have tried to combat the prejudice and hatred which met him at every turn; but Levy's nature was not a patient one. When raised to the rank of captain, he felt that he could not ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... sight,—and was tingling with a keen sense of shame. Sunday after Sunday, putting on his best clothes, he had walked over to the untidy house north of the Park, first to see Maisie's pictures, and then to criticise and advise upon them as he realised that they were productions on which advice would not be wasted. Sunday after Sunday, and his love grew with each visit, he had been compelled to cram his heart back from between his lips when it prompted him to kiss Maisie several times and ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... extremely unpleasant reading. Generals Joubert and Smit, who had been described with admirable truth and candour, were so enraged that they demanded the instant dismissal of the 'conceited young popinjay' who had dared to criticise his masters. The President, however, who had been described as an ignorant, narrow-minded, pig-headed, and irascible old Boer whom—with the others thrown in—the writer could play with and twist round his finger as he chose, was not disturbed ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... and somewhat dull Epoch, that awkward corner turn'd for days More quiet, when our moon 's no more at full, We may presume to criticise or praise; Because indifference begins to lull Our passions, and we walk in wisdom's ways; Also because the figure and the face Hint, that 't is time to give ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... is it? Twelve dollars? For the privilege of suffocating in this compact little Black Hole? By my halidom, Comrade Gooch, that gentleman whose name you are so shortly to tell us has a very fair idea of how to charge! But who am I that I should criticise? Here are the simoleons, as our young friend, Comrade Maloney, would call them. ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... snare of the moment. No untried man dare say that he would have behaved better in his place. He escaped. He thought it natural to escape. His class thinks it was right and proper that he did escape. It is not the man I would criticise, but the manifest absence of any such sense of the supreme dignity of his position as would have sustained him in that crisis. He was a rich man and a ruling man, but in the test he was not a proud ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... act of drying myself when I was accosted by the proprietor of the hotel adjacent to the shore. "You have no business to be bathing here," he shouted. "I'm not," I said; "I'm bathing on the other side." In the same way, if anyone on either side of the water is unintelligent enough to criticise Mr. Leacock's humour, he can always say it comes from the other side. But the truth is that his humour contains all that is best in the humour ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... the Sylvania as he was shaking her now. He was a prudent young man, and I never had occasion to criticise what he did. He understood the present situation as well as I did. The levee force was waiting to close the gap, and thus save many more lives miles from the scene of its operations. We must get through at once, or the ...
— Up the River - or, Yachting on the Mississippi • Oliver Optic
... "I do not criticise," continued their president, magnanimously, "nor do I complain of any one. Each in this world has his or her mission, and the most ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... manner which is rather too decisive and too peremptory; it is not, however, my intention that it should be so; I entreat you to correct, and even publicly to punish me whenever I am guilty. Do not treat me with the least indulgence, but criticise to the utmost. So clear-sighted a judge as you has a right to be severe; and I promise you that the criminal will endeavor to correct himself. Yesterday I had two of your acquaintances to dine with me, Baron B. ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... evening. "I feel as if I were not in a great city at all, because there are not the evidences of a large and wealthy population that we have everywhere in New York." Archie spoke of New York as if he had lived there always, and found much to criticise in Chicago. But toward evening he went up to Lincoln Park and the beautiful North Shore, and he felt that there was nothing more beautiful in New York than this magnificent park, and this handsome Lake Shore Drive, ...
— The Adventures of a Boy Reporter • Harry Steele Morrison
... him a little bow; she was trembling, though she would not have him see it. "We are not here," she said, "to criticise my father." Lucy was scarcely half aware how much she had gained in composure and the art of self-command. "I think he would have been more wise and more kind to have done himself what he thought to be his duty; but what does that matter? You must not try to convince me, please, ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... play. I would treat Lord Canning as I would treat Sir John Bowring; and I would treat Sir John Bowring as I would treat Lord Canning. Do not let us have in the service of the State low-caste men who may be trampled upon at pleasure, and high-caste men whom nobody dare criticise. ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... be the work of an historian, to criticise would be superfluous. They have been so many Malvolios, all alike anxious to win the favour of that capricious Lady Olivia Erin, and not one of them has succeeded, though several have merited better fortune than they met with on ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... Ferrars with Lady Montfort surprised some, but, on the whole, pleased everybody. They were both of them popular, and no one seemed to envy them their happiness and prosperity. The union took place at a season of the year when there was no London world to observe and to criticise. It was a quiet ceremony; they went down to Northumberland to Lady Montfort's father, and they were married in his private chapel. After that they went off immediately to pay a visit to King Florestan and his queen; Myra had sent her ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... It is the letter of a patriot, but not of an intriguer. Fremont establishes an absurd rule concerning the breach of military discipline, and shows by it his ignorance and narrow-mindedness. So Fremont, and other bungling martinets, assert that nobody has the right to criticise the actions of ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... our own day. The second is a work by Mr. James Parton, an American author, whose book (published by Harper Brothers, of New York) treats of "Caricature, and other Comic Art in all Times and many Lands." It is obviously no part of my duty (even if I felt disposed to do so) to criticise the work of a brother scribe, and that scribe an American gentleman. Covering an area so boundless in extent, it is scarcely surprising that Mr. Parton should devote only thirty of his pages to the consideration of English caricaturists and graphic ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... is not more modern and powerful than it is has been made a cause of complaint against the Secretary of the Navy by persons who at the same time criticise and complain of his endeavors to bring the Navy that we have to its best and most efficient condition; but the good sense of the country will understand that it is really due to his practical action that we have at this time any effective ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... to distinguish my Johnny from the legion of other Johnnies, I prefixed the term Jew to his other name, and addressed him as Jew Johnny. How he had picked up his knowledge I cannot tell, but he could talk a little broken English, besides French, which, had I been qualified to criticise it, I should have found, perhaps, as broken as his English. He attached himself very closely to me, and seemed very anxious to share my fortunes; and after he had pleaded hard, many times, to be taken to the Crimea, I gave in, and formally hired him. He was the best and faithfullest ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... Method is Private Judgment, not Church Authority. But private judgment generates authority; authority, first legitimate, that of knowledge, grows into the illegitimate authority of prescription, calling itself Orthodoxy. Then Private Judgment comes forth again to criticise and reform. It thus becomes the duty of each individual to judge the Church; and out of innumerable individual judgments the insight of the Church is kept living and progressive. We contribute one such private ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... belonged to the late Ministry, but had somewhat out-Heroded Herod in his Conservatism, so as to have been considered to be unfit for the Coalition. Of course, he was proud of his own staunchness, and a little inclined to criticise the lax principles of men who, for the sake of carrying on her Majesty's Government, could be Conservatives one day and Liberals the next. He was a laborious, honest man,—but hardly of calibre sufficient not to regret his own honesty in such an ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... path between a gray and a gay life by keeping it radiant and bright. Read and think and talk of cheerful, hopeful, interesting subjects. Avoid small gossip, and be careful in your criticism of neighbors. Sometimes we must criticise, but speak to people whose faults you feel a word of counsel may amend, not ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... time to literary pursuits. Scott commented on the fact, saying, "Southey's ideas are all poetical," and, "In this respect, as well as in many others, he is a most striking and interesting character."[275] Nevertheless Scott found it easy to criticise Southey's poems adversely, as we may see from his correspondence. Writing to Miss Seward he pointed out flaws in the story and the characterization of Madoc,[276] yet after repeated readings he saw enough to convince ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... beside his directness of aim, if not always of achievement, his clearness of vision, his almost business-like adjustment of effort to result, the vagueness and desultoriness of Coleridge look looser and, in the literary sense, more disreputable than ever. Here was a man who could not only criticise but create; who, though he may sometimes, like others, have convicted his preaching of falsity by his practice, and his practice of sin by his preaching, yet could in the main make practice and preaching fit together. ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... that will do. And now I crave your patience and a boon, Which is to listen, while I read my rhyme, A floating fancy of the summer time. 'Tis neither witty, wonderful, nor wise, So listen kindly—but don't criticise My maiden effort of ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... she admitted, "but it isn't nice for you to criticise Mr. Forbes' secretary. He is a trusted employee, and of great use in ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... existence. When the Government shall succeed (if it shall succeed) in conquering a peace, in subjugating the South, and shall undertake to carry out the Constitution as of old, with all its pro-slavery compromises, then will be my time to criticise, reprove, and condemn; then will be the time for me to open all the guns that I can bring to bear upon it. But blessed be God that 'covenant with death' has been annulled, and that 'agreement with hell' no longer stands. I joyfully accept ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... All either man is justified in saying is that he, personally, wouldn't get much fun out of doing it the other way. As a matter of fact, human nature generally goes beyond its justifications and is prone to criticise. The Englishman waxes a trifle caustic on the subject of "pigging it"; and the American indulges in more than a bit of sarcasm on the subject of "being led about Africa like a ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... misinformed authors, Hippolyte Bonnelier, Comtesse de Mirabeau, Chennevieres, etc., have taken great advantage of the liberty used in works of imagination. There is only one reproach to be made—that they did not have the genius of Balzac. But we may criticise more severely the so-called historical writings about Mme. de Combray, her family and residences, and the Chateau of Tournebut which M. Homberg shows us flanked by four feudal towers, and which MM. Le Prevost and Bourdon say ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... some matting, upon which a number of worshipers were kneeling and supplicating "Allah," their supreme being. There was an earnestness that bespoke sincerity, and an all-abiding faith. I could but think how few of us who would criticise are true to ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... that though it is unfinished, and perhaps in part damaged by some restorer, I feel great hesitation in regarding it as Duerer's handiwork. In both cases the magnificent design is his, and that alone in either is fully representative of him. Mr. Campbell Dodgson ventures to criticise the profusion of drapery as excessive, but my feeling, I must confess, endorses Duerer's in this, rather than that of his learned critic. To me this profusion, and the grandeur it gives as a mass in the design, is of the very essence of what is most ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... those sweet fruits of love, without counting the other things that he raised, carved, and caressed with the chisels, smoothed down with his file, and fashioned in a manner that would make their use intelligible to the mind of a greenhorn, and stain his verdure in a single day. The ladies would criticise these beauties, and all of them were smitten with the youthful Cappara. And the youthful Cappara would eye them up and down, swearing that the day one of them gave him her little finger to kiss, he would ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... in his life enhance his praise? Did he make any mistake? Does Browning think so? How does Browning defend him? What imagery in the poem seems especially effective? Are you reminded of anything in "Rabbi Ben Ezra"? Criticise the rhymes and metre. ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... it may be more, and perhaps thou thyself, Novimus et qui te, &c. We have all our faults; scimus, et hanc, veniaim, &c.; [106]thou censurest me, so have I done others, and may do thee, Cedimus inque vicem, &c., 'tis lex talionis, quid pro quo. Go now, censure, criticise, scoff, and rail. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... sorry, but you are illogical. You acknowledge that this is a subject about which you know nothing, yet almost in the same breath you criticise and condemn. Men blame women for having no sense of justice, but they are just as bad. They are worse, and with less excuse. Women's perceptions are so keen that they see every side of a situation, so it ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... "religious" life. It has seemed expedient, because supplementary, then, to put next to it his work on Our Daily Life, which was meant for those who are "in the world"; and which may give pause to some who might otherwise criticise the first hastily, perhaps condemning it as unpractical, or even objectionable in a world where, after all, men must eat and drink and live, and where some, therefore must provide the necessary means. Most intensely practical is this second treatise, and perhaps nowhere more so ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... do Pinkerton the justice to say that none of them were bad, and some had remarkable merit. They went off slowly, but for handsome figures; and their places were progressively supplied with the work of local artists. These last it was one of my first duties to review and criticise. Some of them were villainous, yet all were saleable. I said so; and the next moment saw myself, the figure of a miserable renegade, bearing arms in the wrong camp. I was to look at pictures thenceforward, not with the eye of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have died to regain our liberty." But Fichte neither resumed nor died! Herder criticised his countrymen for their slavish following of French forms and models in their literature, as in their art and social life. And well he might thus criticise, when one remembers how cramped was the literary vision even of such men as Voltaire and Heine. We have already mentioned some of Voltaire's literary judgments in the preceding chapter, and Heine ventured to compare Racine to Euripides! No wonder that Germany needed schooling in taste, if such were ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... not the place, nor have I the space to criticise the various special theories of descent. One, however, must receive particular notice. According to Ameghino, the South American monkeys (Pitheculites) from the oldest Tertiary of the Pampas are the forms from which have ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... happiness is what I venture to consider more important than the gim-cracks created by those same humans. Man first, then man's work, that's the order of mundane importance to me. And if you've got to criticise the work, for God's sake do it with your ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... is the very composition of the Celtic mind, which naturally tends to firm belief, because it is given exclusively to traditions, past events, narratives of poets, historians, and genealogists. Had the Irish at any time turned themselves to criticise, to doubt, to argue, their very existence, as a people, would have ceased. They must go on believing, or all reality vanishes from their minds, accustomed for so many ages to take in that solid knowledge founded, it is true, on hearsay; but how else can truth reach us save by ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... a complicated one. He has not only to conduct, in the spirit of the author's intentions, a work with which the performers have already become acquainted, but he must also introduce new compositions and help the performers to master them. He has to criticise the errors and defects of each during the rehearsals, and to organize the resources at his disposal in such a way as to make the best use he can of them with the utmost promptitude; for, in the majority of European cities nowadays, musical artisanship is so ill distributed, performers ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... piece with the tone of Scripture throughout. It never palliates the faults even of its best men. It tells its story without comment. It never indulges in condemnation any more than in praise. It is a perfect mirror; its office is to record, not to criticise. Many misconceptions of Old Testament morality would have been avoided by keeping that simple fact ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... touching and very warm affection between Longfellow and Lowell. Mrs. Lowell says of it, "I have never seen such a beautiful friendship between men of such distinct personalities, though closely linked together by mutual tastes and affections. They criticise and praise each other's performances with frankness not to be surpassed, and seem to have attained that happy height of faith where no misunderstanding, no jealousy, no reserve exists." Often in his diary Longfellow speaks of "walking to see Lowell," who was either "musing before his fire ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... was arranged that they should have a holiday, and all be together again. It gave Bob a thrill of pleasure when he thought of meeting Dick and Ed and proudly exhibiting his fur to have them examine and criticise the skins and compliment him. It would make a break in ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... is no exaggeration to say that they were ignorant of every principle of every branch of political science. So long as our domestic administration was confined merely to the raising of a revenue, they levied taxes with gross facility from the industry of a country too busy to criticise or complain. But when the excitement and distraction of war had ceased, and they were forced to survey the social elements that surrounded them, they seemed, for the first time, to have become conscious of their own incapacity. These men, indeed, were the mere children of routine. ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... to all the boarders as she was to Mrs. Shaughnessy herself. If she had a history, she kept it carefully from curious ears. Mrs. Shaughnessy was evidently satisfied, and quite challenged criticism of her favorite. Indeed, there was nothing to criticise. It was generally understood that she was a widow, who had to get on in the world as best she could, and thus the public sympathy was secured, and an embargo laid upon gossip. To be sure, there were certain men in Lucky-dog, of a class which has its representatives everywhere, ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... begin to complain, to criticise. God patiently says nothing but provides for their needs. But Moses has not yet reached the high level that later experiences brought him. He is standing to them for God. Yet he is very un-Godlike. Angrily, with hot word, he smites the rock. Once smiting was God's plan; then the quiet ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... tone was casual; her manner had a quality somewhat aggressively democratic. It said that under her welcome lay the right to criticise, which she would have exercised with equal freedom had her visitor been the Lord Bishop John Calcutta himself; and it made short work of the idea that she might be over-gratified to receive Holy Orders in any form. She was not unwilling, however, to show, ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... the other hand, lest we should subside into doing good, hoping better, and making the best of things in a practical way, the whole has to be reviewed at the end of each week by a hard hebdomadal board, on which a dozen clear thinkers sit aside and criticise all the rest of us. Perhaps it is a part of the irreverence of our times that one should gradually lose awe in the presence of this weekly printed wisdom. Or is it that experience finds types are ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... dear brother White is doing, but some criticise the idea of his opening the house of God every evening for amusements as well as prayer. Some don't believe in mingling ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... with sadness, or collapses into rigidity, if the same guest should come under recognizance in a populous city. When I write "Instructions for an Author on his travels," I will advise a measured civility and a constrained homage:—to criticise fearlessly, and to praise sparingly. There are hearts too obtuse for the operations of gratitude. The Scotch have behaved worthy of the inhabitants of the "land of cakes." In spirit I am ever present with them, and rambling ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... sure of that, Marianne. It is easier to criticise than to appreciate, and every thing original or new provokes the opposition of the multitude. In our case, they have double provocation, for Calzabigi's poem is as original as my music. We have both striven for simplicity, nature, ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... coffee; successfully, in the ultimate issue, as surreptitious bits of fried ham and buckwheat cakes, with suspicious odors, winked at discreetly by her nieces, witnessed. It would have been unkind, as Elise suggested, to criticise Aunt Ju-ju's performances at the ungodly hour of seven in the morning, when their own correctly Continental repast, flanked by a chrysanthemum in a tall vase, not only tallied so accurately with their digestive and aesthetic necessities, but appeared, moreover, with such ...
— Julia The Apostate • Josephine Daskam
... happened to Bruno and Vanini. How completely an ordinary mind is paralyzed by that early preparation in metaphysics is seen in the most vivid way and on its most ridiculous side, where such a one undertakes to criticise the doctrines of an alien creed. The efforts of the ordinary man are generally found to be directed to a careful exhibition of the incongruity of its dogmas with those of his own belief: he is at great pains to show that not only ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... of the finest girls in 19—, and if either of you amounted to a third as much, you could be proud of it. No, I don't like her at all, but I admire her immensely, so please choose somebody else to criticise ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... they give rise to contradiction, we would repeat here what Newman wrote in his Preface to "Difficulties of Anglicans," "It has not been our practice to engage in controversy with those who felt it their duty to criticise what at any time we have written; but that will not preclude us under present circumstances, from elucidating what is deficient in them by further observations, should questions be asked, which, either from the quarter whence they proceed, ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... 'I have not the time for all your delicacies, my good people; I have come to see that these things are for the advantage of the world, and it is not my business to explain them. If M. le Cure attempted to criticise me in military matters, or thee, my excellent Martin, in affairs of business, or in the culture of your vines, I should think him not a wise man; and in like manner, faith and religion, these are his concern.' Felix de Bois Sombre is an excellent fellow; but he smells a little of the mousquetaire. ...
— A Beleaguered City • Mrs. Oliphant
... magnanimity which grows and grows, and which will, of a worldly necessity, fall by its own weight at last; nothing less being possible. The scene with Tiburzio and the end of the act with its great effects, are more pathetic than professed pathos. When I come to criticise, it will be chiefly on what I take to be a little occasional flatness in the versification, which you may remove if you please, by knotting up a few lines here and there. But I shall write more of 'Luria,'—and ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... To criticise a work of art historically is to play the science-besotted fool. No more disastrous theory ever issued from the brain of a charlatan than that of evolution in art. Giotto did not creep, a grub, that Titian might flaunt, a butterfly. ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... produced the agreement with Onions Winter, and he produced it with a shamed countenance. He knew that Mark Snyder would criticise it. ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... aeroplane prevail over the sound of a temple bell, happening to speak of The Golden Bough, I asked my neighbour, who had read it, if to a Japanese who got its penetrating view some things could ever be the same again. He answered frankly, "There are things in our life which are too near to criticise. Do you know that there are parts of Japan where ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... state of things she found herself called upon to sanction and conserve. She could not immediately reform it—she must produce first her doctrine of 'true forms,' her scientific definitions and precepts based on them, and her doctrine of constructions. She could not openly condemn it; but she could criticise and reject it by means of that method which is 'sometimes necessary in the sciences,' and to which 'those who would let in new light upon the human mind must have recourse.' She could seize the grand hieroglyphic of the heroic past, and make it ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... on the facts of their own characters and relation to God they would be uncomfortable, and who, therefore, do their best to keep such thoughts at a safe distance. So, as soon as the sermon is over, some of you will begin to criticise me, or to discuss politics, or gossip, and so get rid of the impressions that the truth might produce. Or you fling yourselves into business. One of the reasons for the fierce energy which some men throw into their common avocations ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... sing my sentiments. With self-pitying lines pages I fill, so as utterance to give to all my cares and woes. From these few scanty words, who could fathom the secrets of my heart about the autumntide? Beginning from the time when T'ao, the magistrate, did criticise the beauty of your bloom, Yea, from that date remote up to this very day, your high renown has ever ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... (biting her lips, interrupting him)—It seems to me, sir, that we are the sole judges in this matter. I can well understand why men of the world do not like men of letters! But it is easier to criticise ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... knows more about it than any one else living. Then along comes some insolent little whipper-snapper,—like me,—whose sole knowledge of the matter in hand is drawn from the very book that he pretends to criticise, and patronizes the learned author in a book notice. No, I got out of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... work, though plain and to some extent startling, is chaste, practical and to the point, and will be a boon and a blessing to thousands who consult its pages. The world is full of ignorance, and the ignorant will always criticise, because they live to suffer ills, for they know no better. New light is fast falling upon the dark corners, and the eyes of many are ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... boarders as she was to Mrs. Shaughnessy herself. If she had a history, she kept it carefully from curious ears. Mrs. Shaughnessy was evidently satisfied, and quite challenged criticism of her favorite. Indeed, there was nothing to criticise. It was generally understood that she was a widow, who had to get on in the world as best she could, and thus the public sympathy was secured, and an embargo laid upon gossip. To be sure, there were certain men in ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... at the other's fault. What generals some of us are upon paper! what repartees come to our mind when the talk is finished! and, the game over, how well we see how it should have been played! Writing of an event at a distance of thirty years, 'tis not difficult now to criticise and find fault. But at the time when we first heard of Wolfe's glorious deeds upon the Plains of Abraham—of that army marshalled in darkness and carried silently up the midnight river—of those rocks scaled by the intrepid leader and his troops—of that miraculous ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the higher Vertebrata, the results of recent investigations, however we may sift and criticise them, seem to me to leave a clear balance in favour of the doctrine of the evolution of living forms one from another. Nevertheless, in discussing this question, it is very necessary to discriminate carefully between the different kinds of evidence from fossil remains which are brought ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... with the minimum of inconvenience to others. Human happiness is what I venture to consider more important than the gim-cracks created by those same humans. Man first, then man's work, that's the order of mundane importance to me. And if you've got to criticise the work, for God's sake do it with your ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... disordered nervous states or perverted sexual feeling, "We are surely all familiar in a general way with this method of discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy. We all use it in some degree in criticising persons whose states of mind we regard as overstrained. But when other people criticise our own exalted soul-flights by calling them 'nothing but' expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of the living truth; and we wish ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... Congress forgotten to pass a law forbidding Seward, for decency's sake, to make himself ridiculous? Among others, hear the following query: Whether this unconquerable and irresistible nation shall suddenly perish through imbecility? etc. O Mr. Seward! how can you thus pointedly and mercilessly criticise your own deeds and policy? Seward squints toward the presidency that he may ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... Man, and the counsels of the great apostles; a shrine in which men drew near to the supreme manifestation of God upon earth. But they became wrongly sacred also, as the lengthening lapse of time isolated these precious heirlooms of the Christian household into relics it was blasphemy to criticise; as the falling waters of the river of life stranded high above men's reach the thoughts and experiences of the inspired fisher-folk of Galilee. In the Dark Ages, when to read was a sign of distinction, and to write a schoolboy ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... with something more tangible than a sarcastic verse. He quite admitted, even to himself, that a critic had every right to criticise—that was what he was for—but he claimed that a man who pretended to be an author's friend and who praised his books to his face, had no right to go behind his back and pen a criticism so scathing as that which appeared in the Argus: for ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... explained without the assumption of an entelechy we are encouraged to hope that all forms may be thus explained." The author does not tell us what the mysterious adaptations are, nor does he offer us the explanations which, in his opinion, explain them. We cannot, therefore, criticise his views, and can only remind his readers that, because an explanation plausibly explains an occurrence, it is by no means always therefore certain to be the true explanation; it may, indeed, ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... made," Benassis resumed. "The cell with its deal wainscot, the hard bed, the solitude, all appealed to my soul. The Carthusians were in the chapel, I went thither to join in their prayers, and there my resolutions vanished. I do not wish to criticise the Catholic Church, I am perfectly orthodox, I believe in its laws and in the works it prescribes. But when I heard the chanting and the prayers of those old men, dead to the world and forgotten by the world, I discerned an undercurrent of sublime egoism in the life of the cloister. This ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... easy enough for the writers of the nineteenth century to criticise the actors of the fifteenth; and learned scholars, sitting in luxurious easy-chairs in great libraries, can pass swift and severe judgment upon the acts and motives of Columbus. But let them go back four ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... the account of the balls of Luetzen: he was not left unto temptation. We should extend to Napoleon III. the same charity that we extend to men who have long been historical characters, and judge him by his actions and their results, and not criticise him by ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... a little square platform, called the fijerena, in an angle of the wall, or at the gate, with steps leading up to it. Here the family sits, when the work of the day is over, to watch—and, doubtless, to criticise—the passers-by; also to do the polite according to Malagasy ideas, for it must be told that these people are very courteous. Even the poorest have a natural dignity and ease of manner ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... have been saved at a time when the island was sadly in want of money; the natural surface of the firm soil would have been preferred by all vehicles except during rain, when they would have adopted the metalled parallel way. It is easy to criticise after the event, and there can be no doubt that upon our first occupation of the island a much greater traffic was expected, and the road between the two capitals was arranged accordingly. We halted for the ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... were largely spent in their studios where, seated in the most comfortable chair he could find, he would smoke lazily and watch them at work and criticise freely. Men grumbled and laughed at his presumption, but were ready to acknowledge the justice of his criticism. He had an excellent eye for color and effect and for the contrast of light and shade, and those whose pictures were hung, were often ready enough to admit that the canvas ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... noticed it in the gardens and thought it quite out of style, and had even detected that the ribbons had been ironed! But he did not think as much about it, or her gown either, when he was alone with her, as he did now when there was all his world to see and Blanche to criticise, as she did unsparingly. ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... family," says a social critic, "the father is the man who shouts." How the club-bore must shout when he is in his own castle, surrounded only by his trembling kindred and anxious retainers! In his castle there is no one to resist or criticise him—unless indeed his wife happen to be a lady, like Clytemnestra, of masculine resolution. In that case the arbitrary gent may be a father of a family who is not allowed to shout at home, but is obliged to give nature free ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... yet for perfect precision of action. Nevertheless, we may hope that, with the advance of social development, the faculty is continually gaining in precision and certainty. And, indeed, this hope is already assured to us in the fact that the faculty has begun to criticise itself, to distinguish between an erroneous and a true form of its-operation. In fact, all that has been here said about illusions of insight has involved the assumption that intellectual culture sharpens the power and makes it less ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... a "flashlight" of a reception to thy Master, the Prince. I do not know exactly what that means, but there seem to be many people and— ladies. I have not shown thine Honourable Mother the picture, as she might ask thee to return at once. I do not criticise thy friends, nor could our Prince go to a place not fitting to his dignity, but— the ladies seem in my poor judgment most ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... Duerer, the precise, the perfect, able to say, "It cannot be better done," yet re-engraving a portion of his best-known plate, and frankly leaving the rejected portion half erased?[6] Titian, whose custom it was to lay aside his pictures for long periods and then criticise them, imagining that he was looking at them "with the eyes of ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... pamphlet. Of the author's literary talent, we shall say but little: the phrases, "setting down to count the cost"—"the rights of the man the greatest bore in nature"—the appellation of rigmarole ramble, given to a correct sentence of Dr. Priestley—which the author attempts to criticise—may serve as ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... Tradition for them interpreted their new Constitutions and overmastered them. The State legislatures therefore continued for a time to claim some control over the judiciary, or at least a right to criticise and censure ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... at having compelled the giant of intellect to listen to reason, as I then thought foolishly enough; but there was a rankling feeling left in my heart against him which made me, ten years later, criticise all ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... been with other men I know not. For myself, I could not have come through that dreary winter unscathed without the influence of her, who would have been the first to disclaim such power. Among the velvet cushions of the east one may criticise the lapse of white man to barbarity; but in the wilderness human voice is as grateful to the ear as rain patter in a drouth. There, men deal with facts, not arguments. Natives break the loneliness of an isolated life by not unwelcomed visits. ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... on the poet's side; but his ferocious hates and bigotries too often tempt us to hate the bigot, and always compel us to take part with the fellow-creatures whom he outrages. At least, such is their effect on myself. Nor will he or his worshippers suffer us to criticise his faults with mere reference to the age in which he lived. I should have been glad to do so; but the claims made for him, even by himself, will not allow it. We are called upon to look on him ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... of were taken up by each country and elaborate answers given, papers were read upon them and thorough discussion had. The order was not to take any votes but to bring in facts of the various prison workings, to interchange views, criticise and thus sift out the best, in which, evidently, great enlightening of mind was obtained, and a great advancement made in the right direction. On page 537 of Transactions we have the following reform sentiments: "Man, in the state of penal servitude, is no longer a thing, but a moral ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... for itself the value of this attempt, in the grandiloquent words of the catalogue, "to bring before my countrymen the aesthetic and artistic capabilities, and the beauty in various forms, that are to be found in our great Indian Empire." To criticise the pictures in detail is impossible; but I will try to give an impression of the exhibition as a whole. Imagine a room hung with ordinary school slates, imagine that all these slates have been gilt, ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... cut-and-dried designers for builders, or by academical imitators of bygone styles. Though they may be called experimental, no one can say that they are not born of thought and principle, as well as of great capacity for design. It is nowise our business to-night to criticise them. I suspect their authors, who have gone through so many difficulties (not of their own breeding) in producing them, know their shortcomings much better than we can do, and are less elated by their successes than we are. At any rate, they are gifts to our country ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... discussing the questions of national existence. But the child had no care about those questions. Now God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost are in perpetual session in regard to this world and kindred worlds. Shall you, His child, rush in to criticise or arraign or condemn the divine government? No; the Cabinet of the Eternal Three can govern and will govern in the wisest and best way, and there never will be a mistake, and like razor skillfully swung, shall ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... the whole of life consists of nothing but contradictions. The rich are the poor in spirit; the many little men hold the power, and the great only serve the little men. I've never met such proud people as the humble; I've never met an uneducated man who didn't believe himself in a position to criticise learning and to do without it. I've found the unpleasantest of deadly sins amongst the Saints: I mean self-complacency. In my youth I was a saint myself; but I've never been so worthless as I was then. The better I thought myself, the ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... hereabouts; for the common, so far from being barren, was a perfect sheet of greenest, softest turf, sowed with minute and rare flowers. Often a square foot of ground presented me with enough of beauty and variety in colour and form to criticise and contemplate for a ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... for John Ward to ask how she had been taught, or to criticise another minister's influence, but as he walked home, with anxious, downcast eyes, he wondered what Dr. Howe's belief could be, and how it had been possible for her soul to have been so neglected. This woman, whose gracious, beautiful nature ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... we meet in the world, we know to be very imperfect creatures. In the daily scandals, in the quarrels of friends, in bankruptcy disclosures, in lawsuits, in police reports, we have constantly thrust before us the pervading selfishness, dishonesty, brutality. Yet when we criticise nursery-management and canvass the misbehaviour of juveniles, we habitually take for granted that these culpable persons are free from moral delinquency in the treatment of their boys and girls! So far is this ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... has noticed anything. She is so occupied with her literary matters"—there was a sarcastic touch upon the word, that did not escape the listener—"she has no time for such things. I hope you won't think I mean to criticise her," added the young girl, with a blush. "I know you care a great deal for ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... themselves refrain from criticising the system, but also use their influence upon the members of their own family and all with whom they come in contact. They are subject to trial in special secret courts and one of them who dared in any way to criticise the existing system would not for long remain a member of it. Of course, the members of the Reichstag have the privilege of free speech without responsibility, and there are occasional Socialists, who know that ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... science of ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes. A science only lays down lines within which the rules of the art must fall, laws which the follower of the art must not transgress; but what particular thing he shall positively do within those lines is left exclusively to his own genius. ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... prudent friendship could replace mad love, and he was not very long before he found out his mistake. But at first all went well—her praise stimulated him, he gave loose to the fiery eloquence that was natural to him. Knowing that she would read and criticise every word, he took more pride and pleasure in his public life than he had ever done before; he liked to hear her criticisms on his opinions and actions; he was delighted with the interest she ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... foreign ways of cooking, the author begs her readers to remember how much of the success of any dish depends upon its taste; if it is well-flavored, and palatably seasoned, the eaters of it do not closely criticise its component parts. It is just there that benefit is derived from European culinary skill; the judicious use of a few inexpensive sweet herbs, and savory sauces, will raise a side dish, made from the cheapest cut of meat, in gustatory excellence far above a badly cooked porterhouse steak, ...
— The Cooking Manual of Practical Directions for Economical Every-Day Cookery • Juliet Corson
... point of view?" she asked of her aunt. "When you criticise everything here you should have a point of view. Yours doesn't seem to be American—you thought everything over there so disagreeable. When I criticise I have mine; it's ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... pleased. The situation which the Lodge occupied was a piece of flat ground, now planted with sycamores, not far from the entrance to that magnificent spot where the spectator first stops to gaze upon Blenheim, to think of Marlborough's victories, and to applaud or criticise the cumbrous ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... his late host and hostess. Mr. Boffin was a gentleman who had belonged to the late Ministry, but had somewhat out-Heroded Herod in his Conservatism, so as to have been considered to be unfit for the Coalition. Of course, he was proud of his own staunchness, and a little inclined to criticise the lax principles of men who, for the sake of carrying on her Majesty's Government, could be Conservatives one day and Liberals the next. He was a laborious, honest man,—but hardly of calibre sufficient not to regret his own honesty in such an emergency ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... time, I was too deeply moved to criticise; mere sympathy oppressed my spirit. It had always been a point with me to visit the station, if I could: on the rocks of Hookena the design was fixed. I had seen the departure of lepers for the place of exile; I must see their arrival, and that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... two nuns partook from motives of economy, was good. The rest ordered wine and Cornudet called for beer. He had a particular way with him of uncorking the bottle, of making the liquid froth, of gazing at it while he tilted the glass, which he then held up between his eye and the light to criticise the color; while he drank, his great beard, which had the tints of his favorite beverage, seemed to quiver fondly, his eyes squinting that he might not lose sight of his tankard for a moment, and altogether he had the appearance of fulfilling the sole function for which ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... goj), and that he sat at their tables and ate meat which is not kosher. That in contentious affairs he avoided Jewish courts, and went to the tribunals of the country; that he did not obey the superiors of kahal, and he even dared to criticise them that he did not respect Jewish authorities in general, and ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... his mind, and even the rising colour in Miss Hartley's cheek did not serve to enlighten him. But he was glad to notice that she was becoming reserved again. Mr. Vyner noticed it, too, and, raging inwardly against a tongue which was always striving after his undoing, began with a chastened air to criticise the architecture of the new chapel in Porter Street. Architecture being a subject of which the captain knew nothing, he discussed it at great length, somewhat pleased to find that both his listeners were giving him their ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... makes us touchy, ready to take offence, ill-tempered, suspicious, severe, exacting, easily offended; it keeps alive in our hearts a certain malignity, a secret joy at the mortifications which befall our neighbour; it nourishes our readiness to criticise, our dislike at certain persons, our ill-feeling, our bitterness, and a thousand other things prejudicial ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... so dreadfully afraid of it. Let me practise at once; there is time now, before we go to dinner. Sit down and play for me, Torvald dear; criticise me, and correct me as ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... no attempt either to explain or to criticise this extraordinary passage. It's enough that I yielded for the hour to the strange force of my friend's emotion. On the whole I think my own vision was the more interesting of the two. He beheld but the transient irresponsible ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... very good, L'Isle was ready to acknowledge it; but, in fact, he had not the fear of criticism before his eyes; for when did lady ever criticise verses made in her praise? But he had reckoned without his host. Though Lady Mabel recited them exceedingly well, in a way that showed that she must have read them over many times, and dwelt upon them, there was an under-current of ridicule running through her tones and action—for she ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... write; I can only criticise. Both faculties are very good in their way. You'll have to start from another direction. I'll tell you what to do—try ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... many courtiers who were denied access to them; while some, who were permitted to be present, were too well pleased with the opportunity of sneering at her mediocrity in the art, which those, who could not see her, were ready to criticise with the utmost severity. It is believed that Madame de Genlis found this too favourable an opportunity to be slighted. Anonymous satires upon the Queen's performances, which were attributed to the malice of that authoress, were frequently shown to Her Majesty by good-natured friends. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... him," said Beverley. "I have not misunderstood you. There has been nothing. You have treated me kindly and with beautiful friendliness. You have not done or said a thing that Father Beret or anybody else could criticise. And if I have said or done the least thing to trouble you I repudiate it—I did not mean it. Now you believe me, don't ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... brought up the rear. When a start was made, the little police force hustled vehicles out of the way and even stopped tram-cars when necessary; while the band tortured selections from Handel and Beethoven to the intense delight of passers-by, many of whom paused to criticise shortcomings in the procession among themselves. In about an hour it reached its destination, where Kumodini Babu's uncle received the guests. The family barber carried Samarendra in his arms to a chair which had been provided ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... the president, "I must remind you that you are not here to serve as counsel for the prisoner, or to criticise the decisions of this court. You must confine yourself to a statement of facts, and not express your opinion ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... Malipieri's statement without question, and without the smallest resentment. Somehow the girl had felt that this shadowy woman, who stood between her and Malipieri, would make some claim upon him, and assert herself in some disagreeable way, or criticise his action. It was hateful to think she really had a right to call herself his wife, and was therefore legally privileged to tell him unpleasant truths. Sabina always connected that with matrimony, remembering how her father and mother ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... seem willin' to have me go; she seemed to cling to me. She seemed to be a good, affectionate little creetur. And she said she would give anything almost if she could rehearse the hull lecture over to me, and have me criticise it. Sez she: ...
— Samantha Among the Brethren, Complete • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... was extremely difficult in the atmosphere of that home to criticise one whom he knew to be considered as ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... is any class to be oppressed. It was no longer possible for freemen to be ruled otherwise than by governments of their own making, and subject to their approval. Freedom of the press, which means liberty to criticise all state and social procedure, was established, and public opinion, instead of being crushed, was consulted. The aristocracy could retain its ascendency only by permitting more weight to the middle class, whose influence was therefore ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... no right to criticise mother like that, Aunt Anne, and, of course, she knows a great deal more about bringing up children than you do. If you had not interfered, Dick would have given the proper reason, and, certainly, if we do what we shouldn't it's our fault, ...
— Barbara in Brittany • E. A. Gillie
... therefore, from anyone who can give you a hint, and don't set yourself up (or down) in some obscure country town and fancy you are great. Come out into the world, measure yourself against the best, criticise your own work as if it were a stranger's. Be honest, and say, "That man's work knocks mine into a cocked hat," and then go home miserable, but determined to beat that man's work or perish in the ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... young Athenian in the fifth century before Christ who became unsettled by new ideas, and the student of a modern University who has been the subject of a similar 'aufklarung.' We too observe that when young men begin to criticise customary beliefs, or to analyse the constitution of human nature, they are apt to lose hold of solid principle (Greek). They are like trees which have been frequently transplanted. The earth about them is loose, and they have no roots reaching ...
— The Republic • Plato
... that mankind is heir to none is more sacred than the right of an actor to abuse his manager. It is among the blessed privileges which help to make life cheerful and sunny, for, when all is said, what would be the joy of existence if we might not criticise those whom Providence has placed above us. Even a king may be abused, behind his royal back, and so an ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... trunk up like a wipsy, "Friend," said the elephant, "you're tipsy: Put up your purse again—be wise; Leave man mankind to criticise. Be sure you ne'er will lack a pen Amidst the bustling sons of men; For, like to game cocks and such cattle, Authors run unprovoked to battle, And never cease to fight and fray them Whilst there's a publisher ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... being quite satisfied with it, when everything else also had two days' less importance than it would at home, and gradually he tasted the delights of the detached onlooker who need do nothing but warn, criticise, prophesy, protest. With absolute sincerity to himself he attributed this attitude which Fate had assigned to him as entirely owing to his having had to leave England on his wife's account. He had quite easily, quite calmly drifted into a conviction ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... said, "to have acted in a thoroughly capable and praiseworthy manner. The only point in your conduct which I would permit myself to criticise is your omission to slay the kid. That, however, was due, I take it, to the fact that you were interrupted. We will now proceed to examine the future. I cannot see that it is altogether murky. You have lost a good job, but there are others, equally good, for a man of your calibre. ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... now venture to make a few remarks, and by way of preface I must say that I do not criticise you because I take a low view of your powers: but for the very contrary reason. I think very highly of the promise shown in your writings and therefore think it worth while to write more fully than I can often to contributors. Nor do I set myself up as a judge—I am very sensible of my own failings ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... but you are illogical. You acknowledge that this is a subject about which you know nothing, yet almost in the same breath you criticise and condemn. Men blame women for having no sense of justice, but they are just as bad. They are worse, and with less excuse. Women's perceptions are so keen that they see every side of a situation, so it happens sometimes that they get confused, and appear contradictory. ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... that fair water-way, isolated, yet with all the world around them, those two settled the question of questions; and then, with minds and hearts at ease, and beauty all about them, their thoughts became less serious, and she began to criticise the uniform of a guard standing at a boat-landing, with shoulders ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... is only there From a love of the picturesque— You hint, maybe, that it takes no share In the plot of this weird burlesque; But cliffs that tremble at every touch, And that flap in the dreadful draught, Have something better to do—ah, much! Than to criticise Nature's craft! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... morning, and flies down the steps with the air of one who has performed her whole duty. Now that she has attained to married respectability, she feels quite free to criticise the rest of the world, and she rejoices in the fact that she does carry more ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... mother!" exclaimed the young man, patience at last ceasing to be a virtue. "Criticise me if you wish to; but I will ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... would find nothing good in it. To me it seemed atheistic, fallacious, heretical. You perceive I am not sparing myself in these admissions," he interposed, "but I have been doing some serious thinking during my return voyage, and now I am going to read that book again; not to criticise, but to get at its true inwardness if ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... period of their acquaintance he would have been the man of her choice." As the little if is a very powerful word, of course this amounts to nothing, and it is scarcely the province of a biographer to say what might have taken place under other circumstances, and to criticise a character from that standpoint. If Mary was attracted by Fuseli's genius, and this would not have been surprising, and if she went to Paris for change of scene and thought, she certainly only set a sensible example. As it was, she had ample matter of interest in the stirring scenes ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... shall try to say something elsewhere; but the things which these critics have especially in mind are at once more general and more internal. They concern something tawdry, squalid or superstitious about the shrines and those who use them. Now the mistake of critics is not that they criticise the world; it is that they never criticise themselves. They compare the alien with the ideal; but they do not at the same time compare themselves with the ideal; rather they identify themselves with the ideal. I have met a tourist who had seen the great Pyramid, and ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... must be prepared to face the reproach which attaches to those who criticise a gift, if I venture to observe that I do not think that the Bishop of Manchester need have been so much alarmed, as he evidently has been, by the objections which have often been raised to prayer, on the ground that a belief in the efficacy of prayer is inconsistent with a belief in ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... tent before ten. Then it took me some time to get down to work. From then on until late in the afternoon I would sit at my typewriter, chew my tongue, and pound away. Each night I read to my wife what I had written that day, and Mrs. White would criticise it. While my work was redhot I couldn't get any perspective on it—each day's installment seemed to me the finest literature I had ever read. She didn't always agree with me. When she disapproved of anything I threw it away—after a ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... to mention any names. It is always a mistake to mention names. One cannot guard against it too carefully. But having done what she did ten years ago dear Adela Sellingworth should really—but it is not for me to criticise her. Only there is nothing people—women—are more sensitive about than the question of age. No one likes to be laid on the shelf. Adela Sellingworth has chosen to—well—one might feel such a very drastic step to be quite uncalled ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... a companion, were it only to have some one to criticise the hounds with, so the evening before the appointed day, as the Yorkshireman was sitting in his old corner at the far end of the Piazza Coffee-room in Covent Garden, having just finished his second ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... although she knew that his creed externally was not hers, her own was not sharply cut, and she persuaded herself that, in substance, his and her belief were identical. As she grew older her relationship to the Unseen became more and more intimate, but she was less and less inclined to criticise her husband's freedom, or to impose on the children a rule which they would certainly have observed, but only for her sake. Every now and then she felt a little lonely; when, for example, she read one or two books which were ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... of modern England. You may urge, that I ought rather to describe the qualities of the refined sculpture which is executed in large quantities for private persons belonging to the upper classes, and for sepulchral and memorial purposes. But I could not now criticise that sculpture with any power of conviction to you, because I have not yet stated to you the principles of good sculpture in general. I will, however, in some points, tell you the facts ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... sweet self, dear lady guest, we find Juliet's dark face, Viola's gentle mien, The dignity of Scotland's martyr'd queen— The beauty and the wit of Rosalind. What wonder, then, that we who mop our eyes And sob and gush when we should criticise— ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... inopportune, may even die inopportunely, and this was the revenge that Mr. Aubyn, some two years after her return to Hillbridge, took upon his injured wife. He died precisely at the moment when Glennard was beginning to criticise her. It was not that she bored him; she did what was infinitely worse—she made him feel his inferiority. The sense of mental equality had been gratifying to his raw ambition; but as his self-knowledge defined itself, his understanding of her also increased; and if man ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... She was not going to criticise anything about Patty if she could help it. "I think I ought to get something for poor Miss Almira," she went on. "It is because she is so ill and couldn't make my coat that I could come to-day. What do you think would be nice for ...
— Little Maid Marian • Amy E. Blanchard
... to lift the politics-ridden waterway out of politics altogether. Before he gave his final revision to the printers, he submitted a proof to the Boss, who returned it with the comment that his intellect was of an order quite too everyday to criticise a project obviously framed for the millennium. From the man reputed to own the Legislature, whose committees, certainly, were cut and dried in his office weeks before it met, this sarcasm was gloomily prophetic; but since his Tuscarora speech, Shelby ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... are the poor in spirit; the many little men hold the power, and the great only serve the little men. I've never met such proud people as the humble; I've never met an uneducated man who didn't believe himself in a position to criticise learning and to do without it. I've found the unpleasantest of deadly sins amongst the Saints: I mean self-complacency. In my youth I was a saint myself; but I've never been so worthless as I was then. The better I thought myself, ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... I'm about," continued the detective, pointedly, "as those who are unwise enough to criticise my actions find out, sooner ...
— Walter Sherwood's Probation • Horatio Alger
... was present at a final sitting which my master, Carolus Duran, gave to one of my fair compatriots. He knew that the lady was leaving Paris on the morrow, and that in an hour, her husband and his friends were coming to see and criticise the portrait—always a terrible ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... Orme and Mill have repelled. The materials placed at the disposal of Sir John Malcolm by the late Lord Powis were indeed of great value. But we cannot say that they have been very skilfully worked up. It would, however, be unjust to criticise with severity a work which, if the author had lived to complete and revise it, would probably have been improved by condensation and by a better arrangement. We are more disposed to perform the pleasing duty of expressing ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... he smiled; but at moments a cloud, as it were, passed over his face, for the Roman rabble was satirical and keen in reckoning, and let itself criticise even great triumphators, even men whom it loved and respected. It was known that on a time they shouted during the entrance to Rome of Julius Caesar: "Citizens, hide your wives; the old libertine is coming!" But Nero's monstrous vanity could not endure the least blame or criticism; meanwhile ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... not to criticise his birthplace, I presume, and yet, if I were to do it all over again, I do not know whether I would select that particular spot or not. Sometimes I think I would not. And yet, what memories cluster about that old house! ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... drew up ninety-five theses, or articles, wherein he fearlessly stated his views respecting indulgences. These theses, written in Latin, he nailed to the door of the church at Wittenberg, and invited all scholars to examine and criticise them, and to point out if in any respect they were opposed to the teachings of the Word of God, or of the early Fathers of the Church (1517). By means of the press the theses were scattered with incredible rapidity throughout every ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... let me say something to you about Lady C—— L——'s criticism of my performance. In the first place, nothing is easier than to criticise by comparison, and hardly anything much more difficult than to form a correct judgment of any work of art (be it what it may) upon the foundation of abstract principles and fundamental rules of taste and ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... he was, in a fatigue jacket, that warned him not to imagine his back view, and held him constantly a little to the rear of Lady Camper, lest she should be troubled by it;—and he knew the habit of the second rank to criticise the front—how consent to face the outer world in such style side by side with the lady ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sketching, the time being kept by the player who has not selected a "Position." All the illustrated papers are then passed in order round the table, so that each may view the others' pictures; but no one is supposed to criticise them aloud. Lastly they are handed to the "Guesser" (who, up to this point, has taken no active part in the game, except to time the five minutes), and he ranges them in order before him according to the order in which the players are ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... angel of our church,' answered the man in the white linen coat; 'and it is dangerous to criticise upon his productions, especially as he considers every one to be in the wrong, who does not precisely fall in with his own opinions in matters ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... that I am going to criticise you. I am no judge of sewing,—never set a stitch in my life. It must be a dull way of spending time. Can't you put ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... equal, or something like it. Needless to say that Dyce at heart deemed all women his natural inferiors, and only by conscious effort could entertain the possibility that one or other of their sex might view and criticise him with level eyes. Six years ago Connie Bride had looked up to him; he, with his University culture, held undoubted superiority over the country girl striving hard to educate herself and to find a place in the world. ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... ever and ever so far off, where there are palms and coral reefs, and the people don't believe in wrapping themselves up much.) And so she's given the dance at a great many War Fund matinees. That little Mrs. Jimmy Sharpe, daring to criticise it, said there was too much Ollyoola and not enough dance; but everybody who counts simply raves about it. And then, when some manager person offered Sybil big terms to do it at the "Incandescent," he was "officially informed" that, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... experiences. Then it was that the truth of a very ancient adage struck upon my mind, namely, that money is power. Had I sufficient money I could laugh at unjust critics for example; indeed they or their papers would scarcely dare to criticise me for fear lest it should be in my power to do them a bad turn. Again I could follow my own ideas in life and perhaps work good in the world, and live in such surroundings as commended themselves to me. It was as clear as daylight, but—how to ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... not rash for us, in our profound ignorance, to criticise the workings of a boundless Wisdom? He who takes only a few steps along the pathway of Knowledge, or enters, however slightly, into the secret of the works of God, obtains the proof that Providence leaves no part of the Cosmos, no being anywhere, deprived of its fatherly ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... what had happened on Jubilee night, he made it appear that his estimate of Miss. Lord was undergoing modification. 'She has lost him, all through her flightiness,' said the sisters to each other. They were not sorry, and felt free again to criticise Nancy's ideas of ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... distinctive of the nineteenth century that in its passion for criticising everything in heaven and earth it by no means spared to criticise itself. Alike in Carlyle's fulminations against its insincerity, in Arnold's nice ridicule of Philistinism, and in Ruskin's repudiation of everything modern, we detect that fine dissatisfaction with the age which is perhaps ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... Dr. Johnson's school,' wrote Reynolds to some friend. 'For my own part, I acknowledge the highest obligations to him. He may be said to have formed my mind, and to have brushed from it a great deal of rubbish. Those very persons whom he has brought to think rightly will occasionally criticise the opinions of their master when he nods. But we should always recollect that it is he himself who taught us and enabled us to do it.' Taylor's Reynolds, ii. 461. Burke, writing to Malone, said:—'You state ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... be prepared to face the reproach which attaches to those who criticise a gift, if I venture to observe that I do not think that the Bishop of Manchester need have been so much alarmed, as he evidently has been, by the objections which have often been raised to prayer, on the ground that a belief in the efficacy ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... it is no business of mine to criticise your conduct; you can do as you please with your wife, but may I count upon your keeping your word with me? Well, then, promise me to tell her that her father has not twenty-four hours to live; that he looks in vain for her, and has cursed ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... all this, Chaucer is far indeed from founding the art of criticism. His business was to create, and not to criticise. And, had he set himself to do so, there is no warrant that his success would have been great. In many ways he was still in bondage to the mediaval, and wholly uncritical, tradition. One classic, we may almost say, was as good to ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... do not remember me? Sarelli. Pardon! You looked like a ghost standing there. How badly those fellows marched! We hang, you see, on the skirts of our profession and criticise; it is all we are fit for." His black eyes, restless and malevolent like a swan's, seemed to stab her face. "A fine evening! Too hot. The storm is wanted; you feel that? It is weary waiting for the storm; but after the storm, my dear young lady, comes peace." He smiled, gently, this time, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... want us?" she said. "Next Tuesday night? Well, we could go, I suppose, but I don't believe we shall. Mrs. Lake said something about coming around that evening to help me read my paper and criticise it." ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... observe to you,' he drawled at last; 'all you young people criticise and form judgments on everything at random; you have little knowledge of your own country; Russia, young gentlemen, is an unknown land to you; that's where it is!... You are for ever reading German. For instance, ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... branch of political science. So long as our domestic administration was confined merely to the raising of a revenue, they levied taxes with gross facility from the industry of a country too busy to criticise or complain. But when the excitement and distraction of war had ceased, and they were forced to survey the social elements that surrounded them, they seemed, for the first time, to have become conscious of ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... this essay, announced that it is intended to be partly controversial, I can scarcely begin better than by furnishing the reader with the means of judging whether I myself correctly apprehend the doctrine which I am about to criticise. If, then, I were myself an Utilitarian, and, for the sake either of vindicating my own belief, or of making converts of other people, had undertaken to explain what Utilitarianism is, I should set about the task somewhat ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... alleged, if he will admit that a grammarian's fame should be thought safe enough in his own keeping. Are authors apt to undervalue their own performances? Or because proprietors and publishers may profit by the credit of a book, shall it be thought illiberal to criticise it? Is the author himself to be disbelieved, that the extravagant praises bestowed upon him may be justified? "Superlative commendation," says Dillwyn, "is near akin to detraction." (See his Reflections, p. 22.) Let him, therefore, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... excuses, Hester, which deceive no one; and you, Minna, don't criticise Hester's clothes. It is the Bishop's own fault for not writing his notes himself. He might have known that Miss West would have written to Hester instead of to me. I can't say I think Hester behaved ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... her special gift for organisation she seems almost unequalled. Her picnics are models for all future and past picnics; her combinations of feelings, of conversation, of gentlemen and ladies, are so natural and lifelike that reading to criticise is impossible to some of us—the scene carries us away, and we forget to look for the art by which it is recorded. Her machinery is simple but complete; events group themselves so vividly and naturally in her mind that, in describing imaginary scenes, we ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... for learning never diminished. On the contrary, his zeal for philosophic studies grew, and with it his reputation in the learned world of Berlin. The Jewish thinker finally attracted the notice of Frederick the Great, whose poems he had had the temerity to criticise adversely in the "Letters on Literature" (Litteraturbriefe). He says in that famous criticism:[80] "What a loss it has been for our mother-tongue that this prince has given more time and effort to the French language. We ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... different ways of going to a concert. You can be one of a party of fashionable people to whom music is a diversion, a pastime, an agreeable change from the assembly or the theatre. They applaud, they condemn, they criticise. They know all about it. Into such company as this, even I, whose poor old head is always getting itself wedged in where it has no business to be, have chanced to be thrown. This is torture. My cue is to turn into the Irishman's echo, which always returned ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... I am not. Even in the divinest music of all, I am not blind to defects, if there are defects. The Moonlight Sonata, for instance. You have often heard me say that the two last movements do not approach the first in perfection of form. And if I am permitted to criticise Beethoven, I hope I may be allowed to suggest that Mr Cortese has not produced an opera which will render Fidelio ridiculous. But really I am chiefly sorry for Miss Bracely. I should have thought it worth her while to render ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... and at all times, proceed from the hand of a man who has both thorough knowledge of his subject, and thorough acquaintance with all the means and principles of art. We never criticise them, because we feel, the moment we look carefully at the drawing of any single wave, that the knowledge possessed by the master is much greater than our own, and therefore believe that if anything offends us in any part of the work, it is ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... treat Sir John Bowring; and I would treat Sir John Bowring as I would treat Lord Canning. Do not let us have in the service of the State low-caste men who may be trampled upon at pleasure, and high-caste men whom nobody dare criticise. ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... then proceeded to criticise a statement commonly found in text books, that chemical combination suppresses altogether the properties of the combining bodies. The reverse of this statement is probably true. To take the case commonly given of the combination of copper and sulphur when heated; this is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... was quickly told. A couple of hours ago the acting-manager of Mr. van Tuiver's office had telephoned to ask if he might call upon a matter of importance. He had come. Naturally, he had the most extreme reluctance to say anything which might seem to criticise the activities of Mr. van Tuiver's wife, but there was something in the account in the newspapers which should be brought to her husband's attention. The articles gave the names and locations of a number of firms in whose factories it ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... question that heads this chapter, with the addition, as a rule, of facetious allusions to torture and the knout! My ignorance, however, of Finland as she really is was probably unsurpassed before my eyes were opened by a personal inspection, so I cannot afford to criticise. ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... a drastic course of training, I fear, to open the eyes of the public to the fact that even generosity can be overdone, and I must disclaim any desire to superintend the process of securing their awakening, for it is an ungrateful task to criticise even a mistakenly generous person; and man being by nature prone to thoughtless judgments, the critic of a philanthropist who spends a million of dollars to provide tortoise-shell combs for bald beggars would shortly find himself in ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... decisive and too peremptory; it is not, however, my intention that it should be so; I entreat you to correct, and even publicly to punish me whenever I am guilty. Do not treat me with the least indulgence, but criticise to the utmost. So clear-sighted a judge as you has a right to be severe; and I promise you that the criminal will endeavor to correct himself. Yesterday I had two of your acquaintances to dine with ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... the chief grounds on which socialists criticise the eugenics movement. All of these criticisms should be stimulating, should lead eugenists to avoid mistakes in program or procedure. But none of them, we believe, is a serious objection to anything which the great body of eugenists proposes ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... we blame the belligerents or criticise the powers, or sit in sackcloth and ashes ourselves is absolutely of no consequence at ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... rendered me great services. The boy saved me from being robbed. The mother, in all probability, saved me from falling a victim to smallpox. But that has nothing to do with your affairs. It is scarcely proper for a boy like you to criticise his father's way ...
— Only An Irish Boy - Andy Burke's Fortunes • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... Olivia's letters—I am sorry I sent them to you; for I see that they have lowered, instead of raising her in your opinion. But if you criticise letters, written in openness and confidence of heart to a private friend, as if they were set before the tribunal of the public, you are—may I say it?—not only severe, but unjust; for you try and condemn the subjects of one country by ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... had held the fat baby, and by and by the fat little girl, up admiringly for less fortunate neighbors to criticise. ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade
... summer-time, and should set in wet at five or six o'clock. When it is dark early, he knows that it won't pay to resume the broom; commercial gentlemen are not particular about the condition of their Wellingtons, when nobody can see to criticise their polish, and all they want is to exchange them for slippers as soon as possible. If we were to follow the career of this industrious fellow up to manhood, we should in all probability find him occupying worthily a hard-working but decent and comfortable ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... works should be thought below criticism: or meet with a critic, who, perhaps, will not look on them with so candid and favourable an eye, I am determined to criticise them myself. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... was consulted on every imaginable subject.... Government chiefs and rebels consulted him with regard to policy; political letters were brought to him to read and criticise.... Parties would come to hear the latest news of the proposed disarming of the country, or to arrange a private audience with one of the officials; and poor war-worn chieftains, whose only anxiety was to join the winning side and who ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... here. The administration is using, as I see it, the privilege of having a correspondent at the front as a club. It says until war is declared it won't issue any more. So those syndicates who have no correspondent and the papers forming them, are afraid to attack or to criticise the administration for fear they will be blacklisted. And those who have a correspondent with his three thousand dollar signed and sealed pass in his pocket aren't taking any chance on losing him. So, I see before me an ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... Function of an Opposition Is To Oppose." Criticise this statement from the point of view of the Party in Power, and trace carefully the modification in its view produced by ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... till he recovered breath. Caird begins quietly, but frequently works himself up to a frantic excitement, in which his gestulation is of the wildest, and his voice an absolute howl. One feels afraid that he may burst a bloodvessel. Were his hearers cool enough to criticise him, the impression would be at an end; but he has wound them up to such a pitch that criticism is impossible. They must sit absolutely passive, with nerves tingling and blood pausing: frequently many ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... away from her face; but there was no sort of coiffure that could make Miss Nancy's cheek and neck look otherwise than pretty; and when at last she stood complete in her silvery twilled silk, her lace tucker, her coral necklace, and coral ear-drops, the Miss Gunns could see nothing to criticise except her hands, which bore the traces of butter-making, cheese-crushing, and even still coarser work. But Miss Nancy was not ashamed of that, for even while she was dressing she narrated to her aunt how she and Priscilla had packed their boxes yesterday, because this ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... wish to mention any names. It is always a mistake to mention names. One cannot guard against it too carefully. But having done what she did ten years ago dear Adela Sellingworth should really—but it is not for me to criticise her. Only there is nothing people—women—are more sensitive about than the question of age. No one likes to be laid on the shelf. Adela Sellingworth has chosen to—well—one might feel such a very ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... was a second cupboard. In this, upon a shelf, I found what looked like pressed beef, several round cakes of what tasted like rye bread, and some thin, sour wine, in a straw-covered flask. But I was in no mood to criticise; I crammed myself, I believe, like some famished wolf, he watching me, in silence, all the time. When I had done, which was when I had eaten and drunk as much as I could hold, there returned to his face that ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... like a French perruquier to some absurd fool of a foreigner; and we have seen him, a minute after, holding up his head and cocking his chin in defiance, if an English voice approached. When any of us ventured to criticise any thing foreign, he was up in arms, and cock-a-hoop for the climate, the customs, the constitution! He sneered awfully at a simple gaucherie, but, to make amends, had ever an approving wink ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... to London. Such an oracle might have been consulted and obeyed with rational devotion; but I was soon disgusted with the modest practice of reading the manuscript to my friends. Of such friends some will praise from politeness, and some will criticise from vanity. The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; no one has so deeply meditated on the subject; no one is so ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... found some quiet bits of dell with water, and planted his easel regularly every day. Sometimes he sat dreaming or reading, but he felt an unaccustomed responsibility if, when his mentor appeared with the children late in the afternoon, he hadn't something to show for his day. She never attempted to criticise except as to the amount performed, and she soon learned enough not to measure this by the area of canvas. Although Clayton had abandoned the Magdalen in utter disgust, Miss Marston persisted in the early morning sittings. She made herself useful in preparing his coffee and in getting his ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... serene and somewhat dull Epoch, that awkward corner turned for days More quiet, when our moon's no more at full, We may presume to criticise or praise; Because Indifference begins to lull Our passions, and we walk in Wisdom's ways; Also because the figure and the face Hint, that 't is time to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... are disposed, at present, to criticise yourself too mercilessly," he said in a tone that had drawn forth many a confidence. It was not to ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... called "the beaux"—young men at once of fashion and of letters—who adorned Scotch society between the Rebellions, and continued to adorn many an after-dinner table in Edinburgh down till the present century. Hamilton owns that it was Kames who first taught him "verse to criticise," and wrote to him the poem "To H.H. at the Assembly"; while Kames for his part used in his old age, as his neighbour Ramsay of Ochtertyre informs us, to have no greater enjoyment than recounting the scenes ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... of this, I like to think that we shall have a finer type of expression, a richer kind of personal quality. Every artist is his own maker, his own liberator; he it is that should be the first to criticise, destroy and reconstruct himself, he should find no mood convenient, no attitude comfortable. What the lay-writer says of him in praise or blame will not matter so much in the future; he will respect ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... said to me early in the offensive that he wanted me to have freedom of observation and to criticise as I chose, and he trusted me not to give military information to the enemy. When I went to take my leave and thank him for his courtesies the army that he had drilled had received the schooling of battle and tasted victory. How great ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... Venus, the Commodus, the Zingara, and the Apollo. [1] These, of a truth, are by far the finest things in Rome. He told the King that when his Majesty had once set eyes upon those marvellous works, he would then, and not till then, be able to criticise the arts of design, since everything which he had seen by us moderns was far removed from the perfection of the ancients. The King accepted his proposal, and gave him the introductions he required. Accordingly that beast went off, and took his bad luck with him. Not having the force and courage ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... much in love with thy own dear productions to admire those of one of thy trade. However, I know three or four who have not such a mighty opinion of themselves; but I'll not name them, lest I should be obliged to place myself among them. If thou art one of those who, though they never write, criticise everyone that does; avaunt!—Thou art a professed enemy of mankind and of thyself, who wilt never be pleased nor let anybody be so, and knowest no better way to fame than by striving to lessen that of others; though wouldst thou write thou mightst be soon known, even by the butterwomen, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... went on in the little cabin across the arroyo, a reproduction of an old, old drama. Should we, after all, criticise these two descendants of the first sweet human woman of the world? Consider; to their young and inexperienced eyes appealed all the fascinations of this august but tempting object, new, strange, appealing. For a time their hearts were strong, upon their souls rested the ancient mandate ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... of Darwin's mental equipment, seems to us incomplete, though we do not pretend to mend it. We do not think it is possible to dissect and label the complex qualities which go to make up that which we all recognise as genius. But, if we may venture to criticise, we would say that Mr. Huxley's words do not seem to cover that supreme power of seeing and thinking what the rest of the world had overlooked, which was one of Darwin's most striking characteristics. As throwing light on the quality of their friendship, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... which a number of worshipers were kneeling and supplicating "Allah," their supreme being. There was an earnestness that bespoke sincerity, and an all-abiding faith. I could but think how few of us who would criticise are true to the ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... safeguards are so expressed as to carry out the intention of their authors, or, even in words, adequately to protect either the authority of the Imperial Parliament or the rights of individuals. But it is not my purpose to criticise the Restrictions, or the Bill itself, in detail. The drafting of the Government of Ireland Bill needs much amendment, but at the present juncture it is waste of time to criticise defects removable by better draftmanship or by slight changes ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... the proverb hath it that there is no remedy for the bite of a sycophant. If perchance there shall be idle talkers, who, though they are ignorant of all mathematical sciences, nevertheless assume the right to pass judgment on these things, and if they should dare to criticise and attack this theory of mine because of some passage of scripture which they have falsely distorted for their own purpose, I care not at all; I will even despise their judgment as foolish. For it is not unknown that Lactantius, otherwise a famous writer but a poor mathematician, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... or other the squire was dull. His newspaper was there, but there was no one to cut it, no one to read it aloud to him. The flowers were making a wonderful bloom, but there was no special person to talk them over with. He had no one to tell his thoughts to, no one to criticise, no one to praise, and—saddest want of all to a nature like his—not a soul in the ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... 'Casa Guidi Windows' has received less appreciation than it deserves, both at the time of its publication and since, is that it stands rather apart from all the recognised species of poetry, and is hard to classify and criticise. Its political and contemporary character cut it off from the imaginative and historical subjects which form in general the matter of poetry, while its genuinely poetic emotion and language separate it from the political pamphlet or the occasional verse. It is a poetic treatment of a political ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... and Princess of Wales, I did not go to fashionable balls, but after that Ascot I was asked everywhere. I was quite unconscious of it at the time, but was told afterwards that people were beginning to criticise me; one or two incidents might have enlightened me had I been more aware ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... desires of the petitioners. The most important changes in the law of the land were not made, but grew, through the accumulated effect of judicial decisions. The chief function of Parliaments, after the voting of supplies, was to criticise and to complain; to indicate the shortcomings of a policy which they had not helped to make. Except as the guardians of individual liberty they cannot be said to have made medieval government more scientific or efficient. In the fifteenth ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... Pinkerton the justice to say that none of them were bad, and some had remarkable merit. They went off slowly but for handsome figures; and their places were progressively supplied with the work of local artists. These last it was one of my first duties to review and criticise. Some of them were villainous, yet all were saleable. I said so; and the next moment saw myself, the figure of a miserable renegade, bearing arms in the wrong camp. I was to look at pictures thenceforward, not with the eye of the artist, but the dealer; and I saw the stream widen ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... proudly descended from fifteen different tribes, an' they shorely makes a motley mass meetin'. Still, they're good, zealous dogs; an' as they're going to go for'ard an' take most of the resks of that panther, it seems invidious to criticise 'em. ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... confidence in a young actor and author—to criticise the play of acknowledged dramatists who had been the talk of ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... whether this was a good sign in him or no. He set himself now and then to find fault with the sermon, but the preacher was so humble, so respectful, and above all, so earnest, that Donald Ross could not bring himself to criticise. ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... heart that he would still make himself a great painter. He placed his picture on the easel, and went to one of his former masters, a man of immense talent,—to Schinner, a kind and patient artist, whose triumph at that year's Salon was complete. Fougeres asked him to come and criticise the rejected work. The great painter left everything and went at once. When poor Fougeres had placed the work before him Schinner, after a glance, ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac
... these exceptions, provided she leaves me the general thesis. I will even admit, if you so desire, that there are certain souls usually styled "privileged," for I have never heard anybody deny the virtues of temperament. So, I have nothing to say about women of that species. I do not criticise them, nor have I any reproaches to make them; neither do I believe it my duty to praise them, it is sufficient to congratulate them. However, if you investigate them you will discover the truth of what I have been saying since the commencement of our correspondence: the heart ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... too much," he confessed, "and much that he says is disloyal to our government and calculated to do much harm, especially if widely circulated. This is no time to criticise the men who are working hard to win the war; we should render them faithful support. The task before us is difficult and it will require a united country to defeat our enemies. I must talk ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... she was flattered. Of all flattery praise is the coarsest and least efficacious. When you would flatter a man, talk to him about himself, and criticise him, pulling him to pieces by comparison of some small present fault with his past conduct;—and the rule holds the same with a woman. To tell her that she looks well is feeble work; but complain to her wofully that there ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... feel no anxiety whatever about it. It was also left a matter of uncertainty whether Ben Bolt and his Esquimau bride returned to live happily during the remainder of their lives in England, or took up their permanent abode with Blunderbore. But it is not our province to criticise; we merely chronicle events ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... that he raised, carved, and caressed with the chisels, smoothed down with his file, and fashioned in a manner that would make their use intelligible to the mind of a greenhorn, and stain his verdure in a single day. The ladies would criticise these beauties, and all of them were smitten with the youthful Cappara. And the youthful Cappara would eye them up and down, swearing that the day one of them gave him her little finger to kiss, he would have ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... on the search-light of her own greater glory. She had made the effort which had resulted so disastrously to obtain a lesser one, and he had condemned her. He knew that women always used circuitous ways toward their results, just as men used sledge-hammer ones. Why should a man criticise a woman's method any more than a woman criticise a man's? Wilbur, blushing like a girl with pride and delight, listened to his wife and fairly lashed himself. He was wholly unworthy of such ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... virtue of their "Triple Science," and they constantly emphasise this claim. It is difficult for us to realise that these are the same men who have created the Brahmanic culture of India, which, however we may criticise it from the Western point of view, is essentially a gentle life, a field in which moral feeling and intellectual effort have born abundance of goodly fruit. Yet if we look more closely we shall see that even these ritualists, ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... humanity. We shall go on building our bridge between life and death, each one for himself. When we see that it is not strong enough, we shall break it down and build another. We shall watch other people building their bridges. We shall imitate, or criticise, or condemn. But as time goes on, we shall learn not to interfere, we shall know that one bridge is probably as good as the other; and that the greatest value of them all has been in the building of them. It does not matter what we ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... and had worked his way up from the ranks. Perhaps his long fight against the practise of flogging unruly sailors helped to add to the number of his enemies, for those in authority were outraged that this Jewish upstart should criticise a custom so deeply rooted in the traditions of the navy. Another man of quieter temper might have tried to combat the prejudice and hatred which met him at every turn; but Levy's nature was not a patient one. When raised to the rank of captain, he felt that he could ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... at this, and exclaimed, "It is easier to criticise than to execute; do you take a piece of wood and make a better crucifix!" Brunelleschi determined to do this, and when his work was finished he invited Donatello to sup with him. He placed the crucifix in a ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... told of him turn upon this point in his character; and though they may not be strictly true, they illustrate the stern virtues for which he was celebrated among the Corsicans, and show what kind of men this harsh and gloomy nation loved to celebrate as heroes. This is not the place either to criticise these legends or to recount them at full length. The most famous and the most characteristic may, however, be briefly told. On one occasion, after a victory over the Genoese, he sent a message that the captives in his hands ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... justifiable. But my case is not whether they can be justified by these tests but that it is not by these tests that they are judged even to-day, by the professors of the chief religions of the world. It is the temper and not the conclusions of the religious bodies that I would criticise. These sexual questions are guarded by a holy irascibility, and the most violent efforts are made—with a sense of complete righteousness—to prohibit their discussion. That fury about sexual things is only to be explained on the hypothesis that the Christian God remains a sex God in the minds of ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... three horsemen overtook Cooper, pausing a little, after the custom of the country, to gossip with him as they passed. According to another custom of the country, Thompson, Willoughby and I began to criticise them. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... reconnoitring, but at Ladysmith everything was equally mysterious and perplexing. It was perhaps that my knowledge of military matters was too limited to understand the subtle manoeuvres of those days. But I have made up my mind not to criticise our leader's military strategy, though I must say at this juncture that the whole siege of Ladysmith and the manner in which the besieged garrison was ineffectually pounded at with our big guns for ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... is really impossible to criticise Rudyard Kipling as part of Victorian literature, because he is the end of such literature. He has many other powerful elements; an Indian element, which makes him exquisitely sympathetic with the Indian; a vague Jingo influence which makes him sympathetic with the man that crushes the ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... may say that Lovelace, if too obviously constructed to work the plot, certainly works it well. When we coolly dissect him and ask whether he could ever have existed, we may be forced to reply in the negative. But whilst we read we forget to criticise; he seems to possess more vitality than most living men; he is so full of eloquent brag, and audacious sophistry, and unblushing impudence, that he fascinates us as he is supposed to have bewildered Clarissa. The dragon who is to devour the maiden comes with all the flash and ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... tough band of veterans, weather beaten, scarred in numerous fights or by the backwoods scourge of small-pox, compact, muscular, fearless, loyal, cynically aloof from those not of their cult, out-spoken and free to criticise—in short, men to do great things under the strong leader, and to mutiny at the end of three days under the weak. They piled off the train at Sawyer's, stamped their feet on the board platform of the station, shouldered their "turkeys," and straggled off down the tote-road. It was an eighteen-mile ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... need to labour a distinction which arises from the nature and the activities of the two forces. British Liberalism is both a mental habit and a method of politics. Through both these characteristics it is bound to criticise a State so long as in any degree it rests on the principles of "Penguin Island"—"respect for the rich and contempt for the poor," and to modify or repeal the rights of property where they clearly conflict with ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... best to satisfy this longing for rest and quiet. The Holy Alliance, the main result of the Congress, made the policeman the most important dignitary of the State and held out the most terrible punishment to those who dared criticise a ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... obliged to take into account the mental limitations and tastes of the readers of the 4900 books, and so it fixes its standard of popular exposition and elucidation at a little above the average taste, and does its best to explain according to the author's own lights what to criticise ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... are the prime authors of this vein of piercing regret and passion,—of this Titanism in poetry. A famous book, Macpherson's Ossian, carried in the last century this vein like a flood of lava through Europe. I am not going to criticise Macpherson's Ossian here. Make the part of what is forged, modern, tawdry, spurious, in the book, as large as you please; strip Scotland, if you like, of every feather of borrowed plumes which on the strength of Macpherson's Ossian she may have stolen from that vetus et major Scotia, the true ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... transmuted all he touched into his own forms of thought and language, and there was no branch of speculative literature which he had not mastered. By adopting the form of dialogue, in which all his extant works have come down to us, he was enabled to criticise the various systems of philosophy then current in Greece, and also to gratify his own dramatic genius, and his almost unrivaled power of keeping up an assumed character. The works of Plato have been divided into three classes: first, the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... people next door. If Madame Carre didn't think she could work, she might have heard, could she have listened at the door, something that would show her. But she didn't think her even good enough to criticise—since that wasn't criticism, telling her her head was good. Of course her head was good—she needn't travel up to the quartiers excentriques to find that out. It was her mother, the way she talked, who gave the idea that she wanted to be elegant and moral and a femme du monde and all that ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... of them all Could criticise, and quote tradition How depths of blue sublimed some pall —To get which, pricked a king's ambition; Worth sceptre, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... all have the right to criticise; and my answer to the critics is, that they do not know the facts; or, knowing them, they are interested in preventing a knowledge of these facts coming to the public. Vivisection should be controlled by law. No animal should be allowed to be tortured. ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... President, instead of General Grant, I would have recognized Packard and sustained him with the full power of the general government. My intense feeling, caused by the atrocities in Louisiana, may have unduly influenced me. But General Grant did not think this was his duty. I do not criticise his action, but only state the facts, He would only maintain the peace. He would not recognize Packard as governor, but I know, what is now an open secret, the strong bent of his mind, and at one time his decision was to withdraw ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... You may criticise Chatham's style as too consciously Ciceronian. But has ever a Parliamentary style been invented which conveys a nobler gravity of emotion? 'Buskined'?—yes: but the style of a man. 'Mannered'?—yes, but in the grand manner. 'Conscious'?— ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... marched before him clearly. From this present view point he was enabled to look upon them in spectator fashion and to criticise them with some correctness, for his new condition had ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... architecture or sculpture of modern England. You may urge that I ought rather to describe the qualities of the refined sculpture which is executed in large quantities for private persons belonging to the upper classes, and for sepulchral and memorial purposes. But I could not now criticise that sculpture with any power of conviction to you, because I have not yet stated to you the principles of good sculpture in general. I will, however, in some points, tell ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... of the people to control the government leads naturally to denial of their right to criticise those who shape its policy; since if free and unrestricted discussion and even condemnation of official conduct were allowed, no system of minority rule could long survive. This was well understood in the Federal Convention. The members of that body saw that the constitutional ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... was established by Mr. Wentworth and Dr. Wardell. A second of the same kind soon followed, and was called the Monitor. These papers found it to their advantage, during the unpopularity of Darling, to criticise severely the acts of that Governor, who was defended by the Gazette with intemperate zeal. This altercation had lasted for some time, when, in the third year of Darling's administration, a very small event was sufficient to set the whole colony ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... that in a book like the present—the whole space of which might very well be occupied, without any of the undue dilation which has been more than once rebuked, in dealing with Shakespere alone—any attempt should be made to criticise single plays, passages, and characters. It is the less of a loss that in reality, as the wisest commentators have always either begun or ended by acknowledging, Shakespere is your only commentator on Shakespere. ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... from anyone who can give you a hint, and don't set yourself up (or down) in some obscure country town and fancy you are great. Come out into the world, measure yourself against the best, criticise your own work as if it were a stranger's. Be honest, and say, "That man's work knocks mine into a cocked hat," and then go home miserable, but determined to beat that man's work or perish in the ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... no one has ever seen the bird doing the work, or that the task is too great for any conceivable bird, is to the simple, uncultivated man no objection to this view. It is long, indeed, before education brings men to the point where they can criticise their ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... have allowed yourself to criticise in the office our last operations in the Tunis market. Useless to defend yourself. Your remarks have been reported to me word for word. And as I am unable to admit them from the mouth of one in my service, I give you ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... Susannah could not criticise keenly, so much she marvelled at the man. His activities before starting on this journey were almost incredible. Every hour he had made decisions, for the most part successful, concerning the adaptability of men whom he had only seen, for labours ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... authors of this vein of piercing regret and passion, of this Titanism in poetry. A famous book, MacPherson's 'Ossian,' carried, in the last century, this vein like a flood of lava through Europe. I am not going to criticise MacPherson's 'Ossian' here. Make the part of what is forged, modern, tawdry, spurious in the book as large as you please; strip Scotland, if you like, of every feather of borrowed plumes which, on the strength of MacPherson's ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... free himself from the fetters, his writings, and he himself with them, were burnt; as happened to Bruno and Vanini. But how absolutely paralysed the ordinary mind is by that early metaphysical preparation may be seen most strikingly, and from its most ridiculous side, when it undertakes to criticise the doctrines of a foreign belief. One finds the ordinary man, as a rule, merely trying to carefully prove that the dogmas of the foreign belief do not agree with those of his own; he labours to explain that not only do they not say the same, but certainly do not mean the ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... The guests at these parties used to assemble at about eight o'clock, and after taking off their wraps in an upper room they descended to the parlor, where the host and hostess received them. The older men then went to the punch-bowl to criticise the "brew" which it contained, while the young people found their way to the dining-room, almost invariably devoted to dancing. The music was a piano and two violins, and one of the musicians called the ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... all our faults; scimus, et hanc, veniaim, &c.; [106]thou censurest me, so have I done others, and may do thee, Cedimus inque vicem, &c., 'tis lex talionis, quid pro quo. Go now, censure, criticise, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... cynical smile, "hysteric, as I told you. Well, will you come to-morrow about eleven, and then afterwards we can come back here to criticise 'Hyacinthus'?" ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... he will not attempt to do so by latitude and longitude, for that is a system of which the Latins have learned nothing. He himself, whilst still somewhat burdened by the authoritative dicta of "saints and sages" of past times, ventures at least to criticise some of the latter, such as Pliny and Ptolemy, and declares his intention to have recourse to the information of those who have travelled most extensively over the Earth's surface. And judging from the good use he makes, in his description of the northern ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... did not criticise Uncle Jabez's course. She never did. But she gave Ruth in her sorrow all the sympathy of which her great nature was capable. She seemed to understand just how the girl felt, without a spoken word on her part. She did not seek to explain the miller's reason for acting as he ...
— Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill • Alice B. Emerson
... that I am laying down the law," he said. "I have been out so little, the last few years, that I ought not, perhaps, to criticise. Lady Cynthia, however, seems to me to belong to the extreme section of the younger generation, the section who have a sort of craze for the unusual, whose taste in art and living is distorted and bizarre. You know ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... We may contemplate the characters of the great to arouse emulation, of the moderately endowed to suggest improvement, and of the weak to guard against their failures. Phrenology enables us to form correct estimates in each case, to praise without flattery and to criticise without injustice. There is value in the perpetuation of the physical forms of the illustrious dead upon 'storied urn and animated bust,' as well as in polished granite and enduring marble. For while ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... in wrath. You know well that hastiness of temper is an heirloom of the Brandenburg princes, and Frederick William can not deny that he has the family failing. Yes, he has dismissed me; but then, you know, it was perfectly natural, for he loves the Princess Ludovicka Hollandine, and I ventured to criticise her." ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... of dismay took possession of her, for she knew that the world would criticise her severely ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... They are so anxious because of a dim consciousness of the fact, which they do not distinctly face, that at least a million of the free inhabitants of the United States would have rejoiced if it had succeeded. They at most only criticise the tactics. Though we wear no crape, the thought of that man's position and probable fate is spoiling many a man's day here at the North for other thinking. If any one who has seen him here can pursue ...
— A Plea for Captain John Brown • Henry David Thoreau
... defence, if I may so term it, my article would have been as ephemeral as the mood which induced its composition. I make full admission of Rossetti's claims to the purest kind of literary renown, and if I were to criticise his poems now, I should write very differently. But nothing will shake my conviction that the cruelty, the unfairness, the pusillanimity has been on the other side, not on mine. The amende of my Dedication in God and the ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... &c. ; connoisseur, judge, critic, conoscente, virtuoso, amateur, dilettante, Aristarchus[obs3], Corinthian, arbiter elegantiarum[Lat], stagirite[obs3], euphemist. "caviare to the general" [Hamlet]. V. appreciate, judge, criticise, discriminate &c. 465 Adj. in good taste, cute, tasteful, tasty; unaffected, pure, chaste, classical, attic; cultivated, refined; dainty; esthetic, aesthetic, artistic; elegant &c 578; euphemistic. to one's taste, to one's mind; after one's fancy; comme il faut[Fr]; tire a quatre epingles[Fr]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... too lenient with them. We won't stand them any longer." I told him that as the Times had said that he was too violent, I had no doubt the Queen would say so also, to which he replied: "Probably, and if she does I shall most likely ... deny her right to criticise my speeches, although she may, if she likes, dismiss me, in which case I will lead an agitation against the Lords in the country." I answered: "Yes, but you cannot go alone in such a case, and therefore should not ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... I hadn't said it." She was obviously worried by his admission. "It was horrid of me—perfectly horrid. I ought to have been ashamed of myself. I had no right to criticise you, and you have been ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... wealth and privileges of Cluny made its failure all the more conspicuous. A few years after the expulsion of Pontius, St. Bernard wrote to the Abbot of the Cluniac house of St. Thierry a so-called apology, which, while professing a great regard for the Cluniacs Order and pretending to criticise the deficiencies of his own Cistercians, is in reality a scathing attack upon the lapse of the former from the Benedictine rule. He attacks their neglect of manual work and of the rule of silence; their elaborate cookery and nice taste ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... are some of the theologians who in their own organs of the press venture to criticise science. These may hold their ground when they confine themselves to the geology of long past periods and to general cosmogony: for it is the tug of Greek against Greek; and both sides deal much in what is grand when called hypothesis, petty ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... with them. But all was done gravely and decently. There was no pressing of excited and ignorant young people to the "anxious seats," no singing of "revival hymns." They sang the Psalms from first to last—the old, rough version, which people nowadays criticise and smile at, wondering how ever the cramped lines and rude metre could find so sure and permanent a place in the hearts and memories of their fathers. It is said now that these old psalms are quite insufficient for ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... would have been saved at a time when the island was sadly in want of money; the natural surface of the firm soil would have been preferred by all vehicles except during rain, when they would have adopted the metalled parallel way. It is easy to criticise after the event, and there can be no doubt that upon our first occupation of the island a much greater traffic was expected, and the road between the two capitals was arranged accordingly. We halted for ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... with a mocking smile. You are mistaken if you fancy you can harm any of my moods. Won't you stay and criticise my picture for me?" ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... it a little presumptuous of me to criticise one of the operations of a great captain, but I cannot refrain from commenting that the sending of Mortier to the left bank was a move which had not been sufficiently considered, and was an error which could have had very serious consequences. The Danube, Europe's largest river, is, after Passau, ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... known Captain Marryat many years, and liked him from the first; but this circumstance, far from rendering me more indulgent to his novel, makes me more fastidious; for I find myself at all times more disposed to criticise the writings of persons whom I know and like than those of strangers: perhaps because I expect more from them, if, as in the present case, I know them ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... the man and partly on the spark. A man may not be impressed by a pill-box full of dynamite and a spark creeping toward it, the first time he sees it, but the second time he sees it, if he has time, he is impressed enough. He does not stand and criticise the lack of expression in pill-boxes, nor wait to remember the day when he all but lost his ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... and sympathy, sincere as they may be, do not suffice to win the respect and affection of a people. The reign of Louis XV. had used up the remnants of traditional veneration, the new right of the public to criticise sovereigns was being exercised malignantly upon the youthful ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... enough. She loved and admired her beautiful friend, but she did not understand her, and there was much that she could not approve. It seemed absurd, she often said to herself, for a girl of her age to criticise, to venture to disapprove, of a woman old enough to be her mother, one who had travelled the world over, and knew plenty of human nature, if little of books. Yet, the thought would come again, there was no age to right and wrong; and there were things that it could not be ...
— Margaret Montfort • Laura E. Richards
... shall not believe him," said Beverley. "I have not misunderstood you. There has been nothing. You have treated me kindly and with beautiful friendliness. You have not done or said a thing that Father Beret or anybody else could criticise. And if I have said or done the least thing to trouble you I repudiate it—I did not mean it. Now you believe me, don't ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... ninepins of mankind year after year like this. Fortunately for France, the love of her sons has never been forced; it has grown like grass and simple wild herbs in the heart, alongside the liberty to criticise and blame. The poilu cares for nothing, no, not he! But he is himself a little, unconscious bit of France, and, for oneself, one always cares. State-forced patriotism made this war—a fever-germ which swells the head and causes blindness. A State which teaches patriotism ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... that he did not criticise her. He was only afraid that she might do herself harm by receiving a Bohemian who was ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... Judgment, not Church Authority. But private judgment generates authority; authority, first legitimate, that of knowledge, grows into the illegitimate authority of prescription, calling itself Orthodoxy. Then Private Judgment comes forth again to criticise and reform. It thus becomes the duty of each individual to judge the Church; and out of innumerable individual judgments the insight of the Church is kept living and progressive. We contribute one such private judgment; not, we trust, in conceit, but ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
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