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More "Extempore" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on the following night. The Major was not present, for he was engaged in making some arrangements for the commissariat on the march. He had always insisted on it that they were indispensable, and he had been bitterly opposed the week before by some of his brethren, who were in favour of extempore foraging which looked very much like plunder. He carried his point, notwithstanding some sarcastic abuse and insinuations of half- heartedness, which had touched also Caillaud and Zachariah, who supported ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... was produced and seized to the end of a boat-hook; this extempore flag and staff Grummet took in his hand, and, proceeding to the summit of the beach, commenced waving it to and fro, to attract the attention of the people on board the doomed ship. She was now so close that we could see the two men at her wheel, and a man, whom we supposed to be the master, standing ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... ceremonial of the English Established Church, though so modified as to meet the doctrinal views of the Unitarians. There may be good sense in this, inasmuch as it greatly lessens the ministerial labor to have a stated form of prayer, instead of a necessity for extempore outpourings; but it must be, I should think, excessively tedious to the congregation, especially as, having made alterations in these prayers, they cannot attach much idea of sanctity ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... though we must own it probable that some more jokes were (as they call it) cracked during their dinner; but we have by no means been able to come at the knowledge of them. When dinner was removed, the poet began to repeat some verses, which, he said, were made extempore. The following is a copy of them, ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... an undiscovered knack of extempore rhyming, a gift which has seldom or never been exercised in the House of Commons. That will be a bright day for legislators when a Member rises in his place and begins something like this: "Sir, if the House will bear with me ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... instructive, what is historic, is the probability that young persons offering themselves at that time as guides and communicators—the requirements of our small sister were for long modest enough—quite conceivably lacked preparedness, and were so thrown back on the extempore, which in turn lacked abundance. One of these figures, that of Mademoiselle Danse, the most Parisian, and prodigiously so, was afterwards to stand out for us quite luridly—a cloud of revelations succeeding her ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... 2199," which is without date in the MS., but in the edition bears date March 21, 1771; as likewise the "Invitation to Miss Warb[u]rt[o]n," edit. p. 35., which appears in the MS. without any name; and the "Extempore Rhapsody, March 21, 1771," edit. p. 37., also undated in the MS., but which supplies the name of "Yates," expressed in the edition by asterisks; and also six lines at the end, which were omitted in the edition on account of their indecency. There are several variations in the manuscript, which ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... and Bostonians with Jenny Lind are weak and cold compared with the ovations which Jasmin has received. At a recitation given shortly before my visit to Auch, the ladies present actually tore the flowers and feathers out of their bonnets, wove them into extempore garlands, and flung them in showers upon the panting minstrel; while the editors of the local papers next morning assured him, in floods of flattering epigrams, that humble as he was now, future ages would acknowledge the 'divinity' ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... compliment to his sincerity, has no force in it. His majesty's speech was spoken immediately upon, passing the bills which the Speaker presented, and he could not therefore take notice of the Speaker's words unless he had spoken extempore; for the custom is not, nor I believe ever was, for the Speaker to give beforehand copies of addresses of this nature. James would not certainly have scrupled to repeat the assurances which he had so ...
— A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second • Charles James Fox
... that at so great an age, and on the brink of the grave, man is not wont to compose poems, may be refuted by a reference to the history of the ancient Arabic poetry. The Arabic poets before the time of Mohammed often recited long poems extempore,—so natural to them was poetry. (Compare Tharaphae Moallakah, ed. Reiske, p. xl.; Antarae Moallakah, ed. Menil. p. 18.) The poet Lebid, who attained to the age of 157 years (compare Reiske prolegg. ad Thar. Moall. p. xxx.; ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... home, as if some person really cared for them. One could not help noticing how many of them broke out into verse, though most of them were labouring men at home. Although some was not original, it showed that they liked poetry. Some was extempore, ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... Bon. again, which is always a change, because it gives a good deal of reading and research, whereas Woodstock and such like, being extempore from my mother-wit, is a sort of spinning of the brains, of which a man tires. The ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... that he may test his memory, and then become familiar with a procedure in private in order to be sure to be perfect in it before the public. This private discipline is all the more necessary in the early stages of extempore speaking—if the speaker is at all troubled by ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... contemporary of Demosthenes, who, by his genius for extempore oratory, raised himself to a predominant position in Athens as a champion of the Macedonian influence, but afterwards incurred ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... was now wearing late, and our landlord had just come in to announce that supper was ready, and would be served up when ordered, we agreed to rest satisfied for the night with the extempore autobiographies, as I may call them, of our two worthy companions—the little hunch-backed personage in the bright yellow waistcoat, and the melancholy gentleman; but we, at the same time, resolved that we would resume the same mode of entertainment ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... the fish pounded and mixed with butter, with a little lemon-juice, &c. is an elegant and inoffensive relish to fish (see No. 288). Mushroom sauce extempore (No. 307), or the soup of mock turtle (No. 247), will make an excellent ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... got to the Cedars a solemn stillness reigned in the nursery, and instead of an orderly room a perfect chaos of doll revelry prevailed. All the chairs were turned into extempore beds, and the twelve dolls, with bandaged heads and arms, were tucked up ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... remain with us. That evening we invited the captain and his crew to dine in the camp; and it was fortunate that we did so, as the sequel will show. Shortly after sundown, as we were all sitting in our usual way, on an extempore divan in front of the tents, drinking coffee, telling stories, and enjoying the cool sea evening breezes, a challenge was heard by the sentinel placed on the rear right of the camp, followed by a sudden and rapid discharge of musketry, which took us by ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... song in a gay, ever-repeated chorus; some raffling for nuts and biscuits at smartly-decked fair-booths, or playing at Chinese billiards for painted mugs or huge cakes of gilt gingerbread; some listening to the stump orations of an extempore fortuneteller, who promised the baton of the field-marshal to any conscript who would give him a penny; and some buying by yards the patriotic, soul-stirring songs of Beranger, and reciting them in every tone, in every key and to every tune. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... inclining ominously towards a catastrophe. This story was Waverley. Mr. Carlyle has praised Waverley above its fellows. "On the whole, contrasting Waverley, which was carefully written, with most of its followers which were written extempore, one may regret the extempore method." This is, however, a very unfortunate judgment. Not one of the whole series of novels appears to have been written more completely extempore than the great bulk of Waverley, including ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... under laws which dictate almost every detail of his public and private conduct, and punish every sign of bad discipline with the most appalling rigour; and these laws are enforced by police who supply the chance gaps in them extempore, and exercise that authority in the best manner of prison guards, animal trainers and ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... for this kind of impromptu acting that the actors are freer than when speaking words they have learnt, and can therefore behave with more naturalness. It is the difference between delivering an extempore speech and reciting one that has been learnt—the difference between "recitare a soggetto" and "recitare col suggeritore." So great is the freedom that an actor may introduce anything appropriate that occurs to him at the moment, and ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... are many things may be said to be the practice of the Church, which were never established by any law either common, statute, or canon; as singing of psalms, binding up; prayers at the end of the Bible, and praying extempore before and after sermon: and though these are things indifferent, yet things for aught they at present know may be started, which may be said to be the practice of the Church which would not be fit to allow. For the Lords' priviledges, Mr. Waller told them how tender their predecessors had ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... children, bethought himself that others might receive from them the same delight and interest if they were put into book form. He at once acted upon the suggestion and wrote out a chapter of his story for each day, and instead of telling it to his children in an extempore fashion, read what he had written. When the story was completed, the various chapters were placed together and dispatched to a publisher, who at once accepted and published it. It was in this way the long series of historical stories which has come from his ...
— The Golden Canyon - Contents: The Golden Canyon; The Stone Chest • G. A. Henty
... GESTEIN. We sat down with him for a time, for all felt the heat exceedingly in the climb up this very steep BOLWOGGOLY, and then we set out again together, and arrived at last near the Dead Man's Lake, at the foot of the Sidelhorn. This lonely spot, once used for an extempore burying-place, after a sanguinary BATTUE between the French and Austrians, is the perfection of desolation; there is nothing in sight to mark the hand of man, except the line of weather-beaten whitened posts, set up to indicate the direction of the pass in the OWDAWAKK of winter. Near ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... between the rows. Each scholar was hurrying to his place at one of the desks, where, as he arrived, he stood. The master already stood in solemn posture at the nearer end of the room on a platform behind his desk, prepared to commence the extempore prayer, which was printed in a kind of blotted stereotype upon every one of their brains. Annie had hardly succeeded in reaching a vacant place among the girls when he began. The boys were as still as death while the master prayed; but a spectator might easily ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... unfortunate student is placed being far more uneasy than the tightest fitting "Scavenger's daughter" in the Tower of London. After an anxious hour, Mr. Jones returns, with a light bounding step to a joyous extempore air of his own composing: he has passed. In another twenty minutes Mr. Saxby walks fiercely in, calls for his hat, condemns the examiners ad inferos, swears he shall cut the profession, and marches away. He has been plucked; and Mr. Muff, who stands sixth on the list, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various
... They run on, in a low, guttural, monotonous sort of chant, their lips and tongues seeming hardly to move, and the sounds modulated solely in the throat. There is very little tune to it, and the words, so far as I could learn, are extempore. They sing about persons and things which are around them, and adopt this method when they do not wish to be understood by any but themselves; and it is very effectual, for with the most careful attention I never could detect a word that I knew. I have often heard ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... instruments were very simple, and of two kinds only: the one, a sort of flute, producing four notes, and blown with the nostrils; the other, a drum, made of the hollow trunk of a tree; but the accompanying songs, usually extempore poems, were pretty, and showed the delicacy of their ear. The girls excelled in the dance; the married women were forbidden to take part in it, and the men never did. The dancers executed a species of ballet, and, according to the judgment of travellers, they might with little ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... but, by the by, I must repeat to you some extempore verses I made yesterday at the house of a certain duchess, an acquaintance of mine. I am deuced ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... said Emilius; "he is always the child of the moment. I have done all in my power, and even run the risk of some amicable quarrels, to cure him of this habit of for ever living extempore, and playing out his whole life in impromptus, card after card, as it chances to turn up, without once looking over his hand. But these follies have struck such deep root in his heart, he would sooner part with his best friend ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... Pulaski, but he might have been the gentleman from Vallombrosa for all that any one cared. The convention was annoyed that a gentleman from Pulaski County should have dared to flourish manuscript when there were innumerable orators present fully prepared to speak extempore on any subject. For all that any one knew the gentleman from Pulaski might be primed with a speech on the chinch bug or the Jewish kritarchy; a man with a sheet of paper in his hand was a formidable person, if not indeed a foe of mankind, ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... in the Praise of some Men, that they could Talk whole Hours together upon any Thing; but it must be owned to the Honour of the other Sex, that there are many among them who can Talk whole Hours together upon Nothing. I have known a Woman branch out into a long Extempore Dissertation upon the Edging of a Petticoat, and chide her Servant for breaking a China Cup, in all ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... away; toute a l'heure[Fr]; at one jump, in the same breath, per saltum[Lat], uno saltu[Lat]; at once, all at once; plump, slap; "at one fell swoop"; at the same instant &c. n.; immediately &c. (early) 132; extempore, on the moment, on the spot, on the spur of the moment; no sooner said than done; just then; slap-dash &c. (haste) 684. Phr. touch and go; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... they trembled at the sound of a trumpet, in peace they quaked before the shouting of their own demagogues; and during the assault of Philip II. they could only be prevailed on to man the walls by the savour of extempore cook-shops distributed along the ramparts. The modern Greeks attribute the introduction of Christianity into Byzantium to St Andrew; it certainly had some hold there ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Perfesser Bunker Hill Monument," he said, but spoiled it by laughing himself. It was extempore and had caught him unawares. The harried Bean fled to ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... the United States where I have chanced to be, except among the Dutch, the Germans, and the Quakers, people seem to build everything extempore and pro tempore, as if they looked forward to a speedy removal or did not expect to want it long. Nowhere else, it seems to me, do people work more for the present, less for the future, or live so commonly up to the extent of their ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... charge, had been one of those in whom a more passionate missionary zeal had been stirred by the Methodist movement—"endeared to the more serious inhabitants by warm zeal and a powerful talent for preaching extempore." The parishioners had made urgent appeal to the noble patron to appoint this man to the benefice, and the Duke's disregard of their petition had produced much bitterness in the parish. Then, again, in Crabbe there was a "lay" element, which ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... the improbability of an extempore organ of sense being thus established, by supposing that the mind of the entranced person has only penetrated a little deeper than before into yours, and perceives what you see. But I had the following experiment made, which excludes this solution of the phenomenon. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... sect, but from principle remain, what we have always been, true members of the Church of England.'[732] In 1778, 'To speak freely, I myself find more life in the Church prayers than in any formal extempore prayers of Dissenters.' In 1780, 'Having had opportunity of seeing several Churches abroad, and having deeply considered the several sorts of Dissenters at home, I am fully convinced our own Church, with all her blemishes, is nearer the Scriptural plan than any other Church in Europe.' ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... demand on the part of my class-fellows was, however, as great and urgent as ever; and, setting myself, in the extremity of the case, to try my ability of original production, I began to dole out to them by the hour and the diet, long extempore biographies, which proved wonderfully popular and successful. My heroes were usually warriors like Wallace, and voyagers like Gulliver, and dwellers in desolate islands like Robinson Crusoe; and they had not unfrequently to seek shelter in huge deserted ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... ought to give good bread week in and week out, so saving you from the frequent calamity of soda-biscuits. These may be used for dumplings, or as a sudden extempore, but do not let them be habitual. True, you will occasionally meet people who say that they can eat these, when raised ones are fatal. But some persons find cheese good for dyspepsia, many advocate ice-cream, others can eat ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... for Otto's Bohemian Autumn Nightly Concerts at Covent Garden Theatre, had happened to hear her and that seldom played sonata for the first time. It was a wondrous chance. Otto's large, picturesque, extempore way of inviting her to appear at his promenade concerts reminded her ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... the war of Modena, notwithstanding the weighty affairs in which he was engaged, he is said to have read, written, and declaimed every day. He never addressed the senate, the people, or the army, but in a premeditated speech, though he did not want the talent of speaking extempore on the spur of the occasion. And lest his memory should fail him, as well as to prevent the loss of time in getting up his speeches, it was his general practice to recite them. In his intercourse with individuals, and even with his wife Livia, upon subjects of importance he wrote on his tablets ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... being annually held at a large chait hard by, which is painted red, ornamented with banners, and surmounted by an enormous yak's skull, that faces the mountain. The Lama invited me into his tent, where I found a wife and family. An extempore altar was at one end, covered with wafers and other pretty ornaments, made of butter, stamped or moulded with the fingers.* [The extensive use of these ornaments throughout Tibet, on the occasion of religious ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... to the ideal world of beauty symbolized by the song of the bird. Here finding all real things, even the most beautiful, pall upon him, he extols the fancy, which can escape from reality and is not tied by place or season in its search for new joys. This is, of course, only a passing mood, as the extempore character of the poetry indicates. We see more of settled conviction in the deeply-meditative Ode to Autumn, where he finds the ideal in ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... now extempore," she continued, "and more to my satisfaction than ever before. I am amazed at myself, but I could not do it if any of our other speakers were listening to me. I am entirely off old antislavery grounds and on the new ones thrown up by ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... in the popular mind with the idea of a lecture. After a moment of silence, there was a spontaneous burst of applause. It was renewed when Amelius, first placing on his table a little book, announced his intention of delivering the lecture extempore. The absence of the inevitable manuscript was in itself an act of mercy that cheered the ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... manner which would have been impossible for me to have imitated without being severely burnt. I once saw him go to a bright wood fire, and, taking a large piece of red-hot charcoal, put it in the hollow of one hand, and, covering it with the other, blow into the extempore furnace till the coal was white hot, and the flames licked round his fingers. No sign of burning could be seen then or afterwards ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... money. Hostess, clap to the doors. Watch to-night, pray to-morrow. Gallants, lads, boys, hearts of gold; all the titles of good-fellowship come to you! What! shall we be merry? Shall we have a play extempore? ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... the play out, or to refrain from tears while it was acting. The piece concluded with the reception which she was supposed to meet with from her friends at her return; and it was a reception that was by no means favourable. As these people, when they see occasion, can add little extempore pieces to their entertainments, it is reasonable to imagine, that the representation now described was intended as a satire against the girl, and to discourage others from following her steps. Such is ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... Rocky-Mountain Lines. He was returning from Washington over the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, on a freight-train, when he heard of the President's danger. Langenzunge loved Old Rough and Ready,—and he felt badly about his own office, too. But his extempore train chose to stop at a forsaken shanty-village on the Potomac, for four mortal hours, at midnight. What does he do, but walk down the line into the darkness, climb a telegraph-post, cut a wire, and apply the two ends to his tongue, to taste, at the fatal moment, the words, "Died ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... complaint, ejaculation in the Koran, a vein of true direct insight, of what we might almost call poetry, is found straggling. The body of the Book is made-up of mere tradition, and as it were vehement enthusiastic extempore preaching. He returns forever to the old stories of the Prophets as they went current in the Arab memory: how Prophet after Prophet, the Prophet Abraham, the Prophet Hud, the Prophet Moses, Christian and other real and fabulous Prophets, had come to this Tribe and to that, warning men ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... published, is in order to mark more definitely this limitation of my subject; but in other respects the Lectures have been amplified in arranging them for the press, and the portions of them trusted at the time to extempore delivery, (not through indolence, but because explanations of detail are always most intelligible when most familiar,) have been in substance to the best of my power set down, and in what I said ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... part of Africa are also attended by a band carrying drums, and singing extempore songs, a translation of one of which is subjoined from "Denham's Travels," whence the engraving ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 285, December 1, 1827 • Various
... was desired to make a pun extempore. "Upon what subject?" said Daniel. "The king," answered the other. "O, sir," said he, "the king is ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... prejudice, describes the condition of things. "I have heard painters acknowledge that they could do better without nature than with her, or, as they expressed themselves, it only put them out. Our neighbours, the French, are much in this practice of extempore invention, and their dexterity is such as even to excite admiration, if not envy; but how rarely can this praise be given to their finished pictures!" Twelfth Discourse, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... of extempore preaching, and was unwilling to listen to the delivery of a written sermon." (Indeed, if we had more people like him in this day, we would hear far more of the gospel and far less of politics and jokes which so demoralize ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... the major numbers of mankind are too little self-reverent to dispense with the services of self-conceit, they like to think themselves equal, and very easily equal, to any truth, and habitually assume their extempore, off-hand notion of its significance as a perfect measure of the fact. As if a man hollowed his hand, and, dipping it full out of Lake Superior, said, "Lake Superior just fills my hand!" To how many are the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... quiet, and the extempore official proceeded—with greater solemnity than many another judge of more regular appointment exhibits ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... lecturer failed us at the last moment without giving us notice. Then J. and I had to run an entertainment of an instructive kind extempore. J. was strong on personal hygiene. He might start with saluting or the theft of Miss N.'s purse, our great club scandal, but he worked round in the end to soap and tooth brushes. My own business, if we were utterly driven against the wall, ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... of the paper for the same year are some extempore lines on Brighton, dated from East Street, which ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... faith to every circumstance of his story, which indeed could not well be supposed to be invented extempore; the ring was immediately restored, and our adventurer took his leave, congratulating himself upon his signal deliverance from the snare in which ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... to the top; the rest of the box was then filled with the birds, displayed in regular rows, with heads and tails alternating, and a thin coat of clean dry wheaten straw between each layer, until but a few inches' depth remained between the noble pile and the lid of this extempore refrigerator; this space being filled in with flannel packed close and folded tightly, the box was locked and thrust into the accurately fitting boot by dint of the exertion of Timothy's ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... group to another, groping in slippery tangle for the wreck of ships, wading in pools after the abominable creatures of the sea, and ever with an eye cast backward on the march of the tide and the menaced line of your retreat. And then you might go Crusoeing, a word that covers all extempore eating in the open air: digging perhaps a house under the margin of the links, kindling a fire of the sea-ware, and cooking apples there—if they were truly apples, for I sometimes suppose the merchant must have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of tenderness, truth, or courage. The oratorio has already lost its relation to the morning, to the sun, and the earth, but that persuading voice is in tune with these. All works of art should not be detached, but extempore performances. A great man is a new statue in every attitude and action. A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad. Life may be lyric or epic, as well as ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... fortunately to be concealed in a rugged piece of ground where horses could not act. As the Indians were riding away he shot the horse that bore the pastor, and at the same time uttered a series of yells and extempore war-whoops so appalling that the savages gave him credit for being at least a dozen foes, and fled over a ridge before turning to see what had happened. The fall of the horse had stunned the pastor, but the Indian leaped ...
— The Thorogood Family • R.M. Ballantyne
... the experimenter prostrates himself in front of the fire and prays to the Great Spirit of the Unknown to confer on him the property of metamorphosing, nocturnally, into a werwolf. His prayers take no one particular form, but are quite extempore; though he usually adds to them some such recognised ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... beautifulle is our Liturgie! I grudge at the Puritans for having abolished it; and though I felt not its comprehensive Fullessse [Transcriber's note: Fullnesse?] before I married, nor indeed till now, yet I wearied to Death in London at the puritanicall Ordinances and Conscience-meetings and extempore Prayers, wherein it was soe oft the Speaker's Care to show Men how godly he was. Nay, I think Mr. Milton altogether wrong in the View he takes of praying to God in other Men's Words; for doth he not doe soe, everie Time he followeth the Sense of another Man's extempore Prayer, ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... and nothing is more probable than that disappointment may have made that noxious climate more deadly. Hints of poisoning were thrown out, but this is a surmise easily and often lightly made. "Thus," says Fuller, in his "Holy State," "an extempore performance, scarce heard to be begun before we hear it is ended, comes off with better applause, or miscarries with less disgrace, than a long-studied and openly premeditated action. Besides, we see how great spirits, having mounted up to the highest pitch of performance, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... following treatise remains in the exact form in which it was read at Manchester; but the more familiar passages of it, which were trusted to extempore delivery, have been written with greater explicitness and fulness than I could give them in speaking; and a considerable number of notes are added, to explain the points which could not be sufficiently considered in the time I had at my disposal ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... cried I; "indeed I have nothing to propose." He would not, however, be refused; but urged me so much to say something, that at last, not to make him wait any longer, I ventured to propose an extempore couplet upon some given subject. Mr. Coverley instantly made me a bow, or, according to Mrs. Selwyn, a shrug, crying, "Thank you, Ma'am; egad, that's my forte!-why, my Lord, the Fates ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... hasty breakfast, we went to meeting. My foster-father looked excessively wild. Mr Cate was raving in the midst of an extempore prayer, when a heavy fall was heard in the chapel. The minister descended from his desk, and came and prayed over the prostrate victim of intoxication, and, perhaps, of epilepsy, and he pronounced that brother ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Rorie, and the beginning of our meal, did not detach him from his train of thought beyond a moment. He condescended, indeed, to ask me some questions as to my success at college, but I thought it was with half his mind; and even in his extempore grace, which was, as usual, long and wandering, I could find the trace of his preoccupation, praying, as he did, that God would 'remember in mercy fower puir, feckless, fiddling, sinful creatures here by their lee-lane beside the great ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... first for fear of the law, counterfeited a distraction, and by his own family it was spread about the city that he was mad. He then secretly composed some elegiac verses, and getting them by heart, that it might seem extempore, ran out into the market-place with a cap upon his head, and, the people gathering about him, got upon the herald's stand, and sang that elegy ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... Beau's, his numerals, which is rare nowadays, were very clearly and very beautifully formed. The Prince of Beaux was fastidious in his penmanship as in everything else. Sir Ralph's half- yearly speeches to the shareholders, though delivered extempore, were models of perspicuity. He used the scantiest notes, mere headings of subjects, and a few scraps of paper containing figures which he usually remembered without their aid. Of his memory he was proud. One day, at a meeting ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... fellow damned first, and had directed a deed of separation to be prepared, which should provide for the complete payment of Fiorsen's existing debts on condition that he left Gyp and the baby in peace. After telling Gyp this, he took an opportunity of going to the extempore nursery and standing by the baby's cradle. Until then, the little creature had only been of interest as part of Gyp; now it had for him an existence of its own—this tiny, dark-eyed creature, lying there, watching him so gravely, clutching his finger. Suddenly the baby smiled—not ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... afterward, with an inexplicable disappointment, that her husband had not been talking extempore, but was freely quoting his "Compiler's Foreword" just as it figured ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... the congregation joined in, and the singing went off pretty well. After praying and reading a chapter in the Bible, Odell sat down to collect his thoughts for the sermon, which was, of course, to be extempore, as Methodist sermons usually are. It is customary for the choir, if there is one, to sing an anthem during this pause; or, where no singers are set apart, for some members to strike up an appropriate hymn, in which the congregation joins. On this occasion, all was ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... in rusty black, and bearing in his hand a small plain Bible from which he selects some passage for his text, while the hymn is concluding. The congregation fall upon their knees, and are hushed into profound stillness as he delivers an extempore prayer, in which he calls upon the Sacred Founder of the Christian faith to bless his ministry, in terms of disgusting and impious familiarity not to be described. He begins his oration in a drawling tone, and his hearers listen with silent attention. ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... to be the birthday of the marquis's valet de chambre. The servants had dined more sumptuously than usual. They had toasts and songs over their dessert; and at the conclusion of the repast, they amused themselves by an extempore ball. ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... the pulpit. Failing to understand that the use of "the paper" could interfere in the remotest degree with the due and proper effect of the pulpit, and knowing that he could not do either himself or his congregation adequate justice by extempore preaching, Dr. Anderson continued to adhere to written sermons, until the Presbytery at last gave way, leaving him master of the situation. The feud between Dr. Anderson and his Presbytery has been described by himself as "the eleven months of anguish to which I was subjected ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... sort of letter of form on the occasion, for there is nothing worth telling you. The event that has made most noise since my last, is the extempore wedding of the youngest of the two Gunnings, who have made so vehement a noise. Lord Coventry,(295) a grave young lord, of the remains of the patriot breed, has long dangled after the eldest, virtuously with regard to her virtue, not very honourably with regard to his own ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... former Palaces of Pleasure, because comparisons are odious, and because they contain histories, translated out of grave authors and learned writers; and this containeth discourses devised by a green youthful capacity, and repeated in a manner extempore."[310] It was, again, the personal preference of the individual or the extent of his linguistic knowledge that determined whether the translator should employ the original Italian or Spanish versions of some collections or should content ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... boots,[18] all snugly laced, So that henceforth it can creep ahead On the road of thought with a cautious tread. And not at random shoot and strike, Zig-zagging Jack-o'-lanthorn-like. Then will you many a day be taught That what you once to do had thought Like eating and drinking, extempore, Requires the rule of one, two, three. It is, to be sure, with the fabric of thought, As with the chef d'oeuvre by weavers wrought, Where a thousand threads one treadle plies, Backward and forward the shuttles keep going, Invisibly the threads keep flowing, ...
— Faust • Goethe
... No. 2 is of a similar kind. The binary form is of the later type, i.e. there is a return to the principal theme in the second section. No. 3 opens with a Prelude, and a note states that "in this and other Preludes, which are meant as extempore touches before the Lesson begins, neither the composer nor performer are oblig'd to a Strictness of Tune." The pleasing Allegro which follows shows the influence of Scarlatti-Handel. The sonata concludes with an attractive Minuet and variations. No. 5, with its graceful Gavotta, and No. 7 ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... and generally disreputable aspect. He usually handles a short stick; and, when drummer and piper are absent, he carries a tiny tom-tom shaped like an hour- glass, upon which he taps the periods. This Scealuidhe, as the Irish call him, opens the drama with extempore prayer, proving that he and the audience are good Moslems: he speaks slowly and with emphasis, varying the diction with breaks of animation, abundant action and the most comical grimace: he advances, retires and wheels about, illustrating every point with pantomime; and his features, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... Brothers must be perfect companions for amateurs, and know all about charades and extempore costumes. ...
— Happy-Thought Hall • F. C. Burnand
... Doctor went on, "the Devil can never prevent me preaching from that text. I could speak extempore upon it for hours, it was the very first command both to Adam and also to Noah when he came out of the ark. Dear Mrs. Etheridge, let me touch that divine cunt of yours. I can't make out what your husband has been about ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... A short extempore program written to meet an immediate, transient need. Often written in BASIC, rarely more than a dozen lines long, and containing no subroutines. The largest amount of code that can be written off the top of one's head, that does not need any editing, and that ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... I have a pretty wit. I can rhyme you extempore; I can convulse you with quip and conundrum;I have the lighter philosophies at my tongue's tip; I can be merry, wise, quaint, grim, and sardonic, one by one, or all at once; I have a pretty turn for anecdote; I know all the jests— ancient and modern— past, present, ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... last years of my being at school, I was of the highest form in the school, and chiefest of that form; I could then speak Latin as well as English; could make extempore verses upon any theme; all kinds of verses, hexameter, pentameter, phaleuciacks, iambicks, sapphicks, &c. so that if any scholars from remote schools came to dispute, I was ringleader to dispute with them; I could cap verses, &c. If any ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... Committee on Literature was made by its chairman, Miss Caroline Ruutz-Rees, showing the usual careful selection of valuable matter for publication. Two important compilations she had made herself—Ten Extempore Answers to Questions by Dr. Shaw and extracts from a number of her speeches, gleaned from scattered reports; also an eloquent address made at Birmingham, Ala., the preceding April. So little from Dr. Shaw existed in printed form that these ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... company I go, I am obliged to be the figurante of the circle. Yesterday I preached twice, and, indeed, performed the whole service, morning and afternoon. There were about fourteen hundred persons present, and my sermons (great part extempore) were preciously peppered with Politics. I have here, at least, double the number of subscribers, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... he was somewhat subject to extempore bursts of passion, which were rather unpleasant to his favorites and attendants, whose perceptions he was apt to quicken, after the manner of his illustrious imitator, Peter the Great, by anointing their ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... I mean to hear some of the course but lectures are not much to my taste, whatever the lecturer may be. If read, they are dismal flat, and you can't think why you are brought together to hear a man read his works, which you could read so much better at leisure yourself. If delivered extempore I am always in pain lest the gift of utterance should suddenly fail the orator in the middle, as it did me at the dinner given in honour of me at the London tavern.[117] "Gentlemen," said I, and ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... this little extempore speech,— applause accompanied by an odorous rain of flowers. There were many women in the crowd, and these had pressed eagerly forward to catch every word that dropped from the Poet-Laureate's mellifluous lips,—now, moved by one common impulse, they hastily ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... take the decanter and the glass, and be off to the back chamber looking on the Meadows, where he toiled on his cases till the hours were small. There was no "fuller man" on the bench; his memory was marvellous, though wholly legal; if he had to "advise" extempore, none did it better; yet there was none who more earnestly prepared. As he thus watched in the night, or sat at table and forgot the presence of his son, no doubt but he tasted deeply of recondite ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the Dunlop family: it was printed from a hasty sketch, which the poet called extempore. The major whom it mentions, was General Andrew Dunlop, who died in 1804: Rachel Dunlop was afterwards married to Robert Glasgow, Esq. Another of the Dunlops served with distinction in India, where he rose to the rank of General. They were a gallant ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... and sorrow would cease! Animated by his subject, his voice gradually became bolder and more spirited, as well as his performance, and without any hesitation he sung with much facility two or three stanzas composed extempore. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... you?' he asked. 'We're not. We don't have printed offices, with verses and responds, and that sort of thing. We have extempore prayer by ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... extempore entertainment we again climbed to our seats in the drag and were driven back to Melbourne, stopping en route at the stock farm of J. H. Miller, who had gone into the business of breeding American trotters, and who again persisted ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... alternate hook with mutton and worms. I declared this was too cockney a method of fishing, and selected a tall slender flax-stick, the stalk of last year's spike of red honey-filled blossoms, and to this extempore rod I fastened my line and bait. When one considers that the old whalers were accustomed to use ropes made in the rudest fashion, from the fibre of this very plant, in their deep-sea fishing for very big prey, it is not surprising ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... his name the promise of his eloquence and rare public gifts. He blessed himself that he had been bred from infancy as it were in the public eye, and he looked forward to the debates in the Senate on great political questions as to his fit and native element. And with reason, for in extempore debate his speech was music, and the precision, the flow and the elegance of his discourse equally excellent. Familiar as I was with his powers, when a year ago I first heard him take part in a debate, he surprised me with his success. He spoke so well that he was impatient ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... episodes of animalism by orgies of self-abasement, during which he—in half-confessing his own lapses—attributed freely and unrebukedly the same vices to the male half of his overflowing congregation. These out-pourings—"Pechadur truenus wyf i! Arglwydd madden i mi!"—extempore prayers, psalms chanted with a swaying of the body, hymns sung uproariously, scripture read with an accompaniment of groans, hysteric laughter, and interjections of assent, and a rambling discourse—lasting fully an hour, were in the Welsh language; and David on his three or four visits—and ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... brilliant for her situation, the minister, her father, having bestowed great pains on her education. She was aught drawing, singing, and to play on the theorbo; had learning, and wrote very agreeable verses. The following is an extempore piece which she composed in the absence of her husband and brother, in a conversation with some person relative to them, while walking with her sister—in—law, and ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... than integrity of conduct; of the immorality of the pragmatic standard of mere effectiveness or immediate efficiency in the selection of material; of the aesthetic folly and ethical dubiety of simulated extempore speaking and genuinely impromptu prayers, would not be superfluous. But, on the other hand, we may hope to accomplish much of this indirectly today. Because there is no way of handling specifically either the content of the Christian message or the problem of the immediate needs and temper of ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... genus panthera camelo.] calling it the 'camelopard.' Nor can we, I think, hesitate to accept that account as the true one, which describes the word as no artificial creation of scientific naturalists, but as bursting extempore from the lips of the common people, who after all are the truest namers, at the first moment when the novel creature was presented to their gaze. 'Cerf-volant,' a name which the French have so happily given to the ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... meeting was held at 2:00 o'clock in the same hall in which the exhibit was placed. This was largely attended, some two or three hundred taking advantage of the opportunity to listen to those who found place on this extempore program. Our society reporter took some notes of what transpired at the meeting, but they were only partial notes, and what here follows in regard to what took place is only in the nature ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... for ideas. It was a dreadful ordeal. In fact, in after times it was several years before I could seize a pen, rattle up a subject and dash off a leader. Now I can write far more easily than I can talk. And it is a curious fact that soon after I became really skilled at such extempore work in the opinion of the best judges, such as Raymond, I no longer had any ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... famous punster, was desired to make a pun extempore. "Upon what subject?" said Daniel. "The king," answered the other. "O, sir," said he, "the king is ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... was not so ready with a pathetic answer as he usually was with touching episodes in his extempore sermons. He felt that he ought to say something pretty, something also that should remove the impression on the mind of his lady love. But he was rather put ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... separation, and my lord would take the decanter and the glass, and be off to the back chamber looking on the Meadows, where he toiled on his cases till the hours were small. There was no "fuller man" on the bench; his memory was marvellous, though wholly legal; if he had to "advise" extempore, none did it better; yet there was none who more earnestly prepared. As he thus watched in the night, or sat at table and forgot the presence of his son, no doubt but he tasted deeply of recondite pleasures. To be wholly ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my tent, played on his one-stringed fiddle, and sang an extempore song for the protection of the Consul. I gave him a handkerchief. It appears that ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... of what is called an Extempore Epigram on Voltaire; who, when he was in England, ridiculed, in the company of the jealous English poet, Milton's allegory of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... towards the end of being a good and efficient preacher? Give me, I should say, on the whole, the solid material stock, rather than the trained inind. I look with a curious feeling upon certain very popular preachers, who preach entirely extempore: who make a few notes of their skeleton of thought; but trust for the words and even for the illustrations to the inspiration of the moment. They go on boldly: but their path crumbles away behind them as they advance. Their minds are in ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... work with the former Palaces of Pleasure, because comparisons are odious, and because they contain histories, translated out of grave authors and learned writers; and this containeth discourses devised by a green youthful capacity, and repeated in a manner extempore."[310] It was, again, the personal preference of the individual or the extent of his linguistic knowledge that determined whether the translator should employ the original Italian or Spanish versions ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... instance of it.—You must know I was once a journeyman sonnet-writer to Signor Squallini. Now, his method, when seized with the furor harmonicus, was constantly to make me sit by his side, while he was thrumming on his harpsichord, in order to make extempore verses to whatever air he should beat out to his liking. I remember, one morning, as he was in this situation, thrum, thrum, thrum, (moving his fingers as if beating on the harpsichord,) striking ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... churchwoman, which in truth means a good deal of a sectarian. She not merely recoiled from such as venerated the more primitive modes of church-government rather than those of later expediency, and preferred far inferior extempore prayers to the best possible prayers in print, going therefore to some chapel instead of the church, but she looked down upon them as from a superior social standing—that is, with the judgment of this world, and not that of ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... is heating, the experimenter prostrates himself in front of the fire and prays to the Great Spirit of the Unknown to confer on him the property of metamorphosing, nocturnally, into a werwolf. His prayers take no one particular form, but are quite extempore; though he usually adds to them some such ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... On a Miser To Cassim Obio Allah A Friend's Birthday To a Cat An Epigram upon Ebn Naphta-Wah Fire To a Lady Blushing On the Vicissitudes of Life To a Dove On a Thunder Storm To My Favorite Mistress Crucifixion of Ebn Bakiah Caprices of Fortune On Life Extempore Verses On the Death of a Son To Leila On Moderation in our Pleasures The Vale of Bozaa To Adversity On the Incompatibility of Pride and True Glory The Death of Nedham Almolk Lines to a Lover Verses to My Daughters Serenade to My Sleeping ...
— Oriental Literature - The Literature of Arabia • Anonymous
... the fellow damned first, and had directed a deed of separation to be prepared, which should provide for the complete payment of Fiorsen's existing debts on condition that he left Gyp and the baby in peace. After telling Gyp this, he took an opportunity of going to the extempore nursery and standing by the baby's cradle. Until then, the little creature had only been of interest as part of Gyp; now it had for him an existence of its own—this tiny, dark-eyed creature, lying there, watching him so gravely, clutching his finger. Suddenly the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... highly superior to what has since been printed. There was in it a force—there were shades of reflection so fine—allusions so quick and so happy— and strokes of satire and observation so pointed and so apt,— that it had ten times more brilliancy when absolutely extempore than ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... which will endure with the stereotype plates. They evince the most brilliant characteristics of Halleck's genius, and continually suggest the thought, that if the mind of the author be so powerful and various in its almost extempore sport and play, it must have still ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... obliged to be the figurante of the circle. Yesterday I preached twice, and, indeed, performed the whole service, morning and afternoon. There were about 1,400 persons present, and my sermons, (great part extempore,) were preciously peppered with politics. I have here at least double the number of subscribers I ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... however, all the form and ceremonial of the English Established Church, though so modified as to meet the doctrinal views of the Unitarians. There may be good sense in this, inasmuch as it greatly lessens the ministerial labor to have a stated form of prayer, instead of a necessity for extempore outpourings; but it must be, I should think, excessively tedious to the congregation, especially as, having made alterations in these prayers, they cannot attach much idea of ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... an hour, with frequent pauses and strange changes in the inflexion of the voice. We will not attempt a repetition of his arguments, but must record one sentence in an extempore sermon of great versatility and power; a sentence that, if we understood it aright, was singularly liberal and broad in view. Speaking of the rivalry that existed between the different sects of Christians, and making pointed allusion to the colony of protestant Huguenots established ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... musa virum: are you an author, sir? give me leave a little, come on, sir, I'll make verses with you now in honour of the gods and the goddesses for what you dare extempore; and now I begin. "Mount thee my Phlegon muse, and testify, How Saturn sitting in an ebon cloud, Disrobed his podex, white as ivory, And through the welkin thunder'd all aloud." There's ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... his extempore window curtain, and returned with it. Yuba Bill, who had quietly and disapprovingly surveyed the proceeding, here disengaged himself from ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... occasion was sudden and off-hand, he being called up by the request of a friend. I am sure the gentleman so remembers it, and that it was so; but there is, nevertheless, much method, arrangement, and clear exposition in that extempore speech. It is very able, very, very much to the point, and very decisive. And in another speech, delivered two months earlier, on the proposition to repeal the internal taxes, the honorable gentleman had touched the same subject, and had declared "that ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... "I am speaking now extempore," she continued, "and more to my satisfaction than ever before. I am amazed at myself, but I could not do it if any of our other speakers were listening to me. I am entirely off old antislavery grounds and on the new ones thrown ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... fortunes, already inclining ominously towards a catastrophe. This story was Waverley. Mr. Carlyle has praised Waverley above its fellows. "On the whole, contrasting Waverley, which was carefully written, with most of its followers which were written extempore, one may regret the extempore method." This is, however, a very unfortunate judgment. Not one of the whole series of novels appears to have been written more completely extempore than the great bulk of Waverley, including almost everything that made it either popular ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... distinguished from all other European nations, comes from dulness of intellect and inability to follow out an intricate argumentation. They show the acuteness of their understanding in a thousand ways; in poetry, in romantic tales, in narrative compositions, in legal acumen and extempore arguments, in the study of medicine, chiefly in that masterly eloquence by which so many of them are distinguished. Who shall say that they might not also have reached a high degree of eminence in philosophical ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... suddenly left the building. In an instant I was at their side, for it struck me indisposition was the cause of so strange a movement. Fortunately, at this moment, the whole audience rose in a body, and one of the ministers commenced an extempore prayer. ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... grew afterwards accustomed to see him, absolutely motionless, with his eye glued to the microscope, for twenty minutes at a time. So the greater part of every weekday was spent, and on Sunday he usually preached one, and sometimes two extempore sermons. His workday labours were rewarded by the praise of the learned world, to which he was indifferent, but by very little money, which he needed more. For over three years after their marriage, neither of ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... a picture of the Dunlop family: it was printed from a hasty sketch, which the poet called extempore. The major whom it mentions, was General Andrew Dunlop, who died in 1804: Rachel Dunlop was afterwards married to Robert Glasgow, Esq. Another of the Dunlops served with distinction in India, where he rose to the rank of General. They were a ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... expose-what may there drop inadvertently; but as Mr. Drummond had only made memorandums, perhaps with no resolution to publish them, he may stand acquitted of part of this charge. It is reported of our author that he was very smart, and witty in his repartees, and had a most excellent talent at extempore versifying, above any poet of his time. In the year 1645, when the plague was raging in Scotland, our author came accidentally to Forfar, but was not allowed to enter any house, or to get lodging in the town, though it was very late; he went two miles further to Kirrimuir, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... is the time that the unjust man doth thrive. What an exchange had this been without boot? what a boot is here with this exchange? Sure, the gods do this year connive at us, and we may do anything extempore. The prince himself is about a piece of iniquity,—stealing away from his father with his clog at his heels: if I thought it were a piece of honesty to acquaint the king withal, I would not do't: I hold it the more knavery ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... and masterly touches of nature; he never laughed at his own jest, unless the point of his raillery upon another required it; he had a particular talent in giving life to bons mots and repartees; the wit of the poet seemed always to come from him extempore, and sharpened into more wit from his brilliant manner of delivering it; he had himself a good share of it, or what is equal to it, so lively a pleasantness of humour, that when either of these fell into his hands upon the stage, he wantoned with them to the highest delight of his auditors. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... favour of extempore preaching, and was unwilling to listen to the delivery of a written sermon." (Indeed, if we had more people like him in this day, we would hear far more of the gospel and far less of politics and jokes which so demoralize the pulpit and take away all sacredness. The King was ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... another Allegro of similar structure. No. 2 is of a similar kind. The binary form is of the later type, i.e. there is a return to the principal theme in the second section. No. 3 opens with a Prelude, and a note states that "in this and other Preludes, which are meant as extempore touches before the Lesson begins, neither the composer nor performer are oblig'd to a Strictness of Tune." The pleasing Allegro which follows shows the influence of Scarlatti-Handel. The sonata concludes with an attractive Minuet and variations. No. 5, with its graceful Gavotta, and No. ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... to the Head, with an extempore prayer. It took about forty pages," said Beetle. "I helped him ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... concealed on the off side of the animal, tickled its ear with a straw every time it bent its head towards the bundle of hay which lay at its feet. No clown or pantaloon was there to inflict condign punishment, because none was needed. A brother carter standing by performed the part, extempore. His eye suddenly lit on the culprit; his whip sprang into the air and descended on the urchin's breech. Horror-struck, his mouth opened responsive to the crack, and a yell came forth that rose high above ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... reverently and simply, for, as he had told me before by word and gesture, God has made the heart and the mouth. His long and earnest prayer, spoken extempore in his own language, was evidently well prepared, and thoroughly suitable to the occasion. He asked the Lord to be among us with His blessings, His faithfulness, and His mercies. He continued: "O Saviour, Thou hast all ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe
... admirably did she compose an extempore song, adapted to immediate circumstances, beginning—'I love no vain and fickle youth,' and beautifully depicting the love of a young woman for a man advanced in years. She sung it with a most touching air, and ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... succour. To convince him that this was not the case at present, he produced the bank-note which he had received in the letter, together with his own ready money; and mentioned some other funds, which he invented extempore, in order to amuse the lieutenant's concern. In the close of this expostulation, he desired Pipes to conduct Mr. Hatchway to the coffee-house, where he might amuse himself with the newspaper for half an hour; during which he would put on his clothes, and bespeak something for dinner, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... of a High-Church character, was fully choral, assisted by a robed choir and a good organ. The sermon was preached by the Rev. Provost Powell, who took for his text Romans xiv. 7: "For none liveth to himself and no man dieth to himself." He gave us a clever oration, but whether extempore or otherwise we could not tell, as from where we sat we could not see the preacher. There was not a large congregation, probably owing to the fact that the people in the North are opposed to innovations, and look upon crosses and candlesticks on the Communion-table ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... eighteenth-century men, and parodying their conversation. It was easy enough to speak of Johnson as 'Grand Old Samuel,' and to hob-nob with Swift or Sterne, seeing that, like the lion's part in Pyramus and Thisbe, 'you can do it extempore, for it ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the mysteries of a discovery of mine, that it is not necessary to finish your sentence in a crowd, but by a sort of mumble, omitting sibilants and dentals. This, indeed, if your words fail you, answers even in public extempore speech—but better where other talking is going on. Thus: "We missed you at the Natural History Society, Ingham." Ingham replies: "I am very gligloglum, that is, that you were m-m-m-m-m." By gradually dropping the voice, the interlocutor is ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... Kinchinjhow being annually held at a large chait hard by, which is painted red, ornamented with banners, and surmounted by an enormous yak's skull, that faces the mountain. The Lama invited me into his tent, where I found a wife and family. An extempore altar was at one end, covered with wafers and other pretty ornaments, made of butter, stamped or moulded with the fingers.* [The extensive use of these ornaments throughout Tibet, on the occasion of religious festivals, is alluded ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... have obtained the nick-name of Improvisatore, by perpetrating charades and extempore ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... apprehension), called to the female part of her family, who had stood gazing on me all the while in fixed astonishment, to resume their task of spinning cotton, in which they continued to employ themselves great part of the night. They lightened their labour by songs, one of which was composed extempore; for I was myself the subject of it. It was sung by one of the young women, the rest joining in a sort of chorus. The air was sweet and plaintive, and the words, literally translated, were these:—"The winds roared and the ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... the business of every writer to acquire command of language, in order that he may be able to write with ease and readiness, and, upon any occasion, to form extempore discourses. Unless he can do this, he will never shine as a speaker, nor will he ever make a figure in private conversation. But to do this, it is necessary to study simplicity of style. There never was a ready speaker, whose language was not, generally, plain and simple; for it ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... human nature, unless their special qualities are such as cannot be said to be deducible from the definition of human nature. (3) For instance, a giant is a rarity, but still human. (4) The gift of composing poetry extempore is given to very few, yet it is human. (5) The same may, therefore, be said of the faculty possessed by some of imagining things as vividly as though they saw them before them, and this not while asleep, but while awake. (6) But if anyone could be found who possessed other means ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza
... sketch is Du. schets, "draught of any picture" (Hexham), from Ital. schizzo, "an ingrosement or first rough draught of anything" (Florio), whence also Fr. esquisse and Ger. Skizze. The Italian word represents Greco-Lat. schedium, an extempore effort. ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... Mrs. Falconer rang the bell for Betty, and they had worship. Robert read a chapter, and his grandmother prayed an extempore prayer, in which they that looked at the wine when it was red in the cup, and they that worshipped the woman clothed in scarlet and seated upon the seven hills, came in for a strange mixture, in which the vengeance ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... a contemporary of Demosthenes, who, by his genius for extempore oratory, raised himself to a predominant position in Athens as a champion of the Macedonian influence, but afterwards incurred the penalty ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... Mr. P. was conveyed, in a stifling hack, (the fare had risen, under the unusual circumstances, about one hundred and ten degrees,) to a stifling little room under the hot roof of an hotel exposed to the sun on every side, and had taken an extempore Russian bath while changing his linen, and had partaken of a hot dinner, he might have been excused for saying that he would like to cool off ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... a song, Rhimeson," cried Frank, very glad to escape from his threatened bumper, and still fearful that it might be insisted upon, "a song extempore, as becomes a poet in his cups, and in thine own ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... and the beginning of our meal, did not detach him from his train of thought beyond a moment. He condescended, indeed, to ask me some questions as to my success at college, but I thought it was with half his mind; and even in his extempore grace, which was, as usual, long and wandering, I could find the trace of his preoccupation, praying, as he did, that God would "remember in mercy fower puir, feckless, fiddling, sinful creatures here by their lee-lane beside ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the anti-impositionists with their utter forgetfulness of the possible, nay, very probable differences of opinion between the ministers and their congregations. A vain minister might disgust a sober congregation with his 'extempore' prayers, or his open contempt of their kneeling at the Sacrament, and the like. Yet by what right if he acts only as an individual? And then what an endless source of disputes and preferences of this ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... which dictate almost every detail of his public and private conduct, and punish every sign of bad discipline with the most appalling rigour; and these laws are enforced by police who supply the chance gaps in them extempore, and exercise that authority in the best manner of prison guards, animal trainers ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... the singer scarcely repeats a single motive throughout the extent of the song, but is constantly introducing new tonal ideas argues an extempore performance. It would be interesting to have for comparison another record of the same song made ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... of Isis, the Theatres, the Forum, the Basilica, the Amphitheatre, which is in a perfect state of preservation, and more elliptical in form than any of those I have yet seen, and the School of Eloquence, where R** mounted the rostrum, and gave us an oration extempore, equally pithy, classical and comical. About sunset we got into the carriages, and ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... gently from the stream before it reached the foot of the hill, interposing a piece of comparatively level land. The road that ran on this flat spot, and connected the eastern portion (which, from the extempore character of its buildings, as well as from other causes we do not choose to mention, was called Hasty-Pudding), with the rest of the town, was, usually, in very high floods, overflowed. Such was the fact in the present instance, and boats were busily ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... just drawn from one hat the words 'Daddy Longlegs' and from the other 'What sort of shoe was made on the last of the Mohicans?' He says he doesn't ask to wait until the next meeting, but he'll connect them extempore. Now we'll see what he ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... privy council, incensed by his disloyalty, unanimously opened the door, and kicked him into the inside. He had all the inside places to himself; but such is the rapacity of ambition, that he was still dissatisfied. "I say," he cried out in an extempore petition, addressed to the emperor through the window, "how am I to catch hold of the reins?" "Any how," was the answer; "don't trouble me, man, in my glory; through the windows, through the key-holes—how you please." Finally this ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... hardly do," replied Bob, "as I intend to be secretary. After all, what's the use of thinking about it? Here goes for an extempore chief;" and the villain wrote down the name ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... other climes, had been the putative head of two families; in fact, it was owing to some legal informality in these proceedings that Roaring Camp—a city of refuge—was indebted to his company. The crowd approved the choice, and Stumpy was wise enough to bow to the majority. The door closed on the extempore surgeon and midwife, and Roaring Camp sat down outside, smoked its ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... are ransacked for costumes and properties; hats, canes, umbrellas, and firearms are mustered, and old dresses that haven't seen the light for forty years are rummaged out as disguises for the actors in these extempore theatricals. ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... must practise somewhere. I don't blame you in the least; though I don't profess to like it. No one can do that sort of thing extempore and if it happens to suit you ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... ii.... Anthony-a-Wood.... Mr. Jenkinson's name (now Lord Liverpool) being proposed as a difficult one to rhyme to, a lady present hit off this verse extempore.—N. B. Both father and son (Lord Hawkesbury) have a ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... "I see a man!" Every one looked to that point,—"I see a man of Tarsus; and he says, Make mention of me!" It must not be supposed that the discourses of "Uncle Ebenezer," with these abrupt appeals and sudden starts, were unwritten or extempore; they were carefully composed and written out,—only these flashes of thought and passion came on him suddenly when writing, and were therefore quite natural when delivered—they came ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... agreed with him, and, rising, delivered an extempore speech, declaring that "we must not delay. The leeches (here he looked at Mr. Pell) are sucking the ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... the church-going parishioners. His immediate predecessor, a curate in charge, had been one of those in whom a more passionate missionary zeal had been stirred by the Methodist movement—"endeared to the more serious inhabitants by warm zeal and a powerful talent for preaching extempore." The parishioners had made urgent appeal to the noble patron to appoint this man to the benefice, and the Duke's disregard of their petition had produced much bitterness in the parish. Then, again, in Crabbe there was a "lay" element, which had probably not been found in his predecessor, and ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... hymn happening, by good luck, to be set to a long-metre tune, he was able to start it. This done, the congregation joined in, and the singing went off pretty well. After praying and reading a chapter in the Bible, Odell sat down to collect his thoughts for the sermon, which was, of course, to be extempore, as Methodist sermons usually are. It is customary for the choir, if there is one, to sing an anthem during this pause; or, where no singers are set apart, for some members to strike up an appropriate hymn, ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... says:—'The event that has made most noise since my last is the extempore wedding of the youngest of the two Gunnings, two ladies of surpassing loveliness, named respectively Mary and Elizabeth, the daughters of John Gunning, Esq., of Castle Coote, in Ireland, whom Mrs Montague calls "those goddesses the Gunnings." Lord Coventry, a grave young lord, ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... The first eight stanzas were composed extempore one winter evening in the cottage, when, after having tired myself with labouring at an awkward passage in 'The Brothers', I started with a sudden impulse to this to get rid of the other, and finished it in a day or two. My sister and I had passed the place a ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... part of the following treatise remains in the exact form in which it was read at Manchester; but the more familiar passages of it, which were trusted to extempore delivery, have been written with greater explicitness and fulness than I could give them in speaking; and a considerable number of notes are added, to explain the points which could not be sufficiently considered in the time I had at my ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... had brought him, besought the speaker to rest quiet, and the mover and supporters of the question to let it drop; asserting, that no censure had been intended, and that though the speaker might have made some mistake, it could only be attributed to the hurry of an extempore address, and not to his judgment. The withdrawal of the motion was refused, and then, still hoping to evade a ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... and Bob thereupon set to work in high glee at their extempore ablutions; and, when they had subsequently dried their faces in their pocket-handkerchiefs, both presented a ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... minister was not remarkable for the brilliance of his sermons, which he wrote and "committed"—that is, learned by heart, to deliver in pseudo-extempore fashion, as was the weary custom of most Scotch ministers of his time. But this Sunday, all that he had committed slipped clean out of his memory. He preached as he had never been known to preach before, and never preached again—with originality, power, eloquence; speaking ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... afternoon my father stayed at home—a rare thing for him to do; nay, more, he went and smoked his peaceful pipe in the garden. John lay on an extempore sofa, made of three of our high-backed chairs and the window-sill. I read to him—trying to keep his attention, and mine too, solely to the Great Plague of London and Daniel Defoe. When, just as I was stealthily glancing at his face, fancying it looked whiter and more sunken, that his smile was ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... B.C. He was the pupil and successor of Gorgias and taught at Athens at the same time as Isocrates, whose rival and opponent he was. We possess two declamations under his name: Peri Sofiston, directed against Isocrates and setting forth the superiority of extempore over written speeches (a recently discovered fragment of another speech against Isocrates is probably of later date); 'Odusseus, in which Odysseus accuses Palamedes of treachery during the siege of Troy (this is generally considered spurious). According to Alcidamas, the highest aim of the orator ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... these common-place funereal lines, and said to Garrick, 'I think, Davy, I can make a better.' Then, stirring about his tea for a little while, in a state of meditation, he almost extempore produced the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... of the moment. The generality of speakers are utterly unfit for the task, and accordingly do it ill. A few men, by long training, acquire the power of casting their thoughts into speaking train, so as to make a good appearance in extempore reply; yet even these would do still better if they had a little time. The adjournment of a debate, and the reopening of a question at successive stages, furnish the real opportunities for effective reply. In a debate begun and ended at one sitting, ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... supper, of which the mother and daughter partook almost in silence. Then Mrs. Howland went to her room, where she fell fast asleep, and Maggie had the drawing-room to herself. She had arranged a sort of extempore bed on the hard sofa, and was about to lie down, when Tildy opened ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade
... air. The crowd of beggars and idlers, generally gathered in the street, saw so much that they might be considered to "assist," in an independent but festive capacity, at the entertainment from outside. Matches were hawked about for the convenience of the male portion of this extempore assembly, and fruit in baskets was on sale for the women. "Cigars—cigars of quality!"—"Good fruit—ripe fruit!" were cries audible even in the ballroom; and a fine aroma of coarse tobacco mounted rapidly upward to ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... exceedingly in the climb up this very steep BOLWOGGOLY, and then we set out again together, and arrived at last near the Dead Man's Lake, at the foot of the Sidelhorn. This lonely spot, once used for an extempore burying-place, after a sanguinary BATTUE between the French and Austrians, is the perfection of desolation; there is nothing in sight to mark the hand of man, except the line of weather-beaten whitened posts, set up to indicate the direction of the pass in the OWDAWAKK of winter. Near ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... such as may be consistently used by the irreligious and by infidels, and only by them. We do not say that no Christian prayers are offered up in Masonic lodges. No doubt some godly men, as chaplains, offer up extempore prayers in the name of Christ; but such prayers are not Masonic. They are not authorized by the Masonic ritual; they are contrary to the spirit if not to the express regulations of Masonry. Any member would have a right to object to them, and his objections ...
— Secret Societies • David MacDill, Jonathan Blanchard, and Edward Beecher
... the visit gave opportunity for making speeches, both set and extempore, in Esperanto, and the prized language came through the ordeal with flying colours. Englishmen have now English testimony that Esperanto is not merely an interesting toy to while away the leisure hours, but a sound, solid language, ...
— The Esperantist, Vol. 1, No. 1 • Various
... went on, "the Devil can never prevent me preaching from that text. I could speak extempore upon it for hours, it was the very first command both to Adam and also to Noah when he came out of the ark. Dear Mrs. Etheridge, let me touch that divine cunt of yours. I can't make out what your husband has been about since the charming Ethel was born that you ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... my sermon, I will give my reader some lines with which he may not be acquainted, from a writer of the Elizabethan time. I had meant to introduce them into my sermon, but I was so carried away with my subject that I forgot them. For I always preached extempore, which phrase I beg my reader will not misinterpret as meaning ON THE SPUR OF THE MOMENT, OF WITHOUT THE DUE PREPARATION ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... the Church of England service, lessons and all, the latter, if interesting, eloquently (ibid.). After the service, one of Jeremy Taylor's sermons (vi. 188). After sermon, if the weather was fine, walk with his family, dogs included and guests, to cold picnic (iii. 109), followed by short extempore biblical novelettes; for he had his Bible, the Old Testament especially, by heart, it having been his mother's last gift to him (vi. 174). These lessons to his children in Bible history were always given, whether there was picnic or not. For the rest ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... about preaching. On this subject the Bishop believes that each man must use the method best suited to himself. There have been effective preachers both of written and extempore sermons. The question of memory came up, and the Bishop said: "I learnt something of this from the biography of Chancellor Bird, of Lincoln, who said, 'The memory is very sensitive of distrust; if you trust it, it seldom fails you.' ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... often to confess itself. What is instructive, what is historic, is the probability that young persons offering themselves at that time as guides and communicators—the requirements of our small sister were for long modest enough—quite conceivably lacked preparedness, and were so thrown back on the extempore, which in turn lacked abundance. One of these figures, that of Mademoiselle Danse, the most Parisian, and prodigiously so, was afterwards to stand out for us quite luridly—a cloud of revelations succeeding her withdrawal; a cloud which, thick as it was, never obscured our impression of her genius ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... no need to ask a favor; the world receives one from him. Will not a piece everlastingly be tried by its merit? Shall we esteem it the higher, because it was written at the age of thirteen? because it was the effort of a week? delivered extempore? hatched while the author stood upon one leg? or cobbled, while he cobbled a shoe? or will it be a recommendation, that it issues forth in gilt binding? The judicious world will not be deceived by the tinselled purse, but will examine ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... the chapel Margaret Grant and the other girls of the Specialities were startled when Mr. Fairfax made special mention of Betty Vivian, praying God to comfort her in sore distress and to heal her sickness. The prayer was extempore, and roused the girls to ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... by the by, I must repeat to you some extempore verses I made yesterday at the house of a certain duchess, an acquaintance of mine. I am ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... whole Hours together upon any Thing; but it must be owned to the Honour of the other Sex, that there are many among them who can Talk whole Hours together upon Nothing. I have known a Woman branch out into a long Extempore Dissertation upon the Edging of a Petticoat, and chide her Servant for breaking a China Cup, in ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... he received the translators of the Septuagint Bible with the highest honours, entertaining them at his table. Under the atmosphere of the place their usual religious ceremonial was laid aside, save that the king courteously requested one of the aged priests to offer an extempore prayer. It is naively related that the Alexandrians present, ever quick to discern rhetorical merit, testified their estimation of the performance with loud applause. But not alone did literature and the exact sciences thus find protection. As if no subjects ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... on Literature was made by its chairman, Miss Caroline Ruutz-Rees, showing the usual careful selection of valuable matter for publication. Two important compilations she had made herself—Ten Extempore Answers to Questions by Dr. Shaw and extracts from a number of her speeches, gleaned from scattered reports; also an eloquent address made at Birmingham, Ala., the preceding April. So little from Dr. Shaw existed in printed form that these were very welcome. She urged ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... temporarily come into prominence, as Ophrah, Ramah, and Nob near Gibeah. And, apart from the greater cities with their more or less regular religious service, it is perfectly permissible to erect an altar extempore, and offer sacrifice wherever an occasion presents itself. When, after the battle of Michmash, the people, tired and hungry, fell upon the cattle they had taken, and began to devour the flesh with the blood (that is, without pouring out the blood on the altar), Saul caused a great stone ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... of applause followed this little extempore speech,— applause accompanied by an odorous rain of flowers. There were many women in the crowd, and these had pressed eagerly forward to catch every word that dropped from the Poet-Laureate's mellifluous lips,—now, moved by one common impulse, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... weighty affairs in which he was engaged, he is said to have read, written, and declaimed every day. He never addressed the senate, the people, or the army, but in a premeditated speech, though he did not want the talent of speaking extempore on the spur of the occasion. And lest his memory should fail him, as well as to prevent the loss of time in getting up his speeches, it was his general practice to recite them. In his intercourse with individuals, and even with his ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... the best example of this class of public speaking that is available. Although they were extempore, as far as the actual language is concerned, they have been preserved in full. In spite of the informal style appropriate to the "stump," these discussions of the Dred Scott decision, Popular Sovereignty, and the other questions suggested by slavery are marked by a closeness of reasoning and a readiness ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... and clearly stated, as business always should be. For gay and amusing letters, for 'enjouement and badinage,' there are none that equal Comte Bussy's and Madame Sevigne's. They are so natural, that they seem to be the extempore conversations of two people of wit, rather, than letters which are commonly studied, though they ought not to be so. I would advise you to let that book be one in your itinerant library; it will both ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... Antichrist than a picture in the church window, and chooseth sooner to be half hanged than see a leg at the name of Jesus or one stand at the Creed. He conceives his prayer in the kitchen rather than in the church, and is of so good discourse that he dares challenge the Almighty to talk with him extempore. He thinks every organist is in the state of damnation, and had rather hear one of Robert Wisdom's psalms than the best hymn a cherubim can sing. He will not break wind without an apology or asking forgiveness, nor kiss a gentlewoman for fear of lusting after her. ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... amplifications in private, that he may test his memory, and then become familiar with a procedure in private in order to be sure to be perfect in it before the public. This private discipline is all the more necessary in the early stages of extempore speaking—if the speaker is at all troubled ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... not so ready with a pathetic answer as he usually was with touching episodes in his extempore sermons. He felt that he ought to say something pretty, something also that should remove the impression on the mind of his lady love. But he was rather put about ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... into all the charms of Pisan society. He had organized a little choir of ladies of rank, remarkable for their intelligence and beauty, and had taught them to sing extempore to the guitar. He had had them instructed by the famous Gorilla, who was crowned poetess-laureate at the capitol by night, six years later. She was crowned where our great Italian poets were crowned; ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... down his extempore window curtain, and returned with it. Yuba Bill, who had quietly and disapprovingly surveyed the proceeding, here disengaged himself from ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... receives one from him. Will not a piece everlastingly be tried by its merit? Shall we esteem it the higher, because it was written at the age of thirteen? because it was the effort of a week? delivered extempore? hatched while the author stood upon one leg? or cobbled, while he cobbled a shoe? or will it be a recommendation, that it issues forth in gilt binding? The judicious world will not be deceived by the tinselled purse, but will examine ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... alone, did not hesitate on the course to take. He transformed his quilt into a knotted rope, which he fastened firmly to his own balcony, and in spite of the risk, descended by this extempore ladder ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... brothers, and we were presently joined by a number of people from the town, all of whom demonstrated great joy at seeing their old acquaintance the blacksmith by the most extravagant jumping and singing. On entering the town the singing man began an extempore song in praise of the blacksmith, extolling his courage in having overcome so many difficulties, and concluding with a strict injunction to his friends to ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... December, and on the 11th January the General Officer Commanding the lines of communication was able to report to the Secretary of State that "... speaking in general terms, units of all sorts have been completed with authorised or extempore regimental transport ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... down the middle between the rows. Each scholar was hurrying to his place at one of the desks, where, as he arrived, he stood. The master already stood in solemn posture at the nearer end of the room on a platform behind his desk, prepared to commence the extempore prayer, which was printed in a kind of blotted stereotype upon every one of their brains. Annie had hardly succeeded in reaching a vacant place among the girls when he began. The boys were as still as death while the master prayed; but a spectator might easily have discovered that the chief good ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... thereupon set to work in high glee at their extempore ablutions; and, when they had subsequently dried their faces in their pocket-handkerchiefs, both ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... broad grin and generally disreputable aspect. He usually handles a short stick; and, when drummer and piper are absent, he carries a tiny tom-tom shaped like an hour- glass, upon which he taps the periods. This Scealuidhe, as the Irish call him, opens the drama with extempore prayer, proving that he and the audience are good Moslems: he speaks slowly and with emphasis, varying the diction with breaks of animation, abundant action and the most comical grimace: he advances, retires and wheels about, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... round Him. He does not go round arguing with them, persuading them, but in the crises of their lives, as the answer to every question, as the solution of every difficulty and doubt, as the consolation in every sorrow, he offers them the Blessed Sacrament. All his prayers (and he makes a great use of extempore prayer, much to the annoyance of the Bishop, who considers it ungrammatical), all his sermons, all his actions revolve round that one great fact. "Jesus Christ is what you need," he says, "and Jesus Christ is here in your ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... His sense of humour was keen, and he could relish a joke—especially when it was not directed towards himself. When visiting Dublin he was accompanied by the celebrated violinist Dubourg, who was engaged to play at his performances. One evening Dubourg was delighting the audience with an extempore cadenza, and wandered so far away from the original key that he found it no easy matter to return to it. At length, after some moments of suspense, the shake was heard which announced that the violinist was about to return to the theme; Handel thereupon ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... advised to ride by my Physician. We have delightful Rides round us, I have a Charming horse, am uncommonly fond of the Amusement, replied I quite recovered from my Confusion, and in short I ride a great deal." "You are in the right my Love," said she. Then repeating the following line which was an extempore and equally adapted to recommend both Riding ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... of Demosthenes, who, by his genius for extempore oratory, raised himself to a predominant position in Athens as a champion of the Macedonian influence, but afterwards incurred the ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... arts. In the war of Modena, notwithstanding the weighty affairs in which he was engaged, he is said to have read, written, and declaimed every day. He never addressed the senate, the people, or the army, but in a premeditated speech, though he did not want the talent of speaking extempore on the spur of the occasion. And lest his memory should fail him, as well as to prevent the loss of time in getting up his speeches, it was his general practice to recite them. In his intercourse with individuals, and even with his wife Livia, upon ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... watching him, he changed his tune and burst into an extempore lyric, "The quids! The quids! The golden quids—the quids!" and so on, until, filled with a sudden hot suspicion, he snatched up his hat, with its jingling contents, hugged it to his breast, and ran like ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... luck, to be set to a long-metre tune, he was able to start it. This done, the congregation joined in, and the singing went off pretty well. After praying and reading a chapter in the Bible, Odell sat down to collect his thoughts for the sermon, which was, of course, to be extempore, as Methodist sermons usually are. It is customary for the choir, if there is one, to sing an anthem during this pause; or, where no singers are set apart, for some members to strike up an appropriate hymn, in which the congregation joins. On ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... his predecessor at the Middlesex Hospital entered into a conversation with his barber over an attempt at suicide in the neighborhood, during which the surgeon called the "would-be suicide" a fool, explaining to the barber how clumsy his attempts had been at the same time giving him an extempore lecture on the anatomic construction of the neck, and showing him how a successful suicide in this region should be performed. At the close of the conversation the unfortunate barber retired into the back area of his shop, and following minutely the surgeon's directions, cut ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... and burlesque verses, most of them extempore, are taken from Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson, published ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... not this pretty for a plain rhyme extempore? if ye will ye shall have more.' 'Nay, it is enough,' said Roberto, 'but how mean you to use me?' 'Why, sir, in making plays,' said the other, 'for which you shall be well paid, if you will ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... to all. Moreover, as we have seen, he lives under laws which dictate almost every detail of his public and private conduct, and punish every sign of bad discipline with the most appalling rigour; and these laws are enforced by police who supply the chance gaps in them extempore, and exercise that authority in the best manner of prison guards, ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... happy conclusion against the prince of Hircania, his vassal. Zadig, who had signalized his courage in this short war, bestowed great praises on the king, but greater still on the lady. He took out his pocketbook, and wrote four lines extempore, which he gave to this amiable person to read. His friends begged they might see them; but modesty, or rather a well-regulated self love, would not allow him to grant their request. He knew that extemporary verses are never approved ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... great deal of water, so that the boat was freed to an extent which set aside all danger of our sinking; but with all their efforts they never got beyond a certain point, for the water oozed in pretty constantly through and round the extempore plug. ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... begins with more confidence to scatter Greek quotations through his letters. It occupies him night and day and he urges all his friends to procure Greek books for him. In the autumn of 1502 he declares that he can properly write all he wants in Greek, and that extempore. He was not deceived in his expectation that Greek would open his eyes to the right understanding of Holy Scripture. Three years of nearly uninterrupted study amply rewarded him for his trouble. Hebrew, which he had also taken up, ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... unlucky pastor and carry him off, mounted behind a savage chief. Jacob chanced fortunately to be concealed in a rugged piece of ground where horses could not act. As the Indians were riding away he shot the horse that bore the pastor, and at the same time uttered a series of yells and extempore war-whoops so appalling that the savages gave him credit for being at least a dozen foes, and fled over a ridge before turning to see what had happened. The fall of the horse had stunned the pastor, but the Indian ...
— The Thorogood Family • R.M. Ballantyne
... on these with all due discretion till the hour for family prayer came round, which was early in those days. It was Manasseh's place to conduct it, as head of the family; a post which his mother had always been anxious to assign to him since her husband's death. He prayed extempore; and to-night his supplications wandered off into wild, unconnected fragments of prayer, which all those kneeling around began, each according to her anxiety for the speaker, to think would never end. Minutes elapsed, and grew to quarters of an hour, and his words only became more ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the other by the limited mail at 8.45. A telegram, informing him of what had taken place, reached him the next morning at Brighton while he was at breakfast. He preached his sermon, charming the congregation by the graces of his extempore eloquence,—moving every woman there to tears,—and then was after his wife before the ladies had taken their first glass of sherry at luncheon. But her ladyship had twenty-four hours' start of him,—although he did his best; and when he reached Portray Castle the door was shut ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... we went to meeting. My foster-father looked excessively wild. Mr Cate was raving in the midst of an extempore prayer, when a heavy fall was heard in the chapel. The minister descended from his desk, and came and prayed over the prostrate victim of intoxication, and, perhaps, of epilepsy, and he pronounced that brother ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... up before a public audience to defend the reasonableness of his opinions, may fairly be doubted. The aim of the Dominican teachers was to turn out trained preachers furnished with all tricks of dialectic fence, and practised to extempore speaking on the most momentous subjects. Unfortunately the historian, when he has told us of the arrival of his brethren, leaves us in the dark as to all their early struggles and difficulties, and passes on to other matters with which we are less ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... the by, I must repeat to you some extempore verses I made yesterday at the house of a certain duchess, an acquaintance of mine. I am deuced ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... and, like the illustrious Beau's, his numerals, which is rare nowadays, were very clearly and very beautifully formed. The Prince of Beaux was fastidious in his penmanship as in everything else. Sir Ralph's half- yearly speeches to the shareholders, though delivered extempore, were models of perspicuity. He used the scantiest notes, mere headings of subjects, and a few scraps of paper containing figures which he usually remembered without their aid. Of his memory he was proud. One day, at a meeting of the ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... Saturday pennies was in going with some of my companions into the country to have a picnic. We used to light a fire behind a hedge or a dyke, or in the corner of some ruin, and there roast our potatoes, or broil a red herring on an extempore gridiron we contrived for the purpose. We lit the fire by means of a flint and steel and a tinder-box, which in those days every boy used to possess. The bramble-berries gave us our dessert. We thoroughly enjoyed these glorious ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... eksplodo. Export eksteren sendi. Expose montri. Exposition ekspozicio. Expostulate rezonegi. Expound klarigi. Express esprimi. Express-train rapida vagonaro. Expression esprimo. Expressly speciale. Expulsion elpelo. Expunge elstreki. Exquisite rava. Extant ekzistanta. Extempore senprepara. Extend etendi. Extension etendo. Extensive vasta. Exterior eksterajxo. Exterminate ekstermi. External ekstera. Extinct estingita. Extinguish estingi. Extirpate elradikigi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... writing poetry down to dancing a horn-pipe, the Dr. with great eagerness insisted upon trying his epigrammatic powers with Mr. Garrick, and each of them was to write the other's epitaph. Mr. Garrick immediately said that his epitaph was finished, and spoke the following distich extempore:— ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... professional story-tellers from whom I have already largely quoted. I have indeed listened to many more stories than I have ventured here to insert; some I have rejected from the nature of their details, others from there being a strong impression on my mind that they were the extempore invention of the story-teller with a view to the rupee, which he feared he would not secure if he confessed he had nothing to relate. I have not perhaps been judicious in my selection of those which I hoped would amuse the reader, but I have ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... fastened their lines securely, baiting each alternate hook with mutton and worms. I declared this was too cockney a method of fishing, and selected a tall slender flax-stick, the stalk of last year's spike of red honey-filled blossoms, and to this extempore rod I fastened my line and bait. When one considers that the old whalers were accustomed to use ropes made in the rudest fashion, from the fibre of this very plant, in their deep-sea fishing for very big prey, ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... not be degraded to writing-machines. But this is generally conceded, and a pedantic amount of copying more and more begins to be considered as out of date at our universities. Nevertheless, a new pedantry, that of the wholly extempore lecture, should not be introduced; but a brief summary of the extempore unfolding of the lecture may be dictated and serve a very important purpose, or the lecture may be copied. The great efficacy of the oral exposition does ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... red bandana handkerchief was produced and seized to the end of a boat-hook; this extempore flag and staff Grummet took in his hand, and, proceeding to the summit of the beach, commenced waving it to and fro, to attract the attention of the people on board the doomed ship. She was now so close that we could see the two men at her wheel, and ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... him. He returned home in 1816, full of health and vigour, the personification of happiness; and his conscientious mother immediately set to work to repair the deficiencies of his former education, and sent him to lectures at the Sorbonne, where he heard extempore speeches from such men as Villemain, Guizot, and Cousin. Apparently this teaching opened a new world to him, and he learned for the first time that education can be more than a dull routine of dry facts, and felt the joy of contact with eloquence and learning. ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... undress-balls—hops they were called: but most of the exclusives went to these also in full dress, and both balls and hops usually lasted till three or four in the morning. Then on the off-nights "our set" got up their own little extempore balls in the large public parlor, to the music of some volunteer pianist, and when the weather was bad they danced in the same place all day; when it was good these informal matinees did not generally last more than two or three hours. Then there ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... Basilica, the Amphitheatre, which is in a perfect state of preservation, and more elliptical in form than any of those I have yet seen, and the School of Eloquence, where R** mounted the rostrum, and gave us an oration extempore, equally pithy, classical and comical. About sunset we got into the carriages, ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... eyes to heaven and said, "Is not the whole Creation and the Empire thereof His?"[FN480] Then the gaolers built the cage[FN481] over him and left him therein, lorn and lone, whereupon longing and consternation entered into him and the tongue of his case recited in extempore ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... forms of expression, both of what others had said to him, and he had addressed to them. Hence, it was concluded that he was not a man of much genius, and that all his eloquence was the effect of labour. A strong proof of this seemed to be that he was seldom heard to speak anything extempore, and though the people often called upon him by name, as he sat in the assembly, to speak to the point debated, he would not do it unless he came prepared. For this many of the orators ridiculed him; and Pytheas, in particular, told him, "That all his arguments smelled ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... a really early start, leaving Wangat at 4.15, the path being weirdly illuminated by extempore torches made of pine-wood which the shikari had prepared. A moderately level march of some three miles brought us to the ruined temples of Vernag and the beginning of our work, for here the path, turning sharply to the left, led us inexorably up the almost precipitous ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... somebody to begin, but did not dare to stir first for fear of the law, counterfeited a distraction, and by his own family it was spread about the city that he was mad. He then secretly composed some elegiac verses, and getting them by heart, that it might seem extempore, ran out into the market-place with a cap upon his head, and, the people gathering about him, got upon the herald's stand, and sang ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... while in fixed astonishment, to resume the task of spinning cotton, in which they continued to employ themselves a great part of the night. They lightened their labors by songs, one of which was composed extempore, for I was myself the subject of it. It was sung by one of the young women, the rest joining in a sort of chime. The air was sweet and plaintive, and the words, literally translated, were these: 'The winds roared and the rains fell; the poor white man, faint and weary, came and sat ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... more invited to sup with the king, he was called upon when the cup came to him, to make an oration extempore in praise of the Macedonians; and he did it with such a flow of eloquence, that all who heard it rose from their seats to clap and applaud him, and threw their garland upon him; only Alexander told him ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Practice pence and shilling tables. Play. Gallery; master to give lessons on arithmetic. Extempore teaching on men and ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... with him for a time, for all felt the heat exceedingly in the climb up this very steep BOLWOGGOLY, and then we set out again together, and arrived at last near the Dead Man's Lake, at the foot of the Sidelhorn. This lonely spot, once used for an extempore burying-place, after a sanguinary BATTUE between the French and Austrians, is the perfection of desolation; there is nothing in sight to mark the hand of man, except the line of weather-beaten whitened posts, set up to indicate the direction of the pass in the OWDAWAKK of winter. Near this ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... do," replied Bob, "as I intend to be secretary. After all, what's the use of thinking about it? Here goes for an extempore chief;" and the villain wrote down the name of Tavish ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... her situation at prayer, in which she often found herself, as it were, intoxicated with the love of God, and quite beside herself, said: "I know a person who, without being a poet, sometimes made very good extempore verses in spiritual canticles, which expressed beautifully her sufferings. It was not from her mind that they originated; but, by order of the glory so delicious a suffering caused her; she laid her complaint in this ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... rules; but when once there, I was not allowed to speak, although the President said repeatedly that the floor was mine. The opposition arose from a dozen or more around the platform, who were incessantly raising "points of order"—the extempore bantlings of great minds in great emergencies. For the space of three hours I endeavored to be heard, but they would not hear me (although as a delegate, and I spoke simply as a delegate), I could have spoken but ten minutes by a law of the house. Twice the President was sustained in his ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... limbs,—the chair on which the unfortunate student is placed being far more uneasy than the tightest fitting "Scavenger's daughter" in the Tower of London. After an anxious hour, Mr. Jones returns, with a light bounding step to a joyous extempore air of his own composing: he has passed. In another twenty minutes Mr. Saxby walks fiercely in, calls for his hat, condemns the examiners ad inferos, swears he shall cut the profession, and marches away. He has been plucked; and Mr. Muff, who stands sixth on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various
... lover of his art not to be above mere patriotic prejudice, describes the condition of things. "I have heard painters acknowledge that they could do better without nature than with her, or, as they expressed themselves, it only put them out. Our neighbours, the French, are much in this practice of extempore invention, and their dexterity is such as even to excite admiration, if not envy; but how rarely can this praise be given to their finished pictures!" Twelfth ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... go, I am obliged to be the figurante of the circle. Yesterday I preached twice, and, indeed, performed the whole service, morning and afternoon. There were about 1,400 persons present, and my sermons, (great part extempore,) were preciously peppered with politics. I have here at least double the number of subscribers I had expected. ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... this part of Africa are also attended by a band carrying drums, and singing extempore songs, a translation of one of which is subjoined from "Denham's Travels," whence the engraving ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 285, December 1, 1827 • Various
... tariff of 1816. He has informed us, Sir, that his speech on that occasion was sudden and off-hand, he being called up by the request of a friend. I am sure the gentleman so remembers it, and that it was so; but there is, nevertheless, much method, arrangement, and clear exposition in that extempore speech. It is very able, very, very much to the point, and very decisive. And in another speech, delivered two months earlier, on the proposition to repeal the internal taxes, the honorable gentleman had touched the same subject, and had declared "that a certain encouragement ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... returning from Washington over the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, on a freight-train, when he heard of the President's danger. Langenzunge loved Old Rough and Ready,—and he felt badly about his own office, too. But his extempore train chose to stop at a forsaken shanty-village on the Potomac, for four mortal hours, at midnight. What does he do, but walk down the line into the darkness, climb a telegraph-post, cut a wire, and applied the two ends ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... coarsely executed; and I am inclined to suppose, is not quite correctly exhibited. I hope he did not use the words 'vile agents' for the Americans in the House of Parliament; and if he did so, in an extempore effusion, I wish the lady had not committed ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... to these pines is that their inflammable branches are always suggesting a display of extempore fireworks to the Arabs, who are ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... paper for the same year are some extempore lines on Brighton, dated from East Street, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... when Osmyn delivered an extempore poem before the Caliph, his rival, after having warmly applauded him, cast down his eyes by accident, and saw shining on the floor one of the pastilles that Osmyn, who was led away by the vivacity of his declamation, had let fall by ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 495, June 25, 1831 • Various
... is, you singers and players have a smug little fashion of forgetting that there is a composer back of you. You don't sing extempore, Thayer, make up the song as you go along. You're nothing more than a species of elocutionist, you know, trying to show the people who weren't on the spot what the composer really did when ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... too, in these early times, derived from what they had seen of the Tuscan actors when sent for to Rome to expiate a plague that raged in the city. These seem to have been either like our dumb-shows, or else a kind of extempore farces—a thing to this day a good deal in use all over Italy and in Tuscany. In a more particular manner, add to these that extempore kind of jesting dialogues begun at their harvest and vintage feasts, and carried on so rudely and abusively afterwards ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... to say that a speaker's success before an audience depended chiefly upon the thoroughness of his previous preparation. Mr. Bright has often spoken extempore with great effect, when circumstances demanded it. But his custom is to prepare carefully, and in his earlier days he used frequently to write his speech and learn it by heart. He received his ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... mere basis for the utterance of scientific artifices and the display of vocal gymnastics. The singers, for their part, were allowed innumerable licenses. While the bass sustained the melody, the other voices indulged in extempore descant (composizione alla mente) and in extravagances of technical execution (rifiorimenti), regardless of the style of the main composition, violating time, and setting even ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... like the Grecian, it was void of art, or, at least, with very feeble beginnings of it. Those ancient Romans at these holy days, which were a mixture of devotion and debauchery, had a custom of reproaching each other with their faults in a sort of extempore poetry, or rather of tunable hobbling verse, and they answered in the same kind of gross raillery—their wit and their music being of a piece. The Grecians, says Casaubon, had formerly done the same in the persons of their petulant ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... we give our sons than to follow this? or to what could we better exhort them to accustom themselves? For perfection is only attained by neither speaking nor acting at random—as the proverb says, Perfection is only attained by practice.[18] Whereas extempore oratory is easy and facile, mere windbag, having neither beginning nor end. And besides their other shortcomings extempore speakers fall into great disproportion and repetition, whereas a well considered speech preserves its ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... Boudinot and other Cherokees have printed many essays and tracts in that tongue, but whether original or merely translated I do not know. The sermons of the native Protestant missionaries to their fellows were probably extempore addresses. At any rate, I have not seen any in manuscript or print. A volume of the kind exists, however, in manuscript, in the Library of the Instituto Historico of Rio Janeiro, which it would be very desirable to have printed. It is the Sermones ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... the following treatise remains in the exact form in which it was read at Manchester; but the more familiar passages of it, which were trusted to extempore delivery, have been written with greater explicitness and fulness than I could give them in speaking; and a considerable number of notes are added, to explain the points which could not be sufficiently considered in the time I had at my disposal ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... speakers are utterly unfit for the task, and accordingly do it ill. A few men, by long training, acquire the power of casting their thoughts into speaking train, so as to make a good appearance in extempore reply; yet even these would do still better if they had a little time. The adjournment of a debate, and the reopening of a question at successive stages, furnish the real opportunities for effective reply. In a debate begun and ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... road between Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, extempore. I distinctly recollect the very moment when I was struck, as described,—'He looks up, the clouds are split,' ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... oratorio, but in the human voice when it speaks from its instant life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage. The oratorio has already lost its relation to the morning, to the sun, and the earth, but that persuading voice is in tune with these. All works of art should not be detached, but extempore performances. A great man is a new statue in every attitude and action. A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad. Life may be lyric or epic, as well as a poem ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... went away, and presently returned with two strong men and the long shutter of a shop-window. To this extempore litter she carefully moved the Frenchman, and then her neighbors lifted him and carried him into the parlor, where Miss Lucinda's chintz lounge was already spread with a tight-pinned sheet to receive the poor man, and while her helpers put him to bed she ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... Lung, with twenty li or more still between him and the city of Knei Yang, entered the camphor-laurel forest which stretched almost to his destination. No person of consequence ever made the journey unattended; but Kai Lung professed to have no fear, remarking with extempore wisdom, when warned at the previous village, that a worthless garment covered one with better protection than that afforded by an army of bowmen. Nevertheless, when within the gloomy aisles, Kai Lung more than ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... traveller bivouacked as follows:—His rifles were tied together near the muzzles, the butts resting on the ground widely apart; a knife was laid on the rope that tied them together, to cut it in case of an alarm; over this extempore framework was thrown a large india-rubber cloth, with which he covered his packs when on the road; it made a cover sufficiently large to receive about half of his bed, and was a place of shelter ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... form and ceremonial of the English Established Church, though so modified as to meet the doctrinal views of the Unitarians. There may be good sense in this, inasmuch as it greatly lessens the ministerial labor to have a stated form of prayer, instead of a necessity for extempore outpourings; but it must be, I should think, excessively tedious to the congregation, especially as, having made alterations in these prayers, they cannot attach much idea ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and tastes were exercised and gratified: and new opportunities were now combined with new motives for persisting in his efforts. Concerning the plan or the success of his academical prelections, we have scarcely any notice: in his class, it is said, he used most frequently to speak extempore; and his delivery was not distinguished by fluency or grace, a circumstance to be imputed to the agitation of a public appearance; for, as Woltmann assures us, 'the beauty, the elegance, ease, and true instructiveness with which he could continuously ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... assembled, and with them a greater number of the unconverted; heads were uncovered, a hymn was sung, and a long extempore string of intercessions, praying that the Lord would lay bare his arm and strike the guilty with terror; that Christ crucified would be among them; that they might be washed in the blood of the immaculate lamb; and that the holy spirit would breathe ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... leaving us to our extra seat. At Rhinebeck, however, she found her match in a very fine-looking man, apparently forty or thereabouts, with a weed on his hat and a certain air, which savored strongly of psalms and hymns and extempore praying. In short, I guessed at once that he was a Presbyterian minister, old school at that. Now, madam, you know, is true blue—apostolically descended, and cannot tolerate anything like a dissenter. But I do not give her credit for having sufficient ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... renowned throughout the British Empire for Otto's Bohemian Autumn Nightly Concerts at Covent Garden Theatre, had happened to hear her and that seldom played sonata for the first time. It was a wondrous chance. Otto's large, picturesque, extempore way of inviting her to appear at his promenade concerts ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... example in christian conduct, their joy in health, their consolation in sickness." In the same vault with Mr. Archdeacon Clive, lies buried Robert Lord Clive, conqueror of Plassy: on whose death appeared these extempore lines, by a man of distinction, ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... said Agib, "sit down by me, and eat with us." Buddir ad Deen sat down, and attempted to embrace Agib, as a testimony of the joy he conceived upon sitting by him. But Agib pushed him away, desiring him not to be too familiar. Buddir ad Deen obeyed, and repeated some extempore verses in praise of Agib: he did not eat, but made it his business to serve his guests. When they had done, he brought them water to wash, and a very white napkin to wipe their hands. Then he filled a large china cup with sherbet, and put ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 1 • Anon.
... worthlessness with the work contained in it. No one would insult his readers by offering them what he counted valueless scraps, and telling them they were such. These papers, those two even which were caught in the net of the ready-writer from extempore utterance, whatever their merits in themselves; are the results of by no means trifling labour. So much a man ought to be able to say for his work. And hence I might defend, if not quite justify my title—for they are but fragmentary ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... afforded much amusement; lectures were given to approving assemblies. The Sundays were decently observed, and services were held morning and evening; reading was dispensed with, and the sermons were extempore perforce. ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... With extempore carts she never play'd, Or the odds and ends of a Tinker's Trade, Or little dirt pies and puddings made, Like children happy and squalid; The very puppet she had to pet, Like a bait for the "Nix my Dolly" set, Was a ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Spanish boots,[18] all snugly laced, So that henceforth it can creep ahead On the road of thought with a cautious tread. And not at random shoot and strike, Zig-zagging Jack-o'-lanthorn-like. Then will you many a day be taught That what you once to do had thought Like eating and drinking, extempore, Requires the rule of one, two, three. It is, to be sure, with the fabric of thought, As with the chef d'oeuvre by weavers wrought, Where a thousand threads one treadle plies, Backward and forward the shuttles keep going, ...
— Faust • Goethe
... study, but in Tibet and the Far East the Prajna-paramita, the Lotus and the sutras about Amitabha are in daily use for public worship and private reading. I have heard the first-named work as well as the Leng-yen-ching expounded, that is, read aloud with an extempore paraphrase, to lay congregations in China, and the section of it called the Diamond Cutter is the book which is most commonly in the hands of religious Tibetans. The Lotus is the special scripture of the Nichiren sect in Japan but ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... that the use of "the paper" could interfere in the remotest degree with the due and proper effect of the pulpit, and knowing that he could not do either himself or his congregation adequate justice by extempore preaching, Dr. Anderson continued to adhere to written sermons, until the Presbytery at last gave way, leaving him master of the situation. The feud between Dr. Anderson and his Presbytery has been described by himself ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... third day after our arrival, as to lay out a very imposing spread of books upon all the tables; and there it remained in evidence of our good intentions, until the first time we were called upon to do the honours of an extempore luncheon. Unfortunately, from the very first, Willingham and myself were set down by Hanmer as the idle men of the party; the sort of prophetical discrimination, which tutors at Oxford are very much in the habit of priding themselves upon, tends, like other ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... and musical. Those in particular, who had come a long distance from the interior, executed with spirit and taste some very beautiful airs; much finer, indeed, than any native music I had yet heard. They accompanied their instruments with extempore recitatives in praise of those chiefs whom they knew. I was, of course, included, as they expected that I would be inclined to reward them handsomely. Each minstrel of any repute had a person attached to him by way of fool or jester, several of whom acted their parts ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... he began to conform his own uncouth manner to an imitation of his. He wore a better coat, which he no longer rubbed against the wall to take the gloss from off it; he ceased to interlard all his ordinary speech with texts of Scripture; his snuffle abated audibly; he gave up his habit of extempore rhapsody, and lost, in a great measure, his aversion to Christmas tarts and plum-pudding. After a time, he might even be seen with a fishing-rod over his shoulder; then he contrived sundry improvements in gun-locks and double-barrels, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... On this subject the Bishop believes that each man must use the method best suited to himself. There have been effective preachers both of written and extempore sermons. The question of memory came up, and the Bishop said: "I learnt something of this from the biography of Chancellor Bird, of Lincoln, who said, 'The memory is very sensitive of distrust; if you trust it, it seldom fails you.' ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... objection, that at so great an age, and on the brink of the grave, man is not wont to compose poems, may be refuted by a reference to the history of the ancient Arabic poetry. The Arabic poets before the time of Mohammed often recited long poems extempore,—so natural to them was poetry. (Compare Tharaphae Moallakah, ed. Reiske, p. xl.; Antarae Moallakah, ed. Menil. p. 18.) The poet Lebid, who attained to the age of 157 years (compare Reiske prolegg. ad Thar. Moall. ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... some creatures of such an extempore being that the whole term of their life is confined within the space of a day; for they are brought forth in the morning, are in the prime of their existence at noon, grow old at night, and ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... himself that he had been bred from infancy as it were in the public eye, and he looked forward to the debates in the Senate on great political questions as to his fit and native element. And with reason, for in extempore debate his speech was music, and the precision, the flow and the elegance of his discourse equally excellent. Familiar as I was with his powers, when a year ago I first heard him take part in a debate, he surprised me with his success. He spoke so well that he was impatient of writing as not ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... which cannot be said to be destitute of point, upon being read at table, received, as it deserved, a large share of commendation; and his Lordship declared to the company present, that it had not taken his barber above three hours to produce it extempore." ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... his inferiority of force,—and as soon as Cornwallis joined, crossed back over James River at Osborn's (say the bottom of the little-finger nail on our extempore map). Cornwallis crossed at Westover, also marked now on the maps as Ruffin's, some twenty miles lower down the river. Lafayette felt the necessity of meeting Wayne, who was supposed to be coming from Pennsylvania; he therefore retraced his march of a few weeks before, followed by Cornwallis ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... that place, and that two-masted ships would sail up the Irrawaddy, when all trouble and sorrow would cease! Animated by his subject, his voice gradually became bolder and more spirited, as well as his performance, and without any hesitation he sung with much facility two or three stanzas composed extempore. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 266, July 28, 1827 • Various
... how, tho he could not speak in Parliament, he might preach, rhapsodic preaching; above all, how he might be great in extempore prayer. These are the free outpouring utterances of what is in the heart: method is not required in them; warmth, depth, sincerity are all that is required. Cromwell's habit of prayer is a notable feature of him. All his great enterprises were commenced with prayer. In dark inextricable-looking ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... times, we said it once; we left out half the psalms for the day, the Rector explaining from the chancel steps that they were not fit to be read in a Christian church; we altered this prayer and that prayer; we listened to an extempore prayer for the widows and orphans of some poor fellows who have been killed in a mine ten miles from here, which made me cry like baby; and, most amazing of all, when it came to ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... business of cooking and eating is over, all sit round the camp-fires, and engage in talking or singing. Every evening one of the Batoka plays his "sansa," and continues at it until far into the night; he accompanies it with an extempore song, in which he rehearses their deeds ever since they left their own country. At times animated political discussions spring up, and the amount of eloquence expended on these occasions is amazing. The ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... Barty played the fool with Mr. Gibson, and taught him how to do a mechanical wax figure, of which he himself was the showman; and the laughter, both baritone and soprano, might have been heard in Russell Square. Then they sang an extempore Italian duet together which was screamingly ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... Madame and Madlle. de Branca, the latter being a kind of half pupil of mine, for Sigl seldom comes, and Becke, who usually accompanies her on the flute, is not here. On the three days that I was at Count Salern's I played a great many things extempore—two Cassations [Divertimentos] for the Countess, and the finale and Rondo, and the latter by heart. You cannot imagine the delight this causes Count Salern. He understands music, for he was constantly ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... interruption; whereas the pleader's business and interest compels him to enter the lists upon all occasions, and the unexpected objections and replies of his adverse party jostle him out of his course, and put him, upon the instant, to pump for new and extempore answers and defences. Yet, at the interview betwixt Pope Clement and King Francis at Marseilles, it happened, quite contrary, that Monsieur Poyet, a man bred up all his life at the bar, and in the highest repute for eloquence, having the charge of making the harangue to ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... long been dead. The Vicar of Wakefield's sermon in prison is, it seems, founded on a deep and true knowledge of human nature; the spark of good is often smothered, never wholly extinguished. Mrs. Fry often says an extempore prayer; but this day she was quite silent; while she covered her face with her hands for some minutes, the women were perfectly silent, with their eyes fixed upon her; and when she said, "You may go," they went away slowly. The children sat quite still the whole time; when one leaned, her mother ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... a sort of letter of form on the occasion, for there is nothing worth telling you. The event that has made most noise since my last, is the extempore wedding of the youngest of the two Gunnings, who have made so vehement a noise. Lord Coventry,(295) a grave young lord, of the remains of the patriot breed, has long dangled after the eldest, virtuously ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... guttural, monotonous sort of chant, their lips and tongues seeming hardly to move, and the sounds modulated solely in the throat. There is very little tune to it, and the words, so far as I could learn, are extempore. They sing about persons and things which are around them, and adopt this method when they do not wish to be understood by any but themselves; and it is very effectual, for with the most careful attention I never could detect a word that I knew. I have often heard Mr. Mannini, who was the most noted ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... familiarity of great eighteenth-century men, and parodying their conversation. It was easy enough to speak of Johnson as 'Grand Old Samuel,' and to hob-nob with Swift or Sterne, seeing that, like the lion's part in Pyramus and Thisbe, 'you can do it extempore, for it ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... picture in the church window, and chooseth sooner to be half hanged than see a leg at the name of Jesus or one stand at the Creed. He conceives his prayer in the kitchen rather than in the church, and is of so good discourse that he dares challenge the Almighty to talk with him extempore. He thinks every organist is in the state of damnation, and had rather hear one of Robert Wisdom's psalms than the best hymn a cherubim can sing. He will not break wind without an apology or asking forgiveness, nor kiss a gentlewoman ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... be sure—so much more presence of mind and histrionic resource have women than fall to the lot of our clumsy sex—whether the return of the Count was not, in truth, a surprise to her; and this scrutiny of the contents of my strong box, an extempore undertaking of the Count's. But it was clearing more and more every moment: and I was destined, very soon, to ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... annually held at a large chait hard by, which is painted red, ornamented with banners, and surmounted by an enormous yak's skull, that faces the mountain. The Lama invited me into his tent, where I found a wife and family. An extempore altar was at one end, covered with wafers and other pretty ornaments, made of butter, stamped or moulded with the fingers.* [The extensive use of these ornaments throughout Tibet, on the occasion of religious festivals, is alluded to by MM. Huc and Gabet.] The tents being insupportably noisome, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... genius. Its air of simplicity, the judge not being on his guard against it, begets belief, and tho the discourse in all other parts be elaborate and written with great accuracy, it will for the most part seem an extempore oration, the exordium evidently appearing to have ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... bagpipes—bagpipes of two kinds, the common Calabrian variety and that of Basilicata, much larger and with a resounding base key, which will soon cease to exist. A heaving ebb and flow of humanity fills the eye; fires are flickering before extempore shelters, and an ungodly amount of food is being consumed, as traditionally prescribed for such occasions—"si mangia per divozione." On all sides picturesque groups of dancers indulge in the old peasants' measure, the percorara, to the droning of bagpipes—a demure ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... It was run by the three C. of E. Padres and the Wesleyan hand in hand: the latter has been in the Nile Expedition of '98 and all through South Africa. We had Mission Hymns roared by the Tommies, and then a C. of E. Padre gave a short address—quite good. The Wesleyan did an extempore prayer, rather well, and a very nice huge C. of E. man gave the Blessing. Now they are having a Tommies' concert—a talented boy at ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... gratifying his curiosity. The object of attraction was now plainly visible. Sir Norman's surmises had been correct. The green table of the parliament-house of the midnight court had been converted, by the aid of cushions and pillows, into an extempore couch; and half-buried in their downy depths lay Miranda, the queen. The sweeping robe of royal purple, trimmed with ermine, the circlets of jewels on arms, bosom, and head, she still wore, and the beautiful face was white: than fallen ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... text the clergyman preached long and well: he did not read his sermon, but spoke it extempore; his doing so rather surprised and offended me at first; I was not used to such a style of preaching in a church devoted to the religion of my country. I compared it within my mind with the style of preaching used by the high-church rector in ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... Sam Baker and Boylston Smith reverently uncovered with the rest of the boys, while Deacon Baggs made an extempore prayer. But for the remainder of the day Old Twitchett's administrators foamed restlessly about, and watched each other narrowly, and listened to the conversation of every group of men who seemed to be talking with any spirit; they ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... he stopped and in his unconscious delirium caught at the bell rope and rang the bell with a vigor that started every one from his work, so that in a few minutes 'Extinguisher No. 1' was hurried along the roads by an extempore company of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... about had now appeared, either out of zeal or curiosity, it was soon sunk in the ground, and sufficiently secured. A yard across the upright mast, and a rope stretched along it, and reeved through a block at each end, formed an extempore crane, which afforded the means of lowering an arm-chair, well secured and fastened, down to the flat shelf on which the sufferers had roosted. Their joy at hearing the preparations going on for their deliverance was considerably qualified when they beheld the precarious vehicle ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... picture of the Dunlop family: it was printed from a hasty sketch, which the poet called extempore. The major whom it mentions, was General Andrew Dunlop, who died in 1804: Rachel Dunlop was afterwards married to Robert Glasgow, Esq. Another of the Dunlops served with distinction in India, where he rose to the rank of General. They were a gallant ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... wrote: "The government of God is not a plan—that would be Destiny, [or we may say Calvinism,] it is extempore." ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... I said, "you must practise somewhere. I don't blame you in the least; though I don't profess to like it. No one can do that sort of thing extempore and if it happens to suit ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... could see and hear without difficulty. On the raised platform stood my friend the Abbe looking very grave and rather nervous. A cardinal, two bishops, and some half-dozen priests were seated close to him, and very shortly the lecture, which was, I think, extempore, began. ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... from one group to another, groping in slippery tangle for the wreck of ships, wading in pools after the abominable creatures of the sea, and ever with an eye cast backward on the march of the tide and the menaced line of your retreat. And then you might go Crusoeing, a word that covers all extempore eating in the open air: digging perhaps a house under the margin of the links, kindling a fire of the sea-ware, and cooking apples there—if they were truly apples, for I sometimes suppose the merchant must have played us off with some inferior and quite local ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Maronea. In war they trembled at the sound of a trumpet, in peace they quaked before the shouting of their own demagogues; and during the assault of Philip II. they could only be prevailed on to man the walls by the savour of extempore cook-shops distributed along the ramparts. The modern Greeks attribute the introduction of Christianity into Byzantium to St Andrew; it certainly had some hold there in the time ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... feast that day at Brougham Castle; joyous were the songs of the minstrel bards as they celebrated, in extempore verse, the exile's restoration to his ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... confessed to the finer offense of manslaughter. That swift and sure justice which overtook the horse-stealer in these altitudes was stayed a moment and hesitated, for the victim was clearly the mysterious unknown. Curiosity got the better of an extempore judge and jury. ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... appeared artificial when set by that of Townshend, which was so abundant in him that it seemed a loss of time to think. Townshend's utterances had always the fascinating effervescence of spontaneity, while even Burke's extempore utterances were so pointed and artfully arranged that they wore the appearance of study and preparation. This brilliant, resplendent creature, in every respect the opposite to George Grenville, showy where Grenville was solid, fluent where he was formal, glittering and ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... friendly fights. He travelled the west visiting stations and shearing sheds with his Bible and prayer-book on one handle of his bike, and a set of boxing gloves on the other, and after preaching an impressive extempore sermon, concluding the service, would invariably say, "Now, boys, we will have a little recreation!" and invite his hearers to put on the gloves. He was not always the winner, however. His manly virtues, the sincerity of his life, ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... countries. America can by no means claim a monopoly of orators; there are many elsewhere whose sage sayings and forcible logic are appreciated by all who hear or read them; but, on the whole, Americans excel others in the readiness of their wit, and their power to make a good extempore speech on any subject, without opportunity ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... out his hand, which our hero seized, and then, unable to repress his exultation, threw up his cap to the ceiling and indulged in an extempore dance, the doctor meanwhile looking on ...
— Only An Irish Boy - Andy Burke's Fortunes • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... ancient Italian troop we have retained three or four of the characters, while their origin has nearly escaped our recollection; but of the burlesque comedy, the extempore dialogue, the humorous fable, and its peculiar species of comic acting, all ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... with a wife and children, whom he tenderly loved, looking up to him for subsistence, with a body lacerated by the acutest pains, and with a mind distracted by a thousand avocations and obliged for immediate supply to produce almost extempore a farce, a pamphlet, or a newspaper." Murphy's careless pen seems here to confuse the student years with those of assiduous effort at the Bar; and the extempore farces are, judging by the dates of Fielding's collected plays, no more than a rhetorical flourish: but there seems no reason ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... were very simple, and of two kinds only: the one, a sort of flute, producing four notes, and blown with the nostrils; the other, a drum, made of the hollow trunk of a tree; but the accompanying songs, usually extempore poems, were pretty, and showed the delicacy of their ear. The girls excelled in the dance; the married women were forbidden to take part in it, and the men never did. The dancers executed a species of ballet, and, according to the judgment of travellers, they might with little ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... 2nd.—Mrs. H— took me to Dr. Bell's (the old homoeopathic doctor) to hear Lord Radstock speak about "training children." It was a curious affair. First a very long hymn; then two very long extempore prayers (not by Lord R—), which were strangely self-sufficient and wanting in reverence. Lord R—'s remarks were commonplace enough, though some of his theories were new, but, I think, not true—e.g., that encouraging emulation in ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... sleeves at his commission. Their best answer would have been to have pressed the anti-impositionists with their utter forgetfulness of the possible, nay, very probable differences of opinion between the ministers and their congregations. A vain minister might disgust a sober congregation with his 'extempore' prayers, or his open contempt of their kneeling at the Sacrament, and the like. Yet by what right if he acts only as an individual? And then what an endless source of disputes and preferences of ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of the family, who stood gazing in fixed astonishment, to resume their task of spinning cotton, in which they employed themselves the greater part of the night. They lightened their labours by songs, one of which at least was extempore, as their guest was the subject of it. It was sung by one of the young women, the rest joining in chorus. The air was sweet and plaintive, and the words, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... to read Tully, or such like classical Latin author EXTEMPORE, and make and speak true Latin in verse and prose suo (ut aiunt) Marte, and decline perfectly the paradigms of nouns and verbs in the Greek tongue, then may he be admitted into the College, nor shall any ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... an heirloom, of J. Thompson Harrower, Esq., of this city, was exhibited the full uniform of an artillery officer of the year 1775. Several quaint old sketches and paintings were placed around the Library, which, with the Museum, was converted for the time into an extempore conversazione hall, and while the melodies of the 'B' Battery band were wafted hither and thither through the building, the dames and cavaliers gossiped pleasantly over their tea or coffee and delicacies provided by the members for the guests, and declared, with much show ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... dined with Lord Treasurer to-day, and sat with him till ten, in spite of my teeth, though my printer waited for me to correct a sheet. I told him of four lines I writ extempore with my pencil, on a bit of paper in his house, while he lay wounded. Some of the servants, I suppose, made waste-paper of them, and he never had heard of them. Shall I tell them you? They were inscribed to ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... evidently ran with Congress, yet Johnson had the promise of very respectable support until he threw it away. His extempore expressions suggested an overweening view of his own position. To the committee reporting to him the Philadelphia convention, he said, "We have seen hanging upon the verge of the government, as it were, a body called, or which assumes to be, the Congress ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... held; the bread and wine, mixed with water, were consecrated with the same texts by which they are blessed to-day, only the prayers were extempore. When all had eaten from the platters and drunk from the rude cups, the bishop gave his blessing to the community. Then he addressed them. This, he told them, was an occasion of peculiar joy, a love-feast indeed, since all they who partook of it were about to lay down the burden ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... like dreams, came from the multitude of business, I should write of nothing but that tragedy extempore,-for I am sure it was got up in a minute,-the argument whereof was your running away. It positively is the staple of conversation. And I think it is rather hard upon me, too. I am here; but that seems to go for nothing. All their talk is of your going away,—running ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... musician. Isabella threw a light mantle around her, and rousing one of her maidens, she opened the window. The rich melody came upon her senses through the balmy odour of myrtle boughs and leaves of honeysuckle. The chords were touched with a skilful hand, and the prelude, a wild and extempore commentary on the ballad, was ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... of the Apostolic Church is simple and consistent, as well as spiritual and sublime. The way of redemption it discloses is not an extempore provision of Supreme benevolence called forth by an unforeseen contingency, but a plan devised from eternity, and fitted to display all the divine perfections in most impressive combination. Whilst it recognises the voluntary agency of man, it upholds the sovereignty of God. ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... must have been deplorably imperfect; though we must own it probable that some more jokes were (as they call it) cracked during their dinner; but we have by no means been able to come at the knowledge of them. When dinner was removed, the poet began to repeat some verses, which, he said, were made extempore. The following is a copy of them, procured ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... night in the chapel Margaret Grant and the other girls of the Specialities were startled when Mr. Fairfax made special mention of Betty Vivian, praying God to comfort her in sore distress and to heal her sickness. The prayer was extempore, and roused the ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... time as to preaching was a sort of compromise between reading a sermon and speaking extempore, a mode morally as well as artistically false: the preacher learned his sermon by rote, and repeated it—as much like the man he therein was not, and as little like the parrot he was, as he could. It is no wonder, in such an attempt, either that memory should fail a shy man, or assurance ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... the "right stripe" doctrine. This, however, was soon settled, and Marston not only suspended his engagement with the Elder, but entered into a contract with the neighbouring planters, by the terms of which Harry will fill their pulpit, and preach extempore—the Elder has brought written sermons into contempt with Harry—at a stipulated price per Sunday. In this new avocation-this leap from the plantation to the pulpit, Harry, as a piece of property, became extremely valuable; while, through the charm of his new black coat, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... animal, tickled its ear with a straw every time it bent its head towards the bundle of hay which lay at its feet. No clown or pantaloon was there to inflict condign punishment, because none was needed. A brother carter standing by performed the part, extempore. His eye suddenly lit on the culprit; his whip sprang into the air and descended on the urchin's breech. Horror-struck, his mouth opened responsive to the crack, and a yell came forth that rose high above the surrounding din, while his little legs carried him away over the sands like ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... my father stayed at home—a rare thing for him to do; nay, more, he went and smoked his peaceful pipe in the garden. John lay on an extempore sofa, made of three of our high-backed chairs and the window-sill. I read to him—trying to keep his attention, and mine too, solely to the Great Plague of London and Daniel Defoe. When, just as I was stealthily glancing at his face, fancying ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... now wearing late, and our landlord had just come in to announce that supper was ready, and would be served up when ordered, we agreed to rest satisfied for the night with the extempore autobiographies, as I may call them, of our two worthy companions—the little hunch-backed personage in the bright yellow waistcoat, and the melancholy gentleman; but we, at the same time, resolved that ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... conversation turned upon a war which the king had just brought to a happy conclusion against the prince of Hircania, his vassal. Zadig, who had signalized his courage in this short war, bestowed great praises on the king, but greater still on the lady. He took out his pocketbook, and wrote four lines extempore, which he gave to this amiable person to read. His friends begged they might see them; but modesty, or rather a well-regulated self love, would not allow him to grant their request. He knew that extemporary verses are never approved of by any but by the ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... into my tent, played on his one-stringed fiddle, and sang an extempore song for the protection of the Consul. I gave him a handkerchief. It appears that ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... only important species of literature not derived from the Greeks, and altogether peculiar to Italy. These Fescennine Songs were rude dialogues, in which the country people assailed and ridiculed one another in extempore verses, and which were introduced as an amusement in various festivals. They were formed into the Satire[75] by C. LUCILIUS, who wrote in hexameter verse, and attacked the follies and vices both of distinguished persons and of mankind in general. He was born ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... fear of the law, counterfeited a distraction, and by his own family it was spread about the city that he was mad. He then secretly composed some elegiac verses, and getting them by heart, that it might seem extempore, ran out into the market-place with a cap upon his head, and, the people gathering about him, got upon the herald's stand, and sang that elegy which ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... and hardship with which an instant before they were entirely overcome." And Wood, in his journey to Palmyra:—"At night the Arabs sat in a circle drinking coffee, while one of the company diverted the rest by relating a piece of history on the subject of love or war, or with an extempore tale." ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... him, in relation to two other excellent engravers, were written shortly for extempore expansion in lecturing. I give them, with the others in this terminal article, mainly for use to myself in future reference; but also as more or less suggestive to the reader, if he has taken ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... decided that extempore prayer must be discouraged, and seeking out in one of the manuals a form of prayer of strictly limited range, repressed all ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... a very extempore affair, providing there is enough of meat and drink to be had; but on the present occasion, Ludovic bustled about to procure some better wine than ordinary; observing that the old Lord was the surest gear in ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... informed on most of the subjects which usually occupy the attention of the Legislature; and he is happy in turning his information to good account. He is ready on all occasions, which he deems fitting ones, with a speech in favor of the policy advocated by the party with whom he acts. His extempore resources are ample. Few men in the House can improvise better. It does not appear to cost him an effort to speak.... He is a man of very considerable talent, but has nothing approaching to genius. His abilities are much more the result of an excellent education and of mature ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... Read the 'Extempore Prologue' which Sly speaks at the conclusion of the Induction—a shameless travesty of the Epilogue in As You Like It. Read the beginning of act iii. sc. 2 of The Malcontent, where Malevole ('in some freeze gown') ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... he was able to start it. This done, the congregation joined in, and the singing went off pretty well. After praying and reading a chapter in the Bible, Odell sat down to collect his thoughts for the sermon, which was, of course, to be extempore, as Methodist sermons usually are. It is customary for the choir, if there is one, to sing an anthem during this pause; or, where no singers are set apart, for some members to strike up an appropriate hymn, in which the congregation ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... and interesting subject. I have just been working at it, and you will find my opinions in my book." If he were asked to give his opinions now, or at least to indicate them, he shook his head and gently said, "I am not good at extempore speaking. My thoughts only come out clearly when I have a pen in my hand." Not a day passed by without an allusion to "the book," to which he devoted his nights, and of which he always spoke, with emotion in his voice, as the work ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... Demades, a contemporary of Demosthenes, who, by his genius for extempore oratory, raised himself to a predominant position in Athens as a champion of the Macedonian influence, but afterwards incurred the ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... the bread and wine, mixed with water, were consecrated with the same texts by which they are blessed to-day, only the prayers were extempore. When all had eaten from the platters and drunk from the rude cups, the bishop gave his blessing to the community. Then he addressed them. This, he told them, was an occasion of peculiar joy, a love-feast indeed, since all they who partook of it were about to lay down the burden ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... him, and, rising, delivered an extempore speech, declaring that "we must not delay. The leeches (here he looked at Mr. Pell) are sucking the ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... and impartially faithful to all. Moreover, as we have seen, he lives under laws which dictate almost every detail of his public and private conduct, and punish every sign of bad discipline with the most appalling rigour; and these laws are enforced by police who supply the chance gaps in them extempore, and exercise that authority in the best manner of prison guards, animal ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... compose an extempore song, adapted to immediate circumstances, beginning—'I love no vain and fickle youth,' and beautifully depicting the love of a young woman for a man advanced in years. She sung it with a most touching ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... baiting each alternate hook with mutton and worms. I declared this was too cockney a method of fishing, and selected a tall slender flax-stick, the stalk of last year's spike of red honey-filled blossoms, and to this extempore rod I fastened my line and bait. When one considers that the old whalers were accustomed to use ropes made in the rudest fashion, from the fibre of this very plant, in their deep-sea fishing for very big prey, it is not surprising that we found ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... 8.45. A telegram, informing him of what had taken place, reached him the next morning at Brighton while he was at breakfast. He preached his sermon, charming the congregation by the graces of his extempore eloquence,—moving every woman there to tears,—and then was after his wife before the ladies had taken their first glass of sherry at luncheon. But her ladyship had twenty-four hours' start of him,—although he did his best; and when he ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... admits Burke's wit to have been, he declares that it appeared artificial when set by that of Townshend, which was so abundant in him that it seemed a loss of time to think. Townshend's utterances had always the fascinating effervescence of spontaneity, while even Burke's extempore utterances were so pointed and artfully arranged that they wore the appearance of study and preparation. This brilliant, resplendent creature, in every respect the opposite to George Grenville, showy ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... people even went so far as to assert, that the three Miss Browns, who had an obscure family pew just behind the churchwardens', were detected, one Sunday, in the free seats by the communion-table, actually lying in wait for the curate as he passed to the vestry! He began to preach extempore sermons, and even grave papas caught the infection. He got out of bed at half-past twelve o'clock one winter's night, to half-baptise a washerwoman's child in a slop-basin, and the gratitude of the parishioners knew no bounds—the very churchwardens grew generous, and insisted on the parish defraying ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... strong in hearts in which every other feeling of virtue had so long been dead. The Vicar of Wakefield's sermon in prison is, it seems, founded on a deep and true knowledge of human nature; the spark of good is often smothered, never wholly extinguished. Mrs. Fry often says an extempore prayer; but this day she was quite silent; while she covered her face with her hands for some minutes, the women were perfectly silent, with their eyes fixed upon her; and when she said, "You may go," they went away slowly. ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... men, with the three women of the place, had assembled at the funeral. An extempore prayer was made, filled with all the peculiarities usual to that style of petition. Ah, how different from the soothing verses of the glorious burial service ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... out which might he called the practice of the Church of England: for there are many things may be said to be the practice of the Church, which were never established by any law either common, statute, or canon; as singing of psalms, binding up; prayers at the end of the Bible, and praying extempore before and after sermon: and though these are things indifferent, yet things for aught they at present know may be started, which may be said to be the practice of the Church which would not be fit to allow. For the Lords' priviledges, Mr. Waller told them how tender ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... was thickly and evenly distributed over the inner side of the hammock, and then the invalid was again deposited within it, and securely lashed up, his head only being left free. This done, two lanyards were securely attached to the extempore hammock, one at its head, and the ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... was confirmed by a third, who assured his companions that Potion was never known to be disguised in liquor but once, at a meeting of the godly, where he had distinguished himself by an extempore prayer an hour long. After this preamble, Crab addressed himself to me in these words: "Well, my lad, I have heard a good character of you, and I'll do for you. You may send your things to my house ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... the Doctor went on, "the Devil can never prevent me preaching from that text. I could speak extempore upon it for hours, it was the very first command both to Adam and also to Noah when he came out of the ark. Dear Mrs. Etheridge, let me touch that divine cunt of yours. I can't make out what your husband has been about since the charming Ethel was born that you have ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... and turned, trimmed and tamed, that they never admitted a sentence that could warm the heart, or one that could offend the ear. He had so great a horror of a vulgarism that, like Canning, he would have made a periphrasis of a couple of lines to avoid using the word "cat." It was only in extempore speaking that a ray of his real genius could indiscreetly betray itself. One may judge what labor such a super-refinement of taste would inflict upon a man writing in a language not his own to some distinguished statesman or some literary institution,—knowing ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that Jones wrote verses for the ladies extempore, and gives a sample, the sentiments of which are as characteristic of the declamatory century as of the naively ...
— Paul Jones • Hutchins Hapgood
... three men and a boy. All ranged themselves on seats round the room, and Mrs. Caxton opened her book and read a chapter in the Bible. Eleanor listened, in mute wonder where this would end. It ended in all kneeling down and Mrs. Caxton offering a prayer. An extempore prayer, which for simplicity, strength, and feeling, answered all Eleanor's sense of what a prayer ought to be; though how a woman could speak it before others and before men, filled her with astonishment. But it filled her with humility too, before ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... two hearts. The shock of its coming, after long hours of storm, had stirred Uniacke and his guest strangely. And the former, leaving in the rectory parlour the sermon he had composed, preached extempore on the text, "In the evening there shall ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... is always plainly and clearly stated, as business always should be. For gay and amusing letters, for 'enjouement and badinage,' there are none that equal Comte Bussy's and Madame Sevigne's. They are so natural, that they seem to be the extempore conversations of two people of wit, rather, than letters which are commonly studied, though they ought not to be so. I would advise you to let that book be one in your itinerant library; it will both amuse and ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... The drums were blocks of wood of cylindrical form, solid at one end, but scooped out and covered at the other with shark's skin. They were beaten by the hands instead of sticks. The natives sang to these instruments, and often made extempore verses. ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... directed towards himself. When visiting Dublin he was accompanied by the celebrated violinist Dubourg, who was engaged to play at his performances. One evening Dubourg was delighting the audience with an extempore cadenza, and wandered so far away from the original key that he found it no easy matter to return to it. At length, after some moments of suspense, the shake was heard which announced that the violinist ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... the camp, to bring water, and lead the camels, were permitted to remain with us. That evening we invited the captain and his crew to dine in the camp; and it was fortunate that we did so, as the sequel will show. Shortly after sundown, as we were all sitting in our usual way, on an extempore divan in front of the tents, drinking coffee, telling stories, and enjoying the cool sea evening breezes, a challenge was heard by the sentinel placed on the rear right of the camp, followed by a sudden and rapid discharge of musketry, which ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... hurrying to his place at one of the desks, where, as he arrived, he stood. The master already stood in solemn posture at the nearer end of the room on a platform behind his desk, prepared to commence the extempore prayer, which was printed in a kind of blotted stereotype upon every one of their brains. Annie had hardly succeeded in reaching a vacant place among the girls when he began. The boys were as still as death while the master prayed; but a spectator might easily have discovered that ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... difficulty our gentlemen could prevail upon her to see the play out, or to refrain from tears while it was acting. The piece concluded with the reception she was supposed to meet with from her friends at her return; which was not a very favourable one. These people can add little extempore pieces to their entertainments, when they see occasion. Is it not then reasonable to suppose that it was intended as a satire against this girl, and to discourage others from following ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... fitted up my room with the most thoughtful care. A large bouquet adorns the table; fancy writing materials are displayed; and a waiter, with sirups and an extempore soda fount, one of Parisian household refinements, stands just at my elbow. Above all, my walls are hung with beautiful engravings from ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Praise is the work of heaven; but we see here, that an hypocrite may get into that vein, even while an hypocrite, and while on earth below. Nor do I think that this prayer of his was a premeditated stinted form, but a prayer extempore, made on a sudden, according to what he felt, thought, or ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... injured. He afterwards said that nothing could have been more touching than old Mr. Fordyce's manner of mentioning this special cause for gratitude before the General Thanksgiving; and Frank Fordyce, having had all his sermons burnt, gave a short address extempore (a very rare and almost shocking thing at that date), reducing half the congregation to tears, for they really loved 'the fam'ly,' though they had not spirit enough to defend it; and their passiveness ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Rowland stood behind the high desk of the mistress, and gave a short lecture on the words, 'Thou crownest the year with thy goodness.' Rowland was not ungifted with the talent for extempore preaching, common to so many of his countrymen, and therewith possessed, in general, much self-possession; on the present occasion, it must be confessed that he felt unusually nervous, still he commanded himself and his feelings, and by degrees, forgetting them and his ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... extemporizing his lucid views, leading ideas, and nutshell truths for the breakfast table. The very nature of periodical literature, broken into small wholes, and demanded punctually to an hour, involves the habit of this extempore philosophy. "Almost all the Ramblers," says Boswell of Johnson, "were written just as they were wanted for the press; he sent a certain portion of the copy of an essay, and wrote the remainder while the former part of it was printing." Few men have the gifts ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... direction, but madam frowned so majestically that they passed on into another car, leaving us to our extra seat. At Rhinebeck, however, she found her match in a very fine-looking man, apparently forty or thereabouts, with a weed on his hat and a certain air, which savored strongly of psalms and hymns and extempore praying. In short, I guessed at once that he was a Presbyterian minister, old school at that. Now, madam, you know, is true blue—apostolically descended, and cannot tolerate anything like a dissenter. But I do not give her credit for having sufficient sagacity to detect the heretic in this handsome, ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... an argumentative speech on the spur of the moment. The generality of speakers are utterly unfit for the task, and accordingly do it ill. A few men, by long training, acquire the power of casting their thoughts into speaking train, so as to make a good appearance in extempore reply; yet even these would do still better if they had a little time. The adjournment of a debate, and the reopening of a question at successive stages, furnish the real opportunities for effective reply. In a debate begun and ended at ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... public monitor, their example in christian conduct, their joy in health, their consolation in sickness." In the same vault with Mr. Archdeacon Clive, lies buried Robert Lord Clive, conqueror of Plassy: on whose death appeared these extempore lines, by a man of distinction, a ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... not present, for he was engaged in making some arrangements for the commissariat on the march. He had always insisted on it that they were indispensable, and he had been bitterly opposed the week before by some of his brethren, who were in favour of extempore foraging which looked very much like plunder. He carried his point, notwithstanding some sarcastic abuse and insinuations of half- heartedness, which had touched also Caillaud and Zachariah, who supported him. Zachariah ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... furnish perhaps the best example of this class of public speaking that is available. Although they were extempore, as far as the actual language is concerned, they have been preserved in full. In spite of the informal style appropriate to the "stump," these discussions of the Dred Scott decision, Popular Sovereignty, and the other questions suggested by slavery are marked by a closeness ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... from Washington over the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, on a freight-train, when he heard of the President's danger. Langenzunge loved Old Rough and Ready,—and he felt badly about his own office, too. But his extempore train chose to stop at a forsaken shanty-village on the Potomac, for four mortal hours, at midnight. What does he do, but walk down the line into the darkness, climb a telegraph-post, cut a wire, and applied the two ends to his tongue, to taste, at the fatal moment, the words, ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... find our way about. Instead of saying the Lord's Prayer four times, we said it once; we left out half the psalms for the day, the Rector explaining from the chancel steps that they were not fit to be read in a Christian church; we altered this prayer and that prayer; we listened to an extempore prayer for the widows and orphans of some poor fellows who have been killed in a mine ten miles from here, which made me cry like baby; and, most amazing of all, when it came ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ourselves? Units on the way to heaven, units bowed down by the same sorrows, cheered by the same hopes, torn asunder by the same temptations as the gracious one and myself?" And immediately he launched forth into a flood of eloquence about units; for in Germany sermons are all extempore, and the clergy, from constant practice, acquire a fatal fluency of speech, bursting out in the week on the least provocation into preaching, and not by any known means ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... moreover how, tho he could not speak in Parliament, he might preach, rhapsodic preaching; above all, how he might be great in extempore prayer. These are the free outpouring utterances of what is in the heart: method is not required in them; warmth, depth, sincerity are all that is required. Cromwell's habit of prayer is a notable feature of him. All his great enterprises were ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... to create knowledge, instead of searching for it; and, ready as Burke's wit was, it appeared artificial when set by that of Townshend, which was so abundant that in him it seemed a loss of time to think. He had but to speak, and all he said was new, natural, and yet uncommon. If Burke replied extempore, his very answers that sprang from what had been said by others were so pointed and artfully arranged that they wore the appearance of study and preparation; like beautiful translations, they seemed to want the soul of the original author. Townshend's speeches, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... of animalism by orgies of self-abasement, during which he—in half-confessing his own lapses—attributed freely and unrebukedly the same vices to the male half of his overflowing congregation. These out-pourings—"Pechadur truenus wyf i! Arglwydd madden i mi!"—extempore prayers, psalms chanted with a swaying of the body, hymns sung uproariously, scripture read with an accompaniment of groans, hysteric laughter, and interjections of assent, and a rambling discourse—lasting fully an hour, were ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... thirteen, Beethoven published at Mannheim, in his own name, Variations on a March, Sonatas, and Songs. But at this time his genius displayed itself more decidedly in musical improvisations. His extempore fantasias are mentioned by Gerber, in his Lexicon, as having excited the admiration of the most accomplished ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... early waking on that fine morning, though not quite so early as the one just described. Master Junkie Brook, lying in a packing-box, which served as an extempore crib, in the cottage of Kenneth McTavish, opened his large round eyes and rubbed them. Getting up, he observed that Mrs Scholtz was sound asleep, and quietly dressed himself. He was a precocious child, and had learned to dress without assistance. The lesson was more easily learned ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... one should make an extempore couplet to the same rhyme and measure. Every one accordingly repeated his verse. As we had been very merry, I repeated the following extempore ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... descant; harangue, diatribe, tirade, screed, rhapsody, philippic, invective, rant; soliloquy, monologue; dialogue; colloquy; trialogue; interlocution; improvisation; toast; equivocation, prevarication, quibbling; ambages, pseudology, amphibology, amphiboly, dilogy. Associated Words: extempore, extemporaneous, extemporize, extemporization, impromptu, improvise, improvisation, brogue, aphasia, amnesia, oratory, elocution, rhetoric, oratorical, rhetorical, rhetorician, elocutionary, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... my Saturday pennies was in going with some of my companions into the country to have a picnic. We used to light a fire behind a hedge or a dyke, or in the corner of some ruin, and there roast our potatoes, or broil a red herring on an extempore gridiron we contrived for the purpose. We lit the fire by means of a flint and steel and a tinder-box, which in those days every boy used to possess. The bramble-berries gave us our dessert. We thoroughly enjoyed these glorious Saturday afternoons. It gave us quite a Robinson ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... American traveller bivouacked as follows:—His rifles were tied together near the muzzles, the butts resting on the ground widely apart; a knife was laid on the rope that tied them together, to cut it in case of an alarm; over this extempore framework was thrown a large india-rubber cloth, with which he covered his packs when on the road; it made a cover sufficiently large to receive about half of his bed, and was a place of shelter ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... God's providence provided better for me. For the last two years of my being at school I was of the highest form of the school, and chiefest of that form. I could then speak Latin as well as English; could make extempore verses upon any theme.' 'If any scholars from remote schools came to dispute, I was ringleader to dispute with them.' 'All and every of those scholars, who were of my form and standing, went to Cambridge, and proved ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... of ships, wading in pools after the abominable creatures of the sea, and ever with an eye cast backward on the march of the tide and the menaced line of your retreat. And then you might go Crusoeing, a word that covers all extempore eating in the open air: digging perhaps a house under the margin of the links, kindling a fire of the sea-ware, and cooking apples there—if they were truly apples, for I sometimes suppose the merchant must have played us off ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Hours together upon any Thing; but it must be owned to the Honour of the other Sex, that there are many among them who can Talk whole Hours together upon Nothing. I have known a Woman branch out into a long Extempore Dissertation upon the Edging of a Petticoat, and chide her Servant for breaking a China Cup, in all the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... course from the series now published, is in order to mark more definitely this limitation of my subject; but in other respects the Lectures have been amplified in arranging them for the press, and the portions of them trusted at the time to extempore delivery, (not through indolence, but because explanations of detail are always most intelligible when most familiar,) have been in substance to the best of my power set down, and in what I said too ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... the greatest curiosities you meet with in Italy, is the Improvisatore; such is the name given to certain individuals, who have the surprising talent of reciting verses extempore, on any subject you propose. Mr. Corvesi, my landlord, has a son, a Franciscan friar, who is a ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... the request of the Puritans to be allowed occasionally to substitute extemporaneous for liturgical devotions. "The gift or rather spirit of prayer consists in the inward graces of the spirit, not in extempore expressions which any man of natural parts having a voluble tongue and audacity may attain to without any special gift." Nothing very conciliatory in that. To the complaint that the Collects are too short, the bishops reply that they cannot for that reason be accounted faulty, being like ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... what could we better exhort them to accustom themselves? For perfection is only attained by neither speaking nor acting at random—as the proverb says, Perfection is only attained by practice.[18] Whereas extempore oratory is easy and facile, mere windbag, having neither beginning nor end. And besides their other shortcomings extempore speakers fall into great disproportion and repetition, whereas a well considered speech preserves its due proportions. ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... Church of England service, lessons and all, the latter, if interesting, eloquently (ibid.). After the service, one of Jeremy Taylor's sermons (vi. 188). After sermon, if the weather was fine, walk with his family, dogs included and guests, to cold picnic (iii. 109), followed by short extempore biblical novelettes; for he had his Bible, the Old Testament especially, by heart, it having been his mother's last gift to him (vi. 174). These lessons to his children in Bible history were always given, whether there was picnic or not. For the rest of the afternoon ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... you singers and players have a smug little fashion of forgetting that there is a composer back of you. You don't sing extempore, Thayer, make up the song as you go along. You're nothing more than a species of elocutionist, you know, trying to show the people who weren't on the spot what the composer really did ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... not much in favour either with the genuine lovers of music or the lovers of quiet, and they know the fact perfectly well. They hang about the crowded haunts of the common people, and find their harvest in a vulgar jollification, or an extempore 'hop' at the door of a suburban public-house on a summer night. There are a few old-women performers on this hybrid machine, one of whom is familiar to the public through the dissemination of her vera ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... chief. Jacob chanced fortunately to be concealed in a rugged piece of ground where horses could not act. As the Indians were riding away he shot the horse that bore the pastor, and at the same time uttered a series of yells and extempore war-whoops so appalling that the savages gave him credit for being at least a dozen foes, and fled over a ridge before turning to see what had happened. The fall of the horse had stunned the pastor, but the Indian leaped up and drew his knife. Fortunately Jacob's rifle ...
— The Thorogood Family • R.M. Ballantyne
... Obio Allah A Friend's Birthday To a Cat An Epigram upon Ebn Naphta-Wah Fire To a Lady Blushing On the Vicissitudes of Life To a Dove On a Thunder Storm To My Favorite Mistress Crucifixion of Ebn Bakiah Caprices of Fortune On Life Extempore Verses On the Death of a Son To Leila On Moderation in our Pleasures The Vale of Bozaa To Adversity On the Incompatibility of Pride and True Glory The Death of Nedham Almolk Lines to a Lover Verses to My Daughters ...
— Oriental Literature - The Literature of Arabia • Anonymous
... gave me this translation, also furnished me with a copy of extempore French verses, given by a gentleman of Maestricht, who was celebrated as an improvisatore. They certainly are very superior. He was at a large party, and agreed to improvise upon any theme given him by five of those present in the way of Souvenir. The first ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... stood gazing in fixed astonishment, to resume their task of spinning cotton, in which they employed themselves the greater part of the night. They lightened their labours by songs, one of which at least was extempore, as their guest was the subject of it. It was sung by one of the young women, the rest joining in chorus. The air was sweet and plaintive, and the words, literally ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... pines is that their inflammable branches are always suggesting a display of extempore fireworks to the Arabs, ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... any art, from writing poetry down to dancing a horn-pipe, the Dr. with great eagerness insisted upon trying his epigrammatic powers with Mr. Garrick, and each of them was to write the other's epitaph. Mr. Garrick immediately said that his epitaph was finished, and spoke the following distich extempore:— ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... crow, and the sun did shine so cold,' was the foundation of the whole. The words were reported to me by my dear friend Thomas Poole; but I have since heard the same reported of other idiots. Let me add, that this long poem was composed in the groves of Alfoxden, almost extempore; not a word, I believe, being corrected, though one stanza was omitted. I mention this in gratitude to those happy moments, for, in truth, I never wrote anything ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... the weaker spirits. And within a week or two thereafter there was this farther Puritan triumph—also the contrivance of the Scottish Commissioners through their friends in Parliament,—that the use of the Liturgy was discontinued in the two Houses, in favour of extempore prayers by Divines appointed for the duty by the Assembly. [Footnote: Baillie, II. ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... too brilliant for her situation, the minister, her father, having bestowed great pains on her education. She was aught drawing, singing, and to play on the theorbo; had learning, and wrote very agreeable verses. The following is an extempore piece which she composed in the absence of her husband and brother, in a conversation with some person relative to them, while walking with her ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... had enough already, and so have I.' There was nothing particularly wise or witty in the words; but their truth was so evident, and the manner in which they were spoken so clear and calm, that they were followed by a roar of laughter that for a little time upset the mighty humorist, though, in the extempore song in which he rallied, he did ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... but with greater complaisance, I hope, than I can feel in reciting them. For prudent judges are wont to judge finished works by a somewhat severe standard, but are far more complaisant to improvisations. For you weigh and examine all that is actually written, but in the case of extempore speaking pardon and criticism go hand in hand, as it is right they should. For what we read forth from manuscript will remain such as it was when set down, even though you say nothing, but those words which I must ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... rang the bell for Betty, and they had worship. Robert read a chapter, and his grandmother prayed an extempore prayer, in which they that looked at the wine when it was red in the cup, and they that worshipped the woman clothed in scarlet and seated upon the seven hills, came in for a strange mixture, in which the vengeance yielded ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... out of their senses (says Wood); but when nothing happened of their predictions, the brothers received a severe castigation from those great enemies of prophets, the wits. The buffoon, Tarleton, celebrated for his extempore humour, jested on them at the theatre;[82] Elderton, a drunken ballad-maker, "consumed his ale-crammed nose to nothing in bear-bating them with bundles of ballads."[83] One on the earthquake commenced with "Quake! quake! quake!" They made the people laugh at their false terrors, or, as Nash humorously ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... It was the Syrian Philostratus, a clever extempore speaker and agitator of the people, who placed his clever tongue at the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage. The oratorio has already lost its relation to the morning, to the sun, and the earth, but that persuading voice is in tune with these. All works of art should not be detached, but extempore performances. A great man is a new statue in every attitude and action. A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad. Life may be lyric or epic, as well as a poem or ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... a front seat for me, so I could see and hear without difficulty. On the raised platform stood my friend the Abbe looking very grave and rather nervous. A cardinal, two bishops, and some half-dozen priests were seated close to him, and very shortly the lecture, which was, I think, extempore, began. ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... in a manner which would have been impossible for me to have imitated without being severely burnt. I once saw him go to a bright wood fire, and, taking a large piece of red-hot charcoal, put it in the hollow of one hand, and, covering it with the other, blow into the extempore furnace till the coal was white hot, and the flames licked round his fingers. No sign of burning could be seen then ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... simple, and of two kinds only: the one, a sort of flute, producing four notes, and blown with the nostrils; the other, a drum, made of the hollow trunk of a tree; but the accompanying songs, usually extempore poems, were pretty, and showed the delicacy of their ear. The girls excelled in the dance; the married women were forbidden to take part in it, and the men never did. The dancers executed a species of ballet, and, according to the judgment of travellers, they ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... a lecturer failed us at the last moment without giving us notice. Then J. and I had to run an entertainment of an instructive kind extempore. J. was strong on personal hygiene. He might start with saluting or the theft of Miss N.'s purse, our great club scandal, but he worked round in the end to soap and tooth brushes. My own business, if we were utterly driven against the wall, was ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... ordeal. In fact, in after times it was several years before I could seize a pen, rattle up a subject and dash off a leader. Now I can write far more easily than I can talk. And it is a curious fact that soon after I became really skilled at such extempore work in the opinion of the best judges, such as Raymond, I no longer had any opportunity ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... be above mere patriotic prejudice, describes the condition of things. "I have heard painters acknowledge that they could do better without nature than with her, or, as they expressed themselves, it only put them out. Our neighbours, the French, are much in this practice of extempore invention, and their dexterity is such as even to excite admiration, if not envy; but how rarely can this praise be given to their finished ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... lowering of the price of meat?—a league for reforming the national costume?—or a league for repealing the laws still existing upon the Statute-book against witches?—Happy Jack was ever in the thickest of the fray, lecturing, expounding, arguing, getting up extempore meetings of the frequenters of public-houses, of which he sent reports to the morning papers, announcing the 'numerous, highly respectable, and influential' nature of the assembly, and modestly hinting, that Mr Happy Jack, 'who was received with enthusiastic ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... Holden cf. Dr. Davy, "Notes and Observations on the Ionian Islands." "The grain is beaten out, commonly in the harvest field, by men, horses, or mules, on a threshing-floor prepared extempore for the purpose, where the ground is firm and dry, and the chaff is separated by winnowing."—Wilkinson, ...
— The Economist • Xenophon
... holy sisters dressed in black. The girl alone who was about to take the habit was in white; and, in front of all the others, knelt down before a table, on which was placed the cross. The abbate, from the outside, now addressed her in a long extempore charge, in which he pointed out the duties of the situation she was about to enter, and forcibly set forth the advantages of it; while he painted, in the strongest and most seducing colours, the superior happiness of renouncing the profane world, and of passing her time in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 270, Saturday, August 25, 1827. • Various
... be without malice or heat. Dull poems to read let none privilege take. Let no poetaster command or intreat Another extempore ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... learning of this diuision, I will set you downe one example of a dittie written extempore with this deuice, shewing not onley much promptnesse of wit in the maker, but also great arte and a notable memorie. Make me saith this writer to one of the comnpanie, so many strokes or lines with your pen as ye would haue ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... of every writer to acquire command of language, in order that he may be able to write with ease and readiness, and, upon any occasion, to form extempore discourses. Unless he can do this, he will never shine as a speaker, nor will he ever make a figure in private conversation. But to do this, it is necessary to study simplicity of style. There never was a ready speaker, whose language was not, generally, plain ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... Mr. Drummond had only made memorandums, perhaps with no resolution to publish them, he may stand acquitted of part of this charge. It is reported of our author that he was very smart, and witty in his repartees, and had a most excellent talent at extempore versifying, above any poet of his time. In the year 1645, when the plague was raging in Scotland, our author came accidentally to Forfar, but was not allowed to enter any house, or to get lodging ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... the Committee on Literature was made by its chairman, Miss Caroline Ruutz-Rees, showing the usual careful selection of valuable matter for publication. Two important compilations she had made herself—Ten Extempore Answers to Questions by Dr. Shaw and extracts from a number of her speeches, gleaned from scattered reports; also an eloquent address made at Birmingham, Ala., the preceding April. So little from Dr. Shaw existed in printed form that these were very welcome. She ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... and the French cock has to crow thrice, "Let Germany flourish." In another game between two students who are contending in the play of striking a ball through an iron ring, it is arranged that he that is beat shall make and repeat extempore some verses in praise of him that beat him. This certainly would make many a youth ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... all snugly laced, So that henceforth it can creep ahead On the road of thought with a cautious tread. And not at random shoot and strike, Zig-zagging Jack-o'-lanthorn-like. Then will you many a day be taught That what you once to do had thought Like eating and drinking, extempore, Requires the rule of one, two, three. It is, to be sure, with the fabric of thought, As with the chef d'oeuvre by weavers wrought, Where a thousand threads one treadle plies, Backward and forward the shuttles keep going, Invisibly the threads keep flowing, One stroke a thousand fastenings ties: ...
— Faust • Goethe
... festival in honour of Kinchinjhow being annually held at a large chait hard by, which is painted red, ornamented with banners, and surmounted by an enormous yak's skull, that faces the mountain. The Lama invited me into his tent, where I found a wife and family. An extempore altar was at one end, covered with wafers and other pretty ornaments, made of butter, stamped or moulded with the fingers.* [The extensive use of these ornaments throughout Tibet, on the occasion of religious festivals, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... Scully surely, for he always went to Bethesda Chapel, and to a select prayer-meeting afterwards. Alas! it WAS Scully; for though that gentleman SAID that he went to chapel, we have it for a fact that he did not always keep his promise, and was at this moment employed in rehearsing an extempore speech, which he proposed to deliver ...
— The Bedford-Row Conspiracy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... religious has no absurd shame of this natural passion. I have heard of a Persian Imam, who, suddenly excited as he was sleeping in a friend's house, awoke the master with, "Shahwah daram" "I am lustful" and was at once gratified by a "Mut'ah," temporary and extempore marriage to one of the slave-girls. These morganatic marriages are not, I may note, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... from the undertaking. In August, several students from the University attended the Sabbath and Thursday evening services, and called at other times for conversation, and two Greeks of hopeful piety were accustomed to take part in reading the Scriptures and extempore prayer at a Sabbath evening prayermeeting. The devoted missionary felt himself called on to work while ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson
... himself for succour. To convince him that this was not the case at present, he produced the bank-note which he had received in the letter, together with his own ready money; and mentioned some other funds, which he invented extempore, in order to amuse the lieutenant's concern. In the close of this expostulation, he desired Pipes to conduct Mr. Hatchway to the coffee-house, where he might amuse himself with the newspaper for half an hour; during which he would put on his clothes, and bespeak something ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... unwonted desperation to the very brink of the crag. Some fishermen had brought with them the mast of a boat, and this was soon sunk in the ground and sufficiently secured. A yard, across the upright mast, and a rope stretched along it, and reeved through a block at each end, formed an extempore crane, which afforded the means of lowering an arm-chair down to the flat shelf on ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... to hear his father pray—always extempore. To the Scots mind it is a perplexity how prayer and reading should ever seem one. Kirsty went a little deeper into the matter when ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... parodies, and burlesque verses, most of them extempore, are taken from Anecdotes of Dr. ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... in for that. It was run by the three C. of E. Padres and the Wesleyan hand in hand: the latter has been in the Nile Expedition of '98 and all through South Africa. We had Mission Hymns roared by the Tommies, and then a C. of E. Padre gave a short address—quite good. The Wesleyan did an extempore prayer, rather well, and a very nice huge C. of E. man gave the Blessing. Now they are having a Tommies' concert—a talented ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... a Court of Judgment was opened. Those Greenlanders who had quarrelled stepped forward, and the offended person chanted forth the faults of his adversary in an extempore song, turning them sharply into ridicule, to the sound of the pipe and the measure of the dance. The defendant replied with satire as keen, while the audience laughed, and gave their verdict. The rocks heaved, ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... Town-end, Grasmere. The first eight stanzas were composed extempore one winter evening in the cottage, when, after having tired myself with labouring at an awkward passage in 'The Brothers', I started with a sudden impulse to this to get rid of the other, and finished it in a day ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... and partly as specimen of his speaking and writing style, what Elias Hicks himself says in allusion to it—one or two of very many passages. Most of his discourses, like those of Epictetus and the ancient peripatetics, have left no record remaining—they were extempore, and those were not the times of reporters. Of one, however, deliver'd in Chester, Pa., toward the latter part of his career, there is a careful transcript; and from it (even if presenting you a sheaf of hidden wheat that may ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... and Madlle. de Branca, the latter being a kind of half pupil of mine, for Sigl seldom comes, and Becke, who usually accompanies her on the flute, is not here. On the three days that I was at Count Salern's I played a great many things extempore—two Cassations [Divertimentos] for the Countess, and the finale and Rondo, and the latter by heart. You cannot imagine the delight this causes Count Salern. He understands music, for he was constantly saying Bravo! while other ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... probable than that disappointment may have made that noxious climate more deadly. Hints of poisoning were thrown out, but this is a surmise easily and often lightly made. "Thus," says Fuller, in his "Holy State," "an extempore performance, scarce heard to be begun before we hear it is ended, comes off with better applause, or miscarries with less disgrace, than a long-studied and openly premeditated action. Besides, we see how great spirits, having mounted ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... without stop or interruption; whereas the pleader's business and interest compels him to enter the lists upon all occasions, and the unexpected objections and replies of his adverse party jostle him out of his course, and put him, upon the instant, to pump for new and extempore answers and defences. Yet, at the interview betwixt Pope Clement and King Francis at Marseilles, it happened, quite contrary, that Monsieur Poyet, a man bred up all his life at the bar, and in the highest repute for eloquence, having the charge of making the ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... acting. The piece concluded with the reception which she was supposed to meet with from her friends at her return; and it was a reception that was by no means favourable. As these people, when they see occasion, can add little extempore pieces to their entertainments, it is reasonable to imagine, that the representation now described was intended as a satire against the girl, and to discourage others from following her steps. Such is the sense which they entertain of the propriety ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... tracks; right away; toute a l'heure[Fr]; at one jump, in the same breath, per saltum[Lat], uno saltu[Lat]; at once, all at once; plump, slap; "at one fell swoop"; at the same instant &c. n.; immediately &c. (early) 132; extempore, on the moment, on the spot, on the spur of the moment; no sooner said than done; just then; slap-dash &c. (haste) 684. Phr. touch and go; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... choral, assisted by a robed choir and a good organ. The sermon was preached by the Rev. Provost Powell, who took for his text Romans xiv. 7: "For none liveth to himself and no man dieth to himself." He gave us a clever oration, but whether extempore or otherwise we could not tell, as from where we sat we could not see the preacher. There was not a large congregation, probably owing to the fact that the people in the North are opposed to innovations, and look upon ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... Forum, the Basilica, the Amphitheatre, which is in a perfect state of preservation, and more elliptical in form than any of those I have yet seen, and the School of Eloquence, where R** mounted the rostrum, and gave us an oration extempore, equally pithy, classical and comical. About sunset we got into the carriages, and returned ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... as in places of public resort. Hugh Branning was soon convinced that the village was no place for him. He had bravely horsewhipped a cripple, but he could not stop the tongues of the whole parish, even if he could protect himself from swift and extempore justice. He gathered his clothes, and, after a long private conference with his mother, started before daylight for the railway-station. As he does not appear on the stage again, we may say here, that, not long after, during a financial ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... this as a sort of letter of form on the occasion, for there is nothing worth telling you. The event that has made most noise since my last, is the extempore wedding of the youngest of the two Gunnings, who have made so vehement a noise. Lord Coventry,(295) a grave young lord, of the remains of the patriot breed, has long dangled after the eldest, virtuously with regard to her virtue, not ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... in a gay, ever-repeated chorus; some raffling for nuts and biscuits at smartly-decked fair-booths, or playing at Chinese billiards for painted mugs or huge cakes of gilt gingerbread; some listening to the stump orations of an extempore fortuneteller, who promised the baton of the field-marshal to any conscript who would give him a penny; and some buying by yards the patriotic, soul-stirring songs of Beranger, and reciting them in every tone, in every key and to every tune. One ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... memory; and he was not given to hypothesis and experiment. It did occur to him that he could perhaps get some help by praying for it; but as the prayers he said every evening were forms learned by heart, he rather shrank from the novelty and irregularity of introducing an extempore passage on a topic of petition for which he was not aware of any precedent. But one day, when he had broken down, for the fifth time, in the supines of the third conjugation, and Mr. Stelling, convinced that this must be carelessness, ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... the reputation of genius. Its air of simplicity, the judge not being on his guard against it, begets belief, and tho the discourse in all other parts be elaborate and written with great accuracy, it will for the most part seem an extempore oration, the exordium evidently ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... the Reformation it was called the Bidding of the beads. The people were bid to pray for certain objects as the preacher successively named them. The canonical form of the present prayer is given in the 55th Canon. The ordinary practice of using a collect is now sanctioned by custom. An extempore prayer, however, from the preacher is quite unauthorized. At the University sermons, and also on occasions of more than usual solemnity, the Bidding Prayer is always used. In Borough towns it is appropriately repeated ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... Many of them arrayed themselves in a store on Fort Hill. The original number of one of the parties was fifteen or twenty. Many others joined in the act of breaking up the boxes, who disguised themselves as best they could, and some, chiefly extempore volunteers, were not disguised at all. Hewes himself, while the crowd rushed down Milk Street, made his way to a blacksmith's shop, on Boylston's wharf, where he hastily begrimmed his face with a soot-able preparation, thence ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... from his shocked, scandalized air, had he not recognized in one of the party a clergyman, he would have delivered an extempore philippic on the extraordinary habits of his niece: respect for ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... nearly an hour, with frequent pauses and strange changes in the inflexion of the voice. We will not attempt a repetition of his arguments, but must record one sentence in an extempore sermon of great versatility and power; a sentence that, if we understood it aright, was singularly liberal and broad in view. Speaking of the rivalry that existed between the different sects of Christians, ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... Exposition ekspozicio. Expostulate rezonegi. Expound klarigi. Express esprimi. Express-train rapida vagonaro. Expression esprimo. Expressly speciale. Expulsion elpelo. Expunge elstreki. Exquisite rava. Extant ekzistanta. Extempore senprepara. Extend etendi. Extension etendo. Extensive vasta. Exterior eksterajxo. Exterminate ekstermi. External ekstera. Extinct estingita. Extinguish estingi. Extirpate elradikigi. Extol lauxdegi. Extort eltiregi. Extra ekstra. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... initiated me into all the charms of Pisan society. He had organized a little choir of ladies of rank, remarkable for their intelligence and beauty, and had taught them to sing extempore to the guitar. He had had them instructed by the famous Gorilla, who was crowned poetess-laureate at the capitol by night, six years later. She was crowned where our great Italian poets were crowned; and though her merit was no doubt great, it was, nevertheless, more tinsel than gold, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... decanter and the glass, and be off to the back chamber looking on the Meadows, where he toiled on his cases till the hours were small. There was no "fuller man" on the bench; his memory was marvellous, though wholly legal; if he had to "advise" extempore, none did it better; yet there was none who more earnestly prepared. As he thus watched in the night, or sat at table and forgot the presence of his son, no doubt but he tasted deeply of recondite pleasures. ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dialogues in prose, and not destined for the stage; the Roman were in verse, were acted, and often delivered extempore. The most celebrated authors of this kind were Laberius and Syrus, contemporaries of Julius Caesar. The latter when dictator, by an imperial request, compelled Laberius, a Roman knight, to appear publicly in ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Gauden was a churchman whom his friends might call liberal, and his enemies time-serving. He was a churchman of the stamp of Archbishop Williams, and preferred bishops and the Common-prayer to presbyters and extempore sermons, but did not think the difference between the two of the essence of religion. In better times Gauden would have passed for broad, though his latitudinarianism was more the result of love of ease than of philosophy. Though a ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... own dignity too well to suffer a Fellow of his College to sit down in his presence. He kept his seat himself, and let the Queen's Ambassador stand. Such was the temper, not of a Vice-Chancellor, but of a simple Master of a College. I remember, by the way, an extempore epigram of Matt's on the reception he had there met with. We did not reckon in those days that he had a very happy turn for an epigram; but the occasion was tempting; and he struck it off as he was walking from St. John's College ...
— St. John's College, Cambridge • Robert Forsyth Scott
... fellow who believes in extempore prayer and republican government; and swears England was never so happy or ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... the poop, for a good part of the day. But this soon becomes monotonous; and we begin to consider whether it may not be possible to get up some entertainment on board to make the time pass pleasantly. We had a few extempore concerts in one of the middies' berths. The third-class passengers got up a miscellaneous entertainment, including recitals, which went off very well. One of the tragic recitations was so well received that it was encored. And thus the time was whiled away, while we still kept ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... themselves in which to give a specimen of the construction of their dialect. Music is the only science in which the Gipsies participate in any considerable degree; they likewise compose, but it is after the manner of the Eastern people, extempore." Grellmann asserts that the Hindustan language has the greatest affinity with that of the Gipsies. He also infers from the following consideration that Gipsies are of the lowest class of Indians, namely, Parias, or, as they are ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... multitude became quiet, and the extempore official proceeded—with greater solemnity than many another judge of more regular appointment ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... while his age and life-long devotion to the service of the state, endowed him with unusual authority. The lamented Douglas, who surpassed every other American statesman in casual discussion, and whose name will rank with that of Fox, in the art of extempore debate, could not fail to be the leader of a large party, and the popular idol of a large mass, by the manly energy of his character, his devotion to popular principles, and a rich and sonorous eloquence, which ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... family prayer came round, which was early in those days. It was Manasseh's place to conduct it, as head of the family; a post which his mother had always been anxious to assign to him since her husband's death. He prayed extempore; and to-night his supplications wandered off into wild, unconnected fragments of prayer, which all those kneeling around began, each according to her anxiety for the speaker, to think would never end. Minutes ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... decline of the Irish bards these feet were gradually neglected, and the Caoinan fell into a sort of slipshod metre amongst women. Each province had different Caoinans, or at least different imitations of the original. There was the Munster cry, the Ulster cry, etc. It became an extempore performance, and every set of keepers varied the melody ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
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