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More "Man of letters" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rather than in the moon, and looks for his harvest to the seed and the toil. The intelligent merchant locates his business on the street of largest travel and makes the buying of his goods his best salesman. The intelligent man of letters thrives at first by making friends of poverty and want, until one day his genius places his name in the temple of honor. So it is with the artist, the musician, the inventor, the architect. To be happy and useful in one's lot, one must know something of the sphere in ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... no question that his writings were the first that bore the national literary stamp, that he first made the nation conscious of its gift and opportunity, and that he first announced to trans-Atlantic readers the entrance of America upon the literary field. For some time he was our only man of letters who had a reputation ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... for a cross between a toper and a tinker. Lacking capacity for any other business, he forms a cheap connection with the press, where his first office would seem to be that of sitting in judgment upon literature. Indeed, I have seldom seen a more shabby gentleman set up for a man of letters. His aversion to water and clean linen is only equaled by his love of actors and bad brandy, the latter having painted his face with a deep glow. The limit of his 'set phrases' is somewhat narrow; but notwithstanding this little impediment, he has a wonderful ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... windows, he opens it, leans out, and whistles softly. The alert ear of Policeman Hogan on the pavement below catches the sound, and he returns it. The bottle is lowered to the end of the string, the guardian of the peace applies it to his gullet, and for some time the policeman and the man of letters remain attached by a cord of sympathy. Gentlemen who lead the variegated life of Mr. Scalper find it well to propitiate the arm of the law, and attachments of this sort are not uncommon. Mr. Scalper hauls up the bottle, closes the window, and returns to ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... allowed to find their readers and students they will find them. If their works are annotated and paraphrased by dullards, and the annotations and paraphrases forced on all young people by imprisonment and flogging and scolding, there will not be a single man of letters or higher mathematician the more in the country: on the contrary there will be less, as so many potential lovers of literature and mathematics will have been incurably prejudiced against them. Everyone ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... us say, is the portion of time which the man of letters is called on to devote to ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... from the union with a man of his attainments of intellect, his kind temper, his great experience, and his high position? In this manner they travelled, side by side, lovingly together. Monsieur Peytel was not a lawyer merely, but a man of letters and varied learning; of the noble and sublime science of geology he was, especially, an ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... truth in the reasonings of each individual with reference to the affairs in which he is personally interested, and the issue of which must presently punish him if he has judged amiss, than in those conducted by a man of letters in his study, regarding speculative matters that are of no practical moment, and followed by no consequences to himself, farther, perhaps, than that they foster his vanity the better the more remote they are from common sense; requiring, as they must in this case, the exercise of ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... once published a little book, and he wrote a very nice article about it in a London Review. You did not know I was a man of letters, did you?' Logotheti laughed quietly. 'My book was not very long—only about a hundred pages, I think. But Lushington made out that it wasn't all rubbish, and I ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... press, Columbus with his compass, Galileo with his telescope, Shakspere with his dramas, and almost every other man of note figuring during those times, are grouped, not around some distinguished man of science, or man of letters, or man of mechanical genius, or man famous in war; but around that monk of Wittenberg, who stood with an unchained ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... As a man of letters, Bishop Spencer is entitled to a very honorable position. As a scholar and as a critic, he has evinced such abilities as, fitly devoted, would have secured fame; as a poet and essayist, he has unusual grace and elegance; and ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... for all these are the work of the mind, and in them the body has no share whatever. Since, therefore, arms have need of the mind, as much as letters, let us see now which of the two minds, that of the man of letters or that of the warrior, has most to do; and this will be seen by the end and goal that each seeks to attain; for that purpose is the more estimable which has for its aim the nobler object. The end and goal of letters—I am not speaking now of ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... correspondence columns were crowded with appeals for guidance in questions of dress and etiquette. He was also a favourite in general society, though he is said to have been, next to Fenimore Cooper, the best-abused man of letters in America. One of his most pleasing characteristics was his ready appreciation and encouragement of young writers, for he was totally free from professional jealousy. He was the literary sponsor of Aldrich, Bayard Taylor, and Lowell, ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... was certainly not dead long—when Wales actually did follow, less formidably, of course, in the path of Ireland, beginning with the Church, going on to the Land, and not distantly threatening the State. As usual he goes to his books. He quotes Goethe—a great man of letters, but perhaps the most pedantic of great men of letters except Milton—to prove that "the English are pedants." He quotes Burke—the unregenerate Irish Whig Burke, not the prophet whose tongue the French Revolution had touched as it opened ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... familiarity of intimacy which reveals all that is fine or ignoble in a man's personality. Scanty is the number of those who will come out of that severest of ordeals so successfully as he. The same conclusion would be reached, whether we were to consider him in his private relations or in his career as a man of letters. Among the irritable race of authors no one was freer from petty envy or jealousy. During many years of close intercourse, in which he constantly gave utterance to his views both of men and things with absolute unreserve, I recall no disparaging opinion ever expressed ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Here he battled with others; and since, except on paper, he never possessed business capacity, he failed and went under; but by his defeat he paved the way to future triumph. He passed through an experience possibly unique in the career of a man of letters, one which imparts the peculiar flavour of business, money, and affairs to his books, and which fixed on him for all his days the impression of restless, passionate, thronging humanity which he pictures in his books. The abyss between his early ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... his eternal right of Truth, finds expression in the following song, composed, not by a theologian or a man of letters, but by one who belongs to that ninety per cent of the population of British India whose education has been far less than elementary, in ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... fortunately, to disturb its peace with such profane satire, such withering sarcasm as flashes through an 'entretien' like that between 'Frere Rigolet' and 'L'Empereur de la Chine.' Every French man of letters knows it by heart; but it would wound our English susceptibilities were I to cite it here. Then, too, the impious paraphrase of the Athanasian Creed, with its terrible climax, from the converting Jesuit: 'Or vous voyez bien . . . qu'un homme qui ne croit pas cette histoire ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... a man of the world among men of letters, a man of letters among men of the world.—MACAULAY: Review of Life and Writings ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... the too manifest modernisms in language and manners, and so produce the [blank space]. That, in the sixth century B.C., any man undertook such a task, and succeeded so well as to impose on Aristotle and all the later Greek critics, appears to be a theory that could only occur to a modern man of letters, who is thinking of the literary conditions of his own time. The editor was doing, and doing infinitely better, what Lonnrot, in the nineteenth century, tried in vain to achieve for the Finnish Kalewala. [Footnote: ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... the pen and the sword have been kept apart; the civilian and the soldier, the man of letters and the man of arms, have been distinct and separate. This was also true in old Loo Choo (now Riu Kiu), that part of Japan most like China. In Japan, however, the pen and the sword, letters and arms, the civilian and the soldier, have intermingled. The unique product of this union ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... least possible cost. In fact it forms part of the Series known as "Knight's Weekly Volume." To find a strictly original work of so much ability given to the world in this form, proves that the publisher and the man of letters are, in this mercantile age, second to none in the activity and enterprise with which they render their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Snobs in the same degree as the pettiness of the man Sterne appealed to him: and his business in Willis's Rooms was to talk, not of Captain Shandy, but of the man Sterne, to whom his hearers were to feel themselves superior as members of society. I submit that this was not a worthy task for a man of letters who was also a man of genius. I submit that it was an inversion of the true critical method to wreck Sterne's Sentimental Journey at the outset by picking Sterne's life to pieces, holding up the shreds and ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... it a strife between Michael and Satan, the Spirit of Darkness hurling himself against the Spirit of Light in a vain and presumptuous hope to overpower him; and their irritation was great when an eminent English man of letters was found describing it scornfully as "the burning of a dirty chimney," and when English opinion, speaking through very many journalists and public men, appeared half hostile to the Northern cause. Indeed, it might have been thought that ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... got himself locked up for somebody else. Since then he had grown calmer, but he still worshipped at the shrine of the Cordova. He was not the only one, however; there were several, including the very distinguished English man of letters, Edmund Lushington, who had known her before she had begun to sing ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... well as individual, its pursuit on scientific lines, and its alliance with biology, suggest one thought which applies generally to an age of science and may be found to throw some illumination even on the future. Which of all types of modern men is the most habitually hopeful, the man of letters, the politician, the business man, or the man of science? There can be no question of the answer. The typical man of science is sure of the greatness and solidity of the work he shares, and confident that the future will extend and make still more beneficial its results. ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... a book of solid value, such as a clear-headed business man will appreciate, yet it is such a book as only an accomplished man of letters could write. We commend it to all who wish further knowledge of a region too little known by Americans.—Examiner, ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... like the foregoing, that of a successful man of letters who also passed through a long period of mental conflict before he became reconciled to his homosexual instincts. He belongs to a family who are all healthy and have shown marked ability in different intellectual departments. He feels certain that one of his brothers ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... complete without furnishing the reader with a picture of the fate of one who, with a pertinacity of industry not common, having undergone regular studies, not very injudiciously deemed that the life of a man of letters could provide for the simple wants ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... him. Hospitality of that kind was understandable in men like Kennedy and Latrobe—one the leading literary light of his State, whose civic duties brought him in contact with all classes—the other a distinguished man of letters as well as being a poet, artist, and engineer, who naturally touched the sides of many personalities. So, too, might Richard Horn be excused for stretching the point—he being a scientist whose duty it was to welcome to his home many kinds of people—this man Morse among them, with his ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... nothing of disorder discernible in his mind by any but himself; but he had withdrawn from study, and travelled with no other book than an English Testament, such as children carry to the school: when his friend took it into his hand, out of curiosity to see what companion a man of letters had chosen, 'I have but one book,' said Collins, 'but that ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... of those difficult positions unavoidable to a man of letters. My visitor must have some answer. He had come back for the manuscript of his memoir and for my opinion. It was the twilight of an early Washington winter. The lights in the great library, softened with delicate shades, had been turned on. Outside, Sheridan Circle was almost a thing of beauty ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... civilised nation, and discover that the grammatical rules and the inflections which denote number, time, and equality are usually the product of a rude state of society—that the savage and the sage, the peasant and man of letters, the child and the philosopher, have worked together, in the course of many generations, to build up a fabric which has been truly described as a wonderful instrument of thought, a machine, the several parts of which are so well adjusted ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... neighbourhood as she went, for they might be those of the fournisseurs of her friend. "That is his bread shop, and that is his book shop. And that, mother," she said finally, with even heightened sympathy, pausing before a blooming parterre of confectionery hard by the abode of her man of letters, "that, I suppose, is where he ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... 1549 is marked by an exchange of civilities between Michelangelo and Benedetto Varchi. The learned man of letters and minute historiographer of Florence probably enjoyed our great sculptor's society in former years: recently they had been brought into closer relations at Rome. Varchi, who was interested in critical and academical problems, started the question whether ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... Englishman. He was a deist, being in entire sympathy with Franklin in his views of Christianity. He was also a man of letters. Mr. Franklin addressed a very polite note to Mr. Gibbon, sending his compliments, and soliciting the pleasure of spending the evening with him. Mr. Gibbon, who was never renowned for amiability of character, replied, in substance, we ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... is a man of letters and a philosopher, said to me one day, as if between jest and earnest,—"Fancy! since we last met, I have discovered a haunted house in ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... of that," replied Mr. Cardross. "He loves books; he may turn out a thoroughly educated and accomplished student—perhaps even a man of letters. To have a thirst for knowledge, and unlimited means to gratify it, is not such a bad thing. Why," continued the minister, glancing round on his own poorly-furnished shelves, where every book was bought almost at the sacrifice of a meal, "he will be rich enough to stock from end to end that wilderness ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... distinguished as Ian Stewart's, while at the same time obtaining the services of a man with so many of his best years still before him. Stewart, although he could do fairly well in practical administration, if he gave his mind to it, had won distinction as a student and man of letters, and feared that, difficult as it was to combine the real work of his life with bread-and-butter-making in Oxford, it would be still more difficult to combine it with steering the ship of the Merchants' Guild College. But he had the sensitive man's defect of too often deferring to the judgment ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... us in three great capacities: as a statesman, an advocate, and a man of letters. As the combination of such pursuits is common in our own days, so also was it in his. Caesar added them all to the great work of his life as a soldier. But it was given to Cicero to take a part in all those political struggles, from the ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... not a journalist by choice. He was a pure man of letters, untimely born in a world that had no need of letters; but after publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations, of which one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away, and the balance eventually destroyed ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... Jr. The Man of Letters as a Man of Business A Psychological Counter-current in Recent Fiction. Emile Zola Literary Friends and Acquaintances Biographical My First Visit to New England First Impressions of Literary New York Roundabout ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... subsequent books, it was not so much Disraeli's notable skill as a novelist but rather his portrayal of the social and political life of the day that made him one of the most popular writers of his generation, and earned for him a lasting fame as a man of letters. In "Vivian Grey" is narrated the career of an ambitious young man of rank; and in this story the brilliant author has preserved to us the exact tone of the English drawing-room, as he so well knew it, sketching with sure and rapid strokes a whole portrait gallery of notables, ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... to communicate with the Church of England, or to be present at any worship where the usurper was mentioned as king. He was, I believe, more than once apprehended in the reign of King William, and once at the accession of George. He was the familiar friend of Hicks and Nelson; a man of letters, but injudicious; and very curious and inquisitive, but credulous. He lived in 1743, or 44, about 75 ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... founded a great industry, but was a man of artistic taste, a patron of art, and a lover of science. Telford, the Eskdale shepherd, was a man of literary taste, and was especially friendly with the typical man of letters, Southey. Others, of course, were of a lower type. Arkwright combined the talents of an inventor with those of a man of business. He was a man, says Baines (the historian of the cotton trade), who was sure to come out of ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... de Villalobos is said to have been a man of letters, licentiate in law, and born of a distinguished family in Malaga; he was brother-in-law of Antonio de Mendoza, who (then viceroy of New Spain) appointed him commander of the expedition here described. Departing from Navidad, Mexico (November 1, 1542), he reached Mindanao on February 2 of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume II, 1521-1569 • Emma Helen Blair
... it, as set forth, according to his original views—founding the tradition and personality of "Mr. Punch," and converting him from a mere strolling puppet, an irresponsible jester, into the laughing philosopher and man of letters, the essence of all wit, the concentration of all wisdom, the soul of honour, the fountain of goodness, and the paragon of ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... chiefly to the western States, have been little read in this part of the Union; but his contributions to the North American Review and the Christian Examiner, and his tales, sketches, essays, and poems, printed under various signatures, have entitled him to a desirable reputation as a man of letters. These are all to be collected ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... Associacao Commercial do Amazonas, a most useful society in Manaos composed of the cleverest and soundest business men of that place. I was presented to the President, Mr. J. G. Araujo, and to Dr. Bertino Miranda, the honorary secretary—the latter a man of letters of great distinction, well known not only in his own country but in Latin countries ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... himself to vengeance. Long years of peace in England had come between him and the execution of his projects, and he had prepared himself for the task he never lost sight of, by acquiring all the accomplishments of a knight and warrior, and even of a man of letters, at that court of Rouen, now rapidly becoming the focus of European chivalry, where the fierce barbarian Northmen were becoming the refined but ruthless Normans. Then, in England, he had wormed himself into ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... me had no resemblance to the career of a peaceful man of letters. It was a hot race, a combat as bloody (his own word) as those contests of which ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... as he had the greatest dislike of acting as a professor and teacher in a regular post, he soon tried to make a meagre livelihood by literary work. He had certain social gifts, and especially a fine tenor voice, and appears in his youth to have been welcome as a man of letters among a fairly wide circle ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Thiers' chapter on St. Helena, M. Sainte-Beuve, after expressing his admiration of the commentaries of Napoleon on the campaigns of Turenne, Frederic, and Caesar, adds: "A man of letters smiles at first involuntarily to see Napoleon apply to each of these famous campaigns a methodical criticism, just as we would proceed with a work of the mind, with an epic or tragic poem. But is not ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... regard to the published books and I have tried to solve it on the same line. There has rung in my mind Mr. Belloc's saying: "A man is his mind." To tell the story of a man of letters while avoiding quotation from or reference to his published works is simply not to tell it. At Christopher Dawson's suggestion I have re-read all the books in the order in which they were written, thus ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... my uncle Toby, interrupting the corporal, is no more exempt from saying a foolish thing, Trim, than a man of letters—But not so often, an' please your honour, replied the corporal—my uncle Toby gave ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... in the little island-harbour of Hveen, where the famous observatory stood, close by the house of the astronomer, Tycho Brahe. It so happened that at that very time Brahe was entertaining as a guest the most eminent Danish man of letters of that age, Anders Sorensen Vedel (1542-1616). Vedel, whose labours were encyclopaedic, was engaged in preserving all the monuments of Danish mediaeval history and learning which he could discover in the monasteries and libraries of Denmark. He had been much encouraged in this ...
— Grimhild's Vengeance - Three Ballads • Anonymous
... were elaborately carved, the seats being of the same green velvet as the settee. A high wire-guard surrounded the fire place, and this unusual precaution made one think, that the contents of the room must be precious. The occupant of this apartment might have been an artist, a man of letters, or a virtuoso—probably the latter; but whatever he was, it was evident that his study was a workshop, and ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... other man she owed, as she thought, everything that could be due from a woman to a man. He had come within her ken, and had loved her without speaking of his love. He had seen her condition, and had sympathised with her fully. He had gone out, with his life in his hand,—he, a clergyman, a quiet man of letters,—to ascertain whether she was free; and finding her, as he believed, to be free, he had returned to take her to his heart, and to give her all that happiness which other women enjoy, but which she had hitherto only ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... had in her hand a recent book in which a French man of letters, both historian and poet, had told once again the most piteous of stories; a story, however, which seemed then, and still seems, to be not even yet ripe for history—so profound and living are the sympathies and the passions which to this day ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to contest the debt which the arts owe Leo X, there are certain reservations that we must make on this score. A man of letters, of amiable manners, astute, somewhat of a mischief-maker, ever fluctuating between France and the Emperor, ever on the watch to provide for his family, and, to redeem these defects, having neither heroism nor the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... utter stranger to the fighting inspiration. Her gait was pedestrian, her purpose didactic, her practice neat and formal: and she prosed of England's greatest captain, the victor of Blenheim, as tamely as himself had been 'a parson in a tye-wig'—himself, and not the amiable man of letters who acted as her amanuensis ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... employed to effect this was an adroit man who had succeeded in deceiving the government. Francis I based his glory upon the patronage and encouragement which he accorded to learning, and Calvin, as a man of letters, merited consideration. The King needed some forgiveness for serious political faults, and, with reason, he believed that the humanists would redeem his character before the people. He was at once the protector and the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... blood, who never can be at rest until they are in motion, to whom a settled abode is irksome, and to whom the notion of blessedness is that they shall be out in the free plains. 'Amplius,' the dying Xavier's word, 'further afield,' is the motto of all noble life—scientist, scholar, artist, man of letters, man of affairs; all come under the same law, that unless there is something before them which has dominated their hearts, and draws their whole being towards it, their lives want salt, want nobility, want freshness, and a green scum comes over the pool. We all know that. To live is to aspire; ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... seemed as if he lived in retirement—his late success enabled this to be an "elegant retirement"—and it is said that he passed it on the Lake of Como, in a villa near that of the once Queen Caroline. There are traditions of a distinguished stranger—a man of rank and a man of letters—who lived there estranged from all the world, and deeply engaged in the education of his two sons. One of these youths, however, not responding to all this parental devotion, involved himself in some scrape, fled from his father's ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... the presence of a distinguished man of letters makes," laughed Lady Thurwell. "Now, only a few hours ago, we were dreading a very dull evening—Helen as well as myself. How nice it was of you to take pity ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... have an opportunity of seeing courts and camps: and if I can afterward be so happy as to attain leisure and other opportunities, this knowledge may even turn to account to me as a man of letters, which I confess has always been the sole object of my ambition. I have long had an intention, in my riper years, of composing some history; and I question not but some greater experience in the operations of the field and the intrigues of the cabinet will be requisite, ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... sketched the life of Wordsworth,—a life uneventful even for a man of letters; a life like that of an oak, of quiet self-development, throwing out stronger roots toward the side whence the prevailing storm-blasts blow, and of tougher fibre in proportion to the rocky nature of the soil in which it grows. The life ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... whose voice is to prevail must be an optimist, and his voice often learns its message from his life. Stevenson's life has become a tradition only ten years after his death; he has taken his place among the heroes, the bravest man of letters since Johnson and Lamb. I remember an hour when I was discouraged and ready to falter. For days I had been pegging away at a task which refused to get itself accomplished. In the midst of my perplexity I read an essay of Stevenson which made me feel as if ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... the modern Yankee. Clear rather than subtle, without ideality or romance or fineness of emotion or poetic lift, intensely practical and utilitarian, broad-minded, inventive, shrewd, versatile, Franklin's sturdy figure became typical of his time and his people. He was the first and the only man of letters in colonial America who acquired a cosmopolitan fame and impressed his characteristic Americanism upon the mind of Europe. He was the embodiment of common sense and of the useful virtues, with the ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... art, mademoiselle. How long you think it take M. de Winterset to learn that speech after he write it out? It is a mix of what is true and the mos' chaste art. Monsieur has become a man of letters. Perhaps he may enjoy that more than ...
— Monsieur Beaucaire • Booth Tarkington
... no part in the gaiety of Howard and Joe. The serious man of letters was not easily led into paths of frivolity. Carl swore to himself: "Ben 's the only guy I know that's got any delicate feelings. He appreciates how Gertie feels when she's sick, poor girl. He don't make a goat of himself, like Joe.... Or ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... Holland, Horace Walpole, the Duke of Queensberry, each a type of the society of the eighteenth century; the unscrupulous politician, the cultivated amateur and man of letters, the sportsman with half the opera dancers in London in his pay—of all he was the closest friend. The most intimate of them, the Duke of Queensberry, led an extravagant and a dissipated life, in contrast with which ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... poems and plays were always soldiers, men of action, and in his most original work, the extraordinary Undivine Comedy, he levelled the most damaging indictment against the self-centred egotism of the poet that has ever been penned by a man of letters. And the bitterness of the portrait is only heightened by the fact that it was largely inspired by self-criticism; his letters and his life afford only too frequent justification for the recurrent comment of the mocking spirit in the play on the melodramatic ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully. Johnson, in the eighteenth century, all as a man of letters, was, in good truth, 'the bravest of the brave.' What mortal could have more to war with? Yet, as we saw, he yielded not, faltered not; he fought, and even, such was his blessedness, prevailed. Whoso will understand what it is to have a man's heart, may find that, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... in Faribault. Here I touched storied ground, for near this town Edward Eggleston had laid the scene of his novel, The Mystery of Metropolisville and my imagination responded to the magic which lay in the influence of the man of letters. I wrote to Alice a long and impassioned account of my sensations as I ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... somewhat cold. He dines with Baron d'Holbach, and says his dinners were excellent, but nothing of the guests. He goes to Madame Geoffrin, and pronounces her house an excellent one. Such faint and commonplace praise reflects on the eulogist. The only man of letters of whom he speaks with warmth is Helvetius. He does not appear in this first visit to have known Madame du Deffand, who was still keeping her salon with the help of the pale deep-eyed L'Espinasse, though the final rupture was imminent. Louis Racine died, and so did Marivaux, while he ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... abolition movement. With biting scorn and irony he laughed men out of narrowness, ignorance, and selfishness. During the last epoch in his career Lowell achieved world-wide fame as a diplomat, and was universally admired as the all round man of letters. But now that he has gone, in retrospect, the historian perceives that the first era of Lowell's career was the influential era. He was the Milton of the anti-slavery epoch, as Lincoln was its Cromwell. His influence in England, ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... am not the riding master of the regiment—nor a drill sergeant—nor a crazy cornet; no, sir—and I speak it with a due respect for the commission of the Continental Congress—nor an inconsiderate captain, who regards his own life as little as that of his enemies. I am only, sir, a poor humble man of letters, a mere doctor of medicine, an unworthy graduate of Edinburgh, and a surgeon of dragoons; nothing more, I do assure you, Captain John Lawton." So saying, he turned his horse's head towards the cottage, ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... have been able to collect of this profound scholar and antiquary. But the life of a man of letters appears, and must be chiefly sought for in his works, of which we subjoin ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... Gallienne, who, in spite of his long residence in the United States, must be considered an English poet, was born at Liverpool in 1866. He entered on a business career soon after leaving Liverpool College, but gave up commercial life to become a man of letters after ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... the life of Wemyss Reid. His chief works were all monuments to that faith; it inspired him in tasks which he knew would be irksome and which could scarcely be successful, or which, at least, could ill satisfy his own standard. This is a severe test for a man of letters, but he met it without fail.... All this seems lame and tame enough when I read it over. But it was true and vivid when Wemyss Reid was living, and giving to his friends the high example of a brave and unselfish life. Among them, his memory will be a precious ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... physician. This circumstance made his professional fortune, for his ability enabled him to take full advantage of it, and in 1705 he became physician to the Queen. He became the cherished friend of Swift and Pope, and himself gained a high reputation as a wit and man of letters. His principal works are the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, partly by Pope, but to which he was the chief contributor, the History of John Bull (1712), mainly against the Duke of Marlborough, A Treatise concerning the Altercation or Scolding of the Ancients, and the Art of ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... sky. "At least the people who dislike my prose—and there are a great many of them, I believe—will dislike this work most" This was the first time I had heard him allude to the people who couldn't read him,—a class which is supposed always to sit heavy upon the consciousness of the man of letters. A man organized for literature, as Mark Ambient was, must certainly have had the normal proportion of sensitiveness, of irritability; the artistic ego, capable in some cases of such monstrous development, must have been, in his composition, sufficiently erect and definite. I will ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... "I hope it is not your practice to measure and estimate gentlemen by such paltry standards as those. A man of letters follows the noblest calling which any man can pursue. I would rather be the author of a work of genius, than be Governor-General of India. I admire genius. I salute it wherever I meet it. I like my own profession better than any in the world, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 1400) we meet with a poet of the first rank, whose works are increasingly read and {34} will always continue to be a source of delight and refreshment to the general reader as well as a "well of English undefiled" to the professional man of letters. With the exception of Dante, Chaucer was the greatest of the poets of mediaeval Europe, and he remains one of the greatest of English poets, and certainly the foremost of English story-tellers in verse. He was the son of a London vintner, and was in ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... on this occasion, an accomplished man of letters and a traveler, asked me what England felt about Ulster's share in the responsibility for ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... a courtly old gentleman, and he had seen much of the world. He was a fine scholar; he had been a soldier, and then a man of letters; and he belonged to ...
— Four Great Americans: Washington, Franklin, Webster, Lincoln - A Book for Young Americans • James Baldwin
... all Marvell remained very much the man of letters, though one with a great natural aptitude for business. His was always the critical attitude. He was the friend of Milton and Harrington, of the political philosophers who invented paper constitutions in ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... getting as far as Naples, which was the only disappointment we met with. As a man of letters I have to regret that this most interesting tour was not made by me earlier in life, as I might have turned the notices it has supplied me with to more account than I now expect to do. With respectful remembrances to Lady Lonsdale, and ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... mortal to be? Not her cousin Lucian; for rising young politicians must have helpful wives, with feminine politics and powers of visiting and entertaining; a description inapplicable to the phoenix. Not, as you just now suggested, a man of letters. The phoenix has had her share of playing helpmeet to a man of letters, and does not care to repeat that experience. She is sick to death of the morbid introspection and womanish self-consciousness ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... first to develop anything in the nature of a complete Jewish philosophy. He had essentially the literary gift, the capacity of giving lasting expression to his own thought and the thought of his generation. Treating him merely as a man of letters, he is one of the chief figures in Greek literature of the first century. We have extant over forty books of his composition, and nearly as many again have disappeared. His works are one and all expositions ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... him for a worthy antagonist, he singled out Smedley, M.D., a local practitioner given over to two ideals—sanitation and reform. Needless to say, for sanitation and reform Tyson cared not a hang. It was a stand-up fight between the man of facts and the man of letters. Smedley was solid and imperturbable; he stood firm on his facts, and defended himself with figures. Tyson, a master of literary strategy, was alert and ubiquitous. Having driven Smedley into a tangled maze of controversy, Tyson pursued ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... private conscience, but one which even there must be leniently and trustfully considered. For remember how many serve mankind who do no more than meditate; and how many are precious to their friends for no more than a sweet and joyous temper. To perform the function of a man of letters it is not necessary to write; nay, it is perhaps better to be a living book. So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... A distinguished man of letters, M. Huysman, who has passed out of Zolaism in the direction of transcendental religion, is, in a certain sense, the discoverer of modern Satanism. Under the thinnest disguise of fiction, he gives in his romance of ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... respect, we may say, what he said of Erasmus. 'Erasmus, though justly styled by Muretus, eruditus sane vir ac multae lectionis, was not a learned man in the special sense of the word—not an erudit. He was the man of letters. He did not make a study a part of antiquity for its own sake, but used it as an instrument of culture.' The result of culture in Pattison's actual life was not by any means ideal. For instance, he was head of a college for nearly a quarter of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... same command of his subject and his hearers, and the same success. His only faults as a speaker were committed when, under the inebriating influence of popular applause, he was led away by the heat and passion of the moment. A warm friend, a placable adversary, a scholar, a man of letters, kind in his nature, affable in his manners, easy of access, playful in conversation, delightful in society—rarely have the brilliant promises of boyhood been so richly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... occasional poems, written for sport and festivals, showed a genuine talent, almost a genius, for the poetic art. He was considered by all the very life and spirit of the younger Court set. A great future as a statesman and man of letters was predicted for him ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... people in the dark. No veluti in speculum. Nothing in the dead languages, properly so called, for they ought to die, ay and be DAMNED to boot! The Covent Garden manager tried that, and a pretty business he made of it! When a man says veluti in speculum, he is called a man of letters. Very well, and is not a man who cries O. P. a man of letters too? You ran your O. P. against his veluti in speculum, and pray which beat? I prophesied that, though I never told any body. I take it for granted, that every intelligent man, woman, and child, to whom I ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... beforehand knows too well what it must be to need detailed repetition. Most of the publishers had absolutely refused to look at his manuscripts; one or two had good-naturedly glanced over and returned them at once with a civil word or two of flat rejection. One publisher alone—himself a man of letters, and who in youth had gone through the same bitter process of disillusion that now awaited the village genius—volunteered some kindly though stern explanation and counsel to the unhappy boy. This gentleman read a portion of Leonard's principal poem with attention, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... proud, as men specially sent forth to make converts, kept the pick of the pavement against the Protestants, and were confessing the Catholic ladies, when there arrived from Bordeaux a young vicar, brought up by the Jesuits, a man of letters, of pleasing manners, who wrote well and spoke better. He made a noise in the pulpit, and ere long in the world. By birth a townsman of Mantes, of a wrangling turn, he was Southern by education, with all the readiness of a Bordelais, boastful and frivolous as a Gascon. He soon managed ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... stands thus. Before the days of British rule the Brahmin was the priest and man of letters, the "clerke" in short. The rajahs and chiefs were much of the ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... Piers Plowman," he said, "I had expected to meet a man of letters and the author of this book"—he held up "Happiness and Hayseed"—"but I see I was mistaken. I tell you, sir, a man who would insult his sister before a stranger, as you have done, is an oaf and a cad." He threw the book over the hedge, and before I could say a word he had ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... quite clear by Crabbe's biographer. Scott had to move with all his family to his house in Edinburgh for the great occasion, and he would no doubt have much preferred to receive Crabbe at Abbotsford. Moreover, it fell to Scott, as the most distinguished man of letters and archaeologist in Edinburgh, to organise all the ceremonies and the festivities necessary for the King's reception. In Lockhart's phrase, Scott stage-managed the whole business. And it was on Scott's return ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... the natural, of the things unseen as well as of those seen, Tolstoy has exhausted Nature. He has plunged into her nethermost depths, like Schiller's diver, and lo! forth he comes from the abyss with her swallowed-up treasure. Verily, here Tolstoy is unapproachable. Only one other man of letters hath here even distant fellowship with him, and this is ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... intimation of these broad rights is familiar in the sense of injury which men feel in the assumption of any man to limit their possible progress. We resent all criticism which denies us anything that lies In our line of advance. Say to the man of letters, that he cannot paint a Transfiguration, or build a steamboat, or be a grand-marshal, and he will not seem to himself depreciated. But deny to him any quality of literary or metaphysical power, and he is piqued. Concede to him genius, which is a sort ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... life of a man of letters is necessarily deficient in incident, appears to have originated in a misconception of the essential nature of human action. The life of every man is full of incidents, but the incidents are insignificant, because they do not affect his species; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, translated from the Spanish by Mariano J. Lorente, with a preface by R. B. Cunninghame Graham (The Four Seas Co.). This is an excellent translation by a Spanish man of letters of what is perhaps the best exemplary Novel by Cervantes. As Mr. Cunninghame Graham points out in his delightful introduction, "Rinconete and Cortadillo" is perhaps the best sketch of Spanish low-life that has come down to us. It is highly amoral, despite its sub-title, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... there is yet about the lyrics of Jonson a certain stiffness and formality, a suspicion that they were not quite spontaneous and unbidden, but that they were carved, so to speak, with disproportionate labour by a potent man of letters whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is for these reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity and emotion which we usually associate ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... Wolf, both as man of letters and individual, was misunderstood and persecuted during the greater part of his life, ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... proportion is lost. Macaulay lashed this vice in his celebrated essay on Robert Montgomery's poems. "We expect some reserve," he says, "some decent pride in our hatter and our bootmaker. But no artifice by which notoriety can be obtained is thought too abject for a man of letters. Extreme poverty may indeed in some degree be an excuse for employing these shifts as it may be an excuse for stealing a ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... very ancient family. But all my father ever said, to evince pride of ancestry, was in honor of William Caxton, citizen and printer in the reign of Edward IV.,—Clarum et venerabile nomen! an ancestor a man of letters might be ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... which I hoped to find in our secluded dwelling had never come to light. No profound treatise of ethics, no philosophic history, no novel even, that could stand unsupported on its edges. All that I had to show, as a man of letters, were these, few tales and essays, which had blossomed out like flowers in the calm summer of my heart and mind. Save editing (an easy task) the journal of my friend of many years, the African Cruiser, I had done nothing else. With these idle weeds and withering ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Rhetoric lays it down that not only in the division of the words his orator should draw, but that with his own hand he should know how to sketch and draw; and hence it is, Senhor M. Angelo, that you may at times call a great man of letters or a great preacher a good painter; and a great draughtsman you may call a man of letters, and whosoever most penetrates into real antiquity will find that painting and sculpture were both called ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... the block, if ever she caught him meddling with them. She buried him alive in the heart of his time. She took the seals of office, she took the sword, from his hands and put a pen in it. She would have of him a Man of Letters. And a Man of Letters he became. A Man of Runes. He invented new letters in his need, letters that would go farther than the sword, that carried more execution in them than the great seal. Banished from the state in that isle to which he was banished, he found ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... in the last age, as an author, a statesman, and a soldier; was born about the year 1650. He lost his father when he was about nine years of age, and his mother soon after marrying lord Ossulton; the care of his education was left entirely to a governor, who though a man of letters, did not much improve him in his studies [1]. Having parted with his governor, with whom he travelled into France; he soon found by conversing with men of genius, that he was much deficient in many parts of literature, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... do this, and to change the title, no one would even have known. On the other hand, it was a sin of commission to allow that Professor Henry Morley was responsible for the stage management; Mr. Morley being a man of letters whom some worthy people respect. But perhaps sins of omission and commission counterbalance. The audience was put in a bad humor before the performance began, owing to the curtain's rising fifteen minutes late. However, once the curtain did rise, it was an ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... apostrophised as "our Lady of the Pillar," "our Lady of the Crypt." It may perhaps be excusable to resort to such expedients as these in the conversion of savages; but there is something singularly repulsive in the picture (drawn apparently from life) of a profligate man of letters seeking salvation in a Christianity which has lowered itself far beneath educated paganism. At any rate, let not the name of Mysticism be ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... been a man of arms Mr. Esmond had now come to be a man of letters, but on a safer side than that in which the above-cited poor fellows ventured their liberties and ears. There was no danger on ours, which was the winning side; besides, Mr. Esmond pleased himself by thinking that he writ like a gentleman ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... the delight which he again and again expressed, after the termination of his History, at being able to return to them after spending so many years in reading bad Latin and Greek. In taste and character he was indeed pre-eminently a man of letters, and as such he ranks in the first ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... seen much of. His appearance is Epic; and he is the only existing entire man of letters. All the others have some pursuit annexed to their authorship. His manners are mild, but not those of a man of the world, and his talents of the first order. His prose is perfect. Of his poetry there are various opinions: there is, perhaps, too much of it for the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... improved with the same success, he was able to retire with an income of 300L, or (according to the customary computations) in modern money of 1500L, per annum. Shakspeare was in fact the first man of letters, Pope the second, and Sir Walter Scott the third, who, in Great Britain, has ever realized a large fortune by literature; or in Christendom, if we except Voltaire, and two dubious cases in Italy. The four or five latter years of his life ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... humble roof, they met me in every direction. It was at home, however, and from my father's lips in particular, that they were perpetually sounding in my ears. In fact, his memory was a perfect storehouse, and a rich one, of all that the social antiquary, the man of letters, the poet, or the musician, would consider valuable. As a teller of old tales, legends, and historical anecdotes he was unrivalled, and his stock of them was inexhaustible. He spoke the Irish and English languages with nearly equal fluency. With all kinds of charms, old ranns, ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... as an upstart people of new blood, who had come into their whiteness by no creditable or pleasant process. The late Mr. Johnson, who had died in the West Indies, whither he voyaged for his health in quality of cook upon a Down-East schooner, was a man of letters, and had written a book to show the superiority of the black over the white branches of the human family. In this he held that, as all islands have been at their discovery found peopled by blacks, we must needs believe that humanity was first created of that color. Mrs. ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... take pleasure in sneering at the quality of entertainment given by our aristocracy, merely because it is composed of men who have got rich by the very republican business of sailing ships and selling eatables. Now I by no means underrate the man of letters who truly represents genius, or learning; but that every dabbler in small satire should dub himself a man of letters, and therefore set up for an idol before whom better men must bow, or have their social affairs battered to pieces, is ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... Eshref Pasha a most interesting and amiable personage, out of his place completely in the management of a turbulent and really hostile Christian population, with whom his very best qualities were a disqualification. Eshref was a poet, a dreamer, and, I was told, the second man of letters in the empire. He laughingly asked me if I had been at Podgoritza, and I as good-humoredly replied that I had not come to complain of my treatment there, but to pay my compliments to a fellow man of letters. His broad, good-natured face lighted up with pleasure, and, dropping politics ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... the success of a man of letters from his early promise, his early tastes; as impossible as it is to predict, from her childish grace, the beauty of ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... opening of a great career", they generalized a strong personal impression. They identified their own preference with the public taste. On the other hand, Hawthorne says truly of himself that he was long the most obscure man of letters in America. Yet he had already published the Twice-told Tales and the Mosses from an Old Manse, the two series of stories in which the character and quality of his genius are fully disclosed. But although Longfellow hailed the publication of the first collection ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... a place on his own account in a series of Jewish Worthies, since neither as man of action nor as man of letters did he deserve particularly well of his nation. It is not his personal worthiness, but the worth of his work, that recommends him to the attention of the Jewish people. He was not a loyal general, and he was not a faithful chronicler of the struggle with Rome; but he had the ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... few literary men of his day who was not above using the Italian tongue, treating it seriously as a language and not merely as a debased form of Latin. He was eminent as a juris-consult, and, being a man of action as well as a man of letters, he had filled the office of Podesta in various cities; he had found employment under Lorenzo dei Medici, and latterly under Ercole d'Este, whom ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... critics and writers—'the happy few,' as he used to call them; and among these he has never been without enthusiastic admirers. During his lifetime Balzac, in an enormous eulogy of La Chartreuse de Parme, paid him one of the most magnificent compliments ever received by a man of letters from a fellow craftsman. In the next generation Taine declared himself his disciple; a little later—'vers 1880,' in fact—we find Zola describing him as 'notre pere a tous,' and M. Bourget followed with elaborate incense. ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... Meander, the poet, one of the leading lights in that new sect which prides itself upon the cultivation of abstract beauty, and occasionally touches the verge of concrete ugliness. There were a newspaper man—the editor of a fashionable journal—and a middle-aged man of letters, playwright, critic, humourist, a man whose society was in demand everywhere, and who said sharp things with the most supreme good-nature. The only ladies whose society Mr. Smithson had deemed worthy the occasion were a fashionable actress, with her younger sister, the younger a pretty copy ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the whole population live in towns having over two hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, and less than a quarter still remain in the country. Our modern life is dominated by the great cities, which not only are the center of commerce and manufacturing, but are the homes of the artist and man of letters. ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... be nothing more than a scientific narrative. The disciples of Macaulay and Carlyle, of Stubbs and Gardiner, would be found voting in unison in my imaginary Congress. Gibbon, writes Bury, is "the historian and the man of letters," thus ranking with Thucydides and Tacitus. These three are put in the highest class, exemplifying that "brilliance of style and accuracy of statement are perfectly compatible in an historian."[52] Accepting this authoritative classification it is well worth while to point out the ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... the statesman to the man of letters, we find in Guicciardini one of the most consummate historians of any nation or of any age. The work by which he is best known, the Istoria d' Italia, is one that can scarcely be surpassed for masterly control of a very intricate period, for subordination of the parts ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... follow backward the careers of our HOMUNCULOS and be reminded of our antenatal lives. Our conscious years are but a moment in the history of the elements that build us. Are you a bank-clerk, and do you live at Peckham? It was not always so. And though to-day I am only a man of letters, either tradition errs or I was present when there landed at St. Andrews a French barber- surgeon, to tend the health and the beard of the great Cardinal Beaton; I have shaken a spear in the Debateable Land and shouted the slogan of the Elliots; ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it runs, "to advance in the sciences, and for that I need d'Anville, Ritter, an Italian dictionary, a Strabo in Greek, Mannert and Thiersch; and also the works of Malte-Brun and Seyfert. I have resolved, as far as I am allowed to do so, to become a man of letters, and at present I can go no further: 1st, in ancient geography, for I already know all my notebooks, and I have only such books as Mr. Rickly can lend me; I must have d'Anville or Mannert; 2nd, ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... such spirit, would Chrysostom Trotter argue; and it was in some such fashion that he talked in his charmingly sympathetic way with Dorcas Mesurier, one afternoon, as she had tea with him in a study breathing on every hand the man of letters, rather than the minister of ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... 'Orfeo' was by Calzabigi, a prominent man of letters, but it seems probable that Gluck's own share in it was not a small one. The careful study which he had given to the proper conditions of opera was not likely to exclude so important a question as that of the construction and diction of the libretto, and the poem of 'Orfeo' shows ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... help of books, and be enjoined to continue the story where it breaketh off, and I will undertake, by collating the styles, to judge whether he were the author or no."[**] Thus, had it not been for Bacon's humanity, or rather his wit, this author, a man of letters, had been put to the rack for a most innocent performance. His real offence was his dedicating a book to that munificent patron of the learned, the earl of Essex, at a time when this nobleman lay under ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... must be aware that a reformed rake makes the best husband. And since Topsparkle went on the Continent he has acquired a new reputation as a wit and a man of letters. He wrote an Assyrian story in the Italian language, about which the town raved a few years ago—a sort of demon story, ever so much cleverer than Voltaire's fanciful novels. Everybody was reading or pretending to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... is authentic about the Graeco-Egyptian Sophist or man of letters, Athenaeus, author of the 'Deipnosophistae' or Feast of the Learned, except his literary bequest. It is recorded that he was born at Naucratis, a city of the Nile Delta; and that after living at Alexandria he migrated to Rome. His date is presumptively ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... moreover, that Scribe never wished to be anything but a man of letters. There could be applied to him the words said by him of his confrere, ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... book of solid value, such as a clear-headed business man will appreciate, yet it is such a book as only an accomplished man of letters could write. We commend it to all who wish further knowledge of a region too little known by ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... went about their work with a reckless jollity productive of results eminently interesting to students of character and manners. A battle at the polls brought out all which was most characteristic in the Englishmen of the times, and to describe such a conflict was naturally the aim of many a man of letters. ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... and resident in London as a professor of music. He published two good operas of sonatas for two violins and a bass, and joined Clayton and Dieupart in the service of the opera, until Handel's success superseded them. Haym was also a man of letters, who published two quartos upon Medals, a notice of rare Italian Books, an edition of Tasso's Gerusalemme, and two tragedies of his own. He wrote a History of Music in Italian, and issued proposals for its publication in English, but had no success. Finally ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... The man of letters was attired in a neat but poor suit of clothes, and his surroundings were humble and even sordid; but his face was neither peevish nor careworn, but wore an expression of dignified contentment and scholarly repose. The walls of his lodging were lined with bookcases, upon which ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... at 164, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and at 131—also for a short time—Thomas Bailey Aldrich. It is, however, at 148, that we should longest pause. This, for many rich years, was the home of James T. Fields, that delightful man of letters who was the friend of many men of letters; he who entertained Dickens and Thackeray, and practically every foreign writer of note who visited this country; he who encouraged Hawthorne to the completion of the "Scarlet Letter," and he, who, as an appreciative critic, publisher, and editor, ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... service. Thrale had made him one of his executors, leaving him a small legacy; and Johnson took, it seems, a rather simple-minded pleasure in dealing with important commercial affairs and signing cheques for large sums of money. The old man of letters, to whom three hundred a year had been superabundant wealth, was amused at finding himself in the position of a man of business, regulating what was then regarded as a princely fortune. The brewery was sold after a time, and Johnson ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... period he took a long journey, in which he saw many of the European capitals, and formed, among the learned of foreign lands, friendships which he afterward kept up through constant correspondence. The world already began to speak of Petrarch as a rising man of letters. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... is not wholly a compound of intuition and ignorance. Take for example the profession of my hero, an Irish-American electrical engineer. That was by no means a flight of fancy. For you must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living. I began trying to commit that sin against my nature when I was fifteen, and persevered, from youthful timidity and diffidence, until I was twenty-three. My ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... called to a higher sphere can no longer teach it here below, the 'Method', his work, will help in aiding, comforting, and curing thousands and thousands of human beings: it must be immortal, and communicated to the entire world by generous France—for the man of letters was right, and knew how to illuminate in a word this true simple, and marvellous help in conquering pain: 'IT IS GOING AWAY—! ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... to a late sale in Pall Mall, of one of the choicest and most elegant libraries ever collected by a man of letters and taste? ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... man of the world among men of letters, a man of letters among men of the world.—MACAULAY: Review of Life and ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... to be things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness. Nay, it is worshiped with a positive idolatry, in extenuation of whose gross fanaticism its intrinsic beauty pleads availingly with the man of letters and the scholar. The memory of the dead passes into it The potent traditions of ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... place, the genius of the new poets was lyrical or descriptive, rather than dramatic. The divorce between literature and the stage had not yet, indeed, become total; and, in obedience to the expectation that every man of letters should try his hand at play-writing, Thomson, at least, as well as his friend and disciple Mallet, composed a number of dramas. But these were little better than failures even at the time; and while "The Seasons" has outlived all changes of taste, and "The Castle of Indolence" has never ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... very high—and in fact the men who have appreciated them most highly have been fastidious scholars—we shall not yet have measured Lincoln's effort and performance. For these are not the compositions of a cloistered man of letters, they are the outpourings of an agitator upon the stump. The men who think hard are few; few of them can clothe their thought in apt and simple words; very, very few are those who in doing this could hold the attention of a miscellaneous and large crowd. Popular government owes that comparative ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... hesitation, he put the figure down onto the table. "No, it is too dear," he said. The shop-keeper's eloquence redoubled. "Oh! Monsieur Varin, too dear? It is worth two thousand francs, if it is worth a son." But the man of letters replied sadly, still looking at the figure with the enameled eyes: "I do not say it is not; but it is too dear for me." And thereupon, she, seized by a kind of mad audacity, came forward and said: "What shall you charge me for the figure?" The shop-keeper, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... of the day was the reply to the speech of the King, and the President called on the member who had been appointed to undertake this duty. A young Deputy, a man of letters, then made his way to a bar behind the chairs of the Ministers and read from a printed paper a florid ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... a synonym for 'man of letters' is demanded why not find it in 'literator', which Lockhart did not hesitate to employ in the Life of Scott. It is pleasant to believe that communard, which was prevalent fifty years ago after the burning of the Tuileries, has been succeeded ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... whose burning leaves," as Oliver Wendell Holmes sang of it, "his scarlet web our wild romancer weaves." It was a novel experience for the man who had become accustomed to regarding himself as the obscurest man of letters in America. Lonely, yearning ladies came; enthusiastic young men; melancholy sinners. The little red house was not a literary Mecca only, but a moral one. The dark-browed, kindly smiling author received them all courteously; he was invariably courteous. "I would ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... both as man of letters and individual, was misunderstood and persecuted during the greater part of his life, or else ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... kind of low amusement to myself and perhaps others, by enumerating the absurdities of L'Homme Qui Rit. As far as I remember, when the book appeared, divers good people (the bad people merely sneered) took immense pains to discover how and why this great man of letters made so much greater a fool of himself. This was quite lost labour; and without attempting the explanation at all, a very small selection of the facts, being in a manner indispensable, may ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... driven by stress of weather to take shelter in the little island-harbour of Hveen, where the famous observatory stood, close by the house of the astronomer, Tycho Brahe. It so happened that at that very time Brahe was entertaining as a guest the most eminent Danish man of letters of that age, Anders Sorensen Vedel (1542-1616). Vedel, whose labours were encyclopaedic, was engaged in preserving all the monuments of Danish mediaeval history and learning which he could discover in the monasteries and libraries of Denmark. He had been much ...
— Grimhild's Vengeance - Three Ballads • Anonymous
... supplied the world with their most agreeable novels, and appears to have derived the sources of his existence in his old age from the filial exertions of an excellent son, who was an actor of some genius. I wish, however, that every man of letters could apply to himself the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Holland's, Baron Parke's, The Prussian Minister's, and to-day we dine with the Duchess of Inverness, the widow of the Duke of Sussex; to-morrow with Mr. Milman, a prebend of Westminster and a distinguished man of letters. We have been at a great many SOIREES, at Lady Palmerston's, Lady Grey's, Lord ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... able to spend half his income in Paris; that he could not contrive to give an entertainment that cost him money enough. What can he do better than commence amateur?—then he might throw away money as fast as his heart could wish. M. l'abbe, why do not you, or some man of letters, write directly, and advise him to this, for the good of his country? What a figure those prints would make in Petersburgh!—and how they would polish the Russians! But, as a good Frenchwoman, I ought to wish them to remain at Paris: they certainly cannot ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... not being a literary man the presumptuous will think that they have the right to blame me on the ground that I am not a man of letters. Vainglorious people! Know they not that I could make answer as Marius did to the Roman people, and say: They who make a {11} display with the labours of others will not allow me mine? They will say that being unskilled in letters I cannot find true expression for the matters ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... haunting its groves, and their imaginative contrivances of votive temples, urns, and tablets, and to combine them with these enchanting scenes of Nature, is to realize all that Poets have sung of Arcadia of old. Happy! happy life for the man of letters; what a retreat must your bowers have afforded from the common-place perplexities of every-day life: Alas! the picture is almost too sunny ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... digging the grave of Royalty, and building up the throne of Democracy. Who is to blame? Royalty itself is to blame, for deliberately passing over the claims of art and intellect, and giving preference to the claims of money. The moneyed man is ever the friend of Majesty,—but the brilliant man of letters is left out in the cold. Yet it is the man of letters who chronicles the age, and who will do so, we may be sure, according to his own experience. As the King treats the essayist, the romancist or the historian, so will these recording scribes treat ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... any man of letters to go through a severer ordeal. At last his genius found the true path for which it had been beating about so many years; but not until his prime of life had passed, when even that brave heart must have been chilled and that ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... joy, accepted the invitation. He even bought a new frock coat, as his own was too much worn to make a good appearance. He was terribly afraid of saying something foolish either to the artist or to the man of letters, as do people who speak of an art ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... which is confined to its proper field, the talents of each man may be freely used, and he will not be forced into relations for which he is unsuited. The absurd prejudice, that public employment is the most honorable, will pass away. The man of letters and the man of science, the poet, the artist, and the inventor, the financier, the navigator, the merchant, every one who performs beneficial service and displays great qualities, will be rewarded. Every ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... Browning rarely, even in the defiant heyday of adolescence, set more than a tentative foot across the outer precincts of the Romantic Bohemia. His "individualism" was not of the type which overflows in easy affectations; he was too original to be eccentric, too profoundly a man of letters to look "like a damned literary man." In his poetry this animus took a less equivocal shape. Not a little, both of its vividness and of its obscurity, flows from the undisciplined exuberance of his ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... the description is only relatively accurate. Of him, in this respect, we may say, what he said of Erasmus. 'Erasmus, though justly styled by Muretus, eruditus sane vir ac multae lectionis, was not a learned man in the special sense of the word—not an erudit. He was the man of letters. He did not make a study a part of antiquity for its own sake, but used it as an instrument of culture.' The result of culture in Pattison's actual life was not by any means ideal. For instance, he was head of a college for nearly a quarter of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... like a nun. This was a visionary scheme: He waked, and found it but a dream; A project far above his skill: For nature must be nature still. If he were bolder than became A scholar to a courtly dame, She might excuse a man of letters; Thus tutors often treat their better; And, since his talk offensive grew, He came to take his last adieu. Vanessa, fill'd with just disdain, Would still her dignity maintain, Instructed from her early years To scorn the art of female tears. Had ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... man of learning, who shared the poverty so often attached to it, enjoyed from him at one period a pension of a hundred pounds sterling a year, and continued to enjoy it till fortune rendered it superfluous. To another man of letters, in similar circumstances, he presented fourteen hundred pounds; and many other acts like these are on record to his immortal honor. Himself a frugal and abstemious ascetic, by saving and economising, he was able to assist ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... gain from the union with a man of his attainments of intellect, his kind temper, his great experience, and his high position? In this manner they travelled, side by side, lovingly together. Monsieur Peytel was not a lawyer merely, but a man of letters and varied learning; of the noble and sublime science of geology he was, especially, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Arenemberg, that he might be prepared for the high destiny which he believed awaited him. He published several very important treatises, which attracted the attention of Europe, and which gave him a high position, not merely as a man of letters, but as a statesman of profound views. The Spectateur Militaire, in the review of the "Manual of Artillery," ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... comrade, sir," said Morhange, stepping forward. "He is not a man of letters, as you are. These young lieutenants are hot-headed, you know. And besides, you can understand why both of us are not as calm ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... be a surprise to you to know that there is a book entitled The Thirteenth, the Greatest of Centuries by Dr. James J. Walsh, in its fifth edition with a sale of 70,000 copies. He indeed is not the only man of letters who signalizes that century for its greatness. To confine the quotations to two writers well known in our day, I find that Fiske in his Beginnings of New England says of the thirteenth century: "It was a wonderful time but after all less memorable as the culmination ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... An aged man of letters present, one who was characterized by his ripe scholarship, his richly cultured personality, sat listening in silence to the conversation. Suddenly he rose up, and, in vibrant tones, exclaimed: "Where hath the soul of literature fled, its vital part? If we are to trample ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... us of a man of letters, of England, who had passed his life in constant study; and it was observed that he had written several folio volumes, which his modest fears would not permit him to expose to the eye even of his critical friends. He promised to leave his labours to posterity; and he seemed sometimes, with ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... an excellent dinner by a well-known man of letters I had never met before. I accepted the invitation on condition I should be allowed to leave early, as I had engagements two or three deep for that evening. I came away with the best impression of my host and all his friends. I saw their jokes and their faces, and ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... been looking over the Diary of this very clever person, and I confess it has surprised me to find him, a graduate of Cambridge, and, in fact, I may say a man of letters, constantly employing such vulgar bad grammar as "he do say," and such like. I am the more surprised when, on looking at his letters, even the familiar ones to his cousin Roger and to W. Hewer, I can find nothing of the kind, they being ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 211, November 12, 1853 • Various
... the habit of translating every work, interesting or important, published out of England, and of thus giving a continental and cosmopolitan flavour to their literature. We cannot at this period expect much from a 'man of letters' who must produce a monthly volume for a pittance of L20: of him we need not speak. But the translator at his best, works, when reproducing the matter and the manner of his original, upon two distinct lines. His prime and primary object is to please his reader, edifying him and ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... "Merry Men"; one reader may prefer the one style, one the other—'tis an affair of character, perhaps of mood; but no expert can fail to see that the one is much more difficult, and the other much easier to maintain. It seems as though a full-grown experienced man of letters might engage to turn out "Treasure Island" at so many pages a day, and keep his pipe alight. But alas! this was not my case. Fifteen days I stuck to it, and turned out fifteen chapters; and then, in the early paragraphs of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... developing it, as set forth, according to his original views—founding the tradition and personality of "Mr. Punch," and converting him from a mere strolling puppet, an irresponsible jester, into the laughing philosopher and man of letters, the essence of all wit, the concentration of all wisdom, the soul of honour, the fountain of goodness, and ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... have stated the newsman's simple case. I leave it in your hands. Within the last year the institution has had the good fortune to attract the sympathy and gain the support of the eminent man of letters I am proud to call my friend, {24} who now represents the great Republic of America at the British Court. Also it has the honour of enrolling upon its list of donors and vice-presidents the great name of Longfellow. I beg to ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... something that I call the loathing of perception, Lisaveta: a state in which a man only needs to see through a thing in order to feel nauseated to the point of dying (and by no means put into a reconciled mood)—the case of Hamlet the Dane, that most typical man of letters. He knew what it means to be called upon to know without being born to it. To see clearly even through the tear-woven veil of emotion, to recognize, mark, observe, and be obliged to thrust aside one's perceptions with a smile at the very moment when hands clasp each other, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... 1904. Together with a fellow countryman, also a man of letters, I was travelling aboard a steamer of the Anglo-American Company, "Cunard." Our cabin was small and narrow. It was lighted by the dull light of an electric bull's-eye in the ceiling which served as a deck. There were three ...
— The Shield • Various
... time, a schoolmaster was visited by a man of letters who entered a school and, sitting down by the host's side, entered into discourse with him and found him an accomplished theologian, poet grammarian, philologist and poet; intelligent, well bred and pleasant spoken; whereat he wondered, saying in himself, "It cannot ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... kind of odious libel, which, having every characteristic of calumny, ought to be repressed. This is commonly nothing more than the fruit of anonymous and envenomed revenge: for what are the secret intrigues of courts to any man of letters? He will know time enough that which will suit the ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... complexity of every form of speech spoken by a highly civilised nation, and discover that the grammatical rules and the inflections which denote number, time, and equality are usually the product of a rude state of society—that the savage and the sage, the peasant and man of letters, the child and the philosopher, have worked together, in the course of many generations, to build up a fabric which has been truly described as a wonderful instrument of thought, a machine, the several parts of which ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... somehow got himself locked up for somebody else. Since then he had grown calmer, but he still worshipped at the shrine of the Cordova. He was not the only one, however; there were several, including the very distinguished English man of letters, Edmund Lushington, who had known her before she had begun to ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... this 'human, too human' creature, who comes so close to our hearts, whom we love and reverence, who is also, and above all, or at least in the last result, that great artist in prose, faultless in tact, flawless in technique, that great man of letters, to whom every lover of 'prose as a fine art' looks up with an admiration which may well become despair. What is it in this style, this way of putting things, so occasional, so variegated, so like his own harlequin in his 'ghastly vest of white patchwork,' 'the apparition of a dead rainbow'; ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... man of letters, whom Thackeray introduced in attendance at the death-bed of Francis Esmond. "He had a very notable share in the immortal History of John Bull, and the inimitable and praiseworthy Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus.... Arbuthnot's style ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... broke in a thin, elderly gentleman. "Is there no retired schoolmaster or man of letters in Manchester with whom she ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... scratched his head and muttered: "This Saul is a man of letters; his style is vigorous! Who would ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... sketched for me had no resemblance to the career of a peaceful man of letters. It was a hot race, a combat as bloody (his own word) as those contests of which he ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... sprung from a line of distinguished jurists, was celebrated by Martial as the Tibullus of his time,[443] and is praised by the younger Pliny for the excellence of his light verses.[444] Trajan, his successor (98-117 A.D.), though a man of war, rather than a man of letters, wrote a history of the Dacian wars,[445] and possessed—as his letters to Pliny testify—a remarkable power of expressing himself tersely and clearly. He was, like Vespasian, a generous patron to rhetoric and ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... Geoffrey Chaucer (died 1400) we meet with a poet of the first rank, whose works are increasingly read and {34} will always continue to be a source of delight and refreshment to the general reader as well as a "well of English undefiled" to the professional man of letters. With the exception of Dante, Chaucer was the greatest of the poets of mediaeval Europe, and he remains one of the greatest of English poets, and certainly the foremost of English story-tellers in verse. He was the son of a London vintner, and was in his youth in the service of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... he had befriended Sheridan, and how good he had been to Campbell in his sorest needs. Intellectual or artistic excellence was a sure passport to his salon, and his door never turned on reluctant hinges to admit the unfriended man of letters who ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... November, Brian was as usual making his way down Gower Street, his umbrella held low to shelter him from the driving rain which seemed to come in all directions. The milkman's shrill voice was still far in the distance, the man of letters was still at work upon knockers some way off, it was not yet time for his little girl to make her appearance, and he was not even thinking of her, when suddenly his umbrella was nearly knocked out of his hand by coming violently into collision with another umbrella. Brought thus ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... This is the same threat which Shakespeare uses against his dark mistress in Sonnet 140, and every one will admit that it is more in the character of the poet and man of letters than in that of the warrior son-in-law of a half-barbarous king. The last line here, because it is a little superfluous, a little emphatic, seems to me likely to have a personal application. When Shakespeare's mistress had her will, did she ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... well as man of letters, he is known especially for his war lyrics, which have achieved a wide popularity. They are recommended more by the vigor of their patriotic sentiment than by ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... great many of them, I believe—will dislike this work most" This was the first time I had heard him allude to the people who couldn't read him,—a class which is supposed always to sit heavy upon the consciousness of the man of letters. A man organized for literature, as Mark Ambient was, must certainly have had the normal proportion of sensitiveness, of irritability; the artistic ego, capable in some cases of such monstrous development, must ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... mastery of his art. Here he battled with others; and since, except on paper, he never possessed business capacity, he failed and went under; but by his defeat he paved the way to future triumph. He passed through an experience possibly unique in the career of a man of letters, one which imparts the peculiar flavour of business, money, and affairs to his books, and which fixed on him for all his days the impression of restless, passionate, thronging humanity which he pictures in his books. The abyss between his early romantic novels and such a book as the "Peau de Chagrin" ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... me, and now in my seventy-sixth year I find myself in the mood to do so. You know enough about me to know that it will not be an exciting narrative or of any great historical value. It is mainly the life of a country man and a rather obscure man of letters, lived in eventful times indeed, but largely lived apart from the men and events that have given character to the last three quarters of a century. Like tens of thousands of others, I have been a spectator of, rather than a participator in, the activities—political, commercial, ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... sickened in the discharge of duties wholly unsuitable for him, and longed for the comforts of home. His resources were still limited, but he flattered himself in the expectation that he might earn a subsistence as a man of letters. He fixed his residence at a farm-house in the vicinity of Stirling; and, amidst the pursuits of literature, the composition of verses, and the cultivation of friendship, he contrived, for a time, to enjoy a considerable share of happiness. But he speedily discovered ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... he may not express in a manner to be understood by the meanest among them. And this assertion must be true, or else God requires from us more than we are able to perform. However, not to contend whether a logician might possibly put a case that would serve for an exception, I will appeal to any man of letters, whether at least nineteen in twenty of those perplexing words might not be changed into easy ones, such as naturally first occur to ordinary men, and probably did so at first to those very gentlemen who are ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... to whom the notion of blessedness is that they shall be out in the free plains. 'Amplius,' the dying Xavier's word, 'further afield,' is the motto of all noble life—scientist, scholar, artist, man of letters, man of affairs; all come under the same law, that unless there is something before them which has dominated their hearts, and draws their whole being towards it, their lives want salt, want nobility, want freshness, and a green scum comes over ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... enter was open to him. He was surfeited with roses and praises and incense. He alone took precedence over Scott and Coleridge and Moore and Campbell. For a time his pre-eminence in literature was generally conceded. He was the foremost man of letters of his day, and the greatest popular idol. His rank added to his eclat, since not many noblemen were distinguished for genius or literary excellence. His singular beauty of face and person, despite his slight lameness, attracted ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... "money" instead of "life," and begin to classify men by this standard, we see how it inverts the old-world ideas of social hierarchy. True it is, the man of letters or of high artistic gifts can produce a certain amount of money, but has little chance against the inventor of a new soap or a patent pill. Honesty at once becomes the worst policy, and a thousand other maxims have to be reformed. Yet this is a trifling boule-versement ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... state that my brief letter published in your columns is the 'best reply' I can make to your article upon Dorian Gray. This is not so. I do not propose to discuss fully the matter here, but I feel bound to say that your article contains the most unjustifiable attack that has been made upon any man of letters for many years. ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... five francs were allowed for a bourgeois; a man of letters was granted ten; a Marshal of France ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... speedily summoned the porter, the man of letters of the establishment, and with his aid drew Mr. Jorrocks out a bill, which he described as "reaching down each side of his body and round his waist," commencing with 2 francs for savon, and then proceeding ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... the hall P Louis XVI. the object of lamentation to every true Frenchman G R Basseville, agent of the republic at Rome M R General Marquis de la Fayette, ex-constituent I R General Winphen, ex-constituent P L The Marquis d'Angremont G L De Blackmann, major of the Swiss guards G L De Cazotte, a man of letters, upwards of 80 years of age G R General Montesquieu, ex-constituent P R The celebrated Count Mirabeau, expelled from the pantheon. (Depantheonise.) R Chabroud, advocate to the Duke of Orleans, ex-constituent P D Le Comte de Tally Tollendal, ...
— Historical Epochs of the French Revolution • H. Goudemetz
... Walter Scott suggests as a reason for their differences, "that the youthful vivacity, and perhaps aristocratic assumption, of Walpole, did not agree with the somewhat formal opinions and habits of the professed man of letters." (48) This conjecture may very possibly be the correct one; but we have no clue to guide us with certainty to the causes of their rupture. In after-life they were reconciled, though the intimacy of early friendship never appears to have been restored ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... that the life of a man of letters is necessarily deficient in incident, appears to have originated in a misconception of the essential nature of human action. The life of every man is full of incidents, but the incidents are insignificant, because they do not affect his ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... comfort than a very sensitive organization might find acceptable. The Master does not seem to like him much, for some reason or other,—perhaps he has a special aversion to the odor of tobacco. As his forefinger shows a little too distinctly that he uses a pen, I shall compliment him by calling him the Man of Letters, until I find out more ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... when he wishes, those of the utmost amiability, I remarked in him an industrious and indefatigable minister, an intelligent man, as well instructed in the mass as in details; a mind fertile in resources, means, and expedients; an administrator, a jurist, a theologian, a man of letters and of affairs, an artist, an agriculturist, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... pedestrian, her purpose didactic, her practice neat and formal: and she prosed of England's greatest captain, the victor of Blenheim, as tamely as himself had been 'a parson in a tye-wig'—himself, and not the amiable man of letters who acted as her ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... consulship, his heart was given to the adornment of his Tusculan villa in a way suited to his literary and philosophic tastes. This may be taken as a specimen of his spirit throughout his life. He was before all things a man of letters; compared with literature, politics and oratory held quite a secondary place in his affections. Public business employed his intellect, but never ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... gipsy life, settling down here and there to carry on their trade, had not only founded a great industry, but was a man of artistic taste, a patron of art, and a lover of science. Telford, the Eskdale shepherd, was a man of literary taste, and was especially friendly with the typical man of letters, Southey. Others, of course, were of a lower type. Arkwright combined the talents of an inventor with those of a man of business. He was a man, says Baines (the historian of the cotton trade), who was sure to come out ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... with the Church of England, or to be present at any worship where the usurper was mentioned as king. He was, I believe, more than once apprehended in the reign of King William, and once at the accession of George. He was the familiar friend of Hicks[959] and Nelson[960]; a man of letters, but injudicious; and very curious and inquisitive, but credulous. He lived[961] in 1743, or 44, about 75 years old.' The subject of luxury having been introduced, Dr. Johnson defended it. 'We have ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... the days of British rule the Brahmin was the priest and man of letters, the "clerke" in short. The rajahs and chiefs were much of the same mind ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... forth a bad poem by Hoccleve. The wasteful wars in France, and the turmoil of the Roses, on the other hand, had a great and most disastrous influence. After Lydgate's death about 1447, Capgrave was our leading man of letters, and on his death in 1464 the post was left vacant, unless Master Bennet Burgh can be considered as having held it. The Paston Letters, which begin in 1422 and cover the rest of the century (till ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... face, or the honest intrepidity of virtue? Men will watch him with a jealous eye; they will hide their papers from him, and lock up their escrutoires; he will henceforth esteem it a libel to be called a man of letters; homo trium literarum! He not only took away the letters from one brother, but kept himself concealed till he nearly occasioned the murder of the other. It is impossible to read his account, expressive of the coolest and most deliberate malice, without ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... have been as quick as that of a child to reject a thing it abhorred. His unworldliness had not a flaw. So beautiful a life can never have become distinguished in the struggles and antagonisms which make the career of the man of the world, or even the man of letters, as letters are now written; for he was a man, and the only one I ever knew, of whom one would say that he applied in the divine sense the maxim of Christ, "Resist not evil,"—he simply, and by the necessity of his ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... is decidedly a man of letters, a high-souled gentleman, a most useful citizen in any community—much respected and beloved by all who know him, and most scrupulously modest—a brilliant trait in the character of a teacher. We learn ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... in Britain and elsewhere bookmaking was entirely confined to the monks, and merely consisted in the compilation of a series of bald annals locked up in bad Latin. It is true, Thomas of Ercildoune was a contemporary of Snorro's; but he is known to us more as a magician than as a man of letters; whereas histories, memoirs, romances, biographies, poetry, statistics, novels, calendars, specimens of almost every kind of composition, are to be found even among the meagre relics which have survived the literary decadence that supervened on the ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... was received with strong dissent in Boston, where it was delivered, and in Concord, where it was read with indignation. The critic seemed to be taking away, one after another, our venerated master's claims as a poet, a man of letters, and a philosopher. What! Gray a great poet, and Emerson not! Addison a great writer, and Emerson not! Surely there are heights and depths in Emerson, an inspiring power, an originality and force of thought which are neither ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... effect, there is yet about the lyrics of Jonson a certain stiffness and formality, a suspicion that they were not quite spontaneous and unbidden, but that they were carved, so to speak, with disproportionate labour by a potent man of letters whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is for these reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity and emotion which we usually associate with lyrical poetry. There are no such epitaphs ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... scientific lines, and its alliance with biology, suggest one thought which applies generally to an age of science and may be found to throw some illumination even on the future. Which of all types of modern men is the most habitually hopeful, the man of letters, the politician, the business man, or the man of science? There can be no question of the answer. The typical man of science is sure of the greatness and solidity of the work he shares, and confident that the future ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... Antiche," the story is told of a mule, which pretends that his name is written on the bottom of his hind foot. The wolf attempts to read it, the mule kills him with a kick in the forehead; and the fox, looking on, remarks that "every man of letters is not wise." A similar story is ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... incorrigible members of the book clubs were styled, in New-York, were pressingly invited to be present. Aristabulus had contrived to earn such a reputation for the captain, on the night of the ball, that he was universally called a man of letters, and an article had actually appeared in one of the papers, speaking of the literary merits of the "Hon. and Rev. Mr. Truck, a gentleman travelling in our country, from whose liberality and just views, an account of our society was to be expected, that should, at last, do justice to our ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... through the endless volumes, till I came to the 'Dialogues Philosophiques.' The world is too busy, fortunately, to disturb its peace with such profane satire, such withering sarcasm as flashes through an 'entretien' like that between 'Frere Rigolet' and 'L'Empereur de la Chine.' Every French man of letters knows it by heart; but it would wound our English susceptibilities were I to cite it here. Then, too, the impious paraphrase of the Athanasian Creed, with its terrible climax, from the converting Jesuit: 'Or vous voyez ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... most raving of book-madmen: but he displayed, withal, a spirit of kindness and liberality towards his favourite establishment at Caen, which could not be easily shaken or subdued. He was also a man of letters, and evinced that most commendable of all literary propensities—a love of the LITERATURE OF HIS COUNTRY. He amassed a very large collection of books, which was cruelly pillaged during the Revolution; but the public library ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... time M. de Mocenigo went as ambassador to France, and was replaced by M. Querini. Querini was a man of letters, while Mocenigo only liked music and his ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... great English poet. You cannot, you ought not, to devote yourself to the splendid career to which your genius irresistibly impels you, without that counsel, that support, that protection, which a husband alone can give. My dear child, as the wife myself of a man of letters, and familiarised to all the gossip, all the scandal, to which they who give their names to the public are exposed, I declare that if I had a daughter who inherited Savarin's talents, and was ambitious of attaining ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Scanty is the number of those who will come out of that severest of ordeals so successfully as he. The same conclusion would be reached, whether we were to consider him in his private relations or in his career as a man of letters. Among the irritable race of authors no one was freer from petty envy or jealousy. During many years of close intercourse, in which he constantly gave utterance to his views both of men and things with absolute unreserve, I recall no disparaging opinion ever expressed ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... from the district of Chiang-ning to the capital, where he obtained his doctor's degree and distinguished himself as a man of letters. For some time he filled a minor post, but was eventually disgraced and exiled to the province of Hunan. When the rebellion of An Lu-shan broke out, he returned to his native place, where he was cruelly murdered by the censor Lu Ch'in-hsiao. (See Hervey Saint-Denys, 'Poe/sies des Thang', p. ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... poet is generally more attentive to character than to history; and I much fear that the art of printing was not introduced into England, till several years after Lord Say's death; but of some of these meritorious crimes I should hope to find my ancestor guilty; and a man of letters may be proud of his descent from a ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... the human mind under the most varied circumstances. We have read the volume of the learned and accomplished professor with infinite satisfaction, and we can safely recommend it to the perusal of the student and the man of letters. The history of art, in the early stages of Christianity, is the history of intellectual cultivation in the most extraordinary period of the world's history. The state of the world during the first centuries after the departure of Christ, was essentially exceptional. It had never been; it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... friends chopped off as summarily as his own head fell before the mandate of the King. Everything else is forgotten in the recollection of the Earl's youth, his lofty origin, his brilliant talents, his rank as a man of letters, and his prompt consignment to a bloody grave, the last of the legion of patricians sent by Henry to the block or the gallows. Yet it is Surrey upon whom Mr. Froude makes his last attack, and whom he puts down as a dirty dog, in order that Henry VIII may not be seen devoting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the elbow! You interest me," says Mr. St. John. "'Tis charming to hear of one man of letters from the ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... them to admire strength of will, is that of Vittorio Alfieri, who began to educate himself late in life, overcoming the drudgery of the rudiments by a great effort. He, who had hitherto been a man of the world, set to work to study the Latin grammar, and persevered until he became a man of letters, and, in virtue of his ardent genius, one of our greatest poets. The phrase by which he explained his transformation is just the phrase every child in Italy has heard quoted by his teachers: "I willed, perpetually I willed, with all my ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... in 1790, died rabbi of Prague in 1867. Together with Zunz, he was the founder of modern Jewish science. A distinguished man of letters, he was known above all for his biographies of celebrated rabbis, for historic and archaeologic studies, and ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... the writing-table where he had done his work, and noted the various pictures which hung around the room. It was not like the ordinary Lancashire manufacturer's house at all. It suggested the student, the man of letters, the lover of art. And how silent it was! Away in the distance was the hum of the busy town, but here, sheltered by the great hills which sloped away behind, all was peace. After sitting for a time, she went into Paul's mother's bedroom again, and watched her as she lay asleep. Could ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... a modest American, I confess that I opened my eyes with wonder that a personage of such renown as the Countess Tolstoy, the wife of the greatest living man of letters, should take the trouble to leave so kind a ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... as in all essential points, the first witness to be called is Dante. He strove for the poet's garland with all the power of his soul.33 As publicist and man of letters, he laid stress on the fact that what he did was new, and that he wished not only to be, but to be esteemed the first in his own walks.34 But in his prose writings he touches also on the inconveniences of fame; he knows how often personal ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... (1304-74) we have the beginnings of the movement. He has been called "the first modern scholar and man of letters." Repudiating the other-worldliness ideal and the scholastic learning of his time, [4] possessed of a deep love for beauty in nature and art, a delight in travel, a desire for worldly fame, a strong historical sense, and the self-confidence ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... unfavourable to him. He was a chaotic and unequal writer, and if there is one thing in which artists have improved since his time, it is in consistency and equality. It would perhaps be unkind to inquire whether the level of the modern man of letters, as compared with Scott, is due to the absence of valleys or the absence of mountains. But in any case, we have learnt in our day to arrange our literary effects carefully, and the only point in which we fall short of Scott is in the incidental misfortune that ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... emotion or poetic lift, intensely practical and utilitarian, broad-minded, inventive, shrewd, versatile, Franklin's sturdy figure became typical of his time and his people. He was the first and the only man of letters in colonial America who acquired a cosmopolitan fame and impressed his characteristic Americanism upon the mind of Europe. He was the embodiment of common sense and of the useful virtues, with the enterprise ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... Alice wanted to know who everybody was; and Godmother told her—every one but "the young man lion" as she called him. The home they had been to was that of a celebrated editor and man of letters who numbered among his friends the most delightful people of many nations. The guests represented a variety of talents. The large, dark, distinctly-foreign looking man was the great baritone of one of the opera houses. The younger man, with the long, dark hair, was ...
— Everybody's Lonesome - A True Fairy Story • Clara E. Laughlin
... celebrated hundred guineas' fee equally to all his victims, but we may be pretty sure that in his business- like brain he has each one of them nicely labelled, a Gallant Soldier being good for so much new business, a titled Man of Letters being good for slightly less; and that real Fame is best measured by the number of times that one's unbiased views on Pelmanism (or Tonics or Hair-Restorers) are considered to be worth reprinting. In this matter my friend Mandragon ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... self-command). It is surely not necessary, even for a clever Norwegian man of letters in a realistic social drama, to make quite such a fool of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various
... arises with regard to the published books and I have tried to solve it on the same line. There has rung in my mind Mr. Belloc's saying: "A man is his mind." To tell the story of a man of letters while avoiding quotation from or reference to his published works is simply not to tell it. At Christopher Dawson's suggestion I have re-read all the books in the order in which they were written, thus trying to get the development of Gilbert's mind perfectly clear to myself and to ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... notice of M. Thiers' chapter on St. Helena, M. Sainte-Beuve, after expressing his admiration of the commentaries of Napoleon on the campaigns of Turenne, Frederic, and Caesar, adds: "A man of letters smiles at first involuntarily to see Napoleon apply to each of these famous campaigns a methodical criticism, just as we would proceed with a work of the mind, with an epic or tragic poem. But is not a campaign ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... for, after all, it was something to command kindness and hospitality, or inspire mortal terror, by the deformity that afflicted him. Possibly, too, in his humble heart he was pleased at having been taken for such a social personage as a scholar and a man of letters; for he had always been very careful to keep himself very clean and neat, and if he had any vanity it was that no one could ever detect a spot on his clothes. For instance, he always carried with him a little piece of brown cotton, folded like a handkerchief, which he spread upon the pavement in ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... the Romanists, nor the people who were something more than amateurs in science, could be got to worship M. Comte's new idol properly. In the native country of Positivism, one distinguished man of letters and one of science, for a time, helped to make up a roomful of the faithful, but their love soon grew cold. In England, on the other hand, there appears to be little doubt that, in the ninth decade of the century, the multitude ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... Bertrand Russell, the distinguished man of letters who served sixty-one days in lieu ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... the "Path to Rome" will learn with gladness that Mr Hilaire Belloc has written another book in the same sunny temper, dealing with the oldest highway in Britain. It is a subject that brings into play all those high faculties which make Mr Belloc the most genuine man of letters now alive. The record of the journey makes one of the most exhilarating books of our time, and the series of Mr Muirhead's sixteen pictures painted for this book sets the glittering river itself flowing swiftly past before ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... Then the man of letters flicked it across the room with finger and thumb. And the original theorist became the poorer by the commercial estimate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 10th, 1920 • Various
... please others; I confess it pleases me. And the absence of literary self-consciousness is itself pleasant; indeed, much of the charm of these stories is the charm of their unpremeditated art. But, though he did not write for the critics, Leamy was in spite of himself a man of letters. He was so genuinely an artist that he could not do the thing ill. Any one of these stories will prove his capacity: the first, for instance, about that princess on the "bare, brown, lonely moor" who was "as sweet and as fresh as an ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... absorbed in the mere enjoyment of exercising his critical faculty. Although he achieved only a qualified eminence as poet, or as prose writer, yet because of the breadth and variety of his permanent achievement he must be regarded as our greatest man of letters. His sympathetic interest, always outflowing toward concrete humanity, was ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
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