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Epitome   Listen
noun
Epitome  n.  (pl. epitomes)  
1.
A work in which the contents of a former work are reduced within a smaller space by curtailment and condensation; a brief summary; an abridgement. "(An) epitome of the contents of a very large book."
2.
A compact or condensed representation of anything; something possessing conspicuously or to a high degree the qualities of a class. "An epitome of English fashionable life." "A man so various that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome."
Synonyms: Abridgement; compendium; compend; abstract; synopsis; abbreviature. See Abridgment.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Epitome" Quotes from Famous Books



... to say a word for Eastern poetry, such as portions of the Maha Bharata and Ramayana (too long probably to be read through, but of which Talboys Wheeler has given a most interesting epitome in the first two volumes of his History of India); the Shah-nameh, the work of the great Persian poet Firdusi; Kalidasa's Sakuntala, and the Sheking, the classical collection of ancient Chinese odes. Many I know, will think I ought to ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock

... in its scope and progress an epitome of the course of life. Neither place nor council was lacking in dignity. The debaters were the keenest in the land, the theme they were engaged on the loftiest and most vital. The high hall of Horne's house had never beheld an assembly so ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... garden, which has just reached the coda of a waltz, whirl one another into the room. The harlequin's dress is made of lozenges, an inch square, of turquoise blue silk and gold alternately. His hat is gilt and his mask turned up. The columbine's petticoats are the epitome of a harvest field, golden orange and poppy crimson, with a tiny velvet jacket for the poppy stamens. They pass, an exquisite and dazzling apparition, between McComas and Bohun, and then back in a circle to the ...
— You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw

... doubt the most remarkable of English critics, and summarizes so many opposite theories and tendencies that his pages may in some sort be taken as an epitome of the whole matter. It would be impossible to abstract from their great bulk any consecutive or consistent system of thought or precept. His influence has been mainly by isolated ideas of more or less truth and value. It is impossible here to analyze his work. Such is the mixed tissue of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various

... professional practice, much disposed to fancy the British empire the centre of all that is excellent in the world, and Scotland the focus of, at least, all moral excellence in that empire. In short, he was an epitome, though on a scale suited to his rank, of those very qualities which were so peculiar to the servants of the Crown that were sent into the colonies, as these servants estimated themselves in comparison with the natives of the country; or, in other words, he considered the American ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper

... towering rage. He was a man of irascible temper, bitterly intolerant, and unreasoningly violent against all unbelievers, especially Americans whose affairs brought them to Colombia. In this respect he was the epitome of the ecclesiastical anti-foreign sentiment which obtained in that country. His intolerance of heretics was such that he would gladly have bound his own kin to the stake had he believed their opinions unorthodox. Yet he was thoroughly conscientious, a devout churchman, and saturated with ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... life an unsurpassed singer of old songs, who should give us not only the "Adelaide," but "Mignon," "The Serenade," the "Adieu," and all the many-colored ballads on love,—plain, fantastic, descriptive, sad, and sweet,—so that we might enjoy an epitome of our life-long musical pleasures, and not have to cry, like Faust, but in vain, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various

... stock of memories. Speaking in his constituency after the lying in state of King Edward, which he had attended (standing next to the Prime Minister as the senior Privy Councillor present), he welcomed the precedent which gave a new association to Westminster Hall—that 'epitome of English history.' He recalled to his hearers the outstanding incidents and persons whose record had then come into his mind. His habit of tracing out links with the past made him at Westminster the best and most ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn

... scenes, the trades of the people, in short, the various occupations of the Egyptians, varying only in their details and the mode of their execution, were figured in these tombs, and were intended as a short epitome of human life, which suited equally every future occupant. The tombs at Beni Hassan are even of an earlier date than those of Thebes. Among these the tomb of a monarch or provincial governor is of the age of Osirtasen I. The walls of this tomb ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... is placed by the epitomator of Livy and by Orosius before that on the Isara; but the reverse order is supported by Floras and Strabo (iv. 191), and is confirmed partly by the circumstance that Maximus, according to the epitome of Livy and Pliny, H. N. vii. 50, conquered the Gauls when consul, partly and especially by the Capitoline Fasti, according to which Maximus not only triumphed before Ahenobarbus, but the former triumphed ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... forces, do battle with them, fight with fog on one hand and desert on the other. There never will be one world in education until we have one man who can emphasise persons and things together, and do it every day, side by side, in his own mind. When there is one man who is an all-man, an epitome of a world, there shall be more all-men. He cannot help attracting them, drawing them out, creating them. With enough men who have a whole world in their hearts, we shall ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee

... to the mineralogist, the epigene crystal, formed by materials of one substance modelled on the perished crystals of another. The church of St. Mark's itself, harmonious as its structure may at first sight appear, is an epitome of the changes of Venetian architecture from the tenth to the nineteenth century. Its crypt, and the line of low arches which support the screen, are apparently the earliest portions; the lower stories of the main fabric are of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with later ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin

... NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY Revised edition. Confined to English biography, and to persons dead at the dale of publication of Supplement (1909). The articles are full, and of the highest authority. In the index and epitome is a convenient summary ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner

... said the minister, and the epitome of humanity which filled the room held its breath—the old with a wonder upon their life-scarred faces, the young half frightened to feel the stir of the great wings ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield

... name and the king's, I bid you go back to your master and say this: Kings are great in the eyes of their people, but the people are great in the eyes of God, and it is the people of France who answer you in the name of this epitome. The people of Paris are not so poor of spirit that they fear the croak of the Burgundian ravens. We are well victualled, we are well armed; we lie snug and warm behind our stout walls; we laugh at your leaguer. But when we who eat are hungry, when we who drink ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... and he contrived somehow to get into those two words an epitome of his cousin's character. Ham was stouter, and his clothes were more striking, more obviously expensive than ever.... On our way homeward, after we had walked a block or two in silence, Tom exclaimed:—"Don't make friends with the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... hardly avoid the illusion that it is a rising city; you will almost be tempted to ask where are the workmen, so perfect art the walls of the houses, so bright and uninjured the painting upon them. Hardly anything is wanting to make this scene a magnificent epitome of all that is most worthy of admiration in Nature and art; had there been in addition to the other objects a fine river and a waterfall the epitome would, I think, ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy

... parrots[43] contained most new matter to me, and interested me extremely; that in the Geographical Journal[44] strikes me as an epitome of the whole theory of geographical distribution: the comparison of Borneo and New Guinea, the relation of the volcanic outbursts and the required subsidence, and the comparison of the supposed conversion ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... animals and to plants, either directly or indirectly. The germ of life had passed through various stages of physical form before it could appear as a man. That branch of science which is called Embryology has proved the fact that "man is the epitome of the whole creation." It tells that the human body before its birth passes through all the different stages of the animal kingdom—such as the polyp, fish, reptile, dog, ape, and at last, man. If we remember that nature is always consistent, that her laws ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda

... English parsonage—the quietness, the well-bred but simple air of it, with a tang of scholarly mustiness, the whole of a fragrance never entirely lost to those who have known it intimately. Something of the spirit of George Herbert, that homely gentleman of unassuming saintliness, the epitome of everything that was best and most characteristic in the Anglican Church, has descended on country parsonages ever since and is only now beginning to wear thin. And it was the Church of Herbert, of Jeremy Taylor, of Traherne—how above all he would have loved the works of Traherne ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... was uncertain; but its inevitability was as assured as its magnitude. Thorpe knew it, and shut his teeth, looking keenly about him. The Fighting Forty knew it, and longed for the grapple to come. The other camps knew it, and followed their leader with perfect trust. The affair was an epitome of the historic combats begun with David and Goliath. It was an affair of Titans. The little courageous men watched their ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White

... certainly it shall prove to you "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil," it shall be as the forbidden fruit, which instead of performing that which was promised will bring forth death,—the eternal separation of the soul from God. Adam's sin was a breviary or epitome of the multiplied and enlarged sins of mankind. You may see in this tragedy all your fortunes (so to speak,)—you may behold in it the flattering insinuations and deceitful promises of sin and Satan, who is a liar and murderer ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... these, perhaps, being that the side of which Cato approved was the side of the right. Pompey received his new adherent with astonishment and delight, rising from his chair to greet him. He spent most of his time in camp in study, being ingrossed on the very eve of the battle in making an epitome of Polybius, the Greek historian of the Second Punic War. He passed through the disastrous day of Pharsalia unhurt, Caesar having given special orders that his life was to be spared. After the battle, the conqueror not only pardoned ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church

... room of Lifecraft Three. Two of them, Ferdy Blaine and Moose Mordan, were playing cards for small stakes. Ferdy was of medium size; compact rather than slender; built of rawhide and spring steel. Lithe and poised, he was the epitome of leashed and controlled action. Moose was six-feet-four and weighed a good two-forty—stolid, massive, solid. Ferdy and Moose; a tiger and an elephant; both owned in fee simple ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith

... the girl. The exhilarating influence of the early June outdoors was visible in her countenance. Her eyes sparkled, her cheeks glowed—she seemed the epitome of innocent, happy girlhood. The vision charmed the preacher and caused the blood to course more swiftly through his veins, but he bit his lip and steadied his voice to speak naturally. "Yes, Phoebe, I want to speak to ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers

... Aishika, the refreshing shade; the book called Santi, the mighty fruit; the book called Aswamedha, the immortal sap; the denominated Asramavasika, the spot where it groweth; and the book called Mausala, is an epitome of the Vedas and held in great respect by the virtuous Brahmanas. The tree of the Bharata, inexhaustible to mankind as the clouds, shall be as a source of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... From this long epitome you can gather the following results; first, if the system were a bad one, the Duchess of Sutherland had nothing to do with it, since it was first introduced in 1806, the same year her grace was born; and the accusation against Mr. Sellar dates in 1811, when her grace was five ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe

... in Asia Minor, Oribasius became acquainted with him, and they were soon close friends. When Julian was raised to the rank of Caesar, Oribasius accompanied him into Gaul. During this journey Oribasius, at the request of his patron, made an epitome of the writings of Galen, and then extended the work by including a collection of the writings of all preceding medical authors. When this work was finally completed it consisted of seventy books under the title "Collecta Medicinalia." ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott

... founded upon the Scott version and it has been imperfectly reprinted (4 vole., 8vo, Nimmo and Bain, London, 1883). But most men, little recking what a small portion of the original they were reading, satisfied themselves with the Anglo French epitome and metaphrase. At length in 1838, Mr. Henry Torrens, B.A., Irishman, lawyer ("of the Inner Temple") and Bengal Civilian, took a step in the right direction; and began to translate, "The Book of the Thousand Nights ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... idealization of Aesop,—"The Author's Prayer," the "Address to the Deil," "The Vision" and "The Dream," "Halloween," "The Cottar's Saturday Night," the lines "To a Mouse" and "To a Daisy," "Scotch Drink," "Man was made to Mourn," the "Epistle to Davie," and some of his most popular songs. This epitome of a genius so marvellous and so varied took his audience by storm. "The country murmured of him from sea to sea." "With his poems," says Robert Heron, "old and young, grave and gay, learned and ignorant, were ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... market. He has told us of the desperadoes and their trifling regard for human life, and preserved other elemental characters of these prodigal days. The funeral of Buck Fanshaw that amazing masterpiece—is a complete epitome ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... could cross-examine in capital style and address the jury in a language of his own, by glances, shrugs, and remarks addressed to a witness, but intended for the jury, as they knew perfectly well. His style, bearing, and speeches form an admirable epitome of the arts and devices of a smart counsel. There are "common" forms and Skimpin had them at his fingers' ends. As we listen, we feel how admirably directed they were to work ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald

... and roam about the earth; they penetrate everywhere carrying corruption, distress, {158} sickness and death. The celestial spirits and the supporters of piety are compelled constantly to baffle their ever renewed enterprises. The strife continues in the heart and conscience of man, the epitome of the universe, between the divine law of duty and the suggestions of the evil spirits. Life is a merciless war knowing no truce. The task of the true Mazdean consisted in constantly fighting ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont

... the history of Normandy, from the establishment of the dukedom to the beginning of the thirteenth century, is so interwoven with that of England, that it has been considered needless here to insert an epitome of it, as had at first been intended. In lieu of this, a Table is subjoined, exhibiting the succession, marriages and progeny of the Norman Princes, copied from Du Moulin; and such Table can scarcely be regarded otherwise than useful, ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman

... direct pathway to God through the soul as upon the symbolic character of the world of Nature as a visible revelation of an invisible Universe, and upon the idea that man is a microcosm, a little world, reproducing in epitome, point for point, though in miniature, the great world, or macrocosm. On this line of thought, everything is double. The things that are seen are parables of other things which are not seen. They are like ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... CHRONICLE.—We now reach the valuable and purely historical compilation known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which is a chronological arrangement of events in English history, from the birth of Christ to the year 1154, in the reign of Henry the Second. It is the most valuable epitome of English history during ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... did not know what we were fighting for; thought the North was acting very badly; regarded the people of the South as an oppressed and persecuted race; believed in slavery; considered the Lincoln government a perfect despotism, etc. In short, his views were a general epitome of the speeches, proclamations, and messages of the leading rebels throughout the South. I listened to him with great patience. He had an interesting family on board, all of whom spoke English; and what struck ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne

... his wrath rising as he writes; "a good text always deserves a fair margent, but as for a woman who lives but to ape the newest court- fashions, I look at her as the very gizzard of a trifle, the product of a quarter of a cipher, the epitome of nothing; fitter to be kicked, if she were of a kickable substance, than either honored or humored. To speak moderately, I truly confess, it is beyond the ken of my understanding to conceive how those women should have any ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... religion. We have seen some of its principles and methods, and have discovered these at work in various illustrations and applications. It now remains to realize that these are all to be found in brief epitome in the work of the Great Teacher. For Jesus was first of all a teacher, rather than a preacher. And as a teacher he supplied the model which anticipated all modern psychology and scientific pedagogy, and gave ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts

... using on Paco, said, "I think you do, Mr. Kuran. In the afternoon, tomorrow, avoid whatever tour the Intourist people wish to take you on and wander about Sovietska Park." She giggled some more. The world-wide epitome of a girl being picked up ...
— Combat • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... wave, upflung With writhing head and hissing tongue; The weed whose tangled fibres tell Of some inviolate deep-sea dell; The faultless, secret-chambered shell, Whose sound is an epitome Of all the utterance of the sea; Great, basking, twinkling wastes of brine; Far clouds of gulls that wheel and swerve In unanimity divine, With undulation serpentine, And wondrous, consentaneous curve, Flashing in sudden silver sheen, Then melting on the sky-line keen; The world-forgotten ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson

... progress from Dorset village to school, from school to University, and thence to my present street-bound routine in London. His views were clearly no less opposite to that vague tumult of resentment, protest, and aspiration which represented my own outlook upon life. Indeed, his speech that day was an epitome of the sentiment and opinions which I had chosen to regard with ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... the partisan newspaper spread every virtue in the calendar. A stranger to the country and its customs reading one of their partisan newspapers during a political campaign, might conclude that the party it advocated was composed of only the virtues of the country, and their leader an epitome ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley

... her infant child can reason within the limits of its own experience, long before it can formulate its reason in articulately worded thought? If the development of any given animal is, as our opponents themselves admit, an epitome of the history of its whole anterior development, surely the fact that speech is an accomplishment acquired after birth so artificially that children who have gone wild in the woods lose it if they have ever ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler

... of those who are keenly susceptible to the aesthetic aspects of things but are not given to reflection stand in striking contrast to the epitome of the popular wisdom expressed in the skeptical adage that there ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton

... reclused Hermits oftentimes do know More of Heaven's glory than a worldly can: As Man is of the World, the Heart of Man Is an Epitome of God's great Book Of Creatures, and Men ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... there anything to save him. Religion had passed him by. "A long time dead" was his epitome of that phase of speculation. He was not interested in humanity. According to his rough-hewn sociology, it was all a gamble. God was a whimsical, abstract, mad thing called Luck. As to how one happened to be born—whether a sucker or a robber—was a gamble ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... book entitled Le vrai sens du Systme de la Nature, 1774, attributed to Helvetius, a very clear, concise epitome largely in Holbach's own short and telling sentences, and much more effective than the original because of its brevity. Holbach himself reproduced the Systme de la Nature in a shortened form in Bon-sens, 1772, and Payrard plagiarized it freely in De la Nature et de ses ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing

... twelve men be taken, by lot, from the mass of the people, without the possibility of any previous knowledge, choice, or selection of them, on the part of the government, the jury will be a fair epitome of "the country" at large, and not merely of the party or faction that sustain the measures of the government; that substantially all classes of opinions, prevailing among the people, will be represented in the jury; and especially that the opponents of the government, ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner

... and the means employed, with descriptions of ink and of parchment, resulted in such headings to his chapters as 'My first victim—For a red ribbon—The gingerbread fair—I make the acquaintance of Astier-Rehu—The mysterious ink—I defy the chemists of the Institute.' This brief epitome is enough to show the combination, the humpback's self-satisfaction plus the arrogance of the self-taught artisan. The general result of reading the production was utter amazement that the Permanent Secretary ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet

... betrayed or revealed his personality in his first novel, so in this first effort in another department of literature he showed in epitome his qualities as a historian and a biographer. The hero of his narrative makes his entrance at once in his character as the shipwright of Saardam, on the occasion of a visit of the great Duke of Marlborough. The portrait instantly arrests ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... are accessible to comparatively few of our readers, we will annex a quotation from several of them, at the same time abbreviating them as much as is consistent with perspicuity. Thus, Dr. Hunnius, professor at Wittenberg, and subsequently Superintendent at Luebeck, [Note 6] in his Epitome Credendorum, says:—"The sacrament of baptism is a spiritual action, instituted and ordained by Christ, by the performance of which a man is baptised with water, in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Ghost; and by means of which he receives forgiveness of sins, ...
— American Lutheranism Vindicated; or, Examination of the Lutheran Symbols, on Certain Disputed Topics • Samuel Simon Schmucker

... navigator, that I had never looked through a sextant in my life, and that I doubted if I could tell a sextant from a nautical almanac. And when they asked if Roscoe was a navigator, I shook my head. Roscoe resented this. He had glanced at the "Epitome," bought for our voyage, knew how to use logarithm tables, had seen a sextant at some time, and, what of this and of his seafaring ancestry, he concluded that he did know navigation. But Roscoe was wrong, I still insist. When a young boy he came from Maine to California by way of the Isthmus of ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London

... word evolution has a certain pomp and glamour about it which fits ill with so prosaic an interpretation. In the unfolding of a bud we are wont to see, as it were, the fulfilment of a predetermined and glorious destiny; for the seed was an epitome or condensation of a full-blown plant and held within it, in some sort of potential guise, the very form which now peeps out in the young flower. Evolution suggests a prior involution or contraction and the subsequent manifestation of an innate ideal. Evolution should move toward ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... emotions crudely but vigorously. A soldier saluting an officer became in a Ferriday picture a zealot rendering a national homage. A maid watching her lover walk away angry became a Juliet letting Romeo go; a child weeping over a broken doll was an epitome of all regret. A mother putting a light in the window for an erring daughter's guidance was something new, an allegory as great as Bartholdi's Liberty putting her lamp in the window of ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... of avail the one who frequently practices self-suggestion, at first with, and then without sleep, will inevitably find ere long that to facilitate his work, or to succeed he must first write, as it were, or plan a preface, synopsis, or epitome of his proposed work, to start it and combine with it a resolve or decree that it must be done, the latter being the tap on the bell-knob. Now the habit of composing the plan as perfectly, yet as succinctly as possible, daily or nightly, combined ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland

... which in Durham's opinion rendered the grant of Home Rule to Canada imperative, concluding with a paragraph which, with the substitution of "Canada" for "Ireland," constitutes an admirably condensed epitome of the arguments used both by politicians at home, and the minorities in Canada, in favour of Durham's error and ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers

... first part the greatest freedom has been used in reducing the narration into a narrow compass, so that it is by no means a translation but an epitome, in which, whether everything either useful or entertaining be comprised, the compiler is least ...
— A Voyage to Abyssinia • Jerome Lobo

... wing resting on the seashore. Its losses of the morning, and of the garrisons left in the forts near Bruges, reduced it to an almost exact equality with that of the archduke. Each of these armies was composed of that variety of troops which made them respectively an epitome of the various nations of Europe. The patriot force contained Dutch, English, French, German, and Swiss, under the orders of Count Louis of Nassau, Sir Francis and Sir Horace Vere, brothers and English officers of great ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan

... first observations down to the present time. The embryonic structures grew and shaped themselves on the board, and shifted their relations in accordance with the views of successive observers, until a graphic epitome of the progress of knowledge on the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... as Spain's bulwark against the Moors of the eleventh century is exceeded by his importance to his modern countrymen as the epitome of the noble and vigorous qualities that made Spain great. Menendez y Pelayo has called him the symbol of Spanish nationality in virtue of the fact that in him there were united sobriety of intention and expression, ...
— The Lay of the Cid • R. Selden Rose and Leonard Bacon

... admiralty, partly corrected and partly written by Dr. Johnson, are still extant in the hands of Mr. Nichols[q]. We there find Dr. Williams, in the eighty-third year of his age, stating, that he had prepared an instrument, which might be called an epitome or miniature of the terraqueous globe, showing, with the assistance of tables, constructed by himself, the variations of the magnetic needle, and ascertaining the longitude, for the safety of navigation. ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... number, relative size, and position of the inlets and outlets is a very important one, but we can here give only an epitome of the requirements. The inlet and outlet openings should be about twenty-four inches square per head. Inlet openings should be short, easily cleaned, sufficient in number to insure a proper distribution of air; should be protected from ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various

... the streets, and large white flakes are slowly falling behind the glass; but the room, ornamented with pictures and busts, is lighted and heated by a bright coke fire. Amedee can see himself seated in a corner by the fire, learning by heart a page of the "Epitome" which he must recite the next morning at M. Batifol's. Maria and Rosine are crouched at his feet, with a box of glass beads, which they are stringing into a necklace. It was comfortable; the whole apartment smelled of the engraver's pipe, and in the dining-room, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... rank of these did Zimri stand; A man so various that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome; Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong; Was everything by starts, and ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... Floras (Epitome, ad init.) had already divided Roman history into four periods corresponding to infancy, ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... protector—a strange choice to his mind. "My cousin of Burgundy nourishes a fox who will eat his chickens" is reported as another comment of this impartial father.[24] Like many a phrase, possibly the fruit of later harvests, this is an excellent epitome of the situation. ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam

... Greece or Rome, with any reputation of Eloquence, down to his own time; and as he generally touches the principal incidents of their lives, it will be considered, by an attentive reader, as a concealed epitome of the Roman history. The conference is supposed to have been held with Atticus, and their common friend Brutus, in Cicero's garden at Rome, under the statue of Plato, whom he always admired, and usually imitated in his dialogues: and he ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... you, sir, But you see more with your determination, I fear, than with your prudence or your conscience; And you have never met me with my eyes In all the mirrors I've made faces at. No, I shall never call you strange again: You are the young and inconvincible Epitome of all blind men since Adam. May the blind lead the blind, if that be so? And we shall need no mirrors? You are saying What most I feared you might. But if the blind, Or one of them, be not so fortunate ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson

... a sense an epitome of the world, the centre at which all men's thoughts converged, an ever-changing spectacle, a daily source of novelty and suggestion. The life of the squatters was primitive, inferior in variety, and marked only by a rapid accumulation ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne

... youngest, the freshest thing imaginable; he was overtall and gawky, his cheeks were as delicately rosy as apple blossoms, and his smile was an epitome of ingenuous interest and frank wonder. It was as if some quality of especial fineness, lingering unspotted in Hunter Kinemon, had found complete expression in his son David. A great deal of this certainly was due to his mother, a thick solid woman, who retained more than ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer

... he continued calmly, filled with a queer sense of relief at the idea of being able to talk about it. "My whole life, up till that day, had been one epitome of injustice and evil fortune. You were my one solace. His life—well, you know what it had been. Everything was made easy for him. He had a luxurious boyhood, he was sent to college, pampered and spoilt, and passed on to a dissipated manhood. He spent a great fortune, ruined a magnificent ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... I should decline all merit, it was too probable the hasty reader might have taken me at my word. If, on the other hand, like labourers in the magazine trade, I had, with modest impudence, humbly presumed to promise an epitome of all the good things that ever were said or written, this might have disgusted those readers I most desire to please. Had I been merry, I might have been censured as vastly low; and had I been sorrowful, I might have been left to mourn in solitude and silence; in short, whichever way I turned, ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black

... be told, we teach the ten commandments, where a world of morals lies condensed, the very pith and epitome of all ethics and religion; and a young man with these precepts engraved upon his mind must follow after profit with some conscience and Christianity of method. A man cannot go very far astray who neither dishonours his parents, nor kills, nor commits adultery, nor steals, nor ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... romance were to the Elizabethans real and actual; things as strange and foreign were to be heard any day amongst the motley crowd in the Bankside outside the theatre door. Tamburlaine's last speech, when he calls for a map and points the way to unrealised conquests, is the very epitome ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... the smile, Malone wasn't sure he could still walk evenly. Somehow, though, he managed to go over to her and extend his hand. The notion that a telepath would turn out to be this mind-searing Epitome had never crossed his mind, but now, somehow, it ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)

... consciousness and absolute reason as the essential foundation of the faculty of thought. The defect of his system is its tendency to a sombre pessimism, but his literary style is magnificent and his power of reasoning is exceptional. The epitome here given has been prepared from the ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... recollection of all that is not very novel, or very often repeated, so soon fades from our own minds, during what we consider as our single lifetime, what wonder that the details of our daily experience should find no place in that brief epitome of them which is all we can give in so ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler

... too long a story to be told here, except in bare epitome. A truce was patched up between the contending parties. Bread flowed again into Paris. The seared and hungry people grew courageous and violent again when their appetites were satisfied. When M. Mole and his fellows ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris

... the Catoctin Belt is shown to be an epitome of the leading events of geologic history in the Appalachian region. It contains the earliest formations whose original character can be certified; it contains almost the latest known formations; and the record is unusually full, with the exception ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head

... boats of many kinds moored on every side; quaint craft from the gulfs and bays of Nowhere, full of unheard-of merchandise, and manned by strange-faced crews, every vessel a romance of nameless seas, an epitome of an undiscovered world, and every moment the scene grew busier as the breakfast smoke arose, and wharf and gangway set to work upon ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... style new and old, easily contemporary with all time." Immediately some of the great fairy tales stand out as answering to this test—Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Jack the Giant-Killer,—which has been said to be the epitome of the whole life of man—Beauty and the Beast, and a crowd of others. Any fairy tale which answers to the test of a real classic must, like these, show itself to contain for the child a permanent enrichment of ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready

... Jennie, so soft and delicate, so infantile on their piles of cushions and books, with their white socks and black shoes dangling far distant from the carpet; and yet so old, so self-contained! And they were merely an epitome of the whole table. The whole table was bathed in the charm and mystery of young years, of helpless fragility, gentle forms, timid elegance, unshamed instincts, and waking souls. Constance and Samuel were very satisfied; full of praise for other ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... large Family of Children, with so remarkable a Diversity of Genius, as to be a little Epitome of Mankind. Some studious and thoughtful, and naturally inclin'd to Books and Learning; Others diligent and ambitious, and disposed to Business and rising in the World. Some bold and enterprizing, and loved nothing so well as the Camp and the Field; or so daring ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill

... of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms radically ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... avenue to Columbus avenue the stroller visiting Chinatown reaches the street that places him in the heart of the Latin Quarter, its Italian and French restaurants, and its manners and customs that make it an epitome of Naples and Rome. ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood

... glance, you could see what Harding had been talking about. Commander Frendon was the absolute epitome of every popular physiological cliche associated with people of unusual psi endowment for the past century that it has been known. At least ten years younger than any of the rest of us, he was of medium height, extremely skinny and nervous, his eyes glancing about with a restless uncertainty. ...
— Shock Absorber • E.G. von Wald

... entertain us more, but they do not move and magnetize so much. The persons and events of their stories are conscientiously studied, and are nothing if not natural; but they lack distinction. In an epitome of life so concise as the longest novel must needs be, to use any but types is waste of time and space. A typical character is one who combines the traits or beliefs of a certain class to which he is affiliated—who ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne

... nations and of civilizations, illumined by the light of Evolution, suggests that in the growth of the child from helpless infancy to adolescence, and through the strong and trying development of manhood to the idiosyncrasies of disease and senescence, we have an epitome in miniature of the life of the race; that in primitive tribes, and in those members of our civilized communities, whose growth upward and onward has been retarded by inherited tendencies which it has been out of their power to overcome, or by a ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... Years of African Methodism," a sketch of "What African Methodism Has to Say for Itself," by Dr. J. T. Fenifer, the historian of the church, and the Chronology of African Methodism by Dr. R. R. Wright. In these pages one finds in epitome the leading facts of the history of this church from the time of its establishment by Richard ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various

... is presumed to have told us that this conspiracy intended to restore the ejected Consuls, and to kill the Consuls who had been established in their place. But the book in which this was written is lost, and we have only the Epitome, or heading of the book, of which we know that it was not written by Livy.[191] Suetonius, who got his story not improbably from Livy, tells us that Caesar was suspected of having joined this conspiracy with Crassus;[192] and he goes on to say that Cicero, writing subsequently to one Axius, declared ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope

... every day in a pond on a small scale. Every morning, generally speaking, the shallow water is being warmed more rapidly than the deep, though it may not be made so warm after all, and every evening it is being cooled more rapidly until the morning. The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer. The cracking and booming of the ice indicate a change of temperature. One pleasant morning after a cold night, February 24th, 1850, having gone to ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... beautiful that morning, he thought. The keen air had brought a colour to her face and lent a spring to her gait, and, as she strode along by his side with the free and careless swing of youth, she was an epitome of the life which even now was budding on ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace

... the right of the bureau, I caught a glimpse of the dormitory of the aged Africaness. As on the exterior of the building a brief epitome of Joe's history was written, so in that room a portion of his character was traced. Its comfortable and almost elegant furnishings told, plainer than any words, that he was a devoted and affectionate son. With its ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... between Madras and Calcutta was a floating epitome of the world. There were missionaries contending with pundits, and world travellers lazily amused by discussions involving the eternal welfare of the human race. But the disputes had a hollow and perfunctory sound, and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various

... his feet. All the subordinate forces obeyed him, the mighty first Cause, whose head towered up to the realm of the incomprehensible and inconceivable One. He was the sum total of the universe, the epitome of things created; and at the same time he was the power which gave them life and intelligence and preserved them from perishing by perpetual procreation. It was his might that kept the multiform structure ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... united in a very choral pean of praise; the Fortnightly, the Quarterly, the Edinburgh Review, the Revue des Deux Mondes, and others were practically unanimous in their recognition of a work which was at once felt to be the very epitome of the art and life of Robert Browning. The poem is, indeed, a vast treasure into which the poet poured all his searching, relentless analysis of character, and grasp of motive; all his compassion, ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting

... them. It had remained cold and uninviting, except as a place of shelter, and her soul had shrunk into a sort of knot—until Brent came. Only at his coming did her hungry nature begin to uncurl;—only at the coming of this polished gentleman from the great world, who knew everything, who was the epitome of kindness, who fed her with confidences and compliments, who inspired her with a sudden sense of meaningness, of importance—only since then had she begun to realize that for a long time her heart had ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris

... the national legislature. The concessions made both by pro-slavery and anti-slavery adherents at this time show the relative strength of the two forces and the remarkable fact is that there could be such near-equality of fighting strength on both sides.[8] Tennessee seems to have had an epitome of this national situation within her borders. Not only the zealous work of Embree indicates this, but the general feeling of the people of eastern Tennessee toward slavery. It is interesting here to point out that The Emancipator was the first abolition journal ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various

... to be considered as having more experience at least than most of my predecessors, and as more likely to accommodate the nation with a vocabulary of daily use. I, therefore, offer to the publick an abstract or epitome ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson

... a great importance for me when it first fell into my hands—a strange instance of the partiality of man's good and man's evil. I know no one whom I less admire than Goethe; he seems a very epitome of the sins of genius, breaking open the doors of private life, and wantonly wounding friends, in that crowning offence of "Werther," and in his own character a mere pen-and-ink Napoleon, conscious of the rights and duties of superior talents as a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... epitome of the merciless way inorganic Nature deals with life. An old, dried, and hardened asphalt lake near Los Angeles tells a horrible tale of animal suffering and failure. It had been a pit of horrors for long ages; it was Nature ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... the material for the expression of thought, but also as a type or epitome of all forms and manifestations of life, appeared to me to underlie the universal laws of expression. In order to learn these laws thoroughly, as exemplified in the teaching of the classical languages, I now returned again to the study of these latter, ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel

... preservation except his unique work, the 'Feast of the Learned.' Of the fifteen books transmitted under the above title, the first two, and portions of the third, eleventh, and fifteenth, exist only in epitome—the name of the compiler and his time being equally obscure; yet it is curious that for many centuries these garbled fragments were the only memorials of the author extant. The other books, constituting the major portion of the work, have been pronounced authentic ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... strength, for her warm, sweet womanhood—in a word, she is the epitome of all that ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol

... in wrath. "But will you explain what you mean, epitome that you are of all the contradictions and mutabilities ascribed to women from the beginning! 'Certainly', he says, and knows no more than I. She begs grace for an hour, and returns with a fresh store of evasions, to insult the man she has ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Isles, hitherto Unpublished." The publication appeared in 1816, in two parts, of elegant folio. It was adorned by the contributions of Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg, and other poets of reputation. The preface contains "An Epitome of the History of Scottish Poetry and Music from the Earliest Times." His musical talents have a stronger claim to remembrance than either his powers as a poet or his skill as a writer. Yet his industry was unremitted, and his researches ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various



Words linked to "Epitome" :   paradigm, imago, model, abstract, concentrate, example



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