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More "Rhetorician" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... A rhetorician of times past said, that to make little things appear great was his profession. This was a shoemaker, who can make a great shoe for a little foot.—[A saying of Agesilaus.]—They would in Sparta have sent such a fellow to be whipped for making profession of a tricky and deceitful ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Ward" and "Josh Billings" is distinctively American. Lord Kames, in his "Elements of Criticism," makes no mention of this species of wit, a lack which the future rhetorician should look to. We look in vain for it in the English language of past ages, and in other languages of modern time. It is the genus American. When Artemus says in that serious manner, looking admiringly at his atrocious ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... that what is splendid cannot be solid, that what is clear cannot be profound. Very slowly was the public brought to acknowledge that Mansfield was a great jurist, and that Burke was a great master of political science. Montague was a brilliant rhetorician, and, therefore, though he had ten times Harley's capacity for the driest parts of business, was represented by detractors as a superficial, prating pretender. But from the absence of show in Harley's discourses many people inferred that there must be much substance; and he was pronounced ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... all feel for the cruelty of her position. But if she is—as I have no doubt she is—truly attached to Mr. Torrens, she will find her consolation in the thought that it is given to her to ... to...." But the Countess was not rhetorician enough to know that choice words should be kept for perorations. She had quite taken the edge off her best arrow-head. She could not wind up "to be a consolation to her husband" with any convincingness. So when Gwen interrupted her with:—"I see ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... acquired by dancing; the deportment of their pupils would soon convince them they were imposed on by the sound of words. Improved and beautiful nature is the object of the painter's pencil, the poet's pen, and the rhetorician's action, and not that sordid and common nature, which is perfectly rude and uncultivated. Nature directs us to art, and art selects and polishes the beauties of nature. It is not sufficient for an orator, says Quintilian, that he is a man: he must be an improved ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... real Demosthenes is he who spoke on questions of State policy. This subject alone can call out the best qualities in an orator as distinct from a rhetorician; the tricks and bad arguments which are so often employed to secure condemnation or acquittal in a law court are inapplicable or undignified in a matter of vital national import. But before the great enemy arose to threaten Greek liberty, ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... the golden, or eloquent, mouth), a celebrated Greek rhetorician, born at Prusa, in Bithynia, about the middle of the 1st century; inclined to the Platonic and Stoic philosophies; came to Rome, and was received with honour by Nerva and Trajan; is famous as an orator and as a writer of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... mentions a quarrel with the inhabitants of Oea on the question of the erection of a statue in his honour. These facts may not improbably have led him to seek residence elsewhere. Be this as it may, when we next hear of him he is in Carthage, enjoying the highest renown as philosopher, poet, and rhetorician. It was during this residence at Carthage that he delivered the flamboyant orations of which fragments have been preserved to us in the Florida. A few of these excerpts can be dated. The seventeenth is written during the proconsulate of Scipio Orfitus in 163-164 A.D. The ninth ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... the moral philosopher standeth upon the natural virtues, vices, and passions of man; and follow nature (saith he) therein, and thou shalt not err. The lawyer saith what men have determined. The historian what men have done. The grammarian speaketh only of the rules of speech; and the rhetorician, and logician, considering what in nature will soonest prove and persuade, thereon give artificial rules, which still are compassed within the circle of a question, according to the proposed matter. The physician weigheth the nature of a man's body, and the nature of things helpful, or ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... children. I remember a man who was proud and pleased because he had distracted Morris' thoughts from an attack of gout by leading the conversation delicately to the hated name of Milton. He began at Swinburne. 'Oh, Swinburne,' said Morris, 'is a rhetorician; my masters have been Keats and Chaucer for they make pictures.' 'Does not Milton make pictures?' asked my informant. 'No,' was the answer, 'Dante makes pictures, but Milton, though he had a great earnest ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... Order for the Visitation of the Sick, we come upon the comparison of human life to a "vale of misery" we feel that somehow we have struck a new current in the atmosphere; for the moment it is the rhetorician who speaks, and no longer ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... bailed by Plato and Crito, and tried before a jury of five hundred citizens. Socrates insisted on managing his own case. A rhetorician prepared an address of explanation, and the culprit was given to understand that if he read this speech to his judges and said nothing else, it would be considered as an apology and he would be freed—the intent of the trial ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... pain," "the weaver of fictions," are some expressions of Sappho's preserved by Maximus Tyrius; and Libanius, the rhetorician, refers to Sappho, the Lesbian, as praying "that night might be doubled for her." But the most important of her love-poems, and the one on which her adulators chiefly base their praises, is the following fragment ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... were not his own. He thought him no match for Burke, either in style or matter. Burke was a metaphysician, Mackintosh a mere logician. Burke was an orator (almost a poet) who reasoned in figures, because he had an eye for nature: Mackintosh, on the other hand, was a rhetorician, who had only an eye to common-places. On this I ventured to say that I had always entertained a great opinion of Burke, and that (as far as I could find) the speaking of him with contempt might be made the test of a vulgar democratical ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... exactly one of the points on which the advocates of the punishment, whether from the point of view of deterrence or from that of retribution, chiefly rely, it seems something of a blunder to bring it out with all the power of a poet and a rhetorician. We want "M. l'Assassin," in fact, to be made very uncomfortable—as uncomfortable as possible—and we want M. l'Assassin, in intention or deliberation, to be warned that he will be so made. "Serve him right" sums up the one view, "De te fabula" the other. In fact ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... of the poet and rhetorician Roemer Visscher. She was born on 25th March, 1594, and earned her curious name from the circumstance that on the same day her father was wrecked off Texel. In honour of his rescue he named his daughter Tesselschade, or Texel wreck, thereby, I think, eternally impairing ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... say that his art as a poet consists not so much in the direct expression of feeling in sensuous and passionate language, as in the transfiguration of thought by means of impassioned imagery. In his poems as elsewhere he is a good deal of a rhetorician, but he is never insincere. His verse came from the heart, only it was the expression of character and convictions rather than of moods and fancies. It seems intended to edify rather than to portray; to impress rather than to delight. Some of it, ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... attempt to veil his ignorance in mythology and figures of speech. The gentleness of the first part of the speech contrasts with the aggravated, almost threatening, tone of the conclusion. He characteristically remarks that he will not speak as a rhetorician, that is to say, he will not make a regular defence such as Lysias or one of the orators might have composed for him, or, according to some accounts, did compose for him. But he first procures himself a hearing by conciliatory words. He does not attack the Sophists; for they were ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... adequate word. Even the most minor adjectives applicable to her are bound to be sheer superlatives. There was nothing she could not do better than any woman and than most men. Sing, play—bah!—as some rhetorician once said of old Nap, competition fled from her. Swim! She could have made a fortune and a name as a public performer. She was one of those rare women who can strip off all the frills of dress, and in simple ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... influence enabled him to get an early introduction to public affairs, and he proceeded to train himself as a speaker, and a writer of speeches for others. He put himself under the teaching of a famous rhetorician, Iaenus, and profited by the discourses of Plato and Isocrates then in the height of their fame. He also was a great student of Thucydides, and copied his whole history, with his own hand, eight times. ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... very details did not often degenerate into childish folly, better adapted to spoil the taste of youth than to form it; we need discretion before we can read him. I say nothing of Livy, his turn will come; but he is a statesman, a rhetorician, he is everything which is unsuitable ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... AELIA'NUS, CLAUDIUS, an Italian rhetorician who wrote in Greek, and whose extant works are valuable for the passages from prior authors which they have ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... mere boys, completely dependent upon their guardian, Pothinus, to whom the King left the care of the government, and their tutor, Theodotus, a clever but unprincipled rhetorician. These two men and Achillas, the commander of the troops, would gladly have aided Dionysus, the King's oldest male heir, to obtain the control of the state, in order afterwards to rule him, but the flute-player baffled their plans. You know that in his last will he made Cleopatra, his favourite ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... passed after a while into less gross forms of philosophical speculation, and presently began to lecture on rhetoric at Tagaste and at Carthage. When nearly thirty years of age he went to Rome, only to be disappointed in his hopes for glory as a rhetorician; and after two years his ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... of the Britons, what was actually "servitude."[27] The frontiers of the empire were now so far distant that the roar of the advancing tide scarcely reached Rome. What was overheard of it acted as a stimulus to pleasure, added point to the rhetorician's speeches, excitement to the circus games, and a halo to the beauty of red-haired courtesans. The Romans had reached that point in tottering empires, at which the threat of calamities no longer arouses dormant energy, but only whets and renews the ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... Robespierre's words on the Supreme Being are never a brimming stream of deep feeling; they are a literary concoction: never the self-forgetting expansion of the religious soul, but only the composite of the rhetorician. He thought he had a passion for religion; what he took for religion was little more than mental decorum. We do not mean that he was insincere, or that he was without a feeling for high things. But here, as in all else, his aspiration was far beyond his faculty; he yearned for great spiritual ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... case. No eminent man has ever done more than Burke to justify the definition of genius as the consummation of the faculty of taking pains. Labour incessant and intense, if it was not the source, was at least an inseparable condition of his power. And magnificent rhetorician though he was, his labour was given less to his diction than to the facts; his heart was less in the form than the matter. It is true that his manuscripts were blotted and smeared, and that he made so many alterations ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the feebleness and futility of that boasted tongue, he tramples its grammars and its dictionaries under his feet, and makes new and unheard-of words and combinations of words on the spot for himself and for his subject. He heaps up a hyperbole the like of which no orator or rhetorician of Greece or Rome had ever needed or had ever imagined before. He takes sin, and he makes a name for sin out of itself. The only way to describe sin, he feels, the only way to characterise sin, the only way to aggravate sin, is just to call it sin; sinful sin; 'sin by the commandment became ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... praised, was fundamentally, and in substance, no more than a bit of theological commonplace splendidly decorated. He did indeed speak of 'the concatenation of human affairs,' but only in the same sentence with 'the sequence of the counsels of God.' The gorgeous rhetorician of the Church was not likely to rise philosophically into the larger air of universal history, properly so called. His famous Discourse is a vindication of divine foresight, by means of an intensely narrow survey of such sets of facts as might be thought ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... Christians. The ecclesiastical historians, from whom alone we derive a partial and imperfect knowledge of this persecution, are at a loss how to account for the fears and dangers of the emperors. Two of these writers, a prince and a rhetorician, were eye-witnesses of the fire of Nicomedia. The one ascribes it to lightning, and the divine wrath; the other affirms, that it was kindled by the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... in the manufacture of cut-and-dried constitutions is, in consequence, a puerile task, the useless labour of an ignorant rhetorician. Necessity and time undertake the charge of elaborating constitutions when we are wise enough to allow these two factors to act. This is the plan the Anglo-Saxons have adopted, as their great historian, Macaulay, ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... articles of general consumption produce thirteen millions more. Robbery is a capital offence because the poor alone are tempted to it. Among the poor alone is all combination forbidden. Godwin was often an incautious rhetorician. He painted the present in colours of such unrelieved gloom, that it is hard to see in it the possibility of a brighter future. Mankind seems hopeless, and he has to prove ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... accompanied Maecenas on this occasion, except his coadjutor, Cocceius Nerva, who had three years before been engaged with him on a similar mission to Brundusium, were men whose thoughts were given more to literature than to politics. Horace starts from Rome with Heliodorus, a celebrated rhetorician, and they make their way very leisurely to Anxur (Terracina), where they ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... dismal rhetorician of Potsdam. Real emperors reconcile and consolidate peoples, for an empire is not a nation; but the Hohenzollerns have never dared to be anything but sedulously national, "echt Deutsch" and advocates of black-letter. They know the people ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... Paris an instance of a born historian, one who never consented to be a mere advocate, taking a side and seeing only half the truth of anything; but a man gifted with the judicial faculty, that precious gift without which a man may be anything you please—a rhetorician, a special pleader, a picturesque writer, a laborious collector of facts; but an historian never. And yet Matthew Paris was a magnificent hater, with a fund of indignant scorn and righteous anger which never fails him upon occasion. Friend ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... and rehearsed with so much energy, that all the effects of a dramatic exhibition were frequently produced by them. Those that were most coherent and most minute, and, of consequence, least entitled to credit, were yet rendered probable by the exquisite art of this rhetorician. For every difficulty that was suggested, a ready and plausible solution was furnished. Mysterious voices had always a share in producing the catastrophe, but they were always to be explained on some ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... its owner; but I conquered my disgust, and I did well. The prelate, with his semi-clerical, semi-courtly air, made me a low bow. I calmly waited, so as to give him time to deliver his message. The famous rhetorician proceeded ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... happened to break off I' th' middle of his speech, or cough, H' had hard words, ready to show why, And tell what rules he did it by: Else when with greatest art he spoke, You'd think he talk'd like other folk, For all a rhetorician's rules Teach nothing but to name his tools. But, when he pleas'd to show't his speech In loftiness of sound was rich; A Babylonish dialect, Which learned pedants much affect: It was a party-coloured dress Of patch'd and pye-ball'd languages; 'Twas English cut ...
— English Satires • Various
... versification. The theme of Life, Death, and Immortality is not a narrow one, and affords ample space for imaginative treatment. Young's treatment of it is too often declamatory; he drops the poet in the rhetorician and the wit. There is much of the false sublime in the poem, and much that reveals the hollow character of the writer. The first book is the finest, sparkling with felicitous expressions and rising frequently to true poetry. The poetical quality of that book, however, is lessened by the author's ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... (declamationes), the one purporting to be by M. Cicero against Sallust, and the other by Sallust against Cicero; but both are evidently unworthy of the character and style of the men whose names they bear, and are justly considered to be the production of some wretched rhetorician of the third or fourth century of the Christian era.[2] Such declaimers made use of all possible reports that were current respecting the moral weaknesses of the two men, and respecting an enmity between them, of which history knows nothing, ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... is that of a delirious rhetorician. One might fancy they had been composed as exercises, except for certain traits which mark the frenzy of genuine exaltation. Threats, imprecations, and blasphemies alternate with prayers, vows of fidelity and reminiscences of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... has substituted pomp for grandeur, school routine for individual inspiration, elaborateness for simplicity, fadeur and the monotony of literary orthodoxy for variety, the source and spring of intellectual life; and in the works produced under its auspices we discover the rhetorician and the writer, never the man. By all its traditions the academy was made to be the natural ornament of a monarchical society. Richelieu conceived and created it as a sort of superior centralization applied to intellect, as a high literary ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... rather in the powers of understanding, than in the virtues of the will and affections. There be some, have an over-early ripeness in their years, which fadeth betimes. These are, first, such as have brittle wits, the edge whereof is soon turned; such as was Hermogenes the rhetorician, whose books are exceeding subtle; who afterwards waxed stupid. A second sort, is of those that have some natural dispositions which have better grace in youth, than in age; such as is a fluent and luxuriant speech; which becomes youth well, ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... actual fighting, some personal descriptions of the chief heroes and heroines are given, curiously feeble and strongly tinged with mediaeval peculiarities, but thought to be possibly derived from some similar things attributed to the rhetorician Philostratus at the end of the third century. And among these a great place is given to Troilus ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... is, that a falsity in verse will travel faster and endure longer than a falsity in prose. The man who would sneer or stare at a silly proposition nakedly put, will admit that "there is a good deal in that" when "that" is the point of an epigram shot into the ear. The rhetorician's rules—if they are rules—teach him not only to name his tools, but to use his tools, the capacity of his tools—their extent—their limit; and from an examination of the nature of the tools—(an examination forced on ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... the Rhetorician almost immediately added, "Observe thou. Notaras has established himself within easy hearing of the two. He has actually invaded the ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... authorities; and his history thus acquires a charm such as very few ancient or modern military narratives possess. The anecdotes and expressions which he records we fairly believe to be genuine, and not to be the coinage of a rhetorician, like those in Curtius. In fact, in reading Arrian, we read General Aristobulus and General Ptolemy on the campaigns of the Macedonians, and it is like reading General Jomini or General Foy on the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... younger man. You must imagine such a man standing before the gravest tribunal in the land, and engaged in causes of the deepest moment; but still apparently thinking how he can declaim like a practised rhetorician in the London Cockpit, which he used to frequent. Yet you must, at the same time, imagine his declamation to be chaste and precise in its language and cogent, logical and learned in its argument, free from the artifice and affectation of his manner, and in short, opposite ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... which the Established Church of Scotland has produced, Dr. John Caird is one of the most brilliant as a preacher, as a thinker, and as a rhetorician. During the comparatively short period of his ministry, he secured a world-wide fame for the eloquence and beautiful diction of his sermons, and although his pulpit appearances are now few and far between, ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... Socialists were weak dreamers, who said that things might be only because they wished them to be. G. B. S. in argument with an individualist showed himself, as a rule, much the better economist and much the worse rhetorician. In this atmosphere arose a celebrated Fabian Society, of which he is still the leading spirit—a society which answered all charges of impracticable idealism by pushing both its theoretic statements and its practical negotiations to the ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... knowledge of the subjects of study, I request, Caesar, both of you and of those who may read the said books, that if anything is set forth with too little regard for grammatical rule, it may be pardoned. For it is not as a very great philosopher, nor as an eloquent rhetorician, nor as a grammarian trained in the highest principles of his art, that I have striven to write this work, but as an architect who has had only a dip into those studies. Still, as regards the efficacy of the art and the theories of it, I promise and expect ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius
... put everyone in vast good humour. You might wonder that his sweetly idyllic picture did not stir bitterness by contrast; it were to credit the English workman with too much imagination. Resonance of applause rewarded the sparkling rhetorician. A few of the audience availed themselves of the noise to withdraw, for the clock showed that it was close upon ten, and public-houses shut their doors ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... difference between these he seeks to establish by an argument, which to us appears singular and unsatisfactory. The existence of true opinion is proved by the rhetoric of the law courts, which cannot give knowledge, but may give true opinion. The rhetorician cannot put the judge or juror in possession of all the facts which prove an act of violence, but he may truly persuade them of the commission of such an act. Here the idea of true opinion seems to be a right conclusion from imperfect ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... their wives appear, but drink, dance, and wanton with their whores. This they propose for us to imitate; they permit us to have mimics and music at our feasts, but forbid philosophy; she, forsooth, being very unfit to be wanton with us, and we in a bad condition to be serious. Isocrates the rhetorician, when at a drinking bout some begged him to make a speech, only returned: With those things in which I have skill the time doth not suit; and in those things with which the time suits ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... Laertius and Appuleius, many other legends had gathered around the personality of Plato,—more voyages, more journeys to visit tyrants and Pythagorean philosophers. But if, as we agree with Karsten in supposing, they are the forgery of some rhetorician or sophist, we cannot agree with him in also supposing that they are of any historical value, the rather as there is no early independent testimony by which they are supported or with which they can ...
— Charmides • Plato
... it was acceptable to the Athenian policy (B. C. 443), was enforced by Pericles. Adventurers from all parts of Greece, but invited especially from the Peloponnesus, swelled the miscellaneous band: eminent among the rest were Lysias, afterward so celebrated as a rhetorician [304], and ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... over the very wretched history of Lacretelle, merely for the, dates, and afterwards read the two hundred pages of the naive du Hausset, who, in every half page, overturns half a dozen misstatements of this hollow rhetorician. Madame du Hausset was often separated from the little and obscure chamber in the Palace of Versailles, where resided the supreme power, only by a slight door or curtain, which permitted her to hear all that was said there. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... themselves with new talent. Among other appointments confidently spoken of in the best-informed circles, we learn that Lord Vargrave is to have the place of ———. It will be a popular appointment. Lord Vargrave is not a holiday orator, a mere declamatory rhetorician—but a man of clear business-like views, and was highly thought of in the House of Commons. He has also the art of attaching his friends, and his frank, manly character cannot fail to have its due ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in which there were orders to put Metrodorus to death. Now, Tigranes interred the body with great pomp, sparing no expense on the man, when dead, whom he had betrayed when living. Amphikrates the rhetorician also lost his life at the court of Tigranes, if he too deserves mention for the sake of Athens. It is said that he fled to Seleukeia,[390] on the Tigris, and that when the citizens there asked him to give lectures on his art, he treated them with contempt, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... poet declining to be held by the limitations of the lawyer, the historian, the grammarian, the rhetorician, the logician, the physician, the metaphysician is lifted up with the vigor of his own imagination; doth grow in effect into another nature in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth or quite anew, as the Heroes, Demi-gods, Cyclops, Furies and such like so as he goeth ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... imagine him turning to his Homer, to those poems which were the Bible of the Greek, his ultimate appeal both in religion and in ethics; which were taught in the schools, quoted in the law-courts, recited in the streets; and from which the teacher drew his moral instances, the rhetorician his allusions, the artist his models, every man his conception of the gods. Let us imagine some candid and ingenuous youth, turning to his Homer and repeating, say, the following ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... In the haze of a broken sleep they wrought out again the sorrows of their troubled record. When the morning broke through the dull gray of the eastern sky rim, he would be a heartless surgeon of emotions who attempted to probe the pathos of their thoughts, and a dull and vulgar rhetorician who should attempt to parse the fathomless sorrow ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... me to a scavenger who leaves a copy of verses at his door and begs for a Christmas-box, I must again cry out and say, "My dear sir, it is true your simile is offensive, but can you make it out? Are you not hasty in your figures and illusions?" If I might give a hint to so consummate a rhetorician, you should be more careful in making your figures figures, and your similes like: for instance, when you talk of a book "swelling the tide of exhilaration incident to the inauguration of the new year," ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... drop and bump of the sailing gasbag upon catch-words of enthusiasm, which are the rhetoric of the merely windy, and a collapse on a poetic line, which too often signalizes the rhetorician's emptiness of his wind, the article was eminent for flight, sweep, and dash, and sailed along far more grandly than ordinary provincial organs for the promoting or seconding of public opinion, that are as ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a Roman by descent, but of provincial birth, being native to Cirta, in Numidia. Thence he migrated to Rome in the reign of Hadrian, and became the most famous rhetorician of his day. As a pleader and orator he was counted by his contemporaries hardly inferior to Tully himself, and as a teacher his aid was sought for the noblest youths of Rome. To him was ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... that of dignified, courteous hosts, and played it as Carolina gentlemen are wont to do. From Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas came the fiery spirits, led by Mr. William L. Yancey of Alabama, an able rhetorician. This gentleman had persuaded his State Convention to pass a resolution, directing its delegates to withdraw from Charleston if the Democracy there assembled refused to adopt the extreme Southern view as to the rights of citizens in the territories. In this he was opposed by ex-Governor ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... of the province. At the age of seventeen he proceeded to Rome, where he studied oratory and philosophy under the best masters of the time. A tradition, which the dates make improbable, was that Gaius Octavius, afterwards the Emperor Augustus, was for a time his fellow-scholar under the rhetorician Epidius. In the classroom of the Epicurean Siro he may have made his first acquaintance with ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... may for to make the symple and playne Logi- call argumentes gaye & delectable to the eare. So than the sure iugement of argu- [B.i.r] mentes or reasons must be lerned of the logician / but the crafte to set the[m] out with pleasaunt figures and to delate the mater belongeth to the Rhetorician. As in Mi- loes cause / of whome was made mencion afore. A logician wolde briefly argue / who so euer violently wyll slee an other / may lawfully of the other be slayne in his defence. Clodius wolde vyolently haue slain Milo / wherfore Clodius might lau- fully be slayne of Milo ...
— The Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke • Leonard Cox
... there is not a peasant nor a wretched operative of them all who will not shake his head and tap his forehead with his forefinger when the poor poet chap passes by. The peasant has the same opinion of him that the physician, the trainer, and the money-lender had of the rhetorician. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... ago the great Scotch rhetorician Campbell framed five canons or rules for correct writing. They have never been improved. They should be learned by heart, thoroughly mastered, and constantly practiced by every writer and speaker. They are ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... go up, those above would be eight to four; and, if one go down, both would be six and Allah is all-knowing."[FN438] With this the philosopher put off his clothes and fled: whereupon the next contest took place, for she turned to the Olema present and said, "Which of you is the rhetorician that can discourse of all arts and sciences?" There came forward a sage hight Ibrahim bin Siyyr and said to her, "Think me not like the rest." Quoth she, "It is the more assured to me that thou wilt be beaten, for that thou art a boaster; and Allah will ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... of persuasion is not solely intellectual, but is largely emotional. It uses every principle of public speaking, and every "form of discourse," to use a rhetorician's expression, but argument supplemented by special appeal is its peculiar quality. This we may ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... figures depend primarily, then, upon the mood and intentions of the writer. Figures are figures, whether employed in prose or verse. Mr. Kipling does not lose his capacity for employing metaphors as he turns from writing verse to writing stories, and the rhetorician's analysis of similes, personifications, allegories, and all the other devices of "tropical" language is precisely the same, whether he is studying poetry or prose. Any good textbook in rhetoric gives adequate examples of these various classes of figures, and they need ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... the truths discovered by him through the investigations of many years. He would have done this if he had not mistrusted his own power of treating such a subject with the dignity and style of a practised rhetorician. I know well that when he reads Albert Duerer's book, it seems to him of no great value; his own conception being so far fuller and more useful. Truth to tell, Duerer only treats of the measurements and varied aspects of the human form, making his figures ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... exhort to this life and contest, which is, I protest, far above all contests here." You must remember that Callicles has been taunting Socrates with his lack of worldly wisdom and the certainty that in any court of justice he would be absolutely helpless because of his lack of knowledge of the rhetorician's art: "This way then we will follow, and we will call upon all other men to do the same, not that which you believe in and call upon me to follow; for that way, Callicles, is ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... work of combating British ignorance of Irish affairs and the effects of that ignorance in a manner which seems to me singularly effective. The writer is no mere rhetorician or dealer in generalities. On the contrary, he deals in particular facts and gives his authorities. Nothing is more striking than the care he has obviously taken to ascertain the details of the subjects with which he has concerned himself and the inexorable logic of his method. It is perfectly safe ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... profound personal reflection; they glow with the vitality of experience; and in their tender and pleading eloquence will doubtless commend themselves to many human sympathies. Mr. Giles has been hitherto most favorably known to the public in this country, as a brilliant rhetorician, and an original and piquant literary critic; in the present volume, he displays a rare mastery of ethical ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... Alexander was a Grammaticus, a native of Phrygia. He wrote a commentary on Homer; and the rhetorician Aristides wrote a panegyric on Alexander ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... those that love the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular, and full of influence, And should they paint or write still it is action: The struggle of the fly in marmalade. The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours, The sentimentalist himself; while art Is but a vision ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... Junius Juvenalis (57-128 A. D.), commonly called Juvenal, we behold the foremost satirist in literary history. Born at Aquinum of humble but comfortably situated parents, he came to Rome as a rhetorician; though upon discovering his natural bent, turned to poetical satire. With a fierceness and moral seriousness unprecedented in literature, Juvenal attacked the darkest vices of his age; writing as a relentless enemy rather than as a man of the world like Horace, or as a detached ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... be a criterion, this new master of Vergil's was a rhetorician of the elaborate Asianistic style,[2] then still orthodox at Rome. This school—except in so far as Cicero had criticized it for going to extremes—had not yet been effectively challenged by the rising ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... adopted by the greatest writer then living, and were expounded by him in the most eloquent and gracious prose that had been heard for a thousand years. Petrarca called the appearance of the patriotic tribune and rhetorician the dawn of a new world and a golden age. Like him, he desired to purge the soil of Italy from the barbaric taint. It became the constant theme of the Humanists to protest against the foreign intruder, that is, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... he dyd forthewith gett amonge them great estimacion / and so the more easili drawe them vnto the doctrine of christe. Augustine likewise cam to Millaine / to heere Ambrose / bicause he was counted an excellent Rhetorician. And so whilst he desirusly herd hym / at the lenghth by hearinge he was tourned form the sect of the Manichees / vnto the true catholiques. As therfor by lerning of these sciences of godly teachers / the vnbeleauers haue beene conuerted vnto the faithe of christe / euen so / yea ...
— A Treatise of the Cohabitation Of the Faithful with the Unfaithful • Peter Martyr
... was a main source of his power, both in Parliament and over the people, the effort of his enemies to represent him as a mere rhetorician will seem absurd to the historian who reviews his whole career. The mere rhetorician adorns and popularizes the ideas which have originated with others, he advocates policies which others have devised; he follows and expresses the sentiments which already prevail in his party. He ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... us come to the orators. Isocrates, the eldest of those who have survived, is a mere scholastic rhetorician: for he was a timid man, and did not dare to confront the terrors of a stormy political audience; and hence, though he lived about an entire century, he never once addressed the Athenian citizens. It is true, that, although no bona fide orator—for ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... eloquence. Their style, which appears to be overloaded with flowery images, excited great admiration at the time, especially in the case of Chastellain, who was hailed by his contemporaries as a "supreme rhetorician." ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... equivocation, prevarication, quibbling; ambages, pseudology, amphibology, amphiboly, dilogy. Associated Words: extempore, extemporaneous, extemporize, extemporization, impromptu, improvise, improvisation, brogue, aphasia, amnesia, oratory, elocution, rhetoric, oratorical, rhetorical, rhetorician, elocutionary, peroration, voluble, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... established, there are associations of dignity and of indignity with different conditions and occupations. It is more dignified to serve in the army than to engage in trade; to be a surgeon is more honourable than to be a watchmaker. In this state of things a fervid rhetorician, eager to redress the inequalities of mankind, starts forth to preach the dignity of all labour. The device is a self-contradiction. Make all labour alike dignified, and nothing is dignified; you simply abolish dignity by depriving ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... all the rules of logic and rhetoric, to submit to disagreeable treatment; and for that end has taken lessons in informal oratory from Isocrates or one of his associates. Some of Menon's competitors (feeling themselves less eloquent) have actually a paid rhetorician whom they can take to the bedside of a stubborn invalid, to induce him by irrefutable ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... made not a soul responded; though Euphronius reproached his disciples severely, and desired them to compare their want of spirit with his own thirst for knowledge, which, when he was a young man, had taken him as far as Alexandria to hear a celebrated rhetorician. In the evening, however, two disciples came to him together, and professed their readiness to undertake the expedition, if promised a reward commensurate ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... divided by no deep cleft or ultimate principle. Doellinger never outlived the glamour of the eloquence and ascendancy of Goerres, and spoke of him long after his death as a man of real knowledge, and of greater religious than political insight Between the imaginative rhetorician and the measured, scrutinising scholar, the contrast was wide. One of the many pupils and rare disciples of the former complained that his friend supplied interminable matter for the sterile and unavailing Mystik, in order to amuse him with ropes ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... writings and by the testimony of his biographers. How Macaulay, who knew his Boswell so well, could have accused him of 'speaking of foreign travel with the fierce and boisterous contempt of ignorance' would be a puzzle indeed, did we not know how often this great rhetorician was by the stream of his own mighty rhetoric swept far away from the unadorned strand of naked truth. To his unjust and insulting attack I shall content myself with opposing the following extracts which with ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... let them appear sub dio, and they are changed with the place, like bodies bred in the shade; they cannot suffer the sun or a shower, nor bear the open air; they scarce can find themselves, that they were wont to domineer so among their auditors: but indeed I would no more choose a rhetorician for reigning in a school, than I would a pilot for rowing in ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... me under the gallery, by special order of Mr. Speaker, to hear a "great" speech of Mr. Gladstone, whom he had not before heard. When we went away, I said: "Well, what do you think of him?" He replied: "He is a great rhetorician, but—he is not an orator." Would that men would not be carried away in a torrent of happy words. One hour of the late Patrick Smyth was, to my mind, worth a week ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... exclaim again: but I went on, proleptically, as a rhetorician would say, before their voices ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... it is not necessary in Poetry for the Points of the Comparison to correspond with one another exactly, but that a general Resemblance is sufficient, and that too much Nicety in this Particular favours of the Rhetorician ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... productions, circulated in manuscript, or in print, display no proofs of high scholarship, or of polished writing, but there is a truthful earnestness in some of them, and cogency of reasoning more effective than the skill of the mere rhetorician. Sometimes they appeared in ballad form, and sometimes as simple narrative. The rough poet of the period (the American Revolution can boast of many) was Rednap Howell, who taught the very children to sing, in doggerel verse, the infamy of the proud officials ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... I stood here, To plead in the defence of an ill man, (Most equal Judge) or to accuse the innocent (To both which, I profess my self a stranger) It would be requisite I should deck my Language With Tropes and Figures, and all flourishes That grace a Rhetorician, 'tis confess'd Adulterate Metals need the Gold-smiths Art, To set 'em off; what in it self is perfect Contemns a borrowed gloss: this Lord (my Client) Whose honest cause, when 'tis related truly, Will ...
— The Spanish Curate - A Comedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... self-conscious, but the dominant quality of his style, and the one which forever contradicts the idea of mere showiness, is passion. In his method of approaching a subject, he may be, and perhaps is, rather tedious, but when once he has come to the matter really in hand, he is no longer the rhetorician, dealing in fine phrases, but the great seer, clothing his thoughts in words suitable and becoming. The most magnificent passages in his writings—the Conciliation is rich in them—owe their charm and effectiveness to this emotional capacity. They were evidently ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... impossible to think of addressing a Dedication to your Lordship without calling to mind the well-known reply of the Spartan to a rhetorician, who proposed to pronounce an eulogium on Hercules. "Oh Hercules!" said the honest Spartan, "who ever thought of blaming Hercules?" In a similar manner the concurrence of public opinion has left to the panegyrist of your Lordship a very superfluous task. ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the same time how it was possible for Baius and Jansenius to bolster their heretical systems with quotations from the writings of St. Augustine and his disciples, it is necessary to observe that the quondam rhetorician and Platonic idealist of Hippo delights in applying to the genus the designation which belongs to its highest species, and vice versa.(163) Thus, in speaking of liberty, he often means the perfect liberty enjoyed by our first parents in Paradise;(164) ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... Duty. Arnold was of course with Michael heart and soul, and was only interested in our Lucifer. He approached his subject in a spirit of undue deprecation. He thought it necessary to cite Scherer's opinion that Byron is but a coxcomb and a rhetorician: partly, it would appear, for the pleasure of seeming to agree with it in a kind of way and partly to have the satisfaction of distinguishing and of showing it to be a mistake. Then, he could not quote Goethe without apologising for the warmth of that consummate ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... terror of the times and his own emotion. More than any other Roman historian he desired to tell the truth and was not fatally biassed by prejudice. It is wrong to regard Tacitus as an 'embittered rhetorician', an 'enemy of the Empire', a 'detracteur de l'humanite'.[1] He was none of these. As a member of a noble, though not an ancient, family, and as one who had completed the republican cursus honorum, his sympathies were naturally senatorial. He regretted that ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... the author of the Shakespearean plays was a lawyer. Certainly he was a logician and a rhetorician. The clash of minds and of speech appearing in Julius Caesar, in Antony and Cleopatra, in Henry IV., and in many other plays, shows a most wonderful facility for stating a case, for presenting an argument. Let ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... set up for exhibiting feats of mental agility. The mental agility is often moral suppleness, and nobody expects a critical examination of the parallelism itself. He was not an historian of the first rank, but a phrase-making rhetorician, who is responsible for the current saying, History is philosophy teaching by examples. This definition is about as valuable as some of those other definitions that express one art in terms of ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... time, Pierre Abelard, who had already made himself widely famous as a rhetorician, came to found a school of rhetoric in Paris. The originality of his principles, his eloquence, and his great physical strength and beauty created a profound sensation. He saw Heloise, and was captivated by her blooming youth, her beauty, and her charming disposition. He wrote to her; she answered. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... published in London for thirty years. His memory was so good that he was always appealed to for dates and matters of fact, but his mind was not remarkable for general lucidity. Other friends of Stevens's were Dr. Birdmore, the Master of the Charterhouse, who abounded in anecdote; Walker, the rhetorician and dictionary-maker, a most intelligent man, with a fine enunciation, and Dr. Towers, a political writer, who over his half-pint of Lisbon grew sarcastic and lively. Also a grumbling man named Dobson, who between asthmatic paroxysms vented his spleen on ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... mountainous region in Putnam and Dutchess Counties, through which the Hudson River passes in a deep and picturesque gorge; Eolus God of the winds; Boreas God of the North wind; Seneca one of the Finger Lakes in central New York State; Grecian king both the Senecas of antiquity, the rhetorician (54 BC-39 AD) and his son the philosopher/statesman (4 BC-65 AD), were, of course, Romans—in any case, Lake Seneca is named after the Seneca nation of the Iroquois Indians; Park-Place already in 1816 a fashionable street in lower Manhattan; Chippewa an American army defeated the British ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... His mouth, but out there flew a trope: And when he happen'd to break off I' th' middle of his speech, or cough, H' had hard words, ready to shew why And tell what rules he did it by. Else, when with greatest art he spoke, You'd think he talk'd like other folk. For all a Rhetorician's rules Teach nothing ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Idylls of the King—"all very fine, Alfred, but when are you going to do some work"—and many other such written deliverances suffice to show how absolutely out of court a great tragic humorist and rhetorician may be on an art practised by writers at least as valuable to English literature as himself, say Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats. Carlyle was a great writer, but the names of these four gentlemen who, according ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... powerful heretics grovel at his feet, and beneath are the Sciences and Moral Qualities and certain distinguished men who served them conspicuously, such as Aristotle, the logician, whom S. Thomas Aquinas edited, and Cicero, the rhetorician. In real life Aquinas was so modest and retiring that he would accept no exalted post from the Church, but remained closeted with his books and scholars; and we can conceive what his horror would be could he view this apotheosis. On the ceiling is a quaint rendering ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... or the successful soldier; that is a quality which belongs to the place he occupies rather than to the man; and a change of circumstances reduces it to very discreet proportions. The Prime Minister out of office is seen, too often, to have been but a pompous rhetorician, and the General without an army is but the tame hero of a market town. The greatness of Charles Strickland was authentic. It may be that you do not like his art, but at all events you can hardly refuse it the tribute of your interest. He disturbs ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... introduced a musical softening of our sympathy.[25] He had not those rude ideas of his art which many moderns seem to have, as if the poet, like the clown in the proverb, must strike twice on the same place. An ancient rhetorician delivered a caution against dwelling too long on the excitation of pity; for nothing, he said, dries so soon as tears; and Shakespeare acted conformably to this ingenious maxim without having learned it. The paradoxical assertion of Johnson that "Shakespeare ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... rather be an amanuensis of the Infinite God, as it is my privilege literally to be, than a slave to the formulated rules of any rhetorician, or to the opinions of any critic. Oh, the people, the people over and over! Let me give something to them that will lighten the every-day struggles of our common life, something that will add a little sweetness ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... if I were a professor of rhetoric I should use Dante for my text-book. Dante is the rhetorician. He is all wings, pure imagination and he writes like Euclid." James Russell Lowell told his students in answer to the question as to the best course of reading to be followed: "If I may be allowed a personal illustration, it was my own profound admiration for the Divina Commedia of ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... product. It was the French Revolution which produced Napoleon, and it was the French Revolution which Metternich abhorred, in all its aspects, beyond any other event in the whole history of the world. But he was not a rhetorician, as Burke was, and hence confined himself to acts, and not to words. He was one of those cool men who could use decent and temperate language about the Devil himself and the Pandemonium ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... when the others commended Philip for his able speaking, his beautiful person, nay, and also for his good companionship in drinking, Demosthenes could not refrain from cavilling at these praises; the first, he said, was a quality which might well enough become a rhetorician, the second a woman, and the last was only the property of a sponge; no one of them was the proper commendation of ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... believe that what is splendid cannot be solid, that what is clear cannot be profound. Very slowly was the public brought to acknowledge that Mansfield was a great jurist, and that Burke was a great master of political science. Montagu was a brilliant rhetorician, and therefore, though he had ten times Harley's capacity for the driest parts of business, was represented by detractors as a superficial, prating pretender." Indeed, that peculiar vital energy which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... with their standard of style;" for the accounts are so contradictory, that we should have little to rely upon. The works of the ancient artists are all lost: we must be content with the "hasty compilations of a warrior," Pliny, or the "incidental remarks of an orator," (rhetorician,) Quintilian. The former chiefly valuable when he quotes—for then, as Reynolds observed, "he speaks the language of an artist:" as in his account of the glazing method of Apelles; the manner in which Protogenes embodied his colours; and the term of art circumlitio, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... entranced listeners. Sometimes it was a splendid hyperbole that illuminated a statement which by the dim light of common speech would have offended or repelled those who sat before him. He knew the force of felix audacia as well as any rhetorician could have taught him. He addresses the reformer with one of those daring ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... between opposing difficulties; to play with any symbol of worship without actually worshipping it; to prostrate himself sincerely at many shrines, and yet with a half smile on his lips. He cannot be a rhetorician in the ordinary sense of the word; he would have been hopelessly out of place on the floor of the senate, stirring men's patriotism or sense of right; for half his sympathy would always be with the Opposition. He could not have moved ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... they say. Common fame lies like a Greek rhetorician. You might know so much, Ligarius, without reading the philosophers. But come, I will introduce you to ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... difficulty in improvising any number of such orations. To praise the Athenians among the Athenians was easy,—to praise them among the Lacedaemonians would have been a much more difficult task. Socrates himself has turned rhetorician, having learned of a woman, Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles; and any one whose teachers had been far inferior to his own—say, one who had learned from Antiphon the Rhamnusian—would be quite equal to the task of praising men to ...
— Menexenus • Plato
... contrast possible than between so implacable, patient, reasonable—and above all things capable—a being as General Joffre and the rhetorician of Potsdam, with his talk of German Might, of Hammer Blows and Hacking Through? Can there be any doubt of the ultimate ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... who has decided in his own mind what the world ought to be, and who regulates in advance, and bit by bit, the whole dogma of Collectivism. However, since he had taken pay as a deputy, the outside Socialists had looked upon him as a mere rhetorician, an aspiring dictator who only tried to cast society in a new mould for the purpose of subordinating it to his ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... life to the study of sociological questions, is a failure in the House, while a Randolph Churchill, who confessedly found politics more exciting than any other form of sport, including even horse-racing, should be a success. As in Athens of old, the rhetorician is master of the field. Does it not seem ridiculous that a man shall be allowed to legislate who has not passed an examination in political philosophy, political economy, and universal history? As absurd ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... utterly unprepared to go on with this subject; and finally gave up trying, and attended to his supper. After a little while his wife struck a new theme. She was not a trained rhetorician; but when she had said what she had to say she was always ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... it would be unjust to deny some sincerity. The doctrine of "the Peace of Rome," the idea of a vast democracy organized under Roman protection, lay at the bottom of all political speculations. A Greek rhetorician displays vast erudition in proving that Roman glory should be claimed by all the branches of the Hellenic race as a common patrimony. In regard to Syria, Asia Minor, and Egypt, we may say that the Roman conquest did not destroy any ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... the Caesars; Lucretius the pantheist; Juvenal, who flayed with his pen; Plautus, who composed the best comedies of antiquity while turning a mill-wheel; Seneca the philosopher, of whom it is said that the noblest act of his life was his death; Quintilian the rhetorician; the immoral Sallust, who speaks so eloquently of virtue; the two Plinys; Suetonius and Varro—in a word, all the Latin letters from the time when they stammered their first word with Livius Andronicus until they exhaled their last ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... "Feet and pauses are the constituent parts of verse."—Octavo Gram., p. 252. Here Sheridan gave bias. Intending to treat of verse, and "the pauses peculiarly belonging to it," the "Caesural" pause and the "Final," the rhetorician had improperly said, "The constituent parts of verse are, feet, and pauses."—Sheridan's Rhetorical Gram., ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... momentarily inclined to refuse to see its owner; but I conquered my disgust, and I did well. The prelate, with his semi-clerical, semi-courtly air, made me a low bow. I calmly waited, so as to give him time to deliver his message. The famous rhetorician proceeded as follows: ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... his natural taste, he commenced the study of Philosophy under Philo the Academic, of whom we shall speak more particularly hereafter.[98] But his chief attention was reserved for Oratory, to which he applied himself with the assistance of Molo, the first rhetorician of the day; while Diodotus the Stoic exercised him in the argumentative subtleties for which the disciples of Zeno were so generally celebrated. At the same time he declaimed daily in Greek and Latin with some young noblemen, who were ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... on land produce half a million less than they did a century ago, taxes on articles of general consumption produce thirteen millions more. Robbery is a capital offence because the poor alone are tempted to it. Among the poor alone is all combination forbidden. Godwin was often an incautious rhetorician. He painted the present in colours of such unrelieved gloom, that it is hard to see in it the possibility of a brighter future. Mankind seems hopeless, and he has to prove ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... of words, command of language; copia verborum[Lat]; power of speech, gift of the gab; usus loquendi[Lat]. speaker &c. v.; spokesman; prolocutor, interlocutor; mouthpiece, Hermes; orator, oratrix[obs3], oratress[obs3]; Demosthenes, Cicero; rhetorician; stump orator, platform orator; speechmaker, patterer[obs3], improvisatore[obs3]. V. speak of; say, utter, pronounce, deliver, give utterance to; utter forth, pour forth; breathe, let fall, come out with; rap out, blurt out ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... besides availing himself of the observations of Hipparchus, and of the accounts given of their travels by various Greek and Roman authors. Contemporary with Marinus was Paulus, a native of Tyre, who was noted as a rhetorician, and deputed by his city to go as their representative to Rome and plead the cause of the Tyrians before Hadrian.[14495] A little later we hear of Maximus, who flourished under Marcus Aurelius and Commodus (ab. A.D. 160-190), a Tyrian, like Paulus, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... our companion was a rhetorician, or talker by profession, and the most learned of his class in extraordinary legends and fabrications; in other respects an useful civil fellow, with an Irish brogue, which his service in the French army had not been able to eradicate, or even weaken, ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... de Mort. Persecutor. c. 18. Were the particulars of this conference more consistent with truth and decency, we might still ask how they came to the knowledge of an obscure rhetorician. But there are many historians who put us in mind of the admirable saying of the great Conde to Cardinal de Retz: "Ces coquins nous font parlor et agir, comme ils auroient fait eux-memes a notre place." * Note: This attack upon Lactantius is unfounded. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... of the orator is to turn the minds of his hearers into such a train as may best suit his own interest; that, consequently, rhetoric is the agent of persuasion, the art of all arts, because the rhetorician is able to speak well and convincingly on every subject, though he may have no accurate ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Servetus was a rhetorician, controversialist and diplomat—gentle, considerate, gracious. He belonged to that suave and cultured type of Catholic that wins to the Church princes and people to education and wealth. He has been likened by John ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... the Thessalian Cineas, the confidential minister of Pyrrhus, went to Rome. That dexterous negotiator, whom his contemporaries compared to Demosthenes so far as a rhetorician might be compared to a statesman and the minister of a sovereign to a popular leader, had orders to display by every means the respect which the victor of Heraclea really felt for his vanquished opponents, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... years. His memory was so good that he was always appealed to for dates and matters of fact, but his mind was not remarkable for general lucidity. Other friends of Stevens's were Dr. Birdmore, the Master of the Charterhouse, who abounded in anecdote; Walker, the rhetorician and dictionary-maker, a most intelligent man, with a fine enunciation, and Dr. Towers, a political writer, who over his half-pint of Lisbon grew sarcastic and lively. Also a grumbling man named Dobson, who between ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... a delirious rhetorician. One might fancy they had been composed as exercises, except for certain traits which mark the frenzy of genuine exaltation. Threats, imprecations, and blasphemies alternate with prayers, vows of fidelity and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Arnold was of course with Michael heart and soul, and was only interested in our Lucifer. He approached his subject in a spirit of undue deprecation. He thought it necessary to cite Scherer's opinion that Byron is but a coxcomb and a rhetorician: partly, it would appear, for the pleasure of seeming to agree with it in a kind of way and partly to have the satisfaction of distinguishing and of showing it to be a mistake. Then, he could not quote Goethe without apologising for the warmth ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... inferior to their predecessors and often lapse into rhetorical eloquence. Their style, which appears to be overloaded with flowery images, excited great admiration at the time, especially in the case of Chastellain, who was hailed by his contemporaries as a "supreme rhetorician." ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... to the orators. Isocrates, the eldest of those who have survived, is a mere scholastic rhetorician: for he was a timid man, and did not dare to confront the terrors of a stormy political audience; and hence, though he lived about an entire century, he never once addressed the Athenian citizens. It is ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... in easy familiarity with the learned men of Alexandria; and at another of these literary dinners, when Diodorus, the rhetorician, who was thought to have been the inventor of the Dilemma, was puzzled by a question put to him by Stilpo, the king in joke said that his name should be Cronus, a god who had been laughed at in the comedies. Indeed, he was so teased by Ptolemy for ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... every walk; men trained in the wide experience and high responsibilities of public office; lynx-eyed rivals and opponents. Is this the scene, or were these the men, for the triumphs of the barren rhetorician and the sophist, whose words have no true relation to the facts? Where could general mental strength be better tested? As a matter of history most of those who have held the place of leading minister in the House of Commons have hardly ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... famous son of a famous rhetorician, the Roman philosopher L. Annaeus Seneca was born at Corduba (Cordova), in Spain, about the beginning of the Christian era. While the date of his birth is a matter for conjecture, the circumstances of his death ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... evolution have been applied by the writer to the study of oratory. The orator must illustrate in his art the same steps of progress which govern the growth of other arts. He may have developed the power of the painter, the sculptor, the musician, yet if he would unfold the art of the rhetorician, he must pass through the progressive gradations that have marked the education of his powers in other departments. In a single lifetime he may attain the highest art expression, yet he cannot escape the necessity of cultivating his powers by the same process of evolution which ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... he commits the rhetorical blunder of mixing up metaphors or not. That matters very little, except to a pedant and a rhetorician. In his impetuous way he blends three here, and has no time to stop to disentangle them. They all mean substantially the same thing which I have stated in the words that conduct here determines the possession of life hereafter; but they put it in three different figurative fashions ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and the one which forever contradicts the idea of mere showiness, is passion. In his method of approaching a subject, he may be, and perhaps is, rather tedious, but when once he has come to the matter really in hand, he is no longer the rhetorician, dealing in fine phrases, but the great seer, clothing his thoughts in words suitable and becoming. The most magnificent passages in his writings—the Conciliation is rich in them—owe their charm and effectiveness to this emotional capacity. They were evidently ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... Phaedrus, a slave by birth or by subsequent misfortunes, and admitted by Augustus to the honors of a freedman, imitated many of these fables in Latin iambics about the commencement of the Christian era. Aphthonius, a rhetorician of Antioch, A.D. 315, wrote a treatise on, and converted into Latin prose, some of these fables. This translation is the more worthy of notice, as it illustrates a custom of common use, both in these and in later times. The rhetoricians ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... you are slow in foreseeing its consequences; asking, if I may so say, for something different from the conditions under which we live, and yet comprehending inadequately those very conditions; very slaves to the pleasure of the ear, and more like the audience of a rhetorician than ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... Philocrates. So that, when the others commended Philip for his able speaking, his beautiful person, nay, and also for his good companionship in drinking, Demosthenes could not refrain from cavilling at these praises; the first, he said, was a quality which might well enough become a rhetorician, the second a woman, and the last was only the property of a sponge; no one of them was the proper commendation ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... mirrored both the terror of the times and his own emotion. More than any other Roman historian he desired to tell the truth and was not fatally biassed by prejudice. It is wrong to regard Tacitus as an 'embittered rhetorician', an 'enemy of the Empire', a 'detracteur de l'humanite'.[1] He was none of these. As a member of a noble, though not an ancient, family, and as one who had completed the republican cursus honorum, his sympathies ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... in the first class of American writers. On subjects like that treated in the volume before us, his whole heart and mind seem to be poured into his pages; and in their perusal we doubt whether most to admire the divine or the rhetorician. ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... or proposition, has with the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. But if there be little or no logical connection between these things, we shall soon see how the choice of such a title and topic of discourse opens the way for the rhetorician to make a most powerful appeal to the passions and to the prejudices of his readers. We say, of his readers, because it is evident that the speech was made for Buncombe, and not for the Senate of the ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... soothing medicine and mode of thought (for instance, Epicurean or Christian); it is above all things the happiness of repose, of undisturbedness, of repletion, of final unity—it is the "Sabbath of Sabbaths," to use the expression of the holy rhetorician, St. Augustine, who was himself such a man.—Should, however, the contrariety and conflict in such natures operate as an ADDITIONAL incentive and stimulus to life—and if, on the other hand, in addition to their powerful and irreconcilable instincts, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... nonsense about her. "And we must all feel for the cruelty of her position. But if she is—as I have no doubt she is—truly attached to Mr. Torrens, she will find her consolation in the thought that it is given to her to ... to...." But the Countess was not rhetorician enough to know that choice words should be kept for perorations. She had quite taken the edge off her best arrow-head. She could not wind up "to be a consolation to her husband" with any convincingness. So when Gwen interrupted her with:—"I see what you mean, but it's nonsense," ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... would find himself in rather an odd predicament. He is expected to settle the date of the death of Polycarp, and yet he knows nothing either of the pastor of Smyrna or of his tragic end. It does not appear that he had ever heard of the worthy apostolic Father. Aristides was a rhetorician who has left behind him certain orations, entitled Sacred Discourses, written in praise of the god Aesculapius. It might be thought that such a writer is but poorly qualified to decide a disputed question ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... exhausted all the coin in the purse of his resolution, and expended all the arrows of the quiver of his argument. "Take heed and retreat not from the orator's attack, for nothing is left him but metaphor and hyperbole. Wield thy polemics and law citations, for the wordy rhetorician made a show of arms over his gate, but has not a soldier within his fort":—At length, having no syllogism left, I made him crouch in mental submission. He stretched forth the arm of violence, and began with vain abuse. As ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... winter; drawing from Nature her myriad stores of nutrition and giving back to Nature a wealth of power and grace in return; seemed Henry Ward Beecher, in his youth of old age, to the observation of men. Original orator, advocate, poet, humorist, agitator, rhetorician, preacher, moralist and statesman. The greatest preacher of modern times, possibly of all times, the man was one of the wonders of America; one of ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... palace, he should fall a sacrifice to the rage of the Christians. The ecclesiastical historians, from whom alone we derive a partial and imperfect knowledge of this persecution, are at a loss how to account for the fears and dangers of the emperors. Two of these writers, a prince and a rhetorician, were eye-witnesses of the fire of Nicomedia. The one ascribes it to lightning, and the divine wrath; the other affirms, that it was kindled by the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... abolished and all alike found themselves forced to restrict their appetites to the dainties they could purchase with the table allowance accorded them. "The court's leg is broken," said Michel, the rhetorician.[10] ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... northeast. Robespierre's words on the Supreme Being are never a brimming stream of deep feeling; they are a literary concoction: never the self-forgetting expansion of the religious soul, but only the composite of the rhetorician. He thought he had a passion for religion; what he took for religion was little more than mental decorum. We do not mean that he was insincere, or that he was without a feeling for high things. But here, as in all else, his aspiration ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... fashion, among a certain school of half-hearted Americans—and unless I am mistaken, the teaching has increased during the last decades—to minimize the value of Jefferson's "self-evident truths." Rufus Choate, himself a consummate rhetorician, sneered at those "glittering generalities," and countless college-bred men, some of them occupying the highest positions, have echoed the sneer. The essence of the objection to Jefferson's platform ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... a heathen of Constantinople. His father sent him some time after to Nicomedia, to be instructed in the christian religion, by the bishop of Eusebius, his kinsman, but his principles were corrupted by the pernicious doctrines of Ecebolius the rhetorician, and Maximus the magician. ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... shadowy present, the hollowness, the blank treachery of hollowness, upon which all the pomps and vanities of life ultimately repose. This trite but unwearying theme, this impassioned common-place of humanity, is the subject in every age of variation without end, from the poet, the rhetorician, the fabulist, the moralist, the divine, and the philosopher. All, amidst the sad vanity of their sighs and groans, labor to put on record and to establish this monotonous complaint, which needs not other record or evidence than those very sighs and groans. What is life? Darkness ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... Syrian), The Fisher (Parrhesiades), Swans and Amber, Alexander, Hermotimus (Lycinus), Menippus and Icaromenippus (in which Menippus represents him), A literary Prometheus, Herodotus, Zeuxis, Harmonides, The Scythian, The Death of Peregrine, The Book-fancier, Demonax, The Rhetorician's Vade mecum, Dionysus, Heracles, A Slip of the Tongue, Apology for 'The dependent Scholar.' Of these The Vision is a direct piece of autobiography; there is intentional but veiled autobiography in several of the other pieces; in others again conclusions ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... leave, deliver his judgment upon the whole: which in brief was this:—That it is all windy foppery from the beginning to the end, written, to the elevation of that rabble and meant to cheat the ignorant; that you fight always with the flat of your hand like a rhetorician, and never contract the logical fist; that you trade altogether in universals, the region of deceits and fallacy, but never come so near particulars as to let us know which among divers things of the same kind you would be at ... Besides this, as all your politics reach ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... by way of instituting a change; and I think that some graphic British historian should at once give us a good life of this remarkable and royal man. The massacre of the revolted peasants would afford a fine opening to a stern rhetorician; he might lead off thus—"Dost thou think that this king cared for noble sentiment? Thou poor creature who canst not look on a man without turning green with feminine terror, this writer begs to inform you and all creatures of your ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... on the Trojan side. Before the actual fighting, some personal descriptions of the chief heroes and heroines are given, curiously feeble and strongly tinged with mediaeval peculiarities, but thought to be possibly derived from some similar things attributed to the rhetorician Philostratus at the end of the third century. And among these a great place is ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... of the class mystifies you with metaphysics, half conned and unmastered by himself—more anxious still to make his points than to please his party; and, of the two, would rather sink his country than his climax. He is a rhetorician, a dealer in set phraseology, an ingenious gatherer and polisher of "other men's stuff." Of the faiseurs, may be repeated what Marshal Marmont, in his Voyage en Hongrie, en Transylvanie, &c., says of the faiseurs of Paris—"Subjugues par le gout et cette manie d'uniformite absolue, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... it held under the Republic. The speeches now delivered were chiefly declamations upon unimportant themes. M. Annaeus Seneca, the father of the philosopher, came to Rome from his native city Corduba, in Spain, during the reign of Augustus, and became a famous rhetorician. M. Fabius Quintilianus, a greater name in literature, was born A.D. 42, at Calgurris, in Spain, but, as was customary with men of merit at that period, went up to Rome, and became celebrated as a teacher of rhetoric. He was a person of excellent character, ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... fine rhetorician, who rarely faced realities, said, I think, that an Englishman's house is his castle. This is honestly entertaining; for as it happens the Englishman is almost the only man in Europe whose house is not his castle. Nearly everywhere else exists the assumption of peasant proprietorship; ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... is a rhetorician or philosopher by chance. He who knows that he undertakes to write on questions which he has never studied, may without hesitation determine, that he is about to waste his own time and that of his reader, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... but the immortality of a more majestic youth." In his lecture-room utterances, there was an undue preponderance of rhetoric, declamation, and sentiment over logic, analysis, and philosophy. Yet he once said of himself, that he was "thoroughly logical and argumentative; not a rhetorician, as fools aver." Whether this estimate was right or wrong in the main may be a matter of question: we think it wrong. His genius, in our view, lay rather in pictorial passion than in ratiocination. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... learning of the age. His family influence enabled him to get an early introduction to public affairs, and he proceeded to train himself as a speaker, and a writer of speeches for others. He put himself under the teaching of a famous rhetorician, Iaenus, and profited by the discourses of Plato and Isocrates then in the height of their fame. He also was a great student of Thucydides, and copied his whole history, with his own hand, eight times. He still had to contend ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... he is one of the most interesting. What, indeed, is more romantic than this wandering life of rhetorician and student that the youthful Augustin led, from Thagaste to Carthage, from Carthage to Milan and to Rome—begun in the pleasures and tumult of great cities, and ending in the penitence, the silence, and recollection of a monastery? And again, what drama is more ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... with which he gets up his case. No eminent man has ever done more than Burke to justify the definition of genius as the consummation of the faculty of taking pains. Labour incessant and intense, if it was not the source, was at least an inseparable condition of his power. And magnificent rhetorician though he was, his labour was given less to his diction than to the facts; his heart was less in the form than the matter. It is true that his manuscripts were blotted and smeared, and that he made so many alterations in the proofs that the printer ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... legends had gathered around the personality of Plato,—more voyages, more journeys to visit tyrants and Pythagorean philosophers. But if, as we agree with Karsten in supposing, they are the forgery of some rhetorician or sophist, we cannot agree with him in also supposing that they are of any historical value, the rather as there is no early independent testimony by which they are supported or with which they can ...
— Charmides • Plato
... rather been instigated to appeal to the public, and to ask them to agree with me against my friends. It is not only that Cicero has touched all matters of interest to men, and has given a new grace to all that he has touched; that as an orator, a rhetorician, an essayist, and a correspondent he was supreme; that as a statesman he was honest, as an advocate fearless, and as a governor pure; that he was a man whose intellectual part always dominated that of the body; that in taste he was excellent, in ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... and pattern; but when one reads his Panegyric upon Julius Caesar, in his Oration for Marcellus, and yours upon Trajan, the first seems the genuine language of truth and Nature, raised and dignified with all the majesty of the most sublime oratory; the latter appears the harangue of a florid rhetorician, more desirous to shine and to set off his own wit than to extol the great man whose virtues he ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... century ago the great Scotch rhetorician Campbell framed five canons or rules for correct writing. They have never been improved. They should be learned by heart, thoroughly mastered, and constantly practiced by every writer and speaker. ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... Isocrates, if the work ascribed to him be really his; not that he intended to dishonor his profession, tho he gives us a generous idea of rhetoric by calling it the workmanship of persuasion. We find almost the same thing in the Gorgias of Plato, but this is the opinion of that rhetorician, and not of Plato. Cicero has written in many places that the duty of an orator is to speak in "a manner proper to persuade"; and in his books of rhetoric, of which undoubtedly he does not approve himself, he makes the end of eloquence to ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... more than this; and he makes no attempt to veil his ignorance in mythology and figures of speech. The gentleness of the first part of the speech contrasts with the aggravated, almost threatening, tone of the conclusion. He characteristically remarks that he will not speak as a rhetorician, that is to say, he will not make a regular defence such as Lysias or one of the orators might have composed for him, or, according to some accounts, did compose for him. But he first procures himself ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... ambages, pseudology, amphibology, amphiboly, dilogy. Associated Words: extempore, extemporaneous, extemporize, extemporization, impromptu, improvise, improvisation, brogue, aphasia, amnesia, oratory, elocution, rhetoric, oratorical, rhetorical, rhetorician, elocutionary, peroration, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... of the medieval renaissance, of an age when intellectual curiosity was awakening, when philosophy, the sciences and Latin literature were studied with a lively but uncritical enthusiasm, when the rhetorician and the sophist were the uncrowned kings of intelligent society. The philosophy was little more than school-logic, derived at second or third hand from Aristotle, the science a grotesque amalgam of empiricism and tradition. The Latin classics, apart from their use as a source of tropes ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... what we say: for the man of education will seek exactness so far in each subject as the nature of the thing admits, it being plainly much the same absurdity to put up with a mathematician who tries to persuade instead of proving, and to demand strict demonstrative reasoning of a Rhetorician. ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... burning of the Temple of Apollo near Antioch, complains of the ingratitude of Vulcan to that God, who had formerly discovered to him the infidelity of his wife; a subject upon which St. Chrysostom seems to think that the rhetorician would have done ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... and patriarchs and heavenly attendants, while three powerful heretics grovel at his feet, and beneath are the Sciences and Moral Qualities and certain distinguished men who served them conspicuously, such as Aristotle, the logician, whom S. Thomas Aquinas edited, and Cicero, the rhetorician. In real life Aquinas was so modest and retiring that he would accept no exalted post from the Church, but remained closeted with his books and scholars; and we can conceive what his horror would be could he ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... to believe that what is splendid cannot be solid, that what is clear cannot be profound. Very slowly was the public brought to acknowledge that Mansfield was a great jurist, and that Burke was a great master of political science. Montague was a brilliant rhetorician, and, therefore, though he had ten times Harley's capacity for the driest parts of business, was represented by detractors as a superficial, prating pretender. But from the absence of show in Harley's discourses ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the quarters of the soldiers, severely reprehending all whom he found without their armour or appointments, and not ready to turn out at a moments warning, saying, "It is a bad sheep that cannot carry its own wool." He was a Latin scholar, and as I have been told, a bachelor of laws, a good rhetorician, and something even of a poet. He was very devote to the Holy Virgin, and to St Peter, St James, and St John the Baptist. His oath was, "By my conscience." When angry with any of his friends, he used to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... many ornaments which the Established Church of Scotland has produced, Dr. John Caird is one of the most brilliant as a preacher, as a thinker, and as a rhetorician. During the comparatively short period of his ministry, he secured a world-wide fame for the eloquence and beautiful diction of his sermons, and although his pulpit appearances are now few and far between, they are sufficiently important to draw together larger congregations ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... qualifications of which I am conscious to the theological views of my old Clapham friends. You, I suppose, are an adherent of Mr. Maurice. To myself it appears that he is nothing more than a great theological rhetorician, and that his only definite and appreciable meaning is that of wedding the gospel to some form of philosophy, if so to conceal its baldness. But Paul of Tarsus many ages ago forbade the banns.' In ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... that he set out from Rome accompanied by Heliodorus, a rhetorician whom he calls by far the most learned of the Greeks, and that they found a middling inn at Aricia, the first stopping-place, on the Appian Way, sixteen miles out, at the foot ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... boys, completely dependent upon their guardian, Pothinus, to whom the King left the care of the government, and their tutor, Theodotus, a clever but unprincipled rhetorician. These two men and Achillas, the commander of the troops, would gladly have aided Dionysus, the King's oldest male heir, to obtain the control of the state, in order afterwards to rule him, but the flute-player ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the manufacture of cut-and-dried constitutions is, in consequence, a puerile task, the useless labour of an ignorant rhetorician. Necessity and time undertake the charge of elaborating constitutions when we are wise enough to allow these two factors to act. This is the plan the Anglo-Saxons have adopted, as their great historian, Macaulay, teaches us in a passage that the politicians of all Latin countries ought ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... cabinet; and he had not learned the practice, or even the theory of agriculture. After what he had seen of the harvests of Western New York, bursting with food for the sustenance of man, for him to address the people of such a district on agriculture, would be as absurd as the vanity of the rhetorician who went to Carthage to instruct Hannibal in the art of war. He had been solicited to address the young. In his life time he had been an instructor of youth, and, strange as from his present display they might think it, he had instructed them in the art of eloquence. And there was no more honorable ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... found in Rome in the middle of the sixteenth century, represents Aristides Smyrnaeus, a Greek rhetorician of the second century after Christ. It is still in the Vatican Library, at the ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... trope: And when he happen'd to break off I' th' middle of his speech, or cough, H' had hard words, ready to shew why And tell what rules he did it by. Else, when with greatest art he spoke, You'd think he talk'd like other folk. For all a Rhetorician's rules Teach nothing but ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... M. Cicero against Sallust, and the other by Sallust against Cicero; but both are evidently unworthy of the character and style of the men whose names they bear, and are justly considered to be the production of some wretched rhetorician of the third or fourth century of the Christian era.[2] Such declaimers made use of all possible reports that were current respecting the moral weaknesses of the two men, and respecting an enmity between them, of which history knows nothing, and which ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... to be held by the limitations of the lawyer, the historian, the grammarian, the rhetorician, the logician, the physician, the metaphysician is lifted up with the vigor of his own imagination; doth grow in effect into another nature in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth or quite anew, as the Heroes, Demi-gods, Cyclops, Furies and such ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... determination to overwhelm his antagonists in the several arguments—on India, or America, on Ireland or on France—which made up his political career. He was, said Carlyle, "vehement rather than earnest; a resplendent far-sighted rhetorician, rather than a deep and earnest thinker." The words as they stand would be a good description of a certain type of politician; they would fit, for instance, very well on Mr. Gladstone; but they do Burke less than justice. He was an innovator in modern political thought, and his application of ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... us remember, by a frigidly ingenious rhetorician, who had never looked out of his study-window—does it not seem to mingle, in a trance of absolute simplicity, the peerless beauty of a Claude with the misery and ruin ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... Philodemus, Zonas, and probably Automedon, of the period immediately preceding it. The latest certain allusion in the poems of Antiphilus is to the enfranchisement of Rhodes by Nero in A.D. 53.[14] One of the epigrams under the name of Automedon in the Anthology[15] is on the rhetorician Nicetas, the teacher of the younger Pliny. But there are at least two poets of the name, Automedon of Aetolia and Automedon of Cyzicus, and the former, who is pre-Roman, may be the one included by Philippus. If so, we need not, with Jacobs, date this collection in the reign ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... love the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular, and full of influence, And should they paint or write still it is action: The struggle of the fly in marmalade. The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours, The sentimentalist himself; while art Is ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... betokened mischief—she quickened her pace, leaving her niece a good way in the rear, in her haste to engage the enemy. Before she came up she commenced the action at a long range, and very abruptly—for an effective rhetorician of Aunt Becky's sort, jumps at once, like a good epic poet, in medias res; and as Nutter, who, like all her friends in turn, experienced once or twice 'a taste of her quality,' observed to his wife, 'by Jove, that ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... was gentle and sympathetic and talked West Sixteenth Street slang, to the rhetorician's ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... rhetorician, Longinus, quotes from the Mosaic account of the creation what he calls the sublimest passage ever uttered: "God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light." From the centre of black immensity effulgence burst forth. Above, beneath, on every side, its radiance streamed ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... to indite after others, than for Aelianus Montaltus, that famous physician, to write de morbis capitis after Jason Pratensis, Heurnius, Hildesheim, &c., many horses to run in a race, one logician, one rhetorician, after another. Oppose ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... Sludge is not so much to blame: the people at length push the thing so far that he is obliged to cheat in self-defence. And when a man tasks his wits successfully, if it be only to mislead the witless, he has a sense of satisfaction in the effort akin to that of the rhetorician and the quack. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... Heaven. Hyperbole, prosopopaeia, and other literary machinery are too often and too deliberately used by him. We are tempted to regard him now as a sophist making the best use of his arts, now as a rhetorician cudgeling his brains for a purpose, now as a preacher becoming excited, that is to say, an actor ever maintaining a thesis, striking an attitude and aiming at effects. Finally, with the exception ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... and others. It has nothing so lively as the contrast between France and Algiers in its immediate predecessor. It may even seem, to those who have accustomed themselves to think of Burke wholly or mainly as a gorgeous rhetorician, rather tame as a whole. But if it does not soar, it never droops; it is admirably proportioned, admirably written, and admirably argued throughout, and it shows great knowledge and mastery of foreign politics—the point in which English statesmen have always been weakest. I may add that it ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... found only men who envied him. Barnave presented himself, and they surrounded him, applauded him, intoxicated him with his self-importance. They persuaded him for a moment that phrases were politics, and that a rhetorician was a statesman. ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... was a Grammaticus, a native of Phrygia. He wrote a commentary on Homer; and the rhetorician Aristides wrote a panegyric on Alexander in a ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... lines which are apt to break the continuity of the poem and to injure the harmony of its versification. The theme of Life, Death, and Immortality is not a narrow one, and affords ample space for imaginative treatment. Young's treatment of it is too often declamatory; he drops the poet in the rhetorician and the wit. There is much of the false sublime in the poem, and much that reveals the hollow character of the writer. The first book is the finest, sparkling with felicitous expressions and rising frequently to true ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... to speak of exercise, lest I should share the reproach of that ancient rhetorician who,—as related by Plutarch, in his Aphorisms,—after delivering an oration in praise of Hercules, was startled by the satirical inquiry from his audience, whether any one had ever dispraised Hercules. As with Hercules, so with the physical activity he represents,—no ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... for it.' But against these critics one honest man (whose name of Titus Castricius should not be forgotten by posterity) maintained that Metellus Numidicus could not have spoken more properly; 'For remark,' said he, 'that Metellus was a censor, not a rhetorician. It becomes rhetoricians to adorn and disguise and make the best of things; but Metellus, sanctus vir,—a holy and blameless man, grave and sincere to wit, and addressing the Roman people in the solemn capacity of Censor,—was bound to speak the plain truth, especially as he was treating of ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fascination exercised over us by art, which precisely as art is rude and imperfect in many ways, is to be ascribed to this source. Though here we must remember that the soul is often more truly and artistically betrayed by the simple lispings of childhood than by the ornate and finished eloquence of a rhetorician. ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... if he or she find in the ensuing pages any serious lapses from true literary style. I write merely as I feel, and do not pretend to be either an expert hieroglyphist or a rhetorician of commanding quality. Perhaps I should do more wisely if I were to accept the advice of my great-grandson Ham, who, overhearing my remark to a caller last Sunday evening that the work I have undertaken is one of considerable difficulty, climbed up into my lap ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... again the sorrows of their troubled record. When the morning broke through the dull gray of the eastern sky rim, he would be a heartless surgeon of emotions who attempted to probe the pathos of their thoughts, and a dull and vulgar rhetorician who should attempt to parse the ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... passions of man; and follow nature (saith he) therein, and thou shalt not err. The lawyer saith what men have determined. The historian what men have done. The grammarian speaketh only of the rules of speech; and the rhetorician, and logician, considering what in nature will soonest prove and persuade, thereon give artificial rules, which still are compassed within the circle of a question, according to the proposed matter. The physician weigheth ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... philosopher had exerted over his son, yet who then had considerable influence from the active part he had taken in the expulsion of the Thirty Tyrants. The more formidable accuser was Meletus,—a poet and a rhetorician, who had been irritated by Socrates' terrible cross-examinations. The principal charges against him were, that he did not admit the gods acknowledged by the republic, and that he ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... unintelligible are very intelligent. Quintilian has justly observed, that the obscurity of a writer is generally in proportion to his incapacity. However, as there is hardly a defect which does not find partisans, the same author informs us of a rhetorician, who was so great an admirer of obscurity, that he always exhorted his scholars to preserve it; and made them correct, as blemishes, those passages of their works which appeared to him too intelligible. Quintilian adds, that the greatest panegyric they could give to a ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... heart rather than the head. It was an outburst of deep feeling, a cry in the darkness. The writer no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist. ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... occasional drop and bump of the sailing gasbag upon catch-words of enthusiasm, which are the rhetoric of the merely windy, and a collapse on a poetic line, which too often signalizes the rhetorician's emptiness of his wind, the article was eminent for flight, sweep, and dash, and sailed along far more grandly than ordinary provincial organs for the promoting or seconding of public opinion, that are as little to be compared with the mighty metropolitan ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... school; nor, on the other hand, has he the plain homespun force of Swift and Cobbett. And yet readers who do not insist upon measuring all prose by the same standard, will probably agree that if Hazlitt is not a great rhetorician, if he aims at no gorgeous effects of complex harmony, he has yet an eloquence of his own. It is indeed an eloquence which does not imply quick sympathy with many moods of feeling, or an intellectual vision at once penetrating and comprehensive. It is the eloquence ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... inclinations, but are decreed by immutable right. He does not describe the common multitude of the dead, leading a dark sad existence, like phantoms in a dream: his references to death and Hades seem cheerful in comparison with those of many other ancient Greek authors. Dionysius the Rhetorician, speaking of his Threnes, dirges sung at funerals, says, "Simonides lamented the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... attention of those who are not weary of books relating to that momentous epoch. It is a "Biography of Camille Desmoulins," by Ed. Fleury—an octavo volume, lately issued at Paris. The author discusses the history of this famous pamphleteer and revolutionary rhetorician, as an advocate defends a ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... those arts only which involve the exercise of the mind as a controlling factor. One may be a great orator, according to the usual acceptation of the term "great," and yet be only a declaimer and a rhetorician. That is to say, he may be able to captivate audiences by his superior action, as Demosthenes defines oratory to be, and at the same time his elocution and rhetoric may be unexceptionable, yet he maybe in fact totally lacking in every ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... the waste Places of Gallia; where with their Husbandry, they may help the Roman Empire in time of Peace; and with their Bodies, supply its Armies in time of War—." And in another Panegyrick, by Eumenius the Rhetorician, we find this Passage, "Aut haec ipsa, &c. Or this Country, which was once overspread with the Fierceness of the Franks, more than if the Waters of their Rivers, or their Sea, had cover'd it;" but now ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... gives it life and truth. Cazales was the opposite of Maury: he had a just and ready mind; his eloquence was equally facile, but more animated; there was candour in his outbursts, and he always gave the best reasons. No rhetorician, he always took the true side of a question that concerned his party, and left declamation to Maury. With the clearness of his views, his ardent character, and the good use he made of his talents, his only fault ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... Now this skilful rhetorician seemed to me to expend great skill in rearing a firmly-constructed edifice, towering aloft on its own self-supported basis, but resting on, and upheld by, some internal principle of necessity. I regretted in it the total absence of what I desired to find; and thus it seemed ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... will confirm. The mistake has, doubtless, grown out of a misconception of the nature of eloquence itself.[15] If eloquence were all figure—even if it were, in any considerable degree, mere figure—then the tawdriest rhetorician would be the greatest orator. But it is not so. On the contrary, the use of many words (or figures) to express an idea, denotes not command of language, but the absence of that power—just as the employment of numerous tools, ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... preference. Whoever is desirous of accurately knowing the reign of Louis XV. should run over the very wretched history of Lacretelle, merely for the dates, and afterwards read the two hundred pages of the naive du Hausset, who, in every half page, overturns half a dozen misstatements of this hollow rhetorician. Madame du Hausset was often separated from the little and obscure chamber in the Palace of Versailles, where resided the supreme power, only by a slight door or curtain, which permitted her to hear all that was said there. She had for a 'cher ami' the greatest practical philosopher ...
— The Secret Memoirs of Louis XV./XVI, Complete • Madame du Hausset, an "Unknown English Girl" and the Princess Lamballe
... Roman by descent, but of provincial birth, being native to Cirta, in Numidia. Thence he migrated to Rome in the reign of Hadrian, and became the most famous rhetorician of his day. As a pleader and orator he was counted by his contemporaries hardly inferior to Tully himself, and as a teacher his aid was sought for the noblest youths of Rome. To him was entrusted the ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... words of his authorities; and his history thus acquires a charm such as very few ancient or modern military narratives possess. The anecdotes and expressions which he records we fairly believe to be genuine, and not to be the coinage of a rhetorician, like those in Curtius. In fact, in reading Arrian, we read General Aristobulus and General Ptolemy on the campaigns of the Macedonians, and it is like reading General Jomini or General Foy on the campaigns of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... The 'argumentum ad populum' consists in an appeal to the passions of one's audience. An appeal to passion, or to give it a less question-begging name, to feeling, is not necessarily amiss. The heart of man is the instrument upon which the rhetorician plays, and he has to answer for the harmony or the discord ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... like myself, "no adequate justification for flooding the world (!) with an ocean of filth" (ibid.) showing that he also can be (as said the past-master of catch-words, the primus verborum artifex) "an interested rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity." But audi alteram partem—my view of the question. I have no apology to make for the details offered to the students of Moslem usages and customs, who will find in them much to learn and more to suggest the necessity of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... the glorification of the body, a representation of the full strength and beauty of developed manhood. The saint of the mediaeval mosaic represents the body in its extreme maceration and humiliation. The rhetorician, Dio Chrysostom, in a somewhat whimsical passage, which was suggested by a remark of Plato, found a special moral significance in the fact that Homer, though he places his heroes on the the banks of what he calls 'the fishy Hellespont,' never makes them eat ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... other, that it seems to be unreasonable to speak too deeply when giving explanations. Let the knife of my judgment pare away from the present treatise the unlawful and the unreasonable. One does not permit any Rhetorician to speak of himself without a necessary cause. And from this is the man removed, because he can speak of no one without praise or blame of those of whom he speaks; which two causes commonly induce a man to speak of himself. And in order to remove a doubt which ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... primarily, then, upon the mood and intentions of the writer. Figures are figures, whether employed in prose or verse. Mr. Kipling does not lose his capacity for employing metaphors as he turns from writing verse to writing stories, and the rhetorician's analysis of similes, personifications, allegories, and all the other devices of "tropical" language is precisely the same, whether he is studying poetry or prose. Any good textbook in rhetoric gives adequate examples of ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... speak. At length, however, after much debating, it was determined that arms should yield to the gown, or rather, the horse to the orator—with this precaution, that the monture should be properly secured, by an attendant to hold the bridle. Under this safeguard, the rhetorician issued forth, and the first part of the speech was performed without accident; but when, by way of relieving the declaimer, the whole military band began to flourish ca ira, the horse, even more patriotic than his rider, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... Malatesta, I am no rhetorician, or my words Might keep more even with the love I feel: Simply, I thank you. With an honest hand I take the hand which you extend to me, And hope our grasp may never lose its warmth.— You marked the bastion by the water-side? Weak as a bulrush. ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... appointments confidently spoken of in the best-informed circles, we learn that Lord Vargrave is to have the place of ———. It will be a popular appointment. Lord Vargrave is not a holiday orator, a mere declamatory rhetorician—but a man of clear business-like views, and was highly thought of in the House of Commons. He has also the art of attaching his friends, and his frank, manly character cannot fail to have its due effect with the English ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... before he leaped. His songs prove him to be a melodist, the most original since Brahms in this form. Otherwise, originality is conditioned. He is, for instance, not as original as Claude Debussy, who has actually said something new. Strauss, a rhetorician with enormous temperamental power, modifies the symphonic form of Liszt, boils down the Wagnerian trilogy into an hour and thirty minutes of seething, white-hot passion, and paints all the moods, human and inhuman, with incomparable virtuosity. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... seem clear that all the skill and valor of the German Army had better not be concentrated on it, but on the larger and less contemptible allies. If all the skill and valor of the German Army are concentrated on it it is not being treated as contemptible. But the Prussian rhetorician had two incompatible sentiments in his mind, and he insisted on saying them both at once. He wanted to think of an English Army as a small thing; but he also wanted to think of an English defeat as a big thing. He wanted to exult, at the same moment, in the utter weakness of the British ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... of these sermons is what might be expected from the character of the mind it expresses. If Dr. Walker were not a thinker, it is plain that he could never have been a rhetorician. He has no power at all as a writer, if writing be considered an accomplishment which can be separated from earnest thinking. Words are, with him, the mere instruments for the expression of things; and he hits ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... argumentes gaye & delectable to the eare. So than the sure iugement of argu- [B.i.r] mentes or reasons must be lerned of the logician / but the crafte to set the[m] out with pleasaunt figures and to delate the mater belongeth to the Rhetorician. As in Mi- loes cause / of whome was made mencion afore. A logician wolde briefly argue / who so euer violently wyll slee an other / may lawfully of the other be slayne in his defence. Clodius wolde vyolently haue slain Milo / wherfore Clodius might lau- fully be slayne of Milo in Miloes ...
— The Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke • Leonard Cox
... occidental hemisphere, by the blaze of his genius,—embodying in his own person half the wisdom of the whole nation of Rhode Island,—who should revive and indorse the dictum of the florid British rhetorician, and fix upon the name of the American merchant as fact, the fancy sketch first drawn by a brilliant but libellous imagination! Had it been otherwise, I am sure my friend would have been spared the toils and perplexities incident alike to the mercantile calling, whether ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... drink, dance, and wanton with their whores. This they propose for us to imitate; they permit us to have mimics and music at our feasts, but forbid philosophy; she, forsooth, being very unfit to be wanton with us, and we in a bad condition to be serious. Isocrates the rhetorician, when at a drinking bout some begged him to make a speech, only returned: With those things in which I have skill the time doth not suit; and in those things with which the time suits ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... have allowed their dislike of the thing he says to hurry them into an exaggerated censure on his manner of saying it. It is important, in the first place, to remember that his violences are not the violences of the hired rhetorician. He was prepared to stand by what he wrote, and he knew the risks that he ran in those shifting and uncertain times. His life was in danger at the Restoration, and was saved by some unknown piece of good fortune or clemency. He was not a coward reviler, a "tongue-doughty ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... and can repeat, without missing a single word, even his extempore speeches. He has attained this facility by study and constant practice, for he does nothing else day or night: either as a listener or speaker he is for ever discussing. He has passed his sixtieth year and is still only a rhetorician, and there is no more honest and upright class of men living. For we who are always rubbing shoulders with others in the Forum and in the lawsuits of everyday life, cannot help picking up a good deal of roguery, while in the imaginary cases of ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... not been thought necessary in this chapter to notice either Arnobius, an African rhetorician, who wrote seven Books against the Gentiles; or the Christian Cicero, Lactantius, who is said to have been his pupil. Both these authors appeared about the end of the period embraced in this history, and consequently ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... leaves a copy of verses at his door and begs for a Christmas-box, I must again cry out and say, "My dear sir, it is true your simile is offensive, but can you make it out? Are you not hasty in your figures and illusions?" If I might give a hint to so consummate a rhetorician, you should be more careful in making your figures figures, and your similes like: for instance, when you talk of a book "swelling the tide of exhilaration incident to the inauguration of the new year," or ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... or of an eastern family with a mixture of Greek and Roman blood? The author of the Treatise avows himself a Greek, and apologises, as a Greek, for attempting an estimate of Cicero. Longinus himself was the nephew and heir of Fronto, a Syrian rhetorician of Emesa. Whether Longinus was born there or not, and when he was born, are things uncertain. Porphyry, born in 233 A.D., was his pupil: granting that Longinus was twenty years Porphyry's senior, he must ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... neighbour, however, makes ample amends for the taciturnity of both. He is a Greek, and you may hear him at the other extremity of the bazar. The most laboured efforts of the rhetorician bear no comparison with the honied, artful speeches, and the gay and cheerful air by which he detains, wheedles, and finally succeeds in obliging the passer by to purchase, or at least examine the contents ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... Byron to the multitude, Edgar Poe to the select? Then would some of the mysteries of French reading of English be explained otherwise than by the plainer explanation that has hitherto satisfied our haughty curiosity. The taste for rhetoric seemed to account for Byron, and the desire of the rhetorician to claim a taste for poetry seemed to account for Poe. But, after all, patatras! ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... these again are Scriptural. When in Jeremy Taylor's prayer, introduced by the American revisers into the Order for the Visitation of the Sick, we come upon the comparison of human life to a "vale of misery" we feel that somehow we have struck a new current in the atmosphere; for the moment it is the rhetorician who speaks, and no longer the earnest ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... execution can possibly be. As this is exactly one of the points on which the advocates of the punishment, whether from the point of view of deterrence or from that of retribution, chiefly rely, it seems something of a blunder to bring it out with all the power of a poet and a rhetorician. We want "M. l'Assassin," in fact, to be made very uncomfortable—as uncomfortable as possible—and we want M. l'Assassin, in intention or deliberation, to be warned that he will be so made. "Serve him right" sums up the one ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... probably made upon him: its university was famous for those petty disputes and rivalries which sometimes ruffle the calm of academical retreats; and it is possible that the murmur of these, with which the air was often filled, may have given the first impulse to that scorn for the tricks of the rhetorician and the windy disputations of the sophist which form so marked a feature in some of his writings. The glances of young eyes are clear and sure, and even as a boy he may have perceived how small may be the souls of men and how mean their lives, when ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... who lies tells the whole lie. Lying is the face of the fiend; and Satan has two names,—he is called Satan and Lying." Victor Hugo the romancer would seem to be a safer guide, so far, for the physician or the nurse in the sick-room, than Pliny the rhetorician, or ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... upon him, and yet he may be able to give no account of the manner in which it affects him, or to drag his reasons from their silent lurking-places. This last will be a wise man, though neither a logician nor rhetorician. Goldsmith was a fool to Dr. Johnson in argument; that is, in assigning the specific grounds of his opinions: Dr. Johnson was a fool to Goldsmith in the fine tact, the airy, intuitive faculty with which he skimmed the surfaces of things, and unconsciously formed his Opinions. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... there was no difficulty in improvising any number of such orations. To praise the Athenians among the Athenians was easy,—to praise them among the Lacedaemonians would have been a much more difficult task. Socrates himself has turned rhetorician, having learned of a woman, Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles; and any one whose teachers had been far inferior to his own—say, one who had learned from Antiphon the Rhamnusian—would be quite equal to the task of praising ...
— Menexenus • Plato
... repetundis (pecuniis), used i. of money extorted by an official and to be returned, ii. of money extorted as a bribe. Caesar lost his case, but succeeded in showing that Sulla's senatorial judges were corrupt. 4. Apollonio Moloni, the famous rhetorician, whose pupil Cicero was both at Rome and at Rhodes. Very possibly Caesar took this step by the advice of Cicero. 7. circa Pharmacussam insulam: S.W. of Miletus ( mod. Farmako). 8-9. non sine summa indignatione: Plutarch, Caes. gives a picturesque account of his adventures as their ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... of the Nicene party. Basil of Caesarea was a disciple of the schools of Athens, and a master of heathen eloquence and learning. He was also man of the world enough to keep on friendly terms with men of all sorts. Amongst his friends we find Athanasius and Gregory of Nazianzus, Libanius the heathen rhetorician, the barbarian generals Arinthaeus and Victor, the renegade Modestus, and the Arian bishop Euippius. He was a Christian also of a Christian family. His grandmother, Macrina, was one of those who fled ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... bitter hatred against those who wish to cure an evil by removing its causes. A good example is the language of writers like Mr. Chesterton about eugenics and population. If social maladies were treated scientifically, the trade of the emotional rhetorician ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... vitality of experience; and in their tender and pleading eloquence will doubtless commend themselves to many human sympathies. Mr. Giles has been hitherto most favorably known to the public in this country, as a brilliant rhetorician, and an original and piquant literary critic; in the present volume, he displays a rare mastery ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
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