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Epigrammatical   Listen
adjective
Epigrammatical, Epigrammatic  adj.  
1.
Writing epigrams; dealing in epigrams; as, an epigrammatical poet.
2.
Suitable to epigrams; belonging to epigrams; like an epigram; pointed; piquant; as, epigrammatic style, wit, or sallies of fancy.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Epigrammatical" Quotes from Famous Books



... leave the open field of exaggeration, that broad area which is our chosen territory, and seek for subtler qualities in American humour, we find here and there a witticism which, while admittedly our own, has in it an Old-World quality. The epigrammatic remark of a Boston woman that men get and forget, and women give and forgive, shows the fine, sharp finish of Sydney Smith or Sheridan. A Philadelphia woman's observation, that she knew there could be no marriages in Heaven, because—"Well, ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier

... sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes." This was too bad. The sentence was misquoted, quoted without its qualifying conditions, and frightened some of my worthy professional brethren as much as if I had told them to throw all physic to the dogs. But for the epigrammatic sting the sentiment would have been unnoticed as a harmless overstatement at the ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... A famous and epigrammatic author said that life copied literature; it seems clear that life really caricatures it. I suggested recently that the Germans submitted to, and even admired, a solemn and theatrical assertion of authority. ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton

... contact. The world became full of easy-mannered, graceful, gracefully-dressed, conversationally dexterous, finally shallow Wedderburns, Bishops Wedderburn, Wedderburn M.P.'s, Professors Wedderburn, Wedderburn landlords, all with finger-bowl shibboleths and epigrammatic cities of refuge from a sturdy debater. And everyone ill-clothed or ill-dressed, from the cobbler to the cab-runner, was a man and a brother, a fellow-sufferer, to Hill's imagination. So that he became, as it were, a champion of the fallen ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... foreign sojourner who is so often met in strange cities that the children seemed like little men and women. "Yes," he said, "the Spaniards are not children until they are thirty or forty, and then they never grow up." It was perhaps too epigrammatic, but it may have caught at a fact. From another foreign sojourner I heard that the Catholicism of Spain, in spite of all newspaper appearances to the contrary and many bold novels, is still intense and unyieldingly repressive. But how far the severity of the church characterizes manners it ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells

... press. What does Mr. Pattison say to Burke's "Reflections on the French Revolution," to Paine's "Common Sense," to the tracts written by Halifax and Defoe at the time of the Revolution? Neither thought nor action is his epigrammatic condemnation of Milton's political writings, but an appeal which stirs men to action is surely both. Again of "Eikonoklastes" we are told that "it is like all answers, worthless as a book." Bentley's "Phalaris" is an answer, Demosthenes' "De ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... a riot. I have the clearest recollection of G. K. C. seated ponderously at the table, drinking champagne by magnums, continually feeding his face with food which, as he was constantly employed in the most dazzling and epigrammatic conversation, was apt to fall from his fork and rebound from his corporosity, until the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... be epigrammatic," she retorted, "it doesn't suit your mental complexion. I'll be glad, then, when my youth has passed. It's a time of turmoil during which one can't really think clearly. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... same time the brightest wit and most shameless punster of Westminster Hall; and such pride did he take in his reputation as a punster, that after the fashion of the wits of an earlier period he was often at considerable pains to give a pun a well-wrought epigrammatic setting. Bored with the long-winded speech of a prosy sergeant, he wrote on a slip of paper, which was in due course passed along the barristers' benches in the ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson

... itself be drained. If it would only send away its first-rate men, instead of its second-rate ones, (no offence to the well-known exceptions, of which we are always proud,) we should be spared such epigrammatic remarks as that which the gentleman has quoted. There can never be a real metropolis in this country, until the biggest centre can drain the lesser ones of their talent and wealth.—I have observed, by the way, that the people who really live in two great cities are by no means so jealous ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... audience. He seems to feel that if he cannot achieve his end, the communication of his lyrical impulse, with a single strong motif, a single strong movement of tones, a single rhythmic start, he cannot achieve it at all. So we find him writing songs, the three Japanese lyrics, for instance, that are epigrammatic in their brevity; a piece for string-quartet that is played in fifty seconds; a three-act opera that can be performed ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... esteemed inferior. Only a few fragments are left; but he was not altogether without his influence, for he was, as I have just said, one of the models on which Propertius and Ovid formed themselves; and some, indeed, call him the Father of the Latin elegy, with its terseness, grace, and clear epigrammatic form of thought, and, therefore, in a great degree, of our modern eighteenth century poets; not a useless excellence, seeing that it is, on the whole, good for him who writes to see clearly what he wants to say, and to be able to make his readers see it clearly also. And yet one ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley

... marked man. His whole soul is full of poesy, ever restless and exuberant. I am not aware that he ever molded a rhyme, or sung a measure of song in all his life. And yet so tenacious is his memory, so wonderful his talent in applying the epigrammatic utterances of the leading writers, both old and new, that a person, on being made cognizant of the fact, finds himself puzzled. Poetry enters into even the driest details of Mr. Shepard's business life. The signature to a check is often audibly accompanied ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... running comment, in his "Music and Manners in the Classical Period" (London, 1898). Mr Krehbiel rightly describes some of the entries as mere "vague mnemonic hints," and adds that one entry which descants in epigrammatic fashion on the comparative morals of the women of France, Holland and England is unfit for publication. Looking over the diary, it is instructive to observe how little reference is made to music. One or two of the entries are plainly memoranda of purchases to be made for friends. ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden

... a man, sir; but you can't horsewhip a neighborhood," said the lawyer, in his politely epigrammatic manner. "We will fight our battle, if you please, without borrowing our weapons of the coachman yet a while, at ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins

... beauties, that make these early works so interesting. The above-mentioned three polonaises are full of phrases, harmonic, progressions, &c., which are subsequently reutilised in a. purer, more emphatic, more developed, more epigrammatic, or otherwise more perfect form. We notice the same in the waltzes which remain yet to ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... mayors, alder-men, and councillors. Here, "Blue-brick Walker" first propounded his scheme for superseding the "petrified kidney" pavement. Here "Wedding-ring Edwards," in his quaint, sententious manner, growled out brief epigrammatic sentences, full of shrewdness and wisdom, most strangely seasoned with semi-contemptuous sarcasm. Here Isherwood Sutcliff, with his well-dressed, dapper figure, and his handsome Roman face, was wont to air his oratory; and ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards

... unmatched. Amongst Dafydd's contemporaries and successors, Iolo Goch's noble poem, "The Labourer," very appropriate to our breadless days, Lewis Glyn Cothi's touching elegy on his little son John, and Dr. Sion Cent's epigrammatic "The Noble's Grave" have been treated as far as possible in the metres of the originals, and I have gone as near as I could to the measures of Huw Morus' "The Bard's Death-Bed Confession," Elis Win's "Counsel in view of Death," and the Vicar ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves

... deprecating glance, who stammers and makes a painful spectacle of himself when you ask him his opinion of "The Glees of the Gulches," by Popocatepetl Jones. The slender, dark-haired novelist of your imagination, with epigrammatic points to his mustache, suddenly takes the shape of a short, smoothly-shaven blond man, whose conversation does not sparkle at all, and you were on the lookout for the most brilliant of verbal fireworks. ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... well give 'em away before it's too late, ye know'—and then he settled back in his easy chair to puff at a pipe. I must note down one of his phrases which tickled me—he has such a knack for the proverbial and the epigrammatic. 'He's cut his cloth, he can wear his breeches,' he said of a certain scapegrace. He chuckled over the Suffolk phrase 'a chance child,' for a bastard (alluding to one such of his acquaintance in old days). ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... never omits from her tragedies. These were the Duke's old friend the Marquis de Coeur-Volant, fleeing from his chateau as the peasants put the torch to it, and arriving in Pianura destitute, gouty and middle-aged, but imperturbable and epigrammatic as ever. With him came his Marquise, a dark-eyed lady, stout to unwieldiness and much given to devotion, in whom it was whispered (though he introduced her as the daughter of a Venetian Senator) that a reminiscent eye might still detect the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... be brief, and it must have an unexpected turn of thought. This turn of thought may spring from an apparent contradiction, from the solemn assertion of a truism, from a play on words, or from other sources. There is an apparent contradiction in Wordsworth's epigrammatic line,— ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter

... Some, like the first two below, preserve the metrical division of the quatrains, with the couplet for an epigrammatic summary; others more or less obscure ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum

... book, witty, epigrammatic, flavorsome ... recalls Frank Stockton's bewitching foolery and ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... theme—that he stands detached from it—still, his sympathies are indubitably subordinated to the effort, the successful effort, to bring off a neat point, to make a pun in the right place, to be striking, antithetical, epigrammatic. His verses have the finish, in their way, of Pope's couplet and Ovid's pentameter. His best known and most praised work appeals, primarily, to the taste and the ear: always, perhaps, to the head rather than to ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker

... Sergey Ivanovitch advised him to read the theological works of Homiakov. Levin read the second volume of Homiakov's works, and in spite of the elegant, epigrammatic, argumentative style which at first repelled him, he was impressed by the doctrine of the church he found in them. He was struck at first by the idea that the apprehension of divine truths had not ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy

... probably reads your screeds at her Christian Endeavour meetings just as you cull extracts from Salemina's for your Current Events Club. In a word, the loosened leaf leads to the loosened tongue, and that's rather epigrammatic for ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... Corn-law Rhymer." He was born and died in Yorkshire. He was the author of several pleasing poems, of a somewhat epigrammatic character. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... fashionable London of yours," friend Sauerteig would say, "speaks a plain word to me. Every man feels bound to be something more than plain; to be pungent withal, witty, ornamental. His poor fraction of sense has to be perked into some epigrammatic shape, that it may prick into me;—perhaps (this is the commonest) to be topsyturvied, left standing on its head, that I may remember it the better! Such grinning inanity is very sad to the soul of man. Human faces should not grin on one like masks; ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... Parish has perhaps made the Sussex labourer a thought too epigrammatic: a natural tendency in the illustrations to such a work. The following narrative of adventure from the lips of a South Down shepherd, which is communicated to me by my friend, Mr. C. E. Clayton, of Holmbush, is nearer the normal loquacity of the type:—"I mind one day I'd been to buy some lambs, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... the strength of his passions. Burns was perfectly well aware of the passionate and quarrelsome nature of the man. He compared himself with such a companion to one travelling with a loaded blunderbuss at full-cock; and in his epigrammatic way he said of him to Mr. Walker, 'His mind is like his body; he has a confounded, strong, in-kneed sort of a soul.' The man, however, had some good qualities. He had a warm heart; never forgot the friends of his early ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun

... given to us battles, laws, histories, songs; now we have in Solomon's writings a new style in short, epigrammatic sentences. The proverb was the most ancient way of teaching among the Greeks. The seven wise men of Greece each had his own motto on which he made himself famous. These were engraved on stone in public places. Thus the gist of an argument or a long discussion may be thrown ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... yacht had been towed up the Mincio past Vergil's home when he was a lad of about thirteen. Indeed we hope he was out fishing that day and shared his catch with the home-returning travelers. Parodies are usually not works of artistic importance, and this for all its epigrammatic neatness is no exception to the rule. But it is not without interest to catch the poet at play for a moment, and learn his opinion on a political ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank

... visit to friends in Venice, he avoided every building which contains a Tintoretto, averring that the sight of Tintoretto's pictures would injure his carefully trained taste. It is probable that neither anecdote is strictly true. Yet there is a certain epigrammatic point in both; and I have often speculated whether even Venice could have so warped the genius of Poussin as to shed one ray of splendour on his canvases, or whether even Tintoretto could have so sublimed the prophet of Queen Anne as to make him add dramatic passion to a London drawing-room. ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... generis, while the whole group stands, in a manner also, apart from others and by itself. There is astonishing cleverness everywhere, in regard to almost every point of novel-composition, though with special regard to epigrammatic phrase. But the whole is inorganic somehow, and more than somehow unreal; without (save in the cases mentioned) attaining that obviously unreal but persuasive phantasmagoria which some great writers of fiction have ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... but is a salutation, embodying in its brevity an invitation to the stranger to dismount from his horse, or step down from his carriage, and rest himself beneath the shade of the trees. "Light, stranger, light and shade," is the laconic, epigrammatic ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 3, July, 1900 • Various

... eminent barrister) says: "The following translations will serve to give the English reader a faint, though perhaps, but a faint idea of the Welsh Tribanau, which are most of them, like these, remarkable for their quaintness, as well as for the epigrammatic point in ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins

... deep-toned voice, gave a remarkable impressiveness to all he said—even, indeed, to utterances which, if spoken by another, would sometimes have sounded commonplace or obvious. Sarcasm he could use with effect, and a telling point was often made by an epigrammatic phrase which delighted his hearers. And, more than all else, his meaning was never in doubt. In lucidity of statement he excelled many much greater orators, and was surpassed by none; and these qualities, added to his unmistakable ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill

... He believed that the philosophies of the ages are but stepping stones, that the wisdom of the earth looked but to the future, and that the study of the classics, however essential, is but the ground work for combining and working out the problems of the future. He was epigrammatic, terse, and gifted with a quaint humour, with which he was apt, even when in the driest philosophy, to drive ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... success, that for a period he was the fashionable writer, and the court ladies even formed their conversation after the model of his Euphues. His comedy in prose, Campaspe, is a warning example of the impossibility of ever constructing, out of mere anecdotes and epigrammatic sallies, anything like a dramatic whole. The author was a learned witling, but in ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... point the moral effectively. Not only the long-winded sentences, but the slow evolution of thought and the deliberation with which he works out his pictures of misery, make the general effect dull beside such books as 'Candide' or 'Gulliver's Travels.' A touch of epigrammatic exaggeration is very much needed; and yet anybody who has the courage to read it through will admit that Johnson is not an unworthy guide into those gloomy regions of imagination which we all visit sometimes, and which it is as well to visit in ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... I said, interrupting him, "that you have hit upon those admirable methods of deception which I was intending to describe in a Meditation entitled The Act of Putting Death into Life! Alas! I thought I was the first man to discover that science. The epigrammatic title was suggested to me by an account which a young doctor gave me of an excellent composition of Crabbe, as yet unpublished. In this work, the English poet has introduced a fantastic being called Life in Death. This personage crosses the oceans of the world ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac

... Enort, has certainly viewed the sunny side of his character; and that too I am disposed to think, with a burning glass. I have passed many hours in his society, pleased with his wit and epigrammatic sallies, but strive in vain to call to my recollection "the spontaneous flow of his Latin, his quotations from the ancient and modern poets, and his masterly and eloquent developement of every subject that his acute intellect chose to dilate upon." His conversation was ever egotistical in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various

... sometimes somewhat 'trop naive', though always amusing. This 'naivete' of his is the more piquant from his being really a good-natured man, who unconsciously thinks aloud. Interest Ward on a subject, and I know no one who can talk better. His expressions are concise without being poor, and terse and epigrammatic without ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... very real if very fitful emotions; yet it is impossible to recall or to reconstruct; and when older people attempt to reconstruct it, they remember the emotions which underlay it, and the eager interests out of which it all sprang; and they make it something picturesque, epigrammatic, and vernacular which is wholly untrue to life. The fact is that the talk of schoolboys is very trivial and almost wholly symbolical; emotion reveals itself in glance and gesture, not in word at all. I suppose that most of us remember our boyish friendships, ardent and eager personal admirations, ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson

... bullock-carts or carts drawn by dogs, six or eight of these inextricably harnessed together and panting for dear life; blue-bloused men in French caps, but bigger and blonder than Frenchmen, and less given to epigrammatic repartee, with mild, blue, beery eyes, a fleur de tete, and a look of health and stolid amiability; sturdy green-coated little soldiers with cock-feathered brigand hats of shiny black, the brim turned up over the right eye and ear that they might ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... allusion was to Clemence, the marchande des calas. Her mental activity was evinced not more in the cunning aptness of her songs than in the droll wisdom of her sayings. Not the melody only, but the often audacious, epigrammatic philosophy of her tongue as well, sold her calas ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable

... spoken unusually well, or with remarkable epigrammatic point, she felt that his eye sought the expression of her countenance first of all, if but for an instant; and that, in the family intercourse which constantly threw them together, her opinion was the one to which he listened with a deference,—the more complete, because ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... unworthy of respect on the part of the closing eighteenth century. A very large part of the journal was written by the two brothers, Friedrich furnishing the most aggressive contributions, more notably being responsible for the epigrammatic Fragments, which became, in their, detached brevity and irresponsibility, a very favorite model for the form of Romantic doctrine. "I can talk daggers," he had said when younger, and he wrote the greater part of these, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... slip into the corridor," continued the princess, smiling at her friend's epigrammatic remark. "Once or twice, either to see me or to make me see him, he looked through the glass sash of the box exactly opposite to mine. If I received a visit, I was certain to see him in the corridor ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac

... write about it beautifully, even if you're not very virile or epigrammatic or passionate. I won't ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... Many of his epigrammatic sayings have passed into proverbs: for example, that "genius is but a supreme capacity for taking pains." Another and still more celebrated passage shall be given in its entirety and ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler

... objection to Fort Scott," said Winthrop, when one of his battalions was finally ordered thither, "is that it's too fashionable for my taste. What this regiment needs now is more drill and less dinners." He loved to be epigrammatic. The head-quarters, staff, band, and six troops had taken station at a big frontier post, two other troops went with the lieutenant-colonel to a second post, so that that officer could have a command, and two more ...
— Under Fire • Charles King

... referred—"to ignore this stage in George Eliot's mental development would be to lose one of the connecting links in her history." Furthermore, "nothing in her fictions excels the style of these papers." Here is all her "epigrammatic felicity," and an irony not surpassed by Heine himself, while her paper on the poet Young is one of her wittiest ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... had at many points certain affinities to Carlyle's hero Johnson, but lacked his epigrammatic wit—and much else. But he seems to have desired to emulate Johnson in one particular, as we find in ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter

... giants of the Tory confederacy of wits. But little inferior to them in brilliance, if vastly less in intellectual size, was Pope, with his epigrammatic style, his compact sense—like stimulating essence contained in small smelling bottles—his pungent personalities, his elegant glitter, and his splendid simulation of moral indignation and moral purpose. Less known, but more esteemed than any of them where he was known, was Dr Arbuthnot—a ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville

... immense; and this alone suffices to secure variety in thought. But the aspiring and ardent nature of his intellect made him love to attempt also constant experiments in the theme and in the style. The romantic ballad, the classical tale, the lyric, the didactic, the epigrammatic—the wealth of his music comprehended every note, the boldness of his temper adventured every hazard. Yet still, (as in our Byron, in our Goldsmith, and as, perhaps, in every mind tenacious of its impressions,) some favourite ideas take possession of him ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various

... ineffectualness which runs through so much of the witty and epigrammatic fiction fashionable during the last eight or ten years, which runs through such works of a real though varying ingenuity as "Dodo," or "Concerning Isabel Carnaby," or even "Some Emotions and a Moral," may be expressed in various ways, but to most of us I think it will ultimately amount ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... passages which, if not flat, pointless, or insipid in themselves, are painfully liable to become so in the hands of a translator. I have accordingly on various occasions aimed at epigram and pungency when there was nothing epigrammatic or pungent in the Latin, in full confidence that any trifling additions which may be made in this way to the general sum of liveliness will be far more than compensated by the heavy outgoings which must of necessity be the lot of every translator, and more particularly ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... Acworth, a learned young man, whose facial capillary forces are coming gradually into play, and who seems to have the entire Book of Common Prayer off by heart, is the curate of St. Paul's. He is a good reader, a steady, sententious, epigrammatic preacher, and with a little more knowledge of the world ought to make a clever and most useful minister. Something, which we do not think exists in connection with any other Preston church for the management of affairs, is established here. It is a "Church Committee." It consists of ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus

... being merely clever but often unessential sub-titling. While this criticism is rather severe, it cannot be denied that certain stories of the kind mentioned, featuring this star and others, have been far too dependent for their appeal to the spectator upon the humorous, epigrammatic sayings of the characters. True, it is usually after leaving the theatre, and reviewing the picture in retrospect, that the spectator realizes that the accent has been too definitely on the sub-titling and not enough upon the action, but when he does realize ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds

... be set in the background, to be limited in means, was always to him a source of anger, which manifested itself now in impassioned vehemence, now in vague, gloomy dreaminess, from which he would rise up again with some violent sarcasm or some epigrammatic remark. ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach

... when, in replying to a speech of the ex-dramatist's he said that 'no man admired more than he did the abilities of that right honourable gentleman, the elegant sallies of his thought, the gay effusions of his fancy, his dramatic turns, and his epigrammatic point; and if they were reserved for the proper stage, they would, no doubt, receive what the hon. gentleman's abilities always did receive, the plaudits of the audience; and it would be his fortune sui plausu gaudere theatri. But this was not the proper scene ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton

... words' and flying notes of merry gentlemen and friends were obviously incorporated." No! certainly wings and flying are not the ideas that naturally associate with the historian of the Roxburghe, although, in one instance, the dinner is sketched off in the following epigrammatic sentence, which startles the reader like a plover starting up in a dreary moor: "Twenty-one members met joyfully, dined comfortably, challenged eagerly, tippled prettily, divided regretfully, and paid ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... three unhappy days in Fort Greene Place, then fled to her own house. A light, amusing letter from Berkley awaited her. It was so like him, gay, cynical, epigrammatic, and inconsequent, that it cheered her. Besides, he subscribed himself very obediently hers, but on re-examining the letter she noticed that he had made no mention of coming to pay ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers

... their religious poems. All three writers describe the love of the soul for God in the terms of passionate human love: Crashaw with an ardour which has never been surpassed, Herbert with a homely intimacy quite peculiar to him, and Christopher Harvey with a point and epigrammatic setting which serve only to enhance the deep feeling ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon

... produce the desire to move or resist. My pleasure, a very keen one, came from the imagined excitement produced by the thwarting of this desire. (Are not your own words—that 'emotion' is 'motion in a more or less arrested form'—an epigrammatic summary of all this, though in a somewhat different connection?) I did not undress her from any connection of nakedness with sexual feeling, but simply to enhance her feeling of helplessness and defenselessness under my hands. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... Apostolic Epistles in the latter are many times more numerous, as well as more precise, than in the former. Whole passages in Polycarp are made up of such quotations strung together, while in Ignatius they are very rare, being for the most part epigrammatic adaptations and isolated coincidences of language or thought. Nor indeed is their range coextensive. Thus the Epistle of Polycarp, as I pointed out in a former article [109:1], is pervaded with the language of St Peter's First ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot

... poet of "the town," and of the Court. He was greatly influenced by the neatness and polish of French verse; and, from his boyhood, his great ambition was to be "a correct poet." He worked and worked, polished and polished, until each idea had received at his hands its very neatest and most epigrammatic expression. In the art of condensed, compact, pointed, and yet harmonious and flowing verse, Pope has no equal. But, as a vehicle for poetry— for the love and sympathy with nature and man which every true poet must feel, Pope's verse is artificial; and its ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn

... Mansions!' Henry speculated. At the same time Mr. Snyder's epigrammatic remarks impressed him. He saw the art of Richardson and Balzac in an entirely new aspect. It was as though he had walked round the house of literature, and peeped in at ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett

... sayings of the Talmud, its absurdities no less than its gems of epigrammatic wisdom, were mines of poetry, philosophy, and science to him. He was a dreamer with a noble imagination, with a soul full ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan

... the poor maidens of Leipzig, Witty simplicity come,—come, then, to glad us again! Comedy, oh repeat thy weekly visits so precious, Sigismund, lover so sweet,—Mascarill, valet jocose! Tragedy, full of salt and pungency epigrammatic,— And thou, minuet-step of our old buskin preserved! Philosophic romance, thou mannikin waiting with patience, When, 'gainst the pruner's attack, Nature defendeth herself! Ancient prose, oh return,—so nobly and boldly expressing ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... the darting eye of a migratory interest. He often didn't "follow through," as they say in golf. With the result that he is often scored for insufficient motivation. But my knowledge of him makes me realize he felt and saw deeper than his epigrammatic style indicated. His technique was therefore often threadbare in spots,—not of that even mesh which makes of Pinero such an exceptional designer. I would put Fitch's "Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines" above Edward Sheldon's "Romance" for the faithful reproduction of early ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch

... latent in him also appeared at once, confirming his modest suspicions. Certainly he was a wit! Was not this perfectly charming girl's responsive and delicious laughter proof enough? Certainly he was epigrammatic! Certainly he could be easy, polished, amusing, sympathetic, and vastly interesting all the while. Could he not divine it in her undivided attention, the quick, amused flicker of recognition animating her beautiful face when he had turned a particularly ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers

... out-of-door nature of Theocritus, also a universalist; the finest lyrical poets (who only take short flights, compared with the narrators); the purely contemplative poets who have more thought than feeling; the descriptive, satirical, didactic, epigrammatic. It is to be borne in mind, however, that the first poet of an inferior class may be superior to followers in the train of a higher one, though the superiority is by no means to be taken for granted; otherwise Pope would be superior to Fletcher, and Butler to Pope. Imagination, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... continually haunting us, amid incontestable richness, vigour, and beauty, a sense that the work is over-done. Spenser certainly did not want for humour and an eye for the ridiculous. There is no want in him, either, of that power of epigrammatic terseness, which, in spite of its diffuseness, his age valued and cultivated. But when he gets on a story or a scene, he never knows where to stop. His duels go on stanza after stanza till there is no sound part left in either ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... because he was filled with a sense of his aristocratic position and wished to hold himself aloof from contact with ordinary mortals. As a Parliamentary debater he was singularly clear, concise, and unaffected. He was a great master of phrases, and some odd epigrammatic sentences of his still live in our common speech, and are quoted almost every day by persons who have not the least idea as to the source from which they come. His speech on the introduction of the Reform Bill was even for him peculiarly calm, deliberate, and restrained. It contained some passages ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy

... was affected by a slight stammer, which, in my opinion, but added piquancy to her epigrammatic sayings. She once remarked to me, "I shall never be c-c-cold until I'm dead." An impulse took possession of me which somehow, in spite of the great difference in our ages, I seemed unable to resist, and I retorted, "We are ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur

... Doris indeed, and another female victim of Lady Dunstable (also deposited on the scene by the same obliging arm), get busy unearthing so various a past for the undesirable one that she retires baffled, epigrammatic brilliance bites the dust, and domesticity is left triumphant. It is a jolly little story, very short, refreshingly simple, and constructed throughout on the most approved library lines. If the writer's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various

... compliments is gone. The courtly and polished Abbe, who would have said the above epigrammatically when it would have been considered remarkably witty, has passed away. No one believes in compliment. It has no currency, except done in a most commonplace way. But the epigrammatic compliment, the well-prepared impromptu, the careful rehearsed inspiration, is out of date. Now-a-days there are no wits, and no appreciation of The Wits. Conversation is damped by a bon-mot. An awful silence ...
— Happy-Thought Hall • F. C. Burnand

... that great things had been expected of him; and some fancied, perhaps, that he had been spoiled by prosperity. Remembering him, as I did, as the most brilliant and notable personality among my university friends, I began to apply to him Malloch's epigrammatic damnation of the man of whom it was said at twenty that he would do great things, at thirty that he might do great things, and at forty that he might have done ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland

... His adroitness, his fancy, his insight, his perfect good-humor, and his rare scholarship and delicate art, emphasize themselves on every page of his books. His political and literary addresses were models of what those things should be. They were often graceful and epigrammatic, but always sterling in their value and full of thought. Long ago he established his claim to the title of poet, and as the years went by, his muse grew stronger, richer, fresher, and more original. As an English critic, writing pleasantly of him and his work, in the London Spectator said ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various

... days, as the "family compact," not quite an accurate designation, since its members had hardly any family connection, but there was just enough ground for the term to tickle the taste of the people for an epigrammatic phrase. The bench, the pulpit, the banks, the public offices were all more or less under the influence of the "compact." The public lands were lavishly parcelled out among themselves and their followers. Successive governors, notably Sir Francis Gore, Sir Peregrine Maitland, and Sir ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot

... are many of a kindly character. Some are semi-Christian in their wise benevolence. Many show great shrewdness of observation, and have an epigrammatic wit. We will ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... of Children" (194), and President Hall has written about "Children's Lies" (252a), but we are still without a correspondingly accurate and extensive compilation of "The Thoughts and Reasonings of Parents," and a plain, unbiassed register of the "white lies" and equivoques, the fictions and epigrammatic myths, with which parents are wont to answer, or attempt to answer, the manifold questions of their tender offspring. From time immemorial the communication between parent (and nurse) and child, between the old of both sexes and little children, far from being yea and nay, has been cast in the mould ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... wide variety of knowledge with a great fertility of illustration, and enough of the salt of pleasantry and sarcasm to flavour and in some degree disguise a somewhat declamatory and pretentious dogmatism. It may seem too epigrammatic, but it is, in our serious judgment, strictly true, to say that his History seems to be a kind of combination and exaggeration of the peculiarities of all his former efforts. It is as full of political prejudice and partisan advocacy as any of his parliamentary speeches. It makes the facts ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... neither, it's a sort of an epigram, or rather an epigrammatic sonnet; I don't know what to call it, but it's ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve

... economy, of terseness the art calls for, excessive pruning and clipping. Singular that these three artists, so gifted in brevity were women. There is little, after all, in existence that warrants lengthy dissertation. Life itself is epigrammatic and brief enough. No volumes needed by way of explanation. The fascinating enigma diverts and perplexes everyone alike. The simple understand it best, or at least they seem to do so. Segregation, aloofness, spiritual imprisonment, which is another name for introspection, ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... landscape of my story as it eventually became, spread out before me. I was justified in waiting all the years. My discontent with the futile end of the tale as I originally knew it and saw it was justified. Charley Steele, brilliant, enigmatic and epigrammatic, did not die at the Cote Dorion, but lived in that far valley by Dalgrothe Mountain, and became a tailor! So far as I am concerned he became much more. He was the beginning of a new epoch in my literary life. I had got into subtler methods, reached more intimate understandings, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... the author's home. It deals with art, with journalism, and with human nature, and its love episodes are charming and true to life. The three women characters of the book are finely drawn and contrasted, there is much local color in the story, and a great deal of bright and epigrammatic writing. The author's previous book, "In the Country God Forgot," has been received with the utmost favor. The Boston Daily Advertiser says it "discloses a new ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray

... quite epigrammatic," said Billy, snappishly; "but there is some truth in your contention. We will begin again. When we see Rita, we will formulate a plan and try to ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major

... interest of the meeting, but this is such a waste of time, there is no coming to the point. "That's jus' so, dear," she said, "but that their ign'rance. Ign'rance does waste time, honey. Ign'rance can't come to a pint." That last sentence struck me as a piece of epigrammatic wisdom. ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 38, No. 06, June, 1884 • Various

... we observe a greater depth in the delineation of character; yet the old and tumid extravagance is not altogether lost, but merely clothed with choicer forms. In the situations there is much of pathetic power, the plot is complicated even to epigrammatic subtlety; but of such value in the eyes of the poet were his dearly purchased reflections on human nature and social institutions, that, instead of expressing them by the progress of the action, he exhibited them with circumstantial ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... Commonwealth Constitution to create in the Senate a States' rights House I am amazed at the remoteness of the intention from the achievement. The Senate is as much a party House as is the House of Representatives. Nothing, perhaps, describes the position better than the epigrammatic if somewhat triumphant statement of a Labour Senator some time ago. "The Senate was supposed to be a place where the radical legislation of the Lower Chamber could be cooled off, but they had found that the saucer was hotter than ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence

... kind, save an unknown condiment named Point, into the meaning of which I have vainly inquired; the victual Potatoes-and-Point not appearing, at least not with specific accuracy of description, in any European Cookery-Book whatever. For drink, they use, with an almost epigrammatic counterpoise of taste, Milk, which is the mildest of liquors, and Potheen, which is the fiercest. This latter I have tasted, as well as the English Blue-Ruin, and the Scotch Whiskey, analogous fluids used by the Sect in those countries: it evidently ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... finest are among the best proofs of how much a sonnet gains in unity by the single pause between the eight lines and the six instead of Shakspeare's fourfold division, and especially by the interlocking of the rhymes in the second half of the sonnet as opposed to Shakspeare's isolated and half-epigrammatic ...
— Milton • John Bailey

... are few. Two little educational books are worth mentioning: a book of Latin prose exercises, called Nuces, the sentences of which are full of recondite allusions, curious humour, and epigrammatic expression; and a slender volume for teaching Latin lyrics, called Lucretilis, the exercises being literally translated from the Latin originals which he first composed. Lucretilis is not only, as Munro said, the most Horatian ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)

... idea with which they set out. Some of them are conceived in a vein of fine irony throughout. Others, like "The Journey to Brundusium," are mere narratives, relieved by humorous illustrations. But we do not find in them the epigrammatic force, the sternness of moral rebuke, or the scathing spirit of sarcasm, which are commonly associated with the idea of satire. Literary display appears never to be aimed at. The plainest phrases, the homeliest illustrations, the most everyday topics—if they come in the way—are made ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... Christianity, Grundtvig naturally exalts the God-given means of grace, the word and sacraments, through which the Spirit works. In one of the epigrammatic expressions often found in his ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg

... century. Thus two important metres had been added to German poetry's treasure house of forms: first, the hexameter for a continuous narrative of a somewhat epic character, even though without high solemnity—which Goethe alone once aspired to in his Achilleis—and also for shorter epigrammatic or didactic observations in the finished manner of the distich; second, the sonnet for short mood-pictures and meditations. The era of the German hexameter seems, however, to be over at present, while, on the contrary, the sonnet, brought to still higher perfection by Platen, Moritz von Strachwitz ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... part, but owing to a method he had unconsciously adopted of exhibiting his wares with their most favorable aspect to the front. He was well read, but not deeply read, and yet all Paris considered him a profound scholar; he was quick and epigrammatic in his appreciation and expression of ideas, as men of cultivation and varied experience are apt to be, but he enjoyed the reputation of being a wit, and finally having merely lounged through the world, impelled by a spirit of restlessness, begotten of great wealth and ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various

... that two towns claimed him as their citizen, as the towns, cities, and islands of Greece claimed Homer as a native. Barron, with all the good humor imaginable, put an end to the conversation by the following epigrammatic impromptu:— ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall

... message in the garb of allegory song, and chiefly epigrammatic saying. Form is disregarded; the spirit is all-important, and suffices to cover up every fault of form. The Talmud, of course, does not yield a complete system of ethics, but its practical philosophy consists of doctrines that underlie a moral life. The injustice of the abuse heaped ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles

... 1861, Robert Toombs delivered his farewell speech to the United States Senate. It received profound attention. It was full of brief sentences and bristling points. In epigrammatic power, it was the strongest summary of the demands of the South. As Mr. Blaine said, it was the only speech made by a congressman from the seceding States which specified the grievances of the South and which named the conditions upon which the States would stay in the Union. Other Senators ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall

... Phrenody, justifies an expectation that is gloriously realized. To the vigilant thinker a decade is worth more than aeons to his sleeping brother. The Emerson of to-day is not the Emerson of twenty or even ten years ago. Here is still the true, epigrammatic style of his youth. He is as lavish of his aphorisms, which, like the coins of Donatello, hang over our heads and are free to every passer-by. Still an antiquarian, like Charles Kingsley, he peers among Etruscan vases, Greek ruins, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... first question was, "What kind of a man was Mr. Pope in his conversation?" His Lordship answered, that if the conversation did not take something of a lively or epigrammatic turn, he fell asleep, or perhaps pretended to do so.' Johnson's Works (1787), xi. 200. Johnson in his Life of Pope (Works, viii. 309) says that 'when he wanted to sleep ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell

... sort. Nor have they failed to write about him, they among the others, about him and about him; and it is notable how little real light, on any point of his existence or environment, they have managed to communicate. Dim indeed, for most part a mere epigrammatic sputter of darkness visible, is the "picture" they have fashioned to themselves of Friedrich and his Country and his Century. Men not "of genius," apparently? Alas, no; men fatally destitute of true eyesight, and of loyal heart first of ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle

... Holmes resumed his seat, Mr. Emerson whispered in my ear, in his epigrammatic style, 'This ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr

... forced upon us that even in prose "a thing may be well said once but cannot be well said twice" ([Greek: to kalos eipein hapax perigignetai, dis de ouk endechetai]), but this is generally because the genius of one language lends itself with special ease to some singularly felicitous and often epigrammatic form of expression which is almost or sometimes even quite untranslatable. Who, for instance, would dare to translate into English the following description which the Duchesse de Dino[29] gave of ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... unacquainted with one or other of such well-known aphorisms as: 'Whoever hath charge of a horse's foot has the care of his whole body'; 'As well a horse with no head as a horse with no foot'; or the perhaps better known, and certainly more epigrammatic, ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks

... lends such a charm to the author's essays,— brilliant, epigrammatic, vigorous. Indeed, herein lies the fault of the work, when viewed as a mere detail of historical facts. Its sparkling rhetoric is not the safest medium of truth to the simple-minded inquirer. A discriminating and able critic ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... herself admired no woman who was not of her own type. She was tempted to take advantage of Angela's desire not to be known, and say: "Oh, she's one of a thousand other pretty travelling women with intermittent husbands." This would have been epigrammatic, and at the same time it might have quenched dawning interest in the stranger. Neither the brother nor sister was of the sort who favoured flitting ladies with vague male belongings kept in the background. But suddenly a brilliant idea occurred ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... human ties, have said the beaux esprits of every age in one epigrammatic fashion or another. But frailty can bleed; in fact, it's first ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst

... verse of Mr. Hardy's youth. It is of Mr. Hardy's verses that one thinks oftenest as one reads these verses of Synge, and not only because of certain likenesses in subject-matter, but because of the imperfect mastery of both over the verse forms and a certain epigrammatic gnomic quality common to both. The verses of Synge are not relatively so important in comparison with the rest of his writing as Mr. Hardy's verses are in comparison with the rest of his writing, for they are not needed ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... suspicions of the more thoughtful St. John. Clarence, wholly reconciled to Edward, gazed on him with eyes swimming with affection, and soon drank himself into uproarious joviality. The archbishop, more reserved, still animated the society by the dry and epigrammatic wit not uncommon to his learned and subtle mind. But Warwick in vain endeavoured to shake off an uneasy, ominous gloom. He was not satisfied with Edward's avoidance of discussion upon the grave matters involved in the earl's promise to the insurgents, and his masculine ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... condensing power of Shakspeare, who squeezed meaning into a phrase with an hydraulic press, but he could carve a cherry-stone with any of the concellisti, and abounds in imaginative quaintnesses that are worthy of Donne, and epigrammatic tersenesses that remind us of Fuller. Nor is he wanting in poetic phrases of the purest crystallization. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... beneath their attention. Like the wise modern teacher they made no distinction between the religious and the secular. Everything that influenced man's acts and ideals possessed for them profound religious import. While the proverbial epigrammatic form of their teaching was not conducive to a logical or complete treatment of their theme, yet in a series of concise, dramatic maxims they dealt with almost every phase of man's domestic, economic, legal, and social life. They presented clearly man's duty to ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent

... down from the shelf my Heinrich Heine ... in German ... one of the tasks I set myself, during that three months, was the making an intensive study of just how Heine had "swung" the lyric form to such conciseness, such effectiveness of epigrammatic expression. ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp

... in the history of poetry. The essay on Emerson, his master, shows the same discriminating mind. But as a revelation of both author and subject there are few more delightful papers than Burroughs's essay on Thoreau. In manner it is as pungent and as racy as Thoreau's writings, and as epigrammatic as Emerson's; and his defense of Thoreau against the English reviewer who dubbed him a "skulker" has the sound of the trumpet and the martial tread of soldiers marching ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... value of every word she uttered. She knew how to listen as well as to talk, and gathered information in a manner highly complimentary to those from whom she sought it; her attention seemed far more the effect of respect than of curiosity. Her sentences were frequently epigrammatic; she more than once suggested to me the story of the good fairy from whose lips dropped diamonds and pearls whenever they were opened. She was ever neat and particular in her dress, her feet and hands were so delicate and small ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth

... friendship. Mrs. Procter is the "Lady of Bitterness," cited in the "Eothen" Preface. As Anne Skepper, before her marriage, she was much admired by Carlyle; "a brisk witty prettyish clear eyed sharp tongued young lady"; and was the intimate, among many, especially of Thackeray and Browning. In epigrammatic power she resembled Kinglake; but while his acrid sayings were emitted with gentlest aspect and with softest speech; while, like ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell

... seems to have been a strongly artistic nature; for he was a musician of repute, skillful too at painting, and above all a poet. As master and model in metrical composition he chose Martial, and in his epigrammatic turn he is akin to the great Latin poet. He was fond of experimenting in Latin lyrical forms, and wrote many madrigals and sonnets. They are full of vigorous thought and bright satire, of playful malice and epicurean ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... together, she suddenly made the epigrammatic remark, "Dangerous, very dangerous indeed; like most bears. Mind you don't get badly clawed, Meryl!..." and then with her usual lightness ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page

... his whole life he suffered from this neglect of early instruction. His letters, particularly, though they always "displayed the goodness of his heart, and frequently the strength of his native genius, with a certain laconic mode of expression, and an unaffected epigrammatic turn," were "fearfully and wonderfully made," the despair of his correspondents and the ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober

... like the great Martinus Scriblerus, was both doctor and author. And he was a John Arbuthnot. And to carry the resemblance still further, he was gifted with a vein of rough epigrammatic humor, in which it pleased his independence to indulge without much respect of persons, times, or places. His tongue, indeed, cost him some friends and gained him some enemies; but I am not sure that ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards

... of Mr. Clingman, who represented North Carolina, was alternately enlivened by epigrammatic wit or envenomed by scorching reply. Mr. Justin S. Morrill, of Vermont, was commencing a long and useful Congressional career. Mr. Schuyler Colfax, an editor- politician, represented an Indiana district. The veteran ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore

... unrelenting tribunal for literary culprits, as well as a determined assertor of its own political maxims. The common idea regarding its chief conductor represented him as a man of extraordinary sharpness, alternating between epigrammatic flippancy and democratic rigour. Gentle and refined feeling would certainly never have been attributed to him. It will now be found that he was at all times of his life a man of genial spirit towards the entire circle of his fellow-creatures—that his leading tastes were for ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various

... of the worthy servitor's epigrammatic scolding, and feared that he had followed him beyond the wood of Chaumont; but he would not ask, lest he should have to give explanations or to tell a falsehood or to command silence, which would at once have been taking ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny

... opportunity to look down upon people instead of forever staring up at them from a grovelling attitude. He knew her kind as he knew the first three letters of the alphabet. On the other hand, he was politely attentive, incomparably epigrammatic, and as full of exquisite mannerisms as the famous Brummel himself. In a word, he was THE Van Winkle, ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon

... than money," repeated Mr. Wright, not to be denied: for it struck him as a really fine utterance, with a touch of the epigrammatic too, of which he had not believed himself capable. In the stir of his feelings he was conscious of an unfamiliar loftiness, and conscious also that it did him credit. He paused and added, "There's ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... placed at the gates of Hell. I 170 concluded by observing, that the poem was not calculated to excite passion in any mind, or to make any impression except on poetic readers; and that from the culpable levity betrayed at the close of the eclogue by the grotesque union of epigrammatic wit with allegoric personification, in the allusion to the 175 most fearful of thoughts, I should conjecture that the 'rantin' Bardie', instead of really believing, much less wishing, the fate spoken of in the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... entirely to prose, he speedily became known as a writer of brilliant epigrammatic essays and even more brilliant paradoxical plays such as An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. His aphorisms and flippancies were quoted everywhere; his fame as a wit was only surpassed by his notoriety as an aesthete. ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various

... said to Wieland, "Life is a ticklish business—I propose to spend my time looking at it." This he did, viewing existence from every angle, and writing out his thoughts in terse, epigrammatic language. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... and unflagging attention, have scarcely had their due weight with the general reader, nor secured their just meed of admiration. He was singularly careless, writes his editor, in distributing his pleasing illustrations of playfulness, or pathos, or epigrammatic expression. His 'mission' he considered to be that of an instructor and improver; and the flowers which, equally with more substantial things, were the produce of his vigorous intellect, he looked upon as scarcely worthy of passing ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various

... its inspirations constantly maintained the noblest temper in his soul. The end of Literature was not, in Schiller's judgment, to amuse the idle, or to recreate the busy, by showy spectacles for the imagination, or quaint paradoxes and epigrammatic disquisitions for the understanding: least of all was it to gratify in any shape the selfishness of its professors, to minister to their malignity, their love of money, or even of fame. For persons who degrade it to such purposes, the deepest contempt ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... were called Carmina; or whatever sentence was expressed, were it much or little, it was called an Epic, Dramatic, Lyric, Elegiac, or Epigrammatic poem. ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson

... such thunders of applause, that in response to the manifest desire of the audience, Mrs. Burleigh again came forward, and delivered a highly interesting and eloquent address upon the general subject of woman's improvement, under the epigrammatic title of "Woman's Right to be a Woman." An extract or two will show the spirit with which she treats ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... judgment, and dignity. In Leopardi, philosophical acumen equals the elegance of his style. Giordani (d. 1848), as a critic and an epigraphist, deserves notice for his fine judgment and pure taste, as do Tommaseo and Cattaneo, who are both epigrammatic, witty, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... relations he was a genial and entertaining companion, unsurpassed in conversational powers, delighting in witty and sarcastic observations and epigrammatic sentences. He was elegant in his manners and bland and refined in his deportment. He was a skilful musician and passionately fond of children, and it was his wont in early life to gather them in groups about him and beguile ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... in too much haste, or busied and taken up with other concerns." It is this fulness of anecdote, which, perhaps, more than any other quality of his writings, makes him the favorite of boys as well as of men. He treasures up pithy sayings, and his own reflections are often epigrammatic in expression, and always ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various

... rather touchingly inflated naivete as of a small young person walking on tiptoe while he is talking of elevated things, at the time when he felt himself the author of that unwritten romance, with his present epigrammatic curtness and affectation of power kept strictly in reserve. His paragraphs now seem to have a bitter smile in them, from the consciousness of a mind too penetrating to accept any other man's ideas, and too equally competent ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot

... remove the burden of the state from his own shoulders to those of the rightful heir to the throne!' But before so curious a proposition was made to the king of the French, the other royalists consulted M. de Talleyrand. He replied, with his usual epigrammatic irony, 'There are some people who are born with two left hands. This is poor S.'s case: added to which, he seems to have been brought into the world without brains.' Upon this the party wisely determined to keep the 'prince's' presence in Paris as ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various

... the Writings of Goethe. Selected by Carrie Adelaide Cooke. With an Introduction by Kev. Alexander McKenzie, D.D. Boston: D. Lothrop & Co. Price $1.00. No other volume of the Spare Minute Series contains more real meat than this. Goethe was epigrammatic, and his ideas took the concentrated form of bullets, instead of scattering like shot. We doubt if there is another author, always excepting Shakespeare, from whose books so many noble and complete thoughts can be extracted. In the two hundred and fifty pages of this volume are ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various

... circle which was fitted to teach me, and inspire me with an interest. In this view I wrote at first certain little poems, in the form of songs or in a freer measure: they are founded on reflection, treat of the past, and for the most part take an epigrammatic turn. ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... matter, her epigrammatic sentences are grouped and classified with an accuracy that is both pleasing and popular. At intervals the reader is treated with a sprinkling of ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris

... dear friend, when I was on board a ship, and read it on deck. We laughed amazingly at your epigrammatic witticisms; your reputation is already established here. You are known as a man of genius; so you may judge if they listened to your letter. M. Grimod, from the first, has been the trumpeter of your talents and wit; and the best of the joke is, that on the strength of his descriptions of you, they ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various

... beginner always to have the theme in the last sentence; or if he has stated the theme in the opening, to have a restatement of it in different form, fuller and more explicit usually, sometimes a shorter and more epigrammatic form, ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... Mulvaney (Terence). Rollicking, epigrammatic, harum-scarum Irish trooper, in the Indian service, whose adventures and sayings are narrated in Soldiers Three, The Courting of Dinah ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... dervish has, I think, got immortality upon less laziness and resignation than this temporary sojourner in Massachusetts. It is a common notion that the world (meaning the people in it) has become tame and commonplace, lost its primeval freshness and epigrammatic point. Mandeville, in his argumentative way, dissents from this entirely. He says that the world is more complex, varied, and a thousand times as interesting as it was in what we call its youth, and that it is as fresh, as individual ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... Jonson. To Fine Grand " Brainhardy " Doctor Empiric " Sir Samuel Fuller On Banks, the Usurer " Chevril the Lawyer Epigrammatic Verses by Samuel Butler Opinion Critics Hypocrisy Polish The Godly Piety Poets Puffing Politicians Fear The Law " " " " Confession Smatterers Bad Writers The Opinionative Language of the Learned Good Writing Courtiers Inventions Logicians Laborious Writers On a ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... Mr. CARTON, is not a brilliant play, as its dialogue lacks epigrammatic sparkle: neither is it an interesting play, as the plot, such as it is, is too weak for words,—which, by the way, at once accounts for the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various

... Morse Stephens believes that it is idle to attempt to inquire into the causes of this political and social overturn. If a historian tells the how, he asserts he should not be asked to tell the why. This is an epigrammatic statement of a tenet of the scientific historical school of Oxford, but men will always be interested in inquiring why the French Revolution happened, and such chapters as this of Lecky, a blending of speculation and narrative, will ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes

... with. Thus, in "Ernest Bracebridge," an English story of school-life, the hero is a dreadfully unpleasant boy who is always successful and always right, and we are soon heartily weary of him. Besides, he is a horrible boy for mastery of all the arts and sciences, and delivers brief and epigrammatic discourses, being about twelve years old. However, the book is full of adventure and out-door games, and so ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various



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