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Man of letters   Listen
noun
man of letters  n.  
1.
A writer, especially one who writes for a living.
2.
A learned person; a scholar.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Man of letters" Quotes from Famous Books



... fierce protest against those exclusive rights once enjoyed by the nobility, (shown by Arthur Young to have been the primary impulse to revolution,) to hunt, keep pigeons, grind corn, press grapes, etc. For a long period, the man of letters was never combined with the statesman, as in England. In France, speculation in government ran wild, because the thinkers, suddenly raised to influence in affairs, had enjoyed no ordeal of public duty. Hence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... an apprenticeship in the office of a Writer to the Signet. He became a member of that honourable body, but almost immediately relinquished legal pursuits, and proceeded to London, resolved to commence the career of a man of letters. In the metropolis his literary aspirations were encouraged by Allan Cunningham and Mr and Mrs S. C. Hall. In 1829, he accepted an appointment in Jamaica; but, his health suffering from the climate of the West Indies, he returned in the following year. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... that, not being a literary man, certain presumptuous persons will think that they may reasonably blame me; alleging that I am not a man of letters. Foolish folks! do they not know that I might retort as Marius did to the Roman Patricians [Footnote 21: Come Mario disse ai patriti Romani. "I am unable to find the words here attributed by Leonardo to Marius, either in Plutarch's ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... fame extends over the world. It was created, somewhat on the lines of the Savage, by men who wrote or drew things, and has blossomed into most unrepublican luxury. The ruler of the place is an owl—an owl standing upon a skull and cross-bones, showing forth grimly the wisdom of the man of letters and the end of his hopes for immortality. The owl stands on the staircase, a statue four feet high; is carved in the wood-work, flutters on the frescoed ceiling, is stamped on the note-paper, and ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling

... received, in spite of the warm admiration of a few; nor was it until the publication of "The Scarlet Letter," in 1850, that its author could fairly be termed famous. For twenty years he was, in his own words, "the obscurest man of letters in America"; and it is the thought to which the mind must constantly recur, in thinking of Hawthorne, How could any combination of physical and mental vigor enable a man to go on producing works of such a quality ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various

... interruption to the madness of men and the wrath of gods. It was not that Quadratilla failed to perceive the massive intellectual force of Tacitus. On the contrary, she enraged Rufus and the others still further by a covert irony about Pliny's classing himself as a man of letters with the historian, an innocent vanity which endeared him only the more to those whose experience of his loyal and generous heart left no room for critical appraisement ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson

... that ought never to have been thrust upon us, we ask why it is that the reader of Boswell finds it as hard to help loving Johnson as the reader of Froude finds its hard to avoid disliking Carlyle, the answer must be that whilst the elder man of letters was full to overflowing with the milk of human kindness, the younger one was full to overflowing with something not nearly so nice; and that whilst Johnson was pre-eminently a reasonable man, reasonable in all his demands and expectations, Carlyle was the most unreasonable mortal ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... De Caus, and a folio volume of his works, accompanied by a note, in which this letter of Marion Delorme is unsuspectingly cited as genuine. And only three years ago, at a public banquet at Limoges, a well-known French Senator and man of letters made a speech, in which he retailed the story of the madhouse for the edification of his hearers. Truly a popular error has as many lives as a cat; it comes walking in long after you have ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... solid value, such as a clear-headed business man will appreciate, yet it is such a book as only an accomplished man of letters could write. We commend it to all who wish further knowledge of a region too little known by Americans.—Examiner, ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner

... celebrated as "Mark Twain," was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835. He was one of the foremost American philosophers of his day; he was the world's most famous humorist of any day. During the later years of his life he ranked not only as America's chief man of letters, but likewise as her best known and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... neighbor on the north, "I am the Academic Lion, of whom you must have heard. My character is noted for its concealed sweetness, and my style leaves nothing to be hoped for. I am literally a man of letters, for I have seventeen degrees. Usually I look literary-lean and nobly dissatisfied, but yesterday I swallowed a British Female Novelist by accident, and that accounts for my inartistic air of cheerfulness. I won my splendid reputation by telling other Lions how they ought ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke

... its part in the total effect, there is yet about the lyrics of Jonson a certain stiffness and formality, a suspicion that they were not quite spontaneous and unbidden, but that they were carved, so to speak, with disproportionate labour by a potent man of letters whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is for these reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity and emotion which we usually associate with lyrical poetry. There are no such epitaphs ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson

... the classics, which might set up his name equal to the Alduses, Stevenses, or Elzevirs, and that Mr. Wilson was the properest person in the world to assist him in such a project. He confessed to me that he had sometimes thought of it, but that his great difficulty was to find a man of letters that could correct the press. I mentioned the matter to Wilson, who said he had a man of letters in his eye one Lyon, a nonjuring clergyman of Glasgow. I would desire ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae

... prevailed on himself to break his connexions of acquaintance, and begin a wandering life, very easily continues it. Ireland had, at that time, very little to offer to the observation of a man of letters; he, therefore, passed into France and Italy [71]; made some stay at Montpellier and Padua, which were then the celebrated schools of physick; and, returning home through Holland, procured himself to be created doctor of physick ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson

... the court; Lebrun, Rigaud, Mignard, painted for the king; Perrault and Mansard constructed the Louvre and Versailles; the learned of all countries considered it an honor to correspond with the new academies founded in France. Louis XIV. was even less a man of letters or an artist than an administrator or a soldier; but literature and art, as well as the superintendents and the generals, found in him the King. The puissant unity of the reign is everywhere the same. The king and the nation ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... does Macaulay mean when he says that Johnson "came up to London precisely at the time when the condition of a man of letters was most ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely

... cried my uncle Toby, interrupting the corporal, is no more exempt from saying a foolish thing, Trim, than a man of letters—But not so often, an' please your honour, replied the corporal—my ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne

... style: let him have pen, ink, and paper, and help of books, and be enjoined to continue the story where it breaketh off, and I will undertake, by collating the styles, to judge whether he were the author or no."[**] Thus, had it not been for Bacon's humanity, or rather his wit, this author, a man of letters, had been put to the rack for a most innocent performance. His real offence was his dedicating a book to that munificent patron of the learned, the earl of Essex, at a time when this nobleman lay under ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... Plowman," he said, "I had expected to meet a man of letters and the author of this book"—he held up "Happiness and Hayseed"—"but I see I was mistaken. I tell you, sir, a man who would insult his sister before a stranger, as you have done, is an oaf and a cad." He threw the book over the hedge, and before I could say a word he had vaulted ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley

... of modern thought is steeped in science; it has made its way into the works of our best poets, and even the mere man of letters, who affects to ignore and despise science, is unconsciously impregnated with her spirit, and indebted for his best products to her methods. I believe that the greatest intellectual revolution mankind has yet seen is now slowly taking place by her agency. She is teaching the ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... way. I once published a little book, and he wrote a very nice article about it in a London Review. You did not know I was a man of letters, did you?' Logotheti laughed quietly. 'My book was not very long—only about a hundred pages, I think. But Lushington made out that it wasn't all rubbish, and I was always ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford

... accomplished men of letters in Europe was engaged upon a history of the French Revolution, raised some doubts among those who have thought most about the qualifications proper to the historian. M. Taine has the quality of the best type of a man of letters; he has the fine critical aptitude for seizing the secret of an author's or an artist's manner, for penetrating to dominant and central ideas, for marking the abstract and general under accidental forms in ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley

... have the disappointed courtier still brooding over his disgrace, but we pass to an account of the relief which the new-born man of letters find in the cultivation ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse

... a man of letters, of England, who had passed his life in constant study; and it was observed that he had written several folio volumes, which his modest fears would not permit him to expose to the eye even of his critical friends. He promised to leave ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various

... merely a man of letters. He recognized and did the private and public duties of the hour. He exercised a wide hospitality to souls as well as bodies. Eager youths came to him for rules, and went away with light. Reformers, wise and unwise, came to him, ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... idea of his character. The obvious thing about him is his cleverness. The question is, What will he make of it? He tries business for a short time; the sea for an even shorter; and then he settles down in the country to a life of study and composition: he will be a man of letters. His poems are what we should expect a clever lad to write. Had they been written at the end of the nineteenth century doubtless they would have been as fashionably decadent as, written at the beginning, they are fashionably pompous. It was ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell

... Villalobos is said to have been a man of letters, licentiate in law, and born of a distinguished family in Malaga; he was brother-in-law of Antonio de Mendoza, who (then viceroy of New Spain) appointed him commander of the expedition here described. Departing ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume II, 1521-1569 • Emma Helen Blair

... would tamely surrender to the pressure of misfortune: amidst his losses he could claim the strictest honesty of intention, and he was not unconscious of his powers. With his plaid over his shoulders, he reached Edinburgh in the month of February 1810, to begin, in his fortieth year, the career of a man of letters. The scheme was singularly adventurous, but the die was cast; he was in the position of the man on the tread-wheel, and felt that he must ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... torment ourselves, and often without any compensating success, to secure some small benefits, while we are the involuntary instrument of evils that are by no means small. All our small benefits are transitory, while the light that a man of letters is able to diffuse must, sooner or later, destroy all the artificial evils of the human race, and place it in a position to enjoy all the goods that nature offers.' It is clear that we can only accept Turgot's preference, on condition ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley

... that I will at once visit him. Although a man of letters and devoted to study, I know that he possesses, among his other talents, a military genius, which makes me value his opinion; say also that it is the very subject which has been occupying ...
— The Lily of Leyden • W.H.G. Kingston

... poet is generally more attentive to character than to history; and I much fear that the art of printing was not introduced into England, till several years after Lord Say's death; but of some of these meritorious crimes I should hope to find my ancestor guilty; and a man of letters may be proud of his descent from a ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon

... affected greatly the man of letters, and, therefore, he also affected a passion for everything Greek; he paid ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

... Church theologian and man of letters; wrote, besides other works, a volume of sermons "Through Nature to Christ"; esteemed insistence on miracles injurious ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... the life of a man of letters is necessarily deficient in incident, appears to have originated in a misconception of the essential nature of human action. The life of every man is full of incidents, but the incidents are insignificant, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... of Eilert Lovborg, again, Ibsen seem unquestionably to have borrowed several traits from a definite original. A young Danish man of letters, whom Dr. Brandes calls Holm, was an enthusiastic admirer of Ibsen, and came to be on very friendly terms with him. One day Ibsen was astonished to receive, in Munich, a parcel addressed from Berlin by this ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen

... self-criticism to correct it. The famous Monk (1795), which he published when he was twenty, is as preposterous as Otranto and adds to its preposterousness a haut gout of atrocity and indecency which Walpole was far too much of a gentleman, and even of a true man of letters, to attempt or to tolerate. Lewis's other work in various forms is less offensive: but—except in respect of verse-rhythm which does not here concern us—hardly any of it is literature. What does concern us is that the time took ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... was a man of the world among men of letters, a man of letters among men of the world.—MACAULAY: Review of Life and Writings ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... like; I'm in dead earnest. You want to put on the brakes. You've struck the down grade. Socialism takes the temper out of the steel fiber of character. It makes a man flabby. It is the earmark of racial degeneracy. The man of letters who is poisoned by it never writes another line worth reading; the preacher who tampers with it ends a materialist or atheist; the philanthropist bitten by it, from just a plain fool, develops a madman; ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon

... effects of Capri vintage. The landlord was an old Cossack." On the other hand, we read, "J. Cruttard, homme de lettres, a passe quinze jours ici, et n'a eu que des felicites du patron de cet hotel et de sa famille." Cheerful man of letters! His good-natured record will keep green a name little known to literature. Who are G. Bradshaw, Duke of New York, and Signori Jones and Andrews, Hereditary Princes of the United States? Their patrician names followed the titles of several English nobles in the register. But that which ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells

... the regiment—nor a drill sergeant—nor a crazy cornet; no, sir—and I speak it with a due respect for the commission of the Continental Congress—nor an inconsiderate captain, who regards his own life as little as that of his enemies. I am only, sir, a poor humble man of letters, a mere doctor of medicine, an unworthy graduate of Edinburgh, and a surgeon of dragoons; nothing more, I do assure you, Captain John Lawton." So saying, he turned his horse's head towards the ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper

... poet. She seems to have been no coquette; she flung her dangerous fascinations at his feet; she broke the thread which bound the charms of her spirit and poured them over him. He, for his part, remaining discreet and respectful, was shattered with happiness. To a friend of mine, a young Norwegian man of letters, Ibsen said about this time: "Oh, you can always love, but I am happier than the happiest, for I am beloved." Long afterwards, on his seventieth birthday, when his own natural force was failing, he wrote to Miss Bardach, "That summer at Gossensass was the most beautiful and the most harmonious portion ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... loved him very much at once. I am afraid he finds his entire solitude tedious, but I could not help congratulating him upon his treasure in his wife, and I hope he will not leave the moors; 't is so much better for a man of letters to nurse himself in seclusion than to be filed down to the common level by the compliances and imitations of ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... the particulars we have been able to collect of this profound scholar and antiquary. But the life of a man of letters appears, and must be chiefly sought for in his works, of which we ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant

... want nothing of being a complete monster, you have thought proper to finish it with an assertion which has no foundation, either in fact or philosophy; and as Mr. Ferguson, your secretary, is a man of letters, and has made civil society his study, and published a treatise on that subject, I address this part ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... book-collector and man of letters, was half-brother of the Bishop of Calcutta. He edited, 'inter alia', 'Specimens of the Early English Poets', by George Ellis, 3 ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron

... they might be those of the fournisseurs of her friend. "That is his bread shop, and that is his book shop. And that, mother," she said finally, with even heightened sympathy, pausing before a blooming parterre of confectionery hard by the abode of her man of letters, "that, I suppose, is where he buys his ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell

... passed some time in the seminary of St. Sulpice; broke away from the Seminary and from France itself, and passed some years in Switzerland, where he married; returned to France in middle life, and followed thenceforward the career of a man of letters, but with hardly any fame or success. He died an old man in 1846, desiring that on his grave might be placed these words only: ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... of M. Thiers' chapter on St. Helena, M. Sainte-Beuve, after expressing his admiration of the commentaries of Napoleon on the campaigns of Turenne, Frederic, and Caesar, adds: "A man of letters smiles at first involuntarily to see Napoleon apply to each of these famous campaigns a methodical criticism, just as we would proceed with a work of the mind, with an epic or tragic poem. But is not a ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert

... volumes, twenty or thirty copies were sold, and the rest of the edition was pulped. He had long since worn out the desire for fame. That was an illusion like all else. But one of his friends had taken the matter into his own hands. This was a man of letters, named Leonard Upjohn, whom Philip had met once or twice with Cronshaw in the cafes of the Quarter. He had a considerable reputation in England as a critic and was the accredited exponent in this country of modern French literature. He had lived a good deal in ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... poet had, from the first moment, interested me in his misfortunes; and being a smatterer in learning myself, my vanity, perhaps, was flattered with the idea of becoming the protector of a man of letters in distress. Without appearing to show any particular partiality to him, I succeeded in being appointed to keep watch over him, under the plea that I would compel him to make verses; and conversing in our language, we were ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier

... any worship where the usurper was mentioned as king. He was, I believe, more than once apprehended in the reign of King William, and once at the accession of George. He was the familiar friend of Hicks and Nelson; a man of letters, but injudicious; and very curious and inquisitive, but credulous. He lived in 1743, or 44, about ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell

... he never become interested in politics and conspicuous in the Revolution, might have been remembered in history as a scientist and a man of letters. He had been a physician, and for skill in his profession, as well as for contributions to the science of physics, he had received an honorary degree from St. Andrews University in Scotland, and for a time he was in the service of the count of ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... direction. It was at home, however, and from my father's lips in particular, that they were perpetually sounding in my ears. In fact, his memory was a perfect storehouse, and a rich one, of all that the social antiquary, the man of letters, the poet, or the musician, would consider valuable. As a teller of old tales, legends, and historical anecdotes he was unrivalled, and his stock of them was inexhaustible. He spoke the Irish and English languages with nearly equal ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton

... reprobated by that name, as the language of the schools in the market. The mere man of the world, who insists that no other terms but such as occur in common conversation should be employed in a scientific disquisition, and with no greater precision, is as truly a pedant as the man of letters, who either over-rating the acquirements of his auditors, or misled by his own familiarity with technical or scholastic terms, converses at the wine-table with his mind fixed on his museum or laboratory; ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... is my much sought El Dorado; nor did the cottage, when I came to it, belie my hopes. It was a true woodland cottage, an intimate part and parcel of the scenery. It had been recently inhabited by a man of letters, a poet and a dreamer; and a fitter spot to dream in eye ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson

... triumphs lead to love of this business. I happen to know that Cruger means to make a partner of you in a few years, for he thinks the like of you never dropped into a merchant's counting-house; but never forget that your exalted destiny is to be a great man of letters, a historian, belike. You're taking to history, I notice, and you're getting a fine vocabulary ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... "Thoughts." Many translations have been made of Pascal's "Thoughts"—one in 1680 by J. Walker, one in 1704 by Basil Kennet, one in 1825 by Edward Craig. A more modern one is by C. Kegan Paul, the London publisher, who was also a man of letters. Early translations from the older French, Italian and other Continental writers have frequently come down to us without mention of translators' names on title-pages ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various

... went on to the last pressing his uncle, Lord Burghley. He applied in the humblest terms, he made himself useful with his pen, he got his mother to write for him; but Lord Burghley, probably because he thought his nephew more of a man of letters than a sound lawyer and practical public servant, did not care to bring him forward. From his cousin, Robert Cecil, Bacon received polite words and friendly assurances. Cecil may have undervalued him, or have been jealous ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church

... the right and they knew nothing whatever about the matter in dispute, not one of them having ever before so much as heard of the now famous Warm Springs asylum. But I would not shirk even the humblest journalistic duty; I fought these fellows and acquitted myself as became a man of letters and a politician. The hurts I got were some time healing, and in the interval every prominent member of my party who came to Claybank to speak to the people regarded it as a simple duty to call first at my house, make a tender inquiry as to the progress of my recovery and leave ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce

... dream—("He's not afraid of laying it on thick, is he?" whispered Madeleine with an appreciative laugh)—but, except for a few professors in college, he had seen no men. He had inquired for them everywhere and was told that he did not see them because he was a man of letters. If he had been the inventor of a new variety of railroad brake he would have seen millions. He was told that the men, unlike their wives, had no intellectual interests, had no clubs with any serious purposes, had no artistic aims, had no home life, ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield

... that I need d'Anville, Ritter, an Italian dictionary, a Strabo in Greek, Mannert and Thiersch; and also the works of Malte-Brun and Seyfert. I have resolved, as far as I am allowed to do so, to become a man of letters, and at present I can go no further: 1st, in ancient geography, for I already know all my notebooks, and I have only such books as Mr. Rickly can lend me; I must have d'Anville or Mannert; 2nd, in ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... should be nothing more than a scientific narrative. The disciples of Macaulay and Carlyle, of Stubbs and Gardiner, would be found voting in unison in my imaginary Congress. Gibbon, writes Bury, is "the historian and the man of letters," thus ranking with Thucydides and Tacitus. These three are put in the highest class, exemplifying that "brilliance of style and accuracy of statement are perfectly compatible in an historian."[52] Accepting this authoritative classification it is well worth ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes

... in due proportions, is, therefore, the business of a man of letters. For all these there is not often equal opportunity; excellence, therefore, is not often attainable; and most men fail in one or other of the ends proposed, and are full without readiness, or without exactness. Some deficiency must be ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson

... European Dutchman, a man of letters, showing such animus in the examination of facts, one may judge of what the Boers are capable, ignorant and rough as they are, and inflated with the conviction that they ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot

... filthy rags and lashings necessary to such an operation, as statues do? No! That's settled! Some other road to safety must be found! I have thought up a scheme, see what you think of it! Eumolpus is a man of letters. He will have ink about him, of course. With this remedy, then, let's change our complexions, from hair to toe-nails! Then, in the guise of Ethiopian slaves, we shall be ready at hand to wait upon you, light-hearted as having escaped the torturer, and, with ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... with golden robes and the royal diadem about her brows, and arms outstretched to talent of every kind. Great men would greet him there as one of their order. Everything smiled upon genius. There, there were no jealous booby-squires to invent stinging gibes and humiliate a man of letters; there was no stupid indifference to poetry in Paris. Paris was the fountain-head of poetry; there the poet was brought into the light and paid for his work. Publishers should no sooner read the opening pages ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... Persian," broke in a thin, elderly gentleman. "Is there no retired schoolmaster or man of letters in Manchester with ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... It may well be disputed whether this be a right reading. Ought it not rather to be spelled Dunceiad, as the etymology evidently demands? Dunce with an e, therefore Dunceiad with an e? That accurate and punctual man of letters, the restorer of Shakespeare, constantly observes the preservation of this very letter e, in spelling the name of his beloved author, and not like his common careless editors, with the omission of one, nay, sometimes of two e's (as ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope

... extraordinary lucidity of his, yet abandoning himself all the more. Flossie's weakness made him tender, her very faults amused him. As for his future, he could not conceive of his marriage as in any way affecting him as a poet and a man of letters. While the little suburban Eros lit his low flame upon the hearth, his genius would still stand apart, guarding with holy hands the immortal fire. For those two flames could never mingle. In that dream he saw himself travelling with ease and rapidity along two infinite lines that never ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... mean to tell me," inquired the Prince, "that of every suitor for your daughter's hand—lawyer, soldier, politician, man of letters—you will make it your business to inquire—and will expect to be told the truth—whether they have not at some period of their career had illicit ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... organization might find acceptable. The Master does not seem to like him much, for some reason or other,—perhaps he has a special aversion to the odor of tobacco. As his forefinger shows a little too distinctly that he uses a pen, I shall compliment him by calling him the Man of Letters, until I ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... Tolstoy has exhausted Nature. He has plunged into her nethermost depths, like Schiller's diver, and lo! forth he comes from the abyss with her swallowed-up treasure. Verily, here Tolstoy is unapproachable. Only one other man of letters hath here even distant fellowship with him, and this is ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin

... friends, but persons attracted thither out of the void by the fame of the book "along whose burning leaves," as Oliver Wendell Holmes sang of it, "his scarlet web our wild romancer weaves." It was a novel experience for the man who had become accustomed to regarding himself as the obscurest man of letters in America. Lonely, yearning ladies came; enthusiastic young men; melancholy sinners. The little red house was not a literary Mecca only, but a moral one. The dark-browed, kindly smiling author received them all courteously; he was invariably courteous. "I would not ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... tickled. The unexpected incident had quickened a prematurely aged pulse, and in reward for their good service the young travellers were bidden carry their equipment, not to the village inn, but to the guest- chamber of the half-empty priory. The eminent man of letters, who had been always an enthusiastic gardener, though busy just now not with choice flowers but with salutary kitchen-stuff, working indeed with much effort, to counteract the gout, was ready enough [62] in his solitude to make the most of chance visitors, especially youthful ones. A bell clanged; ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater

... troubled by his pertinacity. I had never liked Morton Harland. His reputation, both as a man of wealth and a man of letters, was to me unenviable. He did no particular good with his money,—and such literary talent as he possessed he squandered in attacking nobler ideals than he had ever been able to attain. He was not agreeable to look at either; ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli

... our thoughts of him are tender, grateful, proud. We are glad of his friendship; glad that he expressed so richly one of the great elements in the temperament of America; glad that he has left such an honourable record as a man of letters; and glad also for his own sake that after many and deep sorrows he is at peace and, we trust, happy in the ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... omitted from contempt! What unutterable things the stone-walls spoke, during these five years! But it is all gone; To-day swallowing Yesterday, and then being in its turn swallowed of To-morrow, even as Speech ever is. Nay what, O thou immortal Man of Letters, is Writing itself but Speech conserved for a time? The Placard Journal conserved it for one day; some Books conserve it for the matter of ten years; nay some for three thousand: but what then? Why, then, the years being all ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... when we try to escape from our own position into one for which we are unfitted. These highly talented women only get a hold over fools. We can always tell what artist or friend holds the pen or pencil when they are at work; we know what discreet man of letters dictates their oracles in private. This trickery is unworthy of a decent woman. If she really had talents, her pretentiousness would degrade them. Her honour is to be unknown; her glory is the respect of her husband; ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... like laughter; and production, without prejudice to liquor, was his god and guide. One day he took me to task—a novel cry to me—upon the over-payment of literature. Literary men, he said, were more highly paid than artisans; yet the artisan made threshing machines and butter-churns, and the man of letters, except in the way of a few useful handbooks, made nothing worth the while. He produced a mere fancy article. Mackay's notion of a book was "Hoppus's Measurer." Now in my time I have possessed and even studied that work; but ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... compared to genius; but has she genius? I cannot say that she has talent as one understands it in the world of letters, but she has genius as humanity feels the need of genius,—the genius of goodness, not that of the man of letters, but of the saint." It is admitted that Mrs. Stowe was not a woman of letters in the common acceptation of that term, and it is plain that in the French tribunal, where form is of the substance of the achievement, and which reluctantly overlooked the crudeness of Walter Scott, in France ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various

... on New Year's Day 1661, with Middleton as Commissioner. In the words of Sir George Mackenzie, then a very young advocate and man of letters, "never was Parliament so obsequious." The king was declared "supreme Governor over all persons and in all causes" (a blow at Kirk judicature), and all Acts between 1633 and 1661 were rescinded, just as thirty years of ecclesiastical ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang

... the career of Mayne Reid was not what one would expect from a man of letters, though it was just what might have been expected from a man of his temperament and antecedents. It grew out of the time, which was warlike, and it drove him into the army with which the United States speedily crushed the forces of the sister Republic—Mexico. He ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid

... my present limits to discuss the question fully. And what man of letters would not shrink from seeming to dispose dictatorially of the claims of two men who are, at any rate, such masters in letters as Dryden and Pope; two men of such admirable talent, both of them, and one of them, Dryden, a man, on all sides, of such energetic and ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... chair at his table for a man in every way beneath him. Hospitality of that kind was understandable in men like Kennedy and Latrobe—one the leading literary light of his State, whose civic duties brought him in contact with all classes—the other a distinguished man of letters as well as being a poet, artist, and engineer, who naturally touched the sides of many personalities. So, too, might Richard Horn be excused for stretching the point—he being a scientist whose duty it was to welcome to his home many kinds of people—this man Morse among them, with his farcical telegraph; ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith

... periods seemed to stimulate, almost uncontrollably, the eloquent stirrings of the eminent man of letters then present. The impulse to speak masterfully was visible, before the recital was well over, in the moving lines about his mouth, by no means designed, as detractors were wont to say, simply to display the beauty of his teeth. One of the ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater

... pupil of the nominalist, William of Champeaux, learned man, artist, man of letters, an incomparable orator, tried to effect a conciliation. He said: "The universal is not a reality, certainly; but it is something more than a simple word; it is a conception of the mind, which is something more than an utterance of the voice. As conception of the mind, in fact, it lives ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet

... of 'Orfeo' was by Calzabigi, a prominent man of letters, but it seems probable that Gluck's own share in it was not a small one. The careful study which he had given to the proper conditions of opera was not likely to exclude so important a question as that of the construction and diction ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... when you were so close, but that I wished you to understand with what delight I anticipate your coming ... The day you arrive come to my house with all your party. You will find that Tyrannio" (a Greek man of letters) "has arranged my books marvelously well. What remains of them is much more satisfactory than I thought[10]. I should be glad if you would send me two of your library clerks, for Tullius to employ as binders and helpers in general; give some orders too to ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church

... in him an industrious and indefatigable minister, an intelligent man, as well instructed in the mass as in details; a mind fertile in resources, means, and expedients; an administrator, a jurist, a theologian, a man of letters and of affairs, an artist, an ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan

... professor,—a man of learning, of habits, of whims and crotchets, such as are hardly to be found, except in old, unmarried students,—the double flowers of college culture, their stamina all turned to petals, their stock in the life of the race all funded in the individual. Being a man of letters, Byles Gridley naturally rather undervalued the literary acquirements of the good people of the rural district where he resided, and, having known much of college and something of city life, was apt to smile at the importance they attached to their ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... his father was connected—the law; but though he made some study of theology, and was called to the bar, his inclination for literature could not be resisted. His whole life, indeed, was that of a man of letters—upright, honourable, serious, dignified, simple; generous to the friends whose genius he could justly applaud; merciless to books and authors condemned by his reason, his good sense, his excellent judgment. He was allied by an ardent admiration to Racine, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... courtly old gentleman, and he had seen much of the world. He was a fine scholar; he had been a soldier, and then a man of letters; and he belonged to a rich and ...
— Four Great Americans: Washington, Franklin, Webster, Lincoln - A Book for Young Americans • James Baldwin

... believe—will dislike this work most" This was the first time I had heard him allude to the people who couldn't read him,—a class which is supposed always to sit heavy upon the consciousness of the man of letters. A man organized for literature, as Mark Ambient was, must certainly have had the normal proportion of sensitiveness, of irritability; the artistic ego, capable in some cases of such monstrous development, must have been, in his composition, sufficiently erect and ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James

... rise in the memory at the name of the Spec.—the stately old room aglow with many candles, the books, the portraits, the pious commemoration of the dead,—famous men and our fathers that begat us." "Stevenson," Mr Dickson goes on to say, "is the most famous man of letters who has belonged to the Society since Scott. No more interesting personality has ever been of our number, and no one has in the public eye been more closely identified with the Society." "Oh, I do think the Spec, is about the best thing in Edinburgh," Louis exclaims, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson

... who, in spite of his long residence in the United States, must be considered an English poet, was born at Liverpool in 1866. He entered on a business career soon after leaving Liverpool College, but gave up commercial life to become a man of letters ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various

... undone, To see her cloistered like a nun. This was a visionary scheme, He waked, and found it but a dream; A project far above his skill, For Nature must be Nature still. If she was bolder than became A scholar to a courtly dame, She might excuse a man of letters; Thus tutors often treat their betters, And since his talk offensive grew, He came to take his ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift

... worship has taken on in successive generations and among peoples of various blood are certainly as well worthy of analysis and classification as are the flora and fauna of Patagonia or New Zealand. But while the Patagonian naturalist secures recognition and is decorated, every jaunty man of letters feels at liberty to scoff at the liturgiologist as a ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington

... A high wire-guard surrounded the fire place, and this unusual precaution made one think, that the contents of the room must be precious. The occupant of this apartment might have been an artist, a man of letters, or a virtuoso—probably the latter; but whatever he was, it was evident that his study was a workshop, and not ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand

... Inquisition. Now for the first time Venetian painters were brought in contact with men of letters. As they were already, fortunately for themselves, too well acquainted with the business of their own art to be taken in tow by learning or even by poetry, the relation of the man of letters to the painter became on the whole a stimulating and at any rate a profitable one, as in the instance of two of the greatest, where it took the form of a partnership for mutual advantage. It is not to our ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson

... his fortunes were profoundly affected. It worked a complete revolution both in the sentiments with which he regarded others, and in the sentiments with which others regarded him. The most intense lover of his country, he became the most unpopular man of letters to whom it has ever given birth. For years a storm of abuse fell upon him, which for violence, for virulence, and even for malignity, surpassed anything in the history of American literature, if not in the history of literature itself. Nor did the effect of this disappear with his ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury

... psychology would arrange his class in the laboratory with sphygmographs on their wrists ready to record those pulse movements which accompany the sensation of 'thrill,' and would then introduce into the room without notice, and in chance order, a bishop, a well-known general, the greatest living man of letters, and a minor member of the royal family. The resulting records of immediate pulse disturbances would be of real scientific importance, and it might even be possible to continue the record in each case say, for a quarter of a minute, ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas

... and left, till all kindles into coruscation round him; and it is such a blaze of spiritual sheet-lightnings,—wonderful to think of; Voltaire especially electric. Never, or seldom, were seen such suppers; such a life for a Supreme Man of Letters so fitted with the place due to him. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle

... I have always considered it in the light of an endowment of my researches. I told you I was a man of letters; it would, perhaps, be more correct to describe myself ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various

... year of his confinement Tasso endured all the horrors of a solitary sordid cell, and was under the care of a gaoler whose chief virtue, although he was a poet and a man of letters, was a cruel obedience to the commands of his prince.... His name was Agostino Mosti.... Tasso says of him, in a letter to his sister, 'ed usa meco ogni sorte di rigore ed inumanita.'"—Hobhouse, Historical Illustrations, etc., 1818, pp. 20, 21, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... man of letters and individual, was misunderstood and persecuted during the greater part of his life, or ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... the head, my good Vernon! You see, human nature comes round again, try as we may to upset it, and the French only differ from us in wading through blood to discover that they are at their old trick once more; 'I am your equal, sir, your born equal. Oh! you are a man of letters? Allow me to be in a bubble about you!' Yes, Vernon, and I believe the fellow looks up to you as the head of the establishment. I am not jealous. Provided he attends to his functions! There's a French philosopher who's for naming ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... a freed-man named Marcus, a man of letters, who slept in the same bed with his brother, who was younger than himself. It seemed to him that he saw a person sitting on the same bed, who was cutting off his hair from the crown of his head. When he awoke, he found his ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet

... with his success, and is looking forward to more. But no one in those days could live by poetry. Even scholars, in spite of university endowments, did not hope to live by their scholarship; and the poet or man of letters only trusted that his work, by attracting the favour of the great, might open to him the door of advancement. Spenser was probably expecting to push his fortunes in some public employment under the patronage of two such powerful favourites as Sidney and his uncle Leicester. ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... even chance never to have met. In the following Letters from Old Friends (mainly reprinted from the "St. James's Gazette"), a few of the writers may, to some who glance at the sketches, be unfamiliar. When Dugald Dalgetty's epistle on his duel with Aramis was written, a man of letters proposed to write a reply from Aramis in a certain journal. But his Editor had never heard of any of the gentlemen concerned in that affair of honour; had never heard of Dugald, of Athos, Porthos, Aramis, nor D'Artagnan. He had not been introduced to them. This little book ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang

... a member of a spiritual connexion which did not stop at the line of demarcation between Nonconformity and the Establishment. To Bull Cowper did greatly take, he extols him as "a Dissenter, but a liberal one," a man of letters and of genius, master of a fine imagination—or, rather, not master of it—and addresses him as Carissime Taurorum. It is rather singular that Newton should have given himself such a successor. Bull was a great smoker, and had made himself ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith

... professional satirist, and a mystifier who will do his best to leave you utterly in the dark with regard to his system of juggling. Is he a teleological theologian making fun of evolution? Is he an evolutionist making fun of teleology? Is he a man of letters making fun of science? Or is he a master of pure irony making fun of all three, and of his audience as well? For our part we decline to commit ourselves, and prefer to observe, as Mr. Butler observes of Von Hartmann, that if his meaning is anything like what he says it is, we can only say that ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler

... is sorest) or by the doubt whether he had enough left to pay the postage of one. He writes prayers (but not for the public eye), abstracts of sermons for Mira, addresses (rather adulatory) to Lord Shelburne, which received no answer. All this has the most genuine note that ever man of letters put into his work, for whatever Crabbe was or was not, now or at any time, he was utterly sincere; and his sincerity makes his not very abundant letters and journals unusually interesting. At last, after a year, during ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... the neighboring squirearchs always spoke of us as a very ancient family. But all my father ever said, to evince pride of ancestry, was in honor of William Caxton, citizen and printer in the reign of Edward IV.,—Clarum et venerabile nomen! an ancestor a man of letters might be ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... man; you say to yourself, 'I will be a minister of state.' Well, then, you—painter, artist, man of letters, statesman of the future—you reckon upon your talents, you estimate their value, you rate them, let us say, at a hundred ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... creative impulses were often absorbed in the mere enjoyment of exercising his critical faculty. Although he achieved only a qualified eminence as poet, or as prose writer, yet because of the breadth and variety of his permanent achievement he must be regarded as our greatest man of letters. His sympathetic interest, always outflowing toward concrete humanity, was ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell

... Tower, and to the block, if ever she caught him meddling with them. She buried him alive in the heart of his time. She took the seals of office, she took the sword, from his hands and put a pen in it. She would have of him a Man of Letters. And a Man of Letters he became. A Man of Runes. He invented new letters in his need, letters that would go farther than the sword, that carried more execution in them than the great seal. Banished from the state in that isle to which he was banished, he found not the ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... there must be leniently and trustfully considered. For remember how many serve mankind who do no more than meditate; and how many are precious to their friends for no more than a sweet and joyous temper. To perform the function of a man of letters it is not necessary to write; nay, it is perhaps better to be a living book. So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the portrait hostess is found, the wife of the Colonel Harrison who presides in the drawing-room. She was the granddaughter of the noted colonial exquisite and man of letters, Colonel William Byrd, whose old home, Westover, we should soon visit on our way up the river. It was through her marriage to Colonel Harrison that there were added to the Brandon collection many of the paintings and other art treasures of the Byrd family, including a certain, well-known canvas ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins

... humiliating. But Robespierre would not dare to put him to death! Grave miscalculation! He was immolated like the rest; the crowd looking on with indifference. Along with him perished Camille Desmoulins, a young man of letters, and a Jacobin, but convicted of advocating clemency. Robespierre was one of Camille's private and most valued friends; he had been his instructor in politics, and had become one of the trustees under his marriage-settlement. Robespierre visited at the house ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 426 - Volume 17, New Series, February 28, 1852 • Various

... reconcile her protege with the court and the university. The person whom she employed to effect this was an adroit man who had succeeded in deceiving the government. Francis I based his glory upon the patronage and encouragement which he accorded to learning, and Calvin, as a man of letters, merited consideration. The King needed some forgiveness for serious political faults, and, with reason, he believed that the humanists would redeem his character before the people. He was at once the protector and the slave ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... clear, and the decision must have been as quick as that of a child to reject a thing it abhorred. His unworldliness had not a flaw. So beautiful a life can never have become distinguished in the struggles and antagonisms which make the career of the man of the world, or even the man of letters, as letters are now written; for he was a man, and the only one I ever knew, of whom one would say that he applied in the divine sense the maxim of Christ, "Resist not evil,"—he simply, and by the necessity of ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James

... Crichton, Mecaenas. bookworm, helluo librorum[Lat]; bibliophile, bibliomaniac[obs3]; bluestocking, bas-bleu[Fr]; bigwig, learned Theban, don; Artium Baccalaureus[Lat][obs3], Artium Magister[Lat]. learned man, literary man; homo multarum literarum[Lat]; man of learning, man of letters, man of education, man of genius. antiquarian, antiquary; archaeologist. sage &c. (wise man) 500. pedant, doctrinaire; pedagogue, Dr. Pangloss; pantologist[obs3], criminologist. schoolboy &c. (learner) 541. Adj. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... him in a reverent sort of way, when I was a Harrow boy and he was a man, I found him even more fascinating when I met him on the more even terms of social life in London. He was indeed the most delightful of companions; a man of the world entirely free from worldliness, and a man of letters without the faintest trace of pedantry. He walked through the world enjoying it and loving it; and yet all the time one felt that his "eyes were on the higher loadstars" of the intellect and the spirit. In those ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell

... was yet not merely a good scholar among many mediocre and bad ones, but himself as much superior to his masters as the burgess of a free Italian community was superior to the cosmopolitan Hellenic man of letters. Eminent creative vigour indeed and high poetic intentions we may not look for in him; he is a richly gifted and graceful but not a great poet, and his poems are, as he himself calls them, nothing but "pleasantries and trifles." Yet when we find not merely his contemporaries electrified ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... thus. Before the days of British rule the Brahmin was the priest and man of letters, the "clerke" in short. The rajahs and chiefs were much of the ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)

... porter, the man of letters of the establishment, and with his aid drew Mr. Jorrocks out a bill, which he described as "reaching down each side of his body and round his waist," commencing with 2 francs for savon, and then ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees

... name (litterae—letters) implies the written rather than the spoken word; that, for example, however closely they approximate one to the other as we trace them back, and even though we trace them back to identical beginnings, the Writer—the Man of Letters—does to-day differ from the Orator. There was a time, as you know, when the poet and the historian had no less than the orator, and in the most literal sense, to 'get a hearing.' Nay, he got it with more pains: for the orator had his senate-house or his law-court provided, whereas ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... or in acts of kindness and affection. A man of learning, who shared the poverty so often attached to it, enjoyed from him at one period a pension of a hundred pounds sterling a year, and continued to enjoy it till fortune rendered it superfluous. To another man of letters, in similar circumstances, he presented fourteen hundred pounds; and many other acts like these are on record to his immortal honor. Himself a frugal and abstemious ascetic, by saving and economising, he was able to assist the industrious poor—and ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran

... whether this new companion was friend, master or servant. The studio habitues also had their doubts. The literary ones always spoke of Argensola as a painter. The painters recognized only his ability as a man of letters. He was among those who used to come up to the studio of winter afternoons, attracted by the ruddy glow of the stove and the wines secretly provided by the mother, holding forth authoritatively before the often-renewed bottle ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... for a friend Madam de Crequi, who, having become devout, no longer received D'Alembert, Marmontel, nor a single man of letters, except, I believe the Abbe Trublet, half a hypocrite, of whom she was weary. I, whose acquaintance she had sought lost neither her good wishes nor intercourse. She sent me young fat pullets from Mons, and her intention was to come and see me the year following had not a journey, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... afterwards to bring the manuscript of the Memoirs to Brockhaus; from Balbi, the monk with whom Casanova escaped from the Piombi; from the Marquis Albergati, playwright, actor, and eccentric, of whom there is some account in the Memoirs; from the Marquis Mosca, 'a distinguished man of letters whom I was anxious to see,' Casanova tells us in the same volume in which he describes his visit to the Moscas at Pesaro; from Zulian, brother of the Duchess of Fiano; from Richard Lorrain, 'bel homme, ayant de l'esprit, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... is not very unusual in ghost seers. The brother of a friend of my own, a man of letters and wide erudition, was, as a boy, employed in a shop in a town, say Wexington. The overseer was a dark, rather hectic-looking man, who died. Some months afterwards the boy was sent on an errand. He did his business, but, like a boy, returned ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang

... portion of his time, for the last thirty years, has been devoted to his profession. Perhaps the value and validity of the conclusions he records in this volume may be questioned from the very circumstance that he expresses them in the lucid and vigorous style of an accomplished man of letters. "People," says Macaulay, "are loath to admit that the same man can unite very different kinds of excellence. It is soothing to envy to believe that what is splendid cannot be solid, that what is clear cannot be profound. Very slowly was the public ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various

... impossible occupations, and labored in the night-time like the heroes one reads about. He taught himself to read five languages, and at the time when I saw him last he knew more great poetry by heart than any man of letters that I have ever met. He was the author of one book, a tragedy in blank verse, called The Captive; that drama forms the chief theme of this journal. For the rest, it seems to me enough to quote this notice, which appeared in the New York Times for ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair

... learning, but the description is only relatively accurate. Of him, in this respect, we may say, what he said of Erasmus. 'Erasmus, though justly styled by Muretus, eruditus sane vir ac multae lectionis, was not a learned man in the special sense of the word—not an erudit. He was the man of letters. He did not make a study a part of antiquity for its own sake, but used it as an instrument of culture.' The result of culture in Pattison's actual life was not by any means ideal. For instance, he was head of a college for nearly ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley

... before. So identified with "this passage of literary history"—in his words—was Henry James that he has recorded the preliminary visit of "a young friend [Harland of course], a Kensington neighbour and an ardent man of letters," with "a young friend of his own," in whom there is no mistaking Beardsley, "to bespeak my interest for a periodical about to take birth in his hands, on the most original 'lines' and with the happiest omen." But there was youth in this readiness for hero-worship—youth ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... is surely not necessary, even for a clever Norwegian man of letters in a realistic social drama, to make quite such a fool of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various

... came to an end when, in 1762, the government awarded him a pension of L300 a year. By this time his great intellectual gifts had begun to be appreciated, and he was the first man of letters in England. In Thackeray's phrase, he "was revered as a ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll

... Lucien's favor. Your brother wrote a criticism of my book, and brought it to me in remorse, telling me that he could not bring himself to publish it, although obedience to the orders of his party might endanger one who was very dear to him. Alas! madame, a man of letters must needs comprehend all passions, since it is his pride to express them; I understood that where a mistress and a friend are involved, the friend is inevitably sacrificed. I smoothed your brother's way; I corrected his murderous ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac

... were captivated by its extraordinary qualities. When Borrow crossed his path in later life he received no special consideration, such as would be given very promptly in our day by a Cabinet minister to a man of letters of like distinction. We find him on one occasion writing to the ex-minister, now Lord Clarendon, asking his help for a consulship. Clarendon replied kindly enough, but sheltered himself behind the statement that the Prime Minister was overwhelmed with applications for patronage. ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter

... callous postman does not occasionally render some doorstep desolate by the delivery of a rejected manuscript. Fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind, and the first steps in the career of a successful man of letters are always interesting. You remember how Franklin slyly dropped his first contribution through the slit in his brother's printing-house door; and how the young Charles Dickens crept softly to the letter-box up a dark court, off a ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various

... of Harun al-Rashid A.H. 158-169 (775-785) third Abbaside who both in the Mac. and the Bul. Edits. is called "the fifth of the sons of Al-Abbas." He was a good poet and a man of letters, also a fierce persecutor of the "Zindiks" (Al-Siyuti 278), a term especially applied to those who read the Zend books and adhered to Zoroastrianism, although afterwards applied to any heretic or atheist. He made many changes ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton

... however, that a man of science has no raison d'etre at all, unless he is willing to face much greater risks than these for the sake of that which he believes to be true; and further, that to a man of science such risks do not count for much—that they are by no means so serious as they are to a man of letters, for example.") So the book came out; and I must do my friend the justice to say that his forecast was completely justified. The Boreas of criticism blew his hardest blasts of misrepresentation and ridicule for some years, and I was ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... Lord Holland, Horace Walpole, the Duke of Queensberry, each a type of the society of the eighteenth century; the unscrupulous politician, the cultivated amateur and man of letters, the sportsman with half the opera dancers in London in his pay—of all he was the closest friend. The most intimate of them, the Duke of Queensberry, led an extravagant and a dissipated life, in ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue

... chose; but there! Charles Lamb knew a man who wanted to be a tailor once, but hadn't got the spirit. I find I haven't got the spirit to be a noble lord. Even Barty might have been a lord—he, a mere man of letters!—but he refused every honor and distinction that was ever offered to him, either here or abroad—even the Prussian ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... spelling ORTHOGRAPHY. You spell induce, ENDUCE; and grandeur, you spell grandURE; two faults of which few of my housemaids would have been guilty. I must tell you that orthography, in the true sense of the word, is so absolutely necessary for a man of letters; or a gentleman, that one false spelling may fix ridicule upon him for the rest of his life; and I know a man of quality, who never recovered the ridicule of having ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... to be most brutally libelled during his life. In every age there will be twenty bad writers for one good one; and every bad writer will think himself a good one. A ruler who neglects all men of letters alike does not wound the self love of any man of letters. But a ruler who shows favour to the few men of letters who deserve it inflicts on the many the miseries of disappointed hope, of affronted pride, of jealousy cruel as the grave. All the rage of a multitude of authors, irritated at once by the sting of want and by the sting of vanity, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... the mass of human beings. He liked the huge machine. Each keeps its own round. The baker's boy brings muffins to the window at a fixed hour every day, and that is all the Londoner knows, or wishes to know, on the subject. But it turned out good men. He named certain individuals, especially one man of letters, his friend, the best mind he knew, whom London ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle

... Haunted Houses. Some natural explanations. Historical continuity of type. Case of Sir Walter Scott. A haunted curacy. Modern instances. Miss Morton's case: a dumb ghost. Ghost, as is believed, of a man of letters. Mr. Harry's ghost raises his mosquito curtains. Columns of light. Mr. Podmore's theory. Hallucinations begotten by natural causes are 'telepathically' transferred, with variations, to strangers at a ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang

... gold in a way that Englishmen hitherto have been at least in the habit of reserving for romantic figures like Garibaldi or Gordon. In one excellent magazine Mr. T. P. O'Connor, who, when he likes, can write on letters like a man of letters, has some purple pages of praise of Sir Joseph Lyons—the man who runs those teashop places. He incidentally brought in a delightful passage about the beautiful souls possessed by some people called Salmon and Gluckstein. I think I like best the passage ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton

... Heidelberg, Munich, and Paris, in what was emphatically the prime of their quaint student-days; an account of my barricade experiences of the French Revolution of Forty-Eight, of which I missed no chief scene; my subsequent life in America as lawyer, man of letters, and journalist; my experiences in connection with the Civil War, and my work in the advancement of the signing the Emancipation by Abraham Lincoln; recollections of the Oil Region when the oil mania was at its height; a winter on the frontier in the debatable land ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... not being a literary man the presumptuous will think that they have the right to blame me on the ground that I am not a man of letters. Vainglorious people! Know they not that I could make answer as Marius did to the Roman people, and say: They who make a {11} display with the labours of others will not allow me mine? They will ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci

... their really harmonious milieu. The process of segregation is deprived to a large extent of the disagreeableness consequent upon a rigid table of precedence. Nothing surprises an American more in London society than the uneasy sense of inferiority that many a distinguished man of letters will show in the presence of a noble lord. No amount of philosophy enables one to rise entirely superior to the trammels of early training and hoary association. Even when the great novelist feels himself as at least on a level ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... to be understood by the meanest among them. And this assertion must be true, or else God requires from us more than we are able to perform. However, not to contend whether a logician might possibly put a case that would serve for an exception, I will appeal to any man of letters, whether at least nineteen in twenty of those perplexing words might not be changed into easy ones, such as naturally first occur to ordinary men, and probably did so at first to those very gentlemen who are so ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift

... "The man of letters is rarely drawn from obscurity by the inquisitive eye of a sovereign:—it is enough for Royalty to gild the laurelled brow, not explore the garret or the cellar.—In this case, the return will generally be ungrateful—the patron is most possibly disgraced or in opposition—if he ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore

... are abundant for an analysis of Daudet such as Sainte-Beuve would have undertaken with avidity; they are more abundant indeed than for any other contemporary French man of letters even in these days of unhesitating self-revelation; and they are also of an absolutely impregnable authenticity. M. Ernest Daudet has written a whole volume to tell us all about his brother's boyhood ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... absence of mine in Europe: this was the erection of the chemical laboratory upon the promontory northwest of the upper quadrangle. That site afforded one of the most beautiful views in our own or any other country. A very eminent American man of letters, who had traveled much in other countries, said to me, as we stood upon it, "I have traveled hundreds of miles in Europe to obtain views not half so beautiful as this.'' It was the place to which ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... book, it may be asked, who else in the 'seventies was, not so fitted, but fitted at all to produce a Life of Dickens. Every eye looked, every finger pointed to Forster; worker, patron, and disciple, confidant, adviser, correcter, admirer, the trained man of letters, and in the school in which Boz had been trained, who had known every one of that era. No one else could have been thought of. And as we now read the book, and contrast it with those ordered or commissioned biographies, so common ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald

... Bastile, and is a principal actor in the revolt, before the change possessed a pension or office under the crown of six hundred pound English a year,—for that country, no contemptible provision; and this he obtained solely as a man of letters, and on no other title. As to the moneyed men, whilst the monarchy continued, there is no doubt, that, merely as such, they did not enjoy the privileges of nobility; but nobility was of so easy an acquisition, that it was the fault or neglect of all of that description ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... command to Gomez de Alvarado. Those foot soldiers which he brought with him were distributed into the companies of Pedro de Vergara and Nunno de Castro, and he formed a new company of musqueteers, of which he appointed the bachelor Juan Velez de Guevara captain. Although a man of letters and educated in the study of the law, Guevara was an excellent soldier, and particularly attentive to discipline, and had even greatly assisted in the construction of the musquets with which his company was armed. Being likewise ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr

... scientific men—as the methods of induction, stated long after by John Stuart Mill, were founded—then, no doubt, their statement would have been a valuable service and a great thing to accomplish. But they were not this. They are the ideas of a brilliant man of letters, writing in an age when scientific research was almost unknown, about a subject in which he was an amateur. I confess I do not see how he, or John Stuart Mill, or any one else, writing in that age, could have formulated the true rules of philosophizing; because the materials and information ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... regard to the published books and I have tried to solve it on the same line. There has rung in my mind Mr. Belloc's saying: "A man is his mind." To tell the story of a man of letters while avoiding quotation from or reference to his published works is simply not to tell it. At Christopher Dawson's suggestion I have re-read all the books in the order in which they were written, thus trying to get the development of Gilbert's mind perfectly ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... kindness, like much that I met with last winter, perpetually makes me wonder at the stock of benignity in human nature. A brother of my friend Julius Hare, Marcus by name, a Naval man, and though not a man of letters, full of sense and knowledge, lives here in a beautiful place, with a most agreeable and excellent wife, a daughter of Lord Stanley of Alderley. I had hardly seen them before; but they are fraternizing with me, in a much better than the Jacobin fashion; and one only feels ashamed ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... then nothing of disorder discernible in his mind by any but himself; but he had withdrawn from study, and travelled with no other book than an English Testament, such as children carry to the school: when his friend took it into his hand, out of curiosity to see what companion a man of letters had chosen, 'I have but one book,' said Collins, 'but ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins



Words linked to "Man of letters" :   humanist



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