United States or Mali ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Poets, dramatists, humorists, satirists, masters of fiction, the great preachers, the character-writers, the maxim-writers, the great political orators they are all literature in so far as they teach us to know man and to know human nature.
Thou art my ninth, And by it I divine That thou shalt live To love the Muses Nine." when he was at college, ventured down among the Character-writers in his two pieces on the University Carrier. Thomas Hobson had been for sixty years carrier between Cambridge and the Bull Inn, Bishopsgate Street, London. He was a very well-known Cambridge character.
His letters are delivered all and gone, Only remains the superscription. How very sure we should all be that Milton did not write these pieces, if he had not given them a place among his published works! Returning to the crowd of Character-writers we find in 1631, the year of Milton's writing upon Hobson, author of "Pictures Loquentes, or Pictures drawn forth in Characters.
The great novel, not of romance or adventure, but of character and manners, from the mighty Fielding, down, at a long interval, to Thackeray, covers the field that in France is held, and successfully held, against all comers, by her maxim-writers, like La Rochefoucauld, and her character-writers, like La Bruyère.
I will say little of La Bruyère, by far the greatest, broadest, strongest, of French character-writers, because his is not one of the houses of which you can judge by a brick or two taken at random. For those in whom the excitements of modern literature have not burnt up the faculty of sober meditation on social man, La Bruyère must always be one of the foremost names.
Word Of The Day