United States or Ukraine ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Yet he was no mere lover and praiser of old times. His London in 1825 is more romantic than the later London of more deliberate romances: he found it romantic; he did not merely think it would be so if only we could see it. He loved the old and the wild too well to deface his feeling by more than an occasional comparison with the new and the refined, and these comparisons are not effective.
It was of no use to recall the many instances where praise to the face had redounded to the everlasting honor of praiser and bepraised; of no use to dwell sentimentally on modest genius and courage lifted up and strengthened by open commendation; of no use to except to the mysterious female, to picture her as rearing a thin-blooded generation on selfish and mechanically repeated axioms all this failed to counteract the monotonous repetition of this sentence.
One of the courtiers, when he saw this, praised the greatness of the gift over-zealously, and declared that no one was equal to King Gaut in kindliness. But Ref, though he owed thanks for the benefit, could not approve the inflated words of this extravagant praiser, and said that Gotrik was more generous than Gaut.
For one may either deny that that has been done which the person is praised for; or else that it ought to bear that name which the praiser has conferred on it, or else one may altogether deny that it deserves any praise at all, as not having been done rightly or lawfully. And Caesar employed all these different kinds of denial with exceeding impudence when speaking against my friend Cato.
Every now and then it becomes necessary to deal faithfully with that immortal type of person, the praiser of the past at the expense of the present. I will not quote Horace, as by all the traditions of letters I ought to do, because Horace, like the incurable trimmer that he was, "hedged" on this question; and I do not admire him much either. The praiser of the past has been very rife lately.
'Tis an artifice commonly observed to be much in use there, where the finest tricks of supplanting are practised, with greatest effect; so that pessimum inimicorum genus, laudantes; there is no more pestilent enemy than a malevolent praiser. All these kinds of dealing, as they issue from the principles of slander, and perform its work, so they deservedly bear the guilt thereof.
Yet this difference between him and us we can only express by trying to imagine ourselves like him, and saying how difficult such excellence would then be. We have here, therefore, a sort of reversed praise, where the disparagement which praise always carries falls exclusively on the praiser.
Their place is established, and they will hold it permanently, in spite of the wild philosophy, and in spite of characteristics of style which would ruin weaker writings. As Ben Jonson said of a volume of poems, now quite forgotten, by his friend Sir John Beaumont, "This book will live; it hath a genius; this Above his reader or his praiser is."
'As to it, she continues, 'all the flattery I ever received from everybody together would not make up his sum. He said there was no name in poetry that might not be glad to own it. All this from Johnson, that parsimonious praiser! He wrote of it to Mrs. Thrale on April 19, 1784: 'It is in my opinion a very great performance. Piozzi Letters, ii. 364. Dr.
She possessed ambition, but she sold herself to praise without regard for the praiser. And whatever an agreement of unknown origin demanded in the way of feeling, she fancied she could satisfy it by keeping her mind on her own wishes, pleasures, and delights while playing. Daniel put his arms around her and kissed her.
Word Of The Day