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To jump over the stile to literature, Wordsworth wrote critical prefaces, and Shelley, too; Poe was a critic; and what of Coleridge, who called painting "a middle quality between a thought and a thing the union of that which is nature with that which is exclusively human"? There are plenty of examples on the side of the angels. Whistler! What a critic, wielding a finely chased rapier!
He was extremely combative, quarrelling both with the veteran Corneille and with the friend who had first helped him towards success Molière; and he gave vent to his antipathies in some very vigorous and cutting prose prefaces as well as in some verse epigrams which are among the most venomous in the language.
It is in these prefaces that a great part of the value of the new edition consists; for they are in themselves treatises of elucidation and illustration of Bacon's opinions, and of investigation concerning the changes they underwent from time to time.
Neither are we less removed at present from the dry and meagre mode of dissecting the skeletons of works, instead of transfusing their living principles, which prevailed in Dryden's Prefaces, and in the criticisms written on the model of the French school about a century ago.
It is a golden prelude, fit to go with the three great Prefaces which challenge the admiration of scholars, Calvin's to his Institutes, De Thou's to his History, and Casaubon's to his Polybius, not because of any learning or rhetoric, though it is charmingly written, but for a spirit flowing through it to which learning and rhetoric are but as the breath that is wasted on the air to the Mood that warms the heart.
Sanderson, seems to demonstrate the same in his two large and remarkable Prefaces before his two volumes of Sermons; and he seems also with much sorrow to say the same again in his last Will, made when he apprehended himself to be very near his death. And these Covenanters ought to take notice of it, and to remember, that, by the late wicked war begun by them, Dr.
We have all been victims of a certain type of public speaker who begins by saying, "Now I don't want to bore you with a long story, but this is so good, etc.," or "An incident occurred at the American Consulate in Shanghai, which reminds me of an awfully good story, etc." When a speaker prefaces his remarks with some such sentences as these, we know we are in for an uncomfortable time.
The Ways of the Hour was both 'nominally' and 'really' Cooper's last novel: he announced it as such; and the announcement was not related to that fallacious category to which belong the 'more last nights' of popular tragedians, and the farewell prefaces of the accomplished author of Rienzi. It was not the 'going, going! but the 'gone! of the auctioneer. And critics maliciously said: Tant mieux.
Tired with the many events of the day, the American quickly undressed, and soothed by the comfort of cool sheets, lay in that relaxation of mind and body which prefaces the panacea of sleep.
Ovid, with all his sweetness, has as little variety of numbers and sound as he; he is always, as it were, upon the hand-gallop, and his verse runs upon carpet-ground." What a dreary half-century would have been saved to English poetry, could Pope have laid these sentences to heart! Upon translation, no one has written so much and so well as Dryden in his various prefaces.
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