Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 18, 2025
He has a vein of dulness, that runs through all he says or does; for nothing can be tedious that is not dull and insipid. Digressions and repetitions, like bag and baggage, retard his march and put him to perpetual halts. He makes his approaches to a business by oblique lines, as if he meant to besiege it, and fetches a wide compass about to keep others from discovering what his design is.
I thought I should have to flee to the friendly fumes of the old stable, with "one stocking off and one stocking on;" but I got my shoe on at last, though not without many amusing interruptions and digressions. In a few moments after this adventure I was in rapid retreat toward camp.
But they are so vigorously drawn, and the narration is so full of power, that few readers can resist the fascination of the story, in spite of the intrusive little digressions which everywhere appear, and which, jumping at random through passages of history, religion, art, politics, literature, as a circus-rider forsakes his steed to dash through the many-colored tissue screens that are invitingly held out to him, interfere quite seriously with its progress.
"'I have never yet seen in any case such favour shown to any prisoner; so many digressions, such delivering of evidence by fractions, and so silly a defence of such great and notorious treasons. May it please your Grace, you have seen how weakly he hath shadowed his purpose and how slenderly he hath answered the objections against him.
But it must be admitted that such digressions are found in many other authors. Does not the agricultural treatise of the great Cato himself fairly bristle with them, as for instance his instructions how to make must cake and cheese cake, and how to cure hams?"
Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop." De Quincey's gravest fault is digression. He frequently leaves his main theme and follows some line of thought that has been suggested to his well-stored mind. These digressions are often very long, and sometimes one leads to another, until several subjects receive treatment in a single paper.
While the story is meant to attract readers, the essays and digressions introduced into the work are intended to inculcate the methods of education which Lyly taught in common with Ascham. It was, however, the manner rather than the matter which gave to "Euphues" its prominence and popularity. The story is but a slender thread.
Its rhetorical cast of style, its ceaseless and glaring melodrama, its childish presentments of human character, its endless digressions and running through all this its evidences of immense and disordered power, make the book perhaps the most magnificent failure the most 'wild enormity' ever produced by a man of genius.
But he was a man of elastic temperament; he could not remain forever upon the stretch; he sought, and he found, relaxation in extraneous matters in metaphysical digressions, or in satirical outbursts, or in the small details of his daily life. It amused him to have the Sudanese soldiers brought in and shown their 'black pug faces' in the palace looking-glasses.
Everything thereabouts speaks of happiness and will do so still more, Most Holy Father, when all these thousands of people shall be gathered among the sheep of your flock, and those devil images, the zemes, shall have been banished. You must not be vexed, Most Holy Father, if from time to time in the course of my narrative I repeat certain particulars, or allow myself some digressions.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking