United States or Serbia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Pasquier's Letters contains the following passage, which applies perhaps quite as forcibly to the present age as to his own time: "I cannot forbear complaining at this time of the calamity of this age which has produced such a plenty of reputed or untimely authors. Any pitiful scribbler will have his first thoughts to come to light; lest, being too long shut up, they should grow musty.
"Yet grant it shou'd succeed, grant that by Chance, Or by the Whim and Madness of the Town, A Farce without Contrivance, without Sense Should run to the Astonishment of Mankind; Think how you will be read in After-times, When Friends are not, and the impartial Judge Shall with the meanest Scribbler rank your Name; Who would not rather wish a Butler's fame, Distress'd, and poor in every thing but Merit, Than be the blundering Laureat to a Court?"
They call him a Mercury, but he becomes the epithet like the little negro mounted upon an elephant, just such another blot rampant. He has not stuffings sufficient for the reproach of a scribbler, but it hangs about him like an old wife's skin when the flesh hath forsaken her, lank and loose.
Tresham, I believe you are guiltless of having ever essayed to build the lofty rhyme; but you must have known in your day many an apprentice and fellow-craft, if not some of the master-masons, in the temple of Apollo. Vanity is their universal foible, from him who decorated the shades of Twickenham, to the veriest scribbler whom he has lashed in his Dunciad.
Why, he might have worked on at his law, and I'd a' set him up and put him in the way of making his living in a few years; made him a credit to all connected with him, I would! But he's chosen to turn a low scribbler, and starve in a garret, which he'll come to soon enough, and that's what I get for trying to help a nephew. Well, it will be a lesson to me, I know that.
Once a scribbler in an attic, subsisting bravely on bread and cheese and hope, he now lords it more than half the year in a palace of fairy-like beauty on the Lago di Como, and he is precisely the same person who was formerly disdained and flouted by fair ladies because his clothes were poor and shabby, yet for whom they now practise all the arts known to their sex, in fruitless endeavors to charm and conciliate him.
It is really the stupid egotism of authors that is the stumbling-block in the way of true literature, each little scribbler that produces a shilling sensational thinks his or her own work a marvel of genius, and nothing can shake them from their obstinate conviction.
If every man can pull a trigger, not every man has either the opportunity, or can wield a pen against a low scribbler, who had the impudence to injure his reputation with strong words. Gentlemen of congress are so badly treated by such newspapers, and to such an excess, for which, even the strongest words of the english language have lost their sharpness.
He trots about a briefless little barrister, a scribbler, devilish clever and impudent, who does his farces for him. Tenby 's the fellow's name, and it's the only thing I haven't heard him pun on. Puns are the smallpox of the language; we're cursed with an epidemic. By gad, the next time I meet him I 'll roar out for vaccine matter.
We must draw the line at our daughter marrying a scribbler with his eyes out, on high principles." At this point the image may be said to have got the bit in its teeth, for it added: "If Gwen squinted and had a wooden leg, nothing would please us better. But...!" How did the growing hope of a revival of sight bear on the question? Well both ways!
Word Of The Day