Quick Excerpts, from a Library of 492 Titles

Generated 2022-07-28 13:26:19

Excerpt #1, from Much Ado about Nothing, by William Shakespeare

…The savage bull may; but if ever the sensible Benedick bear it, pluck off the bull’s horns and set them in my forehead; and let me be vilely painted, and in such great letters as they write, ‘Here is good horse to hire,’ let them signify under my sign ‘Here you may see Benedick the married man.’ CLAUDIO…. If this should ever happen, thou wouldst be horn-mad. DON PEDRO. Nay, if Cupid have not spent all his quiver in Venice, thou wilt quake for this shortly. BENEDICK. I look for an earthquake too then. DON PEDRO. Well, you will temporize with the hours. In the meantime, good Signior Benedick, repair to Leonato’s: commend me to him and tell him I will not fail him at supper; for indeed he hath made great preparation. BENEDICK. I have almost matter enough in me for such an embassage; and so I commit you— CLAUDIO….

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Excerpt #2, from The Fifth Ace, by Isabel Ostrander

…Mr. Wiley is a friend and I will see him—-" “Not here, you won’t!” growled Jim. “He’s gone.” The girl wheeled upon him, her face darkening. “Gone where?” she demanded. “What do you mean, Jim?” “How should I know where?” The hotel-keeper shrugged. “His hacienda is shut up tight, except for the caretaker. Reckon he’s gone home for good. It wasn’t none too healthy for him around here.” Billie rose and stumbled to the window. Across the plaza beyond the flower-market, the Blue Chip could be discerned in an unfamiliar aspect of transformation. Scaffolding had been erected against its walls and their cerulean expanse was being rapidly hidden beneath a coating of brick red. Her eyes blurred for a moment, then a swift hardness came into them and her small fists clenched at her sides. “We will not discuss the matter of your inheritance, further, for the moment.” The lawyer’s voice, smooth as oil, came from just behind her. “You will listen to reason, I know, when you have had time for consideration. Mr. Baggott, here, will agree with me that you must accept the conditions of your grandfather’s will—-” “Mr. Baggott will do nothing of the kind,” vociferated that gentleman, suddenly. "I’ve listened to all you had to say, and kept my mouth shet, but since you’re bringing me into this, you might as well know…

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Excerpt #3, from Rilla of Ingleside, by L. M. Montgomery

…Irene. “There isn’t time to learn anything new.” “Oh, you have lots of lovely songs that nobody in the Glen ever heard before,” said Rilla, who knew Irene had been going to town all winter for lessons and that this was only a pretext. “They will all be new down there.” “But I have no accompanist,” protested Irene. “Una Meredith can accompany you,” said Rilla. “Oh, I couldn’t ask her,” sighed Irene. “We haven’t spoken since last fall. She was so hateful to me the time of our Sunday-school concert that I simply had to give her up.” Dear, dear, was Irene at feud with everybody? As for Una Meredith being hateful to anybody, the idea was so farcical that Rilla had much ado to keep from laughing in Irene’s very face. “Miss Oliver is a beautiful pianist and can play any accompaniment at sight,” said Rilla desperately. “She will play for you and you could run over your songs easily tomorrow evening at Ingleside before the concert.” “But I haven’t anything to wear. My new evening-dress isn’t home from Charlottetown yet, and I simply cannot wear my old one at such a big affair. It is too shabby and old-fashioned.” “Our concert,” said Rilla slowly, "is in aid of Belgian children who…

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Excerpt #4, from Ivanhoe: A Romance, by Walter Scott

…and perhaps his nocturnal potations, prevented from recognising accents which were tolerably familiar to him—“Wend on your way, in the name of God and Saint Dunstan, and disturb not the devotions of me and my holy brother.” “Mad priest,” answered the voice from without, “open to Locksley!” “All’s safe—all’s right,” said the hermit to his companion. “But who is he?” said the Black Knight; “it imports me much to know.” “Who is he?” answered the hermit; “I tell thee he is a friend.” “But what friend?” answered the knight; “for he may be friend to thee and none of mine?” “What friend?” replied the hermit; “that, now, is one of the questions that is more easily asked than answered. What friend?—why, he is, now that I bethink me a little, the very same honest keeper I told thee of a while since.” “Ay, as honest a keeper as thou art a pious hermit,” replied the knight, “I doubt it not. But undo the door to him before he beat it from its hinges.” The dogs, in the meantime, which had made a dreadful baying at the commencement of the disturbance, seemed now to recognise the voice of him who stood without; for, totally changing their manner, they scratched and whined at the door, as if interceding for his admission….

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Excerpt #5, from Mr. Standfast, by John Buchan

…your army from the right, and presently we shall be in Boulogne and Calais. After that Paris falls, and then Peace.” I made no answer. The word “Amiens” recalled Mary, and I was trying to remember the day in January when she and I had motored south from that pleasant city. “Why do I tell you these things? Your intelligence, for you are not altogether foolish, will have supplied the answer. It is because your life is over. As your Shakespeare says, the rest is silence…. No, I am not going to kill you. That would be crude, and I hate crudities. I am going now on a little journey, and when I return in twenty-four hours’ time you will be my companion. You are going to visit Germany, my dear General.” That woke me to attention, and he noticed it, for he went on with gusto. “You have heard of the Untergrundbahn? No? And you boast of an Intelligence service! Yet your ignorance is shared by the whole of your General Staff. It is a little organisation of my own. By it we can take unwilling and dangerous people inside our frontier to be dealt with as we please. Some have gone from England and many from France. Officially I believe they are recorded as ‘missing’, but they did not go astray on any battle-field. They have been gathered from their homes or from…

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Excerpt #6, from Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

…said to him, “You are a dead man, knight, unless you confess that the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso excels your Casildea de Vandalia in beauty; and in addition to this you must promise, if you should survive this encounter and fall, to go to the city of El Toboso and present yourself before her on my behalf, that she deal with you according to her good pleasure; and if she leaves you free to do yours, you are in like manner to return and seek me out (for the trail of my mighty deeds will serve you as a guide to lead you to where I may be), and tell me what may have passed between you and her—conditions which, in accordance with what we stipulated before our combat, do not transgress the just limits of knight-errantry.” “I confess,” said the fallen knight, “that the dirty tattered shoe of the lady Dulcinea del Toboso is better than the ill-combed though clean beard of Casildea; and I promise to go and to return from her presence to yours, and to give you a full and particular account of all you demand of me.” “You must also confess and believe,” added Don Quixote, “that the knight you vanquished was not and could not be Don Quixote of La Mancha, but someone else in his likeness, just as I confess and believe that you, though you seem to be the bachelor Samson Carrasco, are not so, but some other resembling him, whom my enemies have here put before…

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Excerpt #7, from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

…They peddle out such a fish as that by the pound in the market-house there; everybody buys some of him; his meat’s as white as snow and makes a good fry. Next morning I said it was getting slow and dull, and I wanted to get a stirring up some way. I said I reckoned I would slip over the river and find out what was going on. Jim liked that notion; but he said I must go in the dark and look sharp. Then he studied it over and said, couldn’t I put on some of them old things and dress up like a girl? That was a good notion, too. So we shortened up one of the calico gowns, and I turned up my trouser-legs to my knees and got into it. Jim hitched it behind with the hooks, and it was a fair fit. I put on the sun-bonnet and tied it under my chin, and then for a body to look in and see my face was like looking down a joint of stove-pipe. Jim said nobody would know me, even in the daytime, hardly. I practiced around all day to get the hang of the things, and by and by I could do pretty well in them, only Jim said I didn’t walk like a girl; and he said I must quit pulling up my gown to get at my britches-pocket. I took notice, and done better. I started up the Illinois shore in the canoe just after dark. I started across to the town from a little below the ferry-landing, and the drift of the current fetched me in at the bottom of the town. I…

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Excerpt #8, from To Cuba and Back, by Richard Henry Dana

…silent prayer, and not having (for their duties preclude it) any skill in the practice of music, had a large music-box wound and placed on a stand, in the rear, giving out its liquid tones, just loud enough to pervade the air, without forcing attention. The effect was beautiful; and yet the tunes were not all, nor chiefly, religious. They were such as any music-box would give. But what do these poor creatures know of what the world marches to, or dances to, or makes love by? To them it was all music, and pure and holy! Minute after minute we stood, waiting for, but not desiring, an end of these delightful sounds, and a dissolving of this spell of silent adoration. One of the Sisters began prayers aloud, a series of short prayers and adorations and thanksgivings, to each of which, at its close, the others made response in full, sweet voices. The tone of prayer of this Sister was just what it should be. No skill of art could reach it. How much truer than the cathedral, or the great ceremonial! It was low, yet audible, composed, reverent: neither the familiar, which offends so often, nor the rhetorical, which always offends, but that unconscious sustained intonation, not of speech, but of music, which frequent devotions in company with others naturally call out; showing us that poetry and music, and not prose and speech, are the natural expressions of the deepest and highest emotions….

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Excerpt #9, from The Influence of the Stars: A book of old world lore, by Rosa Baughan

…Mercury are deemed of common influence–that is, either of good or evil, according to the planets with which they are connected. The planets have particular familiarity with certain places in the zodiac by means of parts designated as their houses, and also by their triplicities, exaltations and terms. The nature of their familiarity by houses is as follows:– Cancer and Leo are the most northerly of all the twelve signs; they approach nearer than the other signs to the zenith of this part of the earth, and thereby cause warmth and heat; they are consequently appropriated as houses for the two principal and greater luminaries; Leo for the Sun, as being masculine; and Cancer for the Moon, as being feminine. Saturn, since he is cold and inimical to heat, moving also in a superior orbit most remote from the luminaries, occupies the signs opposite to Cancer and Leo; these are Aquarius and Capricorn, and they are assigned to him in consideration of their cold and wintry nature. Jupiter has a favourable temperament, and is situated beneath the sphere of Saturn; he, therefore, occupies the next two signs, Sagittarius and Pisces. Mars is dry in nature and beneath the sphere of Jupiter; he takes the next two signs, of a nature similar to his own, viz., Aries and…

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Excerpt #10, from A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, by Jules Verne

…then we watched a falcon soaring in the grey and misty air, taking his flight towards warmer and sunnier regions. I could not help feeling a sense of melancholy come over me. I sighed for my own Native Land, and wished to be back with Gretchen. We were compelled to cross several little fjords, and at last came to a real gulf. The tide was at its height, and we were able to go over at once, and reach the hamlet of Alftanes, about a mile farther. That evening, after fording the Alfa and the Heta, two rivers rich in trout and pike, we were compelled to pass the night in a deserted house, worthy of being haunted by all the fays of Scandinavian mythology. The King of Cold had taken up his residence there, and made us feel his presence all night. The following day was remarkable by its lack of any particular incidents. Always the same damp and swampy soil; the same dreary uniformity; the same sad and monotonous aspect of scenery. In the evening, having accomplished the half of our projected journey, we slept at the Annexia of Krosolbt. For a whole mile we had under our feet nothing but lava. This disposition of the soil is called hraun: the crumbled lava on the surface was in some instances like ship cables stretched out horizontally, in others coiled up in heaps; an immense field of lava…

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Excerpt #11, from Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde, by Oscar Wilde

…articulate, he might have sat beside him. The only man who can touch the hem of his garment is George Meredith. Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.–The Critic as Artist. THE TWO SUPREME AND HIGHEST ARTS Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression of life. The principles of the former, as laid down by the Greeks, we may not realise in an age so marred by false ideals as our own. The principles of the latter, as they laid them down, are, in many cases, so subtle that we can hardly understand them. Recognising that the most perfect art is that which most fully mirrors man in all his infinite variety, they elaborated the criticism of language, considered in the light of the mere material of that art, to a point to which we, with our accentual system of reasonable or emotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain; studying, for instance, the metrical movements of a prose as scientifically as a modern musician studies harmony and counterpoint, and, I need hardly say, with much keener aesthetic instinct. In this they were right, as they were right in all things. Since the introduction of printing, and the fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the middle and lower classes of this country, there has been a tendency in literature to appeal more and more to the eye, and less and less to the ear which is…

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Excerpt #12, from A Smaller Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, by William Smith

…to cut the debtor in pieces, and to take their share of his body in proportion to their debt. There is no instance of a creditor ever having adopted this extreme mode of satisfying his debt. But the creditor might treat the debtor, who was addictus, as a slave, and compel him to work out his debt; and the treatment was often very severe. The Lex Poetilia (B.C. 326) alleviated the condition of the nexi. So far as we can understand its provisions, it set all the nexi free, or made them soluti, and it enacted that for the future there should be no nexum, and that no debtor should for the future be put in chains. NŌBILES, NŌBĬLĬTAS. In the early periods of the Roman state the Patricians were the Nobles as opposed to the Plebs. In B.C. 366, the plebeians obtained the right of being eligible to the consulship, and finally they obtained access to all the curule magistracies. Thus the two classes were put on the same footing as to political capacity; but now a new order of nobility arose. The descendants of plebeians who had filled curule magistracies, formed a class called Nobiles or men “known,” who were so called by way of distinction from “Ignobiles” or people who were not known. The Nobiles had no legal privileges as such; but they were bound together by a common distinction derived from a legal title and by a common interest;…

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