George Saintsbury
George Saintsbury
George Edward Bateman Saintsbury, was an English writer, literary historian, scholar, critic and wine connoisseur...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth23 October 1845
writing men thinking
We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire.
flirting thinking meals
But dinner is dinner, a meal at which not so much to eat - it becomes difficult to eat much at it as you grow older - as to drink, to talk, to flirt, to discuss, to rejoice "at the closing of the day". I do not think anything serious should be done after it, as nothing should before breakfast.
thinking breakfast dinner
I do not think anything serious should be done after dinner, as nothing should be before breakfast.
childhood early late maria named works
The works of the very beautifully named Regina Maria Roche should probably be read, as they were for generations, in late childhood or early youth.
result
Broadmindedness is the result of flattening highmindedness out
dickens earlier few immense production promote rank second side
Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by not a few names which should rank high in the second class, while some would promote more than one of them to the first.
humor savages curious
Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.
artist giving transition
The transition state of manners and language cannot be too often insisted upon: for this affected the process at both ends, giving the artist in fictitious life an uncertain model to copy and unstable materials to work in.
romance mind division
To pass to the deluge, and beyond it, and to come to close quarters with our proper division, the origin of Romance itself is a very debatable subject, or rather it is a subject which the wiser mind will hardly care to debate much.
missing novelists ordinary
Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.
giving style gold
But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do.
melancholy century whole
But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.
names two fiction
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.
book wine people
When [wines] were good they pleased my sense, cheered my spirits, improved my moral and intellectual powers, besides enabling me to confer the same benefits on other people. (Notes on a Cellar Book)