Word: essays
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1870-1879
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
THERE of the successful competitors for Bowdoin prizes have read their dissertations in public, to audiences which were large for Harvard College. Mr. W. A. Smith's essay on "The Essential Distinction between Human Reason and the Instinct of Brutes" was more interesting than would be expected from the nature of the subject; yet those very qualities which made it interesting detracted from its merit as an essay; it contained too many illustrations and anecdotes. On the other hand, its form was too scientific for the general reader, and its theory was too palpably modelled after that of Mr. Herbert...
...Patten's essay on "The Character of Cicero, as presented by Middleton, Mommsen, Abcken, Bruckner, and Forsyth" showed careful study. The subject involved a large amount of reading, and this reading Mr. Patten had done faithfully. The essay was not strikingly original or interesting, but it was clear and substantial. It made no attempt at elaboration, and its style was excellent...
Motley's abilities were well known to his associates. At one of the college exhibitions he spoke an essay on Goethe which attracted much attention; and the Phi Beta Kappa Society, which then admitted only the first sixteen scholars of each class, extended its rules in order to include...
...stale, flat, and unprofitable; but with one pleasing difference, that none of them is over a column and a half in length. When platitudes are the order of the day, those who write them most briefly deserve most credit and most thanks. In the Bowdoin Orient we find an essay of four columns in length on Emerson, which tells us nothing new, and suggests as little. We should have more patience with it, were it cut down, as it easily might be, to the length of the articles in the Syracusan...
...Yale Literary Magazine in the number for November publishes its prize essay, "Aspasia: the Study of a Portrait." The judges were Yale professors, and we cannot help thinking how different would have been the fate of the essay had it fallen into the clutches of our Bowdoin Prize Committee. Its substance is excellent, but its style would have been fatal to it here...