Author
British · 1850-1933 · 14 quotes
British · 1850–1933
14 quotes in our collection
Augustine Birrell was a British politician, essayist, and literary critic, born in 1850 in Wavertree, Lancashire. Trained as a barrister and later called to the Bar, he built a double career in law and letters before entering Parliament as a Liberal MP in 1889. He served as President of the Board of Education under Campbell-Bannerman and later as Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1907 to 1916. His literary reputation rests chiefly on his three series of essays collected under the title Obiter Dicta, which delighted readers with their graceful wit, wide reading, and affectionate engagement with literature. Birrell wrote with a lightness and precision rare in political men of his era, and his criticism of Hazlitt, Johnson, and other English writers showed genuine appreciation rather than mere scholarship. He died in 1933, remembered as one of the finest essayists of the late Victorian and Edwardian age.
Collected Quotes
A great library easily begets affection, which may deepen into love.
It is perhaps best not to make too great demands upon our slender stock of deep emotions.
Sir Thomas Bodley's Library at Oxford is, all will admit, a great and glorious institution, one of England's sacred places.
It is pleasant to be admitted into the birth-chamber of a great idea destined to be translated into action.
Oxford has never loved Commissioners revising her statutes and reforming her schools.
They were barbarians and wreckers.
The books and manuscripts being thus for sale, the wooden shelves, desks, and seats of the old library, and for the most part the contents of the library had been rescued from miserable ill-usage in the monasteries and chapter-houses where they had their first habitations.
The plain intention of an honest man.
Bodley was always on the look-out for gifts and bequests from his store of honourable friends.
He did all a poor Protestant can do to tempt generosity.
He never even for a day dismounted his hobby, but rode it manfully to the last.