11 uses
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Definition
to gain or reach something with effort
- This is indeed one of the most exquisite beauties of poetry, and attainable by very few: I only know of Homer eminent for it in the Greek, and Virgil in the Latin.Preface (80% in)
- _ Scepticism has attained its culminating point with respect to Homer, and the state of our Homeric knowledge may be described as a free permission to believe any theory, provided we throw overboard all written tradition, concerning the author or authors of the Iliad and Odyssey.Introduction (7% in)
- They were married; careful cultivation ripened the talents which nature had bestowed, and Melesigenes soon surpassed his schoolfellows in every attainment, and, when older, rivalled his preceptor in wisdom.Introduction (11% in)
- The author of that hymn, be he who he may, could never have described a blind man as attaining the utmost perfection in his art, if he had been conscious that the memory of the bard was only maintained by constant reference to the manuscript in his chest.Introduction (43% in)
- A reading class, when once formed, would doubtless slowly increase, and the number of manuscripts along with it; so that before the time of Solon, fifty years afterwards, both readers and manuscripts, though still comparatively few, might have attained a certain recognized authority, and formed a tribunal of reference against the carelessness of individual rhapsodes.Introduction (50% in)
- And if we can but attain this degree of enthusiasm (and less enthusiasm will scarcely suffice for the reading of Homer), we shall feel that the poems of Homer are not only the work of one writer, but of the greatest writer that ever touched the hearts of men by the power of song.Introduction (86% in)
- There are, to be sure, certain conventional anecdotes, which prove that Pope consulted various friends, whose classical attainments were sounder than his own, during the undertaking; but it is probable that these examinations were the result rather of the contradictory versions already existing, than of a desire to make a perfect transcript of the original.Introduction (95% in)
- It is the invention that, in different degrees, distinguishes all great geniuses: the utmost stretch of human study, learning, and industry, which masters everything besides, can never attain to this.Preface (1% in)
- This consideration (together with what has been observed of the parity of some of his thoughts) may, methinks, induce a translator, on the one hand, to give in to several of those general phrases and manners of expression, which have attained a veneration even in our language from being used in the Old Testament; as, on the other, to avoid those which have been appropriated to the Divinity, and in a manner consigned to mystery and religion.Preface (71% in)
- Visiting at Naples a gentleman of the highest intellectual attainments, and who held a distinguished rank among the men of letters in the last century, he informed us that the day before he had passed much time in examining a man, not highly educated, who had learned to repeat the whole Gierusalemme of Tasso, not only to recite it consecutively, but also to repeat those stanzas in utter defiance of the sense, either forwards or backwards, or from the eighth line to the first,...Footnotes (8% in)
- We do not mention these facts as touching the more difficult part of the question before us, but facts they are; and if we find so much difficulty in calculating the extent to which the mere memory may be cultivated, are we, in these days of multifarious reading, and of countless distracting affairs, fair judges of the perfection to which the invention and the memory combined may attain in a simpler age, and among a more single minded people?Footnotes (10% in)
There are no more uses of "attain" in The Iliad by Homer - (translated by: Pope).
Typical Usage
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