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More "Eccentricity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... natural state, and who preserve, under a rough exterior, the warmth, the goodness and the integrity of primitive instincts.—Accordingly, let us call by its true name this elegance, this luxury, this urbanity, this literary delicacy, this philosophical eccentricity, admired by the prejudiced as the flower of the life of humanity; it is only mold and mildew. In like manner esteem at its just value the swarm that live upon it, namely, the indolent aristocracy, the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... never dull; he had plenty to do; and he took everything as it came in its turn. Even the costume ball for which he had now attired himself did not present itself to him as a "bore," but as a new vein of information, opening to him fresh glimpses of the genus homo as seen in a state of eccentricity. ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... and I do not like the notion of your drinking alone or with another woman; with anyone else, in fact, except when you are with me—and then moderately. Personally, I like a womanly woman; Dr. Harpe is—amusing—but I should not care to see you imitate her. One does not fancy eccentricity in one's wife. There, there," he kissed her magnanimously, "now we'll forget this ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... fellow walked off with the good hat. Then, with the relic in my hand, a waiter and myself began a systematic search. My hat was nowhere to be found. How the deuce was I to get up town to the club? I couldn't wear the old plug; I wasn't rich enough for such an eccentricity. I had nothing but a silk hat at the apartment, and I hated it because it was always in the way when ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... about in every point of the political compass, and still feels the wind of popularity in his tail. He too, like a portentous comet, has risen again above the court-horizon; but how long he will continue to ascend, it is not easy to foretell, considering his great eccentricity — Who are those two satellites that attend his motions?' When Barton told him their names, 'To their characters (said Mr Bramble) I am no stranger. One of them, without a drop of red blood in his veins, has a cold intoxicating vapour in his head; and rancour enough in his heart ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... ruin rather an amusing incident. She had always complained that the Romans were very dull; for she was not a Roman herself, but came of a very great old Polish family, the members of which had been distinguished for divers forms of amiable eccentricity during a ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... ten, fifteen, thirty, fifty like this, the character of eccentricity, which you first found in them by comparison with the women of Europe, disappears. A new type of feminine attractiveness is revealed to you, less affecting than irritating, enigmatic and slightly ambiguous by its indefinable ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... went to extremes. It was due to Gnosticism that art and science found an entrance into the Church. It preserved the Church from becoming stereotyped in form; but, built up entirely on ideas and not on historical facts, it died from its own hollowness and eccentricity. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... however, the eccentricity of Louis XI. in keeping himself out of sight when he attended the religious services in his chapel. In the vaulting near the entrance is a small opening communicating with a narrow passage, by means of which Montaigne could leave his bedroom and hear mass ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... there, conforming gracefully to a recognized canon of manly beauty, his neighbor Gerald, who would not have been noticed one way or the other for his looks, yet from being beside him took on an indescribable effect of eccentricity. The bone showed plainly around his eye-sockets and at the bridge of his nose. One eyebrow became different from the other the moment he regarded a thing analytically; and when he smiled those who noticed such things could detect that ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... principles which should guide us in the choice of books. Against that part of his treatise which is occupied with specific recommendations of certain authors I have not a word to say. He has resisted all the temptations to eccentricity which so easily beset the modern critic. Every book which he praises deserves his praise, and has long been praised by the world at large. I do not, indeed, hold that the verdict of the world is necessarily binding on the individual conscience. I admit to the full that there is an enormous quantity ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... unreasonable, for the French had the advantage of the English in ships, guns, and men, but they had omitted to take into their calculations the fact that the English fleet was commanded by one whose promptitude in action, readiness and eccentricity of resource, and utter disregard of consequences when what he deemed the path to victory lay before him, might have been equalled; but certainly could not have been ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne
... characters? Less the actions than the moods of these novels have the epic air. Narrow as Miss Cather's scene may be, she fills it with a spaciousness and candor of personality that quite transcends the gnarled eccentricity and timid inhibitions of the local colorists. Passion blows through her chosen characters like a free, wholesome, if often devastating wind; it does not, as with Miss Jewett and her contemporaries, lurk in furtive corners or hide itself altogether. And as these passions are most commonly ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... upwards a vertical movement which is to some extent interfered with by the outstretched arms of the youth. Mr. Calder has given us so very many excellent things, alone and in collaboration with others throughout the Exposition, that we must allow him this little bizarre note as an eccentricity ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... faddist proposal, not a perplexing ingenious complication of a simple business; it is the carefully worked out right way to do something that hitherto we have been doing in the wrong way. It is no more an eccentricity than is proper baking in the place of baking amidst dirt and with unlimited adulteration, or the running of trains to their destinations instead of running them without notice into casually selected sidings and branch lines. It is not the ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... little doubt about a man's parts, and to damn him with faint praise); and so he looks on the world and plays with the ceaseless humours of all of us—laughs the kindest laugh—points our neighbour's foible or eccentricity out to us with the most good-natured, smiling confidence; and then, turning over his shoulder, whispers our foibles to our neighbour. What would Sir Roger de Coverley be without his follies and his charming little brain-cracks?(93) If the good knight did ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... favour—from pure eccentricity, of course—to save my life on that exact spot, General," said the count. "Your countrymen usually take the other ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... riding with him and she did it. Some of us found them bumping over the line in one of the flat-wheeled catastrophes that the Jonesville Company called cars—and Miss Spencer didn't even blush. She bowed to us just as unconcernedly as if she wasn't breaking all long-distance records for eccentricity ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... with neither self-respect nor position to maintain, who break the City's law. Stockbrokers are, of course, men apart from the rest. They draw most of their customers from a class which knows nothing of business; and must therefore be humoured; moreover, a little eccentricity, a lightheartedness, verging at times on the clownish, is useful, for, if duly reported, it procures the Stock Exchange a free advertisement in the Press. Even Mr. Marlow had been known to play football with a silk hat and wave a little Union Jack, ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... ran an undercurrent of sadness; he was occasionally subject to hours of deep silence and introspection that approached a condition of trance. In manner he was simple, direct, void of the least affectation, and entirely free from awkwardness, oddity, or eccentricity. His mental qualities were a quick analytic perception, strong logical powers, a tenacious memory, a liberal estimate and tolerance of the opinions of others, ready intuition of human nature; and perhaps his most ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... of Emerson do not mind an occasional over-statement, extravagance, paradox, eccentricity; they find them amusing and not misleading. But the accountants, for whom two and two always make four, come upon one of these passages and shut the book up as wanting in sanity. Without a certain sensibility to the humorous, no one should venture upon Emerson. If he ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... and their native customs, should spend a few weeks in a Paris boarding-house, somewhere in the Faubourg St. Honore—if he would have the full aroma of British conceit. The most surprising feature of the English quarter of the French capital is the eccentricity of the English visitors, as it strikes their own countrymen. I cannot find it in me to blame Gallican caricaturists. The statuettes which enliven the bronze shops; the gaunt figures which are in the chocolate establishments; ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... field, or a miasmatic swamp, he would become insane. But if instead of living in conditions that condemn him to lunacy he were to be under no necessity to struggle for his daily bread, if he could live in affluence, he might exhibit some eccentricity of character, but would not cross the threshold of an insane asylum. The same happens in the case of criminality. One may have a congenital predisposition toward crime, but if he lives in favorable surroundings, he will ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... in pedigree. A person does not lose caste by using the pen, or even by taking the not-needed pay for using it. To publish a book or to have an article accepted by a magazine may give a sort of social distinction, either as an exhibition of a certain unexpected capacity or a social eccentricity. It is hardly too much to say that it has become the fashion to write, as it used to be to dance the minuet well, or to use the broadsword, or to stand a gentlemanly mill with a renowned bruiser. Of course one ought not to do this professionally exactly, ought not to prepare for doing it by ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... company of Mennonites led by Pastorius, the "Pennsylvania Pilgrim," who founded Germantown, now a beautiful suburb of Philadelphia. Group after group of picturesque devotees that had been driven into seclusion and eccentricity by long and cruel persecution—the Tunkers, the Schwenkfelders, the Amish—kept coming and bringing with them their traditions, their customs, their sacred books, their timid and pathetic disposition to hide by themselves, sometimes in quasi-monastic communities like that at Ephrata, ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... essentially practical and sane; the second is forceful if it does not violate the fundamental rules of color and design, and if it has a peculiarly apt application; while the third is almost invariably in as poor taste as eccentricity in dress. ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... powders that bloom into omelettes. She scorned them and brought along a generous store of raw steak and bacon and potatoes. A picnic without a fire and roasting meat was too namby-pamby for words; and though she would not now undertake to cook the food herself, because of a certain eccentricity of the knee joints, and since her daughter, despite her domestic science, declined to do so, she had brought along Julia the cook. Nothing but the big limousine would do for such an undertaking, and, as it was, Furbush had to nurse the steak ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... his music is intended to picture. In the knowledge of individual instruments and the grouping of them for effect, in warmth of imagination and brilliancy of color, and in his daring combinations and fantastic moods, which are sometimes carried to the very verge of eccentricity, he is a colossus among modern musicians. He died in Paris, ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... on the soft black margin of the pool—a huge beast, unmarked by any toe scar or eccentricity. Long body, heavy, a perfect thing of his kind. It was as if the tiger had stood some moments listening. Yet the natives declared that only the mated pair operated in this range and the hunter was said to have killed ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... created Kneller a knight, and George I, raised the painter's rank to that of a baronet. Sir Godfrey was notorious for his conceit, irritability, and eccentricity, and for the wit which sparkled more in his conversation than in any originality of observation displayed in his painting. Walpole attributes to Kneller the opposite qualities of great negligence and great love of money. ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... Malvolio especially later; though Shakespeare never employed the method of humours for an important personage. It was not Jonson's fault that many of his successors did precisely the thing that he had reprobated, that is, degrade "the humour: into an oddity of speech, an eccentricity of manner, of dress, or cut of beard. There was an anonymous play called "Every Woman in Her Humour." Chapman wrote "A Humourous Day's Mirth," Day, "Humour Out of Breath," Fletcher later, "The Humourous Lieutenant," and Jonson, besides "Every Man Out of His Humour," returned to the title in ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... sustenance, invited him to dine with her; but he was offended, and assured her he was not hungry. It is quite impossible to account for this uncalled for pride. It was his nature. Lord Byron said he was mad: according to his view of the case, all eccentricity is madness; but in the case of unhappy Chatterton, that madness which arises from "hope deferred," was unquestionably endured. Three days before his death, pursuing, with a friend, the melancholy and speculative employment of reading epitaphs in the churchyard of St. Pancras, absorbed by his own ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... gaze wanders out over acres of roofs—the leaded coverings of hotels, apartment-houses, and office buildings. They rear themselves beneath and around me as the lesser peaks of the Himalayas seen from Mount Everest. My eyes ache with the diversity of their shapes, the eccentricity of their styles, the irregularity of their altitudes. No man viewing them can continue blind to the independence of the American citizen, to the ostentation of his right of personal selection, to his individual caprice. They stand, a brick-and-iron commentary ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... interrupted my discourse somewhat abruptly, as is his wont; for we grant him a license, in virtue of his eccentricity, which we should hardly expect to be claimed by ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the corner. We will dispense with Fletcher with your permission." And Cuthbert brought the chibouque to his uncle's side. In another minute the old man was smoking as gravely as any Turk. This method of consuming tobacco was another eccentricity. For a few moments neither spoke. ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... thinking it possible that the human race is a witness of an exceptionally unchanging and stable condition of things, if the calculations of Mr. Croll are valid as to how far variations in the eccentricity in the earth's orbit together with the precession of the equinoxes have produced changes in climate. Mr. Wallace has pointed out[229] that the last 60,000 years having been exceptionally unchanging as regards these conditions, specific ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... tortillas, I returned to ask the way to the river. The mayordomo cried out in horror at the notion of bathing at night, pointing out that there was not even a moon, and prophesying a fatal outcome of such foolhardiness and gringo eccentricity. His appearance suggested that he had also some strong superstition against bathing ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... character is only the heroic way of understanding it. When we love, by some noble method of our own or some nobility of mien or nature in the other, we apprehend the loved one by what is noblest in ourselves. When we are merely studying an eccentricity, the method of our study is but a series of allowances. To begin to understand is to begin to sympathise; for comprehension comes only when we have stated another's faults and virtues in terms of our own. Hence the proverbial toleration of ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... but in vice; no sin, but in true feeling. Like poor Tom, in Lear, whom the foul fiend has possessed for many a day, it will run through ditches, through quagmires, and through bogs, to see a man stand on his head for the exact space of half an hour. Ask the reason of this raging appetite for eccentricity, the answer is, such a thing is out of the beaten track of manhood, ergo, ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... sallies from which he never came back. We found him, when we went to search for him, face downward in a little green-scummed pool, which lay at the foot of the garden. There was no sign of any violence, and the water was but two feet deep, so that the jury, having regard to his known eccentricity, brought in a verdict of 'suicide.' But I, who knew how he winced from the very thought of death, had much ado to persuade myself that he had gone out of his way to meet it. The matter passed, however, and my father entered into possession of the estate, and of some 14,000 pounds, which lay ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... awakening Mr. Vandeford displayed a marked eccentricity in his demeanor. That morning was unlike any morning he had ever experienced, and his conduct surprised himself. A daybreak shower had fallen on the hot and baked city, and it was as fresh as a suburb. Arrayed in the coolest of white silk, linen, ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the Brunonian system began. Anyway, he made money to help on the fortunes of his family. His younger son, Bysshe, who added to the family wealth by marrying in succession two heiresses, also gained a baronetcy by adhering to the Whig Party and the Duke of Norfolk. He appears to have increased in eccentricity with age and became exceedingly penurious. He was evidently not regarded as a desirable match for either of his wives, as he had to elope with both of them; and his marriage with the first, Miss Michell, ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... hundred a year. The house-mothers from whom she sought information were puzzled at this sudden curiosity about domestic matters. They looked upon the thing as a freak of girlhood which drifted into eccentricity, from sheer idleness; yet they were not the less ready to teach Mary anything she desired to learn. They told her those secret arts by which coppers and brasses are made things of beauty, and meet adornment for an old oak mantelshelf. They ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... sorely puzzled by the receipt of a fifty-dollar bill "for the relief of the depraved." His office was constantly thronged with outcasts, who were generally relieved by small sums. In his relations with these people, his simplicity and eccentricity were noted by all who knew him. Among many stories which I know to be true, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... sufficient. "A man," as one of them observed to me once, "is so in the way in the house!" Although the ladies of Cranford know all each other's proceedings, they are exceedingly indifferent to each other's opinions. Indeed, as each has her own individuality, not to say eccentricity, pretty strongly developed, nothing is so easy as verbal retaliation; but, somehow, good-will reigns among them ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... was a small one, and I was sure of every accessory support I might need from them to tide me over what I hoped would prove only a temporary, though it might be a severe, struggle. The house I occupied was fortunately so situated that no outcry of pain, nor any extorted eccentricity of conduct, consequent upon the effort I proposed to make, could be observed by ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... master, inundate their canvasses with violet shades do not see in nature more violet than was detected there fifty years ago; but they are influenced, "suggestioned," by the personal and special impressions of a painter who, in spite of this eccentricity, was successful in acquiring great prestige. Similar examples might be brought forward in connection with all the elements ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... have reached me in the morning of yesterday, I did not receive until nearly midnight—partly through the eccentricity of our new postman whose good pleasure it is to make use of the letter-box without knocking; and partly from the confusion in the house, of illness in different ways ... the very servants being ill, ... one of them breaking a ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... planets is 59.9643 of the earth's equatorial radii, or only about 237,000 miles. I say the mean or average interval. But it must be borne in mind that the form of the moon's orbit being an ellipse of eccentricity amounting to no less than 0.05484 of the major semi-axis of the ellipse itself, and the earth's centre being situated in its focus, if I could, in any manner, contrive to meet the moon, as it were, in its perigee, the above mentioned distance would be materially diminished. But, to say nothing ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... peace, he was determined to prove his respect for letters, and his masterpiece is no less pompous in manner than it is estimable in tone and sound in reflection. He handled slang as one who knew its limits and possibilities, employing it not for the sake of eccentricity, but to give the proper colour and sparkle to his page; indeed, his intimate acquaintance with the vagabonds of speech enabled him to compile a dictionary of Pedlar's French, which has been pilfered by a whole battalion of imitators. Moreover, there was ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... generally known as "Buffalo Bill." They do not reflect that it is just because the social gap between the two is so irretrievably vast and so universally recognised that the duchesses can afford to amuse themselves cursorily with any eccentricity that offers itself. As Pomona's husband put it, people in England are like types with letters at one end and can easily be sorted out of a state of "pi," while Americans are theoretically all alike, like carpet-tacks. Thus Americans of the best class ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... quality and thickness of the usual "wove" paper. Mr. Howes gives a thick and thin wove and "a closely ribbed paper." This latter like the ribbed varieties in the earlier issues, is evidently due to nothing more than some eccentricity of printing and is, consequently, of doubtful philatelic importance. The classification of the series into thick and thin papers seems to have more to be said in its favor if the statement made in Gibbons' catalogue is to be relied on. According to a foot ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... them losing his senses? They don't do it—believe me. I know they say every man has his loco point," Mr. Bunner added reflectively, "but that doesn't mean genuine, sure-enough craziness; it just means some personal eccentricity in a man ... like hating cats ... or my own weakness of not being able to touch ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... set with pearls, and very few can bear the handicap of a bright gold front tooth. Artists, alone, may gratify their taste for velvet jackets, Tam-o'-Shanters, and Windsor ties, but the privilege is denied business men. Eccentricity of dress usually indicates eccentricity of temper, and we do not want temperamental business men. It is hard enough to get along with authors and artists and musicians. The business man who is wise wears conventional ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... character, of mind and even of body, because it is the possible sign of a slumbering activity as well as of an activity with separatist tendencies, that inclines to swerve from the common centre round which society gravitates: in short, because it is the sign of an eccentricity. And yet, society cannot intervene at this stage by material repression, since it is not affected in a material fashion. It is confronted with something that makes it uneasy, but only as a symptom—scarcely a threat, ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... such classes exist: Eastern despotisms have arrived nearer the idea of equality and fraternity than any republic yet invented. As a friend he proves a model to the Damons and Pythiases: as a lover an exemplar to Don Quijote without the noble old Caballero's touch of eccentricity. As a knight he is the mirror of chivalry, doing battle for the weak and debelling the strong, while ever "defending the honour of women." As a husband his patriarchal position causes him to be loved and fondly loved by more than one wife: as a father affection ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... liking it, their businesslike assumption of equality, their incessant appearance (authorized, it is true, by business) at the railings of his pen, the peculiar disenchanting promiscuity of it all, preserved young Ransome in his eccentricity of indifference to their sex. In fact, if you tried to talk about sex to young Ransome (and Mercier did try) he would denounce it as "silly goat's talk," and your absorption in it as "the most mutton-headed form of ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... more sweetly than before, though it was not really the lieutenant's fault, for Dick kept on throwing out a few clear notes—additional to his part—when some of his companion's threatened to die away, and these grace notes came in with such delicious, florid eccentricity that a hearer would have taken them for intentional variations cleverly composed ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... and disheartening complications was this part of the process completed. This was, after all, the real tug of war. Many unknown quantities existed: its mass, its distance, its eccentricity, the obliquity of its orbit, its position—nothing was known, in fact, about the planet except the microscopic disturbance it caused in Uranus, several thousand million miles away from it. Without going into ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... speaker in either House that excites such universal attention as Jack Randolph. But they listen to him more to be delighted by his eloquence and entertained by his ingenuity and eccentricity, than to be convinced by ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... friends interesting as men. He was nothing, as a person to know and observe, to the genius of the two Mozleys, to the brilliant social charm of Frederic Faber, to the keen, refined intelligence of Mark Pattison, to the originality and clever eccentricity of William Palmer of Magdalen. And he was nothing as a man of practical power for organising and carrying out successful schemes: such power was not much found at Oxford in those days. But his faith in his cause, as the cause of goodness and truth, was ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... round the paper forest in the background, would make six men pass muster very well for sixty, did not the fatally regular recurrence of the hero whose cotton armor bunches at the knees, and the other whose legs insist on the un-Grecian eccentricity of being straight in profile and crooked in a front view, bring us ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... individual examples will express this half-concealed eccentricity. Syme's original cicerone bore the title of Monday; he was the Secretary of the Council, and his twisted smile was regarded with more terror than anything, except the President's horrible, happy laughter. But now that ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... and Sherman ordered his army to return to the vicinity of that city for a period of rest. Hood's conduct for the past three days had been the result of complete misapprehension of the facts; but its very eccentricity had been so incomprehensible that no rule of military probabilities could be applied to it, and before Sherman could learn what he was doing, the time had passed when full advantage could be taken ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... in utter astonishment. "What has come over the man?" said she to herself. "He looks as if he had seen a ghost! Well—I suppose it is nothing more than a fit of eccentricity." ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... that would keep him out of the poorhouse when she died and left him to his own devices. It never occurred to her that he was in any way remarkable. If he were difficult to understand, it reflected more upon his eccentricity than upon her density. What was a woman to do with a boy of twelve who, when she urged him to drop the old guitar he was taking apart and hurry off to school, cried, "Oh, mother! when there is so much to learn ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... ignorance has marked out as her only track, he claps his hands, cries [Greek: euraeka]! and is dubbed 'illustrious' on the spot. Such is the world's reward for a great discovery, which generally, in a twelvemonth's time, is found out to be a blunder of the philosopher, and not an eccentricity of Nature. I am not underrating those great men who, by deep study, or rather by some mysterious inspiration, have produced combinations and effected results which have materially assisted the progress of civilisation and the security of our happiness. No, no! to them be due adoration. Would ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... bottom; all was anxious expectation: 27the covers being removed, exhibited to view, a baked shoulder of mutton at top, and baked potatoes at the bottom. They all looked around with astonishment, but, knowing the general eccentricity of their host, they readily fell into his humour, and partook of his fare; not doubting but the second course would make ample amends for the first. The wine was good, and the Major apologized for his accommodations, being, as he said, a family sort of man, and the dinner, though somewhat ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... my father, though himself of a very sweet disposition, was most unhappy. His parents looked upon him as moonstruck, while he himself, whatever his aspirations, was conscious that he had done nothing to justify the eccentricity of his course, or the violation of all prudential considerations in which he daily indulged. In these perplexities, the usual alternative was again had recourse to—absence; he was sent abroad, to travel in France, which the peace then permitted, visit some friends, see Paris, and then proceed ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... also, was she conscious of strangeness and eccentricity in the man she had married. It often seemed to that keen and practical sense which in her mingled so oddly with the capacity for passion that, as they grew older, and her mind recovered tone and balance, she would probably ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... deny that he seemed improved,—rather perhaps that the setting of fine clothes, cleanliness, and the absence of petty worries, made his characteristics respectable. That which is ill breeding in homespun, is apt to become mere eccentricity in purple and fine linen; Grant felt that Harcourt jarred on him less than he did before, and was grateful without superciliousness. Harcourt, relieved to find that Grant was neither critical nor aggressively reminiscent, and above all not inclined to claim the credit of creating him and ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... the old sailor's peculiarities—or, perhaps, it may have been an eccentricity—was, that in addressing himself to his companions, he was almost sure to assume the national patois of the individual spoken to. In anything like a continued conversation with Harry Blount, his "h's" were handled in a most unfashionable ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... motives in putting forth this chapter of autobiography were two—first, there was "the great and glaring change" in his course of action with respect to the Established Church of Ireland, which was not due to the eccentricity or perversion of an individual mind, but to the silent changes going on at the very basis of modern society. Secondly, there was danger that a great cause then in progress might suffer in point of credit, if not of energy ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... mistakes are owing to the eccentricity of genius," said the doctor, bowing to Mother Hubbard. "Our landlady is what is called 'absent.' Here's a health to ...
— Prudy Keeping House • Sophie May
... parts of New England, and also from the Middle States, men of every shade of opinion, from the straightest orthodoxy to the wildest heresy, and many persons whose church was a church of one member only. A great variety of dialect and of costume was noticed; a great deal of confusion, eccentricity, and freak appeared, as well as of zeal and enthusiasm. If the Assembly was disorderly, it was picturesque. Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... indiscriminately into the shirt drawer, the underwear drawer, and even into no drawer at all. It was not uncommon in his new carelessness to let many of his clean clothes go directly back to the laundry without having ever been worn, a common eccentricity of impoverished bachelors. And this in the face of his favorite magazines, which at that time were fairly staggering with articles by successful authors against the frightful impudence of the condemned poor, such as the buying of wearable shirts and nice cuts of meat, ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... printer of the Dublin Evening Post, was full of shrewdness and eccentricity. Several prosecutions were instituted against him by the government, and many "keen encounters of the tongue" took place on these occasions between him and John Scott, Lord Clonmel, who was at the period Chief Justice of the King's Bench. In addressing the court in his own defence, Magee had ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various
... who, seeing I was miserable, took great pains to make me more so if possible. He proved,—to his own satisfaction if not altogether to mine,—that the abnormal position of certain molecules in the brain produced an eccentricity or peculiar bias in one direction which, practically viewed, might be described as an intelligent form of monomania, but which most people chose to term 'genius,' and that from a purely scientific standpoint ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... appendage as highly unprofessional, and when, soon after, the poor man found his way into a Lunatic Asylum, the neighbouring Doctors of the older school said that they were not surprised; that "there was a bad family history"; and that he himself had shown marked signs of eccentricity. That meant the moustache, and nothing else. Then, again, when was it first recognized as possible to take a pulse without the assistance of a gold chronometer? History is silent; but I am inclined to ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... the influences of surrounding nature, may find for some a more sufficient explanation in the fact that this letter was but one of a series, and that in the rover of doubted identity and incredible eccentricity Pere Jerome ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable
... Kepler. Long had the sublime intuition possessed him, that numerical and geometrical relations connect the distances, times, and revolutions of the planets. He began his studies on the planet Mars,—a fortunate choice, as the marked eccentricity of that planet would afford ready suggestions and verifications of the true law of irregularity, and on which Tycho had accumulated copious data. It had long been remarked that the angular velocity of each planet increases constantly in proportion as the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... to earn the smallest pittance. The Edinburgh started from the first on the principle that its contributors should be paid, and paid well, whether they liked it or not, thus establishing at once an inducement to do well and a check on personal eccentricity and irresponsibility; while whatever partisanship there might be in its pages, there was at any ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... belong to another school to you. My set detests the prosaic and commonplace; we must have the clever and original. Platitudes are detestable to us, unless they come clothed in a brilliant metaphor. Homely virtues I neither pretend to understand or admire. I much prefer eccentricity, even clever vice." ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... of the sum, it occurred to Birt, growing more familiar with the eccentricity of his companion, that he ought not in sheer silliness to throw away a ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... prominent in the same line—Together with a fund of humour he possesses a whimsical eccentricity of character which is always diverting; his voice however, is frequently too weak to be heard in the remote parts of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... world will never suppose a good motive where it can suppose a bad one. I would not willingly offend any of its prejudices. I would not affect eccentricity. At the same time, I do not feel disposed to be put out of my way because it is not the way of the world—Le Chemin du Monde, as a Frenchman entitled Congreve's comedy{1}—but I assure you these seven young women live here as they might do ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... kept in touch with the leading thoughts and achievements of his day. He was a brilliant scholar, a great logician, with a keen wit, having a dash of eccentricity throughout; in fact, he was a born philosopher, and a man of many parts. He was educated for missionary work to Liberia, but he remained at home and became one of the landmarks of Central Ohio in politics and medicine. He was born in 1815 and died in 1902, when, as it ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... declined the invitation, and departed. Having seen him off, Dimitri returned, and, smiling a faintly complacent smile as he did so, and rubbing his hands together (in all probability partly because he had sustained his character for eccentricity, and partly because he had got rid of a bore), started to pace the room, with an occasional glance at myself. I felt more offended with him than ever. "How can he go on walking about the room and grinning like that?" was my ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... unexpected, when two young persons of the opposite sex drift off somewhere under the stars on a summer night without giving any particular account of themselves; but one scarcely looks for that sort of social—or unsocial—eccentricity from two youths, especially two brothers. Nobody but Ruth and Tony, and possibly shrewd-eyed Sue, suspected a quarrel, but everybody was curious and ready to burst into interrogation upon the simultaneous return of the two young men which was quite as sudden ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... whims. Good actor as he was, like many other good actors he was usually out of an engagement, and he was invariably poor. It was always his poorest moment that he would choose for the indulgence of an odd, and surely kindly, eccentricity. He would half starve himself, go without drinks, forswear tobacco, deny himself car fares, till at last he had saved up five dollars. This by no means easy feat accomplished, he would have his five-dollar bill changed into five hundred pennies, filling ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... talked so little and her attention was so concentrated upon the lesson which she appeared to be studying, that her school companions left her entirely alone. Polly's passion for studying had always been regarded as an eccentricity. But now since she had announced on that afternoon that she had her own living to make there was possibly some excuse for her industry. Nevertheless the girls felt more convinced than ever that she was not in the least like any of the rest ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... Emerson himself than whimsical eccentricity or churlish austerity. But there was occasionally an air of bravado in some of his followers as if they had taken out a patent for some knowing machine which was to give them a monopoly of its products. They claimed more for each other than was reasonable,—so much occasionally that ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... owing to the fact that Golightly and William had already summed up the old fellow as "balmy on the bean," while their part was to humor him. Plain as a bursting shell seemed to William Miss Gravely's position in the household, and Steptoe's chivalry toward her an eccentricity which a sense of humor could enjoy. Otherwise they justified his reading of the fundamental non-morality of men, in bringing no condemnation to bear on anyone concerned. Being themselves two almost incapacitated heroes, with jobs likely to prove ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... eight o'clock he expired. He is a great loss to his family, of which he was by much the cleverest member, and he was well calculated to fill the situation in which fortune had placed him. His talents were certainly of a superior description, but their efficacy was counteracted by the eccentricity of his habits, the indolence of his mind, and his vacillating and uncertain disposition. He was, however, occasionally capable of intense application, and competent to make himself master of any subject he thought fit to grapple with; his mind was reflecting, combining, and ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Geoffry Fairfax and Elizabeth Bulmer. When Geoffry married, his brothers were both single men. The elder, Frederick, took to himself soon after a wife of rank and fortune; but there was no living issue of the marriage; and the lady, after a few years of eccentricity, went abroad for her health—that is, her husband was obliged to place her under restraint. Her malady was pronounced incurable, though her life might be prolonged. The second son, Laurence, had distinguished himself at Oxford, ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... in Havre that night. English people are credited in France with any form of eccentricity, so long as it conforms with traditions of le flegme britannique; but there was not much flegme about Liosha's embrace, and so the ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... it," Conners said. Professor Micheals' resting week was a ten-year-old custom, and his only eccentricity. All winter Micheals taught anthropology, worked on half a dozen committees, dabbled in physics and chemistry, and still found time to write a book a year. When summer came, he ...
— The Leech • Phillips Barbee
... balls and suppers in London were a source of perpetual delight to Marguerite, and she appreciated her husband's eccentricity keenly, which caused him to adopt this mode of taking her home every night, to their beautiful home by the river, instead of living in a stuffy London house. He loved driving his spirited horses along the lonely, moonlit roads, and she loved to sit on the box-seat, with ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... bankers. Please fill it up for a hundred pounds. I am sorry to trouble you, but 'necessity has no law,' as the old proverb says. I shall call to-night at the window for the cheque. You will find pen and ink in the desk. Pardon my little bit of eccentricity in bringing you here. When I have got the cheque you will soon be at liberty again, and none the worse, I trust, for your short captivity. I don't wish to proceed to extremities with a relation, but the money I must have. Only let me get the cheque, ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... conquerors, asking and giving no quarter, biding its time when opposed by the brave but crushing the fearful on sight. In one respect alone could it be depended upon—it was never the same. It is said to bring down annually four hundred million tons of mud, but its eccentricity in deciding where to wash away and where to deposit its load is still the despair of river pilots. The great river could destroy islands and build new ones overnight with the nonchalance of a child playing with clay. It could shorten itself thirty miles at ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... rises in rather dense tufts are sufficient to distinguish the plant from its numerous kin. This species produces no cleistogamous or blind flowers. Frequently the bird's-foot violet blooms a second time, in autumn, a delightful eccentricity of this family. The spur of its lower petal is long and very slender, and, as might be expected, the longest-tongued bees and butterflies are its most frequent visitors. These receive the pollen on the base of ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... explained diffidently, not wanting to enlarge on his mother's eccentricity. "She said good-bye and went out and shut the door. Then in a minute or two I looked up and saw her face against the glass.... I offered to open the door, but she shook ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... satellite's orbit from the sun would be greater or less than the distance of Jupiter from the sun by one one-two-thousandth part of the whole distance—that is, by a fifth part of the distance of the utmost satellite from the centre of Jupiter; an eccentricity of the orbit which would be very sensible. But the orbits of the satellites are concentric to Jupiter, and therefore the accelerative gravities of Jupiter and of all its satellites towards the sun, at equal distances from the sun, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... certain, many peculiarities. One was, that he never left his house, or ventured into the streets, save "like a but, in the dusk of the evening." He was, in short, what is called a "crank," and he gloried in his eccentricity. He desired that it might be written on his tombstone, "Here lies an Odd Man." For sixty years he had made no effort to attract popular attention, but in 1755 he had published a sort of romance, called Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain, and now he succeeded it by the truly ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... Winesburg grotesques, to unpack their hearts, to release emotions buried and festering. Wash Williams tries to explain his eccentricity but hardly can; Louise Bentley "tried to talk but could say nothing"; Enoch Robinson retreats to a fantasy world, inventing "his own people to whom he could really talk and to whom he explained the things he had been unable to explain to ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... Government to say, 'You shall bear arms,'" and threaten to "oppose every effort to introduce compulsory military service into Great Britain."[42] Here is a pretty collection of aliens from the commonwealth! It contains examples of almost every variety of anti-social eccentricity. So diverse and conflicting are the types of passive resistance represented that there is only one thing that can be predicated of all the members of all the groups, and it is this—that they ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... acquaintances, here and there, about town, I sometimes made Mr. Beasley the subject of inquiry. Everybody knew him. "Oh yes, I know Dave BEASLEY!" would come the reply, nearly always with a chuckling sort of laugh. I gathered that he had a name for "easy-going" which amounted to eccentricity. It was said that what the ward-heelers and camp-followers got out of him in campaign times made the political managers cry. He was the first and readiest prey for every fraud and swindler that came to Wainwright, I heard, and yet, ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... is in despair, and is as much at a loss to account for the eccentricity of his orchestra as the audience themselves. He says that the ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... the house began to be filled up with visitors from the city, who had been anxiously waiting the return of Mrs. Linwood. The character of Ernest for eccentricity and moodiness was so well known, that the peculiar situation in which he had placed himself did not attract immediate attention. But I knew I must appear, what I in reality was for the time, a neglected and avoided wife; and most bitterly, ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... are asking me a riddle? Well, then—Society, men of birth, men of recognised position, men above eccentricity, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... This eccentricity vexed the soul of the Quartier, where the chief use of money is to be borrowed. To me the idea of Paragot asking needy youngsters for the loan of five francs was exquisitely ludicrous; I am only setting down the impression of the Quartier regarding him. Not only did he never borrow ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... has so wearied you?" he asked. "This bag? And why, in the name of eccentricity, a bag? For an empty one, you might have relied on my own foresight; and this one is very far from being empty. My dear Count, with what trash have you come laden? But the shortest method is to see for myself." And he put down ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Louis' opinion, the result of certain affinities between the constituent elements of matter and those of mind, which proceed from the same source. The man holding a hazel rod when he found a spring of water was guided by some antipathy or sympathy of which he was unconscious; nothing but the eccentricity of these phenomena could have availed to give some of ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... of caprice and desire. They had neither nationality nor national ambition, and would sell their spears for a bunch of fish, as the saying goes. Their one consuming passion and one great wish was that they should not be overlooked, and, so long as the tribes respected this eccentricity, ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... rage, fear, mental anxiety or incompatibility, "if admitted to participation in the act of impregnation will each, in turn or in combination, often set the seal of their presence in the shape of idiocy, imbecility, eccentricity, or ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... invariability of the mean motions or mean distances, is dated 1773.[32] It was in 1784 only, that he established the stability of the other elements of the system from the smallness of the planetary masses, the inconsiderable eccentricity of the orbits, and the revolution of the planets in one ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... with smiles, but his friends came to the rescue, and proved that he was in the habit of writing names on every bit of paper which came to hand. That this eccentricity was well known, and his explanation should be received with favor. The grand jury, however, found an indictment against him, and he was held as an accomplice to ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... gazed wonderingly at the delicate, half-averted face, serious, lit up by the eagerness of a vital enthusiasm. And, having a somewhat sorrowful fund of learning to draw upon in respect of the dangers all eccentricity, either of character or development, inevitably brings along with it, she trembled, divining that noble and strong and pure though it was, that face, and the temperament disclosed by it, might work sorrow, both to its possessor and ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... I am not! I am a mere wanderer—a literary loafer—a student of men and manners. I read books, and I write them too,—this will perhaps explain the eccentricity of my behaviour in trying to read under ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... will dazzle them by his success and win their confidence. There is a certain wisdom in this course. There is a common sense in the mass of men which cannot be neglected with impunity, just as there is sure to be an eccentricity in the differing and reforming individual which it is perhaps well ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... again bowing and pressing his hand to his heart, "wiz so good a lady for his wife, I am sure he shall be so happy and so proud." Detecting the small vein of eccentricity in the little woman's character, Mr. Gusher was evidently inclined to encourage it, hoping that it would still further develop ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... with the valve rod. The straps are semicircular and held together by strong bolts, B B, passing through lugs, or thickenings at the ends of the semicircles. The sheave has a deep groove all round the edges, in which the straps ride. The "eccentricity" or "throw" of an eccentric is the distance between C^2, the centre of the shaft, and C^1, the centre of the sheave. The throw must equal half of the distance which the slide-valve has to travel over the steam ports. ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... district this was called free-thinking, and many people looked upon this free-thinking as an innocent and harmless eccentricity; it made him profoundly unhappy, however. It was for him the maggot of which he had just been speaking; it had fastened upon him and was sucking his life-blood. In his past there had been the strange marriage in the style of Dostoevsky; long ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... and could hit off to a hair an eccentricity or an affectation. The frown of Aunt Anna, who was severe, the smile of Aunt Rachel, who was sentimental, and the yawn of Cornelius Kewley, the clerk who was always sleepy, lived again in the roguish, rippling ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... who behaved stiffly, and, I could not help thinking, uncourteously to the rest of the party. Wyatt's conduct I did not so much regard. He was gloomy, even beyond his usual habit—in fact he was morose—but in him I was prepared for eccentricity. For the sisters, however, I could make no excuse. They secluded themselves in their staterooms during the greater part of the passage, and absolutely refused, although I repeatedly urged them, to hold communication with any ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... what evidence there is for the beliefs we hold. It is possible to foster the latter habit without creating the former. And it is possible to bring up the young in dissent from the common beliefs around them, or in indifference to them, without engendering any of that pride in eccentricity for its own sake, which is so little likeable a quality in either young or old. There is, however, little risk of an excess in this direction. The young tremble even more than the old at the penalties of nonconformity. There is more excuse for them in this. Such penalties ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... litterateurs; we expect that his popularity will be of slow growth, and never universal. Universal popularity a writer of the highest talent and genius can never secure, for his very loftiness of thought and impassioned eccentricity cut him off from the sympathy, and hence from the applause, of a vast section of humanity. But when contemporary prejudice and indifference shall clear up, and the question be summoned for final arbitration before the dispassionate tribunal ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... in a whispering commentary on the amiable widow Lynch, the convulsions within bade fair to blow the nasal organ off his face altogether. Laughter is catching. Pauline and Dominick, ere long, began to wish that Otto would hold his tongue. At last, some eccentricity of Joe Binney, or his brother, or Mrs Lynch, we forget which, raised the pressure to such a pitch that the safety-valves of all three became ineffective. They all exploded in unison, and poor Marsh was brought to consciousness, surprise, and a sitting ...
— The Island Queen • R.M. Ballantyne
... still superficially, the humorous view of Madame Munster. It was not at all true that he thought it very natural of her to have made this pious pilgrimage. It might have been said of him in advance that he was too good a Bostonian to regard in the light of an eccentricity the desire of even the remotest alien to visit the New England metropolis. This was an impulse for which, surely, no apology was needed; and Madame Munster was the fortunate possessor of several New England cousins. In ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... cut his hair perilously near the prizefighter's line, and never went into society, except for money. He was a model business man; the impresarios worshipped him. Such business ability, such frugality, such absence of eccentricity, such ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... and hand of a woman had been lacking, the flat in which Popinot lived had assumed an aspect in harmony with its master's. The indifference of a man who is absorbed in one dominant idea had set its stamp of eccentricity on everything. Everywhere lay unconquerable dust, every object was adapted to a wrong purpose with a pertinacity suggestive of a bachelor's home. There were papers in the flower vases, empty ink-bottles on the tables, plates that had been forgotten, matches used as tapers for a minute when something ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... the earnest sincerity of his ideas were widely appreciated, and within a somewhat confined circle of High Churchmen and Nonjurors he was cordially welcomed, and his services highly valued. He pushed his conformity to what he considered the usages of the Primitive Church to the verge of eccentricity. Yet 'indeed,' says Kennet, without any sympathy in his practices, but with a kindly smile, 'his piety and our ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... her presence could I not display, to its full extent, that mysterious feeling with which my heart embraces nature? Was not our intercourse a perpetual web of the finest emotions, of the keenest wit, the varieties of which, even in their very eccentricity, bore the stamp of genius? Alas! the few years by which she was my senior brought her to the grave before me. Never can I forget her firm mind or ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... length across their bosoms, not many can live down a turquoise ring set with pearls, and very few can bear the handicap of a bright gold front tooth. Artists, alone, may gratify their taste for velvet jackets, Tam-o'-Shanters, and Windsor ties, but the privilege is denied business men. Eccentricity of dress usually indicates eccentricity of temper, and we do not want temperamental business men. It is hard enough to get along with authors and artists and musicians. The business man who is wise wears conventional clothes of substantial material in conservative colors. Good sense ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... that he foretold a transit of Venus, in 1639, which these tables failed to indicate, and was the only observer of it. His life was short, but he accomplished a great deal, and rightly ascribed the lunar inequality called evection to variations in the value of the eccentricity and in the direction of the line of apses, at the same time correctly assigning the disturbing force of the Sun as the cause. He discovered the errors in Jupiter's calculated place, due to what we now know as the long inequality of Jupiter and ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... to all. Those traits have nothing incisive, nothing forcible: compared with Occidental faces they seem but 'half- sketched,' so soft their outlines are—indicating neither aggressiveness nor shyness, neither eccentricity nor sympathy, neither curiosity nor indifference. Some, although faces of youths well grown, have a childish freshness and frankness indescribable; some are as uninteresting as others are attractive; a few are beautifully feminine. But all are equally characterized ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... the lovely rope by which I had detained my prisoner. Then, with a quickening pulse, I waited. Would she stay? Would she spring up and escape? Would she thank me, or would she reply with some eccentricity unpredictable as her whim ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... There is, perhaps, a wider and more stimulating attraction of a dramatic kind in the study of characters which present a history of active and continuous growth; which, while absolutely free from flimsy caprice and disordered eccentricity, are ever surprising our attention by an unsuspected word of calm judgment or fertile energy, a fresh interest or an added sympathy, by the disappearance of some crudity or the assimilation of some new and richer quality. Of such gradual rise into full ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... of God's universe, nor so much as a single hint that I could have made a better one myself—I really do not know where my head can have been.' But while this omission will, he fears, render his book 'philosophically unimportant' he hopes that 'the eccentricity may please ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... paper forest in the background, would make six men pass muster very well for sixty, did not the fatally regular recurrence of the hero whose cotton armor bunches at the knees, and the other whose legs insist on the un-Grecian eccentricity of being straight in profile and crooked in a front view, bring us back to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... discourse somewhat abruptly, as is his wont; for we grant him a license, in virtue of his eccentricity, which we should hardly expect to be claimed ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... written in the best modern Lied style, and are quite unhackneyed. It is always the unexpected that happens, though this unexpected thing almost always proves to be a right thing. Without any sense of strain or bombast he reaches superb climaxes; without eccentricity he is individual; and his songs are truly interpreters of the words they express. Of these five, "Wann die Rosen aufgeblueht" is a wonderfully fine and fiery work; "Die Stunde sei gesegnet" has one of the most beautiful endings imaginable; "Mir ist, nun ich die habe" ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... old sailor's peculiarities—or, perhaps, it may have been an eccentricity—was, that in addressing himself to his companions, he was almost sure to assume the national patois of the individual spoken to. In anything like a continued conversation with Harry Blount, his "h's" were handled in a most unfashionable manner; and ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... cigar, which had fallen on the carpet. He had recovered his calm. "You are a better judge of evidence than I am," he said unemotionally. "Personally, I don't think the facts you have mentioned would convict me of anything but eccentricity. Who is this Harry Goldenburg, anyway? Beyond the fact that he's my double I know nothing of him. That's certainly a coincidence, but why on earth I should conceal anything I know ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... smiled indulgently and called it an artistic eccentricity, others looked upon it as a wise provision, in view of the many events which were crowding thick and fast in Paris just then, but to all, the real motive of that climax remained a puzzle and a mystery. ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... did well. He was always a man of iron nerve, and the story is still told in India how he crawled down a drain after a wounded man-eating tiger. There are some trees, Watson, which grow to a certain height and then suddenly develop some unsightly eccentricity. You will see it often in humans. I have a theory that the individual represents in his development the whole procession of his ancestors, and that such a sudden turn to good or evil stands for ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... one place at least a little band of white-robed people ascended a hill in sure expectation of the Second Advent, and patiently returned to be the laughing stock of their neighbours. This tradition, as I heard it in my childhood, was repeated as if it embodied nothing but eccentricity and absurdity, yet it naturally struck a child's mind with peculiar feelings of awe and pathos. Such an event appeared picturesque matter for a story. It was not easy to deal with; for in setting it, as was necessary, in close relation to the ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... rooms, being only one story in height: there is a wall by the road side, five feet high, the top of which is on a level with the top of the parlour windows; the entrance to it having been altered from the front to the side. The eccentricity of the owner appears, by terming that a hill, which on inspection will be found in a low situation, on the side of a hill. This is noticed, because his peculiar manner of writing, his quaint expressions, ...
— A Description of Modern Birmingham • Charles Pye
... growing warm with Rusper he would say: "Boil it some more, O' Man; boil it harder!" or "Six minutes at least," allusions Rusper could never make head or tail of, and got at last to disregard as a part of Mr. Polly's general eccentricity. For a long time that little tendency threw no shadow over their intercourse, but it contained within it the seeds of an ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... act so long as he holds his present post of tutor to the heir, which post he will retain only during Mrs Ingleton's pleasure. It is also provided that, in the event of any difference of opinion among the trustees, Mrs Ingleton (as is most proper) shall be permitted to decide; and lastly—a curious eccentricity on our dear friend's part, which was perhaps hardly necessary to insert—in the event of Roger Ingleton, previous to his attaining his majority, becoming a felon, a lunatic, or marrying, he is to be regarded as dead, and the property ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... I am a mere wanderer—a literary loafer—a student of men and manners. I read books, and I write them too,—this will perhaps explain the eccentricity of my behaviour in trying to read under the lamplight in ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... as soon as there was water on the floe. It was a wild night for boat service; and I felt some alarm mingle with my curiosity as I reflected on the danger of the landing. My old acquaintance, it was true, was the most eccentric of men; but the present eccentricity was both disquieting and lugubrious to consider. A variety of feelings thus led me toward the beach, where I lay flat on my face in a hollow within six feet of the track that led to the pavilion. Thence, I should have the satisfaction of recognizing the arrivals, and, if they should ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... our levity in playing games during the war, it would have been better to lacerate their feelings a little. They would very soon have got accustomed to our ways and come to regard our excitement over a League match as nothing worse than a curious form of eccentricity. ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... quickly through his locks unconsciously, so that it was singularly wild and rough. In times when it was the mode to imitate stage-coachmen as closely as possible in costume, and when the hair was invariably cropped, like that of our soldiers, this eccentricity was very striking. His features were not symmetrical (the mouth, perhaps, excepted), yet was the effect of the whole extremely powerful. They breathed an animation, a fire, an enthusiasm, a vivid and preternatural intelligence, that I ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... for some centuries the forms of the orbits in which the heavenly bodies move, and we had found these to be ellipses with a very small eccentricity. But why this was the form of those orbits no one could even conjecture. If any person, the most deeply skilled in mathematical science, and the most internally convinced of the universal prevalence of design and contrivance in the structure of the universe, had been ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... still on him, and a rush of old thoughts going through his head, all of which he set down afterwards to the effect of the heat. He put the fiddle away hastily, damning the bridge of it at the same time in loud but hurried tones, with the idea of covering any eccentricity which the wife might have noticed in his actions. "Must 'a' got a touch o' sun," he muttered to himself. He sat down, fumbled with knife, pipe, and tobacco, and presently stole a furtive glance over his shoulder at ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... while she gazed wonderingly at the delicate, half-averted face, serious, lit up by the eagerness of a vital enthusiasm. And, having a somewhat sorrowful fund of learning to draw upon in respect of the dangers all eccentricity, either of character or development, inevitably brings along with it, she trembled, divining that noble and strong and pure though it was, that face, and the temperament disclosed by it, might work sorrow, both to its possessor and to others, unless the enthusiasm animating it should ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... The Frenchman marvelled at the scruples of his guest, and, when that defender of innocence retired overseas and left his bills unpaid, he marvelled once again; the good and evil were, in his eyes, part and parcel of the same eccentricity; a shrug expressed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Gnosticism that art and science found an entrance into the Church. It preserved the Church from becoming stereotyped in form; but, built up entirely on ideas and not on historical facts, it died from its own hollowness and eccentricity. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... understanding it. When we love, by some noble method of our own or some nobility of mien or nature in the other, we apprehend the loved one by what is noblest in ourselves. When we are merely studying an eccentricity, the method of our study is but a series of allowances. To begin to understand is to begin to sympathise; for comprehension comes only when we have stated another's faults and virtues in terms of our own. Hence the proverbial toleration ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... may appear questionable in the eyes of strong-minded and unsentimental people. Would he exercise such personal power, it may be asked, if he were not regarded as a "novelty," if the eccentricity of his position in the nonconformist world had not so skilfully advertised him to a light and foolish generation ever ready to run after what is new? Of an Anglican clergyman's popularity I have heard it said, "Who could not fill a church with the ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... is needed for the oddity of the title of this chapter, it will not be to readers of Burton's Anatomy. The way in which the phrase "Those six non-natural things" occurs and recurs there; the inextinguishable tendency—in view of the eccentricity of its application—to forget that the six include things as "natural" (in a non-technical[407] sense) as Diet, to forget also what it really means and expect something uncanny—these are matters familiar to all Burtonians. And they may excuse the borrowing of that phrase as a general ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... which would require a mason to fill and put in proper shape again at an expense of solid Jersey shillings, struck his thrifty Scotch soul as folly. Still, if Colonel Lisle wished to indulge Mr. Max in this youthful eccentricity, it was not ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... stories. When other resources failed, we used to amuse ourselves by tormenting him; a fair compensation for the trouble he cost us. Tete Rouge rather enjoyed being laughed at, for he was an odd compound of weakness, eccentricity, and good-nature. He made a figure worthy of a painter as he paced along before us, perched on the back of his mule, and enveloped in a huge buffalo-robe coat, which some charitable person had given him at the fort. This extraordinary garment, which would ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... your drinking alone or with another woman; with anyone else, in fact, except when you are with me—and then moderately. Personally, I like a womanly woman; Dr. Harpe is—amusing—but I should not care to see you imitate her. One does not fancy eccentricity in one's wife. There, there," he kissed her magnanimously, "now we'll ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... and with God. We, here in England, like the old Greeks and Romans, dwellers in the busy mart of civilized life, have got to regard mere bustle as so integral an element of human life, that we consider a love of solitude a mark of eccentricity, and, if we meet any one who loves to be alone, are afraid that he must needs be going mad: and that with too great solitude comes the danger of too great self-consciousness, and even at last of insanity, none can doubt. But still we must ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... Fortunata. But the Signora? A mother? What did it all mean? Even the madness of the English could scarcely be so pronounced as to make such a proceeding as this quite a commonplace manifestation of the national life and eccentricity. He ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke; even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done; peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes; until by dint of not following their own nature they have no nature to follow; their human capacities are withered and starved; they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... dove, as fierce as a hawk when aroused; moving always in an eccentric orbit, which few understood; flashing out now and then gleams which some said were sparks of genius but which most people said were mere eccentricity, he had sunk into a recluse. He was in this state when he met HER. He always afterward referred to her so. He was at a reception when he came upon her on a stairway. A casual word about his life, a smile flashed from her large, dark, luminous ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... know those of a petulant woman one lives with. It was a bizarre and preposterous intimacy, in which Leavitt seemed to find a wholly acceptable substitute for human society, and there was something repellant about the man's eccentricity. He had various names for the smoking cone that towered a mile or more above his head: "Old Flame-eater," or "Lava-spitter," he would at times familiarly and irreverently call it; or, again, "The Maiden Who Never Sleeps," or "The Single-breasted ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... curious fact that this act of common humanity was regarded as something remarkable in the neighborhood; the grateful sot himself always said "it was mighty clever of Abe to tote me so far that cold night." It was also considered an eccentricity that he hated and preached against cruelty to animals. Some of his comrades remember still his bursts of righteous wrath, when a boy, against the wanton murder of turtles and other creatures. He was evidently of better ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... rare women who hate pretence even in another woman, but especially in a man. The really eccentric she was not afraid of—could even love, being a searcher after the new and strange, like so many modern pilgrims. But pinchbeck eccentricity—Brummagem originalities—gave to her views of the poverty of poor human nature leading her to a depression not ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... they say and do; and in each play he so combines and disposes the events and persons that the cumulative impression shall express his own judgment, indicate his own design, and convey his own feeling. His individuality is so vast, so purified from eccentricity, and we grasp it so imperfectly, that we are apt to deny it altogether, and conceive his mind as impersonal. In view of the multiplicity of his creations, and the range of thought, emotion, and character they include, it is a common ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... unmarried, in the seventy-first year of his age, Aloysius William Saffron, formerly of Exeter, Surveyor and Auctioneer. He had run, on the whole, a creditable course; starting from small beginnings, and belonging to a family more remarkable for eccentricity than for any solid merit, he had built up a good practice; he had made money and put it by; he enjoyed a good name for financial probity. But he was held to be a vain, fussy, self-important, peacocky fellow; very self-centered also and (as Beaumaroy ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... community will endure without comment and without protest will vary naturally enough with the character of the community. A cosmopolitan community like New York City can and does endure a great deal in the way of individual eccentricity that a smaller city like Boston would not tolerate. In any case, and this is the point of these observations, even in the most casual relations of life, people do not behave in the presence of others as if they were living alone like Robinson Crusoe, each on his individual island. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... taste on earth will have inartistic equivalents. Everyone will not be quiet in tone, or harmonious, or beautiful. Occasionally, as I go through the streets to my work, I shall turn round to glance again at some robe shot with gold embroidery, some slashing of the sleeves, some eccentricity of cut, or some discord or untidiness. But these will be but transient flashes in a general flow of harmonious graciousness; dress will have scarcely any of that effect of disorderly conflict, of self-assertion qualified by the fear of ridicule, that it ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... and certainly he was not quite sane, if we place sanity in justness of external perception, adaptation to matter, and docility to the facts; but his lack of sanity was not due to any internal corruption; it was not even an internal eccentricity. He was like a child, like a Platonic soul just fallen from the Empyrean; and the child may be dazed, credulous, and fanciful; but he is not mad. On the contrary, his earnest playfulness, the constant ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... standard of astronomical measurements—the earth's distance from the sun. Have you personally measured the earth's radius, observed the transit of Venus in 1769, from Lapland to Tahiti at the same time, calculated the sun's parallax, and the eccentricity of the earth's orbit? Would you profess yourself competent to take even the preliminary observation for fixing the instruments for such a reckoning? Were you ever within a thousand miles of the proper positions for making such observations? ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... touch with the leading thoughts and achievements of his day. He was a brilliant scholar, a great logician, with a keen wit, having a dash of eccentricity throughout; in fact, he was a born philosopher, and a man of many parts. He was educated for missionary work to Liberia, but he remained at home and became one of the landmarks of Central Ohio in politics and medicine. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... better one myself.—I really do not know where my head can have been. I seem to have forgotten all that makes it glorious to be man.—'Tis an omission that renders the book philosophically unimportant; but I am in hopes the eccentricity ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of New Canaan the Doc was considered the most blasphemous man in America, but there seemed to be a sort of general impression in the village that his profanity was, in some way, an eccentricity ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... in Edinburgh to bring such a party together; and yet they affect there to have a metropolitan character. In saying this, I mean only with reference to manners; the methods of behaviour in each of the company were precisely similar—there was no eccentricity, but only that distinct and decided individuality which nature gives, and which no acquired habits can change. Each, however, was the representative of a class; and Edinburgh has no classes exactly of the same kind as those to which they ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... of the ablative, when the ablative was absolutely necessary, aroused once more the hilarity of the audience, and proved that Sister Claire's devil was just as poor a Latin scholar as the superior's, and Barre, fearing some new linguistic eccentricity on the part of the evil spirit, adjourned ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... for my own pleasure that I have not been able to see more of this artist's pictures from whom I think our own Theodore Robinson must have gained a deal of strength for his own bridge building between Bastien Le Page and the Monet "eccentricity," ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... Addison's comment about these two favourite comedians shows that then, as now, eccentricity in dress formed a ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... point of view. If my impressions are correct, our educational planing mill cuts down all the knots of genius, and reduces the best of the men who go through it to much the same standard. Does not the Harvard professor of to-day always dine in a dress coat? Is he not free from every eccentricity? Do the students ever call him "Benny" or "Tobie"? Is any "Old Soph" [3] now ambulant on the college green? Is not the administration of the library a combination of liberality and correctness? Is such a librarian as John ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... an act may redeem it from this vulgarizing taint of oddity. Reflection may satisfy us, as in the present case it did satisfy those persons who were best acquainted with Lord Carlisle's public character, that this eccentric step had been adopted, not in ostentation, with any view to its eccentricity, but in spite of its eccentricity, and from impulses of large prospective benignity that would not suffer itself to be defeated by ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... annihilated the French armies in Italy by the desperate daring of his attacks. Wherever Suwarrow came, he was conqueror. In his whole career he had never been beaten. The soldiery told numberless tales of his eccentricity—laughed at, mimicked, and adored him. The nation honoured him as the national warrior. But the failure of some of his detached corps in Switzerland had embarrassed the campaign; and Paul, capricious as the winds, hastily recalled him. The popular indignation now burst out in every form of anger. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... them to the peculiar consideration of the young ladies, if it were not that some of the gentle creatures whom we hold in such high respect, are perhaps a little too apt to confound a great many heavier terms with the light word eccentricity, which we beg them henceforth to take in a strictly Johnsonian sense, without any liberality or ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... daring, the clear-headed excitement, that impelled, at once, and guided them over the world. In the center, the silent and patient firmness of the Breton [Headnote 2], who yet, in the hour of danger, could display a quite sublime eccentricity. And, lastly, the Norman [Headnote 3] wariness, considerately courageous; daring all, but daring all for success. Such was the beauty of man, in that sovereign ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... many of Keene's middle-class protagonists are peculiar and exceptional, and much of their humour lies in their eccentricity, they are characters themselves, rather than types of English characters. Are they really observed and drawn from life, do they really exist just as they are, or are they partly evolved from the depths of an inner consciousness ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... in his veins, can only be described as an impertinence—not to Browning but to the Jewish race. As if to feel the spiritual genius of Hebraism and to be moved by the pathos of Hebraic fate were an eccentricity only to be accounted for by the bias of kin! It is significant that his demonstrable share of German blood left him rather conspicuously impervious to the literary—and more especially to the "metaphysical"—products of ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... addition of rich pastoral regions to the already settled districts was altogether due to Angas McMillan's energy, and is now known as Gippsland, being named officially after Sir George Gipps, the Governor who had the amusing eccentricity of insisting that all the towns laid out during his term of office should have no public squares included within their boundaries, being convinced that public squares ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... amount raised by the states, whether by means of repudiated paper or of taxes, down to 1784, as not more than $30,000,000. No wonder if the issue of such a struggle seemed quite hopeless. In many parts of the country, by the year 1786, the payment of taxes had come to be regarded as an amiable eccentricity. At one moment, early in 1782, there was not a single dollar in the treasury. That the government had in any way been able to finish the war, after the downfall of its paper money, was due to the gigantic efforts of ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... which should have reached me in the morning of yesterday, I did not receive until nearly midnight—partly through the eccentricity of our new postman whose good pleasure it is to make use of the letter-box without knocking; and partly from the confusion in the house, of illness in different ways ... the very servants being ill, ... one of them breaking a blood-vessel—for ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... accomplished daughter of Chan Hung. Possessing no son or heir to succeed him, the Mandarin exhibited towards Lila a very unusual depth of affection, so marked, indeed, that when certain evil-minded ones endeavoured to encompass his degradation, on the plea of eccentricity of character, the written papers which they dispatched to the high ones at Peking contained no other accusation in support of the contention than that the individual in question regarded his daughter with an obvious pride and pleasure ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... a young man of a brilliant Byronic sort of nature. There was much in his character and temperament which often recalls to the mind of the reader the generous impulse, the chivalric ardor, and the impetuous eccentricity of Byron. Tone, as a youth, was a careless student, or, indeed, to put it more distinctly, he only studied the subjects he cared about and was in the habit of neglecting his {310} collegiate tasks until the hour arrived when ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... pianist. The beginner must go according to rule, until he has thoroughly mastered the rules. He must not think because he sees a great artist holding his hands a certain way at times—turning under his unemployed fingers for octaves perhaps, or any other seeming eccentricity, that he himself is at liberty to do the same things. No, he must learn to play in a normal, safe way before attempting any tricks. What may seem eccentric to the inexperienced student may be quite a legitimate means of producing ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... liked him really. Everyone who got to know him said that he improved on acquaintance. His eccentricity increased as he grew older, but particularly after he had lost ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... unexpected analogies becomes to the reader of his works a matter of continual wonder. Strange and curious contrasts and likenesses, both mental and. verbal, which might never once occur even to a mind of more than common eccentricity and invention, seem to have been in his mind with the ordinary flow of thinking. Plenteous and sustained, therefore, as his wit is, it never fails to startle. We have no doubt of his endless resources, and yet each new instance becomes a new marvel. His wit, too, is usually ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... as if unconscious of what they were doing. It seemed a wonder that some of them—semi-somnambulists in a double sense—did not fall overboard into the water. But they did not. Notwithstanding the eccentricity of their movements, they all succeeded in maintaining their position on the raft. To tumble over the edge would have been tantamount to toppling into the jaws of an expectant shark, and getting "scrunched" between no less than six rows of sharp teeth. Perhaps it was an instinct—or some presentiment ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... took place in the great American State of California in October, 1911. Other States had given women votes before, but they were smaller communities, where the movement could still be regarded as an eccentricity, a mere whimsicality. When, however, California in 1911 granted full suffrage to her women, almost half a million in number, the movement became obviously important. The vote of California might well turn the scale in a Presidential election. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... was now between thirty-three and thirty-four years old. She was absolutely free from any artistic self-consciousness, from any eccentricity of either temper or manner. 'Hers was a mind well balanced on a basis of good sense, sweetened by an affectionate heart, and regulated by fixed principles; so that she was to be distinguished from many other amiable and sensible ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... with a half inclination of extricating her hand, and a penetrating glance of doubt, directed full in the face of the speaker: "I know not," said Horatio, (hesitating, as if fearful of giving offence), "but,"-"But what?" said my aunt;-"But I fear his natural love of independence, and eccentricity of mind, will admit of no constraint, which his high sense of honor will anticipate must be partially the case whenever he submits himself to accept the favors of even such generous hearts as yours." "He would feel ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... difficult to describe. It has an individuality, but an elusive one; yet not through any queerness or difficult shade of eccentricity; a subtly normal, an indefinably obvious personality. It is a healthy, cheerful city (by modern standards); a clean-shaven, pink-faced, respectably dressed, fairly energetic, unintellectual, passably sociable, ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... thick, yellow coat and long, sharp teeth, a half-savage beast, bearing the name of Ortog (Satan), were Marsa's companions in her walks; and their submission to their young mistress, whom they could have knocked down with one pat of their paws, gave the Tzigana reputation for eccentricity; which, however, neither pleased nor displeased her, as she was perfectly indifferent to the opinion of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... "Henry V.," and Malvolio especially later; though Shakespeare never employed the method of humours for an important personage. It was not Jonson's fault that many of his successors did precisely the thing that he had reprobated, that is, degrade "the humour: into an oddity of speech, an eccentricity of manner, of dress, or cut of beard. There was an anonymous play called "Every Woman in Her Humour." Chapman wrote "A Humourous Day's Mirth," Day, "Humour Out of Breath," Fletcher later, "The Humourous Lieutenant," and Jonson, besides "Every Man Out of His Humour," ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... abnormality, anomaly; anomalousness &c. adj[obs3].; exception, peculiarity; infraction of law, breach, of law, violation of law, violation of custom, violation of usage, infringement of law, infringement of custom, infringement of usage; teratism[obs3], eccentricity, bizarrerie[obs3], oddity, je ne sais quoi[Fr], monster, monstrosity, rarity; freak, freak of Nature, weirdo, mutant; rouser, snorter* [U.S.]. individuality, idiosyncrasy, originality, mannerism. aberration; irregularity; variety; singularity; exemption; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... complications was this part of the process completed. This was, after all, the real tug of war. Many unknown quantities existed: its mass, its distance, its eccentricity, the obliquity of its orbit, its position—nothing was known, in fact, about the planet except the microscopic disturbance it caused in Uranus, several thousand million miles away from it. Without going into further detail, suffice it to say that in June, 1846, he published his last ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... same may be said of small cups. A plain-surfaced breakfast-cup is perhaps the best to use; and the interior should be white and have no pattern printed upon it, as this confuses the clearness of the picture presented by the leaves, as does any fluting or eccentricity of shape. ...
— Tea-Cup Reading, and the Art of Fortune-Telling by Tea Leaves • 'A Highland Seer'
... with its serried benches upon which clustered two hundred lads hushed in attentive respect, and when I set myself to inquire whither have fled the two hundred souls, so closely bound together by the ascendency of one man, I count more than one case of waste and eccentricity; as might be expected, I can count archbishops, bishops, and other dignitaries of the Church, all to a certain extent enlightened and moderate in their views. I come upon diplomatists, councillors of state, and others, whose honourable careers ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... a gentleman, but he was tall, robust, broad-shouldered, with eagle-like beak, and keen gray eyes that were fitting accompaniments to so distinguished a feature. His dress was rather careless, but his air and the expression of his face evinced a mixture of eccentricity and a sense of superiority. At least, it had evinced this until the singing of Tara. Then he broke down. First he bowed his head down, resting his forehead upon his hands, which were supported by ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... the slight curve of the bank for miles. It appeared irregular and low, slightly diversified by small, marshy islands, similar to this we occupied, possibly cloven from the mainland by some eccentricity of current. Occasionally I distinguished openings into lagoons, such passages into the low-lying mainland being evidenced by the deeper green of the vegetation bordering them, as well as by wind-twisted trees clinging ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... between them. It was also agreed to reestablish the ancient republics of Greece. The emperor, Joseph II., received an earnest invitation to visit Moscow, which he accepted, but, with characteristic eccentricity, refused to travel with the queen, as he was excessively annoyed by the trammels of etiquette and ceremonial pomp. The empress, consequently, returned to St. Petersburg, and Joseph II. set out for Moscow ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... brains. I began to be spoken of as one equal to the highest affairs of the state, and to whom the viceroyalty itself lay naturally open. But I still longed for a return to England. Delighted as I was with the grace of the higher ranks, amused with the perpetual whim and eccentricity of the lower, and feeling that general attachment to Ireland which every man not disqualified by loss of character must feel, my proper position was in that country where my connexions, my companionships, and my habits, had been formed. A new viceroy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... distrustful. Candle in hand, he commenced to descend, looking carefully where he placed his feet. As everywhere else, the woodwork was worm-eaten, and the timbers set up a dismal creaking under the weight of his body, but he had undertaken to investigate the meaning of this architectural eccentricity, and would not now turn back. On he crept, noiselessly as possible, adown the twisting stairs, carefully looking ahead for pitfalls and unsuspected developments. Once he paused, thinking he heard the distant tread of a foot, but the sound died away, and he resumed ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... blaspheme. This ancestral house of a great rich race, which is kept up by the ministrations of a single aged female servant, stands in pure Cloud-Cuckoo Land. The absence of practical amenities in the Rosmer family might be set down to eccentricity, if all the other personages were not equally ill-provided. Rebecca, glorious heroine according to some admirers, "criminal, thief and murderess," as another admirer pleonastically describes her, is a sort of troll; nobody can explain—and yet an explanation ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... house of his uncle, John Goldsmith, Esq., of Ballyoughter, in that vicinity. He now entered upon studies of a higher order, but without making any uncommon progress. Still a careless, easy facility of disposition, an amusing eccentricity of manners, and a vein of quiet and peculiar humor, rendered him a general favorite, and a trifling incident soon induced his uncle's family to concur in his ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... is not a faddist proposal, not a perplexing ingenious complication of a simple business; it is the carefully worked out right way to do something that hitherto we have been doing in the wrong way. It is no more an eccentricity than is proper baking in the place of baking amidst dirt and with unlimited adulteration, or the running of trains to their destinations instead of running them without notice into casually selected sidings ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... 2. Avoid eccentricity.—Eccentricity is the deliberate endeavor to make ourselves different from those around us. (a) Some show it in their dress by wearing garments often of outrageous shape and hue. (b) Some show it in their speech by striving to say things that they think especially smart. (c) Some show ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... characteristic once when a young cousin of mine, a girl at the most susceptible age of hero-worship, meeting him for the first time in our chambers and volunteering, in the absence of anybody else available, to fetch the cab he needed, thought his allowing her to go on such an errand for him the eccentricity of genius and never suspected his lameness until he stood up and took his crutch from the corner. There was nothing about him to ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... in a cursory manner will imagine, that he beholds a solid, compacted, uniform system of monarchy; in which all inferior jurisdictions are but as rays diverging from one centre. But on examining it more nearly, you find much eccentricity and confusion. It is not a monarchy in strictness. But, as in the Saxon times this country was an heptarchy, it is now a strange sort of PENTARCHY. It is divided into five several distinct principalities, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... imitations of it by persons of genius and talent: but this particular instance is unfortunate to the verge of the preposterous, if not over it. The eighteenth century was indeed almost the capital time of English eccentricity: and it was also a time of licence which sometimes looked very like lawlessness. But its eccentricities were not at this special period romantic: and its lawlessness was rather abuse of law than wholesale neglect of it. A rascally attorney or a stony-hearted creditor might inflict ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... eccentricity took a shape which considerably lessened their enthusiasm. Kiffin, the new boy, occupied the seat next to Paul; he was a nervous-looking little fellow, with a pale face and big pathetic brown eyes like a seal's, and his dress bore plain evidence of a mother's careful supervision, having ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... the "gentilhomme Breton" who is so well known for telling the most terrible adventures. He had lately returned from Europe to establish a large sugar manufactory. His enterprise, however, was a failure. The house of the lively old gentleman, whose eccentricity had led him to adopt the dress and the frugal habits of the natives, was neither clean or well kept, although he had a couple of friends to assist him in the business, a Scotchman, and a young Frenchman who had lived in the most refined ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... treasures which no eyes but his ever behold. He is said to have the finest collection of pictures in the south of England, though nobody ever sees them to judge; pictures, fiddles and furniture are his hobby, and he is undoubtedly very eccentric. Nor can one deny that there has been considerable eccentricity in his treatment of his son. For years Sir Bernard paid his debts, and the other day, without the slightest warning, not only refused to do so any more, but absolutely stopped the lad's allowance. Well, I'll tell you what has happened; but first of all you must ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... them would enable them to provide handsomely for themselves, the servants and workpeople about shook their heads, and said it was "aye weel kenned that the auld laird had a bee in his bonnet;" while the class with whom Mr. Hogarth associated on more equal terms declared; that this last eccentricity of affection (for it was all done out of pure love), surpassed all his other oddities with regard to the girls, which had long been the talk ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... other men; he has been knocked about by passion and circumstance. All his life he has had a dislike for iron rules and common-place maxims. There is something of the gipsy in his nature. He is to some extent eccentric, and he indulges his eccentricity. And the misfortunes of men of letters—the vulgar and patent misfortunes, I mean—arise mainly from the want of harmony between their impulsiveness and volatility, and the staid unmercurial world with which they are brought into conflict. They are unconventional in a world of conventions; ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... on to achievements. Every age, every person, and every art obeys the wand of the enchanter. History moves by indirections. The first historic tendency is likely to be slightly askew; there follows then an historic triumph, then an historic eccentricity, then an historic folly, then an explosion; and then the series begins again. In the grade of folly, hard upon an ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... Princess seemed to think total ruin rather an amusing incident. She had always complained that the Romans were very dull; for she was not a Roman herself, but came of a very great old Polish family, the members of which had been distinguished for divers forms of amiable eccentricity during ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... none of its numerous folds, concealed a single movement, a single impulse, which was not dictated by the nicest sense of honor, the most delicate appreciation of affection. Yet no nature was ever more formed to justify eccentricity, whims, and abrupt caprices. His imagination was ardent, his feelings almost violent, his physical organization weak, irritable and sickly. Who can measure the amount of suffering arising from such contrasts? It must have been bitter, but he never allowed it to be seen! He kept the secret of his ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... one, because I wished to contemplate the treasures of art there quite after my own way, and, as I thought, to allow no one to perplex me. Besides this, so simple a matter became more complicated by still another eccentricity. ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... London might. To spell his pronunciation Dyvis is to burlesque it slightly, but that is as near as it can be given phonetically. Several other words containing a long a were sounded by him in the same way, and to my ear the rest of his speech had a related eccentricity. I am told that other men educated in certain Philadelphia schools have a similar diction, but at that time many of Mr. Davis's new acquaintances thought the manner was an affectation. I mention the peculiarity, which after years ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various
... before her appearance in it, a man named Stephenson. He was unmarried, and the last of his family. This person led a solitary and secluded life, and exhibited during the last years of his existence strong symptoms of eccentricity, which, for some months before his death, assumed a character of unquestionable derangement. He was found one morning hanging by a halter in his own stable, where he had, under the influence of his malady, committed ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... the eccentricity of the flood may be gathered from the fact that houses that were situated at Woodvale and points above Johnstown are piled at the lower end of the town, while some massive houses have been lifted and carried from the lower end as far as the cemetery at ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... said Jimmie Dale whimsically. "This is what probably put the idea into his head, after first, in some way, having discovered old Max Diestricht's hiding place; and, if I had given him time enough, he would probably have stuck one of these seals, in clumsy imitation of that little eccentricity of mine, on the wall over there to stamp the job as genuine. You begin to get it, don't you Lannigan? Pretty sure-fire as an alibi, eh? And he'd have got away with it, too, as far as you were concerned. He had only to fire that shot, smash the window, tuck his false ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... seven hundred a year. The house-mothers from whom she sought information were puzzled at this sudden curiosity about domestic matters. They looked upon the thing as a freak of girlhood which drifted into eccentricity, from sheer idleness; yet they were not the less ready to teach Mary anything she desired to learn. They told her those secret arts by which coppers and brasses are made things of beauty, and meet adornment ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... months, the chubby little eccentricity revolved in his humble orbit among the castor-oil bushes and in the dust; always fashioning magnificent palaces from stale flowers thrown away by the bearer, smooth water-worn pebbles, bits of broken glass, and feathers pulled, I ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... recently published his 'Book of Praise;' but if the Attorney General, instead of printing his select hymns had seen fit to exemplify their beauties with his own voice from the stall of a church-singer, the piety of his conduct would have scarcely reconciled Lord Palmerston to its dangerous eccentricity. ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... and allow of. If the will of God is not thus expressed, a ritual must still be drawn up. In a matter that excites the mind, as religion does, and where a large field is open for hallucination and eccentricity, it will not do to have individuals parading methods of worship of their own invention. Here the Greek maxim comes in, [Greek: tima tho daimonion katha tha patria], "honour the Deity after the fashion of thy country." ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... illuminating viewpoint of his own. This was mid-winter, two years after the end of the War, where Dick and his uncle had worked in the Ambulance Corps to the limit of their capacities—Dick, no soldier, because of what seemed to him a diabolic eccentricity of imperfect sight, and Raven, blocked by what he felt to be the negligible disability of age. John Raven had, with the beginning of the War—which, as early as 1914 he had decided to be his war—made up his mind that although ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... as among the moderns, promote the principal activities of the characters? Less the actions than the moods of these novels have the epic air. Narrow as Miss Cather's scene may be, she fills it with a spaciousness and candor of personality that quite transcends the gnarled eccentricity and timid inhibitions of the local colorists. Passion blows through her chosen characters like a free, wholesome, if often devastating wind; it does not, as with Miss Jewett and her contemporaries, lurk in furtive corners ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... resembling the vagrants. He was clad without any attention to the toilette, after the manner of the German student, who likes to affront the Pharisee but without overmuch eccentricity. Under the voluminous cloak, warranted by the chilly wind, a tight-fitting tunic of dark green cloth, caught in by a broad buff leather belt with the clasp of a University, admirably defined the shapeliness of a slight but manly form. His hair, ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... mathematician would say, its eccentricity is increased. It is also useful to study the changes which the form of the ellipse undergoes when one of the pins is altered, while the length of the loop remains unchanged. If the two pins be brought nearer together the eccentricity will decrease, and the ellipse will approximate more closely to the shape of a circle. If the pins be separated more widely the eccentricity of the ellipse will be increased. That the circle is an extreme form of ellipse will be evident, if we suppose ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... something in that, too!' cried the lawyer. 'Ay, certainly, a great deal in that. All the witnesses drowned but one, and he safe in prison; you yourself changed beyond recognition—let us hope—and walking the streets of the very town you have illustrated by your—well, your eccentricity! It is not badly ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... find him attributing solely to the influences of surrounding nature, may find for some a more sufficient explanation in the fact that this letter was but one of a series, and that in the rover of doubted identity and incredible eccentricity Pere Jerome had ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable
... been of great importance to him; my father, though himself of a very sweet disposition, was most unhappy. His parents looked upon him as moonstruck, while he himself, whatever his aspirations, was conscious that he had done nothing to justify the eccentricity of his course, or the violation of all prudential considerations in which he daily indulged. In these perplexities, the usual alternative was again had recourse to—absence; he was sent abroad, to travel in France, which ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... an overweening estimate of themselves and their native customs, should spend a few weeks in a Paris boarding-house, somewhere in the Faubourg St. Honore—if he would have the full aroma of British conceit. The most surprising feature of the English quarter of the French capital is the eccentricity of the English visitors, as it strikes their own countrymen. I cannot find it in me to blame Gallican caricaturists. The statuettes which enliven the bronze shops; the gaunt figures which are in the chocolate establishments; ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... man is the history of his mind. And that is why you have heard so little of late about the simplest, noblest, and most unfortunate of all my personages. Insanity is as various as eccentricity. I have spared the kind-hearted reader some of David's vagaries. However, when we parted with him, he had settled into that strange phase of lunacy, in which the distant past seems nearly obliterated, and memory ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... the MS. suggests that, either the sun is traveling on an orbit of great eccentricity, or else that it was approaching the green star on a lessening orbit. And at this moment, I conceive it to be finally torn directly from its oblique course, by the gravitational pull of ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... of his wife, and by the brisk and eager conversation of the old gentleman. He was acquainted in his earlier days with my predecessor, of twenty-five years previous date, Dr. West, himself a remarkable man in his day, [72] and almost equally so, both for his eccentricity and his sense. An eccentric clergyman, by the by, is rarely seen now; but in former times it was a character as common as now it is rare. The commanding position of the clergy the freedom they felt to say and do what they pleased brought that trait out in high relief. ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... English binding, like French, became purely imitative in its designs; but while in our own decade the French artists have endeavoured to shake themselves free from old traditions by mere eccentricity, in England we have several living binders, such as Mr. Cobden Sanderson and Mr. Douglas Cockerell, who work with notable originality and yet with the strictest observance of the canons of ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... Another reason why Newman did not appeal to these non-studious ones was attributable to the fact that he was, in many ways, very eccentric both in manner and dress. Now, everyone who knows the average English boy at all, knows that if there is one thing he cannot stand it is eccentricity. To be eccentric is to be taboo. As regards the "correct" thing to wear, and the "correct" thing to do and how to do it, he is generally quite as particular as the average young woman over fashion. And anyone who offends in these respects has his name written ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... so inoffensive in this young man's eccentricity, that Derrick found it impossible to be affronted; he leant back, filled his pipe, and smoked in silence for a minute or two; then, driven by the ardour of his desire, by that longing to talk round about, if not directly of, his heart's idol, ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... age of seventy, what with his art and the eccentricity of his life, he became raving mad, at which Messer Francesco Guicciardini, a noble Florentine, and a most trustworthy writer of the history of his own times, who was then Governor of Bologna, found ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari
... unwound it, glancing to right and left. Now Jim amid ordinary events was an acknowledged fool, and had a wife to remind him of it; but perch him out of female criticism, on a dizzy foothold such as this, and set him a desperate job, and you clarified his wits at once. This eccentricity was so notorious that the two men above halted in ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... landladies, among whom were several lifelong residents, on friendly terms of old time with the Jordan family. To them it seemed an astonishing thing that a man in such circumstances had not yet married; granting this eccentricity, they could not imagine what made him change his abode so often. Not a landlady in Islington but would welcome Mr. Jordan in her rooms, and, having got him, do her utmost to prolong the connection. He ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... now to an eccentricity, engendered of loneliness, that altered the whole course of his life. Want had battered down his door. Truth had been evolved from despair. He was at last to have a flash ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... one of the dilapidated lodges on the place, with very little between her and starvation beyond the old-age pension, supplemented by contributions from charity. The old woman was nearer ninety than eighty, but was still lively and intelligent, despite her eccentricity. The big apron she was wearing was full of sticks and she had a bundle in ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... and buddings; but more wonderful far than anything there, are the mysterious blendings and outbursts of what is old and forgotten, along with what is wholly new and strange, and all going to produce often what we call sometimes eccentricity, and sometimes originality ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... one of them losing his senses? They don't do it—believe me. I know they say every man has his loco point," Mr. Bunner added reflectively, "but that doesn't mean genuine, sure-enough craziness; it just means some personal eccentricity in a man ... like hating cats ... or my own weakness of not being able to touch any ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... from Elizabethan conceits. It is difficult to appreciate the difference for a great artist in having the general taste with rather than against the purer tendencies of his art. Probably the Greeks and certain Italians owe their freedom from eccentricity, in a very large measure, to this cause. But I intend to treat these questions more at length in dealing with Duerer's character as an artist and creator. It was necessary to touch on the subject here, because Maximilian embodies the peculiar and fantastic aftergrowth, which sprouted up in some ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... seen since the game and he had stayed so close to his room—it had been reported—that he had even had his meals sent up to him, refusing all interviews as well as callers. This in itself was unusual—but that was John Brown. Eccentricity was expected of a man who had been in the habit of accomplishing such astounding results with raw human material and a football. To those who flattered themselves that they reasoned, it was decided that John Brown, incurring ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... now enter upon an investigation of the LANDSCAPES OF REMBRANDT, which, equally with his portraits, are quite peculiar to himself, but differing from all others not from any eccentricity of manner, but from their giving the real essence and character of the scene, when denuded of any trifling and extraneous matters. Whatever Rembrandt touched was impressed with the peculiar characteristics of his genius; hence it is that the smallest stroke in his etchings is ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... cleric that was to be, and the pedagogue laying on! My father asked concerning the accuracy of some of Borrow's statements in his books, to which Martineau replied that he could not be entirely depended on; not that he meant to mislead or misrepresent, but his imagination, or some eccentricity in his mental equipment, caused him occasionally to depart from literal fact. Very possibly; but Borrow's imagination brought him much nearer to essential truth than adherence to what they supposed to be literal ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... above letter Mr. C. pronounces himself happy, but as no condition, in this changeable world, is either perfect happiness or misery, so the succeeding letter presents Mr. C. over-powered, almost, with a feeling of despondency! The calculation of the course which genius, combined with eccentricity, would be likely to pursue, must be attended with uncertainty, but the probability is, that had Mr. C's mind been easy at this time, surrounded by domestic quiet and comparative seclusion, he might have been ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... I could not help thinking, uncourteously to the rest of the party. Wyatt's conduct I did not so much regard. He was gloomy, even beyond his usual habit—in fact he was morose—but in him I was prepared for eccentricity. For the sisters, however, I could make no excuse. They secluded themselves in their staterooms during the greater part of the passage, and absolutely refused, although I repeatedly urged them, to hold communication with any person ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... wandering like two lovers in the wood,—I imagined that Zenobia, at an earlier period of youth, might have fallen into the misfortune above indicated. And when her passionate womanhood, as was inevitable, had discovered its mistake, here had ensued the character of eccentricity and defiance which distinguished the more public portion ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... omelettes. She scorned them and brought along a generous store of raw steak and bacon and potatoes. A picnic without a fire and roasting meat was too namby-pamby for words; and though she would not now undertake to cook the food herself, because of a certain eccentricity of the knee joints, and since her daughter, despite her domestic science, declined to do so, she had brought along Julia the cook. Nothing but the big limousine would do for such an undertaking, and, as it was, Furbush had to nurse the steak in his lap. Mrs. Norris would have reached the picnicking ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... his money was deposited. The check for seven thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine pounds fourteen shillings was drawn upon the London and Western Counties Bank, and that would have afforded the manager some clew even if he had not been well acquainted with John Minute's eccentricity. ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... freely wherever their fancy led them, eating when they felt inclined, sleeping when and where they pleased. And, in order to see if I were really established in my original rights, I gave myself up to a thousand acts of eccentricity, which enraged the tall Dutchman who was my guide, and who, in his heart, thought I ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... admit my ignorance. "Well!" she said with a reminiscent sigh of satisfaction, "HE'S got only two toes on his left foot—showed 'em to me. And he was born so." Need it be said that in these few words I read the dismal sequel of Warts' unfortunate attachment? His accidental eccentricity was no longer attractive. What were his evanescent accretions, subject to improvement or removal, beside the hereditary and ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... nothing repellent, but, on the contrary, measurably enhanced his attractiveness; making him "different" and lending him a distinction which, without it, he might have lacked. And yet, patent as this singularity must have been to the dullest, it was something quite apart from any eccentricity of manner, though, heaven knows, I was soon to think ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... personality, and the difficulty of expressing what was true without hurting anyone, or acquiring character without becoming a character part. The difference between originality and eccentricity; kindness and tenderness; sympathy and understanding; and the delicate grades by which your attempts at goodness may either help ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... the skilful artificer of words, while accepting this last extension, will show himself conscious of his paradox. So also he will shun the grossness that employs the epithet "quaint" to put upon subtlety and the devices of a studied workmanship an imputation of eccentricity; or, if he falls in with the populace in this regard, he will be careful to justify his innuendo. The slipshod use of "nice" to connote any sort of pleasurable emotion he will take care, in his writings ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... astronomers. They ascertained the position of the stars by right ascension and declination. They knew the obliquity of the ecliptic, and determined the place of the sun's apogee as well as its mean motion. Their calculations on the eccentricity of the moon prove that they had a rectilinear trigonometry and tables of chords. They had an approximate knowledge of parallax. [Footnote: Delambre, Hist. d'Astr. Anc., tom. 1, p. 184.] They could calculate eclipses of the moon, and use them for the correction of their lunar ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
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