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More "Minuteness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gain a definite notion of the furnishing of colonial houses from a contemporary and reliable source—the inventories of the estates of the colonists. These are, of course, still preserved in court records. As it was customary in early days to enumerate with much minuteness the various articles of furniture contained in each room, instead of classifying or aggregating them, we have the outlines of a clear picture of the ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... great public character, whose name he had forgotten, making a particularly happy reply to another eminent and illustrious individual whom he had never been able to identify. He enlarged at some length and with great minuteness upon divers collateral circumstances, distantly connected with the anecdote in hand, but for the life of him he couldn't recollect at that precise moment what the anecdote was, although he had been in the habit ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... sore sense. Even his books were better friends to him than she! And especially had she been dipping into those "Lives of the Saints" that Helbeck read habitually day by day; of which he talked to young Williams with a minuteness of knowledge that he scarcely possessed on any other subject—knowledge that appeared in all the details of the chapel painting. And on one occasion, as she turned over the small, worn volumes of his Alban Butler, she had come upon a certain passage in the ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... limits of their power in matters involving a temporal element. Again Peckham was fain to acquiesce. His policy had not only irritated the king, but alienated his fellow bishops. He visited his province with pertinacity and minuteness, and he was the less able to stand up against the king as he was engaged in violent quarrels with all his own suffragans. The leader of the bishops in resisting his claims was Thomas of Cantilupe. Restored to England by the liberal policy of Edward, Montfort's chancellor after Lewes had ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... (28) The minuteness of this narrative, combined with the simplicity of it, proves that it was written at no great distance of time from the event. It is the first that occurs of any length in the older MSS. ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... amours. He had lately found in Hanover a new object of adoration. This was a Madame Walmoden, a fashionable young married woman, with whom George had fallen headlong into love. He wrote home to his wife, telling her of his admiration for Madame Walmoden, and describing with some minuteness the lady's various charms of person. He induced Madame Walmoden—probably no great persuasion was needed—to leave her husband and become the mistress of a king. George, it is said, paid down the not very extravagant sum of a thousand dollars to make things pleasant ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... no doubt as to their motive; but is it probable, or even possible, that the occurrences which they describe with so much minuteness could ever have taken place? The imaginary Dr. Beaton's story as to the birth is altogether uncorroborated. What became of the attendants on the Princess Louisa, of the lady who was in the bed-chamber, of the nurse who ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... George Smart's servant in his anteroom. Blisters were applied to his chest, and he noted in his diary, 'Thank God, my sleep was sweet!' He fixed his departure for the 6th, arranged all his pecuniary affairs with minuteness, and employed his friends in purchasing presents for his family and friends in Dresden. He was strongly urged by his friends to postpone his journey until he could have recovered some degree of strength. But ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... work in the morning, I took my leave, and retired to my own room, intent upon carrying out with more minuteness the survey I had already commenced: several cupboards in the wall, and one or two doors, apparently of closets, had especially attracted my attention. Strange was its look as I entered—as of a room hollowed out of the past, for a memorial of dead times. The fire had sunk ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... some lurking signs of weakness. It would not have been easy to say whether he most felt respect, or regret, at the faith of the Narragansett. Accompanied by his two grim warriors, the chief examined the position of the shadow with critical minuteness, and when there no longer existed a pretext for affecting to doubt the punctuality of their captive, a deep ejaculation of assent issued from the chest of each. Like some wary judge, whose justice is fettered by legal precedents, as if satisfied ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... whitewasher, mixing his colours as a hodman mixes his mortar, and managing to make the clearest and brightest of them quite muddy. His triumph consisted, however, in combining exactness with awkwardness; he displayed all the naive minuteness of the primitive painters; in fact, his mind, barely raised from the clods, delighted in petty details. The stove, with its perspective all awry, was tame and precise, and in colour as ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... for theoretic images. He had only to change the magnitude of conceptions already in his mind to arrive at the Emission Theory of Light. Newton supposed light to consist of elastic particles of inconceivable minuteness, shot out with inconceivable rapidity by luminous bodies. Optical reflection certainly occurred as if light consisted of such particles, and this was Newton's ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... deeply associated with ecclesiastical symbolism. But I submit that this is only a fancy which can best be left to church embroidery and stained windows; it is unworthy of any serious notice. The beings are described, it will be observed, with great minuteness: all have the same characteristic powers of rapid motion, and all have human hands, a fact that so strikes the prophet that he repeats it three times.[2] These four Cherubim, then, seem to me clearly to indicate the archetypes ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... filled. It comprises the period between the 11th and the 28th December, 1688, both days inclusive, and appears to be a perfect Record of every act of that memorable Assembly. The indorsement on the cover merits notice: it states with singular minuteness the precise hour of James's abdication, namely at one in the morning of ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.11.17 • Various
... rose the mediaeval front of the cathedral, where the imagination of a Gothic architect had long ago flowered out indestructibly, in the first place, a grand design, and then covering it with such abundant detail of ornament, that the magnitude of the work seemed less a miracle than its minuteness. You would suppose that he must have softened the stone into wax, until his most delicate fancies were modelled in the pliant material, and then had hardened it into stone again. The whole was a vast, black-letter page of the richest and ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... better one supplies its place, and that I think hardly possible. You have now fairly beaten Spencer on his own ground, for he really offered no solution of the difficulties of the problem. The incomprehensible minuteness and vast numbers of the physiological germs or atoms (Which themselves must be compounded of numbers of Spencer's physiological units) is the only difficulty, but that is only on a par with the difficulties in all conceptions of ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... any rate exhibit a cheerful countenance and agreeable conversation, for friends are multiplied by agreeable words." He had to provide clean cloths and towels, cups without flaws, spoons of silver, mattresses, blankets and untorn sheets, pillows, quilts, etc. His duties are laid down with much minuteness; every morning he was required to go through the inventory, lest anything ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... and rear of the various bodies, and inspected them with a minuteness and attention which showed that his years had not dulled his soldier's faculties, the Mayor faced round with the evident intention of addressing us. His clerk instantly darted in front of him, and waving his ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... various names, and may thus be broken up into separate virtues. These are many or few, according as we distribute in smaller or larger groups the occasions for virtuous conduct, or analyze with greater or less minuteness the sentiments and dispositions ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... Adventurer, without deriving from it some improvement, either moral or intellectual, or both. The structure and cadence of Johnson's sentences is certainly monotonous; but I seldom read half a page without being struck by the depth of his thought, the accuracy and minuteness of his observation, and the astonishing extent of his ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... foreseen, have unfolded themselves, in all their grandeur, to the eyes of the present age. It is a common amusement of speculative minds to contrast the magnitude of the most important events with the minuteness of their primeval causes, and the records of mankind are full of examples for such contemplations. It is, however, a more profitable employment to trace the constituent principles of future greatness in their kernel; to detect in the acorn at our feet ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... padi by the Malays (from whose language the word seems to have found its way to the maritime parts of the continent of India), bras when deprived of the husk, and nasi after it has been boiled; besides which it assumes other names in its various states of growth and preparation. This minuteness of distinction applies also to some other articles of common use, and may be accounted for upon this principle: that amongst people whose general objects of attention are limited, those which do of necessity occupy them are liable to be more the subject of thought and conversation than ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... intimacies of domesticity with a frankness and a minuteness which dismayed Carol. Juanita Haydock communicated Harry's method of shaving, and his interest in deer-shooting. Mrs. Gougerling reported fully, and with some irritation, her husband's inappreciation of liver and bacon. Maud Dyer chronicled Dave's digestive disorders; ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... with the sun-dial, the clepsydra, the lever and the pulley, must have had no mean knowledge of mechanics. A crystal lens, turned on the lathe, was discovered by Layard at Nimrud along with glass vases bearing the name of Sargon; this will explain the excessive minuteness of some of the writing on the Assyrian tablets, and a lens may also have been used in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... has described with singular minuteness the struggle between the people of these regions and the power of Rome, overwhelming, although tottering to its fall; and has moreover, devoted several chapters of his work upon Germany to a description of the most remarkable Teutonic tribes of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to examine with any minuteness her feelings towards him: but one thing she had known clearly since their first meeting—that he was physically distasteful to her. For all his good looks, and in his rather sinister way he was a handsome man, she had shrunk from him. Now, spirited away ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... suitable and of greatest merit and experience, in order that whatever is done be concurred in by all and the expense be no greater than what is unavoidable. You shall endeavor to make as safe as possible the regions pacified and subdued. You shall advise me, with the minuteness and circumspectness required by the importance of this matter and my desire for its execution, of what you do, of what is pacified, the means that you employ, and the condition in which it shall ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume IX, 1593-1597 • E. H. Blair
... the strictly useful? I fear they are worst offenders of all. For if the astronomer has set before us the infinite magnitude of space, and the practical eternity of the duration of the universe; if the physical and chemical philosophers have demonstrated the infinite minuteness of its constituent parts, and the practical eternity of matter and of force; and if both have alike proclaimed the universality of a definite and predicable order and succession of events, the workers in biology have not only accepted ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... trade, and been one of the main causes why, in spite of deficient home production of necessaries, we have been able to stand the economic strain of the War. Striking off the fetters that it has been found necessary to impose—sometimes with undue strictness and pedantic minuteness—on British commerce and industry will be one of the first things to be hoped for from peace. It is impossible to give detailed examples here. Ask any merchant, he will give you specific instances of the need for a recovered freedom. Questions are so closely involved with ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... three creeds in homage to their sovereign did not displease the Emperor, strange as it was. Count Beugnot's Memoirs must be consulted for a full account of the activity, the interest in details, the minuteness of the administrative investigations which, at Dsseldorf as everywhere else, characterized Napoleon in these laborious journeys, on which, under pretext of seeking distraction, he kept himself in almost as active movement as if he were at war. The Count who once played whist at Dsseldorf ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... close similarity. Father and mother, the only two words which are not identical, are doubtless different expressions, relationship in this, as in most native tongues, being indicated with excessive minuteness. ...
— The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations • Daniel G. Brinton
... of persons who daily use water kept in leaden cisterns receive no sensible injury, yet the apparent salubrity must be ascribed to the great slowness of its operation, and the minuteness of the dose taken, the effects of which become modified by different causes and different constitutions, and according to the predisposition to diseases inherent in different individuals. The supposed security of the multitude who use the water ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... pursuing this part of our plan, we have sometimes descended from that elevation of style, which the reader might expect in a quarto volume; we have frequently been obliged to record facts concerning children which may seem trifling, and to enter into a minuteness of detail which may appear unnecessary. No anecdotes, however, have been admitted without due deliberation; nothing has been introduced to gratify the idle curiosity of others, or to indulge our own feelings of ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... found that she did not see the blemishes—that she appreciated nothing I had said, comprehended nothing. Such unaccountable obtuseness puzzled me. I began again, going over the whole with even greater minuteness and care. I worked hard: the perspiration stood in beads upon my forehead as I struggled with her—what shall I call it—obstinacy? But it was not exactly obstinacy. She simply could not see the faults of her own work, any more than a blind man ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... owing to relations between the sexes.] Nearly the same is the case with all the religions obligations of Islam, prayer, lustration, etc. But although the minuteness of detail with which these are enjoined tends toward that jejune and formal worship which we witness every-where in Moslem lands, still there is nothing in these observances themselves which (religion apart) should lower the social condition of Mohammedan populations and prevent their ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... drawn on Greek vases. A line of absolute correctness, observe. I do not care how slowly you do it, or with how many alterations, junctions, or re-touchings; the one thing I ask of you is, that the line shall be right, and right by measurement, to the same minuteness which you would have to give in a Government chart to the map ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... the front of the head, and the palm and fingers of the right hand were cut. This evidence having been taken, the jury once more repaired to the chamber where the body lay, and proceeded with much minuteness to examine the room, with a view to ascertain, if possible, more particularly the exact ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... 6. This P. M. sought an interview with Dr. Woodward at the White House, to talk of an apparatus for locating the ball by its action in retarding a rapidly revolving el. magnet. I hardly think the plan more than theoretically practical, owing to the minuteness of the action." ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... was told by an old "wise woman" of the neighborhood with a minuteness of detail that rendered the narrative more tedious than graphic. A devout believer in the truth of her own story, she told it with wonderful earnestness, combining fluency of speech with the intonations of oratory in such a way as to render the legend ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... long search, the doll in the bath was discovered to be sitting upon it, and once it actually flew down Regie's back; and amid the wild excitement of the children its cold descent was described by Regie in piercing minuteness until the moment when it rolled out over his ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... is said in defence of the poet's consistency. Several chapters on that point have been excised. The way of living which Homer describes is examined, and an effort is made to prove that he depicts the life of a single brief age of culture. The investigation is compelled to a tedious minuteness, because the points of attack—the alleged discrepancies in descriptions of the various details of existence—are so minute as to ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... Chagre," says the Colombian commissioner, "its channel, and the barks which in the dry season embarrass its navigation, are laid down in my manuscript plan with great care and minuteness. It is subject to one great inconvenience; viz. that vessels drawing more than twelve feet water cannot enter the river, even in perfectly calm weather, on account of a stratum of slaty limestone which runs, at a depth at high water of fifteen feet, from a point on the mainland to some rocks ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... of the repulsive tradition communicated by Lord Webb Seymour to Walter Scott, the murder is described with hideous minuteness. ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... etchings, of which he left not fewer than 1600. He was especially fond of grotesque subjects, which he treated with great skill; his free etchings, touched with the graver, being executed with especial delicacy and wonderful minuteness. ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... consciousness of his own rectitude. In that lay his only comfort, his only hope, his one, strong-built fabric of defence. If that was undermined, if that was eaten away, what was there left for him? Carefully, painfully, and with such minuteness as he could command, he went over the whole affair from beginning to end, forcing his unwilling mind—so unaccustomed to such work—to weigh each chance, to gauge each opportunity. If this were so, if that had been done, then would such results have followed? Suppose ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... find amid these rugged, savage aspects of Nature creatures so fairy and delicate. But such is the law. Go to the sea or climb the mountain, and with the ruggedest and the savagest you will find likewise the fairest and the most delicate. The greatness and the minuteness of Nature ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... and Galerius, which was aimed at the entire uprooting of the new religion, ended with the edict of toleration of 311 and the tragical ruin of the persecutors. Galerius died soon after of a disgusting and terrible disease (morbus pedicularis), described with great minuteness by Eusebius and Lactantius. 'His body,' says Gibbon, 'swelled by an intemperate course of life to an unwieldy corpulence, was covered with ulcers and devoured by innumerable swarms of those insects which have given their name to a most loathsome disease.' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... far different result had been reached than the one foreshadowed in the portentous colloquies between King James and Maximilian de Bethune. Those conferences have been purposely described with some minuteness, in order that the difference often existing between vast projects and diametrically opposed and very insignificant conclusions might once more ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to work were largely restricted. A National Children's Bureau, under the charge of Miss Julia Lathrope, has been created at Washington; and Mrs. J. Borden Harriman was appointed to the Industrial Relations Commission. The minuteness and thoroughness of modern legislation for the protection of women may be realised by noting that in 1913 alone New York passed laws that no girl under sixteen shall in any city of the first, second, or third class sell newspapers or magazines or shine shoes in any street or public ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... a drawer, from, which he brought splints and bandages, trotted back to the settee, and with ghastly minuteness—the result of having been present at an accident, and studious readings of Dr Chartley's books—he proceeded to set a serious compound fracture, assuring himself that he bore it like a man, and that ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... years old. Another and more numerous class, evidently piquing themselves not a little upon avoiding this error, fall into another by fancying it necessary to write down to their young readers. They explain everything with a tiresome minuteness of detail, although any observer of children ought to know that a child's mind does not want everything explained. They think that simplicity demands this lengthy discussion of every trivial matter. There is such a thing as a conceited simplicity, and there is a technical simplicity, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... Perpendicular style presented an effect at once good and bold; the mouldings, though not equal to the best of the Decorated style, were well defined, the enrichments effective, and the details delicate without extravagant minuteness. Subsequently the style underwent a gradual debasement; the arches became depressed; the mouldings impoverished, the details crowded and coarsely executed, and the whole style became wanting in the chaste and elegant effects for ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... sometimes, and again very literally. Style has thus suffered for the sake of clearness and brevity, necessary to secure and retain the attention of readers of this class of books. This same conciseness has also been imposed on our author by the inherent dryness and minuteness of his faithful inquiry into hundreds of figures, tables showing the condition of banks at the time of various panics, etc., etc., essential to his demonstration. As an extreme instance of the latitude I have sometimes allowed myself, I cite my rendering of the title: "Des ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... Daniel Webster, during the first year or two of his practice, was collecting debts due in New Hampshire to merchants in Boston. His first tin sign has been preserved to the present day, to attest by its minuteness and brevity the humble expectations of its proprietor. "D. Webster, Attorney," is the inscription it bears. The old Court-House still stands in which he conducted his first suit, before his own father as presiding judge. Old men in that part of New Hampshire ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... pleasant window looking out on the garden, and it contained a small cot bedstead, besides a table and chairs. Here Hiram spent most of his time busily occupied. By every mail he received letters from New York, detailing with minuteness just what took place in his affairs from day to day. In short, his private office was moved from New York to Hampton, and the only apparent inconvenience was that he did business at arm's length, as they say. Daily came a letter from Hill, although Hill was not in Hiram's ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... moral superiority (especially as based on the assumption that the race had been better in primeval times, when yet fresh from the hands of the gods), there was in them a grain of truth. When Mabuchi and Motowori wrote, the nation had been long subjected to a discipline of almost incredible minuteness in detail, and of extraordinary rigour in application. And this discipline had actually brought into existence a wonderful average of character,—a character of surprising patience, unselfishness, honesty, kindliness, and docility combined with high courage. But only the evolutionist [162] ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... movement beyond this wave, though there will be in the space which it encloses, namely in parts of the particular waves, those parts which do not touch the sphere DCF. And all this ought not to seem fraught with too much minuteness or subtlety, since we shall see in the sequel that all the properties of Light, and everything pertaining to its reflexion and its refraction, can be explained in principle by this means. This is a matter which has been quite unknown to those who hitherto have begun to consider the waves ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... the minuteness of investigation employed, that, although the grate had contained a large fire during the night, they proceeded to examine even the very chimney, in order to discover whether escape by it were possible; but ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... commanded, resumed, and then with minuteness, with much learning and eloquence, discoursed successively upon the histories, or emblematic devices, of this the chief work of his hands. All ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... by J. C. Stevens, of New Jersey, in 1804; by Henry James in 1811—but nothing practical was accomplished. Richard Trevethick, the anticipator of many things, also took out a patent in 1815, and in it he describes the screw propeller with considerable minuteness. Millington, Whytock, Perkins, Marestier, and Brown followed, with ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... by side, we held a long converse on erotic matters. He told me all the tale of his affair with his cousin, and, although I was already well acquainted with it, I was glad to draw all the particulars from himself. I had seen the note his mother wrote to the doctor. The minuteness and undisguised description she had therein given struck me as very strange, and I augured that she herself must be a lewd and lecherous person, to have done more than merely hint at the affair, instead of dwelling, doubtless in erotic delight, on such details. So I pumped him as to what ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... treatises in ten other Oriental languages, which only made me deplore my ignorance, since I was unable to read a word of any of them. The illuminations, though, struck me as fully equal to the finest fourteenth-century European work in their extreme minuteness and wonderful delicacy of detail. The young priest, whom I should suspect of being what is termed in ecclesiastical circles "a spike," was evidently very familiar with the Liturgy of the Church of England, but it came with somewhat of a shock to hear him apply to Buddha ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... Don Juan, v. 33-39, with anatomical minuteness of detail. After trying in vain to wrench an answer out of death, the poet ends in his ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... has been removed, or at any rate a notice put up: "Authors are requested not to lie prostrate on the bowsprit." But even without this advantage, three or four generations of writers have chronicled with great minuteness their sensations during the transit. I need only say that my sensations were just as good as theirs. I will content myself with chronicling the fact that during the voyage we passed two dolphins, one whale and one iceberg (none of them moving very fast ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... question, or any new rules of conduct pointed out, our author gives a minute detail of two cases, where any ancient female of ordinary capacity could have decided as well as himself, and relates with laboured minuteness the contrary opinions of some eminent physicians on a late memorable occasion in this country." Pinel an old woman! It will probably be new to most, if not all, of our readers that this illustrious man was regarded in this light by the leading Review of our country, when his writings first ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... sounds, and even publishing several translations in their language, he undertook to give some account of its grammatical forms. A little work printed in 1842, with the modest title of "A Spelling-book of the Seneca Language," comprises the variations of nouns, adjectives and pronouns, given with much minuteness. Those of the verbs are promised, but the book closes abruptly without them, for the reason—as the author afterwards explained to a correspondent—that he had not as yet been able to obtain such a complete knowledge of them as he desired. This difficulty is ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... acquainted with them, that she describes Lartigue; Dufresne; Richard; Phelan; Bonin; Comte; Bourget; McMahon; Kelly; Demers; Roux; Roque; Sauvage; Tabeau; Marcoux; Morin; Durocher; and all the Roman Priests around Montreal, with the utmost minuteness of accuracy; while the Chaplain of the Ursuline Nunnery at Quebec, Father Daule, is as exactly depicted by her, as if her whole life had been passed under his surveillance. Some of the appellatives in the ensuing catalogue may not be correctly spelt. Scarcely any thing is more difficult ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... to carry two hundred passengers, will appear large to those of our readers whose ideas of ballooning have never gone beyond the ordinary ascensions so much in vogue at the present day, they are yet of almost microscopic minuteness when compared with the developments of which M. Petin and his friends conceive his ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... details of Trajan's expeditions, there is none as to their ultimate result, nor concerning the chief operations of the conqueror and his successors in the newly-acquired territory, which was formally annexed as a province of the Empire. Some historians have attempted to define with great minuteness the boundaries of the new province, but more cautious writers content themselves with naming approximate limits; and these have done wisely, as there is no doubt that the movements of the neighbouring tribes and even of the conquered ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... flesh, the blood is returned from the arteries to the veins, not without some other admirable artifice" (non sine artificio quodam admirabili). It was this artificium admirabile of which Harvey was unable to give a description. On account of the minuteness of their structure, the capillaries were beyond his sight, aided as it was by a magnifying glass merely. He indeed demonstrated physiologically the existence of some such passages; but it remained for a later observer, with improved appliances, to verify the fact. This was done ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... hardly dare insist upon the virtue of completion, lest I should be supposed a defender of Wouvermans or Gerard Dow; neither can I adequately praise the power of Tintoret, without fearing to be thought adverse to Holbein or Perugino. The fact is, that both finish and impetuosity, specific minuteness, or large abstraction, may be the signs of passion, or of its reverse; may result from affection or indifference, intellect or dulness. Some men finish from intense love of the beautiful in the smallest parts of what they do; others in pure incapability ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... minuteness one of the most extensive silver mines in the world, where an average of 5000 men and unnumbered animals are employed, it will not be necessary to go into details as we notice the many other celebrated mines ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... of some of the elementary knots have been gone into with what a practical seaman of even short experience may consider almost unnecessary minuteness, but the aim throughout has been to render the work of value to those who approach the ...
— Knots, Bends, Splices - With tables of strengths of ropes, etc. and wire rigging • J. Netherclift Jutsum
... satisfying minuteness; and all this was for "a wave-offering" to be waved before the Lord—which was ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... household," that is to say, provided with its dependencies and services. Everything is within reach; it is a complete world in itself and self-sufficient. One exalted being attaches to and gathers around it, with universal foresight and minuteness of detail, every appurtenance it employs or can possibly employ.—Thus, each prince, each princess has a professional surgery and a chapel;[2118] it would not answer for the almoner who says mass or the doctor who looks after their health to be obtained outside. So much ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Sacred Scriptures for nearly eighteen centuries. There are few predecessors in the field of Chinese literature into whose labours translators of the present century can enter. This will be received, I hope, as a sufficient apology for the minuteness and length of some of the notes. A second object in them was to teach myself first, and then others, something of the history and doctrines of Buddhism. I have thought that they might be learned better in connexion ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... forgotten if any member of the home-circle was "sick." And the concerns of the patient, whether suffering from a cold, sore eyes, a sprained ankle, or "had her tonsils out," were discussed with minuteness of detail worthy an International Conference. How the patient slept, what the doctor said, the effect of the new medicine, how the heart was standing the strain, what the visiting neighbors thought of the case, in fact the whole subject of sickness held a morbid ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth magnitudes, nearly three hundred nebulae, and globular and other clusters, of all degrees of resolvability, and smaller scattered stars innumerable of every inferior magnitude, from the tenth to such as by their multitude and minuteness constitute irresolvable nebulosity, extending over tracts of many square degrees. Were there but one such object, it might be maintained without utter improbability that its apparent sphericity is only an effect of foreshortening, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... regretted that William Still, the author of the U. G. R. R., failed to give any account of its origin, organization, workings, or the number of persons helped to freedom. It is an interesting narrative of many cases, but is shorn of that minuteness of detail so indispensable to authentic ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... the exactness and minuteness of such descriptive character sketches, but even the shortest and most general is necessary to the proper appreciation of every play, even if it is being merely read. When a student is assimilating a role for rehearsing or acting, these additions of the author ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... of all these branches the most important are the inlaying and mosaic of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, represented in a central manner by these mosaics of St. Mark's. Missal-painting could not, from its minuteness, produce the same sublime impressions, and frequently merged itself in mere ornamentation of the page. Modern book-illustration has been so little skillful as hardly to be worth naming. Sculpture, though in some positions it becomes of great importance, has always a tendency to lose itself in architectural ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... number of species of fungi, probably scarcely less numerous than all the flowering plants, and the immense number of spores which some of the individuals produce, they must be exceedingly plentiful and widely diffused, though from their minuteness not easy to be discerned. It has been attempted to estimate the number of spores which might be produced by one single plant of Lycoperdon, but the number so far exceeds that which the mind is accustomed to ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... 1843, was awarded to Mr. T. Young, architect to the university of king's college, Toronto. The style of the intended obelisk is the simplest and purest Egyptian, the artist having strictly avoided all minuteness of detail in order that the massive proportions of the design might harmonize with the bold and beautiful scenery by which it will be surrounded. The total height of the base, pedestal, and obelisk, will be 120 feet. The ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... if she were listening to him, all the facts without forgetting a single detail, mentioning the most trivial matters with the minuteness of a countryman. And the child still kept assailing him, making kicks at ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... best of these books.... The events are described with minuteness and care. The result is ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... heart in the perfume it sheds so freely upon the air? The odor of the musk of certain animals lingers under certain conditions for years. The imagination is baffled in trying to conceive of the number and minuteness of the particles which the fox leaves of itself in the snow where its foot was imprinted—so palpable that the scent of a hound can seize upon them hours after the fox has passed! The all but infinite divisibility of matter is proved by every odor that ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... commercial boon that ever was devised; but as the committee of the House of Lords, in the report already quoted, has borne ample testimony in their favour, it is unnecessary for us to dwell with further minuteness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... depends largely upon its being near enough to our own conceptions, and yet a little greater, just as the vault of a great church gives one a larger sense of immensity than the sky with its sailing clouds. Indeed it is often the very minuteness of a conception rather than its vastness that makes it great. It must not be outside our range. As to the form, it depends upon some curious felicity of hand, and touch, and thought. Suppose that a great painter gave a rough pencil-sketch of a picture to a hundred students, and ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 1091. Ingulphus relates with painful minuteness the progress of the work of destruction, and enumerates all the rich treasures which those angry flames consumed. I should have given a longer account of this event had not the Rev. Mr. Maitland already done so in his interesting work ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... and I do not think I have actually, committed. I cannot but suspect, that, if I had employed the language of exclusive eulogy,—such language as is employed at and concerning the Commencement dinners and the Alumni dinners, I might have described the celebration of Class-Day with much more minuteness than I have attempted to do, and should have heard no complaints of violated hospitality. This I would gladly have done, had it been possible. As it was not, I have pointed out those features which seemed to me objectionable,—certainly ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... requires greater minuteness of regulation; and the steps of all advancing States are more and more to be picked among the old rubbish and the new materials. The difficulty lies in discovering the right path through the chaos of confusion. The adjustment of mutual rights and wrongs is also ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... walls is notable as being that in which King Rene was born. It is recorded that Wellington received a part of his military education in Angers. If so, it is probable that he studied this military defence with some care and minuteness. To us, at least, who have not been educated with respect to military fortification, it seems to fill all demands that are likely to be made upon a building of its class. Doubtless it could have been besieged successfully, and even battered through to the extent of allowing ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... Instead of any attempt to interpret his state of mind and inner life, she gave the simple facts—that is, his own words, an exact account of his health, what he asked for at their interviews, what commission he gave her and so on. All these facts she gave with extraordinary minuteness. The picture of their unhappy brother stood out at last with great clearness and precision. There could be no mistake, because nothing ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... sixty-fours, frigates, transports, fire-ships, &c. In its diversified pages, persons of every rank, denomination, and pursuit, may be informed—the Philosopher, the Politician, the Citizen, the Handicraftsman, and the Gossip, are regaled by the novelty of its contents, the minuteness of its details, and the refreshing arrivals of transactions which occupy the attention of human beings at the greatest ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... event which Father Medina mentions with as much minuteness as candor, two important points must not be overlooked by the judicious reader, which were the cause of this unfortunate deed. One was the extreme harshness of the provincial in his government, which must have been very excessive.... The imposition of new commands must have been very heavy for the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... with the other three. Not only was each man well armed, but each man kept his trusty rifle hugged to his person, in a sort of jealous watchfulness; while the other white man, from time to time, secretly, but with great minuteness, examined the flint and priming ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... been described as made up of rows of minute elements. It is immaterial for our purpose, however, whether the fibres are to be regarded as made up of microsomes or not. This much is sure, that these microsomes —granules of excessive minuteness—occur in protoplasm and are closely connected with the ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... Iceland, and not far from a century younger, the Iceland Gray-goose. The Norway one is perhaps of date about 1037, the other of about 1118; peace be with them both! Or, if anybody is inclined to such matters let him go to Dahlmann, for the amplest information and such minuteness of detail as might almost enable him to be an Advocate, with Silk Gown, in any Court ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... burial,' &c, it is important to have every particular bearing on this branch of the subject, and much minuteness ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... amply verified by experience; the extraordinary minuteness and accuracy of Mr. Darwin's observations, combined with the charm and simplicity of his descriptions, have ensured the popularity of this book with all classes of readers—and that popularity has ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... Ursula and her Virgins. Although of less solid merit than the preceding, it is infinitely more striking; being most singularly conceived and executed. The gold ornaments, and gold grounds, are throughout managed with a freedom and minuteness of touch which distinguish many of the most beautiful early missals. In the first compartment, or division, are a group of women round "Sibila Ancyra Phrygiae." The dresses of these women, especially ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... convent! You would have thought you heard some gormandizer dilating upon the roasting a savory goose at Michaelmas as he described the roasting of some Spanish Don to make him discover his treasure—a detail given with a minuteness that made every rich old burgher present turn uncomfortably in his chair. All this would be told with infinite glee, as if he considered it an excellent joke; and then he would give such a tyrannical leer ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... and lost, consisting of travellers and traders, from all parts of the world, and who were also on their way to Palmyra, as a point whence to separate to various parts of the vast East. It would delight me to lay before you with the distinctness and minuteness of a picture, the whole of this novel, and to me most interesting route; but I must content myself with a slight sketch, and reserve fuller communications to the time when, once more seated with you upon the Coelian, we enjoy ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... that? there is half an hour that we have lost." This storm[36] disconcerted me. He perceived my confusion, and resumed his discourse with mildness.—"Come, make yourself easy, and repeat to me, with the greatest minuteness, all that has passed between you and X****." I then related the circumstances which had induced me to have an interview with Monsieur X****. I repeated our conversation word for word. I gave him a complete account of all the faults and excesses of the royal government; and I was going ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... that class of women who allow their feelings to show themselves, and afterwards feel bound by the memory of what they have shown. She, too, smiled most sweetly as she surveyed the beautiful fair queen from beneath her long drooping lids, and examined her appearance with all possible minuteness. She remembered her well enough, but so warm was the welcome she received, that she almost thought she had misjudged Atossa in calling her hard and cold. She drew her guest to the cushions upon the carpets, and they ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... not like the corn, nor blinds, nor tiles, not to be comprehended nor understood, but a confusion of yellow and black spots and strokes, carried far too fine for the eye to follow; microscopic in its minuteness, and filling every atom and space with mystery, out of which would have arranged itself the general impression of truth and life.' Once more, Mr Ruskin freely admits that 'all the landscape ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... conducted it with the utmost minuteness, was quite unproductive of results. If the woman possessed a typewriter, she had apparently made away with it. The scrap basket contained nothing but a few torn bits of paper of no value. There was no stationery on the small desk in the living room, no black sealing wax, such as had been used ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks
... Bible, the supreme Lover, Student, Expositor, and Employer of the Bible. With the letter of the Bible He sustained Himself and quelled the Enemy in the Temptation, and the quotations He then selected suggest the minuteness of His study. Upon the written Word He spent the whole Easter afternoon. Accepted Sacrifice for Sin, Conqueror of Death, Lord and Head of Life, He had come that morning from the grave; and He came as it were holding the ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... exclusively concerned with them. Having fully stated in his opening chapters the distinctive doctrines upon which alone he thinks sound morality can be based, Venn in the rest of his treatise enters with the utmost minuteness into the practical duties of the Christian to God and man. Truthfulness, honesty, meekness, courtesy, candour, the relative duties in various capacities—of masters towards their servants and servants towards ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... description. The altitudes marked at the different spots where they were observed, were obtained by the temperature of boiling water, as observed by two thermometers; but as they were not graduated with sufficient minuteness for such purposes, the results can only be ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... intimacy with them cooled; and by dint of turning around Saint Sulpice, he succeeded in forming another connection there, upon which he built greater expectations. This society of priests was beginning to distinguish itself, and from a seminary of a Paris parish to extend abroad. Ignorance, the minuteness of their practices, the absence of all patrons and of members at all distinguished in any way, inspired them with a blind obedience to Rome and to all its maxims; with a great aversion for everything that passed for Jansenism, and made them so dependent upon the bishops ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... faults—it contains many coincidences and improbabilities—are far more than atoned for by the masterly portrait of the simple, manly, generous, and wholly lovable vicar who is the central figure of the story. "It has," says Mitford, "the truth of Richardson, without his minuteness, and the humour of Fielding, without his grossness; if it yields to LeSage in the diversified variety of his views of life, it far excels him in the description of domestic virtues and the pleasing moral of the tale." ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... related, with some minuteness, the substance of Mike's report, and his own plan, of the last of which we have already given an outline. Everything had been well matured in his mind, and all promised success. The men were apprised of the service on which they were ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... it, the complete history of itself. What an invaluable pair of eyes were that! In vain, arraigned before them, would the criminal deny his guilt, the lover the soft impeachment. The whole scene would stand forth, photographed in fatal minuteness and indelibility upon face, hands, coat-sleeve, shirt-bosom. Mankind would be its own book of life, written in the primal hieroglyphic character,—the language understood by all. Vocal conversation would become obsolete, unless among a few superior ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... the Transcontinental telegraph line a feasible undertaking. But his discursive mind ricochetted off to the laying of the Transatlantic cable, in '65; and he dwelt on that epoch-marking work with such minuteness of detail, and such confident mastery of names, dates, and so forth, that I half-resented—not his disconcerting fund of information, but his modest reticence on other subjects of interest. It is a morally upsetting thing, for instance, to ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... travellers gathered in Sudbury Inn, and each suited, either by its scene or its sentiment, to the speaker who recites it. In this also there is a natural reminiscence of Chaucer; and if we miss the rich minuteness of his Van Eyck painting, or the depth of his thoughtful humor, we find the same airy grace, tenderness, simple strength, and exquisite felicities of description. Nor are twinkles of sly humor wanting. The Interludes, and above all the Prelude, are masterly examples of that perfect ease ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... came to London, was perverted by Rawdon at the Cocoa-Tree, made helplessly tipsy by this abominable seducer and perverter of youth, and fleeced of four thousand pounds. She described with the most vivid minuteness the agonies of the country families whom he had ruined—the sons whom he had plunged into dishonour and poverty—the daughters whom he had inveigled into perdition. She knew the poor tradesmen who were bankrupt by his extravagance—the mean shifts ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... making those inclosures for their cabbages, which the islanders call crubs. They have been pulling down the Pictish castle, on the little island in the fresh-water loch called Cleikimin, near Lerwick, described with such minuteness by Scott in his journal, till very few traces of its original construction are left. If the inclosing of lands for pasturage and cultivation proceeds as it has begun, these curious monuments of a race which has long ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... this state of feeble indecision as regarded the great questions, and with this minuteness of detail in secondary matters, that M. Necker presented himself on the 5th of May before the three orders at the opening of the session in the palace of Versailles by King Louis XVI. The royal procession had been saluted by the crowd with repeated ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... in his Memoirs, entitled "Literary Industries" (New York, 1891, 16mo), analyses with sufficient minuteness some practical consequences of the imperfection of the methods of research. He considers the case of an industrious writer proposing to write the history of California. He easily procures a few books, reads them, takes notes; these books refer him to others, which he consults in the public ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... that different tribes tried to steal each other's idols and even fought for the possession of valuable objects of "medicine."[562] Columbus observed and reported the customs of these people with some minuteness. There was nothing that agreed with Marco Polo's descriptions of Cipango, but so far as concerned the discovery of gold mines, the indications were such as to leave little doubt of the success of this reconnaissance. The Admiral now arranged his forces ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... Old Testament. These writers, claiming to be the revealers of the will of God, almost always commenced their messages with the words, "Thus saith the Lord." That they were not deceived in their claims is evident from the minuteness and detail as to names, times and places which characterized their messages, and from the literal fulfillment ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... art—and especially literary creation—becomes, as we have already said, a decadent and rationalized mythology. This form of invention consists neither of idealizing the external world, nor reproducing it with the minuteness of realism, but remaking the universe to suit oneself, without taking into account natural laws, and despising the impossible: it is a liberated realism. Often, in an environment of pure fancy, where only caprice reigns, the characters appear ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... immemorial past tells us at every turn that all agencies have conspired for loveliness and ruin itself has been benign. A passage of Wordsworth's describing the character of the lake-shores illustrates this fact with loving minuteness. ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... curious example of Ibsen's minute care is found in the copiousness of his stage directions. Later playwrights have imitated him in this, and we have grown used to it; but thirty years ago such minuteness seemed extravagant and needless. As a fact, it was essential to the absolutely complete image which Ibsen desired to produce. The stage directions in his plays cannot be "skipped" by any reader ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... at length into his scheme; explaining to his friend all his wishes and hopes, and letting him know, with official minuteness, what was expected at his hands. The rear-admiral listened with his accustomed respect, whenever any thing grave was in discussion between them; and, had any one entered while they were thus engaged, he would have seen in the manner of one, ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... were accessible, better than the grapes that were beyond her reach. The price too was just right, so she gladly took possession of the cage, and hid it under her cloak, preparatory to carrying it home. Emanuel meanwhile was giving her directions as to its food, with all the minuteness of one loving ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... fortune-favored lady—and finally, that upon the evening of the murder he had decoyed the unhappy young lady to the fatal spot, and then and there effected his purpose. The prosecuting attorney made this statement, not with the brevity with which it is here reported, but with a minuteness of detail and warmth of coloring that harrowed up the hearts of all who heard it. He finished by saying that he should call the witnesses in the order of time corresponding with the facts ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... when the life-boat with its small load of castaways, shrieking, praying, or unconscious, was dancing on the great broad swells of the heavy, mineral ocean, Frederick had had no such feeling of the microscopic minuteness of ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... The maddening thought that will not be downed, the haunting, ever-present idea that is not or cannot be banished by a supreme effort of the will, is the theoretical hammer which diminishes the vitality of the sensitive nerve organisms, the minuteness of which makes them visible to the eye only under a powerful microscope. The 'worry,' the thought, the single idea grows upon one as time goes on, until the worry victim cannot throw it off. Through this, one set or area of cells is affected. The cells are intimately connected, joined together ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... though elementary, were of a higher cast than Lenny could have found within his reach at Hazeldean. Riccabocca knew the English language well, better in grammar, construction, and genius than many a not ill-educated Englishman; for he had studied it with the minuteness with which a scholar studies a dead language, and amidst his collection he had many of the books which had formerly served him for that purpose. These were the first works he had lent to Lenny. Meanwhile Jackeymo imparted to the boy many secrets in practical ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... characteristic. Their artists, especially of the later school, sometimes toil to depict such subjects, but are apt to stiffen the lithe tendrils in the process. The poets succeed better, with Tennyson at their head, and often produce ravishing effects by dint of a tender minuteness of touch, to which the genius of the soil and climate artfully impels them: for, as regards grandeur, there are loftier scenes in many countries than the best that England can show; but, for the picturesqueness of the smallest object ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Frankenstein. Can it be true to nature to make one character give a description, over a hundred pages long, repeating at length, word for word, long conversations which he has never heard, marking the changes of colour which he has not seen—and all this with a minuteness which even the firmest memory and the most loquacious tongue could not recall? Does not this give an unreality to the style incompatible with art, which ought to be the mainspring of all imaginative work? This, however, is not Mrs. Shelley's ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... sometimes of their refusing supply when disgusted with any circumstance of public conduct. It is, however, certain, that this power, though essential to parliaments, may easily be abused, as well by the frequency and minuteness of their remonstrances, as by their intrusion into every part of the king's counsels and determinations. Under color of advice, they may give disguised orders; and in complaining of grievances, they may draw to themselves every power of government. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... the marquis has led me to recount this curious story with greater minuteness than is necessary to the understanding of Dorothy's part in what follows, but the worthy doctor's account is so graphic that even for its own sake, had it been fitting, I would gladly have copied it word for word ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... even from his adversary's point of view; but of the further power of appreciating his adversary's character he shows not the slightest trace. He looks at his actors from the outside, and gives us with wonderful minuteness all the details of their lives; but he never seems to remember that within the mechanism whose working he describes there is a soul very different from that of Daniel De Foe. Rather, he seems to see in mankind nothing but so many million ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... into universal ornament, incrusted with tracery and scooped into niches, crowded with statues of saints and martyrs. Stone seems, by the cunning labor of the chisel, to have been robbed of its weight and density, suspended aloft, as if by magic, and the fretted roof achieved with the wonderful minuteness and airy security ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... guidebooks, took a horseback journey through the South. Following closely Olmsted's trail, and speaking therefore with knowledge, he has paid him one of the highest compliments one traveler ever paid another. "Olmsted's work," he wrote, "in vividness of description and in photographic minuteness far surpasses Arthur Young's."[184] During this journey he wrote letters to the London Daily News, and these were continued after his return to New York City. For the last three years of our Civil War, he was its regular correspondent, and, ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... mother to seize! No such booty as these. Were it simply a friend to pursue 'Mid my million or two, Who could pay me in person or pelf What he owes me himself! 30 No: I could not but smile through my chafe: For the fellow lay safe As his mates do, the midge and the nit, —Through minuteness, ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... trace the history of this regiment. I have done this with some degree of minuteness, owing to the fact that, as we were considered a United States organization less can be learned concerning us from the reports of the adjutant-general of the State than concerning any other Connecticut organization. And as the employment of colored troops was at first ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... with all the phenomena of life in the bygone ages. We are brought in contact with actual flesh-and-blood men and women, not the ghostly outline figures which pass for such, in what is called History. The horn lantern of the biographer, by the aid of which, with painful minuteness, he chronicled, from day to day, his own outgoings and incomings, making visible to us his pitiful wants, labors, trials, and tribulations of the stomach and of the conscience, sheds, at times, a strong clear light upon contemporaneous ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... telling me all that? there is half an hour that we have lost." This storm[36] disconcerted me. He perceived my confusion, and resumed his discourse with mildness.—"Come, make yourself easy, and repeat to me, with the greatest minuteness, all that has passed between you and X****." I then related the circumstances which had induced me to have an interview with Monsieur X****. I repeated our conversation word for word. I gave him a complete account of all the faults and excesses ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... that the substance of some real conversations may have been reported to the historian. But events which, if they ever happened, happened in ages and nations so remote that the particulars could never have been known to him, are related with the greatest minuteness of detail. We have all that Candaules said to Gyges, and all that passed between Astyages and Harpagus. We are, therefore, unable to judge whether, in the account which he gives of transactions respecting which he might possibly have been well informed, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... more anxious, Till last night when together we sat in Piazza San Marco (Then, when the morrow must bring us parting—forever, it might be), Taking our ices al fresco. Some strolling minstrels were singing Airs from the Trovatore. I noted with painful observance, With the unwilling minuteness at such times absolute torture, All that brilliant scene, for which I cared nothing, before me: Dark-eyed Venetian leoni regarding the forestieri With those compassionate looks of gentle and curious wonder Home-keeping Italy's nations bend on the voyaging races,— ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... told, as if she were listening to him, all the facts without forgetting a single detail, mentioning the most trivial matters with the minuteness of a countryman. And the child still kept assailing him, making ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... civil liberty. In conclusion, we can hardly recommend the book before us, further than to say, that its gossip, though often prosy to the verge of twaddle, is also sometimes droll and amusing from its graphic minuteness. ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... Cawnpore, but that beyond that indiscretion they had acted, as reported by Mr. Warrener, with great courage, coolness, and good discipline. Then the Warreners went back to their tent, and had to go through their yarn again with great minuteness and detail. ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... murder he had decoyed the unhappy young lady to the fatal spot, and then and there effected his purpose. The prosecuting attorney made this statement, not with the brevity with which it is here reported, but with a minuteness of detail and warmth of coloring that harrowed up the hearts of all who heard it. He finished by saying that he should call the witnesses in the order of time corresponding with the facts they ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... vivid: they are projected with enormous energy, in actions whose violence affords scope for the most vehement self-expression; but are they not, in reality, colossally simple rather than complex? It is true that in Lear the phenomena of insanity are reproduced with astonishing minuteness and truth; but this does not imply any elaborate analysis or demand any great space. Hamlet is complex; and were I "talking for victory," I should point out that Hamlet is, of all the tragedies, precisely the one which does not come within the frame of ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... times of fierce and overpowering delirium, when my name was uttered in the transport of the most passionate enthusiasm—when my features as absent, though not present, were recalled and dwelt upon with all the minuteness of the most faithful detail; and I knelt by her in all those moments, when no other human being was near, and clasped her wan hand, and wiped the dew from her forehead, and gazed upon her convulsed ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of his talk had been devoted to other people, but they were all of them the people whom he saw in his own private mirror. I have no doubt that for the time being I was a figure in his dreams, and that I shall be described with the same minuteness to the unhappy recipients of his confidences who are now awaiting him at dinner,—at which I may mention ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... The minuteness of his record of the gaieties shows how amused and interested Boz was in all that he saw. Nothing escaped him of the routine, day, hour, and place; all is given, even the different rooms at the Assembly House. "In the ball-room, the long card-room, the octagon card-room, the staircases, the passages, ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... large, noble, melancholy landscapes of Philippe de Champagne; and the two magnificent Italian pictures of Leopold Robert: they are, perhaps, the very finest pictures that the French school has produced,—as deep as Poussin, of a better color, and of a wonderful minuteness and veracity ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... deny, the Hebraic [14:3] character of the Fourth Gospel, does he wholly ignore the investigations of Luthardt and others, which (as 'apologists' venture to think) show that the whole texture of the language in the Fourth Gospel is Hebraic? Why again, when he alludes to 'the minuteness of details' [14:4] in this Gospel as alleged in defence of its authenticity, is he satisfied with this mere caricature of the 'apologetic' argument? Having set up a man of straw, he has no difficulty in knocking him down. He has only to declare ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... productions of an earlier age, and in the tombs of the Assaseef, at Thebes, are many admirable specimens of Egyptian art. To those, however, who understand the true feeling of this peculiar school, it is evident, that though in minuteness and finish they are deserving of the highest commendation, yet in grandeur of conception and in boldness of execution they fall far short of the sculptures of ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... with great diligence and minuteness, was altogether ineffectual; they could obtain no intelligence of the runaway. Mr. Trunnion was well distracted at the news of his flight; he raved with great fury at the imprudence of Peregrine, whom ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... baron visited his lands, his tenants were not only obliged to give him and his followers shelter, but also provisions and food, the nature and quality of which were all arranged beforehand with the most extraordinary minuteness. The lesser nobles took advantage sometimes of the power they possessed to repurchase this obligation; but the rich, on the contrary, were most anxious to seize the occasion of proudly displaying before their sovereign all the pomp in their power, at the risk even of mortgaging their ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... at last, "that I do not remember with sufficient minuteness the details you have given me, to be able to advise. I can only suggest that Lord Donal met the Princess herself at the Duchess of Chiselhurst's ball. The Princess, naturally, would wish to mislead him regarding her identity; and so, ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... is fond of the place," she added in conclusion, after setting out all the merits of the villa with feminine minuteness; "at least I know he used to like it, and I think it would please him to get well there. I can only say that it would make me very happy; so do arrange it, dear Mr. Fenton, if possible, and oblige yours ever ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... and then with minuteness, with much learning and eloquence, discoursed successively upon the histories, or emblematic devices, of this the chief work of his hands. All were sorry when ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... they have arrived, I may be pardoned for expressing my belief that this kind of investigation is often pursued with an exaggerated confidence. Plausible conjecture is too frequently mistaken for positive proof. Undue significance is attached to what may be mere casual coincidences, and a minuteness of accuracy is professed in discriminating between the different elements in a narrative which cannot be attained by mere internal evidence. In all writings, but especially in the writings of an age when criticism was ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... (more especially of Flemish and German) design down to the latest times, giving a great superiority to the French and Flemish illuminated work, and causing a proportionate inferiority in their large pictorial efforts. Even Rubens and Vandyke cannot free themselves from a certain meanness and minuteness in disposition of drapery. ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... wore on, diversified with occasional encounters, which Caesar details with the minuteness of a scientific general writing for his profession, and with those admiring mentions of each individual act of courage which so intensely endeared him to his troops. Once an accidental opportunity offered ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... books and talking with the people, I became convinced that the aboriginal tracker's performances evince a craft, a penetration, a luminous sagacity, and a minuteness and accuracy of observation in the matter of detective-work not found in nearly so remarkable a degree in any other people, white or colored. In an official account of the blacks of Australia published by the government ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... which there are innumerable villages (and scarcely a hill), are marked as "unknown mountainous region." General Fraser, after the devotion of a lifetime to the labour, has produced a survey which, in extent and minuteness of detail, stands unrivalled. In this great work he had the co-operation of Major Skinner and of Captain Gallwey, and to these two gentlemen the public are indebted for the greater portion of the ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... smaller animals. But even if their relative susceptibility be assumed to be the same, the lethal dose given the rabbit is equivalent to giving a 140-pound man one dose containing the furane-alcohol content of over 5,000 cups of coffee. Thus, in view of the very apparent minuteness of the quantity of this compound present in one cup of coffee, together with the fact that it is not cumulative in its physiological action, the importance of its toxic properties becomes very inconsequential to even the most profuse ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... for printing from glass or paper negatives, giving a minuteness of detail unattained by any other method, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 235, April 29, 1854 • Various
... anxiety was felt by all for the ills of the one; and for days the "I" would be forgotten if any member of the home-circle was "sick." And the concerns of the patient, whether suffering from a cold, sore eyes, a sprained ankle, or "had her tonsils out," were discussed with minuteness of detail worthy an International Conference. How the patient slept, what the doctor said, the effect of the new medicine, how the heart was standing the strain, what the visiting neighbors thought of the case, in fact the whole subject of sickness held a morbid ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... previous knowledge the material for theoretic images. He had only to change the magnitude of conceptions already in his mind to arrive at the Emission Theory of Light. Newton supposed light to consist of elastic particles of inconceivable minuteness, shot out with inconceivable rapidity by luminous bodies. Optical reflection certainly occurred as if light consisted of such particles, and this was ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... fishes, and insects with considerable minuteness, although it is obvious that he had no special training in, or great gift for, natural history. Wafer eventually reached Philadelphia, where he availed himself of King James's ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... my dear Grandison. I know you love I should be so. From this minuteness, you will judge of the workings of her mind. They are resolved to take your advice, (it was very seasonable,) and treat her with indulgence. The count is earnest to ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... and even the most innocent ones, must come to his knowledge. He is not content with the spontaneous declaration that the penitent feels disposed to make of all infractions of duty; but he insists on examining the case with the most scrupulous minuteness, and takes as much pains as would a clever, cunning lawyer to extract every particle of evidence from the witnesses for or against a culprit on his trial. Under this last point of view, auricular confession may ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... any minuteness the course of Mr. Tazewell through more than three of the most anxious months of his life would far exceed my present limits, and as I have already treated this topic in a separate work, and have been required to treat it again, I shall ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... this Poem, as well as in others, speaks openly of his tastes and passions: his own fortunes are dwelt on with painful minuteness, and his errors are recorded with the accuracy, but not the seriousness of the confessional. He seems to have been fond of taking himself to task. It was written when "Hungry ruin had him in the wind," and emigration to the West Indies was the only refuge which he could think ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... his picture, and the events of the time when he lived gave the scenes for the painting, his colours would fail, and his outlines become unsteady. In other words, there could not be the scrupulous minuteness and the perfect freedom which make history live and breathe, unless, like Tacitus, he registered facts in which he took the deepest interest, from feeling their influence directly and powerfully exerted over himself, and the living ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... tell, and no doubt, if she thought it would flatter, would tell, a beautiful young girl that her destiny was to be a queen; but there is in this prediction a minuteness of detail, that cannot be accounted for on the ground of accidental coincidence. It is a brief history of her life. Unless we are prepared to believe that an ignorant old mulatto woman was gifted by divine Providence with supernatural power, ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... meaning and a charm; that the open record of its immemorial past tells us at every turn that all agencies have conspired for loveliness and ruin itself has been benign. A passage of Wordsworth's describing the character of the lake-shores illustrates this fact with loving minuteness. ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... Perouse made the south coast of New Holland on Dec. 5, 1792, about twenty-eight leagues to the north-west of Cape Chatham.* The coast, from the South-west Cape to the longitude of Termination Island, was explored by the admiral, with all the minuteness that the state of the weather could permit; and he was, generally, able to keep the shore closer abord than captain Vancouver had done, and to supply the deficiencies in his chart. The broken land to the north of Termination Island was found ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... microscope reveals innumerable animalcules in the hundredth part of a drop of water. They all eat, digest, move and from all appearances of their frolics, they are endowed with sensation and ability of enjoyment. What then shall we say of the minuteness of the food they eat; of the blood that surges through their veins; of their nervous system that thrills and guides them? Their minutest organs must be composed of molecules, atoms, ions and electrons inconceivably smaller than ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... "Priestly Narrative" and of the "Jehovistic Narrative" have, for the sake of distinctness, been applied to them. The former is so called because the chapters in Exodus and the two following books, which treat with particular minuteness of the various ceremonial institutions of Israel, are considered to be by the same writer. The latter has received its name from the preference shown by the writer for the use, as the Divine name, of the word Jehovah,—so spelt ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... presented the golden cup to the baron, with a low bow, that nobleman could not find sufficient words to express his admiration. He sighed with rapture, and examined the cup from every side with the utmost minuteness. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... Cazvin calls the Spirit of the Earth) was the tutelar genius of good and virtuous women, etc. For all this the reader may consult the 19th and 20th chapters of Hyde, "de Religione Veterum Persarum," where the names and attributes of these daily and monthly angels are with much minuteness and erudition explained. It appears from the Zend-avesta that the Persians had a certain office or prayer for every day of the month (addressed to the particular angel who presided over it), which they ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... to Anthony's Seat is the fifth plate. Here we scarcely know which to admire most, the beautiful work and etchy spirit of the mountainous foreground, the minuteness and delicacy of the distant city, or the actual brightness of the Firth of Forth broken by the "noble breast-work of Salisbury Crags and the point of the Cat's nick." The Crags, it will be recollected, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... specify, with a little minuteness, two or three points of service. Nature never spares the opium or nepenthe; but wherever she mars her creature with some deformity or defect, lays her poppies plentifully on the bruise, and the sufferer goes joyfully through life, ignorant of the ruin, and incapable of seeing ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... not allowable to lay down that the society in which they are united was originally organised on the patriarchal model. The chief lineaments of such a society, as collected from the early chapters in Genesis, I need not attempt to depict with any minuteness, both because they are familiar to most of us from our earliest childhood, and because, from the interest once attaching to the controversy which takes its name from the debate between Locke and Filmer, they fill a whole chapter, though not a very profitable one, in ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... kept in the very highest order, the trees and flowers are watched and inspected with the greatest minuteness. An old invalid soldier commands his 500 or 600 men as gardeners and overseers. Every leaf that falls in pond or canal is carefully fished up. They trim and polish the trees and paths in the gardens to the greatest nicety, and the grass ...
— A Journey in Russia in 1858 • Robert Heywood
... things by halves, gave to the paintings of the Hollanders another distinctive trait—finish. This they carried to the last possible degree of perfection. Critics say truthfully that in Dutch paintings one may discover the first quality of the nation—patience. Everything is portrayed with the minuteness of a daguerreotype: the furniture with all the graining of the wood, the leaf with all its veins, a thread in a bit of cloth, the patch with all the stitches showing, the animal with every hair distinct, the face with all its wrinkles,—everything is finished ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... But of all these branches the most important are the inlaying and mosaic of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, represented in a central manner by these mosaics of St. Mark's. Missal-painting could not, from its minuteness, produce the same sublime impressions, and frequently merged itself in mere ornamentation of the page. Modern book-illustration has been so little skillful as hardly to be worth naming. Sculpture, though in some positions it becomes ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... (540/2. This refers to the distortion of shells in cleaved rocks.) of the mechanical action in cleaved rocks. The great curvature would be, I think, a grand discovery of Sharpe's, but I confess there is some want of minuteness in the statement of Sharpe which makes me wish to see his facts confirmed. That the foliation and cleavage are parts of curves I am quite prepared, from what I have seen, to believe; but the simplicity ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... weary the reader to describe this Crown-Prince Mansion; which, by desperate study of our abstruse materials, it is possible to do with auctioneer minuteness. There are engraved VIEWS of Reinsberg and its Environs; which used to lie conspicuous in the portfolios of collectors,—-which I have not seen. [See Hennert, just cited, for the titles of them.] Of the House itself, engraved Frontages (FACADES), Ground-plans, are ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... began to ask themselves if this Ayrton's word was to be absolutely believed. There was something suspicious about this unexpected meeting. Certainly the man had mentioned facts and dates which corresponded, and the minuteness of his details was most striking. Still exactness of details was no positive proof. Indeed, it has been noticed that a falsehood has sometimes gained ground by being exceedingly particular in minutiae. ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... of the Periplus did not enter the Gulf of Persia, he certainly stretched over, with the monsoon, either to Karmania, or directly to Scindi, or to the Gulf of Cambay; for at these places the minuteness of information which distinguishes the ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... made the most effective use. One could wish that Boldrewood had made himself as far as possible an exception to the rule—that he had aimed at a praiseworthy provinciality by matching with the elaborate minuteness of his local colour some finished and memorable studies of ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... they are works of imagination and not true stories. "The little art he is truly master of, is of forging a story and imposing it upon the world as truth." So wrote one of his contemporaries. Charles Lamb, in criticizing Defoe, notices this minuteness of detail and remarks that he is, therefore, an author suited only for "servants" (meaning that this method can appeal only to comparatively uneducated minds). Really as every boy and girl knows, ...
— Memoirs of a Cavalier • Daniel Defoe
... discussed the intimacies of domesticity with a frankness and a minuteness which dismayed Carol. Juanita Haydock communicated Harry's method of shaving, and his interest in deer-shooting. Mrs. Gougerling reported fully, and with some irritation, her husband's inappreciation of liver and bacon. Maud Dyer chronicled Dave's digestive disorders; quoted a recent ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... after the birth of Isaac and when Sarah had attained the age of one hundred and twenty-seven, we come to the conclusion of her "mortal story." Her death, and the respect paid to her memory, are related with a circumstantial minuteness which is truly honourable to her character. This affecting event occurred at Kirjah-Arba, or Hebron, in the plain of Mamre, where Abraham came to bemoan his loss. Venerable man! thine was no common mourning! Thou didst not merely sit ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... the square rose the mediaeval front of the cathedral, where the imagination of a Gothic architect had long ago flowered out indestructibly, in the first place, a grand design, and then covering it with such abundant detail of ornament, that the magnitude of the work seemed less a miracle than its minuteness. You would suppose that he must have softened the stone into wax, until his most delicate fancies were modelled in the pliant material, and then had hardened it into stone again. The whole was a vast, black-letter page of the richest and quaintest poetry. In fit keeping with all this old ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and minuteness of such descriptive character sketches, but even the shortest and most general is necessary to the proper appreciation of every play, even if it is being merely read. When a student is assimilating a role for rehearsing or acting, these additions of the ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... women. His gentlemen, whether young or old, are apt to be stiff, priggish, and commonplace; and his ladies, especially his young ladies, are as deficient in individuality as the figures and faces of a fashion-print. Their personal and mental charms are set forth with all the minuteness of a passport; but, after all, we cannot but think that these fine creatures, with hair, brow, eyes, and lips of the most orthodox and approved pattern, would do very little towards helping one through a rainy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... level of poetry, to harness mules to a wagon, particularizing every article of their furniture, straps, rings, staples, and even the tying of the knots that kept all together. HOMER, who writes always to the eye, with all his sublimity and grandeur, has the minuteness ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... camp, the court, the boudoir, the low faubourg, or the country chateau are ranged in order, and catalogued. This is done with relentless audacity, often with a touch of grotesque exaggeration, but always with almost wearying minuteness. Sometimes this great writer finds that a description of actuality fails to give the true spiritual key to a situation, and he overflows into allegory, or Swendenborgian mysticism, just as Bastien-Lepage resorts to a coating of actual gilt, in depicting that ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden
... old times. Once an Indian went forth to hunt. And he departed from the east branch of the Penobscot, and came to the head of another branch that leads into the east branch, and this he followed even to the foot of Mount Katahdin. [Footnote: This minuteness of needless detail is very characteristic of Indian tales. I do not think that it is introduced for the sake of local color, or to give an air of truthful seeming, because the Indian simply believes the whole, as it is. I think the reason may be that, owing to their love of adventure, they enjoy ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... poem, which consists of a series of narratives told by a party of travellers gathered in Sudbury Inn, and each suited, either by its scene or its sentiment, to the speaker who recites it. In this also there is a natural reminiscence of Chaucer; and if we miss the rich minuteness of his Van Eyck painting, or the depth of his thoughtful humor, we find the same airy grace, tenderness, simple strength, and exquisite felicities of description. Nor are twinkles of sly humor wanting. The Interludes, and above all the Prelude, are masterly examples ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... one character give a description, over a hundred pages long, repeating at length, word for word, long conversations which he has never heard, marking the changes of colour which he has not seen—and all this with a minuteness which even the firmest memory and the most loquacious tongue could not recall? Does not this give an unreality to the style incompatible with art, which ought to be the mainspring of all imaginative work? This, however, is not Mrs. Shelley's error alone, but is ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... has of private life a very deep and fine sentiment which goes even to minuteness of detail and of superstition. He knows how to move you and make you palpitate from the first, simply in depicting a garden-walk, a dining-room, a piece of furniture. He divines the mysteries of provincial life; sometimes he makes them. Most often he does not recognize and therefore isolates ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... every portion of the brain with care and minuteness by the psychometric method, even tracing the convolutions and their anfractuosities, and observing from point to point how beautifully and harmoniously the innumerable functions blend with each ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... were the thoughts that floated through the mind of this child of twelve years old. And from these precocious yearnings after the infinite, Olive's fancy turned to earthly, childish things. She pictured with curious minuteness how she would feel when she awoke next morning, and found that Elspie was dead;—how there would be a funeral; how strange the house would seem afterward; even what would be done with the black bonnet and shawl which, two days since, Elspie had hung up against the nursery-door ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... employed than in shedding them), to see her rake out a bed of fresh and glowing coals, and proceed to broil the mackerel. Her usually pale cheeks were all ablaze with heat and hurry. She watched the fish with as much tender care and minuteness of attention as if,—we know not how to express it otherwise,—as if her own heart were on the gridiron, and her immortal happiness were involved in its being done precisely to ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... shawls, household utensils, crockery, everything the contadino needs and loves. Gaspare, having money to lay out, considered it his serious duty to examine everything that was to be bought with slow minuteness. It did not matter whether the goods were suited to a masculine taste or not. He went into the mysteries of feminine attire with almost as much assiduity as a mother displays when buying a daughter's trousseau, ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Pope, you will find described with rather a malicious minuteness some of the personal habits and infirmities of the great little Pope. His body was crooked, he was so short that it was necessary to raise his chair in order to place him on a level with other people at table.(140) ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... its own environment; and his logical starting-point is an analysis of wealth-production as it exists to-day. He begins by insisting on the fact that labour in the modern world is divided with such a general and such an increasing minuteness that each labour produces one kind of product only, of which he himself can consume but a small fraction, and often consumes nothing. His own product, therefore, has for him the character of wealth only because he is able to exchange it for ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... recommended by their novelty, listened, with a degree of patience and attention, which his guest mistook for the humility of wonder. The latter, indeed, described the few festivities which the turbulence of that period permitted to the court of Henry the Third, with a minuteness, that somewhat recompensed for his ostentation; but, when he came to speak of the character of the Duke de Joyeuse, of a secret treaty, which he knew to be negotiating with the Porte, and of the light in which Henry of Navarre was ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... procession that has gone seeking the place of sepulchre three hundred years and more in wind and rain—are daubed in forcibly against the glowing ferns and heather. Every tassel of their rusty foliage is defined with pre-Raphaelite minuteness. And a sorry figure they make out there in the sun, like misbegotten yew-trees! The scene is all pitched in a key of colour so peculiar, and lit up with such a discharge of violent sunlight, as a man might live fifty years in England and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... been amply verified by experience; the extraordinary minuteness and accuracy of Mr. Darwin's observations, combined with the charm and simplicity of his descriptions, have ensured the popularity of this book with all classes of readers—and that popularity has even increased in recent years. No attempt, however, has ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... check; whereas, in the course of centuries, art—and especially literary creation—becomes, as we have already said, a decadent and rationalized mythology. This form of invention consists neither of idealizing the external world, nor reproducing it with the minuteness of realism, but remaking the universe to suit oneself, without taking into account natural laws, and despising the impossible: it is a liberated realism. Often, in an environment of pure fancy, where only caprice reigns, the characters appear clear, well-fashioned, living. The ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... found in large and expensive works, with a host of annotations from the journals of recent travellers and other volumes which bear upon the main subject. This part of the series, describing vegetable substances used for the food of man, is executed with considerable minuteness. A Pythagorean would gloat over its accuracy, and a vegetable diet man would become inflated with its success in establishing his eccentricities. The contents are the Corn-plants, Esculent Roots, Herbs, Spices, Tea, Coffee, &c. &c. In such a multiplicity ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 546, May 12, 1832 • Various
... ceases. Perhaps, although deficient in minuteness of detail, this pot pourri of gossip, history, description, anecdote, suggestion, and opinion, may not only amuse the traveller by railway, but assist him in choosing routes leading to those scenes or those pursuits in ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... precepts he is safe from the Daevas, under the immediate protection of Ormazd. The substance of the law is the command, "THINK PURELY, SPEAK PURELY, ACT PURELY." All that comes from Ormazd is pure, from Ahriman impure; and bodily purity has a like worth with moral purity. Hence the multitude and minuteness of precepts concerning bodily cleanliness. In fact the whole liturgic worship ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... Rev. Nathl. Rogers, there was a portrait of that worthy, about a third of the size of life, carved in relief, with his cloak, band, and wig, in excellent preservation, all the buttons of his waistcoat being cut with great minuteness,—the minister's nose being on a level with his cheeks. It was an upright gravestone. Returning home, I held a colloquy with a young girl about the right road. She had come out to feed a pig, and was a little suspicious that we were making fun of her, yet answered us with a shy laugh ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... England and Scotland when his popularity in Germany has departed, and he, like the philosophers whom he criticizes, is of the past. No other thinker has ever dissected the human mind with equal patience and minuteness. He has lightened the burden of thought because he has shown us that the chains which we wear are of our own forging. To be able to place ourselves not only above the opinions of men but above their modes of thinking, is a great ...
— Sophist • Plato
... thought you heard some gormandizer dilating upon the roasting a savory goose at Michaelmas as he described the roasting of some Spanish Don to make him discover his treasure—a detail given with a minuteness that made every rich old burgher present turn uncomfortably in his chair. All this would be told with infinite glee, as if he considered it an excellent joke; and then he would give such a tyrannical leer in the face ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... of future punishment reached its most repulsive and abnormal developments in the hands of the monks. A vast literature was produced by them, portraying, with vivid minuteness, the pangs of hell. Volcanoes were said to be the portals of the lower world, that heaved and sighed as human souls were plunged into the awful depths. God was held up as a fearful judge, and the saving mercy of Christ himself paled before the ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... very many instances the morality of the moralist has outshone the righteousness of the Christian. Yes! and I have seen canoe-paddles carved by South Sea Islanders with no better tools than an oyster-shell and a sharp fish-bone, which in the minuteness and delicacy of their work, as well as in the truth and taste of their pattern, might put to shame the work of carvers with better tools. But that is not the fault of the tools; it is the fault of the carvers. And so, whilst we acknowledge ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... Mr Quiverful might be, he would not allow himself to be talked out of his opinion on this occasion; and proceeded with much minuteness to explain to his wife the tone in which Mr Slope had spoken of Mrs Proudie's interference in diocesan matters. As he did so, a new idea gradually instilled itself into the matron's head, and a new course of action presented itself to her judgement. What if, after all, Mrs Proudie ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... author's general narrative of the Doctor's life in Mr. Croker's edition of 1831 - and not the least interesting circumstance connected with it is, that Johnson himself read, from time to time, Boswell's record of his sayings and doings; and, so far from being displeased with its minuteness, expressed great admiration of its accuracy, and encouraged the chronicler to proceed with his grand ulterior proceeding. See Life, vol. i. P. viii. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... magazine acceptances, and then revamping the manuscripts to make them presentable. When the young aspirant got a start at last, he rode into sudden fame by describing the celebrated author's private life with such a caustic humor and such minuteness of blistering detail that the book sold a prodigious edition, and broke the celebrated author's heart with mortification. With his latest gasp he said, "Alas, the books deceived me; they do not tell the whole story. Beware of the struggling ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... finish. This is probably the position of most of his readers, who cannot very logically account for either preference. We can only make sure that we have here an annalist, or analyst, as we choose, who fascinates us from his first page to his last, whose narrative or whose comment may enter into any minuteness of detail without fatiguing us, and can only truly ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... had been providentially delayed until the last half of the nineteenth century with its steam and electricity, annihilators of space and time, in order that her evolution might be studied with a minuteness impossible in any previous age, or by any previous generation. It is almost as if one were conducting an experiment in human evolution in his own laboratory, imposing the ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... little foreseen, have unfolded themselves, in all their grandeur, to the eyes of the present age. It is a common amusement of speculative minds to contrast the magnitude of the most important events with the minuteness of their primeval causes, and the records of mankind are full of examples for such contemplations. It is, however, a more profitable employment to trace the constituent principles of future greatness in their kernel; to detect in the acorn at our feet the germ of that majestic oak, ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... manuscripts, as well as treatises in ten other Oriental languages, which only made me deplore my ignorance, since I was unable to read a word of any of them. The illuminations, though, struck me as fully equal to the finest fourteenth-century European work in their extreme minuteness and wonderful delicacy of detail. The young priest, whom I should suspect of being what is termed in ecclesiastical circles "a spike," was evidently very familiar with the Liturgy of the Church of England, but it came with somewhat of a shock to hear him apply to Buddha terms which ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... philosopher, as you are good enough to call me, elaborating theories by the aid of cases sought out by himself, and by him watched and scrutinised with more time at command, and consequently infinitely more minuteness than the ordinary practitioner can afford, falls insensibly into habits of observation, which accompany him everywhere, and are exercised, as some people would say, impertinently, upon every subject that presents itself with the least likelihood ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... impossible for the annalist to be profound and interesting, authentic and animated, at the same time, that a large class of the learned repudiate as spurious the renown of Macaulay,—although his research and his minuteness cannot be questioned, and only in a few instances has his accuracy been successfully impugned. They distrust him chiefly because he is agreeable, doubt his correctness for the reason that his style fascinates, and deem admiration ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... submitted to the House of Representatives a report, signed only by himself and Mr. Watmough, of Pennsylvania, in which he declared his dissent from the report of the committee on that subject. After examining their proceedings with minuteness and searching severity, he asserted that they were without authority, and in flagrant violation of the rights of the bank, and of the principles on which the freedom of this ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... the circumstantial minuteness with which you have related the youthful adventures of Mr. H. I am surprised at your not mentioning one which I know to be a fact. On the first night's performance of the company after his arrival at Bristol, his passionate love of the stage made him imprudent ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... traditional lore of a still more remote period. The same may be said of certain works on cautery and acupuncture, both of which are still practised by Chinese doctors; and also of works on the pulse, the variations of which have been classified and allocated with a minuteness hardly credible. Special treatises on fevers, skin-diseases, diseases of the feet, eyes, heart, &c., are to be found in great quantities, as well as veterinary treatises on the treatment of diseases of the horse and the domestic buffalo. But in the whole range of Chinese medical literature ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... were all those harmonizing wrinkles which become old age—upon canvas—while, below her chin, communicating with a small and shrunken neck, was that sort of concavity, or dewlap, which painters delight to express with a minuteness of touch, and mellowness of tint, that contribute largely to picturesque effect! This good old woman received us with perfect elasticity of spirits and of action. It should seem that we were the first Englishmen who had visited her solitude this year. Her husband approached, but she ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... it be said that this was a greater and more grievous loss to the mind's eye of posterity than to the bodily organs of Pepys himself. It makes me restless and discontented to think what a Diary equal in minuteness and truth of portraiture to the preceding from 1669 to 1688 or 1690 would have been for the true causes, process and character ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... individuality in the Icelandic historian's description of King Olaf that wins one's interest—at first as in an acquaintance—and rivets it at last as in a personal friend. The old Chronicle lingers with such loving minuteness over his attaching qualities, his social, generous nature, his gaiety and "frolicsomeness;" even his finical taste in dress, and his evident proneness to fall too hastily in love, have a value in the ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... being careful to let the cause of humanity and the spread of civil liberty be his watchword, go out with his sword sharpened, and after cutting down the existing powers, snatch up the diadem and place it upon his own head. Glanmoregain explained his various plans with such minuteness that they all became cloud and mist in the general's mind; indeed, he began to debate within himself as to the means by which he could serve two masters whose interests seemed to run in directly opposite channels. Minister Potter had, however, a ready facility for ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... clergyman. This union of the three creeds in homage to their sovereign did not displease the Emperor, strange as it was. Count Beugnot's Memoirs must be consulted for a full account of the activity, the interest in details, the minuteness of the administrative investigations which, at Dsseldorf as everywhere else, characterized Napoleon in these laborious journeys, on which, under pretext of seeking distraction, he kept himself in almost as active movement as if he were at war. The Count who once played whist ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... were mildly Liberal, more warmly Home Rulers, but they put above all the interests of the Church. They were, too, fierce partisans on the controversies about Church music, and had a zeal for the beauty and order of their respective churches that was admirable in its minuteness and its perseverance. They both had a large circle of friends with whom they rejoiced at annual festivities at their Colleges, and with whom they habitually and freely censured their immediate authorities. Those who were warmest ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... brothers, who welcomed our friend and his three companions with grave Italian courtesy. Understanding the curiosity the four felt to see their premises, they did the honors of their place, with a minuteness as politely considerate towards the strangers as it was gratifying to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... the rather that, after an interval of more than twenty years, Schiller himself, on meeting with his early comrade (the late Dr. Elwert of Kantstadt) for the first time since their boyhood, reminded him of the adventure, recounting the circumstances with great minuteness and glee. It is as follows: Once in 1768, Elwert and he had to repeat their catechism together on a certain day publicly in the church. Their teacher, an ill-conditioned, narrow-minded pietist, had previously threatened them with a thorough flogging if they missed even a single word. To make ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... visible some markings still smaller than the last; and in like manner has every increase in the power of the telescope developed more worlds and suns far away from our system and beyond our Milky Way. An approach to the infinite in minuteness and to the infinite in magnitude and distance is thus furnished to us by ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... forms, afforded great amusement and satisfaction. There he united in his person, for some time, the priest and the ruler: he experienced during his residence, most of the anxieties and difficulties incident to such stations, and detailed them with curious minuteness. As a cultivator he was energetic and persevering; but the rats devoured his seed, or torrents washed it away: or a tropical hurricane, which tore up huge trees, overthrew the frail buildings he reared. His people conspired ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... being no movement beyond this wave, though there will be in the space which it encloses, namely in parts of the particular waves, those parts which do not touch the sphere DCF. And all this ought not to seem fraught with too much minuteness or subtlety, since we shall see in the sequel that all the properties of Light, and everything pertaining to its reflexion and its refraction, can be explained in principle by this means. This is a matter which has been quite unknown to those who hitherto have ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... these books. . . . The events are described with minuteness and care. The result is a very ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... have sometimes descended from that elevation of style, which the reader might expect in a quarto volume; we have frequently been obliged to record facts concerning children which may seem trifling, and to enter into a minuteness of detail which may appear unnecessary. No anecdotes, however, have been admitted without due deliberation; nothing has been introduced to gratify the idle curiosity of others, or to indulge our own feelings ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... painting was not one to attract Meissonier, who was ambitious to paint like the old Dutch artists, Terburg, Metzu, Mieris, and others, who have the charm that their pictures are finished with the most exquisite minuteness, and yet treated in such a large way that, after awhile, we forget the microscopic wonder of the performance and think only of the skill the artist has shown in painting character. Meissonier was the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... I found that she did not see the blemishes—that she appreciated nothing I had said, comprehended nothing. Such unaccountable obtuseness puzzled me. I began again, going over the whole with even greater minuteness and care. I worked hard: the perspiration stood in beads upon my forehead as I struggled with her—what shall I call it—obstinacy? But it was not exactly obstinacy. She simply could not see the faults of her own work, any more than a blind man can see the smoke that dims ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... be of no less importance than the outward act is to be gathered from the praises of kindliness already cited and the cry of "I am pure," which is repeated by the soul on trial. Moreover, there is a minuteness of detail in the confession which shows no little delicacy of moral appreciation—"I have not privily done evil against mankind," "I have not afflicted men," "I have not withheld milk from the mouths of sucklings," "I have not been idle," "I have not played the hypocrite," "I have not told falsehoods," ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Rome, then, greatly favoured and recommended by the Marquis, who made him a Chevalier in order to honour him the more, he was received lovingly by that Pontiff and straightway commissioned to paint a little chapel that is in the said place. This he executed with diligence and love, and with such minuteness that the vaulting and the walls appear rather illuminated than painted; and the largest figures that are therein, which he painted in fresco like the others, are over the altar, representing the Baptism ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... horseback, and others in gigs drawn by a pair of horses driven tandem-fashion. They all smoked incessantly, and nearly all of them, on reaching the square, proceeded at once to the shed, and, walking up and down its entire length, examined with the utmost minuteness every individual beneath its roof, frequently stopping to make some inquiry of those who had the ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... robust manhood with artless and unconscious truth. Its freedom, its voluble minuteness of delineation, its rapid changes of construction, its breaks, pauses, significant and sudden transitions, its easy irregularities, exhibit the intellectual play of national youth; while in boldness and splendor it meets the demands ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... observe. I do not care how slowly you do it, or with how many alterations, junctions, or re-touchings; the one thing I ask of you is, that the line shall be right, and right by measurement, to the same minuteness which you would have to give in a Government chart to the map of a ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... window to window, and Godfrey examined each of them with a minuteness that astonished me, for I had no idea what he expected to find. But we completed the circuit of the ground floor without his apparently discovering ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... characteristic audacity he disdained to seek the services of some German Professor, an order of men which, rarely dining out and caring little for "Society," can devote itself entirely to letters, perhaps he hearkened to the silly charge against the Teuton of minuteness and futility of research as opposed to "good old English breadth and suggestiveness of treatment." And the consequence has been a "continuation" which serves as a standard whereby to measure the excellence of the original work and the woful falling- off ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... my music studies. I am teaching here summers to get pin money. It is so quiet here one grows to think all the world very far away, and the wild things among which you have lived and worked are almost unimaginable even when the newspapers describe them with the greatest minuteness. ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... whom I had seen on the previous day, caressing their infants, struck me with the more force that I had learned from my masters that law which had hitherto ruled uncontested, and now underwent a refutation which demonstrated the falsity of its applications with a clearness and minuteness which ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... shams of society to the realities of war, and sets before us with a graphic power and minuteness the inner life of that great struggle in which Count Tolstoi took part.... A thrilling tale of besieged Sebastopol. All is intensely real, intensely life-like, and doubly striking from its very simplicity. We have before our eyes war ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... manner, and sometimes of their refusing supply when disgusted with any circumstance of public conduct. It is, however, certain, that this power, though essential to parliaments, may easily be abused, as well by the frequency and minuteness of their remonstrances, as by their intrusion into every part of the king's counsels and determinations. Under color of advice, they may give disguised orders; and in complaining of grievances, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... Midhurst over the border into Hampshire, the village of Selborne is reached, one of the smallest but best known places in England from the care and minuteness with which Rev. Gilbert White has described it in his Natural History of Selborne. It is a short distance south-east of Alton and about fifty miles south-west of London, while beyond the village the chalk-hills rise to a height of three hundred feet, having a long ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... ample scope for the exuberant fancy of ancient commentators; and it is not unreasonable to suppose that Bishop Taylor may have had the remarks of one of these writers running in his mind, when he quoted St. James as reprobating, with such minuteness of detail, the folly of consulting oracles, spirits, sorcerers, and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 191, June 25, 1853 • Various
... word of this story, although she was quite without proof to the contrary. Jem's letters had not been frequent, nor had they been remarkable for minuteness of detail respecting his own life. Mrs. Agar had done her best to put a stop to this correspondence altogether, and had succeeded in bringing about a subtle reserve on both sides. She had persistently told Jem that Dora was evidently attached to Arthur, and that their marriage ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... in the East is generally known to the reader of travels, so as to render acceptable the following details. They are extracted from Mr. Buckingham's Travels,[1] and bear all the graphic minuteness of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... (which is a curious parallel to this) altogether imaginary, since the writer was at Naples during the whole period of the pestilence,—but also that it was a part indispensable of the entire scheme, and described with all its ghastly minuteness simply to enhance the value of his sunshine and merriment. He was in Naples from 1345 until 1350, without any other indication of a visit to Florence than a chronological table of his life, in which occurs ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... the sermon out of his mind," and went out to his sports with the Elstow lads on the village green, with as "great delight" as ever. But in the midst of his game of tip-cat or "sly," just as he had struck the "cat" from its hole, and was going to give it a second blow—the minuteness of the detail shows the unforgetable reality of the crisis—he seemed to hear a voice from heaven asking him whether "he would leave his sins and go to heaven, or keep his sins and go to hell." He thought also that he saw Jesus Christ looking down on him with threatening ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... the point of view of a twelve-year-old boy, and it might be worth doing; but I have delayed attempting it somewhat too long; the moving pictures in my mind have become too faded and confused. And yet I am surprised at the minuteness of some of my recollections; they have, no doubt, been kept alive by the numerous photographs of Rome which one carries about, and also by the occasional perusal of The Marble Faun and other Roman literature. But much is also due to the wonderful separateness which Rome retains in the mind. It ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... have actually, committed. I cannot but suspect, that, if I had employed the language of exclusive eulogy,—such language as is employed at and concerning the Commencement dinners and the Alumni dinners, I might have described the celebration of Class-Day with much more minuteness than I have attempted to do, and should have heard no complaints of violated hospitality. This I would gladly have done, had it been possible. As it was not, I have pointed out those features which seemed to me objectionable,—certainly ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... curling and fringe-like cirrhi, by the agitation of which it attracts and collects its food. These cirrhi so much resemble feathers, as to have suggested the leading idea of a bird's tail: and hence the construction of the remainder of the fable, which is thus given with grave minuteness in The Herbal, or General Historie of Plants, gathered by John Gerarde, Master ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... accuracy at least as can leave no doubt as to its character. The wonder is that we are able to do so, and that the statements of the Fathers should stand the test so well as they do. Epiphanius especially often shows the most painstaking care and minuteness of detail. He has reproduced the manuscript of Marcion's Gospel that he had before him, even to its clerical errors [Endnote 210:1]. He and Tertullian are writing quite independently, and yet they confirm each other in a remarkable ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... in the midst of another race, it is evident that once you get rid of autocratic or military or class-government of any kind, and return to democratic forms, this difficulty will be much reduced or disappear. Small democratic communes are perfectly simple to form in groups of any magnitude or minuteness which may be desirable; and such groups would easily federate or ally themselves with surrounding democracies of alien race, whereas if lorded over by alien conquerors they would be in a state of chronic ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... Christians under Diocletian and Galerius, which was aimed at the entire uprooting of the new religion, ended with the edict of toleration of 311 and the tragical ruin of the persecutors. Galerius died soon after of a disgusting and terrible disease (morbus pedicularis), described with great minuteness by Eusebius and Lactantius. 'His body,' says Gibbon, 'swelled by an intemperate course of life to an unwieldy corpulence, was covered with ulcers and devoured by innumerable swarms of those insects which have given their name to a most ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... preparation in the leaf. It is believed that the passage of the sap in plants is conducted in a manner precisely similar to that of the blood in man, from the regular contraction and expansion of the vessels; but, on account of their extreme minuteness, it is almost an impossibility to be certain upon this point. Numerous observations made with the microscope show that their diameter seldom exceeds a 290th part of a line, or a 3,000th part of an inch. Leuwenhoeck reckoned 20,000 vessels ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... his arrival in town, called at my chambers, and related with his usual minuteness and precision as many of the foregoing particulars as he knew and thought proper to communicate to me. For the rest I am indebted to subsequent conversations ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... fraud can be imposed, or was ever imposed upon a whole people. They are their own witness also that they were given by the hand of Moses, for they are all prefaced by the words, "And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying." When we consider their fundamental character, their extent, and the number and minuteness of their details, we cannot for a moment suppose that they were left unwritten by such a man as Moses, who had all the qualifications for writing them. Why should not the man who received them from the ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... that these observations comprehend; but, with the use of apparatus suitably arranged, the movements at all depths have been determined, with the exact amount of power exerted by streams coursing along the bed of the sea. The necessity for this minuteness of examination has been fully shown in some of the curious discoveries that ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... treasures of the institution by intelligent officials. A young man who spoke excellent English was given me as a guide by the distinguished Director-in-Chief. Classification of the books is carried to great minuteness, and it is but the work of a moment, to one familiar with its principles, to turn to any book of the million. The apartments are plain and crowded, although some of the rooms of the adjoining palace had recently been turned into the library, which is fast outgrowing its ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... our Professor, as Poets are wont, look back on his childhood; the historical details of which (to say nothing of much other vague oratorical matter) he accordingly dwells on with an almost wearisome minuteness. We hear of Entepfuhl standing "in trustful derangement" among the woody slopes; the paternal Orchard flanking it as extreme outpost from below; the little Kuhbach gushing kindly by, among beech-rows, through river after river, into the Donau, into the Black Sea, into the ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... their steep roofs climbing high in successions of blinking dormers, were more richly mediaeval than anything the travellers had ever dreamt of before, and they feasted themselves upon the unimagined picturesqueness with a leisurely minuteness which brought responsive gazers everywhere to the windows; windows were set ajar; shop doors were darkened by curious figures from within, and the traffic of the tortuous alleys was interrupted by their progress. They could not have said which delighted them more—the houses in ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... elected mayor, after a close election, disputed by Chapin. The enemy practised a good thing on him. During one of the delegate elections, when his ambition seemed to tower higher than it now does, he published a sort of memorabilia, like that of Dr. Mitchell, in which was set forth, with much minuteness of detail, all that he had ever done, and much of all he ever thought, for the good of this poor territory. Such, for instance, as that in 1802, he was appointed town-clerk of Hamtramck; that he offered, in 1811, his services to Congress in a military ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... that on the large Atlantic liners the bowsprit has been removed, or at any rate a notice put up: "Authors are requested not to lie prostrate on the bowsprit." But even without this advantage, three or four generations of writers have chronicled with great minuteness their sensations during the transit. I need only say that my sensations were just as good as theirs. I will content myself with chronicling the fact that during the voyage we passed two dolphins, ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... monsieur. I speak English—I learned it when I was valet for Mr. Parker in London. That is why I am sent here. The pay is of a minuteness. ...
— A Diplomatic Adventure • S. Weir Mitchell
... illustration of the minuteness of this subdivision, an instruction card similar to the one used is reproduced in Figure 1 on the next page. (This card was about 7 inches long by ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... Macha. The floruit of Cuculain, therefore, falls completely within the historical penumbra, and the more carefully the enormous, and in the main mutually consistent and self-supporting, historical remains dealing with this period are studied, the more will this be believed. The minuteness, accuracy, extent, and verisimilitude of the literature, chronicles, pedigrees, &c., relating to this period, will cause the student to wonder more and more as he examines and collates, seeing the ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... Esther, his love in youth, his wife, dearer growing with the passage of years. And yet he was not unmindful of business. Every day a messenger brought him a despatch from Sanballat, in charge of the big commerce behind; and every day a despatch left him for Sanballat with directions of such minuteness of detail as to exclude all judgment save his own, and all chances except those the Almighty has refused to submit to the most ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... With distinct minuteness did she print herself upon my consciousness in that five minutes' interval: she was painted a dull and cholera yellow, like many Russian ships, and there was a faded pink space at her bows under the line where the yellow ceased: ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... of their paper, for they still kept up their old habit of writing tales and poems, and loved to scribble out of doors. And some of it they would use in drawing, since at this time they were taking lessons, and Emily and Charlotte were devoted to the art: Charlotte making copies with minuteness and exact fidelity; Emily drawing animals and still-life with far greater freedom and certainty of touch. Some of Charlotte's paper, also, must have gone in letter-writing. She had made friends at school, an event of great importance to that narrow ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... existence, the physical with the spiritual, we find the horizon of consciousness in the former, is vaguely defined and very much limited; while in the latter, it is sharply defined and widely extended. The more we study and compare, the more readily we understand, that space, duration, size, minuteness, solidity and porosity, are all relative terms which depend for their significance entirely on the standpoint of consciousness. So apparent is this fact, that we soon learn how impossible it is for ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... an indifferent reader, may appear trivial, to a spectator and participant seem often of importance. To the design of this work (which was, to furnish a complete record of the transactions of the colony from its foundation), accuracy and a degree of minuteness in detail seemed essential; and on reviewing his manuscript, the author saw little that, consistently with his plan, he could ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... that I had myself just been trampling on the established boundaries of obligation, and therefore might well have a fellow-feeling for other offenders. Add to which, I had known Mr. Falkland from the first as a beneficent divinity. I had observed at leisure, and with a minuteness which could not deceive me, the excellent qualities of his heart; and I found him possessed of a mind beyond comparison the most fertile and ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... little voyage was the complete knowledge of the existence of a strait separating Van Diemen's land from the continent of New Holland, it may not be improper to enter with some degree of minuteness into the particulars of it; and the writer of these pages feels much gratification in being enabled to do this, from the accurate and pleasing journal of Mr. Bass, with the perusal and use of which he has ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... and, if you undertake my cause, I shall avoid it: and, accordingly, I ask you this favour. But why, you may well ask, when you have already often assured me that yOu intended to record in your book with the utmost minuteness the policy and events of my consulship, do I now make this request to you with such earnestness and in so many words? The reason is to be found in that burning desire, of which I spoke at the beginning of my letter, for something prompt: because I am in a flutter of impatience, ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... these remarks in some measure to the Scottish pulpit ministrations of an older school, in which a minuteness of detail and a quaintness of expression were quite common, but which could not now be tolerated. I have two specimens of such antiquated language, supplied by correspondents, and I am ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... the low walls of the catacombs. There is absolutely nothing to tell us how they lighted these vast buildings up, how they even introduced sufficient light to paint them by or to build them. Look at the minuteness ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... woman not only of sprightly wit, but of great beauty. She liked to tell in her old age of a dinner which John Hancock gave for her father and her, in Boston, when she was a girl. She described her dress with great minuteness, and added naively, ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... two months. The annals of the time describe this expedition with great particularity, presenting a scene of pomp almost surpassing credence. Some allowance must doubtless be made for exaggeration; and yet there is a minuteness of detail which, accompanied by corroborative evidence of the populousness and the power of these Tartar tribes, invests the narrative with a good degree of authenticity. We are informed that several hundreds of thousands of men were in movement; ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... of 360 diameters. Taking into account the large number of species of fungi, probably scarcely less numerous than all the flowering plants, and the immense number of spores which some of the individuals produce, they must be exceedingly plentiful and widely diffused, though from their minuteness not easy to be discerned. It has been attempted to estimate the number of spores which might be produced by one single plant of Lycoperdon, but the number so far exceeds that which the mind is accustomed to contemplate that it seems scarcely possible to realize ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... painted at different periods of her life, yet they bear so great a resemblance to each other that we may reasonably infer they were all good likenesses—in each of them the mole on the cheek has been defined with all due minuteness." ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... situation, than to those reminding themselves of its fine compensations. Hawthorne's entries are to a great degree accounts of walks in the country, drives in stage-coaches, people he met in taverns. The minuteness of the things that attract his attention and that he deems worthy of being commemorated is frequently extreme, and from this fact we get the impression of a general vacancy in the field of vision. "Sunday evening, going by the jail, the setting sun ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
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