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More "Vulgar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was a good sign in Liosha. I don't say that she would have fallen captive to any ordinary child, but Susan being my child was naturally different from the vulgar run of children. She was rarissinia avis in the lands of small girls—one of the few points on which Barbara and I are in unclouded agreement. No one could have helped falling captive to Susan. But, I admit, in the case of Liosha, who was ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... of the (one) Jujube-tree," after narrowing to a stony gut, suddenly flares out into the Wady Zib, the vulgar feature of these regions, provided with the normal "Gate" some three hundred yards broad. Beyond it, the flat surrounding the head of the cove is remarkably well grown with palms, clumps of the Daum, and scattered date-trees, of which one is walled round. Hence I am disposed to ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... As the year advances, as the clover blossoms disappear, and the spring fades into summer, he gradually gives up his elegant tastes and habits, doffs his poetical suit of black, assumes a russet, dusty garb, and sinks to the gross enjoyment of common vulgar birds. His notes no longer vibrate on the ear; he is stuffing himself with the seeds of the tall weeds on which he lately swung and chanted so melodiously. He has become a bon vivant, a gourmand: with him now there is nothing like the "joys of the table." In ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... a capricious power: I've known it hold Out through a fever caused by its own heat, But be much puzzled by a cough and cold, And find a quinsy very hard to treat; Against all noble maladies he's bold, But vulgar illnesses don't like to meet, Nor that a sneeze should interrupt his sigh, Nor inflammations redden ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... fortune-hunter. Had she been of a gloomy temper, disgust at the coarse plots and manoeuvres, so easily unravelled by a clear-sighted person, might have made her a prey to suspicion, and all but misanthropic. Had she been vulgar-minded, she would have been purse-proud; if cold-hearted, she would have become only the more selfish. Vanity would have made her ridiculously ostentatious and conceited; a jealous temper would ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... He had made a mess of it, and now there was nothing for it, so far as he could see, but to hit the man at once. He and Charlie stood six feet apart, with a table between, both very breathless and fierce. A vulgar fight in a public-house, and with what was only too palpably a footman! Good Heavens! And this was the dignified, scornful remonstrance! How the juice had it all happened? Go round the table at him, I suppose. But before the brawl ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... all his plans in life, when the lure of a new love adventure summoned? Women, always women. For them he had again and again cast everything to the winds; sometimes for women who were refined, sometimes for women who were vulgar; for passionate women and for frigid women; for maidens and for harlots. All the honors and all the joys in the world had ever seemed cheap to him in comparison with a successful night upon ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... roughly pushed back and the Lieutenant took Black Hawk kindly by the arm and led him into a reserved apartment where he was free from vulgar eyes. ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... hospitable, aye, charitable, magnanimous, ready to forgive and forget, patient and long-suffering when subjected to the competitive lash of adverse criticism, bearing calumny rather with quiet dignity than stooping to low and vulgar forms of retaliation. ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... jingle; he is fond of a militaristic drum-banging that is as blatant as the insularity he condemns. But a burning, if sometimes too simple faith, shines through his achievements. His best work reveals an intensity that crystallizes into beauty what was originally tawdry, that lifts the vulgar and incidental to ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... long shells explored By him who to befriend his steed's dim sight Would blow the pungent powder in the eye. Her eyes too! O immortal gods! her eyes Resembled—what could they resemble? what Ever resemble those! E'en her attire Was not of wonted woof nor vulgar art: Her mantle showed the yellow samphire-pod, Her girdle the dove-coloured wave serene. 'Shepherd,' said she, 'and will you wrestle now And with the sailor's hardier race engage?' I was rejoiced to hear it, and contrived How to keep up contention; could I fail By pressing not too strongly, yet ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... terms she made about it, the prohibition of neckties and other items till she should be able to guide him through the Burlington Arcade, were such as to fall upon a sensitive ear as a challenge to just imputations. Miss Gostrey was such a woman of fashion as could make without a symptom of vulgar blinking an appointment for the Burlington Arcade. Mere discriminations about a pair of gloves could thus at any rate represent—always for such sensitive ears as were in question—possibilities of something ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... predicting frightful calamities at random? How do the facts which are before us agree with their theories? Nottingham is a city with a franchise even more democratic than that which this bill establishes. Does Nottingham send hither mere vulgar demagogues? It returns two distinguished men, one an advocate, the other a soldier, both unconnected with the town. Every man paying scot and lot has a vote at Leicester. This is a lower franchise than the ten ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... matron hurriedly, "and don't stand talking to vulgar cabmen and calling them by their Christian names. Your name is Charles Newcome, ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... partes sett oute this presente yere, 1584; which three townes above named are under or within the Tropicke of Cancer. And so the Kinge of Spaine hath no footinge beyonde the said tropicke; which is contrary to the opinion of the vulgar sorte, which ymagine, and by some are borne in hande, that all is his from the equinoctiall as farr as the lande stretcheth ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... qualities to which the study of the past does not direct attention, and to which, therefore, the student of Greek civilisation may easily become blind. In what is new and growing there is apt to be something crude, insolent, even a little vulgar, which is shocking to the man of sensitive taste; quivering from the rough contact, he retires to the trim gardens of a polished past, forgetting that they were reclaimed from the wilderness by men as rough and earth-soiled as those from whom he shrinks in his own day. The habit of ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... was bending over Mrs. Perguson's chair. He was a fellow I had seen before and never liked, a vulgar-featured man, too fat for his years, which may have been some twenty-eight. He played the best hand of all of them, and, as my aunt declared, that was quite enough; for the rest she could keep any man in order. I held back ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... coatless, pushed on through the melee. Rullecour, the now disheartened French general, stood on the steps of the Cohue Royale. With a vulgar cruelty and cowardice he was holding the Governor by the arm, hoping thereby to protect his own ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... it be a plain, unvarnished, complete failure, and even though it be a squalid failure, has always a certain dignity. I avoided Soames because he made me feel rather vulgar. John Lane had published, by this time, two little books of mine, and they had had a pleasant little success of esteem. I was a—slight but definite—'personality.' Frank Harris had engaged me to kick up my heels in The Saturday Review, Alfred ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... be impossible to write the truth on such a subject and please this nation. One frothy gentleman denounced you in my presence as having a low, vulgar style, very much such an one as characterised the pen ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... right. Oh, no, your wife hasn't betrayed you—your real wife, I mean. You've betrayed yourself by insisting on paying her by telegraphic money orders. We heard of these mysterious payments but suspected nothing beyond a vulgar love affair. Then one night, whilst your placid and complacent wife was in a cinema, one of my people searched her box and came upon the certificate of marriage. Would you ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... of use in the work of the hour. The stout little Baptist preacher, with his constant every-day jollity and violent sermons, of which he had heard from Rivers, in no way interested Penhallow. When he once said to Ann, "The man is unneat and common," she replied, "No, he is homely, but neither vulgar nor common. I hate his emotional performances, but the man is good, James." "Then I do wish, Ann, he would button his waistcoat and pull up ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... can afford us some information on that subject," said Vallington. "Our safety and success depend mainly upon the vulgar things ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic
... grasp of affairs, the interest in the people's life, which are the marks and aids of a royal caste. It was not in the nature of things that the Doctor should condescend to quarrel with a farmer or mix himself up with any vulgar squabble, because his will was law in ninety cases in a hundred, and in the other ten he skilfully anticipated the people's wishes. When the minister of Nether Pitfoodles—who had sermons on "Love, Courtship, ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... which so sickened Mrs. Morel. As she heard him sousing heartily in cold water, heard the eager scratch of the steel comb on the side of the bowl, as he wetted his hair, she closed her eyes in disgust. As he bent over, lacing his boots, there was a certain vulgar gusto in his movement that divided him from the reserved, watchful rest of the family. He always ran away from the battle with himself. Even in his own heart's privacy, he excused himself, saying, "If she hadn't ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... the sick deacon was filled and running over with vulgar blackguardism, that I would neither answer nor give to the public eye. It was directed to "Laura S. Haviland, Esq., or Dan." As it arrived in my absence, my son Daniel handed it to Rev. John Patchin, who became ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... spies us she will be finding her way up here; there's no piece of effrontery of which that class is not capable," he thought, wondering next who the vulgar-looking girl and gauche youth were who ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... These are vulgar errors, and mechanical impossibilities. Could ten men, with hand-spikes, lift the weight of a horse? Probably. Attach the weight to the thin rein of a lady's bridle. Could a lady lift it with the left hand? I think not; though it is commonly supposed that she could. A pull from a curb ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... our neighbor's also. O gentle man, the common man is yet thy brother, and thy gentleness should make him great, infecting him with thy humility, not rousing in him the echo of a vile unheavenly scorn. Wilt thou, with thy lofty condescension, more intrinsically vulgar than even his ugly self-assertion, give him cause too good to hate thy refinement? It is not thy refinement makes thee despise him; it is thy own vulgarity; and if we dare not search ourselves close enough to discover the low breeding, the bad blood in us, it will ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... cast a dim shadow toward the three little white beds under their mosquito-nets. Meekie had gone, but the quiet breathing of the children came faintly to the girl as she sat down by her table, thankful for a little space of silence and solitude in which to collect her forces. She saw violent and vulgar scenes ahead. Mrs. van Cannan, now that her true colours were unmasked, and it was no longer worth while to play the soft, sleepy role behind which she hid her fierce nature, would stick at nothing to get rid of Christine ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... encouraged him in various other ways to educate himself in the direction toward which his tastes and inclinations seemed to lead. He claimed his help on occasions when intelligence and skill rather than strength were needed, and Davie, well pleased, did his best. The end of it all was, that the lad's vulgar wishes for other work and another kind of life than that which had fallen to him on the farm, took a definite form, and as usual his confidence was given to his sister, and as usual, also, Katie's ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... even more surprised than ashamed. But the great thing was that he saw in this no vulgar reminder of any "sweet" speech. The vanity of women had long memories, but she was making no claim on him of a compliment or a mistake. With another woman, a totally different one, he might have feared ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... vulgar language of proverb which no well brought-up Princess should ever stoop to use, she had made her own bed, and she must lie in it. It would not do for her suddenly to give out to the world of Kronburg that she was not, ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... making the cool, pleasant sound of rain drops pattering among April leaves; such bright eager eyes, turned at every sounding step towards the open door,—I had never looked upon the like before. I sat in a dream of delight, without thinking that it might be thought vulgar to appear delighted, and still ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... eighteenth century were relatively harmless by the side of this, which smirched executive, judiciary, banks, corporate systems, professions, and people, all the great active forces of society, in one dirty cesspool of vulgar corruption. Only six months before, this innocent young man, fresh from the cynicism of European diplomacy, had expected to enter an honorable career in the press as the champion and confidant of a new Washington, and already he foresaw a life of wasted energy, sweeping ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... this, a vulgar oath resounded through the air, pronounced distinctly with great rancour, in a dull but powerful voice. Everyone heard it and became silent for a moment, searching with their eyes the man who had abused them. At this moment nothing was heard save the deep sighs of the engines and the clanking of ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... a screen of feathers hung,— A moscader, or fan for flies, 'tis called in vulgar tongue; From the feathers of the peacock's wing 't was fashioned bright and fair, And glistened like the heaven above when ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... faint to the board school and had been punished as a dull boy. After he had struggled into a place as page, he had been bullied by footmen and had had his ears boxed by cooks and butlers. Ladies'- maids and smart housemaids had sneered at him, and made him feel himself a hopeless, vulgar little worm who never would "get on." But he had got on, in a measure, because he had worked like a slave and openly resented nothing. A place like this had been his fevered hope and dream from his page days, though of course his imagination had not encompassed attendance ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... fancied accomplishments, and to be made unduly suspicious by their licentious desire for greater present return, which was at the root of nine-tenths of the opposition, by their vanity, which would prompt them to affect superiority to the prejudices of the vulgar, and by the stings of their own conscience, which was constantly upbraiding them in the most cruel manner on account of their bodies, which were generally diseased; let a person's intellect be never so sound, unless his body were ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... have I ordered you not to address me as governor. Remember that you are a soldier and not a vulgar civilian. Remember also that when a man enters the army he leaves fear behind him. Heres the key. Unlock ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... when put ashore on Oyster Pond. In most of that which this man had related to the deacon, therefore, he had told the truth, though it was the truth embellished, as is so apt to be the case with men of vulgar minds. He might have been misled by the narrative of the pirate, but it was his own opinion that he had not been. The man was a Scot, prudent, wary, and sagacious; and in the revelations he made he appeared to be governed by a conviction ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... were sharply defined in reality, but smoothed over by a conventional and decorous benevolence of language, which deceived vulgar minds. He was a strict absolutist. His deference to arbitrary power was profound and slavish. God and "the master," as he always called Philip, he professed to serve with equal humility. "It seems to me," said he, in a letter of this epoch, "that I shall never be able to fulfil the obligation ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... howid vulgar, and I don't underland," answered Diana, in a dignified tone. "I'll stand on my two foots if you'll hold G'eased Lightning ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... from his brain she had thought it an inspiration and him a king. Now it sounded silly, coarse, a little indecent. Of course it had not succeeded. How could he ever have been so foolish as to utter it—"Kiss me again—who are you?" Why, it was vulgar! ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... question of how to avenge himself. To bring Tatiana Markovna, with lanterns, and a crowd of servants and to expose the scandal in a glare of light; to say to her, "Here is the serpent you have carried for two and twenty years in your bosom"—that would be a vulgar revenge of which he knew himself to be incapable. Such a revenge would hit, not Vera, but his aunt, who was to him like his mother. His head drooped for a moment; then he rose and hurried like a madman down the ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... came over me, and, in spite of all my efforts to shake off the impression it had made, I fell into a faint. Samuel soon brought me to myself, and, after a deep draught of wine and water, I was greatly revived, and felt my spirit rise above the sphere of vulgar conceptions and the restrained views of unregenerate men. The shrewd but loquacious fellow, perceiving this, tried to make some amends for the pain he had occasioned to me by the following story, which I noted down, and which was brought on by a ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... "mouth-religion" what fatal abundance! To a child, it is no more than the creaking and rattling of a vehicle, which is of a certain worth, doubtless, to the weary, sinful adult,—but to one who feels his life in every limb, incomprehensible, and an offence. Of the vulgar superstition which would confuse the nursery with creeds and vain prayer-repetitions of the heathen there is far too much. We have known parents, reputed pious and church-going, who delighted to pour crushing enigmas into infant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... or a fox; I believe that the fox-nature predominates, that the lion is supplementary. I simply give you my impressions, which I am perfectly willing to be induced to change. I am inclined to fancy that M. Larinski passed his first youth amid vulgar surroundings, that later he came into contact with good society, and being intelligent soon shook off the force of early influences; but there still remain some traces of these. While he was in my salon his eyes twice took an inventory of its contents, and that with ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... jowl, with the coarsest and most obscene companions with which they must become connected, in course of time, in people's minds? Is it tolerable that besides being robbed and rifled an author should be forced to appear in any form, in any vulgar dress, in any atrocious company; that he should have no choice of his audience, no control over his own distorted text, and that he should be compelled to jostle out of the course the best men in this country who only ask to live ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... "Hamlet." 60. Possession and obsession. Again the Catholics and Protestants differ. 61. But the common people believe in possession. 62. Ignorance on the subject of mental disease. The exorcists. 63. John Cotta on possession. What the "learned physicion" knew. 64. What was manifest to the vulgar view. Will Sommers. "The Devil is an Ass." 65. Harsnet's "Declaration," and "King Lear." 66. The Babington conspiracy. 67. Weston, alias Edmonds. His exorcisms. Mainy. The basis of Harsnet's statements. ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... the former labourers, or are remains of noble Indian families, who, disdaining to intermarry with their Spanish conquerors, preferred themselves to till the ground which their vassals formerly cultivated for them. It is said that these Indians of noble race, though to the vulgar eye undistinguishable from their fellows, are held in great respect by their inferior countrymen. In Cholula, particularly, there are still caciques with long Indian names; also in Tlascala—and though barefoot and ragged, they are said to possess great hidden wealth. But it is neither ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... middle of the last century there appeared the following in the London Athenaeum: "The popular belief as to the origin of the mark across the back of the ass is mentioned by Sir Thomas Browne, in his 'Vulgar Errors,' and from whatever cause it may have arisen it is certain that the hairs taken from the part of the animal so marked are held in high estimation as a cure for the hooping-cough. In this metropolis, at least so lately as ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... Lamb who referred to a copy of Shakespeare's plays as "this manly book." The expression is a good one, and epitomizes the judgment of a world which has found that, though Shakespeare introduces evil or vulgar elements into his plays, his emphasis is always upon the right man and the right action. This may seem a trite thing to say in praise of a great genius; but when you reflect that Shakespeare is read throughout the civilized world, the simple fact that ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... heart; with these longings he descended from his blissful, lonely heights, when he heard the cry of this heart for help in the midst of mankind. The halo of his higher nature, however, betrays him. He can not but appear as miraculous. The staring of the vulgar and the rancor of the envious cloud the heart of the loving Elsa. Doubts and jealousy show that he has not been understood but simply adored, and this draws from him the confession of his divinity, after which he returns, his purpose ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... work; he must not trust altogether to Texas Smith; the scoundrel might flinch, or might fail. Something must be done to separate Clara and Thurstane. What should it be? Here we are almost ashamed of Coronado. The trick that he hit upon was the stalest, the most threadbare, the most commonplace and vulgar that one can imagine. It was altogether unworthy of such a clever and experienced conspirator. His idea was this: to get lost with Clara for one night; in the morning to rejoin the train. Thurstane ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... right people are not the people of vivacity and intellectual zest, but the possessors of industrial wealth or the inheritors of scrupulous traditions and historical names. The sad fact, the melancholy truth, is that we have become vulgar; and until we can purge ourselves of vulgarity, till we can realise the ineffable ugliness of pomposity and pretension and ostentation, we shall effect nothing. Even our puritan forefathers, with their hatred of art, were in love with ideas. They sipped ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... glorious red, Amarilly. The color the vulgar jeer at, and artists like your friend and twin, Derry, rave over. You're what ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... famous; there is everywhere the most perfect ease and skill of handling. The observation shown throughout is nothing short of wonderful. Things are painted literally as they are, and, whatever the picture, whether of every-day vulgar, shabby-genteel, or downright low, with neither the condescending air which is affectation, nor the too familiar one which is slang. The book altogether is a perfectly unaffected, unpretentious, honest performance. Under its manly, sensible, straightforward vein of talk ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... The vulgar and obvious criticism on all this is that it is utopian, that such households do not generally exist, because neither masters nor servants possess the qualities needed to maintain these relations of unbroken order and friendliness. Perhaps not; and masters and servants will be more and more ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... by imitation; and he imitated nothing (unless he was forcibly compelled to it) by which a rational being may be distinguished from a brute animal. But the species of imitation in which he most delighted, was that which, in the vulgar style, is called mocking; for he was not possessed of a sufficient stock of ingenuity to be (what he very frequently attempted to be) a clever mimick. If any of his schoolmates happened to be afflicted with an impediment in their speech, an accidental lameness, ...
— Vice in its Proper Shape • Anonymous
... vices which Lucilius attacks are those which reappear in the pages of the later satirists. They are the two extremes to which the Roman temperament was most prone: rapacity and meanness in gaining money, vulgar ostentation and coarse sensuality ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... disagree with us in this statement. Men and women educated in the creeds of the Old World, with the good blood of a long ancestry of quiet ladies and gentlemen, find modern American society, particularly in New York and at Newport, fast, furious, and vulgar. There are, of course, excesses committed everywhere in the name of fashion; but we cannot see that they are peculiar to America. We can only answer that the creed of fashion is one of perpetual change. There is a Council of Trent, we may say, every five years, perhaps even every two years, ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... existence, by one who had known him. Still, I have always had a quarrel with Sidney, for the wicked use to which he put his wit, in abusing good old Dr. Carey, and the missionaries in India; nay, in some places he even stooped to be spiteful and vulgar. I could not help, therefore, saying, when Macaulay observed that he had the most agreeable wit of any literary man of his acquaintance, "Well, it was very agreeable, but it could not have been very agreeable to the people ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... silence for some time he suddenly exclaimed, "Damn it, madam, there is no end to your nose!" The restoration of that beautiful painting has destroyed the delicate charm of its coloring, which was perfectly harmonious, and has as far as possible made it coarse and vulgar: before it had been spoiled, not even Sir Joshua's "Tragic Muse" seemed to me so noble and beautiful a representation of my aunt's beauty as that divine picture ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... companion. His most characteristic quality was elevation of mind. In the essay that is here reprinted he speaks of "that aspiring pride which arises from the sense of walking in intellect on the necks of a subject crowd." Something of this elevation, this aloofness from the vulgar, characterized all of his utterances and gave to them at times a solemn fervency akin to that of the Hebrew prophets. This trait is finely portrayed in the following description of the tutor Grey (a thin disguise for Green) in ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... about the ears, and he exclaimed with much eagerness: "It is not fit, my dear Kakidoran, that this ornament should be common to the whole town, for being worn by all without distinction, it will become ordinary and vulgar. The nobility must necessarily be distinguished from the ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... AEthelwold to Ordgar. But AEthelwold as soon as he saw AElfthryth fell hopelessly in love with her, and so hid the king's message, and wooed and won the fair damsel for himself; and on his return told the king that the accounts of her beauty were altogether false, that she was vulgar and commonplace. So the king, believing his friend, turned his thoughts to other ladies; but before long some rumours of the way in which he had been deceived came to the king's ear, and he, dissembling his purpose and not telling him of what he had ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: A Short Account of Romsey Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... PERKINS.) I say, old chap, this sort of work is most laborious. This flitting from one tram to another, and being jostled and ordered to "step lively" by vulgar guards, and running, yes actually running. It's not only bad taste, old man, but positively undignified. (Dusting shoes with handkerchief, L., PERKINS is up in vestibule ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... Tradition; A Sandy foundation either in matter of Science, or Conscience. So that a purpose to Travell, if it be not ad voluptatem Solum, sed ad utilitatem, argueth an industrious and generous minde. Base and vulgar spirits hover still about home: those are more noble and divine, that imitate the ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... things is recalled here as a means of making plain that the statesmen of these Imperial Powers must in the nature of the case, and without blame, be drawn out from under the customary restraint of those principles of vulgar morality that are embodied in the decalogue. It is not that the subject, or—what comes to the same thing—the servant of such a dynastic State may not be upright, veracious and humane in private life, but only that he must not be addicted ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... pull, and content if, by the labour of hours, a few yards could be gained. [225] Exploits which brought the Prince no nearer to his object, however glorious they might be in the estimation of the vulgar, were in his judgment boyish vanities, and no part of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... struggle that might be masked but could not be escaped. Of course this famine grabbing, this fierce dispossession of others, must follow from such a disharmony between material and training. Of course the rich were vulgar and the poor grew savage and every added power that came to men made the rich richer and the poor less necessary and less free. The men I met in the casual wards and the relief offices were all smouldering for revolt, talking of justice and injustice and revenge. I saw no hope in that ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... "Vulgar," said I. "We used to say," said I, "that the ugliness and vulgarity of the rich men's dwellings was a necessary reflection from the sordidness and bareness of life which they forced upon ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... descended from a son of Hercules; and this he was anxious to support by his appearance and dress. Whenever he appeared in public he had his tunic gired up to the hip, carried a great sword at his side, and wore a rough cloak of Cilician hair. The habits too that seemed vulgar to others—his boastfulness, his coarse humor, his drinking bouts, the way he had of eating in public, taking his meals as he stood from the soldiers' tables—had an astonishing effect in making him popular ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... threatened to send for the Archbishop. With the ring of a bed-curtain, at half an hour past midnight, the wedding took place in Mayfair Chapel. The Scotch were enraged at the alliance, which became an unhappy one. The Duke was vulgar, debauched, extravagant, and "damaged in person and fortune," yet, withal, insolently proud. He betook himself off within six years, and his two sons by the Duchess became, successively, seventh and eighth Dukes of Hamilton; and a daughter married ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... rightly consider his making is a wonder, I am saith our [dh]Prophet fearfully and wonderfully made: but a good man if you consider his new making is a wonderfull wonder, as [di]Paul speakes a spectacle to men and Angels, as the vulgar Latine runnes in the 68. Psalme, at the last verse, mirabilis deus in sanctis, O God wonderfull art ...
— An Exposition of the Last Psalme • John Boys
... gratify their taste by music, the fine arts, and dramatic entertainments, the Romans derived their chief pleasure from contemplating the brutal and bloody fights of gladiators; or at best, such rich shows and processions as gratify the uneducated vulgar. The games in the circus, with which the Romans were so delighted, that they considered them of equal importance, with the necessaries of life, consisted of athletic exercises, such as boxing, racing, wrestling, and ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... clear, it would have fewer attractions for the ignorant. They need obscurity, mysteries, fables, miracles, incredible things, which keep their brains perpetually at work. Romances, idle stories, tales of ghosts and witches, have more charms for the vulgar than true narrations. ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... it down). Really, Baxter, you're vulgar. (He turns away and resumes his promenading, going down R. and then round deck-chair to front of hammock. Suddenly he sees his book on the grass beneath the hammock and makes a dash for it.) Ha, my book! (Gloating over it.) Baxter, she reads ...
— Belinda • A. A. Milne
... men," Ord whispered. "Vulgar, opinionated, brutal—but free! You are still better than any breed who kneels ...
— Remember the Alamo • R. R. Fehrenbach
... Paris and Bologna; and within the confines of Latin Christianity scholarship was an undivided unity. Besides Latin the only other language of any general vogue in the middle of the Middle Ages was vulgar Latin, or Romance. To Dante, writing at the close of the thirteenth century, Romance was still one idioma—even if it were trifarium, according as its 'yes' was oil, or oc, or si.[17] Of the three branches of this ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... no time to answer, for the feet of Philip were on the stairs. He had been visiting Mrs. Hornblower, and persuading her that to make a dragoon of her son was the very best thing for him— great promotion, and quite removed from the ordinary vulgar enlistment in the line—till he had wiled consent out of her. And though Philip declared it was blarney, and was inclined to think it infra dig. to have thus exerted his eloquence, it was certain that Mrs. Hornblower would console herself by mentioning to her neighbours ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... carrying a heavy cane, and wearing eyeglasses. He had high cheek bones, fishy gray eyes, fine teeth, and a simpering smile. Tom judged he was a couple of years older than himself, and became interested in him because of his amusing efforts to charm the ladies around him. The vulgar expression would be that he was trying to "mash" them. The word is not a good one, but it will help my reader to ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... would have it, Miss Chapman chanced to let her eyes stray in their direction; and having fingered her chain indecisively for a little, said: "It seems a pity, doesn't it, Miss Day, that that nice little girl should get in with that vulgar set?" ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... altercations assume much the same character in all families. They are necessarily vulgar, and the details of them need not be recalled. For myself, I must confess that my sister found me in a perverse mood; she, on her side, was in the unreasonable temper of a woman who expects fidelity but does not show appreciation. I suggested ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... much rather sit with a man like you and discuss the phases of life and literature of interest to both of us. But I would write almost anything. I have written a great deal. And I have managed money. There was a time—" A look of pain came into his eyes. This was being vulgar and not in line with the tradition ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... entire contempt for the things of this world spoken of. He was of the class of persons who were called in Provence Troubadours, who invented fables, and composed different pieces of poetry, which were sung in the houses of the nobles. The art of versifying in the vulgar tongue was uncommon in those times, and was only practised by the nobility. The Italians imitated the people of Provence, and translated into their language the best compositions of the Troubadours. The poet ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... World, with its best glass in his eye, would scarcely have recognized him during that insane interval, as the brother Jem of the honourable and jocular member. He was positively agitated. He several times spoke with an emphasis, similar to the vulgar manner. He went in and went out in an unaccountable way, like a man without an object. He rode like a highwayman. In a word, he was so horribly bored by existing circumstances, that he forgot to go in for boredom in the manner prescribed by ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... farm are dull, and crude, and vulgar, and our thoughts are of common things. You of the other world patronize us; you practise on us as you did to-night, thinking we do not know. But some of us do, and ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... jammed full of people, mostly with shawls, and cloaks, and bonnets on. Cousin E. E. was right. What is genteel in one place is vulgar in ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... could be eliminated, the number of cases of venereal infection would be diminished by about one-half. And what is true of venereal disease is also true of seduction of young girls. Alcohol is the most efficient weapon that either the refined Don Juan or the vulgar pimp has in ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... was laughing away as heartily as before. There is no doubt he was as mad as could be. During the day's march he was up to all kinds of pranks, going through all sorts of antics, idiotic, sorrowful, angry, and vulgar in turn. The space between the ridges was greater now, and on them were numerous pointed ant-hills some two or three feet high. One favourite trick of this lunatic was to rush towards one of these, and sit perched on the top with his knees up and feet resting on the side ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... version may be said to have tuned the English tongue; for, since its appearance, no writer, however deficient in other powers, has wanted melody. Such a series of lines, so elaborately corrected, and so sweetly modulated, took possession of the publick ear; the vulgar was enamoured of the poem, and the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... through the rain, he noticed that he was keeping pace with a woman under an umbrella, a slender person who was hurrying with small resolute steps up the boulevard. When he saw her, a mad hope flamed suddenly through him. He remembered a vulgar little theatre and the crude light of a spot light. Through the paint and powder a girl's golden-brown skin had shone with a firm brilliance that made him think of wide sun-scorched uplands, and dancing figures ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... can I forget him? He will be here to-morrow. Once my father and he have found me, what am I to do? Die, I suppose! . . . I would rather die than marry Count Vassilan, and again I would rather die than figure in a vulgar brawl, such as the newspapers would take a delight in. My father is well aware of that, and will play on my weakness. . . . B-but—I may—be ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... the summer draws near, eh, Nat? No, my boy, I think not. To begin with, I believe that it is all a vulgar error about the cuckoo sucking little birds' eggs. Doubtless cuckoos have been shot with eggs in their mouths, perhaps broken in the fall, but I think the eggs they carried were their own, which, after laying, they were on their way to put in some other bird's nest to be ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... very much appreciate, as it is not very common; but I never yet knew an officer who prided himself upon his practical knowledge, who was at the same time a good navigator, and too often, by assuming the Jack Tar, they lower the respect due to them, and become coarse and vulgar in their manners and language. This was the case with Mr Phillott, who prided himself upon his slang, and who was at one time "hail fellow well met" with the seamen, talking to them, and being answered as familiarly as if they were equals, and ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... to her young friend?" he asked quietly. "Believe me, it is not vulgar curiosity which prompts the question. I—I am—interested." His voice ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... mild flippancy, actually undertook to run a vulgar five for an overthrow: and by like methods succeeded in amassing a score of runs in ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... the surrounding waste, where the loveliest plants now shine out among unsightly weeds, and now are choked by their parasitic growth, so intertwined that we cannot disentangle the weed without snapping the flower?—In this statement I have had no reference to the vulgar abuse of Voltaire, save as far as his charges are coincident with the decisions of Shakespeare's own commentators and (so they would tell you) almost idolatrous admirers. The true ground of the mistake lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... have been remanded to duty; and failing to know my regiment, I should have been apprehended as a deserter. At the best, even if other people had recognized the nature of my trouble, I should have been subjected then and always to the vulgar curiosity which I so greatly dreaded. Here in Company H nobody would know me except ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... pantomime art, be it allowed me to defend it against the objections made to it, by those who consider it only under a partial or vulgar ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... warmed with copper warming pans, and nightcaps adorned the slumbering heads of both sexes. Spittoons were part of ordinary household furniture. To colour a meerschaum was the ambition of smokers, swearing was considered neither low nor vulgar, and snuffing was fashionable. Many most respectable men chewed tobacco, and to carry one's liquor well ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... literary talent endowed him with another and a worthier sobriquet "Filosofo," and he carried out the role by dressing as a Greek and living as a sybarite. Devoted to the study of the classics and encouraged by his sensuous tutor, Giovanni Francesco Zeffi, when not engaged in vulgar orgies, he translated Plato and other writers, and even composed a ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... alloyed, counterfeit could be used? When mean, despicable, contemptible, shameful, disgraceful, dishonorable, discreditable, scandalous, infamous, villainous, low-minded could be used? When ignoble, servile, slavish, groveling, menial could be used? When plebeian, obscure, untitled, vulgar, lowly, nameless, humble, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way. The absurd abstraction of an intellect verbally formulating all its evidence and carefully estimating the probability thereof by a vulgar fraction by the size of whose denominator and numerator alone it is swayed, is {93} ideally as inept as it is actually impossible. It is almost incredible that men who are themselves working philosophers should pretend ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... positive fact that whenever the public, in any country, have a free choice in matters of art, that choice generally turns out to be right, and is ultimately endorsed by the best critics. Most of the vulgar art to be found in advertisements and the illustrated papers is put there by ignorant and vulgar providers, who imagine that the whole public are as ignorant and vulgar as themselves; whereas whenever a better standard of taste is given an opportunity, it never fails ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... I have placed at the head of the Peace Egg Play has other verses which also recite "the argument" of the piece, but not one is worth recording. A third song does not, I feel sure, belong to the classic versions, but to another "rude and vulgar" one, which I have not seen for some years, and which was played in a dialect dark, even to those who flattered themselves that they were to the manner born. In it St. George and the Old Fool wrangle, the O.F. accusing the Patron Saint of England ...
— The Peace Egg and Other tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... product. The remainder is paid in wages to productive laborers, who consume it for their daily wants; or if they in their turn save any part, this also is not, generally speaking, hoarded, but (through savings-banks, benefit clubs, or some other channel) re-employed as capital, and consumed. To the vulgar, it is not at all apparent that what is saved is consumed. To them, every one who saves appears in the light of a person who hoards. The person who expends his fortune in unproductive consumption is looked upon as diffusing ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... carried me to the French shore. Free from all the vulgar vexations of the road, I had the full enjoyment of one of the most pleasant of all enjoyments—moving at one's ease through a new and interesting country. The road to Paris is now like the road to Windsor, to all the higher portions of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... beauty, a Grecian statue, as it were, into which the breath of life had been breathed by some modern Pygmalion;—such a pomp of gifts and endowments settling upon one man's head, should not have required for its effect the vulgar consummation (and yet to many it WAS the consummation and crest of the whole) that he was reputed to be rich beyond the dreams of romance or the necessities of a fairy tale. Unparalleled was the impression made upon our stagnant society; ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... exaggerations pushed into caricature. It has been my aim to subdue and tone down the persons introduced, and the general agencies of the narrative, into the lights and shadows of life as it is. I do not mean by "life as it is," the vulgar and the outward life alone, but life in its spiritual and mystic as well as its more visible and fleshly characteristics. The idea of not only describing, but developing character under the ripening influences of ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... witchcraft? he asked; and his answer is worth quoting. "Witchcraft is in truth a cousening art, wherin the name of God is abused, prophaned and blasphemed, and his power attributed to a vile creature. In estimation of the vulgar people, it is a supernaturall worke, contrived betweene a corporall old woman, and a spirituall divell. The maner thereof is so secret, mysticall, and strange, that to this daie there hath never beene any credible witnes thereof."[19] The want of credible evidence ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... enjoyment, logically cultivated the story teller, and Lincoln proved to be the most accomplished in that line of all the members of the Illinois bar. They had no private rooms for study, and the evenings were always spent in the common barroom of the tavern, where Western wit, often vulgar or profane, was freely indulged in, and the best of them at times told stories which were somewhat "broad;" but even while thus indulging in humor that would grate harshly upon severely refined hearers, they despised ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... a succession of visitors till four or five in the evening. During the whole time he presided at his tea-table.' In The Rambler, No. 145, Johnson takes the part of these inferior writers:—'a race of beings equally obscure and equally indigent, who, because their usefulness is less obvious to vulgar apprehensions, live unrewarded and die unpitied, and who have been long exposed to insult without a defender, and to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... soit qu'on prit le Latin ou le Franois," [13] etc. It seems never to have occurred to him that such a journal might be published in German. That language was then, and for a long time after, regarded by educated Germans very much as the Russian is regarded at the present day, as the language of vulgar life, unsuited to learned or polite intercourse. Frederic the Great, a century later, thought as meanly of its adaptation to literary purposes as did the contemporaries of Leibnitz. When Gellert, at his request, repeated to him one of his fables, he expressed his surprise ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Ought not the Creator to possess the perfections of the creature? No. To attribute to God the moral qualities of man, is to suppose him susceptible of passions, which, arising out of corporeal organization, it is plain that a pure spirit cannot possess.... But even suppose, with the vulgar, that God is a venerable old man, seated on a throne of clouds, his breast the theatre of various passions, analogous to those of humanity, his will changeable and uncertain as that of an earthly king; still, goodness and justice are qualities ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... of the subject by remarking on one of the most vulgar and absurd sayings or dogmas that ever yet imposed itself upon the world, which is, "that a Republic is fit only for a small country, and a Monarchy for a large one." Ask those who say this their reasons why it is so, and ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... proportion as he did so, d'Artagnan saw that he became pale. He was at that period of intoxication in which vulgar drinkers fall on the floor and go to sleep. He kept himself upright and dreamed, without sleeping. This somnambulism of drunkenness had something ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... younger bard arise, No vulgar rival in the grand emprize. Hail! learned Trapp! upon whose brow we find The poet's bays, and critic's ivy join'd. Blest saint! to all that's virtuous ever dear, Thy recent fate demands a friendly tear. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... mighty grand things; but I have long since found out that motives of delicacy are usually the excuse of weak minds for not speaking the plain truth to their friends. People quit the straight path from motives of delicacy, may be, to a worm or a beetle—vulgar souls, observe, I rank only as worms and beetles; they cross our path every instant in life; and those who fear to give them offence must deviate and deviate, till they get into a labyrinth, from which they ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... and commanding traits which strike every mind. He displayed more order and justice, than force and elevation, in his ideas. He possessed, above all, in an eminent degree, that quality which some call vulgar, but which very few possess—that quality not less useful to the government of states than to the conduct of life, and which gives more tranquillity than emotion to the soul, and more happiness than glory ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... one can think with ease of Jenny ten years hence or of Emmy as a baby. The fickle Alf is one of the most perfect Cockneys—a type so easy to caricature and so hard to get true—in fiction. If there exists a better writing of vulgar lovemaking, so base, so honest, so touchingly mean and so touchingly full of the craving for happiness than this that we have here in the chapter called After the Theatre, I do not know of it. Only a novelist who ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... display real public virtue, because they had by their side a woman of noble character, who sustained them in their career, and exercised a fortifying influence on their views of public duty; whilst, on the contrary, he had still oftener seen men of great and generous instincts transformed into vulgar self-seekers, by contact with women of narrow natures, devoted to an imbecile love of pleasure, and from whose minds the grand motive ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... us that they at last came to prefer it! We would not have our readers to begin forthwith to dispense with the art of cookery, and cast Soyer to the dogs; but we would have them henceforth refuse to accept that common opinion, and vulgar error, that Esquimaux eat their food raw because they are savages. They do it because nature teaches them that, under the circumstances, ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... to answer his critics in the Appendix to "The Romany Rye," he assumed that they thought him vulgar for dealing in Gypsies and ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... than this: The patched and medley knowledge of the young girl to whom her mother does not speak, comes to her garbled and confused, the sacred seal of modesty torn off, soiled with the touch of vulgar hands, defaced by the coarse jests of polite society, its sanctity forever missed. The temple has been invaded, its white floors trodden by feet from muddy alleys, the gods thrown down. Is not the temple as much ruined when this profanation has ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... this abandoned state Lies here all helpless at Ulysses' gate? His bulk and beauty speak no vulgar praise: If, as he seems, he was in better days, Some care his age deserves; or was he prized For worthless beauty? therefore now despised: Such dogs and men there are, mere things of state, And always cherished by ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... sweet reflection upon the pleasant incident of the day—I might dream rosy dreams—but, alas! the soul is sadly under the influence of the body; the spiritual must ever yield to the physical, and even love itself becomes a victim to the vulgar appetite of hunger. ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... conflict with the outer world? Even our friend is drawn into this strife; reluctantly he submits to contradiction by experience and by life; and since, after a long struggle, he succeeds not in uniting these august figures with those of the vulgar world, or that high desire with the demands of the day, he resolves to let the actual pass current as the necessary, and declares that what has thus far seemed real ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... soon as she spoke, the effect of her appearance was spoiled. Her voice was hoarse, a low-pitched rasp, husky, throaty, and full of brutal, vulgar modulations. ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... Walraven," said Mr. Walraven, perfectly cool, "you have made a little mistake, I fancy. Permit me to rectify it. Wearing the breeches is a vulgar expression, I am aware, and only admissible in low circles; still, it so forcibly expresses what I am trying to express, that you will allow me to use it. You are trying to don the inexpressibles, Blanche, but it won't do. My ward goes with us on our bridal tour, or there shall ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... been blazoned by vain-glorious historians. We appeal, therefore, to the feelings of every reader, whether this very circumstance, so providentially directed towards the perpetuity of his fame, does not indicate the real superiority of such a man as Cook over the mass of vulgar conquerors, whom, unfortunately for the world, it has been so much and so long the fashion to admire? Shall we ever witness the time, when the wanton destroyers of our species, under whatever name or trappings they vaunt themselves, shall inherit ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... raises any general question in his presence, for instance, about the cell or instinct, he sits apart, and neither speaks nor listens; he looks languid and disillusioned; nothing has any interest for him, everything is vulgar and trivial. But as soon as you speak of male and female—for instance, of the fact that the female spider, after fertilisation, devours the male—his eyes glow with curiosity, his face brightens, and the man revives, in fact. All ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... and if that were remedied the Emerald Isle would grow greener than ever. "It is a splendid country," he said "for growing tobacco, and if the Irish were allowed to grow that fashionable weed they would be the most prosperous of peoples." A vulgar Scotchman suggested that Ireland would be all right if the Irish were "Scotched," and the Fenians all roasted on a gridiron. The irascible Irishman replied that a Scotchman was the incarnation of impudence—and hereupon a war of words ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... fermier-general, Mademoiselle Godeau, the pearl of Havre, a rich heiress, and much courted. Croisilles was not received at M. Godeau's otherwise than in a casual sort of way, that is to say, he had sometimes himself taken there articles of jewelry purchased at his father's. M. Godeau, whose somewhat vulgar surname ill-fitted his immense fortune, avenged himself by his arrogance for the stigma of his birth, and showed himself on all occasions enormously and pitilessly rich. He certainly was not the man to allow the son of a goldsmith to enter his drawing-room; but, as Mademoiselle ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... indignation, "who have made money somehow, and have bought honours with the moneys somehow, think yourselves great, and in your little day, your little, little day that will end with three lines in small type in The Times, you are great in this vulgar land. You can buy what you want and people creep round you and ask you for doles and favours, and railway porters call you 'my Lord' at every other step. But you forget your limitations in this world, and that which lives above you. You say you will do this ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... half-dreams of a devolution by which, when national amity shall have become mentionable besides personal pence, London shall attract to herself all the small vice, as she does already most of the great, from the country, all the thrusters after gain, the vulgar, heavy-fingered intellects, the Progressive spouters, the Bileses, the speculating brigandage, and shall give us back from the foggy world of clubs and cab-ranks and geniuses, the poets and painters, all the nice and witty and pretty people, to make towns such as this, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... very glad to hear of Henry's good fortune. It proves to me what an excellent thing perseverance is for getting on in the world. Calm self-confidence (not impudence, for that is vulgar and repulsive) is an admirable quality; but how are those not naturally gifted with it to attain it? We all here get on much as usual. Papa wishes he could hear of a curate, that Mr. Smith may be at liberty to go. Good-bye, dear Ellen. I wish to you ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... Irving's reluctance to ally himself intimately with political affairs, and to assume advocacy of special measures, it is certain that he never failed in open-hearted, outspoken utterance for the cause of virtue, of human liberty, and of his country. There were vulgar assailants, indeed, who alleged at one time that he had thoroughly denationalized himself by his long absences. The charge he always regarded as an affront, and met with scorn. There are those so grossly constituted as to measure a man's love of his own country by the sneers ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... who cloth'st Thyself complete With light as with a garment fair, Thou bor'st the cruel, vulgar stare, Unrobed before ...
— Hymns of the Greek Church - Translated with Introduction and Notes • John Brownlie
... not! Titles are so ostentatious! Vulgar, I call them! The very best families will have nothing to do with them. My father's people were all at the Crusades, and the Wars of the Roses, and the Field of the Cloth of Gold. There is no older family in England, and they ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... knowing; and that they have not used to enlarge their observation to match and sort that effect with instances of a diverse subject, which must of necessity be before any cause be found out. That they have passed over the observation of instances vulgar and ignoble, and stayed their attention chiefly upon instances of mark; whereas the other sort are for the most part more significant and of better height and information. That every particular that worketh any effect is a thing compounded (more or less) of diverse single natures, (more ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... whatever they are, couldn't go inside, but that I should be treated as of the same rank as an Imperial professor and allowed to go. I forgot to say that we had a gendarme in front of us to shoo the vulgar herd out of our way. Then we marched slowly in behind the priest, on stones brought from the seaside, through a picket fence to designated spots near the next fence, I being allowed nearer to the gate than our Japanese ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... those men are vulgar and fishy to such a degree—Nothing but a missionary spirit can take you ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... these just mentioned; a mean state called Munificence (for the munificent man differs from the liberal, the former having necessarily to do with great wealth, the latter with but small); the excess called by the names either of Want of taste or Vulgar Profusion, and the defect Paltriness (these also differ from the extremes connected with liberality, and the manner of their difference shall ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... was frequently invited was Sir George Winbrooke's. He had two daughters nearly of my age, with whom, though they had been bred up in those maxims of vulgar doctrine which my superior understanding could not but despise, yet as their good nature led them to an imitation of my manners in everything else, I cultivated a ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... Betty, never mind this vulgar rabble—with apologies to you, sweet sister," as Grace shot an indignant glance at him. "You were saying that if I found this motorcyclist you'd give me an extra piece of cake, or words to that effect. ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... the great influence, both civil and military, acquired by Oliver Cromwell. This man, suited to the age in which he lived, and to that alone, was equally qualified to gain the affection and confidence of men, by what was mean, vulgar, and ridiculous in his character, as to command their obedience by what was great, daring, and enterprising. Familiar even to buffoonery with the meanest sentinel, he never lost his authority: transported ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... blue,—upon their heads. Every one had a pipe in his mouth. Some were talking with loose, loquacious tongues; some were singing; their ugly, jolly visages—half illumined by the light of tallow candles stuck in iron sconces on the wall—were worthy of the vulgar but faithful Dutch pencils of Schalken and Teniers. They were singing a song as the new ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... broad, Harry, and yet exclude hunting. Bishop Proudie was vulgar and intrusive, such being the nature of his wife, who instructs him; but if you were in orders I should be very sorry to ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... their hatred, and wrath, and querulousness, and suspicions, may be easily broken. Recommend rather for our consideration that saying of Pythagoras, "Do not give many your right hand,"[340] that is, do not make many friends, do not go in for a common and vulgar friendship, which is sure to cause anyone much trouble; for its sharing in others' anxieties and griefs and labours and dangers is quite intolerable to free and noble natures. And that was a true saying of the wise Chilo[341] to ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... Gadarenes. She said nothing about Galilee being there still, with perhaps the identical breed of swine, and even madmen. The Granny's inner vision of Scripture history was unsullied by realisms—a true history, of course, but clear of vulgar actualities. Still, something was on her mind that she was bound to speak about to her ladyship, and she was forced to use the Gospel account of an incident "we were taught" to believe no longer possible, as a means of communicating to Gwen what she herself held ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... always seen. In Pennsylvania and New York laurel was called spoonwood, because the Indians made pretty white spoons from that wood to sell to the colonists. Horn was an appropriate and available material for spoons. Many Indian tribes excelled as they do to-day in the making of horn spoons. The vulgar affirmation, "By the great horn spoon," has ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... his last refuge, "there were two young men taking their refection, and one of them wore a beard no longer than a goat's. Madame will pardon me if I allow myself to use this vulgar expression, but ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... passed. The outlying fog began to roll in at the Golden Gate, obliterating the headland and stretching a fleecy bar across the channel as if shutting out from vulgar eyes the way that he had gone. Night fell, but Zephas had not yet come. This was unusual, for he was generally as regular as the afternoon "trades" which blew him there. There was nothing to detain him in this weather and at this season. She began ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the stranger again. He had not been at the Cafe Royal on the night when she had dined there alone. But Garstin must have seen him again, unless, indeed, Garstin was being absolutely disgusting, was condescending to a cheap and vulgar hoax. ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... to him when it is remembered how much his education has been neglected, how vitiated the Revolution made him, and that but lately his principal associates were, like himself, from among the vilest and most vulgar of the rabble. It is not necessary to be a keen observer to remark in Napoleon the upstart soldier, and in Joseph the former low member of the law; but I defy the most refined courtier to see in Lucien anything indicating a ci-devant sans-culotte. He has, besides, other qualities (and those more ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... liberally commended, were no other than flagrant instances of sacrilege, perfidy, and sedition; that the democracy of Athens was a most absurd constitution, productive of anarchy and mischief, which must always happen when the government of a nation depends upon the caprice of the ignorant, hair-brained vulgar; that it was in the power of the most profligate member of the commonwealth, provided he was endowed with eloquence, to ruin the most deserving, by a desperate exertion of his talents upon the populace, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... located, so hidden in their shelter that they could not be seen from any point in the valley below. To the world that never scaled these crumbling heights, Philbrook's mansion appeared as if it endured independent of those vulgar appendages indeed. ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... don't know what an epicure is? That's a vulgar remark when you don't know no meaning of ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... light, or leading gloom, above all others. But the observance of the rule is often so cunningly concealed by the great composers, that its force is hardly at first traceable; and you will generally find they are vulgar pictures in which the ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... presently sat down, I having, as I suppose, only come in time to hear the fag-end of his sermon. Another succeeded him, who, after speaking for about half an hour, was succeeded by another. All the discourses were vulgar and fanatical, and in some instances unintelligible at least to my ears. There was plenty of vociferation, but not one single burst of eloquence. Some of the assembly appeared to take considerable interest in what was said, and every now ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... days of triumph, when the vulgar herd Crowns you with honour; Judging rare genius to be Equal in merit to ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... made of her, and society still encouraged her to become when she could,—an adventuress,—in the banker's more sophisticated phrase,—a fortuitous, somewhat parasitic creature. In Ernestine's more vulgar idiom, if she had permitted herself to express her conviction, "Milly was a little grafter." But Ernestine would not have let hot iron force ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... remarkable," stated the hunchback. "But—please—do not look so shocked. I assure you I do not commonly pick young gentlemen's pockets. It is a vulgar pastime, and I am an accomplished villain. Why, once upon a time, I wrote an epic poem. What mere larceny can compare with that fell deed! Besides, this particular outrage upon the sanctity of ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... be, he was, undoubtedly, a conscience which was awakening. There existed some mysterious re-habilitation which had begun; and, to all appearances, scruples had for a long time already controlled this man. Such fits of justice and goodness are not characteristic of vulgar natures. An awakening of ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... alone rises above the rank of his flock, and all below him are equal. On doctrinal points, the Catholic faith places all human capacities upon the same level. It subjects the wise and the ignorant, the man of genius and the vulgar crowd, to the details of the same creed: it imposes the same observances upon the rich and the needy; it inflicts the same austerities upon the strong and the weak; it listens to no compromise with mortal man; but, reducing all ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... not in an unknown Tongue in Company but in your own Language and that as those of Quality do and not as y'e Vulgar; Sublime matters treat Seriously. ...
— George Washington's Rules of Civility - Traced to their Sources and Restored by Moncure D. Conway • Moncure D. Conway
... Michillimackinack is Great Turtle. The island is crowned with a cap 300 feet above the surrounding waters, on the top of which is a fortification. If Quebec is the Gibraltar of North America, Mackinaw (the vulgar appellation for this fort) is only second in its physical character, and in its susceptibilities of improvement as a military post. It is also a must important position for the facilities it affords in the fur trade between New York and the Northwest."—Mr. Colton's American ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... rob us, us, that are magistrates, of our respect, bring us upon their stages, and make us ridiculous to the plebeians; they will play you or me, the wisest men they can come by still, only to bring us in contempt with the vulgar, and make ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... Dutch shopkeepers' antechambers. 8. Is again a general term. 9. The man fit to be master of the universe was scarcely master of his own kingdom. 10. The finished hero was all but finished, in a very commonplace and vulgar way. And, 11, the man worthy of immortality was just at the point of death, without a friend to soothe or deplore him; only withered old Maintenon to utter prayers at his bedside, and croaking Jesuit to prepare him, with heavens knows what wretched tricks and mummeries, for his appearance ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... have forgotten; it is so long since I associated with ladies, or perhaps, like beauty, these are natural to her. After all, her father seems to have been a gentleman of birth, and people who live with nature may have every fault in the calendar, but they cannot be vulgar. That is the ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... no mortar without water, but the words do not rhyme except to Cockney ears, though the blame lies at the door of the mouth. "Bricks and mortar" is an odd and somewhat vulgar version of "rekkeless;" and to say that a monk "beyond his bricks and mortar" is a monk "out of his cloister," is not in the manner of Chaucer, or of any ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... the Church is defunct; what we fight are only its remains. The vulgar believe it still lives because they can see and touch it, forgetting that a religion counts centuries in its life as minutes, and that generation after generation pass between its death and burial. Centuries before the birth of Jesus Paganism had fallen. The Athenian ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a perverse desire to give her nothing of what she had refused, to leave her in the solitude of spirit which came of her own action. Besides his fastidiousness revolted from plunging him into a position which was so common, and which he, with his dislike of things common, had always counted vulgar. Thus he was silent, and she also sat silent, looking straight before her. ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... and coiling of his, when you look into it, is mere stage decoration, and that of a vulgar kind. Light is, in reality, more awful than darkness—modesty more majestic than strength; and there is truer sublimity in the sweet joy of a child, or the sweet virtue of a maiden, than in the strength of ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... its healing was denied. I believe the tawny leopardess who keeps his house influences him in this cruel madness. I could wring her neck with exquisite pleasure. Why he allows her to stay and cloud his life with her she-devil temper and fog his name with vulgar gossip is ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... country, either summer or winter. We say in winter, because with very little care in placing it near a cistern, and having a leathern pipe for it, a bath may be easily filled once or twice a week with warm water; and it is a vulgar error that the warm bath relaxes. An excess, either warm or cold, will relax, and so will any other excess; but the sole effect of the warm bath moderately taken is, that it throws off the bad humours of the body by opening and clearing the pores. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... in a manner half-accidental, half furtive and wholly awkward. Mentally I didn't take hold of her. I never did take hold of her mentally. Her talk, I now know all too clearly, was shallow, pretentious, evasive. Only—even to this day—I don't remember it as in any way vulgar. She was, I could see quite clearly, anxious to overstate or conceal her real social status, a little desirous to be taken for a student in the art school and a little ashamed that she wasn't. She came to the museum to "copy things," and this, I gathered, had something to do with some way ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... hearing him discourse about the art of fiction can forget the absolute seriousness of his professional devotion; it was as though a shy celebrant were to turn and explain, with mystical intensity and a mystic's involution and reversal of all the values of vulgar speech, the ceremonial of some strange, high altar. His own power as a creative artist was not always commensurate with his intellectual endowment or with his desire after beauty, and his frank contempt for the masses of men made it difficult for him to write English. He preferred, as did ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... Martin demanded, in the soul of him quite shocked that a Church of England missionary could possess so vulgar an affliction. ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... Every line has its origin in the point p, and the curves generally diminish in intensity towards the extremities of the leaves, one or two, however, again increasing their sweep near the points. In vulgar ornamentation, entirely rigid laws of line are always observed; and the common Greek honeysuckle and other such formalisms are attractive to uneducated eyes, owing to their manifest compliance with the first ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... printed page, Filled with rude speech and ruder forms of strife, Was given to heroes in whose vulgar rage No trace appears of ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... voice of Rousseau was heard. The nursing of children by their own mothers, which had gone into disuse as vulgar and troublesome, became a fashion. Great ladies prided themselves upon returning to the usage of nature, and infants were brought in with the dessert to give an exhibition of maternal tenderness. This affectation died out, but ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... "Puerte un bouen moutu embe un bouen fromage grase," as in upper Dauphine. This pleased the people extremely, and contributed not a little to win him access to all spirits. He was perfectly at home in the thatched cottage and in the mountains. He understood how to say the grandest things in the most vulgar of idioms. As he spoke all tongues, he entered ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... suffer in the first pangs of disillusionment; nevertheless, he was waywardly humorous, sometimes wistful, sometimes petulant, always gallant. Therefore Vera liked him, whilst Beatrice mothered him. Mr Holiday was short, very stout, very ruddy, with black hair. He had a disagreeable voice, was vulgar in the grain, but officiously helpful if appeal were made to him. Therefore Frank hated him. Vera liked his handsome, lusty appearance, but resented bitterly his behaviour. Beatrice was proud of the superior ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... the silent sadness that had brought quick response from Wood. Red Pearce was even quicker. He did not seem to regard her proximity as that of a feminine thing which roused the devil in him. Pearce could not be other than coarse and vulgar, but there was pity in him. Joan sensed pity and some other quality still beyond her. This lieutenant of the bandit Kells was just as mysterious as Wood. Joan mended a great jagged rent in his buckskin shirt. Pearce appeared ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... appeared. A very human figure, however, did so. It looked down upon us for a moment, and mistaking our rapt gaze at the antiquities—of which it did not form a part—for mere vulgar curiosity, held up a reproving hand. Then, catching sight of H.C., it darted forward, looked breathlessly into the night, and seemed also mesmerised ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... have been rightly named Scripture theologians; but it is a strange infatuation to think that this designation characterises them as evangelical. If indeed we here understand "evangelical" in the vulgar sense, the term may be correct, only in this case it means exactly the same as "Catholic." But if "evangelical" signifies "early-Christian," then it must be said that Scripture theology was not the primary means of preserving ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... brutal, rebellious, cruel, boastful, false, and, above all, most insulting in his behaviour to me; only yesterday he ill-treated my favourite attendant, Pushkarika, and gathered flowers from a plant which I had especially cherished, to give to one of his paramours, a low vulgar woman, who is trying to put herself on an equality with me. He is in every way unsuited to me, and my misery is so great, that I am ready to catch at any means of escape from it. It was wretched enough while I thought on no one else, ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... paintings on the walls, and all parts that could easily be reached, were scratched, scraped, and hacked about until they were mere wretched, disfiguring excrescences; and in this mutilated condition they waited for the whitewash that came later, to cover up these vulgar excesses with a cheap but clean decency. Such criminal procedure culminated in the wilful wreckage of all the beautiful glass. The store of three centuries of labour and consummate skill was destroyed till it lay all strewn in broken fragments, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Chichester (1901) - A Short History & Description Of Its Fabric With An Account Of The - Diocese And See • Hubert C. Corlette
... and walked to the window. She had said I was a true daughter of the race. Would it be of the race to kill myself? No—there is nothing so vulgar as to be dramatic. Grandmamma has never erred. She would not ask this of me if there was ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... whom you so justly hated, was and is the cause of all my suffering and of yours. You used to wonder how such a man as that, a low, vulgar knave, could gain such an influence over me and sway me as he did. I will ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... carpenter's shop, and also that Science (by which they meant their practices) was so important that no consideration for the interests of any individual creature, whether frog or philosopher, much less the vulgar commonplaces of sentimental ethics, could weigh for a moment against the remotest off-chance of an addition to the body of scientific knowledge, they operated and vivisected and inoculated and lied on a stupendous scale, clamoring for and actually acquiring such legal powers ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... he did the material of the neighborhood, though no actual history of events came to his ears. And 'Tana, presenting herself to his notice in all the glory of her party dress, felt her enthusiasm cool as he looked at her moodily. He would have liked to shut her away from all the vulgar gaze and comment he knew her charming face would win for her. His responsibilities as a guardian forced on him so many new phases of thought. He had never before given the social side of Sinna Ferry much consideration; ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... stock of old jokes, very ill-mannered. He laughed at his sculling, and had a great mind to strike him after he saw him waltzing with Jacqueline. But he had to acknowledge the general appreciation felt for the fellow whom he called vulgar. ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... whether you are learned enough in Jewish usages to be aware that in every Jewish house, where old traditions are kept up, there is one room consecrated to confusion; a room always locked up and sequestered from vulgar use, except on occasions of memorable affliction, where everything is purposely in disorder—broken—shattered—mutilated: to typify, by symbols appalling to the eye, that desolation which has so long trampled on Jerusalem, and the ravages of the boar within the vineyards of Judea. ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... made acquainted with all that relates to them, and think everything lost that passes unobserved; but others find a solid delight in stealing by the crowd, and modelling their life after such a manner as is as much above the approbation as the practice of the vulgar. Life being too short to give instances great enough of true friendship or good-will, some sages have thought it pious to preserve a certain reverence for the Manes of their deceased friends; and have withdrawn themselves from ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... mean to tell you," rejoined the doctor. "The man was a far-away Scots cousin of my late wife, who bore the honorable name of Bruce, and followed a seafaring life. I'll take another glass of the sherry wine, just to wet my whistle, as the vulgar saying is, before I begin. Well, you must know, Bruce was mate of a bark at the time I'm speaking of, and he was on a voyage from Liverpool to New Brunswick. At noon one day, he and the captain, having taken their ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... and encouragement of his countrymen." His spelling-book, accordingly, in its early editions contained a number of sharp little warnings in the form of footnotes, which imply that he seized the young nation just in time to prevent the perpetuation of vulgar errors, since these, if they once became universal, would have compelled the hereditary Webster to make them the basis of orthoepic canons. Thus, ax is reprobated when ask is intended; Americans were to say wainscot, not winch-cott; resin, not rozum; chimney, not ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... the stage be declared one which only the ignorant or vulgar share. Though away in the wilds of California a theatre was often erected next after a hotel, the second building in a town, and the strolling player would summon the miners by his trumpet when not one was in sight, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... the Dernieres Chansons has aroused in Madame Colet a pindaric fury. I have received an anonymous letter from her, in verse, in which she represents me as a charlatan who beats the drum on the tomb of his friend, a vulgar wretch who debases himself before criticism, after having "flattered Caesar"! "Sad example of the passions," as ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... and go upon. He trusted in the abundance of his riches: he lost God for the multitude of his temptations. But for us there is no such excuse. There has been no pleasure too sordid, no comfort too selfish, no profit too mean, no honour too cheap and vulgar, but we have sometimes preferred it, in seeking for happiness, to the infinite and everlasting mercy of our God. We may not be big men, and deserve to have psalms written about us; but in our own little ways we exult ...
— Four Psalms • George Adam Smith
... as the bane of private education. The inspection and control of these Public Schools would be in the hands of competent officers of the State, whereas the private school is appraised only by the vulgar and uneducated class ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... in Berry's direction, "here we have the Flat-footed Baboon, an animal of diverting but vulgar habits. That between its eyes is its nose. The only other known specimen ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... but uniformly only such as possess a universally recognized economic value.(704) On the whole, people in a low stage of civilization are wont to employ, mainly, only ordinary commodities, such as are calculated to satisfy a vulgar and urgent want, as an instrument of exchange. As they advance in civilization, they, at each step, choose a more and more costly object, for this purpose,(705) and one which ministers to ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... thought that one a little vulgar. I only made it up to please you, Daisy. Primrose, don't you notice what a lot of poems there are in all the magazines, and of course, somebody must write them. I should not be a bit surprised if I could add to our income by writing poetry, Primrose. ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... great hand, as well as perhaps elsewhere. The satiric touch appears even in Petit Jehan itself; for, after all the gracious courtship of the earlier part, the dame des belles Cousines, during an absence of her lover on service, falls a by no means, as it would seem, very reluctant victim to the vulgar viciousness of a rich churchman, just like the innominatas of the nouvelles themselves. But the earlier part is gracious—a word specifically and intensively applicable to it. It may be a little unreal; does not the secondary form and sense which has been fastened upon reality—"realism"—show ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... shunned as vulgar all exhibitions of enthusiasm and strong emotion, such as the love of Juliet and the jealousy of Othello; but the romanticists, knowing that the feelings had as much value and power as the intellect, encouraged ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... and remorse. Implacably she hated the Duchess of Fontanges. With her sharp tongue she mercilessly cut the luxurious beauty, who had intelligence enough to feel the sarcasms keenly, but had no ability to retort. A disgraceful quarrel ensued, in which the most vulgar epithets and the grossest witticisms were bandied between them. The king himself at length found it necessary to interpose. He applied to Madame de Maintenon for counsel and aid. She had quietly attended ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... proceeds of their industry, to buy themselves positions of importance, both social and political. It was not the custom to consider too curiously the source of the wealth. If it was sufficient to dazzle the eyes of the vulgar, it was pretty certain to prove the respectability ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... thoughtful plant—it loves the lordly hot-house, And naturally reprobates poor gilliflowers as "pot-house;" 'Tis rich, exotic, somewhat miscellaneously florid; The rough herbaceous annuals it vulgar deems, and horrid. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, April 2, 1892 • Various
... into a familiar sight in the streets of the district. Denry said that it was funny without being vulgar. Certainly it amounted to a continual advertisement for him; an infinitely more effective advertisement than, for instance, a sandwichman at eighteen-pence a day, and costing no more, even with the licence and the shoeing. Moreover, a sandwichman has this inferiority ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... the Duc de Sairmeuse knew how to preserve an appearance of haughtiness and indifference. Any display of emotion was, in his opinion, vulgar; but, in reality, he ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... live under the nose of so near a relation, who did not acknowledge us, but on the contrary, was ever doing us all the ill turns in her power, and making a party against us in the parish, which is always easy enough to do amongst the vulgar against persons who are their superiors in rank, and, at the same time, their inferiors in fortune. This made Mr. Bennet think of procuring an exchange, in which intention he was soon after confirmed ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... know nothing," thought John Effingham, "except by his own passing declarations, and the evident fact that, as regards station, it can scarcely have reached mediocrity. He is one of those who appear to live for the most vulgar motives that are admissible among men of any culture, and whose refinement, such as it is, is purely of the conventional class of habits. Ignorant, beyond the current opinions of a set; prejudiced in all that relates to nations, religions, and characters; wily, with ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... it in its true colours only when they are ruined; but so long as the discovery would enable them to guard against it, it is never found wanting. Let not this be the case with you, who are weak and hang on a single turn of the scale; nor be like the vulgar, who, abandoning such security as human means may still afford, when visible hopes fail them in extremity, turn to invisible, to prophecies and oracles, and other such inventions that delude men with hopes to ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... varying excellences of the two local hunts. "I.W.W." and "A.F. of L." fell from his lips as "M.F.H." and "J.P." used to from theirs. The contrast between the two worlds entertained her not a little. She thought all these young people looked clever, though singularly vulgar, and that her old friends would have appeared by comparison refreshingly clean and cultivated, ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... has tended to render Christianity less acceptable to men of taste and culture, is the peculiar language adopted in the discourses and writings of its Teachers. The style of some religious teachers is low, vulgar. The style of a still greater number is barbarous. Men soon feel the language of the Law to be barbarous. They would feel the language of theology to be as barbarous, if they were not accustomed to hear it or read it so constantly. The way ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... finished suggesting bits that would brighten it up, and changes that would put it over with the Western buyers, Harrietta would regard the mutilated manuscript sorrowingly. "But I can't play this now, you know. It isn't the same part at all. It's—forgive me—vulgar." ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... who undertook to direct excavations, who manufactured and sold antiquities, selling new ones when the supply of the old happened to fail. Nothing about him, however, smacked of the vulgar exploiter of strangers. He wore a red felt fez from which hung a long blue silk tassel; under the narrow edge of an inner linen cap showed his temples, evidently recently shaved. His olive complexion, his black eyebrows, his hooked nose, his eyes like those of a bird of prey, his big moustaches, ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... her rich wardrobe went, Where treasured odours breathed a costly scent; There lay the vestures of no vulgar art, Sidonian maids embroider'd every part. Here, as the queen revolved with careful eyes The various textures and the various dyes She chose a web that shone superior far, And glow'd refulgent as ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... stared insolently at the occupants of the car and as it passed Sabota made some remark, evidently vulgar, that caused Dorsey to burst into another ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... There was bad blood between them, but that was all I could get out of him. Vulgar disagreeables between Bob, of all people, and his greatest friend! If you could have seen the poor fellow sitting where you are sitting now, like a prisoner in the dock! I put him in the witness-box instead, and examined him on scraps of Bob's letters to me. It was as unscrupulous ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... say, gazing upon this inspiring scene on a beautiful morning in February, when I became aware of a short and visibly vulgar person beside me, plucking persistently ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... Mawworm, a vulgar copy of Dr. Cantwell "the hypocrite." He is a most gross abuser of his mother tongue, but believes he has a call to preach. He tells old Lady Lambert that he has made several sermons already, but "always does 'em extrumpery" because ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... were enough of these, than by a venality never surpassed. The grooms-in-waiting and ladies-of-the-bedchamber sold the public offices in the daylight; and the King, who was aware of it, thought it a subject for vulgar jokes with his intimates. Francis died in 1830 of bad humour at the Paris revolution, and was succeeded by Ferdinand II., to be known hereafter as Bomba—then a clownish youth, one of whose first kingly cares was to create St Ignatius Loyola ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... Nachitoches, have a peculiar language; however, there is not a village in either of the nations, nor indeed in any nation of Louisiana, where there are not some who can speak the Chicasaw language, which is called the vulgar tongue, and is the same here as the Lingua Franca is ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... after, during indigestion and intoxication; written when the signer is trembling for the life of his child or has come from winning the Derby, in his lawyer's office, or under the bright eyes of his sweetheart. To the vulgar, these seem never the same; but to the expert, the bank clerk, or the lithographer, they are constant quantities, and as recognizable as the North Star to ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... with splendid eyes, beautiful wavy black hair, which was so thick, long, and strong that it seemed almost too heavy for her head. She was dressed with a certain Southern elegant bad taste which made her look a little vulgar. Her regular features had none of the grace and finish of the refined races, of that slight delicacy which members of the aristocracy inherit from their birth, and which is the hereditary mark ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... her, especially in restoring her for the time to the ordinary human gravity, that Hum-Drum and Kopy-Keck agreed in recommending the king to bury her alive for three years; in the hope that, as the water did her so much good, the earth would do her yet more. But the king had some vulgar prejudices against the experiment, and would not give his consent. Foiled in this, they yet agreed in another recommendation; which, seeing that one imported his opinions from China and the other from Thibet, was very remarkable indeed. They ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... those unamiable, sexless females who was either coldly ignoring her husband or storing up in her heart any excuse for hurling at him the most bitter invective with which she might humiliate him. She does not appear to have been a vulgar shrieker, but she may have been a silent stabber, which is worse. In any case, Nelson seems to have made a bad choice, as by his actions he openly avowed that he preferred to live with the former mistress of Featherstonehaugh, Greville, ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... through of wringing off the head of a cock, which is by them considered in a very serious light, a sort of incantation, whose effects upon their minds are not unlike those produced by supposed magic spells, once common in our own country, by which the vulgar were persuaded that the Devil was to be made to appear before them. In a Chinese court of justice an oath is never administered. In a late affair, where a Chinese was killed by a seaman of a British man of war, and the Captain was about to administer an oath ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... and studied it morning, noon, and night—in fact, every time when I could snatch a few minutes. I really believe that at one time I could have repeated the whole of the book from memory. Now I found the value of arithmetic, and set to work in earnest on proportion, vulgar and decimal fractions, and, in fact, everything in school work that I could turn to account in the science of chemistry. The result of this sudden application was that I was seized with an illness. For some months I had incessant headache; my hair became dried up, then turned grey, and finally ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... secrecy, this ancient religion and cosmogonic doctrine, revealing the destination of man and the certainty of posthumous rewards and punishments, all disengaged from the corruptions of poets, as well as from the symbols and allegories under which they still remained buried in the eyes of the vulgar. The Mysteries of Greece were thus traced up to the earliest ages, and represented as the only faithful depositaries of that purer theology and physics which had been originally communicated, though under the unavoidable inconvenience of a symbolical expression, by an enlightened ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... has probably learned to consider the Hindu Pariah as a merely wretched outcast, ignorant, vulgar, and oppressed. Such is not, however, exactly their status. Whatever their social rank may be, the Pariahs—the undoubted ancestors of the gypsies—are the authors in India of a great mass of philosophy and literature, embracing ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... greater advantage on horseback than on foot; in all ways it is war, and war only, he is fitted for. His manner in society is constrained without being timid; it is disdainful when he is on his guard, and vulgar when he is at ease; his air of disdain suits him best, and so he is not sparing in the use of it. He took pleasure already in the part of embarrassing people by saying disagreeable things: an art which he has since made a system ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... suspicious by their licentious desire for greater present return, which was at the root of nine-tenths of the opposition, by their vanity, which would prompt them to affect superiority to the prejudices of the vulgar, and by the stings of their own conscience, which was constantly upbraiding them in the most cruel manner on account of their bodies, which were generally diseased; let a person's intellect be never so sound, unless ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... wits are most inclined to vanity, is not true. Men are equally vain of riches, strength, beauty, honours, &c. But these appear of themselves to the eyes of the beholders, whereas the poor wit is obliged to produce his performance to show you his perfection; and on his readiness to do this that vulgar opinion I have before mentioned is grounded; but doth not the person who expends vast sums in the furniture of his house or the ornaments of his person, who consumes much time and employs great pains in dressing himself, or who thinks himself paid for self-denial, labour, or even villany, ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... nicety and daintiness which in some favored American and English homes make of the family board a visible and tangible poem, were very rare in our German experience. And yet there are charming German tables and well-bred German ladies and gentlemen. One custom which we have been taught to regard as vulgar and profane is that of constantly using the names of the Deity by way of exclamation and emphasis in the most ordinary conversation. Being on sufficiently intimate terms with a German lady, we one day ventured to inquire deprecatingly about this habit. "Everybody does it," was her candid reply; ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... spectacle-case, a brandy-flask, and a bon-bon-box, which broke and scattered cloves and peppermint lozenges. (I hope he guessed Aunt Celia is a dyspeptic, and not intemperate!) All this was hopelessly vulgar, but I wouldn't have minded anything if there had not been a Duchess novel. Of course he thought that it belonged to me. He couldn't have known Aunt Celia was carrying it for that accidental Mrs. Benedict, with whom she went to ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... meddle and to interfere with me in the practice of my profession. If you think you can impress me with heroics and declamation, please correct yourself at once. You have only succeeded in making yourself a little vulgar." ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... gently, "you make a speech. It will be recorded. You disclaim the crass and vulgar mechanical details and emphasize that you are like Einstein, dealing in theoretic physics only. That you are naturally interested in attempts to use your discovery, but your presence is a sign of your interest but ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... morning felt satisfied with the conditions of his pastorate, the First Church also had a similar feeling as it congratulated itself on the presence in the pulpit of this scholarly, refined, somewhat striking face and figure, preaching with such animation and freedom from all vulgar, noisy or disagreeable mannerism. ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... a broken toy and pick it up and throw it again away, so she loved for a day. That idle fancy of an afternoon tarnished no pinnacle that shone from her exalted station. But to love for more than a day—(QUEEN'S face lights up)—that were to place your high unequalled glory below a vulgar pastime. One alone may sit in the golden palace to reign over the green fields; ...
— Plays of Near & Far • Lord Dunsany
... the chief scholar of his age in the new learning, and no less certainly one of its truest poets in the vulgar language, lived as tutor to Lorenzo's children in the palace of the Medici at Florence. Benozzo Gozzoli introduced his portrait, together with the portraits of his noble pupils, in a fresco of the Pisan Campo Santo. This prince of humanists recommended ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... is just and reasonable that one who has diligently attained a high degree of knowledge in some great and useful science, should be distinguished from the ignorant-vulgar," etc., etc. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... the hour, When pleasure, like the midnight flower That scorns the eye of vulgar light, Begins to bloom for sons of night, And maids who love the moon. 'Twas but to bless these hours of shade That beauty and the moon were made; 'Tis then their soft attractions glowing Set the tides and goblets flowing. Oh! stay,—Oh! stay,— ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... most worshipful, to reply to you that there dwells, within a brief mile of these TUGURIA, the best FABER FERARIUS, the most accomplished blacksmith, that ever nailed iron upon horse. Now, were I to say so, I warrant me you would think yourself COMPOS VOTI, or, as the vulgar have it, ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... in a familiar epistle you should be playful and jocular, guard carefully that your wit be not sharp, so as to, give pain to any person; and before You write a sentence, examine it, even the words which it is composed, that there be nothing vulgar or inelegant in them. Remember, my dear, that your letter is the picture of Your brains; and those whose brains are a compound of folly, nonsense, and impertinence, are to blame to exhibit them to the ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... long permitted to remain in oblivion of her woes. Her repose was broken by the hoots and hisses of another vulgar crowd, that swarmed like hornets about the carriage-windows. They had arrived at another station, where, in place of finding post-horses, they were met by another mob as vituperative as the one they had ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... Romans will o'erhear us. But who's that stranger? By his warlike port, His fierce demeanour, and erected look, He's of no vulgar note. ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... which I spent in the byways. Oh, I know my people! I know the common people of America and England and France and Germany. I know them and love them. I love the middle classes, too, the honestly vulgar, honestly snobbish, foolishly ambitious, yet over-cautious middle class. The extreme types of every nation lose their racial individuality. You find the true thing only among the bourgeoisie. Oh, if I only knew whether these people," he ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... not believe this in Basel or Bern, without comparing the documents, on account of the violent assertions contained in other writings which he then published. Among these, everything else was eclipsed by the so-called Libel Almanac, whose appearance, with its vulgar wit, its coarse language and its blood-thirsty spirit, was demanded by party-hatred. The almanac of the Zurichers gave rise to its publication, because they had omitted the names of the saints. Instead ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... who greatly interested me. She told me she was an hundred years old, fasted all day long, and expected soon to go to Paradise. It is undoubtedly a vulgar error to say the Mahometan doctrine teaches that women have no souls. During her hundred years, she had never seen a Christian before. Her faculties were too weak for sectarian spite, and she looked upon me as if I had been a simple ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... Texas Smith; the scoundrel might flinch, or might fail. Something must be done to separate Clara and Thurstane. What should it be? Here we are almost ashamed of Coronado. The trick that he hit upon was the stalest, the most threadbare, the most commonplace and vulgar that one can imagine. It was altogether unworthy of such a clever and experienced conspirator. His idea was this: to get lost with Clara for one night; in the morning to rejoin the train. Thurstane ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... efforts in France to suppress the Bible—particularly versions in the language of the common people, Gaussen says: "The decree of Toulouse, 1229," which established the "tribunal of the Inquisition against all the readers of the Bible in the vulgar tongue, ... was an edict of fire, bloodshed, and devastation. In its 3d, 4th, 5th, and 6th chapters, it ordained the entire destruction of the houses, the humblest places of concealment, and even the subterranean retreats ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... this kind should never stand in vulgar and familiar contact with the highway, but at a distance from it of one hundred to a thousand yards; or even, if the estate on which it is built be extensive, a much greater distance. Breadth of ground between the highway and the dwelling adds dignity and character ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... taste by music, the fine arts, and dramatic entertainments, the Romans derived their chief pleasure from contemplating the brutal and bloody fights of gladiators; or at best, such rich shows and processions as gratify the uneducated vulgar. The games in the circus, with which the Romans were so delighted, that they considered them of equal importance, with the necessaries of life, consisted of athletic exercises, such as boxing, racing, ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... others of its sort as scarcely to claim narration-space. Youth, beauty, high spirits, the London season, first love—warranted the genuine article—parental opposition to the union of Romeo and Juliet, on the vulgar, unpoetical ground of Romeo having no particular income and vague expectations; the natural impatience of eighteen and five-and-twenty when they don't get their own way in everything; misunderstandings, ups-and-downs, reconciliations and new misunderstandings; finally one rather more ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Potter "the satisfaction usual among gentlemen," who promptly proposed to give it to him, naming bowie-knives as the weapons for the duel. This mode of gaining "satisfaction" was not accepted, because it was "vulgar, barbarous, and inhuman." Potter thenceforth became a hero, and less was heard of ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... to the town. The gay laugh had awakened the incident in his mind, and he saw again the little cleanly clad figure perched upon his desk, nibbling bakers' buns, while he transacted a tedious piece of business with the vulgar grandfather. ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... elegant, polished contempt against which a new-made man has seldom any weapons. The manners, the semi-Italian gesticulations, the speech of Diard, his style of dress,—all contributed to repulse the respect which careful observation of matters of good taste and dignity might otherwise obtain for vulgar persons; the yoke of such conventionalities can only be cast off by great and unthinkable powers. So ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... the statement that Rembrandt could not have painted the pictures that are ascribed to him, "because the man was low, vulgar and untaught," commands respect on account of the extreme crudity of the thought involved. Lautner is so dull that he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... Ghazee-od Deen Hyder, and about the year 1825 he had become as great a favourite with him as he afterwards became with his son, Nuseer-od Deen Hyder, and he abused his master's favour in the same manner. The minister, Aga Meer, finding his interference and vulgar insolence intolerable, took advantage one day of the King's anger against him, had him degraded, seized, and sent off forthwith to one of his creatures, Taj-od Deen Hoseyn, then in charge of the Sultanpoor district, where he was soon reduced almost ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... time for him to pack and begone. He was now liable to the vulgarest persecution from the vulgar herd; his very tailor and bootmaker would beleaguer him, and coarse unwashed bailiffs take him by the collar. Yes, now indeed, it ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... cultivator toiled in his fields in his fine coat, with white linen, his hair curled and powdered, there, certainly, would be the greatest luxury, and the most impertinent; but that a bourgeois of Paris or London should appear at the theatre clad like a peasant, there would be the most vulgar and ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... canvass the electors of Loughton!" and Lady Laura drew herself up and spoke of this unseemly intrusion on her father's borough, as though the vulgar man who had been named had forced his way into the very drawing-room in Portman Square. At that moment Mr. Kennedy came in. "Do you hear what Mr. Finn tells me?" she said. "He has heard that Mr. Quintus Slide has gone down to Loughton to ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... Very vulgar thing sunligh'. Art is always superior to Nature. You love the garish day being a gross Philistine, wha'? Now I only live at night. Glorious wicked nigh'. So I make my own nigh'. Wha'? Have some Green Chartreuse—only ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... When the-pi ague breaks out she has scope for her fancy, and she certainly adds vivid pictures of horror and pathos to a subject which has been handled by masters of thought at different periods. In this time of horror it is amusing to note how the people's candidate, Ryland, represented as a vulgar specimen of humanity, succumbs to abject fear. The description of the deserted towns and grass-grown streets of London is impressive. The fortunes of the family, to whom the last man, Lionel Verney, belongs, are traced through their varying phases, as one by one the dire ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... lip quivered; she felt a wild wish to burst out laughing. It was all so absurd; this funny queer house; this odd, stuffy, empty-looking room; and this vulgar, common-looking woman asserting that she was descended from the famous Count Cagliostro! And then, to crown everything, the naive, rather pathetic, attempt to get an extra ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... Camillus, heap mistake upon mistake; for being not so competent judges of what belongs to liberty as they were, we take upon us to be more competent judges of virtue. And whereas virtue, for being a vulgar thing among them, was of no less rate than jewels are with such as wear the most, we are selling this precious stone, which we have ignorantly raked out of the Roman ruins, at such a rate as the Switzers did that ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... hold together without further organisation. It began to be ill spoken of, inasmuch as vulgar minds can recognise no good except in what is formed upon a pattern they are familiar with. Then Bernardo had a vision. In his sleep he saw a ladder of light ascending to the heavens. Above sat Jesus with Our Lady ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... their popularity. He is less of a worshipper than any historian whom we can call to mind. Every political sect has its esoteric and its exoteric school, its abstract doctrines for the initiated, its visible symbols, its imposing forms, its mythological fables for the vulgar. It assists the devotion of those who are unable to raise themselves to the contemplation of pure truth by all the devices of Pagan or Papal superstition. It has its altars and its deified heroes, its relics and pilgrimages, its canonized martyrs and confessors, its festivals and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Lawgiver lead his fugitives into a veritable cul-de-sac, then a centre of Egyptian conquest. Evidently we have still to find the "true Mount Sinai," if at least it be not a myth, pure and simple. The profound Egyptologist, Dr. Heinrich Brugsch-Bey, observes that the vulgar official site lies to the south of and far from the line taken by the Beni Israil, and that the papyri show no route leading to it; whilst many have remarked that the Sinai of the Exodus is described as a single isolated mountain or hill, not as one projection from a range of heights.[EN131] ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... "You are hot one moment and cold the next. Citizen, I am afraid that you are no better than a vulgar coward. Take him away," he ended, waving his hand towards the door, and as he watched them leading him out he reflected bitterly that this was the man to whom Suzanne was betrothed—the man whom, not a doubt of it, she loved, since for him she had stooped so low. This miserable ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... with the outer world? Even our friend is drawn into this strife; reluctantly he submits to contradiction by experience and by life; and since, after a long struggle, he succeeds not in uniting these august figures with those of the vulgar world, or that high desire with the demands of the day, he resolves to let the actual pass current as the necessary, and declares that what has thus far seemed real to him ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... higher notions of the Messiah to the Jews. In fact, the dispute seems to rest on the notion that there was a definite and authorized notion of the Messiah, among the Jews, whereas it was probably so vague, as to admit every shade of difference, from the vulgar expectation of a mere temporal king, to the philosophic notion of an emanation from ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... itself." And, again, the celebrated Ambrose Pare, the father of surgery, has left us the following account of the comet of 1528, which appeared in his own time: "This comet," said he, "was so horrible, so frightful, and it produced such great terror in the vulgar, that some died of fear, and others fell sick. It appeared to be of excessive length, and was of the colour of blood. At the summit of it was seen the figure of a bent arm, holding in its hand a great sword, as if about to strike. At the end of the point there were three ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... Committee officers who acted as executioners and a Rev. Mr. Thomas. After the noose had been adjusted, Hetherington addressed the crowd, claiming to be innocent, and ready to meet his Maker. Brace, every once in a while, interrupted him, using terrible and vulgar language. The caps were adjusted, the ropes cut and the two dropped into eternity. They were left hanging 40 minutes, after which the bodies were removed by the Committee to their rooms and afterwards turned over to the Coroner. They were both young ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley
... meaning of this ceremony, which has been construed and interpreted in many different ways. The strong probability is that it was done "for luck;" and yet Lord Bateman should have been superior to the prejudices of the vulgar.] ...
— The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman • Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray
... by the extent of her knowledge and her experience of the world, would have married her without a thought. At the same time, her reserve charmed me. If she had been the first to speak of marriage in a certain tone, I might perhaps have noted it as vulgar in ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... grumbling, and having previously used in bed most of those vulgar words that made Aunt Alice so miserable, had given Anna-Rose one of the L5 notes for the extra expenses of the journey till, in New York, she should be able to draw on the L200, though what expenses there could be for a couple of girls whose passage was paid Uncle Arthur was damned, he ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... men and women should exist outside the bonds of marriage, the sins of the flesh being then redeemed by the virtues of the spirit. Adultery was thus tolerated, and even held in high honour, by many branches of the sect, who believed that the vulgar relations between the sexes were thus spiritually purified, and that men and women who loved under these conditions were like the doves and turtle-doves favoured by heaven. They avoided having children, and abortion was not only ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... inquire: above them all The golden Sun, in splendour likest Heaven Allured his eye: thither his course he bends Through the calm firmament, (but up or down By centre or eccentric hard to tell Or longitude) where the great luminary, Aloof the vulgar constellations thick, That from his lordly eye keep distance due, Dispenses light from far. They, as they move Their starry dance in numbers that compute Days, months, and years, towards his all-cheering lamp Turn swift their various motions, or are turned By his magnetic beam, that gently warms ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... In comparison with the supreme dignity of this ugly, pallid Hapsburger, upon whom disease and death have already laid a shadowy finger, how artificial appear the divine assumptions of an Alexander, how theatrical the Olympian airs of an Augustus, how merely vulgar and ill-worn the imperial poses ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... to drink? The muse is dry, And Pegasus doth thirst for Hippocrene, And fain would paint—imbibe the vulgar call— Or hot or cold, or long ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... Mr. Saunders, 'I heard the old lady Eastman say, that the next time she sees her minister, she is going to lecture him for getting that low-down, vulgar man in the pulpit. Why, his talk was awful. Mrs. Reamy and Mrs. Roberts said they would have both got up in church and walked out, only it would cause so much disturbance. Two girls came in to get a spool of thread. While I was waiting on them one said to the other, ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... no vulgar poisoner: he was a great artist in poisons, comparable with the Medici or the Borgias. For him murder was a fine art, and he had reduced it to fixed and rigid rules: he had arrived at a point when he was guided not by his personal interest but by a taste ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... Islands; 'twas not a thing to which the doors of the workaday world might be opened, lest the ribaldry to which it come offend and wound it: 'twas a thing to conceal, far and deep, from the common gaze and comment, from the vulgar chances, the laugh and cynical exhaustion and bleared wit of the life we live. I loved Judith—her eyes and tawny hair and slender finger-tips, her whimsical way, her religious, loving soul. I loved her; and I would not have you think 'twas any failure ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... Sellwood, both of Chiltern all Saints, were married October 17, 1714. The aforesaid Anne Sellwood was married in her Smock, without any clothes or headgier on." "This is not uncommon," remarks Mr. Ashton, "the object being, according to a vulgar error, to exempt the husband from the payment of any debts his wife may have contracted in her ante-nuptial condition. This error seems to have been founded on a misconception of the law, as it is laid down 'the husband is liable for the wife's debts, because he acquires an absolute interest in ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... newest romance? I read the Bride of Lammermoor. Sir William Ashton is a mask for a vulgar temptation, Ravenswood Castle a fine name for proud poverty, and the foreign mission of state only a Bunyan disguise for honest industry. We may all shoot a wild bull that would toss the good and beautiful, by fighting down ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Style and Manner. This diversifies the Genius of the Composer, and produces the most sensible and touching Difference. There is in all Musick the natural difference of Tone and Measure. They are to be found in the most vulgar Compositions of a Jig or an Hornpipe. But it is a full Knowledge of the Force and Power of Sounds, and a judicial Application of them to the several Intentions of Musick, that forms the Style of a Purcel or Corelli. This is owing to successive Improvements. ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... to our history—which, as the reader has doubtless observed, is not a vulgar description of fictitious persons and imaginary circumstances, but a veracious chronicle of facts, and much above the level of ordinary romances, inasmuch as truth is always stranger than fiction—the early dining hour of the aristocratic Benson (early in an English sense, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... straitened circumstances; but the whisper had been only the breath of rumour, and the imagined poverty far short of the reality: for the pride of Mordaunt (the great, almost the sole, failing in his character) could not endure that all he had borne and baffled should be bared to the vulgar eye; and by a rare anomaly of mind, indifferent as he was to renown, he was ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... took place contrary to my judgment, and the consequences thereof were predicted; yet, finding that the inactivity of the army, whether for want of provisions, clothes, or other essentials, is charged to my account, not only by the common vulgar, but by those in power; it is time to speak plain in exculpation of myself. With truth, then, I can declare that no man, in my opinion, ever had his measures more impeded than I have, by every department of the army. Since the month of July, we have had no assistance from the quartermaster ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... that she was only a child, and that her thin little legs might be tired, and her small body, clad in its forlorn, too small finery, all too short and too tight, might be chilled; when she had been given only harsh words and cold, slighting looks for thanks; when the cook had been vulgar and insolent; when Miss Minchin had been in her worst moods, and when she had seen the girls sneering at her among themselves and making fun of her poor, outgrown clothes—then Sara did not find Emily quite all that her sore, proud, desolate little heart needed as the doll ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... could scarce deliver himself in any other manner. This was the first gift he communicated to his disciples. These aped very sincerely their master's several grimaces, and shook in every limb the instant the fit of inspiration came upon them, whence they were called Quakers. The vulgar attempted to mimic them; they trembled, they spake through the nose, they quaked and fancied themselves inspired by the Holy Ghost. The only thing now wanting was a few miracles, and accordingly they ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... not used, but I suspect that it also produces schirrhus of the pancreas. The use of tobacco in this immoderate degree injures the power of digestion, by occasioning the patient to spit out that saliva, which he ought to swallow; and hence produces that flatulency, which the vulgar unfortunately take it to prevent. The mucus, which is brought from the fauces by hawking, should be spit out, as well as that coughed up from the lungs; but that which comes spontaneously into the mouth from the salivary glands, should be swallowed ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... insane or besotted wreck of man or woman, feel the noble exception of your presence and your house from the general bleakness and stoniness; to make such feel that they were greeted with a voice which made them both remember and hope? What is vulgar but to refuse the claim on acute and conclusive reasons? What is gentle, but to allow it, and give their heart and yours one holiday from the national caution? Without the rich heart, wealth is an ugly ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the thrush is fairly murdered by it. One could almost forgive the sparrow his other crimes, if he would only lie abed in the morning; if he would occasionally listen, and not forever break the peace of the opening day with his vulgar brawling. But the subject of English sparrows is maddening to a lover of native birds; let us not defile the magic hour ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... fall, No liken'd excellence can reach Her, thee most excellent of all, The best half of creation's best, Its heart to feel, its eye to see, The crown and complex of the rest, Its aim and its epitome. Nay, might I utter my conceit, 'Twere after all a vulgar song, For she's so simply, subtly sweet, My deepest rapture does her wrong. Yet is it now my chosen task To sing her worth as Maid and Wife; Nor happier post than this I ask, To live her laureate all my life. On wings of love uplifted free, And by ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... a reproach, may sound in modern ears much more like approval. 'He copied vulgar nature with zeal, and some of his figures seem alive.' Roubiliac constantly had recourse to the living forms about him; Flaxman preferred instead to turn to the antique. We hear of Roubiliac's fondness for modelling the arms of Thames watermen and the legs of chair-porters: in ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... the end of the sixteenth century, says that it was the yeomen who bought the lands of 'unthrifty gentlemen;' and Moryson tells us that 'the buyers (excepting lawyers) are for the most part citizens and vulgar men'.[279] It became one of the boasts of England that she had a large number of yeomen farming their own land. During the Civil War, however, it became important to landowners to protect their properties in the interest of children and descendants from forfeiture for treason. The judges lent their ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... who have no prospective sitter, no rich patron, no terrible drawing-master in mind; here are men to whom painting is the most important thing in the world. Unfortunately, in their isolation they are apt, like the rest, to come on the parish. Theirs is no vulgar provincialism; but in its lack of receptivity, its too willing aloofness from foreign influences, its tendency to concentrate on a mediocre and rather middle-class ideal of honesty, it is, I suspect, typically British. ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... not lived to write another note his memory would live by the Dutchman. It is an enormous leap from Rienzi. There brilliancy is attained by huge choruses and vigorous orchestration and rhythms that continually verge on the vulgar. In the Dutchman it is the stuff and texture of the music that make the effect. Play Rienzi on a piano, and you have nothing; play the Dutchman, and you have immediately the roar of the sea, the Dutchman's loneliness and sadness, Senta's ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... "So vulgar a notion!" reiterated Lady Verner, resuming her seat, and taking her essence bottle in her delicately gloved hand. "I wonder you don't stop ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... "cure" Trust more in nature and less in their plans of interference Ubi tres medici, duo athei Vast community of quacks, with or without the diploma Vowed these gifts to the altar, and the gods saved them Vulgar love of paradox Where knowledge leaves off and ignorance begins Whether they had better live at all Why we teach so much that is not practical Wise enough to confess the fact of absolute ignorance Words ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. • David Widger
... when I came home. You may be sure I was tired. Then I concluded to give you a little surprise by waiting up for you; and, as I looked very haggard, took out that precious cosmetic to tint my cheeks—all, dear Walter, to welcome you; but I was too much fagged, and went off into a sound, vulgar sleep!" said Helen, going to her toilette-table to adjust her hair, while she laughed as if the whole thing had been an amusing adventure. "It will learn you to ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... himself redden slightly, and looked curiously at the man. This vulgar parasite, whom he had set down as a worshiper of sham heroes, undoubtedly did not look like an associate of Bodine's, and had a certain seriousness that demanded respect. As he looked closer into his wide, round face, seamed with small-pox, he fancied he saw even in its fatuous imbecility ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... white beds under their mosquito-nets. Meekie had gone, but the quiet breathing of the children came faintly to the girl as she sat down by her table, thankful for a little space of silence and solitude in which to collect her forces. She saw violent and vulgar scenes ahead. Mrs. van Cannan, now that her true colours were unmasked, and it was no longer worth while to play the soft, sleepy role behind which she hid her fierce nature, would stick at nothing to get rid of Christine and set the whole world against her. ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... am leading a highly virtuous and praiseworthy life, and have not done the least bit of mischief since I came here, except making the Dean's wife jealous, which I can hardly call a crime, as she is a vulgar little woman with a red nose and a yellow bonnet—the Dean is a fat, good-natured man, and calls here nearly every day. His wife abuses me in all societies, and tries to pass me without speaking. You know how I always return good for evil, so I go up and shake hands ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... yes,' Mrs. Kempton said slowly. 'She was a rare woman. I knew her intimately,—better than any one else, I think. I knew all the unhappy circumstances of her life: her horrid, vulgar mother; her poor, dreamy, inefficient father; her poverty, how hard she had to work. You were in love with her. Why didn't you ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... care must be taken in selecting the songs and the windows. To a blonde you may very well sing, "Thy eyes so blue, of violet hue;" to a brunette, "Black-eyed Mary" or Susan; to a bleached blonde, "I am dying, Egypt, dying." Never sing vulgar songs, which are used by hungry lovers of cooks, such as, "Wilt thou meat me to-night by the old garden gate," or, "Meat me ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 39., Saturday, December 24, 1870. • Various
... became early the chief place of manufacture of cheap wares. Hence the name Brummagem, a vulgar pronunciation of the name of the city, has become in England a common name for cheap, tawdry jewelry. Cf. also Shakespeare, Richard III, Act I, ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... clad in their perfect tinsel of a glorious night, spread a softness over the world upon which she gazed. An odd light or two twinkled from a tiny window here and there; and, then, like a vulgar centerpiece, the lights of the saloon stared out harshly. There was no moon, but the mellow sheen of the stars hid the roughness from the mind, ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... preparation for immolation. Full of pernicious sentimentality, they are open to the first promising flirtation. They see elegantly-dressed and diamonded ladies, and their imagination is fed from the fountains of vulgar literature until they dream that they, too, are destined to be won by some splendid cavalier of fabulous wealth. Learning from the wishy-washy literature that their face is their fortune, and so, reading what happened to others, and how perfectly ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... he corrected. "'Murder' is a stupid, vulgar word. Yes, my dear, you are his heiress. He was your uncle, and he left you something over six million dollars. That is to say he left ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... and a man of mettle, too. None has been too exalted or too powerful for attack; withal, his assaults, in comparison with those of his scurrilous contemporaries, have been moderate and gentlemanly in tone. He has attacked abuses from the highest to the lowest. Sham gentility, vulgar ostentation, crazes and fads, linked aestheticism long drawn out, foolish costume, silly affectations of fashion in compliment and language—all have been set up as targets for his shafts of ridicule or scorn. He has been a moral reformer and a disinterested ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... topic of conversation upon which he had not something oracular to say; he was wont to maintain his own opinion with a very considerable amount of heat, and so obstinate was he that it was quite impossible to convince him that he was ever in the wrong. He was essentially a vulgar man; but, as might naturally be supposed from what has already been said, he regarded himself as a polished gentleman, and in his efforts to act up to his ideal of this character he often used words of whose meaning he had but ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... any moment to be acting as Censor. Replace him to-morrow by an Academy of Letters and an Academy of Dramatic Poetry, and the new and enlarged filter will still exclude original and epoch-making work, whilst passing conventional, old-fashioned, and vulgar work without question. The conclave which compiles the index of the Roman Catholic Church is the most august, ancient, learned, famous, and authoritative censorship in Europe. Is it more enlightened, more liberal, more tolerant that the comparatively infinitesimal office of the Lord Chamberlain? ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... timber. Also an Anglo-Saxon word for ask, which seamen still adhere to, and it is difficult to say why a word should be thought improper which has descended from our earliest poets; it may have become obsolete, but without absolutely being vulgar or incorrect. ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... celebrating him and his ship in the highest strains. Yet, in the midst of almost universal applause, some endeavoured to censure his conduct, and to place this great exploit in a wrong light. These persons alleged, that his circumnavigation of the globe served only to amuse the minds of the vulgar, while the main purpose of the voyage had been plunder, of which they pretended he had acquired sufficient to exempt the nation from taxes for seven years. They also set forth, as war had not been proclaimed ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... sweet and dear of you! But I'm sure you will see how very important this is. Here we are, right at the beginning of his campaign. Those vulgar women are going to hound him. They've begun already. As our committee wrote him last week, it is vitally important that he should declare ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... the mythology of Greece, for example, as the result practically of old words and popular sayings surviving in languages after the original, harmless, symbolical meanings of the words and sayings were lost. What had been a poetical remark about an aspect of nature became an obscene, or brutal, or vulgar myth, a stumbling block to Greek ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... my age, and my self-imposed tasks of long rowing trips and other athletic exercises, naturally made me powerful in the arms and chest. Of my brain power I shall say little, as my mind was ever bent on sporting topics when it should have been diving into English history or vulgar fractions. Some new device in fishing gear was always of more consequence to me than any inquiry as to the name of the executioner who gave Charles the I. "chops for breakfast," as we youngsters used to say, when we irreverently spoke of the decollation ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... But he was still nervous and uneasy; habit triumphed, and he took the whiskey. He, however, wiped his lips with a slight wave of his handkerchief, to support a certain easy elegance which he firmly believed relieved the act of any vulgar quality. ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... heartily despised as a mere civilized monkey. He performed every thing by imitation; and he imitated nothing (unless he was forcibly compelled to it) by which a rational being may be distinguished from a brute animal. But the species of imitation in which he most delighted, was that which, in the vulgar style, is called mocking; for he was not possessed of a sufficient stock of ingenuity to be (what he very frequently attempted to be) a clever mimick. If any of his schoolmates happened to be afflicted with an impediment in their speech, an accidental lameness, or the like; he had the mean barbarity ...
— Vice in its Proper Shape • Anonymous
... Q.C. Because MARIA votes Eastbourne vulgar, and the girls (sorry now I sent them to that finishing-school at Clapham) laugh so consumedly whenever I open my mouth to address a native if we go ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 3, 1892 • Various
... contributed a tittle of news to my journal. If I hear nothing to-night, this must depart, empty as it is, to-morrow morning, as I shall for Strawberry; I hope without finding a new mortification, as I did last time. Two companies had been to see my house last week; and one of the parties, as vulgar people always see with the ends of their fingers, had broken off the end of my invaluable Eagle's bill, and to conceal their mischief, had pocketed the piece. It is true it had been restored at Rome, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... of a speaker addressing a public meeting. What he says is weighty and important. His arguments are powerful and well marshalled, but his speech is uncouth and disagreeable. He says things that are coarse and vulgar. His bad manner vastly takes away from the impression which he desires to make, and which, if his manner had been different, he would have made. Again, two young men serve in a place of business. The one is gentle in his demeanor, meets his customers with a pleasant smile, is always polite. The ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... song for the quartette. They won't let us do 'Amos Moss' at the Lyceum concert. That part about the red shirt is vulgar. The new one's close harmony. It will ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... true—a work recalling recollections with which the ears of this generation once tingled, and which shall be read by our children with an admiration approaching to incredulity. Such shall be the Life of Napoleon, by the Author of Waverley." He wished to controvert "the vulgar opinion that the flattest and dullest mode of detailing events must uniformly be that which approaches nearest to the truth."[413] There is no doubt that his histories are readable, yet we feel that Southey was right in his comment on the Life of Napoleon,—"It ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... taking his part and doing their best to 'get him off.' Such was this extraordinary chevalier d'industrie, who might have gone on with his diabolical perpetrations had he not, at last, attempted too much, failing in the grandest stroke he had ever meditated—and yet a vulgar fraud—when he was convicted, branded, and sent ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... language as he opened, but when at the point of fervor pouring forth his soul in a fiery torrent of oratory, whose only restraint was the inability of the human voice to express all that the heart contained. In style impassioned, he yet often chose language bordering on the familiar, but was not vulgar. He is an instance of the fallacy of the saying that the preacher must stoop to his auditory if he would be popular. Father Bernard was ever true to himself, never appeared less than an educated priest and grave religious, and yet he was a most popular preacher. The great truths of ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... of the British became vulgar, a proof of narrow-mindedness. But, by that token, to enlarge upon the inferiority of the British indicated a broad, tolerant spirit, and a wide outlook upon mankind and affairs. From that to the sentiment I have called anti-British was no more than a step. Many thoroughly good, ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... branching, leafless trees or shrubs, with timber of a high order, which is both hard and heavy, and of the colour of raw beef, whence the vulgar name." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... colossal labour. And so the Congregation of the Index condemned en masse, without examination, all works of certain categories: first, books which were dangerous for morals, all erotic writings, and all novels; next the various bibles in the vulgar tongue, for the perusal of Holy Writ without discretion was not allowable; then the books on magic and sorcery, and all works on science, history, or philosophy that were in any way contrary to dogma, as well as the writings of heresiarchs or mere ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... a vulgar and laborious industry, O maiden. I have found a means of gaining much wealth for myself without fatigue. But ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... waters In broad canals and deep, Whereon the silver moonbeams Sleep, restless in their sleep; A sort of vulgar Venice Reminds me where I am; Yes, yes, you are in England, ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... ostentatiously extravagant, not only with purple coverlets, and plate adorned with precious stones, and dancings, and interludes, but with the greatest diversity of dishes and the most elaborate cookery, for the vulgar to admire and envy. It was a happy thought of Pompey in his sickness, when his physician prescribed a thrush for his dinner, and his servants told him that in summer time thrushes were not to be found anywhere but ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... existence, but freemen sometimes gained a desperate subsistence by thus hazarding their lives; and in the decline of Rome, knights, senators, and even the emperors sometimes appeared in the arena, at the instigation of a vulgar and degrading thirst ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... feelings and fancies of the time, when they first enriched the Globe, but not so admirable now: I have also to find fault with the manner in which the characters—granting that they are true to nature—are developed and made palpable to vulgar eyes. The fact is, my benevolent friend, that every thing is gigantic in his conceptions. He is like a sculptor who despises the easy flow of the resting figure, and fills his studio with agonizing athletes—every muscle on the stretch—the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... the "Vicar of Wakefield," boastful for her aristocratic connections and delicacy of taste, but vulgar at bottom. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... studied it morning, noon, and night—in fact, every time when I could snatch a few minutes. I really believe that at one time I could have repeated the whole of the book from memory. Now I found the value of arithmetic, and set to work in earnest on proportion, vulgar and decimal fractions, and, in fact, everything in school work that I could turn to account in the science of chemistry. The result of this sudden application was that I was seized with an illness. For some ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... They to the vulgar sort now pipe and sing, And make them merrie with their fooleries; 320 They cherelie chaunt, and rymes at randon fling, The fruitfull spawne of their ranke fantasies; They feede the eares of fooles with flattery, And good men blame, and losels* ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... the derivation and course of souls from God, through life, back to God, must be similar. There are mysteries in connection with the soul that baffle the most lynx eyed investigation, and on which no known facts of the physical world can throw light. Secondly, the scheme of emanation depends on a vulgar error, belonging to the infancy of philosophic thought, and inconsistent with some necessary truths. It implies that God is separable into parts, and therefore both corporeal and finite. Divisible substance is incompatible with the first predicates of Deity, namely, immateriality and infinity. Before ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... altar shall be ready; The rite shall be performed with solemn fitness, While vulgar crowds shall thy confusion witness. Their scoffing jeers shall be thy wedding hymn; Thy father stooped in vain; now stoop to ...
— Turandot: The Chinese Sphinx • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... work good judgment in the choice of items of news, variety in the manner of stating them, and logical order in arranging and connecting them should be cultivated. The writing of good, plain English, rather than "smart" journalese should be the aim. Stale, vulgar and incorrect phrases, such as "Sundayed," and "in our midst," should be avoided. There are two tests in selecting a news item: (1) Will it interest readers? (2) Ought they to know it? When by these tests ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... from that impatience common to princes compelled to undergo long audiences, or else the outward token of the constant wavering of an undecided mind. In his person there was an expression of bonhommie more vulgar than royal, which at the first glance inspired as much derision as veneration, and on which his enemies seized with contemptuous perversity, in order to show to the people in the features of their ruler the visible and personal sign of those vices they sought to destroy ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... for his face was blunted, his eyes small, and his tail ridiculously insignificant. Nor could he cover the ground with the easy swinging jump that makes one suspect relationship between the red vole and the wood-mouse. Still for a common, vulgar, agrarian vole, he was passable enough, and could hold his own, tooth and ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality. It was his pride besides, that he was duly tinctured with the learning of his age, and judged not altogether with the vulgar, but in harmony with the ancients: he, too, in his prime, had been eager for the most correct manuscripts, and had paid many florins for antique vases and for disinterred busts of the ancient immortals—some, perhaps, truncis naribus, wanting as to the ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... from the counterfeiter,—not from the vulgar shams distributed so widely over the world from the well-known manufactories of paintings in France, England, and other parts, which can deceive only the most ignorant or credulous, but from talent itself debased to forgery ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... power: I've known it hold Out through a fever caused by its own heat, But be much puzzled by a cough and cold, And find a quinsy very hard to treat; Against all noble maladies he's bold, But vulgar illnesses don't like to meet, Nor that a sneeze should interrupt his sigh, Nor inflammations ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... places," I would be there; if bare-footed she had to beg from door to door, rest assured, mother, that an Aylwin would hold the wallet—would leave the whole Aylwin brood, their rank, their money, and their stupid, vulgar British pride, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... the host does not wish to continue the acquaintance he will not return the call in person, but simply send his card by post. This distant rejoinder practically ends the brief acquaintance without any discourteous rebuff. It is one of the mistakes of the vulgar to be rude and gruff in order to repel an undesired acquaintance. In reality, nothing freezes out a bore more effectually than the icy calm of dignified courtesy. There are exquisitely polite ways of sending every undesirable person to limbo. The perfect self-command ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... "unstitched."' But Mr. Froude says that Philip used the expression, later, in reference to another letter of Escovedo's which he also called 'a bloody letter' (January 1578). Here Mr. Froude can hardly be right, for Philip's letter containing that vulgar expression ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... that they are rather vulgar, I believe, but you, I am sure, look like a person of culture." He said this as if he thought he were conveying a rather neat compliment. Indignant as she was, Miss Roberts's strongest feeling was compassion for Annie, and she bit her ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... were expensive and that, moreover, the ability of correct logical and literary expression was necessarily limited in the case of a practising cook who, after all, must have been the collector of the Apician formulae. This is sufficiently proven by the lingua coquinaria, the vulgar Latin of our old work. In our opinion, the ancient author did not consider it worth his while to give anything but the most indispensable information in the tersest form. This he certainly did. A comparison of his literary performance with that of the artistic and ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... fashion the "comic" cartoons of the newspapers have an extraordinary fascination for children. Every child wants to read the funny page, though the funny page is not for childish reading. The humor is coarse, slangy, and distinctly vulgar; very clever frequently and thoroughly enjoyable to those whom ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... as we are concerned with it, may be defined as the literary effect produced by the marshaling of details in their exactitude for the purpose of bringing out character. The fact that they may be ugly and vulgar the reverse, makes not the slightest difference. The modern realist contemplates the inanimate things which surround us with peculiar complaisance, and it is right that he should as these things exert upon us a constant and secret influence. The workings of the human ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... innocence and beauty which did smile In Fletcher, grew on this Enchanted Isle. But Shakespear's Magick could not copied be, Within that Circle none durst walk but he. I must confess 'twas bold, nor would you now That liberty to vulgar Wits allow, Which works by Magick supernatural things: But Shakespear's Pow'r is Sacred as ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... caution singers to exercise discretion in this much-abused effect. Variations of Tempo, the ritardando, accelerando, and tempo rubato, are all legitimate aids demanded by Expression. But unless their use is determined by sound judgment and correct musicianly taste, the effect speedily becomes vulgar and monotonous. Knowledge, and a taste formed in good schools, must be the guide of the vocalist in the use of ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... small pink-faced and black-eyed cherub on every keystone; the rest of the church being for the most part concealed either by dirty hangings, or dirtier whitewash, or dim pictures on warped and wasting canvas; all vulgar, vain, and foul. Yet let us not turn back, for in the shadow of the apse our more careful glance shows us a Greek Madonna, pictured on a field of gold; and we feel giddy at the first step we make on the pavement, for it, also, is of Greek ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... object beyond the mere acquiring of money, particularly after it has been acquired, he had his, to rise high, for he was very ambitious. His natural discernment set all his own failings before him in the clearest light; also their consequences. He knew that he was vulgar and brutal, and that as a result all persons of real gentility looked down upon him, however much they might seem to cringe before his money and power, yes, though they chanced to ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... looks, and still less in their walk; they go stamping along with the step of an athlete and the stride of a peasant on fresh plowed fields. It is the most hideous of walks imaginable. The Grecian bend, which you cannot remember, but may have heard of, was a lackadaisical, vulgar walking fad, but it was grace itself compared with the hideous stride which the New Woman has acquired on the golf ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... gypsy, postillion, ostler; associating with various kinds of people, chiefly of the lower classes, whose ways and habits are described; but, though leading this erratic life, we gather from the book that his habits are neither vulgar nor vicious, that he still follows to a certain extent his favourite pursuits—hunting after strange characters, or analyzing strange words and names. At the conclusion of the fifth volume, which terminates the first part of the history, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... afterward, while sitting in a cafe, a burly, vulgar-looking man, a stranger to him, interrupted him several times while talking, and, after making several rough speeches as if trying to provoke a quarrel, finally threw a card in his face, saying its owner was ready to grant him satisfaction when ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... to the interesting fact that Johnson, who was born in 1709, actually came to Birmingham in his tenth year, on a visit to his uncle Harrison, who in after years, in his usual plain-speaking style, Johnson described as "a very mean and vulgar man, drunk every night, but drunk with little drink, very peevish, very proud, very ostentatious, but, luckily, not rich." That our local governors have a due appreciation of the genius of the famed lexicographer is shown by the fact of a passage-way from Bull Street to the Upper Priory being ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... stanza of the 215 remainder, were written by a friend [Southey] of deserved celebrity; and because there are passages in both which might have given offence to the religious feelings of certain readers. I myself indeed see no reason why vulgar superstitions and absurd conceptions that deform the pure faith of a Christian 220 should possess a greater immunity from ridicule than stories of witches, or the fables of Greece and Rome. But there are those who deem it ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... delighting them or with the purpose of shocking them. These passages, they can easily avoid. This book, however, was written that it might be read: not only read by the Solon, Socrates, Plato, or Seneca of the laity or the profession, but even by the billy-goated dispositioned, vulgar plebeian, who could no more be made to read cold, scientific, ungarnished facts than you can make an unwilling horse drink at the watering-trough. Human weakness and perversity is silly, but it is sillier to ignore that it exists. So, for the ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... ornament, the arrises of the flutings, were cut with marvellous precision and delicacy. It has been rightly said that the Greeks "built like Titans and finished like jewellers." But this perfect finish was never petty nor wasted on unworthy or vulgar design. The just relation of scale between the building and all its parts was admirably maintained; the ornament was distributed with rare judgment, and the vigor of its design saved it from all ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... turned where he stood with his hands in his pockets, and looked after her; then smiled to himself a nasty smile, and said: "At least I have made her angry, and that's something! What has a fellow like that to give her? Poet, indeed! What's that! He's not even the rustic gentleman! He's downright vulgar!—a clod-hopper born and bred! But the lease, I understand, will soon be out, and Potlurg will never let him have it! I will see to that! The laird hates the canting scoundrel! I would rather pay ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... prodigal young American, who haunts hotels. Clean shaven and well dressed, the fellow would be indistinguishable from the thousands of overfed and overdrunk young business men, to be seen every day in the vulgar luxury of Pullman cars, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... was a great, coarse, vulgar woman, and Guy perceived why his uncle had been so averse to taking him to his home, and how he must have felt the contrast between such a wife and his beautiful sister. She had a sort of broad sense, and absence of pretension, but ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... surprising conduct of his is a secret to this day. His behaviour also during his declaration, which he supported but five days, is equally surprising and mysterious. This shows that it is possible for some extraordinary characters to be raised above the malice and envy of vulgar souls; for the merit of any person inferior to the Marshal must have been totally eclipsed by ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... struggle—"ulous! I shall review that: ridiculous of you to pretend to be interested in oil-fields. You are not that sort of person whatever. Nothing could be clearer than that you would never waste the time demanded by fields of oil. Groundlings call this 'the mechanical age'—a vulgar error. My dear sir, you and I know that it is the age of Woman! Even poets have begun to see that she is alive. Formerly we did not speak of her at all, but of late years she has become such a scandal that she is getting talked about. Even our dramas, which used to be all blood, have become ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... opinion or of lodging complaints, as the change in that department took place contrary to my judgment and the consequences thereof were predicted, yet finding that the inactivity of the army, whether for want of provisions, clothes, or other essentials is charged to my account, not only by the common vulgar but by those in power, it is time to speak plain in exculpation of myself. With truth then I can declare that no man, in my opinion, ever had his measures more impeded than I have by every department of the army. ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... unconstrained, always grew abrupt and uncouth when under restraint—a child very far from silly, but apt to say the silliest things—learning quickly all that was mere head-work, but hopelessly or obstinately dull at what was to be done by the fingers—a child whose ways could not be called vulgar, but would have been completely tom-boyish, except for a certain timidity that deprived them of the one merit of courage, and a certain frightened consciousness that was in truth modesty, though it did not look like ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dissipated. The appearance of a light in a part of the castle which had for several years been shut up, and to which time and circumstance had given an air of singular desolation, might reasonably be supposed to excite a strong degree of surprise and terror. In the minds of the vulgar, any species of the wonderful is received with avidity; and the servants did not hesitate in believing the southern division of the castle to be inhabited by a supernatural power. Too much agitated to sleep, they agreed to watch for the remainder of the night. For this ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... that all sort of justice passes in the world for a low-spirited and vulgar virtue, far below the dignity of royal greatness—or at least there are set up two sorts of justice; the one is mean and creeps on the ground, and, therefore, becomes none but the lower part of mankind, and so must be kept in severely by many restraints, that ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... a beggar's disguise: it is democratic only in the sense of having a popular origin and bending easily to popular forces. Swayed as it is by public opinion, it is necessarily conventional in its conception of duty and earnestly materialistic; for the meaning of the word vanity never crosses the vulgar heart. In fine, it is the religion of a race young, wistful, and adventurous, feeling its latent potentialities, vaguely assured of an earthly vocation, and possessing, like the barbarian and the healthy child, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... not have whistled if I had tried; but then, bad as he was, he was not, like me, disobeying a kind parent. When I remember the sort of person Doolan was (for his appearance was coarse and vulgar in the extreme), I wonder he could have gained such an influence over me. I believe that it was the boastful way in which he talked made me fancy him so important. I was very innocent and confiding, ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... they scruple to use this great power to avenge themselves upon those men that had so antagonized them and hindered their investigation. Robert Beverley they represented to the Privy Council as a man of low education and mean parts, bred a vulgar seaman and utterly unfit for high office.[839] Colonel Edward Hill was the most hated man in Charles City county.[840] Ballard, Bray and some of the other Councillors were rash and fiery, active in opposing the ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... do not work, but loaf; who do nothing to elevate, but everything to degrade, the race; who choose the sunny side of the street corners in winter and the shady side in summer; who use all kinds of vulgar and indecent language, insulting ladies as they pass. It is this loafing, nomadic young class that drifts to crime, caused by idleness, evil associations, and the fact that this class does not know the value of a dollar or the enormity of a crime. These young men are millstones welded ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... afford us some information on that subject," said Vallington. "Our safety and success depend mainly upon the vulgar things ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic
... enthusiasm may have contributed to the success of the Turkish and other Tales, it is in the last degree improbable that our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were enamoured, not of a reality, but of an illusion born of ignorance or of vulgar bewilderment. They were carried away because they breathed the same atmosphere as the singer; and being undistracted by ethical, or grammatical, or metrical offences, they not only read these poems with avidity, but understood enough of what they read to be touched ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... of noble Nature's crowning, A smile of hers was like an act of grace; She had no winsome looks, no pretty frowning, Like daily beauties of the vulgar race: But if she smiled, a light was on her face, A clear, cool kindliness, a lunar beam Of peaceful radiance, silvering o'er the stream Of human thought with unabiding glory; Not quite a waking truth, not quite a dream, A visitation, bright ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... sordid desire of the vulgar, Hereward," answered the Follower, with assumed superiority, "who are contented to enjoy life, lacking distinction; whereas we, on the other hand, we of choicer quality, who form the nearest and innermost circle around the Imperial Alexius, in which he himself forms the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... they have finally imbibed the notion that Carlyle's theory of hero worship was a theory of terrified submission to stern and arrogant men. As a matter of fact, Carlyle is really inhumane about some questions, but he is never inhumane about hero worship. His view is not that human nature is so vulgar and silly a thing that it must be guided and driven; it is, on the contrary, that human nature is so chivalrous and fundamentally magnanimous a thing that even the meanest have it in them to love a leader more than themselves, and to prefer ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... it may be asked, "why dwell upon these things? Is there not something coarse and vulgar in this appeal to men's fears? And, after all, to what purpose is it? If men are not won by the love of God, of what avail is it to speak to them of His wrath?" But fear is as real an element in human nature as love, and when our aim is by ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... L30,000, and undergo imprisonment until the mulct was paid, the unfortunate statesman bitterly repented the imprudence which had exposed him to the vengeance of political adversaries and to the enmity of the vulgar. Whilst the passions roused by the prosecution were at their height, the fallen Chancellor was treated with much harshness by Parliament, and with actual brutality by the mob. Ever ready to vilify lawyers, the rabble seized on so favorable an occasion for giving ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... From the time of Zeno to Simplicius, a period of about nine hundred years, the Stoic philosophy formed the characters of some of the best and greatest men. A man's greatness lies not in wealth and station, as the vulgar believe, nor yet in his intellectual capacity, which is often associated with the meanest moral character, the most abject servility to those in high places, and arrogance to the poor and lowly; but a man's true greatness lies in the consciousness of an honest purpose in life, founded ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... he replied. "I am trying to supply the real note. It is badly wanted. There are all kinds of stuff being written, but all indifferent and valueless. If it has a swing, it's merely vulgar, and what isn't vulgar is academic, commonplace. There's a crying need for the high level poetry that shall interpret with dignity and nobility the ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... She typified to me everything that was disagreeable. I have always disliked even being in the neighborhood of her vulgar kind. What was my horror, then, to see her deliberately smiling at me, then coming ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... week he was seen talking to a prizefighter; in short, though Mr. Jay does call himself a journalist, in virtue of his penny-a-line contributions to the newspapers, he is a young man of low taste, vulgar manners, and bad habits. Nothing has yet been discovered in relation to him which redounds to his credit ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... his folly in the next instant. What was this woman but a vulgar impostor, who was doubtless trying to trade upon his fears in some manner ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... please. Leave sensibility to women; but men should be firm in heart and purpose, or they should have nothing to do with war and government." He was thoroughly unscrupulous. He would steal, slander, assassinate, drown, and poison, as his interest dictated. He had no generosity; but mere vulgar hatred; he was intensely selfish; he was perfidious; he cheated at cards; he was a prodigious gossip; and opened letters; and delighted in his infamous police; and rubbed his hands with joy when he had intercepted some morsel of intelligence concerning the men and women about ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... a year, or ten million a year, as Epictetus saw full well, cannot mend that vulgar discontent with circumstances which he had felt—and who with more right?—and conquered, and despised. For that is the discontent of children, wanting always more holidays and more sweets. But I wish my readers to have, and to cherish, ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... and no doubt his being an Admiral helped him to get it. He hopes to get a certificate presently to be a Barge Master, which will put him in charge of the canals. But there is a very difficult examination to go through and Uncle Henry is working for it at night out of a book. He has to take up Vulgar Fractions which, of course, none of our High Seas Command were asked to learn. But Uncle Henry is stooping ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... of the Middle Ages. The more senseless, the more welcome it was as a bugbear to frighten the populace and to stir into flames the sparks of fanaticism which are always smouldering in the hearts of the vulgar, whether of low degree or high ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau
... peeping and undressing, playing "father and mother," using vulgar words, making offensive drawings or writing unsavory verses, urinating in public—punishment in any of its many forms tends to decrease the quick chances of recovery. Humiliation, body-guarding (I never can trust you alone), confinement (lock you up), emotional scenes (you've ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... the agricultural festivals. It swept away what seems to us a thing less dangerous, a large part of the worship of the dead. Such worship, our evidence shows us, gave a loose rein to superstition. To the Olympian movement it was vulgar, it was semi-barbarous, it was often bloody. We find that it has almost disappeared from Homeric Athens at a time when the monuments show it still flourishing in un-Homeric Sparta. The Olympian movement swept ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... attitude more odious to me than any other of the many attitudes of "knowingness," it is that air of lofty superiority to the vulgar. She will soon find out that I ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... and had got his judges into office, and in the end the Trust had been forced to buy him out. And now he had come to New York to play this new game of bank-gambling, which paid even quicker profits than buying courts.—And then there was Holt, a sporting character, a vulgar man-about-town, who was identified with everything that was low and vile in the city; he, too, had turned his millions into banks.—And there was Cummings, the Ice King, who for years had financed the political machine ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... of text. The contents supply the South Babylonian version of the second book of the epic sa nagba imuru, "He who has seen all things," commonly referred to as the Epic of Gilgamish. The tablet is said to have been found at Senkere, ancient Larsa near Warka, modern Arabic name for and vulgar descendant of the ancient name Uruk, the Biblical Erech mentioned in Genesis X. 10. This fact makes the new text the more interesting since the legend of Gilgamish is said to have originated at Erech and the hero in fact figures as one of the prehistoric ...
— The Epic of Gilgamish - A Fragment of the Gilgamish Legend in Old-Babylonian Cuneiform • Stephen Langdon
... published by the Idler which I have read with more approbation than that which censures the practice of recording vulgar marriages in the newspapers. I carried it about in my pocket, and read it to all those whom I suspected of having published their nuptials, or of being inclined to publish them, and sent transcripts of it to all the couples that transgressed your precepts for the next fortnight. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... just admiration of succeeding ages! But our modern filosofastri insist upon stunning us with the noise of their machinery, and blinding us with the dust of their operations. They will not allow the smallest portion of their vulgar labours to escape our notice. They drag us through the chaos of sand and lime, and stone and bricks, which they have accumulated, hoping that the magnitude of the preparation may atone for the meanness of the performance. Very different ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... bad hands at estimating evidence, even where appeal can be made to actual eyesight. Eyesight, in fact, is the least part of the matter. The senses are as often the tools as the guides of reason. One of the longest chapters in the history of vulgar error would contain the cases in which the eyes have only seen what old prepossessions inspired them to see, and were blind to all that would have been fatal to the prepossessions. 'It is beyond all question or dispute,' ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 1: On Popular Culture • John Morley
... shopping, select little dinner-parties, farewell calls, and visits made with Mr. Chamberlain to the famous groves and temples of Ikegami, where the Buddhist bishop and priests entertained us in one of the guest- rooms, and to Enoshima and Kamakura, "vulgar" resorts which nothing can vulgarise so long ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... all thy anguish and thy discontent Was growth of mine, the elemental strife Towards feeling manifold with vision blent To wider thought: I was no vulgar life That like the water-mirrored ape, Not discerns the thing it sees, Nor knows its own in others' shape, Railing, scorning, at its ease. Half man's truth must hidden lie If unlit by sorrow's eye. I by sorrow wrought in thee ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... said the Doctor, raising his voice, 'when, Sir, as we read, and have no reason to doubt—incredible as it may appear to the vulgar—of our time—the brother of Vitellius prepared for him a feast, in which were served, of fish, two ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... careful mother who used to shudder when slang was used in her presence. So she vowed she'd give her son a name that the boys couldn't twist into any low, vulgar nick-name. She called him Algernon, but the kid had a pretty big nose, and the first day he was sent to school with his long lace collar and his short velvet pants the boys christened him Snooty, and now his parents are the only people who know ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... Naive, crude, often vulgar; such is the general impression produced by the mass of these lighter epigrams. The bulk of them are of late date; and the culture of the ancient world was running low when its /vers de societe/ reached no higher level than this. Of course they can only be called ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... the ignoramus that doesnt know poetry from a cabbage thats what you get for not keeping them in their proper place pulling off his shoes and trousers there on the chair before me so barefaced without even asking permission and standing out that vulgar way in the half of a shirt they wear to be admired like a priest or a butcher or those old hypocrites in the time of Julius Caesar of course hes right enough in his way to pass the time as a joke sure you might as well be in bed with what with a lion God Im sure hed have something ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... a dissolute and fearless assassin of private character, of domestic comfort, and of social happiness; when he is known to be the bosom friend and supporter of the profligate and abandoned libertine, who, from the vulgar debauches of night, hastens again to the invasion of private property. Who, through the robbery of the public revenue, and the violation of private seals, hurries down the precipice of ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... all arts and sciences are more or less encumbered with vulgar errors and prejudices, which avarice and ignorance have unfortunately sufficient influence to preserve, by help (or hindrance) of mysterious, undefinable, and not seldom unintelligible, technical terms—Anglice, nicknames—which, instead of enlightening the subject it is professedly pretended ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... Cromwell and the Scots was on a par with that of John Wilkes towards the latter, and was just as unreasonable, while the language he employed in his diatribes against both was so extravagant as to lose its sarcastic point in mere vulgar abuse. In like manner Oldham's Satires on the Jesuits afford as disgraceful a specimen of sectarian bigotry as the language contains. Only their pungency and wit render them readable. He displays Juvenal's violence ...
— English Satires • Various
... had herein justified his confident saying that he would not deny him. He was not one to deny his Lord who had been the first to confess him! Yet ere the cock had crowed, ere the morning had dawned, the vulgar grandeur of the palace of the high priest (for let it be art itself, it was vulgar grandeur beside that grandeur which it caused Peter to deny), and the accusing tone of a maid-servant, were enough to make him quail whom the crowd with lanterns, and torches, and weapons, had only roused ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... bear in mind throughout the whole of this deliberation. It is this: you ought never to conclude that a man must necessarily be innoxious because he is in other respects insignificant. You will see that a man bred in obscure, vulgar, and ignoble occupations, and trained in sordid, base, and mercenary habits, is not incapable of doing extensive mischief, because he is little, and because his vices are of a mean nature. My Lords, we have shown to you already, and we shall demonstrate to you more ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... matters of contemporary history, which have not been obscured by time. For instance, there is the notion that the Lacedaemonian kings have two votes each, the fact being that they have only one; and that there is a company of Pitane, there being simply no such thing. So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand. On the whole, however, the conclusions I have drawn from the proofs quoted may, I believe, safely be relied on. ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... on Irving and sometimes on Beerbohm Tree, And it seems to be observing joy and rapture yet to be. In the nostril elevated and the lip that lightly curled Was a cold scorn indicated of this vulgar nether world. I could marry that expression. Show it once again then, do! And I meekly make profession—I—I—I will ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... that insight which could discern goodness under a ragged cassock, or in a swearing postilion. And, having discerned the true nature of such Great Men, Fielding proceeds to point out that "However the Glare of Riches and Awe of Title may terrify the Vulgar; nay however Hypocrisy may deceive the more Discerning, there is still a Judge in every Man's Breast, which none can cheat or corrupt, tho' perhaps it is the only uncorrupt thing about him"; that nothing is so preposterous as that ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... own. In this scale gold, in the other fame does lie; The weight of that mounts this so high. These men are Fortune's jewels, moulded bright, Brought forth with their own fire and light. If I, her vulgar stone, for either look, Out of myself it must be strook. Yet I must on: What sound is't strikes mine ear? Sure I Fame's trumpet hear: It sounds like the last trumpet, for it can Raise up the buried man. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... stock of Bill Wagstaff. She knew him to be in bad odor with Cariboo Meadows for some unknown reason. She had seen him fight in the street, knock a man unconscious with his fists. According to her conceptions of behavior that was brutal and vulgar. Drinking came under the same head, and she had Jim Briggs' word that Bill Wagstaff not only got drunk, but was a "holy terror" when in that condition. Yet she could not quite associate the twin traits of brutality and vulgarity with the man sitting close by with that thoughtful look on his face. ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... in grammar in the rhymes, many words you cannot find in a dictionary, and some of the rhymes may seem a little coarse and vulgar; but they have lived so long in their present form that it seems almost a pity to change them. Encourage the older children to find the errors and to criticise and correct as much as they wish. Probably they will not like the rhymes in their new form and correct ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... number of lurking leeches infamously gain a subsistence by practising on the credulity of women, pretending to cast nativities, to use the technical phrase; and many females who, proud of their rank and fortune, look down on the vulgar with sovereign contempt, show by this credulity, that the distinction is arbitrary, and that they have not sufficiently cultivated their minds to rise above vulgar prejudices. Women, because they have not been led to consider the knowledge ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... proposition was carried that all should speak in praise of Love. First a youth Phaedrus describes the antiquity of love and gives instances of the attachments between the sexes. Pausanias draws the famous distinction between the Heavenly and the Vulgar Aphrodite; the true test of love is its permanence. A doctor, Eryximachus, raises the tone of the discussion still further. To him Love is the foundation of Medicine, Music, Astronomy and Augury. Aristophanes tells a fable ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... sought, he had never had recourse to witchcraft! Helen, however, partakes in some sort of the triumphant nobility of an avenging deity who has cozened hell itself, and not in vain. In the whole majesty of her great wrong, she loses the originally vulgar character of the witch. It is not as the consequence of a poison-speck in her own heart that she has recourse to sorcery. She does not love witchery for its own sake; she loves it only as the retributive channel for the requital of a terrible offence. It is throughout the ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... considered occult, now recognized among the guiding principles from which scientific deductions are drawn. She believed in the power of magic, which she was universally understood to possess; but she was no vulgar witch: rather was she a worthy priestess of her not ignoble deities. The effect upon Hilda's mind of the teachings of such a woman is easy to conceive. She had been allowed to know little of the ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... signs of strain appeared, however, the mother would be overtaken by a fit of repentant watchfulness, and for days together Robert would find her the most fascinating playmate, story-teller, and romp, and forget all his precocious interest in history or vulgar fractions. In after years when Robert looked back upon his childhood, he was often reminded of the stories of Goethe's bringing-up. He could recall exactly the same scenes as Goethe describes,—mother and child sitting together ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Faust at the opera and La Haine at La Gaite. Americans, especially wealthy ones, usually draw around them a vast circle of French acquaintances, it is true, but these are mostly sponges and adventurers, well born and well bred, it may be, but decidedly, to use a vulgar but expressive American idiom, "on the make." Of the pure and inner sanctuary of French society scarce a glimpse is afforded to these alien eyes. It would not amuse them very much if it were, for, by all accounts, this hallowed inner circle is as dull as it is exclusive. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... these criminals further increase each others' sufferings by cruel taunts, and Dante, fascinated by what he sees, lingers beside this pit, until Virgil cuttingly intimates "to hear such wrangling is a joy for vulgar minds." ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... into every part of the world. We mean tobacco. The inhabitants of Scotland, and especially of the Highlands, are notorious for their fondness for snuff; and many were the contrivances by which they formerly reduced the tobacco into powder. Dr. Jamieson, the etymologist, defines a mill to be the vulgar name for a snuff-box, one especially of a cylindrical form, or resembling an inverted cone. "No other name," says he, "was formerly in use. The reason assigned for this designation is, that when tobacco was introduced into this country, those who wished to have snuff were wont to toast the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various
... was formerly a "Cicisbeo,"[211] But that is now grown vulgar and indecent; The Spaniards call the person a "Cortejo,"[212] For the same mode subsists in Spain, though recent; In short it reaches from the Po to Teio, And may perhaps at last be o'er the sea sent: But Heaven preserve ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... In vulgar phrase, "Your mother knows You're out," at length. Such triumphs too dear Are sometimes purchased. I suppose ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... not the only cause of such a fatal falling away. The portals of chivalry had been opened to too many unworthy candidates. It had been made vulgar! In consequence of having become so cheap the grand title of "knight" was degraded. Eustace Deschamps, in his fine, straightforward way, states the scandal boldly and "lashes" it with his tongue. He says: "Picture to yourself the fact that the degree of knighthood is about ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... man does not stand in the way of progress. When he sees progress roaring down upon him he steps nimbly out of the way. The lazy man doesn't (in the vulgar phrase) pass the buck. He lets the buck pass him. We have always secretly envied our lazy friends. Now we are going to join them. We have burned our boats or our bridges or whatever it is that one burns on the eve of a ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... they were formerly called Pharaohites, (Pharaoh Nepek) Pharaoh's people; and the vulgar in Transylvania continue that name for them. The idea of the English appears to be similar, in denominating them Gypsies, Egyptians; as is, that of the Portuguese and Spaniards, in calling them Gitanos. But the name ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... upon for making inquiries about a broken leg. "My dear," said Landor to a young American girl who had been speaking of the city of New Orleens,—such being the ordinary Southern pronunciation,—"that pretty mouth of yours should not be distorted by vulgar dialect. You should say Or'leans." But he was never pedantic in his language. He used the simplest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... months afterwards this business was carried on and these claims for rebates submitted month after month and checks in payment of them drawn month after month. Such a violation of the law, in my opinion, in its essential nature, is a very much more heinous act than the ordinary common, vulgar crimes which come before criminal courts constantly for punishment and which arise from sudden passion or temptation. This crime in this case was committed by men of education and of large business experience, whose standing in the community was such that they might have ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... lassitude. He seemed to have been infected by her own dreariness, to labour under a disability of doing or saying any more; he, too, gave it up. He wanted to get away out of the dingy room; its rickety table and chairs, its two vulgar vases on the stained mantel, its gross upholstery, seemed too trenchantly sordid in the strong August sun. The child's golden head—she was growing intelligent now, and strong on her legs—was the one bright spot in the room. He stopped to pat it with a great pity, a sense of too much pathos in ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... had been on his tongue all the evening, but now that he had spoken them they struck him as inexpressibly vulgar and out of place. ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
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