"Cant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... am correct in my estimate of her character. If I am, I do not fear. She's very clear-headed, sharp, and clever; a hater of humbug, a despiser of cant." ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... slang are often confused in the popular mind, yet they are not synonymous, though very closely allied, and proceeding from a common Gypsy origin. Cant is the language of a certain class—the peculiar phraseology or dialect of a certain craft, trade or profession, and is not readily understood save by the initiated of such craft, trade or profession. It may be correct, according to the rules of grammar, but it is not universal; it is confined ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... I found an apartment prepared for my reception. Passing through the common room, I saw a face which I thought I recollected. 'Is not that Turl?' said I to Hector—'Pshaw, d——n me, take no notice of such a raff,' replied he, and stalked away. I was too ignorant of college cant, at that time, to know that raff was the term of ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... your readers suggest a proper derivation of this word? Old Bailey, to whom a reference would occasionally save many doubts and inquiries, connects it with "fable." Johnson says nothing as to the etymology, but explains it as "a cant word among children;" while, at the same time, he inserts it on the authority of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 70, March 1, 1851 • Various
... challenges all comers, his money against theirs, his fortune against theirs, is proscribed by your modern moral world. It is a conspiracy of the middle classes against gentlemen: it is only the shopkeeper cant which is to go down nowadays. I say that play was an institution of chivalry: it has been wrecked, along with other privileges of men of birth. When Seingalt engaged a man for six-and-thirty hours without leaving the table, do you think he showed ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in English literature, which, "malicious, light as froth, but amusing, retail," as Stopford Brooke remarks, "with liveliness all the gossip of the time"; he is characterised by Carlyle as "one of the clearest-sighted men of his century; a determined despiser and merciless dissector of cant" (1717-1797). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... wide. The most difficult task was yet to be performed—the loading of the grand piano. We found it necessary to remove the raft to a place where the bank was more shelving, so that the shore side of the structure would rest on the ground, because the weight of the piano on one side would cant it over so ...
— Field and Forest - The Fortunes of a Farmer • Oliver Optic
... they brought. Some of the visiting ladies were of this character—but they were not many. They were as a few fragrant flowers amidst a dense accumulation of noxious weeds. They were examples of humility and kindness shining amidst a vile and loathsome mass of hypocrisy, arrogance, and cant. ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... much afraid of the least appearance of cant, but they would do anything for "Ma"; and when, a few days later, in order to give an object-lesson to the natives, she proposed an English service, they agreed, and one of them read the lessons, and another ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... SIR: It was me that fixed yr sisters house. You have raised hell, aint you. Send ten thousand now. Going up all the time. Dont put any more handicap weights on that bird. You sure cant follow her, ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... I'd rather have been born ere man was blest With the pure dawn of Revelation's light, Yes,—rather plunge me back in Pagan night, And take my chance with Socrates for bliss,[5] Than be the Christian of a faith like this, Which builds on heavenly cant its earthly sway And in a convert mourns to lose a prey; Which, grasping human hearts with double hold,— Like Danaee's lover mixing god and gold,[6]— Corrupts both state and church and makes an oath The knave ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... dreaming—dreaming—I begin To doubt if I be dreaming I am Fife, Who with a lad who call'd herself a boy Because—I doubt there's some confusion here— He wore no petticoat, came on a time Riding from Muscovy on half a horse, Who must have dreamt she was a horse entire, To cant me off upon my hinder face Under this tower, wall-eyed and musket-tongued, With sentinels a-pacing up and down, Crying All's well when all is far from well, All the day long, and all the night, until I dream—if what is dreaming be not waking— Of bells a-tolling and processions ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... money. Whosoever does these things, God's curse is on him, and his sin will surely find him out. No excuse of being in hot blood will avail him. No excuse of having fought well beforehand will avail him. Such cant will no more excuse him with God than it will with truly noble-minded men. He may have been brave enough before, but he is doing a coward's deed then; he is doing the devil's work, and the devil, and not God, will pay him his wages, to the uttermost farthing. But ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... and rather than suffer him to consummate his nuptials, suppose I should (as sure I should) kill myself, it were blasphemy to lay this fatal marriage to heaven's charge——curse on your nonsense, ye imposing gownmen, curse on your holy cant; you may as well call rapes and murders, treason and robbery, the acts of heaven; because heaven suffers them to be committed. Is it heaven's pleasure therefore, heaven's decree? A trick, a wise device of priests, no more——to ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... demanded John in a hoarse voice. "Have you, too, come to preach and sermonise? If so, you can go back where you came from! I'll have none of that cant here." ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... look at me. Do you think I should make a good parson? And then, there's another thing, even if I were so well up in theology that I could puzzle the learned professors themselves, they would never pass me in the examination. All that they care about is having men who can adopt all their cant phrases. If I were the apostle Paul himself they'd refuse to pass me, if they caught sight of this little scar upon my cheek." "What are you going to do then?" asked Mina anxiously, and laying her hand upon his arm, she added: "Oh, don't be a soldier!" "I should think ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... man who had conceived a violent eccentric prejudice against negroes; and he was not content with chiming in with the usual cant of the prejudice that they ought not to be allowed in our churches and in our rail-road-cars, but vociferated, that, if he had his way, they should not be allowed in Africa! The advantage of grit in this respect is in its annihilating a prejudice by presenting a vivid vision of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... shows his hand to the countryman, and convinces him that it is impossible but he must win, offering to let him go halves in the wager. As soon as the countryman lays down the money, these sharpers manage so as to pass off with it, which is the meaning of their cant, and this practice he was very successful in; the country people in Wales, where they travelled, having not had opportunity to become acquainted with such bites as those who live in the counties nearer London have, where the country fellows are often as adroit as ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... could stifle the upbraidings of this cruel monitor.) You keep me in constant torment. This everlasting cant about rank poison, and liquid fire, and blood, and murder, is too much for even a Christian to put up with. Why, if any body but Conscience were to make such insinuations and charges, he would be indictable as a foul slanderer, ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... their success—the successful accomplishment of a sectional organization of the government on the ruins of its nationality— would be the de facto dissolution of the Union." In his Letter he says also, that "it is a fact humiliating to confess that the cant of negroism still has vogue as one of the minor instruments of demagoguy in Northern States." The coolness of such charges, coming from Mr. Cushing, is below the freezing-point of quicksilver. Shall we take lessons in fixedness of principle from the Whig-Antislavery ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... have need enough to do so. But we can hardly expect God to withdraw His chastisement unless we correct the sins for which He chastised us, and therefore unless we find out what particular sins have brought the evil on us. For it is mere cant and hypocrisy, my friends, to tell God, in a general way, that we believe He is punishing us for our sins, and then to avoid carefully confessing any particular sin, and to get angry with anyone who tells us boldly WHICH sin God is punishing us for. But ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... de Bassingbourn in Com. Cant. Dono dedit Edvardus Nightingale de Kneeseworth Armiger Filius et ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 203, September 17, 1853 • Various
... returned to England about 1645, and acted as Colonel Okey's chaplain before he entered into political life. Anthony a Wood (who incorrectly describes him as the son of Dr. Calybute Downing, vicar of Hackney) calls Downing a sider with all times and changes: skilled in the common cant, and a preacher occasionally. He was sent by Cromwell to Holland in 1657, as resident there. At the Restoration, he espoused the King's cause, and was knighted and elected M.P. for Morpeth, in 1661. Afterwards, becoming Secretary to the Treasury and Commissioner of the Customs, he was in 1663 ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... was in all respects suited for their habits. Deer, which still inhabit Galilee (Tristram, Land of the Israel, pp. 418, 447), are likely, before the forests of Lebanon were so greatly curtailed, to have occupied most portions of it (See Cant. ii. 9, 17; viii. 14). To these two Canon Tristram would add the crocodile (Land of Israel, p. 103), which he thinks must have been found in the Zerka for that river to have been called "the Crocodile River" by the Greeks, and which he is inclined to regard as still ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... black-hearted scoundrel. I can see Monsieur exactly the same as ever in the King. The bad brother who voted so wrongly in his department of the Constituent Assembly was sure to compound with the Liberals and allow them to argue and talk. This philosophical cant will be just as dangerous now for the younger brother as it used to be for the elder; this fat man with the little mind is amusing himself by creating difficulties, and how his successor is to get out of them I do not ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... fear that Christ will not receive thee is FOR CANT OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF CHRIST. Thou knowest but little of the grace and kindness that is in the heart of Christ; thou knowest but little of the virtue and merit of his blood; thou knowest but little of the willingness that is in his heart to save thee. Slowness of heart to believe ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... Aix a very celebrated preacher named De Coq. I went to hear him, and, though much struck with his fluency of language, did not much admire his style of preaching; there was too much of cant and declamation, and at times he made a most intolerable noise, roaring as if he were addressing an army. This man, however, succeeded in drawing tears from the audience; but this did not surprise me, for it is astonishing how easily this is accomplished. This reminds me of ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... Dr. Johnson's opinion of the works may be known; but many of them are examples of elaborate criticism, in the most masterly style. In his review of the 'Memoirs of the Court of Augustus,' he has the resolution to think and speak from his own mind, regardless of the cant transmitted from age to age, in praise ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... a raight cant body, and as clean—ye mught eat your porridge off th' house floor. They're sorely comed down. I wish William could get a job as gardener or summat i' that way; he understands gardening weel. He once lived wi' a Scotchman ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... taught him at Edward's court was no doubt that of drawing, for we find that 'He was buried with much pomp at Thetford Abbey under a tomb designed by himself and master Clarke, master of the works at King's College, Cambridge, & Wassel a freemason of BuryS. Edmund's.' Cooper's Ath. Cant., i. ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... obscure writers and talkers who at present infest our literature, and whose parrot-like repetition of their own stereotyped phraseology, mingled with some barbarous infusion of half Anglicised German, threatens to form as odious a cant as ever polluted the stream of thought or disfigured the purity of language. Happily it is not likely to be more than a passing fashion; but still it is a very unpleasant fashion while it lasts. As in Johnson's day, every young writer imitated as well as he could the ponderous diction ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... the other hand, there was Tyke, a man entirely given to his clerical office, who was simply curate at a chapel of ease in St. Peter's parish, and had time for extra duty. Nobody had anything to say against Mr. Tyke, except that they could not bear him, and suspected him of cant. Really, from his point of view, Bulstrode was ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... nothing but cotton, would distribute among their friends parcels of seed from any specially fine plants they might encounter in their fields, and make little ado about it. Men of a more flamboyant sort, such as M.W. Philips, contemning such "ruffle-shirt cant," would christen their strains with attractive names, publish their virtues as best they might, and offer their fancy seed for sale at fancy prices. Thus in 1837 the Twin-seed or Okra cotton was in vogue, selling at many places for five dollars a quart. In 1839 this was eclipsed by ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... life be a heavenly life? Ay, it would be more, it would be heaven—heaven on earth: not in versemongering cant, but really. We should then be sitting, as St. Paul tells us, in heavenly places with Jesus Christ, and having our conversation in heaven. All the while we were doing our daily work, following our business, or serving our country, or sitting at our own firesides ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... Thorndyke's help, and I know that you doctors can be trusted to keep your own counsel and your clients' secrets. And now for some confessions of mine. In the first place, it is my painful duty to tell you that I am a discharged convict—an 'old lag,' as the cant ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... social threw out much smoke, but no vital heat; here and there, the red glare of violence burst up through the dust of words and the insufferable cant of ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the stalls in wet beds, having to sweep out the water without ceasing and suffering severely from clouds of mosquitoes. When at last the storm abated and they could return to the house, they found everything wet and mildewed and the cottage leaning with a decided cant to one side. Worst of all, one of the horses had become entangled in the barbed-wire fence that had been blown down by the wind, and was dreadfully injured. Thus they discovered that life in the tropics has its drawbacks as well ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... wind are? I put it to your konshens, Are is the same to us as milk to babies, Or water is to fish, or pendlums to clox, Or roots and airbs unto an Injun doctor, Or little pills unto an omepath, Or Boze to girls. Are is for us to brethe. What signifize who preaches ef I cant brethe? What's Pol? What's Pollus to sinners who are ded? Ded for want of breth! Why Sextant when we dye Its only coz we cant brethe no more—that's all. And now O Sextant? let me beg of you To let a little are into our ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... the examples of cant, hypocrisy, party violence, I have never seen any to be compared to the Irish Education business; and there was Rosslyn, an old Whig, voting against; Carnarvon stayed away, every Tory without exception going against ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... turning a fierce sharp glance on me, said, "I'd rather you'd touch me with that hot poker there, sir, than hurl that hateful word at my ears. If there's a thing I hate the most, it's what cant—a vile modern slang—calls 'Progress.' You're just in the spot at this moment to mark one of its high successes. Do you know Spezia?" "Not in the least; never was here before." "Well, sir, I have known it, I'll not stop to count how many years; ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... prominent feature to distinguish him from the ordinary class of respectable men. He spoke well, yet without taste or discrimination in his language, was rather bald and gray, with small head and low perceptive powers; and judging from the particular tone of his voice and the cant terms he used, we should think he had figured among the Kentucky horse-traders, or made stump speeches in Arkansas. His dress was inclined to the gaudy. He wore a flashy brown-colored frock-coat with the collar laid very far back, a foppish white vest exposing his shirt-bosom nearly down to the ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... I chatter!" said the rueful prophet. I do not write as a pessimist, hardly as a critic; still less as a censor; to waste time in deriding others' theories of life is a very poor substitute for enjoying it! I think we do very fairly well as we are; only do not let us indulge in the cant in which educators so freely indulge, the claim that we are interested in ideas intellectual or artistic, and that we are trying to educate our youth in these things. We do produce some intellectual athletes, and we knock a few hardy minds more or less into shape; but meanwhile a great ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Palace, was in a state of exceeding misery because she could not, consistently with her amicable relations with the United States, receive Mrs. —— there. (Ah! our dear Emperor has better taste. Heaven bless him!) From Lord Shaftesbury one looks for unmitigated cant, but I did expect better things of Lord Carlisle. How many names that both you and I know went there merely because the owner of the house was a fashionable Duchess,—the Wilmers ("though they are my friends"), ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... and recognized paths to the Eternal, now all torn up and flung in heaps, submerged in unutterable boiling mud-oceans of Hypocrisy and Unbelievability, of brutal living Atheism and damnable dead putrescent Cant: surely a tragic pilgrimage for all mortals; Darkness, and the mere shadow of Death, enveloping all things from pole to pole; and in the raging gulf-currents, offering us will-o'-wisps for loadstars,—intimating that there are no stars, ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... to lift him to the skies. How many times have we been told that he was not a man of genius, but a person of "excellent common sense," of "admirable judgment," of "rare virtues"! and, by a constant repetition of this odious cant, we have nearly succeeded in divorcing comprehension from his sense, insight from his judgment, force from his virtues, and life from the man. Accordingly, in the panegyric of cold spirits, Washington disappears in a ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... to no great truth which he taught, no great distinct policy which he embodied, no noble words which once fascinated his age, and which, in after years, men would not willingly let die. But we shall be able to say "he had a genial manner, a firm, sound sense; he had a kind of cant of insincerity, but we always knew what he meant; he had the brain of a ruler in the clothes of a man of fashion". Posterity will hardly understand the words of the aged reminiscent, but we now feel their ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... lands, near a little country village that lay just at the foot of the mountains. It was made up of the simple peasantry, where life was free from cant, suspicions, criticism and morbid curiosity. Here they could live and follow the bent of their minds, undisturbed and unobserved if they so wished. They kept their identity unknown yet the villagers knew from ...
— Within the Temple of Isis • Belle M. Wagner
... arms behind his back and bubbles out, 'Hold not out your hand to me lest I spit on it. 'Tis like your snivelling cant to write sweet psalms for smuggling rogues and try to frighten honest men with ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... fresh, healthy trade that stirred up a man's blood like sea-bathing; and the whole thing was clean gone from me, and I was dreaming England, which is, after all, a nasty, cold, muddy hole, with not enough light to see to read by; and dreaming the looks of my public, by a cant of a broad high-road like an avenue, and with the sign on a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... always speaking, always instructing, always illuminating the heart that is attentive to Him.' Jonathan Edwards called the poor parish minister of Ettrick 'a truly great divine.' But Law goes on to say, 'A great divine is but a cant expression unless it signifies a man greatly advanced in the divine life. A great divine is one whose own experience and example are a demonstration of the reality of all the graces and virtues of the gospel. ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... was a slight air of contempt in Carlton's voice and manner. "I hate to hear this everlasting cant, if I must so call it, about business; as if there were nothing else in the world to think or care about. Men bury themselves between four brick walls, and toil from morning until night, like prison-slaves; ...
— The Two Wives - or, Lost and Won • T. S. Arthur
... or snuff in the eyes of the person intended to be robbed; also to invent some plausible tale, to delude shop-keepers and others, thereby to put them off their guard. CANT. ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... point, as to prescription of murder in Scotland[272]. 'A jury in England would make allowance for deficiencies of evidence, on account of lapse of time; but a general rule that a crime should not be punished, or tried for the purpose of punishment, after twenty years, is bad. It is cant to talk of the King's advocate delaying a prosecution from malice. How unlikely is it the King's advocate should have malice against persons who commit murder, or should even know them at all. If the son of the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... virulence of pen, in the worst and most prostitute of their party; among whom there has been for some years past such a perpetual clamour against the ambition, the implacable temper, and the covetousness of the priesthood: Such a cant of High Church, and persecution, and being priest-ridden; so many reproaches about narrow principles, or terms of communion: Then such scandalous reflections on the universities, for infecting the youth of the nation ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... is a somewhat bold saying for a divine: "But, to avoid all commonplace cant as much as I can on this head, I will forbear to say, because I do not think, that 'tis a breach of Christian charity to think or speak ill of our neighbour. We cannot avoid it: our opinion must follow the evidence," &c. And a ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... ought, perhaps, to make a special order by itself from the New Testament writings. They are so full of life, light, and love—they are so strong yet so tender—so pure yet so free! They have no cant of piety, no formalism, but breathe throughout a heavenly atmosphere. Their inspiration is of ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... the use of ardent spirits, with which they were copiously supplied by the white people. During these drinking fits, there is always one at least of the party who remains sober, in order to secure the knives, &c. Hence the Americans derive the cant phrase of "doing the sober Indian," which they apply to any one of a company who will not drink fairly. One of the Indians had a pony which he wished to sell, having occasion for some articles, and ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... there were foundation for such rumors. Liberty was the creed or the cant of the day. France was being rocked by revolution, and England by Clarkson. In America, slavery was habitually recognized as a misfortune and an error, only to be palliated by the nearness of its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... chipped and bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some grotesque convulsion. Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great slice from the marble mantel. Each plank in the floor owned its particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony. It seemed incredible that all this malice and injury had been wrought upon the room by those who had called it for a time their home; and yet it may have been the cheated home instinct surviving ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... dictionary I was ashamed I had made it serrafim but seraphim is not a word you can guess at like another long one outlandish in this letter which spells itself. Miss Dearborn says use the words you CAN spell and if you cant spell seraphim make angel do but angels are not just the same as seraphims. Seraphims are brighter whiter and have bigger wings and I think are older and longer dead than angels which are just freshly dead and ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to throw off the yoke which she claimed England wished to fasten on her world relationships. She aimed to dominate the world with German efficiency. She aimed to demonstrate German superiority and expose what she called Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy and cant. Already possessing the world's supply of potash, she struck directly at the coal and iron region of Belgium and Northern France. And she took them on the initial advance. With potash, coal and iron, this was a Teutonic coup for industrial and commercial supremacy indeed. ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... "It's not that kind, General," he said. "There's no cant in the boy. He's more popular for it— that's often so with the genuine thing, isn't it! I sometimes think"—the young Captain hesitated and smiled a trifle deprecatingly—"that Morgan is much of the same stuff as Gordon— Chinese Gordon; the martyr stuff, you know. ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... General Horatio C. King, Frank B. Thurber, J. Amory Knox, E.B. Harper, W.J. Arkell, Dr. Nagle, the poet Geogheghan, Doc White, and Joseph Howard, jun. They were the old guard of the land of Bohemia, where a minister's voice sounded good to them if it was a voice without cant or religious hypocrisy. I remember a letter sent by President Harrison to one of these dinners, in which, after acknowledging the receipt of an invitation to attend, he regretted being unable to be present at "so attractive ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... "To pill" was a cant expression used a good deal by "the set," meaning, apparently, to ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... of the female in anger is noli me tangere. I take this as the most obvious and at the same time the least hackneyed instance of a fundamental quality in the female tradition, which has tended in our time to be almost immeasurably misunderstood, both by the cant of moralists and the cant of immoralists. The proper name for the thing is modesty; but as we live in an age of prejudice and must not call things by their right names, we will yield to a more modern nomenclature and call it dignity. Whatever else it is, it is the thing ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... disinterestedness. "His very failings were those of a sincere, a generous, and a noble mind," says a biographer who knew him well. His contempt for base actions; his love of equity; his passion for truth, which was carried almost to a hatred of cant and hypocrisy, were the immediate causes of his want of fairness in his opinion of himself and of his self-accusation of things most contrary to ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... Jones of the present day, without perhaps being in the ground a better man, would have perished rather than submit to be kept by a harridan of fortune. Therefore this novel is, and, indeed, pretends to be, no exemplar of conduct. But, notwithstanding all this, I do loathe the cant which can recommend Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe as strictly moral, though they poison the imagination of the young with continued doses of 'tinct. lyttae', while Tom Jones is prohibited as loose. I do not speak of young women;—but a ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... his flock, for the city, and for your Majesty's authority, and though I am persuaded that the danger is not so great as he imagines, yet his scruples in this case are to be commended in him as laudable and religious." The Queen understood the meaning of this cant, recovered herself all of a sudden, and spoke to me very civilly; to which I answered with profound respect and so innocent a countenance that La Riviere said, whispering to Beautru, "See what it is not to be always at Court! The Coadjutor knows ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... wot cant be chawd of Chineece jaik; xekewted bi me fur a plitikle awfens, and et bi mi starven hogs, wich aint hed nuthin afore sence jaix boss stoal mi korn. BIL ROPER, and ov ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words. Used at the present day in the streets of London; the universities of Oxford and Cambridge; the houses of Parliament; the dens of St. Giles; and the palaces of St. James. Preceded by a history of cant and vulgar language; with glossaries of two ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... last three days fur my lan'lady, which av coorse goes agin the rint; and whin I cum home yisterday evenin, throth, barrin I tuck the bit from the woman and childre, sorra a taste I could get—so sis I, Biddy jewel, I'm mighty sick intirely, an I cant ate any thing. Well, she coxed me—but I didn't. So afther sittin a while, I bethought me that there wus to be a piper at the Crass-roads, an I was thin gettin morthul hungery; so sis I t'meeself I'll go dance the hunger off—and so I did:—an that wus ...
— Facts for the Kind-Hearted of England! - As to the Wretchedness of the Irish Peasantry, and the Means for their Regeneration • Jasper W. Rogers
... and disgusted with this cant:—"The Carnatic is a country that will soon recover, and become instantly as prosperous as ever." They think they are talking to innocents, who will believe that by sowing of dragons' teeth, men may come up ready ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... appears that even these cant phrases by which the church sometimes tries to fence itself off from the world into a pietistic religiousness that has little or nothing to do with life, all point, when you get their real significance, to a relation between the church ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... was not altogether unpardonable; few, indeed, would have even guessed that the appearance of utter neglect which surrounded the use of Cant and Slang in English song, ballad, or verse—its rich and racy character notwithstanding—was anything but of the surface. The chanson d'argot of France and the romance di germania of Spain, not to mention other ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... of myself. So that if you are not too bemused and bedevilled by my "brilliancy" to kick me downstairs, you may rely on me to cheerfully lend a foot in the operation. But, while I have my share of judicial vindictiveness against crime, Im not going to talk the common judicial cant about brutality making a Better Man of the criminal. I havent the slightest doubt that I would thieve again at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile be so good as to listen to the evidence on the ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... the heavier stuff, so they could cant the boat and spill the bilge water out of her. The tarpaulin was thrown over some willow bushes for a shelter, and under this they piled their grub boxes and dunnage rolls. The beds were all in watertight canvas ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... names. The incident (of anointing with ointment) is one quite in accordance with the customs of the time and country, and there is not the least improbability in its repetition under different circumstances. (Eccles. 9:8; Cant. 4:10; Amos ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... with you.' It isn't agreeable to my self-esteem to own it, but I expected to hear her say that she would consent to any sacrifice for the sake of her dear daughter. No such clap-trap as that passed her lips. She owned the true motive with a superiority to cant which won my sincerest respect. 'I'll do anything,' she said, 'to baffle Herbert Linley and the spies he has set to watch us.' I can't tell you how glad I was that she had her reward on the same day. We were too late at the station, and ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... is strictly historical. The army knew in what manner the emperor had rewarded Marshal Lefebvre, and it became a cant-phrase for soldiers who wished to borrow money of their comrades: "Have you any ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... Dan tapped with his knife again. "You hear me," he warned. "Thirty year I've been ridin' John Cardigan's log-carriages; thirty year I've been gettin' everythin' out of a log it's possible to git out, which is more'n you fellers at the trimmers can git out of a board after I've sawed it off the cant. There's a lot o' you young fellers that've been takin' John Cardigan's money under false pretenses, so if I was you I'd keep both eyes on my job hereafter. For a year I've been claimin' that good No. 2 stock has been chucked into ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... Soon daily contact with vice removes abhorrence to it. Familiarity makes it habitual, and another life is ruined. The heartless moral code of the cynical young pleasure-seeking male is summed up in the cant phrase anent women: "Find, ... and forget!" It is these girls, who are victimized by their lack of self-restraint or moral principle, their ignorance or weakness, who make possible the application of such ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... wreathed round with yellow flowers; the younger, whose hat was only a rimless crown, had stuck it round with laurel leaves. They continued at play till I drew very near, and then they addressed me with the begging cant and the whining voice of sorrow. I said, 'I served your mother this morning' (the boys were so like the woman who had called at our door that I could not be mistaken). 'O,' says the elder, 'you could not serve my mother, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... for his care in having the ship, when she sailed, in a state of unimpeachable order, and his constant intercession for divine protection were quite sufficient to exonerate him from in any way contributing either to loss of life or to loss of property. What cant, what insufferable hypocrisy! What hideous slaughter was committed in those good old times in God's name and in the name of British humanity! The late Dr Parker, preaching in the City Temple some time ago on the Armenian atrocities, exclaimed amid uproarious applause at the end of a fine peroration, ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... at every stile he crossed he would leave one having such an exhortation as "Take heed that thou stumbleth not." Yet all this was done in an honest, and, as I believe, a secretly humorous spirit of a serious nature, for Gordon was as opposed to cant and idle protestations as any man. There is a strikingly characteristic story preserved somewhere of what he did when a hypocritical, canting humbug of a local religious secretary of some Society Fund ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... be Johnson's friend, that biographer has raised more objections to his character, than all the enemies to that excellent man. Sir John had a root of bitterness that "put rancours in the vessel of his peace." Fielding, he says, was the inventor of a cant phrase, "Goodness of heart, which means little more than the virtue of a horse or a dog." He should have known, that kind affections are the essence of virtue: they are the will of God implanted in our nature, to aid and strengthen moral obligation; they incite to action: a sense of benevolence ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... toward him. "It's a bit unusual, dear, for the woman to propose, to the man, but we are an unusual two, and the business of life has shaken us free from the conventions of the drawing-room and frothy society. With us there need be no cant nor pretence nor false modesty, because there is not ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... most in him was not his mind—which lacked elasticity—but his religion, his unquestioning obedience to the will of God and his perfect freedom from cant. His mentality was brittle and he was as quick-tempered in argument as he was sunny and serene in games. There are people who thought Alfred was a man of strong physical passions, wrestling with temptation till he had achieved ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... here gives a minute and accurate description, took place on the 22d of July 1544, when Lord Gray's partizans were repulsed with a loss of upwards of sixty men.—(Adamson's Muses Threnodie, by Cant, pp. 70, 71, 112.) Lord Gray, in October that year, received from the Cardinal a grant of part of the lands of Rescobie in Forfarshire, for his "ready and faithful help and assistance in these dangerous times ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... Turk of Mahomet's own kin; Clad in a mantle della guerre Of rough impenetrable fur; And in his nose, like Indian King, 255 He wore, for ornament, a ring; About his neck a threefold gorget. As rough as trebled leathern target; Armed, as heralds cant, and langued; Or, as the vulgar say, sharp-fanged. 260 For as the teeth in beasts of prey Are swords, with which they fight in fray; So swords, in men of war, are teeth, Which they do eat their vittle with. He was by birth, some ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... cant of the bigot or the hypocrite, no reasoning can aught avail. If you would argue until the end of life, the infallible creature must alone be right. So it proved with the laird. One Scripture text followed another, not in the least connected, and one sentence of the profound Mr. Wringhim's sermons ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... microcosm. Not to one's nearest and dearest friend, not to one's mother or brother would one babble promiscuously on such awful themes; and to have the soul's sublime and eternal emotions, its sacred and unspoken communings, lugged out into farcical prominence by such conversational cant as that, is to dry up the very fountain of true religion, and put a premium on the successful grin of ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... his good wife refresh one by the reality and simplicity of their life, the simple-mindedness, the absence of all cant and formalism. I mean the formal observance of a certain set of views about the Sabbath, about going to parties, about reading books, &c., the formal utterance of ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... intoxicate. Her eyes said nothing about screaming for help. Her eyes said: 'I'm a woman; you're a man. How jolly!' Her eyes said: 'I was born to do what I'm doing now.' Her eyes said: 'Touch me—and we shall see'. But what chiefly enchanted Henry was her intellectual courage and her freedom from cant. In conversing with her you hadn't got to tread lightly and warily, lest at any moment you might put your foot through the thin crust of a false modesty, and tumble into eternal disgrace. You could talk to her about anything; and ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... married she ought to do all she can for the sake of peace. I dont see what a man has got to do interferin with the cookin, no how; a woman oughter 'tend to these matters. 'Pears to me, Mr. Moore, (captain, as you calls him,) is mighty fidjetty about bottles, all at once. But if he cant bear the sight of a brandy bottle in the house, bring 'em down here to me; I'll keep 'em out of his sight, I'll be bound. I'll put 'em in the corner of my old chist yonder, and I'd like to see him thar, rummagin arter brandy bottles or any ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... read and praised by Charles II, and his court, and the one that best represents the spirit of the victorious party, is the satirical poem of Hudibras by Samuel Butler. The object of the work is to satirize the cant and excesses of Puritanism, just as the Don Quixote of Cervantes burlesques the extravagances and ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... there might be some error in the translation of the Greek expression. I replied that, in my opinion, there was; and that I had myself always been irritated by the entire irrelevance of the English word, and by something very like cant, on which the whole burden of the passage is thrown. How was it any natural preparation for a vast spiritual revolution, that men should first of all acknowledge any special duty of repentance? The repentance, if any movement of that ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... not owing to any one quality, but must have been due to a singularly happy combination and balance of qualities. Every one thought of him as a man having a genius for popular eloquence. But he had also as truly unique gifts and graces for personal friendship. Without a particle of cant, he possessed profound religious faith and devotion. He walked with God and had no gifts which were not consciously devoted to his service. At the same time he was intensely human. He never affected to be ethereal. He was a son of man, a child of nature. And he touched ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... Batavia. While here, I saw a good deal of the novelist. His manners and style of conversation appeared to be those of a sailor, and such as we should look for in his own Peter Simple. Temperance and religion, if not morality, were to him mere cant words, and whether he was observed, either before dinner or after dinner—in the parlor or out of it—his words and manners were anything but those of a quiet, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... to-night for saying it, my heart sat somewhat nearer to those old people who were perhaps a little too dumpish in their repentance and their faith and their hope that morning, than it did to those who took to the table with a light heart. I know all your flippant cant about gospel liberty and against Highland introspection, as you call it—as well as all your habitual neglect of a close and deep self-examination, as Paul called it; but I tell you all to-night that it would be the salvation of your soul if you too worked ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... evil that will always be in it? The smallness of the quantity in currency only heightens the value. They who raise suspicions on the good on account of the behavior of ill men are of the party of the latter. The common cant is no justification for taking this party. I have been deceived, say they, by Titius and Maevius; I have been the dupe of this pretender or of that mountebank; and I can trust appearances no longer. But my credulity and want of discernment cannot, as I conceive, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... if it will not procure that happiness after which all are so eager in pursuit, but which none has ever yet attained? Was Christ, who is said to have been spotless, happy? No; he was a man of sorrows. Away, then, with this cant of virtue. It is a shadow, a deception; a thing, like religion, that has no existence, but takes our senses, our interests, and our passions, and works with them under its own mask. Yet why am I afraid of my daughter? and why do I, in my heart, reverence her as a being so far superior to myself? ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... novel of "Paul Clifford" (and hence the introduction of a semi-burlesque or travesty in the earlier chapters) was to show that there is nothing essentially different between vulgar vice and fashionable vice, and that the slang of the one circle is but an easy paraphrase of the cant ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the columns. "Sentimentalists!" he said as his eye caught an interjection. "Cant!" he added. Then he looked at Hylda, and remembered once again on whom and what his speech had been made. He saw that her face ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... preached, he had held no meetings. He was as yet William Rufus Holly, the cricketer, the laziest dreamer of a college decade. His religion was simple and practical; he had never had any morbid ideas; he had lived a healthy, natural, and honorable life, until he went for a mikonaree, and, if he had no cant, he had not a clear idea of how many-sided, how responsible, his life must ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... direction to Huda or salvation. The old bawd was still dressed as a devotee, and keeps up the cant of her caste. No sensible man in the East ever allows a religious old ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... cunning to be profound. In his wisdom is no stamen. It is all head and no body, like the pictures of the Goddess Laverna,—or, at best, all head and shoulders, like a codfish. But he is a good creature after all. I like him especially for one master stroke of cant, by which he has attained his reputation for ingenuity. I mean the way he has 'de nier ce qui est, et d'expliquer ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and no mistake, as the Grand Old Man will find—to his cost. All classes are united against the common enemy" (Mr. Gladstone). "But tell me something—How is it that the English people are deceived by that arch-professor of cant? Tell me that!" ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... imperceptibly to decline. Men that had made eloquent speeches on temperance had now other things to look to. Fastidious persons thought that matters had, perhaps, been carried too far, and ladies declared that it was old and threadbare, and getting to be cant and stuff; and the ever-ready wine cup was gliding back into many a circle, as if, on sober second thoughts, the community was convinced that it was a ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... their versification has withdrawn the public attention from their other excellences, as the vulgar eye will rest more upon the splendour of the uniform than the quality of the troops. It is this very harmony, particularly in Pope, which has raised the vulgar and atrocious cant against him:—because his versification is perfect, it is assumed that it is his only perfection; because his truths are so clear, it is asserted that he has no invention; and because he is always intelligible, it is taken for granted that he has no genius. We are sneeringly ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... translation are numerous, but perhaps the most eccentric example is to be found in Stanyhurst's rendering of Virgil, published in 1583. It is full of cant words, and reads like the work of a madman. This is a fair specimen of ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... one of feverish haste, Of racial hatred and of loathsome cant, Of gross corruption and of tawdry taste, Of monster fortunes, with a ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... Palsey "she cant guess the worst yet," out loud he added "hush Miss Winston, you are over fatigued, that is all, would you like a cup of coffee? the refreshment ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... ugly county. I have no patience with the cant of travellers, who so bepraise it. They have surely slept all the way through Somersetshire. Its rivers are beautiful, very beautiful, but nothing else. High hills, all angled over with hedges, and no trees. Wide views, and no object. I have heard a good story of our friend, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... we wish to go home, we have only to give her the bit. But when we are perhaps but two steps from our journey's end, it would be foolish to give up and return such a long road; and yet I am at a loss what to do. I cant see sky or earth, and I am afraid that the child will catch the fever if we remain in this cursed fog, or that he will be crushed beneath our weight if the horse ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... in right, Doc," and Doc was accomplishing it, partly to oblige Brandes, partly for practice. His agreeable voice so nicely pitched, so delightfully persuasive, recapitulating all the commonplaces and cant phrases concerning the literature of the day, penetrated gratefully the intellectual isolation of these humble gentlepeople, and won very easily their innocent esteem. With the Reverend Mr. Carew Doc discussed such topics as the influence on fiction of the ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... Cambridge. He was an excellent specimen of an English gentleman of the nineteenth century. Free from all affectation and pedantry, still his whole nature seemed to revolt from anything slangish or low. No oaths, nor anything which would be considered one, nor any cant expressions, ever escaped his lips. Yet he was full of life and spirits, the soul of every society in which he moved. He had numerous friends, and so mild and quiet was his disposition that he seldom or never made enemies; or rather, I may say, if he made ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... not dare mention in your hearing. We imitate them, and out-herod Herod, but we are never like them. We send to Paris for our clothes, and borrow their newest words—for they are ever inventing some cant phrase to startle dulness—and we make our language a foreign farrago. Why, here is even plain John Evelyn, that most pious of pedants, pleading for the enlistment of a troop of Gallic substantives and adjectives to ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... I am employed in looking over the several notices which I have received of their manner of dexterity, and the way at dice of making all rugg, as the cant is. The whole art of securing a die has lately been sent me by a person who was of the fraternity, but is disabled by the loss of a finger, by which means he cannot, as he used to do, secure a die. But ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... clearer and clearer; for now he presents the church to us under the similitude of a garden, which is taken out of the wide and open field, and inclosed; "A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse"; a garden inclosed, "a spring shut up, a fountain sealed" (Cant 4:12); and there he put the man whom he had formed. An excellent type of the presence of Christ ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... that her convictions play, and she had a vague but passionate belief in what she and Russia might do together. Yet here were these declaimers threatening to overrun Europe, and "Equality setting peoples at the throats of kings!" The cant about fraternity, the catch-words and sentiments, vanish like smoke. No anathemas on the Revolution were fiercer than those of the "Ame Republicaine," who had burned to restore the ancient institutions of Athens. The hostess of Diderot breathed fiery indignation against ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... they,—"See! the wolf's teeth peep out!" Is he familiar with the people?—it is cajolery! Is he distant?—it is pride! What, then, sustains a man in such a situation, following his own conscience, with his eyes opened to all the perils of the path? Away with the cant of public opinion,—away with the poor delusion of posthumous justice; he will offend the first, he will never obtain the last. What sustains him? HIS OWN SOUL! A man thoroughly great has a certain contempt for his kind while he aids them: their weal or ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... extreamly his rejecting the Old Cant of Forty One, and giving the great Rebellion its true Name Forty Two: But, if I had been he, I would not have named it at all. For there are a great many Men in England, who, tho' they were not concern'd in it themselves, yet they do not love to hear of it, for the sake of those ...
— Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to Harley (1712) and The British Academy (1712) • John Oldmixon
... derivation. Still more flagrant is the case of Wihtgar, who conquered the Isle of Wight, and was buried at Wihtgarasbyrig, or Carisbrooke. For the origin of that name is really quite different: the Wiht-ware or Wiht-gare are the men of Wight, just as the Cant-ware are the men of Kent: and Wiht-gara-byrig is the Wight-men's-bury, just as Cant-wara-byrig or Canterbury is the Kent-men's-bury. Moreover, a double story is told in the Chronicle as to the original colonisation of Wessex; the first attributing the conquest to Cerdic and Cynric, ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... counsel a son of yours to marry a society woman of the same character as Major Colquhoun, and neither more nor less degraded, for the purpose of reforming her, would you, mother? I know you would not. And as a woman's soul is every bit as precious as a man's, one sees what cant this talk of reformation is. It seems to me that such cases as Major Colquhoun's are for the clergy, who have both experience and authority, and not for young wives to tackle. And, at any rate, although ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... reason, and the real secret of Nietzsche's influence, is the fine quality of his moral personality. However much we may be repelled by the thinker, we are attracted by the magnetism of the man, by his noble courage, by his splendid integrity, by his love of truth, his hatred of cant. Even though he has himself misunderstood Christianity, he has done a great deal to bring us back to the fundamental ideals of the Christian religion. He has done a great deal to undermine that superficial and "rose-water" view of Christianity current in official and academic Protestant ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... e'er an aunt? Then learn the rules of woman's cant, And forge a tale, and swear you read it, Such as, save woman, none would credit Win o'er her confidante and pages By gold, for this a golden age is; And should it be her wayward fate, To be encumbered with a mate, A ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... was rather sleepy of countenance, but could assume an air of great consequence, and would receive his importuning visitor with unexceptional bows. 'Peppers I think you said?' Thomas would politely inquire, smoothing his chin reflectively, giving his ear a knowing cant, and concluding by whisking his fingers through his powdered hair. 'Mr. Peppers presents a little affair this morning;' he would announce blandly, having left the gentleman standing in the hall. Mr. Bolt, who occupied a sumptuous ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... loving interest is generally sweet—and rarely gives offence," he said. "If people never spoke of religious things but from the love of them, there would be an end to cant and bad taste ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... I don't know," said Honor in assumed despair, "I've lost my programme and am thrown quite on the mercy and veracity of my gentlemen friends. I regret to say—if you say this is yours—I cant refuse it, for I've neither programme nor memory to prove ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... and i Mustnt Tell Who cause if my mother was Home I Wood and she wood say yes. She always helps dyeing folks and sick ones one the boys will go and he can ride Moses or prince Which he likes. I guess marty so i Cant right any more the paper is so ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... give him the "Abolition" kiss, write an article on slavery, like Dickens; marry him to a white gall to England, get him a saint's darter with a good fortin, and well soon see whether her father was a talkin' cant or no, about niggers. Cuss 'em, let any o' these Britishers give me slack, and I'll give 'em cranberry for their goose, I know. I'd jump right down their throat with spurs on, and gallop ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... long did he continue in the common cant of office, in declamation about the Scheldt and Holland, and all the vulgar causes of common contests! and when at last the immense genius of his new supporter had beat him out of these words (words signifying places and dead objects, and signifying nothing more), ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... book of nature, without being biassed by what has been done by other painters; it is as absurd as if they would recommend a youth to learn astronomy by lying in the fields, and looking on the stars, without reference to the works of Kepler, Tycho Brahe, or of Newton." There is indeed a world of cant in the present day, that a man must do all to his own unprejudiced reason, contemning all that has been done before him. We have just now been looking at a pamphlet on Materialism (a pamphlet of most ambitious verbiage,) in which, with reference ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... CANT. Cant is a kind of affectation; affectation is an effort to sail under false colors; an effort to sail under false colors is a kind of falsehood; and falsehood is a term of Latin origin which we often use instead of the stronger Saxon ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... pretend a proper and ostentatious horror of corruption. Secretly, however, they quickly dispensed with what were to them idle dronings of political cant. As capitalists they ascribed their success to a rigid application and practicality; and being practical they went about purchasing laws by the most short-cut and economical method. They had the money; ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... agriculture—and the amenities of society and manners, were allowed to develop themselves in their own way, without reference to rule and preconcerted dogmas. Hence the peculiarities which mark the institutions of America—their utter freedom from cant and the shows and pageantry of state. Bank, titles, and caste were abolished; and the enormous gulfs which separate the European man from the European lordling were bridged over by Equality with the solid ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... between starving and perjury? And what does he think of the poor man executed at Birmingham, who declared at his death, he had been provoked by the infamous handbill? I know not who wrote it. No, my good friend: Deborah may cant rhymes of compassion, but she is a hypocrite; and you shall not make me read her, nor, with all your sympathy and candour, can you esteem her. Your compassion for the poor blacks is genuine, sincere from your soul, most amiable; ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... sick at heart of craft and cant, Sick of the crazed enthusiast's rant, Profession's smooth hypocrisies, And creeds of iron, and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... communication—and so, sir, you have my history. Sneer. Most obligingly communicative indeed! and your confession, if published, might certainly serve the cause of true charity, by rescuing the most useful channels of appeal to benevolence from the cant of imposition. But, surely, Mr. Puff, there is no great mystery in your present profession? Puff. Mystery, sir! I will take upon me to say the matter was never scientifically treated nor reduced to rule before. Sneer. Reduced to rule! Puff. O Lud, ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... me and Cissy rite off. Why aint you done it? It's so long since you rote any. Mister Recketts ses you dont care any more. Wen you rite send your fotograff. Folks here ses I aint got no big bruther any way, as I disremember his looks, and cant say wots like him. Cissy's kryin' all along of it. I've got a hedake. William Walker make it ake by a blo. So no more at present from ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... Parliament may fairly turn his attention. I know not a more solemn or important duty that a member of Parliament can have to discharge, than by giving, at fit seasons, a free opinion upon the character and qualities of public men. Away with the cant of "measures, not men!" the idle supposition that it is the harness, and not the horses, that draws the chariot along! No, sir, if the comparison must be made, if the distinction must be taken, men are everything, measures computatively nothing. I speak, sir, of times of difficulty and ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... Scott was wont to pride himself upon being a man of business, and he averred, in contradiction to what he called the cant of sonneteers, that there was no necessary connection between genius and an aversion or contempt for the common duties of life. On the contrary, he was of opinion that to spend some fair portion of every day in any matter-of-fact occupation was ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... see about it," said he,—"we'll see about it in the morning; but, at the same time, let me assure you, the affair is not so easy as you may at first blush suppose. These worthy people have been so often 'done'—to use the cant phrase—before, that scarcely a ruse remains untried. It is of no use pleading that your family won't consent; that your prospects are null; that you are ordered for India; that you are engaged elsewhere; that ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... best of men may be glad to hold as a friend. Yet we find in the condition to which we have drifted such a one may be pilloried by wasters, gamblers, rioters, a crew that are the curse of every community. We lash the atheist and the age but give little heed to the insincerity and cant of those we do not refuse to call our own. What an example for the man anathematised. He sees the vice and meanness of those we allow to pass for orthodox, and when he sees also the complacency of the better part, he is unconvinced. We praise the sweetness ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... pay for being flattered: Security essential to happiness: A triumphant retort, and difficult to be answered: Vice inevitable, under a vitiated system: A dangerous attack: or an exhibition of one of the principal arts of a gambler: A few cant phrases ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... Hume, Robert Knox, William Jameson, Robert Murray, Henry Guthrie, James Hamilton, in Dumfreis, Bernard Sanderson, John Levingstoun, James Bonar, Evan Camron, David Dickson, Robort Bailzie, James Cuninghame, George Youngh, Andrew Affleck, David Lindsay, Andrew Cant, William Douglas, Murdo Mackenzie, Coline Mackenzie, John Monroe, Walter Stuart Ministers; Archbald Marquesse of Argyle, William Earle Marshall, John Earle of Sutherland, Alexander Earle of Eglingtoun, John Earle of Cassils, Charles Earl of Dumfermeling, John Earle of Lauderdale, ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... them? Right my Gallic friend! 'Tis my duty, sad but binding. Free the Wolf—to what good end? Loose the Snake—what vantage finding? Faction flusters, Cant appeals In the name of sham-humanity. Right, not wrath, my bosom steels; Softness here ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 19, 1892 • Various
... not rare to see his polite face while she bores him with that kind of cant which is the most intolerable of all, and he quietly ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... To stop my sport Vain were thy cant and beggar whine, Though human spirits of thy sort Were tenants ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... trained in at home. If Paul and Esther had done nothing else for their children they had certainly done this; they had implanted in their minds a deep and strong feeling that one of the things to be most desired in life is honesty; clean, frank, wholesome honesty, free from cant and hypocrisy and double dealing. And Walter knew in his heart that what he was going to do was not honest to Bauer, even after he had juggled with his conscience and proved to himself that Bauer had no real rights in the matter. ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... verses to flow in that channel. Indeed, feeling without thought, and the consequent combination of impulse to speak with lack of matter, is the cause of much of that common-place utterance concerning things of religion which is so wearisome, but which therefore it is not always fair to despise as cant. ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... on the English language by traducing all who now write that tongue. "None seek the audience, fit, though few, which contented the ambition of Milton, and all writers for the press now measure their glory by their gains," and so indefinitely onward,—which is simply cant. Does Sylvanus Cobb, Jr., who honestly earns his annual five thousand dollars from the "New York Ledger," take rank as head of American literature by virtue of his salary? Because the profits of true literature are rising,—trivial as they still are beside those of commerce or the professions,—its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... when I add that to build a cathedral, and to spend our tears and pity upon a Saviour who was crucified nearly two thousand years ago, while women and men and little children are being crucified in our midst, without pity and without help, is cant, and sentimentality, ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford |
