"Plebeian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... avoided by a parvenu. Thus Oxford interests classes who care very little for its educational, antiquarian, or architectural resources, as one of the institutions of the country by which any capable man may cut off his plebeian entail, and start according ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... we do not disclose the true opinion of our hearts, because we think it more advisable to keep the people in outward decency by means of these images. Or if we are less reflective, and ourselves fettered by the bands of authority, then we sink, ourselves, to the true plebeian level, by believing that which, so understood, would be foolish fable; and by finding, in those purely spiritual indications, nothing but the promise of a continuance, to all eternity, of the same miserable existence which we lead ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... a narrow glass cage, which is added to our house, like a family relation. Within I can just make out the strong, plebeian framework of Crillon himself, upright beside a serrated heap of ruins, over which a candle is enthroned. The light which falls on his accumulated tools and on those hanging from the wall makes a decoration obscurely golden around the picture of this wise man; ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... though her temple had been actually destroyed by authority in the reign of Tiberius. Her singular and in many ways beautiful ritual was now popular in Rome. And then—what the enthusiasm of the swarming plebeian quarters had initiated, was sure to be adopted, sooner or later, by women of fashion. A blending of all the religions of the ancient world had been accomplished. The new gods had arrived, had been welcomed, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... The sturdy, kindly, plebeian sheep-dog proved an admirable foster-mother, diligent, thorough, and forgetful of nothing, not even of her own needs and well-being, though it was evident that these were served from quite unselfish motives, and obliged to take a secondary place in all her thoughts. It was ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... give him the right to bring forward measures in the comitia tributa, such as he desired to pass, and would in particular give him the opportunity of attacking Cicero. The difficulty was that to become tribune he must cease to be a patrician. He could only do that by being adopted into a plebeian gens. He had a plebeian ready to do it in B.C. 59. But for a man who was sui iuris to be adopted required a formal meeting of the old comitia curiata, and such a meeting required the presence of an ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... revenues, or sold themselves to the highest bidder.[1] Indescribable misery oppressed the poorer classes and the peasants. A series of obscure revolutions in the smaller despotic centers pointed to a vehement plebeian reaction against a state of things that had become unbearable. The lower classes of the burghers rose against the 'popolani grassi,' and a new class of princes emerged at the close of the crisis. Thus the plebs forced the Bentivogli on Bologna and the Medici on Florence, and Baglioni ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... in this case, that Leviathan affirms the politics to be no ancienter than his book "De Cive." Such also as have got any fame in the civil government of a commonwealth, or by the leading of its armies, have been gentlemen; for so in all other respects were those plebeian magistrates elected by the people of Rome, being of known descents and of equal virtues, except only that they were excluded from the name by the usurpation of the patricians. Holland, through this defect at home, has borrowed princes for generals, and gentlemen of divers nations ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... closer glance unexpected imagination. I once saw him coming through a little pine grove near The Wayside with my father; it was after our return from England. He was so short, sturdy, phlegmatic of exterior, and plebeian, that I was astonished at my father's pleasure in his company, until I noticed a certain gentleness in his manner of stepping, and heard the modulations of his voice, and caught the fragrance of his humility. One or two letters of his ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... large fortune, on the interest of which he was now living in elegant style in the city of New York. Frank, who was the eldest child, had chosen the profession of his father, contrary to the wishes of his proud lady mother, who looked upon all professions as too plebeian to suit her ideas of gentility. This aristocratic lady had forgotten the time when, with blue cotton umbrella and thick India rubbers, she had plodded through the mud and water of the streets in Albany, giving music ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... which as used by them is likely to lead to endless disputes and tumults, and to drive the nobles into dangerous and desperate courses. In instance whereof might be cited the case of Rome itself, wherein the tribunes of the people being vested with this authority, not content to have one consul a plebeian, insisted on having both; and afterwards laid claim to the censorship, the praetorship and all the other magistracies in the city. Nor was this enough for them, but, carried away by the same factious spirit, they began after ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... suited to such an art than the rest: his very qualities, his plebeian force, were obstacles in the way. He could only conceive it, and with the aid of Francoise realize a ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... scholars; it has produced some of the greatest ornaments of their time; and the feeling among the boys themselves is, that it is a medium, between the patrician pretension of such schools as Eton the Westminster, and the plebeian submission of and charity schools. In point of University honors, it claims to be equal with the best; and though other schools can show a greater abundance of eminent names, I know not where many will be found who are a greater host in themselves. One original author ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... little, cheap home of two rooms—one of them opening upon nothing by a loft-door—over a garage that had been a coach-house, at the end of the paved yard looking towards the rear of the tall, drab-stuccoed house whose high double plate-glass windows were shielded from plebeian eyes by softly-quilled screens of silk muslin running on polished brass rods. But when the electric lights were switched on, before the inner blinds were drawn down, you could see quite plain into the consulting-room, a little below your level, where the Doctor sat at his big ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the cross-bar and waving the other as he spoke. His voice was full of passion, his eyes flashed fire, and his brow was bathed in sweat. There seemed to be some weird power in his words as in those of the prophets of old. The more than plebeian simplicity of his dress still further increased the pride of his gestures and the impressiveness of his voice. The French Revolution has shown since that in the ranks of the people there was no lack of eloquence ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... door of the house in which the Moses family were at present interested, a man of fashionable exterior—a baronet at the very least. He had a martial air and bushy whiskers—his movements all the ease of nature added to the grace of art. The plebeian Moses felt an involuntary respect for the august presence, and, in the full gladness of his heart, took off his hat in humble reverence. We promised the reader one glimpse of the incomparable Warren de Fitzalbert. He has obtained it. That mysterious ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... have done it.' To his friend, William Nicol, he wrote in the same strain. 'I never, my friend, thought mankind very capable of anything generous; but the stateliness of the patricians in Edinburgh, and the servility of my plebeian brethren (who perhaps formerly eyed me askance) since I returned home, have nearly put me out of conceit altogether with ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... just to see what the passion of gambling really was. Those who were taking their pleasure at a higher strength, and were absorbed in play, showed very distant varieties of European type: Livonian and Spanish, Graeco-Italian and miscellaneous German, English aristocratic and English plebeian. Here certainly was a striking admission of human equality. The white bejewelled fingers of an English countess were very near touching a bony, yellow, crab-like hand stretching a bared wrist to clutch a heap of coin—a hand easy to sort with the square, gaunt face, deep-set eyes, grizzled ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... really mean, that the whole affair is not so bad, that there is something bold in it, something in a sense eminently plebeian, which ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... we shall hear much. A sharp contrast to Chrysantas, the Peer, with his pointed plebeian similes. His speech important again for Xenophon's sympathetic knowledge of children and also of the ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... they object to the rent in chickens? Is it because our republican farmers have got to be so aristocratic themselves, that they do not like to be thought poulterers? This is being aristocratic on the other side. These dignitaries should remember that if it be plebeian to furnish fowls, it is plebeian to receive them; and if the tenant has to find an individual who has to submit to the degradation of tendering a pair of fat fowls, the landlord has to find an ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... there are few Republicans, using that word to designate those who actually wish to see France a republic. There are indeed, many who regret the social equality of the republic, the times when plebeian birth was an aid in the struggle for power, and a journeyman mason could be a serious candidate for the Presidentship, but they are alarmed at its instability. They have never known a republic live for more than a few years, or die except in convulsions. The Republican ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... or else have chosen some other occupation than barbering. Barber he did, however; in this very box he kept his wigs, and, painful as it was to have continually before my eyes this perpetual reminder of plebeian great-grand-paternity, I consented to it rather than lose my seeds. Then I folded my hands in sweet, though calm satisfaction. I had proved myself equal to the emergency, and that always diffuses a glow of genial complacency ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... had a good sound drubbing from the enraged father, and has been kicked out of the house, and the outraged mamma has locked the young lady in her chamber, and repelled the attempted storming on the part of the desperate lover by the armed domestics of the house, and when plebeian fists have even entertained no shyness of the very finest cloth" (here the canon sighed somewhat), "then this fermented prose of miserable vulgarity must evaporate in order that the pure poetic unhappiness of love ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... representative man of the epoch which ushered in the nineteenth century. Though an aristocrat by descent, he was in life, in training, and in quality neither that nor a plebeian; he was the typical plain man of his time, exhibiting the common sense of a generation which thought in terms made current by the philosophy of the eighteenth century. His period was the most tumultuous and yet the most ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... for consent, and being really anxious to help Toni by making her guests eat a good tea, Fanny eagerly piled her neighbour's plate with shrimps; and at that moment Lady Martin first discovered what plebeian dishes ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... represented in the following selections, which are taken from Obermann's Deutscher Minnesang. The most original is Neidhart von Reuental, who eschewed the conventional hohe Minne and sang lustily of the plebeian maid and ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... with keen gray eyes, into the face of each speaker? His cap is in his hands, so you can see the bullet head of crisp brown hair and the wrinkled forehead, as well as the high cheek bones, the short square face, the broad temples, the thick lips, which are yet firm as granite. A coarse plebeian stamp of man: yet the whole figure and attitude are that of boundless determination, self-possession, energy; and when at last he speaks a few blunt words, all eyes are turned respectfully upon him;—for ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... time engaged. On the way he turned aside on a mission to the council of Trent. Returning home, he was appointed tutor to the sons of Henry II., by one of whom (Charles IX.) he was afterwards made grand almoner (1561) and by the other (Henry III.) was appointed, in spite of his plebeian origin, commander of the order of the Holy Ghost. Pius I. promoted him to the bishopric of Auxerre, and here he continued to live in comparative quiet, repairing his cathedral and perfecting his translations, for the rest of his ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... rites in contempt, except those of the Syrian Goddess [636]; but at last he paid her so little reverence, that he made water upon her; being now engaged in another superstition, in which only he obstinately persisted. For having received from some obscure plebeian a little image of a girl, as a preservative against plots, and discovering a conspiracy immediately after, he constantly worshipped his imaginary protectress as the greatest amongst the gods, offering to her three sacrifices daily. He was also ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... closer, more perceptive or sceptical observers were needed than those who frequented the hotel Graslin, to detect the barbaric grandeur, the plebeian force of the People which lay deep-hidden in her soul. If sometimes her friends surprised her in a torpor of meditation either gloomy or merely pensive, they knew she bore upon her heart the miseries of others, and had doubtless that morning been initiated in some ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... the most part, McTeague enjoyed the pleasure of these sittings with Trina with a certain strong calmness, blindly happy that she was there. This poor crude dentist of Polk Street, stupid, ignorant, vulgar, with his sham education and plebeian tastes, whose only relaxations were to eat, to drink steam beer, and to play upon his concertina, was living through his first romance, his first idyl. It was delightful. The long hours he passed ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... the course of this sketch, to give a reason why so sounding and aristocratic a name as Grandville has been changed into the plebeian one of Grindwell. I might account for it by adducing similar instances of changes in the names of cities through the bad pronunciation and spelling of foreigners. For instance, the English nickname ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... character, it is the absence of truth, sensibility, and reflection. The vulgar in manner, is the result of vulgarity of character; it is grossness, hardness, or affectation.—If you would see how Shakspeare has discriminated, not only different degrees, but different kinds of plebeian vulgarity in women, you have only to compare the nurse in Romeo and Juliet with Mrs. Quickly. On the whole, if there are people who, taking the strong and essential distinction of sex into consideration, still maintain that Shakspeare's female characters ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... path of inquiry; others had already passed the mile-stone of criticism; and still others had left the earth and were floating in full azure of intoxication. Of the many wedding parties that sat down to breakfast, we soon made the commonplace discovery that the more plebeian the company, the more certain-orbed appeared to be ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... Carteret and the Charleston set, the former being from Virginia, while the latter was, as we have seen, a little given to kindergarten aristocracy and ofttimes tripped up on their parade swords while at the plough. Of course outside of this were the plebeian people, or copperas-culottes, who did the work; but Lord Shaftesbury for some time, as we have seen, lived in a baronial shed and had his arms worked on the left ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... of Coriolanus is one of the most amusing of our author's performances. The old man's merriment in Menenius; the lofty lady's dignity in Volumnia; the bridal modesty in Virgilia; the patrician and military haughtiness in Coriolanus; the plebeian malignity and tribunitian insolence in Brutus and Sicinius, make a very pleasing and interesting variety: and the various revolutions of the hero's fortune fill the mind with anxious curiosity. There is, perhaps, ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... which such a spirit, diffused over so vast a territory, must in any age ensure. Of Charlemagne, in an age when as yet the use of infantry was but imperfectly known, it may be said symbollically, that he found the universal people, patrician and plebeian, chieftain and vassal, with the left foot [Footnote 11] in the stirrup—of Napoleon, in an age when the use of artillery was first understood, that he found every man standing to his gun. Both, in short, found war in pro-cinctu—both found the people ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... upon him the odium of his circle, but the other would not; and the odium of that circle is the only kind of odium he dreads. Appius Claudius apprehended no odium from his own order—the patrician—from the violation of the daughter of Virginius, of the plebeian order; nor did Sextus Tarquinius of the royal order, apprehend any from the violation of Lucretia, of the patrician order—neither would have been punished by their own order, but they were both punished by ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... forth. We can conceive that an English nobleman travelling in this country, who might chance in one of our cities to see a turn-out with its outriders, tassels, and crests, almost or quite as fine as his own, if he were informed that it belonged to a plebeian who had grown vastly rich through some coarse traffic, might resolve to reduce all the display of his own equipage the moment he reached home. The labored and mean-spirited purpose of the writer of the aforesaid article in the Quarterly, and of other writers of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... little towns, made up of about a hundred villas, four hotels, a church and a casino, that lie scattered along the Norman coast like beads of a broken necklace. Living is dear in these stylish little out-of-the-way places, and this naturally keeps away the more plebeian element that frequents the great centres. About the fifteenth of August begins the week of races at Deauville, the principal event of the Norman circuit, bringing together not unfrequently as many as a hundred and sixty horses, and ranking, in fact, as third ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... about them, is unbounded, and they put him down (why, it is difficult to say) as the aristocratic, and therefore impartial champion of Demus. Whenever we fell into the bilious moods to which our plebeian nature is addicted, we were gravely admonished of his bright example, and assured that to speak evil of the Republic was the infirmity of vulgar minds. There is, it would appear, a sympathy betwixt "great ones;" a kind of free-masonry betwixt the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... likely only plebeian envy, and I dare say, if I were a lovely duchess of the realm, I would ride in a coach-and-six, with a coronet on the top of my bonnet and a robe of velvet and ermine even in ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... story. He rallied a little one night and said he wanted to tell me something. I, being a gentleman, he said, he could confide in me. I told him that he was mistaken. That there was a good deal of a plebeian in me, that he couldn't know. He seemed disappointed. He muttered something about his innocence and something that sounded like a curse on some woman, then turned to ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... that the association of men and women in refined circles shall be frank without freedom, friendly without familiarity. "Flirting" is a plebeian diversion. Every well-bred woman is a queen, for whose sake every well-bred man will hold a ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... prim and set, Twittered and chirped through a long duet; And poor little Wren, who tried with a will, But who couldn't tell "Heber" from "Ortonville," Unconscious of sarcasm, piped away And courtesied low o'er a huge bouquet Of crimson clover-heads, culled by the dozen, By some brown-coated, plebeian cousin. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... one of the brethren of Mount St. Bernard. The prince, who was returning in triumph from hunting, and who, by good luck, had that day killed a bear and ruined a countess, had an odd inclination to do a good deed. He approached the plebeian who was about to pass into the condition of a corpse, stirred the thing with his foot, and seeing that there was still a little hope, bade his people ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the street. The tobacco scattered before it fell, but I sat at the window gloating over the packet, which lay a dirty scrap of paper, where every cab might pass over it. What I call the street is more strictly a square, for my windows were at the back of the inn, and their view was somewhat plebeian. The square is the meeting-place of five streets, and at the corner of each the paper was caught up in a draught that bore it along ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... of truly fashionable people is, that they never say or do spiteful, or vindictive things; revenge and spite they consider low, plebeian, and vulgar; besides, vindictiveness of any kind disturbs their equanimity, puts them out of their way, and levels them with the people who may have injured or annoyed them; they cannot endure jaundice of body or mind, and equally abhor ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... the courage to imitate Luther. He has told us that he wanted courage; he again repeats it: he says that he, a plebeian, trifling as a man, and having but little learning, has nothing in him which could deserve celebrity. And yet he essayed a timid protest in favor of certain Huguenots who had been burned on the public square. "The work," says Prince Masson, "of a double-faced writer, a Catholic in his ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... the persons of kings divine, and their right to reign indefeasible. He was an Emperor. But he saw around him a mother, brothers and sisters, not ennobled; whose humble state reminded him, and the world, that he was born a plebeian; and he had no heir to wait impatient for the imperial crown. He scourged the earth again, and again fortune smiled on him even in his wild extravagance. He bestowed kingdoms and principalities upon his kindred—put ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... father, laying down the newspaper at which he had been glancing carelessly, and throwing himself back in the window-seat, 'I believe you know how very much I dislike what are called family affairs, which are only fit for plebeian Christmas days, and have no manner of business with people of our condition. But as you are proceeding upon a mistake, Ned—altogether upon a mistake—I will conquer my repugnance to entering on such matters, and give you a perfectly plain and candid answer, if you will do me the favour ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... the empire almost as a sovereign, for Caesar, formerly a laborious and autocratic ruler, shrank from all business. Even before they left Alexandria the plebeian prefect could see that Serapion's prophecy was fulfilling itself. He remained in close intimacy with the soothsayer; but only once more, and just before Caesar's departure, could the magian be induced to raise the spirits ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... by the side of the burgesses a second community in Rome: out of the clients arose the Plebs. This change of name is significant. In law there was no difference between the client and the plebeian, the "dependent" and the "man of the multitude;" but in fact there was a very important one, for the former term brought into prominence the relation of dependence on a member of the politically privileged class; the latter suggested merely ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... of nature, which most married men, whether of noble or plebeian blood, will quickly recognise. During the whole of her daughter's courtship, the good old lady had scarcely spoken, save by expressive smiles and looks of approval. But now that her object is gained, and her daughter fast married (as she thinks), ...
— The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman • Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray
... must have been employed in such a process excites very painful reflections. Some legend, too, there is of a book creditor having forced his way into the Cacus den, and there seen a sort of rubble-work inner wall of volumes, with their edges outwards, while others, bound and unbound, the plebeian sheepskin and the aristocratic russian, were squeezed into certain tubs drawn from the washing establishment of a confiding landlady. In other instances the book has been recognised at large, greatly enhanced ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... his toes turned out, his elbows jerking and the daylight showing under him at every step, bestriding a cantering beast of the plebeian breed, thick at every point where he should be thin, and thin at every point where he should be thick, is not one of those noble objects that bewitch the world. The best horsemen outside of the cities are the unshod country-boys, who ride "bare-backed," with only a halter round ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... speak of your pastor, do so in a more becoming manner," interrupted Mademoiselle de Colrandeuil, although she herself in private did not speak of the plebeian priest in very respectful terms. But if Joseph Bartou's son was always the son of Joseph Bartou to her, she meant that he should be Monsieur ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Whom the sun hath freckled. Then the Wild-Rose is a flirt; And the trillium Lily, In her spotless gown, 's a prude, Sanctified and silly. By her cap the Columbine, To my mind, 's too merry; Gossips, I would sooner wed Some plebeian Berry. And the shy Anemone— Well, her face shows sorrow; Pale, goodsooth! alive to-day, Dead and gone to-morrow. Then that bold-eyed, buxom wench, Big and blond and lazy,— She's been chosen overmuch!— ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... awe, To give the song-smit generation law; Who wield Apollo's delegated rod, And shake Parnassus with your sovereign nod; A pensive Pilgrim, worn with base turmoils, Plebeian cares, and mercenary toils, Implores your pity, while with footsteps rude, He dares within the mountain's pale intrude; For, oh! enchantment through its empire dwells. And rules the spirit with Lethean ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... unparadised Eden, hard as it was to make some of my floral houris unveil, still the damask roses sweetened the June breezes, the bladed and plumed flower-de-luces unfolded their close-wrapped cones, and larkspurs and lupins, lady's delights,—plebeian manifestations of the pansy,—self-sowing marigolds, hollyhocks, the forest flowers of two seasons, and the perennial lilacs and syringas,—all whispered to' the winds blowing over them that some caressing ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... matter for jeers and mockery. What remained, therefore, for the poor local noble but to hasten back to the spot where his nobility held good! It was better to bask as a Marquis in the sunshine of the south than to be cold-shouldered as a plebeian in stately Castile. ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... anti-natural, out of Nature's oneness drawing distinctions of castes, of priestly orders. Not only do they count the spirit noble, and the body ignoble; but even parts of the body are called noble, while others are not, being evidently plebeian. In like manner heaven is noble, and hell is not; but why?—"Because heaven is high up." But in truth it is neither high nor low, being above and beneath alike. And what is hell? Nothing at all. Equally foolish are they about ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... of her father—a loss she was still too young to comprehend, but for which she was soon to suffer through the strange, the anomalous position, in which it was to place her. Maurice Dupin's patrician mother and her plebeian daughter-in-law, bereft thus violently of him who had been the only possible link between them, found themselves hopelessly, actively, and increasingly at variance. Their tempers clashed, their natures were antipathetic, their views contradictory, their positions irreconcilable. ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... these goddesses as desiring worship and feeling that they are slighted: they persecute those who ignore them, but shower blessings on their worshippers, even on the obdurate who are at last compelled to do them homage. The language of mythology could not describe more clearly the endeavours of a plebeian cult to obtain recognition.[695] ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the book from the family of the accursed to that of Maule, the utterer of the evil prophecy. "As for Matthew Maule's posterity," says the romancer, "to all appearance they were a quiet, honest, well-meaning race of people"; but "they were generally poverty-stricken; always plebeian and obscure; working with unsuccessful diligence at handicrafts; laboring on the wharves, or following the sea as sailors before the mast"; and "so long as any of the race were to be found, they had been marked out from other men—not ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... ability, who stood out from the rest by the beauty of his face. But even he did not rouse in me the feeling which I should have expected. I do not know his works, and he is a man of no family. Whatever the genius and the merits of a plebeian or a commoner, he could never stir my blood. Besides, this man was obviously so much more taken up with himself than with anybody else, that I could not but think these great brain-workers must look on us as things rather than persons. When men of intellectual ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... (or it may be plebeian) reader, how eagerly must thou be looking forward to this preface, expecting to find there retaliation, scolding, and abuse against the author of the second Don Quixote—I mean him who was, they say, begotten at Tordesillas and born at Tarragona! Well then, the truth is, I am ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... that his late Duchess was flirtatious, plebeian in her enthusiasm, not sufficiently careful to please her husband; but the evident truth is that he had a Satanic pride, that he was yellow with jealousy, that he was methodically cruel. His jealousy is shown by the fact that he would ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... and fatigue jacket. Wherever too there is mystery there is importance; there is no knowing for whom I may be mistaken; but let me once give my humble cognomen and occupation, and I sink immediately to my own level, to a plebeian station and a vulgar name; not even my beautiful hostess, nor my inquisitive friend, the Clockmaker, who calls me "Squire," shall extract that secret!) ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... at the word of a sergeant," but I loved them still more when I saw their good-natured, unostentatious way of life. They were, above all things, easy and sympathetic livers. Almost the only thing that shocked and disgusted them was being treated as heroes. Dr. Johnson talked about the "plebeian magnanimity of the British common soldier" and meant the right thing, though, in truth, there was nothing plebeian in the said magnanimity,—nothing which would not have been worthy of the highest ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... mucky thing!" Emily exclaimed. She resented the application of such a substance to the inside of her person. Her plebeian mind was too narrow to conceive a second legitimate use for soap, and from that day Beth's influence declined. Emily's attendance became irregular, then gradually ceased altogether; not, however, before Beth's own interest in the lessons was over, and ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... course, an object of ambition to Count Mirabeau to have a seat in this illustrious assembly. To secure this, he renounced his rank, became a plebeian, solicited the votes of the people, and was elected a deputy both from Marseilles and Aix. He chose Aix, and his great career began with the meeting of the States-General at Versailles, the 5th of May, 1789. It was composed of three hundred nobles, three hundred priests, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... such as cauliflower and Brussels sprouts, kale and curly greens, and remember that they are all scions of the not very promising wild cabbage found on our shores. And are not all the aristocrat apple-trees of our orchards descended from the plebeian crab-apple of the roadside? We know far too little about the precise origin of our cultivated plants, but there is no doubt that after man got a hold of them he took advantage of their variability to establish race after race, say, of rose and chrysanthemum, of potato and ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... this, but he had not understood her, he too had thought it "mere vanity." Love then was nowhere—neither in his heart nor in hers. . . . Ronsard, following her with his eyes as she went finally away, saw a youth keeping as close as he dared to the doorway by which she would pass. He was a mere plebeian; naturally his life was not so precious as that of the brilliant De Lorge (thus Ronsard ironically remarks); but there was no doubt what he would have done, "had our brute been Nemean." He would exultantly have accepted the test, have thought ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... their prerogative to speak first, and they were so astonished to see what a child it was that was making such a noise in the world and degrading personages of their dignity to the base function of ambassadors to her in her plebeian tavern, that they could not find any words to say at first. Then presently their spokesman told Joan they were aware that she had a message for the King, wherefore she was now commanded to put it into words, briefly and without waste of time ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... hand the tramp and the street-walker may have as "royal" blood in their veins as any lineal princely personage. It is records, therefore, that differentiate "civilized" from uncivilized people, blue blood from plebeian; and as we see millions of people living without records to-day in various parts of the world, notwithstanding that for centuries, or even for millenniums, they have been surrounded by or in immediate contact with neighbours ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... the House of Plantagenet, with no higher addition than that of Esquire, and with no civil privileges beyond those enjoyed by every farmer and shopkeeper. There was therefore here no line like that which in some other countries divided the patrician from the plebeian. The yeoman was not inclined to murmur at dignities to which his own children might rise. The grandee was not inclined to insult a class into which his own ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... have said it, Edward; and I am sorry to add, that the admiral eggs her on. O pardon, Captain Mertoun, the plebeian slip of the tongue! I mean to say corroborates ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... can her strict laws withstand: Her cruel rigour no one spares, The blooming cheek, and hoary hairs, Alike submit to her victorious hand. O'er all she bears unbounded sway, All her impartial scythe relentless mows: Th' ill-manner'd tyranness no difference shows, Betwixt imperial and plebeian clay. ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... the same source as the exaggerated statement of Archbishop Des Ursins, that on another occasion Henry promised that his plebeian soldiers should be ennobled and invested with collars of SS. This cannot be taken directly from Des Ursins, whose history of the reign of Charles VI., though written in the fifteenth century, ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... door leading to the dining-room. In winter it served the two as both kitchen and dining-room, having a compromising sort of stove on which one could cook, and which still did not look entirely plebeian and fitted only for the kitchen. Maria saw through the open door the neatly laid table, with its red cloth and Aunt Maria's thin silver spoons and china. Aunt Maria had a weakness in one respect. She liked to use china, and did not keep that which had descended to her ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... lifted him as a blow might from his ebony chair. "Pilate, though you are a plebeian, why show ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... enough to be heard all over the room, whether (indicating Harry) that was the little ploughboy whom she had heard Mr. Barlow was attempting to bring up like a gentleman? Mrs. Merton answered "Yes." "Indeed," said the lady, "I should have thought so by his plebeian look and vulgar air. But I wonder, my dear madam, that you will suffer your son, who, without flattery, is one of the most accomplished children I ever saw, with quite the air of fashion, to keep ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... sure he picked her up at Rome; but never mind where—somewhere. Now (this is entirely between ourselves), is she very plebeian?' ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... conquered the tribe of the Lacetani; and finding among them six hundred deserters from the Roman army, he put them to death. When Scipio expressed his dissatisfaction with this, Cato sarcastically answered, that Rome would be greatest if those of high birth and station, and those of plebeian origin like himself, would only contend with one another in virtue. However, as the Senate decreed that nothing that Cato had settled in the province should be altered or rearranged, Scipio found that it was he rather than Cato that was disgraced, as he had to pass his time ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... too, has his moments of misgiving, apparently in regard to his nobility, and his acceptance of Newman on the basis of something like "manhood suffrage" is very charming. It is of course difficult for a remote plebeian to verify the pictures of legitimist society in "The American," but there is the probable suggestion in them of conditions and principles, and want of principles, of which we get glimpses in our travels abroad; at any rate, they reveal another and not impossible world, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... might he inclined. Of course the defendants were accused of this heinous sin; this brilliant passage concluded with a direct allusion to the "very aristocratic trio before him." Mr. Stanley was declared to be no aristocrat; he was pronounced thoroughly plebeian in all his actions and habits. "Like the individual who has now the honour of addressing you, gentlemen, Mr. Stanley is entirely free, in all his habits and opinions, from the hateful stain of aristocracy." ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... him be so To those that want his mercy: My poor lord Made no such covenant with him, to spare me When he was dead. Yield me to Caesar's pride? What! to be led in triumph through the streets, A spectacle to base plebeian eyes; While some dejected friend of Antony's, Close in a corner, shakes his head, and mutters A secret curse on her, who ruined him! I'll none ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... expiated at a house of correction. Since that time he had vanished from Halfdan's horizon. He had still the same broad freckled face, now covered with a lusty growth of coarse red beard, the same rebellious head of hair, which refused to yield to the subduing influences of the comb, the same plebeian hands and feet, and uncouth clumsiness of form. But his linen was irreproachable, and a certain dash in his manner, and the loud fashionableness of his attire, ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... manner, continued to cook up at Bluff Head. The master, feeling that at least he paid for the necessity, ate in peace; but Saxton, who fell between the aristocracy of Devant's ideas and the Quintonite ideal, suffered cruelly from his plebeian position. Only a vague hope of city life and pleasures held him to his position. And Devant was undecided as to what he should do. Thornly had not "looked him up" after seeing Katharine. Indeed, that rigid young man had sailed, within the week, for Point Comfort, and Devant, fearing ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... no account. But as we ascend in the social scale, the process of discriminating and being discriminated by hearing increases in difficulty, partly because voices are assimilated, partly because the faculty of voice-discrimination is a plebeian virtue not much developed among the Aristocracy. And wherever there is any danger of imposture we cannot trust to this method. Amongst our lowest orders, the vocal organs are developed to a degree more than correspondent with those ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... is a reasonably diverting because superbly improbable account of England under the new Socialist Commonwealth, with Joseph Anymoon, a highly popular Cockney plebeian, as President. Follows an era of feminist control and a Bolshevist revolution contrived by one Cohen (with the authentic properties, "Crimson Guards" and purple morality), and finally the Restoration through the loyalist Navy, the complacent Anymoon consoling ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... was not only her face and her hair, which resembled that of the late lamented Titian's Beauty; there was something in her figure and walk that made him half mad when he watched her; hers was not the stately stride of the black-eyed plebeian beauty, balancing her huge copper 'conca' on her classic head, still less was it the swaying, hip-dislocating, self-advertising gait of some of those handsome and fashionable ladies who frequented the Villa Medici on Sunday afternoons, and progressed through a running fire of compliments from pale-faced ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... all the various factors of Place, Work, and Family tabulated. Suffice it here, however, for the present to note that such differentiation does take place, without entering into the classification and comparison of the protean types of patrician and plebeian throughout geography and history. ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... infallibly be lost in allusion and authority; but, in point of fact, the new poets are just as great borrowers as the old; only that, instead of borrowing from the more popular passages of their illustrious predecessors, they have preferred furnishing themselves from vulgar ballads and plebeian nurseries. ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... insinuate. It impresses me as a cowardly and contemptible bit of plebeian practice that found favor after the royal purple was trailed in agrarian democratic dust; and lest you should unjustly impute abhorred innuendoes to me, I will say perspicuously, that the most attractive and beautiful woman I have ever ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... from Nether Drumgley—in the absence of his wife, who on her way home from buying a cochin-china met the spinet in a cart—how the mother of one of them, realizing in a klink that she was common no more, henceforth wore black caps instead of mutches (but the father dandered on in the old plebeian way), what the enterprise meant to a young man in distant Newcastle, whose favorite name was Jessy, how the news travelled to still more distant Canada, where a family of emigrants which had left its Sarah behind in Thrums, could ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... senate, or the privy council of the prince, or the judgment seat, but not even the jury-box, or a municipal corporation, or the pettiest edileship of Italy; nay, you shall not be lieutenants of armies, or tribunes, or anything above the lowest centurion. You shall become a plebeian class,—cheap bodies to be exposed in battle or to toil in the field, and pay rent to the lordly Christian. Such shall be the fate of you, the worshippers of Quirinus and of Jupiter Best and Greatest, if you neglect to crush and extirpate, during the weakness of its infancy, this ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... fringe of the river, too, dwelt the lordly waterbuck, magnificent and proud as the stags of Landseer; and the tiny steinbuck and duiker, no bigger than jack-rabbits, but perfect little deer for all that. The incredibly plebeian wart-hog rooted about; and down in the bottom lands were leopards. I knocked one off a rock one day. In the river itself dwelt hippopotamuses and crocodiles. One of the latter dragged under a yearling calf just below the ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... Condottieri. Malatestas of Rimini and Pesaro, Vitelli of Citta di Castello, Varani of Camerino, Baglioni of Perugia, to mention only a few of the most eminent nobles, enrolled themselves under the banners of plebeian adventurers like Piccinino and Sforza Attendolo. Though their family connections gave them a certain advantage, the system was essentially democratic. Gattamelata and Carmagnola sprang from obscurity by personal address and courage to the command of armies. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... his lordship changed his residence; or, since we must descend to plebeian language, was committed to Newgate, and immediately there appeared over the front of his apartment his chosen motto, as large as the ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... himself, and whose genius is consuming his health, 'Pause in the midst of the inspiration which carries you away!' No! I could not; I—I! abdicate this royalty which I exercised, and return, ruined, ashamed, mocked, to the state of a plebeian—unknown; give this triumph to my rivals, whom I had until then defied, ruled, crushed! No, no, I could not! not voluntarily, at least. The fatal day came, when, for the first time, my money was wanting. I was as surprised ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... backsliding. He was not the man to defer in that way to the prejudices of others. The truth was that he had no religious beliefs or faith whatever. But his scepticism was that of the French noble of the time, that of Voltaire and Mirabeau, rather than of the English plebeian and ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... plain, unknown man, a hill-billy from the Pennyroyal, and the nominee because there was no opposition and no hope." But hope was running high now, and now with the aristocrat, the autocrat, and the plebeian from the Pennyroyal—whose slogan was the repeal of the autocrat's election law—the ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... first years of the Army of Northern Virginia the question of rank presented itself only upon the parade ground, and beyond the borders of the camp a private had been known to condescend to his own Colonel. "A gentleman fights for his country as he pleases, a plebeian as he must," the Governor would have explained with a touch of his old oratory. "He's a nice old chap himself, but, by George, the discipline fits like a straight-jacket," pursued Dan, as he finished his coffee. "Why, here we are three miles ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... there is a picture of his in the Rospigliosi Palace—or rather, to give an example which is nearer at hand, and fresh in my memory, there is in the gallery here, his Madonna del Rosario. It represents a beautiful young woman, evidently of plebeian race: the form of the face is round, the features have nothing of the beau-ideal, and the whole head wants dignity: yet has the painter contrived to throw into this lovely picture an inimitable expression which depends on nothing external, which in the living prototype ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... with a bundle of old-world memoirs, even when edited and brought up to date by an interesting woman! What to him was the spotless character of the ignoble Francois, son of a butcher, created a Clairville for his plebeian virtues, or the lives of each succeeding descendant of Francois, growing always a little richer, a little more polished, till in time the wheel turned and the change came in the fortunes of the house which culminated ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... an increase of intelligence, greater facilities for intercommunication, and, as we have seen, a diversity of social and political forces interrelated, and acting and reacting upon each other in a manner quite unprecedented. The inquiry and criticism of plebeian minds were becoming more daring, and there was a stir and a restlessness in society, which made bad subjects for an absolute monarch. The religious Reformation, which began in Germany and spread to the westward, was but the legitimate result of the intellectual agitation which preceded ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... with a haughty gesture. "'Speculation!' 'yield!' 'profit!' 'bring in!' What language to grow familiar to the lips of a son of mine! You talk like a tradesman already! My son, give up all idea of this plebeian enterprise!" ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... precarious order exists, and in the ranks of the City Guards, which march from Lyons, Dijon, and Grenoble, to keep the inundation down. Throughout the country scattered chateaux are swallowed up by the popular tide, and, as the feudal rights are often in plebeian hands, it insensibly rises beyond its first overflow.—There is no limit to an insurrection against property. This one extends from abbeys and chateaux to the "houses of the bourgeoisie."[1343] The grudge ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... classic company, smiling or frowning upon him from the oaken shelves, where Petronius Arbiter, exquisite, rubbed shoulders with Balzac, plebeian; where Omar Khayyam leaned confidentially toward Philostratus; where Mark Twain, standing squarely beside Thomas Carlyle, glared across the room at George Meredith, Henry Leroux pursued the amazing career ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... woman gave me, in a coarse plebeian fashion, six or seven ferocious pinches below the shoulders, as if she would like to tear the skin from my back in strips; and then went away, ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... in my enjoyment that was yielded neither by the sights, the adventures, nor the chewing-candy. I had a keen feeling for the sociability of the crowd. All plebeian Chelsea was abroad, and a bourgeois population is nowhere unneighborly. Women shapeless with bundles, their hats awry over thin, eager faces, gathered in knots on the edge of the curb, boasting of their bargains. Little girls in curlpapers and little boys ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... the classes mentioned and the native petty aristocracy, locally designated the gente ilustrada and the pudientes (Intellectuals and people of means and influence). Education, thus limited, divided the people into two separate castes, as distinct as the ancient Roman citizen and the plebeian. Residing chiefly in the ports open to foreign trade, the Intellectuals acquired wealth, possessed rich estates and fine houses artistically adorned. Blessed with all the comforts which money could procure and the refinement resulting from education, they freely associated ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... the debate. The passions of the right reverend fathers were so excited by the consideration of a fundamental article of their faith that in the course of disputation they accused one another of conduct unbecoming to Christians, taunted one another with {393} plebeian origin and tore hair from one another's beards. The decree as finally passed established the position that faith and works together justify, and condemned the semi-Lutheran doctrines of "duplicate justice" ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... raged that any wife of his should dare to be ill or absent (when not fulfilling patriotic obligations), consult her own selfish whims by having nerves and lying speechless in bed. But he had a very considerable respect for Herr Doktor Meyers—a rank plebeian but the best doctor in Berlin—and when that family adviser, as autocratic as himself, ordered the Frau Graefin to go to a sanatorium in the Austrian Dolomites—but alone, mind you!—and remain as long as he—I, myself, Herr Graf!—deemed ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... was of children! To his breast The tenderest nurslings gained a free admission. Rank he despised, nor, if they came well dressed, Cared if they were plebeian or patrician. Shade of Leigh Hunt! Oh, guide this laggard pen To write of one who loved his ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... prescribed a scratch on the door, like that of a pet animal; the knock was too rough and plebeian ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... by nature as of a higher and finer grade than the common run of people as the white pine is marked in its form, its stature, its bark, its delicate foliage, as belonging to the nobility of the forest; and the pitch pine, stubbed, rough, coarse-haired, as of the plebeian order. Only the strange thing is to see in what a capricious way our natural nobility is distributed. The last born nobleman I have seen, I saw this morning; he was pulling a rope that was fastened to a Maine schooner ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... regulation.[57] A great deal of Betson's business would be done at the mart of Calais itself, where he met with the dignified Flemish merchants, scions of old families with estates of their own, and the more plebeian merchants of Delft and Leyden, and the wool dealers from sunny Florence and Genoa and Venice. Among the best customers both of the Stonors and the Celys (for they are mentioned in the letters of both) were Peter and Daniel ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... educational value. Hampton and Tuskegee are known to do excellent work, and a few of the smaller schools are to be classed as efficient; but in the great majority of negro schools the old curriculum is still followed, and the students gladly submit to its exactness. Why study something so plebeian as carpentry when one may study such scholarly subjects ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... lexicon of Amy and Ethel meant "plebeian." No one in the Merryman family had ever been so ordinary as Anne. Hitherto the Merrymans had been content to warm themselves by the fires of their own complacency, to feed themselves on past splendors; for the Merrymans were as old as Norman rule in England. They had come to America with ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... as the case might be; and, by and by, a spanking gig shoots rapidly ahead of them, driven by a smart-looking servant in murrey-colored livery, who looks back with a sneer of contempt as he wheels round a corner, and leaves the plebeian vehicle far ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... boat," "little daughter," "little dog." This is probably due to provincial Custom, and may be compared with the fondness shown in some parts of Scotland for words such as "boatie," "lassie" or "lassock," etc. There are several Hebraisms. Some of the Greek words are frankly plebeian, such as a foreigner would pick up without realizing that they were inelegant. There are also some Aramaic words and phrases which the writer inserts with a true artistic sense and then interprets—Boanerges ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... of one piece. He was, besides, a mighty toper; he could sit at wine until the day dawned, and pass directly from the table to the Bench with a steady hand and a clear head. Beyond the third bottle, he showed the plebeian in a larger print; the low, gross accent, the low, foul mirth, grew broader and commoner; he became less formidable, and infinitely more disgusting. Now, the boy had inherited from Jean Rutherford a shivering delicacy, unequally mated with potential violence. In ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... exclaimed, when the Lieutenant was out of hearing, "think of it! A real prince, and my ambition has never risen higher than a paltry count, or some plebeian of that sort. He's mine, ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... Reforming Synod. First, occasional officiations of ministers outside their own churches were authorized; secondly, there was a movement to revive the authority and office of ruling elder and other officers; thirdly, "plebeian ordination," or lay ordination, ordination by the hands of the brethren of the church in the absence of superior officers, was no longer allowed;[d] and fourthly, there was a variation from the "personal and public confession" in favor of a private examination by the ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... astronomy knew hardly anything of solstices and equinoxes, and where these are noted in the more advanced rituals, they appear to be attachments to observances founded on other considerations—so the Roman Saturnalia, celebrated near the winter solstice, and apparently the plebeian festival of the summer solstice attached to the worship of Fortuna; and the same thing is probably true of the Semitic and Greek festivals that occurred ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... world, and all the world was present. The finest music, the richest wines, the most splendid decorations were lavished on the occasion. Perhaps, among that brilliant company, there was more than one plebeian, who, under cover of the masque, and employing the license common at these saturnalia, had ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... submission. Philosophy had not yet taught her the impossibility of adjusting these allotments of our earthly state, so as to distribute the gifts of fortune in accordance with merit. Little, however, did the proud grandees imagine, as in courtly splendor they swept by the plebeian maiden, enveloping her in the dust of their chariots, that her voice would yet aid to upheave their castles from their foundations, and whelm the monarchy and the aristocracy of France ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... claws, dolphins and busts of naiads. Undoubtedly it was once a king's! Chichi gravely affirmed that it had been Marie Antoinette's, and the entire family thought that the home on the avenue Victor Hugo was altogether too modest and plebeian to enshrine such a jewel. They therefore agreed to put it in the castle, where it was greatly venerated, although it was useless and solemn as a museum piece. . . . And was he to permit the enemy in their advance ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... also the beginning of colonial empire. Virginia was a cavalier settlement, proceeding from the epoch of exploration and the search for gold; and New England was a plebeian and sectarian establishment, planted by men who fled from oppression. They did not carry with them very clear notions of human right; but these ripened under their oppressive rule among those whom they persecuted. There were local self-government and federation in Connecticut, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... base-born blotter of parchment, such as Saunders Fairford; or from the empty pedantic coxcomb, his son, who now, forsooth, writer himself advocate? When Scotland was herself, and had her own king and legislature, such plebeian cubs, instead of being called to the bar of her supreme courts, would scarce have been admitted to the honour of bearing a ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... Aeschylus and Shakespeare seems to the countrymen of Racine nearest to the limit of the terrible and the brutal permissible in art: a princess nailed by the hands like a sparrow-hawk to a pine by a brutal peasant; the daughter of a noble house submitting to a loathed marriage with a foul-mouthed plebeian in ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... The contrast between the two men might indeed have afforded some ground for speculation as to the nature of their intimacy. Furley, a son of the people, had the air of cultivating, even clinging to a certain plebeian strain, never so apparent as when he spoke, or in his gestures. He was a Member of Parliament for a Labour constituency, a shrewd and valuable exponent of the gospel of the working man. What he lacked in the higher qualities ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in being carried off in such a way! Never had he read anywhere of so ridiculously slow and tame a proceeding. And on an ox-cart! However, times had changed, and he realized that until he had established the new era of knight-errantry, the most plebeian ways of being captured by enchantment would have to serve. Yet, he did not consider it beneath his dignity to ask Sancho what he ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... were some men and women who out of wide knowledge or a natural justice recognized and loved the people of the whole land. But too frequently, in those days, the Southerner saw in the North only a mass of plebeian laborers excited by political and religious fanaticism; while the Northerner looked south to a group of tyrannical and arrogant slaveholders lording it over their victims. To the one, the typical figure of the North was John Brown; to the other, the representative ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... have actually done) our market-man driving by our old buggy and cheap horse on holidays, with a barouche and span, we enjoy the sight very much; and when I say (for the other occupant of the buggy has a little taste for two horses, which I am so plebeian as not to share, having never been able to understand why one is not enough for anybody): "But would you be the span-owner—for the span?" we see the end of the subject, and grow ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... says in his Federal Government, the citizen "looked down upon the vulgar herd of slaves, the freedmen and unqualified residents, as his own plebeian fathers had been looked down upon by the old Eupatrides in the days of Cleisthenes and Solon." Whatever phase of this Greek society we discuss, we must not forget that there was a large class excluded from rights of government, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends. Washington is not Corinth, and Lais, the beautiful daughter of Timandra, might not have been the prototype of the ravishing Laura, daughter of the plebeian house of Hawkins; but the orators add statesmen who were the purchasers of the favors of the one, may have been as incorruptible as the Republican statesmen who learned how to love and how to vote from the sweet lips of the Washington lobbyist; ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Her pure white skin was flat on the bone; the lips came forward in a soft curve, and, if they were not artistically stained, were triumphantly fresh. Here, in any case, she beat her rival, whose mouth had the plebeian beauty's fault of being too straight in a line, and was not trained, apparently, to tricks ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... late Heav'n-banisht Host, left desert utmost Hell Many a dark League, reduc't in careful Watch Round thir Metropolis, and now expecting Each hour their great adventurer from the search 440 Of Forrein Worlds: he through the midst unmarkt, In shew plebeian Angel militant Of lowest order, past; and from the dore Of that Plutonian Hall, invisible Ascended his high Throne, which under state Of richest texture spred, at th' upper end Was plac't in regal lustre. Down a while He sate, and round about him saw unseen: At ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... me rather a plebeian action, to attack a man's castle, and then, if captured, crawl behind a drastic threat ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... tallow candle within, indicated that the room possessed an occupant. Who could it be? Possibly it was John, the proud man, who lived in Kentucky, and who, to please his wealthy bride exchanged the plebeian name of Nichols, for that of Livingstone, which his high-born lady fancied was more aristocratic ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... with smallpox, and with sunken, heavy eyes - a face hard and unkind, and without anything lovely. There was a woman on the platform seeing him off. At first sight, with her one eye blind and the whole cast of her features strongly plebeian, and even vicious, she seemed as unpleasant as the man; but there was something beautifully soft, a sort of light of tenderness, as on some Dutch Madonna, that came over her face when she looked at the man. They talked ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reason is always reason; they have an intrinsick and unalterable value, and constitute that intellectual gold which defies destruction; but gold may be so concealed in baser matter, that only a chymist can recover it; sense may be so hidden in unrefined and plebeian words, that none but philosophers can distinguish it; and both may be so buried in impurities, as not to pay ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... a mind capable of remaining on such a verge, is, alone, to be, intellectually speaking, what we call "aristocratic." When, even with eyes like poor Gloucester's in the play, we can see "how this world wags," it is slavish and "plebeian" to swear that it all "means intensely, and means well." It is also to lie ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... the most aristocratic lady can use the most plebeian conveyance. The "four-wheeler" is the favorite carriage. A servant calls them from the door-step with a whistle. They are very cheap—one-and-sixpence for two miles, including a call not to exceed fifteen minutes (the call). The hansom cab with ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... accommodate eight or ten persons, are decorated with handsome silks, the ceilings are painted and ornamented in light and pleasing colors; the woodwork is gilt. Ices and sorbets are served there, and sweetmeats; for only the plebeian classes ever have a serious meal. Each box is freehold property, and of considerable value; some are estimated at as much as thirty thousand lire; the Litta family at Milan own three adjoining. These facts sufficiently indicate the importance attributed ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... however, a plebeian strain in his humanity, and his utilitarianism, at least in its expression, hardly did justice to what gives utility to life. His condemnation for atheism—if we choose to take it symbolically—was not altogether unjust: ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... "equality" what is usually meant. One member of the married twain may be rich, the other poor in worldly goods; one an aristocrat, the other plebeian; one educated, the other unschooled; and yet they may be to each other what they are ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... stay his plans, however, on such a feeble prop, Byrd hunted up the minister, whom he took to be a trifle less plebeian than most of the men, and obtained from him an endorsement of Miss Mason's views. The man of God, though stiff, was too conscientious to be unforgiving, and on receiving Stefan's explanation congratulated him sincerely, if with restraint. He did not know Shadeham personally, ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... her. She could not have explained why clearly, yet she knew. And she would have blushed in the attempt to explain why; it would have revealed a detestation of her lot. Clara had lately discovered the meaning of the word "plebeian"; more, she believed she comprehended its applicableness. The word was a burr in her thoughts. Mr. Copple was the personification of the word. Clara had not repulsed him. You do not do that sort of thing in a small town. She knew intuitively that the clergyman would not be satisfied with the statement ...
— Different Girls • Various
... pointed him out for an example. "I've a new chum, up here," Norris overheard him saying, "a young swell. He's worth any two in the squad." The words fell on the ears of the discarded son like music; and from that moment, he not only found an interest, he took a pride, in his plebeian tasks. ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... he knew, none of his immediate predecessors had ever been a conspicuous scholar, or had gained any honour in the great triennial examinations. The result was that his family was a plebeian one, from which no mandarin had ever sprung. In what way, then, could he secure that the fame and dignities, which had come to some of the clans in the region in which he lived, should descend upon his home and ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... was incapable of possessing any part of the territory. From this theory the author deduced numerous consequences which are important both to law and history. Neither of these systems is free from errors. Montesquieu seems to have made no difference between patrician and plebeian in using the term citizen, while it is no longer disputed that the plebeian was not a burgess and consequently had no civic rights save those granted to him by the ruling class. His idea of goods must have, at least, become chimerical at a very early ...
— Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic • Andrew Stephenson
... with all the sterling good qualities, which, had I married a fashionable woman, I could never have found. As for my inheritance, I would care little had I but some honest trade by which to live—but that my father thought too plebeian to be introduced in the education of his fashionable son—however, if I can pick his clerk's pocket of a few more bank deposits, with my part of our spoils to-night, I'll do. I'm not always going to be so bad. If my life is spared till this business is settled, I shall spend the rest of my days ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... considered in all ages, as one of the first and most captivating ornaments of the sex. The savage, the plebeian, the man of the world, and the courtier, are agreed in stamping it with a preference to every other ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous |
