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Second-rate   Listen
adjective
Second-rate  adj.  Of the second size, rank, quality, or value; as, a second-rate ship; second-rate cloth; a second-rate champion.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Second-rate" Quotes from Famous Books



... ripening beauty expand, three years were added to that age, Mr. Templeton was most deeply in love. Mary was indeed lovely,—her disposition naturally good and gentle, but her education worse than neglected. To the frivolities and meannesses of a second-rate fashion, inculcated into her till her father's death, had now succeeded the quackeries, the slavish subservience, the intolerant bigotries, of a transcendental superstition. In a change so abrupt and violent, the whole character of the poor girl was shaken; her principles ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... one. Not only was it out of tune enough to curdle the milk, but they had endeavoured to distract attention from its defects by crowding its lid with rubbish till it resembled the parlour chimney-piece in a suburban villa or the altar in a second-rate church. ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones

... mon ami! I did leave her quieter: my promise made her look almost like herself again. As for what you say about mentioning Clara and Mrs. Ralph in the same breath, I've been talking and smoking till I have no second breaths left to devote to second-rate virtue. There is an unanswerable reason for you, if you want one! And now let us get to the business that brings me here. I don't want to worry you by raking up this miserable mess again, from beginning to end, in your presence; but I must make sure at the same ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins

... or not? To marry a Nausicaa with grace was a feat for the performance of which exceptional qualities were required. The conjugal complement to a Nausicaa must be a man of ponderous presence and statuesque demeanor—not a shrill and nervous modern like himself, with second-rate physique, and a morbidly active intellect. No, it mattered little what he did or left undone. The world would be no better and no worse for anything he could do. Very likely, in the arms of this chair where he was now sitting, a dozen Roman Romeos, in powdered wigs and silk stockings, had pined ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... leading members of the young Tory party, and brought persons together who could not, in the ordinary way of life, have met each other at all. Although the more gaudy and best known among them came from the first second-rate families in England, the rank and file were formed mainly by young men of good estate and breeding—the sons of clergy, country squires, or merchants, all sprung from that class which is called Middle, because it represents civilised society neither in its rough beginnings nor in ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes

... the most splendid of the schools of elegance; and it is not without reason that the best performances in this lower school are valued higher than the second-rate performances of those above them; for every picture has value when it has a decided character, and is excellent in its kind. But the student must take care not to be so much dazzled with this splendour as to be tempted to imitate ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds

... seven this morning, and will continue the practice, but the shoal of proofs took up all my leisure. I will not, I think, go after these second-rate pictures again to-day. If I could get a quiet day or two I would make a deep dint in the third volume; but hashed and smashed as my time is, who can make anything of it? I read over Henry's History of Henry VI. and Edward IV.; he is but a stupid historian ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... nightfall that Brady and a man named Gaston had been stopping at a second-rate hotel in Eastport for two days. They had settled their bills the evening before and left, stating that they were going to Chambersburgh on ...
— The Young Bridge-Tender - or, Ralph Nelson's Upward Struggle • Arthur M. Winfield

... volume on Sunday afternoon. For according to the story which Mr. Beecher tells his publishers in a very pleasant prefatory letter, this compilation was made in England, where it attained great popularity among those who never heard the preacher, and who found satisfaction in the first-rate or the second-rate, without being moved by the arts of oratory. Indeed, the book is one that must everywhere be welcome, both for its manner and for its matter. The application of the "Truths" is generally enforced by a felicitous apologue or figure; in some cases the lesson is conveyed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various

... artist, and he disposed of it in a lottery, in which many tickets were left on his hands. And while this was the fate of works which still stand unsurpassed in their peculiar field, the amateurs were paying enormous prices for worthless pictures of second-rate Italian masters, and talking about their "Correggios ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... seemed serenely certain of a comfortable future. There was no too modern uneasiness about it, no trifling, gim-crack furniture constructed to catch the eye and the angles of any one venturing to seek repose upon it, no unmeaning rubbish of ornaments or hectic flummery of second-rate pictures. Above the high oaken mantel-piece was a little pure bust in marble of the Prophet when a small boy. To right and left were pretty miniatures in golden frames of the Prophet's delightfully ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens

... wood-cutters were likewise scandalized, and with a better show of reason—though I admit that the reason itself was quite inadmissible. Oh, quite! I had made up my mind that if my late helmsman was to be eaten, the fishes alone should have him. He had been a very second-rate helmsman while alive, but now he was dead he might have become a first-class temptation, and possibly cause some startling trouble. Besides, I was anxious to take the wheel, the man in pink pyjamas showing himself a ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... respectable, at all events, and I'd rather be a second-rate doctor than a second-rate actor. But I know you don't mean it, and only say so to ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott

... and governed. Algiers is situated on an amphitheatre of hills, sloping down towards the sea, and presenting therefore the fairest mark to the fire of hostile ships. But where is the capital exactly so situated that we are ever likely to attack? And as to the destruction of a few second-rate towns, even when practicable, it is a mean, unworthy species of warfare, by which nothing was ever gained. The severe loss sustained before Algiers must also be taken into account, because it was inflicted by mere Algerine artillery, and was much ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck

... with the society to which they had attained, the younger ones passing their elders in cultivation, and every discomfort of change of position felt, though not acknowledged. Even the mother, lady as she was by birth, had only belonged to the second-rate class of gentry, and while elevated by wealth, was lowered by connection, and not having either mind or strength enough to stand on her own ground, trod with an ill-assured foot on ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Otis Yeere At the Pit's Mouth A Wayside Comedy The Hill of Illusion A Second-rate Woman Only a Subaltern In the Matter of a Private The Enlightenments of Pagett. ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling

... family, regards him as its most renowned benefactor. He is generally a pillar (or a buttress) of the Church, and oftentimes a mayor; with his ill-gotten wealth he promotes charities, and endows schools; his portrait is painted by a second-rate Academician, and hangs, until disaster overtakes him, in the town-hall of his ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley

... were wonderfully snug and comfortable for the second floor of a second-rate house in a small retired side street near the Embankment at Chelsea. He had made the most of the four modest little rooms, with his quick taste and his deft, cunning fingers:—four rooms, or rather boxes, one might almost call them; a bedroom each for himself ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... not pretend to write or enlarge upon a new subject. Much has been said and written—and well said and written too—on the art of fishing; but loch-fishing per se has been rather looked upon as a second-rate performance, and to dispel this idea is one of the objects for which this present treatise has been written. Far be it from us to say anything against fishing, lawfully practised in any form; but many pent ...
— Scotch Loch-Fishing • AKA Black Palmer, William Senior

... at last, "that you do not realize how commonplace I am. You know those conventional heroines of second-rate novels, who love tremendously once, and then, when things go wrong, promptly turn into marble statues, and go through life with hearts of stone? Well, my dear, I am just like that. I know it's despicable. ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley

... why we should care for them. When we are polite to them, they think the less of us; there are plenty of people like that. Mamma thinks so much of them simply because they are foreigners. If I could tell you all the dull, stupid, second-rate people I have had to talk to, for no better reason than that they were de leur pays!— Germans, French, Italians, Turks, everything. When I complain, mamma always says that at any rate it's practice in the language. And she makes so much ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James

... to spread the contemptible misinformation; women either smiled or remained indifferent. The impression became general and fixed that women were gallinaceous, that a hen-like philosophy characterised the sex; that they were, at best, second-rate humans, tagging rather gratefully at the heels of the Lords of Creation, unconcerned with the greater and vital questions of ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers

... deeds of man, and as such we have to pass judgment on it categorically. Any compromise on this point would obscure the issues; nay, it would be almost immoral.... War, like everything else, should have light thrown upon it from every side before we pass judgment on it; but only to persons of second-rate intelligence can it seem that we should actually pass our judgment on war from all sides at once, or even ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland

... push through, and one can almost always foretell who the few will be. There are men who are destined always to occupy second-rate places, and who seem also to know their fate. I never heard Erle speak even of an ambition to ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... style so pure as that of either of his rivals, nor is his enthusiasm the same. We feel him always a polished man of the world—never the rugged patriot, never the rapt seer. He seems, too, to lack impartiality. He lavishes praise upon Agesilaus, a second-rate man, while he is curt and ill-tempered concerning Epaminondas, the real genius of the age. It is more than likely that he has colored his own part in the famous "Retreat," in glowing colors. His hereditary instincts lead him to approve of autocrats as against ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... make a difference. Charley wasn't out in the bally any more, either; he was backstage among the second-rate acts, the tattooed man and the fire-eater and the rest, while Erma and Ned and Ed and the top-liners took their bows out before the crowd, pulling them in, and got the gasps ...
— Charley de Milo • Laurence Mark Janifer AKA Larry M. Harris

... ask him whether he can give him work until I get back, or whether he can find employment with others. [Editor's note: Drer's brother was Hans Drer, who was fifteen at this date. He became a painter of second-rate ability, and afterwards helped Albrecht in the decoration of the Emperor Maximilian's prayer book]. I should like to have brought him with me to Venice, which would have been useful both to me and to him and he would have learned the language, but she was afraid that ...
— Memoirs of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries - [This is our volunteer's translation of the title] • Albrecht Durer

... the waterproof apron was threadbare, and one of the splash-boards was split. The harness also was of the most ancient description, and the rough pony badly needed clipping, so that the whole turn-out was deplorably shabby and second-rate. ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil

... second-rate Gloucester low ground. It has no improvements thereon, but lies on navigable water, abounding in fish and oysters. It was received in payment of a debt (carrying interest), and valued in the year 1789, by an impartial gentleman, at L800. N. B. It has lately been sold, ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing

... Wuerttemberg were converted into kingdoms. By the humiliating treaty of Pressburg, Austria thus lost 3,000,000 subjects and large revenues; was cut off from Italy, Switzerland, and the Rhine; and was reduced to the rank of a second-rate power. ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... was going to say 'admire?' But I cautiously left my sentence unfinished, and was glad that I had done so, for he said, with unwonted emphasis, 'Anything second-rate.' ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm

... lover arrived in Sydney with comparatively very little cash. However, with an Epicurean-like philosophy, they enjoyed themselves on what little they had, and then came to Melbourne, where they stayed at a second-rate hotel. Musette, I may tell you, had one special vice, a common one—drink. She loved champagne, and drank a good deal of it. Consequently, on arriving at Melbourne, and finding that a new generation had arisen, which knew ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume

... produce abortions!" cried Roderick with ire. "Preach that to others. Production with me must be either pleasure or nothing. As I said just now, I must either stay in the saddle or not go at all. I won't do second-rate work; I can't if I would. I have no cleverness, apart from inspiration. I am not a Gloriani! You are right," he added after a while; "this is unprofitable talk, and it makes my head ache. I shall take a nap and see if I can dream of a bright idea ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James

... "I make three assortments in fortune—first-rate, second-rate, and third-rate fortunes. I call those first-rate which are composed of treasures one possesses under one's hand, such as mines, lands, and funded property, in such states as France, Austria, and England, provided these treasures ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... Goldsmith made his philosophical Chinaman visit Vauxhall, the other members of the party consisting of the man in black, a pawnbroker's widow, and Mr. Tibbs, the second-rate beau, and his wife. The Chinaman was delighted, and, by a strange coincidence, Addison's metaphor crops up once more in his rapturous description. "The illuminations began before we arrived, and I must confess that, upon entering the gardens, I found every sense overpaid with ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley

... right in his feelings in this respect. Harcourt had formed a very false idea of Miss Waddington;—had led himself to imagine that she was second-rate and unattractive. In the first place, he had his own ideas about Littlebath, and conceived that it was not the place in which the highest beauty of England should be looked for; and in the next place, he knew George Bertram, and regarded him as a man ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope

... point of sharpened bronze; then he went to the threshold of the cloister and said to Euryclea, "Nurse, did you make the stranger comfortable both as regards bed and board, or did you let him shift for himself?—for my mother, good woman though she is, has a way of paying great attention to second-rate people, and of neglecting others who are in reality much ...
— The Odyssey • Homer

... retraced the very course along which earlier in the day Rebecca had proceeded in the opposite direction, thinking she saw him ahead of her. By dint of making numerous inquiries, he found himself at length in a region of squalid residences and second-rate shops and ale-houses, in the midst of which he finally ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye

... security are generally very good customers, from the fact of their either having large families, all engaged in the same work, or else several females or males working under them, and living at their house. The parties becoming securities thus not only greatly increase their trade, but furnish a second-rate article at a first-rate price. It is useless to complain of the bad quality or high price of the articles supplied by the securities, for the shopkeepers know, as well as the workpeople, that it is impossible for the hands to leave them without losing ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... knights-errant of the twelfth century. My grandfather talked of nothing but his pedigree and the prowess of his ancestors. He regretted the good old days when every lordling had instruments of torture in his manor, and dungeons, and, best, of all cannon. In ours we only had pitchforks and sticks, and a second-rate culverin which my Uncle John used to point—and point very well, in fact—and which was sufficient to keep at a respectful distance the military force of ...
— Mauprat • George Sand

... never thought this about his wife People had said how extraordinarily Aylmer must have been in love to have married that uninteresting girl, no-one in particular, not pretty and a little second-rate. As a matter of fact the marriage had happened entirely by accident. It had occurred through a misunderstanding during a game of consequences in a country house. She was terribly literal. Having taken some joke of his seriously, she had sent him a touchingly coy letter saying ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson

... Bowdler is a poor second-hand and third-rate example of the Jonsonian gull; and the transfer of Moll's regard from him to his friend is both childishly conceived and childishly contrived. On the whole, a second-rate play, with one or two first-rate scenes and passages to which Lamb has done perhaps no more than justice by the characteristic and eloquent cordiality of his commendations. Its date may be probably ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... a merchant: what sort of trade could you hope for among a people who earn 10 cents a day—the head {184} of a family getting half enough to buy a single meal in a second-rate restaurant? Or if you are a banker, what sort of deposits could you get among such a people? Or if a railroad man, how much traffic? Or if a manufacturer, how much business? Or if a newspaper man, how much circulation? Or if a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or preacher, how ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... dutifully can for Stevenson, cannot see. His genius is in nearly all cases pulled up or spoiled by his all too conscious cleverness, and at last we say, "Oh Heavens! if he could and would but let himself go or forget himself what he might achieve." But he doesn't—never does, and therefore remains but a second-rate creator though more and more the stylist and the artist. This is more especially the case at the very points where writers like Scott would have risen and roused all the readers' interest. When Stevenson reaches such points, he is always as though saying "See now how ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... is no need to follow the unhappy details of the unended dinner. Mr. Fyshe's one idea was to be gone: he was too true an artist to think that finance could be carried on over the table-cloth of a second-rate restaurant, or on an empty stomach in a deserted club. The thing must be done over again; he must wait his time and ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock

... by mediocrity against individual eminence, no matter of what kind. In his own sphere of work no one will allow another to be distinguished: he is an intruder who cannot be tolerated. Si quelq'un excelle parmi nous, qu'il aille exceller ailleurs! this is the universal password of the second-rate. In addition, then, to the rarity of true merit and the difficulty it has in being understood and recognized, there is the envy of thousands to be reckoned with, all of them bent on suppressing, nay, on smothering it altogether. No one is taken for what he is, but for what others ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer

... away! A great battle is even now being fought just outside the gates!—a battle on the issue of which hangs the fate of France—and much more than France. If the thin line which stands between Paris and her enemies does not hold, this day sees France reduced to a second-rate Power and Paris will again hear the tramp of German armies marching down the Champs-Elysees!" My feet walked the familiar streets, but every pulse-beat, every conscious thought was with the Allied armies of defense with which I had so recently ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood

... intention of the Count to marry Beatrice. It is Beatrice's intention to do nothing rashly, but to take as much time as she can get for making up her mind, and then to do exactly as she pleases. She perfectly appreciates her own position and knows that she can either marry a rich man of second-rate family, or a poor man of good blood, a younger son or a half ruined gentleman at large like San Miniato, and she hesitates. She is not quite sure of the value of money yet. It might be delightful to be even much richer than she is, because there are so ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford

... we ain't cut our eye-teeth!" And he would instantly begin speculating as to whether this was a new scheme for selling him second-rate nursery stock, or the smooth introduction of another ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker

... well as the workers needed this selective power. The factories of the day had accustomed the public to second-rate material and second-rate colour, and Morris was determined to set a higher standard. In 1875 he was absorbed in the production of vegetable dyes, which he insisted on having pure and rich in tone. Though madder and weld might supply the reds and yellows which ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... very little to see. Except that it was solidly built of good sound stone, the Craig Fernie hotel differed in no other important respect from the average of second-rate English inns. There was the usual slippery black sofa—constructed to let you slide when you wanted to rest. There was the usual highly-varnished arm-chair, expressly manufactured to test the endurance of the human ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins

... teacher said, "it was a great deal easier. The next thing I wanted to do was to get the children examined for glasses and throat trouble. There were two second-rate country doctors there who knew little or nothing about modern medicine. The nearest man that I could trust was forty miles away. He was a specialist, too, and high priced. Still, I sat down and wrote him a letter, telling him how we were fixed. He answered by return mail, making a special rate ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... in the Press the prominence of a grand European event. Descriptions of what the ladies wear at Ascot occupy as many columns in the newspaper as the condition of four million unemployed occupy lines. The attention of the public is engulfed in second-rate sport. It is not as if there were a real boom in sport. The war has effected men's physique and their nerves so that most sporting exhibitions are of the second class. Strictly speaking, it is not an interesting cricket year. But the interest in the county ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... balance on the side of the Soviet complex, the West will have lost the cold war. Every neutral in the world will jump on the bandwagon. International trade, sources of raw materials, will be a thing of the past. Without a shot being fired, we'd become second-rate powers overnight." ...
— Combat • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... in the large cities and capitals of Europe, greater extent of locality requires evidently a different method of arrangement: it might be awkward for the inhabitants of Hyde Park were no hatters to be found nearer than the Tower. But what is Berezdah compared even with a second-rate European city? However, in a crowd, it yields to none: the streets at this time of the day are thronged to choking, and, to make matters worse, a huge splay-footed camel every now and then, heaving from side to side like a lubber-rowed boat, with ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous

... of trumpets, as the editions of Steevens and Malone are to his. Yet, prompted by the "Dunciad," it is the fashion of literature to regard Theobald with compassion, as a block-head and empiric. Cibber escapes but little better, and yet he was a man of respectable talent, and played no second-rate part in the literary history ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... irresponsible way of the young girl so attractive to men? It does not make for domestic happiness; and why, Oh why, do some of our best men marry such odd little sticks of pin-head women, with a brain similar in caliber to a second-rate butterfly, while the most intelligent, unselfish, and womanly women are left unmated? I am going to ask about this the first morning I am in heaven, if so be we are allowed to ask about the things which troubled us while on our mortal journey. I have never been able to find out about ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung

... count on him. It was naturally not large: it had exhausted itself in having arrived at what he had already touched upon—the sense of an intention in her poor zeal at Cocker's. But any deficiency of this kind was no fault in him: he wasn't obliged to have an inferior cleverness—to have second-rate resources and virtues. It had been as if he almost really believed she had simply cried for fatigue, and he accordingly put in some kind confused plea—"You ought really to take something: won't you have something or other somewhere?" to which ...
— In the Cage • Henry James

... experience described emotion, and think prepared thoughts. They live not in life, but in printed reports of life. They gather the odour of odours, not the odour itself: they do not hear, they overhear. A poor, sad, second-rate existence! ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson

... present published on the subject of drawing are all directed, as far as I know, to one or other of two objects. Either they propose to give the student a power of dexterous sketching with pencil or water-color, so as to emulate (at considerable distance) the slighter work of our second-rate artists; or they propose to give him such accurate command of mathematical forms as may afterwards enable him to design rapidly and cheaply for manufactures. When drawing is taught as an accomplishment, the first is the aim usually proposed; while ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin

... great city' of Arcadia, was only a mate to Tegea and Mantinea. Even thus, the work was by no means lost; a Spartan army, to reach Messenia, whose independence was to be secured, must pass through the territory of Megalopolis, and even a second-rate city would answer as a guard. But not even Epaminondas could make of Arcadia a first-class power, and a sufficient counterpoise to Sparta. Megalopolis is now wholly deserted, and represented only by the little village of Sinanu, half ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various

... reader, venting itself in apostrophes, digressions, hyperbole (over-drawn description), episodes and epigrams, an unhappy laboriousness that strains itself to be first-rate for a moment, but leaves the poem second-rate ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce

... however, from the way Clayton neglected the mistakes of the pets of his own eleven, and his constant and petty fault-finding with the three Lakerimmers, that he was determined to keep them from the varsity, even if he had to keep second-rate players on the team, and even if he imperiled the Academy's ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes

... opened, when the waters being let off to within a few inches of the bottom, the quantity of fish taken with the casting-net is enormous. In the large Gour of Akin, the longest, the deepest, and containing more fish than any on the Cure or the Cousin, which I mention as representing the ten or twelve second-rate rivers of Le Morvan, I have seen as much as four horse-loads of fish taken, though every fish under two pounds was thrown back. The average depth of water in these rivers is from three to four feet, except near the dams and flood-gates, where it is from twelve to thirteen. ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle

... Roses, a mere cut-throat civil butchery of rival factions with no real principle at stake. Throughout the fifteenth century the leading poets (of prose we will speak later) were avowed imitators of Chaucer, and therefore at best only second-rate writers. Most of them were Scots, and best known is the Scottish king, James I. For tradition seems correct in naming this monarch as the author of a pretty poem, 'The King's Quair' ('The King's ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... tawdry antiquities giving off its corridors, and other antiquities (as we see them in Italian inns) crammed against walls and into corners. Donatello and Mino bas-reliefs become sham by their surroundings, apocryphal Byzantine mosaics, second-rate pictures. Even empty sarcophagi and desecrated tombs just as at Riettis or Della Torres at Venice, and with seventeenth-century gilding and painting obbligato overhead. And then into wider corridors, ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee

... retired to my sofa, and would have nothing to do with it. At last they made arrangements, and I was transported to the establishment from which I now write you. I write you from the bosom of a Parisian menage—from the depths of a second-rate boarding-house. ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James

... age. Do you dress well, and not too well? Do you consider your air and manner of presenting yourself enough, and not too much? Neither negligent nor stiff? All these things deserve a degree of care, a second-rate attention; they give an additional lustre to real merit. My Lord Bacon says, that a pleasing figure is a perpetual letter of recommendation. It is certainly an agreeable forerunner of merit, and smoothes the ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... Haynes'—one of your second-rate, ultra dandies. Twig his vasty whiskers, will you! Takes his fellow hours to curl 'em. And then his ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al

... many places in the Plays where this happens. Poor old dying John of Gaunt volleying second-rate puns at his own name, is a pathetic instance of it. "We may assume" that it is Bacon's fault, but the Stratford Shakespeare has to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... had time to tell you what that town was like where he slept and ate, but I have not. You can read for yourself, some day, what Atlantis was like. Plato tells us a good deal, and the Colonies of Atlantis must have had at least a reasonable second-rate copy of the cities of that fair and ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit

... a few cases of looseness, either of thought or of expression, to be met with in these pages; a point of style to be particularly looked to when the occurrence or the absence of such forms one very sensible difference between the first-rate and the second-rate poets of ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various

... families and protection against summer heat. At their advent prices made another jump—one which took the breath away. Several of the most conservative owners parted with their estates after naming a figure which they supposed beyond the danger point, and half a dozen second-rate situations, affording but a paltry glimpse of the ocean, were snapped up in eager competition by wealthy capitalists from Chicago, Pittsburg, and St. Louis who had set their hearts on securing the best ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant

... Mason, was early active in planning and administering Southern cotton loans in England, and was in constant touch with Mason. By Slidell he was much less favourably regarded and the impression created by his frequent letters to Mason is that of a man of second-rate calibre elated by the prominent part he seemed to be playing in what he took to be the birth ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams

... Mariana was well out of that. He had been wise in saying nothing to Charlotte; the thing had expired naturally. But, irrationally, he thought of Polder with a trace of contempt—a man who had, unquestionably, possessed Mariana Jannan's regard marrying the pink-faced understudy to a second-rate emotional actress! In a way it made him cross; the fellow should have shown a—a greater appreciation, delicacy. "Commonplace," he said decisively, aloud. The following day Mariana herself appeared, with a touch of sable and ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... people escaping charity by so narrow a margin had been second-rate actors and scene shifters, or artists—of both sexes—the men being either too old or otherwise ineligible for the army. This was their only square meal during twenty-four hours. They made at home such ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... the League; or if matters actually came to a war, might make the issue of it doubtful. But, unfortunately, private interests dissolved the band of union which should have held together the Protestant members of the empire. This critical conjuncture found none but second-rate actors on the political stage, and the decisive moment was neglected because the courageous were deficient in power, and the powerful in sagacity, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... that an allegory should never be pressed too far.” Are all the lovely passages of human passion and human pathos in these ‘Idylls’ allegorical—that is to say—make-believe? The reason why allegorical poetry is always second-rate, even at its best, is that it flatters the reader’s intellect at the expense of his heart. Fancy “the allegorical intent” behind the parting of Hector and Andromache, and behind the death of Desdemona! Thank Heaven, however, Tennyson’s allegorical intent was a destructive afterthought. For, says ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... reached Aix-la-Chapelle, at which ancient town we arrived about six. Unlike Spa, where we had the choice among a hundred furnished houses, Aix was so crowded that we got narrow lodgings, with great difficulty, in a second-rate hotel. ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper

... adequately surrounded than this. What was Mrs. Leyburn—what were the Elsmeres about? He rebelled against the thought of her living perpetually among her inferiors, the centre of a vulgar publicity, queen of the second-rate. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... qualities which, when tested, showed that he would make but a second-rate artist, the character-divers demonstrated that these youths possessed natural tendencies better fitting them for some ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)

... 'femme libre' [free woman] of the new social order may, indeed, escape the charge of neglecting her family and her household by contending that it is not her vocation to become a wife and a mother! Why, then, we ask, is she constituted a woman at all? Merely that she may become a sort of second-rate man?" ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... lead from the Malvern Hills, and some cargoes of corn and wool—this was all that the Empire had ever gained from her troublesome conquest. Even in the world of mind Britain had done nothing more than give birth to one second-rate heretic.[148] The curse of poverty and of barbarous insignificance was upon her, and would remain upon her till ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin

... Lucinda played nurse at other times to the best of her ability. Such flavorous gruels and porridges as she concocted! such tisanes after her guest's instructions! such dainty soups, and sweetbreads, and cutlets, served with such neatness! After his experience of a second-rate boarding-house, Monsieur Leclerc thought himself in a gastronomic paradise. Moreover, these tiny meals were garnished with flowers, which his French taste for color and decoration appreciated: two or three stems of lilies-of-the-valley ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various

... the English, who are always ready to confound what is rare with what is really admirable, are very successful in their curiosities of this kind. They collect them at a great expense, and employ skilful engravers to reproduce fac-similes for second-rate amateurs, whose whole fortune would not suffice for ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various

... survive a fortnight? The fame of classical authors is originally made, and it is maintained, by a passionate few. Even when a first-class author has enjoyed immense success during his lifetime, the majority have never appreciated him so sincerely as they have appreciated second-rate men. He has always been reinforced by the ardour of the passionate few. And in the case of an author who has emerged into glory after his death the happy sequel has been due solely to the obstinate perseverance of the few. ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett

... tail-feathers; but Mr. Swinhoe has counted in other birds of this breed from 18 to 24 tail-feathers. From a rough sketch sent to me, it is evident that the tail is not so much expanded or so much upraised as in even second-rate European Fantails. The bird shakes its neck like our Fantails. It had a well-developed oil-gland. Fantails were known in India, as we shall hereafter see, before the year 1600; and we may suspect that in the Java Fantail we see the breed in its earlier ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin

... illustrations can be used when you have your editions rebound. There is no particular merit about the greater part of them, but they depict incidents described in the text, so at least they are apposite. Each to his taste; our book-hunter for his part needs no second-rate illustrations to help him visualise the glories of Childe Harold or Don Juan; and he has long since confined his Grangerising to the sparing addition of finely engraved ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan

... temperament which he studies so patiently and so cruelly. Madame Bovary is a little woman, half vulgar and half hysterical, incapable of a fine passion; but her trivial desires, her futile aspirations after second-rate pleasures and second-hand ideals, give to Flaubert all that he wants: the opportunity to create beauty out of reality. What is common in the imagination of Madame Bovary becomes exquisite in Flaubert's rendering of it, and by that counterpoise of a commonness in the subject he is ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... pronunciation of the old New Englander, never slurring his syllables, and he has a really fine face, the kind of face one doesn't often see nowadays. I kept looking at it, wondering what was the matter with it, and at last I realized what it lacked—will, desire, ambition,—it was what a second-rate sculptor might have made of Bradford, for instance. But there is a remnant of fire in him. Once, when he spoke of the strike, of the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... Anglo-Saxon origin, bases and builds the strongest opinions upon the weakest foundations, hinders the higher Avatars of genius and interferes with the "chief duty of a nation which is to produce great men." It accounts for the ever-incroaching reign of women in literature—meaning as a rule cheap work and second-rate. And the main lack is not so much the "thrill of awe," which Goethe pronounces to be the best thing humanity possesses, but that discipline of respect, that sense of loyalty, not in its confined meaning of attachment to royalty, but ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... highest prizes of human affairs, it is, I believe, admitted on all hands, that these generally fall to second-rate men. Civilized nations have found it convenient entirely to give up the hallucination that the monarch is the greatest, wisest, and best man in his dominions. Nobody supposes that. And in the case of hereditary dynasties, such an end is not even aimed at. But it is curious to find ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... in the Legislature and was working very hard, with little chance of getting out of doors, all the exercise I got was boxing and wrestling. A young fellow turned up who was a second-rate prize-fighter, the son of one of my old boxing teachers. For several weeks I had him come round to my rooms in the morning to put on the gloves with me for half an hour. Then he suddenly stopped, and some days later I received a letter of woe from ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... infernally brilliant when I uncovered the first secret of the Highways in Hiding. I found out that I did not know one-tenth of the truth. They had a network of Highways that would make the Department of Roads and Highways look like a backwood, second-rate, ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith

... he gave made the two well-to-do men stare. But they said nothing, though the looks they cast back at the second-rate quarters they were leaving, so far below the elegant apartment house they had visited first, were sufficiently expressive. The scale of descent from luxury to positive discomfort was proving a rapid one and prepared them for the dismal, ill-cared-for, altogether repulsive ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green

... and Ovid must needs make Greek of Latin, and bend the stiff syllables to Alcaics and Sapphics and Hexameters. The task looked easy enough, though it was within the powers of so very few. Thousands tried it, no doubt, when the three or four had set the fashion, and failed, as the second-rate fail, with some little brief success in their own day, turned into the total failure of complete disappearance when they ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... sort of shop," she remarked thoughtfully as they pursued their way. "Such a dingy little second-rate place. And why do you suppose she came up in a taxi instead ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell

... out of conceit with Castile, you are not likely to be put in again by Palencia; for a second-rate town in this kingdom is like a piece of the plain enclosed by a wall, and only emphasises the desolation at the expense of the freedom; and as in a windy square all the city garbage is blown into corners, so the walled town seems to collect and set to festering ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett

... "It's always second-rate," said his wife, passionately. "Third-rate, fourth-rate! Godolphin was quite right about that. I wish you were writing a novel, Brice, instead of a play. Then you would be really addressing ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells

... generation. When she married Kent Mulville, who was older than Gravener and I and much more amiable, I gained a friend, but Gravener practically lost one. We reacted in different ways from the form taken by what he called their deplorable social action—the form (the term was also his) of nasty second-rate gush. I may have held in my 'for interieur' that the good people at Wimbledon were beautiful fools, but when he sniffed at them I couldn't help taking the opposite line, for I already felt that even should we happen to agree it would always be for reasons ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James

... head in a bag or hold a pistol to it to calm him.... What is the good of all this clamouring for a change of government? We haven't a change of government. It's like telling a tramp to get a change of linen. Our men, all our public men, are second-rate men, with the habits of advocates. There is nothing masterful in their minds. How can you expect the system to produce anything else? But they are doing as well as they can, and there is no way of putting in any one else now, ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells

... rose into importance during the papacy of Innocent III. Up to this date she had been a town of second-rate distinction even in Tuscany. Pisa was more powerful by arms and commerce. Lucca was the old seat of the dukes and marquises of Tuscany. But between the years 1200 and 1250 Florence assumed the place she was to hold thenceforward, by heading the league of Tuscan cities formed to support the Guelf ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... that it was time for me to go, but when I announced this fact the ladies very much demurred. Why should I go to that uncomfortable hotel? They would send for my baggage. There was not the least reason in the world why I should spend the night in that second-rate establishment. ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton

... a St. Peter, from a German fifteenth-century MS., of good average execution; and Fig. 116 a Madonna, either of the best English, or second-rate French, work, from a service-book executed in 1290. The reader will, I doubt not, perceive at once the general grace and tenderness of sentiment in the lines of the drapery of the last, and the comparatively delicate type of features. ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin

... other girls, with plenty of inquisitiveness and sharp sense, and not too much refinement and feeling; whose accomplishments are learnt from the 'first masters,' and whose principles are left to be picked up from gossip, servants, and second-rate books; digested by ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... Louis who said that he would like to make all the politicians who caused wars into a salad, accompanying his threat with appropriate gestures; Charles who thought that once the "Boches" were properly pruned they might be acceptable second-rate members of international society; and Leon who wanted the Kaiser put to the plow in a coat of corduroy as the best cure for his conceit. That afternoon, when au revoirs were spoken and our cars wound in and out over the byroads ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... raising a feeling of forgiveness for such in the minds of other women. I could not venture to make this female the heroine of my story. To have made her a heroine at all would have been directly opposed to my purpose. It was necessary therefore that she should be a second-rate personage in the tale;—but it was with reference to her life that the tale was written, and the hero and the heroine with their belongings are all subordinate. To this novel I affixed a preface,—in doing which I was acting in defiance of my old-established principle. ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope

... that gave zest to the sport of annexing him. Besides, his eyes are very fine, and, if souls really shine through eyes, showed that he was refreshingly innocent. I expect, too, that there was something piquant in the company of the clerk who takes the money at the door of a second-rate entertainment. Mrs. Ascher has often told me that she is more interested in life than in anything else, even art. She distinguishes between life and real life. Mine, I gather, is not nearly so real as that of a performer in a travelling circus. I do not know why this should ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham

... is doubtful whether entire severance from American or European control would last a year, because some other Power, Asiatic or European, would seize the Colony. Sovereign independence would be but a fleeting vision without a navy superior in all respects to that of any second-rate naval Power, for if all the fighting-men of the Islands were armed to the teeth they could not effectively resist a simultaneous bombardment of their ports; nor could they, as inhabitants of an archipelago, become united in ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... amused instead of annoyed as she climbed the stairs to the Vondeplosshe residence. At Trudy's request Gay had discreetly consented to be absent. He had pretty well picked up the threads of his various enterprises and what with his club duties, his second-rate concerts, his gambling, and commissions from antique dealers, he managed to put in what he termed a full day. So he swung out of the house early in the afternoon to buy himself a new winter outfit, wondering if Trudy would row when she discovered ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley

... after the rise of literature, the very want of that multitude of second-rate books we now possess, had the effect of compelling those who learned any thing to betake themselves to studies of a solid nature; and there was consequently less difference then, between the education of the two sexes, than now. The reader will immediately recollect the instances ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... them would have gladly abandoned have connected their office with a smile. The nature of it has for the most part filled the Sees with men of second-rate abilities. The latest and most singular theory about them is that of the modern English Neo-Catholic, who disregards his bishop's advice, and despises his censures; but looks on him nevertheless as some high-bred, worn-out animal, ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... that he was almost an orphan like myself; his father, who was a clergyman, having died early and left his widowed mother with a large number of children to support on a scanty income; whence the fact of his being at such a poor second-rate school as Dr Hellyer's, about which Tom then proceeded to unfold the ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson

... and again in his leisurely breakfast to scowl across the dining room at Mr. Biggleswade, who, with his sour-looking wife and woebegone little girl, was breakfasting at an opposite table. The Royal Victoria Hotel was second-rate. The cooking was poor, the wine was bad, and Solesgate itself was dull. But these misfortunes Sir Tancred would have endured cheerfully because the place suited Hildebrand Anne, who had but lately recovered from ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson

... followed by precipitate decay. This had been the case with the eastern caliphate, and was now so with the western. During the life of Alhakem's successor, the empire of the Omeyades was broken up into a hundred petty principalities; and their magnificent capital of Cordova, dwindling into a second-rate city, retained no other distinction than that of being the Mecca of Spain. These little states soon became a prey to all the evils arising out of a vicious constitution of government and religion. Almost every accession ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott

... Second-rate actors, like Theophilus Gibber, or gnats such as Murphy, and others, easily stung him. He was lampooned as "The Sick Monkey" on his return to the stage after having taken a much needed rest. But discretion and audacity seemed to go hand-in-hand, and the self-satisfied satirizer generally ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving

... record all the acts of spoliation committed by second-rate ambitious aspirants who hoped to come in for their share in the division of the Continent: The Emperor's lieutenants regarded Europe as a twelfthcake, but none of them ventured to dispute the best bit with Napoleon. Long would be the litany were I to enregister all the fraud and treachery which ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... take the lower and spurious forms of it for the higher and nobler, who think of love as being what, alas! it often is, in our imperfect lives, a fierce desire to have for our very own the thing or person beloved. But that is a second-rate kind of love. God's love is an infinite desire to give Himself. If only we open our hearts—and nothing opens them so wide as longing—He will pour in, as surely as the atmosphere streams in through every chink and cranny, as surely as if some great black rock that stands on the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... son of a worthy middle-class family of Autun, was an intelligent man carrying his head high in his collar. Small and slight, he redeemed his rather puny appearance by the precise and carefully dressed air that belongs to Burgundians. He accepted the second-rate post of Blangy out of pure devotion, for his religious convictions were joined to political opinions that were equally strong. There was something of the priest of the olden time about him; he held to the Church and to the clergy passionately; saw the bearings of things, and no selfishness marred ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac

... knows at first but one Gandharva (an inferior genius, mentioned in but one family-book), who guards Soma's path, and, when Soma becomes the moon, is identified with him, ix. 86. 36. As in the Avesta, Gandharva is (the moon as) an evil spirit also; but always as a second-rate power, to whom are ascribed magic (and madness, later). He has virtually no cult except in soma-hymns, and shows clearly the first Aryan conception of the moon as a demoniac power, potent over ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... without saying that Dan Ford will drive no second-rate horseflesh, any more 'n he will a second-class railroad. My! See 'em travel! At that gait they'll pick up the stretch 'twixt here and 'Roderick's' long before nightfall, or I'm ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond

... don't think things have been going extra well with the lady. She's spent most of what she got from the Gardner family, and she doesn't seem to have had the best of luck with it, either. I came across her by accident. She is staying at a flashy hotel, but it's in the wrong quarter—second-rate—quite second-rate." ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... Vauxhall Gardens;—I have not seen them—they are no longer in fashion—the theatres are quite vulgar—even the opera-house has sunk into a second-rate place of resort. Almack's balls, the Argyle-rooms, and the Philharmonic concerts, are the only public entertainments frequented by people of fashion; and this high superiority they owe entirely to the difficulty of gaining admission. London, as my brother says, is too rich, and grown ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt

... the necessity of making some concessions," said the king, "since he it is whose arms have sustained reverses. But Turkey may still remain a second-rate power, for I think that Russia will be satisfied with the Crimea and the Black Sea for herself and a guaranty of independent sovereigns for ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... it. In that head of his a flame burnt that was like an altar-fire, a miraculous and beautiful phenomenon, than which nothing is more miraculous nor more beautiful over the whole earth. Whence had it suddenly sprung, that flame? After years of muddy inefficiency, of contentedness with the second-rate and the dishonest, that flame astoundingly bursts forth, from a hidden, unheeded spark that none had ever thought to blow upon. It bursts forth out of a damp jungle of careless habits and negligence that could not possibly have fed it. There is little to encourage it. The very architecture ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... read another; found I could understand them perfectly; and that hour the poetry of the sixteenth century, hitherto a sealed fountain, became an open well of refreshment, and the strength that comes from sympathy. What if its second-rate writers were full of conceits and vagaries, the feelings are very indifferent to the mere intellectual forms around which the same feelings in others have gathered, if only by their means they hint at, and sometimes ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald

... authorship from foreign competition, but we cannot but think it unfair that British authorship should be protected (as it now practically is) at the cost of our own, and for the benefit of such publishers as are willing to convey an English book without paying for it. The reprint of a second-rate work by an English author has not only the advantage of a stolen cheapness over a first-rate one on the same subject by an American, but may even be the means of suppressing it altogether. The intellectual position of an American is so favorable for the treatment of European history as ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various

... extend my letter any further at present, but you shall soon hear from me again. You tell me I am a party man. I hope I shall always be so, when I see my country in the hands of a pert London joker and a second-rate lawyer. Of the first, no other good is known than that he makes pretty Latin verses; the second seems to me to have the head of a country parson and the tongue ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith

... fashionable, as Belgravia and Mayfair are fashionable at the present day—remained the locality of many important families, at the time when Mr. Theodore Hook was pleased to assume that no one above the condition of a rich tradesman or second-rate attorney lived in it. Of the lawyers whose names are mournfully associated with the square itself are Sir Samuel Romilly and Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd. In 1818, the year of his destruction by his own hand, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson

... reputation; and the character which he thus obtained, although at times purchased at great cost, eventually justified the soundness of his views. As the eminent Mr. Penn, the head of the great engineering firm, is accustomed to say, "I cannot afford to turn out second-rate work," so Mr. Maudslay found both character and profit in striving after the highest excellence in his productions. He was particular even in the minutest details. Thus one of the points on which he insisted—apparently a trivial matter, but in reality of considerable importance ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... dulness which encumbers the depth of Wilhelm Meister, and the cruel reserve which conceals from all but the intensest readers the meaning of Faust, have made him, in a great degree, an evil influence in European literature; and Evil is always second-rate. ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin

... St. Stephen. The spire has been long distinguished for its elegance and height. Probably these are the most appropriate, if not the only, epithets of commendation which can be applied to it. After Strasburg and Ulm, it appears a second-rate edifice. Not but what the spire may even vie with that of the former, and the nave may be yet larger than that of the latter; but, as a whole, it is much inferior to either—even allowing for the palpable falling off in the nave ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various

... thought of mine, and I didn't expect it to be accepted. My happiest thoughts are approved by myself alone, and so I'll keep 'em to myself. My second-rate thoughts are for others, over the heads of ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler

... furious resentment they rouse in the bosoms of the majority. Mistaken they may be; but why yell them down as knavish blasphemers? Our reverence, after all, is given not to an Elizabethan named William Shakespeare, who was born at Stratford, and married, and migrated to London, and became a second-rate actor, and afterwards returned to Stratford, and made a will, and composed a few lines of doggerel for the tombstone under which he was buried. Our reverence is given to the writer of certain plays and sonnets. To that ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm

... a voice. "Where do you suppose the second little blob of protoplasm with legs came from?" Dr. Andrews asked. "And the third? If that ape who found he could stand erect had walked lonesomely off into the sunset like a second-rate actor on a late, late show, where do you suppose ...
— The Sound of Silence • Barbara Constant

... experience, desiring to become a skilled machinist, may secure some experience with machinery in a second-rate factory during the rush season. Because of his incapacity, he is laid off as soon as the rush is over. Thereupon he applies as an experienced machinist in a better shop. If he is lucky, he may secure a position. ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott

... Metternichs, was there. I was glad to see him, though he is so dreadfully severe, solemn, and satirical. He found fault with everything; he thought the theaters in Paris horribly dirty, mal soignes, bad style, bad actors, orchestra second-rate, singers worse, public ignorant, etc. He smiled once with such a conscious look and scanned people's faces, as if to say, "I, Richard Wagner, have smiled!" But he can very well put on airs, for he is a genius. At Les Italiens, Patti, Mario, Alboni, and Delle Sedie are ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone

... smaller. Regarding the merits of the Cape scheme, I heard different views expressed. Nobody seemed opposed in principle to the division of the Legislature into two houses, but many condemned the existing Council as being usually composed of second-rate men, and apt to be obstructive in its tendencies. Some thought the Council was a useful part of the scheme of government, because it interposed delay in legislation and gave time for reflection and further debate. One point came out pretty clearly. No difficulty is deemed ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce

... on your tracks quick enough when you skipped from the Waldorf and blossomed out in a second-rate ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... every one believed, that "Sir William Wilde was a pithecoid person of extraordinary sensuality and cowardice (funking the witness-box left him without a defender!) and that his wife was a highfalutin' pretentious creature whose pride was as extravagant as her reputation founded on second-rate verse-making.... Even when a young woman she used to keep her rooms in Merrion Square in semi-darkness; she laid the paint on too thick for any ordinary light, and she gave herself besides all manner ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris

... the Blackfriars Theatre, but gradually rose to be actor and also adapter of plays. He was connected with the theatre for about five-and-twenty years; and so diligent and so successful was he, that he was able to purchase shares both in his own theatre and in the Globe. As an actor, he was only second-rate: the two parts he is known to have played are those of the Ghost in Hamlet, and Adam in As You Like It. In 1597, at the early age of thirty-three, he was able to purchase New Place, in Stratford, and to rebuild the house. In 1612, at the age of forty-eight, he left London altogether, ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn

... Some brightness had died in the air, some great thing had gone for ever from the world and left it empty. He found himself regarding the brilliant career which he had planned for himself with a sudden disfavour. It was only second-rate after all, that glittering old world of courts and legislatures and embassies. For a moment he had had a glimpse of the firstrate, and it had shivered his pretty palaces. He wanted now something which he did not ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan

... have to visit that second-rate musician in his studio again and give him a piece of my mind. In the meantime be calm, my child, be calm," said he, stroking her brown hair, "Old Carovius is ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... time the rest of the Dartons gave no sign. Old Con, I discovered, made occasional obscure trips to the city where he saw Lin Darton and Miss Etta, the former established as a second-rate real-estate dealer, the latter, as buyer for a large department store. Later it became more apparent that it was after these trips of his that he was able to purchase another horse. He quoted more and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... passable; pretty well, pretty good; rather good, moderately good; good; good enough, well enough, adequate; decent; not bad, not amiss; inobjectionable[obs3], unobjectionable, admissible, bearable, only better than nothing. secondary, inferior; second-rate, second-best; one-horse [U.S.]. Adv. almost &c.; to a limited extent, rather &c. 32; pretty, moderately, passing; only, considering, all things considered, enough. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... to London tomorrow, and intend to call at Albemarle Street.... I make no doubt that we shall be able to come to terms; I like not the idea of applying to second-rate people. I have been dreadfully unwell since I last heard from you—a regular nervous attack; at present I have a bad cough, caught by getting up at night in pursuit of poachers and thieves. A horrible neighbourhood ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles

... we are indebted to the Ptolemies for preserving to our times all the best specimens of Greek literature which have come down to us. This encouragement of letters, however, called forth no great original genius; but a few eminent men of science, many second-rate and artificial poets, and a host of grammarians ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... dear as the consequence of protective imposts. The Australian working man is a staunch protectionist, being somehow persuaded that it is essential to his interests that he should suffer for the benefit of his only enemy, the middleman. There are hundreds of restaurants in the second-rate streets of colonial towns where you may see painted up a legend, "All Meals—6d." For that small sum a man may have a sufficiency of hot or cold beef or mutton, bread, tea and a choice of vegetables. I can testify from personal knowledge that the meals ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray

... arrests the sight is an immense arch, painted in fresco, which runs the whole length of the nave. This fresco, unhappily much deteriorated by time, is the work of Matteo Preti, called the Calabrese; one of those great second-rate masters, who, if they have less genius, have often more talent than the princes of the art. What there is of science, facility, spirit, expression, and abundant resource, in this ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various



Words linked to "Second-rate" :   inferior



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