"Saturnine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 1558-67. Its language is much more English than that spoken and written in Scotland at the time. It is of the highest historical value, and in style terse, vigorous, with flashes of a quiet, somewhat saturnine humour, and of vivid description—the writing of a great man of action dealing with the events in which he had been the leading actor. His own figure and that of the Queen are those round which the drama turns. The leading features of his character were courage and intense earnestness. "Here," ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... the saturnine Guapo, laughed loudly at the counterfeit, and the vaquero himself was heard to chuckle through the long wool upon the breast. He did not lose time, however, but instantly prepared to set off. He needed no other preparation ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... confess that at times I felt a little jealous—jealous of a man named Hammond Brake, who lived in our village. He was a weird, saturnine fellow, who made no friends among the young men of the neighborhood, but who loved to go alone, with his books and his own thoughts for company. He was a studious and, I believe, a learned young man, and there was no avoiding the fact that he possessed considerable influence over Elsie. ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... he liked, they were not going to miss the opportunity of baiting him: and Mr. Chamberlain's pale face wore a deadlier pallor. There was even a colder and fiercer ring than usual in his clear, cruel voice; his always saturnine look deepened as he seemed to grasp beforehand his great and long delayed hour of vengeance. Mr. Balfour adopted the same tactics. In favour of 103 members? Not at all—the vote would mean nothing of that kind—it would simply mean that they were opposed to the plan of the Government; in short, ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... to the noble Captain's marvels with different feelings, as their temperaments were saturnine or sanguine. But none could deny that such things had been; and, as the narrator was known to be a bold dashing fellow, possessed of some abilities, and according to the general opinion, not likely to be withheld by any peculiar scruples of ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... gloom of the big cellar. The man who personated the inspector (he was no stranger to the part) was speaking harshly, and giving bogus orders to his bogus subordinates for the removal of his prisoners. Evidently nothing enlightening had happened so far. Horne, saturnine and swarthy, waited with folded arms, and his patient, moody expectation had an air of stoicism well in keeping with the situation. I detected in the shadows one of the Hermione Street group surreptitiously chewing up and swallowing a small piece ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... divided in their opinions concerning this action; some may applaud it perhaps as an act of extraordinary humanity, while those of a more saturnine temper will consider it as a want of regard to that justice which every man owes his country. Partridge certainly saw it in that light; for he testified much dissatisfaction on the occasion, quoted an old proverb, and said, he should not wonder if the rogue attacked them again ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... distant sea, but when it came to securing passage, and in feverish, nervous haste the Frenchwoman had packed her chosen belongings into the one little trunk the stage people would consent to carry, lo! there came to her a messenger from headquarters where Colonel Byrne, grim, silent, saturnine, was again in charge. Any attempt on her part to leave would result in her being turned over at once to the civil authorities, and Elise understood and raved, but risked not going to jail. Mullins, nursed ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... boy is a woman!" And though he had a saturnine and harsh countenance, his disposition was both merry and lenient. He teased her unmercifully, threatening to promote so fine a lad to a gentleman of his bed-chamber. He bade a woman bring some clothing suitable for a female ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... under the beetling brow of the falcons,—projecting, not in frown, but as roof, to shade the eye from interfering skylight,—gives them their apparently threatening and ominous gaze; the iris itself often wide and pale, showing as a lurid saturnine ring under the ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... living quarters behind, his enthusiasm knew no bounds. Leaving Chakawana and her mistress to chatter and clack in their patois, he inspected the premises inside and out, peering into all sorts of corners, collecting souvenirs, and making friends with the saturnine breed. ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... said, in soft, purring accents,—"that my friend, Dr. Mudley"—here he bowed toward the saturnine looking individual who had entered into conversation with Alwyn—"takes a very proper, and indeed a very lofty, view of the whole question. The moral sense"—and he laid a severely weighty emphasis on these ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... contempt which fell upon the Puritans as a deposed and unpopular party found stinging literary expression in one of the most famous of English satires, Samuel Butler's 'Hudibras.' Butler, a reserved and saturnine man, spent much of his uneventful life in the employ (sometimes as steward) of gentlemen and nobles, one of whom, a Puritan officer, Sir Samuel Luke, was to serve as the central lay-figure for his lampoon. 'Hudibras,' which appeared in three parts ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... in her hungry heart; such romance as the Sunday-groomed youths who frequented the house on the hill might never satisfy. She'd read books, all sorts of books, but one of the plains she loved. In it a somewhat saturnine horseman, a son of the sage-brush, unlettered but tutored much by life, had wooed and won a prim little schoolmistress from the East. Whether she went with the hope of emulation in her heart or not none can venture to say. Maybe it was in search of manhood, a ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... indeed could cursing have blighted it, to whom the game of detective seemed to possess the fascination of the chase; and so successful was he that his baffled opponents could not view the matter dispassionately, nor accept their defeat in sportsman-like spirit. I knew him later; he had a saturnine appearance, not calculated to conciliate a victim, but he liked a joke, especially of the practical kind, and for the sake of one successfully achieved could forgive an offender. Night surprises, inroads on the enemy's country, ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... the grave-clothes garb and swaddling barret, (Why purse up mouth and beak in a pet so, You bald, saturnine, poll-clawed parrot?) No poor glimmering Crucifixion, Where in the foreground kneels the donor? If such remain, as is my conviction, The hoarding does ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... and panting, on he ran, and on. His slobbering lips could only cry, "Christine! My Dearest Love! My Wife! Where are you gone? What future is our past? What saturnine, Sardonic devil's jest has bid us live Two years together in a puff of smoke? It was no dream, I swear it! In some star, Or still imprisoned in Time's egg, you give Me love. I feel it. Dearest Dear, this stroke Shall never part us, I will reach to ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... feeling in it: he attires himself in tawdry sentiment as in a flowered waistcoat. What a difference between him, at this period, and his contemporary Benjamin Disraeli, who indeed committed similar inanities, but with a saturnine sense of humor cropping out at every turn which altered the whole complexion of the performance. We laugh at the one, but ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... broad still moon stared down on them grim and cold, as if with a saturnine sneer at the whole humbug; and the silly birds about whom all this butchery went on, slept quietly over their heads, every one with his head under his wing. Oh! if pheasants had but understanding, how they would ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... cries, and groans went up from the maddened crew. You might have smiled to see men, light-hearted by nature, grow tragical as Crebillon's dramas, and pensive as a sailor in a coach. Hard-headed men blabbed secrets to the inquisitive, who were long past heeding them. Saturnine faces were wreathed in smiles worthy of a pirouetting dancer. Claude Vignon shuffled about like a bear in a cage. ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... conceived that, as the years passed by, as the period of the Truce grew nearer and the religious disputes became every day more envenomed, the government at Madrid should look on the tumultuous scene with saturnine satisfaction. There was little doubt now, they thought, that the Provinces, sick of their rebellion and that fancied independence which had led them into a whirlpool of political and religious misery, and convinced of their incompetence ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... not even by the Skipper, and the others watched him fascinated as he glared at his victim, and even the iron composure of the saturnine mate seemed to be moved partially aside. The Mexican began to whimper and moan as his eyes shifted to avoid the terrible ones of the Captain. He was not suffering any special violence, but a strange tremor filled the soul of the ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... temporary failure, were consistent characteristics of his generalship. The Vaalkranz operations are particularly difficult to defend from the charge of having been needlessly slow and half-hearted. This 'saturnine fighter,' as he had been called, proved to be exceedingly sensitive about the lives of his men—an admirable quality in itself, but there are occasions when to spare them to-day is to needlessly imperil them tomorrow. ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... son with tidings. Well, Jack, have you found your sister?" he added, addressing a dark and somewhat saturnine young man who now rode up to them from over ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... quite recovered himself, Mr. Hamlin lounged gracefully across the hall into the parlor. As he did so, a darkish young man, with a slim boyish figure, a thin face, and a discontented expression, rose from an armchair, held out his hand, and, with a saturnine smile, said:— ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... the old man, bitterly; "I heard. I don't wonder at a lad of spirit resenting my harsh, saturnine ways. What a life for a lad like you! Well, you've made up your mind, and I'll be just to you, my lad. You shall be started well. When would you like ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... gigantic stature, dressed in coarse canvas breeches, and with a handkerchief of gaudy dye twisted about his head. His bold features wore the usual Indian expression of saturnine imperturbability, and he half sat, half reclined upon the log as motionless as a piece of carven bronze, staring at Landless ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... came up to Gallipoli wharf in the night and not long after daylight we were shaken out of our blankets to receive the call of the mutessarif, or local governor, a big, slow, saturnine man in semi-riding-clothes, with the red fez and a riding-whip in his hand, who spoke only Turkish and limited himself to few words of that. He was accompanied by a sort of secretary or political director—a plump little man, with glasses and a vague, slightly ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... behooved him to oppose or to float upon. For him in all its essentials to-day had flowed quietly out of yesterday, and he lived unperplexed by fear of change. With something of a Southern gaiety of spirit, he was a merrier monarch than his dark-featured and saturnine descendant who bore the appellation. He was fond of martial sports, he loved to glitter at tournaments, his court was crowded with singing men and singing women. Yet he had his gloomy moods and superstitious despondencies. He could not forget that he had appeared in arms ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... into my mind, as I perused the fixed eyes and the saturnine face, that this was a spirit, not a man. I have speculated since, whether there may have ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... rather to like the saturnine candour of the soldier. "Well," he said, smiling, "I mustn't tell you anything of the man's identity, or his own story, of course; but there's no particular reason why I shouldn't tell you of the mere outside facts which I found ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... that the enemy I have most to guard against is myself. To pretend a belief in opinions I despise, to sit with saturnine gravity and nod approbation when my sides are convulsed with laughter, to ape admiration at what reason contemns and spurns, and to smooth my features into suavity while my heart is bursting with gall at the intercourse they continually hold, of becks and smiles and approving kind epithets, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... Helmsley's mouth hardened, and made him look almost cruelly saturnine. Yet he murmured ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... corner of Kearney and California streets. Thither, with some half-formed mission in his mind, Francisco took his way. A saturnine man took him up in a little box-like elevator, pointing ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... miles to the westward of Manatomana, on the island of Tagalag," he continued abruptly, with an air of saturnine disappointment in that there had been no discussion. "But first I must tell you of how I got to Tagalag. For reasons I shall not mention, by paths of descent I shall not describe, in the crown of my manhood and the prime of my devilishness in which Oxford renegades and racing ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... hands warmly with a very small and saturnine clergyman decorated with a shock of ebon hair, who was passing at ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... water, imparted to the water a considerable solvent power of action on the lead, which, in its natural state it did not possess. Hence the necessity of keeping leaden cisterns clean; and this is the more necessary, as their situations expose them to accidental impurities. The noted saturnine colic of Amsterdam, described by Tronchin, originated from such a circumstance; as also the case related by Van Swieten,[21] of a whole family afflicted with the same complaint, from such a cistern. And it is highly ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... occupied his imagination. The solitude of the sea intensifies the thoughts and the facts of one's experience which seems to lie at the very centre of the world, as the ship which carries one always remains the centre figure of the round horizon. He viewed the apoplectic, goggle-eyed mate and the saturnine, heavy-eyed steward as the victims of a peculiar and secret form of lunacy which poisoned their lives. But he did not give them his sympathy on that account. No. That strange affliction awakened in him a ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... under Chatham's nominal leadership—for during the next two years Chatham was absolutely incapacitated from all attention to business, his policy was reversed by his colleagues, and America taxed by Charles Townshend—he maintained an 'attitude of saturnine reserve,' amusing himself with landscape gardening at his villa at Highgate, doing its honours to Warburton, Hurd, Garrick and other friends, and corresponding among others with Stanislas Augustus, ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... never been known to smile, but at this speech he lifted one eyebrow and turned his saturnine face full at his superior, inquiry written upon every line of it. Captain Swarth was musing, however, and said no more; so the mate, knowing better than to attempt probing his mind, swung his long figure down the poop-ladder, and went forward to harass the ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... them grew saturnine at that announcement. For Chairman Presson was not recognized as the especial friend of prohibition by the fanatics ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... is totally his own. Where did he get his qualities? In the earlier times the fairies were supposed to have blessed him or cursed him in his cradle. A later age saw in the stars the rulers of man's destiny. He was jovial, or saturnine, or martial, depending on the planet which was in the ascendant at the time of his birth. Now we know "it is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings." Everything a man is comes to him from within or from without; from nature or from nurture; from his heredity ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... of the Nineteenth Century: the mother of these gosling affirmatives and negatives divorced from harmony and awakened by the slight increase of incubating motion to vitality. Victor and Colney had been champion duellists for the rosy and the saturnine since the former cheerfully slaved for a small stipend in the City of his affection, and the latter entered on an inheritance counted in niggard hundreds, that withdrew a briefless barrister disposed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... avaricious grasp. They were rich men already; but that fact did not gild the pill, for the possession of money does not detract from the desire for the acquisition of more. Mr. Addison was purple with fury, and Mr. Roscoe hid his saturnine face in his hands and groaned. Just then the Attorney-General rose, and seeing James Short coming forward to speak to his clients, stopped him, and shook ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... belong to the widow of his last descendant. This territory, nominally assigned for the maintenance of the troops under the adventurer's command, was valued in those days at six laths of rupees annually; so that the blood-stained miscreant, whose saturnine manners had given him a bad name, even among the rough Europeans of the Company's battalion, found his career of crime rewarded by an income corresponding to that of many such petty sovereigns as those of his ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... a strange, a sombre assembly. The chiefs were for the most part tall, well-built men, warriors and hunters from their youth up. There was something fierce and haughty in their bearing, something menacing, violent, and lawless in their saturnine faces and black, glittering eyes. Most of them wore their hair long; some plaited, others flowing loosely over their shoulders. Their ears were loaded with hiagua shells; their dress was composed of buckskin leggings and ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... Churchill, large and beaming, and Major Edward Churchill, thin and saturnine, rode away, and from between the white pillars Deb and Jacqueline watched them go. Colonel Dick's wife was an invalid, and lay always in the cool and spacious "chamber," between dimity bed curtains, with her ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... the malady of students. It has been the complaint of the good and the wise and the witty, and even of the gay. Regnard, the author of the last French comedy after Moliere, was atrabilarious, and Moliere himself saturnine. Dr. Johnson, Gray, and Burns, were all more or less affected by it occasionally. It was the prelude to the more awful malady of Collins, Cowper, Swift, and Smart; but it by no means follows that a partial affliction of this disorder is to terminate like theirs. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... noted that something was wrong: the grim, sinister faces of the men, constantly on guard, as though the old hacienda were in a state of siege; the altered disposition of his father, always given to gloomy moods, but lately doubly silent and saturnine, full of strange savagery and smouldering fire. Yes, somewhere in the back of his mind he had known the whole, shameful truth; had known the purpose of those silent, stealthy excursions, and equally silent returns,—and ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... of bank and stream as you glide by increases ten-fold when lying, hour after hour, with nothing to do but gaze at it. Under this trial the jolliest faces grow long and dismal; quiet men become dreadfully blue and the saturnine look actually suicidal. Even the negro hands talk under their breath, and the broad Yah! Yah! comes less frequently from ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... The Arab lifted an expressive shoulder. Carefully he removed the great white robe and handed it to an attendant. To another he gave the rose. Shane handed his coat and hat to a saturnine French corporal. Ahmet Ali took his shirt off. Kicked away his sandals. There was the dramatic appearance of an immense bronze torso. The Syrians smiled. The French soldiers looked judicially grave. Ahmet Ali ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... place on a remote, barren hillside, on the edge of a dead forest whose gaunt stems stood upright, or leaned against each other, a weird, unearthly company. As Dirke arrived with his second,—a saturnine Kentuckian, with a duelling record of his own,—he glanced about the desolate spot thinking it well chosen. Only one feature of the scene struck him as incongruous. It was a prickly poppy standing there, erect ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... and hat, throwing them over the back of a convenient chair, drew his fingers thoughtfully across his chin, and, standing at a little distance, regarded the girl with a shadow of a saturnine smile softening the hard line of ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... Arezzo, With the grave-clothes garb and swaddling barret (Why purse up mouth and beak in a pet so, You bald old saturnine poll-clawed parrot?) Not a poor glimmering Crucifixion, Where in the foreground kneels the donor? If such remain, as is my conviction, The hoarding it does you ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... fiercely, talking liberal sentiments in a cracked voice, and apparently feeling extreme pleasure in making the respectable middle classes stare at her in reverent amazement. Also, two Royal Academicians—a saturnine Academician, swaddled in a voluminous cloak; and a benevolent Academician, with a slovenly umbrella, and a perpetual smile. Also, the doctor and his wife, who admired the massive frame of "Columbus," but said not ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... it were, from his cradle, he seemed completely transformed by his Spanish tuition, for he was educated and not sacrificed by Philip. When he returned to the Netherlands, after a twenty years' residence in Spain, it was difficult to detect in his gloomy brow, saturnine character, and Jesuistical habits, a trace of the generous spirit which characterized that race of heroes, the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... barrens. Misty and wet was the wind, and cold with the kiss of many icebergs. Under a grey sky, glooming to purple, the gelid water writhed nakedly. Spectral islands elbowed each other, to peer at us as we flitted past. Still more wraithlike the mainland, fringed to the sea foam with saturnine pine, faded away into fastnesses of impregnable desolation. There was a sense of deathlike passivity in the land, of overwhelming vastitude, of unconquerable loneliness. It was as if I had felt for the first time the Spirit of the Wild; the Wild ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... dark, dismal, obscure, dim, shaded, lowering, overcast, lurid; melancholy, dejected, sad, despondent, pessimistic, disheartened, morose, crestfallen, glum, saturnine; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... than short, and though she was rather of the Diana or girlish type of goddess, she was by no means lank. Yet it was in this shape that I had always thought of him, perhaps through an obscure association with his fellow-villager, Deering. I had fancied him saturnine of spirit, slovenly of dress, and lounging of habit, upon no authority that I could allege, and I was wholly unprepared for the neat, small figure of a man, very precise of manner and scrupulous of aspect, who said, "How ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... was somewhat younger than Mr Foster, but rather more pale and saturnine in his aspect, here took up the thread of the discourse, observing, that the proposition just advanced seemed to him perfectly contrary to the true state of the case: "for," said he, "these improvements, as you call them, appear to me only so many links in ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... the Pantheon before, had never been inside a building with so great a dome. They stood under it now. She sent her glance up to its vast, dim, noble heights and brought it down to the saturnine, unsavory wreck at her side. She was regretting the impulse which had made her call out to him. What could she say to him now they were together? What word, what breath could be gentle enough, light enough not to be poison ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... is it? He's much lovelier than that. He's SO beautiful-mmm, Looloo, my sweet darling.' And she flew off to embrace the chagrined little dog. He looked up at her with reproachful, saturnine eyes, vanquished in his extreme agedness of being. Then she flew back to her drawing, and chuckled ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... And a saturnine smile, accompanied by the frowning bend of his white fuzzy eyebrows over his flashing black eyes, had produced such a withering, blistering effect on the soul of the unfortunate Englishman, whose practical ideas of utility had exceeded his prudence, that he had scarcely ever dared to look the ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... been of the minority in Congress and have seen the Democrats kicked about, trampled upon, and otherwise manhandled by Republicans, so that I must confess it now gives me a saturnine pleasure to see the Democrats in a position to do the same thing to ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... obediently to school, Mary noted that they carried no flowers to their dear teacher, but that Ben, the oldest pupil, twenty-one years old, six feet four inches in height and deeply saturnine in manner, carried a six-shooter in his cartridge-belt. The teacher felt that she was the last to deny a pupil any reasonable palliative of the tedium of class-hours—the nearness of her own school-days inclined her to leniency ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... Young Jack was brought forward to display his accomplishments, which he did in the most hang-dog fashion. The cleverness and good-looks and goodness of the girls were expatiated upon, but Margret gave no sign of interest. Once Fanny caught her looking at her with a queer saturnine glance, that made her feel all at once hot and uncomfortable, though she had felt pretty secure of her smartness before that. Margret's reception of Mrs. Jack's overtures did not satisfy that enterprising lady. When she had departed Mrs. Jack put her down as ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... corner, propped against the leather upholstery, was Mr. Cortlandt, as pale, as reserved, and as saturnine as at breakfast. He was sipping Scotch-and-soda, and in all the time that Anthony remained he did not speak to a soul save the waiter, did not shift his position save to beckon for another drink. Something about his sour, introspective aloofness displeased the onlooker, who shortly ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... a singularity rather than otherwise.[1124] Hickes, on the other hand, writes in 1701, as if those who refused to stand at the singing of psalms and anthems were for the most part 'stiff, morose, and saturnine votists.'[1125] In fact, High Churchmen insisted on the one posture, while Low Churchmen generally preferred the other; and so the custom remained very variable, until the High Church reaction of Queen Anne's time succeeded ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... cheat, thief, seducer, and murderer, as he casts his glance over the mental events which form his spiritual biography. Interspersed with serious histories and moralities like these, are others which embody the sweet and playful, though still thoughtful and slightly saturnine action of Hawthorne's mind,—like "The Seven Vagabonds," "Snow-Flakes," "The Lily's Quest," "Mr. Higgenbotham's Catastrophe," "Little Annie's Ramble," "Sights from a Steeple," "Sunday at Home," and "A Rill from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... always to the purpose; and almost all the anecdotes recorded of him, except by himself, are full of pride and sarcasm. He was so swarthy, that a woman, as he was going by a door in Verona, is said to have pointed him out to another, with a remark which made the saturnine poet smile—"That is the man who goes to hell whenever he pleases, and brings back news of the people there." On which her companion observed—"Very likely; don't you see what a curly beard he has, and what a dark face? owing, I dare say, to ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... to the cottage. His worst forebodings were realized. Stretched on the floor of their respective rooms, with big, gaping wounds in their chests and throats, lay his wife and children; whilst cross-legged, on a chest in the kitchen, his dark saturnine face suffused ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... for vindication only increased the ridicule of my appearance; and the strange quaintness of the costume totally obliterated every trace of any characteristic of the wearer, so infernally cunning was its contrivance. I don't think that the most saturnine martyr of gout and dyspepsia could survey me without laughing. With a bold effort, I flung open my door, hurried down the stairs, and reached the hall. The first person I met was a kind of pantry boy, a beast only lately emancipated from the plough, and destined after a dozen years' training ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... Spaniard, assuring him of his sympathies, and offering to render whatever assistance might be in his power. To which the Spaniard returned for the present but grave and ceremonious acknowledgments, his national formality dusked by the saturnine ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... can never straighten 'em out," cried his half-laughing, half-sobbing successor, his first sergeant of the year gone by. He stood there prisoner, held by the staff and special duty men. He could not get away. Even the saturnine officer in charge stood a smiling observer, and, catching the young graduate's eye, waved approval and encouragement, and so there was no help for it. With a voice half-broken through emotion, he gave ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... fullness of Lord Macaulay. It is not unreasonable even in that later generation which can still recall the frank but high-bred gaiety of the great Lord Derby, the rollicking good-humour and animal spirits of Bishop Wilberforce, the saturnine epigrams of Lord Beaconsfield, the versatility and choice diction of Lord Houghton, the many-sided yet concentrated malice which supplied the stock in trade of Abraham Hayward. More recent losses have been heavier ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... precipitate retreat out of the hut, not being aware at the time that by avoiding Sylla, they ran a great risk of failing into Charybdis. The widow Laddie, although huge, fat, and deaf, was by no means of a cold, phlegmatic or saturnine disposition—many a wistful look she cast towards Lander, but he either would not or could not comprehend their meaning, and to punish him for his stupidity, she took care that he should not comprehend any of the significant glances, which were cast towards him by the ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... probably the common room of the family, with the large kitchen fireplace, and flagged hearth, and wall cupboards, and the only furniture, the usual red backed splinter chairs and wooden table. A woman standing before the fire with a broom in her hand, answered Fleda's inclination with a saturnine nod of the head, and, fetching one of the red-backs from the ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... meal. The saturnine Hahn stood at my door with a weapon upon me while I ate. They were taking no chances—and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... saturnine man sat opposite me at table on board the steamer. During the entire run from Sandy Hook to Fastnet Light he addressed no one at meal-times excepting his table steward. Seated next to him, on the ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... knowing him. Heavily and somewhat clumsily built, of a vast, disjointed, rambling frame, he can still pull himself together, and figure, not without admiration, in the saloon or the ball-room. His hue and temperament are plentifully bilious; he has a saturnine eye; his cheek is of a dark blue where he has been shaven. Essentially he is to be numbered among the man- haters, a convinced contemner of his fellows. Yet he is himself of a commonplace ambition and greedy of applause. In talk, he is remarkable for a thirst of information, loving rather to hear ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... from the storm-swept sky. But nothing really interested him now. Since he had heard of Lilla's death, the gloom of his remorse, emphasised by Mimi's upbraiding, had made more hopeless his cruel, selfish, saturnine nature. He heard no sound, for ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... every church throughout the length and breadth of Italy; but when you have seen one you have seen them all, for they all have the same expression. The eyes are generally large and ill shaped, the nose is long, the face is wan and meagre, and there is a peevish and almost saturnine expression in the wooden features which shows but slight affection for the Christ-child, and which could have afforded but scant comfort to any who sought to find there a gleam of tender pity. These pictures were generally half-length, against a background ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... Mr. Fern also settled with his mortgage creditor, and went home at night happy that his head would again lie under a roof actually as well as in name his own. Notes which he had given came back to him soon after, and he burned them with a glee that was almost saturnine. Burned them, after looking at their faces and backs, after scanning the endorsements; burned them with his office door locked, using the flame of ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... ye enjoy it," shouted the saturnine Alfred Brangwen, and the men roared by now boldly, and the ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... fully,—a countenance which, though weather-worn and deeply furrowed, was a distinctly intelligent one, shrewd and thoughtful, with sundry little curves of humour lighting up its native expression of saturnine sedateness. ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... up, shaved and booted, but already an enthusiastic convert to the startling theory of a sensation journalist, and consequently an irritable observer of the saturnine countenance which darkened to a tinge of distinct amusement over the ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... stone walls with their windows and loopholes, its stockade of logs, its two little houses on either side, its barracks for the guard upon the ridge back of the gristmill, and its accustomed groups of grinning black slaves, all eyeballs and white teeth, of saturnine Indians in blankets, and of bold-faced fur-traders. Beyond this place I had never been, but I knew vaguely that Schenectady was in that direction, where the French once wrought such misery, and beyond ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... a back number of "Punch," and reads the advertisements with deep interest. Meanwhile, the Loquacious Assistant has bowed out the Sympathetic Customer, and touched a bell. A Saturnine Assistant appears, still masticating bread-and-butter. The Second Customer removes his hat, revealing a denuded crown, and thereby causing surprise and a distinct increase of complacency in the Grizzled Gentleman, who submits himself to the Loquacious Assistant. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 19, 1892 • Various
... heedless mothers bounded from rock or stump like balls of india-rubber. They were extremely careless mothers. Even Junkie, as he stood paralysed with terror and surprise, could not avoid seeing that. The troop was led by a great blue-faced old-man baboon with a remarkably saturnine expression. On reaching the top of the rock which the leopard had just vacated, the old man called a halt. The others came tumbling awkwardly towards him on all-fours, with the exception of several of the youngsters, who loitered behind to play. ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... (mania, melancholia, paranoia, circular insanity, dementia); mental alienation in conjunction with neurosis (epilepsy, hysteria, progressive general paralysis); alienation resulting from toxic influences (alcoholism, including forms produced by indulgence in absinthe and coca, saturnine encephalopathy, pellagra). An investigation is made into the etiology of these various forms with special ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... the tall figure standing in front of me and saw that he was watching the retreating figure of his henchman with a saturnine smile on his face. I thought swiftly. If I could yell a warning to Lucky, he could bolt the door of the pilot's chamber and then set the ship down at the Trans-Space base. It was the only way to save Lucky and ...
— Larson's Luck • Gerald Vance
... letters." May I ask Aristarchus how he would render "Sal'am" (vol ii. 24), which apparently he would confine to "Arabic MSS."(!). Or would he prefer A(llah) b(less) h(im) a(nd) k(eep) "W.G.B." (whom God bless) as proposed by the editor of Ockley? But where would be the poor old "Saturnine" if obliged to do better than the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... But he found a saturnine pleasure in being old Anthony's Nemesis. He meant to be that. He steadily widened the breach between Lily and her family, and he watched the progress of her affair with Louis Akers with relish. He had not sought this particular ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Eighteenth Century rum and whiskey flasks recently collected by Mrs. Norris. There were, additionally, a porcelain image of two farmers, dos a dos, one with rosy cheeks and flashing eye labelled "water," and the other, haggard and ill-favoured, labelled "gin"; also a brace of saturnine china cats. Above the mantel stretched an expanse of oak panelling which supported the portrait of Mrs. Norris's great-great-grandfather in a heavy gilt frame. The old gentleman, who looked amiably out from his starched neckcloth, had been a delegate to the Continental Congress and ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... weather had taken the kinks out of Judge Gatchell's joints, he came to see us—a tall, thin, punctilious, saturnine old gentleman with frosty Scotch eyes and the complexion of a pair of washed khaki trousers. Chaos reigned in Hynds House then, and he was forced to pick his way, like an elderly and cautious cat, between piled-up ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... cleft stick from the Dodger; and, advancing to Oliver, viewed him round and round; while the Jew, taking off his nightcap, made a great number of low bows to the bewildered boy. The Artful, meantime, who was of a rather saturnine disposition, and seldom gave way to merriment when it interfered with business, rifled Oliver's pockets with ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... gone perhaps fifty yards when Henry gave a signal to stop and Jim and Tom rested on their oars. Then they heard a burst of firing behind them, and a smile of saturnine triumph spread slowly but completely over ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... in her saturnine, brooding way the warmth of April sunshine and the stirring greenery of awakening life now beginning to soften the brown austerity of the dead winter earth. Beside her kitchen wall the pink cones of rhubarb were ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... while his senses retained their powers. His reason, instead of giving way, like those of the men around him, rather brightened under the excitement, as if it foresaw the danger it incurred, and the greater necessity there existed for vigilance. Though born in a southern clime, he was saturnine and cold when unexcited, and such temperaments rather gain their tone than lose their powers by stimulants under which men of feebler organizations sink. He had passed his life amid wild adventure and in scenes of peril which suited such a disposition, and it ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... too ruthlessly. The climate had played Old Gooseberry with the fine primordial stock. Physically, the Suffolk Punch had degenerated into the steeplechaser; psychologically, the chasm between the stolid English peasant and the saturnine, sensitive Australian had been spanned with that facilis which marks ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... the self-styled servants of the Highest Constrained by earthly duress to embrace Mighty imperiousness as it were choice, And hand the Italian sceptre unto one Who, with a saturnine, sour-humoured grin, Professed at first to flout antiquity, Scorn limp conventions, smile at mouldy thrones, And level dynasts down to journeymen!— Yet he, advancing swiftly on that track Whereby his active soul, fair Freedom's child Makes strange ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... her pretty well and bade her think no more about the man, I very soon had reason to be of her opinion. Two or three days later, as I was sawing planks in the yard, to make a trellis, that saturnine person came in, resplendently dressed, and filled the wholesome place with the reek of his essences. He saluted me with extravagant politeness, telling me that he had words for my private ear which he was sure would interest me. When I took little or no notice ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... accosted by one Nonno, a sour, saturnine personage. "I know nobody here; not a soul have I seen before; I wonder who they all are." And just then he was familiarly nodded to by nine worthies abreast. Whereupon Nonno vanished. But after going the rounds of the company, and paying court to many, he again sauntered ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... standing out, in proof that it had long been used as a pen-rest; his nose pronounced and Semitic in outline; his eyes, big, projecting and yellowish brown; his chin, retreating; his complexion, dark and saturnine. ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... at first, somewhat saturnine and silent. The fact was that, for many days, he had been fasting from the luxuries dearest to every American heart—whisky and tobacco; for all money and clothes had been taken from him at the Provost Marshal's office, and never were returned: in these ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... pure-bred Arab of stately appearance and saturnine expression, who wished to add ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... quality. For this purpose, he had hired a small apartment near the Temple. He was, nevertheless, almost sorry for what he had done, when he observed that his removal appeared to give some pain to John Christie, and a great deal to his cordial and officious landlady. The former, who was grave and saturnine in every thing he did, only hoped that all had been to Lord Glenvarloch's mind, and that he had not left them on account of any unbeseeming negligence on their part. But the tear twinkled in Dame Nelly's eye, while she recounted the various improvements she had made in the apartment, of express ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... Blake." To the rear Speed saw three other men—an Indian, tall, swart, and saturnine, who walked with a limp; a picturesque Mexican with a spangled hat and silver spurs, evidently the captor of Lawrence Glass on the evening previous; and an undersized little man with thick-rimmed spectacles and a heavy-hanging holster from which peeped ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... the shabby dress and down-cast mien of the little weaver that appealed to the farmer's saturnine humour. He measured with his eye first of all the man, and next the girl; then, slapping his knee with his right hand, exclaimed: "Well, Tom, t' lass is thine; an' ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... deeply stirred some readers and bored others. Young Boswell, not unduly saturnine in temperament, was profoundly impressed by them and determined on their account to seek out the author. Taine, a century later, discovered that he already knew by heart all they had to teach and warned his readers away from them. Generally speaking, they were valued as they ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson
... are indebted for it to the Quarterly Reviews. Surely there can be nothing in mere size, abstractly considered—there can be nothing in mere bulk, so far as a volume is concerned which has so continuously elicited admiration from these saturnine pamphlets! A mountain, to be sure, by the mere sentiment of physical magnitude which it conveys, does impress us with a sense of the sublime—but no man is impressed after this fashion by the material grandeur of even ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... the others, some, like Jonson, Fletcher, Massinger, had the art without the power; others, like Chapman, Dekker, Webster, had flashes of the power without the art. But there is something in the whole crew, jovial or saturnine, which is found nowhere else, and which, whether in full splendour as in Shakespere, or in occasional glimmers as in Tourneur or Rowley, is found in all, save those mere imitators and hangers-on who ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... was despatched to Merton School, and ranked, according to his merits, as lag of the penultimate form. When he came home for the Christmas holidays he was more saturnine than ever; in fact, his countenance bore the impression of some absorbing grief. He said, however, that he liked school very well, and eluded all other questions. But early the next morning he mounted his black pony and rode to the Parson's rectory. ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Champe. There entered in response a young man, large and muscular of build, saturnine of countenance; a grave, thoughtful, silent person, safe to trust with a secret, for his words were few, his sense of honor high. In all the army there was not his superior in courage and persistence in anything ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... of a temper admirably adapted to the circumstances in which he was placed. Of a cold and saturnine, rather than an arden disposition, he was never either so much elevated by good fortune or depressed by bad, as to lose for an instant the full possession of all his faculties. He saw that immediate escape was ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... The former he affirms to be the choice of the French people, and the latter he insists is necessary to the salvation of these kingdoms. This last point a little inoffensive gentleman among us, of a saturnine aspect but simple conceptions, cannot comprehend. 'I will tell you, sir—I will make my propositions so clear that you will be convinced of the truth of my observation in a moment. Consider, sir, the number of trades that would be ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... in torment. It was like the sudden opening of a gigantic blast-furnace, and in that instant I saw him vividly—his thin, saturnine face, his damp black hair pushed sleekly back, his lips twisted to a cruel smile, his eyes craftily alert, as if to some ambushed danger continually at hand. He was watching me with a sort of malicious relish in the shock ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... as he had foretold. She said nothing, and if the glance he felt upon him was of inquiry he did not look about to meet it. He was still staring a saturnine Pasht out of ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... there, I'll drink him a full bumper', filling his glass till it ran over. Rochambeau, with great politeness, was still so French, that he would every now and then be touching on points that were improper, and a breach of real politeness. Washington often checked him, and showed in a more saturnine manner, the infinite esteem he had for his gallant prisoner, whose private qualities the Americans admired even in a foe, that had so often filled them with the most cruel alarms." Many years later, when Cornwallis was governor-general of India, he sent a verbal message ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... the same time she could not help feeling that he was eminently a man to whom she would turn in danger or trouble. Girl though she was, she could not mistake his great admiration of her, and by degrees, as the winter wore on, she trusted him more, though he still repelled her a little, for his saturnine calm was opposed to her violent vitality, as a black rock to a tawny torrent. Griggs had neither the manner nor the temper which wins women's hearts as a rule. Such men are sometimes loved by women when their sorrow has chained them to the rock of ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... irresponsible band of ten or twelve thousand mountaineers gathered from the wilds of Virginia, North Carolina and Kentucky and Tennessee. They were moon-shiners, feudists, hilly-billies, small farmers and basket-makers, men of lean and saturnine appearance, some of them horse thieves, pirates of the forest who cared little for the laws of God or man and fought as naturally as ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... head the "Grand Wizard of the Empire." It was all in sport—a great jest, or at the worst designed only to induce the colored man to work somewhat more industriously from apprehension of ghostly displeasure. It was a funny thing—the gravest, most saturnine, and self-conscious people on the globe making themselves ridiculous, ghostly masqueraders by the hundred thousand! The world which had lately wept with sympathy for the misfortunes of the "Lost Cause," ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... wife. Not only that, Hugo Mandle, at forty, had no thought of marrying. Not that there was anything austere or saturnine about Hugo. He made you think, somehow, of a cherubic, jovial monk. It may have been his rosy rotundity, or, perhaps, the way in which his thinning hair vanished altogether at the top of his head, so as to form a tonsure. ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... and part of the compact bony structure of the 2d. On examining the sore, Ormangey saw a bony sequestrum which appeared to keep it open. He extracted this, and, until cicatrization was complete, he dressed the stump with saturnine cerate. Some months afterward Ormangey saw with astonishment that the nail had been reproduced; instead of following the ordinary direction, however, it lay directly over the face of the stump, growing from the back toward the palmer aspect of the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... shrank away, the colour flaming into his disgusted, saturnine face. He did not speak to her again until he said good-bye ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... compliments in the manner of the eighteenth century. She answered them with composure, for she was sure of her French, sure of herself—the princess had not annihilated her. Her aunt, accompanied by the marquis, crossed to her, and the old nobleman amused her with his saturnine remarks. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker |
