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More "Decorous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... am to take it for a month's warning, of course." Matthew understood well enough that this was merely an expression of his master's displeasure, and, being anxious for his master's welfare, knew that it was decorous that some decision should be come to at once as to Miss Thoroughbung, and that time should not be lost in his own little personal quarrel. "She is waiting, you know, sir, and she looks uncommon irascible. There is the other lady left outside ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... three Miss Stimpsons remain unmarried, we cannot say, nor would it be decorous to enquire; but hearing them drop a hint now and then about visits, "a considerable time ago," to Brighthelmstone and Bath, we are led, however reluctantly in the case of ladies now evangelical, to conclude, their attention has formerly been directed to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... Ponsonby had intended to say, but there was something about the young man that touched her exceedingly; even when fresh from a very civil and decorous combat with his father, and a ripping-up of all the ancient grievances of the married life of their two relations, rendering wider than ever the breach between the houses of ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... as these desert men were magnificently primitive. Gone was all the veneer of civilization, the humanity which bids a man respect a fellow-creature's life. He was no longer the educated, travelled man of the world, who earned his living in honourable and decorous ways. He was the cave-dweller, the man of another and more barbaric age, who defended his stronghold because it held his woman, the woman for whom he would fight to the very end, and count his life ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... next day, in the decorous Times (Great—Guns— How the headlines ran!) In spite of the kings and the wars and the crimes, There were five ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... Mrs. Jaynes, informing her of his good fortune, and suggesting that Laura should at once bestir herself in preparations for their wedding, in order that this blissful event might precede his ordination. Then, after waiting for the lapse of that period of decorous delay which immemorial usage has prescribed in such cases, he indited an epistle to the church in Walbury, stating, in proper and accustomed form, that his native humility inclined him to refuse their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... it—of some defunct transgressor. A dusky tumult would flap its wings from one house to another. Then—the morning light still waxing stronger—old patriarchs would rise up in great haste, each in his flannel gown, and matronly dames, without pausing to put off their night-gear. The whole tribe of decorous personages, who had never heretofore been seen with a single hair of their heads awry, would start into public view with the disorder of a nightmare in their aspects. Old Governor Bellingham would come grimly forth, with ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... honestly prouder Had she left it alone, and found out only powder. 100 My Lord! when I think of our labours and cares Who rule the Department of foreign affairs, And how with their libels these journalists bore us, Though Rage I acknowledge than Scorn less decorous; Yet their presses and types I could shiver in splinters, 105 Those Printers' black Devils! those Devils of Printers! In case of a peace—but perhaps it were better To proceed to the absolute point of my letter: For the deep wounds of France, Bonaparte, my master, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... a distinguished family-tree. ESTO PERPETUA! To have had somebody for a great-grandfather that was somebody is exciting. To be able to look back on long lines of ancestry that were rich, but respectable, seems decorous and all right. The present Earl of Warwick, I think, must have an idea that strict justice has been done him in the way of being launched properly into the world. I saw the Duke of Newcastle once, and as the farmer in Conway ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... who were of very convivial habits, chanced to meet on the street at nine o'clock in the morning after an evening's revel together. The major addressed the colonel with decorous solemnity: ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... became a habit to do so. Wolff too, though not a boaster, was yet persecuted into a habit of egotism both in his prefaces and in his ordinary conversation, and the same holds good of the founder of the Brunonian system, and of his great namesake Giordano Bruno. The more decorous manners of the present age have attached a disproportionate opprobrium to this foible, and many therefore abstain with cautious prudence from all displays of what they feel. Nay, some do actually flatter themselves, that they abhor all egotism, and never betray it either in their writings or ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... fragments Infinite capacity for pecuniary absorption Leading motive with all was supposed to be religion Past was once the Present, and once the Future Sages of every generation, read the future like a printed scroll Sewers which have ever run beneath decorous Christendom Wrath of that injured personage as ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... any alien race, either allied to or under the protection of that world-famous commonwealth. In the speeches of the foremost orators and statesmen among the conquerors of the then known world, the allusions to subject or allied aliens are distinguished by a decorous observance of the proprieties which should mark any reference to those who had the dignity of Rome's [249] friendship, or the privilege of her august protection. Observations, therefore, regarding individuals of rank ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... invitations; the quietest possible party with Amy Loring (who was so anxious to meet him because he had known Jim), two days afterwards a dinner for two in Berkeley Square, followed by Mrs. O'Rane's house-warming, later still a decorous and rather dull dinner ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... general riff-raff of the place. Although the crowd was not so great, the meeting strongly reminded me of those scenes of infamy and disgrace in England—public executions; the conduct of the assembled throng on this occasion being the more decorous of the two. Precisely at twelve, the mob made a rush towards one corner of the open space, from which direction I saw the culprit advancing, in charge of thirty or forty well-dressed people (the committee appointed for the occasion being among the number). He was a stout ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... of imprisonment was ended. She received a good character in the governor's books; she had picked her daily quantity of oakum, had never deserved the extra punishment of the treadmill, and had been civil and decorous in her language. And once more she was out of prison. The door closed behind her with a ponderous clang, and in her desolation she felt as if shut out of home—from the only shelter she could meet with, houseless and penniless as she was, ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Morgue could evince less sign of resuscitation than those respectable defuncts! For, indeed, Jackeymo had been less thrifty of his apparel—more profusus sui—than his master. In the earliest days of their exile, he preserved the decorous habit of dressing for dinner—it was a respect due to the Padrone—and that habit had lasted till the two habits on which it necessarily depended had evinced the first symptoms of decay; then the evening clothes ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... said the Doctor. "Faith, I forgot that. I was going to High Mass meself, but I ran over to see ye. Yes, it's his turn. Sure, the poor man puts me to sleep, and sleepin' in the House of God is neither respectful nor decorous. But what is a ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... wits; one of those stale interludes of prematurely old young men, which separate the serious epochs of history. Oscar Wilde was its god; but he was somewhat more mystical, not to say monstrous, than the average of its dried and decorous impudence. The two survivals of that time, as far as I know, are Mr. Max Beerbohm and Mr. Graham Robertson; two most charming people; but the air they had to live in was the devil. One of its notes was an artificial reticence ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... novelty of Burns's advent had worn off by his second winter in Edinburgh, and, though it may be a weakness, novelty always counts for something in human affairs. Then, again, the quiet decorous men of Blair's circle knew more of Burns's ways and doings than at first, and what they came to know was not likely to increase their desire for (p. 091) intimacy with him. It was, it seems, notorious that Burns kept that formidable memorandum-book already ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... this. Plenty of people, the whole of Market Square and East Elgin, a good part, too, probably, of the Town Ward, were unaware of his arrival; but for the little world he penetrated he was clothed with all the interest of the great contingency. His decorous head in the Emmetts' pew on Sunday morning stood for a symbol as well as for a stranger. The nation was on the eve of a great far-reaching transaction with the mother country, and thrilling with the ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... signifies the draught or pull of the horses." The phrase "a prince's pelf" is reprobated, because pelf means properly "the scraps or shreds of taylors and of skinners." He gives strict rules for the decorous behaviour of ambassadors and all who address themselves to princes, being himself a courtier, and having probably exercised some diplomatic function. "I have seen," says he, "foreign ambassadors in the queen's presence laugh ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... abetting and encouraging the urchins in their misbehaviour. Master Pope, alone of all his fellows, maintained a suitable deportment. As he sat demurely behind me I observed him in the act of imitating my gestures of reproof to his less decorous comrades—a manifestation of the emulative spirit which ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... innocence lit up our eyes, and our hearts laughed. Her cheeks were deliciously overcoloured. We stole I know not what from the night and the day, and conventional circumstances, and rallied Captain Bulsted, and behaved as decorous people who treat the night properly, and live by rule, do not quite do. Never since Janet was a girl had I seen her so spirited and responsive: the womanly armour of half-reserve was put away. We chatted with a fresh-hearted natural young creature who forfeited ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... decisive for freedom. Even the strongest conservatives would have been "Free-Soilers,"—not only those who are conservatives in virtue of their prudence, moderation, sagacity, and temper, but prejudiced conservatives, conservatives who are tolerant of all iniquity which is decorous, inert, long-established, and disposed to die when its time comes, conservatives as thorough in their hatred of change as Lamennais himself. "What a noise," says Paul Louis Courier, "Lamennais would have made on the day of creation, could he have witnessed it. His first cry to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... was full of subdued bustle and decorous excitement; and all the bustle and all the excitement were ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... the grievance of the Stamp Act. Nine out of thirteen of the colonies sent their delegates to this congress, and fourteen strong resolutions were passed condemnatory of the bill; and three petitions were concocted—one to the king, another to the lords, and a third to the commons. From the decorous manner adopted in its proceedings little alarm was excited, but by it an important point was gained to the Americans—a closer connexion was established by the meeting among the leading men of the various ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... organized a church as ever trod shoe-leather." Our elegant Unitarian friends have probably quite forgotten, and will hardly thank us for reminding them, that there ever was a time when they "put mouth to ear, and hand to pocket, and said, St-boy!" Our decorous Calvinistic D.D.s would scarcely recognize their own dogmas at the inquiry-meeting, where "language of simplicity came along, and they'd see me talking 'way down in language fit for children.... And then the language of free agency and ability came along ... and they'd stick up their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... of admirers, for the years had made her more rather than less desirable in herself, and men had grown used to her independence among them. Moreover, she was a "catch," a maid with money, and this may have influenced the decorous, well-considered offers she had about this time from farmers inland as well as on the Marsh. She refused them decidedly—nevertheless, it was obvious that she was well pleased to have been asked; these solid, estimable proposals testified ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... Loftus, in the innocence of his heart, announced his song and its theme, was thoroughly uneasy, and would have given a good deal that he had not helped that simple youth into his difficulty. But things must now take their course. So amid a decorous silence, Dan Loftus lifted up his voice, and sang. That voice was a high small pipe, with a very nervous quaver in it. He leaned back in his chair, and little more than the whites of his upturned eyes were visible; and beating time upon the ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... young soldier's passing away is not untimely. The longest life can accomplish only benefaction and fame, and the life that has accomplished these has reached life's ultimatum. It is a fair and decorous fate to devote length of days to humanity, but he who gathers up his life with all its beauty and happiness and hope, and lays it on the altar of sacrifice,—he has done all. A century of earthly existence only scatters its benefits one by one. The martyr binds his in a single bundle ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... sequence, Mr. Freely's business, in spite of prejudice, started under favourable auspices. For Mrs. Chaloner, the rector's wife, was among the earliest customers at the shop, thinking it only right to encourage a new parishioner who had made a decorous appearance at church; and she found Mr. Freely a most civil, obliging young man, and intelligent to a surprising degree for a confectioner; well-principled, too, for in giving her useful hints about choosing sugars he ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... home in the crisp starlight gurgling and leaning over their saddle-horns in spasmodic fits of laughter. But when they trooped into the bunk-house they might have been deacons returning from prayer meeting so far as their decorous behavior was concerned. Happy Jack was in bed, covered to his ears and he had his face to the wall. They cast covert glances at his carroty top-knot and went silently to bed—which ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... offend, will be pleased to recollect that this deviation from the usual dinner hour took place in the long vacation; that it was introduced for the convenience of study, and that the doctor, could he so far have forgotten his dignity as to have joined the four o'clock party, would have found decorous manners, and more than one ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... the conventional, aristocratic set. The disordered golden hair proclaimed it, while in the depths of the fine, blue eyes manifold changing lights told of a capriciousness out of the pale of a stiffly decorous and well-contained caste. ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... Horace in question, I must explain that Herbert was merely being facetious. My life is a most orderly and decorous one. But my wife, unfortunately, lacks a sense of humor, and I felt that the remark might have ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... bodies of people assembled. Democrat and Republican, Administration and anti-Administration, were commingled. The President spoke everywhere in an aggressive and disputatious tone. It has been the decorous habit of the Chief Magistrate of the country, when upon a tour among his fellow-citizens, to refrain from all display of partisanship, and to receive popular congratulations with brief and cordial thanks. ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... opinion respecting him, rejecting, certainly with good reason, the fanatical panegyrics of some French and English writers of the last century. Upon the whole, we are inclined to believe that Epicurus was an apathetic, decorous, formal man, who was able, without much difficulty, to cultivate a measured and even habit of mind, who may have occasionally indulged in sensual gratifications to prove that he thought them lawful, but who generally preferred, as a matter of taste, the exercises ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... to fill an unexpected place, or make a decorous entry afterward, to play accompaniments. Fortunately Kitty Meryon sang, in a pinched little soprano, not nearly so pretty as her ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... and her friend Miss Tressilian home from the play and after leaving them had walked about the streets, had roamed back to his sister's house, in a state of exaltation the intenser from his having for the previous time contained himself, thinking it more decorous and considerate, less invidious and less blatant, not to "rave." Sitting there in the shade of the box with his companions he had watched Miriam in attentive but inexpressive silence, glowing and vibrating inwardly, yet ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... to the more easy-going Britisher, yet it is not rudeness, and the Canadian is an extraordinarily orderly person, with a discipline that springs from self rather than from obedience to by-laws. It may be this that makes a Canadian crowd so decorous, even at the moment when it ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... daughter, but there was no other exhibition of sentiment. The judges did most of the talking, addressing questions to the defendants, who made a few short answers; the rest of the assemblage observed a decorous silence. There ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... Lalage hurried into the restaurant; scrutinized the tables; and selected the best lighted one. The waiter, a decorous elderly man, approached with some severity of manner, and handed a bill of fare to Marmaduke. She snatched it from him, and addressed the ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... men whether wishing or not to become purchasers. She goes abroad unveiled; dances with the other sex; mingles fearlessly though without effrontery amid the groups of men; kisses the hand of the stranger before seating herself on the divan by his side; and, though truly modest and decorous in her deportment, she yields her cheek, almost without a blush, to the lips of the warrior who, returning from the slaughter of the enemy, feels entitled to claim those favors which in less fortunate lands can only be stolen by swains the most dexterous ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... would use to another after offering some deep insult. Jo dropped a kiss on the top of Mr. Laurence's bald head, and ran up to slip the apology under Laurie's door, advising him through the keyhole to be submissive, decorous, and a few other agreeable impossibilities. Finding the door locked again, she left the note to do its work, and was going quietly away, when the young gentleman slid down the banisters, and waited for her at the bottom, saying, with his most virtuous expression of countenance, "What ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... fact. This should be borne in mind. The whole of this scene of the quarrel between Mowbray and Bolingbroke seems introduced for the purpose of showing by anticipation the characters of Richard and Bolingbroke. In the latter there is observable a decorous and courtly checking of his anger in subservience to a predetermined plan, especially in his calm speech after receiving sentence of banishment compared with Mowbray's unaffected lamentation. In the one, all is ambitious hope of something yet to come; ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... simplicity of dress and the gentle manners, especially among the female portion of the community, are marked features. No stranger can fail to notice the low, sympathetic tones in which the women always speak; but though decorous and worthy, it must be admitted that the Norwegian ladies, as a rule, are not handsome. One sees here none of the rush and fever of living which so wearies the observer in many parts of Southern Europe. ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... together in the big pew, and Alma Spencer, who sat behind them, declared that they held each other's hands all through the service. This lasted until spring; then came a sensation and scandal, such as decorous Heatherton had not known since the time Isaac Allen got drunk at Centreville Fair and came ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... told me that in the morning Miss Mavis had paid her a long visit. She knew nothing, poor creature, about anything, but her intentions were good and she was evidently in her own eyes conscientious and decorous. And Mrs. Nettlepoint concluded these remarks with ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... answer that they were ready to obey it, and that he would go and give account to the Lord Governor of what had been done. And the Abbot went accordingly to Court, and informed the Cardinal Governor of the translation which had been made; and that the tomb of the Cid had been removed to a place more decorous, and nearer the High Altar, and answering the site where King Don Alfonso VI. had commanded him to be placed in his ivory chair before he was first interred; and where the vault had been made wherein he had lain ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... Abraham Peeley, of course. There's a great deal of feeling about it in Sparta—the first Mrs. Snider was so popular, you know —and it isn't a full year. People say it isn't the marriage they object to under such circumstances, it's—all that goes before," said Miss Kimpsey, with decorous repression, and Elfrida burst into a peal of laughter. "Really," she sobbed, "it's too delicious. Poor Mr. and Mrs. Snider! Do you think people woo with improper warmth—at that ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... Celtic Twilight—still there are few greater attractions than that of open healthy laughter of the contagious sort; and it would be black ingratitude not to pay tribute to the authoresses of Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.—a book that no decorous person can read with comfort in a railway carriage. These ladies have the keenest eye for the obvious humours of Irish life, they have abundance of animal spirits, and they have that knack at fluent description embroidered with a wealth of picturesque details that is shared by ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... neither very important nor very extensive; but such as it is, happily for the reputation of the writer's taste, if not for her sanity, I believe it is in my power to show the trifle I thought it decorous to write, in reply to your own letter. Here is a copy," she added, opening what in fact was a ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... But, besides these sterling qualities, he was gifted with irrepressible spirits, a good voice and ear, and a special delight in the exercise of them. To county magnate or parson or stranger seated by him on the box he could be as decorous as a churchwarden, and talk of politics or cattle or county business with all due solemnity. But he was only at his best when "the front" was occupied by boys, or at any rate with a strong sprinkling of boys, amongst whom he was quite at his ease, and who were even more eager to hear than he to sing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... is of stone, and has an immense gable roof, slated, and studded with eaved windows. A shortish square basement is at one end, from which springs a tall octangular steeple. Within all is quiet and decorous. The church is paved with stone, and there is a double row of pews down the centre. But is this a Protestant Church? Most assuredly; Lutheran. You are astonished at the crosses, the images, the altar? True! there is something ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... whom probably not a Dissenter could be found in the whole realm. Both Catholics and Dissenters were alike held in scornful contempt or indifference, and had inferior social rank. On the whole, these aristocrats were a decorous class of men, though narrow, bigoted, reserved, and proud, devoted to pleasure, idle, extravagant, and callous to the wrongs and miseries of the poor. They did not insult the people by arrogance or contumely, like the old Roman nobles; but they were ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... engagement; fortune was faithful to the Portuguese; and late in the afternoon, the capable judge rode off homeward with his portfolio under his arm. No court could have been more equally and decently conducted; judge, parties, lawyers, and police were all decorous and competent; and but for the plaintiff, the business ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was a well-formed man of the world, easy in his exterior, but conducting himself with great decorum. He everywhere produced a very agreeable impression. Prince Esterhazy, the Bohemian envoy, was not tall, though well formed, lively, and at the same time eminently decorous, without pride or coldness. I had a special liking for him, because he reminded me of Marshal de Broglio. Yet the form and dignity of these excellent persons vanished, in a certain degree, before the prejudice that was entertained in favor of Baron von Plotho, the Brandenburg ambassador. ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... March 3.—OLD MORALITY, decently dressed in black, stood at table to-night, reading through the space of an hour his discourse on Report of Parnell Commission. A decorous, almost funereal function. J. G. TALBOT enjoyed it thoroughly. "So like being in church on Sunday afternoon," he said. "Wish OLD MORALITY could have seen his way to put on white neck-tie, and brought his notes bound up ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... exactly alike, being meagre, dilapidated, white-haired old ladies, with the same beaked noses and receding chins; both wore rusty black frocks, each of which was decorated with a white cameo brooch; both walked with the same propitiatory shuffle. They were like a couple of elderly, moulting, decorous hens who, in spite of their physical disabilities, had something of a presence. This was obtained from the authority they had wielded over the many pupils who had passed through ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... hand; the sweetmeat to which our neighbor helps herself is just the one we desired, but we are careful to give no sign of this. All the movements of our body are not merely those dictated by impulse or weariness; they are the correct expression of what we consider decorous. Without impulses we could take no part in social life; on the other hand, without inhibitions we could not correct, ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... Whiston became sufficiently agitated to lose his decorous gravity, he began to splutter, and at such moments he was not impressive. Rose kept her eyes cast down. She felt her strength once more, the strength of a wholly reasonable and half-passionate revolt against that tyrannous propriety ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... toleration of the errors of royalty might—and, as it happened, did compromise; while, on the other side, there were the obligations of filial duty, which, as in this instance of the India Bill, made desertion decorous, at a time when co- operation would have been most friendly and desirable. There was also the perpetual consciousness of being destined to a higher station, in which, while duty would perhaps demand an independence of all ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... with the result that his bolt into the Salles de Jeu and his difficult extrication from them by the brawny, but liveried officials was fast becoming one of the events of the day. Sometimes Tinker would make his bolt from the outermost portal; sometimes, with the decorous air of one going to church, he would join the throng filing into the concert room, and bolt from the midst of it. The process of expulsion was always conducted with the greatest courtesy on either side; for his bolt had become an agreeable ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... girl's desires—and apparently her talent—seemed to lie in the direction of the stage. Though she had declared she had no patience with Pritchard notions and pretensions, she couldn't help feeling that it was hardly decorous for the last of the Pritchards to become an actress. Moreover, she feared that Elsie's capability did not point to what is called the legitimate drama; it looked from the first as if she would make straight for vaudeville and, perhaps, never ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... entirely new fields of knowledge, such as have been opened to us since the birth of modern science, this notion seems childlike and pathetic. But it was eminently characteristic of the eighteenth century, an age of staid and decorous subsidence from the energetic restlessness of the seventeenth—an age in which men eschewed revolution and innovation, and devoted themselves assiduously to conserve, consolidate, polish, refine, and make the best of what ...
— The evolution of English lexicography • James Augustus Henry Murray
... of delegates of forty-five Reform Societies, seems to have pursued dully decorous methods until 6th November, when citizens Hamilton Rowan and Simon Butler came to represent Ireland; Joseph Gerrald and Maurice Margarot were the delegates from the London Corresponding Society; and Sinclair and York from the Society for ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... with flowers. By the tongs and shovel lay a pair of riding boots, still so wet and mud-spattered that he must have pulled them off within the hour. A decanter of rum was near him on a stand. On his knee was a volume of Rabelais, which was affording him decorous amusement. ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... her need she did not pick them up, for the gleaning assigned to the poor by law does not refer to quantities of more than two ears inadvertently dropped at one time. (50) Boaz also admired her grace, her decorous conduct, her modest demeanor. (51) When he learned who she was, he commended her for her attachment to Judaism. To his praise she returned: "Thy ancestors found no delight even in Timna, (52) the daughter of a royal ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... Fanny herself was not prone to rate the privilege very highly. Possibly, two very elderly maiden step-aunts are discouraging to the homing instinct; the fact remained that as long as the youngest Miss Fitzroy possessed the where-withal to tip a housemaid she was but rarely seen within the decorous precincts of Craffroe Lodge. ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... his new hack, he rode him behind his mistress in the park, and nothing could be more decorous than the behaviour of both horse and groom. It was early, and in Rotten Row, to his delight, they met the lady of rebuke. She and Florimel pulled up simultaneously, greeted, and had a little talk. When they parted, and the lady came to pass Malcolm, whom ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... quite wrong. No well-brought-up and decorous Englishman had any right to feel so annoyed with another man's face that he longed to hit it with a stick. But Vane was beginning to doubt whether he had been well brought up; he was quite certain that he was ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... course, you are only a child yet, but I trust if I have the care of you, which I fully expect to have—for it is scarcely likely you will for a single moment win this ridiculous Scholarship—I trust that I shall send you out to your father a well-mannered and decorous woman. I have the greatest dislike to the manners of the present day, and the new sort of girl who is growing up so rapidly in our midst ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... the "foreign element," the obnoxious visitor at the beauty shop, who was so sorely and fatally stage struck that she had seriously disturbed the peace of decorous ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... soon recovered its good looks, and became as glossy and sleek as ever ... but for a whole year it never indulged in any other sound than a grave and decorous croak.... One bright summer morning ... the bird advanced with fantastic steps to the door of the Maypole, and then cried "I'm a devil!" three or four times, with extraordinary rapture ... and from that time constantly practised and improved himself in the vulgar tongue.—C. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... And a decorous and seemly scene they stepped in upon. Uncle Tucker sat back of a small table, which was placed at one side of the wide open fireplace, in which crackled a bit of fragrant, spring fire. His Bible and a ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... be permitted," she said, rising, "before I leave the room to speak to my confessor, who is waiting for me, on a matter of business"—this was an excellent sham, and sounded decorous and natural—"may I be permitted, Count Nobili, to congratulate you on your approaching marriage? I do not know Enrica Guinigi, but I ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... functionaries should make decorous behavior their guiding principle, for decorous behavior is the main factor in governing the people. If superiors do not behave with decorum, inferiors are disorderly; if inferiors are wanting in proper behaviour, offences ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... to caper with a sort of decorous hilarity before their teacher. " Look at the sausage, professor. Did you ever see such sausage " Isn't it salubrious " And see these other things, sir. Aren't they curious " I shouldn't wonder if they were alive. Turnips, sir? No, sir. ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... on everything. If two intrepid persons meet, and neither will give way, the slightest difference may cause a shower of abuse, then fisticuffs, and, finally, a fatal blow: so that it would really be a more decorous proceeding to omit the intermediate steps and appeal to arms at once. An appeal to arms has its own special formalities; and these have developed into a rigid and precise system of laws and regulations, together forming the most solemn farce there is—a regular temple of honor ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... and restrained to your heart's content. Do not imagine I have any intention of putting servility and canting hypocrisy permanently out of place, or of filling up with courage and sense those offices which naturally devolve upon decorous imbecility and flexible cunning: give us only a little time to keep off the hussars of France, and then the jobbers and jesters shall return to their birthright, and public virtue be called by its own name of fanaticism." Such is the advice ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... checked themselves, and passed the back of their hands across their mouths to compose that unlucky feature, and then some would try to fix their eyes on the rafters of the ceiling, in a manner which was decorous if rather abstracted from the business in hand. Most of these were young farmers, with whom Philip had nothing in common, and from whom, in shy reserve, he had withdrawn himself when he first came in. ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... more guests arrived, mostly of the ancient order, and a little too much of one sort to please a lover of variety. The advent of Mr. Frump, with all his impulsive occidental peculiarities of character fresh upon him, was a decided relief to the decorous company already assembled in the parlors. In less than ten minutes, he was on terms of off-hand friendship with everybody, and was telling strange stories of Western adventure to a group ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... himself on the body, sobbing violently; he kissed his mother's rigid face, and wept so that great tears fell on the dead woman's face like drops of water, and, naturally, Madame Caravan, junior, showed a decorous amount of grief, and uttered feeble moans as she stood behind her husband, while ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... or freed slaves, and the like. With women of this description the easy morality of the Greeks allowed of the greatest license, especially to young unmarried men. The ancient writers, therefore, of the New Comedy paint this mode of life with much less disguise than we think decorous. Their comedies, like all comedies in the world, frequently end with marriages (it seems this catastrophe brings seriousness along with it); but the marriage is often entered upon merely as a means of propitiating a father incensed at the irregularities of some illicit amour. It sometimes ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... but only one female came near us—a meagre old woman who darted past with an axe in her hand, and sprang up into one of the huts like a harlequin, showing at the same time more of her long shrivelled shanks than was strictly decorous. Besides the usual petticoat reaching to the knee, made of a grass or some leaf—perhaps of the pandanus—cut into long shreds, this dame wore a somewhat similar article round the neck, hanging over the breast and shoulders, leaving the arms free. An axe was ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... Streaming tears, sobbing tears, throes, choked with wild cries; O storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps along the beach! O wild and dismal night storm, with wind—O belching and desperate! O shade so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance and regulated pace, But away at night as you fly, none looking—O then the unloosen'd ocean, Of tears! ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... I informed Betty, there had been others daily—most decorous. They were excellent friends. Neither seemed to perceive anything absurd in the situation. Even Marigold looked on it as a ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... yon? Lordships; there is nothing sinister which can happen to you, in which we shall not be involved; and, if it should so happen, that we shall be subjected to some of those frightful changes which we have seen; if it should happen that your Lordships, stripped of all the decorous distinctions of human society, should, by hands at once base and cruel, be led to those scaffolds and machines of murder upon which great kings and glorious queens have shed their blood, amidst the prelates, amidst the nobles, amidst the magistrates, who supported ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... yourself the modest pride of its composer; unless indeed, it had been copied from an older inscription in an English yard, and transplanted through the heart and brain of some settler whose thoughts were ever flitting back. Thus it runs in decorous metre:— ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... hesitated. He was not prepared to find that this last resting-place of his people had something to do with taxes and tithes, and that a certain material respectability and security attended his votive sigh. God and the reigning sovereign of the realm preserved a decorous alliance in the royal arms that appeared above the official notices. Presently he pushed open the door gently and entered the nave. For a moment it seemed to him as if the arched gloom of the woods he had left behind was repeated ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... from the Duchesse de Berry, to Louise, Queen of Spain, each has left behind her a record almost as scandalous as that of her father. It was, in fact, an era of corruption in high places, when, in the reaction that followed the dismal and decorous last years of Louis XIV.'s reign, Pleasure rose phoenix-like from the ashes of ruin and flaunted herself unashamed in every guise with which vice could ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... from well-considered motives of public policy, was favoring his honorable recall. But he allowed a decorous interval of more than three years to elapse in which to terminate his affairs, and to take a deliberate departure from that French embassy to which the Advocate had originally promoted him, and in which there had been so many years of mutual benefit and confidence between the two ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... for shuffling off the trammels of his ecclesiastical habit. He was destined to appear in public at least once more, not only in the black coat and white tie of his everyday professional costume, but even in the flowing snowy surplice of a solemn and decorous spiritual function. The very next morning's post brought him a little note from Ernest Le Breton specially begging him, in his own name and Edie's, to come down to Calcombe Pomeroy, and officiate as parson at their ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... a choice piece of work for her, a silk quilt. No one had gone insane over crazy work then. This was shapely, decorous diamonds, with the name of the wearer, or a date, embroidered on each block. The Morgans had given her pieces from Paris and Venice and Holland, and even Hong Kong. Some were a hundred and more years old, and were ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... made. Behind the decorous figure of the attentive shopman that I had the honour of showing you at first, rises a vision of a nightly struggle, of two dark figures and a machine in a dark road,—the road, to be explicit, from Roehampton ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... by that body, and listened to with respectful attention. One would have thought the gentlemen to whom the arguments and appeals of such women were addressed would have found it in their hearts to make some reply, even while disclaiming the official character of their act; but they preserved a decorous and non-committal, if not incurious silence, and the ladies withdrew. The press said, the morning after their visit: "The gentlemen were all interested and amused by the errand of the ladies." The morning following, the constitutional ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... Sussex Square. My mother took him down by the Brighton coach, and he entered the school on November 10, 1836.[50] The school, says Fitzjames, was in many ways very good; the boys were well taught and well fed. But it was too decorous; there was no fighting and no bullying and rather an excess of evangelical theology. The boys used to be questioned at prayers. 'Gurney, what's the difference between justification and sanctification?' 'Stephen, prove the Omnipotence of ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... great awe of her mother," wrote Simond, the traveller, "but was exceedingly familiar with and extravagantly fond of her father. Madame Necker had no sooner left the room one day, after dinner, than the young girl, till then timidly decorous, suddenly seized her napkin, and threw it across the table at the head of her father, and then flying round to him, hung upon his neck, suffocating all his reproofs by her kisses." Whenever her mother returned to the room, she at once became silent ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... account of a different story circulated by some gentlewomen of our acquaintance, a little too close to the text. The part erased contained merely some Turkish names, and circumstantial evidence of the girl's detection, not very important or decorous." ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... a favourite haunt, towards midnight, of several of the younger members of the party at the Castle, who loved to find relaxation from the decorous gravities of polished life in the fumes of tobacco, the inspiration of whiskey toddy, and the infinite amusement of Lucian Gay's conversation and company. This was the genial hour when the good story gladdened, the pun flashed, and the song sparkled with jolly mirth ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... death, Mr. Nelson was a deputy to the triennial meetings of every General Convention, and became the principal spokesman in the House of Deputies. This body is not always as decorous and staid in its deliberations as the House of Bishops, but Mr. Nelson at all times commanded a respectful hearing among the deputies. He came to be one of the leaders who, as a veteran church-paper correspondent put it, "could read the signs of the times." His ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... round this circle. The owner of this horse has refused $15,000 or 3000l. for it. It is said to be the fastest horse in America, and a beautiful animal, but most of the horses were very fine. The people seemed to enjoy themselves much, and all appeared most quiet and decorous, but the whole population surprised us in this respect. We have seen but one drunken man since we landed. Even in our new cabaret, the opening of which might have given occasion for a carousal, every thing was most ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... always began with the "HOO-ray" and "BR-R-RA-vo" of greeting; after which we were to inquire, "Who's with us to-day?" Whereupon he would make known the character in which he elected to be received for the occasion. If he announced himself as "Mister Swift," everything was to be very grown-up and decorous indeed. Formalities and distances were observed; and Mr. Corley Linbridge (an elderly personage of great dignity and distinction as a mountain-climber) was much oftener included in the conversation than Bill Hammersley. If, however, he declared himself to ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... gathered from this that the occasion was made solemn and oppressive with weight of ceremony, as when a temple was erected or as when a tabu chief walked abroad, and all men lay with their mouths in the dust. On the contrary, it was a time of joy and decorous exultation, a time when in prayer-songs and ascriptions of praise the poet ransacked all nature for figures and allusions to be used ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... that union with mortals runs in families or clans, if one may so describe their curious relationships to each other. There were five sisters of the wood in one of the Western departments of France (Lot-et-Garonne, I think), who all married men: two of them married two brothers. Apart they led the decorous lives of the French middle class, but when they were together it was a sight to see! A curious one, and to us, with our strong associations of ideas, that tremendous hand which memory has upon our heart-strings, ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... there was nothing in the Doctor's appearance or behavior that seemed to warrant any of these idle stories. It is the way with many hopeful widowers (as everybody knows) to become, after an interval of decorous sadness, more brisk and gay than even in their youthful days; bestowing unusual care upon their attire and the adornment of their persons, and endeavoring, by a courteous and gallant demeanor towards every ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... greater part of a long table to themselves, and Zene sat among them. These men the landlady called the boarders: she placed Grandma Padgett's family at the other end of the table; it seemed the decorous thing to her that a strip of empty table should separate the ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... possible persons, beginning with the Metropolitan and ending with riding-masters and midwives! Then began the visits to acquaintances and strangers! And here is one point which must be noted: in making his calls he did not cringe and did not importune; but, on the contrary, he behaved himself in decorous fashion, and even wore a cheery and pleasant aspect, although an ingrained odour of liquor accompanied him everywhere—and his Oriental costume ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... please to bear in mind, that Samuel B. Comstock, the ringleader of the mutiny, was an officer, (being a boat-steerer,) and as is customary, ate in the cabin. The conduct and deportment of the Captain towards this individual, was always decorous and gentlemanly, a proof of intentions long premeditated to destroy the ship. Some of the crew were determined to leave the ship provided she touched at Fannings Island, and we believe had concerted a plan of escape, but of which the perpetration of a deed chilling to humanity, precluded ...
— A Narrative of the Mutiny, on Board the Ship Globe, of Nantucket, in the Pacific Ocean, Jan. 1824 • William Lay
... the voices of tired and lounging soldiers. A traveling kitchen had just been set up near by. From it arose a blend of smells that were mighty tempting to a healthily hungry dog. Thither, at a decorous but expectant pace, ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... game very earnestly. Only Lois, waiting by the tray, ready to hand the cake, was silent. It was a peculiarity of Ashurst that even after childhood had passed young people were still expected to be seen, and not heard; so her silence would only have been thought decorous, had any one noticed it. By and by, when she saw she was not needed, she slipped out to the front porch, and sat down on the steps. Max followed her, and thrust his cold ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... rectangular compartments—enhances this effect while the addition of swirling trees studded with flowers imbues each wild encounter with a surging vegetative rhythm. Krishna is no longer the tepid well-groomed youth of Mughal tradition, but a vigorous Rajput noble expressing with decorous vehemence all the violent longings denied expression by the Rajput moral code. Such pictures have a lyrical splendour, a certain wild elation quite distinct from previous Indian painting and we can only explain these ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... go from Lucerne in a decorous little steamboat down the pleasant Vierwaldstaettersee, or Lake of the Four Forest Cantons, with the sloping hills on either side, and the green meadow-patches and occasional house among the trees, you come to a sudden turn where the scenery changes swiftly, and pass between ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... cock-fighting, puppet pwes, or plays in the Burmese character. These were acted by little figures wonderfully manipulated by strings behind the scenes; the holder of the string also supplied any amount of dialogue (not always of the most decorous description), and also all the latest and coarsest jokes from the bazaar. To the Europeans these entertainments offered scanty amusement, but to natives they proved enthralling. An audience would sit spell-bound and motionless for a whole ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... even Mr. NORRIS himself could say offhand what its number is. Sara and her circle are eminently characteristic of their creator. You have here the same well-bred well-to-do persons, pleasantly true to their decorous type, retaining always, despite modernity of clothes and circumstance, a gentle aroma of late Victorianism. Perhaps Sara is the most immediate of Mr. NORRIS'S heroines so far. Her money-bags had been filled ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... am non-literary and non-decorous (let me at least be human, and pay part of my debt) in this word about Tennyson. I want him to realize that here is a great and ardent Nation that absorbs his songs, and has a respect and affection ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... pardon," Harry said, as there burst from the lips of the little man an exclamation which was somewhat less decorous than would have been expected from a personage so gravely clad. The little man stared Harry in the face, and uttered another exclamation, this time of surprise. Harry, to his dismay, saw that the man with whom he had come in contact was the preacher ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... genius saved him from driving the indignant Titania desperate at that critical moment by any ill-advised rejoicings; and the sight of Nettie's agitation so far calmed Dr Rider that he made the most sober and decorous congratulations to the sister-in-law, whom for the first time he felt grateful to. Perhaps, had he been less absorbed in his own affairs, he could scarcely have failed to remember how, not yet a year ago, the shabby form of Fred lay on ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... mid-day meal is served for the whole household, as of old, with the salt-cellar in the middle, but with a far larger company above it than when first we saw it. The seven young folks preserve a decorous silence, save when Fraulein Ermentrude's cookeries are good-naturedly complimented by her father, or when Baron Friedmund Maximilianus breaks out with some wonderful fact about new armour seen at Ulm. He is a handsome, ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not cannibals, and behaved in an extremely decorous manner when they visited our ship. A finer, more stalwart, proud, self-possessed, and dignified lot of savages—if they could be so termed—I had never ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... even than that with which he had bent his ear to Valentin de Bellegarde's last words. Every now and then, as his companion looked up at him, she reminded him of an ancient tabby cat, protracting the enjoyment of a dish of milk. Even her triumph was measured and decorous; the faculty of exultation had been chilled by disuse. She presently continued. "Late one night I was sitting by the marquis in his room, the great red room in the west tower. He had been complaining a little, and I gave him a spoonful of the doctor's dose. My lady ...
— The American • Henry James
... mounting these steps without falling. I first rested my hand upon the wall and then endeavored to lift my feet upon the second step, but I had not the strength for such an exertion. I thought of crawling to the door, but this was hardly a decorous exhibition for the most fashionable street of the city, filled just then with gayly-dressed ladies. Why I did not ask some gentleman to aid me I can not now recall. I only recollect waiting for several minutes in blank dismay over the seeming impossibility of ever entering the door before ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... Botticelli's "Spring"—the three oil portraits occupying the large spaces; the spindle-legged chairs and tables, the tea service in the corner, the tall bronze lamp by the piano, the neat little grate-hearth, with its mantel of marble; the ormolu clock, all the decorous and decorated gentility which marked the irreproachable correctness of whoever had furnished the apartment. Dark and heavy hangings depended in front of a double door leading into another room beyond. Equally ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... night there was an entertainment—half concert, half theatricals, wholly dilettante—at the Malkasten, the Artists' Club. We, as is the duty of a decorous English family, buried all our private griefs, and appeared at the entertainment, to which, indeed, Adelaide had received a special invitation. I was going to remain with Adelaide until Sir Peter's return, which, we understood, was to be in the course of a few weeks, and then ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... his last gape over his 'Chronicle,' concluded that the couple had surely had their swing of private conversation for one night, and resolved to curtail the courtship to the shortest decorous bounds. So Mr. Baring looked at his watch, and said quite lovingly to Gervase: "My boy, when I do act the family man, I do the thing thoroughly, by supping in my dressing-room at eleven. What! you ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... of the Six Acts. He then told the House that, unless the executive power were reinforced, all the institutions of the country would be overturned by popular violence. Was he then accused of threatening the House? Will any gentleman say that it is parliamentary and decorous to urge the danger arising from popular discontent as an argument for severity; but that it is unparliamentary and indecorous to urge that same danger as an argument for conciliation? I, Sir, do entertain great apprehension for the fate of my country. I do in my conscience ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... probably no stranger to the neighbourhood, having lived within thirteen miles of it when he dwelt at Horton. Ellwood could not welcome him on his arrival, being in prison on account of an affray at what should have been the paragon of decorous solemnities—a Quaker funeral. When released, about the end of August or the beginning of September, he waited upon Milton, who, "after some discourses, called for a manuscript of his; which he delivered to me, bidding me take it home ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... crowds, with their bewildering blend of glittering toilet, deferential movement, and flattering speech, he knew no more of the inner realities of life than the young girl knows of it from a series of dances, flirtations, and afternoon teas. This polite and decorous, yet dazzling mask had been drawn between him and the actualities of existence, presenting itself to view again and again, and concealing its essential sameness in the pomp and circumstance with which it was attended. At these functions thousands of brilliant and distinguished ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... the body, sobbing violently; he kissed his mother's rigid face, and wept so, that great tears fell on the dead woman's face, like drops of water, and, naturally, Madame Caravan, Junior, showed a decorous amount of grief, and uttered feeble moans, as she stood behind her husband, while ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... of those dreams which, even when they fade away, leave a feeling of supernatural voluptuousness, which a man runs after for the remainder of his life. A single kiss had been enough. Never had rendezvous been spent in a manner more decorous or chaste, or, perhaps, more coldly, in a spot of which the surroundings were more gruesome, in presence of a more hideous divinity; for the mother had remained in Henri's imagination like some infernal, cowering thing, cadaverous, monstrous, savagely ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... unquestionably superior to those of Don John; whose name had been surrounded with such splendor by the World-renowned battle of Lepanto. Moreover, he possessed far greater power for governing men, whether in camp or cabinet. Less attractive and fascinating, he was more commanding than his kinsman. Decorous and self-poised, he was only passionate before the enemy, but he rarely permitted a disrespectful look or word to escape condign and deliberate chastisement. He was no schemer or dreamer. He was no knight errant. He would not have crossed seas and mountains to rescue a ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... and the Duke saw with dismay the position of the Prussians on a slope that must expose them to the full force of Napoleon's cannon—or, as he whispered to Hardinge, "they will be damnably mauled if they fight here."[486] In more decorous terms, but to the same effect, he warned Gneisenau, and said nothing to encourage him to hold fast to his position. Neither did he lead him to expect aid from Quatre Bras. The utmost that Gneisenau could ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... and cravats, and oars, and canes disposed about it tastefully, souvenirs of various persons, times, and places, and talked of the original owners in a way that made Ethel's blue eyes open their widest when she came to be admitted there, that decorous young person not being used, as she frankly said, to hearing "a person of the opposite sex" called "a perfectly lovely fellow," and his nose pronounced "a dream," though not in the sense of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... I observed another monk in the sacristy—a tall, lean, black-bearded man, in whose presence my old friend with the snuff-box suddenly became quite decorous and devotional to look at. I suspected I was in the presence of the father superior, and I found that I was right the moment he ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... the carved figures of Alonzo Cano, Montanez, and Hernandez, may be regarded as authorized effigies of "Our Lady of the most pure Conception;" in other words, as embodying, in the most attractive, decorous, and intelligible form, an abstract theological dogma, which is in itself one of the most curious, and, in its results, one of the most important of the religions phenomena connected with the artistic ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... the king of France or the king of Spain. He was determined to break down the power of the Old Whigs and the system of cabinet government, and as the Old Whigs had been growing unpopular, it seemed quite possible, with the aid of the Tories, to accomplish this. George was quite decorous in behaviour, and, although subject to fits of insanity which became more troublesome in his later years, he had a fairly good head for business. Industrious as a beaver and obstinate as a mule, he ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... grown crimson, and his decorous blood tingled to his finger-tips. To hear a young lady talk in such an open way was terrible. Why, in reading the Decalogue from the altar, Mr. Meekin was accustomed to soften one indecent prohibition, lest ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... and no fun!" said Gervase gayly. "And the possibility of a highly decorous marriage with a curate or a bankclerk, followed by the pleasing result of a family of little curates or little bank-clerks. It is ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... feeling the first time she knelt with the family to hear Mr. Gurney ask for a "particular blessing to rest on our young neighbor, who worships with us this morning." The charm of it all seemed to be in the feeling of reality there was about it, the decorous behavior of the little ones showing that it meant more than outside form to them. None of the Gurney family was excused from this morning worship unless sickness made it impossible to appear, and it soon became a regular thing for Dexie Sherwood to ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... little to do with the life of the other. The native population centres wholly in the west half; we drift first over to this, in our afternoon walk, and scan its appearance and people with inquisitive though decorous interest. This section, comprising much of what was the old town, has evidently aimed to reproduce it; it has been rebuilt with persistent regard to the former municipal type, and shows to-day a curious combination ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... with feelings similar to our own. Let us suppose that some work of Zeuxis or Pheidias has been transported to their shores, and that they are compelled to acknowledge its excellence from its own point of view—its colouring true to nature, though not to their own type—its unveiled forms decorous, though not conforming to their own standard of decorum. Might they not still, and justly, tax it on its own ground with some flaw or incongruity, which proved the artist to have been human? And may not a stranger, judging you in the same way, recognize in you one part ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... suggest. Rumour soon began to play with her name, more freely and more critically than even it had done with that of her mother, and her reputation extended over a wider area; for with an elderly lady as chaperon—a stiff, decorous person, admirably adapted for the office, who saw everything and said nothing—she travelled a good deal in foreign countries, from England to Egypt. But she so arranged her movements that she always contrived to spend the summer in Ancona and the ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... you about that slippery-ellum!" came in a positively triumphant voile to greet them as they stepped out of the front door. Mrs. Peavey was ascending the steps all out of breath, her decorous hat awry, and her eyes snapping with excitement. "Course I don't think this can be no positive cure and like as not you'll wake up to-morrow with your voice all gone dry again, but it were ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... far, indeed, did the unhappy creature's Abandonment extend, that those who were about her could with difficulty persuade her to keep any Garments upon her body, and were forced with Stripes and Revilings to force to a decorous carriage the gentle Lady who had once been the very soul and mirror of Modesty. But in process of time these dreadful furies and rages left her, and she became calm. She was still beautiful, albeit her comeliness ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... topsy-turvy straining after new effects, which is so wearisome to those who love the racy naturalism of Parson Adams and Edie Ochiltree. But let us have no pessimism also. The age is against the romance of colour, movement, passion, and jollity. But it is full of the romance of subtle and decorous psychology. It is not the highest art: it is indeed a very limited art. But it is true art: wholesome, sound, and cheerful. The world does not exist in order to supply brilliant literature; and ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... one of his majesty's justices of the peace, you are a brother magistrate, and you are a Doctor of Divinity; you owe a duty to your country, and you owe a duty to yourself. Is it wise, is it decorous, that one of the Quorum should go a-gipsying? Is it possible that you can credit this preposterous tale? Brother Masham, there will be a rescue, or my name ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... I had inadvertently committed, Chrysantheme takes up her piece of wood, putting in its place my snake-skin drum; I shall therefore be in the middle between the two. It is really more correct, decidedly more proper; Chrysantheme is evidently a very decorous ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... natural, and that Italian statesmen with their germanophile leanings should readily fall in with his scheme is not to be wondered at. The Kaiser's ambassador proposed that in the case of war each contracting party should respect the property of the other. This formula sounds decorous. Its meaning is profound. A treaty embodying these stipulations was agreed to and secretly signed by Prince von Buelow and Baron Sidney Sonnino, whose admiration for Germany embodied itself in all the more important ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... hadn't ought to! It's ridiculous!" she protested. But she suffered herself to be thrust out of the room, grateful for exile, in which she could collect her scattered wits and set herself to realize the fact that had dispersed them. It was decorous, also, for her to leave Marcia alone with Mr. Hubbard, far more so now than when he was merely company; she felt that, and she fumbled over the dressing she was sent about, and once she looked ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... Boboli, where she hadn't been yet. I've done what I could to make the place attractive. But what is an old woman to do for a girl in a garden? We ought to have brought some other young people—some of the Inglehart boys. But we're respectable, we Americans abroad; we're decorous, above all things; and I don't know about meeting you here, Mr. Colville. It has a very bad appearance. Are you sure that you didn't know I was to go by here ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... scribbling. Now I am free as a wood-bird, and can take up the pen without fretting or fear. Your letter should, and nearly did, make me jump for joy,—fine things about our poor speech at Cambridge,— fine things from CARLYLE. Scarcely could we maintain a decorous gravity on the occasion. And then news of a friend, who is also Carlyle's friend. What has life better to offer than such tidings? You may suppose I went directly and got me Blackwood, and read the prose and the verse of John ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... read some of his plays every year, that I may keep up a constant intercourse with what is excellent. It is not merely the perfectly artistic treatment which delights me; but particularly the amiable nature, the highly formed mind of the poet. There is in him a grace and a feeling for the decorous, and a tone of good society, which his innate beautiful nature could only attain by daily intercourse with the most eminent men ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... jailer granted me. The child Ernie alone saw and wondered at these manifestations of which I first saw the extravagance through his solemn imitations thereof, which yet made me catch him rapturously in my arms and kiss him a thousand times, until he put me aside, at last, with decorous dignity, as one ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... advocates, men of letters and academicians, all had feasted luxuriously according to custom. At the dessert the wines of Malvoisie and of Constance contributed to the social gaiety a sort of freedom not always kept within decorous limits. At that time society had reached the point at which everything may be expressed that excites laughter. Champfort had read to us his impious and libertine stories, and great ladies had listened to these ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Hervey's Memoirs, mentions that Hervey, answering one of her letters in 1737, in which she had complained that she was too old to inspire passion, after paying a compliment to her charms more gallant than decorous, said: "I should think anybody a great fool that said he liked spring better than summer merely because it is further from autumn, or that they loved green fruit better than ripe only because it was further from being rotten. I ever did, ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... first who dared to draw Mankind the mixture that he saw; Not wholly good nor ill, but both, With fine intricacies of growth. He pulled the wraps of flesh apart, And showed the working human heart; He scorned to drape the truthful nude With smooth, decorous platitude! ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... color-guard, to their infinite delight, in the cupola of the most conspicuous house, I deployed skirmishers along the exposed suburb, and set a detail of men at work on the lumber. After a stately and decorous interview with the queens of society of St. Mary's,—is it Scott who says that nothing improves the manners like piracy?—I peacefully withdrew the men when the work was done. There were faces of disappointment among the officers,—for all felt a spirit of mischief ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... portraits occupying the large spaces; the spindle-legged chairs and tables, the tea service in the corner, the tall bronze lamp by the piano, the neat little grate-hearth, with its mantel of marble; the ormolu clock, all the decorous and decorated gentility which marked the irreproachable correctness of whoever had furnished the apartment. Dark and heavy hangings depended in front of a double door leading into another room beyond. Equally dark and heavy hangings had closed behind Orde as he entered. An absolute ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... prospering! The Puritan of Elizabeth's reign survives to this hour; the trying difficulties which that wise sovereign had to overcome in settling the national religion, found no sympathy in either of the great divisions of her people; she retained as much of the catholic rites as might be decorous in the new religion, and sought to unite, and not to separate, her children. John Knox, in the spirit of charity, declared, that "she was neither gude protestant, nor yet resolute papist; let the world ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... read 'Evangeline' with more pleasure than it would be decorous to express. It cannot fail, I think, to prove the most triumphant of all ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... Walkingshaw, accompanied as usual by his eldest son, set forth from his decorous residence. It was one of a circle of stately houses, broken in two or three places to permit the sedatest kind of street to enter. The grave dignity of these mansions was accentuated by the straight, deep-hewn furrows ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... where she hadn't been yet. I've done what I could to make the place attractive. But what is an old woman to do for a girl in a garden? We ought to have brought some other young people—some of the Inglehart boys. But we're respectable, we Americans abroad; we're decorous, above all things; and I don't know about meeting you here, Mr. Colville. It has a very bad appearance. Are you sure that you didn't know I was to go by here at exactly ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... state,—and hesitated. He was not prepared to find that this last resting-place of his people had something to do with taxes and tithes, and that a certain material respectability and security attended his votive sigh. God and the reigning sovereign of the realm preserved a decorous alliance in the royal arms that appeared above the official notices. Presently he pushed open the door gently and entered the nave. For a moment it seemed to him as if the arched gloom of the woods he had left behind was repeated in the ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... a sort of confession of faith, turning toward Mecca. The relatives bowed in the same direction and then left the place, but on stated days afterward offerings of spices and flowers are made. It was reverential and decorous, perhaps even more so than the Buddhist funerals which I saw in Japan, but the tombs are not so carefully tended, and look more melancholy. The same dumpy, pawn-shaped pillars are placed at the head and feet of the raised mounds of earth which ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... quelques instants, Bessie," said the voice of madame. And then with a gentle, decorous ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... hollow beside a copse of oak. There were not many trees over the sixty or more acres, and the roads on either side of the club grounds were marked by dense clouds of dust. Yet it was gay—open to the June heavens, with a sense of limitless breathing space. And it was also very decorous, well-bred, and conventional. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... into the spacious, low-ceilinged, bright place, presences long past seemed to fill it intolerably. Brock and Hugh, little chaps, roared in untidy and tumultuous from football, or came, decorous and groomed, handsome, smart little lads, to be presented to guests. Her own Hugh, her husband, proud of the beautiful new house, smiled from the hearth to her as he had smiled twenty-six years back, the night they came in, a young Hugh, younger than Brock ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... slowly through the ancestral hall. The sunlight edged it like a bright border. The doors were wide open, and Dong-Yung saw the decorous rows of square chairs and square tables set rhythmically along the walls, and the covered dais at the head for the guest of honor. Long crimson scrolls, sprawled with gold ideographs, hung from ceiling to floor. A rosewood cabinet, filled with vases, peach bloom, imperial yellow, and turquoise ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... full of subdued bustle and decorous excitement; and all the bustle and all the excitement were caused by ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... ballroom, and, for a time, they did not speak. Over their heads the music reached a climax of vivacity: drums, cymbals, triangle, and sleighbells, beating, clashing, tinkling. Here and there were to be seen couples so carried away that, ceasing to move at the decorous, even glide, considered most knowing, they pranced and whirled through the throng, from wall to wall, galloping bounteously in abandon. George suffered a shock of vague surprise when he perceived that his aunt, Fanny ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... Probably, he would not have admitted, even to himself, that he was in love, for, somehow, the phrase seemed hopelessly inapplicable. It belonged to the Grierson part of his nature, and was supposed to signify a preliminary to marriage, an altogether decorous kind of affection for a decorously-behaved girl, who had never been homeless or hungry or cold. All he cared for now was to get Lalage away, to be with her always, and, for the moment at least, anything which did not help towards that end seemed of absolutely no importance. ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... the cake, was silent. It was a peculiarity of Ashurst that even after childhood had passed young people were still expected to be seen, and not heard; so her silence would only have been thought decorous, had any one noticed it. By and by, when she saw she was not needed, she slipped out to the front porch, and sat down on the steps. Max followed her, and thrust his cold nose under ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... complacency in every feature; but Miss Thankful thought it more decorous to seem to be ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... protested, sternly; "I cannot permit this unseemly conduct. You are forgetting the solemnity of the occasion and your own responsible positions. I must insist on more decent and decorous behaviour." ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... the personal appearance of an author agrees with the preconceived ideas of his admirer. Langton, from perusing the writings of Johnson, expected to find him a decent, well dressed, in short a remarkably decorous philosopher. Instead of which, down from his bed chamber about noon, came, as newly risen, a large uncouth figure, with a little dark wig which scarcely covered his head, and his clothes hanging loose about him. But his conversation was so rich, so animated, and so forcible, and his religious ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... putrefy, rot, spoil. Deceit, deception, double-dealing, duplicity, chicanery, guile, treachery. Deceptive, deceitful, misleading, fallacious, fraudulent. Decorate, adorn, ornament, embellish, deck, bedeck, garnish, bedizen, beautify. Decorous, demure, sedate, sober, staid, prim, proper. Deface, disfigure, mar, mutilate. Defect, fault, imperfection, disfigurement, blemish, flaw. Delay, defer, postpone, procrastinate. Demoralize, deprave, debase, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Cannebiere. It flattered my vanity a little to be able to say that I had a corner table always reserved in the Salon des Palmiers, otherwise Salon Blanc, where the atmosphere was legitimist and extremely decorous besides—even in Carnival time. "Nine tenths of the people there," I said, "would be of your political opinions, if that's an inducement. Come along. Let's ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... that for years one sees a family cover themselves over with a conventional cloak of decorum, and preserve the real relations of its members a secret from every eye! How often, too, have I remarked that, the more impenetrable (and therefore the more decorous) is the cloak, the harsher are the relations which it conceals! Yet, once let some unexpected question—often a most trivial one (the colour of a woman's hair, a visit, a man's horses, and so forth)—arise in that family circle, and without any visible cause there will also ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... up at five. The sky is grey. There is a cold, unpleasant wind that reminds one of Moscow. It is dull. I wait for the church bells and go to late Mass. In the cathedral it is all very charming, decorous, and not boring. The choir sings well, not at all in a plebeian style, and the congregation entirely consists of young ladies in olive-green dresses and ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... all groaned over the pathetic absurdity of the whole affair, and wondered with unrighteous glee what the decorous ladies below would say to some of their pranks at home. But, fearing that M. le President might feel it his duty to eject them from the town as dangerous persons, they shrouded their past sins in the most discreet ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... drama there had been much that was reprehensible. But whoever compares even the least decorous plays of Fletcher with those contained in the volume before us will see how much the profligacy which follows a period of overstrained austerity goes beyond the profligacy which precedes such a period. The nation resembled ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... quasi-maternal love extended itself beyond the children. The idea, however, was a mistaken one, arising from the strength of her language, to which I was then unaccustomed. I have since become aware that nothing can be more decorous than old Mrs. Upton, the excellent head-nurse at Hardover Lodge; and no gentleman more discreet in his ...
— Mrs. General Talboys • Anthony Trollope
... Doctor laid down his paper, and, looking round with the glance of proprietorship on his pupils, who had relapsed into a decorous and gloomy silence, observed: "Well, boys, you have had an unusually protracted vacation this time—owing to the unprecedented severity of the weather. We must try to make up for it by the zest and ardour with which we pursue our studies during the ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... Company drill, and she visited brides and babies and old folks, and attended some funerals. When she was twelve years old she "came out"—became a "miss in her teens"—and went to a succession of prim little routs or parties, which she called "constitutions." To these decorous assemblies girls only were invited,—no rough Boston boys. She has left to us more than one clear, perfect picture of these formal little routs in the great low-raftered chamber, softly alight with candles on mantel-tree and in ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow
... mad about them and refuses to produce anything else but lily-bells newly sprung in June, cowslips and daisies pied, rosemary and rue, and all these in decorous courtesy on a deep, dark background like twilight on a bank or moonlight in a dell—and lo, we have the marvellous ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... century into the United States and the nineteenth, disturbs Peter's enjoyment of his ancestor's castigation by saying vehemently to his face with all the lightning of the law in his eye, and its thunders in his voice, "Thou art the man!" Peter recoils with decorous horror, begs his pastor to remember that he and Herod are sheep who were to be led by still waters; warns him not to bring politics into the pulpit, to talk not of living people, but of old pictures. So the poor shepherd is driven back to his pictures, ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... had halted at the door, his platoon behind crowding the stairway. He was small and scarred, serious and decorous. Peter felt that the head under the helmet was shaven; that here was a man conscious of moving through the days of his life's stateliest fulfillment. Boylan was nearest; a little back from the rest Poltneck stood smiling, singing as he had never ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... alone together in the big pew, and Alma Spencer, who sat behind them, declared that they held each other's hands all through the service. This lasted until spring; then came a sensation and scandal, such as decorous Heatherton had not known since the time Isaac Allen got drunk at Centreville Fair and came home ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... on Sunday to the Friends' meeting, where a most unusual manifestation for that decorous sect occurred. I had been told that, if I felt inclined, it would be considered quite proper for me to make some remarks, and just as I was revolving an opening sentence to a few thoughts I desired to present, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... is nothing sinister which can happen to you, in which we shall not be involved; and, if it should so happen, that we shall be subjected to some of those frightful changes which we have seen; if it should happen that your Lordships, stripped of all the decorous distinctions of human society, should, by hands at once base and cruel, be led to those scaffolds and machines of murder upon which great kings and glorious queens have shed their blood, amidst the prelates, amidst the nobles, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... records to the year 1825." What a caprice of Fate that the young aspirant should, on the very threshold of his adult career, be thrown into these coulisses of criminal biography! That a taste already keen to search out the birds of prey that haunt the fringe of decorous society, should be immersed, as it were, in a stream of criminal records! Old songs of Denmark, the poems of Ab Gwilym ("worth half a dozen of Chaucer"!), the "romance in the German style," all were ruthlessly swept aside to give place to a catena ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... that the acute young Scot conceived that the wearer must be either very rich or very poor, probably the former. The fashion of the dress was close and short, a kind of garment which was not then held decorous among gentry, or even the superior class of citizens, who generally wore loose gowns which descended below the middle ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... habit to do so. Wolff too, though not a boaster, was yet persecuted into a habit of egotism both in his prefaces and in his ordinary conversation, and the same holds good of the founder of the Brunonian system, and of his great namesake Giordano Bruno. The more decorous manners of the present age have attached a disproportionate opprobrium to this foible, and many therefore abstain with cautious prudence from all displays of what they feel. Nay, some do actually flatter themselves, ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... This skirmish decided the fate of the engagement; fortune was faithful to the Portuguese; and late in the afternoon, the capable judge rode off homeward with his portfolio under his arm. No court could have been more equally and decently conducted; judge, parties, lawyers, and police were all decorous and competent; and but for the plaintiff, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... termed, were also spread in honour of the deceased; but the lady herself, and most of her attendants, observed a stern course of vigil, discipline, and fasts, which appeared to the Normans a more decorous manner of testifying their respect for the dead, than the Saxon and Flemish custom of banqueting and drinking ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... Burns's advent had worn off by his second winter in Edinburgh, and, though it may be a weakness, novelty always counts for something in human affairs. Then, again, the quiet decorous men of Blair's circle knew more of Burns's ways and doings than at first, and what they came to know was not likely to increase their desire for (p. 091) intimacy with him. It was, it seems, notorious that Burns kept that formidable ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... the fumes of vanity; and then to let the public opinion come round—for where are rules of accommodation to stop? The narrow path of truth and virtue inclines neither to the right nor left, it is a straight-forward business, and they who are earnestly pursuing their road, may bound over many decorous prejudices, without leaving modesty behind. Make the heart clean, and give the head employment, and I will venture to predict that there will be nothing ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... In that decorous mansion I could not follow her; and my impulse to dash after her and knock at her door till she answered me, I was forced to put aside ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... on towards her own cabin, willing to escape any more of Sir George's complaints. "Just be so kind, Miss Effingham, ma'am, to look into this here pantry, once! Them niggers, I do believe, have had their fingers in every thing, and it will take Toast and me a week to get things decorous and orderly again. Some of the shrieks" (for so the steward styled the chiefs) "have been yelling well in this place, I'll engage, as you may see, by the manner in which they have spilt the mustard and mangled that cold duck. ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... should be the will of God to place thee in a company of players. Of all nations in the world, the French best understand the stage. If thou shouldst ever write for it, which God forbid, copy them very carefully. Murders on their stage are quite decorous and cleanly. Few gentlemen and ladies die by violence who would not have died by exhaustion. 'For they rant and rave until their voice fails them, one after another; and those who do not die of it die consumptive. They cannot bear to see cruelty; they would rather see any ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... were of very convivial habits, chanced to meet on the street at nine o'clock in the morning after an evening's revel together. The major addressed the colonel with decorous solemnity: ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... that warmed it without the play of firelight. But when the company had assembled it was evident that the velvet jackets, gold lace, silver buttons, and red sashes of the entertainers not only lost their tawdry and theatrical appearance in the half decorous and thoughtful gloom, but actually seemed more in harmony with it than the modern dresses of the guests. It was the Excelsior party who looked strange and bizarre in these surroundings; to the sensitive fancy of Miss Keene, Mrs. Brimmer's Parisian toilet had ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... houses of a recent settlement in a mining region. In South Africa, except at and near Johannesburg, one scarcely sees them. Drinking rarely obtrudes itself. What gambling there may be I know not, but at any rate there are no gambling-saloons. Nothing can be more decorous than the aspect of these new African towns, and the conduct of the inhabitants seldom belies the aspect. There is, of course, a free use of alcohol. But there is no shooting, such as goes on in American mining towns: crimes of violence of any kind are extremely rare; ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... best temper. In society the excitement has ceased, but the bitterness remains. The Tories are, however, so utterly defeated, and the victory of their opponents is so complete, that the latter can afford to be moderate and decorous in their tone and manner; and the former are exceedingly sulky, cockering up each other with much self-gratulation and praise, but aware that in the opinion of the mass of mankind they are covered with odium, ridicule, and disgrace. Peel and the Duke are ostensibly great friends, and the ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... called her mother, as Marjorie burst into the living-room, her cheeks pink from a brisk run up the drive. After leaving her schoolmates Marjorie had set off for home as fast as her light feet would carry her. She managed to keep to a decorous walk until she had swung the gate behind her, then she had sped up the drive like ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... others (like myself) engaged in professional studies, and still others making a debut in business as clerks. We sang mostly the innocent old songs, American or English, of an earlier day, and sometimes the decorous numbers from the self-respecting operetta recently established in London. No contributions from a new and dubious foreign element had yet come to cheapen our taste, to disturb our nervous systems, or to throw upon the negro, the Hawaiian, ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... are one of his majesty's justices of the peace, you are a brother magistrate, and you are a Doctor of Divinity; you owe a duty to your country, and you owe a duty to yourself. Is it wise, is it decorous, that one of the Quorum should go a-gipsying? Is it possible that you can credit this preposterous tale? Brother Masham, there will be a rescue, or my name is ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... the little Princess Amelia was with her; and, though shy of me at first, we afterwards made a very pleasant acquaintance. She is a most lovely little thing, just three years old, and full of sense, spirit, and playful prettiness: yet decorous and dignified when called upon to appear en princesse to any strangers, as if conscious of her high rank, and of the importance of condescendingly sustaining it. 'Tis amazing what education can do, in the earliest years, to those of quick understandings.(205) ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... we attended church all day, with a well-dressed and decorous congregation of Hawaiians. They had a melodeon and a very good choir. Mr. Alexander told us that six of the choir could play on the instrument, and they all take turns, one playing in the morning, another ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... be a levity here, would be a serious immorality there; and a little lower down again, a mere domestic arrangement, slightly more decorous and a shade more legal than the old system of the halter and the public sale. It was declared, however, that this "relief"—that is the popular phrase in such matters—should be extended to the poor man. It was decided ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... the Apostles and Evangelists.' Its object was to prove they were wholly free from the errors of enthusiasts; that in their private conduct, and in the government of the Church, they were 'rational and sober, prudent and cautious, mild and decorous, zealous without violence, and steady without obstinacy; that their writings are plain, calm, and unexaggerated, ... natural and rational, ... without any trace of spiritual pride, any arrogant claims to full perfection of virtue; ... teaching heartfelt piety to God without ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... fire. Even yet some flickering combustion illuminated the drifting hulk. His face and hands had been recently washed—a rite insisted upon by Phillips as a memorial to the slaughtered conventions. In the candle-light he stood, a flaw in the decorous fittings of the apartment. His face was a sickly white, covered almost to the eyes with a stubble the shade of a red Irish setter's coat. Phillips's comb had failed to control the pale brown hair, long matted ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... compelled the respect of all his ministers, and his disappearance from the scenes, to make way for the regency of his eldest son, was almost as disastrous for English society as the exchange, in France, of Louis XIV.'s decorous rule for that ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... enjoyment about it that might well belong to a first book rather than to—I doubt whether even Mr. NORRIS himself could say offhand what its number is. Sara and her circle are eminently characteristic of their creator. You have here the same well-bred well-to-do persons, pleasantly true to their decorous type, retaining always, despite modernity of clothes and circumstance, a gentle aroma of late Victorianism. Perhaps Sara is the most immediate of Mr. NORRIS'S heroines so far. Her money-bags had been ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... could have been devised, since it is derived from the cart, and signifies the draught or pull of the horses." The phrase "a prince's pelf" is reprobated, because pelf means properly "the scraps or shreds of taylors and of skinners." He gives strict rules for the decorous behaviour of ambassadors and all who address themselves to princes, being himself a courtier, and having probably exercised some diplomatic function. "I have seen," says he, "foreign ambassadors in the ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... social life was regulated by a coterie of ten or twelve young ladies who had grown up together and who were generally known as the "Spree,"—not because they were given to romping, for none kept more strictly within the bounds of a decorous propriety, but because they were accustomed to go off together in the summer to the White Mountains or to some other rustic resort, where they were supposed to have a perfectly splendid time; and this they probably did, for it requires cultivation and refinement of feeling ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... conquering territory on paper, France was persuaded to set up a naval station in Gorilla-land. The northern and the southern shore each had a king, whose consent, after a careless fashion, was considered decorous. His Majesty of the North was old King Glass[FN1] and his chief "tradesman," that is, his premier, was the late Toko, a shrewd and far-seeing statesman. His Majesty of the South was Rapwensembo, known to the English as King ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... better genius saved him from driving the indignant Titania desperate at that critical moment by any ill-advised rejoicings; and the sight of Nettie's agitation so far calmed Dr Rider that he made the most sober and decorous congratulations to the sister-in-law, whom for the first time he felt grateful to. Perhaps, had he been less absorbed in his own affairs, he could scarcely have failed to remember how, not yet a year ago, the shabby ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... live unchallenged. To be sure this was summer, and most of the houses along the street were boarded up; but the Governor would certainly not be invading in broad daylight premises to which he had no claim, and the retinue of trained and decorous servants disposed effectually of ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... purchasers. She goes abroad unveiled; dances with the other sex; mingles fearlessly though without effrontery amid the groups of men; kisses the hand of the stranger before seating herself on the divan by his side; and, though truly modest and decorous in her deportment, she yields her cheek, almost without a blush, to the lips of the warrior who, returning from the slaughter of the enemy, feels entitled to claim those favors which in less ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... He had seated himself on a settee opposite the girl, who did not trouble on his account to assume a posture more decorous, and he surveyed her keenly as he waited ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... society in which the Vicar of Sutton could not expect to enroll himself without offence. We may fairly suppose, therefore, that it was to his association with these somewhat too "jolly companions" that Sterne owed that disfavour among decorous country circles, of which he shows resentful consciousness in the ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... said Mrs. Blandford, who had regained her rigorous precision once more under the decorous ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... which answered all these functions. The room was about 15 by 30 feet and was lighted by three candles, a kerosene lamp, and a blazing fire of pitch pine. Two violins were in lively operation, one being played by Lyman Hamblin, a son of Old Jacob, and there was a refreshing air of decorous gaiety about the whole assemblage. Dancing is a regular amusement among the Mormons and is encouraged by the authorities as a harmless and beneficial recreation. At that time the dances were always opened with prayer. Two sets could occupy the floor at one time and to even ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... break the silence, though it stretched to the crack of doom, yet, on the other hand, to close the meeting before the mill bell had struck nine would have been regarded as a dangerous innovation. Accordingly, it only remained to wait in decorous silence during the remaining ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... soldier's passing away is not untimely. The longest life can accomplish only benefaction and fame, and the life that has accomplished these has reached life's ultimatum. It is a fair and decorous fate to devote length of days to humanity, but he who gathers up his life with all its beauty and happiness and hope, and lays it on the altar of sacrifice,—he has done all. A century of earthly existence only scatters its benefits one by one. The martyr binds his in a single bundle of life, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... to the extent of counting me out of this nest of persecutors? Thank Heaven! I am not a Palma! My soul does not work like the piston of a steam-engine,—is not regulated by a gauge-cock and safety-valve to prevent all explosions, to keep the even, steady, decorous, profitable tenor of its sternly politic way. I am a Neville. The blood in my veins is not 'blue' like the Palma's, but red,—and hot enough to keep my heart from freezing, as the Palma's do, and to melt the ice they manufacture, wherever they breathe. I ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... and the carved figures of Alonzo Cano, Montanez, and Hernandez, may be regarded as authorized effigies of "Our Lady of the most pure Conception;" in other words, as embodying, in the most attractive, decorous, and intelligible form, an abstract theological dogma, which is in itself one of the most curious, and, in its results, one of the most important of the religions phenomena connected with the artistic ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... would be comely and cynical, and would die as she had lived, secure "in the high places of laughter"—a laughter that, for all its geniality, struck him at times as richly sardonic—in the decent drapery of her fictitious youth; in a decorous piety, yet a little complicated, in the very reception of the last rites, by the amiable arching of her ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... was increased by the hope of learning some tidings of his betrothed. As soon as the girl entered she took a seat, and invited the Indian to place himself near her; then she continued silent, as if she thought it decorous for him to question her, before she consented to speak on the subject she had on her mind. But, as Chingachgook did not understand this feeling, he remained respectfully attentive to any thing she might ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... Liberal, containing The Vision of Judgment, was received soon after the copartnery had established themselves at Genoa, accompanied with hopes and fears. Much good could not be anticipated from a work which outraged the loyal and decorous sentiments of the nation towards the memory of George III. To the second number Lord Byron contributed the Heaven and Earth, a sacred drama, which has been much misrepresented in consequence of its fraternity with Don Juan and The Vision of Judgment; ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... stick and Irene the other, while the baskets swung between in a fashion that would have turned the milk to butter had there been any in them to turn. Behind the trio walked Audrey and Daphne, dainty and decorous enough to give ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... evening, he would not allow that the private life of a Judge, in England, was required to be so strictly decorous as I supposed. 'Why then, Sir, (said I,) according to your account, an English judge may just live like a gentleman.' JOHNSON. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... elegantes who promenade the Bois de Boulogne or the Champs-Elysees in carriages. Here the wife and the daughter of the poorest shopkeeper disdain chintz and calico; nothing short of silk or velvet is considered decorous except within doors. But, having made this confession, I must add that the general effect is charming, and as for beauty, both of face and figure, especially the latter, surely no city in the world can show such an ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... course of business pursued by the two houses, I do not say that the mode adopted in this particular case is irregular, but if it has not the sanction of precedent, it appears to me to be wanting in that courtesy which should be perpetually cherished between the two houses. It would have been more decorous to have acted on our bill, to have agreed to it if it were approved, to reject or amend it. In the latter case, upon its being returned to the Senate, the views of the other body would have been contrasted with our own, and we might then ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... it was all quite wrong. No well-brought-up and decorous Englishman had any right to feel so annoyed with another man's face that he longed to hit it with a stick. But Vane was beginning to doubt whether he had been well brought up; he was quite certain that he was not decorous. He ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... has," said Conny, carried away by the excitement out of her ordinarily staid and decorous demeanour. "Let us all run down ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... will leave the graveyard still a graveyard in the old sense, and requires no authority outside the church. It may be prudent to take a vote of the Vestry on the subject as a defence against irate parishioners, but, if nothing be done beyond a decorous renovation of the burial-ground, the matter is really one which is entirely within the functions of the parson and churchwardens. Moreover, although it is not generally known, the expenses of such works are a legal charge against ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... not mentioned. Her name stood for things that decorous persons do not mention, except under certain sanctions and the plea of privilege. The Colonel might mention them to his wife, and his wife might mention them to Mrs. Jurd, who might pass them on with unimpeachable propriety to Miss Keating. But these ladies were unable to discuss Mrs. ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... a moment, please?" a voice said, and the dictation broke off abruptly, while when the girl rose Alice Deringham found herself suddenly confronted with Miss Townshead. Deringham, who stood up, made her a little decorous inclination. ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... I believe, who have, or think they have, a very small share of vanity. Such may speak of their literary fame in a decorous style of diffidence. But I confess, that I am so formed by nature and by habit, that to restrain the effusion of delight, on having obtained such fame, to me would be truly painful. Why then should I suppress ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... only to one of them, that Grant's manuscript diary contained the significant historical note as to the fate of Alse Young. It waited two centuries and more for its true interpreter, as did Wolcott's cipher notes of Hooker's famous sermon, and there it is, "not made on the decorous pages which memorize the saints," Brookes, Hooker, Warham, Reyner, Hanford, and Huit, "but scrawled on the inside of the cover, where it might be ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... with his friends had suffered so much from the limitations of view of a mid-Victorian Royal Academy, should be so maliciously ready to have all modern rebels in paint, their milestones hung about their necks, sunk in the nethermost deeps with all their works! One can find diversion, too, in the decorous story of Mr. HOLIDAY'S nude statue of Sleep, rejected (according to a message from G. F. WATTS) on account of its nudity in 1879 by that same Academy, and accepted in 1880 when the artist with laborious modesty had modelled for it a plaster-of-paris nightgown. The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... Country. This is not to be accounted for on any supposition (since the education of men of rank naturally devolves on those members of our Universities, who choose the Church for their profession) but that of a repugnance on their part to associate with persons of grave character and decorous manners. Is the distracted remnant of the Party, now surviving, improved in that respect? The dazzling talents with which it was once distinguished have passed away; pleasure and dissipation are no longer, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... When the decorous murmur of applause which greeted the President's closing sentences had died away, and Franklin Marmion went to the reading-desk and unfolded his notes, there was a tense silence of anticipation, and hundreds of pairs of eyes, which had some of the keenest brains in Europe behind them, were converged ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... the "classic" accounts of the usage such as those by Mme. de Stael, Stendhal, Parini, Byron and his biographers date from very much later, when the institution was long past its prime if not actually moribund. Now Smollett saw it at the very height of its perfection and at a time when our decorous protestant curiosity on such themes was as lively as Lady Mary Montagu had found it in the case of fair Circassians and Turkish harems just thirty years previously. [A cicisbeo was a dangler. Hence the word came to be applied punningly to the bow depending ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... soul! behold her: what decorous calm! She, with her week-day worldliness sufficed, Stands in her pew and hums her decent psalm With decent dippings at the name of Christ! And she has mov'd in that smooth way so long, She hardly can believe ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Our coldness can only come from our neglecting to stir up the gift that is in us. People reproach us with extravagant emotion: let us confess that we have never deserved that reproach half as much as we ought. The world's ideal of religion is decorous coldness—has not the world's ideal been our practice? We are afraid to be fervent, but our true danger is icy torpor. We sit frost-bitten and almost dead among the snows, and all the while the gracious sunshine ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... good-looking lady in the bloom of womanhood, attired in a plain black dress, with easy unrestrained manners.... The lecture might have been a newspaper article, the first chapter of a book of travels, or the speech of a long-winded American Ambassador at a Mansion House dinner. All was exceedingly decorous and diplomatic, slightly gilded here and there with those commonplace laudations that stir a British public into the utterance of patriotic plaudits. A more inoffensive entertainment could hardly be imagined; and when the six sections into which the lady had divided her discourse, were exhausted, ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... impossible that I may have three or four cantos of Don Juan ready by autumn, or a little later, as I obtained a permission from my dictatress to continue it,—provided always it was to be more guarded and decorous and sentimental in the continuation than in the commencement. How far these conditions have been fulfilled may be seen, perhaps, by-and-by; but the embargo was only taken off upon these stipulations. You can answer ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... allowable &c. (permitted) 760; lawful, licit, legitimate, legal; legalized &c. (law) 963. square, unexceptionable, right; equitable &c. 922; due, en rgle; fit, fitting; correct, proper, meet, befitting, becoming, seemly; decorous; creditable, up to the mark, right as a trivet; just the thing, quite the thing; selon les rgles[Fr]. Adv. duly, ex officio, de jure[Lat]; by right, by divine right; jure divino[Lat], Dei gratia[Lat], in the name of. Phr. civis Romanus sum [Lat][Cicero]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... body was deposited in the box, Tennessee's Partner drew over it a piece of tarred canvas, and gravely mounting the narrow seat in front, with his feet upon the shafts, urged the little donkey forward. The equipage moved slowly on, at that decorous pace which was habitual with Jenny even under less solemn circumstances. The men—half curiously, have jestingly, but all good-humoredly—strolled along beside the cart; some in advance, some a little in the rear, of the ...
— Tennessee's Partner • Bret Harte
... indeed, about anything likely to interest an intelligent adolescent. At the approach of all such things he must have acquired the habit of the modest cough, the infectious trick of the nice evasion. How can "Kappa" expect inspiration from the decorous resultants who satisfy these conditions? What brand can ever be lit at altars that have borne no fire? And you find the secondary schoolmaster who complies with these restrictions becoming the zealous ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... easily disconcerted. He prided himself on his aplomb. It was hard to get behind his cynical, decorous smile, the mask of a suave and worldly-wise Pharisee of the twentieth century. But for once he was amazed. The orchestra was playing a lively fox trot and he thought that perhaps he ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... himself up into a more decorous position, and turned his eyes towards his boss. "I never knew yuh took any interest ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... lord," interrupted the servitor with hands uplifted in defence, "who besought you not to measure this innocent daughter of a decorous household, who was scarcely beyond childhood, by the standard you applied to others? Who entreated you to spare her fair fame? And if you deem the stuff of which the servant is made too coarse to understand what moves so pure a soul, you ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... warmth of the amicable contest, the most decorous Christian assembly, not even excepting those in which its reverend ministers are collected, might have learned a wholesome lesson of moderation from the forbearance and courtesy of the disputants. The words of Uncas ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... pulled at the bell with a lordly air." The hostler and his curates rushed zealously from the further end of the yard, and received us with astonishing command of face—not a grin was visible, even the waiters stood with decorous solemnity, while child after child was lifted down, and all out of one gig. They rather looked on with the pleased expression we have seen on the countenances of a rural audience when Mr Ingilby, or other juggler, produced, out of some unaccountably ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... at one end, which held only the singers and the organ. The seats below were not more than one-third full. Dr. Beecher ministered in this place for about ten years. It was now without a pastor, but was temporarily supplied by Professor Allen. The congregation was far more decorous and attentive than those in New Orleans. After the introductory service, and while the hymn before sermon was being sung, a man came trudging down the aisle, bearing an immense scuttle full of coals to supply the stoves. How easy it would have been ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... day were more decorous," soliloquized the lady, complacently. "But then the De Forrests have French blood in them, and what else could you expect? It's he that sets ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... before him, and feeling a sort of vested interest in their possessor, the heart of the pastor was merry within him; and he, so to speak, caroused over the profusely-sugared tea and well-buttered galette with a decorous and regulated joviality; ever as he drank casting down the wreaths of his florid eloquence at the feet of his entertainers. In any atmosphere whatsoever, no matter how uncongenial, those garlands were sure to bloom. His zeal was such a hardy perennial that ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... clean, scoured tables in the sitting room, sip his tea, and look over a book. Or a friendly company may prepare their supper and sit down to tea together. Lord Shaftesbury said that the effect produced on the men by such an arrangement was wonderful. They became decent, decorous, and self-respecting. They passed rules of order for their community. They subscribed for their library from their own earnings, and the books are mostly of their own selection. "It is remarkable," said his lordship, "that of their own accord they decided to ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... their faces were placid, but their eyes were sad. Their schoolrooms are hospital wards, the tiny chapel is piled high with supplies; in the refectory, where decorous rows of small girls were wont to file in to the convent meals, unthinkable horrors of operations go on all day and far into the night. The Hall of the Holy Rosary is a convalescent room, where soldiers smoke and play at cards. The Room of the Holy Angels ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... in biblical history. The mediaeval plays had very plain music, which followed entirely the cadences of the plain song, and made no attempt at representing the dramatic situation or the feelings growing out of it. All that the music sought to do was to afford a decorous utterance, having in it, from association with the cadence of the music of the Church, something impressive, yet not in any manner growing out of the drama to which it was set. The Florentine music drama ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... her mother only hoped to heaven it would last the day out; perhaps Sir Redmond would be able to extract some sort of a promise from her in that mood, Mrs. Lansell reflected, as she watched Beatrice chatting to her two cavaliers, with the most decorous impartiality. Sir Redmond seemed in high spirits, which argued well; Mrs. Lansell gave herself up to the pleasure of the drive with a heart free from anxiety. Not only was Beatrice at her best; Dorman's mood was nothing short of angelic, and as the weather was simply perfect, ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... by cupids, is found a domestic scene by a Fragonard or a Chardin; and the portraits of innocent children by Greuze replace the courting shepherds and mythological goddesses of Boucher and Lancret. Sculpture, too, becomes more refined and decorous ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... could I? The very idea, a woman in divorce proceedings! . . . I have not been to a single chic party since you went away. I wanted to preserve a certain decorous mourning fiesta. How horrible it was! . . . It ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... inclined to revert to the vulgar opinion respecting him, rejecting, certainly with good reason, the fanatical panegyrics of some French and English writers of the last century. Upon the whole, we are inclined to believe that Epicurus was an apathetic, decorous, formal man, who was able, without much difficulty, to cultivate a measured and even habit of mind, who may have occasionally indulged in sensual gratifications to prove that he thought them lawful, but who generally preferred, as a matter of taste, the exercises ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... him accessory to a second peril of his life; and that he thought that he could pay his debt more effectually to the justice of the country by suffering his offences to be proved by evidence, and submitting to the forms of a regular trial. This, though it was penitence too late, was at least decorous language. His whole conduct on the trial showed that, intemperate as his passions were, he possessed abilities and feelings worthy of a wiser career, and a less unhappy termination. Part of his speech ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... among the most faithful attendants. The lad's fancy for Anice had extended to Grace. Grace's friendly toleration of Nib had done much for him. Nib always appeared with his master, and his manner was as composed and decorous as if rats were subjects foreign to his meditations. His part it was to lie at Jud's feet, his nose between his paws, his eyes twinkling sagaciously behind his shaggy eyebrows, while occasionally, as ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... straining after new effects, which is so wearisome to those who love the racy naturalism of Parson Adams and Edie Ochiltree. But let us have no pessimism also. The age is against the romance of colour, movement, passion, and jollity. But it is full of the romance of subtle and decorous psychology. It is not the highest art: it is indeed a very limited art. But it is true art: wholesome, sound, and cheerful. The world does not exist in order to supply brilliant literature; and the march of democratic equality and of decorous ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... church, that during the process of this change was undergoing a candidating siege? Why, they met in decorous assemblage, and passed resolutions, and had them printed, and draped the pulpit in mourning, and sent a delegation of the church to the funeral, with knots of the finest crepe streaming from their ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... Twilight—still there are few greater attractions than that of open healthy laughter of the contagious sort; and it would be black ingratitude not to pay tribute to the authoresses of Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.—a book that no decorous person can read with comfort in a railway carriage. These ladies have the keenest eye for the obvious humours of Irish life, they have abundance of animal spirits, and they have that knack at fluent description ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... course, and their brothers, and their relations; it would not be decorous to love any one else," said the ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... to be there, a decorous resort for those who became hungry, as I did, at the hour of noon each day. In my very pleasant boarding-house, where, to be sure, there was one dreadful boarder, a tall lady, whom I soon secretly called Juno—but let unpleasant things wait—in the very pleasant house where I boarded (I ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... the bobolink, Remembering duty, in mid-quaver stops Just ere he sweeps O'er rapture's tremulous brink, And 'twixt the winrows most demurely drops, A decorous bird of business, who provides For his brown mate and fledglings six besides, And looks from right to left, a ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... we were to inquire, "Who's with us to-day?" Whereupon he would make known the character in which he elected to be received for the occasion. If he announced himself as "Mister Swift," everything was to be very grown-up and decorous indeed. Formalities and distances were observed; and Mr. Corley Linbridge (an elderly personage of great dignity and distinction as a mountain-climber) was much oftener included in the conversation than Bill Hammersley. If, however, ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... and cowardice equalling that of Rooney-Molyneux! Dawn lacked restraint in her emotional outbursts; the poor girl's state of nervousness bordered on hysteria; the water was nearly out of her hand in any case, and with a smack of that irritated divergence from lawful and decorous conduct of which the sanest of us are at times the victim, she pitched the dish of greasy, warm water fairly on the immaculate young athlete, accompanying the ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... century witnessed the rise of an entirely new style of English prose. The ancient and universal restraints were swept away, the decorous stateliness of all the buried centuries was abandoned, and there arose a band of writers, to whom De Quincey and Ruskin were the leaders, who withdrew all veils from their emotions, threw away all the shackles of reserve, and poured their sobs and ecstasies upon us, in ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... startling clothes, appear in all quarters. Under Phelps Gate-way one meets pirates with long hair, with ear-rings, with red sashes; crossing the campus comes a band of Highlanders, in front of the New Haven House are stray Dutchmen and Japanese and Punchinellos and other flotsam not expected in a decorous town; down College Street a group of men in gowns of white swing away ...
— The Courage of the Commonplace • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... submissive; and there are glimpses of an unsettled hurry in her nature, which put me out. Yet she is usually most tranquil, too dejected and thoughtful indeed sometimes. In time, I doubt not, I shall make her uniformly sedate and decorous, without being unaccountably pensive. I ever disapprove what ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... lips, who seem relatively to be men of honor and probity compared with a man like the first Lord Holland or like Rigby. There were poor slaves of the stews, wretched servants of the bagnios, whose lives seem sweet and decorous when compared with those of a Sandwich or a Dashwood or a Duke of Grafton. Yet these men, whose companionship might be rejected by Jack Sheppard, and whose example might be avoided by Pompey Bum, are the men whose names are ceaselessly prominent in the early story of the reign, and to whose ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... beleaguered by vanity always. Denman delights me. I am glad to think I have always liked him so well. I am sure that whenever he makes a mistake, it is a mistake; and that no man lives who has a grander and nobler scorn of every mean and dastard action. I would to Heaven it were decorous to pay him some public tribute of respect . . . O'Connell's speeches are the old thing: fretty, boastful, frothy, waspish at the voices in the crowd, and all that: but with no true greatness. . . . What a relief to turn to that noble letter of Carlyle's" (in which ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... said in his suavest tones, "the gentleman you name is indisposed to wait very long—he must not indeed be delayed—and is wholly incapable of travel unattended. He must therefore ride where I ride. As for the lady upon whom you bestow so decorous a name, I cannot answer. The lady whom I escort will please herself. Step behind us, Master Porges, I entreat of you. You would not ask so much of Sir Galors de Born if you knew him as well as ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... admirers, for the years had made her more rather than less desirable in herself, and men had grown used to her independence among them. Moreover, she was a "catch," a maid with money, and this may have influenced the decorous, well-considered offers she had about this time from farmers inland as well as on the Marsh. She refused them decidedly—nevertheless, it was obvious that she was well pleased to have been asked; these solid, estimable proposals ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... were surrendered, and in order to indemnify those who were to be obliged to live abroad during the term of the armistice, as an assistance to stay out of the Philippines while they were trying to establish themselves and looking for legitimate and decorous means of existence. ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... you, Rhoda Hammond," she said sympathetically. "You must not mind our animal spirits. We just do slop over at this time, my dear. Wait till you see how gentle and decorous we have to be after the semester really begins. This is only letting ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... it Grace was standing in the middle of the room, earnestly advocating Gertrude Wells's cause, while the Morton House girls were making as much demonstration as was considered decorous on Sunday. Grace concluded with, "I'm quite sure that every girl at Morton House will vote for Miss Wells and every freshman at Wayne Hall, too. Before class meeting next Friday I hope to be able to convince the ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... in conversation, but not without his usual faults of violence and pretension. Nor was he always as decorous as an old man ought to be; especially one whose turn of mind is not of the lighter and more pleasurable cast. The licenses he took were coarse, and had not sufficient regard to his company. Certainly they went a great deal ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... way through the hall she met Holliday. His appearance was decorous and subdued, as befitted the occasion, yet as he came up the stairs in his dark, inconspicuously correct attire, she felt in his manner something assured, almost proprietary, as if he considered himself already master here. She inclined her head slightly and was hurrying ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... conservatives would have been "Free-Soilers,"—not only those who are conservatives in virtue of their prudence, moderation, sagacity, and temper, but prejudiced conservatives, conservatives who are tolerant of all iniquity which is decorous, inert, long-established, and disposed to die when its time comes, conservatives as thorough in their hatred of change as Lamennais himself. "What a noise," says Paul Louis Courier, "Lamennais would have made on the day of creation, could he have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... picture to ourselves a great mass of people undisturbed by the passing of vehicles, or by the shouts and whip-crackings of the noisy charioteers—was ever such a thing as a quiet Italian coachman, ancient or modern, we digress to wonder! All was orderly and decorous when compared with the quarrelling, screaming groups of citizens that block the congested streets of modern Naples. Happily for us various paintings of the Forum of Pompeii have been discovered, and these are naturally of immense value in helping us to a proper understanding ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... or Pyncheon Street, as it were now more decorous to call it, was thronged, at the appointed hour, as with a congregation on its way to church. All, as they approached, looked upward at the imposing edifice, which was henceforth to assume its rank ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... the vulgar feeling towards teachers, too often to be observed in schools, exists towards me. The pupils seem to reverence my tastes and opinions in all things; they are docile, decorous, and try hard to please; they are in awe of my displeasure, but delighted whenever permitted to associate with me on familiar terms. As I treat them like ladies, they are anxious to prove that they deserve to be so treated. ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Kardi, as he had intended, and employed the former, to their intense disgust, in throwing up rough entrenchments round the camp. The Darwanis he sent out in raiding-parties (this operation appeared under the more decorous name of "making reconnaissances" in his reports to Ranjitgarh), with orders not to penetrate more than a certain distance into the country, but to do as much damage as possible, and bring back supplies for the force. These tactics had the result he anticipated. ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... juxtaposition. But I can not help writing plainly that I am still in favor of a distinguished family-tree. ESTO PERPETUA! To have had somebody for a great-grandfather that was somebody is exciting. To be able to look back on long lines of ancestry that were rich, but respectable, seems decorous and all right. The present Earl of Warwick, I think, must have an idea that strict justice has been done him in the way of being launched properly into the world. I saw the Duke of Newcastle once, and as the farmer in Conway ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... back in his ancestral home, replying to the questions of his aunts and uncles, who were still expecting him to bring home a rich and beautiful American heiress. Some of the Cavanaghs were drunkards and some were vixens, but they were on the whole rather decent, rather decorous and very dull, and to them this broken ex-convict and this slattern old barmaid would seem very far from the ideal they had formed of the family into which ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... he was facetiously declared to bear tattooed above the region of his heart. Mr. Fairfax had been two months at Hale when Lady Geraldine left on that dutiful visit to her father, and necessary interviewing of milliners and dressmakers; and he was, it is just possible, a little tired of decorous country-house life, with its weekly dinner-parties and perpetual influx of county families to luncheon, and its unfailing croquet. He felt, too, that at such a time it would, be perhaps safer for him to be away from ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... time of life which Sheridan had now attained—four years beyond that period, at which Petrarch thought it decorous to leave off writing love-verses [Footnote: See his Epistle, "ad Posteritatem," where, after lamenting the many years which he had devoted to love, he adds: "Mox vero ad quadragesimum annum appropinquans, dum adhuc et caloris satis esset," &c.]—a union with ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... attached to the family, and surroundings tinged with a general color of age, the boy had only seen friends worthy of respect. All of those about him, with the exception of the Chevalier, had example of venerable age, were elderly men and women, sedate of manner, decorous and sententious of speech. He had been petted by those women in gray gowns and embroidered mittens described by Blondet. The antiquated splendors of his father's house were as little calculated as possible to suggest frivolous thoughts; and lastly, he had ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
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