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More "Incapable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and only observe that Mrs. Pickle's mother and aunt stood godmothers, and the commodore assisted at the ceremony as godfather to the child, who was christened by the name of Peregrine, in compliment to the memory of a deceased uncle. While the mother confined to her bed, and incapable of maintaining her own authority, Mrs. Grizzle took charge of the infant baby double claim, and superintended, with surprising vigilance, the nurse and midwife in all the particulars of their respective offices, which were performed by her express direction. But ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... to the camp occupied the best part of an hour, and the latter part of the journey was made through a belt of pine wood, the timber of which left the human figure something so infinitesimal that its passage was incapable of disturbing the abiding silence. The scrunch of the springy carpet of needles and pine cones under heavily shod feet was completely lost. The profoundness of the gloom ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... at all points, incapable of being either surprised or exhausted, courage achieves results which seem miraculous. It is an element of inspiration, something superadded and incalculable, when all the other forces are exhausted. When ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... among the number. That he had been dropped overboard at an early stage in the lady's career seemed probable from the fact that neither his wife nor his daughter ever mentioned him. Mrs. Newell was incapable of reticence, and if her husband had still been an active element in her life he would certainly have figured in her conversation. Garnett, if he thought of the matter at all, had concluded that divorce must long since have eliminated Mr. Newell; but he now saw how he had underrated ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... some natures so great a hoard of generosity, that it often dulls their acuteness. Maltravers could not believe that frankness could be wholly a mask—it was an hypocrisy he knew not of. He himself was not incapable, had circumstances so urged him, of great crimes; nay, the design of one crime lay at that moment deadly and dark within his heart, for he had some passions which in so resolute a character could produce, should the wind waken them into storm, dire and terrible effects. Even ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... circulating currents of dry air in and around wet wool, the absorbing power of the air draws off the moisture. For continuous drying free circulation is a necessity, as otherwise the air would soon become saturated and incapable of taking up more moisture. Warming the air increases its capacity to absorb moisture; thus a higher temperature is capable of drying the wool much quicker than the same volume of air would at a low temperature. A free circulation of air at 75 to 100 degrees F., evenly distributed, ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... treating them as children to whom education must be given little by little instead of throwing down before them a mass of dangerous knowledge which their minds, unaccustomed to such strong food, are incapable of digesting. ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... of his state; he had kept a serious eye upon the activities of all the politicians of note; he had kept his mind open and free from party prejudice. He knew that the present governor of the state was incapable, or swayed by invisible and malign influences. He was aware that the state railroad commissioner lacked aggressiveness, or that he had been directed to keep in the background. And he was also aware that for a year ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... not go to the fire at first, and when Michel called to him that Mr. Hood was dead a considerable time had elapsed. Although I dared not openly to evince any suspicion that I thought Michel guilty of the deed, yet he repeatedly protested that he was incapable of committing such an act, kept constantly on his guard, and carefully avoided leaving Hepburn and me together. He was evidently afraid of permitting us to converse in private and whenever Hepburn spoke he inquired if he accused him ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... will prompt a conduct which as far transcends the necessity of human sanction. Miss Walladmor had learned through Grace the discovery which Mrs. Godber had made of the prisoner's relation to Sir Morgan Walladmor. That gentleman was incapable of acting: and, apart from her own love to Edward Walladmor, she knew under these circumstances, how it became her to act as the person on whom the interests and power of the unhappy parent had devolved. She had taken her resolution at once: all ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... of what we esteem virtue than according to the fashion of the savage. As bright examples of great qualities are but too uncommon among Christians, so are they singular and solitary with the Indians; though, for the honor of our common nature, neither are incapable of producing them. Let us then hope that this Mohican may not disappoint our wishes, but prove what his looks assert him to be, a ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... many kinds of lies, as well as many degrees of them. A child that is branded a liar has undoubtedly given abundant occasion for mistrust, and has lied aplenty; but undoubtedly also he has specialized in his lying, and would be incapable of certain kinds of lies that are common enough with other children. As we are the judges of our children in all of their misdeeds, we must preserve not only a judicious attitude, but we must really be just. And to this end it is essential that we take into consideration all ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... years' nerveless reign of the Doctrinaire Democracy had left us impotent for attack and almost as feeble for defence. Jefferson, though a man whose views and theories had a profound influence upon our national life, was perhaps the most incapable Executive that ever filled the presidential chair; being almost purely a visionary, he was utterly unable to grapple with the slightest actual danger, and, not even excepting his successor, Madison, it would be difficult ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... was far from perfect) in that chamber, a little flush of offence. The Rector rose abruptly, waving his hand, and went to join Miss Wodehouse in her corner. There the two elderly spectators looked on silent at ministrations of which both were incapable; one watching with wondering yet affectionate envy how Lucy laid down the weakened but relieved patient upon her pillows; and one beholding with a surprise he could not conceal, how a young man, not half his own age, went softly, with all ...
— The Rector • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... ever cease from the land, or that the compassionate will fail to find objects for their compassion; but at present the supply vastly exceeds the demand: the land is overstocked and overburdened with the listless and the incapable. ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... convict's escape, the breaking open of the gunsmith's shop, the finding of the front door of Cashing's store ajar, and the discovery by Cashing that at least one suit of valuable clothing had been taken, came upon the astonished villagers and rendered them incapable of reason, and of every other ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... the legal distinctions between slave and free as a line of cleavage between different kinds of men. It was a social arrangement and no more. Most of the slaves were, indeed, still chattel, bought and sold; many of them were incapable of any true family life. But there was nothing uncommon in a slave being treated as a friend, in his being a member of the liberal professions, in his acting as a tutor, as an administrator of his master's fortune, or a doctor. ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... go out filibustering, then, thinks that more territory is needed. Whoever wants wider slave-fields feels sure that some additional territory is needed as slave territory. Then it is as easy to show the necessity of additional slave-territory as it is to assert anything that is incapable of absolute demonstration. Whatever motive a man or a set of men may have for making annexation of property or territory, it is very easy to assert, but much less easy to disprove, that it is necessary for the wants ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... could succeed in this, it was necessary to dispose of the pacha already in possession. Fortunately for Ali, the latter was a weak and indolent man, quite incapable of struggling against so formidable a rival; and his enemy speedily conceived and put into execution a plan intended to bring about the fulfilment of his desires. He came to terms with the same Armatolians whom he had formerly treated so harshly, and let ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... they to carry the flag of their beloved Admiral again into battle, and so sanguine in the expectation of victory, notwithstanding the disparity of force,—nearly two to one! This I could not consent to, as they would have been worn out and incapable of further exertion; but I directed that all hands should be employed during the day, and that they should work watch and watch during the night. They immediately commenced their various duties, with all the energy and zeal that could be expected from men under such powerful causes ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... into a lower tone full of meaning, and which said to me that his very inmost soul was pouring itself out, with the awful words he used. I felt utterly helpless and undone—like an ant in the pathway of a giant—incapable of resistance or escape. I suppose all this was visible in my countenance. I said nothing; and Aurelian, after pausing a moment, ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... though the brakes had let go, she could not endure the bleak platform, and even less could she endure sitting in the chair car, eyed by the smug tourists—people as empty of her romance as they were incapable of her sharp tragedy. She balanced forward to the vestibule. She stood in that cold, swaying, darkling place that was filled with the smell of rubber and metal and grease and the thunderous clash of steel on steel; she tried to look out into the fleeing darkness; she tried to imagine ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... de Hautlieu, "the Bruce, the Douglas, Malcolm Fleming, and others of that party, although they are incapable of abusing such an advantage to any dishonourable purpose, might nevertheless, under a strong temptation, consider you as an hostage thrown into their hands by Providence, through whom they ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... actually have), that in no case should a chief of platoon tolerate any intercourse between his men and the enemy other than that of the rifle; this duty is explicit and not to be departed from except in the case of the wounded and prisoners incapable of doing harm. ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker
... have escaped, but now you shall pay for your vile and cowardly acts. It would be a sin to allow a creature like you to remain at large. It is far better to settle with you immediately and thus make you incapable of doing more harm in the future. You took it upon yourself to enter Glen West to ruin my daughter, and you must ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... creation of things, but are designated by the name "heavens" or of "light." And they were either passed over, or else designated by the names of corporeal things, because Moses was addressing an uncultured people, as yet incapable of understanding an incorporeal nature; and if it had been divulged that there were creatures existing beyond corporeal nature, it would have proved to them an occasion of idolatry, to which they ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... tired that his legs seemed incapable of support. He wiped the razor blade and put it away with a lax nerveless hand. He realized that he had been again at the point of murder. He had been saved by the narrowest margin in the world. For a moment the fact that he had been saved absorbed him, and ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... improbable to obtain credence, and would be more likely to draw upon him severe punishment, or perhaps the torture, with the view of inducing him to confess its falsehood. Bewildered by his terror, Antonio sat trembling, and utterly incapable of deciding as to the course he should adopt, when the trusty gondolier ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... also subject to the law of Malthus. It is continually living beyond its means, it increases in proportion to its means, and draws its support solely, from the substance of the people. Woe to the people who are incapable of limiting the sphere of action of the State. Liberty, private activity, riches, well-being, independence, dignity, ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... much greater, and the pulse is much quicker than in measles.—In scarlatina the throat is inflamed, usually the brain affected, and the patient smells like salt-fish, old cheese or the cages of a menagerie; in measles, the eyes are affected, inflamed, and incapable of bearing the light; the organs of respiration likewise (thence coryza, sneezing, hoarseness, cough); the perspiration smells like the feathers of geese freshly plucked.—In scarlatina the period of incubation is a day less than in measles; namely, in scarlatina the rash ...
— Hydriatic treatment of Scarlet Fever in its Different Forms • Charles Munde
... law is held to be decision in these wrangles, and as wrangling is subject to artistic elaboration, the business of the barrister is the business of a professional wrangler; he is a bravo in wig and gown who fights the duels of ordinary men because they are incapable, very largely on account of the complexities of legal procedure, of fighting for themselves. His business is never to explore any fundamental right in the matter. His business is to say all that can be said for his client, and ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... impressed upon my brain as actinic light upon a photo-screen. Close by Elza, partially behind her, I saw something small, no taller than Elza's waist. A naked thing of sleek, glistening skin. The monstrosity of a human child; a bulging head, wavering upon a neck incapable of supporting it; a thick round body; twisted, misshapen limbs. A face ... human? It made my gorge rise with its gruesome suggestion of humanity. Nostrils—no nose; a mouth, lipless, but red like a curved gash with upturned ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... that an Egyptian deity could inspire the Hebrews of Goshen with courage for the struggle against the Egyptians, or that an abstraction of esoteric speculation could become the national deity of Israel. It is not inconceivable indeed, although at the same time quite incapable of proof, that Moses was indebted to the Egyptian priests for certain advantages of personal culture, or that he borrowed from them on all hands in external details of organisation or in matters of ritual. But the origin of the germ which developed into Israel is not ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... Hamilton rather than of Jefferson. He was the sound thinker, the constructive statesman, the candid and honorable, if erring, gentleman; while Jefferson was the amiable enthusiast, who understood his fellow-countrymen better and trusted them more than his rival, but who was incapable either of uniting with his fine phrases a habit of candid and honorable private dealing or of embodying those phrases in a set of efficient institutions. But although Hamilton is much the finer man and much the sounder thinker and statesman, there were certain limitations in his ideas and ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... he soon discovered that his recruits, enlisted at Montreal, were fit to vie with the ragged regiment of Falstaff. Some were able-bodied, but inexpert; others were expert, but lazy; while a third class were expert and willing, but totally worn out, being broken-down veterans, incapable of toil. ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... you think of me as clearly as if you had spoken. Let me say what I think of you. You are a gallant gentleman, full of the ideas of the past, and incapable of changing; you will be a loyal servant to your own cause, and it will be beaten. To you I owe my life. Possibly it might have been better for you to have let me fall by the sword of one of Conde's dragoons, but we are all in the hands of the Eternal, Who doeth ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... I could neither forget past feelings nor show such sensibility as this beast reputed incapable of feeling! Things that happen lay hold of my heart, and when my heart is moved, I cannot control it. Therefore, smiling at myself, I called this song "A Song of ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various
... was one of the party.) To any one else such a subject would have been appalling: not so to Hook. He rose, glanced once or twice round the table, and chanted (so to speak) a series of verses perfect in rhythm and rhyme: the incapable theme being dealt with in a spirit of fun, humor, serious comment, and absolute philosophy, utterly inconceivable to those who had never heard the marvellous improvisator,—each verse describing something which the world considered great, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... composer at all but as a pianoforte player; and certainly Beethoven regarded Haydn as being behind the age. That he was unjust to Haydn cannot be gainsaid. He even went so far as to suspect Haydn of willfully trying to retard him in his studies, a proceeding of which Haydn was altogether incapable. For many years he continued to discharge splenetic remarks about his music, and he was always annoyed at being called his pupil. "I never learned anything from Haydn," he would say; "he never would correct ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... small poodle, the production of some unknown and disadvantageous cross with the true poodle. It has all the sagacity of the poodle, and will perform even more than his tricks. It is always in action; always fidgety; generally incapable of much affection, but inheriting much self-love and occasional ill temper; unmanageable by any one but its owner; eaten up with red mange; and frequently a nuisance to its master and a torment to ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... the north, near Diego Suarez, by Misson, a Frenchman, and the most humane of pirates, with whom was allied Tew, the English pirate. Misson's aim was to build a fortified town "that they might have some place to call their own; and a receptacle, when age and wounds had rendered them incapable of hardship, where they might enjoy the fruits of their labour and go to their graves in peace." The settlement was named Libertatia. Slavery was not permitted, and freed slaves were encouraged to settle there. The harbour was ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph
... intrusions and offences an annoyance. But when Mr. Frothingham gratifies the public with those most interesting personal recollections which I have had the privilege of looking over, it will be seen that his equanimity, admirable as it was, was not incapable of being disturbed, and that on rare occasions he could give way to the feeling which showed itself of old in the doom pronounced ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... his projects. He had humbled Francis, but Henry had most signally avenged his father. He had trampled upon Philip of Hesse and Frederic of Saxony, but it had been reserved for one of that German race, which he characterized as "dreamy, drunken, and incapable of intrigue," to outwit the man who had outwitted all the world, and to drive before him, in ignominious flight, the conqueror of the nations. The German lad who had learned both war and dissimulation ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... that the young lady preserved her presence of mind, for Bruce seemed incapable of connected thought or action. He roused himself, indeed, at his daughter's call, but gazed stupidly about him, stammered in his speech, and faltered in his step when he crossed the room. The shock of grief had evidently overmastered ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... by a number of torches, thanks to which the duchess and Mayneville could see cuirasses and swords shining. Incapable of moderation, she cried—"Go down, Mayneville, ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... The sound was incapable of being described, for outside the laboratory the sound of the advance of the Moon-cubes eating into the dwellings of men, tumbling them down, grinding them to powder, was cataclysmic in its mighty volume. A million ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... have observed, exerts a more degrading influence upon husbands that upon wives. The love of the latter finds expression in flowers and children, while the former seem to be rendered incapable of pure love of anything. The spirit of Mormonism is intensely exclusive and un-American. A more withdrawn, compact, sealed-up body of people could hardly be found on the face of the earth than is gathered here, notwithstanding railroads, telegraphs, and the penetrating lights that go ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... times of the day, and sometimes directly beneath one's feet. When kept in a room, the tucutucos move both slowly and clumsily, which appears owing to the outward action of their hind legs; and they are quite incapable, from the socket of the thigh-bone not having a certain ligament, of jumping even the smallest vertical height. They are very stupid in making any attempt to escape; when angry or frightened they utter the tucu-tuco. Of those I kept alive, several, even the first day, became quite tame, not attempting ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... impressed by the occult powers and seek short cuts to health, or goodness, or wisdom. They delight to build up, out of their own inner consciousness, systems which have little contact with reality and which, through their very tenuousness, are as incapable of disproof as through their disengagement from normal experience they are capable of verification. They are the people of what the alienist calls the "idee fixe." Everything for them centers about one idea; they have ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... matter before her, but paused and sat down on the little chair before her writing desk. Covering her eyes with her clenched hands she tried to think. Tante Lydia was worse than useless, scatterbrained, self-centered, incapable. What would she do? Lament and call all her friends in conclave; send in the police; acknowledge her fright, and give this nameless writer the satisfaction of knowing that his shaft had found ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... says,[348] Antiochus Philopappus, that all men pardon the man who acknowledges that he is excessively fond of himself, but that there is among many other defects this very grave one in self-love, that by it a man becomes incapable of being a just and impartial judge about himself, for love is blind in regard to the loved object, unless a person has learnt and accustomed himself to honour and pursue what is noble rather than his own selfish interests. This gives a great field ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... Julius Caesar[1] once more, puts in to hinder our passage. The Moone (saith he) is not altogether opacous, because 'tis still of the same nature with the Heavens, which are incapable of totall opacity: and his reason is, because perspicuity is an inseparable accident of those purer bodies, and this hee thinkes must necessarily bee granted, for hee stops there, and proves no further; ...
— The Discovery of a World in the Moone • John Wilkins
... with the consent of the Master, could expulse a Scholar for rebelliously and obstinately withstanding the Master or Usher; but if any scholar, upon proof first had, should be found altogether negligent or incapable of learning, at the discretion of the Master he could be returned to his friends to be brought up in some other honest trade ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... and immoral, sunk almost to one dead social level, and totally uninteresting because, in their new life of peaceful tillage—a life far more suited to their English law-givers than to themselves—they were apparently incapable of maintaining that complete, vigilant interest in their ordinary surroundings which makes for ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... things, as becometh one that hath received grace and redemption by his blood, is true; but that it is in our power, as is here insinuated, to become new creatures, is as untrue. The new creature, is of God; yea, immediately of God; man being as incapable to make himself anew, as a child to beget himself (2 Cor 5:17,18). Neither is our conformity to the revealed will of God, any thing else, if it be right, than the fruit and effect of that. All things are already, or before, become new in the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... obstacle, would gladly negotiate her acquiescence. To spur on this, she is coquetting it with England. The King of Prussia, too, is playing a double game between France and England. But I suppose the former incapable of forgiving him, or of ever reposing confidence in him. Perhaps the spring may unfold to us the final arrangement, which will take place among the ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the beating of drums, gongs, etc., with the object of delivering the Sun from the monster which threatened to devour it. The two astronomers by virtue of their office should have superintended these rites. They were, however, drunk and incapable of performing their duties, so that great turmoil ensued, and it was considered that the land was exposed to the anger of the gods. By way of appeasing the gods, and of suitably punishing the two State officials for their neglect ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... long as he is known to have loved any one in the past, or to love any one in the present, or to be even likely to love any one in the future, he may be pardoned. But if it is firmly believed that he is incapable of love, woman-kind arises in a body and abuses him in unmeasured terms. He is selfish. He is arrogant. He is so conceited that he thinks no one good enough for him. He is a stone, a prig, a hypocrite, a maniac, a monster, a statue, and especially he is a bore. In other words, he is ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... d'honneur." L'abbe commence a se pencher sur un petit pont et le prince aussitot le saisit et le fait culbuter a l'eau, d'ou l'abbe se tire non sans peine, et non sans colere, car il court sur le prince avec un fouet pour le corriger, declarant a qui veut l'entendre ce qu'il pense d'un prince incapable de tenir parole. Les practical jokers de ce genre n'etaient pas rares: le duc de Cumberland fit partager le meme sort a une jeune fille qui servait de dame de compagnie. Les ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... of intelligence, or of fibre, or of all three, they are inefficient or unwilling workers, and consequently unable to support themselves . . . They are often so degraded in intellect as to be incapable of distinguishing their right from their left hand, or of recognising the numbers of their own houses; their bodies are feeble and without stamina, their affections are warped, and they scarcely know what family ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... through the town dispelled the Lord George Sanger illusion at one fell blow, the rustic-urban mind being incapable of conceiving that that self-named nobleman could demean himself to the ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... ship, or cut off a politician's head. No excitement quickened his moderation. Even the most biting of personal sarcasms failed to ruffle a temper that seemed incapable of ...
— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various
... his power of endurance; and a hard gallop of five miles was about the extent of his capacity. The rude jolting of his arm made it extremely painful, while his system, reduced by the fever attending the wound, was incapable of supporting such a heavy draft upon his strength. He bore up against the pain and faintness which beset him as long as he could; but at last, to the oft-repeated inquiries of Captain de Banyan in regard to his condition, he was compelled ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... with a contemptuous shrug of his shoulders and impatient exclamation, turned back to the table. Fred, shivering and helpless, stood by the fire, uttering confused directions, and rubbing miserably his own flabby hands; his wife, crying, scolding, and incapable, stood at the end of the table, offering no assistance, but wondering when ever Nettie would come back. Dr Rider took the patient in his arms, and, beckoning Mrs Smith to go before him, carried the child up-stairs. There the good mistress of the ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... prehistoric geniuses whose names the night of antiquity has covered up; they may have been verified by the immediate facts of experience which they first fitted; and then from fact to fact and from man to man they may have SPREAD, until all language rested on them and we are now incapable of thinking naturally in any other terms. Such a view would only follow the rule that has proved elsewhere so fertile, of assuming the vast and remote to conform to the laws of formation that we can observe at work in ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... a gentle, patient soul, living for her family, wholly unselfish and incapable of complaint. She was placid and cheerful, courageous and trusting. I had four fine aunts, two of whom were then unmarried and devoted to the small boy. One was a veritable ray of sunshine; the other, ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... freely. He spent one hundred and five days exploring the gulf; then he continued his voyage round the west coast and back to Port Jackson by the south. He returned after a year's absence with a sickly crew and a rotten ship. Indeed, the Investigator was incapable of further service, and Flinders decided to go back to England for another ship. As passenger on board the Porpoise, early in August 1802, he sailed from Sydney for the Torres Strait accompanied by two returning transports. ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... escape, is committed to the care of a third person—usually a kinswoman of the husband, and in many cases his mother; and that the wife as a rule only recovers it when it is given to her, or at least when that which contains it has been opened by another: she seems incapable of finding ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... Barbarians of the land and sea, the Scots, the Picts, and the Saxons, spread themselves with rapid and irresistible fury, from the wall of Antoninus to the shores of Kent. Every production of art and nature, every object of convenience and luxury, which they were incapable of creating by labor or procuring by trade, was accumulated in the rich and fruitful province of Britain. A philosopher may deplore the eternal discords of the human race, but he will confess, that the desire of spoil is a more ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... and you ought to have taken that into consideration, if you had had any sympathy for him. But I dare say you were incapable of that sort of consideration. Your starting-point is so very widely-removed from ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... extent to supply his glasshouse with fuel. He has erected a theatre for his workmen, supplied them with scenes, dresses, etc.; and they have acquired such a taste for theatrical amusements, that it has conquered their violent passion for drinking which formerly made them incapable of work three days in the week; now they work as hard as possible, and amuse themselves for ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... purse!" cried Cibot. "I am incapable of taking the worth of a single pin; you mind that, Remonencq! I am known in the neighborhood for an honest ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... Bloemfontein Conference, had been at once opened—and opened in another way. What Lord Milner had learnt at Bloemfontein was not merely that President Krueger was unwilling to yield, but that he was psychologically incapable of yielding. He had learnt, that is to say, not that Krueger was determined to refuse the particular reform which the Imperial Government demanded, but that his whole system of thought was irreconcilably opposed to that of any English statesman. It is the knowledge ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... the choice between surrender and death; for nothing, as has been said, but their hearts' blood would satisfy the vindictive cravings of their foes; and, when the king's captivity became known, many of those who had formerly been most intrepid, remained motionless and incapable ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... understand. And when one remembered that her father was in prison shut up together with a lot of criminals and so on—it made one uncomfortable. If the child had only tried to forget her troubles! But she obviously was incapable or unwilling to do so. And that was somewhat perverse—wasn't it? Upon the whole, she thought it would be ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... among the peoples of eastern Mindano certain individuals who are known by a special name and who are reputed to be incapable of sexual intercourse. The individuals whom I saw were most feminine in their ways, preferring to keep the company of women and to indulge in womanly work rather ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... assault on Senator Hanna, one would have thought that he was a man incapable of patriotism or of far-sighted devotion to the country's good. I was brought into intimate contact with him only during the two and a half years immediately preceding his death. I was then President, and perforce watched all his actions at close range. During that time he showed ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... a business in the Old iron Ages. Of which, in the form of Carrousel or otherwise, down almost to the present day, there have been examples, among puissant Lords;—though now it is felt to have become extremely hollow; perhaps incapable of fully entertaining anybody, except children and their nurses ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... these vacuous tricks he would be struck with admiration of Ethelberta's wisdom, foresight, and self-command in refusing to wed such an incapable man: he felt that he ought to be thankful that a bright memory of her was not also denied to him, and resolved to be content with it as a possession, since it was as much of her as he could ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... that it may fairly be contended that under the provisions of this section any soldier whose faculties of mind or body have become impaired by accident, disease, or age, irrespective of his service in the Army as a cause, and who by his labor only is left incapable of gaining the fair support he might with unimpaired powers have provided for himself, and who is not so well endowed with this world's goods as to live without work, may claim to participate in its bounty; that it is not required that he should be without ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... opportunity, unprecedented in history, of displaying his power of design and reconstruction. Writing of this great architect, Macaulay says, "The austere beauty of the Athenian portico, the gloomy sublimity of the Gothic arcade, he was, like most of his contemporaries, incapable of emulating, and perhaps incapable of appreciating; but no man born on our side of the Alps has imitated with so much success the magnificence of the palace churches of Italy. Even the superb Louis XIV. has left to posterity no work which can bear ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... it has been blown out of the bolt-ropes," replied Hop, coolly; and he seemed to be incapable of anything like fear. "We have lost the reefed foresail, and that is what makes her roll so much worse than she did five ...
— Up the River - or, Yachting on the Mississippi • Oliver Optic
... this prince, henceforth incapable of serving the throne, was equally incapable of serving the republic. Odious to the royalists, put aside by the demagogues, suspected by the constitutionalists, there only remained to him the stoical attitude in which he took refuge. He had abdicated his rank, abdicated his own faction; ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... France, but his father supplanted him. Subsequently he expected to marry the arch-duchess Anne, daughter of the emperor Maximilian, but her father opposed the match. In 1564 Philip II. settled the succession on Rodolph and Ernest, his nephews, declaring Carlos incapable. This drove Carlos into treason, and he joined the Netherlands in a war against his father. He was apprehended and condemned to death, but was killed in prison. This has furnished the subject of several tragedies: ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... was awake again, dry-mouthed, feeling stupid and drowsy, yet incapable of dozing off for more than several minutes at a time. He abandoned the idea of sleep, ate breakfast in bed, and devoted himself to the morning papers and the magazines. But the drug effect held, and he continued briefly to doze through ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... JOBS ARE BONES. The phrase was an incessant iteration in Saxon's brain. Much as she might have wished it, she was powerless now to withdraw from the window. It was as if she were paralyzed. Her brain no longer worked. She sat numb, staring, incapable of anything save seeing the rapid horror before her eyes that flashed along like a moving picture film gone mad. She saw Pinkertons, special police, and strikers go down. One scab, terribly wounded, on his knees and begging ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... impatiently that she did not know. In ordinary circumstances she would not have been so short with the colonel's nonsense. She thought that was the way all men talked when they got well acquainted with you; and, as coming from a sex incapable of seriousness, she could have excused it if it had not interrupted her in her solution of so nice a problem. Colonel Kenton, however, did not mind. He at once possessed himself of much more than his share of the cylinder, extorting a cry of indignation from his wife, who now ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... brought Max flying back to the bosom of his family; and then the Charlotte episode had followed, over which Max had not been at all sympathetic, for in spite of his emancipated views about things in general, he had still the particular notion that revolution belonged only to men, and that women, incapable of conducting it efficiently, had far better ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... that she was in the hands and at the mercy of an unscrupulous villain, who was incapable of performing a noble or magnanimous act, but base enough to resort to any means in the use of which to carry an end, or gain a point. She but too well knew the fate before her, if no means of resistance were placed in her hands; and where to find these she knew not. She was, ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... proceeded at once to Transylvania, and the Vaivode himself had indulged in the delightful hope that the first person he should embrace at Croia would be his long-lost child. When, therefore, they met, and were mutually incapable of imparting any information on the subject to each other, they were filled with astonishment and disquietude. Events, however, gave them little opportunity to indulge in anxiety or grief. On the day that Hunniades and his lances arrived at Croia, the invading ...
— The Rise of Iskander • Benjamin Disraeli
... intermittently through the brain, and the outer world apprises us of its existence only by successive impulses, it must result that our sense of things will be rhythmic. The brain being alternately stimulated and relaxed we must think—as we feel—in waves, apprehending nothing continuously, and incapable of a consciousness that is not divisible into units of perception of which we make mental record and physical sign. That is why we dance. That is why we can, may, must, will, and shall dance, and the gates of Philistia shall not ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... distinguishable, to hear that our secret was a secret no longer. I was bound to show myself, and yet shrank from all gatherings of men. I transacted my business with an absent mind and a face of such superhuman innocence that, had anyone been watching me, he must at once have suspected something wrong. I was incapable of adding up a row of figures, and Jones became most solicitous about the state of my brain. In a word, my nerves were quite shattered, and I registered a vow never to upset a Government again as long I lived. ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope
... "that you don't judge me incapable of that high art. But it is not so very long since Malcolm used to hint something much the same ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... brother-in-law, who had tried to kill the girl he deceived, another. But before he gave voice to his thoughts he recognized them as springing only from panic. They were of a part with the acts of men driven by sudden fear, and of which acts in their sane moments they would be incapable. ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... delighted especially in a certain air known as the elf-dance, which was so irresistible that no one who heard it could refrain from dancing. If a mortal, overhearing the air, ventured to reproduce it, he suddenly found himself incapable of stopping and was forced to play on and on until he died of exhaustion, unless he were deft enough to play the tune backwards, or some one charitably cut the strings of his violin. His hearers, who were forced to dance as long as the tones continued, ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... with their powerful impulses, and the organism would become incapable of activity of any kind; it would lie inert and motionless, like a wonderful clockwork whose mainspring had been removed, or a steam-engine ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... objects, and never signed a subscription paper for their relief,—he was never a member of a charitable society, and never contributed a cent to the Missionary funds, whether for the Valley of the Mississippi or the Island of Borneo, where there are nothing but monkeys, or Malays as incapable of being christianized as the monkeys. Had he lived at the present time, and in this section of the country, he would have been prayed for and prayed at, at least once a day, and been, besides, occasionally held up in the ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... nakedness, a little diversified by now and then a stream rushing down the steep. An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility. The appearance is that of matter incapable of form or usefulness, dismissed by nature from her care and disinherited of her favours, left in its original elemental state, or quickened only with one ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... found that, in their own matters of rural business, he had always a fund of curious information to impart; and whoever, young or old, gentle or simple, learned or ignorant, asked his advice, it was given with not more humility than wisdom. In the common affairs of life he seemed incapable of acting for himself; he left all to my mother; or, if taken unawares, was pretty sure to be the dupe. But in those very affairs, if another consulted him, his eye brightened, his brow cleared, the desire ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pressed against the panes. It was the hero of the evening. The knightly beard curled crisply about the chin; but there were tears in the man's eyes, for he had been hissed off, and indeed with reason. The poor Incapable! But Incapables cannot be admitted into the empire of Art. He had deep feeling, and loved his art enthusiastically, but the art loved not him. The prompter's bell sounded; 'the hero enters with a determined air,' so ran the stage direction in his part, and ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... glorious light of beloved Helios. To Homer the after life in Hades was merely the perpetuation of the shadows of departed humanity, "strengthless shades" who live on the gloomy plains of asphodel, feeding upon dear memories, and incapable of keen emotions or any real mental or physical progress or action. Only a few great sinners like Tantalus, doomed to eternal torture, or favored being like Menelaus, predestined to the "Blessed Isles," are ordained to any real immortality. ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... 8. By the Self-Denying Ordinance of 1645 all members of Parliament were compelled to resign their commands. This rid the parliamentarians of some of their most incapable commanders. Exception was made in favour of Cromwell who was soon ...
— Memoirs of a Cavalier • Daniel Defoe
... departed very widely from the views of Mr. Darwin, and in place of the well-established causes and admitted laws to which he appeals have introduced theoretical conceptions which have not yet been tested by experiments or facts, as well as metaphysical conceptions which are incapable of proof. And when they come to illustrate these views by an appeal to palaeontology or morphology, we find that a far simpler and more complete explanation of the facts is afforded by the established principles of variation and natural selection. The confidence with ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... a far abler minister than the successor charged to undo his work. But his knowledge of colonial facts was very insufficient, and the light in which he viewed them was hopelessly false. Franklin had a knowledge immeasurably greater, and was almost incapable of an error of judgment; of all the reputation which was won or lost in this famous contest he gathered the lion's share; he was the hero of the colonists; his ability was recognized impartially by both the contending parties in England, and he was marked ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... shall inform the police." Nothing, surely, could be further from literature. Yet thrill after thrill is conveyed, by visual means, through situations artfully contrived; and in the sheer excitement of the moment, the audience is made incapable of noticing the ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... if the fate of this unhappy man, now condemned to long weary years of imprisonment, shall result in deterring others from the commission of crime, surely the operations of the detective have been more powerfully beneficial to society than all the eloquence and nicely-balanced theories—incapable of practical application—of the theoretical moralist, who doubts the efficiency or the propriety of the manner in which this ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... endless miles of corduroy road to be laid and relaid as course after course sank into the mud under the heavy army wagons; frequent head-water channels of rivers to be bridged; the lines of railroad along their route to be torn up and rendered incapable of repair; food to be gathered by foraging; keeping up, meanwhile a daily average of ten or twelve miles of marching. Under such conditions, Sherman's army made a mid-winter march of four hundred and twenty-five miles in fifty ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... deteriorate. Deeper lines became visible near her eyes, and the light of those eyes was feverish. Her nerves began to go to pieces. Restlessness increased upon her. She was scarcely able to keep still for a moment. The more she needed repose the more incapable of repose she became. The effort to seem younger, gayer, stronger than she was became at last almost convulsive. Her social art was tarnished. The ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... cage." "When I first knew Nat Emery," he once said, "he was sitting up till all hours reading Les Miserables, and would knock you down if you didn't bow your head at the mention of Thackeray. He might have liked music, too. An American isn't inherently incapable of that, I suppose." At which he had turned on sixteen-year-old Lydia with, "Which would you rather have, Lyddy; a husband with a taste for Beethoven or one that'd make you five thousand a year?" Lydia ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... in the next cell, an innocent gentleman, seized with an apoplexy in the street but entered in the charge-sheet as drunk and incapable, died like a dog. ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... achievements seem small and absurd. Such so-called successes seem to him the dreariest forms of failure. In short, Beauty has made him divinely discontented with the limited human world about him, divinely incapable of taking it seriously, or heeding its standards or conditions. No wonder society should look upon Beauty as dangerous, for she is constantly upsetting its equilibrium and playing havoc with its smooth schemes and smug conventions. She ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... know anything about that?' inquired her sister in surprise; for unless her sister had been listening at the door, a meanness of which she knew her to be incapable, she could not imagine how she could guess what the new owners of ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin
... on a thin layer of air, perhaps no more than a sixteenth of an inch thick but infinitely less friction-producing than the finest ball-bearing wheels and quite incapable of being broken, the ship now waited only the application of the ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... rule, are very ignorant, are very lazy, are very brutal, are very criminal. But a little way removed from savagery, they are incapable of adopting the white man's moral code, of assimilating the white man's moral sentiments, of striving toward the white man's moral ideals. They are creatures of brutal, untamed instincts, and uncontrolled ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... November, 1914, and afterwards was killed as a brigadier in the Somme battles); but the left was much in the air, as the only communication trench led up to some reserve breastworks near the Messines road, barely shoulder high, and themselves incapable of secure daylight approach, and all rations, stores, etc., had to be brought up overland by night over bullet-swept ground, but ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... buffet. The little thing must have spent a part of the previous afternoon in preparing it, and she must have put the package in the post at Crewe. Secretive and delightful little thing! After his recent experience beyond the bay he had imagined himself to be incapable of ever eating again, but it was not so. The lemon gave a peculiar astringent, appetising, settling quality to the chocolate. And he ate even with gusto. The result was that, instead of waiting for the nine o'clock boarding-house breakfast, he hurried energetically ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... let go of my wrist," she said, "you are hurting me, Porfirio. I know no more than you do why he came out of the cupboard; but of course you do him a wrong. He did not mean anything of the sort—he is of a good heart—incapable of murder. And now, please, Porfirio, let ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... last occasion, only a week ago, when he had made his confession. He had been afraid of hurting his aunt then, he remembered. He did not mind very much now ... he saw his aunt and uncle as two people suddenly grown effete, purposeless, incapable. They seemed to have changed altogether, which only meant that he was, at last, ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... engagements with her several times for lunch and tea—the former were hurried and, to him at least, rather unsatisfactory occasions, for she was sleepy-eyed and casual, incapable of concentrating upon anything or of giving consecutive attention to his remarks. When after two of these sallow meals he accused her of tendering him the skin and bones of the day she laughed and gave him a tea-time three days off. ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... enterprising and grasping mind to objects of public advantage, in preference to designs for individual aggrandizement: influence of such a nature had never operated upon the views and faculties of the hero of Marathon. Habituated to the enjoyment of absolute command, he seemed incapable of the duties of civil subordination; and the custom of a life urged him onto the desire of power [1]. These features of his character fairly considered, we shall see little to astonish us in the later reverses of Miltiades, and find additional causes for the popular suspicions ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... said, that I could not get through Mrs. Montague's "Essay on Shakspeare," I do not delay a moment to declare, that, on the contrary, I have always commended it myself, and heard it commended by every one else; and few things would give me more concern than to be thought incapable of tasting, or unwilling to testify my ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... emotion vanished; her tears were stopped, and she no longer had the strength to abandon that loving and unfortunate youth. To be the sole hope of a noble being, to love him and then abandon him!—that sacrifice is the treachery of which young hearts are incapable. Ginevra had the generosity to bury her own grief and suffering silently ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... strength of the English diminished to such a point that they were at length incapable of holding the long line of trenches, and they were obliged to ask the French to relieve them, which they did by taking over the right of our attack, a measure which placed them opposite to the two Russian positions of ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... very stupid things, the Jivros. Like an insect, their patterns are fixed and repetitive. They are almost incapable of original thought. Once you know them, you can always outwit them. With you will go my brother, Genner. He may be successful ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... would shine through the whole twenty-four hours; the political night came, as regularly as the night of nature, and with it came the march of tens of thousands of political lunatics, as brave as lions, though as incapable of discipline. My prediction was formidably fulfilled: the firebrand and the pike ravaged the land; blood flowed in torrents; and when the country returned to its senses, and the light of common sense once more dawned, ministers and people ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... went on Sir Richard; "for the rightful owners of the said goods being either miserably dead, or incapable, by reason of their servitude, of ever recovering any share thereof, the treasure, falsely called Spanish, cannot be better bestowed than in building up the state of England against them, our natural ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... Wilhelmina is incapable of deliberate falsehood; and this her impression or reminiscence, with all its exaggeration, is entitled to be heard in evidence so far. From this, and from other sources, readers will assure themselves that discontents were not wanting; that King Friedrich ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... without fear, without pleasure, without horror, and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and the dead heart, in the diseased habit, in the hardened conscience, that men become vulgar; they are forever vulgar, precisely in proportion as they are incapable of sympathy,—of quick understanding,—of all that, in deep insistence on the common, but most accurate term, may be called the "tact" or "touch-faculty" of body and soul; that tact which the Mimosa has in trees, which the pure woman ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... young oak among it that overtopped the firs, and yet its diameter was so small that it looked no larger than a pole; and the supporting boughs of the firs being now removed it could not uphold itself, but bent so much from the perpendicular as to appear incapable of withstanding a gale. The bark of the oak, when stripped and stacked, requires fine weather to dry it, much the same as hay, so that a wet season like 1879 is ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... you the truth, Sandip," my husband replied. "It is my feelings that are outraged, whenever you try to pass off injustice as a duty, and unrighteousness as a moral ideal. The fact, that I am incapable of stealing, is not due to my possessing logical faculties, but to my having some feeling of respect for ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... came still closer to the trees where he was hiding than she had come the night before. He was entranced with her loveliness, for it was indeed a marvellous thing. All night long he watched her, but dared not go near her. He would have been ashamed of watching her too, had he not become almost incapable of thinking of anything but how beautiful she was. He watched the whole night long, and saw that as the moon went down she retreated in smaller and smaller circles, until at last he could ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... somnambulists by this method. It was often necessary to repeat the command three or four times; and if the patient still remained awake, the abbe got out of the difficulty by dismissing him from the chair, and declaring that he was incapable of being acted on. And it should be especially remarked that the magnetisers do not lay claim to universal efficacy for their fluid; the strong and the healthy cannot be magnetised; the incredulous cannot be magnetised; those who reason upon ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... not shed tears or weep, as is well known to nurses and medical men. This circumstance is not exclusively due to the lacrymal glands being as yet incapable of secreting tears. I first noticed this fact from having accidentally brushed with the cuff of my coat the open eye of one of my infants, when seventy-seven days old, causing this eye to water freely; and though the child screamed violently, the other eye remained ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... that nauseating place of peril, confronting the grisly thing that might have hurled him outward into space with one wing-blow had it not been clogged with human flesh and incapable, that McKay reached for the remnants of the dead Hun's clothing and, facing the feathered horror, ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... was like any other mirror—quite ready to receive what was thrown upon her, but incapable of originating anything, almost incapable of ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... she utter this libel on my memory! Haughty, I might have been to others, but never to her—and coldness was no part of my nature. Would that it were! Would that I had been a pillar of ice, incapable of thawing in the sunlight of her witching smile! Had she forgotten what a slave I was to her? what a poor, adoring, passionate fool I became under the influence of her hypocritical caresses! I thought this to myself, but I ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... after starting the little fire. It was not that she was cold, but the fire, at least, in the heart of the black night, was a friend incapable of human treachery. She had not been there long when the tall bay, Wilbur's horse, stiffened, raised his head, arched his tail, and ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... child. She disguised the harshness of the words she was frequently obliged to say to him by a joking manner. No household was ever more tranquil; and the aversion Phileas felt for society, where he went to sleep, and where he could not play cards (being incapable of learning a game), had made Severine sole mistress of ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... the west of England. This malady appears on the nipples of cows in the form of irregular pustules, and it is now ascertained that persons inoculated with the matter taken from them are thereby rendered incapable of the small pox infection. Innumerable experiments have been made in different countries, in Asia and America, with nearly the same success; and by a series of facts duly authenticated, in many thousands of ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... "or else is ignorant of the fact, that the very object of the appointment of a guardian is because the law considers that a minor is incapable of acting for himself. He has no discretionary power in connection with his estate. He has no more right to go on the witness-stand and give voluntary hearsay evidence which shall be adverse to his own interests than he has to give away any part of his estate which may be under ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... viscous cohesive saliva, by licking its body with its tongue, which facilitates the power of swallowing it entire; this process is tedious, and it gradually sucks in the body, which, if large, renders it incapable of moving for some time, until it digests; and this is the period which the hunters watch to destroy it: it makes a hissing noise like a serpent, and has recourse to a variety of expedients to conceal itself; it is called by the natives Tinnui, and is ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... stood godmothers, and the commodore assisted at the ceremony as godfather to the child, who was christened by the name of Peregrine, in compliment to the memory of a deceased uncle. While the mother confined to her bed, and incapable of maintaining her own authority, Mrs. Grizzle took charge of the infant baby double claim, and superintended, with surprising vigilance, the nurse and midwife in all the particulars of their respective offices, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... importance with the passage of time, for it is a fact, unperceived by onlooking nations at the moment, that it was the turning point of the war; and that the turning was accomplished by troops of a nation that hated war and was supposed to be incapable of military development; and that these troops had met and whipped the choicest troops of a power that above all things was military, that had assumed proprietary rights in the art of war, and believed ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... and young men with canes and great show of cuffs; multitudes of distinguished-looking people, Francais a l'outrance; people with beaked noses and olive complexions; clerks and shop-girls, gamins and bonnes; policemen of inferior stature, who though armed with swords, look incapable of dealing with desperate men; laborers in blouses and old ladies ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... causation to people who show so much ingenuity in the construction of houses, boats, weapons, and a great variety of mechanical devices, such as traps, and in other operations involving the intelligent application of mechanical principles. These operations show that, though they may be incapable of describing in abstract and general terms the principles involved, they nevertheless have a nice appreciation of them. If a trap fails to work owing to its faulty construction, the trapper treats ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... concentration of the mind on a single object, or on a single aspect of human nature, overpowers the orderly perception of the whole. Yet the feelings too bring truths home to the minds of many who in the way of reason would be incapable of understanding them. Reflections of this kind may have been passing before Plato's mind when he describes the poet as inspired, or when, as in the Apology, he speaks of poets as the worst critics of their own writings—anybody ...
— Ion • Plato
... possession of Charleston, Augusta, Ninety-Six, and Camden, supported by an army in the field, secured entire control over all the wealthy parts of South Carolina. North Carolina was full of Tories, anxiously awaiting the approach of Cornwallis. The three Southern States were incapable of helping themselves, and those further north, exhausted and penniless, were little able to send assistance. It seemed as if the promises so often made by Lord George Germaine's American correspondents were now about to be fulfilled, and the rebel colonies to sink beneath the accumulated pressure ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... I am glad for the sake of contrast to set beside it a talk with one of the revolution's chief theorists. The leather-worker illustrated the revolution as it affects an individual. The revolutionary theorist was quite incapable of even considering his own or any other individual interests and thought only in terms of enormous movements in which the experiences of an individual had only the significance of the adventures of one ant among a myriad. Bucharin, ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... account. Contrary to all expectation, Marksman was beaten for the Chester Cup, and the squire's property was placed under the charge of a receiver. Under the new management things were gone into more closely, and it was then discovered that Mr. Latch's accounts were incapable of satisfactory explanation. The defeat of Marksman had hit Mr. Latch as hard as it had hit the squire, and to pay his debts of honour he had to take from the money placed in his charge, confidently hoping to return it in a few months. The squire's misfortunes anticipated the realization ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... peculiar to Prussia. We may claim to produce the article in a perfection that may well make Germany despair of ever surpassing us in that line. Sir Edward Grey is a Junker from his topmost hair to the tips of his toes; and Sir Edward is a charming man, incapable of cutting down even an Opposition front bencher, or of telling a German he intends to have him shot. Lord Cromer is a Junker. Mr. Winston Churchill is an odd and not disagreeable compound of Junker and Yankee: his frank anti-German pugnacity is enormously more popular ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... was that he was absolutely incapable of work next day; and then, giving way to the maddening desire, he and his comrade-in-debauchery went in, as they said, for a regular spree. It lasted for more than a week, and when it came to an end, the two men, with cracked lips, bloodshot eyes, and haggard faces, ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... assented to whatever she advanced; he did so because he considered her a fool and incapable of reasoning. Moreover, he was not anxious to see half of this estate drop into the hands of Garcia, believing that whatever Clara kept for herself would shortly be his ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... threatened, were unable to endure the disappointment. Accordingly, they kept continually trying to inspire me with the fear of imminent death by means of various terrifying hints. But, as I have already said, I had become so well acquainted with troubles of this sort that I was incapable of fear, and nothing any longer could disturb me; only I had that one great longing to behold the sphere of the sun, if only ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... exalted in the pages of the Edinburgh, so famous for its incartades of old. As Dryden says, "He has done me all the honour that any man can receive from him, which is to be railed at by him." I am content to share the vituperation of this veteran—incapable in company with the poetaster George Gordon who suffered for "this Lord's station;" with that "burnish fly in the pride of May," Macaulay, and with the great trio, Darwin, Huxley and Hooker, who also have been the butts of his bitter and malignant abuse (April '63 and April ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... if any person shall offend against any of the prohibitions of this act he shall be deemed guilty of a high misdemeanor and forfeit to the United States the penalty of $3,000, and shall upon conviction be removed from office and forever thereafter incapable of holding any office under the United States: Provided, That if any other person than a public prosecutor shall give information of any such offense, upon which a prosecution and conviction shall be had, one-half the aforesaid penalty of $3,000, when ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... own heart and was still, until it burned within her, and the supplication came. When she rose from her knees, she was resigned in all things to God's will, no matter what self-denial it involved; and she was not unhappy. For, O believe this truth, the saddest thing under the sky is a soul incapable of sadness! Most blessed are those souls who are capable of lodging so great a guest as Sorrow, who know how to regret, and how to desire, and who have learned ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... more colonial poetry, more young nations with withered traditions. Yet it is before this prospect that the provincial overseas lifts up his voice in a boast or a promise common enough among the incapable young, but pardonable only in senility. He promises the world a literature, an art, that shall be new because his forest is untracked and his town just built. But what the newness is to be he cannot tell. Certain words were dreadful once in the mouth of ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... or rather is the universe itself, in this heaven of abstraction, nevertheless, a cloud begins to appear; a limitation casts its shadow over the formless void. Infinite is finite because it is infinite. That is to say, because infinity includes all things, it is incapable of creating what is external to itself. Deny infinity in this sense, and the being to whom it is attributed receives a new power. God is greater by being finite than by being infinite . . . Logic must admit that the infinite over-reaches itself ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making: we will not choose the path of submission and suffer the most sacred rights of our nation and our people to be ignored or violated. The wrongs against which we now array ourselves are not common wrongs; they reach out to the very roots of ...
— Why We are at War • Woodrow Wilson
... servants of the company came up and broke the lance across Don Quixote's ribs. It was not until a countryman came by that the Don was extricated, and then he had to ride back to his own village on the ass of the poor labourer, being so stiff and sore as quite incapable ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... "Why do you ask, star voyager? Did you not also break free from the power of the disk when I led you by the underground ways, awaking in the river? Do you then rate this other one as less than your own breed that you think him incapable ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... and Madame de Maintenon. His mind was limited and; like all persons of little wit and knowledge, he was obstinate and pig-headed— smiling affectedly with a gentle compassion on whoever opposed reasons to his, but utterly incapable of understanding them—consequently a dupe in friendship, in business, in everything; governed by all who could manage to win his admiration, or on very slight grounds could claim his affection. His capacity was small, and yet he believed he knew everything, which was the more pitiable, as all ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... pernicious neighbour, he made everybody miserable with whom he had to do." I like to imagine La Bruyere escaping from some dreadful scene where Henry Jules had injured his dependants and insulted his familiars, or had drawn out in public the worst qualities of his son, "incapable of affection and only too capable of hatred." I imagine him escaping from the violence and meanness of those intolerable tyrants up into the asylum of his own hushed apartment at Versailles; there flinging himself down for ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... Melissa, that you are incapable of duplicity or evasion. I have promised, and now repeat the declaration, that I will silently submit to your decision. This you have engaged to make, and this is the time you have appointed. The pains of present suspense can scarcely be surpassed ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... have Chaul, Daman, and Basseen; and Cananor, Mangalor, Cochin, and Chale were to become the share of the Zamorin. At the same time, the king of Acheen was to attack Malacca, that the Portuguese, assailed at once on every important point, might be incapable of sending succours to the different places. Adel Khan was so confident of success, that he had assigned the different offices at Goa among his chiefs, and had even allotted among them certain Portuguese ladies, who were celebrated ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... rudimentary wings of many insects, the rudimentary stamens or pistils of many flowers, are all swept into the Darwinian net. "Nothing can be plainer than that wings are formed for flight; yet in how many insects do we see wings so reduced in size as to be utterly incapable of flight, and not rarely lying under wing-cases, firmly soldered together?" These phenomena are all explicable if descent with ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... and bodily, that accompanied this depression, was so great as to seriously retard her recovery, and almost baffled the doctor's skill. She would lie for hours without speaking or moving, apparently asleep, but only in a sort of waking dream. She took no interest in anything, and appeared quite incapable of making any effort to overcome this apathy. Emily tried her best to amuse her; but after taking pains to relate everything that she thought of interest that had occurred, Isabel would smile and thank her, in a way that proved she had not been listening. Thus week after week of her ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... France which had begun with the shameful defeat of Rossbach and ended with the loss of Canada in the west and the Indies in the east (1757-1763), were due to no want of valour in the common soldier. It was the generals, as Napoleon said fifty years afterwards, who were incapable and inept. And it was the ineptitude of the administrative chiefs that made the militia at once ineffective and abhorred. First, they allowed a great number of classified exemptions from the ballot. The ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... moment, you make off, and leave your fine words to look after themselves. Similarly, when your tragedians represent this subject on the stage, you are loud in your applause; the spectacle of one friend risking his life for another generally brings tears to your eyes: but you are quite incapable of rendering any such signal services yourselves; once let your friends get into difficulties, and all those tragic reminiscences take wing like so many dreams; you are then the very image of the silent mask which the actor ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... in the main I am the worse for having loved her: Whenever she is recalled to my imagination my youth returns, and I feel a forgotten warmth in my veins. This affliction in my life has streaked all my conduct with a softness, of which I should otherwise have been incapable. It is, perhaps, to this dear image in my heart owing that I am apt to relent, that I easily forgive, and that many desirable things are grown into my temper, which I should not have arrived at by better motives than the thought of being ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... may appertain. And any person who shall falsely take the said oath shall be guilty of perjury, and on conviction, in addition to the penalties now prescribed for that offense, shall be deprived of his office, and rendered incapable forever after, of holding any office or place under ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... along my nerves. I tried her on a variety of subjects, equally in vain; and at last led the talk to her daughter. But even there she proved indifferent; said she was pretty, which (as with children) was her highest word of commendation, but was plainly incapable of any higher thought; and when I remarked that Olalla seemed silent, merely yawned in my face and replied that speech was of no great use when you had nothing to say. 'People speak much, very ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... midst of severe physical suffering. Just after the inauguration, Washington was laid up with an anthrax or carbuncle in his thigh, which brought him at one time very near death. For six weeks he could lie only on one side, endured the most constant and acute pain, and was almost incapable of motion. He referred to his illness at the time in a casual and perfectly simple way, and mind and will so prevailed over the bodily suffering that the great task of organizing the government ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... from the authority of the gravest men—theologians, presidents, judges, corporations, universities, senates—that every prince is better than his father, 'of blessed memory, now with God'. If they continue to rise thus transcendently, earth in a little time will be incapable of holding them, and higher heavens must be raised upon the highest heavens for their reception. The lumber of our Italian courts, the most crazy part of which is that which rests upon a red cushion in a gilt chair, with stars and sheep and crosses dangling from it, must be approached ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... so," said the captain, as he crossed the quarter-deck and disappeared from view beneath the break of the poop, going into his own cabin to send in his report to our senior officer, Admiral Hope, who was subsequently invalided home, being so dangerously wounded as to be incapable of attending to any other business after forwarding his dispatches home. "And, the sooner the better, Nesbitt—the sooner the better!" Both officers judged the feeling of their countrymen well, but quite twelve months ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... No sight of Giacinta was to be had in any direction. Her mistress commenced chiding the absent garrulous creature, and did so until she pitied her, when she accused herself of cowardice, for she was incapable of calling out to the coachman to stop. The rapid motion subdued such energy as remained to her, and she willingly allowed her hurried feelings to rest on the faces of rocks impending over long ravines, and of perched ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... species. But we may thus greatly deceive ourselves, for to ascertain whether a small isolated area, or a large open area like a continent, has been most favourable for the production of new organic forms, we ought to make the comparison within equal times; and this we are incapable of doing. ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... the Persians were made. As for Ariaeus and his troops, alike traitors and cowards, their desertion was rather a gain than a loss. The enemy were superior in horsemen: but men on horseback were after all only men, half occupied in the fear of losing their seats—incapable of prevailing against infantry firm on the ground,—and only better able to run away. Now that the satrap refused to furnish them with provisions to buy, they on their side were released from their covenant, and would take provisions without buying. Then as to the rivers; ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... on the contrary, finished to the minutest details, notwithstanding that carnelian and red jasper are even harder than green felspar. Lapis lazuli is insufficiently homogeneous, almost as hard as felspar, and seems as if it were incapable of being finely worked. Yet the Egyptians have used it for images of certain goddesses—Isis, Nephthys, Neith, Sekhet,—which are marvels of delicate cutting. The modelling of the forms is carried out as boldly ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... rightful protector being still in his drunken sleep. Arrived there, they needed help and comfort even more than they had before. There were friends by the hundreds, but Theodore could not fail to see that while Mrs. Hastings appeared incapable of directing, and indeed very indifferent as to what was done, Dora turned steadily and constantly to him for advice and assistance. Pliny was prevailed upon to go at once to his room, and was very soon asleep. When the wretched stupor of sleep had worn itself out upon him, and left the fearful ...
— Three People • Pansy
... reproduction was in fact regarded as a proof of divine inspiration. When the chief's sons were trained to recite the genealogical chants, those who were incapable were believed to lack a share in the divine inheritance; they were literally "less ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... conducted himself so well in the service of the Cardinal, and gained such esteem, that his master had no small regret that his secretary was incapable of holding a living, for which he ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... who was now almost incapable of speech. "Very well, rascal Greek! die you shall, like your master. Holy prophet! what a state for a Mussulman to go to Paradise in—impregnated with the essence of a cursed Jew!—Wretch! you ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... that will be felt for Lady Ida is the sympathy which is commonly felt for the spendthrift—for the person who, no matter what his income, is congenitally incapable of making ends meet. The miser has no friends; but the spendthrift has generally too many. We avoid Harpagon as though he were a leper; but Falstaff, who, like Lady Ida, could "find no cure for this intolerable consumption of the purse," never lacked friends, and even Justice Shallow, ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... he spoke not the truth. He felt the great brown eyes of the girl penetrate his naked soul; and he knew that in the dark recesses of the inner man they fell upon the grinning skeleton of hypocrisy. Carmen might be, doubtless was, incapable of reasoning. Of logical processes she knew nothing. But by what crass assumption might he, admittedly woefully defeated in his combat with Fate, oppose his feeble shafts of worldly logic to this child's instinct, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the most faithful portrait that can be traced of Casimir at this epoch. He had not as yet the vices which developed in him later on. He had nothing to distinguish him from the average man. He was selfish, without being disagreeable, rather idle, rather incapable, rather vain and rather foolish. He was just an ordinary man. The wife he had married, though, was not an ordinary woman. That was their misfortune. As Emile Faguet has very wittily put it, "Monsieur Dudevant, about whom she complained ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... the winter. He showed the extreme improbability of our overtaking ships which must have been driven very far to the south by the gale, as also the danger of being swamped should the slightest sea get up; while, should we not succeed in our attempt, we should be worn out, and, incapable of providing for the future, must ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... enlightened," had "tasted of the heavenly gift," were "partakers of the Holy Ghost," had "tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come;" if such fall away—forsake the Lord and choose to live in sin—they soon become incapable of being affected by any manifestation of the Spirit or any inducement held out to them—a deplorable, lost condition! bearing only thorns and briers! whose end is to be burned! Now we ask, Who ever saw any one come back to God who was content ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... satisfaction" (I still quote from the Dario) "followed this expressive discourse. Joy was painted on every countenance. The frank satisfaction which every one felt gave to this act a solemnity which words are incapable of describing. His Excellency, accompanied by the corporations and by a brilliant and numerous concourse, then passed to the hall of the court-martial, to put in possession of his Excellency General D. Gabriel Valencia the sword of honour which the august national representation had granted ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... consider it to be a virtue rather than a sin to tell a lie to save a 'pal' from punishment, but in cases where their own interests are not specially at stake, they can speak the truth as well as other men. But this prisoner seemed utterly incapable of speaking the truth, even when falsehood brought no advantage ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... went to the West Indies, his absence would heighten the probability of Nancy's detection. Yet he desired to escape from her. Not to abandon her; of that thought he was incapable; but to escape the duty—repulsive to his imagination—of encouraging her through the various stages of their fraud. From the other side of the Atlantic he would write affectionate, consolatory letters; face to face with her, could he support the show of tenderness, go through an endless series ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... invalids, who have unfortunately a sensitive palate, and have been accustomed to a luxurious variety of savoury sauces, and highly seasoned viands; those who, from the infirmity of age, are become incapable of correcting habits created by absurd indulgence in youth, are entitled to some consideration; and, for their sake, the Elements of Opsology are explained in the most intelligent manner; and I have assisted the memory of young cooks, by annexing to each dish ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... not object. It was a great relief to go to her rooms, worn out, and to lie, unable to think, incapable of calculation, lost to everything except her will to play Ariel with all the magic and youthful vitality she possessed. Everything outside the play had disappeared for her, too. That so much of Charles's work should be submerged ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... Carl is an honorable boy, incapable of theft, and at this moment has but thirty-seven cents ...
— Driven From Home - Carl Crawford's Experience • Horatio Alger
... still-born and of those dying in infancy are held in great fear. These spirits, called Con Ranh, or Con Lon (from lon, "to enter into life"), are ever seeking "to incorporate themselves in the bodies of others, though, after so doing, they are incapable of life." Moreover, "their names are not mentioned in the presence of women, for it is feared they might take to these, and a newly-married woman is in like manner afraid to take anything from a woman, or to wear any of the clothing of one, who has had such ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... it?—finesse. Your mother was just the same. A sweet woman, but with no diplomacy, no notion of handling a situation. I remember her as a child giving me away hopelessly on one occasion after we had been at the jam-cupboard. She did not mean any harm, but she was constitutionally incapable of a tactful negative at the right time." Uncle Chris brooded for a moment on the past. "Oh, well, it's a very fine trait, no doubt, though inconvenient. I don't blame you for leaving Brookport if you weren't happy there. But I wish ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... bell, said, "No matter; it is of no importance," and turning around again toward the Prince asked indifferently how other things were going in Dresden and what had occurred during his absence. Then, incapable of hiding his inner state of mind, he saluted him with a wave of the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... so remote from man as fishes—cold-blooded inhabitants of an element in which man exists only so long as he keeps on the surface; mute, incredible and incapable of exchanging any intercourse with him—why these should provide the Cockney, the dweller in the citiest City of the world, with so much of the material of jocoseness is an odd problem. But they do. Herrings, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919 • Various
... use in parliament by a political tract of the time of Charles II. It was actually used by the Scots parliament of 1662 in proceeding on the Billeting Act, a measure proposed by Middleton to secure the ostracism of Lauderdale and other political opponents who were by secret-vote declared incapable of public office. The plan followed was this: each member of parliament wrote, in a disguised hand, on a piece of paper, the names of twelve suspected persons; the billets were put in a bag held by the registrar; the bag was then ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... fighting came, the defenders might confound the enemy by lighting the surrounding desert, making a surprise impossible. Old barrels were broken up, therefore, and saturated with oil. The spiked double gates of iron, though apparently strong, Stephen judged incapable of holding out long against battering rams, but he knew heavy baulks of wood to be rare in the desert, far from the palms of the oases. What he feared most was gunpowder; and though he was ignorant of the marabout's secret ambitions and warlike preparations, ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... bees will suck the honey without difficulty.—These valuable insects are liable to various disorders, both from the food they eat, from foreign enemies, and from one another. If they have fed greedily on the blossoms of the milk thistle or the elm, it will render them incapable of working, and the hive will be stained with filth. The best cure in this case is pounded pomegranate seed, moistened with sweet wine; or raisins mixed with wine or mead, and the infusion of rosemary. When they are infested with vermin, the hive must be cleansed, and perfumed with ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... stimulate the admiration of the men with whom she flirted. As to Bertie, one would have imagined from the sound of his voice and the gleam of his eye that he had not a sorrow nor a care in the world. Nor had he. He was incapable of anticipating to-morrow's griefs. The prospect of future want no more disturbed his appetite than does that of the butcher's knife disturb the appetite ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... one in advance had a thoughtful, anxious, and somewhat crafty expression of face, and in spite of his loftiness of manner, which was evidently the result both of an ambitious spirit and of long continuance in high stations, he seemed not incapable of cringing to a greater than himself. A few steps behind came an officer in a scarlet and embroidered uniform, cut in a fashion old enough to have been worn by the Duke of Marlborough. His nose had a rubicund tinge, which, together with the twinkle of his eye, might have ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... recognized a great artist in the old mountebank, and I was quite sure that he was altogether incapable of any trickery. I told him so, while expressing my admiration to him; and he had been touched by my open admiration and above all by the justice I had done him. Thus we became good friends, and he ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... voyage across the Bay of Biscay in a ship lit for nothing but wine, was excessive, and creatures reared in the lovely climate and refined luxury of the land of the palm and orange, exhausted too already by the toils of the mountain journey, were incapable of enduring it, and Abenali's brave wife and one of her children were left beneath the waves of the Atlantic. With the one little girl left to him, he arrived in London, and the recommendation of his Cadiz friend obtained for him work from a dealer in foreign ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Aldermen, fourteen policemen, seventeen officers in the fire department, four deputy sheriffs, and forty Negro magistrates besides. It is probable that not one of these was qualified to fill his office. The new government soon found itself incapable of governing. It could not control its own. The homes of the people were at the mercy of thieves, burglars and incendiaries, and the police were either absolutely incapable of preventing crime, or connived ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... rougher puff blows out the flame, and she is left in what to her, standing as she was on that forbidden ground, must have been a horror of darkness. At the same moment, clear and sharp from right beneath her, a pistol-shot rings out on her ear. For an instant she stands in stone, incapable of motion. Then on her dazed senses there supervenes—so she swore—the consciousness that some object is moving in the room—moving apparently of its own accord—moving in direct opposition to all the laws of nature as she knows them. She imagines that she perceives a phantasm—a strange something—globular-white—looking, ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... approaches thrusts his hand, armed with the splinter of wood, into his terrible mouth, which the creature closes directly, and by these means forces the sharp points into each of his jaws, where they stick fast. He is then incapable of doing hurt, and they pull him to the shore by the cord. "Pray, sir," said Tommy, "is this dreadful animal capable of being tamed?" "Yes," answered Mr Barlow; "I believe, as I have before told you, there is no animal that may not be rendered mild and inoffensive by good usage. There ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... temporary occultation. His own, no doubt, have not always been in their primitive vogue. Even at first, English readers complained of the difficulty caused by his Scotch, and now many make his I "dialect" an excuse for not reading books which their taste, debauched by third-rate fiction, is incapable of enjoying. But Scott has never disappeared in one of those irregular changes of public opinion remarked on by his friend Lady Louisa Stuart. In 1821 she informed him that she had tried the experiment of reading Mackenzie's "Man ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... wife being one person could not contract nor enter into a business partnership with each other; neither could one convey property to the other without the intervention of a third party. The wife was incapable of receiving a legacy unless it was willed to another person as trustee, for her use and benefit, and if a legacy were paid directly to her, the husband could compel the executor to ...
— Legal Status Of Women In Iowa • Jennie Lansley Wilson
... bad as Madame de Serizy; you laugh justice to scorn," said Camusot, who was incapable of flouting his profession. "Madame de Serizy seized the minutes and ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... formed a part of the penitentiary procedure, and by which the crown and Holy Office made pecuniary gains. The second secured secrecy in the action of the tribunal, whereby a door was opened to delation, and accused persons were rendered incapable of rational defense. The third elaborated the judicial method, so as to leave no loophole of escape even for those who showed a wish to be converted, empowering the use of torture, precluding the accused from ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... approaching procession, with its sizzling band and its abhorrent orange-and-blue flags, following in the wake of Bill Kenna, whose proud post was at the head of the procession, carrying a cushion on which was an open Bible. The fact that Bill was a notorious ruffian—incapable of reading, and reeling drunk—had no bearing on his being chosen as Bible carrier. The Bible fell in the dust many times and was accidentally trampled on by its bearer, which was unfortunate but not important. Bill ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... and supposed that Waally's fleet had intercepted her, Betts coming back for reinforcements. But, as the boat drew near, the fluttering of female dresses was seen, and then his unerring glass let him get a distant view of the sweet face of his young wife. From that moment the governor was incapable of giving a coherent or useful order, until Bridget had arrived. Vessels that came in from the southward were obliged to pass through the narrow entrance, between the Reef and the Hog Lot, where was the drawbridge so often mentioned. There was ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... become more acutely accentuated with each passing year. Finally, it has furnished a signal proof of the fairness and good will with which two friendly nations can approach and determine issues involving national sovereignty and by their nature incapable of submission to a third ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... be represented in a modern play or novel as a kind of degenerate; a shifty-eyed moral maniac with a twist in his soul's backbone and green blood in his veins. The mediaevals were quite capable of boiling him in melted lead, but they would have been quite incapable of despairing of his soul in the modern fashion. A striking a fortiori case is that of the strange mediaeval legend of Robert the Devil. Robert was represented as a monstrous birth sent to an embittered woman actually in answer to ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... look into Eleanore Leavenworth's face would have been enough to satisfy you that she is incapable of crime," was her unexpected answer; and, lifting her head with a proud gesture, Mary Leavenworth fixed her eyes steadfastly ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... about it, he had always supposed this to be the case. But now it struck him as a very strange thing that Miss Annie did not attend to her husband, but allowed his mistress and himself to do everything that was done for him. It was a question which his mind was totally incapable of solving, but when he reached the house, he spoke to Letty on the subject. "Bress your soul!" exclaimed that well-nourished person, "dat's not Mister Null, wot married Miss Annie. Dat's Mister Crof', an' he aint married to ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... have perhaps suffered more hitherto than any of the brave men who have risked their lives in this house. It is a horrible feeling to be obliged to sit still when honor summons one to the foremost ranks. But, for this very reason, I have no right to dictate to you. He who is incapable of fighting has no right to decide when the fighting shall cease; nay, I have hardly a right to tell you my views, because I fear that they may influence your high-hearted minds; besides which, unfortunately, I do not know the men who defend ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... there, however. Excessive childbearing is now recognized by the medical profession as one of the most prolific causes of ill health in women. There are in America hundreds of thousands of women, in good health when they married, who have within a few years become physical wrecks, incapable of mothering their ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... to lead out the water either of the Zambesi or any of its tributaries; no machinery has ever been used to raise it even from the stream, but droughts and starvations are endured, as if they were inevitable dispensations of Providence, incapable of ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... well-marked seasonal sexual rhythm in animals. Most of the higher animals breed only once or twice a year, and at such a period that the young are born when food is most plentiful. At other periods the female is incapable of breeding, and without sexual desires, while the male is either in the same condition or in a condition of latent sexuality. Under the influence of domestication, animals tend to lose the strict periodicity of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... them and him. They hung there in all weathers, with the wind and rain driving in upon them; facing only the outsides of all the houses; never getting any nearer to the blazing fires that gleamed and shone upon the windows or came puffing out of the chimney tops; and incapable of participating in any of the good things that were constantly being handed through the street doors and iron railings to prodigious cooks. Being but a simple man, he invested the Bells with a strange and solemn ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... application, and cannot be abandoned while government by the people endures." In 1904, the Democratic party, while professing adherence to fundamental principles declared in favor of casting into the outer darkness of the fictitious "independence" every people "incapable of being governed under American laws, and in consonance with the American Constitution," but the Populists still held to the principles of the Declaration, while the Republicans held to ...
— "Colony,"—or "Free State"? "Dependence,"—or "Just Connection"? • Alpheus H. Snow
... and laughing, carrying out rebellions and little plots as though the centuries that stretch ahead were still her willing slaves, has in the end become to onlookers a veritable nightmare. Puzzled by a phenomenon which is so disconcerting as to be incapable of any clear definition, they have ended by declaring that an empty Treasury is an empty rule, adding that as it is solely from this monetary viewpoint that the New China ought to be judged, their opinion is the one which will finally be accepted as authoritative. ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... time to time, tried to maintain some sort of friendly relations with him; but it seemed as the years passed that he grew ever lonelier and more bitter, and not only more friendless, but seemingly more incapable of friendliness. In times past I have seen what men call tragedies—I saw once a perfect young man die in his strength—but it seems to me I never knew anything more tragic than the life and death of Old Toombs. If it cannot be said of a man when he dies that either ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... bear me beyond his reach I had not. I could not vanish with a thought. The door was open, but my murderer was interposed between that and me. Of self-defence I was incapable. The phrenzy that lately prompted me to blood was gone; my state was desperate; ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... gayety is not to be despised, considering that we had been sitting still for hours in cold and darkness, and had had nothing to eat or drink since our early breakfast. Even the one disconsolate member of our company was perhaps really incapable of exerting herself so much as we younger and naturally ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... artillery. With what silent eagerness the newspapers are devoured in war-time when the details of a battle appear! If two cocks in a farm- yard get at one another the heaviest bumpkin from the plough-tail, who seems incapable of an emotion, grows animated. I suppose it is because of the animal nature of which we partake which frequently excites us to prey on other animals and quarrel with one another. Fights were very rare at Weston, but they took place occasionally, and ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... another the choice between the imitation and the real. The rightful pill and the cork ball are placed together on the floor of the jar. Will the Spider be able to know the one that belongs to her? The fool is incapable of doing so. She makes a wild rush and seizes haphazard at one time her property, at another my sham product. Whatever is first touched becomes a good capture ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... as the channel filled. Whilst I was thus employed, Mr. Poole and Mr. Stuart were on the ranges, and both, as well as the men generally, continued in good health; but I was exceedingly anxious about Mr. Browne, who had a low fever on him, and was just then incapable of much fatigue; nevertheless he begged so hard to be permitted to accompany me on my contemplated journey, that I ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... it was, her policy taught her to endure whatever Miss Debby might choose to inflict. So she leaned back hopelessly in her chair, while the old lady snapped and cracked a plate of candied fruits with a vigor of which her teeth looked incapable. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... sword. But, as in the revolution of 1648, so in the revolution of 1653, no thought of military despotism can be fairly traced in the acts of the general or the army. They were in fact far from regarding their position as a revolutionary one. Though incapable of justification on any formal ground, their proceedings since the establishment of the Commonwealth had as yet been substantially in vindication of the rights of the country to representation and self-government; and public opinion had gone fairly with the army ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... balance, and weighing off the proper amount of silver, larger payments being made in sycee. This want of a currency arises from their utter lack of confidence in the coinage of their own country. No currency that the Imperial Government might issue, not like the copper cash, or tsien, incapable of adulteration, would be above suspicion; and while the shameless system of mandarin plunder and fraud continues, it is hopeless to expect a proper currency in China, unless the foreigners interfere or obtain the control in this part of the national ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Herr Haskins to his fine home, where they were splendidly entertained that night. Tubby ate so much dinner that he was incapable of joining in the conversation that immediately followed, though that fact was of minor importance, because, as a rule, he only made himself a nuisance when there was any serious discussion ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... and losing himself in the subtleties in which the Ibn Ezras and the Nahmanides were entangled. His common sense rendered him the same service in the interpretation of many a Talmudic passage that Saadia and Nissim had thought incapable of explanation unless wrested from its literal meaning. Since justice requires the admission, I shall presently dwell upon the points in which Rashi's lack of philosophic training was injurious to him. Here ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... that the passion of Maurice was unrequited. He had been puzzled in what manner to interpret Madeleine's determined rejection of her cousin. He was unable to comprehend a purity of motive which his narrow mind was equally incapable of experiencing. He finally attributed her conduct partly to a dread of her aunt's and his own displeasure, partly to a desire to render herself more highly valued by Maurice, and to gain a ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... elusive; stone walls are not elusive, but they do not lend themselves to an easy way across country. As to women, theoretically Estelle desired their friendship just as much as that of men; but in practice she generally found them unsympathetic, and incapable of the finest type of intimacy. They did not seem to know what the word devotion meant. Men did, especially young men, though the older ones talked more about it. Estelle had already seen herself after marriage as a confidante ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... been saying too," remarked the woman called Mrs Wishing in a hesitating voice, "for Mrs James White is a very strict woman and holds herself high, and 'Lilac' is a fanciful kind of a name; but I dunno." She broke off as if feeling incapable of dealing ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... before the shaking approach of Booverman's frantic club. Incapable of speech, he waved him feebly to drive. He began incredulously to count up again, ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... wasn't by any means incapable of supporting herself; and at the fresh, youthful age of seventy-nine she went into the business of providing teas for perspiring cyclists, and storing the cycles of those travellers who decided that they had better return by train. Her first customers were four young men who left their cycles ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... understand me better. I handed the whole affair over to Nevin, and to you that seems like ennui, I know. But it does not mean that; it simply means that as a hopeless man of business I appoint another to do what I know myself incapable of doing. Once I am committed to the production of a book, Don, I cease to exist outside its pages. I live and move and have my being in it. But please don't misunderstand. Anything within my power to do for Flamby I will do gladly. I only learned to-day of her second bereavement. ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... of ranch life, the social triumphs of her sister making her a little restless. She was incapable of feeling jealous, but material ambitions made her anxious that her children should not bring up the rear of the procession in which the other grandchildren were ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... uses to which they ultimately contribute. Now that the time has come to establish for ourselves an organ in the press, addressing higher orders of intelligence than those which are needed to destroy and incapable of reconstructing, the time has also arrived for the reappearance in his proper name and rank of the man in whom you take so gracious an interest. In vain you have pressed him to do so before; till now he had not amassed ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Noachites by the Tyrian branch of the spurious system, in the symbols, myths, and legends which the former received from the latter, but which it so modified and interpreted as to make them consistent with its own religious system. One thing, at least, is incapable of refutation; and that is, that we are indebted to the Tyrian Masons for the introduction of the symbol of Hiram Abif. The idea of the symbol, although modified by the Jewish Masons, is not Jewish in its inception. It was evidently borrowed from the pagan mysteries, where Bacchus, ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... work (30th June, 1837), he said, "By one set of intimate acquaintances, especially well informed, he has been killed outright; by another, driven mad; by a third, imprisoned for debt; by a fourth, sent per steamer to the United States; by a fifth, rendered incapable of mental exertion for evermore; by all, in short, represented as doing anything but seeking in a few weeks' retirement the restoration of that cheerfulness and peace of which a sad bereavement had ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... sun that melted the frozen torrents and set them boiling; with that sun removed, they froze again, and the army and all France became what they had been before, mere dead corpses—that and nothing more; incapable of thought, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... language of Indian philosophy it is the delusion or misconception which makes the soul imagine itself a personal agent and think, I see, I hear, I slay, I am slain, whereas the soul is really incapable of action and the acts ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... was called so invariably, even outside of the family, and, in truth, he was indeed one of those good men who seem to be the born cousins of all the world—Cousin Benedict, always impeded by his long arms and his long limbs, would be absolutely incapable of attending to matters alone, even in the most ordinary circumstances of life. He was not troublesome, oh! no, but rather embarrassing for others, and embarrassed for himself. Easily satisfied, besides being very accommodating, forgetting to eat or drink, if some one did not bring him ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... us; but notwithstanding all his merry quips as we went home, not once could we be moved to laughter. My heart was indeed right heavy; a bitter drop had fallen into it by reason of Cousin Maud. I had ever deemed her incapable of anything but what was truest and best, and she had proved herself a double-dealer; and young as I was, and rejoicing in life, I said, nevertheless, in my soul's dejection, that if life was such that every ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... her heart would burst with its palpitations of fear, but she was incapable of flight. Her limbs seemed like leaden weights. Some force working without the zone of her mental control ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... possible for two natures so incapable of disguise—the one from simplicity and frankness, the other from ungovernable temper,—to have continued in relations of amity, notwithstanding their disagreement upon a question which was at that moment setting the world in arms, both themselves and the country would ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... do spring. The skipper sprang four yards, and let off a screech which was the subject of much comment on the barque which had just passed. When Bob, who came shuffling up at the double, reached him he was leaning against the side, incapable of ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... disliked Zanetti's soft and delicate treatment, so characteristic of 18th-century work, and considered his interpretation of Parmigianino and Raphael little short of sacrilege. Since Jackson was incapable of hiding his feelings a quarrel became inevitable. The first rift came when Zanetti let Jackson have for a few weeks a drawing by Parmigianino, the Venus and Cupid with a Bow, to be executed in four blocks. The print was done "intirely in Hugo's [da Carpi's] manner, with ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... fear us, most are unaware of us, and not one loves us. In the world of plants, we have dumb and motionless slaves; but they serve us in spite of themselves. They simply endure our laws and our yoke. They are impotent prisoners, victims incapable of escaping, but silently rebellious; and, so soon as we lose sight of them, they hasten to betray us and return to their former wild and mischievous liberty. The rose and the corn, had they wings, would fly at our approach ...
— Our Friend the Dog • Maurice Maeterlinck
... But you have no right to judge so unfavorably of my heart. If I have spoken to my aunt with boyish petulance when she vexed me, at least it was to her face, and regretted and atoned for to her satisfaction. I am incapable of deceiving her, much less of ridiculing her either behind her back or before her face. I respond to her love for me with sincere gratitude, and the sister of my grandmother shall never want any attention that an own grandson could render ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... startled eyes he beheld a young girl, clad after the manner of a settler's daughter, standing a few yards away, staring at him with wild horrified eyes. The girl's fingers were clutching her hair, her face was white, her limbs convulsed, she seemed glued to the spot, incapable of movement, but power of screaming remained with her, and she exerted it to the utmost—she screamed, and screamed, and screamed again, the bush resounded with the echoes ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... is pointed out elsewhere (see p. 94), is arranged in patterns after the fashion of a kaleidoscope. This arises from the fact that the fragments of which it is composed are entirely disjointed, and probably incapable of being pieced together. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... I should," continued Hester, "if I were in political life. If a man threw in his lot with me, and then, when some means of worldly advancement seemed probable from the other side, deserted to it, I should not in consequence think him incapable of being a good husband and father and landlord. But I should never again believe that he cared for what I had staked my all on. And when he began to talk as if he cared (as they always do, as if nothing had happened) I should not show ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... acquires some knowledge of one or two foreign languages; a knowledge, however, which is seldom sufficient to enable him either to speak or write them with propriety. In other respects he commonly returns home more conceited, more unprincipled, more dissipated, and more incapable of any serious application, either to study or to business, than he could well have become in so short a time had he lived at home. By travelling so very young, by spending in the most frivolous dissipation the most precious years of his life, at a distance from the inspection and controul ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... to reply, but his speech was unintelligible both to the Indian and the negro. In fact, terror had so paralysed his tongue, as to render him incapable ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... entitled women property holders to vote for representatives in Parliament, and who claimed that the word "man" in Parliamentary statutes should be interpreted to include women. In the case of the 5,346 householders of Manchester, the court held that "every woman is personally incapable" in a legal sense.[288] This legal contest had been fully reported in The Revolution, and disappointing as the verdict was, Susan looked upon this attempt to establish justice as an indication of a great ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... or thing, the said trust so as aforesaid to convey and assure the said last-mentioned tract or parcel of land and premises to the said 'Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning,' in the manner herein before directed, should be incapable of being accomplished or carried into effect, or otherwise become, or be, or be deemed or construed to be invalid, illegal, or inoperative, then and in either or any of those cases upon trust, and that they the said John Richardson, James Reid, John Strachan, and James Dunlop, or the survivors ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... reverence, in the minds of many," replied the philosopher of Academus. "As for the multitude, they consider all principles of right and wrong as things that may exist, or not exist, according to the vote of the Athenian people. Of ideas eternal in their nature, and therefore incapable of being created or changed by the will of a majority, they cannot conceive. When health is restored, they will return to the old worship of forms, as readily as they changed from Pericles to Cleon, and will again change from ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... to a word against Captain Parsons, Mrs. Jackson. Whatever he did, he had a perfect right to do. He's incapable of acting otherwise than as ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... hard to entirely agree with Lamb here. Hissing seems to me to proceed for the most part from ill-temper, or at least from the dissatisfaction of the head. Applause is often the outburst of the heart, the gush of a feeling, an enthusiasm incapable of restraint. No wonder that the retired actor longs for a sniff of the footlights and for the echo of the reverberating plaudits to the accompaniment of which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... bolsters; and for the new Wilkins's a bathroom was not more modern than a bolster.) Also, other hotels resembled Wilkins's. The Majestic, too, had a chamberlain at its portico and an assortment of pages to prove to its clients that they were incapable of performing the simplest act for themselves. Nevertheless, the difference between Wilkins's and the Majestic was enormous; and yet so subtle was it that Edward Henry could not immediately detect where it resided. ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... dark by five o'clock; that wan darkness caused by the snow, and I shook my men. Some of them would not get up; they were almost incapable oi moving or of standing upright, and their joints were stiff from the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... struck with a thousand new amusing Objects around it, and born away as a Feather before the Wind; and, on the other hand, how, when Distempers seize it, the feeble Powers are over-born in a Moment, and render'd incapable of any Degree of Application and Attention. And, Lord, wilt thou open thine Eyes on such a one, to bring it into strict Judgment with thee[c]? Amidst all the Instances of thy Patience, and thy Bounty, to ...
— Submission to Divine Providence in the Death of Children • Phillip Doddridge
... Rostopchin said: "In France the shoemakers want to become noble; while here, the nobles would like to turn shoemakers." But, in spite of all, the greater part of this caste, with its essential conservative instincts, was nothing more than an inert mass, without initiative, and incapable even of defending its own interests except by the aid of ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... and gen. thing, to hinder, render incapable of, restrain: inf. ic hine ne mihte ... ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... logicians state, that one cannot have a concept of an individual, but only a representation. The so-called concept of the individual is always a universal or general concept, full of details, very rich, if you will, but however rich it be, yet incapable of attaining to that individuality, to which historical knowledge, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... thought that Negroes were incapable of education, but we have found ourselves mistaken, and now favor the education of the race, trusting that with better edification ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 44, No. 5, May 1890 • Various
... the tubers are of most value when cooked, although some authors affirm to the contrary. It seems possible to prove this on philosophical principles; for it is well known that the starch contained in the potato is incapable of affording nourishment until the containing globules are broken, and one of the most efficient means of doing this seems to ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... you that this is not a company of teetotallers." "Ask them what wine they would like," whispered the waitress behind me, who saw my plight, and who evidently pitied it, for she added, "Don't let that nasty man at the other end of the table bully you." But I was incapable of maintaining the deception in which I had been innocently involved, and, taking my courage in both hands, I frankly told the company that I was not a commercial traveller, had never in my life dined at a commercial table, and, as I knew nothing of the usages ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... he were really underfed. I never saw a German prisoner who was except for the intervals when battle kept the food waiting at the rear away from his mouth, though some who were under-sized and ill-proportioned looked incapable of absorbing nutrition. ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... councils of war, where, hearing all suggestions, he selected whatever was best; and certainly no general ever planned his battles more judiciously. But if deranged during the course of the action, if any member of his plan was dislocated by sudden circumstances, he was slow in a readjustment. He was incapable of fear, meeting personal dangers with the calmest unconcern. Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting until every circumstance, every consideration, was maturely weighed; refraining if he saw a doubt, but when once decided, going through with his purpose, ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... members of society some taste of the advantages arising from commerce, from public order, and from personal security, the human mind became conscious of powers which it did not formerly perceive, and fond of occupations or pursuits of which it was formerly incapable. Towards the beginning of the twelfth century, we discern the first symptoms of its awakening from that lethargy in which it had been long sunk, and observe it turning with curiosity ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... quality, which they had in common, had been the root of their sin; and was now the instrument of their suffering. Stronger people could have borne up better; worse people might have found a certain evil solace in evil ways and with evil associates: but Jim and Sally were incapable of any such course; they were simply two utterly broken-spirited and hopeless children whose punishment had been greater than they could bear. In a dogged way, because they must live, Jim went ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... the disbelief of a Divine Providence renders a man incapable of holding any public station; for, since kings avow themselves to be the deputies of Providence, the Lilliputians think nothing can be more absurd than for a prince to employ such men as disown the authority ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... separated them from the German army, three days' march; they did not exactly know where it was; they believed it scattered, possessing little unity, badly informed, led somewhat at random upon several points at once, incapable of a movement converging upon one single point, like Sedan; they believed that the Crown Prince of Saxony was marching on Chalons, and that the Crown Prince of Prussia was marching on Metz; they were ignorant of everything appertaining ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... government (on the contrary, its influence causes their continual degradation), but through the fact that all men are constantly growing better and better of themselves, so that even the most wicked, who are in power, will become less and less wicked, till at last they are so good as to be incapable ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... was in the hands and at the mercy of an unscrupulous villain, who was incapable of performing a noble or magnanimous act, but base enough to resort to any means in the use of which to carry an end, or gain a point. She but too well knew the fate before her, if no means of resistance were placed in her hands; and where ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... beyond Example, in an unusual Scene of Life, whom no Temptations, or Sufferings, could subdue. It is a fine, and glorious Original, for the Fair to copy out and imitate. Our own Sex, too, require it of you, to free us, in some measure, from the Imputation of being incapable of the Impressions of Virtue and Honour; [del. 8th] {and to shew the Ladies, that we are not inflexible ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson
... immediately after death.' I do not know how he has found this out, but he is a man of science—how then can it be objected against the future vitality of the machines that they are, in their present infancy, at the beck and call of beings who are themselves incapable ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... dreams; yet not more forgotten than some living beings with whom our infancy and boyhood held converse—whose voices, laughter, eyes, forehead—hands so often grasped—arms linked in ours, as we danced along the braes—have long ceased to be more than images and echoes, incapable of commanding so much as one single tear. Alas! for the treachery of memory to all the holiest human affections, when beguiled by the slow ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... this proposition is self-evident; for no art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change. To require of an artist that he should always reproduce the same picture, would be not one whit more base than to require of a carver that he should ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... it highly probable you know nothing about it," snapped Clara. "You are incapable ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... the method of disputation, which Mr. Kingsley thinks it right to adopt. Observe this first:—He means by a man who is "silly" not a man who is to be pitied, but a man who is to be abhorred. He means a man who is not simply weak and incapable, but a moral leper; a man who, if not a knave, has everything bad about him except knavery; nay, rather, has together with every other worst vice, a spice of knavery to boot. His simpleton is one who has become such, in judgment for his having ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... mighty tropical river were to pour its fertilizing inundation over the country, the result would be the impartation of a vigorous and gigantic growth to the vegetation already in existence, and at the same time the development of life in seeds and germs which had long lain latent in the soil, incapable of vegetation in the unkindly climate of their birth. Exactly in the same way, the flood of a Divine life, poured suddenly into the souls of men, enlarged and ennobled qualities which had been used already, and at the same time developed ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... him orders to use his utmost endeavours to break off the action and retire at the earliest possible moment, as it was impossible for me to send him any support, the 1st Corps being at the moment incapable of movement. ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... siliceous nature a man of iron was needed. After standing, but without enduring, the shock of Lady Dudley, Felix was the fitting mate to Natalie. There is no great merit in divining that to you she was indifferent. In love with her yourself, you have been incapable of perceiving the cold nature of a young woman whom you have fashioned and trained for a man like Vandenesse. The coldness of your wife, if you perceived it, you set down, with the stupid jurisprudence ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... Statute Book, by the laws now in force for the regulation of the tribe. Fearing, in the plenitude of its benevolence, that the Indians would never rise to be men, the Commonwealth has, in the perfection of its wisdom, given them over to absolute pauperism. Believing they were incapable of self-government as free citizens, it has placed them under a guardianship which is sure to keep them in the chains of a servile dependance. Deprecating partial and occasional injustice to them on the part of individuals, it has shrewdly deemed it lawful to plunder them by wholesale, ...
— Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts - Relative to the Marshpee Tribe: or, The Pretended Riot Explained • William Apes
... secretly to his master's bedside, and assured him there was treachery. The Marquis answered he could believe no gentleman capable of such baseness, and at any rate he was incapable of escaping through such defiles as they had passed; he told him in that case it could only aggravate his sorrow to see him also betrayed; and advised him to go off immediately, which he did. Early in the morning a party from Dumbarton, summoned ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... malice or inspired by the natural chagrin which animates a man of spirit when he reflects upon the undeserved humiliation which he has endured from her who was once dearer to him than life itself. Mine is a nature susceptible and sensitive, yet, I natter myself, incapable of harbouring sentiments unworthy of a gentleman and ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... three girls who had constituted Saint-Castin's household at the fort passed complacently back to their own homes laden with riches, Madockawando's daughter was unreasonably angry, and felt their loss as they were incapable of feeling it for themselves. She was alien to the customs of her people. The fact pressed upon her that her people were completely bound to the white sagamore and all his deeds. Saint-Castin's sins had been open to the tribe, and his repentance ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Comte he knew him to be absolutely incapable of telling a deliberate lie, and absolutely incapable of bartering his word of honour for the sake of ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... not pleasant. But if you use exactly the proper quantity, and no more, there is no perfume which is more lovely. "Shy as musk" thus refers to that kind of girlish modesty which never commits a fault even by the measure of a grain—beautiful shyness incapable of being anything but beautiful. Nevertheless the comparison must be confessed one which should be felt ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... according to Epicurus, was a subtle but energetic compound (of air, vapour, heat, and another nameless ingredient), with its best parts concentrated in the chest, yet pervading and sustaining the whole body; still, however, depending for its support on the body, and incapable of ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... kind of courage which leads to quick heroic action in great emergencies is apt to be lost by the habit of balancing arguments for and against action. The gentleness which comes from quiet study often makes one incapable of decision when severity is necessary. I was shocked not long ago by hearing a group of sweet, high-bred girls discussing the scene in "William Tell" where the wife of the hero tries to prevent him from going out with his bow and arrow while Gessler is in the neighborhood. With one accord the ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... trouble would be the problem of determining what wages should be paid to shirkers and those incapable of working with efficiency. Would wage courts decide the value of their services? If so, how many thousands of such courts would be required? If not, would state officials or politicians decide the cases? The wages of such persons, no matter how ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... is mainly a question of confidence and balance. As said before, it is better at first to avoid straight running down a steep slope, because the Skis may go so fast that the beginner is quite incapable of keeping up with them and a fall at very high speed is somewhat upsetting and may ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... many months afterwards any cold which the child may catch will be attended by a paroxysmal cough undistinguishable save by its milder character and shorter duration from the previous hooping-cough, though I believe incapable of communicating that disease. ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... salination - the process through which fresh (drinkable) water becomes salt (undrinkable) water; hence, desalination is the reverse process; also involves the accumulation of salts in topsoil caused by evaporation of excessive irrigation water, a process that can eventually render soil incapable of supporting crops. siltation - occurs when water channels and reservoirs become clotted with silt and mud, a side effect of deforestation and soil erosion. slash-and-burn agriculture - a rotating cultivation technique in which trees ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... impulse was to try and restore the boy to consciousness; but his second, and the one upon which he acted, was to assure himself that the animal he had shot was really dead, and incapable of making another attack. Holding his rifle in one hand, and cautiously parting the bushes with the other, he peered, with a loudly beating heart, into the thicket. There, stretched out stiff and motionless, he saw the body of a huge alligator. It was dead—dead as a mummy; there ...
— Wakulla - A Story of Adventure in Florida • Kirk Munroe
... the poop and the prow. A galley of this length would only have a beam of 19 feet and a depth of hold of 7 feet 6 inches. The sailing ship of contemporary times would for the same length have had a beam of about 40 feet and an extremely high freeboard; she was in consequence necessarily slow and incapable of sailing ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... sciences of treaty, war, military campaigns, maintenance of posts against the enemy and stratagems by ambuscades and reserves. He was a thorough master of every branch of learning, fond of war and music, incapable of being repulsed by any science or any course of action, and possessed of these and numberless other accomplishments. The Rishi, having wandered over the different worlds, came into that Sabha. And the celestial ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... that he was incapable of moving, of helping himself, at any rate until assistance came. And the water was rising, of course. Would rescue or ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... them and ourselves. I have a twofold object in view, and believe that, by guiding our missionary labors so as to benefit our own country, we shall thereby more effectually and permanently benefit the heathen. Seven years were spent at Kolobeng in instructing my friends there; but the country being incapable of raising materials for exportation, when the Boers made their murderous attack and scattered the tribe for a season, none sympathized except a few Christian friends. Had the people of Kolobeng been in the habit of raising the raw materials of English commerce, the outrage would have ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... France, M. le Blond, had been charged with the affairs of the embassy, and after the arrival of M. de Montaigu, continued to manage them until he had put him into the track. M. de Montaigu, hurt at this discharge of his duty by another, although he himself was incapable of it, became disgusted with the consul, and as soon as I arrived deprived him of the functions of secretary to the embassy to give them to me. They were inseparable from the title, and he told me to take it. As long as I remained with ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... officers were so surprised at the suddenness of the incident and the overthrow of their companion, and for a moment so amused at the latter's appearance, covered as he was from head to foot with the sticky liquor and bleeding from a cut inflicted by the edge of the can, that they were incapable ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... were lolling, ichoglans and pages, with lazy looks and shabby dresses; and among them, sunning himself sulkily on a bench, a poor old fat, wrinkled, dismal white eunuch, with little fat white hands, and a great head sunk into his chest, and two sprawling little legs that seemed incapable to hold up his bloated old body. He squeaked out some surly reply to my friend the dragoman, who, softened and sweetened by the tarts he had just been devouring, was, no doubt, anxious to be polite: and the poor worthy fellow walked away rather crestfallen at ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a piece of integument was hardly a desirable possession. And yet, how many of us have at this very moment a peau de chagrin of our own, diminishing with every costly wish indulged, and incapable, like the magical one of the story, of being ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of Solano, and the establishment of the missions on the banks of the Rio Negro, put an end to it. Old laws of Charles V and Philip III* (* 26 January 1523 and 10 October 1618.) had forbidden under the most severe penalties (such as the being rendered incapable of civil employment, and a fine of two thousand piastres), the conversion of the natives to the faith by violent means, and sending armed men against them; but notwithstanding these wise and humane laws, the Rio Negro, in the middle of the last century, was no further ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the Boy. "Why didn't you confide to me before, that you were physically and mentally incapable of packing? I've often noticed that your hold-alls looked like overfed boa constrictors, but I didn't dream things were as bad as this. You had better let Innocentina and me do the work for you. We're what you call 'nailers' ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... as Schopenhauer and so many others have done, down to Sir Almroth Wright's recent hysterical wail in The Times, that woman, on account of her womanhood is incapable of intellectual or social development, paying her sole debt of Nature in bearing and caring for children, is really to state a belief in decay for humankind. Any stigma attached to women is really ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... cried victory, the field of battle and some of the enemy's baggage remaining in my occupation. As a matter of fact, my moral sufferings during the engagement had rivalled those of Mr. Sebright. I was left incapable of fresh hostilities; I owned that the navy of old England was (for me) invincible as of yore; and giving up all thought of the doctor, inclined to salute her veteran flag, in the future, from a prudent distance. Such was my inclination when I retired to rest; and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Slow and Bideawhile's office,—from whom no slightest rumour emanated; and as they had been in part collected by Squercum, who was probably less prudent. The Bideawhiles were still perfectly sure that Dolly had signed the letter, believing the young man to be quite incapable of knowing on any day what he had done on ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... "louping-on stane." These were necessary in the olden days of heavy armour, and at a time when women rode astride. Men can now mount alone, although the struggles of a small man to climb to the top of a big horse sometimes are mightily entertaining; but women have to trust to any capable or incapable man who can ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... out into the hall before he could remonstrate, had he had the energy to do it. But Mr. DeVere seemed incapable of thinking for himself, now that this trouble had come ...
— The Moving Picture Girls - First Appearances in Photo Dramas • Laura Lee Hope
... pocket-money from a tinker who was ill-using him, and then claimed for him the hospitality of their parents; so, though Atherley often spoke of the dog as a disgrace to the household, he remained a member thereof, and received, from a family incapable of being uncivil, far less unkind, to an animal, as much attention as if he had been high-bred and beautiful—which indeed he plainly supposed himself ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... fix the type of the epigram for the future. For pure poetry he had small gifts. He was endowed with a warm heart, a real love for simplicity of life and for the beauties of nature. But he had no lyrical enthusiasm, and was incapable of genuine passion. He entered heartwhole on all his amatory adventures, and left them with indifference. Even the cynical profligacy of Ovid shows more capacity for true love. At their best Martial's erotic epigrams attain to a certain shallow prettiness,[655] for the most part ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... Mahomet, although harmonizing well enough with his faith in general, that women have no souls; or take the ground that truth in this, its widest extent, is not as essential to their highest welfare as it is to ours; or assert, that possessing inferior intellects, they are incapable of deriving advantage from the general pursuit of knowledge, and therefore must be confined to a few primary truths, of which man is to be the judge. The first supposition we leave with the fanaticism that may have given it birth, and with which ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... testimony on this point for the satisfaction of H.R.H. Archduke Ludwig. As for the conduct of the mother of my nephew, it is easily to be inferred from the fact of her having been declared by the Court wholly incapable of undertaking the guardianship of her son. All that she plotted in order to ruin her poor child can only be credited from her own depravity, and thence arises the unanimous agreement about this affair, and the boy being entirely withdrawn ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... which may happen to you from his present situation. And this is the cause of the melancholy which I could not so well dissemble, but that you soon perceived it. I would believe that prince Ahmed, by his own good disposition, is incapable of undertaking anything against your majesty; but who can answer that the fairy, by her attractions and caresses, and the influence she has over him, may not inspire him with the unnatural design of dethroning your majesty, and seizing the crown of the Indies? ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... see a distinct stage of moral downfall in the character of the Conqueror. Yet it is thoroughly characteristic. All is calm, deliberate, politic. William will have no more revolts, and he will at any cost make the land incapable of revolt. Yet, as ever, there is no blood shed save in battle. If men died of hunger, that was not William's doing; nay, charitable people like Abbot AEthelwig of Evesham might do what they could to help the sufferers. But the lawful ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... notoriously with all the most lovable and livable summer places which the artists and authors find out and settle themselves cheaply and tastefully in. The Philistines, a people wholly without invention, a cuckoo tribe incapable of self-nesting, stumble upon those joyous homes by chance, or by mistaken invitation. They submit meekly enough at first to be sub-neighbors ruled in all things by the genius of the place; but once in, they begin to lay their golden eggs in some humble cottage, and then they hatch out broods ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... charge. "I do plainly and ingenuously confess that I am guilty of corruption, and do renounce all defence. I beseech your Lordships," he added, "to be merciful to a broken reed." Though the heavy fine laid on him was remitted by the Crown, he was deprived of the Great Seal and declared incapable of holding office in the State or sitting in Parliament. Fortunately for his after fame Bacon's life was not to close in this cloud of shame. His fall restored him to that position of real greatness from which his ambition had so long torn him away. "My conceit of his person," says Ben Jonson, ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... regal bearing and youthful aspect; beardless face of the finest chiselling, a profile as beautiful as if created for the coin-maker; all the lines sharp and yet pleasing; every inch an aristocrat; but the very mirror of a cold nature, incapable of any lofty aspiration, any warm emotion, any tenderness of feeling. All in all, a handsome, haughty, calculating man, whose friendship would hardly benefit the heart, but from whose enmity may the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... titled imbecile had succeeded distinguished incapable at London in the task of humiliating and bullying us into subjection. Now it was Granville, now Townshend, now Bedford, now North—all tediously alike in their refusal to understand us, and their slow ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... clearly a party which wished to make the rule of his order more severe and, had he consented, the religious world of his day would have approved. But by so doing he would have made Buddhism an Indian sect like Jainism, incapable of flourishing in lands with other institutions. If Buddhism has had little influence outside Asia, that is because there are differences of temperament in the world, not because it sanctions anachronisms or prescribes observances of a purely local and temporary value. In ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... solemn man, and he did not appear to relish the picture I so graphically drew of him, when in truth I was thinking only of his own comfort; so I changed the subject with an alertness of mind which perhaps he was incapable of appreciating. ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
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