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More "Indecent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in this case. The tricks also of robbing the bride groomes of their faculty that they can do nothing to the wives is very ordinar heir; as also that of bewitching gentlewomen in causing them follow them lasciviously and wt sundry indecent gestures; and this they effectuat sometymes by a kind of pouder they have and mix in amongs hir wine; some tymes by getting a litle of hir hair, which they boill wt pestiferous herbs; whilk act when its parfaited the women who aught ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... understand at first. Presently I saw what it expressed; in my drawing-room he was off duty, he had no longer to sit up and play a part; he would lean back and rest and draw a long breath, and forget that the day of his execution was fixed. There was to be no indecent haste about the marriage; it was not to take place till after the session, at the end of August It puzzled me and rather distressed me. that his heart should n't be a little more in the matter; it seemed strange to be engaged to so ...
— The Path Of Duty • Henry James
... papers, the way in which they associated his political conduct with an offence that was wholly unpolitical. It had amused Wilkes to set up a private printing-press at his own house. At this {65} press certain productions were printed which were no doubt indecent, which were no doubt blasphemous, but which were furthermore so foolish as to make both their indecency and their blasphemy of very little effect. One was the "Essay on Woman," written as a parody of Pope's "Essay on Man;" the other was an imitation of the "Veni Creator." Neither ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... anointed their lawful prince always recommended the duty of allegiance; and the spiritual censures were denounced on the heads of the impious subjects who should resist his authority, conspire against his life, or violate by an indecent union the chastity even of his widow. But the monarch himself, when he ascended the throne, was bound by a reciprocal oath to God and his people that he would faithfully execute his important trust. The real or imaginary faults of his administration ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... have ever been proverbial, she is impatient to measure her crude theories against the sure revelation of GOD'S Word. Where the two differ, she assumes that of course the inspired Oracles are wrong, and her own wild guesses right. She is even indecent in her eagerness to invalidate the testimony of that Book which has been the confidence and stay of GOD'S Servants in all ages. On any evidence, or on none, she is prepared to hurl to the winds the august record of Creation. Inconveniently enough for the enemies ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... at Hieropolis served by three hundred priests, who were always employed in offering sacrifices. The priests of Cybele, called Corybantes, also Galli, were not admitted to their sacred functions without previous mutilation. In the celebration of their festivals these priests used all kinds of indecent expressions, beat drums, cymbals, and behaved just like madmen: his worship extended all over Phrygia, and was established in Greece under the name of Eleusinian mysteries. In short, every thing was personified: the sea was under the empire ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... their heads to oil the wheels of the new Yuen-nan railway, and I despise him for believing it. The Chinese will not fight, and I sneer at him; he abhors me because I do. I ridicule his manner of dress; he thinks mine grossly indecent. I consider his flat nose and the plaited hair and shaven skull as heathenish; but the Chinese, eating away with his to me ridiculous chopsticks, looks out from his quick, almond-shaped eyes and considers me still a ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... him in short, savage jerks. To Straker, to Mrs. Viveash, he appeared intolerable; but he had ceased to care how he appeared to anybody. He had ceased to know that they were there. They turned from him as from something monstrous, intolerable, indecent. Mrs. Viveash's hands and mouth were quivering, and her eyes implored Straker to take her away somewhere where she couldn't see ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... for a week; his manner was as dry as a burned-out fire. She knew there was a special reason; he was displeased at Ralph Touchett's staying on in Rome. He thought she saw too much of her cousin—he had told her a week before it was indecent she should go to him at his hotel. He would have said more than this if Ralph's invalid state had not appeared to make it brutal to denounce him; but having had to contain himself had only deepened his disgust. Isabel read all this as she would have read the hour on the clock-face; ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... strike the visitor as he perambulates these miles of sculptured terraces is the complete absence of any offensive or indecent figure. Mere nudity is not, of course, an outrage to the artistic soul; but here there is not even a nude or grotesque figure. Each is draped in the fine flowing robes of the East, not in monotonous regularity but suggestive of prince and peasant, princess ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... They calculated too largely on the prospective business with California, and have too large a sum invested to make much for the future. And yet, with a smaller investment they could not perform the service, except in that dangerous, cheap, indecent way, of innumerable wants and deprivations, which the American people have begun to despise. They have had some few disasters, but none of those of a fatal character in the Pacific. The "Winfield Scott" was lost in entering the harbor of Acapulco; ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... met him. I left a director's meeting and vital engagements, with indecent firmness, to meet that ship. At crack of dawn on a raw morning in March I arose and drove miles to a freezing pier to meet it. And presently, as I stood muffled in a fur coat, an elderly, grizzled, small man, grim and unexhilarating—presently the soul ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... who is at the bottom of this indecent talk of hers. I found his picture cut out of the school magazine and pasted in her diary. She's a changed child since that Lindsley came to the High School the year before ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... their own vanity. They pollute the purity of real beauty by the foul arts of beautifying, and cry out in loud rude voices in every assembly and gathering. They strut about in vain-glorious conceit, and flaunt their gaudy apparel in indecent boldness. They claim what does not belong to them and meddle with what does not concern them. They do not blush to cloud the precious jewel of modesty with the selfish airs of passion. Nothing is said which they do ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... look so much, but we are sixty). Well, be it so. We were handsome once—is this vanity at sixty? if so, our grey hairs are a hatchment for the past. We were "swells once!—hurrah!—we were!" Stop, this is indecent—let us be calm—our action was like the proceeding of the denuder of well-sustained and thriving pigs, he who deprives them of their extreme obesive selvage—vulgo, "we cut it fat." Bond-street was cherished by our smile, and Ranelagh was rendered happy by the exhibition ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... slept. Most of them brooded, like Harold, on the sunshine lost to them, and paced their cells like wild animals. It had, however, the advantage of giving to each man a separate bed at night, though during the day they occupied a common corridor. Some of them sang indecent songs and cursed their fellows for their stupidity, and ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... The women in New York seemed to her artificial and affected in appearance, and they walked, she thought, as if they were trying to make people look at them. The bold way they laced in their figures she regarded as almost indecent, and she noticed that they looked straight into the eyes of men instead of lowering their lashes when they passed them. Her provincialism, like everything else which belonged to her and had become endeared by habit and association, seemed ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... of the shop turned to his wife, (a very pretty woman, and dressed even to a plumed head)—shew Monsieur the little miniature, said he; she then opened a drawer and took out a book, (I think it was her mass-book) and brought me a picture, so indecent, that I defy the most debauched imagination to conceive any thing more so; yet she gave it me with a seeming decent face, and only observed that it was bien fait. After examining it with more attention than I should, had I received ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, 1777 - Volume 1 (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... Fielding, following the doctrine laid down in his initial chapters, has depicted him under certain conditions (in which, it is material to note, he is always rather the tempted than the tempter), with an unvarnished truthfulness which to the pure-minded is repugnant, and to the prurient indecent. Remembering that he too had been young, and reproducing, it may be, his own experiences, he exhibits his youth as he had found ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... and the price of land, but, most of all, of horses, since it was a horsey day. The screaming of a stallion came persistently from the meydan—a naughty screaming which foreboded mischief. I recognised the voice. The culprit was my own Sheytan. The screams were so disturbing, so indecent, that several of the great ones round me frowned and asked: 'Whose horse is that?' in accents of displeasure. I was ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... for the "indecent" sculptures of the Orissa temples, the same writer quotes the following from Baboo Ragendralala Mitra, in his work on the ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... printing it. He collected the news, wrote the contents, sold the paper, and received advertisements. He worked manfully, but his difficulties were enormous. He made his little journal spicy, attractive, and even impudent—though not indecent, as some have wrongly asserted—in the hope of making it popular. He worked from sixteen to eighteen hours a day, but in spite of all his efforts he lost money until the end of the third month, after which he contrived to pay the ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... you: don't deny it.—'Tis base in you To be so flippant with your hands. For what Affront's more gross than to receive a friend Under your roof, and tamper with his mistress? And, last night in your cups too, how indecent And rudely ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... the eulogium here given to the indecent trash of the younger Cr'ebillon: but in the age of George II. coarseness passed for ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... apparently without any surviving children, and before the year was half-way through, on the 23rd of the following May, he was married a second time to Margaret Bentley. At the end of seventeen years Thomas Bunyan was again left a widower, and within two months, with grossly indecent haste, he filled the vacant place with a third wife. Bunyan himself cannot have been much more than twenty when he married. We have no particulars of the death of his first wife. But he had been married two years to his noble-minded ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... in a great roll upon it; a shaky deal table and primitive chair completed the furniture. Ornament did not wholly lack; round the walls hung a number of those coloured political caricatures (several indecent) which are published by some Italian newspapers, and a large advertisement of a line of emigrant ships between Naples and New York. Moreover, there was suspended in a corner a large wooden crucifix, very quaint, very hideous, and black ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... dynasties of despots, and reduce refractory districts to the Papal sway. For these services they were rewarded with ducal and princely titles, with the administration of their conquests, and with the investiture of fiefs as vassals of the Church. The system had its obvious disadvantages. It tended to indecent nepotism; and as Pope succeeded Pope at intervals of a few years, each bent on aggrandizing his own family at the expense of those of his predecessors and the Church, the ecclesiastical States were kept in a continual ferment of expropriation ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... her character to give it a fair chance with her critics. They one and all recommended powder for her hair and cheeks. That odour of the shepherdess could be exorcised by no other means, they declared. Her blushing was indecent. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... serious middle class. We are incapable of sending Mr. Gladstone to be tried at the Old Bailey because he proclaims his antipathy to Lord Beaconsfield. A majority in our House of Commons is incapable of hailing, with frantic laughter and applause, a string of indecent jests against Christianity and its Founder. But we are not, or were not incapable of producing a Parliament which burns or sells the masterpieces of Italian art. And one may surely say of such a Puritan Parliament, and of those ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... in making men give credit to what he delivered, not only during the time of his natural life, but even there is still no one of the Hebrews who does not act even now as if Moses were present, and ready to punish him if he should do any thing that is indecent; nay, there is no one but is obedient to what laws he ordained, although they might be concealed in their transgressions. There are also many other demonstrations that his power was more than human, for still some there have been, who have come from the parts beyond Euphrates, a ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... facetious pantomime dances here on this day every week—admired by some, the Jews especially. To the more classic taste, many of his movements—his recoil, especially—are wanting in the true antique severity—might be called, perhaps, on the whole, indecent. Still the weary pilgrim must be amused. Let us step ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... noisy Sunday dinner-parties, sitting among five or six women, to all of whom her father spoke familiarly. There were actresses, dancers or singers, who, after dinner, would settle themselves down to smoke with their elbows on the table absorbed in the indecent stories so keenly relished by their host. Fortunately, childhood is protected by a resisting candour, by an enamel over which all impurities glide. Felicia became noisy, turbulent, ill-behaved, but without being touched by all that ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... hospital which was the first ever built in Paris. But according to the descriptions of all authors who wrote at that period upon the subject, the streets were in a filthy condition in many parts of the city, and the names which have long since been changed were as dirty and indecent; some were absolutely ridiculous; as Did you find me Hard, Bertrand Sleeps, Cut Bread, John Bread Calf (alluding to the leg); the last still exists, as also Bad Advice, Bad Boys, etc. It was in this reign that the first crusade from France took place, and Louis VII was followed ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... doomed house. Thick, languid flames blocked the doorway, swaying idly, ready to fasten their fangs in anything that approached. Furniture crashed and bounded to the pavement. Mattresses were flung out to receive the indecent figures of their owners. The ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... a cross hung three chains, and combustibles were piled beneath. Sad and solemn was the silence of the vast throng assembled in the Piazza, excepting where members of the factions were raging like wild beasts and venting indecent blasphemies. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... declarations, threats, and harangues, highly censurable in any, are peculiarly indecent and unbecoming in the Chief Magistrate of the United States, by means whereof said Andrew Johnson has brought the high office of the President of the United States into contempt, ridicule, and disgrace, to the great scandal of all good ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... knives, and some of the plates were broken. He struck me so severely for this, that at last I defended myself, for I thought it was high time to do so. I then told him I would not live longer with him, for he was a very indecent man—very spiteful, and too indecent; with no shame for his servants, no shame for his own flesh. So I went away to a neighbouring house and sat down and cried till the next morning, when I went home again, not knowing what ...
— The History of Mary Prince - A West Indian Slave • Mary Prince
... into the faces of those who ascend and descend. The place is worth your visit, for you are not likely to find elsewhere a spot which, either in costly and ponderous brutality of building, or in the squalid and indecent accompaniment of it, is so far separated from the peace and grace of nature, and so accurately indicative of the methods of our national resistance to the Grace, Mercy, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... and considered this. Then: "Dal," she said, "I do hate singing before that sort of audience. It is like giving them your soul to look at, and you don't want them to see it. It seems indecent. To my mind, music is the most REVEALING thing in the world. I shiver when I think of that song, and yet I daren't do less than my best. When the moment comes, I shall live in the song, and forget the audience. Let me tell you a lesson I once had from Madame Blanche. I was singing ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... complexion or their temper. Others would be compelled to confess that the belief of a wife or a sister had displaced that which they naturally inherited. No man can be expected to go thus into the details of his family history, and, therefore, it is an ill-bred and indecent thing to fling a man's father's creed in his face, as if he had broken the fifth commandment in thinking for himself in the light of a new generation. Common delicacy would prevent him from saying that he did not get his faith from ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... rejected with contempt, in two indecent lines, sung with absolute frankness and producing a furore in the audience. The ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... his mother I knew him in the street. I would like to give him a fantasia, but it is not proper for a woman to send for the dancing-girls, and as I am the friend of the Maohn (police magistrate), the Kadee, and the respectable people here, I cannot do what is indecent in their eyes. It is quite enough that they approve my unveiled face, and my associating with men; that is 'my custom,' and they think no harm ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... It had never occurred to her that it was wicked. If, as Mrs. Munday explained, it was the Devil that had whispered it to her, then what did God mean by allowing the Devil to go about persuading little girls to do indecent things? God could do everything. Why didn't He smash the Devil? It seemed to Joan a mean trick, look at it how you would. Fancy leaving a little girl to fight the Devil all by herself. And then get angry because the Devil ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature. I had even written one, "The Travelling Companion," which was returned by an editor on the plea that it was a work of genius and indecent, and which I burned the other day on the ground that it was not a work of genius, and that "Jekyll" had supplanted it. Then came one of those financial fluctuations to which (with an elegant modesty) ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... what is known as the "half time," or the "part time" waltz. This is a dance accompanied by a swaying and contorting of the hips, most indecent in its suggestion. It is really a very primitive form of the dance, and probably goes back to the pagan harvest and bacchic festivals. You may see traces of it in certain crude peasant dances in out-of-the-way corners of Europe. Now they teach it to immigrant girls in New York dancing ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... was moved by Lord Hilsborough and Lord Suffolk, after some wrangling between Lord Temple, Lord Halifax, the Duke of Bedford, and Lord Gower; Lord Sandwich(353) laid before the House the most blasphemous and indecent poem that ever was composed, called "An Essay on Woman, With notes, by Dr. Warburton."', I will tell you none of the particulars: they were so exceedingly bad, that Lord Lyttelton begged the reading might be stopped. The House was amazed; nobody ventured even to ask a ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... priests, endeavored in their attire to show a mingling of the male and female sex; they wore long garments like women, vergogna! they wore long hair, guai! and they SHAVED THEIR FACES! It pains me to say, that their indecent example is followed even to this day, by the priests of what should be a ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... so much as cheerfulness—an indecent, extravagant sort of quality, which had no relation to facts. The mixture of his desires and hopes was, in a word, becoming torture; and lately the thought had come to him that perhaps Irene knew she ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... something to many quite overawing. The dinner, that had at first, in his hurry, seemed so long in coming on, seemed now quite as fast in going off. Not that I would have you suppose by this, that he thought the guests were showing any indecent haste to make way with the dishes that were set before them without number, and heaped up without measure, on Mr. Chamberlin's ample board. On the contrary, they partook of the good things of the table with a well-bred slowness, that would have been beyond his endurance to bear, had Mars been ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... Russia is the spirit of cynicism. It informs the declarations of her statesmen, the theories of her revolutionists, and the mystic vaticinations of prophets to the point of making freedom look like a form of debauch, and the Christian virtues themselves appear actually indecent.... But I must apologize for the digression. It proceeds from the consideration of the course taken by the story of Mr. Razumov after his conservative convictions, diluted in a vague liberalism natural to the ardour of his age, had become crystallized ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... him, therefore, the brunt of episcopal indignation fell. He was not a wholly exemplary person. "I mean," says La Motte, "to show you the truth in all its nakedness. The fact is that, about two years ago, when the Sieur de Mareuil first came to Canada, and was carousing with his friends, he sang some indecent song or other. The count was told of it, and gave him a severe reprimand. This is the charge against him. After a two years' silence, the pastoral zeal has wakened, because a play is to be acted which the clergy mean to ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... had made it. She had never seen a baby without a cap before, and the sight was unusual if not indecent. But Miss Kitty was a quick needlewoman, and when the new cap was fairly tied over the thick crop of silky black hair, the baby looked so much less like Puck, and so much more like the rest of the baby world, that it was ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... is plainer, and such that it becomes indecent; for from the small mantas or textiles of these regions, which are all very thin, they make a sack nine palmos long and open at both ends. They gird this in at the waist as much as may be necessary, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... to leave them to themselves; but why should they be left to themselves? Their conversation is always the most lively, while their persons are generally the most agreeable objects. No: the plain truth is, that it is the love of the drink and of the indecent talk that send women from the table; and it is a practice which I have always abhorred. I like to see young men, especially, follow them out of the room, and prefer their company to that of the ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... semi-mystical emotion, but little progress will be effected towards a due appreciation of the character of the offences referred to. It is a curious circumstance, as illustrating the change of men's view of offences, that an ordinary indecent assault, which in the Middle Ages—in Chaucer's time, for instance—would evidently have been regarded as a species of rude joke, should now be deemed one of ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... protested against the sculpture, rich and fantastic, but gloomy, it might be indecent, developed more abundantly than anywhere else in the churches of Burgundy, and especially in those of the Cluniac order. "What is the use," he asks, "of those grotesque monsters in painting and sculpture?" ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... off if 'e looks up over the edge. I've 'ad enough o' dug-outs an' observin' from the trenches, an' Coal-Box dodgin' to last me a bit, an' it's a pleasant change to be ridin' a decent 'orse on a most indecent apology for a road, an' not a Jack Johnson in sight, even if they ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... blessed principle of self-determination was in fetters. Chapter iii. lays down that all inscriptions must have the approval of the civic body. You are warned that they will not approve of sentences or words which are indecent, and that they prohibit all expressions and allusions that might give offence to anyone, to moral corporations, to religions, or which are notoriously false. No doubt, in practice, they waive the last stipulation, so that the survivors may give praise to famous or to infamous men; ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... illumination of extraordinary splendor. They were highly delighted with the beauty and the novelty of a scene such as they had never before witnessed; but her pleasure was in a great degree marred by the indecent boldness of one whose sacred profession, as well as his ancient lineage, ought to have restrained him from such misconduct, though it was but too completely in harmony with his previous life. Prince Louis de Rohan was a descendant of the great Duke de Sully, and a member ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... talkative, inquisitive and restless, busy in their own pursuits, keen sportsmen and naturally independent, absorbed in the chase from sheer love of it and other physical occupations, and not lustful, indecent, or indecently abusive. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... own, in his favour, that he has observed some decency in his accounts to you of the most indecent and shocking actions. And if all his strangely-communicative narrations are equally decent, nothing will be rendered criminally odious by them, but the vile heart that could meditate such contrivances as were much stronger evidences of his ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... commandments strictly, and yet be a most objectionable person? You might smoke, drink, listen at doors, repeat private conversations, open other people's letters, pry amongst their papers, be vulgar and offensive in conversation, and indecent in dress—altogether detestable, if your code of morality were confined to the ten commandments. But why will you talk like this, Angelica? Why will you be so defiant, when your heart is breaking, as I know ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... stuttered, "getting married—like that." Myrtle was rigid in an indignation that left her momentarily without speech. Mrs. Penny, Howat saw, drew into the slight remoteness from which she watched the conflicts of her family. "I know I'm fearfully bold, yes, indecent," Caroline went on, "and undutiful, impertinent. I'm sorry, truly, for that. Perhaps you'll forgive me, later. But I won't ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... seized at Bristol as an obscene publication. The book had been supplied in the ordinary course of business by Mr. Charles Watts, but the Bristol bookseller had altered its price, had inserted some indecent pictures in it, and had sold it among literature to which the word obscene was fairly applied. In itself, Dr. Knowlton's work was merely a physiological treatise, and it advocated conjugal prudence and parental responsibility; it argued in favor of early marriage, ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... thorns for her. She chafed under the burden and her joy was indecent when the little boy died. Until then he had believed that the path of duty was wide enough and lined sufficiently with flowers to gratify or ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... of these acts of folly, on to the prohibition of what I thought then were the maddest, most impossible, and most indecent things one could well imagine. A kind of rhythmic fervour fell on all of us; we gabbled and swayed faster and faster, repeating this amazing Law. Superficially the contagion of these brutes was ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... trotters—are at length apparent. Mary Isabella attributes it to a lightness induced by his headaches. But I think I see in it a less accidental influence. Mister Clark is at perfect staggers! the whole fabric of his infidelity is shaken. He has no one to join him in his coarse-insults and indecent obstreperousnesses against Christianity, for Holmes (the bonny Holmes) is gone to Salisbury to be organist, and Isabella and the Clark make but a feeble quorum. The children have all nice, neat ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... babbler of them all, hot with the exercise of the indecent gestures wherewith he illustrated his filthy tale, had slunk off ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... spoken to myself," said Lady Arabella, who, though she did not absolutely doubt her husband's word, gave him credit for having induced and led on Sir Omicron to the uttering of this opinion. "Doctor Thorne has behaved to me in so gross, so indecent a manner! And then, as I understand, he is absolutely ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... was accordingly slight. Lewd meant belonging to the laity; it came to mean ignorant, and then morally reprehensible. Common may be used to signify ill-bred; vulgar may be and frequently is used to signify indecent. Sabotage, from a French term meaning wooden shoe, has come to be applied to the deliberate and systematic scamping of one's work in order to injure one's employer. Idiot (common soldier) crystallizes the exasperated ill opinion of ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... after his return to town, to have sent to forbid its appearance; but his thoughts of late had crushed everything else out of his memory—he had forgotten its existence. And now, in all the pomp and parade of authorship, it was sent into the world! Now, now, when it was like an indecent mockery of the Bed of Death—a sacrilege, an impiety! There is a terrible disconnection between the author and the man—-the author's life and the man's life—the eras of visible triumph may be those of the most intolerable, though unrevealed and unconjectured anguish. The book that delighted ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Baxter Court forever. Which was as it should be. Then tumult. Probably you are not in a position to know that few spectacles are more hideous than the unrestrained grief of the poor. The things they said and did—it was unhuman, indecent. I can't describe it. As I was leaving, after a pretty bad half hour, I met the doctor at the door—one of these half-drunken quacks who live on the ignorant. That child died of diphtheria. I knew it, and he admitted it. The funeral was this breathless morning, ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... halls) has been very far from liberal, except in the one particular in which the Lord Chamberlain is equally illiberal. That particular is the assumption that a draped figure is decent and an undraped one indecent. It is useless to point to actual experience, which proves abundantly that naked or apparently naked figures, whether exhibited as living pictures, animated statuary, or in a dance, are at their best not only innocent, but refining in their effect, whereas ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... grosser portions of Scripture, and, by a reverse process, lends to the soul the vilest functions of the body, and discusses virtue in the terms of fleshliness. No knowledge can come out of this straw-splitting in vacuo; and certainly no art out of this indecent pedant's symbolism: all things are turned to dusty, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... how this condition arose may be answered very briefly. The Church ordained that marriage is indissoluble, but, this being found impossible to maintain in practice, the State stepped in with a way of escape—a kind of emergency exit. But what a makeshift it is! how flagrantly indecent! how inconsistent! Adultery must be committed. To escape the degradation of an unworthy partner another partner must first be sought, and love degraded in an act of infidelity. Adultery is, in fact, a State-endowed offence ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... the Germans gave themselves up to the worst excesses. Angered doubtless by the remark which an officer had addressed to a soldier, against whom a young girl of nineteen, Mlle. Helene Proces, had made complaint of on account of the indecent treatment to which she had been subjected, they burned the village and made a systematic massacre of the inhabitants. They began by setting fire to the house of an inoffensive householder, M. Jules Gand, and by shooting ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... Carnarvon—the most curious and pathetic instance of a man of the nineteenth century speaking of one who was almost his exact prototype, in virtues and graces as in weaknesses and disabilities of temperament, during the seventeenth. It would, of course, have been indecent for Mr Arnold to bring this parallel out, writing as he did in his own name and at the moment, and I do not find any reference to it in the Letters; but I can remember how strongly it was felt at the time. His own interest in Falkland as the martyr of Sweetness ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... unworthy in return for their gifts. I have no desire to be a beggar, sir; I am very well aware of the fact that the other street musicians are satisfied to reel off a few street ditties, German waltzes, even melodies of indecent songs, all of which they have memorized. These they repeat incessantly, so that the public pays them either in order to get rid of them, or because their playing revives the memory of former joys of dancing or of other disorderly amusements. For ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... is the earnest desire of the board of lady managers of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition that there be no indecent dances or improper exhibits in the Midway during the exposition, and that the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company be urged to use the utmost care in awarding the concessions for shows, in order that there may be no ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... which now waves so pleasantly with its elms and poplars. The cruel second James, afterwards king, wanted him beheaded before his own house, but the cynical second Charles was not quite so cruel as that, and rejected the proposed dramatic fancy "as indecent," Burnet says. So Lord Russell, after Tillotson had prayed with him, "laid his head on the block at a spot which the elms and poplars now hide, and it was ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... assisted me. At that I ceased calling and listened very attentively, because I thought I heard a man laughing in a peculiarly offensive manner. The heat made me sweat, but the laughter made me shake. There is no earthly need for laughter in high grass. It is indecent, as well as impolite. The chuckling stopped, and I took courage and continued to call till I thought that I had located the echo somewhere behind and below the tussock into which I was preparing to back just before I lost Mr. Wardle. I ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... God's works which doth this world adorn, There is none more fair and excellent Than is man's body, both for power and form, Whilst it is kept in sober government, But none than it more foul and indecent, Distempered through misrules and passions base, It grows a monster and incontinent, Doth lose ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... Harding. "It is becoming almost objectionable, almost indecent. At the same time the health of the body is a very interesting subject because of its effect upon the mind, even, so it seems sometimes, upon the very nature of a man. Now I—" he struck the ash off the end of his cigar—"was, I might almost say, the ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... nomination," he said aloud as Arthur turned from the window. "Of course there'd be no end to the ridicule. Didn't the chap on Harper's, when I was elected for the Senate, rig me out as a gladiator, without a stitch on me, actually, Artie, not a stitch—most indecent thing—and show old Cicero in the same picture looking at me like John Everard, with a sneer, and singing to himself: a senator! No, I couldn't stand it. I give up. I've got as high as my kind can go. But there's one ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... a sad thing, I cannot choose but say, And all the fault of that indecent sun, Who cannot leave alone our helpless clay, But will keep baking, broiling, burning on, That howsoever people fast and pray, The flesh is frail, and so the soul undone: What men call gallantry, and gods adultery, Is much more common where ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... their last observations, and Mankeltow asked questions, and Lord Lundie sort o' summarised, and I looked at the photos in the album. 'J'ever see a bird's-eye telephoto-survey of England for military purposes? It's interestin' but indecent—like turnin' a man upside down. None of those close-range panoramas of forts could have been taken ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... already in the past, Mr. Levitt," said Montcalm mildly. "Let's keep to the issue at hand. You won't deny that children see this indecent statue every day?" ...
— The Gift Bearer • Charles Louis Fontenay
... and saw that my cheek was hurt: How comes this wound? said he. Though I was not very guilty, yet I could not think of owning the thing: besides, to make such confession to a husband, was somewhat indecent; therefore I told him, that as I was going to seek for that stuff you gave me leave to buy, a porter carrying a load of wood came so close by me, as I went through a narrow street, that one of the sticks gave ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... he say in that one?' the Pussum asked, leaning forward, her dark, soft hair falling and swinging against her face. There was something curiously indecent, obscene, about her small, longish, dark skull, particularly when the ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... English language and second in the language of the Hebrews, Frederick called his fellow- lodgers together earlier than usual on the evening before Thanksgiving Day. He explained to them, in the patois which they used together, that it would be indecent for them to carry this supply of food farther than next Monday for their own purposes. He told them that the occasion was one of exuberant thanksgiving to the God of heaven. He showed them that they all had great reason for thanksgiving. And, in short, he made three heads of a discourse ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... who believe in God and blacken his character; who credit him with less knowledge than a child, and less intelligence than an idiot; who make him quibble, deceive, and lie; who represent him as indecent, cruel, and revengeful; who give him the heart of a savage and the brain of a ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... the healths of Mrs. Babbitt, Miss Babbitt, and the Other Children were softly paternal, but Babbitt had nothing with which to answer him. It was indecent to think of using the "How's tricks, ole socks?" which gratified Vergil Gunch and Frink and Howard Littlefield—men who till now had seemed successful and urbane. Babbitt and Frink sat politely, ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... to two questions asked about the Queen are, it seems to me, practically certain, (1) She did not merely marry a second time with indecent haste; she was false to her husband while he lived. This is surely the most natural interpretation of the words of the Ghost (I. v. 41 f.), coming, as they do, before his account of the murder. And against this testimony ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... widow, belonging to the town of Villaro, was seized by a party of the Irish brigades, who having beat her cruelly, and ravished her, dragged her to a high bridge which crossed the river, and stripped her naked in a most indecent manner, hung her by the legs to the bridge, with her head downwards towards the water, and then going into boats, they fired ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... was about him something indescribably rural, something of the sod—not the dignity, the sturdiness of it, but rather of the pettiness, the sordidness of it. It showed in his dirty, flapping garments, his unlaced shoes, his stubble beard, in his indecent carelessness in expectorating the tobacco he was ceaselessly chewing. But these, after all, were some of his minor traits. I was soon to get an inkling of one of his major ones—his prodigious meanness. For when I rushed about and finally found a lorcha that was to sail for Bacolod and ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... have wished to learn more, but the Prince had addressed himself to the good liquor somewhat more than his head could stand, and he began to sing indecent French chansons, only to pass of a sudden to melancholy Russian popular songs. In his present condition it was impossible to think of continuing a sensible conversation ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... of a Wretched Miser, and the form had become a Scottish convention before Burns produced his Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie. As important as any of these was the example set by Ramsay and bettered by Burns of refurbishing old indecent or fragmentary songs. Robert Fergusson (1750-1774) was regarded by Burns still more highly than Ramsay, and his influence was even more potent. In his autobiographical letter to Doctor Moore he tells that about ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... mind at the present writing attached himself impartially and equally to everyone in camp, no one ventured to exclusively claim him; while, after the perpetration of any canine atrocity, everybody repudiated him with indecent haste. ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... preached, and it is well known to every one, only that it is not as carefully observed and practised as other works which are not commanded. So ready are we to do what is not commanded and to leave undone what is commanded. We see that the world is full of shameful works of unchastity, indecent words, tales and ditties, temptation to which is daily increased through gluttony and drunkenness, idleness and frippery. Yet we go our way as if we were Christians; when we have been to church, have said our little prayer, have observed ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... things, and they have many means of concealment. A man shuts the door, he sets somebody before the chamber; if a person comes, say that he is out, he is not at leisure. But the Cynic instead of all these things must use modesty as his protection; if he does not, he will be indecent in his nakedness and under the open sky. This is his house, his door; this is the slave before his bedchamber; this is his darkness. For he ought not to wish to hide anything that he does; and if he does, he is gone, ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... still lower," said she (all the pride of her sex revolting at the idea of such an indecent exhibition), "you don't pretend to say they stripped her below the waist! What did the Admiral say? Did he stand by and see her handled ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... man or woman not being married to each other lewdly and viciously associate and cohabit together, or if any man or woman, married or unmarried, is guilty of gross lewdness and designedly make an open and indecent, or obscene exposure of his or her person, or the person of another, every such person shall be punished by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, or by fine not ...
— Legal Status Of Women In Iowa • Jennie Lansley Wilson
... a heroic part; but the rest of those present would have considered it almost indecent to speak of it as Libbie did. She continued to clasp her hands and gaze soulfully into the ravine. Bob, having made sure that Betty was all right, had gone down to the bottom of the slope and helped the gray horse to its feet. The animal was more frightened than hurt, ...
— Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp • Alice B. Emerson
... the gossoon is indecent and dirty, O chone! In spite of his dressin' so. O chone! Let him dress up ez foine ez a king or a queen, Let him put on more wrinkles than ever was seen, You'll be sure he's no match for my ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... bore three pegged skulls somewhat white with age; eight years ago they were taken off certain wizards who had bewitched their enemies. A labyrinthine entrance of transparent cane-work served to prevent indecent haste, and presently we found ourselves in presence of the Mfumo, who of course takes the title of "Le Rei." Nessudikira was a "blanc-bec," aged twenty or twenty-one, who till lately had been a trading lad at Boma—now he must not look upon the sea. He ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... some points: it is very delightful to hear him talk. I mean it is uncommonly pleasant to hear things one has long thought very vehemently, put to one by a Master!! Par exemple. You know my mania about the indecent-cruel element in French art, and how the Frenchiness of Victor Hugo chokes me from appreciating him: just as we were going away yesterday Mr. Ruskin called out, "There is something I MUST show Aunt Judy," and fetched two photos. One, an old court with bits of old gothic ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... objection, the sheer instinctive taboo which rules the subject out altogether as indecent, has no age limit. It means that at no matter what age a woman consents to a proposal of marriage, she should do so in ignorance of the relation she is undertaking. When this actually happens (and ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... a little ashamed, a little shy, what with his gray hairs, his paternity, that there should still be a thrill in his heart, a sense of flight in him. At fifty-eight to feel like a schoolboy going home, it seemed—well, not indecent, indecorous. This thing of returning to Antrim had been a matter of pure reason, and then suddenly his heart ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... and just are all thy ways. Now immolate the tongues, and mix the wine, Sacred to Neptune and the powers divine, The lamp of day is quench'd beneath the deep, And soft approach the balmy hours of sleep; Nor fits it to prolong the heavenly feast, Timeless, indecent, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... by this time are filled with dismay. In Rossmoyne, where families are few and far between, and indecent scandal unknown, the smallest trifles are seized upon with avidity and manufactured into mountains. "A good appearance," Miss Penelope was taught at school, "is the first step in life," and here have these children been making their appearance for the first ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... and indecency, shocking as it was unnecessary. Usually, the students had contented themselves with ripping open the graves of strangers and negroes, about whom there was little feeling; but this winter they dug up respectable people, even young women, of whom they made an indecent exposure. ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... Marguerite who put an end to this indecent dispute. Its increasing violence had aroused her from her stupor. Casimir's impudence brought a flush to her forehead, and stepping forward with haughty resolution, she exclaimed: "You forget that one never raises one's voice in the chamber of death." Her words were so ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... rest here, but must be for peeping into Chambers, Closets, and Withdrawing-Rooms, ay, and into Beds too (sometimes with the Ladies in 'em) and have all things brought openly upon the Stage, tho' never so improper, and indecent. But this Objection may yet be better answer'd by Instances; and first for the Unity of Time, we may mention the Play call'd, The Adventures of Five Hours, the whole Action lasting no longer (much ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... laughter which endears. "You villain, have you been making love to Elsin Grey, that she should come babbling of Mr. Renault, Mr. Renault, Mr. Renault ere I had set foot in my own hallway? It was indecent, I tell you—not a word for me, civil or otherwise, not a question how I had 'scaped the Skinners at Kingsbridge—only a flutter of ribbons and a pair of pretty hands to kiss, and 'Oh, Cousin Coleville! Is Mr. Renault kin to me, too?—for I so take it, having ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... rule, in such cases self-revelation is not only not demanded, but not even allowable. The opening of the secret chambers of one's life to the public, confessions like those of Rousseau, are, if anything, indecent and nauseating. The case of a man in such situations is bad enough, but the remedy for it is perforce committed to his own hands. Let him put his hand to the plough and not turn back, let him grapple with the evil in his nature and subdue and transform it, let him accomplish his inner ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... to, was very cheerful without being noisy, and many of the guests were waggish, without descending to vulgarity. The old commander with all his smutty stories, with respect to the substance, never lost sight of the politeness of the old court; nor did any indecent expression, which even women would not have pardoned him, escape his lips. His manner served as a rule to every person at table; all the young men related their adventures of gallantry with equal grace and freedom, and these narratives were the more complete, as the seraglio ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Winchelsea complained of this strange method of huddling things together, and declared it highly unbecoming to see the grant made "in such a hotch-potch Bill—a Bill which really seems to be the sweepings of the other House." The Earl of Crawford declared it a most indecent thing to provide the marriage-portion of the Princess Royal of England in such a manner; "it is most disrespectful to the royal family." The Duke of Newcastle could only say in defence of the course taken by the Government that he saw nothing disrespectful or inconvenient in the manner ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... This indecent sloth is very much owing to that luxury and excess men usually practise upon this day, by which half the service thereof is turned to sin; men dividing the time between God and their bellies, when, after ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... full that night, a new comic singer of great promise having been announced, and oh! it was sad to see the youths of both sexes, little more than big boys and girls, who went there to smoke, and drink, and enjoy ribald songs and indecent jests! ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... chamber in the third story. The door was ajar. I entered it on tiptoe. Sitting on a low chair by the fire, I beheld a female figure, dressed in a negligent but not indecent manner. Her face, in the posture in which she sat, was only half seen. Its hues were sickly and pale, and in mournful unison with a feeble and emaciated form. Her eyes were fixed upon a babe that lay stretched upon a pillow at her feet. The child, like its mother, for such she was readily imagined ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... high debate admit of that indecent and repugnant expedient which the more or less parliamentary type of politician has devised and dubbed "a formula of agreement," the property of which is to render it impossible for either side to claim ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... village, is usually surrounded by a high stockade, or irregular wooden fence, the posts of which are often of great height and thickness, and sometimes headed by the frightful carving of an uncouth or indecent image." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... with the utter absence of any treatise on the hygiene of the sexual life in either sex, written in the proper spirit by a scientific man. The field had been left to quacks or worse, who, to serve their own base ends, scattered inflammatory and often indecent pamphlets over the land; or else, had one or more of the points been handled by reputable writers, it was in such a vague and imperfect manner that the reader gained little benefit from the perusal. ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... neighbors all come and talk to him about it till he gets ashamed, then they all forgive him and have a feast. They're lovely people, so kind and gentle. But you'll get awfully tired of them in about a month. They have absolutely no respect for anybody's privacy. In fact, it seems slightly indecent to them for ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... dinner. What a hypocrite Society is! Everyone pretended never to have heard me before. I was allotted to Miss HORNBLOWER (worse luck!) and she positively called me "Her own!"—at my age, too! It's indecent. Complained to HORNBLOWER, who now faced round, and maintained that he was the first to bring me out. I could almost have cried. No wonder I fell flat, and injured myself. Why, Sir, SIDNEY SMITH was my godfather, and was always trotting me out as a prodigy, and trading ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various
... the night had not yet arrived. It was only about dusk that the indecent haste of these 'miscreants' offended the sober eyes of Madame Deluc. But we are told that it was upon this very evening that Madame Deluc, as well as her eldest son, 'heard the screams of a female in the vicinity of the inn.' And in what words does Madame Deluc designate the period ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... responsibility, half humorously, without apology or explanation. Let us avoid self-justification at all costs. Real corporal punishments apply to the sensual plane. The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack. The pained but resigned disapprobation of a mother is usually a very bad thing, much worse than the father's shouts of rage. And sendings to bed, and no dessert for a week, and so on, are crueller and meaner than a bang on the head. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... too much for the excited state of mind under which Anthony had been laboring for some hours, and with a stifled groan he fell across the bed in a fit. Godfrey alarmed in his turn, checked his indecent mirth, and dressing himself as quickly as he could, roused up his valet to run for the surgeon. The fresh air and the loss of a little blood soon restored the unfortunate young man to his senses and to a deep consciousness of his ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... Kansas-Nebraska Act was their first step, the Dred Scott decision the second; but one more step, and slavery could be fastened upon States as they had already fastened it upon Territories. Douglas protesting that to bring such a charge, incapable of proof or disproof, was indecent, Lincoln pointed out that Douglas had similarly charged the administration with conspiring to force a slave constitution upon Kansas; and afterwards took up a charge of Trumbull's that Douglas himself had at first conspired with Toombs and ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... to close the dim glazed eyes; and the other sorrowing domestics slunk away; and Charles led Emily out of the chamber of death, saddened and shocked at such indecent haste. ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Indecent language and grossly immoral situations should be excluded from the stage. When this is not done, as is frequently the case, the drama, instead of uplifting, degrades humanity. This fact has brought the stage into disrepute with many excellent people. ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... thus the whole affair would collapse. But the Papal authorities did not want it to collapse; they wanted more bloodshed, and if the words which express the ungarnished truth as acknowledged by their own writers and apologists, sound indecent when describing the government of the Vicar of Christ, it only shows once more the irreconcilability of the offices of priest and king in the nineteenth century. Kanzler insisted that a crushing blow must be ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... Everett warmly. "That does not excuse him. The point is, that with him they have not existed. To him they should be against his conscience, indecent, horrible! He has a greater knowledge, a much higher intelligence; he should lift the ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... march hour after hour, and if he came to a brook or a muddy place, instead of turning aside and passing over on stepping-stones or upon a fallen tree, he must go through without breaking the ranks. His companions were not altogether such as he liked to associate with. Some were very profane, and used indecent language. There was one great, over-grown Dutchman, Gottlieb von Dunk, who smoked nearly all the time when awake, and who snored terribly when asleep. But he was a good-hearted fellow for all that, and had a great many pleasant stories ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... directly sanctioned by God. He attacked the morals of the clergy and of the people and, besides renovating his own order, suppressed not only public immorality but all forms of frivolity. The people burned their cards, false hair, indecent pictures, and the like; many women left their husbands and entered the cloister; gamblers were tortured and blasphemers had their tongues pierced. A police was instituted ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Eric heard indecent words in dormitory Number 7, he was shocked beyond bound or measure. Dark though it was, he felt himself blushing scarlet to the roots of his hair, and then growing pale again, while a hot dew was left ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... when its intention became manifest. Measures however were taken to restrict the miscellaneous discussion of doctrine, which had not unnaturally degenerated into frequent displays of gross irreverence and indecent brawling; while on the other hand the use of a Litany in English instead of Latin was by Cranmer's influence introduced ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... rotten fabric of guess and speculation," and whose "mode of dealing with nature" is reprobated as "utterly dishonourable to Natural Science." And all this high and mighty talk, which would have been indecent in one of Mr. Darwin's equals, proceeds from a writer whose want of intelligence, or of conscience, or of both, is so great, that, by way of an objection to Mr. Darwin's views, he can ask, "Is it credible ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... admiration as I did for those of Ivan Tourgueneff, and none in whose personality I felt so profound an interest. Tourgueneff is far from being a model novelist, but his tales are written with wonderful power, and yet are neither indecent nor melodramatic nor rasping to the nerves. That the burden of strong natures is in proportion to their strength, that human nature in general is weak, and that the Devil still sometimes appears incarnate in the person of lovely woman, seem to form his theory of life. Hence ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... you!" "You tried to cheat Nincan!" "You want to build a watch-house!" "You have an old ewe at home now, that you did not come honestly by!" "You denied your own hand!"—with other ribaldry still more gross and indecent. But the most singular part of the scene was a number of little boys, dressed in black and white, who all wore badges of the parties to which they belonged, and were provided with a syringe, and two canteens, one filled with rose-water, and ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... taste for sculpture," Mrs. Ebley said. "People may call it what names they please, but I consider it immoral and indecent." ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... for me in a high-voiced Spanish accent: "I ordered the music stopped; I will not permit such an indecent exhibition ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... saw and understood the smile, and became more angry than ever. She drew her chair close to the table, and began to fidget with her fingers among the papers. She had never before encountered a clergyman so contumacious, so indecent, so unreverend,—so upsetting. She had had to deal with men difficult to manage;—the archdeacon for instance; but the archdeacon had never been so impertinent to her as this man. She had quarrelled once openly with a chaplain of her husband's, a clergyman whom ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... and exposed her poor old scalp, with its thin, forlorn wisps and patches of grey hair, grotesque, almost indecent, in its nudity. But the coiffeur measured it in sublime seriousness, putting his tape this way and that way, while Madame Valiere's eyes danced in ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... you doing, Josie?" asked her grandfather again, "dressed up in that indecent manner and ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... old song. Percy says it was an indecent ballad. Shakespeare alludes to it in his Twelfth Night, act ii. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... with amazement. She knew that hitherto Bonaparte had always sought to avoid the sight of a woman in her condition; he had frequently said that he thought there was nothing more indecent than for a female to join in the dance under such circumstances, and now it was he who asked her ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... strolling companies of minstrels, jugglers, and jesters, who went about the country, and acted secular pieces composed of comic stories, jokes, and dialogues, interspersed with dancing and tumbling. The whole performance was very absurd and often indecent, and the clergy did their utmost ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... last night. It was a bespeak—"The Love Chase," a ballet (with a phenomenon!), divers songs, and "A Roland for an Oliver." It is a good theatre, but the actors are very funny. Browne laughed with such indecent heartiness at one point of the entertainment, that an old gentleman in the next box suffered the most violent indignation. The bespeak party occupied two boxes, the ladies were full-dressed, and the gentlemen, to a man, in white gloves with flowers ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... of prophecy, asks Johnson what he would say if he were told that a hundred years after his death the Oxford University Press would allow his Dictionary to be re-edited by a Scotch Presbyterian. "Sir," replies Johnson, "to be facetious it is not necessary to be indecent." Here and here alone is something which ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... a symbol for me, and the less none because of his animal humour, his queer indecent side, and because of such lapses into utter meanness as that which made him sound the note of the begging-letter writer even in his "Dedication," reminding His Magnificence very urgently, as if it were the gist of his matter, of the continued malignity ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... thankful Consent, Behold the Hand-maid of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy Word[l]. Jonah the Prophet, tho' favour'd with such immediate Revelations, and so lately delivered, in a miraculous Way, from the very Belly of Hell[m], was thrown into a most indecent Transport of Passion, on the withering of a Gourd; so that he presumed to tell the Almighty to his Face, that he did well to be angry even unto Death[n]: Whereas this pious Woman preserves the Calmness and Serenity of her ...
— Submission to Divine Providence in the Death of Children • Phillip Doddridge
... miles, furrowed by the troughs of battered trenches, pitted every yard with shell-holes and smeared over with the wreckage of what once were human bodies. I could not imagine what useful purpose women could serve amid such surroundings. It seemed to me indecent that they should be allowed to go there. They were going to do reconstruction, I was told. Reconstruction! you can't reconstruct towns and villages the very foundations of which have been buried. There is a Bible phrase which expresses such annihilation, "The place thereof ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... of the woman's rights convention want? They want to vote and to hustle with the rowdies at the polls. They want to be members of Congress, and in the heat of debate subject themselves to coarse jests and indecent language like that of Rev. Mr. Hatch. They want to fill all other posts which men are ambitious to occupy, to be lawyers, doctors, captains of vessels and generals in the field. How funny it would sound in the newspapers ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... sit down on her cushions; none of the grooms is looking. Dark-blue, I see, like Jane. That is the sort of car I love. I am like the lady herring; I don't approve of all this talk about the insides of things; it seems to me to be rather indecent—unless, of course, you do it very nicely, like that young herring. When you go and look at a horse you don't ask how its sweetbread is arranged, or what is the principle of its ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... see if she had the tokens upon her. There had been none when I put her to bed again, so that I had hoped it was but a colic or some such affection; but, alas, when I looked at his direction, there were the black swellings plainly to be seen. Forthwith he fled with indecent haste, and only stopped to say he would send a nurse and such remedies as ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... sounds of a man's grief that is almost indecent. This sobbing was pitiful in its abandonment and in its effort to control ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... hands gleefully. From the moment the curtain rose, Tadeo had been heedless of the music. He was looking only for the prurient, the indecent, the immoral in actions and dress, and with his scanty French was sharpening his ears to catch the obscenities that the austere guardians of the fatherland ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... forbidden voices, Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd and I remove the veil, Voices indecent ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... democratic nature, which he believed was directly sanctioned by God. He attacked the morals of the clergy and of the people and, besides renovating his own order, suppressed not only public immorality but all forms of frivolity. The people burned their cards, false hair, indecent pictures, and the like; many women left their husbands and entered the cloister; gamblers were tortured and blasphemers had their tongues pierced. A police was instituted with power of ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... them with having succeeded. A strange complaint. The cause of the emigration, which we all agreed in deploring, was, according to Mr. Carmady, the desire of a sinless people for sin. A strange accusation. The people, according to Mr. Carmady, were leaving Ireland because they wished to indulge in indecent living. Mr. Carmady did not use these words; the words he used were "The joy of life," but the meaning of the words ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... huddling things together, and declared it highly unbecoming to see the grant made "in such a hotch-potch Bill—a Bill which really seems to be the sweepings of the other House." The Earl of Crawford declared it a most indecent thing to provide the marriage-portion of the Princess Royal of England in such a manner; "it is most disrespectful to the royal family." The Duke of Newcastle could only say in defence of the course taken by the Government that he saw nothing disrespectful or inconvenient ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... uncomplimentary references to himself, Ludwig instructed his librarian, Herr Lichenthaler, to collect all the pasquinades, lampoons, squibs, and caricatures (many of them far from flattering, and others verging on the indecent) that appeared and have them sumptuously bound. It was not long before enough had been assembled to fill half a dozen volumes. His idea was "to preserve for posterity all this mountain of mud, as a witness of Bavaria's shame." That somebody else was responsible for the "shame" did ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... was a great hulking fool. He never could be anything but a clod-hopper, anyway. He looked down at his great hand, at his short trousers, and the indecent ugliness of his horrible boots, and studied himself without mercy to himself. He acknowledged that they were hideous, but ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... like lacrosse. Stakes were wagered on the game. This game is also-described by Domenech, [Footnote: Vol. II, p. 196.] who says the women wore a special costume which left the limbs free and that the game was "unbecoming and indecent." Powers [Footnote: Contribution to North American Ethnology, Vol. III, p. 383.] found a game among the Nishinams, on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, not far from Sacramento, which in some respects also resembled lacrosse. He says "The 'Ti'-kel' is the only really robust ...
— Indian Games • Andrew McFarland Davis
... all God's works which doth this world adorn, There is none more fair and excellent Than is man's body, both for power and form, Whilst it is kept in sober government, But none than it more foul and indecent, Distempered through misrules and passions base, It grows a monster and incontinent, Doth lose his dignity and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... very menacing, although it is not declared in Espana—is that both the villages of your Majesty and those of encomenderos are places where the curacy is so ill-supplied with chalices and ornaments that it is a shame to see them. Many of the churches are so indecent that when I visited them, from pure shame I was obliged to command that they be torn down; they were not fit to be entered by horses. There are two principal causes for this: the first is that the encomenderos are penurious and allow little for ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... sagacity in dealing with one case which came before him. A complaint was made of a book well known at that time, the memoirs of a dissolute woman, which was full of indecency, but in which there could not be found a single, separate indecent sentence or word. The Major was at a loss for some time what to do in indicting it. If he set forth the whole book, it would give it an immortality on the records of the court which perhaps would be worse for the public morals than the original publication. Finally he averred in the indictment ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... "tutelage," or a protectorate, ourselves. We wisely left Venezuela to work out its destiny in its own way, and in the fullness of time. That policy was far-seeing, beneficent, and strictly American in 1895. Why, then, make almost indecent haste to abandon ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams
... hating their heavenly King; and the latter was parabolically spoken, and rather intended to denote the certain and necessary consequences of sin, than any express judgment against it. But to represent the Almighty as avenging the sins of the guilty on the innocent, was indecent, if not blasphemous, as it was to represent him acting against the first principles of natural justice, and against the original notions of right and wrong, which he himself had implanted in our minds; ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... thing, revealed and made yet plainer. He stood convicted, a chronic violator of the immutable rule. And he knew, likewise, there was but one way out of the coil—and took it, there in his bedroom, vividly ringed about by the obscene and indecent circlet of his lights which kept away the blessed, cursed darkness while the ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... she has only changed her seat. They do that sometimes—he hates PARQUET." And, after a pause: "How cross she looks! She's evidently in a temper about something. I never saw people hide their feelings as badly as they do. It's positively indecent." ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... similar. Smollet's continuation of Hume was confessedly a bookseller's job: four octavo volumes in only ten times the number of months, even in our days of locomotive celerity, would be thought rather a suspicious piece of literary handiwork; and besides the indecent haste, so incompatible with thoroughness, the misrepresentations of Smollet are patent. Goldsmith, as unambitious in research as he was genial in expression, made so agreeable a story, that, with all its imperfection, his sketch still finds readers; while the rarely quoted work of Henry ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... had played a heroic part; but the rest of those present would have considered it almost indecent to speak of it as Libbie did. She continued to clasp her hands and gaze soulfully into the ravine. Bob, having made sure that Betty was all right, had gone down to the bottom of the slope and helped the gray horse to its ...
— Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp • Alice B. Emerson
... your gallantry, would you not have followed it with shouts of laughter? You and I see things with such different eyes, and perhaps we are both right. Such a procession formed of the fairest beauties of France would be an indecent spectacle; but let it consist of Roman ladies, you will all gaze with the eyes of the Volscians and feel with the ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... saw what it expressed; in my drawing-room he was off duty, he had no longer to sit up and play a part; he would lean back and rest and draw a long breath, and forget that the day of his execution was fixed. There was to be no indecent haste about the marriage; it was not to take place till after the session, at the end of August It puzzled me and rather distressed me. that his heart should n't be a little more in the matter; it seemed strange to be engaged to so charming a girl and yet go through with it as if it ...
— The Path Of Duty • Henry James
... himself, much less to make any reprisals: his resentment therefore against him was no less implacable than it had been against Augustus,—But the emperor had also disobliged him. Count Zobor, the chamberlain, had taken very indecent and unbecoming liberties with his character, in the presence of his own Ambassador at Vienna; and that court had given shelter to 1500 Muscovites, who having escaped his arms, fled thither for protection. As he was now so near, he therefore thought best to call the emperor first ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... speak, entirely physical, and even at the noisy Sunday dinner-parties, sitting among five or six women, to all of whom her father spoke familiarly. There were actresses, dancers or singers, who, after dinner, would settle themselves down to smoke with their elbows on the table absorbed in the indecent stories so keenly relished by their host. Fortunately, childhood is protected by a resisting candour, by an enamel over which all impurities glide. Felicia became noisy, turbulent, ill-behaved, but without being touched by all that passed over ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... but the fact of any one deliberately starting by the early train was one of the few. In regard to such conduct, he retained all his youthful capacity for wonder. Surprise, however, gave way to unrestrained and indecent exultation when he learned that the early party had consisted of Kate and Haddington, and that Eugene himself had escorted them to the station. Eugene was in too good a temper to be ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... as men, when her sex was as vitally interested as theirs. And therefore, with her characteristic consistency, she did so. But while her language may seem coarse to our over-fastidious ears, it never becomes prurient or indecent. In her Dedication she expresses very distinctly her disgust for the absence of modesty among contemporary Frenchwomen. Hers is the plain-speaking of the Jewish law-giver, who has for end the good of man; and not that of an Aretino, ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... consider as objects of general detestation and the severest animadversion of law. When, in the place of that religion of social benevolence and of individual self-denial, in mockery of all religion, they institute impious, blasphemous, indecent theatric rites, in honor of their vitiated, perverted reason, and erect altars to the personification of their own corrupted and bloody republic,—when schools and seminaries are founded at public expense to poison mankind, from generation to generation, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... physicians, priests, and nobles, not knowing what contest for the throne might now take place, or what might happen in it, hastened away, each man for himself and his own property; the mercenary servants of the court began to rob and plunder; the body of the King, in the indecent strife, was rolled from the bed, and lay alone, for hours, upon the ground. O Conqueror, of whom so many great names are proud now, of whom so many great names thought nothing then, it were better to have conquered ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... correct; but our Parisians are not just now thinking about such matters; they are all wild for love of a new comedy, written by Mons. de Beaumarchais, and called, "Le Mariage de Figaro," full of such wit as we were fond of in the reign of Charles the Second, indecent merriment, and gross immorality; mixed, however, with much acrimonious satire, as if Sir George Etherege and Johnny Gay had clubbed their powers of ingenuity at once to divert and to corrupt their auditors; who now carry the verses of this favourite piece ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... piety demanded the delivery of his father's soul from peril, it counselled no less the fulfilment of his dying requests, and the arrangements for Catherine's marriage were hurried on with an almost indecent haste. The instant he heard rumours of Henry VII.'s death, Ferdinand sent warning to his envoy in England that Louis of France and others would seek by all possible means to break off the match.[81] To further it, he would withdraw his objections to ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... the officer, "you are lost to the world for some time. This indecent profession of opinion—What! a wooden cross as big as a dagger! Give it to me at once, and follow me to ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... is said, more than six hundred alterations, most of them of a verbal character and of no great importance, was accomplished within the compass of a single month. It is consoling to those who within our own memory have been charged with indecent haste for seeking to effect a revision of the American Book of Common Prayer within a period of nine years, to find this precedent in ecclesiastical history ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... indecent kind were so common at the time, that no one thought of interfering; the congregation looked on in silence, the better class scandalized, and the lower orders, some laughing, and others backing the soldier or minister as their ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... "I, A.B., on condition of being admitted as a member of Yale College, promise, on my faith and honor, to observe all the laws and regulations of this College; particularly that I will faithfully avoid using profane language, gaming, and all indecent, disorderly behavior, and disrespectful conduct to the Faculty, and all combinations to resist their authority; as witness my hand. A.B." —Yale Coll. Cat., 1837, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... vanquished by her device of a feigned but continuous hilarity—she would utter a shrill cry, shut tight her little bird-like eyes, which were beginning to be clouded over by a cataract, and quickly, as though she had only just time to avoid some indecent sight or to parry a mortal blow, burying her face in her hands, which completely engulfed it, and prevented her from seeing anything at all, she would appear to be struggling to suppress, to eradicate a laugh which, were she to give way to it, must inevitably leave her inanimate. ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... to say that these prognostications of Mr. Pott's were but too soon, and too fatally realised, for in almost the next issue of the Independent, we find a scandalous and indecent attack on our late beloved Mr. Pickwick. Shocking as it is, we cannot forbear, in duty to the deceased gentleman, ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... she is but twelve years of age," wrote her young Ladyship, whose spelling, by the way, was by no means as correct as her sense of the proprieties. "Her father, Sir Jeoffry, allows her to ride in boys' clothes, which is indecent for a young lady even at her time of life. Brother Tom, how would you like to see your sister Betty astride a hunter, in breeches? Lady Maddon (she is the slender, graceful buty who is called the 'Willow Wand' by the ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... all the rhetoric and logic that could be urged, by way of auxiliaries. Every one saw the egregious folly, not to say presumption, of the mistake; and at the moment, every one wondered how a common-sense community could have committed so indecent a blunder. We are mistaken. There was an exception to the general feeling in the person of Sir George Templemore. To his church-and-state notions, and anti-catholic prejudices, which were quite as much political ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... seasonable interposition of some miraculous power preserved the chaste spouses of Christ from the dishonor even of an involuntary defeat. We should not indeed neglect to remark, that the more ancient as well as authentic memorials of the church are seldom polluted with these extravagant and indecent ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... great deal of the world. He did not expect to find the bereaved one inconsolable, but he was certainly staggered to behold her busy in preparations for a second marriage. Indignant at what he conceived to be an affront upon the memory of his friend, he argued and remonstrated against her indecent haste, and besought her to postpone the unseemly union. Roused by all he saw, the faithful friend spoke warmly on the deceased's behalf, and painted in the strongest colours he could employ, the enormity of her transgression. Now Margaret loved Michael as she had never loved before. Slander ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... the aesthetic sense is a struggle, a conflict, a war, a contradiction, going on in the heart of things. The aesthetic sense does not only reveal loveliness and distinction; it also reveals the grotesque, the bizarre, the outrageous, the indecent and the diabolic. If we prefer to use the term "beauty" in a sense so comprehensive and vast as to include both sides of this eternal duality, then we shall be driven to regard as "beautiful" the entire panorama of life, with its ghastly contrasts, with its ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... near Halle. Here he lived with his mistress and his daughters—he had repudiated his wife—in disreputable peace until 1789, when he was condemned to a year's imprisonment for a lampoon on the Prussian religious edict of 1788. His year's enforced leisure he spent in writing indecent stories, coarse polemics, and an autobiography which is described as "a mixture of lies, hypocrisy and self-prostitution." He died on ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... nodded his head. And then he looked glum. 'Twas indecent to wring his secret from his bosom before a single brave ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... and he opened the door, and the people went in, where Mr. Hallett addressed them. While the Indians were thus gratified in meeting their friends, and in hearing good advice from Mr. Hallett, on temperance and their affairs, Mr. Fish's messenger interrupted the speaker, in a very abrupt and indecent manner, and tried to bring on a quarrel and break up the meeting. Captain George Lovell, always a friend to the Indians, tried to keep Mr. Crocker still, and Mr. Hallett declined having any controversy, yet the man persisted ...
— Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts - Relative to the Marshpee Tribe: or, The Pretended Riot Explained • William Apes
... is good-breeding less the ornament and cement of common social life: it connects, it endears, and at the same time that it indulges the just liberty, restrains that indecent licentiousness of conversation, which alienates and provokes. Great talents make a man famous, great merit makes him respected, and great learning makes him esteemed; but good breeding alone ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... married!" Miss Vance stood up, her lean face reddening. "Jean! You surprise me! That kind of talk—it's indecent! It is that loose American idea of marriage that ends in hideous divorce cases. But for one of ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... Nikiforovitch very well, and am able to state that he never even had any intention of marrying. Where do all these scandals originate? In the same way it was rumoured that Ivan Nikiforovitch was born with a tail! But this invention is so clumsy and at the same time so horrible and indecent that I do not even consider it necessary to refute it for the benefit of civilised readers, to whom it is doubtless known that only witches, and very few even of these, have tails. Witches, moreover, belong more to the feminine than to the ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... apparently without compunction, notwithstanding that the poor brute had served him well in its way. He cut up and smoke-dried the flesh, and the intolerable pangs of hunger compelled me to share the loathsome food with him. We were not only indecent, it seemed to me, but cannibals to feed on the faithful servant that had been our butcher. "But what does it matter?" I argued with myself. "All flesh, clean and unclean, should be, and is, equally abhorrent to me, and killing animals a kind of murder. But now I find ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... responsible for?—and it is shamelessly frivolous. Why not? Where the highest sanctities are so lamentably human, and where the phylacteries of the moralists are embroidered with such earth-spun threads, why go on tip-toe and with forlorn visage? It is outrageously indecent. Why not? Who made this portentous "decency" to be the rule of free-born life? Who put fig-leaves upon the sweet flesh of the immortals? Decency after all is a mere modern barbarism; the evocation of morbid vulgarity ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... near her.] It's indecent—at the horse-show, the opera, at races and balls, to meet the man who once—It's not civilized! It's fantastic! It's half baked! Oh, I never should have come here! [He sympathizes, and she grows irrational and furious.] ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... they called us all sorts of bad names, made indecent gestures, and aggravated us, so that between 3 and 4 o'clock in the afternoon, by an inexplicable concert of action, and with a serious breach of discipline, a large number of the men and many of the officers broke ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... I was concerned. But he can't take it from me. He doesn't "want" it. Even he with his infernal talent couldn't do anything with it. Unscrupulous as he was, and I assure you he'd stick at nothing (he'd "take" his mother's last agony if he "wanted" it badly enough), indecent as he ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... will a queen by the administering of special food. Bees, accordingly, are further advanced in the knowledge of sexual development than men. They have not, probably, been sermonized for two thousand years that it is "indecent" and "immoral" to ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... string if I put them on again, but I tell him we must economize now to make up for what the party cost. My dress was charming. Grace Nott brought it over from Pacquin for her mother, and meanwhile this cruel indecent new tariff came on! Get down on your knees, my dear, and be grateful you don't live in this wretched country which is being turned into one great picnicking ground for the working classes. The custom house wanted to make Grace pay an awful duty, ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... months, or as it seemed to young Hamlet, less than two months, she had married again, married his uncle, her dear husband's brother, in itself a highly improper and unlawful marriage, from the nearness of relationship, but made much more so by the indecent haste with which it was concluded, and the unkingly character of the man whom she had chosen to be the partner of her throne and bed. This it was, which more than the loss of ten kingdoms, dashed the spirits and brought a cloud over the mind of this ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... show his fitness for such a beginning,—that he is fitter than the rest who offer themselves for the same post. The entry into it can only justly be made through the door of merit. And whenever any one aspires to and attains such high post, especially if by unfair and disreputable and indecent means, and is afterward found to be a signal failure, he should at once be beheaded. He is the worst among ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... writing a line to express her indignation at the very unjustifiable manner in which the minority of thirteen members obstructs the progress of business.[55] She hopes that every attempt will be made to put an end to what is really indecent conduct. Indeed, how is business to go on at all if such vexatious opposition prevails? At all events, the Queen hopes that Sir Robert will make no kind of concession to these gentlemen, which [could] encourage them to go on in the ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... Egyptian priests, endeavored in their attire to show a mingling of the male and female sex; they wore long garments like women, vergogna! they wore long hair, guai! and they SHAVED THEIR FACES! It pains me to say, that their indecent example is followed even to this day, by the priests of what should be a purer ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... prospective business with California, and have too large a sum invested to make much for the future. And yet, with a smaller investment they could not perform the service, except in that dangerous, cheap, indecent way, of innumerable wants and deprivations, which the American people have begun to despise. They have had some few disasters, but none of those of a fatal character in the Pacific. The "Winfield Scott" was lost in entering the harbor of Acapulco; the "Tennessee" ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... beginning of the Commonwealth had there been so much of that general decorum of external behaviour which Cromwell liked to see. Cock-fights, dancing at fairs, and other such amusements, were under ban. Indecent publications that had flourished long in the guise of weekly pamphlets disappeared; and books of the same sort were more closely looked after than they had been. But what shall we say about this Order, affecting the newspaper press especially:—"Wednesday, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... another argument, which does not seem more convincing, though it probably lights up the humorous or indecent side of the Eleusinia. Isocrates speaks of "good offices" rendered to Demeter by "our ancestors," which "can only be told to the initiate." {86b} Now these cannot be the kindly deeds reported in the Hymn, for these were publicly proclaimed. ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... the Scriptures with thy famulistical interpretations. I observed you spoke but a moment ago of the soul of the grape, as if it were possible that a divine principle could lodge therein, I caution thee against this, as a profane and indecent form of speech, unbecoming in one of the congregation; and, besides, an' thou wouldst retain my custom, take heed thou put more malt into ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... anything myself. I call it perfectly indecent dragging the good lady out of her well-earned tomb at this time of day. I've looked her up in the Dic. of Antiquities, and it appears that she committed suicide some years ago. Body-snatching, I call it. What do I want to know ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... attack, which was led by Stefano Colonna, was repulsed almost by accident; but Rienzi, who had shown more cowardice than generalship, disgusted his supporters by his indecent exultation over the bodies of the slain. And there was one fatal ambiguity in Rienzi's position. He had begun by announcing himself as the ally and champion of the papacy, and Clement VI had been willing enough to stand by and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... them all, hot with the exercise of the indecent gestures wherewith he illustrated his filthy tale, had slunk off like ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... influence of another; and to prove it, that every act of my administration would be tortured, and the grossest and most insidious misrepresentations of them be made, by giving one side only of a subject, and that too in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero—to a notorious defaulter—or even to ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... while the whole church interfered. In 1769 the church at Andover put it to vote whether "the parish Disapprove of the female sex sitting with their Hats on in the Meeting-house in time of Divine Service as being Indecent." In the town of Abington, in 1775, it was voted that it was "an indecent way that the female sex do sit with their hats and bonnets on to worship God." Still another town voted that it was the "Town's Mind" ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... opened near their home, the daughter, for accomplishment, was sent to it. She came from her home, modest, and her innate spirit of purity rebelled against the liberties taken by the dancing-master, and the men he introduced to her. She became indignant at the indecent attitudes she was called upon to assume, but noticing a score of young women, many of them from the best homes in the town, all yielding to the vulgar embrace, she cast aside that spirit of modesty which had been the development of years of home-training, and ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... Sully,' he says. 'I've got to break it to him gently. 'Twould be indecent for other eyes to witness the operation. This is the time, Sully,' says he, 'when old Denver has got to make good as a jollier and a silver-tongued sorcerer, or else give up all the ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... happy to have so fluent a pen, to lampoon or satirize his enemies, or to make indecent comedies for his amusement; while Dryden's aim seems to have been scarcely higher than preferment at court and honored contemporary notoriety for his genius. But if the great majority lauded and flattered him, he was not without his share in those quarrels of authors, which were carried ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... taken with indecent laughter, and turned away, while ninety summers observed, "Of course them boys would cut the wire if ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... plaited, and tied behind with ribbons, but never disguised by powder; and the brightness of their skins round the temples, clearly appears through their dark hair. Though amours are universal at Lima, the men are very careful to bide them, and no indecent word or action is ever permitted in public. They usually meet for these purposes, either in the afternoon at the Siesta, or in the evening in calashes on the other side of the river, or in the great square ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... purchasing the good will of ministers for Foreign Affairs or Directors. In the gilded halls of the Luxembourg, Barras, surrounded by a raffish court, dispensed the honours and the spoils of the new regime. Women in astounding and wilfully indecent dresses gravitated about him and his entourage, women representing all the strata heaved upwards by the Revolution, with here {241} and there a surviving aristocrat, like the widow of Beauharnais, needy, and turning ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... young a country to tolerate middle-aged heroines. We are steeped in conventionalism, for all our fads. We have certain cast-iron formulae for life, and associate love with youth alone. I think we have a vague idea that autumnal love is rather indecent." ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... struggle against the perpetual jealousy of rivals, and died at length assassinated by an insult.] We have often heard similar opinions maintained by our own countrymen. While Anglo-American criticism blows hot or cold on the two departments of French practice, it is not, I hope, indecent to question whether all the wisdom is necessarily with us in ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the Government to close than to close the churches. As the needs of the Government increase, as M. Fouillee predicts, without much doubt it will claim a monopoly in houses of ill-fame and in the publication of indecent literature; enterprises in which there would be money. And after all, tolerating such things for the profit of certain traders and annexing them to be worked for the profit of the State, is surely much the same thing from a moral point of view. And the ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... serve me for three days, of fish—but no meat—together with a bottle of strong punch, he was in much better spirits, and vastly agreeable. There were only six people, four of which were ladies. He did not sit a quarter of an hour after they left us; and excepting talking a little on the indecent behaviour of the Mountain in the House of Commons, and telling an anecdote or two of the women who went up with addresses to the Queen, not a word was said of politics. He remained till twelve o'clock, and he and Princess Augusta and myself ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... they had told you truly—even if I had been dead—dead by the hand of your father—could that circumstance have excused you for rushing with such indecent haste to the altar with another man? It was but a poor tribute to the memory of the husband of your choice (if he had been dead) to marry again within ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... of his shoulders, Dick turned. Having taken his bow and quiver from David, who could not conceal his indecent joy at the utter humiliation of Ambrosio, whom he hated with a truly British hate, he walked slowly to where Hugh sat upon ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... have been seen to do so," admitted Travers. "But I will never believe they are at our beck and call, to bang tambourines or move furniture. We cannot ring up the dead as we ring up the living on a telephone. The idea is insufferable and indecent. Neither can anybody be used as a mouth-piece in that way, or tell us the present position or occupation and interests of a dead man—or what he smokes, or how his liquor tastes. Such ideas degrade our impressions of life beyond the grave. They are, if I may say so, disgustingly anthropomorphic. ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... a hypocrite Society is! Everyone pretended never to have heard me before. I was allotted to Miss HORNBLOWER (worse luck!) and she positively called me "Her own!"—at my age, too! It's indecent. Complained to HORNBLOWER, who now faced round, and maintained that he was the first to bring me out. I could almost have cried. No wonder I fell flat, and injured myself. Why, Sir, SIDNEY SMITH was my godfather, and was always trotting me out ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various
... should watch and pray, [Matt. 26:41] avoid idleness, evil company, bad books and papers, indecent songs and pictures, immoral plays, intemperance in eating and drinking, and all that would incite to impurity. We should keep our minds occupied with good thoughts and desires, so that we have no room ...
— An Explanation of Luther's Small Catechism • Joseph Stump
... sex-hygiene movement. Undoubtedly a considerable amount of the celibacy in sensitive women may be traced to ill-balanced mothers and teachers who, in word and attitude, build up an impression that sex is indecent and bestial, and engender in general a damaging ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... celerity with which such things are done in our country, was to take place on the next day. Too often the haste appears indecent, and it may be that in some instances the body has been buried before life deserted it. It would seem that the family felt constrained by the presence of the corpse, and compelled to exercise an irksome self-control, and, therefore, desired to hurry it under ground, ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... as sure as this war begins it's going to last. There'll be lots of killing and dying, and I warn you now, your share'll be a double one. So, then, no indecent haste. Artillery can't fight every day. Cavalry can—in its small way, but you may have to wait months and months to get into a regular hell on earth. All the same you'll get there!—soon enough—times enough. Don't you know why, when we have to be recruited—to ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... their posts and said not a word. Neither they nor any one asked, "Who did this? Where is he gone?" The sense of the people certainly was that it was an act of summary justice on an offender whom the laws could not reach, but they felt it to be indecent to shout or exult on the spot where he was breathing his last. Rome, so long supposed the capital of Christendom, certainly took a very pagan view of this act, and the piece represented on the occasion at the theatres ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... approached, no indecent manifestations of joy were exhibited by the leaden-eyed young gentlemen assembled at Doctor Blimber's. Any such violent expression as 'breaking up,' would have been quite inapplicable to that polite establishment. ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... this time raised his mob to fifty men, and made every arrangement to give me a warm reception. Two ruffians who were intoxicated had been selected to start the disturbance, or "open the ball," as they called it. I had just commenced speaking when one of these men began to swear and use indecent language, and made a rush for me with his fist drawn. I made a Masonic sign of distress, when, to my relief and yet to my surprise, a planter pushed to my aid. He was the man who employed Dickey. He took the drunken men and led them out of the crowd, ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... an example unto thee; and since I am denied life to educate and bring thee up, let this dreadful monument of my death suffice to warn you against yielding in any degree to your passion, or suffering a vehemence of temper to transport you so far even as indecent words, which bring on a custom of flying out in a rage on trivial occasions, till they fatally terminate in such acts of wrath and cruelty as that for which I die. Let your heart, then, be set to ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... willing to assume his care? It's scandalous the way you leap at conclusions. No, Solomon, no—I won't shirk a single irksome responsibility," and the judge's voice shook with suppressed emotion. Mahaffy laughed. "There you go again, Solomon, with that indecent mirth of yours! Friendship aside, you grow more offensive every day." The judge paused and then resumed. "I understand there's a federal judgeship vacant here. The president—" Mr. Mahaffy gave him a furtive leer. "I tell you General Jackson was my friend—we were ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... is the first and truest step towards womanliness. When this has not been taken, and a girl is therefore unkind to her social inferiors out of fear of what rumor will say,—"the fume of little hearts,"—I blush for an indecent girlhood, and I grieve for an unpromising, unchristian womanhood. We know that encouragement, not intimacy, the gentle rebuke of a bow or a greeting, are more helpful to arouse the sparks of womanliness than the cold stare or averted head. Next to the respect of woman for woman, comes ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... attempting to bribe him to secrecy, I left him, cursing him for his obstinacy, and came direct to you. Heavens!' added her ladyship, drawing her robe over her partially denuded bosom, 'how desperate the fear of exposure has made me, that in this indecent attire I go at midnight to the chambers of male servants!—Simpson, can you help me in this dreadful emergency? You have heretofore proved faithful to me,—do not desert me now. Lagrange must be silenced!—do you understand me? At any cost,—at any risk,—his babbling tongue must be hushed, ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... 17th April 1828, he thus censured Jabez in the matter of the Society's action at home:—"From a letter of yours to Jonathan, in which you express a very indecent pleasure at the opposition which Brother Marshman has received, not by the Society but by some anonymous writer in a magazine, I perceive you are informed of the separation which has taken place between them and us. What in that ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... listen to the licentious and shameless jests of the popular Roman poet only with bashful blushes, Henry was so much the more delighted by it, and accompanied the obscenest allusions and the most indecent jests with his uproarious laughter and ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... answered Mauleverer. "Even the indecent immorality of delaying our dinner could scarcely bring a blush to the parchment ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and conviction combined by the Senate, prior to the bringing of an accusation by the House of Representatives, the constitutional body for the preferment of an impeachment of the President—and was an improper, and not far removed from an indecent proceeding on the part of the Senate. In effect, the President was thereby condemned by the Senate without trial, and his later arraignment was simply to receive sentence-it being solely upon the removal of Mr. Stanton that the ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... circulation than any other. It is a daily paper, of $12 a year, and its circulation being mainly among the larger merchants, planters, and professional men, it is a fair index of the 'public opinion' of Louisiana, so far as represented by those classes of persons. Advertisements equally gross, indecent, and abominable, or nearly so, can be found in almost every number ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the Devill himselfe that appeires in this case. The tricks also of robbing the bride groomes of their faculty that they can do nothing to the wives is very ordinar heir; as also that of bewitching gentlewomen in causing them follow them lasciviously and wt sundry indecent gestures; and this they effectuat sometymes by a kind of pouder they have and mix in amongs hir wine; some tymes by getting a litle of hir hair, which they boill wt pestiferous herbs; whilk act when its parfaited ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... know more than they, don't let either of the old folks see that you think so. That attitude on your part is almost indecent. Be grateful also. How singular that where young men have everything to be thankful for, ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... insisting that their co-religionists are ill-treated by the Moslems,—not that they really care about the matter,—and that is sufficient to convince anyone who has got his weather-eye open that they only want a pretext for war, decent or indecent. The news has just arrived, though it has not yet been made public, that we should be suspicious of the designs of Louis Napoleon, who has so wonderfully been transmogrified into an emperor—though for my part, I believe that no ruler of France ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... of the Cabinet of Antiques; of the Indecent little Statue there, and of the orders Catherine got to kiss it, with a "KOPF AB (Head off, if you won't)!" from the bantering Czar, whom she had to obey,—is not incredible, after what we have seen. It seems, he begged this bit of Antique Indecency from Friedrich Wilhelm; who, we may ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... legal rather than literary chastisement, the two principal objects and occasions which I find for blame and regret in the conduct of the review in question are first, its unfaithfulness to its own announced and excellent plan, by subjecting to criticism works neither indecent nor immoral, yet of such trifling importance even in point of size and, according to the critic's own verdict, so devoid of all merit, as must excite in the most candid mind the suspicion, either that dislike or vindictive feelings were at work; or that ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... garden spot, a new earth where should be planted the seeds of a mighty nation, strong in justice and simple right, wise, temperate, brave; an enlightened people, serving God in spirit and in truth, not with the slavish observance of prelatist and papist, nor with the indecent familiarity of the Independent; loyal to their governors, but exercising the God-given right of choosing those who are to rule over them; a people amongst whom liberty shall walk unveiled, and to whom Astraea shall come again; a people ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... remarked openly in the House of Commons after many months of war that it was more than one could expect of human nature for coal-owners not to get the highest price they could. Such a standpoint is not merely indecent: it is hopelessly out-of-date. Looked at from the political point of view it is a pure anachronism. There used to be times when men made large fortunes out of the service of government, as men still make them out of the service of the ...
— Progress and History • Various
... time are filled with dismay. In Rossmoyne, where families are few and far between, and indecent scandal unknown, the smallest trifles are seized upon with avidity and manufactured into mountains. "A good appearance," Miss Penelope was taught at school, "is the first step in life," and here have these children been making ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... get him a command in this army of Candia, wherein the King had just permitted his own kinsmen to go and win laurels for themselves. He was already a full colonel of dragoons, and one of the captains of the guard. The King, who till then liked him well enough, considered such a proposition indecent, and, gauging or not gauging his intentions, he postponed until a later period these aspirations of Lauzun to the post of prince ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... reading at this time Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, called by Ruskin the greatest poem in the English language, but criticized by others as an indecent romance revolting to the purity of many women. Susan had bought a copy of the first American edition and she carried it with her wherever she went. After a hard active day, she found inspiration and refreshment in its pages. No matter how dreary the hotel room or how unfriendly ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... in dress has covered both absurdities and indecencies with the aegis of custom. From the beginning of the fourteenth century laws appear against indecent dress. What nobles invented, generally in order to give especial zest to the costume of a special occasion, that burghers and later peasants imitated and made common.[378] In the fifteenth century the man's hose fitted the legs and hips tightly. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... adventures, the recounting of which is not without touches of Rabelais, of the Moyen de Parvenir, perhaps of the rising fancies about the occult, which generated Rosicrucianism and "astral spirits" and the rest of it—a whole farrago, in short, of matters decent and indecent, congruous seldom and incongruous often. It is not like Sterne, because it is dull, and at the same time quasi-romantic; while "sensibility" had not come in, though we shall see it do so within the limits ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... study our Sunday papers. But you can't deny there's something comic in the rough about all Germans, before you've civilized them. They're a pecooliar people, a darned pecooliar people, else they wouldn't staff all the menial and indecent occupations on the globe. But that pecooliarity, which is only skin-deep in the working Boche, is in the bone of the grandee. Your German aristocracy can't consort on terms of equality with any other Upper Ten Thousand. They swagger and bluff about ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... Abominable!" they yelled. "We thought the bishop wanted to worship these sacred and holy things, and lo! he has, with doggish ritual, put them to his teeth for mutilation." While they were raging he quieted them with words which may give us the key to such otherwise indecent behaviour. Suppose they had been having a great Sacramental dispute, and some, as is likely, had maintained against the bishop that the grinding of the Host by the teeth of any communicant meant the grinding of ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... those people. They are the worst beggars! When a lot of folks get together and start a church it is almost indecent for them to come running around to ask other folks to support it. I have half a notion not to give ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... I'm agoin' to put on play-actor clothes an' go round lookin' indecent, Phoebe Wise, why, you're mistaken—'cause I ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... have seven dozen for my breakfast. As for Sir Hercules, he didn't know what to do; he did nothing but storm at everybody, for my lady, with her head under the clothes, was serving him out at no small rate. She wouldn't, she declared, allow any man to come into the cabin to hoist her up again. So indecent, so indelicate, so shocking,—she was ashamed of Sir Hercules,—to send for the men; if they didn't leave the cabin immediately, she'd scream and she'd faint—that she would—there was no saying what she wouldn't do! Well, there we waited just outside ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... this may vary according to circumstances. They were, however, not so troublesome in begging for beads and other presents, nor so forward to bestow their favours on the new comers, though at our landing and putting off, some of the common sort frequently performed an indecent ceremony, which is described in the accounts of former voyages, but without any of the preparatory circumstances which Ooratooa practised. We had likewise much less reason to extol the hospitality of the inhabitants, their general ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... c'est dommage que la nature ne leur ait donne une troisieme main, qui leur serait necessaire pour tenir cette longue queue, qui souvent patrouille la boue ou balaye la poussiere. Plut a Dieu que les anciennes lois fussent encore en vigueur, ou ceux et celles qui portaient des habits indecent etaient obliges d'aller a Rome pour en obtenir l'absolution, qui ne pouvait leur etre accordee que ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... living away all these years; though Madame de Maluet has tried to make Ellaline believe he's coming back to settle down because of a letter she wrote, reminding him respectfully that after nineteen it's almost indecent for a girl to be kept ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... almost without exception vulgar and coarse—yet never had she got on so well with women of her own age—or older than herself. She was ready with a laugh and a word, and though she was unable to venture on indecencies herself, yet she had an amazing faculty for looking knowing and indecent beyond words, rolling her eyes and pitching her eyebrows in a certain way—oh, it was quite sufficient for her companions! And yet, if they had ever actually demanded a dirty story or a really open indecency from her, she would have ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... soldier is rejected with contempt, in two indecent lines, sung with absolute frankness and producing a furore in the audience. The song ends ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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