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More "Vulgar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Perhaps in all instances the phraseology we employ, like our manners, is derived from the society we frequent: that which is imbibed from persons of good education bears the stamp of superior discrimination and correctness, contrasted with the rude dialect of the vulgar: but it still remains unsolved, by what means these phantasms, or Ideas, accommodate themselves with the appropriate words to express ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... of the spectators to wait breathlessly the moment when Orestes shall be discovered. We now perceive why the poet at once, in the opening of the play, announced to us the existence and return of Orestes—why he disdained the vulgar source of interest, the gross suspense we should have felt, if we had shared the ignorance of Electra, and not been admitted to the secret we impatiently long to be communicated to her. In this scene, our superiority to Electra, in the knowledge we possess, refines ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... producing crime must be mentioned. Here comes in especially the lack of opportunity for wholesome social amusements among our poorer classes, particularly in our large cities. Lacking these, the masses resort to the saloon, gambling-houses, cheap music and dance halls, and vulgar theatrical entertainments. The influence of all of these institutions is undoubtedly to spread the contagion of vice and ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... not know a subject. I know the subject of arithmetic, for instance; that is, I am not good at it, but I know what it is. I am sufficiently familiar with its use to see the absurdity of anyone who says, "So vulgar a fraction cannot be mentioned before ladies," or "This unit is Unionist, I hope." Considering myself for one moment as an arithmetician, I may say that I know next to nothing about my subject: but I know my subject. I know it in the street. There ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... eyes—her thin fingers peeling an egg.... She had made them all look so "common." Ulrica was different. Was she? Yes, Ulrica was different... Ulrica peeling an egg and she, afterwards like a mad thing had gone into the saal and talked to Millie in a vulgar, ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... vulgar woman, one who does not piously regard her vulva as an orifice to be approached with Gregorian chants. I must be careful to avoid those veteran masturbators marching heroically under the gonfalons ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... founded on similar mistakes, plays which serve to improve, according to Andrew Borde's prescription, if not the morals, at least the health of the "Palais Royal" audiences of to-day. With Sidney, the comic is a vulgar style; he very rarely risks any jests, a portrait of a cowardly peasant, or of an injured husband.[246] One of his best attempts in this style is a character in his masque of the "Lady of May," the pedant Rombus, who gives quotations ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... universally believed. We have already observed that Rushbrook was a fine, tall man; and if there is any class of people who can be transplanted with success from low to high life, it will be those who have served in the army. The stoop is the evidence of a low-bred, vulgar man; the erect bearing equally so that of the gentleman. Now, the latter is gained in the army, by drilling and discipline, and being well-dressed will provide for all else that is required, as far as mere personal appearance is ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... month of May), Sophia Scott, the Duke of Buccleuch's "Little Jacobite," the most like her father of all his children. Every reader of the Life knows the delightful pictures, enough for interest and not enough for vulgar obtrusion, given by Lockhart of life at Chiefswood, the cottage near Abbotsford which he and his wife inhabited for ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... men of good taste who care for the best they know. Vulgarity is satisfaction with mean things. That is vulgar which is poor of its kind. There is a kind of music called rag-time,—vulgar music, with catchy tunes—catchy to those who do not know nor care for things better. There are men satisfied with rag-time music, with rag-time theatres, with rag-time politics, rag-time ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... not give her in reality the pleasures of which she dreamed, he tried at least to ensure that she should be happy in his company, tried not to contradict those vulgar ideas, that bad taste which she displayed on every possible occasion, which all the same he loved, as he could not help loving everything that came from her, which even fascinated him, for were they not ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... is also the most vulgar—price. The reply of the man of wealth to the statement that a recent purchase was an inferior example of an artist's work; "I paid ten thousand for it. Of course it's all right," was considered final to the critic. The man whose first judgment concerning an elaborate picture of roses was ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... Savior and the same gospel with the ignorant and debased working classes. Traces of a similar style of feeling are discernible in the letters of the polished correspondents of Hannah More. Robert Walpole gayly intimates himself somewhat shocked at the idea that the nobility and the vulgar should be equally subject to the restraints of the Sabbath and the law of God—equally exposed to the sanctions of endless retribution. And Young makes his ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... is almost the only religion I know that can expose the mysteries of its ritual to the vulgar gaze and yet retain the devotion of its worshippers. There is nothing a British audience so loves as to be taken behind the scenes and shown how it is done—or not done; and then it will attend the next play and go on adoring with the blindest infatuation. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... hung upon every syllable that fell from his lips, but, to my indescribable chagrin, it was a mere voluble jargon of statements, which simply baffled and puzzled me and caused me pain. Our charge would stare at us stolidly, and then remark, in a vulgar Cockney voice, that he was quite sure we were going the wrong way. By this time, I should mention, we had re-clothed him in his trousers and shirt, for he had obviously suffered terribly from ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... Variations of Tempo, the ritardando, accelerando, and tempo rubato, are all legitimate aids demanded by Expression. But unless their use is determined by sound judgment and correct musicianly taste, the effect speedily becomes vulgar and monotonous. Knowledge, and a taste formed in good schools, must be the guide of the vocalist in the use ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... the representative of the proud Aylwins, the genteel Aylwins, the heir-presumptive Aylwins—the most respectable branch of a most respectable family, which, alas! has its ungenteel, its bohemian, its vulgar offshoots? Did I hear ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... smile seemed to pass over Seymour's features. "I'm afraid it is the vulgar test of trousers," he said. "When I saw daylight between the long legs I was sure it was ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... She would not hurry a step to overtake him. All in good time. She no more doubted him—she no more doubted that in due time he would ask her to be his wife—than she doubted what her answer would be when he did so. Between them there had been no vulgar philandering; no word of what might have been, what yet might be, had passed their lips. Yet, deep in their hearts was guarded an unspoken compact which—she would have staked her ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... lodging houses, tenements—these myriads were squirming in darkness and squalor, ignorant and never to be less ignorant, ill fed and never to be better fed, clothed in pitiful absurd rags or shoddy vulgar attempts at finery, and never to be better clothed. She would not be of those! She would struggle on, would sink only to mount. She would work; she would try to do as nearly right as she could. And in the end she must triumph. She would get at least a good part ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... beautiful looks. And distant women are so very excited... They have hundreds of red, round hands, Still, large, without end Placed around their high, motley bellies. Most people are drinking yellow beer. Grocers, their cigarettes burning, gape. A fine young woman sings vulgar songs. A young Jew plays the piano ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... wise with God's Wisdom'? How few of us order our lives on the footing of this old teacher's lesson, and act out the belief that Wisdom is more than wealth! The man who heaps millions together, and masses it, fails in life, however a vulgar world and a nominal church may admire and glorify him. The man who wins Wisdom succeeds, however bare may be his cupboard, and however people may pity him for having failed in life, because he has not drawn prizes in the Devil's lottery. His ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... while she was seated acquitting herself in chat with Sir Hugo, she glanced round her with careful ease, bowing a recognition here and there, and fearful lest an anxious-looking exploration in search of Deronda might be observed by her husband, and afterward rebuked as something "damnably vulgar." But all traveling, even that of a slow gradual glance round a room, brings a liability to undesired encounters, and amongst the eyes that met Gwendolen's, forcing her into a slight bow, were those of the "amateur too fond of Meyerbeer," Mr. Lush, whom Sir Hugo continued to ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... against your will? Look here, my man, you showed your hand immediately you came, and you've been playing your game without knowing the trump cards. It looked very innocent to be mesmerized last night, didn't it? Oh, mesmerism is a vulgar affair; but there was more than mesmerism realized last night. I played three trump cards last night, Mr. Justin Blake. The Egyptian story was one, the thought-reading was the second, the animal and mental magnetism was the third. ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... forgive thy hastiness; but it is more difficult to forgive rude gestures, vulgar shouts, and a voice reminding one of players at mora. I do not like that style, Marcus, and do thou guard against it. Know that Tigellinus is Caesar's pander; but know also that if I wanted the girl for myself now, ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... with incessant striving to adapt herself to her environment, that she might search its farthest nook and angle; what with ceaseless efforts to check her almost momentary impulse to cry out against the vulgar display of modernity and the vicious inequity of privilege which she saw on every hand; what with her purity of thought; her rare ideals and selfless motives; her boundless love for humanity; and her passionate desire to so live her "message" that all the world might ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... nothing more to say, and she washed the cups, and watched the dark, sad man bending over the fire. A vulgar woman, a selfish woman, would have interrupted that solemn session at her hearth. She would have turned Inquisitor, and tortured him with questions. "What's the matter?" "Is there anything wrong?" "Are you sick?" etc., etc. But when Maggie ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... minds of these high-born ladies with less perplexity and awe than the vulgar souls without, were the portents and horrors of the heaven, without due effect. No mind in those days, however clear and enlightened, but held some lingering belief that such things were ominous of coming wrath, and sent by the Gods to inform their ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... a therd floar in Pump Cort, he lived as if he had the welth of Cresas. The tenpun notes floo abowt as common as haypince—clarrit and shampang was at his house as vulgar as gin; and verry glad I was, to be sure, to be a valley to ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... longer can I keep this up? Sooner or later I bust loose and smash little Jeff one in the snoot, and he takes the count, and I'm never allowed to see Claire again. Turn the roughneck out on his ear. I s'pose I'm vulgar. I s'pose that fellow Michael in Youth's Encounter wouldn't talk about snoots. I don't care, I'll—— If I poke Saxton one—— I'm not afraid of the kid-glove precinct any more. My brain's as good as theirs, give it a chance. But oh, they're all against me. And they bust the ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... "That's vulgar work," said the Darning-needle. "I shall never get through. I'm breaking! I'm breaking!" And she really broke. "Did I not say so?" said ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... Salvation? Who doth not commiserate this sort of Persons? Who can refuse to help them by all means which are possible? For my part, I, by the help of God's Grace, will not only help them, but will make publick and vulgar what is best to be done therein, yea, and have done so already, that they can understand others speaking, even with the softest Voice, ...
— The Talking Deaf Man - A Method Proposed, Whereby He Who is Born Deaf, May Learn to Speak, 1692 • John Conrade Amman
... to school, but I looked at the master, and saw that he was a smooth, round ferule—or an improper noun—or a vulgar fraction, and refused to obey him. Or he was a piece of string, a rag, a willow-wand, and I had a contemptuous pity. But one was a well of cool, deep water, and looking suddenly in, one day, I saw ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... in toilet which seems to have obtained much as yet among young girls is the very vague impulse to look 'stylish,'—a desire which must answer for more vulgar dressing than one would wish to see. If girls would rise above this, and desire to express by their dress the attributes of true ladyhood, nicety of eye, fastidious neatness, purity of taste, truthfulness, and sincerity of nature, they might form, each one for herself, a style having its own individual ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... called spoonwood, because the Indians made pretty white spoons from that wood to sell to the colonists. Horn was an appropriate and available material for spoons. Many Indian tribes excelled as they do to-day in the making of horn spoons. The vulgar affirmation, "By the great horn spoon," has ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... on me if I hadn't fooled them that way—' and again his eyes snapped and his face flushed as the humor of the situation rose in his mind. 'You'll forgive me, won't you? Don't tell Gretchen.' The light in his eyes was gone now. I'd rather she'd think me drunk than vulgar, and it was vulgar, and maybe cowardly, to hit him, but I couldn't help that either, and I'm not sorry I ...
— Fiddles - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... on this occasion, no less than on that of his other publications, Hume exhibits no small share of the craving after mere notoriety and vulgar success, as distinct from the pardonable, if not honourable, ambition for solid and enduring fame, which would have harmonised better with his philosophy. Indeed, it appears to be by no means improbable that this peculiarity of ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... noted as a positive fact that whenever the public, in any country, have a free choice in matters of art, that choice generally turns out to be right, and is ultimately endorsed by the best critics. Most of the vulgar art to be found in advertisements and the illustrated papers is put there by ignorant and vulgar providers, who imagine that the whole public are as ignorant and vulgar as themselves; whereas whenever a better standard of taste is given an opportunity, it never fails to find ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... gave for its being obtainable on these terms—its remoteness from a station, its lack of electric light, hot-water pipes, and other vulgar necessities—were exactly those pleading in its favor with two romantic Americans perversely in search of the economic drawbacks which were associated, in their tradition, with unusual ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... was the first gift he communicated to his disciples. These aped very sincerely their master's several grimaces, and shook in every limb the instant the fit of inspiration came upon them, whence they were called Quakers. The vulgar attempted to mimic them; they trembled, they spake through the nose, they quaked and fancied themselves inspired by the Holy Ghost. The only thing now wanting was a few miracles, and accordingly ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... port called San Pedro, and as we were to lie there a week or two, and the California was to sail in a few days, we lost the opportunity. Just before sailing, the captain took on board a short, red-haired, round-shouldered, vulgar-looking fellow, who had lost one eye, and squinted with the other, and introducing him as Mr. Russell, told us that he was an officer on board. This was too bad. We had lost overboard, on the passage, one of the ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... one among the anxious crowd of spectators, however, had carefully studied the small, thin countenance of the child perched up on the tall stone cross, he would have discovered that its expression was by no means that of vulgar curiosity. It was not simply the fierce attractions of an execution that had drawn thither this wild, weird-looking young creature, with his sun-burned complexion, great, flashing, dark eyes, brilliant ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... than the clear. It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions. Knowledge and acquaintance make the most striking causes affect but little. It is thus with the vulgar; and all men are as the vulgar in what they do not understand. The ideas of eternity and infinity, are among the most affecting we have: and yet perhaps there is nothing of which we really understand so little, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... on the pyre Of her dead husband, half consumed, As well might there be false, as I To those abhorred embraces doomed, 510 Far worse than fire's brief agony As to the Christian creed, if true Or false, I never questioned it: I took it as the vulgar do: Nor my vexed soul had leisure yet 515 To doubt the things men say, or deem That they are other than ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... to Mr. Yatman for the last month; yesterday evening he came home excited by liquor, and last week he was seen talking to a prizefighter; in short, though Mr. Jay does call himself a journalist, in virtue of his penny-a-line contributions to the newspapers, he is a young man of low taste, vulgar manners, and bad habits. Nothing has yet been discovered in relation to him which redounds to his credit in the ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... He would go back to San Francisco and work there, where he at least had friends who respected his station. Yet, he ought to have refused the girl's offer before she had repulsed him; his retreat now meant nothing, and might even tempt her, in her vulgar pique, to reveal her rebuff of him. He raised his eyes mechanically, and looked gloomily across the dark waste and distant bay to the opposite shore. But the fog had already hidden the glow of the city's ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... employed by wives against their husbands. There are some coarse and violent men who have been taught the tricks of women by their mistresses, in the happy hours of their celibacy, and so flatter themselves that they are never to be caught by this vulgar trap. But all their efforts, all their arguments end by being vanquished before the magic of these words: "I have a headache." If a husband complains, or ventures on a reproach, if he tries to resist the power of this Il buondo cani ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... she would refuse. Shuddering disgustfully, the thought of a new family scandal shot through his mind: a breach-of-promise case begun by Margot against him, if he tried to escape. It was the sort of thing she would do, he could not help recognizing. Another cause celebre, more vulgar than the fight for his brother's title! How Victoria would turn in shocked revulsion from the hero of such a coarse tragi-comedy. But he would never be that hero. He would keep his word and stick to Margot. When he should come to the desert telegraph station between Toudja and Touggourt, he would ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... knowledge, and observation, above others, he is a kind of reproach to them for the debasement into which they allow themselves to fall, and they endeavour to remove him from their sight. This is my history: I knew more than the vulgar, and therefore was separated ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... doubted and the spell of which none cared to escape, it occurred to me that here was the solution of all the pother we have recently got into about the realistic and the ideal schools in fiction. In "Posson Jone," an awkward camp-meeting country preacher is the victim of a vulgar confidence game; the scenes are the street, a drinking-place, a gambling-saloon, a bull-ring, and a calaboose; there is not a "respectable" character in it. Where shall we look for a more faithful picture of low life? Where shall we find another so vividly set forth in all its sordid details? ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... to the weak lungs of many consumptive patients, who came to drink the water. The Doctor overhearing this remark, made up to him, and assured him he was mistaken. He said, people in general were so misled by vulgar prejudices that philosophy was hardly sufficient to undeceive them. Then humming thrice, he assumed a most ridiculous solemnity of aspect, and entered into a learned investigation of the nature of stink. He observed, that stink, or stench, meant no more ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... which has tended to render Christianity less acceptable to men of taste and culture, is the peculiar language adopted in the discourses and writings of its Teachers. The style of some religious teachers is low, vulgar. The style of a still greater number is barbarous. Men soon feel the language of the Law to be barbarous. They would feel the language of theology to be as barbarous, if they were not accustomed to hear it or read it so constantly. ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... some fundamentals of the Christian religion, and great mysteries of faith, are handled with the greatest gospel simplicity and most dexterous plainness and are brought down to the meanest capacity and vulgar understanding, with abundant evidence of a great height and reach of useful knowledge in the author, who, had he lived to have perfected the explication of the grounds of religion in this manner—as he intended, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... resolve had had time to mature—constituted in strictness, singularly enough, the first reference to Milly, or to what Milly might or might not have done, that had passed between our pair since they had stood together watching the destruction, in the little vulgar grate at Chelsea, of the undisclosed work of her hand. They had at the time, and in due deference now, on his part, to Kate's mention of her responsibility for his call, immediately separated, and when they met again the subject was made present to them—at all events till some ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... to me to test my wife's fidelity in a vulgar, commonplace way familiar to everyone who has acquaintance with the literature of fact and fiction. I went to the city, telling my wife that I should be absent until the following afternoon. But I returned ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... amuse the vulgar," said the baron. "I do not mind admitting to you that I contemplate residing on this spot, and perhaps contracting ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... mean by revolution. But this revolution is Russian and not French, and its art, if all goes well, should inevitably bear the popular Russian stamp. It is would-be primitive and popular art that is vulgar. Such at least is the reflection engendered by an inspection of Russian peasant work as compared with the spirit of ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... to God, not suffering evil from God, for the Divinity does only what is good. It is the man himself who causes his evils by his false beliefs in regard to God. The impious is not so much he who does not honor the statues of the gods as he who mixes up with the idea of God the superstitions of the vulgar. As for thyself, do not hold any unworthy idea of God, of his blessedness or of ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... ignore her pearls, they want to be better than anybody else's—and so it is with everything else. You know what I mean—you know it's only the showy things that are cheap. Well, I should want my wife to be able to take the earth for granted if she wanted to. I know there's one thing vulgar about money, and that's the thinking about it; and my wife would never have to demean herself in that way." He paused, and then added, with an unfortunate lapse to an earlier manner: "I guess you know the lady I've got ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... simplest phrase of tenderest fall, No liken'd excellence can reach Her, thee most excellent of all, The best half of creation's best, Its heart to feel, its eye to see, The crown and complex of the rest, Its aim and its epitome. Nay, might I utter my conceit, 'Twere after all a vulgar song, For she's so simply, subtly sweet, My deepest rapture does her wrong. Yet is it now my chosen task To sing her worth as Maid and Wife; Nor happier post than this I ask, To live her laureate all ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... establish such a principle of disqualification against themselves and their posterity, and, for the sake of gratifying the schemes of a transitory administration of the cockpit or the castle, or in compliance with the lightest part of the most vulgar and transient popularity, fix so irreparable an injury on the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... was displayed in the powerful delineation of character, and the dramatic evolution of human passions. His personages seem to be real—living and breathing before us. So, too, with Cervantes, whose Sancho Panza, though homely and vulgar, is intensely human. The characters in Le Sage's "Gil Bias," in Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield," and in Scott's marvelous muster-roll, seem to us almost as real as persons whom we have actually known; and De Foe's greatest works are but so ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... the dog's speciality as a subtle sense of smell. That is certainly what I mean, if you will understand by that that the nasal passages of the animal are the seat of the perceptive organ; but is the thing perceived always a simple smell in the vulgar acceptation of the term—an effluvium such as our own senses perceive? I have certain reasons for doubting this, which I ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... darling prize, and, above all, that worst sign of all, the almost perfect indifference with which the most enormous frauds are received by the public; these and similar things show the bitter consequences of this vulgar passion. I rejoice that our venerable friend, when in the prime of his extraordinary powers, and at a period of life when the flame of ambition glows wildest, turned his back upon the gilded phantoms which have lured so many to destruction, and sought ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... feelings, but an occasional visit would probably injure none but very weak minds. Your guardian is, I daresay, a prudent judicious man, and would be careful in selecting plays that could offend neither morality nor delicacy. There are many things upon the stage which are sinful, vicious, and vulgar, but there are hundreds of books quite as bad and dangerous. As we choose only the best volumes to read, so be sure to select only pure plays and operas. 'Lear' would teach you the awful results of filial disobedience; 'Merchant of Venice,' the sin of avarice; 'Julius ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... gamekeeper's or farmer's journal as "even worse than the rook." Even the ornithologists who are interested in birds as birds haven't a good word to say of the daw. According to them he alone is responsible for the disappearance of his distinguished relation, the chough. (The vulgar daw is of course devoid of any distinction at all, unless it be his grey pate and ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... and the cold was bitter. Eldris stumbled on toward the end of the street, her eyes searching the houses on either hand. When but three remained between her and the open strip of beach on the marsh side, she paused irresolute. One was a low and vulgar place, its door fast closed, no light to be seen about it. The second was a half burnt ruin, where cattle had been stalled. The third seemed of somewhat better class. It presented a blank wall to the street, broken only by a low and narrow door with a wicket, ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... souls to one another he loves to display upon a background of political life. Then we follow him from the cloudy North into sunny Italy. Shakspeare is one of the intellectual powers of nature; he takes away the veil by which the inward springs of action are hidden from the vulgar eye. The extension of the range of human vision over the mysterious being of things which his works offer constitutes them a great ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... It is thrown out, in part at least, under the epidermis, and there it remains to the patient's dying day. This is a striking illustration of the difficulty which the system finds in dealing with non-assimilable elements, and justifies in some measure the vulgar prejudice ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Nature's self in white arrayed, She bade thee shun the vulgar eye, And planted here the guardian shade, And sent soft waters murmuring by; Thus quietly thy summer goes,— Thy days declining ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... Exili was no vulgar poisoner: he was a great artist in poisons, comparable with the Medici or the Borgias. For him murder was a fine art, and he had reduced it to fixed and rigid rules: he had arrived at a point when he was guided not by his personal interest but by a taste for experiment. God has reserved the act ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... lance in rest; but I do, in truth, believe that this knightly sensitiveness of honourable feeling is the best antidote to the petty soul-degrading transactions of every day life, and that the total want of it, is one reason why this free-born race care so very little for the vulgar virtue ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... by a very large majority. Here the hoarse voice of a boy strikes in,—"Buy the account of the grand conspiracy of Citoyen Thiers against the Republic!" Then another chimes in with wares of a less political and more vulgar nature. The movement to and fro and the excitement is extraordinary. While the populace basks in the sun the destiny of the city is being decided.—"M. Desmarest is elected for the 9th Arrondissement," says some one close to me.—"Lesueur ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... exhibit their ingenuity in pilfering. We have seen instances of this sort before. Mr G.F. relates one of some interest, as presented in the king's own sister, a woman about twenty-seven years old, and who possessed great authority over her sex. Her high rank did not elevate her above some very vulgar propensities, of which, covetousness, though abundantly conspicuous, was not the most considerable. The only apology Mr G.F. makes for her, has little specific excellence to commend it. "In a country," says he, "where the impulses of nature are followed ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... I will venture to say, there is no man but owes something to his character. It is the grace, undoubtedly, of a virtuous, firm mind often to despise common, vulgar calumny; but if ever there is an occasion in which it does become such a mind to disprove it, it is the case of being charged in high office with pecuniary malversation, pecuniary corruption. There is no case in which it becomes an honest man, much less a great man, to leave upon record ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... a good deal of feeling, sir, for the unlettered and the vulgar. They have their station, but they have also—though doubtless in smaller capacity ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... are going to do it, if I can't get the thousand by telegram, as I asked Cousin Gilmore to send it by Monday morning—which they don't know about yet. I hate to write the sacrifice down—it seems a desecration! They are going to sell one of the foundation stones of the Byrd family pride for this vulgar money they need for the doctor from Cincinnati. I can't bear to think about it, though I have never seen the ancestral stone, and it is only a few musty papers, kept in the vault at the Byrdsville County Bank. They are ...
— Phyllis • Maria Thompson Daviess
... should I trouble my head to do so?" mused Lucian as he went to bed. "The man and his mysteries are nothing to me. Bah! I have been infected by the vulgar curiosity of the Square. Henceforth I'll neither see nor think of this drunken lunatic," and with such resolve he dismissed all thoughts of his strange acquaintance from his mind, which, under the circumstances, was perhaps the wisest thing he ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... Madam Gregorig,—The undersigned desires an invitation to the next soda-squirt.' Comment by Dr. Lueger: 'Neither the rest of the card nor the signature can I venture to read to the House, so vulgar are they.' ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... with all his dandyism and effeminacy of manner, was of a high and resolute spirit. "Do either of you fancy that I want courage to face a positive danger, because I may not happen to have any particular vulgar predilection for ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... the generous creatures, whom I envy," said Mr. Skimpole, addressing us, his new friends, in an impersonal manner. "I envy you your power of doing what you do. It is what I should revel in myself. I don't feel any vulgar gratitude to you. I almost feel as if YOU ought to be grateful to ME for giving you the opportunity of enjoying the luxury of generosity. I know you like it. For anything I can tell, I may have come into the world expressly for the purpose of increasing your stock of happiness. I may have been ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... is remarkable," stated the hunchback. "But—please—do not look so shocked. I assure you I do not commonly pick young gentlemen's pockets. It is a vulgar pastime, and I am an accomplished villain. Why, once upon a time, I wrote an epic poem. What mere larceny can compare with that fell deed! Besides, this particular outrage upon the sanctity of your overcoat ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... was afraid. But he was a peace-loving boy and he thought fighting brutal and vulgar. His books were such a delight. He liked to go in and talk to Mr. Theodore, as they all called the eldest Whitney son. Mr. Theodore in his newspaper capacity had found out so many queer things about old New York, they really called New York that in early 1800. He had such wonderful ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... The vulgar error expressed in these lines is not extinct, even at the present day. The only explanation I have seen of its origin is given in Barrington's Observations on the more Ancient Statutes, p. 474., on 3 Hen. VIII., where, after referring in the text to a statute by which surgeons ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... bad," she went on, "that the world-wide appreciation of your artistic devotion should not take some tangible form. Dollars may be vulgar and sordid, as you say, but still, in our primitive era, they are our only expression of value. I have even heard it said," she went on, rapidly, "that the amount of wealth honestly acquired by any individual was, after all, only the measure of his ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... right people; but unfortunately for us the right people are not the people of vivacity and intellectual zest, but the possessors of industrial wealth or the inheritors of scrupulous traditions and historical names. The sad fact, the melancholy truth, is that we have become vulgar; and until we can purge ourselves of vulgarity, till we can realise the ineffable ugliness of pomposity and pretension and ostentation, we shall effect nothing. Even our puritan forefathers, with their hatred of art, were in love with ideas. They sipped theology with the air ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... rather fleshy features were those of the sensual, prodigal young American, who haunts hotels. Clean shaven and well dressed, the fellow would be indistinguishable from the thousands of overfed and overdrunk young business men, to be seen every day in the vulgar luxury of Pullman cars, hotel ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... A more potential draught of guilt than this With more of wormwood in it! ... ... Courage, Firmilian! for the hour has come When thou canst know atrocity indeed, By smiting him that was thy dearest friend. And think not that he dies a vulgar death— ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... [Footnote: Compare Voltaire, Lettres sur les Anglais, xii., where Newton is acclaimed as the greatest man who ever lived.] He was superficial in his knowledge both of history and of science, and his conception of utility was narrow and a little vulgar. Great theoretical discoverers like Newton and Leibnitz he sets in a lower rank than ingenious persons who used their scientific skill to fashion some small convenience of life. Monuments of art, like Notre Dame, possessed little value ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... watch-chain. Then he glanced at a sheet of pink paper which lay on the mantelpiece. She snatched it at once; opened it; stared incredulously at it; and said, "Pink paper, and scalloped edges! How filthily vulgar! I thought she was not much of a Countess! Ahem! 'Music for the People. Parnassus Society. A concert will be given at the Town Hall, Wandsworth, on Tuesday, the 25th April, by the Countess of Carbury, assisted by the following ladies and gentlemen. Miss Elinor ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... through into the Pacific. I have passed that cape three times, and have been working to windward off them some weeks, but although we always kept a bright look-out for ice islands and strange vessels, we never, to use a vulgar expression, saw "hide or ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... Histoire de la Geographie, p. 369; Peschel, Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, concluding chapters; and for an admirable summary, Draper, Hist. Int. Devel. of Europe, pp. 451-453; also an interesting passage in Sir Thomas Brown's Vulgar and Common Errors, Book I, chap. vi; also a striking passage in Acosta, chap. ii. For general statement as to supplementary proof by measurement of degrees and by pendulum, see Somerville, Phys. Geog., chap. ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... ignominiously to the contempt of the people; which usage, as she did not deserve it, she bore with a patient resignation that excited the admiration as well as compassion of those who judged of things better than the vulgar. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... the meanwhile seemed to take but little notice of the vulgar insults put upon him by his guardian. He stood, a quaint, impassive little figure, more interested apparently in de Batz, who was a stranger to him, than in the three others whom he knew. De Batz noted that the child looked well nourished, ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... Misunderstandings in some high Affairs wherein he was concern'd: his Name was De Pais, a Man of great Birth, but of no Fortune; or at least one not suitable to the Grandeur of his Original. And as it is most natural for great Souls to be most proud (if I may call a handsome Disdain by that vulgar Name) when they are most depress'd; so De Pais was more retir'd, more estrang'd from his Neighbours, and kept a greater Distance, than if he had enjoy'd all he had lost at Court; and took more Solemnity and State upon him, because he would not be subject to the Reproaches ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... proportions, and at the same time permitting the utmost freedom and grace of movement. Jewellery was clearly only used as a medium for adding to the brilliancy of the general effect, and I saw no one with any lavish or vulgar display of jewels. ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... upon a British stage. Distress, which turns upon the involutions of unnatural or incestuous passion, carries with it something too disgusting for the sympathy of a refined age; whereas, in a simple state of society, the feelings require a more powerful stimulus; as we see the vulgar crowd round an object of real horror, with the same pleasure we reap from seeing it represented on a theatre. Besides, in ancient times, in those of the Roman empire at least, such abominations really occurred, as sanctioned the story of OEdipus. But the change of manners has introduced not ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... then, brother, the faces of the beaux are of such a lily-white hue! None of that horrid robustness of constitution, that vulgar corn-fed glow of health, which can only serve to alarm an unmarried lady with apprehensions, and prove a melancholy memento to a married one, that she can never hope for the happiness of being a widow. ...
— The Contrast • Royall Tyler
... of this genus flower about Michaelmas, hence their vulgar name of Michaelmas-Daisy; a name exceptionable not only on account of its length, but from its being a compound word. Aster, though a Latin term, is now so generally received, that we shall make no apology for ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. I - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... the body of the device, must be exactly fitted to the motto, which he terms its soul; and though it should not be so obscure as to require a sibyl to explain it, yet the motto ought to be in a foreign or dead language, so that it may not be comprehended by the vulgar—'such dainties not being intended for vulgar appetites.' The human figure, also, should never be introduced into the emblem, and the motto ought not to contain more than three or four words. These rules, however, were not strictly adhered to, even by Jovius himself. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... this work good judgment in the choice of items of news, variety in the manner of stating them, and logical order in arranging and connecting them should be cultivated. The writing of good, plain English, rather than "smart" journalese should be the aim. Stale, vulgar and incorrect phrases, such as "Sundayed," and "in our midst," should be avoided. There are two tests in selecting a news item: (1) Will it interest readers? (2) Ought they to know it? When by these tests an item is proved to be real ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... memory, a lively imagination, and a pleasant style, this 'Old Colleger' might have given us something far more amusing than he has done. Of course Anybody's Anecdotes of our Grand Old School will probably be interesting up to a certain point: and they might be made 'funny, without being vulgar.' But this worthy Octogenarian, be he who he may, has produced only a very matter-of-fact book, containing historic information likely to arrest the attention of an old or young Etonian, but only now and again does the author give us anything sufficiently amusing to evoke ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 28, 1893 • Various
... and gain a loving heart; with these longings he descended from his blissful, lonely heights, when he heard the cry of this heart for help in the midst of mankind. The halo of his higher nature, however, betrays him. He can not but appear as miraculous. The staring of the vulgar and the rancor of the envious cloud the heart of the loving Elsa. Doubts and jealousy show that he has not been understood but simply adored, and this draws from him the confession of his divinity, ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... lineage, more, to obey; So would have built you, in a few short years, A just, therefore a safe, supremacy. For well he knew, what you, his chiefs, did not— How of all human rules the over-tense Are apt to snap; the easy-stretch'd endure. O gentle wisdom, little understood! O arts above the vulgar tyrant's reach! O policy too subtle far for sense Of heady, masterful, injurious men! This good he meant you, and for this he died! Yet not for this—else might thy crime in part Be error deem'd—but that pretence is vain. For, if ye slew him ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... THE WORLD. Young man, if this were a performance, you would be dealt with by our aesthetic policewoman. Vulgar comments made in public upon works of art are now an ...
— The Harlequinade - An Excursion • Dion Clayton Calthrop and Granville Barker
... one of these!... A woman appears over there: she is tall and fair-haired. She stoops over a well; I cannot make out her features. She draws herself up again. Oh, no, her figure is clumsy, her hair looks dull and colourless and her clothes vulgar. Rose would never dress like that, in two colours that clash! Rose ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... should have been remanded to duty; and failing to know my regiment, I should have been apprehended as a deserter. At the best, even if other people had recognized the nature of my trouble, I should have been subjected then and always to the vulgar curiosity which I so greatly dreaded. Here in Company H nobody would know me except as an ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... as a fair; and the idle young people sat under the oaks, or walked slowly in the shadow of the hedges, pulling poppies and wild flowers, and realizing all the poetry of a pastoral life, without any of its hard labor or its vulgar cares. Mrs. Sandal had given them a basket with berries and cake and cream in it. They were all young enough to get pleasantly hungry in the open air, all young enough to look upon berries and cake and cream as a distinct addition to happiness. They set out a little feast under the trees, ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... xv. 45. Some of the Christians were covered with the skins of wild beasts so that savage dogs might tear them to pieces; others were besmeared with tar and tallow, and burnt at the stake; others were crucified (crucibus adfixi), while Nero in the attire of a vulgar auriga ran his races around the goals. This took place A. D. 65. Two years later the leader of the Christians shared the same fate in the same place. He was affixed to a cross like the others, and we know exactly where. A tradition current in Rome from time immemorial says that S. Peter was ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... come merely as the friend of Poritol, for the difference in the station of the two South Americans was marked. Poritol was a cheap character—useful, no doubt, in certain kinds of work, but vulgar and unconvincing. He might well be one of those promoters who hang on at the edge of great projects, hoping to pick up a commission here and there. His strongest point was his obvious effort to triumph over his own insignificance, for this effort, by its comic but ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... highly-intelligent working-class orator repeatedly pronounce the word suggest as 'sug jest'. Such vagaries as this are not likely ever to be generally adopted. But a good many 'spelling-pronunciations' have found their way into general educated use, and others which are now condemned as vulgar or affected will probably at some future time be universally adopted. I do not share the sentimental regret with which some philologists regard this tendency of the language. It seems to me that each case ought to be ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English
... bear in mind throughout the whole of this deliberation. It is this: you ought never to conclude that a man must necessarily be innoxious because he is in other respects insignificant. You will see that a man bred in obscure, vulgar, and ignoble occupations, and trained in sordid, base, and mercenary habits, is not incapable of doing extensive mischief, because he is little, and because his vices are of a mean nature. My Lords, we have shown to you already, and we shall demonstrate to you more clearly in future, that ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... free from all miasmata. West Africa is my lovely home, and I am big and beautifully pot-bellied. It is the home of the large-eared chimpanzee, a near relative of ours, though we never marry. He is an active fellow, with rather large vulgar-looking ears; while mine, though I ought not to say so, are beautifully small, and denote my more exalted birth. Master Chimpanzee needs all his ears, for he is not so strong as I, and as you will hear, we anthropoids have enemies in our trees, just as you perhaps have, Master Redhair. ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... 'vulgar error'—that no man can swear as a witness in a court of law to any thing he has seen through glass. This is based upon the formerly universal use of blown glass for windows, in which glass the constant recurrence of the greenish, and barely more than semi-transparent bull's eyes, so ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... The tones of her quiet voice, the gentleness of her movements, the kindly sobriety of her regard seemed to fortify her patient. For her part, a genuine compassion for the little man was mixed with some liking; he was a furtive and vulgar creature at the best, but his dependence on her, his helplessness and trouble, reached to the maternal in her honest heart. She could manage him; but for her strategy he would have lived in his bed, day and night, in a sort ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... fall into that vulgar habit of calling ill names. It isn't worth while! It doesn't pay! If your honor doesn't like my terms, you needn't employ me. What is certain is that I cannot work ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... is fond of a militaristic drum-banging that is as blatant as the insularity he condemns. But a burning, if sometimes too simple faith, shines through his achievements. His best work reveals an intensity that crystallizes into beauty what was originally tawdry, that lifts the vulgar and incidental to the place ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... striven to go, not only in the plains, but in the very deepest of the valleys, as many manifestly enough appear to whoso considereth these present stories, the which have been written by me, not only in vulgar Florentine and in prose and without [author's] name, but eke in as humble and sober a style as might be. Yet for all this have I not availed to escape being cruelly shaken, nay, well nigh uprooted, of the aforesaid ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... the vulgar name for a halfpenny. In the reign of Queen Mary, it was equivalent to three pennies Scotish money, but was afterwards raised to six pennies. The particular coins so designated, were billon or copper, and are described in Lindsay's "Coinage ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... from the outmost twig Was somewhat withered, 'tis true, Long years had flown since it lightly danced To the summer air and the dew; Not much of a dowry brought she, In beauty or vulgar pelf, But she had two or three ancestors ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... Turner instigated the Southampton massacre, Lord Fairfax hunted, and John Brown was hung, Randolph bitterly jested, and Pocahontas won a holy fame—there treason reared its hydra head and profaned the consecrated soil with vulgar insults and savage cruelty; there was the last battle scene of the Revolution and the first of the Civil War; there is Mount Vernon, Monticello, and Yorktown, and there also are Manassas, Bull Run, and Fredericksburg; ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... his zeal in bringing Joan of Arc to the stake. Cupidity, lust of place and power, and fear of the enemies of the French were the principal motives which influenced these men, whose names should for ever be execrated. In truth, a vulgar greed induced them to destroy one of the noblest creatures ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... wonder, and breeding some delight thereto. It raiseth admiration, as signifying a nimble sagacity of apprehension, a special felicity of invention, a vivacity of spirit, and reach of wit more than vulgar: it seeming to argue a rare quickness of parts, that one can fetch in remote conceits applicable; a notable skill, that he can dexterously accommodate them to the purpose before him; together with a lively briskness of humour, not apt to damp those sportful ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... due or destiny, positions which appeared preposterously out of accord alike with his early career and with his later opportunities for development. In trying to explain this, it is easier to say what was not the underlying quality than what it was. Certainly there was no taint whatsoever of that vulgar self-confidence which is so apt to lead the "free and equal" citizens of the great republic into grotesque positions. Perhaps it was a grand simplicity of faith; a profound instinctive confidence that by patient, honest thinking it would be possible to know the right road, and by earnest enduring ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... pass for conversation in the salons. The duchess of Vallambrosa—"the queen of the strand," as they call her at Cannes—Madame de Lavalette, the countess of Mercy-Argenteau, are all there, as if against their will and disdainful of the vulgar herd which is staring at them. To make amends, however, the duchess of Luynes is charming, surrounded and, as it were, adorned by her beautiful children. M. Cabanel is the recognized head of what may be called the official school. To get medals and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... read here a line and there a line. As for your Institutes, and Academies of Science, they strive bravely; and, from amid the thick-crowded, inextricably intertwisted hieroglyphic writing, pick-out, by dextrous combination, some Letters in the vulgar Character, and therefrom put together this and the other economic Recipe, of high avail in Practice. That Nature is more than some boundless Volume of such Recipes, or huge, well-nigh inexhaustible Domestic-Cookery Book, of which the whole secret will in this manner one ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... belief, holds communication with spirits of another world. For, be it observed, Smith possesses all the qualities and exercises all the tricks of the necromancers during the middle ages. His speech is ambiguous, solemn, and often incomprehensible—a great proof to the vulgar ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... all this and grew more than ever afraid of her. He tried to understand, to make out things a little in the darkness, but she was right after all; he took these things too seriously in his way. With all her vulgar depravity, Barbro was not worth a single earnest thought. Infanticide meant nothing to her, there was nothing extraordinary in the killing of a child; she thought of it only with the looseness and moral nastiness that was to be expected of a servant-girl. It was plain, too, in the days that ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... would open wide His listening ears, did Jacko of the forest So "slate" a foeman when his head was sorest. Strange that to rave and rant, like scullion storm, Like low virago scold, should seem "good form" To our Society Simians, when one name Makes vulgar spite oblivious of its shame! "Voluntary and deliberate," their speech, "Articulate too"—those Apes! Then could they teach Their—say descendants,—much. Does Club or cage Hear most of rabid and unreasoned rage? "Apes' manner of delivery shows" (they say) "They're conscious of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 1, 1892 • Various
... is a splendid word!" chorussed the others, and poor Miss Inches, who had only got as far as Michael Angelo's fourteenth year, found that no one was listening, and stopped abruptly. Hash seemed to her a vulgar word for the children to choose, but there was no help for it, and ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... a cave on an island in the Lake Dearg (Lough Derg), in the County of Donegal, near the borders of Fermanagh. Bollandus shows the falsehood of many things related concerning it. Upon complaint of certain superstitious and false notions of the vulgar, in 1497, it was stopped up by an order of the Pope. See Bollandus, 'Tillemont,' p. 287, Alemand in his 'Monastic Hist. of Ireland,' and Thiers, 'Hist. des. Superst.' I. 4 ed. Nov. It was soon after opened again by the inhabitants; but only according to the original institution, ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... ten or twenty years among the Eskimo, return without any real addition to their knowledge of the traditional ideas upon which their social state is based. The white man, whether a missionary or a trader, is firm in his dogmatic opinion that the most vulgar European is better than the most distinguished native."—The Eskimo ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... them vulgar at first, and savoring of the shop; but they are useful and handy, and we cannot do without them. They rivet, they forge, they coin, they "fire up," "brake up," "switch off," "prospect," "shin" for us when we are "short," ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... some of the girls thought I was there out of mere vulgar curiosity. No, indeed. I have seen the worst places in the State, I have visited the girls, talked with them, eaten with them, and praise God, have helped some of ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... strange mental photograph. The man was well-dressed, and had the bearing of a gentleman. Looking back upon the scene long after, when I had learned once more what words and things meant, I could feel instinctively this was no common burglar, no vulgar murderer. Whatever might have been the man's object in shooting my father, I was certain from the very first it was not mere robbery. But at the time, I'm confident, I never reasoned about his motives or his actions in any way. I merely took in the scene, as ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... artistic lot to put us in the back row. It isnt a fact that we're inferior to them: it's a put-up job; and it's they that have put the job up. It's we that run the country for them; and all the thanks we get is to be told we're Philistines and vulgar tradesmen and sordid city men and so forth, and that theyre all angels of light and leading. The time has come to assert ourselves and put a stop to their stuck-up nonsense. Perhaps if we had nothing ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... of Oliver Cromwell; since both equally deplored the evils of the day, and both invoked the aid of God Almighty. Both were ambitious, and unscrupulous in the use of tools. Neither of them was stained by vulgar vices, nor seduced from his course by love of ease or pleasure. Both are to be contemplated in the double light of reformer and usurper. Both were honest, and both were unscrupulous; honest in seeking to promote public morality and the welfare of society, and unscrupulous in the arts by which their ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... are usually observed to be most lively and emphatic in the weaker sort of minds, and which signs can after all but indicate some passion, as I said before, anger, or grief, generally; but of the motives and grounds of the passion, wherein it differs from the same passion in low and vulgar natures, of these the actor can give no more idea by his face or gesture than the eye (without a metaphor) can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible sounds. But such is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which we take in at the eye and ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... noticed one peculiarity about her manner of talking, and that was its perfect simplicity. There was no sort of effort or strain in anything she said, no attempt by emphasis of words to make up for the weakness of thought, and no compliance with that vulgar and most disagreeable habit of using intense language to describe what is not intense in itself. Her yea was yea, and her no, no. I observed also that she spoke without disguise, although she was not rude. The manners of the cultivated classes are sometimes ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon. I love better to see stones in place. The grandeur of Thebes was a vulgar grandeur. More sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds an honest man's field than a hundred-gated Thebes that has wandered farther from the true end of life. The religion and civilization which are barbaric and heathenish build ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... wherefore, as he and I alone remain to complete the day's narration, I will tell my story first, and he shall have the grace he craved, and be the last to speak. After which prelude she thus began her story:—'Tis a proverb current among the vulgar that the deceived has the better of the deceiver; a proverb which, were it not exemplified by events, might hardly in any manner be justified. Wherefore, while adhering to our theme, I am minded at the same time dearest ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... lively a prototype for the curates of poetry who swarm in the world's capitals at the present hour. There is a tendency in the followers of every art or craft to impose it on the world as a mystery of which the vulgar can know nothing. In medicine, as in bricklaying, there is a powerful trade union into which the members can retire as into a sanctuary of the initiate. In the same way, the theologians took possession of the temple of religion and refused admittance ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... [mentioned by Lalla, etc.] which has a tube with its lower end open is a vulgar machine on account of its being dependant, because that which manifests an ingenious and not a rustic contrivance is said ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... Laura Brooks, my most intimate friend, who is shocked at anything vulgar or countrified—I wouldn't have her know that I have such a cousin—oh, not ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... the fire of his looks. And then, must it be said, that nature, exquisite in its tenderness and its reserve, no longer finding anything that comprehended its feelings, gave itself up to grief with all the warmth of vulgar natures when they give themselves up to joy. The Comte de la Fere, who had remained a young man up to his sixty-second year; the warrior, who had preserved his strength in spite of fatigues, his freshness of mind in spite of misfortunes, his mild serenity of soul and body in spite of Milady, ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... visitor has been rightly brought up to consider it vulgar to spend much money upon clothes, to care so much for "appearances." She realizes dimly that the care for personal decoration over that for one's home or habitat is in some way primitive and undeveloped; but she is silenced by its obvious need. She ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... the wonder of the world. The meal of society among the Greeks consisted of only two courses, or, to speak more strictly, of one course and a dessert; and the first or solid course was in all probability made up of small portions of each kind of food. The more vulgar Romans added in all cases a third, but occasionally a fourth, fifth, sixth, even a seventh course; and at the fall of the empire, barbarian taste uniting with the blase luxury of Rome, heaped viand upon viand, and course upon course, till the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 428 - Volume 17, New Series, March 13, 1852 • Various
... their meanness, the generality of the upper and middling classes were inviting. There wanted, only, what their subtle invaders well knew was never far distant, some plausible artifice suddenly to prevail over the simplicity of the honest but credulous vulgar, which could not fail to divert that powerful torrent, into whatever channel should most rapidly lead them to the gulph ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... out to Harvey at the top of her voice, "Let Lady Worden be told at once there are visitors." The poor new things looked so uncomfortable, that I felt, as I was Aunt Maria's niece, I at least must be polite to them; so I asked them to sit down, and we talked. They were jolly, fat, vulgar souls, who have taken the Ortons' place they told me, and this was their return visit, as the Ortons had asked Aunt Maria to call. They were quite old maids, past thirty, with such funny, grand, best smart ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... the rustic bard in renovating the national minstrelsy. Possessing a fine musical ear, she adapted her lyrics with singular success to the precise sentiments of the older airs, and in this happy manner was enabled rapidly to supersede many ribald and vulgar ditties, which, associated with stirring and inspiring music, had long maintained a noxious popularity among the peasantry. Of Burns' immediate contemporaries, the more conspicuous were, John Skinner, Hector Macneill, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... executioner, a vulgar, bloodthirsty wretch, was then called to cut up the body. With bitter taunts he stood over him with his hatchet, and cut off his head and quartered him. Philip had one remarkable hand, which was much scarred by the explosion of a pistol. This hand was given ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... two stories in a gentleman's country residence, and a dormer or mansard story if we may so term it, in the roof;—we will not be so vulgar as to call it a garret,—nor yet so classical as to resort to the appellation of an attic. If, therefore, you require a large house, take plenty of ground, and lay out all your rooms en suite. Let all the offices, whence any noise or smell can arise, be perfectly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... longer the little prettinesses of the Medicean Venus flirt by you in the nervous silks that flutter along these walks, but something nobly womanly, of a solid past, slow and stately, moves solemnly, by. We know the lives of these copies of the Venus of Milos, we know its most commonplace and vulgar attributes, but we know, too, its strength! The city of Rome holds in its women the mothers of heroes, when Providence shall withdraw the black veil now hung over their rude minds, and let in the light of knowledge. We who laugh ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and individually at the idea of writing anything interesting, likely to be enjoyed by the toilers of modern days. Whatever pictures, songs, books or plays were written by anyone who did not belong to "The Circle," these were considered "pretty, but not Tart!" Anything successful was pronounced "Vulgar!" To be artistic in Mrs. Octagon's sense, a work had to possess obscurity, it had to be printed on the finest paper with selected type, and it had to be sold at a prohibitive price. In this way "Rowena" had produced her works, and her name was not known beyond her small coterie. All the same, ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... Partiality is immorality; for any book is wrong that gives a misleading picture of the world and life. The trouble is that the weakling must be partial; the work of one proving dank and depressing; of another, cheap and vulgar; of a third, epileptically sensual; of a fourth, sourly ascetic. In literature as in conduct, you can never hope to do exactly right. All you can do is to make as sure as possible; and for that there is but one rule. Nothing should be done in a hurry that can be ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rather hard to explain," he replied with a rueful knitting of the brows, for he realized her disgust at the vulgar brawl. ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... a pause, "it is better for man to worship God, his image on the clouds, the creation of his fancy, than to worship the vulgar apparatus of organised life, government. Better sacrifice his children to Moloch than to that society for the propagation and protection of commerce, the nation. Oh, think of the cost of government in all the ages since men stopped living in marauding tribes! Think of ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... those who do not know; and, for the benefit of those who do know, it will examine and discuss the right principles on which windows should be made, and the rules of good taste and of imagination, which make such a difference between beautiful and vulgar art; for you may know intimately all the processes I have spoken of, and be skilful in them, and yet misapply them, so that your window had better never ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... the most inveterate was the Chinaman's boss, Mr. Smythe, managing partner of Mondunbarra. This gentleman, whose exclusiveness took the very usual form of excluding all considerations not tending to his own profit, and whose refinement manifested itself to the vulgar eye chiefly in cutting things fine about the station, had, a couple of years previously, taken Alf in the very act of running one of his own bullocks out of the station cattle. An altercation had ensued, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... in her red hair, stuck in her chignon, a needle, terminated by a glass bell in imitation of emerald, and, in spite of her mourning, she wore (so artless was her bad taste) straw slippers trimmed with pink satin—a vulgar curiosity probably bought at ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... was uninhabited when the Portuguese, after having doubled the Cape of Good Hope, discovered it. They gave it the name of Mascarhenas, a cause que leur chef se nommoit ainsi; and the vulgar still preserve it, calling the inhabitants Mascarins. It was not decidedly inhabited until 1654, when M. de Flacour, commandant at Madagascar, sent some invalids there to recover their health, that others followed; and since then it has been named ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... proper marriage and settling down, and the next step which means a cradle and perambulator and—as it grows up—an engagement ring, marriage and children again. Much of this procedure is upset when a child like Soerine's little one is vulgar enough to allow itself to be ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... political life then in the federal metropolis. "There was no place for the intrusion of the rabble in crowds, or for the mere coarse and boisterous partisan," says Colonel Stone in some remarks upon these receptions. "There was no place for the vulgar electioneerer or impudent place-hunter. On the contrary, they were select, and more courtly than have been given by any of Washington's successors. Proud of her husband's exalted fame, and jealous of the honors due, not only to his own lofty character, but to ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... not be rendered into characters, as is done in foreign handbooks for teaching elementary Chinese; one can only say that the Chinese do not think it worth while. There are a few words, indeed, which, though common enough in the mouths of genteel and vulgar alike, have positively no characters to represent them. On the other hand, there is a vast store of purely book words which would never be used or understood ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... of Will, which pursues him beyond his death with sneers and fantastic suspicions about his monument and his grave, and asks if he "died with a curse upon his lips, an imprecation against any man who might MOVE HIS BONES? A mean and vulgar curse indeed!" {188a} And the authority for the circumstance that he died with a mean and vulgar curse ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... Natural History in a famous northern university had refused to invite a very distinguished man to occupy it because he advocated the doctrine of the diversity of species of mankind, or what was called "polygeny." Even among those who considered man from the point of view, not of vulgar prejudice, but of science, opinions lay poles asunder. Linnaeus had taken one view, Cuvier another; and among my senior contemporaries, men like Lyell, regarded by many as revolutionaries of the deepest dye, were strongly opposed to anything which tended to ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... pointed to a fat, rather vulgar woman, dressed in black, sitting in a stall in the middle of the auditorium with a man in a broadcloth frock-coat on either side ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... I leap' over the Atlantic. Is it true that for a few thousand dollars a large tract of land may be obtained? I speak of South America, recollect. I have read some publications on the subject, but they seemed violent and vulgar party productions. Please to address your answer[81] to me at this place, and believe me ever and ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... "How very vulgar." He paused to glance at his watch. "Dear me! Half-past ten, and I haven't had my beer yet." He stepped to the door. "Should the pain become excruciating, turn upon the stomach and repeat Kipling's ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... is the most noted. That legacy of hate, inherited from the 1830 poets, of the bourgeois, was a merry play for Rops. He is the third of the trinity of caricature artists, Daumier and Gavarni being the other two. The liberal pinch of Gallic salt in the earlier plates need not annoy one. Deliberately vulgar he never is, though he sports with things hallowed, and always goes out of his way to insult the religion he first professed. There is in this Satanist a religious fond; the very fierceness of his attacks, of his blasphemies, betrays ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... elder. "Are we children or slaves that we should wrangle thus? Have we met here in order to rid the Empire of an abominable and bloodthirsty tyrant, or are we mere vulgar conspirators pursuing our own ends? There was no thought in our host's mind of supreme power, O Hortensius! nor in thine, I'll vow. As for me, I care nought for the imperium," he added naively, "it is difficult to content everyone, and a permanent consulship ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Lady Griffin permitted such a spectacle. I am sure it was a vulgar thing to do. Only the san-culottes, make such exhibition ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... Padmini, the perfect woman, the "lotus woman," Hindu writers say that "her sweat has the odor of musk," while the vulgar woman, they say, smells of fish (Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana). Ploss and Bartels (Das Weib, 1901, p. 218) bring forward a passage from the Tamil Kokkogam, minutely describing various kinds of sexual odor in women, which they regard ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... investigation of divorce causes, is highly productive of evil. Many of the divorce cases in New York are simply food for a set of morbidly curious scandal-mongers. Even the Mohammedans consider our practice in this respect extremely vulgar: there is no more reason why a court should know why a husband and wife wish to separate than ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... eyes and pencil that first directed Benham to the poor indolences and evasions and insincerities of the masters. It was Prothero's wicked pictures that made him see the shrivelled absurdity of the vulgar theology. But it was Benham who stood between Prothero and that rather coarsely conceived epicureanism that seemed his logical destiny. When quite early in their Cambridge days Prothero's revolt against foppery reached a nadir of personal neglect, ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... it? I get it direct from Paris. But under this vulgar Republic everything has degenerated over there. "Cotelettes a l'imperiale" vanished, of course, with the Bourbon, and omelettes went out with the Orleanists. La belle France is entirely ruined, Prince, through bad morals and worse cookery. (Enter the MARQUIS DE POIVRARD.) Ah! Marquis. ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... in the action and perhaps for those movements of the body copied from the marionette shows of the 14th century. A mask will enable me to substitute for the face of some common-place player, or for that face repainted to suit his own vulgar fancy, the fine invention of a sculptor, and to bring the audience close enough to the play to hear every inflection of the voice. A mask never seems but a dirty face, and no matter how close you go is still ...
— Certain Noble Plays of Japan • Ezra Pound
... the colored race, however, were not easily discouraged by that "vulgar race prejudice which reigns in the breasts of working classes."[1] Arthur Tappan, Gerrit Smith, and William Lloyd Garrison made the appeal in behalf of the untrained laborers.[2] Although they knew the difficulties encountered ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... not treated him in accordance with his high deserts; but as Fate was rather too intangible for him to satisfactorily vent his spleen upon it, he made his fellow creatures Fate's substitute, and never missed an opportunity to vent his spleen upon them instead. And, as he was a vulgar, surly, ill-bred fellow, he was able to make himself excessively disagreeable when he seriously set about the attempt, as he did when he discovered Captain Blyth's anxiety to overhaul the ship ahead. He did not—he dared not—set ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... against it; and in 1772 appeared a "Critical Latin Grammar", which his son called "his best work," and which is not wholly unknown even now to the inquisitive by the proposed substitution of the terms "prior, possessive, attributive, posterior, interjective, and quale-quare-quidditive," for the vulgar names of the cases. This little Grammar, however, deserves a philologer's perusal, and is indeed in many respects a very valuable work in its kind. He also published a Latin Exercise book, and a Sermon. His school was celebrated, and most of the country ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... digression to our history—which, as the reader has doubtless observed, is not a vulgar description of fictitious persons and imaginary circumstances, but a veracious chronicle of facts, and much above the level of ordinary romances, inasmuch as truth is always stranger than fiction—the early dining hour of the aristocratic Benson (early in an ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... scarcity of butter and other fats that had been used to produce moistness and richness in foods, brought about such clear soups as bouillon and consomme. These, as well as other liquid foods, found much favor, for about the time they were devised it came to be considered vulgar to chew food. Thus, at various periods, and because of different emergencies, particular kinds of soup have been introduced, until now there are many kinds from which the housewife may choose when she desires a dish that will start a meal ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 3 - Volume 3: Soup; Meat; Poultry and Game; Fish and Shell Fish • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... she wore was not sprinkled in any vulgar profusion; it merely frosted the rich curls, making her pink checks pinker and her grey eyes a darker and purpler grey, and rendering her lips fresh and dewy in vivid contrast. And she wore a patch on her smooth left cheek-bone. And it was a most deadly thing to ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... assigning some happiness, proportioned to the soul of man, that caused many of them, either, on the one hand, to be sour and morose, supercilious and untreatable; or, on the other, to fall into the vulgar pursuits of common men, to hunt after greatness and riches, to make their court, and to serve occasions; as Plato did to the younger Dionysius, and Aristotle to Alexander the Great. So impossible is it for a man, who looks no further than the present world, to fix himself long in a contemplation ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... misfortune. Everybody believed that, and it was commonly understood that General Arnold believed it, too. But would he overcome his enemies by retrieving the past and put to shame their vulgar enthusiasm by rising to heights of newer and greater glory? Or would he yield to the more natural propensities of retaliation or despair? A man is no greater than the least of his virtues; but he who has acquired self-control ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... whom the vulgar call Glorious John, did rescue and enlarge it from its slavery to the Grand Vizier of Turkey at the great battle of Vienna. There is ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... broken momentary conversations—almost about every meeting of their eyes. It had disturbed him the first time he had ever seen her smile. He remembered the occasion well enough. She had just finished executing the dance step—the almost inexcusably vulgar little dance step he had ordered her to do as a condition of getting the job she said she wanted—had turned on him blazing with indignation; but right in the full blaze of it, at something she must have seen, and understood, in his own face, in deprecation of her own wrath, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... the story teller, and Lincoln proved to be the most accomplished in that line of all the members of the Illinois bar. They had no private rooms for study, and the evenings were always spent in the common barroom of the tavern, where Western wit, often vulgar or profane, was freely indulged in, and the best of them at times told stories which were somewhat "broad;" but even while thus indulging in humor that would grate harshly upon severely refined hearers, ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... hill, bearing the thank-offerings from field and loom and vineyard, what do you suppose he would have seen? Dullness and insensitiveness in the eyes of those Grecian farmer-lads, no doubt, occupied entirely with keeping the oxen in line; a low vulgar stare of bucolic curiosity as the country girls, bearing their woven linen, looked up at the temple. Don't you suppose he would have thought they managed those things a great deal more ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... erroneous conceptions prevail as yet concerning them, and the most rude or absurd ideas are entertained in our country of their objects and nature. As in modern Greece, every ruin is now a Paleo-castro or old castle for the vulgar peasant or herdsman, thus all our ruins of the West are Indian forts for the settlers of the Western states; and every traveller gazing at random at a few, exclaims that nothing is known about them, nor their builders. ...
— The Ancient Monuments of North and South America, 2nd ed. • C. S. Rafinesque
... most becoming to the wearers, setting off their elegant proportions, and at the same time permitting the utmost freedom and grace of movement. Jewellery was clearly only used as a medium for adding to the brilliancy of the general effect, and I saw no one with any lavish or vulgar display of jewels. ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... magistrate is but a man, and though the vulgar may rate his power as something almost superhuman, your majesty is ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... prodigioso, sin embargo, que el organo de Santa Ines, ni nada mas vulgar que los insulsos motetes que nos ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... "Your slightly vulgar but happy simile; it is easy to see where you draw your inspiration from. If you had only said butterine, inferior butter, you know, the counterfeit article, ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... that her people are so obsessed with admiration for it that they longed to test it on their neighbours, is to accept as an explanation a stultifying contradiction. It is of course much easier to put the blame on the Kaiser. This line of thought is highly popular: it accords, too, with a fine vulgar instinct. ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... silly and vulgar idea of the beating and the fright—is what would occur to any one. You have not an ounce of brains, Remedios; to solve a serious question you can think of nothing better than a piece of folly ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... discovered two poor women, in an inner apartment, wringing their hands over a shrouded corpse. While the chief entered his friends came up. Murray and Graham, struck with sounds never breathed over the vulgar dead, lingered at the porch wondering what noble Scot could be the subject of lamentation in so lowly an abode. The stopping of these two chieftains impeded the steps of Wallace, who was pressing forward, without eye or ear for anything but the object of his search. Kirkpatrick at that ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... of intense personality, irresistible in his hold upon your attention, they take you far afield from weary cares and business into the enamouring airs of the open world, and into days when the countryside was uncontaminated by the vulgar conventions which form the worst side of "civilised" life in cities. They give you the sense of emancipation, of manumission into the liberty of the winding road and fragrant forest, into the freshness of an ancient country-life, into a milieu where ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... not live. People praised his work for the accuracy with which he reproduced Nature, for the gleam of light, for the indefinable color of the atmosphere, and the exterior of things; but something was lacking, something that stirred within him and fought in vain to leap the vulgar ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... purpose of shocking them. These passages, they can easily avoid. This book, however, was written that it might be read: not only read by the Solon, Socrates, Plato, or Seneca of the laity or the profession, but even by the billy-goated dispositioned, vulgar plebeian, who could no more be made to read cold, scientific, ungarnished facts than you can make an unwilling horse drink at the watering-trough. Human weakness and perversity is silly, but it is sillier to ignore that it exists. So, for the ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... meditation. The immediate value of this work was for the poor native wives of the English soldiers, whom he found professing Christianity, but utterly ignorant; and to them every Sunday, after the official English service, he repeated the Liturgy in the vulgar tongue. In this holy work he was the pioneer, since Swartz's service was in Tamul. While working at his translations with his moonshee, or interpreter, a Mussulman, he had much opportunity for conversation and for study ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Castries, seeking for the blood of his perfidious son-in-law to be. He said things—vulgar and "impossible" things which showed the raw rough "ranker" below the "Honorary," and I fancy Peythroppe's eyes were opened. Anyhow, he held his peace till the end; when he spoke briefly. Honorary Lieutenant Castries asked for a "peg" before he went away ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... the occasion of his marriage to spread vulgar falsehoods about him, which soon were further exaggerated, and have been raked up shamelessly again, even in our own time, or at least repeated ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... place,) Saying, "Click, cluck," like an ancient hen, A-gathering the minutes home again, To the kitchen knave with its wooden stutter, Doing equal work with double splutter, Yelping, "Click, clack," with a vulgar jerk, As much as to say, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... made no immediate reply. She seemed to be puzzled by Mountjoy's simple question. Her familiar manner, with its vulgar assumption of equality in the presence of a stranger, revealed the London-bred maid-servant of modern times. "Did you say ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... up to Falloden who stood beside him, smiling, almost reconciled to the vulgar, greedy little man by his collapse, he ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that'll do," interposed my father, who from his service-training had a rooted objection to anything approaching to familiarity from servants and other subordinates, besides which he particularly disliked the waiter's "vulgar curiosity" as he styled it, saying he was always prying and poking his nose into other people's affairs; although, I honestly believe my worthy old cock-eyed friend only took a laudable interest in my welfare, as indeed he did in the business of everybody who patronised the hotel. "You can leave ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... product. The remainder is paid in wages to productive laborers, who consume it for their daily wants; or if they in their turn save any part, this also is not, generally speaking, hoarded, but (through savings-banks, benefit clubs, or some other channel) re-employed as capital, and consumed. To the vulgar, it is not at all apparent that what is saved is consumed. To them, every one who saves appears in the light of a person who hoards. The person who expends his fortune in unproductive consumption is looked upon as diffusing benefits all around, and is an object of ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... in silence for the letter, which she read through carefully, then, "It has been a deliberate plot on Ethel Grimmer's part," she said. "She has gone out of her way to do it. I know she has got fast and vulgar lately, smoking cigarettes and talking slang; but I did not think she would do an immoral ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... almost unalloyed survival of this worship of the sun-disk may be instanced in the Shinto ceremonies of Japan. All other representation of Deity is in this faith regarded as impious, and even the circular mirror of polished metal is hidden from the vulgar gaze save on ceremonial occasions. Unlike the gorgeous temple decorations of Atlantis however, the Shinto temples are characterized by an entire absence of decoration—the exquisite finish of the plain wood-work being unrelieved by ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue purely to meditate. But it was his domain now. He could go in the wrong direction on one-way streets, stop wherever he pleased, drive as fast or as slowly as he would (and could, of course). If he wanted to do anything as vulgar as spit in the street, he could (but they were his streets now, not to be sullied) ... cross the roads without waiting for the lights to change (it would be a long, long wait if he did) ... go to sleep when he wanted, eat as many meals as he wanted whenever ...
— The Most Sentimental Man • Evelyn E. Smith
... of fact, in spite of his assumed bad manners, the social instinct was so strong in him that, just as a vulgar person shows his origin in every unguarded moment or unexpected situation, Tornik's good breeding was constantly revealed. And in appearance, he was an attractive contrast to the Italians, tall, broad-shouldered, very blond, and high cheekboned; he might have been taken ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... ill-natured comment,—suggesting that she be seen less frequently with you in public. I wrote as nicely, as kindly, as delicately as I knew how. And her reply was a practical request that I mind my business!... Which was vulgar and outrageous, considering that she had given me her promise—" Mrs. Collis checked herself in her headlong and indignant complaint; then she coloured painfully, but her mouth settled ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... this crowd of poor women seeking work, and my spirits sank like lead. A set of mournful, depressed, broken-down women! There was not one I would have chosen to be a governess for my girls. Those who were not dispirited were vulgar and self-asserting; a class that wished to rise above the position they were fitted for by becoming teachers. These were laughing loudly among themselves at the cross-questioning going on so calmly within their hearing. ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... at once he looked vulgar, obscene. And nobody had, before. That did it. Somebody said they were humans, not pigs, and if the men on the rescue ship had never seen a naked body before it was time they did. What was so wrong about the ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... no tongue, Nor any unproportioned thought his act. Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar: The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel; But do not dull thy palm with entertainment Of each new-hatched, unfledged comrade. Beware Of entrance to a quarrel; ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... the revival of passions and jealousies which he had thought as completely outgrown as the school-boy jackets in which he had formerly experienced them. He tried to think of some justification of his anger—some better reason for it than the vulgar taunt of a bully. He told himself presently that the idea of Lydia marrying such a man had maddened him to strike. As Cashel had predicted, he was beginning to plume himself on his pluck. This vein of reflection, warring with his inner knowledge that he had been driven by fear and hatred into a ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... pursuits were yet in infancy, a bitter animosity had been manifested toward them by the Levites, whose manner of healing was by prayer, expiatory sacrifice, and miracle; or, if they descended to less supernatural means, by an application of such remedies as are popular with the vulgar everywhere. Thus, to a person bitten by a mad dog, they would give the diaphragm of a dog to eat. As examples of a class of men soon to take no obscure share in directing human progress may be mentioned ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... both be much infamed for the caterpillars of the commonwealth during the reign of Henry VII., who, being of a noble extract, was executed the first year of Henry VIII., but not thereby so extinct but that he left a plentiful estate, and such a son who, as the vulgar speaks it, would live without a teat. For, out of the ashes of his father's infamy, he rose to be a duke, and as high as subjection could permit or sovereignty endure. And though he could not find out any appellation to assume the crown in his ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... loves to hear the Little Gentleman talk. She smiles sometimes at his vehement statements, but never laughs at him. When he speaks to her, she keeps her eye always steadily upon him. This may be only natural good-breeding, so to speak, but it is worth noticing. I have often observed that vulgar persons, and public audiences of inferior collective intelligence, have this in common: the least thing draws off their minds, when you are speaking to them. I love this young creature's rapt attention to her diminutive neighbor while he ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... poetry touches religion and philosophy, the formalist heresy encourages men to taste poetry as they would a fine wine, which has indeed an aesthetic value, but a small one. And then the natural man, finding an empty form, hurls into it the matter of cheap pathos, rancid sentiment, vulgar humour, bare lust, ravenous vanity—everything which, in Schiller's phrase[3], the form should extirpate, but which no mere form can extirpate. And the other heresy—which is indeed rather a practise than a creed—encourages ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... as an officer in the Social war. We have less information regarding the personality and the original designs of Cinna than regarding those of any other party leader in the Roman revolution. The reason is, to all appearance, simply that this man, altogether vulgar and guided by the lowest selfishness, had from the first no ulterior political plans whatever. It was asserted at his very first appearance that he had sold himself for a round sum of money to the new burgesses and the coterie of ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... decimal-word begins with S, thus: 945.51 barley sold; 71.3412 "good Samaritan." (2) If it is a decimal by itself, the S indicates the decimal point only; .01 society; .02 Susan; .94 sparrow. (3) If it is a vulgar fraction, the words translating numerator and denominator begin with S, and the S's are not counted, the numerator-word coming first, and the denominator-word last; thus ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... figure are those of a woman of the Trastevere.[1] The apostles stand around; one or two of them—I must use the word—blubber aloud: Peter thrusts his fists into his eyes to keep back the tears; a woman seated in front cries and sobs; nothing can be more real, nor more utterly vulgar. The ecclesiastics for whom the picture was executed were so scandalized, that they refused to hang it up in their church. It was purchased by the Duke of Mantua, and, with the rest of the Mantuan Gallery, came afterwards ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... meaning, with which you make abundant concessions to the democratic instincts of the modern soul! "Everywhere equality before the law—Nature is not different in that respect, nor better than we": a fine instance of secret motive, in which the vulgar antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic—likewise a second and more refined atheism—is once more disguised. "Ni dieu, ni maitre"—that, also, is what you want; and therefore "Cheers for natural law!"—is it not so? But, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Lucien answered curtly. He was beginning to think his father's apprentice prodigiously vulgar, though he had blessed the man for his kindness, for honest Postel had helped his master's widow and ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... were so insulting to women that Miss King proposed to send an artist the following Sunday to photograph the women possessing so little self-respect as to sit under his ministrations. He punctuated his four-hours' vulgar diatribe by a series of resounding whacks with the Bible on the table ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... others," replied Paul. "that spiritualism is a fraud. The mediums merely follow the vulgar superstition in the kind of spirits ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... reception in their new seats, added their active cavalry to the heavy infantry of the Germans; and the Gothic adventurers crowded so eagerly to the standard of Radagaisus, that by some historians, he has been styled the King of the Goths. Twelve thousand warriors, distinguished above the vulgar by their noble birth, or their valiant deeds, glittered in the van; [68] and the whole multitude, which was not less than two hundred thousand fighting men, might be increased, by the accession of women, of children, and of slaves, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... remarkably keen judgment of people, and a remarkably bad taste in her opinions of things artistic, from beauty in nature to beauty in dress, but she maintained her point of view obstinately, and admitted no contradiction. It was a singular circumstance that whereas many of her attributes were distinctly vulgar, she nevertheless had an indescribable air of good breeding, the strange inimitable stamp of social superiority which cannot be acquired by any known process of education. A person seeing her might be surprised at her loud talking, ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... world had been awakened to arms against a dazzling new world of love and pleasure. She was led captive by emotion, but the cold rook of scruple remained. She had read of women surrendering all for love, but she felt dismally that this happy gift had been denied her. Criticism, a fierce, vulgar antagonism, impervious to sentiment, not to be exorcised by generous impulse—such was ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... success generally began by the first words, no matter how vague, of any conversation; these he found means to make interesting; and what, generally, is mere talk about the weather became at once sublime; and one never heard anything vulgar from him. He ennobled everything; and the examples of Greeks and Romans, or of modern Generals, soon dissipated everything of what, with others, would have remained trivial ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... hand, and shuts out cross-lights, and looks, and peers, and keeps his eyes steady, and he sees the filmy outline of the mountain land. If you look for a minute, not much caring whether you see anything or not, and then turn away, and get your eye dazzled with all those vulgar, crude, high colours round about you here on earth, it is very little that you will see of 'the things that are not seen.' Concentrated attention, and a steadfast look, are wanted to make the invisible visible. You have to alter the focus of your eye ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... that had no learning: yet His command unto them, as unto us, is, 'Ye shall not make unto you any graven image.' I take it that the small good that might thereby be done (supposing any such to be) should be utterly overborne of the companying evil. Moreover, when you do learn the vulgar, you would, I hope, learn them that which is true. Is it true, I pray you, that Mary was borne into Heaven of angels, like as Christ did Himself ascend?—or that being thus carried thither, she was crowned of God, as a queen? Dear maid, we have the Master's word ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... machine manufacturers from St. Louis, had made matters worse. Such wealth!—such careless, vulgar, easily gotten wealth!—heaped up by means that seemed to the outsider so facile, and were, in truth, for all but a small minority, so difficult. A commonplace man and a frivolous woman; yet possessed, through their mere ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... for just such an atmosphere as the one which you breathe. And I take advantage of my good-fortune in winning your love to drag you down, to take the beauty and charm from your life, to fill it with small and vulgar cares, never-ending and soul- killing. Selfish beast that I am, why should I allow you to come down into the stress and worry of life, when I found you so high above it? And what can I offer you in exchange?' These are the thoughts which ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... blunted, his eyes small, and his tail ridiculously insignificant. Nor could he cover the ground with the easy swinging jump that makes one suspect relationship between the red vole and the wood-mouse. Still for a common, vulgar, agrarian vole, he was passable enough, and could hold his own, tooth and nail, with ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... a silence. Then it occurred to Oleron that this was common vulgar grumbling. It was not his habit. Suddenly he rose and began to stack cups and ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... of the soul, for the better understanding of that which is to follow; because many hard words will often occur, as mirach, hypocondries, emerods, &c., imagination, reason, humours, spirits, vital, natural, animal, nerves, veins, arteries, chylus, pituita; which by the vulgar will not so easily be perceived, what they are, how cited, and to what end they serve. And besides, it may peradventure give occasion to some men to examine more accurately, search further into this most excellent subject, and thereupon with that royal [944]prophet ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... in all the books about Hawthorne published since 1880, which would do him little credit if it could be proved,—a story that he challenged one of his friends to a duel, at the instigation of a vulgar and unprincipled young woman. Horatio Bridge says in reference ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way. The absurd abstraction of an intellect verbally formulating all its evidence and carefully estimating the probability thereof by a vulgar fraction by the size of whose denominator and numerator alone it is swayed, is {93} ideally as inept as it is actually impossible. It is almost incredible that men who are themselves working philosophers should pretend that any philosophy can be, or ever has been, constructed without the help ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... nothing relaxed, nothing diminished strength. Encouragement and emulation were the principles of the fine arts as well as of politics; they afforded scope for every virtue, and for every talent. The vulgar gloried in knowing how to admire, and the worship of genius was served even by those who could not aspire ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... present, though strictly necessary, you see. Oh, I haven't told you about the diamonds! Helena Desmond was so funny about them! 'Hilda,' she said, 'it was clear from the beginning that I must be offered up on the altar of diamonds. I detest diamonds. They are absolutely uninteresting; they are almost vulgar. Never mind, you have to have some, and nobody else will be stupid and commonplace enough to give them to you. I had hopes of your Aunt Emily, but she has expended herself in lace, and was so happy over it that I hadn't the heart to whisper "diamonds!" in her ear, as I had meant to do. Here they ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... Giorgione's pastoral reveries, his shepherds and nymphs become mere peasants, herdsmen, and country wenches, who have nothing of the idyllic distinction which Giorgione never failed to infuse. "The Adulteress before Christ" at Glasgow still bears the greater name, but its short, vulgar figures and faulty composition disclaim his authorship, while Cariani is fully capable of such failings, and the exaggerated, red-brown tone is quite characteristic ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... Gildippes fair, and Edward thy dear lord, Your noble death, sad end, and woful fate, If so much power our vulgar tongue afford, To all strange wits, strange ears let me dilate, That ages all your love and sweet accord, Your virtue, prowess, worth may imitate, And some kind servant of true love that hears, May grace your death, my ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... so!" exclaimed the lady. "I always knew that would happen! Now tell me, don't you think this perfume of iris is delicate? It's in that little glass scent bottle; break the neck.[38] I shall use it in a minute. I have just had some bottles sent up from Capua. Roman perfumes are so vulgar!" ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... indeed," said the Master, "possessed of knowledge? I know nothing. Let a vulgar fellow come to me with a question—a man with an emptyish head—I may thrash out with him the matter from end to end, and exhaust ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... were peasants; and his father, Esaias Lucasson, was a peasant lad who by industry and ambition had obtained an education and become a clergyman. He owed his aristocratic name to the custom, prevalent in those days, to Latinize all vulgar appellations. Esaias Lucasson, of Tegnaby (the little Smaland village where he was born), became, in the Latin school, Esaias Tegnerus. He married in the course of time a clergyman's daughter, Sara Maria Seidelius, who bore him a large family of sons and daughters. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... to herself, "the one drawback in adopting Florence is that most unpleasant little woman. Where did she get that splendid silk from? But what airs she does put on; how vulgar she is!" ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... of these prejudices. In his perpetual reaction against his surroundings he was rather attracted towards the different race. But he hardly knew them. He had only come in contact with the more vulgar of the Jews: little shopkeepers, the populace swarming in certain streets between the Rhine and the cathedral, forming, with the gregarious instinct of all human beings, a sort of little ghetto. He had often strolled through the neighborhood, catching sight of and feeling a sort ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... familiar, but by no means vulgar. Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... persuade me to seek wealth For empire's sake, nor empire to affect For glory's sake, by all thy argument. For what is glory but the blaze of fame, The people's praise, if always praise unmixed? And what the people but a herd confused, A miscellaneous rabble, who extol 50 Things vulgar, and, well weighed, scarce worth the praise? They praise and they admire they know not what, And know not whom, but as one leads the other; And what delight to be by such extolled, To live upon their tongues, and be their talk? Of whom to be dispraised ...
— Paradise Regained • John Milton
... my age, and my self-imposed tasks of long rowing trips and other athletic exercises, naturally made me powerful in the arms and chest. Of my brain power I shall say little, as my mind was ever bent on sporting topics when it should have been diving into English history or vulgar fractions. Some new device in fishing gear was always of more consequence to me than any inquiry as to the name of the executioner who gave Charles the I. "chops for breakfast," as we youngsters used to say, when we irreverently ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... of those abominable "round games," which, unless they descend to vulgar romping, are the dreariest attempts at conviviality possible to conceive; none of those dreadful and much-to- be-avoided exactions and remissions of "forfeits," that plunge everybody into embarrassing situations, and destroy, instead of creating, sociability; ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... already assured his friars in Ciudad Real that he neither felt insults nor feared threats, so the vulgar abuse of Maldonado did not touch him; he drew up and presented a wordy memorial to the Audiencia, divided into seven articles. The first article affirmed that the Bishop was hindered in the exercise of his ecclesiastical jurisdiction, by the opposition of the ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... himself. To bring Tatiana Markovna, with lanterns, and a crowd of servants and to expose the scandal in a glare of light; to say to her, "Here is the serpent you have carried for two and twenty years in your bosom"—that would be a vulgar revenge of which he knew himself to be incapable. Such a revenge would hit, not Vera, but his aunt, who was to him like his mother. His head drooped for a moment; then he rose and hurried like a madman down the ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... references to the coming of the Son of Man; while others insisted he was a pirate, who had buried treasure on the lonely island, and there watched over its security. This last opinion was received with especial favor by the gaping vulgar, and further confirmed by the fact that the Solitary never asked alms or was destitute of money, of which, indeed, he gave away to those whom he considered poorer than himself. But whatever was the truth, or however anxious the good people of Hillsdale might be to discover ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... that Sloane's reply expressed astonished resentment that he should be suspected of knowing anybody vulgar enough to ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... severe Prussianism which betrays itself in the New Creed of Strauss. Look at the oligarchy of enlightenment and enjoyment which Renan, in his Moral Reform of France, proposes to institute for the benefit of a select circle, with sublime indifference to the lot of the vulgar, who, he says, "must subsist on the glory and happiness of others." This does not look much like a nearer approach to a brotherhood of man than is made by the Gospel. We are speaking, of course, merely of the comparative moral efficiency of religion and the proposed substitutes ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... divine origin resting upon miraculous proofs are not worth consideration. It professes to be a sanction to all morality, but is forced to construct a mythology which outrages all moral considerations. Taken as a serious statement of fact, the anthropomorphism of the vulgar belief was open to the objections which Socrates brought against the Pagan mythology. The supreme ruler was virtually represented as arbitrary, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... understood him least, it being the custom of the vulgar to charge an excess upon the most complaisant, and to form a character by the morals of a few, who have sometimes spoiled an hour or two in good company. Where only fortune is wanting to make a great name, that single ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... I having, as I suppose, only come in time to hear the fag-end of his sermon. Another succeeded him, who, after speaking for about half an hour, was succeeded by another. All the discourses were vulgar and fanatical, and in some instances unintelligible at least to my ears. There was plenty of vociferation, but not one single burst of eloquence. Some of the assembly appeared to take considerable interest in what was said, and every now and then ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... remember how delightfully Pope has adapted the passage to his own relation with Harley. (Imitation of Sat. II, vi.) Often he dined with Maecenas or his friends, and one such dinner he has described, at the house of a rich, vulgar epicure (Sat. II, viii). The guests were nine in number, including Maecenas, Varius, and Viscus: they lay on couches at maplewood tables arranged in three sides of a square. The first course was a Lucanian ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... are for the conventionalities of the world, for the belief of the mass of mankind in right and wrong, and for the customs and habits which the republic of humanity has established for better assistance in the paths of virtue—as if, forsooth, such were vulgar because common, and to be despised by the mighty because useful to the feeble. This is not the proper spirit for the satirist. If he wields his pen in support of such a theory he will do more harm than good. A ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... despairing outburst). I'm full o' vulgar words and ways; and though I may keep them in their holes when you are by, as soon as I'm by myself out they comes in a rush like beetles when the house is dark. I says them gloating-like, in my head—'Blooming' I says, and 'All my eye,' and 'Ginger,' and 'Nothink'; and all the time we was being ...
— The Admirable Crichton • J. M. Barrie
... during the ceremony at the Registry Office—I did not at that time say anything, but handed him the coin. I do not know if I should have left him at once, had he not aggravated the baseness of his conduct by using the vulgar expression, 'Fork it out quick!' But I regret to say that his origin is painfully low. Whereas, anybody who consults my relatives will hear from them that they belong to the very highest County Families. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various
... There was nothing violent in these exercises; nothing a dog of the best breeding in the world could have felt to derogate from dignity. She was much petted and applauded for her performances, and was rewarded by two or three lumps of sugar, which she ate without any of the vulgar haste characteristic of most dogs in their dealings ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... confidence, my son, that there was never a greater fool than that man. He absolutely knows nothing at all. When he dies he will be no more missed in this world than an old dead stage-horse who is made into a manure heap. He is coarse, and vulgar, and mean. His daughter Kate married his clerk, young Tom Witchet—not a cent, you know, but five hundred dollars salary. 'Twas against the old man's will, and he shut his door, and his purse, and his heart. He turned Witchet away; told his ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... countess, before I could answer, you must not expect a mere stiff maiden answer from Miss Byron: she is above all vulgar forms. She and her cousins have too much politeness, and, I will venture to say, discernment, not to be glad of your acquaintance, as an acquaintance— But, for the rest, you ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... elaborately painted and gilt. Mention, however, is made of pulpits at a much earlier period; for in the year 1187 one was set up in the abbey church, Bury St. Edmund's, from which, we are told, the abbot was accustomed to preach to the people in the vulgar tongue and provincial dialect[164-*]. The most ancient pulpit, perhaps, existing in this country, is that in the refectory of the abbey (now in ruins) of Beaulieu, Hampshire: it is of stone, and partly projects from the wall, and is ornamented ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... laudable end:— The general has his star; Shylock his four per cent; The contractor's wife a costly gem To enhance her vulgar charms; The mother a harvest of tears; The wife a broken heart; The unborn babe a prenatal curse; While I have my surfeit ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... Her, thee most excellent of all, The best half of creation's best, Its heart to feel, its eye to see, The crown and complex of the rest, Its aim and its epitome. Nay, might I utter my conceit, 'Twere after all a vulgar song, For she's so simply, subtly sweet, My deepest rapture does her wrong. Yet is it now my chosen task To sing her worth as Maid and Wife; Nor happier post than this I ask, To live her laureate all my life. On wings of love uplifted free, And by her gentleness made ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... Richelieu, near Tours, belongs an Academy where besides the exercise of the horse, armes, dauncing, etc., all the sciences are taught in the vulgar French by Professors stipendiated by the great Cardinal. The Academy of Juilly included some study of physical science, mathematics, geography, heraldry, French history, Italian, and Spanish, besides the riding ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... tranquillity. Show yourself a philosopher in practice as well as profession. Think on the impotence and rashness and futility of the common judgments of men, how little they are regulated by reason on any subject, much more on philosophical subjects, which so far exceed the comprehension of the vulgar— ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... would probably be heaped on me by the reproach that I had compromised our dear Weber's memory, because it was none other than I, weak and unimportant as I am, who had first mooted this celebration. Pray, do what you can in order to be helpful to our enterprise, for gradually, as I observe the vulgar indifference of our theatres, which owe so much to Weber, I begin to fear that our fund might easily remain such as it is at present, and that would be tantamount to our having to commence with very inadequate means the erection of a monument which ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... was so little dignity, so little repose. I do not think that people who live in such places can understand what it is to love one's homeland. Everywhere, too, even amongst the aristocracy, one met vulgar people. Shopkeepers and merchants who had made very much money mixed freely with the nobles. They tell me that in England it is also like this. In Theos I ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... Lucilius attacks are those which reappear in the pages of the later satirists. They are the two extremes to which the Roman temperament was most prone: rapacity and meanness in gaining money, vulgar ostentation and coarse sensuality ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... glaring, the latter's more close and even: Plautus had the most dazelling out-side, and the most lively Colours, but Terence drew the finest Figures and Postures, and had the best Design; the one pleas'd the Vulgar, but our Author the Better sort of people; the former wou'd usually set his Spectators into a loud Laughter, but the latter steal 'em into a sweet Smile that shou'd continue from the beginning to the end of the Representation: in short, Plautus was more ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... challenges, nor sensed the menace in every slightest sound of the dark night outside. There was something else. "Death?" At first he did not consciously strive for an answer. But the question kept falling, and falling again, as a lash. The vulgar hands which plied the scourge, the stupid yellow faces, these no longer mattered. He felt the blows ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... through its hollow stalk—Eupatorium purpureum—Queen of the Meadow, Gravel Root: Root used in decoction with a somewhat similar plant called [)A]m[)a]dit[/a][']t[)i] [^u][']tanu, or "large water dipper" (not identified) for difficult urination. Dispensatory: "Said to operate as a diuretic. Its vulgar name of gravel root indicates the popular estimation of its virtues." The genus is described as tonic, diaphoretic, and in large ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... private matter, no vulgar attempt at robbery and crime as you think—or pretend to think—for you are very intelligent, Mr. Neeland, and you know that ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... he, "if I was rude, I'll own to it. I meant no ill, and did nothing out of my just rights; but I am above all these old vulgar notions too; and if I spoke sharp, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... forced into visiting promiscuously, they imbibe certain manners, certain peculiarities in mode and words—even in an accent or a pronunciation, which are confined to themselves; and whatever differs from these little eccentricities, they are apt to condemn as vulgar and suburban. Now, the fastidiousness of these sets making them difficult of intimate access, even to many of their superiors in actual rank, those very superiors, by a natural feeling in human nature, of prizing ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... education, yet it was a common saying of the many who knew her, that she would have graced a court. She never said or did any thing that was not delicate and beautiful. Her dress, even when they were very poor, had never a hole nor a spot. She never allowed any rude or vulgar thing to be said in her presence without expressing her displeasure. She was one of nature's nobility. She lived and moved in beauty as well as ...
— The Pedler of Dust Sticks • Eliza Lee Follen
... other talent than that of chloroforming his prey by means of a few tweaks resembling kisses, he would be unknown to the vulgar herd; but he also knows how to light himself like a beacon; he shines, which is an excellent manner of achieving fame. Let us consider more particularly the female, who, while retaining her larval shape, becomes marriageable and glows at her best during the hottest part of ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... was just the sort of thing he would have said if he had said it, and in any case it was true. Merely hearing Mrs. Wilkins's evil communications at meals—she did not listen, she avoided listening, yet it was evident she had heard—those communications which, in that they so often were at once vulgar, indelicate and profane, and always, she was sorry to say, laughed at by Lady Caroline, must be classed as evil, was spoiling her own mental manners. Soon she might not only think but say. How terrible that would be. If that were the form her breaking-out was going ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... Nor, to the vulgar eye, does there seem much poetry in the French Revolution, though it was the mightiest tide of human passion which ever boiled and raved: a great deal, doubtless, in Burke's "Reflections"—but none in the cry of a liberated ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... known, on account of his fame as a writer of Latin verse, as Giovanni del Virgilio, a poetical epistle inviting him to visit the author in his native city. His correspondent, while doing homage to his poetic genius, incidentally censured him for composing his great work in the base tongue of the vulgar[20]. Dante replied in a Vergilian eclogue, courteously declining Giovanni's invitation to Bologna, on the ground that it was a place scarcely safe for his person. As regarded the strictures of his correspondent, his triumphant answer in the ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... gloominess. The grandfather of Jane and John-Andrew Vaguener committed a most cold-blooded murder—this in a prologue. Then, when we get to the real story, we find Jane tapping out popular fiction at an amazing pace, and her brother, John-Andrew, living on the proceeds thereof. Jane is noisy, vulgar, and successful in her own line, and gets on John-Andrew's nerves; and when he discovers that she has for once turned aside from tawdry fiction and written a play that is really good he decides ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 7, 1917. • Various
... and disgraceful male costume" for the most picturesque garments I had—a kilt, a blue blazer, and a yellow turban, which I once wore at a fancy dress ball. Then strolled along Piccadilly to the Club. Rather cool. Having abandoned "the most vulgar form of salutation, the shake-hands," bowed distantly to several men I had known for years—but they looked another way. Met a policeman. "Hullo!" he said. "Come out o' that! Your place is in the road." He mistook me for a sandwich-man! Explained that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various
... accompany Ralegh into France. Ralegh, with all his wit and experience of men, his wife, with her love and her clearness of vision, the shrewd French diplomatists, and honest King, were dupes of a mere cormorant, like Stukely, and of vulgar knaves, like Cottrell and Hart. Without the least suspicion of foul play Ralegh on that Sunday night, after le Clerc and de Novion had left, went down to ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... people, both noble and vulgar, it requires but a very short residence amongst them to be highly disgusted; few receive any thing which deserves the name of a regular Education, & I have been told from, I believe, undoubted Authority, ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... forbidden by Mohammed who believed with the vulgar that the Devil has something to do with it. Even Paganini could not escape ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... lofty Calydon,—the youths, And aged seniors weep; the vulgar crowd And nobles mourn alike; the matrons rend Their garments, beat their breasts, and tear their hair. Stretch'd on the earth the wretched sire defiles His hoary locks, and aged face with dust, Cursing ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... brighten it up, and changes that would put it over with the Western buyers, Harrietta would regard the mutilated manuscript sorrowingly. "But I can't play this now, you know. It isn't the same part at all. It's—forgive me—vulgar." ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... men who opposed him in this manner were good citizens according to their lights, prominent in the social clubs and in philanthropic circles, men of means and often men of business standing. They disliked coarse and vulgar politicians, and they sincerely reprobated all the shortcomings that were recognized by, and were offensive to, people of their own caste. They had not the slightest understanding of the needs, interests, ways ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... between the so-called Lady Anna and the young tailor. To these distant Lovels,—to Frederic Lovel who had been brought up with the knowledge that he must be the Earl, and to his uncle and aunt by whom he had been brought up,—the women down at Keswick had been represented as vulgar, odious, and disreputable. We all know how firm can be the faith of a family in such matters. The Lovels were not without fear as to the result of the attempt that was being made. They understood quite as well as did Mr. Flick the glory of the position which would attend upon success, and ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... votes Eastbourne vulgar, and the girls (sorry now I sent them to that finishing-school at Clapham) laugh so consumedly whenever I open my mouth to address a native if we go ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 3, 1892 • Various
... tell the good people at home not to bore you with such long letters,' said she; 'and, above all, do bid them write on proper note-paper, and not on those great vulgar sheets. You should see the charming little lady-like notes ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... Warden, would about realize the Northern ideal of a Southern overseer. He was an obstinate man, and his cruelty was low, vulgar, and brutal like his mind. He would have been hypocritical, but that his character was too coarse-grained to be pliant enough for successful dissimulation. The members of the Board of Directors (with one or two exceptions) were ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... Baccaloas, of the fish taken there.] Trending this coast, we came to the Iland called Baccalaos, being not past two leagues from the maine: to the South thereof lieth Cape S. Francis, 5. leagues distant from Baccalaos, between which goeth in a great bay by the vulgar sort called the bay of Conception. Here we met with the Swallow againe, whom we had lost in the fogge, and all her men altered into other apparell: whereof it seemed their store was so amended, that for ioy and congratulation ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... nurses' exclamations of surprise—"Oh, I say!" "Not I!" "You don't say so!" "What idiocy!" and the like. No doubt those expressions sounded quite proper among the nurses, but on Tommy's lips they seem curiously more vulgar than his natural and rougher expletives. It is, besides, as if one were eavesdropping outside the nurses' ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... the Third Order. Why, then, should it be a subject of astonishment to you, that a cardinal should cover his purple with a garment of ash color, and gird himself with a cord? If this dress seems vulgar and vile, I require it the more, because, finding myself raised to a high degree of honor, I must humble myself the more in order to avoid pride. But is not the garb of St. Francis, which is of ash color, a real ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... himself; and when we were going to enter the carriages he said: 'Now, look here! I give due notice to all and sundry, that I mean to sing that song, and a good many others, during the ride; so those ladies who think them vulgar can go in the other carriages. I am not going to invest my hard-earned penny for nothing.' I was quite certain that Charles Dickens was the last man in the world to shock the modesty of any female, and too much of a gentleman to do anything that was annoying to us, but I thought it as well to ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... spectacle of so world-embracing an organism, persistently maintained in action for an anti-social end. There is something Roman in the colossal proportions of Loyola's idea, something Roman in the durability of the structure which perpetuates it. Yet the philosopher cannot but agree with the vulgar in his final judgment on the odiousness of these sacerdotal despots, these unflinching foes not merely to the heroes of the human intellect, and to the champions of right conduct, but also to the very angels of Christianity. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... secure us all in case of accidents, etc.(21) I left the Society at seven. I can't drink now at all with any pleasure. I love white Portugal wine better than claret, champagne, or burgundy. I have a sad vulgar appetite. I remember Ppt used to maunder, when I came from a great dinner, and DD had but a bit of mutton. I cannot endure above one dish; nor ever could since I was a boy, and loved stuffing. It was a fine day, which is a rarity with us, I assure ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... was not negligent in encouraging the vulgar and mechanical arts, which have a more sensible, though not a closer, connexion with the interests of society. He invited, from all quarters, industrious foreigners to repeople his country, which had been desolated ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... the three partners' cabin at Heavy Tree Hill. His short hair and beard still clung to his head like curled moss or the crisp flocculence of Astrakhan. He was dressed more pretentiously, but still gave the same idea of vulgar strength. She listened to him without emotion, but said, with even a deepening of scorn ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... upon a tiny bit of plate glass. How it ever got there, is more than I can make out; but the thing seems a mistake, a very lie, to look at. Would any fisherman, now, have rowed out here with it and laid it down and rowed away again? I left it where it lay; it was thick and common and vulgar; perhaps a bit of a tramcar window. Once on a time glass was rare, and bottle-green. God's blessing on the old days, when something could ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... opening. Suppose we introduce the hero in his dressing-room. We have something of the kind in Pelham; and if we can't copy his merits, we must his peculiarities. Besides, it always is effective: a dressing-room or boudoir of supposed great people, is admitting the vulgar into the arcana, which ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... peacefully reached the long coveted throne of England in the person of a most unkingly King. Gross in appearance and vulgar in manners, James had none of the royal attributes of his mother. A great deal of knowledge had been crammed into a very small mind. Conceited, vain, pedantic, headstrong, he set to work with the confidence of ignorance to carry out his undigested ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... a narrow doorway, he found himself in the dock, confronting a judge in his scarlet robes, in a large court-house. There was nothing to elevate this Temple of Themis above its vulgar kind elsewhere. Dingy enough it looked, in spite of candles lighted in decent abundance. A case had just closed, and the last juror's back was seen escaping through the door in the wall of the jury-box. ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... his return, and Richard at the Waldorf sat amusing himself with those tides of vulgar humanity that ebb and flow in a stretch of garish corridor known as Peacock Lane. Surely it was a hopeless place wherein to seek a wife, and Richard had no such thought. But who shall tell how and when and where his fate will overtake ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... then? You are ruined, that is all! Remember to what a point your Puritanism in England has brought you. In old days nobody pretended to be a bit better than his neighbours. In fact, to be a bit better than one's neighbour was considered excessively vulgar and middle-class. Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, every one has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues—and what is the result? You all go over like ninepins—one after the other. Not a year passes in England ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... scruple to use this great power to avenge themselves upon those men that had so antagonized them and hindered their investigation. Robert Beverley they represented to the Privy Council as a man of low education and mean parts, bred a vulgar seaman and utterly unfit for high office.[839] Colonel Edward Hill was the most hated man in Charles City county.[840] Ballard, Bray and some of the other Councillors were rash and fiery, active in opposing the King's orders and unjust to the poor people.[841] The Privy ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... Buddhas are,' makes answer Akira; 'yet there is truly but one Buddha; the many are forms only. Each of us contains a future Buddha. Alike we all are except in that we are more or less unconscious of the truth. But the vulgar may not understand these things, and so seek refuge in symbols and ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... continent as that of his drunkenness has made intemperate. It is not shameful not to be as virtuous as he, and it seems excusable to be no more vicious. We do not believe ourselves to be exactly sharing in the vices of the vulgar, when we see that we are sharing in those of great men; and yet we do not observe that in these matters they are ordinary men. We hold on to them by the same end by which they hold on to the rabble; for, however exalted they are, they are still united at some point to ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... silent sadness that had brought quick response from Wood. Red Pearce was even quicker. He did not seem to regard her proximity as that of a feminine thing which roused the devil in him. Pearce could not be other than coarse and vulgar, but there was pity in him. Joan sensed pity and some other quality still beyond her. This lieutenant of the bandit Kells was just as mysterious as Wood. Joan mended a great jagged rent in his ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... "Laughing is vulgar," said Agatha. If any indirect question were ever thrown upon the family position, Agatha immediately began expounding the ethics of high breeding, as one ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... thoughts with which it inspired him; he took his friends there; he even took people whom he did not like. "Procul este, profani!" exclaimed a delighted aesthete on being introduced to it. But this was never to be the attitude of Rickie. He did not love the vulgar herd, but he knew that his own vulgarity would be greater if he forbade it ingress, and that it was not by preciosity that he would attain to the intimate spirit of the dell. Indeed, if he had agreed with ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... palace there, and in the tumult which followed, Singeric, the brother of his enemy and a stranger to the royal race, was hailed as king. This revolution made Placidia once more a fugitive, and we see the daughter of Theodosius "confounded among a crowd of vulgar captives, compelled to march on foot above twelve miles before the horse of a barbarian, the assassin of a husband whom Placidia loved and lamented." On the seventh day of his reign, however, Singeric was himself ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... built housewife who is portrayed in the Arena beneath the label 'Caritas,' and a reproduction of whose portrait hung upon the wall of my schoolroom at Combray, incarnates that virtue, for it seems impossible, that any thought of charity can ever have found expression in her vulgar and energetic face. By a fine stroke of the painter's invention she is tumbling all the treasures of the earth at her feet, but exactly as if she were treading grapes in a wine-press to extract their juice, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... pussy-wants-a-corner stuff Ed got wise that the thing had come to be a mere vulgar chase, and that his private car was hampering him by being so easy to keep track of. So he disguised himself by taking off his diamond ornaments and leaving his private car at Colfax, and started out to stalk Ben as a common private citizen in a day coach. ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... By it the last lingering doubts as to the absolute exactness of the Newtonian Law were dissipated. Recondite analytical methods received a confirmation brilliant and intelligible even to the minds of the vulgar, and emerged from the patient solitude of the study to enjoy an hour of clamorous triumph. For ever invisible to the unaided eye of man, a sister-globe to our earth was shown to circulate, in perpetual frozen exile, at thirty ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... the risks to which Bois-Guilbert exposed himself in endeavouring to save Rebecca from the blazing castle, and his neglect of his personal defence in attending to her safety. The men gave these details with the exaggerations common to vulgar minds which have been strongly excited by any remarkable event, and their natural disposition to the marvellous was greatly increased by the satisfaction which their evidence seemed to afford to the eminent ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... visit America. In one of his letters to the late WILLIS GAYLORD CLARK, now lying before us, he writes: 'I have long felt a peculiar admiration for your great and rising country; and it gives me a pleasure far beyond that arising from a vulgar notoriety, to think that I am not unknown to its inhabitants. Some time or other I hope to visit you, and suffer my present prepossessions to be confirmed by actual experience.' . . . WE have received and perused with gratification ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... persecutions, an ancient writer says: "In the year 1243, Pope Innocent II. ordered the Bishop of Metz rigorously to prosecute the Vaudois, especially because they read the sacred books in the vulgar tongue."[95] From time to time, new persecutions were ordered, and conducted with ever-increasing ferocity—the scourge, the brand, and the sword being employed by turns. In 1486, while Luther was still in his cradle, Pope Innocent VIII. issued ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... you that there dwells, within a brief mile of these TUGURIA, the best FABER FERARIUS, the most accomplished blacksmith, that ever nailed iron upon horse. Now, were I to say so, I warrant me you would think yourself COMPOS VOTI, or, as the vulgar have ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... get real salt, and the waiter spoke English and where one had a name instead of a number; and though the tablecloth might be dirty the windows opened so that the air was clean, where one had the excellent company of farmers and men of the wold, who could not be thoroughly vulgar, because they had not the money to be so even if they had wished it. At first the novelty was delightful, and then one day in a queer old inn up Uthering way, beyond Lingwold, I heard for the first time the rumour of the city said to ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... we reached the ranch in safety, and after securing him with a collar and a strong chain, we staked him out in the pasture and removed the cords. Then for the first time I could examine him closely, and proved how unreliable is vulgar report where a living hero or tyrant is concerned. He had not a collar of gold about his neck, nor was there on his shoulders an inverted cross to denote that he had leagued himself with Satan. But I did find ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... gentlewoman as any. You are smiling at my partiality. Shall you be shocked if I add that I have met in Woldshire grand people who, if they were not known by their titles, would be reckoned amongst the very vulgar, and gentry of old extraction who bear no brand of it but that disagreeable manner which is qualified as ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... with strained attention, looking for a guilty smile. But either he did not know how to read their faces, or not one of these women felt herself to be guilty; he read on every face nothing but a blank expression of everyday vulgar boredom and complacency. Stupid faces, stupid smiles, harsh, stupid voices, insolent movements, and nothing else. Apparently each of them had in the past a romance with an accountant based on underclothes for fifty roubles, and looked for no other charm in the present but coffee, a dinner of ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... epochs of great social convulsions events and circumstances put certain individuals into an eminent or elevated position, their names become intertwined with the great epoch. In the eyes of the masses and of the vulgar observers, such names acquire a high importance on account of the commonly made confusion between circumstances and personal merit, and, moonlight-like, such names reverberate not their own, but a borrowed splendor. Thus much for the official ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... me to his cabin. He had a book of mathematical tables in front of him, and great sheets of vulgar fractions littered the floor ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... Lordships to bear in mind throughout the whole of this deliberation. It is this: you ought never to conclude that a man must necessarily be innoxious because he is in other respects insignificant. You will see that a man bred in obscure, vulgar, and ignoble occupations, and trained in sordid, base, and mercenary habits, is not incapable of doing extensive mischief, because he is little, and because his vices are of a mean nature. My Lords, we have shown to you already, and we shall demonstrate to you more clearly ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... well have been born to an entirely different fortune. And then indeed the hollow security! What kind of a frame of things is it of which the best you can say is, "Thank God, it has let me off clear this time!" Is not its blessedness a fragile fiction? Is not your joy in it a very vulgar glee, not much unlike the snicker of any rogue at his success? If indeed it were all success, even on such terms as that! But take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... when at last he saw that Germany did not love him. Nothing is so repugnant to the great of the earth, and especially to conquerors, as the thought of death,—death, the only unconquerable foe! What, the first comer, a fool, a vulgar fanatic, can with a kitchen knife lay low the greatest hero, the most illustrious warrior, the mightiest king! At Regensberg, when he was wounded for the first time since he had begun his military career, the hero ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... suppression and patience. They are either biding their time or else they are content with the past and the part played by their ancestors therein. For there is an old French and a new. In Paris the new is spoken—the very newest. Were it anything but French it would be intolerably vulgar; as it is, it is merely ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... one had a pipe in his mouth. Some were talking with loose, loquacious tongues; some were singing; their ugly, jolly visages—half illumined by the light of tallow candles stuck in iron sconces on the wall—were worthy of the vulgar but faithful Dutch pencils of Schalken and Teniers. They were singing a song as the new ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... necessity had taught to read faces quickly without offence, as children read the faces of parents, as wives read the faces of hard-souled husbands. All this was but a few seconds' work, and yet the main point was settled. If there had been any vulgar curiosity or coarseness of any kind lurking in his expression, she would have detected it. If she had not lifted her eyes to his face so softly and kept them there so calmly and withdrawn them so quietly, he would not have said to himself, "She is a LADY," for that word meant a good ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... nape from some deleterious padding or other used in the manufacture of her chignon. Sometimes it is vegetable stuff, sometimes animal, but it always teems with pedicular creatures akin to that low and vulgar kind not usually recognized in polite society. All these horrors come and and don't make much difference in the chignon market; but PUNCHINELLO has a new one that is calculated to create a sensation—about the nape of the female ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 29, October 15, 1870 • Various
... great cathedral with High Mass and children playing hide-and-seek behind the pillars; and the Mass would not be itself without the children. That is the mind of Mozart which people have called frivolous, just because in his heaven there is room for everything except the vulgar glory of Solomon and cruelty and stupidity and ugliness. There never was anything in art more profound or beautiful than Sarostro's initiation music, but it is not, like the solemnities of the half-serious, incongruous with the twitterings of Papageno. Mozart's religion is so real that it seems ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... her. This I have undertaken to say to you. It is a strange role, yet conventional. I am the father whose matrimonial whims are not met by the son. The stock measure is to disinherit. But the cause of our quarrel is somewhat unusual, and I can be neither so practical nor so vulgar as to set about making codicils. Love is of no value to financiers; there is no bank for it nor may it be made over in a will. Rather is it carried on in the blood, even as Barbara carried it on into the life of her girl-babe. Your sister keeps me ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... second is accustomed. A poor man who finds himself under the necessity of entertaining a rich one should not feel that he must do it on a grand scale if he has been so entertained by a rich one. Aside from the moral question involved the great game of bluff is too silly and vulgar a one ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... the peacocks, when they saw him, One and all began to haul, And to harry and to claw him Till the creature couldn't crawl; While their owner's vulgar daughter, When her startled callers sought her, And to see the struggle brought her, Only ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl
... small lamp in coloured glass and a knitted white centre-piece wanting in freshness, to enhance the effect of the purplish cloth on the principal table; she had above all, from time to time, taken a brief stand on the small balcony to which the pair of long windows gave access. The vulgar little street, in this view, offered scant relief from the vulgar little room; its main office was to suggest to her that the narrow black house-fronts, adjusted to a standard that would have been low even for backs, constituted quite the publicity ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... (philanthropia) is by far the most prominent characteristic of the God upon earth. Was it that people really felt that to save or benefit mankind was a more godlike thing than to blast and destroy them? Philosophers have generally said that, and the vulgar pretended to believe them. It was at least politic, when ministering to the half-insane pride of one of these princes, to remind him of his mercy rather than of ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... always supposed that this and similar expressions in other parts of Grotius' Commentary, were understood, by all who were acquainted with Grotius' history and the times in which he wrote, to be intended for a mere salvo, as a tub thrown out to that great whale the vulgar; to contradict directly whose opinions with regard to the prophecies, was in the time of Grotius very dangerous, as he himself, notwithstanding all his precaution ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... Kathleen that Kate Rourke was rather a vulgar girl. She drew a little nearer to her, however, and fixed her very bright ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... serious ideas about such a person as Ida Palliser; but he liked to talk to her, he liked to watch the sensitive colour come and go upon the perfect oval of her cheek, while the dark eye brightened or clouded with every change of feeling; and while he was yielding to these vulgar distractions there was no chance of his falling in love ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... ignorance, too often also with silliness—which is not the case with you," I added, with a smile. "Real, that is to say, conscious simplicity is not even recognised; and, when it becomes active, it appears to vulgar minds a danger that must be averted. The better to attack it, they disfigure it. It is this proud and noble grace that I want you to acquire. Look, it may be compared with this diamond which I wear on my finger. The stone is absolutely simple; and yet through how many ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... affecting parting?" cry I, jumping up and running to him. "Do not I look as if I had been crying? Quite the contrary, I assure you. But Musgrave and I have been asking each other such amusing riddles—would you like to hear them? Mine is good, plain, vulgar English, but his is French, so we will ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... has taken place in our attitude towards marriage. I am not, however, at all certain. We talk a great deal, I fear, that is all. The innumerable tragedies of marriage among us to-day are witness to our failure; they have a far closer connection than often is recognized with the romantic and vulgar poverty of our ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... galleon, captured off St. Vincent by three English frigates, entered St. James's street, escorted by cavalry and infantry, with trumpets sounding, the enemy's flags waving over the waggons, and the whole surrounded by an immense multitude of spectators. Now here, to the vulgar mind, was a happy augury of the future golden reign of the Royal baby. He comes upon the earth amid a shower of gold! The melodious chink of doubloons and pieces of eight echo his first infant wailings! What a theme for the gipsies of the press—the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... to Hyde, "I fear his immoderate delight in empty, effeminate, and vulgar conversations is become an irresistible part of his nature, and will never suffer him to animate his own designs, and others' actions, with that spirit which is requisite for his quality, and much more to his fortune."—27, Jan. ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... and left scarcely any debts. He must have lived amidst many self-deprivations; nor was this difficult to practise for this king, for he was a philosopher, indifferent to the common and imaginary wants of the vulgar of royalty. Whenever he threw himself into the arms of his Parliament, they left him without a feeling of his distress. In one of ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... this prevailing folly—of raising 700l., 1000l., or 1500l. per series, merely by cramming the mouths of the asinine with mock-majestic details of fine life—this found favour with an indolent no less than sagacious humorist; and the fatal example was set. Hence the vile and most vulgar pawings of such miserables as Messrs. Vivian Grey and "The Roue"—creatures who betray in every page, which they stuff full of Marquess and My Lady, that their own manners are as gross as they make it their boast ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... leave to man,—no consolation but what the mind can arrive at unaided, no knowledge but what can be reached by original scientific investigation. He destroys not only all faith but all authority, by a low appeal to prejudices, and by vulgar wit such as the infidels of a former age used in their heartless and flippant controversies. I am not surprised at the hostility displayed even in France against him by both Catholics and Protestants. When he advocated ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... am leading a highly virtuous and praiseworthy life, and have not done the least bit of mischief since I came here, except making the Dean's wife jealous, which I can hardly call a crime, as she is a vulgar little woman with a red nose and a yellow bonnet—the Dean is a fat, good-natured man, and calls here nearly every day. His wife abuses me in all societies, and tries to pass me without speaking. You know how I always return good for evil, so I go up and shake hands with her, ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... poor speak correctly; there is no vulgar style; but children have a 'patois' of their own, using many words in their play which men would scorn to repeat. The Bamapela have adopted a click into their dialect, and a large infusion of the ringing "ny", which seems ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... repeatedly pronounce the word suggest as 'sug jest'. Such vagaries as this are not likely ever to be generally adopted. But a good many 'spelling-pronunciations' have found their way into general educated use, and others which are now condemned as vulgar or affected will probably at some future time be universally adopted. I do not share the sentimental regret with which some philologists regard this tendency of the language. It seems to me that each case ought to be judged on its own merits, ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 3 (1920) - A Few Practical Suggestions • Society for Pure English
... of those who do not know; and, for the benefit of those who do know, it will examine and discuss the right principles on which windows should be made, and the rules of good taste and of imagination, which make such a difference between beautiful and vulgar art; for you may know intimately all the processes I have spoken of, and be skilful in them, and yet misapply them, so that your window had better never ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... contemplate the excesses of the late Jerry. She had always mistrusted the man. She had never liked his face—not merely on aesthetic grounds but because she had seemed to detect in it a lurking savagery. How right events had proved this instinctive feeling. Mrs. Pett was not vulgar enough to describe the feeling, even to herself, as a hunch, but a hunch it had been; and, like every one whose hunches have proved correct, she was conscious in the midst of her grief of a certain complacency. It seemed to her that ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... From Casa Guidi windows, what is done Or undone. Whatsoever deeds they be, Pope Pius will be glorified in none. Record that gain, Mazzini!—it shall top Some heights of sorrow. Peter's rock, so named, Shall lure no vessel any more to drop Among the breakers. Peter's chair is shamed Like any vulgar throne the nations lop To pieces for their firewood unreclaimed,— And, when it burns too, we shall see as well In Italy as elsewhere. Let it burn. The cross, accounted still adorable, Is Christ's cross only!—if the thief's would earn Some stealthy ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... so true, that I myself have seen very many become frantic through fear; and, even in those of the best settled temper it is most certain that it begets a terrible astonishment and confusion during the fit. I omit the vulgar sort, to whom it one while represents their great-grandsires risen out of their graves in their shrouds, another while werewolves, nightmares, and chimaeras; but even amongst soldiers, a sort of men over whom, of all others, it ought ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... about thirty feet high, of solid masonry, without door or window or cranny, as shapely as when it first came from the hands of the old builders. Again I had the sense of breaking in on a sanctuary. What right had I, a common vulgar modern, to be looking at this fair thing, among these delicate trees, which some white goddess had once taken ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... he had seen Ratoneau for the first time on horseback, a smart, correct officer, reviewing his troops. Then it would have been easy enough to accept him as a brother-in-law. But this red-faced, slovenly creature in careless undress, made even more repulsive by his uncanny likeness to Napoleon—vulgar in manners, bragging in talk! De Sainfoy had met strange varieties of men among his brother officers, but never anything quite so forbidding as this. He did not give his sister a thought of pity; it ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... however, with their usual superstition attributed its good effects to some mysterious healing power in water itself. Therefore, when the patient was not able to undergo the usual process, or when his medical attendant was above the vulgar and routine practice of his profession, it was administered on the infinitesimal system. The quack muttered a formula over a gourd filled from a neighboring spring and sprinkled it on his patient, or washed the diseased part, or sucked out ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... that of many other men of my character, is one of the many curses of this idiotic nineteenth century! No, I offer you love, Ziska!— ideal, passionate love!—the glowing, rapturous dream of ecstasy in which such a thing as marriage would be impossible, the merest vulgar commonplace—almost a profanity." ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... and unknown horrors rise: For pomp and splendour, for her guard and crown, A gloomy dungeon, and a keeper's frown: Black thoughts, each morn, invade the lover's breast, Each night, a ruffian locks the queen to rest. Ah mournful change, if judg'd by vulgar minds! But Suffolk's daughter its advantage finds. Religion's force divine is best display'd In deep desertion of all human aid: To succour in extremes, is her delight, And cheer the heart, when terror strikes the sight. We, disbelieving our own senses, gaze, And ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... proportion to the space over which gradation extends, and to its invisible subtilty, is its grandeur, and in proportion to its narrow limits and violent degrees, its vulgarity. In Correggio, it is morbid and vulgar in spite of its refinement of execution, because the eye is drawn to it, and it is made the most observable and characteristic part of the picture; whereas natural gradation is forever escaping observation to that degree that the greater part of artists in working from nature ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... things sorter tended to make our home in Missouri onpleasant. A disposition to smash furniture, and heave knives around; an inclination to howl when drunk, and that frequent; a habitooal use of vulgar language, and a tendency to cuss the casooal visitor,—seemed to pint," added Mr. McClosky with submissive hesitation "that—she—was—so to speak—quite onsuited to the marriage ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... signal was given for the general battle. The Turks impetuously crossing the narrow stream, assailed the Christian camp in all directions, with their characteristic physical bravery, the most common, cheap and vulgar of all earthly virtues. A few months of military discipline will make fearless soldiers of the most ignominious wretches who can be raked from the gutters of Christian or heathen lands. The battle was waged with intense fierceness on both sides, and was long ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... believe I can do better than marry her when the mourning is ended. My late spouse, to be sure, would make a quiet man rather apprehensive about a second venture; but if Mrs. Kinloch is a Tartar, she is not a vulgar shrew, but will be lady-like, even if she is bitter. I think I shall take her. Of course she'll consent. I should like to see the unmarried woman in Innisfield that would dare refuse Theophilus Clamp. When she knows—that I know—what she knows, she'll do pretty much what ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so as exactly to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... all the more vividly after looking at the thoughtless faces and gay-coloured dresses of the young women—just as one feels the beauty and the greatness of a pictured Madonna the more when it has been for a moment screened from us by a vulgar head in a bonnet. But this presence of Dinah in his mind only helped him to bear the better with his mother's mood, which had been becoming more and more querulous for the last hour. Poor Lisbeth was suffering from a strange conflict of feelings. Her joy and pride ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... VULGAR.—Do you love the society of the vulgar? Then you are already debased in your sentiments. Do you seek to be with the profane? In your heart you are like them. Are jesters and buffoons your choice friends? He who loves to laugh at folly is himself a fool. Do you love and seek the society of the ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... literature, were founded in almost every community. Their fame reached distant lands. It became a popular saying that "from Kiev shall go forth the Law, and the word of God from Starodub." Horodno, the vulgar pronunciation of Grodno, was construed to mean Har Adonai, "the Mount of the Lord." A pious rabbi did not hesitate to write to a colleague, "Be it known to the high honor of your glory that it is preferable by far to dwell in the land of the Russ and promote the study of the Torah in Israel than ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... detail struck the same curiously national note, from the rare iron-work to the octagonal lantern, a miracle of Plateresque design, which lifted itself, clear and bright, above the centre of the great church. Perhaps the effect lay partly in the gorgeous colour, colour never tawdry, never vulgar, as I had seen it sometimes in Italy; or else in the wonderful reliefs; statues in niches of gold, flowering stones, arabesques, alabaster columns, richly-toned pictures; but no matter whence it came, it was there, and could have been ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... yet; 't is just the hour When pleasure, like the midnight flower That scorns the eye of vulgar light, Begins to bloom for sons of night And ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... movements are as active and springy as those of a cat; but, unless there is some pressing necessity for nimbleness, Jack regards it as the correct thing and a duty he owes to his own dignity to be deliberate of action. And, above all, whatever the circumstances, there must be no exhibition of vulgar curiosity, no eagerness, no enthusiasm, no astonishment while one of ocean's countless mysteries is unfolding itself before his eyes; he must exhibit an air of semi-contemptuous indifference, as who should say, "I am a seasoned hand—a ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... kiss her, his heart filled with compunction at the thought of the promise he was about to break. It seemed to him almost more than sacrilegious to make of this dear and honoured ornament of old age a vehicle for the satisfaction of the vulgar ambitions and disagreeable curiosity of the couple who dwelt ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... a good memory Air of science calculated to deceive the vulgar And scarcely a woman; for your answers are very short Bad habit of talking very indiscreetly before others Beaumarchais sent arms to the Americans Because he is fat, he is thought dull and heavy Can make a Duchess a beggar, but cannot make a beggar a Duchess Canvassing for a ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... saying, 'Andrew has sneezed, or put some coal on the fire'—the most ordinary way you can imagine. And that was the end of whisky for father. After that he tried to make everyone he knew cast their burden on the Lord. I rather felt like laughing at the time. It seemed rather silly, and just a bit vulgar—most religion is, isn't it? But since I've been worrying myself to death about you I've ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... knew, was a very vulgar word; I had heard Rador use it in a moment of anger to one of the serving maids, and it meant, approximately, "kitchen girl," "scullion." Beneath the insult and the acid disdain, the blood rushed up under ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... nothing's so vulgar as these nicknames in a first-rate situation. It is all very well when one lives with skinflints, but with such a master as our'n, respect's the go. Besides, Madame is not a French 'oman; she is one of the family,—and as ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the lady's hair. The costly furniture, the lady and her lover, the one in black and white, the other in creamy lace, the panelled skirt extended over her knees, filled the room like a picture—an enticing but somewhat vulgar picture of modern refinement and taste. Mike ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... degree. Should the heroine reside in a town, and especially London, she must have dwelt previously in some isolated mansion, seldom visited by beings superior in intellect to the foxes they hunt; an idiot mother, vulgar aunt, a father, an uncle, or a guardian in his dotage, must have superintended her education; and when, at the age of sixteen, some fortunate chance throws her into society, her accomplishments and manners are found more ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... that ye had, And that ye had, — as me thought, — in despite Every thing that *sounded unto* bad, *tended unto, accorded with* As rudeness, and peoplish* appetite, *vulgar And that your reason bridled your delight; This made, aboven ev'ry creature, That I was yours, and shall while I ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... they may be for a time set aside. Abraham Lincoln with all his lofty mind, acquiesced in the vulgar belief when he took his son Robert to have the benefit of a "madstone," at a distance from where the boy was dog-bitten. He made the pact with the Divine Power as to the Emancipation Act, with a sincerity ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... water or drop your pocket-handkerchief. You know, of course, that a really elegant cavalier never carries any sort of money about with him short of guineas, and these, too, must be fresh from the mint, and well sprinkled with eau de Cologne or some other perfume, so as to be free from the soil of vulgar hands. ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... origin; unless there are preponderant reasons for diverting it, grounded on our need of the word to express a certain sense, and the greater difficulty of finding any other word for the same purpose. It is better to lean to the classical than to the vulgar sense of 'indifferent,' ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... approbation of both sexes that followed his steps, and the untouched heart that escaped so many shafts. Nor, while foremost in the brilliant pleasures that distinguished the British camp and made Philadelphia a Capua to Howe, was he ever known to descend to the vulgar sports of his fellows. In the balls, the theatricals, the picturesque Mischianza, he bore a leading hand; but his affections, meanwhile, appear to have remained where they were earliest and last bestowed. In our altered days, when marriage and divorce seem so often interchangeable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... not always feel obliged to sing his music when they sang at his house. "J'acclamerais avec delice 'Au clair de la lune,' meme avec variations," he said, in his comical way. Rossini's wife's name is Olga. Some one called her Vulgar, she is so ordinary and pretentious, and would make Rossini's home and salon very commonplace if it were not that the master glorified all by his presence. I saw Rossini's writing-table, which is a thing ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... All proverbs are vulgar, and I do believe that is the vulgarest of all. You are really catching Roger ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... that darksome avenue which gives access to the historic precincts of the Province House. In short, if any credit be due to the courteous assurances of Mr. Thomas Waite, we had brought his forgotten mansion almost as effectually into public view as if we had thrown down the vulgar range of shoe-shops and dry-good stores which hides its aristocratic front from Washington street. It may be unadvisable, however, to speak too loudly of the increased custom of the house, lest Mr. Waite should ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... business was carried on and these claims for rebates submitted month after month and checks in payment of them drawn month after month. Such a violation of the law, in my opinion, in its essential nature, is a very much more heinous act than the ordinary common, vulgar crimes which come before criminal courts constantly for punishment and which arise from sudden passion or temptation. This crime in this case was committed by men of education and of large business ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... and brutal to carry revenge beyond the grave. The executions in London, after the rebellion of 1745, were followed by such a revolting display, useless for any object of salutary terror, and calculated only to excite a vulgar curiosity. Horace Walpole, in a very few words, describes the feelings with which the public crowded to this sight:—"I have been this morning at the Tower, and passed under the new heads of Temple Bar, where people make a trade of letting spying ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... could bear that Jewiston," remarked Miss Leveredge; "I always thought him very under-bred and vulgar. Why will Harry have any thing to do ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... been said, that our poet drew the characters of life as he found them, but bad as his characters are, they exhibit only a vulgar wickedness. Unable to portray a Clytaemnestra, he revels in the continual paltriness of a Menelaus or Ulysses. As if he took a delight in the black side of humanity, he loves to show the strength of false reasoning, of sophistry antagonistic to truth, and of cold expediency ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... of his nation without that heaviness, either of body or of mind, which characterized and deteriorated the Theban people. By the study of philosophy and by other intellectual pursuits his mind was enlarged beyond the sphere of vulgar superstition, and emancipated from that timorous interpretation of nature which caused even some of the leading men of those days to behold a portent in the most ordinary phenomenon. A still rarer accomplishment for a Theban was ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... she came out to her native land and ran everything down in the most merciless manner. They did not do this in England—oh! dear no! nothing so common—the people in Melbourne had such dreadfully vulgar manners; but then, of course, they are not English; there was no aristocracy; even the dogs and horses were different; they had not the stamp of centuries of birth and breeding on them. In fact, to hear Mrs Meddlechip talk one would think that England was a perfect ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... in trembling tones, "if—if you take the dust from those common young women and that vulgar man, I'll ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... fortune made her a woman that one would still take a pleasure in making love to. It would be pleasant to be her lover for many reasons. There were disadvantages, however, for Gertrude, though never vulgar herself, liked vulgar things. Her friends were vulgar; her flat, for she had just left her husband, was opulent, overdecorated; the windows were too heavily curtained, the electric light seemed to be always turned on, and as for the ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... courteous and suave. No vulgar crowding would have occurred on the streets of their cities. No ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... him that the gaping sight-seers and the fat strangers with their guide-books, and all those mean, common people who thronged the shop, with their trivial desires and vulgar cares, were mortal and must die. They too loved and must part from those they loved, the son from his mother, the wife from her husband; and perhaps it was more tragic because their lives were ugly and sordid, and they knew nothing that gave beauty to the ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... was far less brilliant. His principal patrons were Henry Burgum and George Catcott, a pair of pewterers, the former vulgar and uneducated but very ambitious to be thought a man of good birth and education, the latter a credulous, selfish and none too scrupulous fellow, a would-be antiquary, of whom there is the most delightfully absurd description ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... bland Jeffersonian toper who carried tippling to the level of a fine art. I have no patience with the doctrine of complete immersion. Ever since I was first admitted to the bar I have deplored the conduct of those violent and vulgar revelers who have brought discredit upon the loveliest, most delicate art known to man. Now, at last, by supreme wisdom, drinking is to be elevated to the dignity of a career. I like to think that I express your sentiment when I say that drinking is too precious, ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... perpetually guilty of the greatest mischief in the matter. Nothing is done to retard or prevent marriage; everything to accelerate and promote it. Marriage is universally treated as a virtue which of itself consecrates the lives of the mostly vulgar and entirely selfish young creatures who enter into it. The blind and witless passion in which it oftenest originates, at least with us, is flattered out of all semblance to its sister emotions, and revered as if it were a celestial inspiration, a spiritual impulse. ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... a lady Aunt Sophia is—and compared to you and me, Nancy, she is very stately and very grand and very noble—I would not give you up. Aunt Sophy is a lady with a great brave heart, and her ideas are up-in-the-air ideas, and she doesn't know anything about mean and low and vulgar things. I'd have clung to you, Nancy, and always owned you as my friend, even if Aunt Sophy had taken me into good society. Yes, I'd have stuck to you whatever happened; but now"—Pauline pressed her hand to her heart—"everything is altered. You are cruel, and I don't love you any more. But ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... complete, and Dante left it with the monks of a certain convent while he wandered into a far-distant country. The Frate questioned him eagerly, asking why he had chosen to write the poem in Italian since the vulgar tongue seemed to clothe such a wonderful theme unbecomingly. "When I considered the condition of the present age," the poet replied, "I saw that the songs of the most illustrious poets were neglected of all, and for this ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... officers who acted as executioners and a Rev. Mr. Thomas. After the noose had been adjusted, Hetherington addressed the crowd, claiming to be innocent, and ready to meet his Maker. Brace, every once in a while, interrupted him, using terrible and vulgar language. The caps were adjusted, the ropes cut and the two dropped into eternity. They were left hanging 40 minutes, after which the bodies were removed by the Committee to their rooms and afterwards turned ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley
... the caterpillars of the commonwealth during the reign of Henry VII., who, being of a noble extract, was executed the first year of Henry VIII., but not thereby so extinct but that he left a plentiful estate, and such a son who, as the vulgar speaks it, would live without a teat. For, out of the ashes of his father's infamy, he rose to be a duke, and as high as subjection could permit or sovereignty endure. And though he could not find out any appellation ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... Penn, who, as we have seen, was at one time Squire of Warminghurst. "In recent years we have gathered from the works of American comic writers and others many words which at first have been termed 'vulgar Americanisms,' but which, on closer examination, have proved to be good old Anglo-Saxon and other terms which had dropped out of notice amongst us, but were retained in the New World! Take, for instance, two 'Southern words,' (probably Sussex) quoted by Ray (1674). ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... He states, that at another time it produced copious bleeding at the nose; the same effect was produced also upon his lady, who was almost rendered incapable of walking. The strange accounts naturally excite the attention and wonder of all classes of people; the learned and the vulgar were equally desirous of experiencing so singular a sensation, and great numbers of half-taught electricians wandered through every part of Europe to gratify ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various
... rivers and streams serve as sewers and dumping grounds, forests are swept away and fishes are driven from the streams. Many birds are becoming extinct, and certain mammals are on the verge of extermination. Vulgar advertisements hide the landscape, and in all that disfigures the wonderful heritage of the beauty of Nature to-day, we ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
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