"Aristocracy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... voice loud. He made a fine figure there, I must admit; he was a big, fair, handsome young man with a fine tenor voice and an instinct for gallant effect. My eyes were drawn to him at first wholly. He seemed a symbol, a triumphant symbol, of all that the theory of aristocracy claims, of all that filled my soul with resentment. His chauffeur sat crouched together, peering at the crowd under his lordship's arm. But Mitchell showed as a sturdy figure also, and his voice ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... economic laws that were of that foreigner's bringing; the economic laws of the monarchist and despotic forms of government, that is making this republic a republic only in name: the economic laws of the monarchist and despotic forms of government that has built up an aristocracy of wealth here as they have there, that must of necessity depend here for its existence as it does there, on the enslavement of the people. Do not let a mere word further deceive you. The word republic means a free people - we are slaves. For great revenue, be it of king or ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... the lower city, with its marvellous Town Hall, it was always the upper portion of Brussels she beheld when she thought of the capital. She had felt that she belonged to this quarter, where all who had any claim to aristocracy lived; here, near the palace and the beautiful leafy trees, her future home had been ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... as the row from his rooms was appalling. He always had an eyeglass and wonderfully cut clothes, and his hair was brushed back till it was as shiny as a billiard ball. I put him down, as did everyone else, as an out-and-out rotter, and held him up as an example of our decadent aristocracy. ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... they blighted the name of the renegade. Folly has its rights, but it has also its limits. A man may be a brute, but he has no right to be a rebel. And, after all, what was this Lord Clancharlie? A deserter. He had fled his camp, the aristocracy, for that of the enemy, the people. This faithful man was a traitor. It is true that he was a traitor to the stronger, and faithful to the weaker; it is true that the camp repudiated by him was the conquering camp, and the camp adopted by him, the conquered; it is true ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... be tried for them, and that 'I would not be in such a situation for ten thousand worlds. He was mild and more patient than I expected.' Perhaps, after all, Carlyle was not so far wrong when he praised our aristocracy for their 'politeness.' In 1808 Young became blind. In 1815 his wife died. In 1820 he died himself, leaving behind him seven packets of manuscript and twelve ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... have immortal qualities in himself, even though flayed and roasted alive by the critics. He is most assuredly an artist in form, is endowed with a brilliant style, and has been named "L'Historiographe de la bourgeoise contemporaine." Indeed, antagonism to plutocracy and hatred of aristocracy are the fundamental theses in almost every ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... make the mistake common to those who cry Peace, when there is no peace," was the quick retort. "I, and my kind, can remodel it, and some day, when the burden has grown too heavy to be borne, we will. The aristocracy of rank, birth, feudal tyranny went down in fire and blood in France a century ago: the aristocracy of money will go down here, when the ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... not claim that the political and social system that creates an aristocracy of leisure, and consequently of intellect, is the best possible kind of human organization; I perceive its disadvantages clearly enough. But I do not hold that a system under which all important ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... none the less American for loving the picturesque traditions of his English ancestry; Cooper, a gallant and fertile genius, did his country and our language an inestimable service by adding a whole group of specifically American figures to the deathless aristocracy of the realms of romance. Then, in the generation which has just passed away, we have such men as Thoreau, racy of his native soil; Longfellow, in his day and way the chief interpreter of America to England; ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... was collected all the aristocracy of the little population of the town and territory of Mur, every one of whom, as we found afterwards, possessed some high-sounding title answering to those of our dukes and lords and Right Honourables, ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... place the glorious liberty of a republic, or more properly, an aristocracy, the common people being here as arrant slaves as the French; but the old nobles pay little respect to the doge, who is but two years in his office, and whose wife, at that very time, assumes no rank above another noble lady. 'Tis true, the family of Andrea ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... together under hereditary kings, whose power was limited by the lay and priestly aristocracy. The common people, many of whom were skilled artisans, made themselves felt in some degree in public affairs. The mercantile class were influential. Thus there was developed a germinant municipal feeling and organization. The "strong city," Tyre, is mentioned in Joshua xix. 29. In Isaiah xxiii., ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Forrester—and many another magnate in his day, whose powdered head, however, was scarcely in the tomb before his mountain pile of wealth began to dwindle. The founders of the greater part of the families which now compose the aristocracy of Salem might here be traced, from the petty and obscure beginnings of their traffic, at periods generally much posterior to the Revolution, upward to what their children look upon ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... urged that in every township a sixth of the land should be reserved to enable His Majesty "to reward such of His provincial Servants as may merit the Royal favour" and "to create and strengthen an Aristocracy, of which the best use may be made on this Continent, where all Governments are feeble and the general condition of things tends to a wild Democracy." Grenville saw further possibilities in this suggestion. It would give the Crown a revenue ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... causes that are thus producing want in the midst of plenty, ignorance in the midst of intelligence, aristocracy in democracy, weakness in strength—that are giving to our civilization a one-sided and unstable development; and you will find it something which this Hebrew statesman three thousand years ago perceived and guarded against. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... folk-lore they imperfectly understood, and made of what, of course, it had never been before: the vehicle to carry a rich freight of chivalric customs and ideals. As an ideal of social conduct, the code of chivalry never touched the middle and lower classes, but it was the religion of the aristocracy and of the twelfth-century "honnete homme". Never was literature in any age closer to the ideals of a social class. So true is this that it is difficult to determine whether social practices called forth the literature, or whether, ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... offence. Driven from his first determination by the cooler heads of his colleagues, the young inquisitor next proposed that the case should be sent to the ordinary tribunals for judgment. Instances had not been wanting in which the aristocracy of Venice sacrificed one of its body to the seemliness of justice; for when such cases were managed with discretion, they rather strengthened than weakened their ascendency. But the present crime was known to be too common, to permit ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... calls himself a promoter. He has made sundry efforts to promote myself. I conclude 'promoter' is one other fashion of wolf-saying. The yet littler and yet younger man at his left of our friend, the one of soft voice and insinuating manner, much resembling a stray scion of aristocracy, discloses to those with whom he affably acquaints himself the location of a luxurious gaming house not far off; he will even consent to accompany one to its tables; and still yet he has but yesterday evening invited me ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... the most notorious and influential of Francis I.'s many mistresses; and if Carew's evidence is to be depended upon, we see what was the part assigned by Surrey to his sister in the political game the old aristocracy and the Catholics were playing. She, the widow of the King's son, was to seduce the King, and to become his mistress! Carew's story was confirmed by another witness, and Lady Richmond had complained of Surrey's "language to her with abhorrence and disgust, and had added, 'that she defied her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... anticipation. But with his undisciplined desires and hot-blooded eagerness, her half-hearted acknowledgments and inadequate concessions, closed her about with a chilling barrier that staggered him with its problematic nature. Feeling himself her equal in the aristocracy of blood, and her master in the knowledge and strength of loving, he resented those half understood reasons which removed him from the possibility of being anything to her. And more, he was angry with himself for acquiescing in that self understood agreement. But it was only in ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... neither poverty nor riches, and the idea of brotherhood was firmly fixed in the minds of men. The feverish desire for place, pelf and power was not upon them. The rise of the barons and an entailed aristocracy were ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... proclaimed the equality of men, its own social structure and habit north and south contradicted the declaration, not merely by the fact of slavery, but by the life of its classes. The south long remained oligarchic; in the north aristocracy slowly melted away. The coincidence of an economic opportunity with a philosophic principle is the secret of the career of American democracy in its first century. The vast resources of an undeveloped country gave this opportunity to the individual, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... partial protector of his own or any other man's followers. They found that the law of the land was not in his hands an instrument of oppression, or pretence for partiality. They discerned that he did even justice; neither inclining to the people, for the sake of popularity; nor to the aristocracy, for the sake of power. This was a thing so unusual, that they could at first hardly believe that it ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... European sense, scarcely exists, and the possession of an hereditary title gives in itself no special privileges. Official position is more highly esteemed than birth and the bureaucracy takes the place of the aristocracy in the west. There are, nevertheless, besides personal decorations for merit, such as the yellow jacket, five hereditary rewards for merit; these last only for a fixed number of lives. A few Chinese families, however, enjoy hereditary titles in the full sense, the chief among ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... by the other two cities, and is regarded as a parvenu. But there is yet another reason for this: Rotterdam is a merchant city pure and simple, and is exclusively occupied with her own affairs. She has but a small aristocracy, which is neither wealthy nor proud. Amsterdam, on the contrary, holds the flower of the old merchant princes. Amsterdam has great picture-galleries,—she fosters the arts and literature; she unites, in short, distinction and wealth. Notwithstanding ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... me this evening what I thought of the beauty of the ladies of the English aristocracy: she was a Scotch lady, by the by; so the question was a fair one. I replied, that certainly report had not exaggerated their charms. Then came a home question—how the ladies of England compared with the ladies of America. ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... women and their female posterity. For them, this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. For them this government is not a democracy; it is not a republic. It is the most odious aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe. An oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor; an oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant; or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... In Upper Canada high schools for the education of the upper classes were established at a very early day, and the Cornwall Grammar School, under the superintendence of Dr. John Strahan, for some years was {360} the resort of the provincial aristocracy. Upper Canada College dates from these early times. But in 1838 there were only twenty-four thousand children at school out of a total population of four hundred thousand. In the maritime provinces things were not much ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... rest of the fashionable world in this respect. I felt for my part that I respected them. They were in daily communication with a duke! They were not the rose, but they had lived beside it. There is an odor in the English aristocracy which intoxicates plebeians. I am sure that any commoner in England, though he would die rather than confess it, would have a respect for those great big hulking ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... get back to his College with nothing worse than black eyes and bruises. It is so seldom that the members of the Oxford snobocracy have the privilege afforded them of using their fists on the faces and persons of the members of the Oxford aristocracy, that when they do get the chance, they are unwilling to let it slip through their fingers. Dark tales have, indeed, been told, of solitary and unoffending undergraduates having, on such occasions, not only received a severe handling from those same fingers, but also having been ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... Lady Willow was a sort of society St. Peter, who held keys that would open the gates of the social heaven, if she were sufficiently recompensed. Of all the ancient landmarks of England, none attracted Jennie so much as the aristocracy, and although she had written to New York for letters of introduction that would be useful in London, she was too impatient to await their arrival. Thus she came to secure the services of Lady Willow, the widow of Sir Debenham Willow, who had died abroad, insolvent, some years before, mourned ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... fellows never got together; and as money was plenty, they made the wine fly with a whirl. I hunted up old Bill and Dad Ryan, and made up my mind we would tackle the gentry and given them something to spend their money for. Bill opened up, and the young sprigs of the aristocracy began to pile up the bills, which Bill was not slow to rake in. There was nothing mean about Bill, and he didn't refuse to take gold watches and sparklers; and after the game closed, some of the fellows resembled picked ducks. They wanted to redeem their watches and diamonds, so Bill agreed ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol
... impracticable to that of Richelieu. With the horrors of civil war fresh in the memory of all, the general desire was for tranquillity and peace, not liberty; to which, moreover, had it been contemplated, the first necessary step was that of humbling the aristocracy. It was impossible that constitutional freedom could grow out of the chaos of privileges, and anarchy, and organized rebellion, that the government had to contend with. In building up her social fabric ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... accusation of his countrymen, by the Roman authorities. He was without technical education, but he had been carefully trained in the sacred books, as was usual with his people. Belonging neither to the aristocracy nor to the learned class, he was one of the common people yet separate from them—a separation not of race or caste or education, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... half of democracy; even the municipal administration has not been wholly captured by the Irish voter. The Bostonian has, to a very appreciable extent, solved the problem of combining the virtues of democracy with the manners of aristocracy; and I know not where you will find a better type of the American than the Boston gentleman: patriotic with enlightened patriotism; finely mannered even to the class immediately below his own; energetic, but not a slave to the pursuit ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... hideous strains of the Carmagnole. It is indeed a dance of death. The other night we were at a reception given by Madame Talma to the victorious General Dumouriez. All the Brissot party were there. Your father will remember Brissot de Warville very well. He was greatly petted by Mrs. Jay and the aristocracy of New York and Philadelphia. Jefferson made a friend of him, and even Washington talked with him about his book on our country. Then he passed himself off as a noble, but he is really the son of an innkeeper. I had ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... but really I am not. I am an Austrian. I was born on the Zillenstein estate of Prince Karl of Auersperg. My family has served his for a thousand years. Great as I hold Hapsburg and Hohenzollern, Auersperg means even more to me. The Auerspergs are the very essence and spirit of that aristocracy and rule of the very highborn, in which I believe and to which your country and later the French have stood in the exact opposite. Every time that my pulse beats within me it beats with the wish that you and all that ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... those young parvenus of the second generation who form an aristocracy of letters, and are the patricians of the Third Republic. His name was Lucien Levy-Coeur. He had quick eyes, set wide apart, an aquiline nose, a fair Van Dyck beard clipped to a point: he was prematurely bald, which did not become him: and he had a silky voice, ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... female inhabitants of Atlantis dwelling on the plains, while the aristocracy lived on the higher lands. And this is confirmed by the fact that part of them were called Atlantids, offspring of Atlantis. The Hesperides were also "daughters of Atlas;" their mother was Hesperis, a personification ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... intruder, noiselessly as if they were the ghosts that haunt the spot, but dare not reveal to the eye of man the human shape that they once wore. This castle belonged, and still belongs, to the D'Hebrard family, which was connected by marriage with the Cardaillacs and most of the ancient aristocracy of ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... hereditary prince, a nobility without vassals, and a people voting by their representatives, form the best monarchy, aristocracy, and ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... around in steamer chairs, wearing necklaces of pearls, diamonds, emeralds and other precious stones, fit for only a banquet or a ball, with their fingers blazing with jewels and their wrists covered with bracelets. There seemed to be a rivalry among the aristocracy on our steamer as to which could make the most vulgar display of gold, silver and precious stones, and it occurs to me that these Englishwomen had lived in India so long that they must have acquired the Hindu barbaric ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... heart and that sincerity and unaffected dignity which had won for her many friends before her elevation, and which, in spite of national animosity, conquered the prejudices and gained the heart of the aristocracy of Great Britain. But her crowning virtue was her Christian humility, which is beautifully exemplified in a letter which she wrote to Mr. Adams, on the 8th of February, 1797, "the day on which the votes for President were counted, and Mr. Adams, as Vice-president, was required by law to announce ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... was made easier for me by the fact that the Dean was a singularly simple-minded man. Reverence for the aristocracy had become with him almost a religion. When he was brought—or believed himself to be brought—in contact with the aristocracy, his intellectual vision closed in a swoon of ecstasy. Snob? Oh, dear, no! Of course not. What can have made you think that? It was simply that the aristocracy appealed ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... ought to shine and not permit itself to be kept in the shade by the aristocracy. Besides, Monsieur Birotteau is in the government; he is before ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... is inimitable." Such observations strike the ear with painful discord, when the mind is filled with memories of those who are brave or independent enough to "look forward" with creative genius. There are many noble exceptions among our aristocracy; but with far too great a number ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... muslin dresses, sometimes white ones, without fear of soiling them. This slight difference of apparel and our fewer work-hours seemed to give us a slight advantage over the toilers in the mills opposite, and we occasionally heard ourselves spoken of as "the cloth-room aristocracy." But that was only in fun. Most of us had served an apprenticeship in the mills, and many of our best friends were still there, preferring their work because it brought them more money than we ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... There were examples. Aristocracy had ere now condescended to wealth; earls had married women rich by tallow-importing papas; and no doubt, had these same earls been consulted in Gatty's case, they would have decided that Christie Johnstone, with her real and funded property, was not a villainous match for a green grocer's ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... with an ironical sigh. "Ah, we shall never have a real aristocracy while this plebeian reluctance to live upon a parent or a wife continues the animating spirit of our youth. It strikes at the root of the whole feudal system. I really think you owe me an apology, Tom. I supposed you wished to marry the girl's ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... apparent that war is a wasteful and unsafe process, and public and personal interests lead us to avoid it as much as possible. But, however genuinely war may be deprecated, it is certainly an exciting game. The Rough Riders in this country recently, and more recently the young men of the aristocracy of England, went to war from motives of patriotism, no doubt, but there are unmistakable evidences that they also regarded it as the greatest sport they were likely to have a chance at in a lifetime. And there is evidence in plenty that the emotional attitude of women toward ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Carolina, in those days, to avoid close contact with the populace and to preserve an esprit de corps. They believed that their only associates, on terms of equality, should be of their own order, as the clergy or medical profession, representing an educated aristocracy. The masses were illiterate, unpolished and, in the estimation of the lawyers, unfit for companionship with the cultivated classes, whose policy it was to inspire the plain people with ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... would have been different. It would scarcely have been possible to have united so completely the whole force of the country against a common enemy. A contest would probably have arisen in the outset between the orders for the control. Had the aristocracy prevailed, the people would have been heartless. Had the people prevailed, the nobility would probably have left the country, or, remaining behind, internal divisions would have taken place in every State and a civil war broken ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... were ripe for revolt.[234] It was an absurd mistake. Yet though the number of revolutionists was still comparatively small, the propaganda caused much uneasiness. Thousands of French refugees were landing in England, mostly priests and members of the aristocracy, many of them completely destitute. Subscriptions were raised for their relief, and Burke and others exerted themselves nobly in their behalf. This large immigration made it easy for French spies and revolutionary agents to carry on their work undetected. Its progress ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... of justice, which they delivered to the praefect of the city. But every Roman prejudice was awakened by the name, the language, and the manners, of a Barbarian lord. The Caesars of Saxony or Franconia were the chiefs of a feudal aristocracy; nor could they exercise the discipline of civil and military power, which alone secures the obedience of a distant people, impatient of servitude, though perhaps incapable of freedom. Once, and once only, in his life, each emperor, with an army of Teutonic ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... character of Christ, but did not believe in divine redemption through Christ's work. His dearest aim was to bring down the aristocracy and elevate the masses. ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... matters of sport. With regard to small game, partridges, ducks, quails, rabbits, &c., there is abundance to be found in Algeria. Near Algiers there is hawking of partridges and hares among the Arab tribes; and, before the French occupation, falconry was the especial amusement of the Arab aristocracy. For shooting of small game I would more especially recommend a caravanserai called Oued el Massin, about half way between Milianah and Teniet. Partridges and woodcock abound there; the quarters, moreover, are remarkably ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... the national faith—which no one understood and which at times was the subject of the mockery of all—or the banishment from his home, his family, and his country with or without an alleged cause, that it was the act not of a single tyrant or hated aristocracy, but of his assembled countrymen. Far different is the power of our sovereignty. It can interfere with no one's faith, prescribe forms of worship for no one's observance, inflict no punishment but after well-ascertained guilt, ...
— Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Harrison • James D. Richardson
... my gratitude. But just think! I should have left with my few pence without hope of ever saving any more; obliged to go and cultivate my vineyard in that little country district of Montbars, a very narrow field for a man who has lived in the midst of all the financial aristocracy of Paris, and among those great banking operations by which fortunes are made at a stroke. Instead of that, here I am established afresh in a magnificent situation, my wardrobe renewed, and my savings, which I spent a whole day in fingering over, intrusted to the ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... suppose Pantheism is as near as I could go. I believe in the eternity of matter and in the eternity of intelligence, but I do not believe in any Being outside of nature. I do not believe in any personal Deity. I do not believe in any aristocracy of the air. I know nothing about origin or destiny. Between these two horizons I live, whether I wish to or not, and must be satisfied with what I find between these two horizons. I have never heard any God described that I believe in. I have never heard any religion explained ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... his agent to Limoges to negotiate the matter; telling him to accept any good sum of money, for he remembered the Revolution of 1789 too well not to profit by the lessons it had taught the aristocracy. This agent had now been a month laying siege to Graslin, the shrewdest and wariest business head in the Limousin,—the only man, he was told by practical persons, who was able to purchase so large a property and pay for it on the spot. The ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... not entirely successful. After the decline of the Roman power there arose from the ruins of the fallen empire the modern nationalities, which used all forms of government hitherto known. They partook of democracy, aristocracy, or imperialism, and even attempted, in some instances, to combine the principles of all three in one government. While the modern state developed some new characteristics, it included the elements of the Greek and Roman governments. ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... "In Odense, aristocracy and democracy held out the longest," said Wilhelm, smiling; "yet I remember, in my childhood, that when the nobles and the citizens met on the king's birthday at the town-house ball, that ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... thinks it isn't; an' though 'e gets angry, 'e thinks a lot o' 'er. An' w'en I don't like the words she uses sometimes, 'e says I don't know the way o' society; that the aristocracy speak like ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... of the ideal state seems to waver between two ideals. There is the ideal of an aristocracy and the ideal of what he calls constitutional government, a mixed constitution. The principle of "tools to those who can use them" ought to lead him, as it does Plato, to an aristocracy. Those who have ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... peculiar type of Virginia society, the aristocracy of planters, that dotted the Old Dominion with lordly manor-houses and filled them with gay, ample life—a life almost feudal in its pride and power. In this day of our nation's tardy awakening to an appreciation ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... ladies and gentlemen, together with myself, met at Mr. Thompson's house, and, in company with Mrs. Thompson, and Miss Amelia Thompson, the Crafts and Brown, proceeded from thence to the Exhibition. Saturday was selected, as a day upon which the largest number of the aristocracy and wealthy classes attend the Crystal Palace, and the company was, on this occasion, the most distinguished that had been gathered together within its walls since its opening day. Some fifteen thousand, mostly of the upper classes, were there congregated, including the Queen, ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... lived in Washington, doubtless fancies, like the rest of the benighted world, that its officials are its aristocracy. The Senate of the United States is regarded abroad as a sort of House of Peers. One has to come and live in Washington to hear of the 'Old Washingtonians,' the 'cave-dwellers,' as Sally calls us; I expected to see a coat of blue mould on each ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... "You think zo? I wouldn't moch like to drost 'em. I've driedt idt too often." He began to speak German again fiercely: "Besides, they owe me nothing. Do you think I knowingly gave my hand to save this oligarchy of traders and tricksters, this aristocracy of railroad wreckers and stock gamblers and mine-slave drivers and mill-serf owners? No; I gave it to the slave; the slave—ha! ha! ha!—whom I helped to unshackle to the common liberty of hunger and cold. And you think I would be the beneficiary of such a ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... to history. In Germany the dominant class is composed in part of an aristocracy by birth and of bourgeois capitalists, more or less of them ennobled. The interior policy of Germany since 1871 and even since 1866 is explained by the relations, sometimes kindly, sometimes hostile, of these two categories of persons, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... of fortune, and to have beheld the fair face of wisdom is to be forever her votary. Words spoken for the masses grow obsolete; but what is fit to be heard by the chosen few shall be true and beautiful while such minds are found on earth. In the end, it is this little band—this intellectual aristocracy—who move and guide the world. They see what is possible, outline projects, and give impulse, while the people do the work. That which is strongest in man is mind; and when a mind truly vigorous, open, supple, and illumined reveals itself, ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... man and a holy man, and should have despised such vanities, but an historic past had great seduction for him; a militant race fascinated him against his conscience, and aristocracy allured him despite all his better judgement; it seemed to him that if he had learned that he had come from a knightly gens such as this of the Tor'alba, he would have been more strongly moved to self-glorification than would have become a servant of the Church. ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... he did not know more than we could hope to. He, at any rate, had no doubt of his own omniscience. Judging from the intimate details with which he regaled us, he was equally in the confidence of the Vatican and the Quirinal, equally at home with the Blacks and the Whites. The secrets of the Roman aristocracy were his, he was the first to hear the scandals of the foreign colony. The opera depended upon his patronage and balls languished without him, though I could never understand how or why, so rarely did he leave us to enjoy them. Every archaeologist, every scholar, every historian in Rome appealed ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... inferos sermones. Et Scellij filium abominor (of him that cannot endure the sound of a matter; from Aristocrates Scellius sonne, whome a man deuoted to a democracy said he could not abide for the nearnesse of his name to an Aristocracy). Water from the handes (such doctrynes as ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... true place the miracle-worker and the scholar, these are perhaps not entirely new;[31] but St. Francis must have had singular moral strength to impose upon his contemporaries ideas in such absolute contradiction to their habits and their hopes; for the intellectual aristocracy of the thirteenth century with one accord found the perfect joy in knowledge, while the people found it ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... the government in the hands of a lesser number, so that there are more plain citizens than magistrates; and this form of government is called Aristocracy. ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... found himself immediately occupied with several portraits of the merchants of the Hanseatic League. During his first sojourn in England, he had painted the chancellor, Sir Thomas More, his protector and friend, and he had traced the features of several members of the aristocracy. On his return, circumstances for his gaining access to the court were less favourable. Henry VIII. was obeying his own good pleasure and satisfying all his caprices, and the chancellor was holding aloof, and could not exert his influence. Holbein did not now possess the title of Painter ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... hobnobbing with the aristocracy or writing treaties he was sitting in inns and drinking with teamsters ... had a long love affair with a cobbler's wife, and married the lady after ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... have its rightful place in the world it must become a science for the people. It must not be permitted to remain the possession of an aristocracy of intellect. The heart of thousands of social workers who are trying to reform society and cure its ills is throbbing with sympathy and hope, but there is much waste of energy and misdirection of zeal ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... to those who are sometimes termed our aristocracy, that is to say—the wealthy portion of the Jewish community, I would ask, Are you contented that the stigma which unjustly presses on the Jewish name should longer continue? I am free to admit that the Christians rather than the Jews require to be enlightened upon this point; but have ...
— Suggestions to the Jews - for improvement in reference to their charities, education, - and general government • Unknown
... tributaries by other cantons, and were governed by a bailiff residing in his castle, and exercising a power like that of a feudal baron. A considerable portion of Switzerland is still subject to an aristocracy, as absolute in its sway, and as much opposed to the extension of light and liberty, as any other branch of the holy alliance. The press is, in many cantons, under severe restrictions, and industry and enterprise are checked by the regulations of the incorporated trades, which place the rod of ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... foreign Powers, grown old and grey in their strenuous efforts to protect fellow-countrymen who had got mixed up with sailors and fishermen in drunken brawls, or assist at Gala performances, christenings, weddings and funerals. So much for the aristocracy. In the centre of a large space Mr. Blom suddenly discovered the chimney sweep of his quarter, the proprietor of a small inn, the chemist's assistant and others of the same standing. He watched the game-keeper in his green coat and silver ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... instances were cited amongst the highest circles of her success in the art which she professed. So ample were the pecuniary tributes which she levied upon the hopes and the fears, or the simple curiosity of the aristocracy, that she was thus able to display not unfrequently a disinterestedness and a generosity, which seemed native to her disposition, amongst the humbler classes of her applicants; for she rejected no addresses that were made to her, provided ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... by political power, owning men and money-bags, Colonel Dodd rode home with great serenity. He had even forgotten his rather tempestuous half-hour with the Honorable Archer Converse. As a matter of fact, gentlemen of the aristocracy of the state who prided themselves on their ancestry were considered by Colonel Dodd to be impracticable cranks; he despised the poor and hated the proud—and called himself a self-made man. And Colonel Dodd was firmly convinced that nobody ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... much of his time at the springs, but they don't seem to have purified his body, or subdued the natural ferocity of his temper. His wife must have a pleasant time. I wonder if he sleeps well, or enjoys Herzain's essays on Russian aristocracy? But make way, ye pedestrian rabble, for here comes a secretary of legation on horseback—make way, or he will tumble off and inflict some bodily injury upon you with the points of his waxed mustache! I know he must be a secretary of legation by the enormous polished boots he wears over his tight ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... years in the sixteenth century, eight in the seventeenth, twelve in the eighteenth, sixteen in the nineteenth, and by the original and characteristic institution which is technically known as nepotism, the selection of a Prime Minister, not from the College of the ecclesiastical aristocracy, but from the family of the reigning sovereign, the tonsured statesmen introduced a dynastic infusion into the fluctuations of ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... to disturb his view of the painting or the name of the artist, "Titty Ann was a great painter of the blue-blooded women of the aristocracy, so blue-blooded they seemed to be bruised all over, and Titty Ann wanted you to see there was no place they had ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... though it has been inspired "by the dreams of that most visionary of all centuries, the eighteenth." (V. de Lapouge, "Les Selections sociales", page 259, Paris, 1896.) The "Equality" which levels down and mixes (justly condemned, he holds, by the Comte de Gobineau), prevents the aristocracy of the blond dolichocephales from holding the position and playing the part which, in the interests of all, should belong to them. Otto Ammon, in his "Natural Selection in Man", and in "The Social Order and its Natural Bases" ("Die naturliche ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... so in a measure," I confessed. "I imagine that it will not be long before the English aristocracy derives as largely from American millionaires as from kings' mistresses. Not," I added, virtuously, "that we approve ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... Did he expect they could call? (This was the gentler sex.) Plutocracy might jostle aristocracy into the background, but the line must be drawn somewhere, and the daughter of a London soap-boiler they would not receive. Who was to be positive there had been a marriage at all. And poor Inez Catheron! Ah it was very sad—very sad. There was a well-known, well-hidden taint of insanity ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... with a rose from the Dovecot hot-house for buttonhole (which he slipped into his pocket when he saw other boys approaching), delivered them at the doors of the aristocracy, where, by the way, he had been a few weeks ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... cold Northern city. You must not think that Silver is totally ignorant; Shadow had the education of her day, poor thing, for ours was a good old family as old families go in this new country of ours, where three generations of well-to-do people constitute aristocracy. But religion, so called, I have not taught her. Is she any the worse for ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... not pretend to embrace the religion of all the savages in the world. We are content with typical, and, as a rule, well-observed examples. We range from the creeds of the most backward and worst-equipped nomad races, to those of peoples with an aristocracy, hereditary kings, houses and agriculture, ending with the Supreme Being of the highly civilised Incas, and with the Jehovah of ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... used again and again so long as any sort of reform is demanded. Of course it need hardly be said that when Sir Robert Inglis referred to mob orators he used the phrase as a term of contempt applying to all speakers who advocated principles which were not the principles represented by the Tory aristocracy. A Tory landlord spouting any kind of nonsense to the most ignorant crowd would not have been, according to this definition, a mob orator; he would have been a high-bred Englishman, instructing his humbler brethren as to the way they ought to go. Sir Robert ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... to me, and because it is my first duty to shed it only for their honor and security. The population of Berlin is only a victim of the war, while the instigators of the hostilities between France and Prussia have escaped. But I will humiliate and impoverish the court-aristocracy, who dared to oppose me, and make them beg their bread ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... way the opposition of dignitaries, very strong some mouths earlier, had grown silent and yielded to boundless obedience. The whole aristocracy, all the priests, fell on their faces before Ramses XIII; Mefres and ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... Burleigh used to say, with Aristotle and the Emperor Frederick II. to back him, that 'nobility was ancient riches,' whence also the Spanish were wont to call their nobles ricos hombres, and the aristocracy of America are the descendants of those who first became wealthy, by whatever means. Petroleum will in this wise be the source of much good blood among our posterity. The aristocracy of the South, such as it is, has the shallowest ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... illumination, while all the intermediate view is in shadow. No wonder that the Pincian Hill is the favourite promenade of Rome, and that on week-days and Sunday afternoons you see multitudes of people showing every phase of Roman life, and hundreds of carriages containing the flower of the Roman aristocracy, with beautiful horses, and footmen in rich liveries, crowding the piazza below, ascending the winding road, and driving or walking round between the palms and the pines, over the garden-paths, to the sound of band music. And thus they continue ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... Wisdom to govern us, we must be governed by the Wisest, we must have an Aristocracy of Talent! cry many. True, most true; but how to get it? The following extract from our young friend of the Houndsditch Indicator is worth perusing: 'At this time,' says he, 'while there is a cry everywhere, articulate or inarticulate, for an "Aristocracy ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... you from having any. You see," Mr. Kennaston went on, with somewhat the air of one climbing upon his favourite hobby, "money is the only thing that counts nowadays. In America, the rich are necessarily our only aristocracy. It is quite natural. One cannot hope for an aristocracy of intellect, if only for the reason that not one person in a thousand has any; and birth does not count for much. Of course, it is quite true that all of our remote ancestors came over with William the Conqueror—I have sometimes thought ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... natural pride in its own aristocracy, which is the pride of its culture. Culture only acknowledges the excellence whose criticism is in its inner perfection, not in any external success. When this pride succumbs to some compulsion of necessity ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... first parliament, had reason to see the danger attending that station which he had assumed, and the obstacles which he would meet with in governing an unruly aristocracy, always divided by faction, and at present inflamed with the resentments consequent on such recent convulsions. The peers, on their assembling, broke out into violent animosities against each other; forty gauntlets, the pledges of furious battle, were thrown on the floor of the house by noblemen ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... possessed of great wealth, and through his marriage with the beautiful Isabella Bobadilla affiliated with the highest nobility, and having been appointed Governor of Cuba by Charles V.—the flower of the Spanish and Portuguese aristocracy flocked to his standard. The seven large and three small ships, including his flag-ship, the "San Christoval," in which the expedition set sail, were fitted out with great splendor. De Soto was then forty-two years of age, having been born at Xeres, Spain, ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... were to Ferragut the aristocracy of humanity. Its potent climate had tempered mankind as in no other part of the planet, giving him a dry and resilient power. Tanned and bronzed by the profound absorption of the sun and the energy of the atmosphere, its navigators were transmuted into pure metal. The men from the ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... everything is done on a financial basis, payment being made for work only. The lazy and the incapable are being pushed to the wall. Many of the poorest and most pitiable people of the land to-day are the proud sons of the former aristocracy, who glory in the history of their ancestors, but are not able or willing to change their old habits of thought ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... aristocracy except that of genius or of character. Our countrymen are all citizens. Our government was founded upon the principle that "all men are created free and equal" and though intellectual endowments differ ...
— A Broader Mission for Liberal Education • John Henry Worst
... the poet, walked towards the long gardens of Beni-Mora. She passed over a wooden bridge. White dust was flying from the road, along which many of the Arab aristocracy were indolently strolling, carrying lightly in their hands small red roses or sprigs of pink geranium. In their white robes they looked, she thought, like monks, though the cigarettes many of them were smoking fought against the illusion. Some of them were dressed like ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... on terms so moderate that he would not ask for nor accept any profit. He, indeed, could imagine no higher nor holier duty than that of assisting in the dissemination of a paper which boldly and energetically preached the extinction of the aristocracy and the perfect equality in social position, and in property too, of all classes of the community. Accordingly the coffins, with a rudeness in make and material which were in perfect keeping with the purpose to which they were to be applied, were got ready; and Mr. Cleave, in the dead of night, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... the royalists. Then came the Revolution of 1820 in the mother country. Forthwith demands were heard for a recognition of the liberal regime. Fearful of being displaced from power, the viceroy with the support of the clergy and aristocracy ordered Agustin de Iturbide, a Creole officer who had been an active royalist, to quell an insurrection in the ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... his exploiters, the Orangeman of the people has lived in a world of phantoms. In politics he has never in his whole career spoken for himself. The Catholic peasant comes to articulate, personal speech in Davitt; the national aristocracy in Parnell. The industrial worker discovers within his own camp a multitude of captains. Even landlordism, although it has produced no leader, has produced many able spokesmen. Every other section in Ireland enriches public life with an interpreter of its mind sprung from its own ranks. Orange Ulster ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... been deemed almost impossible—that a conservative should take up the reforming ideas of the Gracchi, and should become the champion of equal rights for the Italians—had nevertheless occurred; a man of the high aristocracy had resolved to emancipate the Italians from the Sicilian Straits to the Alps and the government at one and the same time, and to apply all his earnest zeal, all his trusty devotedness to these generous plans of reform. Whether he actually, as was ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... church there is no aristocracy of sanctity, nor does the name of saint belong only to those who live high above the ordinary tumults of life and the secularities of daily duty. You may be as true a saint in a factory—ay! and a far ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren |
