"Chirography" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me. One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... waiting heap of mail, proof, and manuscript, Hal selected the sheets covered with Milly Neal's neat business chirography. She had written her account briefly and with restraint, building her "story" around the girl's letter. It set forth the tragedy ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... over "the girl" to me as she might a brown paper parcel of moist sugar. She supplied, gratis, a personal voucher for the woman I had engaged, having known her well for five years. Katy had, moreover, a model "recommend," which she unwrapped from a bit of newspaper that had kept it clean. The chirography was the fashionable "long English;" the diction was good, and the orthography faultless. Envelope and paper had evidently come from ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... study to acquire an elegant, free, and educated hand; there is nothing so useful, so sure to commend the writer everywhere, as such a chirography; while a cramped, poor, slovenly, uneducated, unformed handwriting is sure to produce the impression upon the reader that those qualities are more or less indicative of the writer's character. The angular English hand is at present the fashion, although less legible and not more beautiful ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... blotted and the scrawl characteristic of an office boy's chirography proved that his terms at public school had not done Scorch much good. This was ...
— A Little Miss Nobody - Or, With the Girls of Pinewood Hall • Amy Bell Marlowe
... then realized that, without thinking, I had been following a succession of faint lines, cross-ruled on my white paper, and looking up, I saw that a leaf-filtered opening had reflected strands of a spider-web just above my head, and I had been adapting my lines to the narrow spaces, my chirography controlled by ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... % 590. Writing. — N. writing &c. v.; chirography, stelography[obs3], cerography[obs3]; penmanship, craftmanship[obs3]; quill driving; typewriting. writing, manuscript, MS., literae scriptae[Lat]; these presents. stroke of the pen, dash of the pen; coupe ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... many of the private houses in Damascus and Aleppo. The building is of wood, the walls ornamented with detestable frescoes by modern Greek artists, and except a small but splendid collection of arms, and some wonderful specimens of Arabic chirography, there is ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... now. Mechanically he picked it up from the mantel, where he had tossed it upon entering the room, glancing carelessly at the superscription. His countenance changed when he saw it; his lips trembled, and a hard, bitter light crept into his brown eyes. He remembered the chirography but too well. ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... sheets. On the walls, from ceiling to foot-board, hung faded photographs of actors and actresses, most of them with bold inscriptions dashed across their corners in which the donors invariably expressed their friendship, affection, or if the chirography was feminine their devoted love, for "dear Claude Martel." Over the mantel was a portrait of dear Claude himself, taken in the role of Mark Antony, and making rather a good job of it, on the whole, with his fine ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... had seen it we had gazed upon a sea of radiance pierced with lanced forests, swept with gigantic gonfalons of flame; we had seen it emptied of its fiery mists—a vast slate covered with the chirography of a mathematical god; we had seen it filled with the symboling of the Metal Hordes and dominated by the colossal integrate hieroglyph of the living City; we had seen it as a radiant lake over which ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... just above the cherry tree, her name was written with a pencil that had been many times wet to get the desired degree of blackness, "Eleanor Hamlin, Colhassett, Massachusetts. Private Dairy," and on the first page was this warning in the same painstaking, heavily shaded chirography, "This book is sacrid, and not be trespased in or read one word of. By order ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... me! what has got into Mirandy?" And he looked scrutinizingly at the little, fine, thin, faintly-traced inscription on the package, as if the writer had begrudged the ink that must be expended on the letters, or from a subtle and mystic self-sympathy had made the chirography faint, delicate, and ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... reference to one point, with not having thought it necessary to "pore over musty manuscripts, in the obscure chirography of two centuries ago." So far as my proper subject could be elucidated by it, I am constrained to claim, that this labor was encountered, to an extent not often attempted. The files of Courts, and State, County, Town, and Church records, were very extensively and thoroughly studied ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... distance from the post-office as I read this, for Mr. ——'s chirography was almost undecipherable, even to one accustomed to it. I was just folding the letter to replace it in the envelope, when I heard heavy footsteps hurrying behind me. I turned my head and saw Wilson, quite ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... grace and charm; and, in the deeper stroke with which the x was crossed, I felt a challenge, a readiness to abide by consequences once her word was given. Then my own inclination to think well of her angered me. It was only a pretty bit of chirography, and I dropped the book impatiently when I heard ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... another roll, evidently pamphlets, and two letters,—one from Professor Grandet, the other in an unknown hand. She hurriedly opened the professor's, and struggled through its tangled and much abbreviated chirography, looking up finally with a pale, puzzled, yet radiant face. "I can't quite make it out. I think—it seems to say that my letter has done him much good; he says it was read before the society, and is ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... had purchased from a monastery. Unhappily, Count Musin-Pushkin's valuable library was burned during the conflagration of Moscow, in 1812. But the Slovo had been twice published previous to that date, and had been examined by many learned paleographists, who decided that the chirography belonged to the end of the fourteenth century or the beginning ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... a charming. Italian bronze ink-stand, over whose cover wrestled the infant Hercules in the act of strangling a goose—in friendly aid of "drivers of the quill." My father wrote with a gold pen, and I can hear now, as it seems, the rapid rolling of his chirography over the broad page, as he formed his small, rounded, but irregular letters, when filling his journals, in Italy. He leaned very much on, his left arm while writing, often holding the top of the manuscript book lovingly with his left hand, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... N. writing &c v.; chirography, stelography^, cerography^; penmanship, craftmanship^; quill driving; typewriting. writing, manuscript, MS., literae scriptae [Lat.]; these presents. stroke of the pen, dash of the pen; coupe de plume; line; headline; pen and ink. letter &c 561; uncial writing, cuneiform character, arrowhead, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the company are in a talking mood, I replace the manuscript or manuscripts, clap on the cover, and wait until there is a moment's quiet before taking it off again. I might guess the writers sometimes by the handwriting, but there is more trouble taken to disguise the chirography than I choose to take to identify it as that of any ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... than ever, which naturally called out my powers of self-assertion and led to some lively conversation between us. But that is neither here nor there. He had brought me an answer to my advertisement and I was presently engrossed by it. It was an uneducated woman's epistle and its chirography and spelling were dreadful; so I will just mention its contents, which were highly interesting in themselves, as ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... encircling his brow was a moist red line that told of a silk hat but lately doffed. "Give the gentleman a cup of tea," said he to Mesrour, looking up from the note, which now completed, he was perusing with an air that indicated satisfaction with its chirography, orthography, and literary style. At last, placing it in an envelope and affixing thereto a seal, he turned and ordering Mesrour to give Mr. Middleton another cup of tea, he lighted a cigarette and began ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... unseen admirers are of almost daily occurrence. I think I would not exaggerate in saying she might reckon by the bushel these letters, written generally in very questionable grammar, and worse chirography. In very few instances has she ever replied to them, for they have been usually from people possessing so little claim upon her, that the favors they so boldly requested could only be viewed in ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... The chirography was labored, heavy and trembling; it betrayed the stiff hand of a man more accustomed to guiding ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... glimpse of good Dr. Dolliver showed a flannel night-cap, fringed round with stray locks of silvery white hair, and surmounting a meagre and duskily yellow visage, which was crossed and criss-crossed with a record of his long life in wrinkles, faithfully written, no doubt, but with such cramped chirography of Father Time that the purport was illegible. It seemed hardly worth while for the patriarch to get out of bed any more, and bring his forlorn shadow into the summer day that was made for younger folks. The Doctor, ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Ah, but it's a swate pair ye'd make! (the rascal knew I was a married man). Ah, miss, if you could see him wroightin' day and night with such an illigant hand of his own—(he had evidently believed from the gossip of my servants that I was a professor of chirography)—if ye could see him, miss, as I have, ye'd ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... the long winter through. The grandfathers of the neighbourhood could remember when these receptacles were their writing-desks, in which, stick in hand, they were taught to trace in the smoothed sand their names or any higher efforts of chirography that the teacher might demand. These superannuated articles of furniture were now used in winter as places of deposit for the children's folded outer garments, rather than the cold vestibule. There, too, the dinner-baskets ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... Christian faith opened a wide field for the outward decoration of religious books. "The Hours" (meaning devotional hours) of kings and queens are magnificent specimens of chirography, showing also the skill of artists in the earliest centuries. The art of preparing these volumes was divided into two branches: that of the Miniatori, or illuminators, who furnished the paintings, the borders, and arabesques, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... down at his table and wrote a letter to himself. With young Kent's epistle for his model, he made an amazingly clever forgery of the enthusiastic writer's chirography, and at the bottom signed ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... several churches,—to men and women who had "labored with him in the gospel,"—casual yet significant words, which "show a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity." The letters were written by an amanuensis,—all save these concluding words which Paul added in his own chirography. He seems to desire to put more of himself into these personal messages than into the didactic and doctrinal parts of his epistles. At the end of the second of the letters to the Thessalonians we find these words: "The salutation ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... had already bought an album in Charlestown, and after copying the sonnet several times to practise his chirography, he inscribed it upon the first page—a pink one—signing it "Your most obedient Hunsdon," with an austere flourish. Then he carefully wrapped the album in tissue paper and sent it to Anne's room, with strict ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... "Miserable chirography is one of the most prolific causes of Post-office inefficiency. It is safe to say that unmistakably written directions would remove nine-tenths of the complaints. What is a non-plussed clerk to do with letters addressed to 'Mahara Seney,' 'Old Cort,' or 'Cow House,' ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe |
