Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Puritan   Listen
noun
Puritan  n.  
1.
(Eccl. Hist.) One who, in the time of Queen Elizabeth and the first two Stuarts, opposed traditional and formal usages, and advocated simpler forms of faith and worship than those established by law; originally, a term of reproach. The Puritans formed the bulk of the early population of New England. Note: The Puritans were afterward distinguished as Political Puritans, Doctrinal Puritans, and Puritans in Discipline.
2.
One who is scrupulous and strict in his religious life; often used reproachfully or in contempt; one who has overstrict notions. "She would make a puritan of the devil."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Puritan" Quotes from Famous Books



... were a source of much trouble to the sexton, for in digging a new grave they came up to the surface in quantities, and had to be shovelled in and covered up again, so that the bodily remains of successive generations were jumbled together, and Puritan and Georgian Thaxtons were mixed promiscuously with their descendants. Nevertheless, Eastthorpe had really had a history. It had known victory and defeat, love, hatred, intrigue, hope, despair, and all the passions, just as Elizabeth, King Charles, Cromwell, and Queen Anne knew them, ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford

... was standing on the crest of the barricade, gun in hand, raised his beautiful, austere face. Enjolras, as the reader knows, had something of the Spartan and of the Puritan in his composition. He would have perished at Thermopylae with Leonidas, and ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... It was proposed to open Congress with prayer. Objections were made on account of the religious differences of the delegates. Old Samuel Adams arose, with his white hair streaming on his shoulders,—the same earnest Puritan who, in 1768, had written to England: "We hope in God that no such establishment as the Protestant episcopate shall ever take place in America,"—and said: "Gentlemen, shall it be said that it is possible that there can be any religious differences which will prevent men from crying to ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple

... in Richmond able to bear arms was sent an order—"Come at once to the front"—and among them was Prescott, nothing loath. His mother kissed him a tearless good-by, hiding her grief and fear under her Puritan face. ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler

... so quietly Lying, it fancies A holier odour About it, of pansies— A rosemary odour, Commingled with pansies— With rue and the beautiful Puritan pansies. ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... think and act for myself I should be a slave. You might say, 'We KNOW we are right, that what we believe has the Divine sanction.' That is what the tormentors of the Inquisition said and believed; that is what my Puritan and persecuting forefathers said and believed; what does history say now? The world is growing wise enough to understand that God has no slaves. He endows men and women with a conscience. The supreme obligation is to be true to this. When any one who has passed the bounds ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe

... ordinary course. But because Cicero's honesty was abnormal, we are first surprised, and then, suspecting little deviations, rise up in wrath against him, because in the midst of Roman profligacy he was not altogether a Puritan in ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope

... and bands, and had taken off his cap, which was held by an attendant, who stood near the stool on which he was mounted. The latter differed materially from his master. His closely-cropped hair, demure looks, sugar-loaf hat, and suit of rusty sable, seemed to proclaim him a Puritan; but his twinkling eye—for he had but one, and wore a black patch over the orifice—his inflamed cheeks, and ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth

... a state of absolute destitution of the necessaries of life. Here they are employed in menial services, lodged and fed until they can be sent to their friends, or employment found for them. We went over the building, a spacious structure, in the Canongate, of the plainest Puritan architecture, with wide low rooms, which, at the time of the union of Scotland with England, served as the mansion of the Duke of Queensbury. The accommodations of course are of the humblest kind. We were shown into the sewing-room, were we saw several healthy-looking ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant

... same thing held true of our politicians, even the worst: that the average Roman rich man, like the average Roman public man, of the end of the Republic and of the beginning of the Empire, makes the corresponding man of our own time look like a self-denying, conscientious Puritan. He did not think very highly of the American multi-millionaire, nor of his wife, sons, and daughters when compared with some other types of our citizens; even in ability the plutocrat did not seem ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... title we may presume that he was no Puritan,) published a little book in the year 1626, which he wittily called "Adam out of Eden." In this he undertakes to show how Adam, under the embarrassing circumstance of being shut out of Paradise, may increase the product of a farm from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various

... is town-morality and country-morality, all over the world, as they tell me. But, in America, our morals were, and long have been, separated into three great and very distinct classes; viz.—New England, or puritan-morals; middle colonies, or liberal morals; and southern colonies, or latitudinarian morals. I shall not pretend to point out all the shades of difference in these several schools; though that in which I had ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper

... opinion by entering into no entangling alliances with brother owners, and the bookmaker did not live who could call him friend. He attended strictly to his own business, which was training horses and racing them to win, and while he did not swear, drink liquor, or smoke, he proved he was no Puritan by chewing fine-cut tobacco and betting on his horses when he thought they had a chance to win and the odds were to his liking. For the latter ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan

... Islanders, shot buffalo, hunted chamois, and lunched on mangosteens at Penang. Through all his wanderings the loftiest sense of what was heroic in human nature and divine in its purified form, the monitions of a most tender conscience, and the echoes of that Puritan education which above all other schemes of training makes human responsibility terrible, had gone with him like his tissue. He saw the good and great things within reach of a fulfilled manhood, and of a sudden waked up to feel that they could on earth never be his. He was naturally ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day

... the rumor that Sir Peter Morley had pronounced his wife to be "the loveliest woman in Leicestershire"; for Lady Morley herself was a sufficiently splendid type, with her austere Puritan beauty. As for the rector, it was considered that his admiration of Mrs. Nevill Tyson somewhat stultified his ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair

... her approval, for she shared with Billy his horror of debt, just as both shared it with that early tide of pioneers with a Puritan ethic, ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... enjoyment of large conveniences; it is not improbable that the same men will handle and enjoy in much the same manner, though in theory they are doing it as instruments, and not as individuals. For instance, the Prime Minister has a private house, which is also (I grieve to inform that eminent Puritan) a public house. It is supposed to be a sort of Government office; though people do not generally give children's parties, or go to bed in a Government office. I do not know where Mr. Herbert Samuel ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton

... Agamemnon, may not unreasonably induce us to conclude that similar heroes were to succeed him. Shakspeare made a better man when his imagination moulded the mighty figure of Macbeth. And if you will measure Satan by Prometheus, the blind old Puritan's work by that of the fiery Grecian poet, does not Milton's angel surpass AEschylus's—surpass him by "many ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Plato and Socrates and the Seven Sages adorn this illustrious circle, which includes likewise the philosophers of Chaldea and Egypt. Opinions like these were no longer the passport to Papal favour or even toleration. The age of the humanist Popes was past, and the Puritan movement, stimulated into life by the active competition of the Reformers, was beginning to show its strength, so that a man who spoke in terms of respect or reverence concerning Averroes or Plato would put himself in no light peril. Thus for those of Cardan's enemies who were minded ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters

... books; enough if, in the one, there glimmer some hint of the great light that blinds us from heaven; enough if, in the other, there shine, even upon foul details, a spirit of magnanimity. I would scarce send to the VICOMTE a reader who was in quest of what we may call puritan morality. The ventripotent mulatto, the great cater, worker, earner and waster, the man of much and witty laughter, the man of the great heart and alas! of the doubtful honesty, is a figure not yet clearly set before the world; he still awaits a sober and yet genial portrait; ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... her occupations. "'Life's employments are life's enjoyments,'" she sadly writes on the night before Christmas, "and surely I have not a few of them; but with my beloved husband and son far from me I cannot half enjoy my life. I have given the servants their presents to-night" (though living in Puritan Connecticut, our madam was of Hollandish stock, and did not ignore the Christmas festival), "and paid them eighteen pence apiece not to wish me a Merry Christmas to-morrow, for little merriment indeed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various

... on the hill-sides, his long black coat buttoned strictly about him, his soft felt hat crushed over the thin, grey face. Pretty Fanny Elliot had won the squire's heart as he rode across the down. Do you not see the shy figure of the Puritan maiden tripping through the gorse, hastening the hoofs of the squire's cob? And, furnished with some pretext of estate business, he often rode to the farm that lay under the shaws at the end of the coombe. The squire had to promise to become one of the Brethren and ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore

... is a find. Jones and Giuseppe! Puritan father, Italian mother—and he worships me! It will be a test for my personal magnetism, the handling of Gieseppe Jones will. He hates a thief worse than the devil hates holy water. If I could make him steal for me, I would know that I could ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis

... Mrs. Hummer, who flew off with a whirr like an angry little spinning-wheel—if such a proper Puritan thing is ever angry; and there in the nest were two tiny ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues

... "clerk it" in the village store. She did marry him, and, a little later on, and most obligingly for all concerned, he died. Few people mourned him. His wife, though, was among the few. She had a conscience of Puritan extraction, and the keenest possible ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... saying that she found her level in going to this particular quarter, or associating with these people, for from what I was told, I should think the worst den in London far too good for her. The person from whom I got my information, as you may suppose, no great Puritan, shuddered and grew sick in telling me of the nameless infamies which were laid to her charge. After living there for a year, or perhaps a little more, she disappeared as suddenly as she came, and they saw nothing of her till about ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen

... while it awes. Again we have in his life the story, so often told in the Ohio annals, of early struggles with poverty, and of triumph over unfriendly fate. The child who was born in the rude farmhouse in Orange, Cuyahoga County, in 1831, was of Puritan lineage on his father's side and Huguenot blood on his mother's; and throughout his life he showed the qualities of both strains. He was left the youngest of four children to the care of his widowed ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells

... the heathen is an honorable characteristic of the Spanish conquests. The Puritan, with equal religious zeal, did comparatively little for the conversion of the Indian, content, as it would seem, with having secured to himself the inestimable privilege of worshipping God in his own way. Other adventurers who ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott

... prithee, Jack, no more of that if you love me. What, shall I stop short with the game in full view? Faith, I believe the fellow's turned puritan. What think you of turning methodist, Jack? You have a tolerable good canting countenance, and, if escaped being taken up for a Jesuit, you might make ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore

... as prosperity follows privation, the mind expands, reaching out for what the changed psychology demands. It is the old story of Rome grown rich and gay in mood and dress. There were of course, villains in Puritan drab and Grecian white, but the child in every man takes symbol for fact. So it is that to-day, some shudder with the belief that Beauty, re-enthroned in all her gorgeous modern hues, means near disaster. The progressives claim that into the world has come ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank

... top of his head, and trained to hang down on each side in curled locks, one of which, descending two or three inches lower than the others, intimated Montrose's compliance with that fashion against which it pleased Mr. Prynne, the puritan, to write a treatise, entitled, THE UNLOVELINESS OF LOVE-LOCKS. The features which these tresses enclosed, were of that kind which derive their interest from the character of the man, rather than from ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott

... willing to accept the phrase. I think it is true in the past, I hope it will be true in the future, that we go at the things which we have to do with a certain intensity, which I suppose we owe to these Puritan Fathers whom to-night we are celebrating. Certainly we have gone at this business of emigration with that intensity. It is perfectly true that there are in Brooklyn to-day more people than there are in Boston, who were born in Boston from the old New England blood. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... was the Duke of Cimicifugas, and no other. Hilda was presented first, while I tried to fire my courage by thinking of the Puritan Fathers, and Plymouth Rock, and the Boston Tea-Party, and the battle of Bunker Hill. Then my turn came. I murmured some words which might have been anything, and curtsied in a stiff-necked self-respecting ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... remonstrance into pleasantry, replied to Roland that he owed his blood to the nation, but neither owed it the sacrifice of his tastes nor his amours; that he understood patriotism as a hero, and not as a puritan. The bitterness of his language left venom behind, and they ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... the double-turreted monitors Puritan, Terror, and Amphitrite, contracted for under the act of March 3, 1883, is in process of construction. No work has been done during the past year on their armor for lack of the necessary appropriations. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... clipped question struck him squarely now. Just what were his expectations concerning Claire Robson? The thought turned him cold. Essentially he was of Puritan mold, but he had always had a theory that love of illicit pleasures must have been uncommonly strong in a people who found it necessary to fight the flesh so uncompromisingly. Battling with the elements upon the bleak shores of New England contributed, no doubt, to the gray and chastened spirits ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... mural painting in this country. Doubtless, from various traces discovered under Puritan whitewash, the walls of our mediaeval churches were painted as frequently as in continental countries, but so completely did artistic tradition and religious sentiment change after the Reformation that the opportunities have been few and the encouragement less for mural painting. ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane

... a group at the entrance of the Bay of Bengal, and are near 750 miles from the Sand Heads at Calcutta, and twelve degrees from the Equator. That on which the vessel was driven was in point of latitude about the centre, and may be easily known by a remarkable hill somewhat resembling a puritan's hat, and being placed in a hollow of the land, with much higher hills, both on the north and south of it. The anchorage is good, and a ship may ...
— The Wreck on the Andamans • Joseph Darvall

... Author of "Margret Howth" 69. Political Problems and Conditions of Peace Woodbury Davis 70. Puritan ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... study of this character and this development. The man shows himself in them with none the less disguise because he shows himself unwillingly. In these hard, crabbed, formal, painfully truthful letters we see the whole narrow, precise, and fanatical soul of this Puritan of art, who sacrificed himself, his family, his friends, and his country to an artistic sense of duty only to be paralleled among those religious people whom he ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... I won't offend again. Well, then, I will confess that I don't know why you wear jewels. There must be a Puritan strain in my character, for I cannot enter into the desire for jewels. I say this merely because you have practically invited ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett

... bark a counterpart, as it were a kennel of dogs; roar out a treble, as it were a sort of bulls; and grunt out a bass, as it were a number of hogs: Christmas, as it is kept, is the devil's Christmas: and Prynne employed a great number of pages to persuade men to affect the name of "Puritan," as if Christ had been a Puritan; and so he saith in ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume

... in the occasional constraints and affectations to which the writer had been driven by his self-imposed necessities. The same chimera exists in Germany; and so much further is it carried, that one great puritan in this heresy (Wolf) has published a vast dictionary, the rival of Adelung's, for the purpose of expelling every word of foreign origin and composition out of the language, by assigning some equivalent term spun out from ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... I'm asking you to cut the capital gains tax to a maximum of 15.4%. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you, those of you who say, "Oh no, someone who's comfortable may benefit from this" you kind of remind me of the old definition of the Puritan, who couldn't sleep at night worrying that somehow someone somewhere was out ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... old Roman johnnies who jawed in the Forum knew what they were about, but added that the Puritan chap with the wart on his nose was a thundering old humbug, ending triumphantly: "And we whacked old Bony at Waterloo! And—suppose you stop a Boer bullet and get knocked out—where do I ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... respectable Puritan gentlemen at Rome also held that a wife be content to be a humble admirer of her husband (e.g., Pliny, Paneg., 83, hoc efficiebat, quod mariti minores erant ... nam uxori sufficit obsequii gloria, etc.). But Roman law insisted that what was morally right for the ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker

... cannot be utterly depopulated of its old stocks, for at every turn you come up against those good old Puritan names which bespeak a longer ancestry than many an English peer can claim. I find among the signatures to a petition against the reinstatement of an elevated railroad in Boston, such names as Adams, Morse, Lowell, Emerson, Bowditch, Lothrop, Storey, Dabney, Whipple, Ticknor, and ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer

... to a section of Republicans. Charles I. was executed in 1649; and, though his son came back to the throne in 1660, the face, the manners, the thoughts of England and of Englishmen had undergone a complete internal and external change. The Puritan party was everywhere the ruling party; and its views and convictions, in religion, in politics, and in literature, held unquestioned sway in almost every part of England. In the Puritan party, the ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn

... James I. confronted and confuted the Puritan divines whom he invited to lay their complaints before him, and there in his pedantic brow-beating so hammered their hard metal that he tempered it to the sword soon to be unsheathed against his son; it was there that Charles ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... "What a little Puritan it is!" returned Grace, playfully caressing the rosy cheeks of Edith, who had now joined her in the hall. "Arthur never will know, for I certainly shall not tell either him or any one, and I gave Mrs. Johnson some ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes

... seldom glanced up, as it used to do, at the organ-loft where he sat separated from the choir by a low green curtain. Thus he had on his hands the whole unemployed day, with no break in its monotony; and it often seemed interminable. The Puritan Sabbath as it then existed was not a thing to be trifled with. All temporal affairs were sternly set aside; earth came to a standstill. Dutton, however, conceived the plan of writing down in a little blank-book the events of his ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... 1885, resulted in, the passage of a law raising the "age of consent" from thirteen to sixteen years. It is almost beyond belief, that, in the State of Delaware, only a few years ago, the "age of consent" was actually as low as seven years (180.194)! Even in Puritan New England, we find the "age of consent" fixed at thirteen in New Hampshire, and at fourteen in Connecticut, Vermont, and Maine (180. 195). It is a sad comment upon our boasted culture and progress that, as of old, the law protects, and even religion fears to disturb too rudely, ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... well known. How they tormented the Puritan Commissioners who came thither in 1649, to break up the place, and dispose of it for the benefit of the Commonwealth! The poor Puritans had a horrid time. A disembodied dog growled under their bed, and bit the bed-clothes; ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum

... hand before, having been fumbled and friveled over by softly incompetent, feminine fingers. But presently it began to thrill under the passionate hand of its lover, and carried away by his one innocent weakness, Jack was launched upon a sea of musical reminiscences. Scraps of church music, Puritan psalms of his boyhood; dying strains from sad, forgotten operas, fragments of oratorios and symphonies, but chiefly phases from old masses heard at the missions of San Pedro and Santa Isabel, swelled ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... universally received. Lord Bacon, I think, was the latest author of note in the library bequeathed by John Harvard; and Lord Bacon rejected the Copernican system. English literature had had its great Elizabethan age; but little of the genius of that literature had penetrated the Puritan mind. It is doubtful if a copy of Shakespeare had found its way to these shores in 1636. Milton's star was just climbing its native horizon, invisible as yet to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various

... was gone I made up my mind that, his commands and threats notwithstanding, I must continue to live as I always did: joyful, free within certain limits and careless of puritan standards. If the rest of the royal ladies, and the women of the service, want to mope and look sour, that's their affair. Let them wear out their lives between confessional, knitting socks for orphan children, ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer

... undaunted {216} courage, however, contributed largely to the success of this bold venture. Captain Edward Tyng, a capable colonial sailor, was the commodore of the little fleet of thirteen vessels, carrying in all about two hundred guns. The Puritan spirit of New England had much influence in organising an expedition, and whose flag had a motto suggested by the Methodist revivalist, Whitfield: "Nil desperandum Christo duce." The story of the success of the New England troops, ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot

... respect, our Puritan ancestors were the true children of Pharisaism, and their Blue Laws more properly belong in the Talmud than in the Constitution of an American Commonwealth. God loves a cheerful giver, and would you not judge from appearances that religion was painful to these pious witch-burners and everything ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton

... from the presence of war though savage, and recognized as the handmaid of desolation. Frequently and admirably has Burns given way to these impulses of nature; both with reference to himself and in describing the condition of others. Who, but some impenetrable dunce or narrow-minded puritan in works of art, ever read without delight the picture which he has drawn of the convivial exaltation of the rustic adventurer, Tam o'Shanter? The poet fears not to tell the reader in the outset that his hero was a desperate and sottish drunkard, whose excesses were frequent as his opportunities. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... conflict, if it would be prayer indeed" (Colossian Studies, p. 124). The Bishop goes on to quote a familiar incident which illustrates this great truth: "A visitor knocked betimes one morning at the door of a good man, a saint of the noblest Puritan type—and that was a fine type indeed. He called as a friend to consult a friend, sure of his welcome. But he was kept waiting long. At last a servant came to explain the delay: 'My master has been at prayer, and this morning he has ...
— The Prayers of St. Paul • W. H. Griffith Thomas

... the ultra Boer of South Africa, the Puritan of Puritans, the Covenanter of Covenanters, whose religious creed and conduct are compacted of manifold rigidities, and who would deem it as unpardonable a sin to shave off his beard, as it would have been for an early Methodist preacher to wear one. Formerly ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry

... all amounted to, told disjointedly, was this: Since Monny had had an inspiration the day after our arrival in Cairo, to give Rachel Guest a lot of her new unworn clothes, Rachel had become quite girlish and "flighty." She had lost her puritan primness, and behaved more in accordance with her slanting eyes than with her bringing up. She giggled like a schoolgirl rather than a schoolmistress, tried to make herself look young, and copied Monny in the way she tilted her hat and ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... those who came hither did not shrink from the hardships around them. They came to stay, and sent back for their friends. Samuel desired Christopher to follow him. Many of their families were large, there were at least nine members of this Puritan household. Samuel was born probably about 1610; he had emigrated from England in 1635 or 1636. His name is found at Ipswich, Mass., about 1637 where land was assigned to him. Ipswich had been organized in 1635 ...
— Log-book of Timothy Boardman • Samuel W Boardman

... there as long as I have been standing here, and is never a bit the better for it?' Our most earnest preaching is like putting a red-hot iron into a pond: the cold water puts it out and closes above it, and there is no more heard nor seen of it. Our old Puritan forefathers used to talk about 'gospel-hardened hearers.' I believe that there are people listening to me now who have become so inured to Christian preaching that, like artillery horses, they will not move a muscle or quiver if a whole battery of cannon is fired off under their ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... frequent regular intervals throughout the series of their days, a richer vein, as it were, of time. The improvement of this, in a manner by no means strained to the austerity of exercise prescribed in the Puritan rules, might diffuse a worth and a grace over all the time between, and assist them against the tendency there may be in its necessary habits and employments, to depress the intelligent nature into meanness or debasement. ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster

... the popular religious conscience. Again, by promulgating the doctrine of personal freedom, and by connecting itself with national politics, the Reformation was linked historically to the Revolution. It was the Puritan Church in England, stimulated by the patriotism of the Dutch Protestants, which established our constitutional liberty and introduced in America the general principle of the equality of men. This high political abstraction, latent in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... ceased. God left him to himself, as he puts it, and gave him over to his own wicked inclinations. He fell, he says, into all kinds of vice and ungodliness without further check. The expression is very strong, yet when we look for particulars we can find only that he was fond of games which Puritan preciseness disapproved. He had high animal spirits, and engaged in lawless enterprises. Once or twice he nearly lost his life. He is sparing of details of his outward history, for he regarded it as nothing but vanity; but his escapes from death were providences, and ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude

... Huger in his coach through the suburbs of Boston and of calling with him upon many distinguished personages. Huger charmed and delighted every one. Josiah Quincy said that he had that "charm of a high-bred southerner which wrought with such peculiar fascination upon those inheriting Puritan blood." Besides his attractive personality, there was the romantic association with the attempted rescue. Scott's novels were then in the full blossom of popularity; but there was no hero in all those brave tales whose adventures appeared ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow

... And what man of letters in England—a country abounding in "the oxen of the gods," strong, slow, and stupid—is free from his influence? Carlyle's early essay on Voltaire is a mixture of hatred and admiration. But read the Life of Frederick, and see how the French snake fascinates the Scotch Puritan, until at last he flings every reservation aside, and hails with glowing panegyric the Savior ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote

... the same rank in the middle, southern, and western states as Thanksgiving Day in the eastern states or New England, where, owing to the Puritan origin of the bulk of the inhabitants, Christmas is not much celebrated. In Pennsylvania many of the usages connected with it are of German origin, and derived from the early settlers of the Teutonic race, whose descendants ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 217, December 24, 1853 • Various

... son of a candidate for office, a boy wearing the golden boss, a lad not less than twelve years of age. He was jingling a pair of castanets and dancing a step which an immodest slave could not dance with decency." [57] Such might have been the reflections of a puritan had he entered a modern dancing-academy. We may be permitted to question the immorality of the exhibition thus displayed, but there can be no doubt as to the social ambition which it reveals—an ambition which would be perpetuated throughout the whole of the life of the boy with the castanets, ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... gender. I had got hold of her brother. In the meanwhile the mother had got a candle, and I saw the girl with the bedclothes up to her chin, for, like her brother, she was as naked as my hand. Although no Puritan, I was shocked. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... more durable, and I remember very well when you wore them. But they are out of fashion! And here is your collar turned down over your black satin stock, (where, by the by, have all the white cravats gone, that were a few years ago so fashionable?) as smooth as a puritan's! Don't you remember how much trouble you used to have, sometimes, to get your collar to stand up just so? Ah, brother, you are an incorrigible ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur

... be in a hurry, looking neither to the right nor left, nor abating her pace in the least until she reached the dock where the Fall River boat, Puritan, had but a little while previous poured forth her freight of humanity ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... queried in her heart, whether Dr. H. would feel satisfied that she could bring this wanderer to the fold of Christ without undertaking to batter down the walls of her creed; and yet, there they were, the Catholic and the Puritan, each strong in her respective faith, yet melting together in that embrace of love and sorrow, joined in the great communion of suffering. Mary took up her Testament, and read the fourteenth chapter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... to Walter Scott!—A monument forsooth! What has that bigot done for us, for freedom, or for truth? He always back'd the Cavalier against the Puritan, And sneer'd at just fraternity, and the equal rights ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... whenever I had a chance, within the four walls of my house; and three at least, who had refused at the festival, greedily drank rum behind a door. But there were others thoroughly consistent. I said the virtues of the race were bourgeois and puritan; and how bourgeois is this! how puritanic! how Scottish! and how Yankee!—the temptation, the resistance, the public hypocritical conformity, the Pharisees, the Holy Willies, and the true disciples. With ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... [8] The Puritan emigrants to New England represented a sturdy and well- educated class of English country squires and yeomen. They came of thrifty and well-to-do stock, the shiftless and incompetent not being represented. All had had good educational advantages, and many were graduates ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... acquaintanceship. His grandfather lived in the next house to my father's in Newington Green, and I had sometimes when a boy been invited to play in the old gentleman's garden. He was a fine specimen of the old Scotch puritan; stern, severe, and powerful, but very kind to children, on whom such men make a lasting impression. Although it was years after my introduction to Mrs. Taylor before my acquaintance with her became at all intimate or confidential, I very soon felt ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill

... Mr. President, spoken for the sole purpose of getting into the volumes that go out annually freighted with the rich eloquence of your speakers—the fact that the Cavalier as well as the Puritan was on the continent in its early days, and that he was "up and able to be about." I have read your books carefully and I find no mention of that fact, which seems to me an important one for preserving a sort of historical equilibrium if for nothing else. Let me remind you the Virginia Cavalier ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various

... which religious and civil liberty was beaten out in Europe at a time when the clang was scarcely heard anywhere else. We can never forget our historical debt to that country and to those people. Puritan, Independent, Huguenot, whoever he may be, forced to flee for conscience's sake, will not forget that in the Netherlands there was found in his time of need the asylum where conscience, property and ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford

... chairs of state and what pity that his Duke did not cut off his head to save him from the mean end (forgive) of retiring from the municipal incense "to arrange tastefully his gifts and medals"! Then the Puritan in me accepts no apology for bad morals in such as he. We can tolerate vice in a splendid nature whilst that nature is battling with the brute majority in defence of some human principle. The sympathy his manhood and his ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... people's life. It was also a bond of union, North and South, too strong to be separated by civil strife. It is an element in the make-up of the South that will ever be a conservative force in behalf of theology, of law and order, of Puritan institutions. ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 48, No. 10, October, 1894 • Various

... those who obtained such rights was a company of Dorchester merchants who planted a town on Cape Ann. The enterprise failed, and the colonists went off and settled at a place they called Naumkeag. But there was one man in Dorchester who was not discouraged by failure. He was John White, a Puritan rector. What had been done by the Separatists in a small way might be done, it seemed to White, on a great scale by an association of wealthy and influential Puritans. The matter was discussed by them in London, and in 1628 an association was formed, and a tract ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster

... still, the harebell and the Rhexia Virginica. The last, growing in patches of lively pink flowers on the edge of the meadows, had almost too gay an appearance for the rest of the landscape, like a pink ribbon on the bonnet of a Puritan woman. Asters and golden-rods were the livery which nature wore at present. The latter alone expressed all the ripeness of the season, and shed their mellow lustre over the fields, as if the now declining summer's ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... Notice the Puritan dress, cloaks, shoes, caps, and collars. These people are well dressed, and do not seem to be poor. Perhaps they are simply longing to hear from their friends, and hoping the ship will bring some news of them. It may be that it has ...
— Stories Pictures Tell - Book Four • Flora L. Carpenter

... Dick Forrest, son of Richard the Lucky, Son of Jonathan the Puritan, son of John who was a sea-rover, as his father Albert before him, who was the son of Mortimer, a pirate who was hanged in ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... the mendicant orders,—"the Begging Friars," as they were styled. He also advocated the cause of the king against the demands of the Pope. He contended that the clergy had too much wealth and power. He adopted doctrines, at that time new, which were not behind the later Protestant, or even Puritan, opinions. He translated the Bible into English. He was protected by Edward III. and by powerful nobles, and he died in peace in his parish at Lutterworth, in 1384; but, after his death, his bones were taken ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... ushers were nearly demented. When drove after drove had divided and passed to the right or the left, that is, to the ladies' or gentlemen's dressing-rooms, and the stream began to slacken a little, so that they could distinguish individuals, Mr. Joy in turn received and passed a "puritan preacher," a "cavalier soldier," a "Highlander," a "knight," a "minstrel," the "vailed prophet," a "Switzer," a "Chinese mandarin," a "Russian serf," and black, white, and gray, red, yellow, and blue ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... Dissenters or Nonconformists, basing their action upon the fallacious arguments derived from the fourth commandment, and upon the plea that the Saviour was raised from the dead on the first day of the week, inaugurated what is known as the Puritan Sabbath, which having been transferred to our shores by the voyagers in the Mayflower, and enforced by those statutory enactments known as Blue Laws, caused the people of New England to have a blue time of it while ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill

... this more strikingly than the fact that the Puritan Milton introduces the loves of Adam and Eve in the ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... men of America is now wasted in dissipation, gross or petty, in drink or smoke. This strength would be saved could we remember training rules. Through the training rules of our fathers we have come to consider as part of our inheritance the Puritan Conscience. As the success of our nation is built upon this conscience, so in like fashion depends upon it the success ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan

... Manse, and used to watch the Assyrian dawn and the Paphian sunset and moonrise, from the summit of our eastern hill. When I first saw the room, its walls were blackened with the smoke of unnumbered years, and made still blacker by the grim prints of puritan ministers that hung around. These worthies looked strangely like bad angels, or, at least, like men who had wrestled so continually and so sternly with the devil, that somewhat of his sooty fierceness had been imparted to their own visages. They had all vanished now; ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... period of intrigue and an uprising of the Scotch Presbyterians against the English Puritan. In August of the year 1648 after the three-days' battle of Preston Pans, Cromwell made an end to this second civil war, and took Edinburgh. Meanwhile his soldiers, tired of further talk and wasted hours of religious ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... Puritan is a Heretical Hypocrite, in whom the conceit of his own perspicacity, by which he seems to himself to have observed certain errors in a few Church dogmas, has disturbed the balance of his mind, so that, excited ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson

... the Long Parliament and displayed there great audacity in opposing the government. An unfriendly critic at this time describes "his countenance swollen and reddish, his voice sharp and untuneable, and his eloquence full of fervor." Though a zealous Puritan, who believed himself in all sincerity to be the chosen agent of the Lord, Cromwell was not an ascetic. He hunted, hawked, played bowls, and other games, had an ear for music, and valued art and learning. In public ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER

... The Puritan Pilgrims of the May-Flower landed on Plymouth Rock, and founded the Colony of Massachusetts, on the 21st day ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward

... God, that rends asunder and makes havoc of our plans, bore heavy on them in that moment, I have no doubt, but neither murmured. Uncle Eb began to pump vigorously at the cistern while David fussed with the fire. We were all quaking inwardly but neither betrayed a sign of it. It is a way the Puritan has of suffering. His emotions are like the deep undercurrents ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller

... retired from the contest, presented it to the pleased and blushing boy. The boys and girls applauded California fashion, and the old man's face glowed with satisfaction. He had in him curiously mingled the elements of the Puritan and the Cavalier—the uncompromising persistency of the one, and the chivalrous impulse and ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald

... delegated to them certain religious functions, at Monthly Meeting and Quarterly and Yearly Meetings, on which they deliberated, before submitting them to the whole meeting. This old Oblong Meeting House is a mute record and symbol of the century-old contest of the Puritan spirit among the old Quakers, striving for an inflexibly right relation between the sexes. They attained their ends through the creation of a community, but not until the ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson

... stews, bordering the river's edge. Since the players were at this time subject to the bitterest attacks from the London preachers, Burbage wisely decided not to erect the first permanent home of the drama in a locality already a common target for puritan invective. ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams

... Puritan Colony proposed.%—Among those who obtained such rights was a company of Dorchester merchants who planted a town on Cape Ann. The enterprise failed, and the colonists went off and settled at a place they called Naumkeag. But there was one man ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster

... myself," said Mr. Dapper, "I rather like the spirit of the Puritan mothers and daughters here in the Colonies; they are worthy descendants of the men who had it out with Charles I. It is all nonsense, this plea of Lord North, that the people in the Colonies ought to pay a portion of the debt incurred by England in ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin

... you fetch from contemplation a theoretic license to be base, your contemplative habit itself will have purified you more than your doctrine will have power to degrade you afresh, for training affects instinct much more than opinion can. Antinomian theory can flourish blamelessly in a puritan soil, for there it instinctively remains theoretical. And the Teutonic pantheists are for the most part uncontaminated souls, puritan by training, and only interested in furthering the political and intellectual efficiency ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... date of the Discourse of Method is 1637. The Augustinus of Jansenius was published in 1640, and in 1643 Arnauld's Frequent Communion made Jansenism a popular power. The Jansenist movement was in France in some measure what the Puritan movement was in England, and it caught hold of serious minds in much the same way. The Jesuits had undertaken the task of making Christianity easy, of finding a compromise between worldliness and religion, and ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... talent she is driven to such as this! For song must have audience, however unfit! There was Orpheus with his! Genius was always eccentric! If he could but be her protection against that political father, that Puritan mother, and that idiotic brother of hers, and put an end to this sort of thing before it came ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... "the pride of being ladies," of belonging to a stock not exactly aristocratic, but unquestionably "good." The very quotation of the word good is significant and suggestive. There were "no parcel-tying forefathers" in the Brooke pedigree. A Puritan forefather, "who served under Cromwell, but afterward conformed and managed to come out of all political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate," had a hand in Dorothea's "plain" wardrobe. ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... lie to women. You know how much I have lived with worthless men—aye, and worthless women too. Well, they could all rise to some sort of goodness and kindness when they were in love. (The word love comes from him with true Puritan scorn.) That has taught me to set very little store by the goodness that only comes out red hot. What I did last night, I did in cold blood, caring not half so much for your husband, or (ruthlessly) for you (she droops, stricken) as I do for myself. I had no motive and no ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw

... of a dollar," was properly equipped to do battle with the realities of life. The value of a dollar, and a clear title to it—these were the principles upon which her integrity must be founded if she were to survive her own self-respect. Her Puritan fathers had bestowed this heritage upon her. She had always felt the irregularity of her economic position; now that the complication of her relation with David had arisen, it was beginning to make ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley

... native stock, he had a strenuous desire to come of "respectable people;" and his very reluctance to have his apparently low extraction investigated is evidence that he would have been glad to learn that he belonged to an ancient and historical family of the old Puritan Commonwealth, settlers not far from Plymouth Rock, and immigrants not long after the arrival of the Mayflower. This descent has at last been ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse

... also that the Indians were treacherous, and more, no compliance with the conditions of any treaty, was ever to be trusted. But the Puritan fathers cannot be wholly exonerated from the charge of faithlessness; and who does not blush to talk of Indian traitors when he remembers the Spanish invasion and the fall of ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson

... this he tried to express to Jean as, arriving at Woodstock in the early afternoon, they passed the College. "I might have been a priest," he said, "if I hadn't been too much of a Puritan or a Pagan. I am not sure which held ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey

... She represented the Puritan Maiden, Priscilla; who, though not a juvenile character was one of Ruth's favorite heroines, and the dress suited her so well, that Cousin Elizabeth said she ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells

... been extirpated root and branch by the Protector. The Ffrench estate of Ballyvore had once formed portion of the Costello property, and had been purchased by Gerald's ancestor from the Cromwellian Puritan to whom it had been granted ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne

... honour of the Puritan clergy of New England, it should be said that many of them were Boylston's strongest supporters. Increase and Cotton Mather had been among the first to move in favour of inoculation, the latter having called Boylston's attention to it; and ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... don't be such a little Puritan. Leucha is far from well now, and the only person who can calm and control her is Holly. If you take Holly away from her, which you will do by confession, you may possibly have to answer for Leucha's very ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade

... often find his share ignored. After a time the engraver claims to be considered, and by degrees the designer is also recognised; yet for the most part illustration was looked upon merely as "jam" to conceal the pill. The old Puritan conception of art as vanity had something to do with this, no doubt; for adults often demand that their children shall obey a sterner rule of life than that which ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White

... omission of the histories of these rare inventions. As two-thirds of the editors of the whole country, however, are Yankees, I suppose they must be permitted to go on exulting in the cleverness of their race. We are indebted to the Puritan stock for most of our instructors—editors and school-masters—and when one coolly regards the prodigious progress of the people in morals, public and private virtue, honesty, and other estimable qualities, he must indeed rejoice in the fact that our masters ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper

... will be pointed out as they occur. In Milton's ode On the Morning of Christ's Nativity there are several passages which recall Prudentius' treatment of the theme in this and the succeeding hymn; but curiously enough, the Puritan poet in alluding to the season of the Nativity takes an opposite line of thought, and regards the diminished sunshine of winter as a veiling of an inferior flame before the light of "a greater Sun." Prudentius proclaims the increase of the sun's light, ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius

... generations before them—only the traditions of it, and certain of its influences—for influences do not die when institutions pass away. There is not, for example, much old-fashioned Puritanism stalking about in New York in these days, but considerable of Puritan influence is alive and is just now contributing to the hopefulness of the times and the interests of municipal reform and even of the State government. Influences continue, and it will take time for those of slavery or the effect on ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 49, No. 3, March, 1895 • Various

... training, Germans trained in the investigation of such matters agree in telling me that the boys who come up to the universities, especially in the large cities and towns, are somewhat lax in their moral standards as regards matters upon which the puritan still ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... ignored all sensuous pleasure:—he was very different from the miner. Gertrude herself was rather contemptuous of dancing; she had not the slightest inclination towards that accomplishment, and had never learned even a Roger de Coverley. She was puritan, like her father, high-minded, and really stern. Therefore the dusky, golden softness of this man's sensuous flame of life, that flowed off his flesh like the flame from a candle, not baffled and gripped into incandescence ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence

... and with great increase both to the numbers and interest of the audience. I am not pretending to judge this for others, but simply to state how it naturally strikes one educated in the simple, sober observances of Puritan New-England. I have heard of Protestants being converted in Rome, but it seems to me the very last place where the great body of those educated in really Protestant ways would be likely to undergo conversion. I have seen ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley

... do it timidly because the pigeon-holed Caucasian God was represented—unconsciously perhaps—as difficult, ungenial, easily offended. He measured your blindness and weakness by the standard of His own knowledge and almightiness. A puritan God, extremely preoccupied with morals as some people saw them, He was lenient, apparently, to the narrow-minded, the bitter of tongue, and the intolerant in heart. He was not generous. He was merciful only when you paid ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King

... not exactly see the necessity of their commands. He understood full well that obedience was a law of the household, which could not be violated with impunity; therefore, he wisely obeyed. His father was quite rigid in his requirements, a Puritan of the olden stamp, who ruled his own house. Among other things, he required his children to observe the Sabbath by abstaining from labor and amusements, reading the Scriptures, and attending public worship. A walk in the streets, a call upon a ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer

... sombre smugness, which almost makes one fancy they loved the negro for his colour, and would have turned away from red or yellow men as needlessly gaudy. But his wit and his politics (combined with that dropping of the Puritan tenets but retention of the Puritan tone which marked his class and generation), lifted him into a sphere which was utterly opposite to that from which he came. This Whig world was exclusive; but it was not narrow. It was very difficult for an outsider to get into it; but if he ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton

... Saviour's gentle I must lead ([Greek: dei me agagein]) and our forefathers' various attempts to produce "uniformity" by driving. The reproach of that sinful blunder is one that none of our greater Churches—Roman, Anglican, Presbyterian, or Puritan—can cast in another's teeth. Each of us committed it in our day of triumph. "What fruit had we then in those things whereof we are now ashamed?" The memory—one-sided, and carefully cultivated—of what each suffered in its turn of adversity has ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various

... the populace is either ignored or elaborately proved to have been wrong. It is true that Green called his book "A Short History of the English People"; but he seems to have thought it too short for the people to be properly mentioned. For instance, he calls one very large part of his story "Puritan England." But England never was Puritan. It would have been almost as unfair to call the rise of Henry of Navarre "Puritan France." And some of our extreme Whig historians would have been pretty nearly capable of calling the campaign of ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton

... must be copy-book sentiments. He suffered from his versatility, not, as is loosely said, by not doing every department well enough, but by doing every department too well. As child, cockney, pirate, or Puritan, his disguises were so good that most people could not see the same man under all. It is an unjust fact that if a man can play the fiddle, give legal opinions, and black boots just tolerably, he is called an Admirable Crichton, ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton

... swing in the middle of the arc. So he would have gone to the other extreme and revelled in the pleasures whose very breath had been forbidden to his youth; but he found his sensibilities revolting from everything that did not accord with the old Puritan code by which they had been trained. He knew himself to be full of capabilities for evil, but it seemed as if some power greater than his held him back. It was Frederick Brent who looked on sin abstractly, but its presence in the concrete was seen through the eyes of Mrs. Hester ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... Having no factitious weight of dignity to carry, the Montagues steadily improved their condition from the day they landed, and they were never more vigorous or prosperous than at the date of this narrative. With character compacted by the rigid Puritan discipline of more than two centuries, they had retained its strength and purity and thrown off its narrowness, and were now blossoming under the generous modern influences. Squire Oliver Montague, a lawyer who had retired from the practice of his profession ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... which we shall say not a word more than may sooner or later be needful) was the most ancient in the town. The clay of the original settlers had been incorporated with the soil; those stalwart Englishmen of the Puritan epoch, whose immediate ancestors had been planted forth with succulent grass and daisies for the sustenance of the parson's cow, round the low-battlemented Norman church towers in the villages of the fatherland, had here contributed their rich Saxon mould to tame and Christianize the ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... of those women formed under the kindly severe discipline of Puritan New England, to act not from blind impulse or instinct, but from high principle. The habit of self-examination and self-inspection, for which the religious teaching of New England has been peculiar, produced a race of women who rose superior to those ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... at the suffering of delicate ladies, old men, and mothers with little children clinging to them, crying, "O, mamma, mamma," and old women, and tottering old men, whose gray hairs should have protected them from the savage acts of Yankee hate and Puritan barbarity; and I wondered how on earth our generals, including those who had resigned—that is where the shoe pinches—could quietly look on at this dark, black, and damning insult to our people, and not use at least one effort to rescue them from such terrible and unmitigated ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins

... 283. Gentlemen,—I am no Puritan, and have never praised or advocated puritanical art. The two pictures which I would last part with out of our National Gallery, if there were question of parting with any, would be Titian's Bacchus and Correggio's Venus. But the noble naturalism of these was the fruit of ages of ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... impartiality. The author evidently aimed throughout to do exact justice to the dominant party, and all their opponents of every name. The standpoint from which the whole subject is viewed is novel, and we have in this volume a new and most important contribution to Puritan History. ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller

... know that," said Lenox, laughing. "I will tell you, Miss Lothrop—if I can. A Puritan is a person so much better than the ordinary run of mortals, that she is not afraid to let Nature and Solitude speak to her—dares to look roses in the face, in fact;—has no charity for the crooked ways of the ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner

... colonizing new lands. By the middle of the seventeenth century Spain had ceased to be a dangerous rival; Germany and Italy were at the time little more than geographical expressions, while England was in the throes of the Puritan Revolution. ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro

... and admired. Caroline was to be Amy Robsart, and Clara, Janet Foster; a part her mother had chosen for her, as more appropriate to a girl not yet come out. Certainly, Tony Foster would scarcely have recognized his demure little Puritan under the little lace hood, the purple bodice, and white skirt, at which Clara looked with such exultation; and Janet was further to be supposed to have taken possession of the Countess's orient neck-pearls, and was to wear them as the only ornament that ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... many religious sects born in the seventeenth century under the influence of Puritan thought. The foundation principle of the Reformation, the right of private judgment, the Quakers carried out to its logical conclusion; but they were people whose minds had so long been suppressed and terrorized that, once free, they rushed ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher

... when they were sitting side by side on the upper deck of the Puritan, the magnificent steamer on the Fall River line. "I want you to consent to a little plan that will mystify my ...
— Cast Upon the Breakers • Horatio Alger

... the orthodox party of Greece and Asia Minor had a few very eccentric allies. One was Acesius, the Novatian, "the Puritan," summoned by Constantine from Byzantium with Alexander, from the deep respect entertained by the Emperor for his ascetic character. He was attended by a boy, Auxanon, who lived to a great age afterward ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various



Words linked to "Puritan" :   ascetic, puritanic, prude, protestant



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com