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More "Baseness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... told with the simplicity and directness of obvious truth, are full of terror, of pathos, the shame of human baseness and the glory of human virtue; and though the time is not yet sufficiently distant from the date of their occurrence to give to this record the universal acceptance it deserves, there are few, we think, even ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... had to combat the influence of the Arioi may have exaggerated its baseness. In their unsophisticated minds, unprepared by reading or experience for comparisons, most of them sailing directly from English divinity schools or small bucolic pastorates, the devout preachers thought Sabbatarianism of as much consequence ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... a case herself, is the link between the two other cases"; that device was to ask for as much help as it gave and to require a good deal more application than it announced on the surface. The sense of a system saves the painter from the baseness of the arbitrary stroke, the touch without its reason, but as payment for that service the process insists on being kept ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... more generous aspirations than to sin and sin and sin and at last sneak into heaven? My heart rises at the thought. Is this, then, your experience of mankind? or is it because you find me with red hands that you presume such baseness? And is this crime of murder indeed so impious as to dry up the ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... with his chin in his hands, dull, stricken, crushed. He had heard the story of his father's baseness from Frances Cable, and he had been told the true story of Jane; from Rigby he learned of the vile transactions in which his father had dealt. At first, he could scarcely believe his own ears, but in the end lie saw that but—half the truth could ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... whose misery and baseness Hangs on my door; whose hateful whine of woe Breaks in upon my sorrows, and distracts My jarring senses with thy ...
— Jane Shore - A Tragedy • Nicholas Rowe
... Wild, Will think of it Dandelion, Love's oracle Daphne, Glory Dew Plant, A serenade Dianthus, Make haste Dipteracanthus, Fortitude Diplademia, You are too bold Dittany, Pink, Birth Dittany, White, Passion Dock, Patience Dodder of Thyme, Baseness Dogsbane, Falsehood Dogwood, Durability Dragon Plant, Snare Dragonwort, Horror Dried Flax, Usefulness Ebony, Blackness Echites, Be Warned in Time Elder, Zeal Elm, Dignity Endive, Frugality Escholzia, Do Not Refuse ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... passionate, generous, tender, brave, with an unbounded and unquestioning love for his fellow-men, with a holy and fervid hope in their ultimate virtue and happiness, and an intense and passionate scorn for all baseness and oppression. ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... "How good a knight are you, and how ill default do you make in another way! No knight, methinketh, is there in the world that would have refused me save only you. This cometh of your folly, and your outrage, and your baseness of heart! The griffons have not done my will in that they have not slain you or strangled you as you slept, and, so I thought that they would have power to slay you, I would make them come to slay you now. But the devil hath put so much knighthood into you that ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown
... solely in thought of what is immoral and low, bound in the fetters of impure delights, living the life, whatever it may be, peculiar to the passion of body; and so totally merged in sensuality as to esteem the base pleasant, and the deformed beautiful and fair. But may we not say, that this baseness approaches the soul as an adventitious evil, under the pretext of adventitious beauty; which, with great detriment, renders it impure, and pollutes it with much depravity; so that it neither possesses true life, nor true sense, but is endued with a slender life through its mixture of evil, and ...
— An Essay on the Beautiful - From the Greek of Plotinus • Plotinus
... once reflect that he is one of the most scandalous as well as pernicious lyars; sure he must despise himself to so intolerable a degree, that it would be impossible for him to continue a moment in such a course. And to confess the truth, notwithstanding the baseness of this character, which he hath too well deserved, he hath in his countenance sufficient symptoms of that bona indoles, that sweetness of disposition, which furnishes out a good Christian."—"Ah, master! master!" says the host, "if you had travelled as far as I have, and conversed ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... been thrice defeated by a garrison so contemptible in numbers, and led by a female. To his eternal infamy let it be recorded, that pretending to have been deceived by the terms of capitulation, D'Aulney hanged the brave survivors of the garrison, and even had the baseness and cruelty to parade Madame de la Tour herself on the same scaffold, with the ignominious cord around her neck, ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... served what seemed the voice; and unprofane Have dedicated to melodious ends All of myself that least ignoble was. For though of faulty and of erring walk, I have not suffered aught in me of frail To blur my song; I have not paid the world The evil and the insolent courtesy Of offering it my baseness for a gift. And unto such as think all Art is cold, All music unimpassioned, if it breathe An ardour not of Eros' lips, and glow With fire not caught from Aphrodite's breast, Be it enough to say, that in Man's life Is room for great emotions unbegot Of dalliance and embracement, ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... Amelie," replied the Lady de Tilly; "I know it is hard to bear, but perhaps Le Gardeur did not send that message to you. The men about him are capable of deceiving you to an extent you have no conception of,—you who know so little of the world's baseness." ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... by the monks. What Francis Parkman said of the Roman Catholic Church is true of the monastic institution: "Clearly she is of earth, not of heaven; and her transcendently dramatic life is a type of the good and ill, the baseness and nobleness, the foulness and purity, the love and hate, the pride, passion, truth, falsehood, fierceness, and tenderness, that battle in the restless heart ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... the king, And I, his son, am here to-day atonement fall to bring. Count, ye did a craven business and I call ye COWARD here! Behold, if I await you, think not I come with fear, For Diego Laynez wrought me well set in his own mould, And while I prove my birthright I your baseness shall unfold. Your valor as a crafty blade will not avail ye more, For to my needs I bring a sword and charger trained to war." Thus spake to Count Lozano Spain's champion, the Cid, (Ere long he won the title by achievements which he did) That day he slew ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... not for my sake, but in order to satisfy my people, that they may bear more patiently your operations in Spain. For my part, I approve all you have done in that country. King Charles and his son Ferdinand have abundantly deserved their present fate by their incapacity and baseness, and I do not pity them. But one must comprehend the system of the great Napoleon as clearly and thoroughly as I do, to be able to pass over the great catastrophes which your majesty has caused the world to witness. My people, and, above all, my nobility, have not yet progressed so ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... basest scoundrel, double-eyed, Would pluck an Uncle's whiskers in their pride, What baseness, then, doth such a man disclose Who'd raise a hand ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... forget. We shall be cheerful and happy. You remember: 'Where beauty shines amidst mire and baseness there is only torment'.... You need not ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... II. Of his mother nothing is known. The conjectures of scandal are heightened and perplexed by the fact that he was ennobled when a child, and that, amidst all the denunciations of his overbearing behaviour and insufferable arrogance, he is never reproached with the baseness of his maternal lineage. Legitimated in infancy by an imperial diploma, Antonio was literally a courtier and politician ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... the gods together, he said: "Ye see what the Earth has become through the baseness of men. Once they were deserving of our protection; now they even neglect to ask it. I will destroy them with my thunderbolts and ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... Cholulans. Cortez pretended to believe them, as he was desirous, as long as possible, of keeping up a semblance of friendship with Montezuma; and declared that he was willing to believe that, after the friendly messages and gifts the emperor had sent, he could not be guilty of such baseness and treachery. His anger therefore would be directed chiefly against the Cholulans, who were guilty not only of foul treachery to himself, but of dishonoring the emperor's name by ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... hold our tongues. We took it for granted that Lawless would hold his, and as for my people, they knew nothing, I thought, or if they did, I was sure of them. How the thing got abroad I could not at the time conceive, though now I am well acquainted with the baseness and treachery of the woman I called my friend. The affair was known and talked of every where the next day, and the story was told especially at odious Mrs. Luttridge's, with such exaggerations as drove me almost mad. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... old. I speak to those of you who have condemned me. I am condemned, not for lack of argument, but because I have not chosen to plead after the methods that would have been pleasant and flattering to you, but degrading to me. There are things we may not do to escape death, for baseness is worse than death, and swifter. Death has overtaken me, who am old, but baseness my accusers, who are strong. Truth condemns them, as you have condemned me, and each of us abides sentence, And for you who have condemned me there will be a penalty swift and ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... descend, he says, from ugly forms to ugly conduct, and from ugly conduct to ugly principles, till we finally arrive at the absolute ugliness which is vulgarity. This identification of insensibility to beauty with moral baseness was something of a paradox even in Greece, and does not fit the English character at all. Our towns are ugly enough; our public buildings rouse no enthusiasm; and many of our monuments and stained glass windows seem to shout for a friendly Zeppelin ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... to the Christians than to treachery and their own miserable feuds. A body of cavalry, which El Zagal despatched from Guadix to throw succors into the beleaguered city, was encountered and cut to pieces by a superior force of the young king Abdallah, who consummated his baseness by sending an embassy to the Christian camp, charged with a present of Arabian horses sumptuously caparisoned to Ferdinand, and of costly silks and Oriental perfumes to the queen; at the same time complimenting them on their successes, and soliciting the continuance of their friendly dispositions ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... charge Cecil, or the mass of Englishmen who conformed with him in turn to the religion of Henry, of Edward, of Mary, and of Elizabeth, with baseness or hypocrisy. They followed the accepted doctrine of the time—that every realm, through its rulers, had the sole right of determining what should be the form of religion within its bounds. What the Marian persecution was gradually ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... event. Supposing, for instance, I heard a report of the death of some public man; it would not startle me, even if I did not at once credit it, for all men must die. Did I read of any great feat of valour, I should believe it, if imputed to Alexander or Coeur de Lion. Did I hear of any act of baseness, I should disbelieve it, if imputed to a friend whom I knew and loved. And so in like manner were a miracle reported to me as wrought by a Member of Parliament, or a Bishop of the Establishment, or a Wesleyan preacher, I should repudiate the notion: were it referred to a saint, ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... off, so far as concerned notice given, with a House that shall be nameless,—for the question on which I took my departing stand was a fixed charge for waiters, and no House as commits itself to that eminently Un-English act of more than foolishness and baseness shall be advertised by me,—I repeat, at a momentous crisis, when I was off with a House too mean for mention, and not yet on with that to which I have ever since had the honour of being attached in the capacity of Head, {1} I was casting about what to do next. Then it were that proposals ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... sent by the Duke of Parma were so insulted by the bestialities of the French commander as to go back to their master without negotiating, and no decent man would consent to return. A starving little abbe volunteered for the service, and, possessing a special aptitude for baseness, succeeded in his mission. Thus Alberoni, afterward Cardinal and Prime Minister of Spain, got his foot on the first rung of the ladder of fame. The details of the story are too gross to repeat, and the Memoirs ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... the English, besides an annual tribute of 48,000l. The country was wholly exhausted both of money and spirit. The Danes in England, under the protection of the foreign Danes, committed a thousand insolencies; and so infatuated with stupidity and baseness were the English at this time, that they employed hardly any other soldiers ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... rebuke, and when I informed him that Mr. Flanders had attempted to debauch me, he foamed with rage, and loaded the reverend libertine with epithets which were decidedly uncomplimentary. Still, he doubted the story of my mother's crime—he could not believe her to be guilty of such baseness; but he assured me that he should satisfy himself of her innocence or guilt, then left me, after having made me promise not to expose him in reference to his affair with the servant girl ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... speaking of anything that Edmonson did not like; his feelings were so strong that he seemed always ready to be vindictive. Her feeling toward him for this intimation had been anger which had cooled into contempt of a nature like his, ready to find baseness everywhere. The suggestion was no reproach to her, for she had had no thoughts of disloyalty to Katie. As she sat there still seeming to listen, suddenly, it seemed to her, for she could not trace its coming, a picture rose before her with the vividness of reality. She ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... you give power to Marylebone, they will fawn on the householders of Marylebone. If you leave power to Gatton, they will fawn on the proprietor of Gatton. I can see no reason for believing that their baseness will be more mischievous in the former case than in ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the number of married men occasioning the comparative desertion (for a time) of Taverns, Hotels, Billiard-rooms, and Gaming-Houses, will deprive the Proprietors of their accustomed profits and returns. And in further proof of the depth and baseness of such designs, it may be here observed, that all proprietors of Taverns, Hotels, Billiard-rooms, and Gaming-Houses, are (especially the last) solemnly devoted to ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Loyalty died away into servility. We look in vain among the leading politicians of either side for steadiness of principle, or even for that vulgar fidelity to party which, in our time, it is esteemed infamous to violate. The inconsistency, perfidy, and baseness, which the leaders constantly practised, which their followers defended, and which the great body of the people regarded, as it seems, with little disapprobation, appear in the present age almost incredible. In the age of Charles the First, they would, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... vulgarized by the repetition of her ancient tales of war and overthrow on a scale of such apparent magnitude, but with no glamour of distance to hide the baseness of the agencies by which the destinies of Europe were shaped anew. This was an occasion that tried the hearts of men; it was not easy to remain through all those years at once undazzled and untempted, and never in the blackest hour to despair of ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... take care to avoid his error. It will be sufficient to say that when he had finished Richard stood accused not only of having stolen two thousand pounds from John Trevethick, but of having compassed that crime under circumstances of peculiar baseness. He had taken advantage of his superior education, manners, and appearance, to impose himself upon the honest Cornishman as the legitimate son of his landlord, and secured within that humble home a footing of familiarity, only the better to compass a scheme of villainy, which must ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... Washington. His voice, deeply musical, and uncommonly sweet, enhanced the admiration with which one viewed his matchless delivery, in which was perfect grace, and entire harmony with the expressions which fell from his lips. How mournful a sight, to see one so nobly gifted, leading a life of baseness and vice, devoting his immortal qualities to the vilest selfishness, and to the betrayal of his country and of liberty! Should the descendant of an oppressed and persecuted race take part with oppressors? ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... est via, 'tis hard for a poor man to [2295] rise, haud facile emergunt, quorum virtutibus obstat res angusta domi. [2296]"The wisdom of the poor is despised, and his words are not heard." Eccles. vi. 19. His works are rejected, contemned, for the baseness and obscurity of the author, though laudable and good in themselves, they ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... dyery standing before him. Quoth the door-keeper to him, "Is no this thy comrade whom thou robbedst of his silvers and leftest with me sick in the closet doing such and such by him?" And the workmen said to him, "Is not this he whom thou badest us seize and beat?" Therewith Abu Kir's baseness was made manifest to the King and he was certified that he merited torture yet sorer than the torments of Munkar and Nakr.[FN228] So he said to his guards, "Take him and parade him about the city and the markets;"—And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... Roman history which the Tower of London has done in our own. Here, by the orders of Cicero, were strangled Lentulus, Cethegus, and one or two more of the accomplices of Catiline, in his famous conspiracy. Here was murdered, under circumstances of great baseness, Vercingetorix, the young and gallant chief of the Gauls, whose bravery called forth the highest qualities of Julius Caesar's military genius, and who, when success abandoned his arms, boldly gave himself ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... applied, the indignant and mortified priest concealed his resentment for a moment, and took the undaunted boy into the house, where, having him secure, he presented him to others, whose baseness and cruelty being equal to his own, they stripped him to the skin, and applied their scourges to so violent a degree, that, fainting beneath the stripes inflicted on his tender frame, and covered with the blood that flowed from them, ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... indeed, no; she was still threatening Paris. Once there, she would not lack for reprisals. To have played on her pity! To have made a lure of her tender concern for the unfortunate! Never would she forgive such baseness. And only a little while ago she had been as happy as the nightingale to which they compared her. Never had she wronged any one; she had been kindness and thoughtfulness to all with whom she had come in contact. But from now on!... Her fingers tightened round the bars. She might ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... undoubtedly mistaken in supposing that by "baseness" is meant "self-love" here assigned as the motive of all human actions. Shakespeare meant only to observe, that a minute analysis of life at once destroys that splendour which dazzles the imagination. Whatever grandeur can display, or luxury enjoy, is procured by "baseness", by offices ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... love; in its secret, inscrutable, unyielding loyalty to that promise given to a dead man; in the nobility of its refusal to shine brighter in its faith and truth and chivalry by the revelation of that other man's mean baseness; in its almost paternal solicitude; in its agony of love for her, insensible and careless; in the sick despair that had given up and left off hoping: even in the pride that had—or so it seemed to her—asserted itself ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... intelligence directing very inferior abilities, just as our good friend the dog is an excellent shepherd to his silly, docile flock. In her, the most ordinary ideas are so logically dovetailed that one is tempted to accept them even when one hesitates to approve them. Her mind must be free from baseness, for throughout our conversation she made no effort to please me. Would it not have needed a very quick discernment, a very uncommon shrewdness to know so soon that she would ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... not. Still, her spirit was darkened with scorn and indignation at the act of dishonor which she felt her lover had committed, just as the atmosphere is by a tempest. In fact, she detested what she considered the baseness and treachery of the vote; but could not of a sudden change a love so strong, so trusting, and so pure as hers, into the passions of enmity and hatred. No sooner, however, had her father named Hycy Burke with such approval, than the storm within her directed itself against him, and ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... There be some sports are painful; and their labour Delight in them sets off; some kinds of baseness Are nobly undergone; and most poor matters Point to rich ends. This my mean task Would be as heavy to me, as odious; but The mistress, which I serve, quickens what's dead, And makes my labours pleasures: O! she ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... natural man was exalted on this account. Some of the old Greek philosophers, too, found much in nature that was divine. Christianity took a different view of the matter—it exalted the spirit, and emphasised the baseness of the material. The growth of the sciences made man again a mere tool of laws and methods, but it considered matter as superior to mind, mind being entirely dependent upon impressions received from matter. The question ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... these do not inspire and direct them. The stream is as pure as it is mighty, fed by ten thousand springs in the bounty of untainted nature; any augmentation from the kennels and sewers of guilt and baseness may clog, but cannot strengthen it.—It is not from any thought that I am communicating new information, that I have dwelt thus long upon this subject, but to recall to the reader his own knowledge, and to re-infuse into that knowledge a breath and life of appropriate ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... "I might have the baseness to abandon that poor old man whose life I am; but, my friend, those other feeble creatures there before us, Madeleine and Jacques, would remain with their father. Do you think, I ask you do you think they would be alive in three months under the insane dominion of ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... been, the knowledge remained with him that she herself had suspected and convicted him. In all that mattered their friendship had ended there. Distrust was unbearable between friends. It was a flaw in his little lady that she could believe him capable of baseness.... But not an unforgivable flaw, it would seem, since every hour that he had spent in her presence had become roses and music in his memory, and the thought that he would see her no more stabbed ceaselessly ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... threw off the damp cloth, and revealed the clay model of a head. The face was unmistakable, but it expressed every baseness—cunning, arrogance, ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... wherefore base? When my dimensions are as well compact, My mind as generous and my shape as true, As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us With base? with baseness? with bastardy? base, base? Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land; Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund As to the legitimate: fine ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... collusion between the parties. The proof of this you will find in the enclosed paper, which will be sworn to, in due legal form, whenever it is necessary. Even when you see them, you will scarcely believe these 'damning proofs' of Wharton's baseness. But I always knew, I always told you, that this pretence to honour and candour, frankness and friendship, with this avowed contempt of all principle and all virtue, could not be safe, could not he sincere, would ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... against King William that were no more honourable than the ambushes of cut-throats and footpads. 'Tis humiliating to think that a great prince, possessor of a great and sacred right, and upholder of a great cause, should have stooped to such baseness of assassination and treasons as are proved by the unfortunate King James's own warrant and sign-manual given to his supporters in this country. What he and they called levying war was, in truth, no better than instigating murder. The noble Prince of Orange burst magnanimously through those feeble ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the liberty of observing to him, father, that, having obtained his throne by perjury, and cemented it by blood, and maintained it by hypocrisy, he could entertain no hope of preserving it unless the collective baseness of his subjects should be found to exceed his own, which was ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... "You are wronging Lucilla and wronging Nugent. Lucilla is incapable of saying anything against you to Grosse; and Nugent is equally incapable of misleading her as you suppose. What horrible ingratitude you attribute to one of them—and what horrible baseness to the other! I have listened to you as patiently as I can; and I feel sincerely obliged by the interest which you have shown in me—but I cannot remain in your company any longer. Madame Pratolungo, your suspicions are inhuman! You have not brought forward a shadow of proof in ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... swear and call on Gods when they mean nothing? Who call it complaisant, polite good Breeding, To say Ten thousand things they don't intend, And tell their nearest Friends the basest Falsehood? I know you cannot think me so perverse, Such Baseness dwells not in an Indian's Heart, And I'll convince you that I ...
— Ponteach - The Savages of America • Robert Rogers
... allowed," said Robinson, indignantly; "nor did I think that any member of this chamber would have had the baseness ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... OF HIS PREDECESSORS: The right to be free is a truth planted in the hearts of men, and acknowledged so to be by all who have hearkened to the voice of nature, and disproved by none but such as through wickedness, stupidity, or baseness of spirit, seem to have degenerated into the worst of beasts, and to have retained nothing of men but the outward shape, or the ability of doing those mischiefs which they have learnt ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... On the whole, he thought, such a marriage was what one would have looked for in Regnault; as Buscarlet said, one might almost have guessed. He, with his genius and his restlessness, his great fame and his infamy, the high achievement of his art and the baseness of his relaxations, he was just such ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... good husband and father, he becomes better in his domestic relations. If he has been charitable before, he becomes more so now. Men's weaknesses he looks upon as human frailties, until time and sense teach him that frailties have degenerated into positive perversity of character and baseness of heart. He will condemn falsehood and ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... (whose Thursday evening receptions we well know, attended by some of the most illustrious French and foreign residents in the metropolis,) to accompany him on a tour of inspection to the Gobelins, and had afterwards been guilty of the unexampled baseness of leaving the coupe he had employed standing, unpaid, at the door of a certain house in the Rue Racine, whilst he escaped by a private passage into the Rue de la Harpe, and so forth, and so forth. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... of his men did, and the pirate immediately sent some of his crew on board the Perry galley, who effectually made themselves masters thereof, and as Upton said, used him and the rest of the persons they found on board with great inhumanity and baseness, a thing very common amongst those wretches. Upton also insisted that as to himself, one of the pirate's crew ran up to him as soon as they came on board and with a cutlass in his hand, said with an oath, You old son of a bitch, I know you and you shall ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... that had the deepest interest in their safety and success must surely feel the deepest sorrow at their unhappy and unmerited misfortune. Read the epitaph inscribed upon their monument by public authority. In this, AEschines, you will find a proof of your absurdity, your malice, your abandoned baseness. Read! ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... inviolable attachment to religion and virtue, and seemed so averse to all sorts of inflammatory discourse, that he durst not presume upon the footing he had gained in her affection, to explain the baseness of his desire; he therefore applied to another of her passions, that proved the bane of her virtue. This was her timidity, which at first being constitutional, was afterwards increased by the circumstances of her education, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... come to the point of establishing a distinction between his own money and the housekeeping money, just as Louis XV. drew the line between his privy purse and the public moneys. He deceived Dinah as to his earnings. On discovering this baseness, Madame de la Baudraye went through fearful tortures of jealousy. She wanted to live two lives—the life of the world and the life of a literary woman; she accompanied Lousteau to every first-night performance, and could detect in him many impulses of wounded vanity, for ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... forty-eight hours,' muttered Calenus, 'has an appetite even in such a time.' He seized on the food, and devoured it greedily. Nothing could perhaps, be more unnaturally horrid than the selfish baseness of these villains; for there is nothing more loathsome than the valor of avarice. Plunder and sacrilege while the pillars of the world tottered to and fro! What an increase to the terrors of nature can be made by ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... power on landing; storms the fortress of St. Domingo; assumes the government before he investigates the conduct of Columbus; seizes his arms, gold, secret papers, etc.; summons Columbus to appear before him; his baseness in collecting evidence; puts Don Diego in chains; also Columbus; his fears in respect to the Adelantado; puts him in irons; his mal-administration; a saying of his; superseded in his government by Ovando; sails for Spain ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... danger, far or near; Spurn at baseness, spurn at fear. Still, with persevering might, Speak the truth, and ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... sports are painful; and their labour Delight in them sets off: some kinds of baseness Are nobly undergone; and most poor matters Point to rich ends. This, my mean task Would be as heavy to me as odious, but The mistress, which I serve, quickens what's dead And makes my labours pleasures: O, she is Ten times more gentle than her father's crabbed, And he's compos'd of harshness. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... general depression, when even the unconquerable Washington said "I have almost ceased to hope," one staggering blow would be very likely to end the struggle. There could be no heavier blow than the loss of the Hudson river, and with baseness almost incredible Arnold asked for the command of West Point, with the intention of betraying it into the hands of Sir Henry Clinton. The depth of his villainy on this occasion makes it probable that ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... offspring of the Chief 165 Antimachus, who when my brother once With godlike Laertiades your town Enter'd ambassador, his death advised In council, and to let him forth no more? Now rue ye both the baseness of your sire. 170 He said, and from his chariot to the plain Thrust down Pisandrus, piercing with keen lance His bosom, and supine he smote the field. Down leap'd Hippolochus, whom on the ground He slew, cut sheer ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... evil passions of men will ever be buried beyond hope of resurrection. We would not have this war end without signal and bitter retribution, and especially for all who have been guilty of deliberate treachery; for that is a kind of baseness that should be extirpated at any cost. If, in moments of impatience, we have wished for something like the rough kingship of Jackson, cooler judgment has convinced us that the strength of democratic institutions will be more triumphantly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... he said; "let me not delay another moment in seeking her, and convincing her that I could not have been guilty of the baseness of ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... flooding its banks, and eating out new channels with many a landslip. It is a strange world, and man, a strange animal, guided, it is true, usually by most commonplace motives; but, for that reason, ready and glad at times to escape from them and their dulness and baseness; to give vent, if but for a moment, in wild freedom, to that demoniac element, which, as Goethe says, underlies his nature and all nature; and to prefer for an hour, to the normal and respectable ditch-water, a bottle of champagne or even a carouse ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... now mentioned, or from little frivolous excuses, or idle and unfounded conjectures, unworthy of beings expected to fill a moral station in life. Yes, O man! often in these solitary journeyings have I exclaimed against the baseness of thy nature, when reflecting on the little paltry considerations which have smothered thy benevolence, and hindered thee from succouring an oppressed brother. And yet, on a further view of things, I have reasoned myself into a kinder feeling ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... world of treachery and cowardice fill you with disgust as it does myself? Does not your soul shrink with dismay at the infamy we behold everywhere at the present time? Oh, I know your heart is noble and pure, and despises the baseness which is now the master of the world. Let us, therefore, escape from it. Come, dearest, come! I have two pistols at my rooms. They are loaded, and will not fail us. A pressure of my finger—and we are free! ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... well-practised skill, He "squares" Surveyors too! For Jobbery finds some baseness still For venal hands ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... we have all the poverty and none of the pride!" Some one unluckily said that the things were not all in that torn state. "What," said he, with the utmost contempt, looking to the party, "is there any one that wishes to exhibit his devoted baseness? Let him not whisper here behind my back, but come forward and get into the box." He paused, and had no further interruption. "To you, Gentlemen of the Jury, I appeal. I ask you if you have seen ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... you amaze me.—In what part of my mind or conduct have you found that baseness, which entitles you to treat me ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin
... of your correspondents be good enough to explain the circumstances which gave rise to the adoption of "farina" as a term expressive of baseness ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various
... with beauty night and morn, Guarding the soul within from every stain, No baseness since the first day she was born Behind those star-lit brows could access again, Bathed in the light that streamed from all things fair, Turning to spirit each delicate door of sense, And with all lovely shapes of earth and air Feeding her ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... brain. That faithful love roused the reviving influences of my better and nobler sense. Was the man whom I had enshrined in my heart of hearts capable of such base wickedness as the bare idea of his marriage to another woman implied? No! Mine was the baseness, mine the wickedness, in having even for a moment thought it ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... why the Poet's dictum "change is of all things most pleasant" is true, is "a baseness in our blood;" for as the bad man is easily changeable, bad must be also the nature that craves change, i.e. it is ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... it has not only destroyed but made a world." At Naples, in the Romagna, wherever he saw a spark of noble life stirring, he was ready for any exertion; or danger, to blow it into a flame. He stigmatized baseness, hypocrisy, and injustice, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... straight! It's well God had mercy on us. And what was it for? Who doesn't have intrigues nowadays? Why, if he was so jealous, as I see things he should have shown it sooner, but he lets it go on for months. And then to call him out, reckoning on Fedya not fighting because he owed him money! What baseness! What meanness! I know you understand Fedya, my dear count; that, believe me, is why I am so fond of you. Few people do understand him. He is such ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... hunger-maddened incendiaries had been at work. Smoke was rising already from Downing Street and the back of the Treasury. Then came the carnage. One can well believe that not a single unnecessary bullet was fired. Not to believe that would be to saddle those in authority with a less than human baseness. But the question history puts is: Who was primarily to blame for the circumstances which led up to the tragic necessity ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... the most precious jewel that was ever intrusted to the custody of a friend. You are the arbiter of my fate. More, much more than my life is in your disposal. If you should betray me, you will commit a crime, that laughs to scorn the frivolity of all former baseness. You will inflict upon me a torture, in comparison of which all the laborious punishments that tyrants have invented, are couches of ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... war, and have, I hope, said enough to show that we have no reason to blush for our soldiers, but only for those of their fellow-countrymen who have traduced them. But there are a number of opponents of the war who have never descended to such baseness, and who honestly hold that the war might have been avoided, and also that we might, after it broke out, have found some terms which the Boers could accept. At their back they have all those amiable and goodhearted idealists who have not examined the question very critically, but are oppressed ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... wicked deception on the part of Jasper," said Melleville to himself, as he left the store. "A lie told with sinister purpose. How given over to all baseness is the man!" ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... bright look coming into his eyes, 'and that is one reason why I am quite determined not to precipitate matters. We can't afford to have revolution after revolution in a poor and struggling place like Gloria, and so I want these people to give the full measure of their incapacity and their baseness so that when they fall they may fall like Lucifer! Hamilton would be rather for rushing ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... proper course of public conduct shews that we are still as ready to resort to torture as Bacon was. As to vindictive cruelty, an incident in the South African war, when the relatives and friends of a prisoner were forced to witness his execution, betrayed a baseness of temper and character which hardly leaves us the right to plume ourselves on our superiority to Edward III. at the surrender of Calais. And the democratic American officer indulges in torture in the Philippines just as the aristocratic English officer did in South Africa. The incidents ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... ready to declare for her as always before, when the gods decreed otherwise, and the day was lost—but lost, in the indignant language of the Queen, 'not in fair and honorable fight, but through the baseness of a stratagem rather to have been expected from a Carthaginian than ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... your weaknesses, your meannesses in detail. One thing I might have told him, which I left out—the fact that you are no gentleman, not even bourgeois—a mere peasant clown. He would not have let you measure swords with him if he had known the baseness of your ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... But while we can think and maintain the rights of our own individuality against every human combination, let us not forget to caution all who are disposed to waver that there is a cowardice which is criminal, and a longing for rest which it is baseness to indulge. God help him, over whose dead soul in his living body must be uttered the sad ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... employer's shoulder. It has been said of men in battle that they have been shot and have run forward some hundred feet without knowing what has happened to them. And so Mr. Crewe got five or six lines into that editorial before he realized in full the baseness of Mr. Pardriff's treachery. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... easier to do if she had conspired against her heart in doing it. And yet, cold-bloodedly to expose him and pluck the clothing from a passion—dear to think of only when it is profoundly secret—struck her as an extreme baseness, of which not even the woman who perused and reperused his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... world calls gross, there are a thousand that slide into it. The storm only blows down the trees whose hearts have been eaten out and their roots loosened. And when you see a man having a reputation for wisdom and honour all at once coming crash down and disclosing his baseness, be sure that he began with small deflections from the path of right. The evil works underground; and if we yield to little temptations, when great ones come we shall ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Kneel to Him who will judge you for your baseness; it is too late to kneel to me! Oh, great God! to think how I have loved this woman, and how ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... said." It is no wonder, then, that Holt, driven to desperation by such treatment, wrote to Speed:—"Your forbearance towards Andrew Johnson, of whose dishonorable conduct you have been so well advised, is a great mystery to me. With the stench of his baseness in your nostrils you have been all tenderness for him, while for me ... you have ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... my friends, but all may not have prudent tongues in their heads. The reward is large, and perhaps some will be tempted;" he glanced at Iasus, who, to do him justice, had never thought of a second deed of baseness. "I cannot risk that. No, Artemisia goes out of the city to-night, and she must get ready without the ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... on him some abusive epithets, challenged him to the field. Grant declined to accept the invitation; and Lewis, after spitting in his face in the presence of several of the French officers, left him to reflect on his baseness. ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... city when there was war, but his counsel was that of a traitor, and the city was lost. Now behold, it is written that he who has given counsel about the country or its capital should perish with it when it comes into peril. He would not die—so I killed him; but not before he had heaped upon me baseness and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... his insolence so far, as to declare that he should mutilate Honorius before he sent him into exile. But this assertion of Zosimus is destroyed by the more impartial testimony of Olympiodorus; who attributes the ungenerous proposal (which was absolutely rejected by Attalus) to the baseness, and perhaps ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... to know a father's love and care, I cannot but despise a man who becomes a father, then shirks from the responsibility which follows—who leaves the burden and the disgrace which follow parenthood outside the marriage relation to the poor woman alone. Such baseness, such cowardice, such despicable littleness of soul!—do you wonder why I don't want ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... fight for bread, for the necessities. This law may seem brutal, but there is an excuse in its very harshness, and it is generally limited to elemental cruelties. Quite different is the battle for the superfluous—for ambition, privilege, inclination, luxury. Never has hunger driven man to such baseness as have envy, avarice, and thirst for pleasure. Egotism grows more maleficent as it becomes more refined. We of these times have seen an increase of hostile feeling among brothers, and our hearts are less ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... had finished this letter, he had actually written himself into a sort of persuasion of its truth. When a finely constituted nature wishes to go into baseness, it has first to bribe itself. Evil is never embraced undisguised, as evil, but under some fiction which the mind accepts and with which it has the singular power of blinding itself in the face of daylight. The power of imposing on one's self ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Peter, Murderer of the Dutch, Destroyer of the Hamburgers, Chastiser of the Danes, and Scourge of the Bremen Ships." But Long Peter, "by his own grace, and not that of God," had at length fallen a victim to the vicissitudes of life. The women of Helgoland, revolting against his cruelty, baseness, and tyranny, surrendered the island, the seat of the ancient gods, to Admiral Paulsen, of the Danish navy. This occurred in 1684, and since then Helgoland remained under the authority of the Danish crown until 1807. The conflagration ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... hell." Bligh on being asked by the friends of young Heywood if he thought it possible that this boy of fifteen, who had been detained against his will, could have a guilty knowledge of the mutiny, replied in writing that the lad's "baseness was beyond all description. It would give me great pleasure to hear that his friends can bear the loss of him without ...
— The Naval Pioneers of Australia • Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery
... in my power to have concealed the loss, and to have married, by continuing the same appearance, with all the credit of my original fortune; but I was not so far sunk in my esteem, as to submit to the baseness of fraud, or to desire any other recommendation than sense ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... her strong agony—aroused for the moment to the true realization of all the bitterness and baseness of his unkindness toward her—moved, perhaps, by memories of that time when between them there was pleasant and endearing confidence, and when it was not she who was obliged to plead for love—Sergius drew his arm more closely about her, and, bending over, pressed his lips upon her forehead. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of all Italy! On the one side, chastity contends; on the other wantonness; here purity, there pollution; here integrity, there treachery; here piety, there profaneness; here constancy, there rage; here honesty, there baseness; here continence, there lust; in short, equity, temperance, fortitude, prudence, struggle with iniquity, luxury, cowardice, rashness; every virtue with every vice; and, lastly, the contest lies between well-grounded hope ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... the Liegoise was shared by many of the French, whose sense of national honor was shocked to see so utter a lack of pride and so open a display of treachery in their monarch. They had not deemed his boasted policy capable of such baseness. Louis afterwards excused himself with the remark, "When pride rides before, shame and hurt follow close after," a saying very pretty as a politic apothegm, but not likely to soothe the wounded ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... you'd manners too you'd shame To boast your weakness or your baseness name. Appraise the things you have, but measure not The things denied to your unhappy lot. He values manners lighter than a cork Who combs his beard at table with a fork. Hare to seek sin and tortoise to forsake, The laws of taste condemn you to the stake To expiate, where all the ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... baseness of my soul, O Lord, Yet fearest not to stoop and enter me. Come to my heart, O Sacrament adored! Come to my heart . . . it craveth but for Thee! And when Thou comest, straightway let me die Of very love for Thee; this boon impart! Oh, hearken Jesus, to my ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... peculiar physiognomy, which is complicated with an air of baseness mingled with an air of authority. Javert possessed this physiognomy minus ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Sweet Mildness; yet there were seasons when this brightness, as that of the Sun in a wholly cloudless sky, became Fierce, and burnt up him who beheld it. Time had been so long a husbandman of her fair demesne, had reaped so many crops of smiles and tears from that comely visage, that it were a baseness to infer that no traces of his husbandry appeared on her once smooth and silken flesh, for the adornment of which she had ever disdained the use of essences and unguents. Yet I am told that her wrinkles ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... made during the month of October, 1789, long before 'the Terror,' by Gouverneur Morris. 'Surely it is not the usual order of Divine Providence to leave such abominations unpunished. Paris is, perhaps, as wicked a spot as exists. Incest, murder, bestiality, fraud, rapine, oppression, baseness, cruelty, and yet this is the city which has stepped forward in the sacred cause ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... poison, and also the doleful birds in the branches over the serpents. I then asked them, "What do you see?" But being much terrified, they did not answer; and I said, "Do you see the dreadful sight? Know then that this is a representative of adultery in the baseness of its lust." Suddenly at that instant an angel presented himself, who was a priest, and opened the hell in the western quarter into which such spirits are at length collected; and he said, "Look thither:" and they saw that firy lake, and knew there some of their ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... I was obliged to leave Italy upon it, sooner than I intended, because of his numerous relations, who looked upon me as the cause of his death; though I pacified them by a letter I wrote them from Inspruck, acquainting them with the baseness of the deceased: and they followed me not to Munich, ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... promotion of a better state, not in and for themselves—in this sense good can never come out of evil—but by furnishing a counter-poise to opposite vices, and finally annihilating those vices and themselves by their preponderance. Oppression could never have gained the upper hand unless cowardice, and baseness, and mutual distrust had prepared the way for it. It will continue to increase until it eradicates cowardice and the slavish mind; and despair re-awakens the courage that was lost. Then the two antagonistic vices will have destroyed each other, and the noblest ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... for lack of argument, but because I have not chosen to plead after the methods that would have been pleasant and flattering to you, but degrading to me. There are things we may not do to escape death, for baseness is worse than death, and swifter. Death has overtaken me, who am old, but baseness my accusers, who are strong. Truth condemns them, as you have condemned me, and each of us abides sentence, And for you who have condemned me there will be a penalty ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... battlement or labored mound, Thick wall or moated gate; Not cities proud with spires and turrets crowned; Not bays and broad-armed ports, 5 Where, laughing at the storm, rich navies ride; Not starred and spangled courts, Where low-browed baseness wafts perfume to pride. No:—men, high-minded men, With powers as far above dull brutes endued 10 In forest, brake, or den, As beasts excel cold rocks and brambles rude; Men who their duties know, But know their rights, ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... lightly-uttered, irresponsible utterances with which the chronicles of the time abound, for Naldo had left his wife and children at Forli in the hands of the Countess, as hostages for his good faith, and this renders improbable the unsupported story of his baseness. ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... His baseness was well known to the town, for he was one of those whose tongues reveal their degradation as soon as they are intoxicated. He boasted of his exploits in the city and of the women he had brought to ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... the whites to unite against this tremendous menace, we are challenged with the smallness of our vote. This has long been flippantly charged to be evidence and has now been solemnly and officially declared to be proof of political turpitude and baseness on our part. Let us see. Virginia—a state now under fierce assault for this alleged crime—cast in 1888 seventy-five per cent of her vote; Massachusetts, the State in which I speak, sixty per cent of her vote. Was it suppression ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... wonderful accuracy the purport that I have ever had in view in my writing. I have always desired to 'hew out some lump of the earth', and to make men and women walk upon it just as they do walk here among us,—with not more of excellence, nor with exaggerated baseness,—so that my readers might recognise human beings like to themselves, and not feel themselves to be carried away among gods or demons. If I could do this, then I thought I might succeed in impregnating the mind of the novel-reader with a feeling that honesty ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... doom to him, hut he is calm. He cannot stoop even to pray. He has deserted his Maker, and it would be baseness now to prostrate himself ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... dean shall know, before this hour is expired, the baseness of the nephew whom he supports upon charity; he shall know the misery, the grief, the shame he has brought on me, and how unworthy ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... Alberoni, and shown what filthy baseness he stooped to in order to curry favour with the infamous Duc de Vendome. I have also shown that he accompanied the new Queen of Spain from Parma to Madrid, after she had been married, by procuration, to Philip V. He arrived ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... them. They will commit any baseness for money, except betraying their masters. It has been tried a hundred times. We may avoid using violence, as you call it, but the man must be frightened with the show of it. The people who can be bribed ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... man's love, which thy worth earns, As thou thyself; we envy not to see Thy friends with bays to crown thy poesy. No, here the gall lies;—we, that know what stuff Thy very heart is made of, know the stalk On which thy learning grows, and can give life To thy one dying baseness; yet must we Dance anticks on your paper. But were thy warp'd soul put in a new mould, I'd wear thee as a jewel ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... liking and good will towards so offensive an object. He has wit, it will be said; chearfulness and humour of the most characteristic and captivating sort. And is this enough? Is the humour and gaiety of vice so very captivating? Is the wit, characteristic of baseness and every ill quality, capable of attaching the heart and winning the affections? Or does not the apparency of such humour, and the flashes of such wit, by more strongly disclosing the deformity of character, but the more ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... placed himself thinking it the best place for him, or has been placed by a commander, there in my opinion he ought to stay and to abide the hazard, taking nothing into the reckoning, either death or anything else, before the baseness [of deserting his post]. ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... resolved to make a desperate effort to recover him; and he was the more fixed in this determination, because the horse was intended as a gift to Eveline on her recovery, in case she did recover, and, also, because, as he believed, the detection of the culprit would expose the baseness of her lover to his daughter, and cause her to discard him at once from her thoughts.—Full of these thoughts, he offered a handsome reward for the horse, and a very large one for the apprehension ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... dishonourable knave, who owed all he had to me, tried to deny the debt, and on being compelled by the court to pay me, reproached me with being a villainous miser? I could tell you more such like cases; and these things have made me hard and insensible to emotion when I have to deal with folly and baseness. Nay, more—I could tell you of the many bitter tears I have wiped away, and of the many prayers which have gone up to Heaven for me and my Angela, but you would only regard it as empty boasting, ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... done, might justly be termed idle abuse. But to go through all his actions and convict him in detail, will take, as it happens, but a short time, and is expedient, I think, for two reasons: first, that his baseness may appear in its true light; secondly, that they, whose terror imagines Philip to be invincible, may see he has run through all the artifices by which he rose to greatness, and his career is just come to an end. I myself, men of Athens, should most assuredly have regarded Philip as an object of ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... but in this instance I am not behind you. Ellen Walton left this house as pure as she entered it! Think you I had no object in all my restrictions of time, of secrecy and darkness? I had. One hour in the society of Miss Walton, convinced me of her unsullied purity, and another of your baseness. I resolved to save her at all hazards; and I did. My only regret now is, that I made myself the victim ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... she expresses her strong sympathy, her words indeed rise into the realm of charity. It is no mark of baseness to be unfortunate; "but these must endure," what Zeus lays upon them. Such is the exhortation of the young maiden to the much-enduring man; she has divined too the ground-work of his character. "But now, since thou ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... aspirations, his imaginings, his will? May not the people become the body in which his spirit, with all its forces, shall incarnate itself? Coming into actual acquaintance with the people for the first time, the sight of their multiform miseries, their sorrows, even their baseness lays hold of Sordello; it seems as if it were they who were about to make him their instrument, the voice through which their inarticulate griefs should find expression; he is captured by those whom he thought ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... First. Whatever may have been Marston's antecedents, they were such as to gratify his tastes as a cynical observer of the crimes and follies of men,—an observer whose hatred of evil sprang from no love of good, but to whom the sight of depravity and baseness was welcome, inasmuch as it afforded him me occasion to wreak his own scorn and pride. His ambition was to be the English Juvenal; and it must be conceded that he had the true Iago-like disposition "to spy out abuses." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... with such an air of mild and angelic candor pervading her whole face, that you would have sworn her the most innocent, the purest of her sex. Alas! that she was indeed almost the vilest! that she was that rare monster, a woman, who, linked with every crime and baseness that can almost unsex a woman, preserves yet in its height, one eminent and noble virtue, one half-redeeming trait amidst all her infamy, in her proud love of country! Name, honor, virtue, conscience, womanhood, truth, piety, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... forces united in one body, directly to Gom'phi, a town in the province of Thes'saly. But the news of his defeat at Dyr'rachium had reached this place before him; the inhabitants, therefore, who had before promised him obedience, now changed their minds, and, with a degree of baseness equal to their imprudence, shut their gates against him. 23. Caesar was not to be injured with impunity. Having represented to his soldiers the great advantage of forcing a place so very rich, he ordered the scaling ladders to be got ready, and causing an assault to be made, proceeded with such ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... reproach branding me every hour I stood in her presence with all vile and hateful names. The man just gone, coarse, low-bred, brutal soldier as he was, manflogger and drilling-block, had yet found heart to feel my baseness, and words in which to denounce it. What, then, would she say, when the truth came home to her? What shape should I take in her eyes then? How should I be remembered through ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... habit of her life. But this was now hard indeed. Her mind would not now take that turn. All that it would turn to was to the wretched and worse than worthless question, what punishment might fall on him for such utter baseness and wickedness. ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... had seized Lucy. After reading accounts of the case in half a dozen papers she could not doubt that her father was justly condemned, and she was horrified at the baseness of the crime. His letters to the poor woman he had robbed, were read in court, and Lucy flushed as she thought of them. They were a tissue of lies, hypocritical and shameless. Lucy remembered the question she had put to ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... the worth of the ideal must be largely determined by the success with which it can in practice be realized. We should abhor the so-called "practical" men whose practicality assumes the shape of that peculiar baseness which finds its expression in disbelief in morality and decency, in disregard of high standards of living and conduct. Such a creature is the worst enemy of the body politic. But only less desirable as a citizen is his nominal opponent ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... landslip. It is a strange world, and man, a strange animal, guided, it is true, usually by most commonplace motives; but, for that reason, ready and glad at times to escape from them and their dulness and baseness; to give vent, if but for a moment, in wild freedom, to that demoniac element, which, as Goethe says, underlies his nature and all nature; and to prefer for an hour, to the normal and respectable ditch-water, a bottle of champagne or ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... hand by means of violence, or infamy, or baseness, however large it may be, is tainted and unblest. On the other hand, whatever is obtained by honest profit, small though it be, brings a ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... of the hard-won earnings of years of ingenious industry was brought about by the baseness of a man who was concerned with me in purchasing drugs for exportation to the Confederate States. Unluckily, I was obliged to employ as my agent a long-legged sea-captain from Maine. With his aid, I invested in this enterprise about six thousand dollars, which I reasonably hoped ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... Prohorovna was terribly alarmed. This was why she decided at once to go when Shatov came to fetch her, though she was tired out, as she had been hard at work at a confinement ah! the night before. She had always been convinced that "a wretched creature like Shatov was capable of any political baseness," but the arrival of Marya Ignatyevna put things in a different light. Shatov's alarm, the despairing tone of his entreaties, the way he begged for help, clearly showed a complete change of feeling in the traitor: a man who was ready to betray himself ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... deception on the part of Jasper," said Melleville to himself, as he left the store. "A lie told with sinister purpose. How given over to all baseness is the man!" ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... Oates were summoned before it, when the latter, making many additions to his narrative, solemnly affirmed its truth. Aghast at so horrible a relation, the council knew not what to credit. The evil reputation Oates had borne, the baseness of character he revealed in detailing his actions as a spy, the mysterious manner in which the fanatical Tonge accounted for his possession of the document, tended to make many doubt; whilst others, believing no man would have the hardihood to bring forward such ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... others regard me as a saint and expect me to perform miracles; an upright man to some people, to others—a liar and a deceiver—I myself know who I am, and I do not ask them to understand me. And if there are people who will accuse me of deception, of baseness, even of the lack of simple honour—for there are scoundrels who are convinced to this day that I committed murder—no one will dare accuse me of cowardice, no one will dare say that I could not perform my painful duty to the end. ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... Indian life. Distrust exists not among the children of the wilderness, until generated by the conduct of white men. These stories, and thousand others, all exemplifying the triumph of virtue and honour over baseness and vice, are every day narrated by the elders, in presence of the young men and children. The evening encampment is a great school of morals, where the red-skin philosopher embodies in his tales the sacred ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... sentiment, such inviolable attachment to religion and virtue, and seemed so averse to all sorts of inflammatory discourse, that he durst not presume upon the footing he had gained in her affection, to explain the baseness of his desire; he therefore applied to another of her passions, that proved the bane of her virtue. This was her timidity, which at first being constitutional, was afterwards increased by the circumstances of ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... and went hurriedly out of the room. I stood still. I felt all of a sudden so uncomfortable and so ashamed that I hid my face in my hands. I realised all the impropriety, all the baseness of my behaviour, and, choked with shame and remorse, I stood as it were in disgrace. 'Mercy,' I thought, ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... final impression one carries away, after reading Nietzsche, is the impression of "distinction," of remoteness from "vulgar brutality," from "sensual baseness," from the clumsy compromises of the world. It may not last, this Zarathustrian mood. It lasts with some of us an hour; with some of us a day—with a few of us a handful of years! But while it lasts, it is a rare and high experience. As from an ice-bound promontory stretching ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... mother nothing is known. The conjectures of scandal are heightened and perplexed by the fact that he was ennobled when a child, and that, amidst all the denunciations of his overbearing behaviour and insufferable arrogance, he is never reproached with the baseness of his maternal lineage. Legitimated in infancy by an imperial diploma, Antonio was literally a courtier ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... sets." "People young, and raw, and soft-natured," says South, "think it an easy thing to gain love, and reckon their own friendships a sure price of any man's: but when experience shall have shown them the hardness of most hearts, the hollowness of others, and the baseness and ingratitude of almost all, ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... of those who, at least, once loved me, and to take their hands; to kiss Dorcas and good Dolly; and feel that all the time I am a vile impostor, stained incredibly, from whom, if they knew me, they would turn in horror and disgust. Now, Stanley, I can bear anything but this baseness—anything but the life-long practice of perfidy—that, I will not and cannot endure. Dorcas must know the truth. That there is a secret jealously guarded from her, she does know—no woman could fail ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... and led them to feel ashamed of treachery and to acquire enthusiasm in his behalf. They gained by this in zeal, both through indignation at being tempted and through their attempt to show that they would not willingly gain a reputation for baseness. Antony after his unexpected setback took refuge in his fleet and prepared to have a combat on the water, or in any case to sail to Spain. Cleopatra seeing this caused the ships to desert and she herself rushed ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... will deteriorate rather than improve. The Jewish desire for national prosperity was an immeasurably nobler motive to action than is the Christian's fear of the quasi-material fires of Hell. Indeed it is nothing but our familiarity with the latter motive that has blinded us to its inherent baseness. It is no exaggeration to say that there have been epochs in the history of Christendom (as there are still quarters of Christian thought and phases of Christian faith) in which the trumpet-call that was meant to rouse ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... treason heaped on treachery, of insult repaid by fraud, would be easy enough. Indeed, a huge book might be compiled containing nothing but the episodes in this grim history of despotism, now tragic and pathetic, now terror-moving in sublimity of passion, now despicable by the baseness of the motives brought to light, at one time revolting through excess of physical horrors, at another fascinating by the spectacle of heroic courage, intelligence, and resolution. Enough however, has been said to describe the atmosphere of danger in which the tyrants breathed and moved, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... so, Frances understood. Penitence that brings only a headache is like plating over brass; it cannot long conceal the baseness of the thing ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... of the indemnification to be made to his injured honour. There is, therefore, scarcely any Italian that would upon some occasions scruple assassination. Men of spirit among them, notwithstanding the prejudices of their education, cannot fail to have a secret conviction of its baseness, and will be desirous of extending as far as possible the cartel of honour. Real or affected arrogance teaches others to regard almost the whole species as their inferiors, and of consequence incites ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... times of politics, and perhaps in all times, contempt is a dangerous luxury. A man may be a very poor creature, and still have a faculty for mischief. And Robespierre had this faculty in the case of Danton. With singular baseness, he handed over to Saint Just a collection of notes, to serve as material for the indictment which Saint Just was to present to the Convention. They comprised everything that suspicion could interpret malignantly, from the most conspicuous acts ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... his success which filled the breasts of the rulers of his country, a jealousy which even self-interest was unable to overcome. From the first he had borne their burden alone, and owing to the treachery and baseness of his own nation in the end it proved ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... tortures her without ceasing, deceives them all. Where is there another woman who has been so shamelessly robbed of her children? For is not my daughter the captive and concubine of an insane tuft-hunter? Has not my son been taken from me through the baseness that has been practised against his sister, and the lamentable spectacle afforded him by my own powerlessness? Where, I ask high Heaven, is there another woman so cursed as ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... came a finer comprehension of his baseness to Katrine, and an emphasized doubt as to whether she ever could forgive the miserable selfishness which ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... wanting in favor of a prince who was so extremely revered and beloved by his own party, and whom the nation in general began to regard with great affection and compassion. To murder him privately was exposed to the imputation of injustice and cruelty, aggravated by the baseness of such a crime; and every odious epithet of "traitor" and "assassin" would, by the general voice of mankind, be indisputably ascribed to the actors in such a villany. Some unexpected procedure must be attempted, which would astonish the world by its novelty, would bear the semblance ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... knows a trick worth any two of these: but it is curious to observe the community of baseness, and the comparative innocence of awkwardness and inexperience, which at once connote the species and denote the specimens of the later and ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... become a good husband and father, he becomes better in his domestic relations. If he has been charitable before, he becomes more so now. Men's weaknesses he looks upon as human frailties, until time and sense teach him that frailties have degenerated into positive perversity of character and baseness of heart. He will condemn ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... you, girl: I have been fighting in the open, against treachery and deceit fighting always under cover. I have been fighting bare-handed where others were armed. Day by day I have been finding out the baseness and the trickery; how my own side has used me as a screen behind which the old dishonorable expedients could be safely planned and carried out. I never knew until within the past two days what all this chicanery and double-dealing ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... woman in question to bring Before her own face, were a flattering thing; But we think thy father's baseness," quoth they, "Might by thy beauty ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various
... uncommonly sweet, enhanced the admiration with which one viewed his matchless delivery, in which was perfect grace, and entire harmony with the expressions which fell from his lips. How mournful a sight, to see one so nobly gifted, leading a life of baseness and vice, devoting his immortal qualities to the vilest selfishness, and to the betrayal of his country and of liberty! Should the descendant of an oppressed and persecuted race take part with oppressors? Senator Benjamin is a renegade to the spirit of freedom ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... take it in a mocking sense. Rachel looked up out of her depths and gave her heart to this high-minded nobleman. He looked down and lifted her, as it were, so that she could forget for the time all the baseness and the brutality that she had known, that she might put aside her forced vivacity and the self that was ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... Our care recovered the wretch; but, when he had collected strength, the ungrateful Dominique, forgetting at once his duty and the signal service which we had rendered him, went and rejoined the rebels. So much baseness and insanity did not go unrevenged; and soon after he found, in a fresh assault, that death from which he was not worthy to be saved, but which he might in all probability have avoided, if, true to honour and gratitude, he ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... to have 'em in an equal degree; 'tis impossible they shou'd not have some Imperfections, seeing they are Men, but their Imperfections ought not to destroy the Character that is attributed to them; if we describe them Brave, Liberal and Generous, we ought not to attribute to them Baseness or Cowardice, because that their Actions wou'd otherwise bely their Character, and the Predominant Virtures of the Heroes: 'Tis no Argument that Salust, though so Happy in the Description of Men, in the Description of Cataline does not in some manner describe ...
— Prefaces to Fiction • Various
... owe him all, that now I am; He taught me first the noble thirst of fame. Shewed me the baseness of unmanly fear, Till the unlicked whelp I plucked from the rough bear, And made the ounce and tyger give me way, While from their hungry jaws I snatched the prey: 'Twas he that charged my young arms first with toils, And drest me glorious in ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... When my dimensions are as well compact, My mind as generous and my shape as true, As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us With base? with baseness? with bastardy? base, base? Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land; Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund As to the legitimate: ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... not thoroughly believe in the baseness of the woman he had trusted. Again and again he went over the same ground, trying to find some lurking circumstance, no matter how unlikely in its nature, which should explain and ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the safety of his friends and the officers of his staff, and he did not even in this moment forget to recommend those whose merit had given them claims to promotion. When life was nearly extinct, with an unsubdued spirit, as if anticipating the baseness of his posthumous calumniators, he exclaimed, "I hope the people of England will be satisfied! I hope my country will do me justice!" In a few minutes afterwards he died; and his corpse, wrapped in a military cloak, ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... his stepbrother and tried in his stupid way to read the secrets beneath that curly hair. But he had no success. He caught himself calculating how much Sidney had cost him, at periods of his career when he could ill spare money; and, having caught himself, he was angry with himself for such baseness. At eight o'clock he ventured to knock at Ella's door and explain to her that Sidney had not been quite well. She had passed a peaceful night, for he had, of course, refrained from ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... methods, which every man in love with glory tries first of all. Lucien was struggling as yet with himself and his own desires, and not with the difficulties of life; at strife with his own power, and not with the baseness of other men, that fatal exemplar for impressionable minds. The brilliancy of his intellect had a keen attraction for David. David admired his friend, while he kept him out of the scrapes into which he was led by ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... his aunt before the evening came, a word or two in the speaking of which she had found some difficulty. She was prepared with the money,—with that two hundred pounds for which he had asked,—obtained with what wiles, and lies, and baseness of subterfuge I need not stop here to describe. But she was by no means willing to give this over into her nephew's hands without security. She was willing to advance him this money; she had been willing even to go through unusual ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... Bruce, but probably polished to its present perfection by Logan, whose other writings give us rather the impression of a man of varied accomplishments and excellent taste, than of deep feeling or original genius. If Logan were not the author of 'The Cuckoo,' there was a special baseness connected with the fact, that when Burke sought him out in Edinburgh, solely from his admiration of that poem, he owned the soft and false impeachment, and rolled as a sweet morsel praise from the greatest man of the age, which he knew was the ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... regarded as impregnable, was on the eve of being forced, they led out twenty white prisoners, stripped them, tied their hands behind them, and put them to death. It was impossible, after having witnessed this act of baseness and cruelty, that anything short of their extermination should satisfy ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... will digress for the moment to relate an incident of the Federal march, to show the brutal cowardice and baseness of the Federals in making war upon the non-combatants—women and children—and also the unyielding spirit and inflexible courage of our Southern people. Those dispositions were manifested on both sides throughout the whole war. It is unnecessary to say that feeling ran ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... this division in certain proportions according to their usage, these strange monsters did not neglect to set apart a small sum as an offering to Kalee their goddess; and when, after this and several other murders, all characterized by similar features of treachery and baseness, they returned to their village, they proceeded at once to celebrate Tapoonee, or a solemn rite of their most ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... a sigh, and sat apparently meditating on the enormous baseness of the man who saved a lady's life and then proposed; and it was not until Mrs. Willoughby had spoken twice that she was ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... in journalism closed to him. He knew that his doing so would cause a scandal. The paper was violent, malignant, and always being condemned. But as Christophe never read it, he only thought of the boldness of its ideas, of which he was not afraid, and not of the baseness of its tone, which would have repelled him. Besides, he was so angry at seeing the other papers in alliance to suppress him that perhaps he would have gone on even if he had been warned. He wanted to show people that he ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... Cecil, or the mass of Englishmen who conformed with him in turn to the religion of Henry, of Edward, of Mary, and of Elizabeth, with baseness or hypocrisy. They followed the accepted doctrine of the time—that every realm, through its rulers, had the sole right of determining what should be the form of religion within its bounds. What the Marian persecution ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... vexation employed a hundred arguments to reprove such baseness in her, and enable me to refuse her request for to-night; but she became so importunate, shed so many tears, heaved so many sighs, said so often that I was driving her to despair if I refused to gratify her passion, that my heart was brought to consent in spite of me; and, to ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... terrible consequences which might come of Jonathan's tale being told—a tale so colored with all their bitterest prejudices that it was certain to be greedily listened to; and in the storm of angry passion it would rouse everything else would be swallowed up by resentment against Eve's baseness; and the fire once kindled, what would come ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... marriage provided Pa would consent. This was obtained,—for Pa was a tradesman; and I suppose every one of my readers has remarked how great an effect a title has on the lower classes. Yes, thank Heaven! there is about a freeborn Briton a cringing baseness, and lickspittle awe of rank, which does not exist under any tyranny in Europe, and is only to be found ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... killing rule of no rule; the consecration of cupidity and braying of folly, and dim stupidity and baseness, in most of the affairs of men. Slop-shirts attainable three-half-pence cheaper by the ruin of living bodies ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... capitulations of conscience, come to the point of establishing a distinction between his own money and the housekeeping money, just as Louis XV. drew the line between his privy purse and the public moneys. He deceived Dinah as to his earnings. On discovering this baseness, Madame de la Baudraye went through fearful tortures of jealousy. She wanted to live two lives—the life of the world and the life of a literary woman; she accompanied Lousteau to every first-night performance, and could detect in ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... of the baseness of the avaricious functions of the Lower Pthah, p. 54, with his beetle-gospel, p. 59, "that a nation can stand on its vices better than on its virtues," explains the main motive of all my books ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... thy superhuman power Needs no assistance from an arm like mine; But grateful as I am for this great service, I cannot leave thee now, and shrink from peril, That would be baseness ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... explains that to my satisfaction. There is goodness in all men, and sermons even in stones. But goodness and badness is apt to run in streaks. Man, to use the language of another, is a queer combination of cheek and perversity, insolence, pride, impudence, vanity, jealousy, hate, scorn, baseness, insanity, honor, truth, wisdom, virtue and urbanity. He's a queer combination all right. And those mixed elements of his nature, in their effects on other people, we call personal influence. Many a man is not altogether what he has ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... above his head on the pillow. He lay like some poor little wounded boy, like Putney's Winthrop; the mother that is in every woman's heart gushed out of hers in pity upon him, mixed with filial reverence. She had thought that she should confess her baseness to him, and ask his forgiveness, and offer to fulfil with the people he had chosen for the guardians of his child that interrupted purpose of his. But in the presence of death, so august, so simple, all the concerns of life seemed trivial, and ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... lie which my appearance gave to their false assertions. They had blazoned forth everywhere that my manners were those of a housemaid; that I was absurd and unladylike in my conduct; and that it was only requisite to have a glimpse of me to recognize both the baseness of my extraction, and the class of society in which my life had been hitherto spent. But I showed manners so easy and so elegant that the people soon shook off their preconceived prejudice against me. I heard my demeanor lauded as greatly ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... sentence reached him in Siena, in April, 1302, and from that time began the last sad phases of his life, the long, slow agony of his exile and bitter disappointment. Disillusioned, separated from his wife, his children, the city of his love, he wandered from city to city, disgusted with the baseness alike of Guelphs and Ghibellines, feeling how salt is the bread of exile, and how hard it is to climb another's stairs. "Alas," he says, "I have gone about like a mendicant, showing against my will the wounds with which fortune hath smitten me. I have indeed been a vessel without ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... with a gulp. "You've deceived me, Jack. You've lied to me. You have given me feigned names. You have decoyed me to your house under false pretences. And I recognise you now. I know you in all your baseness. You're my father's murderer! Don't hope to escape by playing on my feelings. I'd deserve to be murdered myself, if I could act like that! I'm on my way to the police-office, to give you in custody on the charge of murdering Vivian ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... seems to have hesitated in letting these troops join those under the Maid, for fear that were she to gain a thorough success his influence at Court would be weakened. When Joan fell into the hands of her foes, the Archbishop had the incredible baseness publicly to show his pleasure, declaring that her capture by the enemy was a ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... dressed out with the sweepings of civilisation, came forth and stared upon the emigrants. The silent stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic degradation of their appearance, would have touched any thinking creature, but my fellow-passengers danced and jested round them with a truly Cockney baseness. I was ashamed for the thing we call civilisation. We should carry upon our consciences so much, at least, of our forefathers' misconduct as we continue to ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this horrible exhibition of baseness, my solicitor came to me and told me that he had had an interview with the Attorney-General, and that he had authorized him to say, that if I would enter into bonds and give securities to keep the peace, he would not ask me to plead guilty, but set me at liberty without more to do. He ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... favouring atmosphere of opinion or feeling. Two features of recent controversy suffice of themselves (if proof were needed) to establish the truth of this assertion. The rhetorical emphasis laid by Home Rulers on the baseness of the arts which carried the Act of Union is, as an argument in favour of repealing the Act, little else than irrational. The assumed infamy of Pitt does not prove the alleged wisdom of Gladstone; and to urge the repeal of an Act which has stood for nearly a century, because it was carried by corruption, ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... settled down to a quiet periodical. Perhaps the real John Bull, heavy, good-natured lumberer as he is, was never worse represented than in this journal which bore his name, but had little of his kindly spirit. Hook was its originator, and for a long time its main supporter. Scurrility, scandal, libel, baseness of all kinds formed the fuel with which it blazed, and the wit, bitter, unflinching, unsparing, which puffed the flame ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... destitute of morals, and perfidious in the extreme; but with a supple, insinuating address, and an accommodating spirit, tolerant of all kinds of profligacy in others. Conscious of his own inherent baseness, he sought to secure an influence over his pupil, by corrupting his principles and fostering his vices; he debased him, to keep himself from being despised. Unfortunately he succeeded. To the early precepts of this infamous pander have been attributed those excesses ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... is not, perhaps, judging him too mildly to say that, had he succeeded in obtaining Evelyn's hand and fortune, he would have shrunk from the baseness he now meditated. To step coldly into the very post of which he, and he alone, had been the cause of depriving his earliest patron and nearest relative; to profit by the betrayal of his own party; to damn himself eternally in the eyes of his ancient friends; to pass down the stream of ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book XI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Reformation. In later times names could only be changed by form of law. It is thus that Bugg became Norfolk Howard, a considerable transformation inspired by a natural instinct to "avoid the opinion of baseness," as Camden puts it. We no longer connect Gosse with goose, nor Pennefather with a miser. Cotgrave has pinse-maille (pince-maille), "a pinch peny, scrape-good, nigard, miser, penie-father." In Purcell we lose Old Fr. pourcel (pourceau), ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... like benefit afterwards. It fell out as he feared. For as the Polonga drank, the Child patted him on the head, and he in his hasty humour bit him on the hand and killed him. The Noya seeing this, was resolved to be revenged; and so reproaching him for his baseness, fought him so long till he killed him, and after that devoured him. Which to this day they ever do, always fight when they meet, and the Conquerour eats the the body of the vanquished. Hence the ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... whose husband is tainted with the reproach of cowardice; and all who succeed her, "from dawn to dewy eve," unless under the ban of the same withering stigma, have the same privilege of taunting her with her husband's baseness, and of stepping between her or her cattle until their ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... hopeless. People of free countries will not tolerate a fiction which teaches that in the end evil is triumphant and virtue is wretched. Want of hope means either distrust of God or a belief in the essential baseness of man or both. It teaches men to be base. It makes a country base. A world wherein there is no hope is a world where there is no virtue. The contrast between the teacher of hope and the teacher of despair is to be found in the pessimism of Carlyle and the serene cheerfulness of ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... is a sorry end— A most unworthy end! To think—O God!— To think that I should fall by the hand of one Whose office, like his nature, is all baseness, Gives Death ten thousand stings, and to the Grave A damning victory! Fame sinks with life! A galling—shameful—ignominious end! (sinks down). O mighty heart! O full and orbed heart, Flee to thy kindred sun, ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... its own characteristic value. Indeed, if this were not so there would be no possibility of that form of baseness known as being merely prudent. There is a prudential equilibrium; a condition of smooth and harmonious adjustment, within the personal life or the community. I propose that this equilibrium be termed health. In that ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... and unrelenting were the persecutions he suffered from those enemies, and so deep his indignation at their baseness, that for some time he seriously thought of escaping beyond the bounds of Christendom, and seeking refuge among the Muslim. But just then (1125) he was offered an important position, the abbotship of the monastery of St. Gildas-de-Rhuys, in Lower Brittany, on the lonely, inhospitable ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... tinkers mad, The baseness of the metal, Because, they said, it was so bad It would not mend a kettle. O ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... conscience I do fear. Once, for one moment, George, I thought that I would fear nothing. Once, for one moment, I was still willing to be yours; but I remembered what you would think of me if I should so fall, and I repented my baseness. May God preserve me from such sin! But, for the world—why should you ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... shows that your proud nation has no flattering opinion of us," Franklin answered. "We, who are the injured parties, have not the baseness to entertain it. You will forgive me for reminding you that the King's paternal solicitude has been rather trying. It has burned our defenseless towns in mid-winter; if has incited the savages to ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... The moral tendency of many parts of it is good, while the incidents are exceedingly laughable. Old Rapid continually betraying his trade by stuffing his conversation with the technical terms of the taylor—his son's distress at it—the honest rusticity of Frank Oatland—the baseness, vanity and folly of Vortex the nabob—the insolence and amorousness of Miss Vortex his daughter, and the whimsical incidents arising from their various designs, mistakes, detections and disappointments, form ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... determination into act he had chosen his colour in the game, and had given an inevitable bent to his wishes. He had made it impossible that he should not from henceforth desire it to be the truth that his father was dead; impossible that he should not be tempted to baseness rather than that the precise facts of his conduct should ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... know of a more appropriate name—after the baseness that you haven't even tried to hide, in ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... rests musing in a dreamy way, "Behold, 'tis Charlemagne!" Tawny to see And hairy, and seven feet high was he, Like John of Bourbon. Roaming hill or wood He looked a wolf was striving to do good. Bound up in duty, he of naught complained, The cry for help his aid at once obtained. Only he mourned the baseness of mankind, And—that the beds too short he still doth find. When people suffer under cruel kings, With pity moved, he to them succor brings. 'Twas he defended Alix from her foes As sword of Urraca—he ever shows His strength is for the feeble and oppressed; Father ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... all, it gives immense and irresponsible power to a handful of wealthy men—and especially to the one most wealthy and unscrupulous among them—whose wealth is an accident of speculation, whose origins are repulsive, and whose characters have, as a rule, the weakness and baseness developed by this sort of adventures. There are, among such gutter-snipes, thousands whose luck ends in the native gutter, half a dozen whose luck lands them into millions, one or two at most who, on the top of such a career go crazy with the ambition of the parvenu ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... Anglo-American war, he alludes, with a good deal of justice, to the Americans of 1812, as "a people who (notwithstanding the curse of black slavery which clings to them, adding the most horrible ferocity to the peculiar baseness of their mercantile spirit, and rendering their republican vanity ridiculous) do, in their general government, uphold civil institutions which have startled the crazy despotisms of Europe."] The Tennesseeans were troubled by no such ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... will hardly believe that a Princess of England, grand-daughter of Henry the Great, hath wanted a faggot, in the month of January, to get out of bed in the Louvre, and in the eyes of a French court. We read in histories, with horror, of baseness less monstrous than this; and the little concern I have met with about it in most people's minds, has obliged me to make, I believe, a thousand times, this reflection,—that examples of times past move men ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... separation between statecraft and morality, which recognizes force and fraud among the legitimate means of attaining high political ends, which makes success alone the test of conduct and which presupposes the corruption, baseness, and ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... causes inferior to those which have been now mentioned, or from little frivolous excuses, or idle and unfounded conjectures, unworthy of beings expected to fill a moral station in life. Yes, O man! often in these solitary journeyings have I exclaimed against the baseness of thy nature, when reflecting on the little paltry considerations which have smothered thy benevolence, and hindered thee from succouring an oppressed brother. And yet, on a further view of things, I have reasoned myself into a kinder feeling towards thee. For I have been obliged to consider ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... immortal joys, but we forsook them for lesser things. For that we were thoroughly punished and failed even in our baseness. You, too, Sir Walter, have ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... will begin from the first principles of praise and blame. For everything is to be praised which is united with virtue; and everything which is connected with vice is to be blamed. Wherefore the end of the one is honour, of the other baseness. But this kind of discourse is composed of the narration and explanation of facts, without any argumentations, in a way calculated to handle the feelings of the mind gently rather than to create belief or to confirm it in a suitable manner. For they are not doubtful points ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... than most men; that he had seen the English Parliament, the American Congress, the French Council of Elders and Council of Five Hundred, the Batavian Convention; but that he had nowhere found anything like the baseness and impudence of the scoundrels, as he called them, at Dublin. If Mr Pitt's whole plan had been carried into execution, that infamous parliament, that scandal to the name of parliament, would have perished unregretted; ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... institutions, and yet with those pinched features, that stunted form, that villainous look; is it Papuan, Bushman, or Carib? Fitly representing either of these, though born in a Christian city, and bearing about not only the stamp of violated physical law, but of moral neglect and baseness. And no one needs to be told that there are savages in New York, as well as in the islands of the sea. Savages, not in gloomy forests, but under the strength of gas-light, and the eyes of policemen; with war-whoops and clubs very ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... sort were glad to see him go, but his old companions with whom he had shared so many dangers and privations were filled with grief. "He ever hated baseness, sloth, pride and indignity," said one of them. "He never allowed more for himself than for his soldiers with him. Upon no danger would he send them where he would not lead them himself. He would never see us want what he either had or could by any means get us. He loved action ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... himself spoke to the captain in his brother's behalf, and desired to know what offence the doctor had committed; when the hard-hearted villain had the baseness to say that he should never forgive him for the injury which he had endeavoured to do him in his favour; which, he said, he had pumped out of him, and was such a cruelty that it ought not to ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... the chief source of all evils to Man, and of baseness and cowardice, is not death, but the fear ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... learn to distinguish between false appetite and real. There is such a thing as a false appetite, which will lead a man into vagaries with regard to diet, will tempt him to eat spicy things which he should not eat at all, and would not but that it is toothsome, and for the moment in baseness of mind. A man ought to inquire and find out what he really and truly has an appetite for—what suits his constitution; and that, doctors tell him, is the very thing he ought to have in general. And so with books. As applicable to almost all of you, I will say that it is highly expedient to ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... circumstance which, for baseness and diabolical iniquity, is unparalleled in civilized society. I could not pollute your daughter's ears by reciting it in her presence, and besides she ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... beyond endurance. Her plan was, to make them all fond of her—and so drive me wild with jealousy. To be familiar and endearing with them all—and so make me mad with envying them. When we were left alone in our bedroom at night, I would reproach her with my perfect knowledge of her baseness; and then she would cry and cry and say I was cruel, and then I would hold her in my arms till morning: loving her as much as ever, and often feeling as if, rather than suffer so, I could so hold her in my arms and plunge ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... say that only the pure can repose in his action,—only he obtain deliverance by his deed, and after deliverance from it? The egotism, the baseness, the partialities that are in our performance are hooks and barbs by which it wounds and wearies us in the passage, and clings to us ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... greatness or nobility of mind, may indeed be earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied upon; and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which ...
— The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... be recognised and punished by those over whom he usurps power. The King is no longer the just, rather kind, man of affairs who takes power in the earlier, much finer play. He is a swollen, soured, bullying man, with all the ingratitude of a king and all the baseness of one who knows his cause to be wrong. Opposed to him is a passionate, quick-tempered man, ready to speak his mind, on the instant, to any whom he believes to be ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... hand, the soul thus spiritually minded has a keen sense of like qualities in others. It cannot but discern when another is tender in conscience, disinterested, forbearing, scornful of untruth and baseness, and esteeming nothing so much as the fruits of the Spirit: accordingly, John did not hesitate to say: "We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren." Our doctrine certainly had been, that the Church was the assembly of the saved, gathered by ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... infallibly be this night thirteen months hence. I didn't see any of the other millions who would be choking and gasping for breath and writhing in the torture of the universal fire—I only saw you and my own baseness in thinking, even for a moment, that such a ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... social conditions is a legitimate one for the author to make; and that we may be in no state to judge justly of his exposure while the punishment is being inflicted, or while the irritation is fresh. For, no doubt, the reader winces often because the novel reveals to himself certain possible baseness, selfishness, and meanness. Of this, however, I (speaking for myself) may be sure: that the artist who so represents vulgar life that I am more in love with my kind, the satirist who so depicts vice and villainy ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... inexorable shape of the Slave Power, which consults no interest but its own in the management of government, and which will never make a concession to the manufacturers or the merchants of the North, unless it be to purchase some new act of baseness, or bind them in some new chains of servility.—But have you inquired whether that flood of paper is necessary? We frankly tell you that we do not believe it is; we believe that a better system is possible,—to be brought about, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... little porringer: Of me she shall not win renown: For the baseness of its nature shall have strength to drag ...
— Phantasmagoria and Other Poems • Lewis Carroll
... obscurity and baseness of his birth, he was sent proconsul to Africa, where he died, after having obtained the honors of the triumph. It is said that, on his return to Africa, the same person who had predicted his future grandeur appeared to him again at the moment of ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... your guiltier head Shall our intolerable self-disdain Wreak suddenly its anger and its pain; For manifest in that disastrous light We shall discern the right And do it, tardily.—O ye who lead, Take heed! Blindness we may forgive, but baseness we ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... than before the encroachments of literary simplisme. The man of whom Delsarte speaks is not confined to such or such a category of the species. He proposes that aesthetics should interpret an all-comprehensive human nature, which is not made up alone of baseness, egotism and duplicity. Though it be subject to perversion, it has its luminous aspects, its radiant sides, and we should not too long turn our eyes ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... hungered forty-eight hours,' muttered Calenus, 'has an appetite even in such a time.' He seized on the food, and devoured it greedily. Nothing could perhaps, be more unnaturally horrid than the selfish baseness of these villains; for there is nothing more loathsome than the valor of avarice. Plunder and sacrilege while the pillars of the world tottered to and fro! What an increase to the terrors of nature can be made by ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... modesty is engaged; on that, impudence: on this, chastity; on that, lewdness: on this, integrity; on that, fraud: on this, piety; on that, profaneness: on this, constancy; on that, fickleness: on this, honour; on that, baseness: on this, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... eternal suffering. He saw his own guilt and the infinite goodness of his Master at the same time. The one produced penitence; the other, hope. But, when Judas hanged himself, he did not go into eternal punishment, but into temporal. He saw his own baseness and his own folly; but he did not see God's love. If he had seen God's love and Christ's pardoning mercy, together with his sin, he would not have hanged himself; but, like Peter, he would have repented, and gone forth to preach ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... what such a creature would do with the cash; that he would hasten to celebrate the success of his cunning by a revel at which he could brag to some loose companion how neatly he had cheated a generous and noble woman. But he did something more, almost inconceivable in its baseness; he took that letter to the Queen's Proctor and showed it to that archive of centuried insapience as a proof that there had been collusion in the case, that his wife and he were really on good ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
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