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More "Crotchet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... silk stocking according to his crotchet, that's my maxim," submitted Bowers as they threshed the matter ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... onomatopoetic, or "bow-wow" imitations. For instance, the North Americans express by "whip-poor-will" what the Brazilians call "Joao-corta-pao." The Guinea fowl may have been the "Afraa avis;"but that was a dear luxury amongst the Romans, though the Greek meleagris was cheap. The last crotchet about it is that of an African traveller, who holds it to be the peacock of Solomon's navies, completely ignoring the absolute certainty which the South-Indian word "Tukkiim" carries ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... thee to be scarce a bit, would it, and leave me to go and find out what's up? He has, perhaps, getten some crotchet into his head thou'rt an accomplice, and is laying a trap ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... desiring to play a trick upon the Spanish ambassador, a man of great erudition, but who had a crotchet in his head upon sign language, informed him that there was a distinguished professor of that science in the university at Aberdeen. The ambassador set out for that place, preceded by a letter from the King with instructions to make the best of him. There ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... tongue then speaketh more smoothly, and the ear listeneth more benignantly; but why do I attempt to reason with you? do I not know you for conceited creatures, with one idea—and that a foolish one—a crotchet, for the sake of which ye would sacrifice anything, religion if required—country? There, fling down my book, I do not wish ye to walk any farther in my company, unless you cast your nonsense away, which ye will never do, for it is the breath of your nostrils; fling down my book, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... given above from his 'Principia' palpably violate it. But Theists, however learned, pay little regard to any rules of philosophising, which put in peril their fundamental crotchet. ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... breaks in syllables the volant word. Then forms the next upon the marshal'd plain In deepening ranks his dexterous cypher-train; And counts, as wheel the decimating bands, 130 The dews of AEgypt, or Arabia's sands, And then the third on four concordant lines Prints the lone crotchet, and the quaver joins; Marks the gay trill, the solemn pause inscribes, And parts with bars the undulating tribes. 135 Pleased round her cane-wove throne, the applauding crowd Clap'd their rude hands, their ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... said Mr. Rolfe. "And now for my motive in reading these letters. Sir Charles may still have a crotchet, an inordinate desire for an heir; but, even if he has, the writer of these letters has nothing to fear from any jury; and, therefore, I am now ready to act. I propose to go down to the asylum to-morrow, and get him out ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... little lady nowadays; as if she'd got something on 'er mind.' And I to him: 'Pooh! Isn't it enough that she's got to put up with the cranks and crotchets of one o' YOUR sect?'—Oh Mary, my dear, there's many a true word said in jest. Though little did I think what the crotchet would be." And slowly the rims of Tilly's eyes and the tip of ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... part-authorship which are easily accessible elsewhere, while another excludes those which are difficult to be got at anywhere. It is impossible for any one who reads literature as literature and not as a matter of idle crotchet, not to reflect that if either of the societies which, during the nineteenth century, have devoted themselves to the study of Shakespere and his contemporaries, had chosen to employ their funds on ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... cause of both. Of him an honest thinker has said,—and there is much truth in the apparent paradox,—"No man who was not a fanatic, had ever more natural piety than he; and his supposed atheism is a mere metaphysical crotchet in which he was kept by the affected scorn and ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... drinking, (the first of the bin which he had tasted,) and upon the decision which the Chancellor might come to on a case brought into court on his advice, and which had been argued that afternoon. At last Frankpledge unwittingly fell foul of a favorite crotchet of Mortmain's—and at it they went, hammer and tongs, for nearly twenty minutes, (it had nothing whatever to do with the case they were consulting upon.) In the end, Mortmain of course adhered to his points, and ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... "Most people have some crotchet or other," said the Rector. "When a man's views are clear about subscription, and that sort of thing, he generally goes as far wrong the other way. Buller might go out to Central Africa, perhaps, if there was ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... vainly insisted—that these and similar honoraria ought to be accepted, because else you were lowering the prescriptive rights and value of the office, which you—a mere locum tenens for some coming successor—had no right to do upon a solitary scruple or crotchet, arising probably from dyspepsia. Better men, no doubt, than ever stood in your stockings, had pocketed thankfully the gifts of ancient, time-honored custom. My uncle, however, though not with the carnal recusancy which besieged the spiritual efforts of poor Cuthbert Headrigg, that ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Dyer gave me what he calls his 'Crotchet,' and what I call an indifferent poem. Said he to me, 'I could not bring in Wordsworth, and Lloyd, and Lamb, but I put them in a note.' That man ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... "Call it a crotchet, call it a foolish fancy, or what you will, Antonio," rejoined Salvator,—"at any rate I love the fair sex; but there is not one, not even she on whom I foolishly dote, for whom I would gladly die, but what excites ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... Peacock, at that time, shared, in a more practical way, Shelley's desire for root and branch reform; both wore poets, although not equally gifted, and both loved Plato and the Greek tragedians. In "Crotchet Castle" Peacock has expressed his own delight in Greek literature through the talk of the ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... has lately been our good fortune to meet with. Every page, nay, every line is a satire upon the extravagance and precocity of what Vivian Grey calls our "artificial state;" and all the weak sides of our age are mercilessly dealt with by the coterie at Crotchet Castle. The book is altogether Shandean, and the satire shandied to and fro with great vivacity. We need not tell the reader what period or event of the last seven years is pointed to in the following extract. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... "Musicks a crotchet the sober think vain, The fiddle's a wooden projection, Tunes are but flirts of a whimsical brain, Which the bottle brings best to perfection: Musicians are half-witted, merry and mad, The same are all those that admire 'em, They're fools if they play unless they're ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... took a more general survey of the inmates of the hall. Many persons were present whose right of entrance appeared to consist in some crotchet of the brain, which, so long as it might operate, produced a change in their relation to the actual world. It is singular how very few there are who do not occasionally gain admittance on such a score, either in abstracted musings, or momentary thoughts, or bright anticipations, ...
— The Hall of Fantasy (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "You'll have to watch the M.P. guide though—she's warm." Then, remarking that the after-well is dry, and that I've got plenty of water in the boilers for him, I leave him and go below till he relieves me. It is a point of honour among us to know every kink and crotchet of day-to-day working. If a joint starts "blowing" ever so little away up in some obscure corner of our kingdom, we know of it within an hour or two. One would think we were a mothers' meeting discussing our babies, to hear the grave tittle-tattle concerning the inevitable ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... usual order of exercise, without any determined manoeuvre; it may apply to defensive positions, or to offensive operations, where no definitive object has been decided on. Military writers lay down twelve orders of battle, viz.: 1st. The simple parallel order; 2d. The parallel order with a crotchet; 3d. The parallel order reinforced on one or both wings; 4th. The parallel order reinforced on the centre; 5th. The simple oblique order; 6th. The oblique order reinforced on the assailing wing; 7th. The perpendicular order on one or both wings; 8th. The ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... the many-coloured crotchet-mats and anti-macassars with which Miss Opie loved to decorate the apartment; nor was a paper frill adorning a paltry green flower-vase wanting to ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... that one friend will marry and put you to the door; a second accept a situation in China, and become no more to you than a name, a reminiscence, and an occasional crossed letter, very laborious to read; a third will take up with some religious crotchet and treat you to sour looks thence-forward. So, in one way or another, life forces men apart and breaks up the goodly fellowships for ever. The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget. And ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... or crotchet is fixed upon the stone in such a way as easily to hold it firm, even when shaken, so that it may not revolve backward; then an iron instrument is used, of moderate thickness, thin at the front end but blunt, which, when applied to ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... something in the tone of this note which gave me great uneasiness. Its whole style differed materially from that of Legrand. What could he be dreaming of? What new crotchet possessed his excitable brain! What "business of the highest importance" could HE possibly have to transact? Jupiter's account of him boded no good. I dreaded lest the continued pressure of misfortune had, at length, fairly unsettled the reason of my friend. Without a moment's hesitation, therefore, ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... Pope had another reason for withholding his sanction from the iron bridge; and as that reason shows how some wretched crotchet, springing from their miserable system, is sure to start up on all occasions, and defeat the most needed improvement, I shall here state what it was. At the point where it was wished to have the bridge erected, the Tiber flows between ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... says Mr. Seabrook, as deliberately he proceeds to the fulfilment of his promise. He is a methodical gentleman, and having weighed the matter well over in his legal mind, is deeply indebted to it for the conclusion that Mrs. Rosebrook has got a very unsystematised crotchet into her brain. "The exhibition of sympathy for 'niggers'-they're nothing else" says Mr. Seabrook-"much adds to that popular prejudice which is already placing her in an extremely delicate position." He will call to his aid some very nice ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... of a ladies' school at Williamsburg—and a very charming sum total they were. Having a day's holiday, they had come up by the early steamer to pic-nic on the banks, and were now returning to chronology and crotchet-work, or whatever else their studies might be. Landing at King's Mills, a "'bus" took us all up to Williamsburg, a distance of three or four miles, one half of which was over as dreary a road as need be, and the other through ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... law of Rome the subject of corresponding carefulness was the bestowal of the Universal Succession. One of these rules seems to our eyes a principle dictated by common sense, while the other looks very much like an idle crotchet. Yet that without the second of them the first would never have come into being is as certain as any proposition of the kind ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... syl.), a man of wealth, who has a crotchet about the proper training of girls to make good wives, and tries his scheme on Agnes, whom he adopts from a peasant's hut, and intends in time to make his wife. She is brought up, from the age of four years, in a country convent, where difference of sex and the conventions of society ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... First turned the country topsy-turvy. While the mother's race was thus indubitably Saxon, the father's had not only the name but the peculiar idiosyncrasy of the Normans, and went far to establish that crotchet of the brilliant author of "Sybil; or, The Two Nations," as to the continued distinction between the conquering and conquered populations. Mrs. Leslie's father boasted the name of Montfichet,—doubtless ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... imagination, conception, conceit, idea, apprehension, impression, opinion, notion; caprice, whim, whimsey, fantasy, vagary, maggot, crotchet; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... we must not let them spy for nothing. They shall see us all stand out to sea to catch them in the open, as I said in the town-hall of Scarborough yesterday, on purpose. Everybody laughed; but I stuck to it, knowing how far the tale would go. They take it for a crotchet of mine, and will expect it, especially after they have seen us standing out; and their plans will be ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... to get well and out of doors;—but I have told you before, that nothing wrought with our family after the common way;—and from the time and manner in which this eager desire shewed itself in the present case, the penetrating reader will suspect there was some other cause or crotchet for it in my uncle Toby's head:—There was so, and 'tis the subject of the next chapter to set forth what that cause and crotchet was. I own, when that's done, 'twill be time to return back to the parlour fire-side, ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... Throughout our travels in India, we were struck with the undue reliance placed on native names of plants, and information of all kinds; and the pertinacity with which each linguist adhered to his own crotchet as to the application of terms to natural objects, and their pronunciation. It is a very prevalent, but erroneous, impression, that savage and half-civilised people have an accurate knowledge of objects of natural history, and a uniform nomenclature for them.] Mesua ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... another reason for withholding his sanction from the iron bridge; and as that reason shows how some wretched crotchet, springing from their miserable system, is sure to start up on all occasions, and defeat the most needed improvement, I shall here state what it was. At the point where it was wished to have the bridge erected, the ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... drink oatmeal-water unless they are paid to do it. If they are paid extra beer-money and oatmeal water is made for them gratis, some will, of course, imbibe it, especially if they see that thereby they may obtain little favours from their employer by yielding to his fad. By drinking the crotchet perhaps they may get a present now and then-food for themselves, cast-off clothes for their families, and so on. For it is a remarkable feature of human natural history, the desire to proselytise. The spectacle of John Bull—jovial John Bull—offering his men a bucket of oatmeal liquor is not ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... on 'er mind.' And I to him: 'Pooh! Isn't it enough that she's got to put up with the cranks and crotchets of one o' YOUR sect?'—Oh Mary, my dear, there's many a true word said in jest. Though little did I think what the crotchet would be." And slowly the rims of Tilly's eyes and the tip of her nose reddened ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... Uncle Frank learned to say, or rather to drawl his letters—gives, in his large dictionary, as one of the definitions of the word crotchet, this: "a peculiar turn of mind, a whim, a fancy." Here you have just that kind of crotchet that I am going to deal with. Mr. Webster could not have hit my crotchet more exactly, if he had taken aim at it on purpose. It is a peculiar turn of mind, or, if you prefer it, a whim, or a fancy, that I shall talk about, for an hour or so, perhaps longer. Indeed, I am not perfectly ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank
... tenderness to all created things which the good of the community does not require them to destroy. And though their notion of compensation to a tortured insect or a cankered flower may seem to some of us a very wild crotchet, yet, at least, is not a mischievous one; and it may furnish matter for no unpleasing reflection to think that within the abysses of earth, never lit by a ray from the material heavens, there should ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Theistical character, wrote and talked as though most blissfully ignorant of that rule. The passages given above from his 'Principia' palpably violate it. But Theists, however learned, pay little regard to any rules of philosophising, which put in peril their fundamental crotchet. If they did, Atheism would need no apologist, and Theism have no defenders; for Theism, in all its varieties, presupposes a supernatural Causer of ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... leads to the confusion of distinct ideas. An example of this is the recent use of the adverbial phrases in respect of, in regard of, for in or with respect to, or regard to. This innovation is without any syntactical ground, and ought to be condemned and avoided as a mere grammatical crotchet."—George P. Marsh, "Lectures on the English Language," ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... accept any crotchet (pardon the word), however odd, rather than embrace at once the notion of ghosts and hobgoblins we imbibed in our nurseries. Still, to my unfortunate house, the evil is the same. What on earth can I ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... meet with. Every page, nay, every line is a satire upon the extravagance and precocity of what Vivian Grey calls our "artificial state;" and all the weak sides of our age are mercilessly dealt with by the coterie at Crotchet Castle. The book is altogether Shandean, and the satire shandied to and fro with great vivacity. We need not tell the reader what period or event of the last seven years is pointed to in the following extract. Mr. Touchandgo, it appears, was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... appointment of a Parliamentary head, connected by close ties with the present Ministry and the ruling party in Parliament The Parliamentary head is a protecting machine. He and the friends he brings stand between the department and the busybodies and crotchet-makers of the House and the country. So long as at any moment the policy of an office could be altered by chance votes in either House of Parliament, there is no security for any consistency. Our guns and our ships are not, perhaps, very good now. But they would be much worse if any thirty ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... them, or for Handel.— Cannot a man live free and easy, Without admiring Pergolesi? Or through the world with comfort go, That never heard of Doctor Blow? So help me heaven, I hardly have; And yet I eat, and drink, and shave, Like other people, if you watch it, And know no more of stave or crotchet, Than did the primitive Peruvians; Or those old ante-queer-diluvians That lived in the unwash'd world with Jubal, Before that dirty blacksmith Tubal By stroke on anvil, or by summ'at, Found out, to his great surprise, the gamut. I care no more for Cimarosa, Than he did for Salvator ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... merely replied that 'he would shortly see his opinions in print;' and to Ellice's warm remonstrances and entreaties he only dryly said, 'I have made up my mind.' His nephew, Lord Russell,[12] who, from some extraordinary crotchet, has thought fit to embrace republican opinions, and is an ultra-movement man, but restrained in the manifestation of his opinions from personal deference to his father and his uncle, with whom he lives on excellent terms—said the other day to Lord Tavistock, 'Lord John has undertaken a great ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... men whom he had there. For he said that on t'other side the water lived friars who styled themselves her sweet ladyship's most humble servants. Item, the goodly Friar-minors, who are semibreves of bulls; the smoked-herring tribe of Minim Friars; then the Crotchet Friars. So that these diminutives could be no more than Semiquavers. By the statutes, bulls, and patents of Queen Whims, they were all dressed like so many house-burners, except that, as in Anjou your ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... perfume of yellow gorse in the air? A thrush on a bough below began to flute softly, trying its tones before it burst forth, giving full voice to its enthusiasm in one clear call, eloquent of life and love and longing, and all expressed in just three notes—crotchet, quaver, crotchet and rest—which shortly shaped themselves to a word in my heart, a word of just three syllables, the accent ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... he had educated for this purpose, because, within a few weeks of the time fixed for the wedding, she was guilty of the frivolity, while on a visit from home, of wearing thin sleeves. Yet Mr. Day and my aunt's relations were benevolent people, only strongly imbued with the crotchet that by a system of training might be educed the hardihood and simplicity of the ideal savage, forgetting the terrible isolation of feelings and habits which their pupils would experience in the future life which they must pass among the corruptions ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... of Edison's masters, and perhaps his fellows, who appreciated him. Mediocrity had only seen the gawky stripling, with his moonstruck air, and pestilent habit of trying some new crotchet. Himself an inventor, Milliken recognised in his deep-set eye and musing brow the fire of a suppressed genius. He was then just twenty-one. The friendship of Mr. Milliken, and the opportunity for experiment, rendered the Boston office ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... tone of this note which gave me great uneasiness. Its whole style differed materially from that of Legrand. What could he be dreaming of? What new crotchet possessed his excitable brain? What "business of the highest importance" could he possibly have to transact? Jupiter's account of him boded no good. I dreaded lest the continued pressure of misfortune had, at length, fairly unsettled the reason of my ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... many cups; the tongue then speaketh more smoothly, and the ear listeneth more benignantly; but why do I attempt to reason with you? do I not know you for conceited creatures, with one idea—and that a foolish one—a crotchet, for the sake of which ye would sacrifice anything, religion if required—country? There, fling down my book, I do not wish ye to walk any farther in my company, unless you cast your nonsense away, which ye will never ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... principle that if we put down a healthy instinctive aversion, nature avenges herself by creating an unhealthy insane attraction. For this reason, the most earnest truth-seeking men fall into the worst delusions. They will not let their mind alone; they force it toward some ugly thing, which a crotchet of argument, a conceit of intellect recommends: and nature punishes their disregard of her warning by subjection to the ugly one, by belief in it. Just so, the most industrious critics get the most admiration. They ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... any difference with Fanny," said he. "I was not able to explain all about it, nor can I now: it was a crotchet of the earl's—only some nonsense; however, I'm off now—I can't wait a day, for I mean to write to say I shall be at Grey Abbey the day after to-morrow, and I must go by Dublin. I shall be off in a couple of hours; so, for Heaven's sake, ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... 40 B) are [Greek: gen de trophon men hemeteran, eillomenen de peri ton dia pantos polon tetamenon]. Quid tu, Epicure: the connection is that Cic., having given the crotchets of other philosophers about [Greek: physike], proceeds to give the peculiar crotchet of Epic. Putas solem ... tantum: a hard passage. Egone? ne bis is the em. of Lamb. for MSS. egone vobis, and is approved by Madv., who thus explains it (Em. 185) "cum interrogatum esset num tantulum (quasi pedalem 82) solem esse putaret, ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... imitations. For instance, the North Americans express by "whip-poor-will" what the Brazilians call "Joao-corta-pao." The Guinea fowl may have been the "Afraa avis;"but that was a dear luxury amongst the Romans, though the Greek meleagris was cheap. The last crotchet about it is that of an African traveller, who holds it to be the peacock of Solomon's navies, completely ignoring the absolute certainty which the South-Indian ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
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