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More "Equivocal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... became invariable in later Spanish history, and it resulted in cumbrous ineffectiveness. Interminable inquiry and discussion ended frequently only in suspension of judgment or a divided report. Points of policy of imminent importance had to await a dilatory investigation and equivocal conclusions. This impotence of the central organs of government did not come in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella and their immediate successors, and the growing inefficiency of the councils was long overcome by the resolution of the monarchs. Nevertheless ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... saw me in the bonds of matrimony, and enjoying its liberty, he recommenced his somewhat equivocal pursuit of me, and managed to get himself talked about at my expense. Society was unjust; M. de Lauzun only dared to pay me homage of an insipid sort. He had success enough in other quarters, and I knew what I owed to some one as well as what I ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... at her mercy, must submit to the shifty weather of "the mistress's" moods without complaint, and be willing to take buffets or caresses according to the temper of the hour. To Kirstie, thus situate and in the Indian summer of her heart, which was slow to submit to age, the gods sent this equivocal good thing of Archie's presence. She had known him in the cradle and paddled him when he misbehaved; and yet, as she had not so much as set eyes on him since he was eleven and had his last serious illness, the tall, slender, refined, and rather melancholy young gentleman ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... include the actors and the observations of the author's vagabond life. To a clear and unprejudiced mind, observation of the life of the common folk and, above all, of the itinerant population and of their equivocal moral code, of necessity and invariably, compels resort to the form and manner ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... supplied by Jacqueline Pascal, sister of the great Blaise Pascal. Young, spirituelle, very much sought after and the idol of brilliant companions, at the age of twenty-six she abandoned the world to devote herself to God. At thirty-six years of age she died of sorrow and remorse for having signed an equivocal formulary of Pope Alexander VI., "through pure deference to the authority of her superiors." The papal decision concerning Jansenius's book, already mentioned, was drawn up in a formula "turned ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... philosophers or some Fathers, in defence of lies. Nor does there seem to me other difference when I consider their respective grounds, except that the ancients frankly called those modes of speech lies, and the more recent writers, not a few of them, call them amphibological, equivocal, and material." ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... sure, for to me there was something equivocal in his air and bearing. He might have been, I thought, the son of some good family who had fallen early into dissipation and run from home. But, making every allowance, how admirable was his talk! I wish you ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there be a fair discussion; remember we fight only with foils, and the point of mine shall be covered with velvet. In your attack upon chemistry, Philalethes, you limited the use of it to the apothecary's shop and the kitchen. The first is an equivocal use; by introducing it into the kitchen you make it an art fundamental to all others. But if what you had stated had really meant to be serious, it would not have deserved a reply; as it is in mere playfulness, ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... whatever of your father being able to get the money to pay off Cossey and Son, and if he did, it would not help him, because he could not pay the interest on it. Under these circumstances you have to choose between putting yourself in an equivocal position and letting events take their course. It would be useless for anybody else to undertake the task, and of course I cannot guarantee that even you will succeed, but I will not mince matters—as ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... undertake the defense by representations not justified in fact, and by an impression of the nature of the case which developments in the court-room had not confirmed, he had the right to step aside out of an equivocal position. He wished to do this without injury to the prisoner and while there was yet an opportunity for him to obtain other counsel. The whole tenor of the speech was the right to be relieved from the obligation of an error; an error that had involved ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... word, it is of a nature altogether equivocal and ambiguous, or, rather, it must appear so to those who believe the hypothetical order of their own ideas to be the real order of things, and who see nothing in the infinite chain of existences but a few apparent points to which they will ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... from the steps of the front door. "Milk below," (certainly much below "proof"), was answered by the assent of the busy cooks, when a knock at the door of Mrs Smith's room from the red knuckles of the housemaid, awoke her to a sense of her equivocal situation. ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... human body, are frequently found in beautiful ones, because they are generally found in all mankind; but if it can be shown too that they are found without beauty, and that beauty frequently exists without them, and that this beauty, where it exists, always can be assigned to other less equivocal causes, it will naturally lead us to conclude that proportion and beauty are not ideas of the same nature. The true opposite to beauty is not disproportion or deformity, but ugliness: and as it proceeds from ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... thrown into an urn, the first that was taken out was delivered to the family.[11] Health, prosperity in worldly affairs, and all that was intermixed in the good or evil of this world were regulated by the responses or signs which these equivocal, not to say less than absurd, means afforded, of prying into the ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... judicious. It has also endeavoured to promote manufactures. It has gardens and museums fitter for scientific than practical instruction, admirable lecturers, a library most generously opened, a drawing-school of the largest purposes and of equivocal success, and various ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... Whereabouts were we? Priapus was standing in the chimney-corner, and having heard what Mercury had reported, said in a most courteous and jovial manner: King Jupiter, while by your order and particular favour I was garden-keeper-general on earth, I observed that this word hatchet is equivocal to many things; for it signifies a certain instrument by the means of which men fell and cleave timber. It also signifies (at least I am sure it did formerly) a female soundly and frequently thumpthumpriggletickletwiddletobyed. Thus I perceived that every cock of the game used to call ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... smokers, not countenancing the cigar so much as their neighbors the Belgians, nor the meerschaum so largely as their German neighbors on the Rhine frontier. A notable bit of sharp practice is on record in connexion with the pipe-smokers of Holland—a dodge only to be justified on the equivocal maxim that all is fair in trade provided it just keeps within the margin we need not speak. A pipe manufactory was established in Flanders about the middle ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... occasionally "showed her head" (a term in the lexicon of such characters) in the Bois, where the fashionable young men of the day began to remark her. In fact, before long Malaga was very much talked about in the questionable world of equivocal women, who presently attacked her good fortune by calumnies. They said she was a somnambulist, and the Pole was a magnetizer who was using her to discover the philosopher's stone. Some even more envenomed scandals drove her to a curiosity that was ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... that the name all had in mind be given in the resolution; although, he admitted, no one knew whether Clinton would pursue a policy different from Madison's. No man in the country, he said, was more equivocal in his character. He had disapproved the embargo and then receded from his opinion; and, to restore himself to the confidence of his party, he had published a tirade against the Federalists. "If we succeed in promoting his election," thundered the orator, "I fear we may ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... perfect Penelope's web. Carpenters and bricklayers have been at work for these eighteen months, and yet I sometimes stand and wonder whether anything has really been done. One exploit in last June was, however, by no means equivocal. Our good neighbour fancied that the limes shaded the rooms, and made them dark (there was not a creature in the house but the workmen), so he had all the leaves stripped from every tree. There they stood, poor miserable skeletons, as bare as Christmas ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... enthusiasm and convincing calculation. Dicaeopolis in the "Aeharnenses," in presenting a gentleman called Nicharchus to the audience, observes: "He is small, I confess, but, there is nothing lost in him: all is knave that is not fool." Parodying the equivocal compliment, I may say that though Uncle Jack was no giant, there was nothing lost in him. Whatever was not philanthropy was arithmetic, and whatever was not arithmetic was philanthropy. He would have been equally dear ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... paramour. Mrs. Grundy in the meanwhile began to be suspicious, and rumors, at first vague and indefinite, became almost pointed accusations against Mrs. Clarkson. The poor husband, although not altogether crediting the fact that there was a foundation for these reports, saw the necessity, in the equivocal position in which both he and his wife stood, of putting a stop to all suspicious intercourse with the Count; and, being resolute enough when so disposed, he forbade his wife to meet Von Alba any more in private, or to ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... France the clear perception of right which will induce our own people and the rulers and people of all other nations, even of France herself, to pronounce our quarrel just will be obscured and the support rendered to us in a final resort to more decisive measures will be more limited and equivocal. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... adjudged with their titles. The writer is the author of Stories of Waterloo, from whom better things might have been expected. He has taken for his model, Mr. Lloyd's really excellent Field Sports of the North of Europe; but he has woefully missed his mark. The title of the work before us is equivocal: a reader might as reasonably expect the Sports of the Western World, as adventures in Ireland, such as make up the present volumes. What we principally complain of is the paucity of Sports among their contents. It is true that the title also promises Legendary ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various
... of the Grand Pensionary of Holland, who was governor of the place, received his noble visiter with every mark of attention. The Count, however, no sooner beheld Sophia, than he became deeply enamoured of her; and on learning the equivocal situation in which she stood, being neither a slave nor a mistress, but, as it were, a piece of merchandize purchased for 1,500 piastres, he wound up his declaration of love by an offer of marriage. The Count was a handsome man, scarcely thirty years of age, a lieutenant-general in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 379, Saturday, July 4, 1829. • Various
... because it was the will of the Lord, and because he had no right to interpose his selfish love and yearnings between the people of God and their worldly opportunity. The others followed. Not one referred to the equivocal language of the manifesto or questioned it. They accepted it—as it was then and afterwards interpreted—as a revelation from God made through the Prophet of the Church; and they subscribed to it as a solemn covenant, before God, with the ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... England." The mob gathered, and were of the same opinion. Jack began to talk loud, and to speak of the motto as a national insult. Fortunately, however, before the matter could proceed to breaking windows, or perhaps worse, some of the envoy's servants informed their master of the equivocal nature of his motto. The obnoxious word was changed accordingly, and the illumination in the evening (which was most ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... had a raised dais only a little lower than that provided for the duchess de Berri. At a dinner at Baron Rothschild's, Careme, the Delmonico of those times, surprised her with a column of ingenious confectionery architecture on which was inscribed her name spun in sugar. It was a more equivocal compliment when Walter Scott christened two pet donkeys Hannah ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... seen at the Rougons' house was an individual with clammy hands and equivocal look, one Monsieur Vuillet, a bookseller, who supplied all the devout ladies of the town with holy images and rosaries. Vuillet dealt in both classical and religious works; he was a strict Catholic, a circumstance which insured him the custom of the ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... and looked again at the fire, and Mr. Hardesty looked at Miss Sidebottom. Presently, that amiable lady turned her gaze, lighted as it was by an equivocal smile, full upon Tom. In the space of about fifteen seconds, after trying in vain to interpret that smile to his own satisfaction, Mr. Hardesty quailed, while his heart commenced vibrating against ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... Diodorus assures us that by the vast catacombs of Egypt, the dismal mansions of the dead— were the temple and stream, both called Cocytus, the foul canal of Acheron, and the Elysian plains [42]; and, according to the same equivocal authority, the body of the dead was wafted across the waters by a pilot, termed Charon in the Egyptian tongue. But, previous to the embarcation, appointed judges on the margin of the Acheron listened to whatever accusations were preferred by the living against the deceased, and if convinced ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... working basis, and is good enough for mundane purposes. But if I am asked if I can solve the riddle of the Universe I can only answer, No. Brunetiere then retorts that science is bankrupt. But this is equivocal. It only means that it cannot meet demands beyond ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... that Rob Roy's conduct during the insurrection of 1715 was very equivocal. His person and followers were in the Highland army, but his heart seems to have been with the Duke of Argyle's. Yet the insurgents were constrained to trust to him as their only guide, when they marched from Perth ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... it now was to do for me a thousand things that hitherto I had been forced to do for myself, was almost naive. I could not hide it. I was at last a man's woman. I had a protector. Yes; I must not shrink from the equivocal significance of that word—I had ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... seasickness, a malady which I had always held in contempt, believing it to exist more in imagination than in fact, and which I was determined to resist, as unsailor-like and unmanly. Other symptoms of a less equivocal description, soon placed the character of my illness beyond a doubt. My woe-begone looks must have betrayed my feelings, for one of the men told me, with a quizzical leer, that old Neptune always exacted toll in advance from a green hand for his ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... notice his proffered arm, Chloe walked beside him in a sudden pensive silence which Anstice found oddly appealing after her impetuous speech; and for a moment he forgot his own equivocal position in a desire to help her through what he guessed to ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... being a victim, was, on the contrary, a defaulter. Tadpole and Taper would back Rigby for a 'slashing reply' against the field. Here, too, at the end of a busy week, he found it occasionally convenient to entertain a clever friend or two of equivocal reputation, with whom he had become acquainted in former days of equal brotherhood. No one was more faithful to his early friends than Mr. Rigby, particularly if they ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... of the Echinades has something equivocal in it, which is cleared up, if we suppose it addressed to the inhabitants of the Asiatic side of the Archipelago. But if, with Pope, we understand the words 'beyond the sea' to relate to Elis, I think we adopt an unnatural construction to come at a forced meaning; for ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... eyes looked straight into hers, and the quick blood rushed into her face as she bent her head again hurriedly over the magazine. She knew instinctively that he was trying to help her, talking nonsense with a tact that ignored her equivocal position. She was grateful to him, but even his chivalry hurt. She watched him under her thick lashes as he went back to the Sheik and sat down beside him, refusing his host's proffered cigarettes with a wry face of disgust and ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... furnishing you with some hints for the more easy and effectual discharge of it: hints which are, I confess, loosely thrown together; but which are the result of long experience, and of frequent reflection and comparison. And if anything should strike you, at first sight, as rather equivocal in point of morality, or deficient in liberality and feeling; I beg you will suppress all such scruples, and consider them as the offspring of a contracted education and narrow way of thinking, which a little intercourse with the World and ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... recognition is very satisfactory.—No more, thank you, Sir Richard," the lady replied, not without a touch of acerbity. Ludovic was very clever no doubt; but his comments often struck her as being in equivocal taste. He gave a turn to your words you did not expect and so broke the thread of your conversation in a rather exasperating fashion. "Very satisfactory," she repeated. "And, of course, the constituency is fully informed ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... politic, is a very equivocal term: true union is such a harmony as makes all the particular parts, as opposite as they may seem to us, concur to the general welfare of the society, in the same manner as discords in music contribute to the general melody of sound. Union may prevail in a state full ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... a story Bert told once," she said, "about an Irishman who was called upon to plead guilty or not guilty to the charge of drunkenness. When asked afterwards how he pleaded he said: 'Bedad, I give the judge an equivocal answer.' 'And what was that?' said his friend. 'Begorra, whin the judge axed me was I guilty or not guilty, I answered, "Was yer grandfather a monkey?" And then he gave me ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... to the Persians, whom Herodotus accuses of adoring the sun and moon. But, as Gibbon says, "the Persians of every age have denied the charge, and explained the equivocal conduct, which might appear to give colour to it." [157] It will certainly require considerable explanation to free from lunar idolatry the following passage, which we find in the Zend Avesta: "We sacrifice unto the new moon, the holy and master of holiness: ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... the presence which in itself he conceived to be a challenge was to demonstrate itself for this in no equivocal terms. ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... Mrs. Evelyn's definition of a very old friend?" said he, with another smile, as that lady moved off to take a more particular view of what she had come to see. "To judge by the specimen before me, I should consider it very equivocal." ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... a branch of the Caqueta coming from the south-east, and that the Rio Negro issued immediately from it. (* See the classical memoir of this great geographer in the Journal des Savans, March 1750 page 184. "One fact," says D'Anville, "which cannot be considered as equivocal, after the proofs with which we have been recently furnished, is the communication of the Rio Negro with the Orinoco; but we must not hesitate to admit, that we are not yet sufficiently informed of the manner in which this communication takes place." I was surprised to see ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... emoluments in case of forfeiture stimulated their natural and irregular vivacity to enforce laws which had become obsolete, and they pounced upon American property as they would have gone to war in quest of prize-money. Even at first their acts were equivocal, and they soon came to be as illegal as they were oppressive. There was no redress. An appeal to the Privy Council was costly and difficult; and besides, when it so happened, before the end of the year, that an officer had to defend himself on an appeal, ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... it is a consistent mode of procedure, to allow things to make their own impression; and the result is attained by following the order of impressions in the mind of one of the actors, or of a looker-on. "To see things as they are" is an equivocal formula, which may be claimed as their own privilege by many schools and many different degrees of intelligence. "To see things as they become," the rule of Lessing's Laocoon, has not found so many adherents, but it is more certain in meaning, and more pertinent to the art of narrative. ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... knee-breeches, with a ruffled shirt, white waistcoat, and white silk stockings. He was the Chairman of the Whig Senatorial caucus, and on the last night of the extra session Mr. Clay had complimented him, in rather equivocal language, on the ability with which he had presided. When the laughter had subsided, Senator Dixon rose, and with inimitable humor thanked the Senator from Kentucky. "I am aware," said he, "that I never had but one equal as a presiding officer, and that was the Senator from ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Emperor, then talked for some time with the American Ambassador and set forth to him separately the events which led to the outbreak of the war. Particularly did the Kaiser call attention to the equivocal and unloyal position of England which had destroyed the hope of ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... very gang of Circe;—and in their midst he now observed his son, the brutish looking, cunning, and sensual Narcisse, wine-flushed and loud, and seeming to be the mimic Comus of the crew. As with the power of divination, he at once comprehended the spectacle. He had arrived opposite the equivocal building wherein Narcisse and his companions had disappeared some hours before, and the door of which had just been suddenly flung open, and kindling with wrath he at once advanced upon the bacchants in the midst of their orgies. At ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... equivocal hour, whose suppliant feet Haunt the mute reaches of the sleeping wind, Art thou a watcher stealing to entreat Prayer and sepulture ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... Lady Lefevre, "with his equivocal compliments. I shouldn't wonder if he says that, my dear, because you have not yet had more than a word ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... had thought so much about her equivocal position that her future troubled her. If there was just enough money to give her a college education, she wanted to know it. If she must prepare herself for taking some place at the end of her schooldays in the work-a-day world, she wanted to know ...
— A Little Miss Nobody - Or, With the Girls of Pinewood Hall • Amy Bell Marlowe
... Dawkins. "I asserted, and I repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a MAN, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with an equivocal (Prof. V. Carus, who has a distinct recollection of the scene, does not remember the word equivocal. He believes too that Lyell's version of the "ape" sentence is slightly incorrect.) success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... attractions of spiritualism. A recent article in the Literary Supplement of the Times commenced with the statement that "Among the strange, dismaying things cast up by the tide of war are those traces of primitive fatalism, primitive magic, and equivocal divination which are within general knowledge." The writer of the article in question thinks that as we have taken a huge and lamentable step backwards in civilisation, we need not be surprised that we should ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... in its predictions, when the deity gives clear and manifest signs, but that in the course of another period the art falls into a low condition, being for the most part conjectural, and attempting to know the future by equivocal and misty signs. Now this is what the Tuscan wise men said, who are supposed to know more of such things than anybody else. While the senate was communicating on these omens with the seers, in the ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... beliefs, as scales and roundles to mount the pinnacles and highest pieces of divinity. The severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, where- in, as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some real substance in ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... well as jealousy, was aroused. He was brave comme son epee. Should he shrink from the power or the enmity of a man mortal as himself? And why should Zicci desire him to give his name and station to one of a calling so equivocal? Might there not be motives he could not fathom? Might not the actress and the Corsican be in league with each other? Might not all this jargon of prophecy—and menace be but artifices to dupe him,—the tool, perhaps, of a mountebank ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Philippe's. The exhausted old man and the Rabouilleuse were now plunged by their nephew into the excessive dissipations of the dangerous and restless society of actresses, journalists, artists, and the equivocal women among whom Philippe had already wasted his youth; where old Rouget found excitements that soon after killed him. Instigated by Giroudeau, Lolotte, one of the handsomest of the Opera ballet-girls, was the amiable assassin of the old man. Rouget died after a splendid supper ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... long account of his personal dealings with Giambattista Pessina, descending into the most curious particulars; he publishes the secret alphabet of the Palladium, specimens of litanies addressed to the good god Lucifer, and hymns of equivocal tendency attributed to Albert Pike. Finally, he fully admits the Satanic character of perfect Masonic initiation, and contributes a long chapter to swell our recent knowledge upon the ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... though plain and low in stature, when singing her best parts she appears beautiful, and awakens enthusiastic admiration; that she is rigidly correct in her demeanor towards her numerous admirers, having even returned a present sent her by the crown-prince, Oscar, in a manner that she deemed equivocal. This last circumstance being noised abroad, the next time she appeared on the stage she was greeted with more enthusiastic plaudits than ever, and thicker showers of flowers fell upon her from the hands of her true friends, the public. ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... spiritual among the Jews is called real, the terms really, substantially, and essentially, are used in the Protestant Confessions, and by their Doctors." It is plain from what he subjoins, that he sought rather to unite different sentiments by means of equivocal expressions, than by an exact Creed, which might be susceptible of only one sense. "We must not condemn, says he, those who assure us that the Eucharist is but the sign of the body of Jesus Christ, since St. Augustine, ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... done at the close of the legislative assembly. But Sieyes, after having lost Joubert, sought for a general who could enter into his designs, and who would protect the republic, without becoming its oppressor. Hoche had been dead more than a year. Moreau had given rise to suspicion by his equivocal conduct to the directory before the 18th Fructidor, and by the sudden denunciation of his old friend Pichegru, whose treason he had kept secret for a whole year; Massena was not a political general; Bernadotte and Jourdan were devoted to the party of the Manege; Sieyes was compelled to postpone ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... maintained by Waterland, by Whiston, by Blackburne, and by some of the more ardent Calvinists, was strong, and felt to be so. In appearance, if not in reality, there was clearly something equivocal, some appearance of casuistry and reserve, if not of insincerity, in subscribing to formularies, part of which were no longer accepted in the spirit in which they had been drawn up, and with the meaning they had been originally intended to bear. The Deistical and Arian controversies ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... principle in them which overcame, were of the same nature. The pleasure of doing good to others and of bodily self-indulgence, the pleasures of intellect and the pleasures of sense, are so different:—Why then should they be called by a common name? Or, if the equivocal or metaphorical use of the word is justified by custom (like the use of other words which at first referred only to the body, and then by a figure have been transferred to the mind), still, why should we make ...
— Philebus • Plato
... debauch; in love he was most susceptible, and jealous to the point of madness even about a courtesan, had she once taken his fancy; his prodigality was princely, although he had no income; further, he was most sensitive to slights, as all men are who, because they are placed in an equivocal position, fancy that everyone who makes any reference to their origin is ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... expression in its pages, and he even introduces himself under the imperfect anagram of Philisides, and shadows forth his friendship with the French humanist Languet. More than this it would be rash to assert, and Greville did his friend an equivocal service when he sought to find a deep philosophy underlying the rather formal characters of the romance[148]. These characters, as we have seen, are for the most part essentially courtly; the pastoral guise ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... themselves guilty of ignoring and treating with contempt the local Courts and authorities by continually making all sorts of ridiculous and ex parte complaints to Her Majesty's Government in the first instance; Her Majesty's Government is also thereby placed in the equivocal and undesirable position of intermeddling in the internal affairs of this Republic, which is in conflict with the London Convention. Had the complaints been lodged with this Government, or with the proper officials or Courts, the facts could have been very easily arrived at, and it would ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... of the glums, and insisted that I should go with him and take a ride to Abingdon. The chaise would be ready in half an hour, and he would introduce me to the finest girl in all England. Thinking his language equivocal and suspecting his intentions, I ventured to ask if she were a modest woman? He burst into a loud laugh and exclaimed (I shall omit his oaths) 'Modest! to be sure! as modest as any of her sex.' This did not satisfy me; I continued to interrogate and ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... turn from a recollection of the words to a consideration of the peculiarities of the style of Junius, I think it will be agreed that the most remarkable of all is that species of irony which consists in equivocal compliment. Walpole also excelled in this; and prided himself upon doing so. Are we not justified in saying, that of all who, in the eighteenth century, cast their thoughts on public occurrences into the form of letters, Junius and Walpole are the most distinguished! that the works of no other ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... of the court was equivocal and embarrassing. It encouraged every anti-revolutionary enterprise and avowed none; it felt more than ever its weakness and dependence on the assembly; and while desirous of throwing off the yoke, feared to make the attempt because success ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... rival, aimed at her absolute ruin, though she had broken no treaties. The Carthaginians, broken-hearted, sent embassy after embassy, imploring the Senate to preserve peace, to whom the senators gave equivocal answers. The situation of Carthage was hopeless and miserable—stripped by Masinissa of the rich towns of Emporia, and on the eve of another conflict with the mistress ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... he looked. Nothing equivocal was in "that magnificent boy," as his friends called him, and his interest in little Mrs. Haney was that of the Easterner who, having been told that strange things take place in the West, is disappointed if they do not happen under his nose. He had heard much of the Haneys from Congdon, and ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... beneath the portrait, and with the image present to their minds of painter and sitter hasting on their way to be wed, saw this equivocal masterpiece with a difference. Not Aurora alone looked forth from the canvas,—throat of lily, cheek of rose, heaven-blue eyes, smile and ringlets of immitigable sunniness. Gerald, self-depicted in ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... classics is pat in, Suggests to our writers, as test of their "style," Just to turn their equivocal prose into Latin, As DRYDEN did. Truly the plan makes one smile! Reviewers find Novelists' nonsense much weary 'em. Writers of twaddle Take DRYDEN a model— Turn your books into some ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 20, 1891 • Various
... knows the truth, and the perfidious meanness with which he makes her the reluctant instrument of her lover's ruin, win back for her much of our alienated sympathy. Yet at the close her position is curiously equivocal. It is at her prayer that Bussy has spared Montsurry when "he hath him down" in the final struggle; but when her lover is mortally wounded by a pistol shot, she implores his pardon for her share ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... foot wide, each furnished with a mattress and bedding, and hooked to the ceiling by a very suspiciously slender cord. Direful are the ruminations and exclamations of inexperienced travellers, particularly young ones, as they eye these very equivocal accommodations. "What, sleep up there! I won't sleep on one of those top shelves, I know. The cords will certainly break." The chambermaid here takes up the conversation, and solemnly assures them that such an accident is not to be thought of at all; that it ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... aberration, eccentricity, and "devil-may-careism" as prime badges of genius, and he proceeded accordingly to astonish the natives, many of whom, in their turn, set themselves to copy his faults. But when we subtract some half-dozen pieces, either coarse in language or equivocal in purpose, the influence of his poetry may be considered good. (We of course say nothing here of the volume called the "Merry Muses," still extant to disgrace his memory.) It is doubtful if his "Willie brew'd a peck o' Maut" ever made a drunkard, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... murderer brought to justice, and now, when through the efforts of M. Godin, a man stood all but convicted of the crime, she was pleased to hear Maitland, whose efforts to track Latour she had applauded in no equivocal way, say that he should spare no pains to give the suspect every possible chance to prove his innocence. There was certainly a reason, whatever it might have been, for Gwen's attitude in this matter, ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... of meaning, when it is applied, as it constantly is, to different persons among our "fellow-creatures," with express reference to their different duties and different qualifications for performing them? The duties of a father are not the same as those of a son; is the word therefore wholly equivocal when we speak of one person as a good father, and another as a good son? Nay, when we speak generally of a man as good, has not the epithet a tacit reference to human nature and human duties? and yet is there no community of meaning when the same epithet is applied to ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... have made me very prudent, for I have seen pass under my eyes many equivocal and terrible situations, which not only agonized my conscience but gave me many cruel hours of indecision. Man is often so little responsible and circumstances are often so powerful. Our impenetrable nature is so capricious, our instincts are so mysterious that we must be tolerant ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... came to see, was not designed for seeing, nor the hand for handling—then, we suppose, he is justly chargeable with denying, and very needlessly denying, all design in organic Nature; otherwise, we suppose not. Why, if Darwins well-known passage about the eye[III-10] equivocal though some of the language be—does not imply ordaining and directing intelligence, then he refutes his own theory as effectually as any of his opponents are likely to ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... king of Prussia, returning to Berlin, began to put his army on a war footing. The emigrants, triumphing in the engagement they had entered into, increased in numbers. The courts of Europe, with the exception of England, sent in equivocal adhesions to the courts of Berlin and Vienna. The noise of the declaration of Pilnitz burst forth, and died away in Paris in the midst of the fetes in honour of the acceptance ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... It was rather an equivocal look which the mistress cast over her shoulder at the girl. It might have said,—"Poor fool! singe your wings in the candle, if you will." It might have been only the scorn of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... for Sego, to the King our master. In case Isaaco wishes to go back, we beg you will not let him do so; but if he wishes to go on, on his mission to Sego, we also beg and hope you will give him all assistance, and some trusty persons to conduct him to Sego. [Footnote: This equivocal invitation was given to the King, who well knew that the King of Sego was more powerful than him; and if he should injure Isaaco in any manner, he would ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... who conceived the notion of pulling the irrigation project down in ruins at the moment of Weir's own fall. Judge Gordon a few days later had pieced out the method, which was either to corrupt the workmen to wreck dam and camp or to place them in the equivocal position of having done so apparently though others did it in fact. Vorse and Burkhardt devised the details. Weir should be left free until the blow had fallen on the camp, whereupon he should be immediately clapped into jail on the murder charge, which, coming on top of the "riot," would ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... consult them, the leading points in the history or character of persons of whom they have no previous knowledge, they at the same time persuade themselves that they see something indicative of their circumstances in their finger nails. Such is the equivocal character of the greater part of their sect: but there are some who are mere honest dupes to the pretensions of the science; and others again, who have not one tittle of credulity ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... attention of Tallien, the son of the Marquis of Bercy's butler and ci-devant lawyer's clerk, who had blossomed into "a Terrorist of the first water." He obtained her release and she became his mistress. She took advantage of the equivocal but influential position which she had attained to engage in a vile traffic. She and her paramour amassed a huge fortune by accepting money from the unfortunate prisoners who were threatened with the fate which she had so narrowly escaped, ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... had arrived in the town only a few days before. He, too, had been recommended to Yulia Mihailovna, and she had received him with reverence. I know now that he had only spent one evening in her company before the reading; he had not spoken all that evening, had listened with an equivocal smile to the jests and the general tone of the company surrounding Yulia Mihailovna, and had made an unpleasant impression on every one by his air of haughtiness, and at the same time almost timorous readiness to take offence. It was Yulia Mihailovna herself who had enlisted his services. ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Scot flushed, somewhat angrily, at this equivocal compliment. "What Time hath done with me I cannot tell," said he, with less than his wonted ease, "save that nothing Time can do can avail to quench old feelings. This is the first liberty that I have had since we landed. I have used it to lay ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene
... break up the government; to break up the government would be to sunder the slender thread on which the chances of peace were hanging.[306] The thought, in short, of the high-minded Aberdeen striving against hope to play a steadfast and pacific part in a scene so sinister, among actors of such equivocal or crooked purpose, recalls nothing so much as the memorable picture long ago of Maria Theresa beset and baffled by her Kaunitzes and Thuguts, Catherines, Josephs, great Fredericks, Grand Turks, and wringing her hands over the consummation ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... of minds, equivocal though it was on Martin's part, resulted gradually in a more friendly period. Rose always liked to remember that winter, with its peace that quenched her thirsty heart and helped to blur the recollection of old unkindnesses long since forgiven, but still too vividly recalled. When, ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... a humorous grimace; and although Dick was displeased to lie under so great favours to so equivocal a personage, he was yet unable ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... detained the declaration of war is said to have a retroactive effect, and to render it liable to be considered as the property of enemies taken in time of war. The property is seized provisionally—an act hostile enough in the mere execution, but equivocal as to its effects, and liable to be varied by subsequent events, and by the conduct of the government, the property of whose subjects is so detained. Where the first seizure is equivocal, if the matter in dispute terminates in reconciliation, the seizure is converted into a mere ...
— The Laws Of War, Affecting Commerce And Shipping • H. Byerley Thomson
... statistics, more or less reliable, from every nation of Northern Europe, showing a gain of ten to twenty-five per cent, during the last century. Where the tables are most carefully prepared, the result is least equivocal. Thus, in Geneva, where accurate registers have been kept for three hundred years, it seems that from 1560 to 1600 the average lifetime of the citizens was twenty-one years and two months; in the next century, twenty-five years ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... These equivocal compliments did not seem to please Hortense. She drew herself up, puckered her black eyebrows, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... absolute supremacy of slavery in the Government, and thus inviting a resistance commensurate with that policy; and that this breach should be made the exodus of the people from the bondage of all compromises. They argued that to cut down the issue between slavery and freedom to so narrow, equivocal, and half-hearted a measure, at a time when every consideration pleaded for radical and thorough work, was practical infidelity to the cause and the crisis. It was sporting with humanity, and giving to the winds a glorious victory for the right ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... individual soul feels the presence of those supreme companions whose real and personal existence I have attempted to indicate. These ideal and yet most real companions of humanity make their presence felt by the soul in just the same immediate, direct and equivocal way in which we feel the influence of a friend or lover whose spirit, in his bodily absence, is concentrated upon our spirit, even ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... whether his wife and his sister would be found to have much in common. But he was more or less consciously building on the hope that Dalton's suit would prosper, and that Lettice would settle down quietly as the mistress of Angleford Manor, and so be weaned from the somewhat equivocal situation of a successful author. It did not so much as enter his mind, by the way, that there was anything equivocal in Mrs. Westray's authorship. Her book had failed, and her husband was very wealthy, so that ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... the house of Volumnius Eutrapelus, her protector. His friend Atticus was with him; and although Cicero finds some excuse necessary, it is still obvious that even grave and sober citizens might dine in such equivocal company without any serious compromise ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... was dead, and asked me if the Comte de Waldstein had in the library the illustration of the Villa d'Altichiero, which the Emperor had asked for in vain at the city library of Prague, and when I answered 'yes,' he gave an equivocal laugh. A moment afterwards, he asked me if he might tell the Emperor. 'Why not, monseigneur? It is not a secret.' 'Is His Majesty coming to Dux?' 'If he goes to Oberlaitensdorf (sic) he will go to Dux, too; and he may ask you for it, for there is a monument there which relates to him ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... civilization were the least equivocal, however, on and around a natural elevation in the land, which arose so suddenly on the very bank of the stream, as to give to it the appearance of a work of art. Whether these mounds once existed everywhere on the face of the earth, and have disappeared ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... housekeeper, with cards of gingerbread ; and the last held a plum- cake, so called from the number of large raisins that were showing their black heads in a substance of suspiciously similar color. At each corner of the table stood saucers, filled with a thick fluid of some what equivocal color and consistence, variegated with small dark lumps of a substance that resembled nothing but itself, which Remarkable termed her sweetmeats. At the side of each plate, which was placed bottom upward, with its knife ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... sheet of water, deep set like a mirror, in green sloping banks of turf. In its glassy bosom was reflected the dark mass of a neighboring grove, one of the most important features of the garden. This grove goes by the sinister name of "the Devil's Wood," and enjoys but an equivocal character in the neighborhood. It was planted by "The Wicked Lord Byron," during the early part of his residence at the Abbey, before his fatal duel with Mr. Chaworth. Having something of a foreign ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... love-letter was brought to him. It purported to come from the lady at whom he had flung the comfits;[27] offered him her heart, and begged an interview with him. The bearer was a masked woman, who owned to an equivocal position in Count Guido's household. Caponsacchi saw through the trick, declined the proposed interview on the ground of his priesthood, and completed his answer with an allusion to the husband, which would punish him in the probable case of its passing directly into his hands. The next day the ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... by accident that Defoe drifted into this equivocal position. His first writings under the new reign were in staunch consistency with what he had written before. He did not try to flatter the Queen as many others did by slighting her predecessors; on the contrary, ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... methods in your classes. You take a chemical text, and then turn and twist it into any sort of a metaphysical conclusion that appeals to you at the minute. No; wait! I am talking. Science is not equivocal, Brenton. It's as downright and determinate as AB. It's what we know; not what we think we ought to think about the things we know. And it's science you are there to teach, not glittering abstractions having to do with man's latter end. The ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... fresh, strawberry and cream complexion under a plenteous harvest of flaxen hair would not be associated in America with anyone very serious. There she would have been thought arrayed by Nature as a tearing blonde, suitable for the equivocal light stage, or as a frivolous artist's model, or as promenade girl in a suit and cloak house. But in Fraeulein the extraordinary combination of volatile comeliness and unimpeachable earnestness daily worked growing ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... necessary. And the veil imposed by authority did not really serve any purpose of concealment. Every reader was let into the secret of the writer's true opinion of the old mysteries, by means of a piquant phrase, an adroit parallel, a significant reference, an equivocal word of dubious panegyric. Diderot openly explains this in the pages of the Encyclopaedia itself. "In all cases," he says, "where a national prejudice would seem to deserve respect, the particular article ought to set it respectfully forth, with its whole procession of attractions ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... of God in the most affecting manner, except in union with each other. It is frequently said, we are aware, that if God had pardoned the sinner without enforcing the demands of the law, he would have displayed his mercy alone, and not his justice; but in fact this would have been a very equivocal display of mercy. It would have shown only one of two things: either that God regarded the sinner with an eye of compassion, or that he did not regard his sin: either that he was merciful, or that he had no great abhorrence of sin: either that he ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... the translator felt free to interchange words indiscriminately. Of his treatment of the original Purvey writes: "But in translating of words equivocal, that is, that hath many significations under one letter, may lightly be peril, for Austin saith in the 2nd. book of Christian Teaching, that if equivocal words be not translated into the sense, either understanding, of the author, it is error; as in that place of the Psalm, ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... passed to other subjects; and I inferred, upon the whole, that, having detected my manoeuvre, they wished to put me on my guard in the only way open to them. At any rate, this was the sole personality, or equivocal allusion of any sort, which ever met my ear during the years that I asserted my right to be as poor as I chose. And, certainly, my censors were right, whatever were the temper in which they spoke, kind or ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Galindo, etc., are inserted, with the remark that the Mexican public will thus see the uniformity and decision of the whole republic in favour of order, and especially will receive in the communication of his Excellency, General Santa Anna, an equivocal proof of this unity of sentiment, notwithstanding the assurances given by the rebels to the people, that Santa Anna would either assist them, or would take no part at all in the affair. It must be confessed, however, that his Excellency is rather ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... of observation may be set aside; first, because the so-called facts are in their own nature equivocal; secondly, because they stand on insufficient authority; thirdly, because they are not sufficiently numerous. But, in this case, the disease is one of striking and well-marked character; the witnesses are experts, interested in denying and disbelieving the facts; the number ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... well knew that some men can satisfy their consciences by calling a certain sort of treachery by the soft name of gallantry. He was aware that he could, like many others in similar circumstances, deceive by equivocal looks and expressions, and then throw the blame from themselves, by asking why the woman was such a fool as to believe, protesting that they never had a thought of her, and swearing that they had not the least idea ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... a roll of that sudden, graceful, but somewhat equivocal laughter that was habitual with ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... An equivocal smile touched the pale lips of Chaleck. It might be the weird inhabitant of the little house in Cite Frochot was not so sure as the porter was of the astuteness of the police. Perhaps he was thinking that a few hours before a certain Doctor Chaleck, hemmed in a passage with no exits and about ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... known by the name of the Story of the Three Seals. It is to be found in the Appendix, No. 10, to the First Report of the state and condition of the East India Company, made in 1773. The word Report, my Lords, is sometimes a little equivocal, and may signify sometimes, not what is made known, but what remains in obscurity: the detail and evidence of many facts referred to in the Report being usually thrown into the Appendix. Many people, and I among the rest, (I take shame to myself ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... three months, Antonin Goulard and the procureur-du-roi, Frederic Marest, have received, so they say, equivocal answers which mean ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... never fully cured himself of that passion, which now broke out afresh, like a fire which has only slumbered for a time. He spent night after night at his club, playing at baccarat, and could be met in the betting ring at every race meeting. Then, too, he glided into equivocal society and appeared at home only at intervals to vent his irritation and spite and ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... poetry over prose, of soul and heart over calculation and business. A Soul's Tragedy exhibits the inverse process: the triumph of mundane policy and genial savoir faire in the person of Ogniben over the sickly and equivocal "poetry" of Chiappino. Browning seems to have thrown off this bitter parody of his own idealisms in a mood like that in which Ibsen conceived the poor blundering idealist of the Wild Duck. Chiappino is ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... speech to the men, in which be reminded them of the mercy of God in having brought them so long a voyage with such favourable weather, and in comforting them with so many tokens of a successful issue to their enterprize, which were now every day becoming plainer and less equivocal. He besought them to be exceedingly watchful during the night, as they well knew that in the first article of the instructions which he had given to all the three ships before leaving the Canaries, they were enjoined, when they should ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... this somewhat equivocal form of expression, that flagellation was threatened, Taddy obeyed, still feeling his smarting and ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... unadulterated, or the infusion will be destroyed by its pernicious qualities. Nothing is more prejudicial to the health, or the intellectual faculties of mankind, than adulterated liquors. Articles which in their purest state are of an equivocal character, and never to be trusted without caution, are thus converted into decided poisons.—Another way of making wormwood ale. Take a quantity of the herb, according to the intended strength of the liquor, and ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... With this equivocal explanation, the examination ended, and the Governor now made a long speech, in which he said: If we were Japanese, and had secretly left our prison, the consequences for us would have been very serious; but as we were ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... these was Mr. Peter Van Tromp, an English-speaking, two-legged animal of the international genus, and by profession of general and more than equivocal utility. Years before he had been a painter of some standing in a colony, and portraits signed 'Van Tromp' had celebrated the greatness of colonial governors and judges. In those days he had been married, and driven his wife and infant daughter in a pony trap. What were ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which you are ruler, we might at once, and by open force, have defended the frontiers of our states, against a host commanded by so many different and discording chiefs, and advancing upon us with such equivocal intentions. If the first swarm of these locusts, under him whom they called Walter the Penniless, was thinned by the Hungarians, and totally destroyed by the Turks, as the pyramids of bones on the frontiers of the country still keep in memory, surely the united forces of the Grecian ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... afflicting mankind on earth are due to the hostility of the 'chief demon,'[949] who becomes the controller of the earth and of the atmosphere immediately above the earth. Ea's answer is not intended to be equivocal, for he further orders Parnapishtim to announce to ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... not occur to Emil that any one had ever reasoned thus before, that music had ever before given a man this equivocal revelation. ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... sovereignty." (Shouts of down! down! in the galleries.) Ibid., 208, session of July 21. M. Dumolard: "You must distinguish between the people of Paris and these subaltern intriguers... these habitual oracles of the cafes and public squares, whose equivocal existence has for a long time occupied the attention and claimed the supervision of the police." (Down with the speaker! murmurs and hooting in the galleries).-Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 398. Protests of the arsenal section, read by Lavoisier (the chemist): "The caprice of a knot of citizens (thus) ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Carbuccia by a long account of his personal dealings with Giambattista Pessina, descending into the most curious particulars; he publishes the secret alphabet of the Palladium, specimens of litanies addressed to the good god Lucifer, and hymns of equivocal tendency attributed to Albert Pike. Finally, he fully admits the Satanic character of perfect Masonic initiation, and contributes a long chapter to swell our recent knowledge upon the subject ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... feminine hypocrisies would cost them on either side much more than the usual effort. Mrs. Ambient, smooth-haired, thin-lipped, perpetually fresh, must have regarded her crumpled and dishevelled visitor as an equivocal joke; she herself so the opposite of a Rossetti, she herself a Reynolds or a Lawrence, with no more far-fetched note in her composition than a cold ladylike candour ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... Treatment of Zona or Shingles. 28, On the Remedial Effects of Camphor in Acute and Chronic Rheumatism. 29, Examination of the Question, whether the Medical Use of Phosphorus internally, is useful, injurious, or equivocal. 30, Nitrous Acid and Opium in Dysentery, Cholera and Diarrhoea. 31, Tartar Emetic in Pneumonia Biliosa. 32, Bark of the Ampelopsis in Catarrhal Consumption. 33, Obstinate Vomiting cured with Extract of Marigold. 34, Vomiting of Fat and Blood. 35, Rupture of the Spleen. 36, Chilblains ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... But this was not all; I had reason to suspect they had endeavoured to damp the exertions of the Indians, with the hope that the want of provision in the spring would put an end to our progress at once. St. Germain, in particular, had behaved in a very equivocal way, since his journey to Slave Lake. He denied the principal parts of the charge in a very dogged manner, but acknowledged he had told the leader that we had not paid him the attention which a chief like him ought to have received; and that we had put a great affront on him in sending ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... the most ticklish things. A foreigner would have understood nothing, the language was so carefully veiled. But as the slight coating of modesty with which every woman of the world is enveloped is hardly more than skin deep, they expanded under the influence of this equivocal adventure, enjoying themselves wildly at bottom, thoroughly in their element, dabbling in sensuality with the gusto of an epicurean cook preparing a ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... whom he understood Harley, in a freak of generous romance had adopted, was familiar and courteous, as became a host. But he looked upon Helen as a mere child, and naturally left her to the Countess. The dim sense of her equivocal position—of her comparative humbleness of birth and fortunes, oppressed and pained her; and even her gratitude to Harley was made burthensome by a sentiment of helplessness. The grateful long to requite. And what could she ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... moment Orlando, with his eyes turned towards the door, remained silent, again sad, reflecting no doubt on all the difficult, equivocal present, so different from the glorious past. But all at once he turned to Pierre, who was still waiting. "And so, my friend," said he, "you are staying at the Palazzo Boccanera? Ah! what a grievous misfortune there has been on ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... sides by the Spanish Viceroys of Naples on the one side, and that of Milan upon the other. Venice was confined between the Austrian Tyrol and the Spanish territories in Milan. Savoy was surrounded by the latter and France. Hence the wavering and equivocal policy, which from the time of Charles V. had been pursued by the Italian States. The double character which pertained to the Popes made them perpetually vacillate between two contradictory systems of policy. If the successors ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... achieve independence—his treaty with the Indians, his sensational plan to incorporate the Cherokees into the new state, his constancy to an ideal of revolt against others in face of the reality of revolt against himself, his struggle, equivocal and half-hearted, with the North Carolina authorities under Tipton—despite all these heroic efforts, the star of Franklin swiftly declined. The vigorous measures pursued by General Joseph Martin, and his effective influence focussed upon a movement already honey-combed with ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission from sire to son of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the "House of Usher"—an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... storms which shook the family, that one party or the other took up and patronized Dolores for a while, more, as it would appear, out of hatred for the other than any real love to her. At such times it was really affecting to see with what warmth the poor child would receive these equivocal demonstrations of good-will—the nearest approaches to affection which she had ever known—and the bitterness with which she would mourn when they were capriciously withdrawn again. With a heart full of affection, she reminded me of some delicate, ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... mysterious man you are.' 'Ay, ay!' observes Mr. Fairfax, 'Indeed!' Now Mr. Fairfax says this ay, ay, and indeed, which are slight words enough in themselves, with so very unfathomable an air, and accompanies them with such a very equivocal smile, that ma and the young ladies are more than ever convinced that he means an immensity, and so tell him he is a very dangerous man, and seems to be always thinking ill of somebody, which is precisely the sort of character the censorious young gentleman is most desirous to establish; ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Because all Poles are counts—those that are not princes. But why a Pole? Well, perhaps from the convenience of vagueness, inasmuch as there is something international about a Pole—international, and yet neither equivocal nor vulgar; every one sympathizes with them, for they all possessed, once upon a time, vast estates whose loss is borne in cheerful resignation, and never so much as alluded to; they know everybody, ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... and equipment of a factory, will be quite likely, when B., C., and D. erect factories in his immediate neighborhood, to hold his peace when sundry varieties of swill milk are offered at his door, instead of speaking out an equivocal protest against the insult thus offered to his professional ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... what justice could the money belong to my friend, who had, as yet, done nothing but help to squander it? A more sturdy honesty, joined to a more even and impartial temperament, would have drawn from these considerations a new force of industry, that this equivocal position might be brought as swiftly as possible to an end, and some good services to mankind justify the appropriation of expense. It was not so with my friend, who was only unsettled and discouraged, and filled full of that trumpeting anger with which young men ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of definition is the most precise and least equivocal of any; but it is not brief enough, and is besides too technical for common discourse. The more usual mode of declaring the connotation of a name, is to predicate of it another name or names of known signification, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... my business frankly. I said I heard the house was considered to be haunted,—that I had a strong desire to examine a house with so equivocal a reputation; that I should be greatly obliged if he would allow me to hire it, though only for a night. I was willing to pay for that privilege whatever he might be inclined to ask. "Sir," said Mr. J——, with great courtesy, ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... shadows was the order of things. The rules were the rules of phantoms. Flesh lived there in subjection. Long miscegenation with shadow had made phantoms of them all and endowed all shadows with the menace of the real. Everything was equivocal as hell. ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... from precise correctness, the most venial trippings, the smallest inattention paid to doubtful rules and equivocal positions of criticism, inflames their anger, and calls forth their invectives. Regardless of the sage maxims of Cicero, Quintilian, and Horace, they not only disdain the sober rules which their ancient brethren have wisely laid down, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... preponderates, visual, auditory, motor and mixed types? Is not the way clear and is it not well enough to go in this direction? However natural this solution may appear, it is illusory and can lead to naught. It rests on the equivocal use of the word "imagination," which at one time means mere reproduction of images, and at another time creative activity, and which, consequently, keeps up the erroneous notion that in the creative imagination images, the raw materials, are the ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... of the ecclesiastical community. Hence we find them sitting in church courts with these brethren, [47:1] and desirous to be known not as apostles, but as elders. [47:2] We possess little information respecting either their official or their personal history. A very equivocal, and sometimes contradictory, tradition [47:3] is the only guide which even professes to point out to us where the greater number of them laboured; and the same witness is the only voucher for the statements which describe how most ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... remember we fight only with foils, and the point of mine shall be covered with velvet. In your attack upon chemistry, Philalethes, you limited the use of it to the apothecary's shop and the kitchen. The first is an equivocal use; by introducing it into the kitchen you make it an art fundamental to all others. But if what you had stated had really meant to be serious, it would not have deserved a reply; as it is in mere playfulness, ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... one of his tragedies, the success of which was equivocal, the abbe Pellegrin complained loudly that Voltaire had stolen some verses from him. "How can you, who are so rich," said the abbe, "thus seize upon the property of another?" "What! have I stolen from you?" replied Voltaire; "then I no longer ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... on, or by turning back, or by standing still, would have signified nothing towards proving that she had intended to put an end to her own life and to that of her child. One shudders to think that innocent women may have suffered an ignominous death, from such equivocal proofs and ...
— On the uncertainty of the signs of murder in the case of bastard children • William Hunter
... and people of all other nations, even of France herself, to pronounce our quarrel just will be obscured and the support rendered to us in a final resort to more decisive measures will be more limited and equivocal. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... in the evening. He had just retired, after the office, to his canon's cell in the cloister of Notre-Dame. This cell, with the exception, possibly, of some glass phials, relegated to a corner, and filled with a decidedly equivocal powder, which strongly resembled the alchemist's "powder of projection," presented nothing strange or mysterious. There were, indeed, here and there, some inscriptions on the walls, but they were pure sentences of learning and piety, extracted from good authors. The ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... naturally as the inevitable setting for a picture which has to include the actors and the observations of the author's vagabond life. To a clear and unprejudiced mind, observation of the life of the common folk and, above all, of the itinerant population and of their equivocal moral code, of necessity and invariably, compels resort to the form and manner of the ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... indeed painted Miss Saunt more than once and that if he were interested in my work I should be happy to show him what I had done. Mr. Geoffrey Dawling, the person thus introduced to me, stumbled into my room with awkward movements and equivocal sounds—a long, lean, confused, confusing young man, with a bad complexion and large, protrusive teeth. He bore in its most indelible pressure the postmark, as it were, of Oxford, and as soon as he opened his mouth I perceived, in addition to a remarkable revelation of ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... orator, and did not follow the example of Mr. Seymour or Mr. Greeley in going before the people, but skillfully and quietly directed all the movements of the canvass. In spite of his personal fidelity to hard money, the equivocal position of his party was used against him with great effect. The fact that the Republicans had passed the Resumption measure, and that the Democrats had demanded the repeal of its most important feature, made ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... of opinion that the Orinoco was a branch of the Caqueta coming from the south-east, and that the Rio Negro issued immediately from it. (* See the classical memoir of this great geographer in the Journal des Savans, March 1750 page 184. "One fact," says D'Anville, "which cannot be considered as equivocal, after the proofs with which we have been recently furnished, is the communication of the Rio Negro with the Orinoco; but we must not hesitate to admit, that we are not yet sufficiently informed of the manner in which this ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... early opportunity of questioning him concerning his intentions towards my child: he gave an equivocal answer, and I ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... in modern language) monopolized all the graces of their countrywomen. In the same cities were many of unblemished virtue and repute who possessed equal cultivation and attraction, but whom a more decorous life has concealed from the equivocal admiration of posterity; though the numerous female disciples of Pythagoras throw some light on their capacity and intellect. Among such as these had been the mother of Cleonice, not long since dead, and her daughter inherited and equalled her accomplishments, ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... heaven, is the object to whom they are addressed." Yet, at the same time, in the true spirit of a polytheist, he accuseth them of adoring Earth, Water, Fire, the Winds, and the Sun and Moon. But the Persians of every age have denied the charge, and explained the equivocal conduct, which might appear to give a color to it. The elements, and more particularly Fire, Light, and the Sun, whom they called Mithra, [1201] were the objects of their religious reverence, because they considered them as the purest symbols, the noblest productions, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... humiliation of their old rival, aimed at her absolute ruin, though she had broken no treaties. The Carthaginians, broken-hearted, sent embassy after embassy, imploring the Senate to preserve peace, to whom the senators gave equivocal answers. The situation of Carthage was hopeless and miserable—stripped by Masinissa of the rich towns of Emporia, and on the eve of another conflict with the mistress ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... for the duchess de Berri. At a dinner at Baron Rothschild's, Careme, the Delmonico of those times, surprised her with a column of ingenious confectionery architecture on which was inscribed her name spun in sugar. It was a more equivocal compliment when Walter Scott christened two pet donkeys Hannah More ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... older than any opinions, the blood of generations of good men. He met George Sand and her poetical circle and hated it, with all the hatred of an old city merchant for the irresponsible life. He met the Spiritualists and hated them, with all the hatred of the middle class for borderlands and equivocal positions and playing with fire. His intellect went upon bewildering voyages, but his soul walked in a straight road. He piled up the fantastic towers of his imagination until they eclipsed the planets; but the plan of the foundation on which he built was ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... black specialists to white units was a key part of the committee's program, and despite Gray's private assurances that specialists would be integrated, Fahy was not prepared to accept the Army's "equivocal" language on this subject. There was also the issue of the quota, still very much alive between the committee and the Army. The committee was bound, furthermore, to resent being ignored in the approval process. Fahy and his associates had been charged by the President with ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... the point of madness even about a courtesan, had she once taken his fancy; his prodigality was princely, although he had no income; further, he was most sensitive to slights, as all men are who, because they are placed in an equivocal position, fancy that everyone who makes any reference to their origin ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... cones of scoriae, tuff, and lava, or with narrow streams of lava in great part scoriaceous and porous, such as were observed to have proceeded from Vesuvius and Etna, the resemblance seemed remote and equivocal. It was, in truth, like comparing the roots of a tree with its leaves and branches, which, although the belong to the same plant, differ in form, texture, colour, mode of growth, and position. The external cone, with ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... life is not at all points incompatible in tone with the innocence which it certainly fails to establish—except in minds already made up to accept any plea as valid which may plausibly or possibly be advanced on her behalf; and the arguments advanced by Vittoria are not more evasive and equivocal, in face of the patent and flagrant prepossession of her judges, than those put forward by the Queen of Scots. It is impossible not to wonder whether the poet had not in his mind the actual tragedy which had ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... could detect an air of equivocal bonhomie upon the countenance of the sergeant; but the adventure of the vault might have excited the curiosity of the man, and it was not surprising that he allowed some of the feelings which agitated his mind to appear ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the lexicon of such characters) in the Bois, where the fashionable young men of the day began to remark her. In fact, before long Malaga was very much talked about in the questionable world of equivocal women, who presently attacked her good fortune by calumnies. They said she was a somnambulist, and the Pole was a magnetizer who was using her to discover the philosopher's stone. Some even more envenomed scandals drove her to a ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... the like equivocal sayings, were followed by a vague buzz, which was traceable to no individual author, but seemed to rise on all sides, like a dark mist, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... held a whispered conference among themselves, evidently to determine whether this equivocal apology was to be accepted. Apparently it was, for Dr Johnson now asked loftily and with an abstracted air, as though he already knew the answer and considered it beneath notice, "What was this magic formula you caused to be put on ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... baronet of some sort, not above the professional; sundry propriety-faced people in yellow waistcoats, who say little, and whose social position you cannot well make out; half-a-dozen ladies of an uncertain age, dressed in grand style, with turbans of imposing tournure; and a young, diffident, equivocal-looking gent who sits at the bottom of the table, and whom you instinctively make out to be a family doctor, tutor, or nephew, with expectations. No young ladies, unless the young ladies of the family, appear at the dinner-parties of these gentility-mongers; because the motive ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... way to secure it was a retirement from the vexing world, a recreant forsaking of the active duties of life, as if it consisted in immunity from temptation rather than in victory over it. Others have placed it in surpliced observance or in monastic vow; an equivocal regard to patterns of things in the heavens which common men mistake for idolatry. Others again, reversing the old Pythagorean maxim, and wearing the image of God upon their ring, have expressed it by unworthy familiarity, a continual adverting ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... his exposition—strange as the proceeding appears to us—as short and as clear as the most admirable literary skill could contrive. That eccentric ambition dominates the writings of the times. In a purely literary direction it is illustrated by the famous but curiously rambling and equivocal controversy about the Ancients and Moderns begun in France by Perrault and Boileau. In England the most familiar outcome was Swift's Battle of the Books, in which he struck out the famous phrase about sweetness and light, 'the two noblest ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... pause without dissipating the cloud we have unexpectedly cast over him. The temptation to scrutinize his conduct and bearing is irresistible. Is it not better to lay bare all the facts, than to leave matters in the equivocal ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... down stairs, that Madame de Rosenberg was dead, and asked me if the Comte de Waldstein had in the library the illustration of the Villa d'Altichiero, which the Emperor had asked for in vain at the city library of Prague, and when I answered 'yes,' he gave an equivocal laugh. A moment afterwards, he asked me if he might tell the Emperor. 'Why not, monseigneur? It is not a secret, 'Is His Majesty coming to Dux?' 'If he goes to Oberlaitensdorf (sic) he will go to Dux, too; and he may ask you for it, for there ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... service of the Union. Colonel Lee made no reply, whereupon "Old Chapultepec" came directly to the point, saying, "I suppose you will go with the rest. If your purpose is to resign, it is proper you should do so at once. Your present attitude is an equivocal one." "General," Colonel Lee then answered, "the property belonging to my children, all that they possess, lies in Virginia. They will be ruined if they do not go with their State. I cannot raise my hand against my children." General Scott then ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... days before, your wife had spoken of you in rather equivocal terms to Madame de Fischtaminel: your fair friend comes to visit her, and Caroline compromises you by a long and humid gaze; she praises you and says ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... faint and scattering shout of applause, in two or three places, mingled with hisses and murmurs in others, was the only response with which this address was received. But even with this equivocal testimony of public feeling towards him, this despicable functionary felt gratified. "I am safe," said he to himself, with a long-drawn breath, as he descended the steps, to watch an opportunity to mingle with the party with whom he was now ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... Dick Swinton's equivocal position as the son of a needy clergyman and the very uncertain heir to a great fortune, ruled him out of the reckoning as an eligible bachelor, compared with Jack Lorrimer, Ned Carnaby, Harry Bent, and Vivian Ormsby, all rich men. The miser so frequently advertised the ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... Yao bridge, Hsiao Hung makes known sentimental matters in equivocal language. In the Hsiao Hsiang lodge, Tai-y gives, while under the effects of the spring lassitude, expression ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... plausible excuse for the commission of this egregious folly. These men over whose sad deeds the bibliophile sighs with mournful regret, were those who carried out the Reformation, so glorious in its results; but the righteousness of the means by which those results were effected are very equivocal indeed. When men form themselves into a faction and strive for the accomplishment of one purpose, criminal deeds are perpetrated with impunity, which, individually they would blush and scorn to do; they feel no direct responsibility, no personal ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... Measures,—which in structure it greatly resembles,—or than the pines or cedars of our own times (see Fig. 3). In the Middle Old Red Sandstone there occurs, with plants representative apparently of the ferns and their allies, a somewhat equivocal and doubtful organism, which may have been the panicle or compound fruit of some aquatic rush; while in the Upper Old Red, just ere the gorgeous flora of the Coal Measures began to be, there existed in considerable abundance a stately fern, the Cyclopteris Hibernicus (see Fig. ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... That play is a beautiful triumph of poetry over prose, of soul and heart over calculation and business. A Soul's Tragedy exhibits the inverse process: the triumph of mundane policy and genial savoir faire in the person of Ogniben over the sickly and equivocal "poetry" of Chiappino. Browning seems to have thrown off this bitter parody of his own idealisms in a mood like that in which Ibsen conceived the poor blundering idealist of the Wild Duck. Chiappino is Browning's Werle; the reverse side of a type which he had drawn with so much indulgence ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... translation signally, and the others to some extent, not dead "versions," but as it were reincarnations of the original, the spirit or the flesh (whichever anyone pleases) being his own, or both being blended of his and the author's. To do this requires a "strong nativity" though not in the equivocal sense in which another great translator of FitzGerald's own type[39] used that term. It shows in his scanty "original" work: but it shows also and perhaps more strongly in his letters. Everyone who has studied the history of the English Universities in connection with ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... time of which I speak, Tom Hopkins was of an age somewhat equivocal; public fame called him fifty, whilst he himself stuck obstinately at thirty-five; of a stout active figure, rather manly than gentlemanly, and a bold, jovial visage, in excellent keeping with his person, distinguished by round, bright, stupid black eyes, an aquiline nose, a knowing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 340, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... alone—all the exaltation gone. For the moment I hated the two down-stairs. I felt the situation equivocal and untenable, and it had amused me so ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... belief that Raleigh had given information against him, to accuse Sir Walter himself of being privy to a conspiracy against the government. This charge Cobham retracted, confirmed, and retracted again, behaving in so equivocal a manner, that no reliance whatever can be placed on any of his assertions. But as the King was afraid of Raleigh as much as the secretary hated him, this vague charge, unsupported by other evidence, was made sufficient ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... pulpit methods in your classes. You take a chemical text, and then turn and twist it into any sort of a metaphysical conclusion that appeals to you at the minute. No; wait! I am talking. Science is not equivocal, Brenton. It's as downright and determinate as AB. It's what we know; not what we think we ought to think about the things we know. And it's science you are there to teach, not glittering abstractions having to do ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... between Mr. Townshend and Lord Shelburne on the Irish questions—is minute and voluminous; and only a few letters have been selected from the mass to show the course of ministerial diplomacy in reference to the equivocal relations subsisting at that period between the two countries. They form a running commentary upon a curious passage in Irish history; and although the circumstances to which they relate have long been completely ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... king's disputes with the ecclesiastics, Mr. Lingard in any other instance would have readily traced,) he states it as not altogether incredible that both Ethelgiva, the mother, and her daughter, whom he does not name, had sacrificed their honour to the equivocal ambition of one of them becoming queen. The nobles, he adds, accompanied their demand for the king's return with an injunction in the name of the whole assembly, for Ethelgiva to leave the court. The rest of his account does not ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... specific, he added: "If the people felt as I feel, there is never a Grant or Glenelg who crossed the Tay and Tweed to exchange high-born Highland poverty for substantial Lowland wealth, who would dare to insult Upper Canada with the official presence, as its ruler, of such an equivocal character as this Mr. What-do-they-call-him—Francis Bond Head." Ever and anon the Tory press retorted on him in a spirit by no means calculated to soften the asperity of his heart. The most contemptuous epithets were freely bestowed upon him, and he was ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... Mississippi, a river that forms the sole passage from the western States to the ocean. This navigation, although of general benefit, has been always valued and desired, as of peculiar advantage to the Western States, whose demands to obtain it were neither equivocal nor unreasonable. But with the river Mississippi, by a sort of coercion, we acquired, by good or ill fortune, as our future measures shall determine, the whole province of Louisiana. As this acquisition was made at the common expense, it is ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... turned to Anaitis: now that the candles were behind him, she was standing in his shadow. "Well, well! but you are a little old-fashioned, with all these equivocal mummeries. And I did not know that civilized persons any longer retained sufficient credulity to wring a thrill from god-baiting. Still, women must be humored, bless them! and at last, I take it, we have quite fairly fulfilled the ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... repeat—that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man—a man of restless and versatile intellect—who, not content with (an equivocal[1]) success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... property of the male representative. But this idea had never entered into the conceptions of either mother or son. Mrs, Tyrrel conceived that she performed an act of the most exalted benevolence in admitting Miss Emily into a sort of equivocal situation, which was neither precisely that of a domestic, nor yet marked with the treatment that might seem due to one of ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... with the morning—when I had slept off the fumes of the night's debauch—I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched. I again plunged into excess, and soon drowned in wine all ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... life of Law, and the equivocal means by which he appeared to live, playing high, and always with great success, threw a cloud of suspicion over him wherever he went, and caused him to be expelled by the magistracy from the semi-commercial, semi-aristocratical cities ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... the same in both cases: but the office, the powers and preeminences annexed to it, differ very widely; and so doth the constitution of the courts where the offices are executed. The identity of the name may have confounded our ideas, as equivocal words often do, if the nature of things is not attended to; but the nature of the offices, properly stated, will, I hope, remove ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... not have acknowledged it if he had, smiled the indulgent smile of a self-satisfied superior and uttered a few equivocal sentences. This was gall and wormwood to Sweetwater, but he kept his temper admirably and, with an air of bravado entirely assumed for the ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... friendship for Keats, I think the points you mention look equivocal; but Hunt was a many-laboured and much belaboured man, and as much allowance as may be made on this score is perhaps due to him—no more than that much. His own powers stand high in various ways—poetically ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... excuse for convoking a general meeting of the associates which consequently took place at the town of St. Trond, in the district of Liege. Full two thousand of the members appeared on the summons. The language held in this assembly was much stronger and less equivocal than that formerly used. The delay in the arrival of the king's answer presaged ill as to his intentions; while the rapid growth of the public power seemed to mark the present as the time for successfully demanding all that the people required. Several of the ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... material progress. Here the prize was within every man's reach: patient industry need never doubt its reward; nay, in defiance of the four Gospels, assiduity in pursuit of gain was promoted to the rank of a duty, and thrift and godliness were linked in equivocal wedlock. Politically she was free; socially she suffered from that subtle and searching oppression which the dominant opinion of a free community may exercise over the members who compose it. As a whole, she grew upon the gaze of the world, a signal example of expansive energy; but she has not ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... proposed to us by the British then it would not have been necessary for the people to come together at Vereeniging. But in matter of fact we have come here with a proposal, which, rightly understood, is nearly equivocal to the Middelburg proposal, and which meets the wishes of the English Government as ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... character. The action of a man pulling his hat over his forehead is indifferent enough in itself, and generally speaking, may mean anything or nothing; but in the circumstances in which Macduff is placed, it is neither insignificant nor equivocal. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... alone—according to this system—we actually behold, is as thorough idealism as Berkeley's, inasmuch as it equally removes all reality and immediateness of perception, and places us in a dream-world of phantoms and spectres, the inexplicable swarm and equivocal generation of motion in our own brains. (3) That this hypothesis neither involves the explanation nor precludes the necessity of a mechanism and co-adequate forces in the percipient, which, at the more than magic touch of the impulse from without, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... emerges from matter, it is still quite material. It is cold, hunger, fear, transformed into something that as yet has no shape. It crawls vaguely around great dangers, around the long nights, the approach of winter, of an equivocal sleep which almost ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... believe, no prospect whatever of your father being able to get the money to pay off Cossey and Son, and if he did, it would not help him, because he could not pay the interest on it. Under these circumstances you have to choose between putting yourself in an equivocal position and letting events take their course. It would be useless for anybody else to undertake the task, and of course I cannot guarantee that even you will succeed, but I will not mince matters—as you doubtless know, any man would find it hard to ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... was to give support of any kind to the revolted subjects of the other." It is nevertheless true that James did not withdraw his troops from the service of the states; but he authorized the Spaniards to levy soldiers in England. The United Provinces were at once afflicted and indignant at this equivocal conduct. Their first impulse was to deprive the English of the liberty of navigating the Scheldt. They even arrested the progress of several of their merchant-ships. But soon after, gratified at finding that James received their deputy with the title of ambassador, they ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... confuted the Gnostic or the Manichean heresies in colourful allegory, but instead he sang fervid hosannahs on his canvases to the greater glory of Christ and His saints. Perhaps if he had lived in our times he might have painted heads of fashionable courtesans or equivocal statesmen. But whether primitive or modern, realist or symbolist, he would always have been a painter of dramatic genius. He is the ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the last ten minutes, forgot the depressing certainty that he would have a great deal more that he wanted to say in the immediate future, over and above the thirty-five minutes or so of discourse that she would contract to listen to next Sunday. And Cicely listened with the wistful equivocal triumph of one whose goose has turned out to be a swan and who realises with secret concern that she has only planned the role of goosegirl ...
— When William Came • Saki
... the Belgians, nor the meerschaum so largely as their German neighbors on the Rhine frontier. A notable bit of sharp practice is on record in connexion with the pipe-smokers of Holland—a dodge only to be justified on the equivocal maxim that all is fair in trade provided it just keeps within the margin we need not speak. A pipe manufactory was established in Flanders about the middle of the ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... have been like the best of them in manners. Its existence shows, of course, Diderot's worst side, that is to say, the combination of want of breeding with readiness to get money anyhow. If it is worth reading at all, which may be doubted, it is to show the real, if equivocal, value of Crebillon himself. For it is vulgar, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... forfeiture stimulated their natural and irregular vivacity to enforce laws which had become obsolete, and they pounced upon American property as they would have gone to war in quest of prize-money. Even at first their acts were equivocal, and they soon came to be as illegal as they were oppressive. There was no redress. An appeal to the Privy Council was costly and difficult; and besides, when it so happened, before the end of the year, that an officer had to defend himself on an appeal, the suffering ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... political economy, with all its contradictory hypotheses and equivocal conclusions, is nothing but an organization of privilege and misery, I shall have proved thereby that it contains by implication the promise of an organization of labor and equality, since, as has been said, every systematic contradiction is the ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... the night before Wyvis' return. The whole household seemed somewhat disorganized by the prospect. There was an air of subdued excitement visible in the oldest and staidest of the servants, for in spite of Wyvis' many shortcomings and his equivocal position, he was universally liked by his inferiors, if not by those who esteemed themselves his superiors, in social station. Mrs. Brand had gone to bed early, and Janetta hoped that she was asleep; Mrs. Wyvis had kept Janetta at her bedside until after ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... alleged results of observation may be set aside; first, because the so-called facts are in their own nature equivocal; secondly, because they stand on insufficient authority; thirdly, because they are not sufficiently numerous. But, in this case, the disease is one of striking and well-marked character; the witnesses are experts, interested in denying and disbelieving the ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... a descendant of the Grand Pensionary of Holland, who was governor of the place, received his noble visiter with every mark of attention. The Count, however, no sooner beheld Sophia, than he became deeply enamoured of her; and on learning the equivocal situation in which she stood, being neither a slave nor a mistress, but, as it were, a piece of merchandize purchased for 1,500 piastres, he wound up his declaration of love by an offer of marriage. The Count was a handsome man, scarcely thirty years of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 379, Saturday, July 4, 1829. • Various
... was perfectly isolated, and very little intruded upon by acts of neighbourhood; for the rank of its occupants was of that equivocal kind which precludes all familiar association with those of a decidedly inferior rank, while it is not sufficient to entitle its possessors to the society of established gentility, among whom the nearest residents were the O'Maras of Carrigvarah, whose ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... description of the fatal lock of hair, though why it should be depicted in that form especially, it is difficult to guess. The change of Scylla into a lark, or partridge, and of her father into a sea eagle, are poetical fictions based on the equivocal meanings of their names, the one Greek and the other Hebrew; for the name 'Ciris' resembles the Greek verb keiro, which signifies 'to clip,' or 'cut short.' 'Nisus,' too, resembles the Hebrew word 'Netz,' which means a bird resembling the osprey, or ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... we are not deceived even though he outdo nature. We know where we stand and where he stands; we know that this is the power of art. If he is writing an animal romance like Kipling's story of the "White Seal," or like his "Jungle Book," there will be nothing equivocal about it, no mixture of fact and fiction, nothing to confuse or ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... head contemptuously. "Agostino would gather up all such equivocal objects before he showed ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... property so detained the declaration of war is said to have a retroactive effect, and to render it liable to be considered as the property of enemies taken in time of war. The property is seized provisionally—an act hostile enough in the mere execution, but equivocal as to its effects, and liable to be varied by subsequent events, and by the conduct of the government, the property of whose subjects is so detained. Where the first seizure is equivocal, if the matter in dispute terminates in reconciliation, ...
— The Laws Of War, Affecting Commerce And Shipping • H. Byerley Thomson
... ambitious novel, "The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless" (1751). The productions known to be hers do not certainly represent the entire output of her industry during this period, for since "The Dunciad" her writing had been almost invariably anonymous. One or two equivocal bits of secret history and scandal-mongering may probably be attributed to her at the very time when in "Epistles for the Ladies" (1749-50) she was advocating sobriety, religion, and morality. These suspected lapses into her old habits should serve as seasoning to ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a man, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... infused so much of her own special tact, That it now claims to be one of the most FAMED OF THE METROPOLITAN THEATRES. Indeed, It is a fact that will always remain on record, That amid the vicissitudes of all other theatrical Establishments, with Madame at its head, success has Never been equivocal for a moment, and the Receipts have for years past averaged nearly As much as the patent theatres. The boxes are In such high repute, that double the present low Rental is available by this means alone. Madame Vestris has a lease for three more seasons at ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... necessary to insist on, nor reiterate, the decadence of the Palais Royal. It is no longer the "capitol of Paris," and whatever its charms may be they are mostly equivocal. It is more a desert than an oasis or a temple de la volupte, and it was each of these things in other days. Its priestesses and its gambling houses are gone, and who shall say this of itself is not a good thing in spite of the ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... history, and it resulted in cumbrous ineffectiveness. Interminable inquiry and discussion ended frequently only in suspension of judgment or a divided report. Points of policy of imminent importance had to await a dilatory investigation and equivocal conclusions. This impotence of the central organs of government did not come in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella and their immediate successors, and the growing inefficiency of the councils was long overcome by the resolution ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... She was an impassioned, vivacious woman, fond of adoration, exasperated by five years of marital rudeness; and the sense of release was so strong upon her that it stilled anxiety for more than she actually enjoyed. An equivocal position was of no importance to her then; she had no envy for the honors of a dull, disregarded wife: the one spot which spoiled her vision of her new pleasant world, was the sense that she left her three-year-old boy, who died two ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... Evelyn's definition of a very old friend?" said he with with another smile, as that lady moved off to take a more particular view of what she had come to see. "To judge by the specimen before me I should consider it very equivocal." ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... upon her trial for murder, the police reporters would have discovered traces of great beauty in her countenance. An ordinary spectator, having no occasion to spice a paragraph, would have made the equivocal remark that ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... a better name for me," she said, casting Crossman a look whose intimacy made his blood run hot within him. "'The Black Dawn'—n'est-ce-pas? Though I have heard him call me in the night—by another name," with which equivocal statement she swung the axe into the curve of her arm, turned on her heel, and softly ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... has resulted a character equivocal and ambiguous, but peculiarly Porto Rican. The heat of the climate has made them lazy, to which end also the fertility of the soil has conduced; the solitary life of the country residents has ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... at a distance, admiring him, learning from him, and trying to imitate him. For this reason Chopin has not found a critic, although his works are already known everywhere. They have either excited equivocal smiles and have been disparaged, or have provoked astonishment and an overflow of unlimited praise; but nobody has as yet come forward to say in what their peculiar character and merit consists, by what they are distinguished ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... where a literary man (in spite of all we can say against it) ranks below that class of gentry composed of the apothecary, the attorney, the wine-merchant, whose positions, in country towns at least, are so equivocal. As, for instance, my friend the Rev. James Asterisk, who has an undeniable pedigree, a paternal estate, and a living to boot, once dined in Warwickshire, in company with several squires and parsons of that enlightened county. Asterisk, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... manner, and your clothes were fashionably made, you would far excel the city girls," he said, a compliment which to Maude seemed rather equivocal. ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... was apt to be debauched. Her ladyship's poet-laureate, in whose behalf she was teazing each new-comer for subscriptions, got sufficiently independent to sing in her ladyship's presence, at supper, a song of rather equivocal meaning; and her chief painter, who was employed upon an illustrated copy of the Loves of the Plants, was, at another time, seduced into such a state of pot-valour, that, upon her ladyship's administering her usual dose of criticism upon his works, he not only bluntly disputed her judgment, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... the ports of entry so that a ship cannot discharge her cargo there, or get papers for another voyage, then ships will cease to trade; or, if he undertakes to blockade her, and thus collect it, she has not gained her independence by secession. What must she do? If she is contented to live in this equivocal state, all would be well perhaps; but she could not live there. No people in the world could live in that condition. What will they do? They must take the initiative and declare war upon the United States; and the moment that they ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... about other children, one by one, as though calling the roll. At first he evaded her questioning, giving such vague and equivocal replies that presently she clearly ...
— A Melody in Silver • Keene Abbott
... felt that, having been induced to undertake the defense by representations not justified in fact, and by an impression of the nature of the case which developments in the court-room had not confirmed, he had the right to step aside out of an equivocal position. He wished to do this without injury to the prisoner and while there was yet an opportunity for him to obtain other counsel. The whole tenor of the speech was the right to be relieved from the obligation of an error; an error that had involved him unwittingly ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... generally quicker to see and better able to estimate distances correctly, proves that the fault is not in our eyes, but in our use of them. Their occupations give them the training we lack, and they check the equivocal results of the angle of vision by its accompanying experiences, which determine the relations of the two causes of this ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... renounce those timid and restrictive definitions and to free our mind of them. A true classic, as I should like to hear it defined, is an author who has enriched the human mind, increased its treasure, and caused it to advance a step; who has discovered some moral and not equivocal truth, or revealed some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and discovered; who has expressed his thought, observation, or invention, in no matter what form, only provided it be broad and great, refined and sensible, sane and beautiful ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... Counsel is a Rightness of deliberation, and so the first question must regard the nature and objects of deliberation. Now remember Rightness is an equivocal term; we plainly do not mean Rightness of any kind whatever; the [Greek: akrataes], for instance, or the bad man, will obtain by his calculation what he sets before him as an object, and so he may be said to have deliberated rightly in one sense, but ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... his equivocal footing in the house of Ruthven, obtained another no less precarious in the house of Fane—all in the beginning on a purely gaming basis. However, Gerald had already proposed him for the Stuyvesant and Proscenium ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... the things which balk, Retard, divert, draw into sluices small, But who beholds the stream turned back to mock, Not just itself, but make equivocal A Universal Reason, Vision? No. You find no proof of this, but prodigal Proof of ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... for it are as follow:—"Scene—An ale-house room.—Several shabby fellows with punch and tobacco; Tony at the head of the table, &c., discovered." Never perhaps, in any previous representation, was the mise en scene so perfect. It drew three rounds of applause. A very equivocal compliment to ourselves it may be; but such jolly-looking "shabby fellows" as sat round the table at which our Tony presided, were never furnished by the supernumeraries of Drury or Covent-garden. They were as classical, in their way, as Macready's Roman mob. Then there was no make-believe ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... have lost its nationality, its language, its locality, its independence, its name—any one or any number of its characteristics. Perhaps, the name alone, with a vague notice of its locality, may remain; a name famous from the glory of its new country, but obscure, and even equivocal in its fatherland. ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... will as it does will, is determined to determine as it does determine, and hence that its apparent freedom is illusory. Hobbes' definition, it may be urged, when applied to the case of the Will, is equivocal. No doubt a man is free as to his action, if there be an 'absence of all impediments' to his action—or, in other words, if he is able to act as he wills to act. But it does not follow that he is free as to his will, even though there be an absence of all impediments to his willing as he ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... enemies awakes his self-reproach. His invective turns into panegyric, and he warms for a time into hearty admiration, which proves that his irritation arises from an excess, not from a defect, of sensibility; but finding that he has gone a little too far, he lets his praise slide into equivocal description, and, with some parting epigram, he relapses into silence. The portraits thus drawn are never wanting in piquancy nor in fidelity. Brooding over his injuries and his desertions, Hazlitt has pondered almost with the eagerness of a lover upon the qualities ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... mentioned, however, my translation may fairly claim to be true to the spirit of the original. Even the strictest moralist will not cavil at seeing equivocal situations painted in Bilse's book when his purpose in doing so has been the radical exposure of ills existing in a body around which cluster so many traditions of honor and duty well done as is the case with the German army. ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... Atheist. He did not admit a God in any rational sense. True, he professed to believe in gods, but evidently in a very equivocal manner, and solely to escape the popular condemnation. "They are not pure spirits, for there is no spirit in the atomic theory; they are not bodies, for where are the bodies that we may call gods? In this embarrassment, Epicurus, compelled ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... sex, who are weak-minded enough to trust their lives to the rash artifices of an ignorant pretender who affects to discover an occult quality in the constitution of the patient denoting the existence of some internal complaint beyond that which less equivocal symptoms sufficiently present to the eye and knowledge of the regular practitioner—we can only say that we conceive them to be justly punished in the loss of their money, and the consequent ruin of ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... these in many instances equivocal cases, I have," says he, "since the month of July past, made application for the discharge from British men-of-war of two hundred and seventy-one seamen, who, stating themselves to be Americans, have claimed my interference. Of this number, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... the American workingman is a 'moving picture' in two senses of this equivocal phrase. It is kinetoscopic, first of all, in its lifelikeness and the convincing reality of the actions it pictures. Then, again, it is emotionally moving; for the character of Anton, the big, honest, alert and energetic Chicago laborer, ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... back to Paris by an insolent and ferocious crowd, and looked back with gratitude to the equivocal civilities of Sauce. The journey occupied four days, during which the queen's hair turned grey. Three deputies, sent by the Assembly, met the dolorous procession half way, and took charge of the royal family. The king at once assured them ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... a good girl," said the deacon, "not overburdened with fat, but a good girl!" and with this rather equivocal compliment to the donor, with his boot in one hand and the cap in the other, he rushed impulsively to the ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... are direct and positive. They admit of no equivocal construction. That the Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchical government is true, or the Scripture is false. And a man hath good reason to believe that there is as much of kingcraft as priestcraft in withholding ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... Among the manuscripts of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Captain Larimore in 1704 played an equivocal part in the case of Quelch and his pirate crew (see no. 104, post), assisting their attempts to escape, but his testimony as to prize-money is to be valued, as that of an experienced shipmaster and privateer. ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... more curiously a weak spot in Hooker's character than the odd pride he took in Mr. Lincoln's somewhat equivocal letter to him at the time ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... shrink from seeking admission to the presence of the Queen. She was not afraid even of that royal lady's penetrating eye. Shiftiness, poverty, debts, modes of getting money that were, perhaps, equivocal, help too lightly accepted, all these are bad enough; but they are not in a woman the unpardonable sin. And a caprice in English society was always possible. The young beauty of Bice might attract the eye of some one whose notice would throw down all obstacles; or it ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... Francis, less easily cozened than the countess, should find his suspicions aroused? What if the princess, who had immediately dismissed the fool's denouncement of the free baron as an ebullition of blind jealousy—after informing her betrothed of the mad accusation—should see in his request equivocal circumstances? Or, was the countess—like many of her sisters—given to second thoughts, and would this after-reverie dampen the ardor ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... of twenty. Such a fresh, strawberry and cream complexion under a plenteous harvest of flaxen hair would not be associated in America with anyone very serious. There she would have been thought arrayed by Nature as a tearing blonde, suitable for the equivocal light stage, or as a frivolous artist's model, or as promenade girl in a suit and cloak house. But in Fraeulein the extraordinary combination of volatile comeliness and unimpeachable earnestness daily worked growing ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... was personally known to her," he repeated. "Now I should like to remind you of young Charles Rambert's equivocal behaviour in the course of the evening that preceded the crime. It struck President Bonnet and shocked the priest. I also recall his hereditary antecedents, his mothers insanity, and finally——" Juve broke off abruptly and unceremoniously dragged the magistrate ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... for me a thousand things that hitherto I had been forced to do for myself, was almost naive. I could not hide it. I was at last a man's woman. I had a protector. Yes; I must not shrink from the equivocal significance of that word—I had ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... at Lutzen; the beneficent part of his career Gustavus Adolphus had already terminated; and now the greatest service which he could render to the liberties of Germany was—to die. The all-engrossing power of an individual was at an end; the equivocal assistance of an over-powerful protector gave place to a more noble self-exertion on the part of the estates; and those who formerly were the mere instruments of his aggrandizement, now began to work for themselves. ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... but I really have little hope otherwise.' It was hard to weigh the value of this statement. It was decidedly an equivocal one. ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... present connexion must be at once apparent; but it may perhaps be rendered more so if we try to imagine how the case would have stood supposing geological investigation to have yielded in this matter an opposite result, or even so much as an equivocal result. If it had yielded an opposite result, if the lower geological formations were found to contain as many, as diverse, and as highly organized types as the later geological formations, clearly there would have been no room at all for any theory of progressive evolution. And, by ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... another, shall," &c., and the word "legally" was struck out, and the words "under the laws thereof" inserted after the word "State," in compliance with the wish of some, who thought the term legal equivocal, and favoring the idea that slavery was legal "in a moral view." A conclusive proof that, although future generations might apply that clause to other kinds of "service or labor," when slavery should have died out, or been killed off by the young spirit of liberty, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... ignoring and treating with contempt the local Courts and authorities by continually making all sorts of ridiculous and ex parte complaints to Her Majesty's Government in the first instance; Her Majesty's Government is also thereby placed in the equivocal and undesirable position of intermeddling in the internal affairs of this Republic, which is in conflict with the London Convention. Had the complaints been lodged with this Government, or with the proper ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... consul, and you had yourself a full view of them in our conversations and discussions. Yet from the very first my feelings were hurt by many circumstances, when, on your mooting the question of the full restoration of my position, I detected the covert hatred of some and the equivocal attachment of others. For you received no support from either in regard to my vexatious to me: but much more so was the fact that they used, before my very eyes, so to embrace, fondle, make much of, and kiss my enemy mine do I say? rather the enemy of the laws, of the law courts, ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... Hardenberg. "Come, Frederica, sit down by my side here on the couch on which you have so often reposed as a modern Pythia, and proclaimed to me the oracles which your mysterious priest had whispered to you. Now you are no priestess uttering equivocal wisdom, but a young woman telling the truth, and making me listen to the revelations ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... tottering on the battlements of some old turret, when a storm arose, the maiden crept to his side, but in an instant, with a hideous crash, she was borne away by the rude grasp of the tempest. He awoke, with a mortifying discovery that the crash had been of a somewhat less equivocal nature. A cabinet of costly workmanship lay overturned at his feet, and a rich vase, breathing odours, strewed the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... appear to notice the equivocal answer, and Bill suggested that they return to the ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... by the equivocal Angel of Eclipses, she had turned into King Street, and arranged her face, and courageously met her mother. Her mother had not at first perceived the unusual; for mothers, despite their reputation to the contrary, really are the blindest creatures. Sophia, the naive ninny, had actually ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... in fine, but led to a different ending from what either anticipated. The "lady" who acted as "alcahuete" soon placed herself en rapport with Rosita; but her success was more equivocal than that of Vizcarra himself; in fact, I should rather say unequivocal, for there was no ambiguity ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... for a picture which has to include the actors and the observations of the author's vagabond life. To a clear and unprejudiced mind, observation of the life of the common folk and, above all, of the itinerant population and of their equivocal moral code, of necessity and invariably, compels resort to the form and manner of the ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... himself of that passion, which now broke out afresh, like a fire which has only slumbered for a time. He spent night after night at his club, playing at baccarat, and could be met in the betting ring at every race meeting. Then, too, he glided into equivocal society and appeared at home only at intervals to vent his irritation and spite and jealousy upon his ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... the equivocal office which my friend Mark had prepared for me. If family squabbles were to arise, I had no fancy to mix in them; and I did not want a collision with Mr. Larkin either; and, on the whole, notwithstanding his modesty, I thought ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... generally were clothed in blue cotton and grass hats, while the native cavalry, in the brilliant tunics and feathered coronals, already described, must have completed the diversity of the variegated cortege. Had poor Hammond been mounted among them, his costume would have been as equivocal as his new complexion, for he had attired himself in the scarlet coat of a British officer of rank, with several blazing stars of glass jewels, surmounted by a white Panama hat, in which clustered an airy profusion of ladies' ostrich feathers, dyed ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... difference between the Continent and England. Eternally the ridiculous pretence of being "noble" by family, seems to claim for obscure foreigners some sort of advantage over the plain untitled Englishman; but eternally the travelled Englishman recollects, that, so far as this equivocal "nobility" had been really fenced with privileges, those have been long in a course of superannuation; whilst the counter-vailing advantages for his own native aristocracy are precisely those which time or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... be a foolish chronicler to commit himself to any such statement," said Dr. Burge, who seemed to feel it his duty to speak the moral tag to our little Fast-Day interlude. "I cannot allow that these Foxden manifestations are one whit more silly or equivocal than many I have seen elsewhere. This shamming the ghost of somebody still alive is no uncommon deception: several cases of the sort have come under my recent observation. And it is well that they sometimes occur; for they must cause reflection in all who are not victims of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... my arms all afternoon," Lady Queenie burst out, her voice liquid. "And now I'm going straight back to her." She looked at him with the strangest triumphant expression. Then her large, equivocal blue eyes fell from his face to the flowers, and their expression simultaneously altered to disdainful amusement full of mischievous implications. She ran off without another word. The glazed entrance ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... retreated into the background on the arrival of two relatives, whom three lines in the newspapers had roused from the forgetfulness in which Claude himself, no doubt, had left them. There was an old female cousin,* with the equivocal air of a dealer in second-hand goods, and a male cousin, of the second degree, a wealthy man, decorated with the Legion of Honour, and owning one of the large Paris drapery shops. He showed himself good-naturedly condescending in his elegance, and desirous of displaying an enlightened ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... upright man; and this exclamation, however equivocal it may sound, was intended, on his part, to ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the consequent undeviating transmission from sire to son of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the "House of Usher"—an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... dubbed the "equivocal position" of Lola Montez at Munich also stuck in the gullet of the Cabinet, and heads were shaken. Public affronts were offered her. When she visited the Odeon Theatre, the stalls adjoining the one she occupied were promptly emptied. "Respectable women drew back, exhibiting on their ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... curiously a weak spot in Hooker's character than the odd pride he took in Mr. Lincoln's somewhat equivocal letter to him at the time ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... is a "mighty onsartin" one. Here, now, in a magazine sketch, we find it stated that one of the characters of the story was "as rich as CROESUS, and a good fellow to boot." Vernacularly, this is correct; and yet so equivocal is it that it puzzles one to think why the acquisition of wealth should subject the holder of it to ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 29, October 15, 1870 • Various
... foreign dungeon, and his master to the block. You came out victorious; but, from the violence of the rupture, you took a political bias not perhaps entirely for good; and the necessity of the war blended you, under equivocal conditions, with other colonies of a wholly different origin and character, which then "held persons to service," and are now your half-dethroned tyrant, the Slave Power. This Revolution will lead ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... only had more manner, and your clothes were fashionably made, you would far excel the city girls," he said, a compliment which to Maude seemed rather equivocal. ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... to Emil that any one had ever reasoned thus before, that music had ever before given a man this equivocal revelation. ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... of conveyance to London in time of war, was assuredly by the way of France; but two vessels, the first of which was commanded by the brother of the captain-general, had sailed a short time before for that destination; so that this answer, if not false, was at least equivocal. My opinion of the general's unfair dealing had induced me to write by the last of these French vessels to the minister of the marine, representing the little probability there was of his order being executed; but this vessel was captured, ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... did not entirely lose his presence of mind; for in that case he would have sunk on the earth or started backward; whereas he kept his ground and smiled at Jacob, who nodded his head up and down, and said, "Hoich, Zavy!" in a painfully equivocal manner. David's heart was beating audibly, and if he had had any lips they would have been pale; but his mental activity, instead of being paralysed, was stimulated. While he was inwardly praying (he always prayed when he was much frightened)—"Oh, ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... of applause, and still less equivocal approbation, bursts of laughter, constitute perfect success to a comic writer, Mr Reynolds, in this, as well as in other of his comedies, has been ...
— The Dramatist; or Stop Him Who Can! - A Comedy, in Five Acts • Frederick Reynolds
... duchess de Berri. At a dinner at Baron Rothschild's, Careme, the Delmonico of those times, surprised her with a column of ingenious confectionery architecture on which was inscribed her name spun in sugar. It was a more equivocal compliment when Walter Scott christened two pet donkeys Hannah More ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... her—nothing could alter the fact or mitigate the shame. Past experience had taught him nothing; once again he had left a woman in her need to fend for herself. She was his wife, his to shield and to protect, doubly so in her equivocal position that subjected her to much that would not affect one happily married. During the few months they had lived at Craven Towers after their marriage she had shown by every means in her power her desire to be to him the comrade he had asked her to be. And he had ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... Hodge's article, I had not supposed that any of them denied its sinfulness. It is true, that a large proportion of them refuse to take a stand against it. Let them justify to their consciences, and to their God, as they can, the equivocal silence and still more equivocal action on this subject, by which they have left their Southern brethren to infer, that Northern piety sanctions slavery. It is the doctrine of expediency, so prevalent and corrupting in the American ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... approach. General Fowke, who commanded at Gibraltar, had received two successive orders from the secretary at war, with respect to his sparing a battalion of troops, to be transported by Mr. Byng, as a reinforcement to Minorca; but as the two orders appeared inconsistent or equivocal, a council of war was consulted, and a majority were of opinion that no troops should be sent from thence to Minorca, except a detachment to supply the deficiency in the little squadron of captain Edgecumbe, who had left a good number of his seamen and mariners, under the command of captain Scroop, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... with a mattress and bedding, and hooked to the ceiling by a very suspiciously slender cord. Direful are the ruminations and exclamations of inexperienced travellers, particularly young ones, as they eye these very equivocal accommodations. "What, sleep up there! I won't sleep on one of those top shelves, I know. The cords will certainly break." The chambermaid here takes up the conversation, and solemnly assures them that such an accident is not to be thought of at all; that ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... however, that the translator felt free to interchange words indiscriminately. Of his treatment of the original Purvey writes: "But in translating of words equivocal, that is, that hath many significations under one letter, may lightly be peril, for Austin saith in the 2nd. book of Christian Teaching, that if equivocal words be not translated into the sense, either understanding, of the author, ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... Croud in damasks, silks, and crapes, Equivocal in dress, half-belles, half-trapes: A length of night-gown rich Phantasia trails, Olinda wears one shift, and pares no nails: Some in C——l's Cabinet each act display, When nature in a transport dies away: Some more refin'd transcribe ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... the present alliance. Though at the age of forty, she is, I assure you, very far from being cold and insensible; her fire may be covered with ashes, but it is not extinguished.—Don't be deceived, my dear, by that prudish and sanctified air.—Warm devotions is no equivocal mark of warm passions; besides, I know it is a fact, (of which I have proofs in hand, which I will tell you by word of mouth) that our learned and holy prude is exceedingly disposed to use the means, ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... St. Sebastian will unveil his youthful beauty, and St. George will display beneath his armour the muscular wealth of a robust virility; apostles, confessors, doctors, and God the Father himself will appear as ordinary beings like you and me; the angels will affect an equivocal, ambiguous, mysterious beauty which will trouble hearts. What desire for heaven will these representations impart? None; but from them you will learn to take pleasure in the forms of terrestrial life. ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... insist on, nor reiterate, the decadence of the Palais Royal. It is no longer the "capitol of Paris," and whatever its charms may be they are mostly equivocal. It is more a desert than an oasis or a temple de la volupte, and it was each of these things in other days. Its priestesses and its gambling houses are gone, and who shall say this of itself is not a good thing in spite ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... been an excellent service against the enemy had he tactfully allowed himself to be annihilated by the German bomb which missed him yesterday. Later in the afternoon I took tea with Mr. Herrick at the Chancellerie, and he was much amused when I recounted to him this example of a somewhat equivocal good-will. ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... the river before quitting us. Towards nightfall several of our friends of the morning again made their appearance with a number of strange natives, dodging us among the deep muddy ravines which abound at this part of the river; their manoeuvres being equivocal and unsatisfactory, we kept well on our guard; they, however, ran off at night, on my facing about on horseback to ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... occurred in my practice. July 1st I attended a lady in labor, who was afterwards quite ill and feverish; but at the time I did not consider her case a decided puerperal fever. On the 8th I attended one who did well. On the 12th, one who was seriously sick. This was also an equivocal case, apparently arising from constipation and irritation of the rectum. These women were ten miles apart and five from my residence. On 15th and 2Oth two who did well. On 25th I attended another. This was a severe labor, and followed by unequivocal puerperal fever, or peritonitis. She recovered. ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... of which I speak, Tom Hopkins was of an age somewhat equivocal; public fame called him fifty, whilst he himself stuck obstinately at thirty-five; of a stout active figure, rather manly than gentlemanly, and a bold, jovial visage, in excellent keeping with his person, distinguished by round, bright, stupid ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 340, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... egaleco. Equalise egaligi. Equally egale. Equation ekvacio. Equator ekvatoro. Equilibrium ekvilibro. Equinox tagnoktegaleco. Equipment (milit.) armilaro. Equitable justa. Equity justeco. Equivalent ekvivalenta. Equivocal dusenca. Era tempokalkulo. Eradicate elradikigi. Erase surstreki. Eraser skrapileto. Erasure surstrekajxo. Ere antaux (ol). Erect starigi. Erect vertikala. Erection konstruo. Ermine (animal) ermeno. Ermine ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... is," he replied. "I have held an equivocal position for months, and it isn't pleasant. Why, I've practically seen nothing ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... durations, their terminations, and their names. The preponderance of testimony is in favor of four antecedent cycles, the present being the fifth. The interval from the first creation to the commencement of the present epoch, owing to the equivocal meaning of the numeral signs expressing it in the picture writings, may have been either 15228, 2316, or 1404 solar years. Why these numbers should have been chosen, no one has guessed. It has been looked for in ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... days, the affair of the Rue de Provence had been the universal topic of conversation; and friends and enemies were alike glad to seize this opportunity of approaching the banker, some to tender their sympathy, and others to offer equivocal condolence, which of all things is the most ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... S.T.C. for his knowledge of Gospel truths, the nature of a Xtian Church, etc., to the talk of S.T.C. (at whose Gamaliel feet he sits weekly) [more] than to that of all the men living. This from him—The great dandled and petted Sectarian—to a religious character so equivocal in the world's Eye as that of S.T.C., so foreign to the Kirk's estimate!—Can this man be a Quack? The language is as affecting as the Spirit of the Dedication. Some friend told him, "This dedication will do you no Good," ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... genius, like Swift, who wrote one, or even of a lively observer, who lived amidst the scenes he describes, as Horace Walpole's letters to Sir Horace Mann, which form a regular diary, only show that they are better acquainted with the more ephemeral and equivocal labours. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... utterly alone—all the exaltation gone. For the moment I hated the two down-stairs. I felt the situation equivocal and untenable, and it had amused me ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... in case of forfeiture stimulated their natural and irregular vivacity to enforce laws which had become obsolete, and they pounced upon American property as they would have gone to war in quest of prize-money. Even at first their acts were equivocal, and they soon came to be as illegal as they were oppressive. There was no redress. An appeal to the Privy Council was costly and difficult; and besides, when it so happened, before the end of the ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... was brought back to Paris by an insolent and ferocious crowd, and looked back with gratitude to the equivocal civilities of Sauce. The journey occupied four days, during which the queen's hair turned grey. Three deputies, sent by the Assembly, met the dolorous procession half way, and took charge of the royal family. The king at once assured them that he had intended to ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... genius, and he proceeded accordingly to astonish the natives, many of whom, in their turn, set themselves to copy his faults. But when we subtract some half-dozen pieces, either coarse in language or equivocal in purpose, the influence of his poetry may be considered good. (We of course say nothing here of the volume called the "Merry Muses," still extant to disgrace his memory.) It is doubtful if his "Willie ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... curiosity without telling him too much, for there is no reason why we should take anyone into our confidence. To-morrow morning I shall find my way to Coombe Tracey, and if I can see this Mrs. Laura Lyons, of equivocal reputation, a long step will have been made towards clearing one incident in this chain of mysteries. I am certainly developing the wisdom of the serpent, for when Mortimer pressed his questions to an inconvenient ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... opposition by workers for the larger sex-education. Many of the modern novels and magazine stories seem to introduce sexual situations for the same reason that Boccaccio did in some of his tales, namely, the attractiveness of lasciviousness. Unlike the commendable novels, it is characteristic of the equivocal ones that no penalty is demanded or paid and no moral conclusion is suggested. In fact, the way is very often left open to an immoral interpretation. All such literature certainly tends to work against the aims of sex-education. Perhaps parents and teachers ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... thrusting away. She could hear the knock of the unwelcome guest upon her door, and though always refused admittance he withdrew only to return. She had been grievously frightened, too, at having been seen in equivocal circumstances by such a man as Captain Pratt. The very ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... every moth in the shop coughed aloud. The uneasiness of Hans increased, and he looked towards the door with the most cowardly intention; and, lo! two laughing, dimpled faces, were peeping in at them. "Ha! how are you?" said the stranger; "come in! come in!" and to Hans' horror, two very equivocal damsels entered the shop. Hans felt scandalised, and was about to make a most powerful remonstrance, when he encountered the eye of his impertinent customer; and, from its sinister expression, he thought it wise ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... de Rosenberg was dead, and asked me if the Comte de Waldstein had in the library the illustration of the Villa d'Altichiero, which the Emperor had asked for in vain at the city library of Prague, and when I answered 'yes,' he gave an equivocal laugh. A moment afterwards, he asked me if he might tell the Emperor. 'Why not, monseigneur? It is not a secret.' 'Is His Majesty coming to Dux?' 'If he goes to Oberlaitensdorf (sic) he will go to Dux, too; and he may ask you for it, for there is a monument there which relates to him when he ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... bluntness which is called Justice. The High Court took advantage of this, it drew up a prudent judgment; this judgment is not known; it is published here for the first time. Here it is. It is a masterpiece of equivocal style:— ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... except in union with each other. It is frequently said, we are aware, that if God had pardoned the sinner without enforcing the demands of the law, he would have displayed his mercy alone, and not his justice; but in fact this would have been a very equivocal display of mercy. It would have shown only one of two things: either that God regarded the sinner with an eye of compassion, or that he did not regard his sin: either that he was merciful, or that he had no great abhorrence of sin: either ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... of the Caqueta coming from the south-east, and that the Rio Negro issued immediately from it. (* See the classical memoir of this great geographer in the Journal des Savans, March 1750 page 184. "One fact," says D'Anville, "which cannot be considered as equivocal, after the proofs with which we have been recently furnished, is the communication of the Rio Negro with the Orinoco; but we must not hesitate to admit, that we are not yet sufficiently informed of the manner in which this communication takes place." I was surprised to see in a very ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... shadow district, and the play of shadows was the order of things. The rules were the rules of phantoms. Flesh lived there in subjection. Long miscegenation with shadow had made phantoms of them all and endowed all shadows with the menace of the real. Everything was equivocal as hell. ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... only a few days before. He, too, had been recommended to Yulia Mihailovna, and she had received him with reverence. I know now that he had only spent one evening in her company before the reading; he had not spoken all that evening, had listened with an equivocal smile to the jests and the general tone of the company surrounding Yulia Mihailovna, and had made an unpleasant impression on every one by his air of haughtiness, and at the same time almost timorous readiness to take offence. It was Yulia Mihailovna herself who ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... attracted the attention of Tallien, the son of the Marquis of Bercy's butler and ci-devant lawyer's clerk, who had blossomed into "a Terrorist of the first water." He obtained her release and she became his mistress. She took advantage of the equivocal but influential position which she had attained to engage in a vile traffic. She and her paramour amassed a huge fortune by accepting money from the unfortunate prisoners who were threatened with the fate which she had so narrowly escaped, and to which she was again to be exposed. The ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... re-improving, doing and undoing here. It is a perfect Penelope's web. Carpenters and bricklayers have been at work for these eighteen months, and yet I sometimes stand and wonder whether anything has really been done. One exploit in last June was, however, by no means equivocal. Our good neighbour fancied that the limes shaded the rooms, and made them dark (there was not a creature in the house but the workmen), so he had all the leaves stripped from every tree. There they stood, poor miserable ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... armory! What a distinct and memorable revelation of ancient Greece is the Venus or Apollo, a Parthenon frieze or a fateful drama! The best political essays on the French Revolution are based on the economical and social facts recorded in the Travels of Arthur Young. The equivocal action of Massena, when he commanded Paris against the Allies, is explained in the recently published letter of Joseph Bonaparte, wherein we learn his deficiency of muskets. Humboldt accounted for the defects of Prescott's "Conquest of Mexico" by the fact that the historian had never visited ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... they might turn out to be two-deckers; ships of war they were, beyond all question, and I fancied them English from the squareness of their upper sails. They, too, were consorts, making signals to each other, and closing fast on opposite tacks. The lugger was no longer equivocal: it was the Polisson, and she was standing directly for us, though it was ticklish business, since the remaining ship, a corvette, as I fancied, was already in her wake, carrying sail hard, going like a witch, and only about two ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... the mendicant deserved a coin, who, knowing the love of wit in Louis XIV., complained sadly to him, Ton image est partout—excepte dans ma poche. In such cases the pun is sometimes transformed, for it only invariably exists where the words are equivocal and where the allusion is peculiarly applicable to the double meaning the falsity vanishes, and the verbal coincidence becomes an effective ornament of style. It has been so used by the most successful writers, and ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... got, as much self-sacrifice as this of the Sufi; and the burden of Omar's Song—if not "Let us eat"—is assuredly—"Let us drink, for To-morrow we die!" And if Hafiz meant quite otherwise by a similar language, he surely miscalculated when he devoted his Life and Genius to so equivocal a Psalmody as, from his Day to this, has been said and sung by any rather than ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... with a kind of delirious enchantment, to all her elevated and eloquent admirer uttered; and in return for his praises of her charms, and his equivocal replies in respect to his designs towards her, she gave to him her most undisguised thoughts, ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... was to do for me a thousand things that hitherto I had been forced to do for myself, was almost naive. I could not hide it. I was at last a man's woman. I had a protector. Yes; I must not shrink from the equivocal significance of ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... wide circle of heaven, is the object to whom they are addressed." Yet, at the same time, in the true spirit of a polytheist, he accuseth them of adoring Earth, Water, Fire, the Winds, and the Sun and Moon. But the Persians of every age have denied the charge, and explained the equivocal conduct, which might appear to give a color to it. The elements, and more particularly Fire, Light, and the Sun, whom they called Mithra, [1201] were the objects of their religious reverence, because they considered ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... have realized at this point that his position as regards the cabman had become equivocal. The figures on the clock had already reached a substantial sum, and he was not in a position to ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... fear had passed, and she seemed less concerned about the equivocal situation than a girl should be; at least, this is the way Tom's thought was shaping itself. He tried to imagine Ardea in Nan's place, but the thing was baldly unimaginable. A daughter of the Dabneys would ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... that political economy, with all its contradictory hypotheses and equivocal conclusions, is nothing but an organization of privilege and misery, I shall have proved thereby that it contains by implication the promise of an organization of labor and equality, since, as has ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... Renovation at Dervock, 1853, as being inadequate, defective, and unfaithful—part of the document couched in abstract, evasive, and equivocal language. Also, we condemn and reject the Pittsburgh Bond, as ambiguous, self-contradictory and treacherous—"a snare on Mizpah." We abjure and testify against Popery, as delineated by our ancestors in the National Covenant, ...
— The Auchensaugh Renovation of the National Covenant and • The Reformed Presbytery
... cheese-consuming world. A., having invested his entire capital in the construction and equipment of a factory, will be quite likely, when B., C., and D. erect factories in his immediate neighborhood, to hold his peace when sundry varieties of swill milk are offered at his door, instead of speaking out an equivocal protest against the insult thus offered to his professional pride and sense ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... summer; but, above all, the very name of Palm Sunday (a festival in the English church) troubled me like an anthem. "Sunday!" what was that? That was the day of peace which masked another peace deeper than the heart of man can comprehend. "Palms!" what were they? That was an equivocal word; palms, in the sense of trophies, expressed the pomps of life; palms, as a product of nature, expressed the pomps of summer. Yet still even this explanation does not suffice; it was not merely by the peace and by the summer, by the deep sound of rest below all rest and of ascending ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... on a new character altogether and relapsed into queer ancestral traits, stripping off, like so many worthless rags, the layers of laboriously acquired civilization. The refined and bashful girl became brusque, supercilious, equivocal. When sympathizing friends said that they had also lost lovers, she laughed and told them to look for new ones. There were better fish in the sea, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... forth into a roll of that sudden, graceful, but somewhat equivocal laughter that was habitual with her. Then ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... perception of right which will induce our own people and the rulers and people of all other nations, even of France herself, to pronounce our quarrel just will be obscured and the support rendered to us in a final resort to more decisive measures will be more limited and equivocal. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... of a very old friend?" said he, with another smile, as that lady moved off to take a more particular view of what she had come to see. "To judge by the specimen before me, I should consider it very equivocal." ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... observation may be set aside; first, because the so-called facts are in their own nature equivocal; secondly, because they stand on insufficient authority; thirdly, because they are not sufficiently numerous. But, in this case, the disease is one of striking and well-marked character; the witnesses are experts, interested in denying and disbelieving ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Teresina and Nanetta, waited on the guests, and served the excellent wine grown on Olivo's hillsides. Both the Marchese and the Abbate paid their thanks to the young waitresses with playful and somewhat equivocal caresses which a stricter parent than Olivo would probably have discountenanced. Amalia seemed to be unaware of all this. She was pale, dejected, and looked like a woman determined to be old, since her own youth ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... misalliance by marrying a painter, and where a literary man (in spite of all we can say against it) ranks below that class of gentry composed of the apothecary, the attorney, the wine-merchant, whose positions, in country towns at least, are so equivocal. As, for instance, my friend the Rev. James Asterisk, who has an undeniable pedigree, a paternal estate, and a living to boot, once dined in Warwickshire, in company with several squires and parsons of that enlightened county. ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Nitrate of Silver in the Treatment of Zona or Shingles. 28, On the Remedial Effects of Camphor in Acute and Chronic Rheumatism. 29, Examination of the Question, whether the Medical Use of Phosphorus internally, is useful, injurious, or equivocal. 30, Nitrous Acid and Opium in Dysentery, Cholera and Diarrhoea. 31, Tartar Emetic in Pneumonia Biliosa. 32, Bark of the Ampelopsis in Catarrhal Consumption. 33, Obstinate Vomiting cured with Extract of Marigold. 34, Vomiting of Fat and Blood. 35, Rupture of the Spleen. ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... of Monseigneur le Duc de Bourgogne at the army continued to be equivocal. He was constantly in collision with M. de Vendome. The latter, after the loss of Lille, wished to defend the Escaut, without any regard to its extent of forty miles. The Duc de Bourgogne, as far as he dared, took the part of Berwick, who maintained ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Leigh Hunt's friendship for Keats, I think the points you mention look equivocal; but Hunt was a many-laboured and much belaboured man, and as much allowance as may be made on this score is perhaps due to him—no more than that much. His own powers stand high in various ways—poetically higher perhaps than is I at present admitted, despite his detestable flutter ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... voices beneath her window. The Chevalier was making equivocal jokes, foreign witticisms, vulgar and clumsy. She listened, in despair. Servigny, just a bit tipsy, was imitating the common workingman, calling the Marquise "the Missus." And all of a sudden he said to Saval: "Well, Boss?" That caused a ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... standard of our accustomed enjoyments; and that we pursue this aim in our saving with the same calm certainty as we do our aim in working. A contradiction between this and what was said just now is found only when you overlook the equivocal meaning of the word "care." We know no "care" so far as a fear concerning the morrow is implied by the word; but our whole public and private life is pervaded by foresight, in the sense of making precautionary arrangements ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... explanation may be all wrong in the eyes of omniscience. All one can say is that it is a practical working basis, and is good enough for mundane purposes. But if I am asked if I can solve the riddle of the Universe I can only answer, No. Brunetiere then retorts that science is bankrupt. But this is equivocal. It only means that it cannot meet demands ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Captain Larimore in 1704 played an equivocal part in the case of Quelch and his pirate crew (see no. 104, post), assisting their attempts to escape, but his testimony as to prize-money is to be valued, as that of an experienced shipmaster and privateer. In 1677 he had assisted the authorities of Virginia against the rebel Bacon by conveying ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... coincidences together. Don't you see that she had a lover, and that he was about her in London and other places? Stop! Fact 10.—Those two were married for years, and had no child but this equivocal one; and now four years and a half have passed, during all which time they have had none, and the young parson has been abroad ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... And with a manful brevity he replied that he submitted because it was the will of the Lord, and because he had no right to interpose his selfish love and yearnings between the people of God and their worldly opportunity. The others followed. Not one referred to the equivocal language of the manifesto or questioned it. They accepted it—as it was then and afterwards interpreted—as a revelation from God made through the Prophet of the Church; and they subscribed to it as a solemn covenant, before God, with the people of ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... foils, where attack and defence proceed with equal indifference, where the most nonchalant display of grace is answered with the same nonchalance; while the vivacity of the Polka, charming, we confess, may easily become equivocal; while Fandangos, Tarantulas and Minuets, are merely little love-dramas, only interesting to those who execute them, in which the cavalier has nothing to do but to display his partner, and the spectators have ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... workman whom Marius had encountered in the vicinity of the Invalides recurred to his mind. It now seemed probable that that workingman and M. Leblanc were one and the same person. So he disguised himself? That man had his heroic and his equivocal sides. Why had he not called for help? Why had he fled? Was he, or was he not, the father of the young girl? Was he, in short, the man whom Thenardier thought that he recognized? Thenardier might have been mistaken. These formed so many ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... day from the steps of the front door. "Milk below," (certainly much below "proof"), was answered by the assent of the busy cooks, when a knock at the door of Mrs Smith's room from the red knuckles of the housemaid, awoke her to a sense of her equivocal situation. ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... interest, as you pass through the village, in the loves of a needy cripple whose utmost industry has but served to save himself from parish relief, and a giddy girl without a sixpence, and you ask me to accept these very equivocal tenants instead of substantial ones, and at a rent one-third less than the market value. Suppose that I yielded to your request, what becomes of my reputation for practical, business-like justice? I shall have made an inroad into the system by which ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the vain observation of dreams, which, from a superstitious credulity, they mistook for salutary warnings from Heaven; those obscure and equivocal answers of oracles, beneath whose veil the spirits of darkness concealed their ignorance; and, by a studied ambiguity, reserved to themselves an evasion or subterfuge, whatever might be the event. To this are owing the prognostics with regard to futurity, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... to pursue a course so equivocal without arousing suspicion. In after years many who had been committed to it became ashamed of their actions, and loudly proclaimed that they had really been devoted to the Union; to which it was sufficient ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... male representative. But this idea had never entered into the conceptions of either mother or son. Mrs, Tyrrel conceived that she performed an act of the most exalted benevolence in admitting Miss Emily into a sort of equivocal situation, which was neither precisely that of a domestic, nor yet marked with the treatment that might seem due ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... way, who is the person that a few months before Egalite's death had a secret conference with him? I wish they would reinsert in the Memoirs of La Campan the suppressed paragraphs. The death of the Dauphin appears to me equivocal. The powder magazine at Grenelle by exploding killed two thousand persons. The cause was unknown, they tell us: what nonsense!" For Pecuchet was not far from understanding it, and threw the blame for every crime on the manoeuvres of the aristocrats, ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... and my business frankly. I said I heard the house was considered to be haunted,—that I had a strong desire to examine a house with so equivocal a reputation; that I should be greatly obliged if he would allow me to hire it, though only for a night. I was willing to pay for that privilege whatever he might be inclined to ask. "Sir," said Mr. J——, with great courtesy, "the ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... difficulty, and with many forebodings and anxious fears, made his first attempt, brings it to his teacher. The teacher, if he is a kind-hearted and considerate man, perhaps briefly commends the effort with some such dubious and equivocal praise as it is "Very well for a beginner," or "As good a composition as could be expected at the first attempt," and then proceeds to go over the exercise in a cool and deliberate manner, with a view of discovering and bringing out clearly ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... serious thoughts occasionally find expression in its pages, and he even introduces himself under the imperfect anagram of Philisides, and shadows forth his friendship with the French humanist Languet. More than this it would be rash to assert, and Greville did his friend an equivocal service when he sought to find a deep philosophy underlying the rather formal characters of the romance[148]. These characters, as we have seen, are for the most part essentially courtly; the pastoral guise is a mere veil shielding them from the crude ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... and it was very true that political effect was desired. "We wish that the visit shall exert a beneficent influence upon the mutual relations of both empires." Public opinion in England allowed itself to be satisfied with this equivocal, oracular statement. In other countries, however, a keener insight was displayed. THE NEW YORK TIMES judged the situation correctly when it said: "It is always a mistake to force a warm friend, who is at the same ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... some that breed, By suckers from their base or tubercles, Sea-hedgehog, madrepore, sea-ruff, or pad, Fungus, or sponge, or that gelatinous fish, That taken from its element at once Stinks, melts, and dies a fluid; so from these, Through many a tribe of less equivocal life, Dividual or insect, up I ranged, From sentient to percipient, small advance, Next to intelligent, to rational next, So to half spiritual human kind, And what is more, is more than man may know. Last came the ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... delay of three years to complete works in hand; then he pleaded the impossibility of taking any step whatsoever without the sense of religious duty. The King naturally grew weary, and interpreted the equivocal dealing as a denial. Cornelius again in 1833, when the new Basilica of St. Boniface needed decoration, once more proposed that his fellow-labourer in Rome should settle in Munich, but with no avail; the King evidently had ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... Understanding, by this somewhat equivocal form of expression, that flagellation was threatened, Taddy obeyed, still feeling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... he made a speech to the men, in which he reminded them of the mercy of God in having brought them so long a voyage with such favorable weather, and in comforting them with so many tokens of a successful issue to their enterprise, which were now every day becoming plainer and less equivocal. He besought them to be exceedingly watchful during the night, as they well knew that in the first article of the instructions, which he had given to all the three ships before leaving the Canaries, they were enjoined, when they should have sailed seven hundred leagues west without ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... crossed his arms meekly on his bosom, sunk in an attitude of leave-taking, that was so equivocal as to cause the attentive and critical young captain to smile, and then glided past him ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... had made an end of my lecture, Mr. Dammit indulged himself in some very equivocal behavior. For some moments he remained silent, merely looking me inquisitively in the face. But presently he threw his head to one side, and elevated his eyebrows to a great extent. Then he spread out the palms of his hands and shrugged up his shoulders. Then he winked ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... delighted her so much, for example, when returning from an evening drive in the Bois, as a supper at the Cafe Anglais with the sounds of luxurious vice around her. From these repeated excursions she brought back peculiarities of speech and behavior, equivocal songs, and a style of dress that imported into the bourgeois atmosphere of the old commercial house an accurate reproduction of the most advanced type of the Paris cocotte ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... Second Coming occupies at the present moment a curiously equivocal position in the thought of the Christian Church. On the one hand by many it is wholly ignored. There is no conscious disloyalty on their part to the word of God; but the subject makes no appeal to them, it fails ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... She is expected by her cousin Lescaut, a Garde du Corps, and while he is looking for her luggage, the young beauty is accosted by Guillot-Marfontaine, an old roue, and rich farmer, who annoys her with his equivocal speeches, and offers her a seat in his carriage. He is quickly driven away by Lescaut on his return; the young man is however enticed away by his comrades to play a game of cards, for which purpose he leaves his ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... of gingerbread ; and the last held a plum- cake, so called from the number of large raisins that were showing their black heads in a substance of suspiciously similar color. At each corner of the table stood saucers, filled with a thick fluid of some what equivocal color and consistence, variegated with small dark lumps of a substance that resembled nothing but itself, which Remarkable termed her sweetmeats. At the side of each plate, which was placed bottom upward, with its knife and fork most accurately ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... and fever; they had a still harder service to bear with the pride, the official arrogance, the hardness or the folly—perhaps the impertinence and presumption of half-trained medical men, whom the urgencies of the case had fastened on the service.[A] Their position was always critical, equivocal, suspected, and to be justified only by their undeniable and conspicuous merits;—their wisdom, patience and proven efficiency; justified by the love and reverence they exacted ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... a cup of spiced wine stood by his elbow on a bracket on the wall. His countenance had a strong masculine cast; not properly human, but such as we see in the bull, the goat, or the domestic boar; something equivocal and wheedling, something greedy, brutal and dangerous. The upper lip was inordinately full, as though swollen by a blow or a toothache; and the smile, the peaked eyebrows, and the small, strong eyes were quaintly and almost comically evil in expression. Beautiful white hair hung ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... controversy, this is the most frequent, and it is used instinctively. You hear of "religious zeal," or "fanaticism"; a "faux pas" a "piece of gallantry," or "adultery"; an "equivocal," or a "bawdy" story; "embarrassment," or "bankruptcy"; "through influence and connection," or by "bribery and nepotism"; "sincere ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... performance of one of his tragedies, the success of which was equivocal, the abbe Pellegrin complained loudly that Voltaire had stolen some verses from him. "How can you, who are so rich," said the abbe, "thus seize upon the property of another?" "What! have I stolen from you?" replied Voltaire; "then I no longer ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... count? Because all Poles are counts—those that are not princes. But why a Pole? Well, perhaps from the convenience of vagueness, inasmuch as there is something international about a Pole—international, and yet neither equivocal nor vulgar; every one sympathizes with them, for they all possessed, once upon a time, vast estates whose loss is borne in cheerful resignation, and never so much as alluded to; they know everybody, and everybody worth knowing is related to them, by marriage ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... fault. I gave you the opportunity. You failed to profit by it. You got drunk the first night you arrived. Kenneth Traynor was a temperate man. Is it no wonder you excited wonder and talk? Then you were stupid under questioning and gave equivocal answers. Your explanation to Parker about the diamonds was more than unfortunate; it was idiotic. His suspicions were at once aroused. He may yet give us trouble before we have time to get rid of the stones. Finding the wife eluded you, you began to stay out late at night. You caroused, ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... seen him often and with pleasure; but I have always treated him as a child, and my affection for him was truly that of a sister. In many cases I have given him good advice; and, instead of instigating him to any equivocal action, I have hindered him from taking part in wanton tricks, which might have brought ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... induced to undertake the defense by representations not justified in fact, and by an impression of the nature of the case which developments in the court-room had not confirmed, he had the right to step aside out of an equivocal position. He wished to do this without injury to the prisoner and while there was yet an opportunity for him to obtain other counsel. The whole tenor of the speech was the right to be relieved from the obligation of an error; an error that had involved him unwittingly by reason ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... the fearless agitation of Dr. William Carson. A distinguished medical graduate of Edinburgh, Carson incurred the dislike of Governor Duckworth, and his successor, Governor Keats, by his outspoken pamphlets. Indeed, there was nothing equivocal in Carson's views: ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... philosophical doctrines which so greatly influenced the alchemists, and which, I believe, they borrowed for their attempted explanations of chemical and physical phenomena. This system of doctrine I have termed "mysticism"—a word which is unfortunately equivocal, and has been used to denote various systems of religious and philosophical thought, from the noblest to the most degraded. I have, therefore, further to define my usage of ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... but somewhat equivocal smile spread itself over Henry's features on hearing this question, which, however, he did not understand; and he immediately began to run down the ...
— Rollo in Switzerland • Jacob Abbott
... that "day" and "night" in those regions are very equivocal terms). There are, besides, a cooking-apparatus, of which the fire is made in spirit or tallow lamps, one or two guns, a pick and shovel, instruments for observation, pannikins, spoons, and a little magazine ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... the opinions of an interpreter. But this was not all; I had reason to suspect they had endeavoured to damp the exertions of the Indians, with the hope that the want of provision in the spring would put an end to our progress at once. St. Germain, in particular, had behaved in a very equivocal way, since his journey to Slave Lake. He denied the principal parts of the charge in a very dogged manner, but acknowledged he had told the leader that we had not paid him the attention which a chief like ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... liquor, into which herbs are infused, must be unadulterated, or the infusion will be destroyed by its pernicious qualities. Nothing is more prejudicial to the health, or the intellectual faculties of mankind, than adulterated liquors. Articles which in their purest state are of an equivocal character, and never to be trusted without caution, are thus converted into decided poisons.—Another way of making wormwood ale. Take a quantity of the herb, according to the intended strength of the liquor, and infuse it for half an hour ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... the house, but even in that short time he saw enough to convince him that she possessed the most unusual attractions. His curiosity was not only highly excited by this incident, but his spirits were improved to a still more notable degree. The alarming manners and more than equivocal life of his father ceased from that moment to prey upon his mind; from that moment he embraced his new family with ardour; and whether the young lady should prove his sister or his wife, he felt convinced ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... modifications of our own being, which alone—according to this system—we actually behold, is as thorough idealism as Berkeley's, inasmuch as it equally removes all reality and immediateness of perception, and places us in a dream-world of phantoms and spectres, the inexplicable swarm and equivocal generation of motion in our own brains. (3) That this hypothesis neither involves the explanation nor precludes the necessity of a mechanism and co-adequate forces in the percipient, which, at the more than magic touch of the impulse ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... latter failing, for Andalusian women who never learn anything but the elementary doctrines of Christianity, are among the most charming creatures in the world, in their youth. [Ill at ease in society.] Its cause lies rather in this equivocal position; they are haughtily repelled by their white sisters, whilst they themselves disown their mother's kin. They are wanting in the ease, in the tact, that the women of Spain show in ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... muscle, the two gentlemen passed to other subjects; and I inferred, upon the whole, that, having detected my manoeuvre, they wished to put me on my guard in the only way open to them. At any rate, this was the sole personality, or equivocal allusion of any sort, which ever met my ear during the years that I asserted my right to be as poor as I chose. And, certainly, my censors were right, whatever were the temper in which they spoke, kind or unkind; for a little extra care ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... This is probably alluded to under the allegorical description of the fatal lock of hair, though why it should be depicted in that form especially, it is difficult to guess. The change of Scylla into a lark, or partridge, and of her father into a sea eagle, are poetical fictions based on the equivocal meanings of their names, the one Greek and the other Hebrew; for the name 'Ciris' resembles the Greek verb keiro, which signifies 'to clip,' or 'cut short.' 'Nisus,' too, resembles the Hebrew word 'Netz,' which means a bird resembling ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... news in a paper he got at Kimberley, so that when he stepped out upon Johannesburg station, from a difficult, perplexing, somewhat equivocal situation he found himself suddenly and ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... in Molly's presence which that young lady could not understand, and felt that it was not intended she should. She even regarded with a certain veneration the cap itself, which she had once met in equivocal circumstances, journeying with a plait of white hair ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... communities. To adopt his own style of phraseology, ROBERTSON is clearly a "gay and festive cuss." He is a specimen brick from Kansas, and doubtless always carries one in his hat. The expression "ordinary gait," as applied to driving in Kansas, where everybody owns "fast stock," is rather equivocal in these quieter latitudes to be sure, but we may guess that, at Leavenworth, a man who rides or drives at a pace of twenty miles an hour, is liable, "for instance," to a fine of $20, or just one dollar per mile. Kansas maybe a very nice place to ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... favoring annexation. But Calhoun had now shown his motive so plainly that the country took alarm, and the Senate rejected the treaty. The Whigs nominated Clay. He was believed to be opposed to the annexation scheme, but his hunger for the great prize betrayed him into an equivocal expression, which lost him the confidence of the strong anti-slavery men. Again they nominated Birney,—taking now the name of the Liberty party—and gave him so many votes that the result was to lose New ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... Miss Fermor would feel such raillery to be equivocal. It may be added, that an equal want of delicacy is implied in the mock-heroic battle at the end, where the ladies are gifted with an ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... Dicaeopolis in the "Aeharnenses," in presenting a gentleman called Nicharchus to the audience, observes: "He is small, I confess, but, there is nothing lost in him: all is knave that is not fool." Parodying the equivocal compliment, I may say that though Uncle Jack was no giant, there was nothing lost in him. Whatever was not philanthropy was arithmetic, and whatever was not arithmetic was philanthropy. He would have been equally dear to Howard and to Cocker. Uncle Jack was comely ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from a recollection of the words to a consideration of the peculiarities of the style of Junius, I think it will be agreed that the most remarkable of all is that species of irony which consists in equivocal compliment. Walpole also excelled in this; and prided himself upon doing so. Are we not justified in saying, that of all who, in the eighteenth century, cast their thoughts on public occurrences into the form of letters, Junius and Walpole are the most distinguished! ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... separated. Leopold to go and be crowned at Prague, and the king of Prussia, returning to Berlin, began to put his army on a war footing. The emigrants, triumphing in the engagement they had entered into, increased in numbers. The courts of Europe, with the exception of England, sent in equivocal adhesions to the courts of Berlin and Vienna. The noise of the declaration of Pilnitz burst forth, and died away in Paris in the midst of the fetes in honour of ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... Each of these became the theme of extravagant eulogy and didactic preachments by Diderot, his literary protagonist, who hailed him as a French Hogarth making Virtue amiable and Vice odious. An even more equivocal note is struck (L. wall) in 372A, The Milkmaid; and 372, The Broken Pitcher, where as Gautier acutely remarks, the artist contrives to make Virtue exhale the same sensual delight as Vice had done, and to suggest that Innocence will fall an easy victim to temptation. Madame Du Barry ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... part of that region was not reciprocal, so long as Great Britain held Jamaica and commanded the entrance to the canal. He had always regarded the terms of the British protectorate over the Mosquito coast as equivocal; but the insuperable objection to the treaty was the European partnership to which the United States was pledged. The two parties not only contracted to extend their protection to any other practicable communications ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... walking one morning with Buckthorne, near one of the Principal theaters, he directed my attention to a group of those equivocal beings that may often be seen hovering about the stage-doors of theaters. They were marvellously ill-favored in their attire, their coats buttoned up to their chins; yet they wore their hats smartly on one side, and had a certain knowing, dirty-gentlemanlike air, which is common to the subalterns ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... scenes my dear friend Mr. Harness, with old Mr. Sotheby; both were very kind in their commendation of my performance, but the latter kept repeating with much emphasis, "But how do you contrive to make yourself look so beautiful?" a rather equivocal compliment, which had a peculiar significance; my beauty, or rather my lack of it, being a sore subject between us, as I had made it the reason for refusing to act Mary Stuart in his play of "Darnley," assuring him I was too ugly to look the part ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... mind, with a far and free vision, began to compute the costs and canvass the various terms and prolonged trials of county court litigation. He saw fee after fee thrust into his hands—he beheld the opposing parties desirous to conciliate, and extending to him sundry of those equivocal courtesies, which, though they take not the shape of money are money's worth, and the worthy chairman had no scruples as to the propriety of the measure. The profits and pay once adjusted to his satisfaction, his spirit took a broad sweep, and the province ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
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