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More "Pretension" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Benedictine. It was not seen until after his death, when the manuscript was discovered in his cell. What is more remarkable is that the monk was distinguished for nothing but his piety, and had never made any pretension to learning ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... thence transmitted to the less civilized portions of the globe, those incidents in our Dog's life which he has been too modest to relate himself, in order that after-generations may fully appreciate all the goodness of his character. To greatness, he had no pretension, although few animals are aware how close is the ...
— The Adventures of a Dog, and a Good Dog Too • Alfred Elwes
... elaborated the mistakes of Baumgarten, is very long. Yet with C.H. Heydenreich in Germany and Sulzer in Switzerland we find that the truths contained in Baumgarten have begun to bear fruit. J.J. Herder (1769) was more important than these, and he placed Baumgarten upon a pedestal, though criticizing his pretension of creating an ars pulchre cogitandi instead of a simple scientia de pulchro et pulchris philosophice cogitans. Herder admitted Baumgarten's definition of poetry as oratio sensitiva perfecta, perfect sensitived speech, and ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... pleasant villages, and even tranquil county towns, are losing their primitive characters for simplicity and contentment, by the passage of these fiery trains, that drag after them a sort of bastard elegance, a pretension that is destructive of peace of mind, and an uneasy desire in all who dwell by the way-side, to pry into the mysteries of the whole length and breadth ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... Pisanio, are instances of what I mean. All these indeed differ very widely from each other as individuals; but they all have this in common, that their virtues sit easy and natural upon them, as native outgrowths, not as things put on: there is no ambition, no pretension, nothing at all boastful or fictitious or pharisaical or squeamish or egoish in their virtues; we never see the men hanging over them, or nursing and cosseting them, as if they were specially thoughtful and tender of them, and fearful lest they might catch cold. Then too, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... ruled in the High-School could compare with him in the power he had to make the young people care for their books and their school-work, or to present to the clever idle ones among them the most enticing motives to exertion. "He got them on," the fathers and mothers said, and though he made no pretension to being a very good man, and sometimes used sharper words than were pleasant to hear, he loved the truth and hated a lie, and lived an honourable life among them, and all men regarded him with respect, and ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... the absence of all control over the subject of African slavery, are you agitated in relation to it? With Pharisaical pretension it is sometimes said it is a moral obligation to agitate, and I suppose they are going through a sort of vicarious repentance for other men's sins. [Laughter.] Who gave them a right to decide that it is ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... Philosophy, so interlinked with all the other branches, that its conclusions, even in its own peculiar province, are only true conditionally, subject to interference and counteraction from causes not directly within its scope: while to the character of a practical guide it has no pretension, apart from other classes of considerations. Political Economy, in truth, has never pretended to give advice to mankind with no lights but its own; though people who knew nothing but political economy (and therefore knew that ill) have taken upon themselves to advise, and ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... the day. They went down to breakfast, and during the meal Hugh would speak to nobody. When the gloomy meal was over he took his pipe and walked out to the cottage. It was an untidy-looking, rickety place, small and desolate, with a pretension about it of the lowest order, a pretension that was evidently ashamed of itself. There was a porch. And the one sitting-room had what the late Mr. Soames had always called his bow window. But the porch looked as though it were tumbling down, and ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... is the reason why wealth and poverty are correlative, inseparable, not only in idea, but in fact; this is the reason why they exist concurrently; this is what justifies the pretension of the wage- receiver that the rich man possesses no more than the poor man, except that of which the latter has been defrauded. After the monopolist has drawn up his account of cost, profit, and interest, the wage-paid consumer draws up his; and he finds that, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... Hotel is a small house, not at all such a one as American travellers of any pretension would think of stopping at, but still very respectable, cleanly, and with a neat sitting-room, where the guests might assemble, after the American fashion. We asked for the landlady, and anon down she came, a round, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... women at the age which amongst us gives the insulting name of old maid. 'What striking sacrifices of sexual honour does this one fact argue!' The French style is remarkable for simplicity—'a strange pretension for anything French;' but on the whole the intellectual merits of their style are small, 'chiefly negative,' and 'founded on the accident of their colloquial necessities.' They are amply compensated, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... been told they ought to, he passed as their own. The few who had known him from the first knew also that poets like Rickman are never discovered until they discover themselves. Maddox, whom much worship had made humble, gave up the absurd pretension. Enough that he lived, and was known to live, ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... and high pay. As to the second argument, of hope of advancement if they served well and continued faithful to the king of Spain; what man could be so blockishly ignorant ever to expect promotion and honour from a foreign king, having no other merit or pretension than his own disloyalty, his unnatural desertion of his country and parents, and rebellion against his true prince, to whose obedience he is bound by oath, by nature, and by religion? No! such men are only assured to be employed on all desperate enterprizes, and to be held ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... sight—in a moment, through some secret aperture, he returns as quickly through another equally unseen passage. Upon an average, I set his bibliomaniacal peregrinations down at the rate of a full French league per day. It is the absence of all pretension and quackery—the quiet, unobtrusive manner in which he opens his well-charged battery of information upon you—but, more than all, the glorious honours which are due to him, for having assisted to rescue the book treasures of the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... he recoiled from humiliating by a show of generosity this unreasonable being—a fellow-soldier of the Grande Armee, a companion in the wonders and terrors of the great military epic. "You don't set up the pretension of dictating to me what I am to do ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... "Of all the countries that we know, there is none which is so fruitful in grain. It makes no pretension indeed, of growing the fig, the olive, the vine, or any other trees of the kind; but in grain it is so fruitful as to yield commonly two hundredfold, and when the production is greatest, even three hundredfold. The blade of the wheat plant and barley is often ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... makes it extremely difficult for a lady to get over a country stile. The rigours of winter only enable them to appear even yet more charming in furs and sealskin. In all this the Grange people have not laid themselves open to any reproach as to the extravagance or pretension of their doings. With them it is genuine, real, unaffected: in brief, they have money, and have a right ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... lyrics, these calm idylls pure and cold as the surface of a lake, these verses so essentially feminine, is an ambitious little creature in a tightly buttoned frock-coat, with the air of a diplomat seeking political influence, smelling of the musk of aristocracy, full of pretension, thirsting for money, already spoiled by success in two directions, and wearing the double wreath of myrtle and of laurel. A government situation worth eight thousand francs, three thousand francs' annuity from the literary fund, two thousand ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... the ruin of her family), and some youthful extravagances, his income, joined to hers, could not keep the dear child in that fashion and appearance her mother had enjoyed before her, and people without pedigree or solid pretension of any sort, looked down upon her, just because they had money (she meant the Chattesworths), and denied her the position which was hers of right, and so seeing no other way of doing the poor child justice, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... course, could have been but an indifferent judge. But I have thought of it often since, and must say, that in the degrading sense of the word, my company of that night was not vulgar. It was pastoral, and perhaps barbarous, but everything was natural, and everything free from pretension. I did not often again, though I have danced with spirits as unwearied, dance with a heart so light. During this festive evening I saw no indications of that pugnacity so inseparable with Irish ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... in the beginning constitutes a preventive. Fear that they are not truly loved usually paves the way for "spats." Let all who make any pretension guard against all beginnings of this reversal, and strangle these "hate-spats" the moment they arise. "Let not the sun go down upon thy wrath," not even an hour, but let the next sentence after they begin quench them forever. ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... have played upon the word. A mistake, however, is likewise possible, as the Polish for engraver is sztycharz.] (engravers') errors, but, I think, the harmonic errors committed by those who pretend to understand Bach. I do not do it with the pretension that I understand him better than they, but from a conviction that I sometimes guess ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... clown. It is not strange that the impartial critic summed up the review with the remark that "the atmosphere of history was evidently too pure and cool for Greene's taste." The play is a romance from beginning to end; it has no pretension to the character of an historical drama. Mr. Dyce says of it: "From what source our author derived the materials of this strange fiction I have not been able to discover; nor could Mr. David Laing of Edinburg, who is so profoundly versed in the ancient literature of his ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... and anti-Christian. They openly shake off the control of all religion, and pretend to be in possession of a secret to make men better and happier than Christ, his apostles, and his Church have made them or can make them. "The pretension," says Professor ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... that this or that belief must be true because so many generations have believed it, so many countries, so many famous men,—as if error, like stolen property, gained a title from prescription of time! Scot pierced this pretension with a single sentence: "Truth must not be measured by time, for every old opinion is not sound." "My great adversaries," he says, "are young ignorance and old custom. For what folly soever tract of time hath fostered, it is so superstitiously pursued of some as though ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... undertaken a journey to Milan, in the hope of accomplishing a negotiation in which the whole of the smaller provincial city had felt itself deeply interested. He had gone thither for the purpose of engaging the celebrated prima donna, Bianca Lalli, to sing at Ravenna during the coming Carnival. The pretension was a very ambitious one on the part of the impresario—or, as it may be more properly said, on the part of the city—for the step was by no means the result of his own independent and unaided enterprise. Such matters were not done in that way in the good old times in the ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... establish itself in a position conveniently close to the General, to whom, moreover, we had the honor of an introduction; and he bowed, on his horseback, with a good deal of dignity and martial courtesy, but no airs nor fuss nor pretension beyond what his character ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... nearly succeeded. Just when he was within sight of the grand prize, and just as the last payment was about to be made, to Dave's utter surprise the Doctor got very angry one day about some trifling matter (all pretension) and in his pretended rage he said there were too many "free niggers" going about, and he thought that Dave would do better ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... a new obstacle arose in the path of Madame de Soubise. Cardinal de Bouillon, a man of excessive pride and pretension, who upon reaching Rome claimed to be addressed as "Most Eminent Highness," and obtaining this title from nobody except his servants, set himself at loggerheads with all the city—Cardinal de Bouillon, I say, was himself canon of Strasbourg, and uncle of the Abbe d'Auvergne. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... is he who is to pay us, and that (surely on the face of it) for services that he shall desire to have performed. Here also, if properly considered, there is a question of transcendental honesty. To give the public what they do not want, and yet expect to be supported: we have there a strange pretension, and yet not uncommon, above all with painters. The first duty in this world is for a man to pay his way; when that is quite accomplished, he may plunge into what eccentricity he likes; but emphatically not till then. Till then, he must pay assiduous court to the bourgeois who ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the man as I see him plainly now, a very ordinary scamp, his pretension not even amusing, I find it difficult to present him as he appeared to my boyish eyes. He was well educated and well read. He gave himself the airs of a superior being by freak of fate compelled to abide in a world of inferior creatures. ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... it will hardly be believed, that, by that means, there was less talking among the society Madame assembled together than elsewhere. Madame hated people who talked much, and took a remarkably cruel revenge upon them, for she allowed them to talk. She disliked pretension, too, and never overlooked that defect, even in the king himself. It was more than a weakness of Monsieur, and the princess had undertaken the amazing task of curing him of it. As for the rest, poets, wits, beautiful ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Charlie; "but occasionally I've had the chance of visiting hospitals and dissecting-rooms, besides hearing lectures on anatomy, and I have taken advantage of my opportunities. Besides, I'm fond of mechanics; and tooth-drawing is somewhat mechanical. Of course I make no pretension to a knowledge of regular dentistry, which involves, I believe, a scientific and ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... of possible scientific precision. There is, I allege, a not too clearly recognised order in the sciences which forms the gist of my case against this scientific pretension. There is a gradation in the importance of the individual instance as one passes from mechanics and physics and chemistry through the biological sciences to economics and sociology, a gradation whose correlations and implications have not yet received adequate recognition, and which does ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... and mistresses the treachery Was known to him, with all their cunning lore. He, both from old and modern history, And from his own, was ready with such store, As plainly showed that none to modesty Could make pretension, whether rich or poor; And that, if one appeared of purer strain, 'Twas that she better ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... sensitive excitement that even through the unconscious irony of this speech he was noticing the difference between the young English girl's evident interest in a political problem and the utter indifference of his own countrywomen. Here was a girl scarcely out of her teens, with no pretension to being a blue stocking, with half the aplomb of an American girl of her own age, gravely considering a question of political economy. Oddly enough, it added to his other irritation, and he said almost abruptly, ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... pygme] and promotes [Greek: pykna] to honour,—happily standing alone in his infatuation. Strange, that the most industrious of modern accumulators of evidence should not have been aware that by such extravagances he marred his pretension to critical discernment! Origen and Epiphanius—the only Fathers who quote the place—both read [Greek: pygme]. It ought to be universally admitted that it is a mere waste of time that we should argue ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... the street was a wooden building of some pretension, having bow-windows and a veranda. High pickets enclosed a secluded garden. It was very unlike ...
— The King Of Beaver, and Beaver Lights - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... desirable power. The further question therefore arises as to the mission of Israel in history to come as well as in history past. History seems contradicted by the claim made by Judaism. Jews are quick enough to see the weakness of the pretension made by certain sects of dogmatic Christianity that it is the last word of religion, that all saving truth was once for all revealed some nineteen centuries ago. History, says the Jewish controversialist, teaches no such lessons ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... in 1252, which belonged to the Red Friars. (See the notices in New Stat. Account, Ayrshire, p. 748, &c.) The manner in which Knox speaks of Wallace as "a simple man without learning," may mean, without much pretension to learning, or not having enjoyed a learned education. Yet we find two persons of the same name, Adam Wallace, incorporated at Glasgow in 1536 and 1539.—His trial and execution took place in 1550; yet in the Latin verses by John Johnston of St. Andrews, on the Scotish Martyrs, ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... comfort and easy living which accompanied the development of humanitarianism, and in which, as we have just seen, the Evangelicals had their full share, was evidenced to the eye by the changes in domestic architecture. There was less pretension in exteriors and elevations, but more regard to convenience and propriety within. The space was not all sacrificed to reception-rooms. Bedrooms were multiplied and enlarged; and fireplaces were introduced into every room, transforming the arctic "powdering-closet" into a habitable dressing-room. ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... When a person takes pains to impress others with a sense of his importance, it almost always excites a suspicion that he is trying to pass for something more than he really is. It does not require all this show and pretension to keep the place which really belongs to him, and to attempt more than this, will only draw upon ...
— The Diving Bell - Or, Pearls to be Sought for • Francis C. Woodworth
... name are current, generally connecting it with bhulna, to forget. The Bhulias occupy a higher rank than the ordinary weavers, corresponding with that of the Koshtis elsewhere, and this is to some extent considered to be an unwarranted pretension. Thus one saying has it: "Formerly a son was born from a Chandal woman; at that time none were aware of his descent or rank, and so he was called Bhulia (one who is forgotten). He took the loom in ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... treated him as well as Louis XIV. treated Racine and Boileau. I have given him, as Louis XIV. gave to Racine, some pensions, and a place of gentleman in ordinary. It is not my fault if he has committed absurdities, and has had the pretension to become a chamberlain, to wear an order, and sup with a King. It is not the fashion in France; and, as there are here a few more men of wit and noblemen than in Prussia, it would require that I ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... shall perhaps take some opportunity to speak separately of M. Leroux's work, Sur l'Humanite. It is a work of very superior pretension to the writings of MM. St Simon, Fourier, and others, who must rather be regarded as makers of projects than makers of books. M. Leroux has the honour of indoctrinating George Sand with that mysticism which she has lately infused into her novels—by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... Russelton, with a very faint smile at a pun, somewhat in his own way, and levelled at a tradesman, of whom he was, perhaps, a little jealous—"True; Stultz aims at making gentlemen, not coats; there is a degree of aristocratic pretension in his stitches, which is vulgar to an appalling degree. You can tell a Stultz coat any where, which is quite enough to damn it: the moment a man's known by an invariable cut, and that not original, it ought to be all over with him. Give me the man who makes the tailor, not ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... respect to answering his own view, as it was insolent: For, could he think, as Betty (I suppose from her betters) justly observed, that parents would be insulted out of their right to dispose of their own child, by a violent man, whom they hate; and who could have no pretension to dispute that right with them, unless what he had from her who had none over herself? And how must this insolence of his, aggravated as my brother is able to aggravate ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... wished the ceremony to be delayed some months, at least; and I wished it too. It seemed a horrible thing to hurry on the inauspicious match, and not to give the poor creature time to think and reason on the irrevocable step she was about to take. I made no pretension to 'a mother's watchful, anxious care,' but I was amazed and horrified at Mrs. Murray's heartlessness, or want of thought for the real good of her child; and by my unheeded warnings and exhortations, I vainly strove to remedy the evil. Miss ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... following pages makes no pretension to authorship. He is deeply conscious that many defects characterize his production; and he hopes that they will be treated with the consideration which so candid an avowal merits, and ...
— The Village Sunday School - With brief sketches of three of its scholars • John C. Symons
... "Sigismund, sure, is Kur-Brandenburg, though under pawn!" argued Friedrich—and, I almost guess, though that is not said, produced from his own purse, at some stage of the business, the actual money for Jobst, to close his Brandenburg pretension. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... beautiful hands, and he was very proud of them; while conversing he would often look at them with an air of self-complacency. He also fancied he had fine teeth, but his pretension to that advantage was not so well founded as his vanity on the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... carefully embellishing it, while the denouement waits and the interest grows cold. Neither can he write a page without sending a sly bolt of amused perception through it, in which he discovers some foible or pricks some bubble of pretension, but always tenderly, as if he loved his victim. To the fact that Mr. Blackmore's success came late in life, we have perhaps to be thankful for the softened and indulgent maturity which finds a hundred excuses, and knows that nothing is as good or ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... pictures with silent intense delight. He had a deep and just perception of what was beautiful in this art, at least in its higher schools; for he did not pay much regard, or perhaps quite do justice, to the masters of the 17th century. To technical criticism he made no sort of pretension; painting was to him but the visible language of emotion; and where it did not aim at exciting it, or employed inadequate means, his admiration would be withheld. Hence he highly prized the ancient paintings, both ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... the superior Estates in their contests with the Crown; and the new Parliament pursued the aims and the tactics of the old Great Council, with all the advantages conferred by an exclusive right to grant taxation. For more than two hundred years it was a popular assembly in form and in pretension alone. The most active members of the Lower House were drawn from the lower ranks of the territorial aristocracy; and the Commons were bold in their demands only when they could attack the prerogative ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... element of our active nature which the Christian religion has emphatically recognized, but which philosophers as a rule have with great insincerity tried to huddle out of sight in their pretension to found systems of absolute certainty. I mean the element of faith. Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible; and as the test of belief is willingness to act, one may say that faith is the readiness ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... of the invocation of the spirit of Mahomet the Second will be censured as over subtle. I could easily have made the Jew a regular conjuror, and the Phantom an ordinary ghost. I have preferred to represent the Jew as disclaiming all pretension, or even belief, in supernatural agency, and as tempting Mahmud to that state of mind in which ideas may be supposed to assume the force of sensations through the confusion of thought with the objects of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... understanding that exist between the ruder peoples and ourselves. In view of our common hope, and our common want of knowledge, I would rather identify religion with a general striving of humanity than with the exclusive pretension of any one people or sect. Who knows, for instance, the final truth about what happens to the soul at death? I am quite ready to admit, indeed, that some of us can see a little farther into a brick wall than, say, Neanderthal man. Yet when I find facts that appear to prove that Neanderthal man ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... Rogeard. If the people won't have Rogeard, so much the worse for the people. Beautiful! admirable! But why don't you speak out your opinion frankly? There were some honest brigands (par pari refertur) in the Roman States who were perhaps no better than you are, but at least they made no pretension of being otherwise than lawless, and followed their calling of brigands without hypocrisy. When, by the course of various adventures, the band got diminished in numbers, they stuck no handbills on the walls to invite people to elect new brigands to fill up the vacant places; they simply ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... capitals appear to resemble one another, and look like bits cut off from great cities. One or two streets have a good deal of pretension about them; and the inevitable "Capitol," with its dome, forms the principal feature. A sentry stands at the door of each railway car, who examines the papers of every passenger with great strictness, and even after that inspection the same ceremony is performed ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... demonology, in all its forms and phases, embracing witchcraft, held a more commanding place throughout Europe, in the literature of the centuries immediately preceding the eighteenth, than any other. Works of the highest pretension, elaborate, learned, voluminous, and exhausting, were published, by the authority of governments and universities, to expound it. It was regarded as occupying the most eminent department of jurisprudence, as well ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... lies. But let me be brief and hurry over the tale of shame. I was a clerk at Wardlaw's office. A bill-broker called Adams was talking to me and my fellow-clerks, and boasting that nobody could take him in with a feigned signature. Bets were laid; our vanity was irritated by his pretension. It was my fortune to overhear my young master and his friend Robert Penfold speak about a loan of two thousand pounds. In an evil hour I listened to the tempter and wrote a forged note for that amount. I took it to Mr. Penfold; he presented it to ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... Olympus, one must take the Hotel de Rambouillet. Juno resolves herself into Araminta. A pretension to divinity not admitted creates affectation. In default of thunderclaps there is impertinence. The temple shrivels into the boudoir. Not having the power to be a goddess, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... woman, who makes much pretension to fine manners and an elegant education, takes the steam-car for a rostrum, and exclaims about her French teacher as "awfully funny but awfully horrid, don't you know; awfully lovely sometimes, but awfully awful at others!" we wonder ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... quantity. He was neither rich nor poor, neither proud nor humble; he knew no hunger he was not sure of satisfying, no luxury which could enervate mind or body. His parents were sober, God-fearing people; intelligent and upright, without pretension and without humility. He grew up in the company of boys like himself, wholesome, honest, self-respecting. They looked down on nobody; they never felt it possible they could be looked down upon. Their houses were the homes of probity, piety, patriotism. ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... sometimes frightful, sometimes seducing. As a whole this composition is constructed in the ancient manner—as in Byzantine art—several series rising one above the other, each of equal size, and without any pretension to perspective: the single groups, at the same time, are executed ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... and maintain its imprescriptible rights. If this exercise of their rights has been delegated to them, they still belong to the nation, and it reserves to itself the privilege of interposing when it pleases. A pretension of this kind travels fast; immediately after the Third-Estate of the Assemblies it reaches the Third-Estate of the streets. Nothing is more natural than the desire to lead one's leaders: the first time any dissatisfaction occurs, they lay hands on those who halt and make them march on ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... connection—had known the ludicrous surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt, that seized upon many of the persons who were present,—had guessed what a sudden flash of light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the pinchbeck, the shabby, perking pretension belonging to certain social layers,—so inherent in their whole mode of being, that the holiest offices of religion cannot exclude its impertinences,—the good man would have given his marriage-fee twice over to recall that superb ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... their opinion energetically, young Bergounioux like the rest, he happening to class himself with his fellows in the words—we men of letters. At the conclusion of his little speech, Balzac uttered a guffaw: "You, sir, a man of letters! What pretension! What presumption! You! compare yourself to us! Really, sir, you forget that you have the honour to be sitting here with the marshals ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... are derived from principles, which, however common, are neither universal nor unavoidable in human nature. The modern philosophy pretends to be entirely free from this defect, and to arise only from the solid, permanent, and consistent principles of the imagination. Upon what grounds this pretension is founded must now be ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... much like an old military officer if his face, besides its real energy, had not affected more. There was the same defect in it as in his pictures. Conscious of not having all the strength he wished, he endeavoured to make up for it by violence and pretension. He carried this so far as to look fiercer than usual when he sat for his picture. His friend and engraver, Mr. Houghton, drew an admirable likeness of him in this state of dignified extravagance. He is sitting back in ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... his very true friends and servants, and to extend to you every manner of kindness as regards your honor and your persons. For this disobedience the Lord and possessor of all things permitted that he should suffer retribution for his want of reverence, dying as he did in the evil pretension which he attempted to sustain, contrary to his prince's will. And God did him not a little good in allowing him to die as he did there; for had he returned alive, the pay for his negligence had not been so light. And, in order that you and all ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume II, 1521-1569 • Emma Helen Blair
... It would be a pretension, which we do not mean to put forward, to assert that, whether considering the length and amount of his public services, or his prominence before the country, General Pierce stood on equal ground with several of the distinguished ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... anguish in Ranny's father's eyes now. They turned to him for reassurance. As if in some final act of humility and contrition, he unbared and abased himself, he laid down the pretension of integrity. ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... shortly after 1496 appeared the Margarita Philosophica of Gregory Reisch,[452] the same we must suppose, who was confessor to the Emperor Maximilian.[453] This is again a collection of treatises, of much more pretension: and the estimation formed of it is proved by the number of editions it went through. In 1531 appeared the little collection of works of Ringelberg,[454] which is truly called an Encyclopaedia ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... proof of the assertion that though in charge of a large parish, and with a lecture parish which extended from Bangor to St. Louis, he still seemed to have time for every noble work, to be open to every demand of misfortune, tender to every pretension of weakness, responsive to every call of sympathy, and true to every obligation of friendship; all will indulge the hope that California, cordial as must be the welcome she extends him, will still not be able to ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... chapter, we have seen that the distinctive characteristics of those who have more pretension than right to the honors of gourmandise, consists in the fact, that, at the best spread table, their eyes are dull ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... duty, and also as an indemnification for the consequent loss of fees at the Irish Bar. Yet now, in 1843, having ceased to attend his duty in Parliament, Mr. O'Connell could no longer claim in that senatorial character. Such a pretension would be too gross for the understanding even of a Connaught peasant. And in that there was a great loss. For the allegation of a Parliamentary warfare, under the vague idea of pushing forward good bills for Ireland, or retarding bad ones, had been a pleasant and easy labour ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... militarist it is particularly effective. It is the laughter of wholesome men that will finally end war. The stern, strong, silent man will cease to trouble us only when we have stripped him of his last rag of pretension and touched through to the quick of his vanity with the realization of his apprehended foolishness. Literature will have failed humanity if it is so blinded by the monstrous agony in Flanders as to miss the essential triviality ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... worship of his followers; declaring that the institution had been established by Enoch and Elias, and that he had been summoned by "spiritual" agencies to restore it to its pristine glory. In fact, this pretension, which influenced thousands upon thousands of believers, was one of the most daring impostures that ever saw the light; and it is astounding to think that, so late as 1780, it should, for a long time, have been entirely successful. The preparatory course of exercises for ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... training and well-rooted prejudices. In presenting this man to the mind of the reader, we have no intention to impugn the doctrines of the particular church to which he belonged, but simply to show, as the truth will fully warrant, to what a pass of flagrant and impudent pretension the qualities of man, unbridled by the wholesome corrective of a sound and healthful opinion, was capable of conducting abuses on the most solemn and gravest subjects. In that age usages prevailed, and were so familial to the minds of the actors as to ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... equivalent in the bales of goods, for all the vices we export."[27] With what obstinacy an idea once mooted is cherished, may be inferred from an opinion afterwards expressed by an authority of still greater pretension:—"The most sanguine supporter of New South Wales system of colonisation, will hardly promise himself any advantage from the produce it may be able to supply."[28] Its corn and wool, its timber and hemp, he excludes from the chances of European commerce, and declares that the whale fishery, after ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... speculative, has more to do with philosophy than with the permanent conflicts which agitate the world; the other of which could not alone furnish us with rules in practice, nor with a formulary for the measures to be taken in a given case, since such a pretension would be both vain and ridiculous, but which would inform the practical judgment of men charged with the solution of the numberless difficult and complicated questions which come up every day. If pure science refuses to interfere ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... necromancy a test in capital cases for heresy-Hence Wycliffe had no alternative but to deny transubstantiation, for nothing could be more insulting to the intelligence than to adore a morsel of bread which a priest held in his hand. The pretension of the priests to make the flesh of Christ was, according to Wycliffe, an impudent fraud, and their pretension to possess this power was only an excuse by which they enforced their claim to collect fees, and what amounted to extortionate ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... Sound. "Grey Rocks," he called it. It was a long, low rambling house, built of stone and of darkened wood. It sat ensconced in a deep phalanx of great, green trees at the head of a great, green lawn. It was not a big house, of pretension, of arrogant wealth, of many servants—of closely-shaven shrubbery and woodeny landscape gardening. It was, rather, a house that was a home—and there is a distinction—a vast distinction; for there is many a house that is not a home even as there is many a home ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... Catholic and the Protestant. An oppressed Catholic nationality, above all a weak and powerless one, had therefore the right of appeal to the great Catholic powers for help against oppression. And the pretension of England to the possession of Ireland was the very essence of oppression and tyranny in itself, doubly aggravated by the fact of an apostate and vicious king or queen making it treason for a people, utterly separate and ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... and converse with his wife. The explanation afforded was, that a Circassian officer cannot, consistently with honour, enter his wife's apartment during the day, and it seems that in all families with the slightest pretension to distinction this rule is ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... marries an heiress, he does not impale his arms with hers, as in the preceding examples, but bears them in an escutcheon of pretence in the centre of the shield, showing his pretension to her lands in consequence of his marriage with the lady who is legally entitled to them. The escutcheon of pretence is not used by the children of such marriage; they bear the arms of their father and mother quarterly, and so transmit them to posterity. ...
— The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition • Anonymous
... play-actors must appeal; we shall not, however, go back so far, but keep the later times always in our view. In those associations in which the Abbe de Chaulieu and other friends of Vendome and Conti led the conversation, literature was brought wholly under the dominion of audacious pretension and immorality, in the time of the Regency and during the minority of Louis XV. In reference to the leaders there needs no proof. What could a Philip of Orleans or his Dubois take under his protection, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... youth; for as soon as I heard that my rival was supported by the Cardinal, who did him the honour to own him for his kinsman, I sent the Cardinal word, by M. de Raconis, Bishop of Lavaur, that I desisted from my pretension, out of the respect I owed his Eminence, as soon as I heard that he concerned himself in the affair. The Bishop of Lavaur told me the Cardinal pretended that the Abby de La Mothe would not be obliged for the first ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... besides, philological absurdities, because they are fabricated on the false assumption that their primaries indicate men. They are, moreover, liable to the charge of affectation and prettiness, to say nothing of pedantic pretension ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... Koko-nor wear a hat shaped like a pot, high crowned and narrow, rimmed with red fringe sewn on it, so that it looks like an iron helmet, and this is a proof of [the accuracy of the derivation].' Although the proof is not very satisfactory, it is as good as we are often offered by authors with greater pretension ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... barkeeper, said, "Gimme some whiskey, will you?" The man placed a bottle, a whiskey-glass, and a glass of ice-thick water upon the bar. The Swede poured himself an abnormal portion of whiskey and drank it in three gulps. "Pretty bad night," remarked the bartender, indifferently. He was making the pretension of blindness which is usually a distinction of his class; but it could have been seen that he was furtively studying the half-erased blood-stains on the face of the Swede. "Bad night," ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... says he, "I will take you round and show you the abominations which have been set up in this building—a disgrace both to the taste and integrity of the nation. You will understand the impudent pretension for which our people have been taxed in order that the National Capitol may be made a laughing-stock for foreigners, and those Americans who are compelled to blush for ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... common soldiers in the two armies, took sides with their respective sovereigns. One great source of trouble was, that Richard claimed to be the feudal sovereign of Philip himself, on account of some old claims that he advanced, as Duke of Normandy, over the French kingdom. This pretension Philip, of course, would not admit, and the question gave rise to endless ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... etymological importance, that although the British Government had never been able to refute the arguments advanced by the South African Republic as to the abolition of the suzerainty in 1884, the British Government was nevertheless determined not to abandon its pretension, and is now prepared to make war in South ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... Catholic Church should propound a formulary of her faith, enlarge this formulary from time to time, as further interpretation is wanted, and enforce acquiscence in it by spiritual censures, is consistent with her principles. Whether such a pretension can be avowed, without inconsistency, by any Protestant Church, has been a subject of much discussion. In point of fact, however, no Protestant Church is without her formulary, or abstains from enforcing it by ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... all. Hereditary statesmen have a foolish pretension: that of being initiated by long study into a certain science represented as arduous, which they call the science of public affairs and which they (like physicians with medical science) alone have the right to practise. They are not willing ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... plans, and setting the machinery in motion: their subsequent office appeared to be reduced to a sinecure, or if they continued to reign, it was in the manner of constitutional kings, bound by the laws to which they had previously given their assent. Accordingly, the pretension of philosophers to explain physical phaenomena by physical causes, or to predict their occurrence, was, up to a very late period of Polytheism, regarded as a sacrilegious insult to the gods. Anaxagoras was banished for it, Aristotle had to ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... that infidelity would make him, then indeed might every man curse God for the existence bestowed upon him—as I would, but dare not do. Yet why can I not believe? Alas! why should God accept an unrepentant heart? Am I not a hypocrite, mocking Him by a guilty pretension to His power, and leading the dark into thicker darkness? Then these hands—blood!—broken vows!—ha! ha! ha! Well, go—let misery have its laugh, like the light that breaks from the thunder-cloud. ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... pretension has been made by a President of the Society. In 1855, Lord Rosse presented a confidential memorandum to the Council on the expediency of enlarging their number. He says, "In a Council so small it {27} is impossible to secure a satisfactory representation of the ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... the race of public life in England on equal terms with the sons of the oldest of the titled and untitled aristocracy, even though his father were an eminent retired dust contractor, and his mother laundry maid or factory girl. But money alone won't do it, and the pretension, the display, the coxcombry permitted in a peer, must be carefully avoided by a parvenu. Thus Oxford interests classes who care very little for its educational, antiquarian, or architectural resources, as one of the institutions of the country by which any capable man may ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... do." Peregrine, having checked him for his boorish behaviour, sent him out of the room, and begged that Miss Sophy would not endeavour to debauch the morals of his servant, who, rough and uncultivated as he was, had sense enough to perceive that he had no pretension to any such acknowledgment. But she argued, with great vehemence, that she should never be able to make acknowledgment adequate to the service he had done her, and that she should never be perfectly easy in her own mind until she ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... an envoy from Anna of Lenkenstein, direct out of Milan: an English lady, calling herself Mrs. Sedley, and a particular friend of Countess Anna. At the first glance Violetta saw that her visitor had the pretension to match her arts against her own; so, to sound her thoroughly, she offered her the hospitalities of the villa for a day or more. The invitation was accepted. Much to Violetta's astonishment, the lady betrayed no anxiety to state the exact terms ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... throw everything into the crucible, nor should he suffer the whole to pass as if he trembled to touch it. Lampoons and satires in time will lose their effect, as well as panegyrics. He must learn to resist the seductions of his own pen: the pretension of composing a treatise on the subject, rather than on the book he criticises—proud of insinuating that he gives, in a dozen pages, what the author himself has not been able to perform in his volumes. Should he gain confidence by a popular ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... That was why I determined not to try anything in London, for a good many years at least. I didn't like what I saw when I was studying there—so much empty bigwiggism, and obstructive trickery. In the country, people have less pretension to knowledge, and are less of companions, but for that reason they affect one's amour-propre less: one makes less bad blood, and can follow ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... her, and the builder had a lien on her, or that you had captured her from the Russians, and had not had her condemned by a prize court, what would you think of the proceeding? And how does the case supposed differ from the one in hand? In both it is a pretension on the part of a foreign power to look into the antecedents of a ship of war—neither more nor less in the one case than in the other. I will even put the case stronger. If it be admitted that I had the right to commission a tender, and the fact had been that I had seized a French ship ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... the two spies. He tongue-lashed them in Arabic. I could not follow it word for word. I gathered that they had hinted some suspicion as to the genuineness of Grim's pretension to be Staff-Captain Ali Mirza. He was rebuking them for it. They slunk away. One went and sat near the door we had entered ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... its proper state, then I defy any one to surpass me in good humour." Her heartiness and tolerance are the causes, she thinks, why every one likes her. "I am fond of people, and that every one feels directly—young and old. I pass without pretension through the world, and that gratifies men. I never bemoralise any one—always seek out the good that is in them, and leave what is bad to Him who made mankind, and knows how to round off the angles. ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... the tutors, Azua and Loisir, I knew only that they existed, without being able to learn their names or characters. The only character designed to be fully and faithfully accordant with history is that of Toussaint himself. Those which have much, but less absolute, pretension to historical truth are those of Jean Francais, Christophe, Dessalines, and the other negro Generals, old Dessalines, Bellair, Raymond, the French Commissaries ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... stands over a dormer window in the red-tiled roof of an old house of the Sheraton period, immediately opposite the famous "Chequers Inn." The house itself is very interesting; it has evidently been, in its early days, of considerable pretension, but has been an ironmonger's shop since 1804. On going within to make inquiries about the vane, I gathered that it is at least 120 years old, probably much more, the oldest part of the house being contemporary with the "Chequers." The vane is cut out of thick sheet copper ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... on a sofa Ipsden, one of the most distinguished young gentlemen in Europe; a creature incapable, by nature, of a rugged tone or a coarse gesture; a being without the slightest apparent pretension, but refined beyond the wildest dream of dandies. To him, enter Aberford, perspiring and shouting. He was one of those globules of human quicksilver one sees now and then for two seconds; they are, in fact, two globules; ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... the walls, when Frederic sent out a flag of truce soliciting a cessation of hostilities for twenty-four hours, that they might negotiate respecting peace. The peremptory reply returned was, that there should not be truce for a single moment, unless Frederic would renounce all pretension to the crown of Bohemia. With such a renunciation truce would be granted for eight hours. Frederic acceded to the demand, and the noise of war ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... illusion, already glanced at, we find still another resemblance between the mysticism of the ancients and moderns. The priestess rendering herself invisible to the bystanders, appears to transcend all the rest of Jamblichus's wonders. Strange to say, even this pretension of the Colophonian prophetess is not without something analogous among the alleged phenomena of mesmerism. "I requested a young lady," says Dr. Elliotson, "whom I had long mesmerised, with the never-tiring devotion of a parent, and in whom I produced a variety of phenomena, to promise ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... he, taking one of her hands. "It is a house I hope you will like. I like it, though it has no pretension whatever. It is an old house; and the ground belonging to it has been in the possession of my family for a hundred years; the house itself is not quite so old. But the trees about it are. The old house stands shut up and empty. I told you, I have no one very near ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... will instantly promise to drop the correspondence." "Else what follows?" answered Ferdinand, with a cool and temperate voice. "My resentment and immediate defiance," replied the other; "for the only alternative I propose is, to forego your design upon that lady, or to decide our pretension by the sword." ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... said Phyllis; "such pretension in a girl of her age is utterly absurd. Besides, it is so vulgar. Well-born people are not always trying to force their importance on you as she does; if I did not try to keep her down a little she would be ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... which he aspired to occupy at the beginning of the session. He is without a party, and without any authority in the House except what he derives from his own talents for debate. He has now no alternative but to unite himself with Peel's party, and to act under him, without any pretension to competition, and without the possibility of being considered as a separate element of political power. He has been brought to this by a series of false steps from his first refusal to join Peel, followed by his flippant and undecided conduct throughout the great contest. ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... upright in his saddle; and his horse, a steady, stalwart quadruped of the Norman breed, with a terribly long tail and a prodigious breadth of chest, put one stately leg before another in a kind of trot, which, though it seemed, from its height of action and the proud look of the steed, a pretension to motion more than ordinarily brisk, was in fact a little slower ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the 9th of Thermidor, and that Louis XVIII. was reigning at the battle of Marengo? Never, since the origin of history, had princes been so blind in the presence of facts and the portion of divine authority which facts contain and promulgate. Never had that pretension here below which is called the right of kings denied to such a point the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... at the disingenuous creature. He was saving me for the dry hour. He could point out Mulehaus in any passing chair, and I would give some coin to be rid of his pretension." ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... his gallantry and politeness—and to these he made much pretension—it was not his custom to receive lady visitors standing. In the upright attitude the artificial leg made him look stiff, and he preferred stowing it away under the table. Besides, there was his dignity, as ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... in general outline the century story of McGill University. They have no pretension to the title of detailed History, for it has been possible to chronicle only the circumstances which shaped the University in its infancy and the important events of its succeeding years. The story is one of struggle and disappointment, of discouragement ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... Factory is a receiving-house for the women on their first arrival (if not assigned from the ship), or on their transition from one place to another, and also a house of correction for faults committed in domestic service; but with no pretension to be a place of reformatory discipline, and seldom failing to turn out the women worse than they entered it. Religious instruction there was none, except that occasionally on the Sabbath the superintendent of the prison read prayers, ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... when I said something about good manners. Leaning over the table with his eyes set and his fist clenched he shouted at me, "I am a boor and the son of a boor".' So ready as he was to challenge anything which smacked of conventionality or pretension, he was not quite a safe poet to lionize or to ask ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... are exalted every moment by the invisible presence of lovers, poets, inspired and inspiring companions. Such as they are we also shall be; when we walk among them and with them, we shall wash our hands of all injustice, meanness, and pretension. Women are as tired as men of our silly civilization, its compliments, restraints, and compromises. They feel the burden of routine as heavily, and keep their elasticity under it as long as we. What they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... the beneficence of France, England, provided that she renounced all pretension to the rest of the continent, would become the rightful owner of an attenuated strip of land reaching southward from the Kennebec along the Atlantic seaboard. The document containing this magnanimous proposal was preserved in the Chateau St. Louis at Quebec till the middle of the eighteenth ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... year XIII of Binet's 1908 scale. The terms used were "happiness and honor"; "evolution and revolution"; "event and advent"; "poverty and misery"; "pride and pretension." In the 1911 revision, "happiness and honor" and "pride and pretension" were dropped, and the other three pairs were moved up to the adult group, two out of three successes being required for a pass. Kuhlmann places it in year XV, using "happiness and honor" ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... in spite of your pretension to be an observer: for, with a little sense, all that seems obscure to you would have been explained. Was it not very natural that Madame de Montpensier should be interested in the fate of M. de Salcede, in what he might ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... was still towards me, and the dim twilight of the room too uncertain to see much, yet I could perceive that he was evidently admiring himself in the glass. Of this fact I had soon the most complete proof; for as I looked, he slowly raised his broad-leafed Spanish hat with an air of most imposing pretension, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... regarded as of purely Jewish origin; the ancient Egyptians likewise believed themselves to be "the peculiar people specially loved by the gods."[51] But in the hands of the Jews this belief became a pretension to the exclusive enjoyment of divine favour. According to the Zohar, "all Israelites will have a part in the future world,"[52] and on arrival there will not be handed over like the goyim (or non-Jewish races) to the hands of the angel Douma and sent ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... attitude was friendly and sensible, but it was at the same time critical and independent; and that is what every frank, upright, and sterling character naturally becomes in face of an unfamiliar society. Harriet Martineau was too keen-sighted, too aware of the folly and incompetent pretension of half the world, too consciously self-respecting and proud, to take society and its ways with any diffidence or ingenuous simplicity. On the importance of the small litterateur who unreasonably thinks ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley
... matters which, at the commencement of the dispute, they had never studied, and it was only at the last moment that the measure was resolved on. Thus circumstanced, they naturally and conscientiously felt a dependence upon providence. They had a clear pretension to it, and had they failed therein, infidelity had ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Michael Angelo, now Baccio the noble sculptor; then Master Perino, or Bastiaeo Veneziano, and sometimes Valerio de Vicenca, or Jacopo Mellequino, architect, and Lactancio Tolomei, the acquaintance and friendship of these men I valued much more than others of more parade and pretension (as if there could be greater in the world, and so Rome values them); because from them, and from their works in my art, I obtained some fruit and knowledge. I amused myself in discussing with them many rare and ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... one of some pretension originally; that is to say, it had been built in the style of country gentlemen in New England forty years ago. A row of white-pine pillars surrounded the house from roof to basement, and formed a piazza-walk very convenient in a dull day. Six chimneys crowned ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... or altogether abandoning it, according as those new facts prove it to be partially or fundamentally unsound. Proceeding thus,—patiently,—diligently,—candidly,—we may hope to form a system as far inferior in pretension to that which we have been examining and as far superior to it in real utility as the prescriptions of a great physician, varying with every stage of every malady and with the constitution of every patient, to the pill of the advertising quack which is to cure all human beings, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... cliff above it. There was a tower, and a small harbour with several small craft and boats at anchor in it, and two or three better sort of houses, besides numerous cottages and huts, and, at a little distance, a chateau of some pretension to architecture. They would have preferred a place where there were no gentlemen, who would naturally be less likely to believe their story. In other respects, they could not have desired to reach a more satisfactory locality. The cliffs appeared to ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... might very well have sent him back, in return for his epistle, the answer of Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost:—"Via goodman Dull, thou hast spoken no word all this while." The author of this performance, which is as weak in effect as it is pompous in pretension, shews a great dislike of Robespierre, Buonaparte, and of Mr. Jeffrey, whom he, by some unaccountable fatality, classes together as the three most formidable enemies of the human race that have appeared in ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... all the beauty of gold, and jasper, and amethyst. It must state the date of incorporation, and the fact that "all subscribers shall get the benefit of the original undertaking. While it does not make so much pretension as some other companies, it must be distinctly announced that this is a safe and permanent investment." The circular must state that "there are a goodly number of flowing wells, and others which the company are happy to say have a very good smell of oil." "The books will be open ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... Muse," as Fred. Verne had dubbed her, now entered from the conservatory, and throwing aside a scarlet wrap, also joined in the conversation. She was a slight creature, with some pretension to good looks; but there was a sort of languor in her manner that disappointed one ere she had uttered half a dozen sentences. In order to sustain the character her name suggested, she was continually soaring into immensity of space and deducing celestial ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... good nevertheless to meet him in the wood paths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual gleam diffused about his presence like the garment of a Shining One; and he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alike as if expecting to receive more than he could impart. And in truth, the heart of many an ordinary man had, perchance, inscriptions which he ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... merely to submit to Necessity,—Necessity will make him submit,—but to know and believe well that the stern thing which Necessity had ordered was the wisest, the best, the thing wanted there. To cease his frantic pretension of scanning this great God's-World in his small fraction of a brain; to know that it had verily, though deep beyond his soundings, a Just Law, that the soul of it was Good;—that his part in it was to conform to the Law of the Whole, and in devout silence follow that; not ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... beautiful brown hair bound up in a string of white pearls, and holding Talleyrand's hand, she entered the great reception hall, in which the foreign ambassadors, the generals, and the high dignitaries of the republic were gathered. She came without pretension or ostentation, but at her appearance a murmur of admiration ran through the company, and brought on her cheeks the timid blush of a young maiden. With the assurance of an accomplished lady of the world she received the salutations of the ambassadors, knew ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... partial to those to whom birth or education gave a claim to the title of gentleman. To those who derived no pretension to it from either of those sources, he never showed a want of attention, unless they exhibited any traits of vulgar assurance, or upstart insolence; to those he unsparingly dealt the full measure of contemptuous observance. To the incorrect in morals or professional ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 573, October 27, 1832 • Various
... necessary to an intelligent religious faith? And what about feeling or emotion, which is usually represented as a vital part of the driving power of Christian life and conduct? Well, speaking for myself, I make no pretension to the lofty disregard of doctrine which in so many quarters seems to be regarded as the hall-mark of enlightened thinking. We do well to beware of a so-called "breadth," which is but a pet euphemism ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... a great pretension!" exclaimed the queen, angrily. "A pedlar's daughter who carries arrogance so far as to wish to appear at the court of the King of Prussia! This can never be, and never could I advocate such an innovation: it is destructive, ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... read, and I extracted from them the chief material of my speeches. I dare say it was sad stuff, furbished up at a moment's notice. We carried the election. Cobden sent me a challenge to attend a public discussion of the subject. Whether this was quite fair, I am not certain, for I was young, made no pretension to be an expert, and had never opened my lips in parliament on the subject. But it afforded me an excellent opportunity to decline with modesty and with courtesy as well as reason. I am sorry to say that, to the best of my recollection, I did far otherwise, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... practical physician and surgeon. For, if the cases were identical, preoccupation with Greek and Roman antiquity would be identical with the "science of education." In short, the relationship between theory and practice in the philologist cannot be so quickly conceived. Whence comes his pretension to be a teacher in the higher sense, not only of all scientific men, but more especially of all cultured men? This educational power must be taken by the philologist from antiquity; and in such a case ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of authority in such a case, for any man, or set of men, is either a folly or a revelation. Such an authority is not human, but divine: if any man pretends to possess it, let him show God's clear warrant for his pretension, or he must be regarded as a ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... what you shall please to set down to me: But is it necessary or convenient that I should know 'em first? It is, (answer'd Sir Philip) let us sit, and you shall understand 'em.—I am very sensible (continu'd he) of your sincere and honourable Affection and Pretension to my Niece, who, perhaps, is as dear to me as my own Child could be, had I one; nor am I ignorant how averse Sir George your Father is to your Marriage with her, insomuch that I am confident he would disinherit you immediately upon it, merely ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... because, if every man were the villain that infidelity would make him, then indeed might every man curse God for the existence bestowed upon him—as I would, but dare not do. Yet why can I not believe? Alas! why should God accept an unrepentant heart? Am I not a hypocrite, mocking Him by a guilty pretension to His power, and leading the dark into thicker darkness? Then these hands—blood!—broken vows!—ha! ha! ha! Well, go—let misery have its laugh, like the light that breaks from the thunder-cloud. Prefer Voltaire to Christ; sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind, as I have ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... large number of English ones. Specialist publications in France in their turn commented on them. It will be understood with what eagerness the report was expected after this by all men interested in psychical studies. They have not been disappointed. Professor Hyslop is too modest for such unbounded pretension; he knows that the great problem will not be solved at one stroke, nor by one man. "I do not claim," he says, "to demonstrate anything scientifically, not even the facts I offer." This phrase does not at all resemble ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... is meant mainly to arouse in children an interest in the beginnings of our literature—asubject that is still terribly neglected in schools. It makes no pretension to being an adequate or satisfactory version ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... come in. Mrs. Clandon is between forty and fifty, with a slight tendency to soft, sedentary fat, and a fair remainder of good looks, none the worse preserved because she has evidently followed the old tribal matronly fashion of making no pretension in that direction after her marriage, and might almost be suspected of wearing a cap at home. She carries herself artificially well, as women were taught to do as a part of good manners by dancing masters and reclining boards ...
— You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw
... vehemence became so great as to make him overbearing and unjust. This was apt to happen in cases of pretension and any kind of wrong-doing. Mr. Adams was very impatient of cant, or of opposition to any of his deeply established convictions. Neither was his indignation at all graduated to the character of the individuals who might happen to excite it. He had little respect ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... her did affect him as comparatively black—very much as if that had absolutely, in such a medium, to be the graceless appearance of any item not positively of some fresh shade of a light colour or of some pretty pretension to a charming twist. Any witness of their meeting, his hostess should surely have felt, would have been a false note in the whole rosy glow; but what note so false as that of the dingy little presence that she might actually, by a refinement of her perhaps always too visible study of effect, have ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... men with him. He is beyond doubt a pirate direct and indirect, and occasionally commands excursions in person, or employs the Illanuns of Tampasuk, and others to the eastward, who for their own convenience make common cause with him. He has no pretension to the territory he occupies; and the authority he exerts (by means of his piratical force) over the interior tribes in his vicinity, and on the island of Palawan, is of the worst and most oppressive description. This seriff has probably never come in contact with any Europeans, and consequently ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... might perhaps be considered incomplete that failed to include the quaint little two and a half story building at Number 229 Arch Street, with its tiny store on the street floor and dwelling on the floors above. Devoid of all architectural pretension and showing the decay of passing years, it is nevertheless typical of the modest shop and house of its day, and it interests the visitor still more as the home of Betsy Ross, who for many years was popularly ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... of two pictures of the modern German school, this room contains the works of English artists not living. Only one of the German school is a picture of any pretension, "Christ blessing the Little Children"—Professor Hesse. The reputation of this painter led us to expect something better. We must consider it apart from its German peculiarities, and with respect ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... dormer window in the red-tiled roof of an old house of the Sheraton period, immediately opposite the famous "Chequers Inn." The house itself is very interesting; it has evidently been, in its early days, of considerable pretension, but has been an ironmonger's shop since 1804. On going within to make inquiries about the vane, I gathered that it is at least 120 years old, probably much more, the oldest part of the house being contemporary with the "Chequers." The vane is cut ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... or not, she did not enjoy Lord Byron's sympathy, and knew it; she had also to forgive him various little circumstances which had wounded her "amour propre," and was obliged to measure her praise in order not to create any jealousy with certain people who surrounded him and who had some pretension to beauty. ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... later times always in our view. In those associations in which the Abbe de Chaulieu and other friends of Vendome and Conti led the conversation, literature was brought wholly under the dominion of audacious pretension and immorality, in the time of the Regency and during the minority of Louis XV. In reference to the leaders there needs no proof. What could a Philip of Orleans or his Dubois take under his protection, except what corresponded with his ideas and ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... and the seat of liberty. The assembly of Virginia, in a petition or remonstrance to his majesty, ventured to express their strong dissatisfaction at Lord North's imperfect Repeal Act, and their deep affliction at seeing that the pretension of the mother country to the right of taxing the colonies was persevered in by the retention of duty upon tea. They also criticised the conduct of Lord Bottetourt, their governor, and represented that no alliance ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... with the years bringing him an experience of life that will dominate any propagandist purpose, Mr. Robinson should grow in seriousness of intention and accomplishment. He hates sham, he has sane and cleansing satire of pretension, he writes good dialogue, his experience as stage manager of the Abbey Theatre is teaching him the stage; he is only twenty-five. Do not these things ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... head. Our party managed to establish itself in a position conveniently close to the General, to whom, moreover, we had the honor of an introduction; and he bowed, on his horseback, with a good deal of dignity and martial courtesy, but no airs nor fuss nor pretension beyond what his character and rank ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... boldnesse; Tell skill, it is pretension; Tell charity of coldness; Tell law, it is contention; And as they yield reply, So give them still ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... words—monstrous in such a connection—had known the ludicrous surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt, that seized upon many of the persons who were present,—had guessed what a sudden flash of light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the pinchbeck, the shabby, perking pretension belonging to certain social layers,—so inherent in their whole mode of being, that the holiest offices of religion cannot exclude its impertinences,—the good man would have given his marriage-fee twice over to recall that superb and full-blown ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... has exhausted the resources of his craft. Yet without possessing, in a certain degree, the qualities we have named, no man ever did, and no man ever will, become a gentleman. Where they do not bear sway, society may be brilliant in garniture, high in pretension, but it is intrinsically and ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... "The pretension is curious!" said Madame de Lucenay, with a burst of sardonic laughter. "Know that when a lackey robs me—I do not break with him—I turn ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... Horace met the two sisters, he refused to be introduced to them: having heard so much of them that he concluded they would be 'all pretension.' The second night that he met them, he sat next Mary, and found her an 'angel both inside and out.' He did not know which he liked best; but Mary's face, which was formed for a sentimental novel, or, still more, for genteel comedy, riveted him, he owned. Mr. Berry, the father, was a little ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... They came to the mission and complained about it, but they never withstood the usurper. It ought to be added that it always appeared more as the making good of a practical joke than as a serious pretension, but the point is—the ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... there is only one wrong connected with my vows to her—she does not know who I am. I have deceived her there,—but in nothing else. Had I told her of my rank, she would never have married me. But now she is mine,—and for her sake I am willing to resign all pretension to the Throne in favour of my brother Rupert. Let it be so, I implore you! Let me live my own life of love and ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... pretty manners of a little servitor. And even when it presumes to be determined in the expressed desire for the dryness of a biscuit or the warmth of a lap, with how small a word or glance can it be laid upon its back, in the abject renunciation of every pretension, anxious only for the forgiveness that nobody with a touch of tenderness could withhold. Ah, there is much to be thankful for in a companion with a tail! Jessie had winning ways, the deep heart of a dog. A toy dog she was, no doubt, but hers was no toy nature. Cuckoo could not ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... merit. It clad its proud self in the silver robe of humility, by professing to possess only an imperfect degree of qualification for the reception of God's grace. Grace of condignity, on the other hand, put itself on an equality with the Divine gift, by its pretension to possess that qualification ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... at Benares we sometimes met these naked creatures in the streets; but for many years they have disappeared, as there is a magisterial order that they be flogged for their indecency, however loud may be their pretension of sanctity. At Allahabad there were many devotees with their tangled hair, besmeared bodies, and very scanty clothing—if what they had on could be called clothing. These are yet seen all over the country. The time has not yet come for stringent ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... "it is well you should learn upon what undeniable facts my pretension to arrive at the Pole is founded. In 1817 the Neptune got up to the north of Spitzbergen, as far as the eighty-second degree. In 1826 the celebrated Parry, after his third voyage to the Polar Seas, started ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... should propound a formulary of her faith, enlarge this formulary from time to time, as further interpretation is wanted, and enforce acquiscence in it by spiritual censures, is consistent with her principles. Whether such a pretension can be avowed, without inconsistency, by any Protestant Church, has been a subject of much discussion. In point of fact, however, no Protestant Church is without her formulary, or abstains from enforcing it by temporal ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... the only one who made any pretension of saying good-bye to Lane. They all crowded out before Helen, with Mackay in the rear. From the hall Lane heard him say to Helen: "Dick'll sure go to the mat with ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... the subject of pathology with a thoroughness lacking in many works of greater pretension. The illustrations—many of them original—are profuse and ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... 'arp." We play with metaphors, hesitating to characterize this latest Minerva-birth. For it is either that "new sensation" demanded by the Sir Charles Coldstream who has used up all religions and all philosophies, or, being a reductio ad absurdum of speculative pretension, it fulfils the promise of a recent quack advertisement, and is in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... and fashionable, perfect in etiquette, costume, and most particular in their society; but the rank and position of the noble Lady de Tilly made her friendship most desirable, as it conferred in the eyes of the world a patent of gentility which held good against every pretension to overtop it. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... whether Seymour or Hunt had been chosen. Both were popular, and of about the same age. Washington Hunt seems to have devoted his life to an earnest endeavour to win everybody's good will. At this time Greeley thought him "capable without pretension," and "animated by an anxious desire to win golden opinions by deserving them." He had been six years in Congress, and, in 1849, ran far ahead of his ticket as comptroller. Horatio Seymour was no less successful in winning approbation. He ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... "opinions" they have been chiefly those of Mr. Tristram Shandy's father and other members of his family, or those of its friends and circle, or of those shadowy personages outside the pretended story, such as Eugenius and Yorick, besides a few discourses which drop the slightest pretension of being Shandean or Tristramic and are plainly and simply the author's. In the Journey there is more unity; but it is, quite frankly, the unity of the temperament of that author himself. The incidents—sentimental, whimsical, fie-fie—have no other connection ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... to a kitchen, which, even at that moment, he noticed to be in trimmer condition than is usual where much housework is done, but he saw nothing that bespoke tragedy, or even a break in the ordinary routine of life as observed in houses of like size and pretension. ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... trident-scraped, we are to fancy, by a helmeted Dame Abstract familiarly profiled on discs of current bronze—price of a loaf for humbler maws disdainful of Gallic side-dishes for the titillation of choicer palates—stands Clashthought Park, a house of some pretension, mentioned at Runnymede, with the spreading exception of wings given to it in later times by Daedalean masters not to be baulked of billiards or traps for Terpsichore, and owned for unbroken generations by a healthy line of ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... to foot as if an ague-fit were on her, and her sobs almost mounted to a scream. No heart that had any pretension to humanity could have helped pitying her. Her husband did pity her; but Arundel was carried away by passion, and Bilson had no heart. Through all this tempest, however agonised, firm and unwavering came ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt
... time forward I could not believe him, as I would believe a real Christian, but I wished to hear his worldly arguments. On the following day, I asked him how it can he said, that the pope was infallible if there were no proofs of the fact to be brought. I asked him if this pretension of the pope was that of an apostle, or a prophet? if an apostle, or a prophet, he could not be believed without miracles, and that we christians were not to believe any one, though he were to bring down fire from Heaven.[H] His ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... the Manhattanite of the older generation, you are likely to derive the impression that club life in New York is a matter of the last half-century at most. He is rather inclined to fleer at any pretension to American club life of earlier date. In one sense he is right. The club as we know it now is essentially a British institution modelled on British lines. More and more is the British idea being carried to the extreme, until we are associating club life with the vast club-house ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... at the last moment there were explanations and reservations on both sides. Philip made it clear that he acknowledged no claim of his vassal to any territories, beyond those which he actually possessed. Edward's advisers protested that they abandoned no pretension to the whole by performing homage for a part. Moreover, the act of homage was couched in such ambiguous phrases that it remained doubtful whether Edward had performed "liege homage," as the King of France demanded, or only "simple homage," such as seemed to him less offensive ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... and against the high silliness of the militarist it is particularly effective. It is the laughter of wholesome men that will finally end war. The stern, strong, silent man will cease to trouble us only when we have stripped him of his last rag of pretension and touched through to the quick of his vanity with the realization of his apprehended foolishness. Literature will have failed humanity if it is so blinded by the monstrous agony in Flanders as to miss the essential triviality at the head of the present war. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... at the same time admire a monitor. Many persons, in truth, will refuse to regard a turret-ship as a ship at all. It overturns our every notion of what a ship should look like. A low, black, mastless, raft-like, cruel-looking machine, without the faintest pretension to form or comeliness, a turret-ship is simply a fighting-engine, a floating battery—an ingenious and formidable instrument of death and destruction, no doubt, but nothing more. Yet these are among the leading ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... a visible, a studied lapse, in Waymarsh, of betrayed concern. As if to make up to his comrade for the stroke by which he had played providence he now conspicuously ignored his movements, withdrew himself from the pretension to share them, stiffened up his sensibility to neglect, and, clasping his large empty hands and swinging his large restless foot, clearly looked to another quarter ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... boys walked together to Oscar's boarding-place. It was a large house, of considerable pretension for a village, and Oscar's room was large and handsomely furnished. But what attracted Harry's attention was not the furniture, but a collection of over a hundred books, ranged on shelves at one end of the room. In his father's house it had always been ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... it is almost superfluous to say that this book makes no pretension to originality of any kind. If it contributes towards restoring to Englishmen that precious heritage—the old language and literature of Iceland—which our miserably narrow scheme of education has hitherto defrauded them of, it will ...
— An Icelandic Primer - With Grammar, Notes, and Glossary • Henry Sweet
... M'Gillivrays, the Frobishers, and the other magnates of the Northwest, whom they had been accustomed to look up to as the great ones of the earth; and they were a little disposed, perhaps, to wear their suddenly-acquired honors with some air of pretension. Mr. Astor, too, had put them on their mettle with respect to the captain, describing him as a gunpowder fellow who would command his ship in fine style, and, if there was any fighting to do, would "blow all out ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... not an educated woman, but she is a good creature, and has a delicate and refined susceptibility. She recognises in me a gentleman. She reveres in my person a genius to which I make no pretension. I am not a man of genius. A man of genius does one thing supremely well. Some men of exceptional talent do many things admirably, but nothing supremely well. I am a man of exceptional talent. Pardon the modest candour which is compelled to ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... legitimate—by virtue of a pretended secret marriage between Charles Stuart and Lucy Walter—it was possible that this Monmouth who now proclaimed himself King of England was not even the illegitimate child of the late sovereign. What but ruin and disaster could be the end of this grotesque pretension? How could it be hoped that England would ever swallow such a Perkin? And it was on his behalf, to uphold his fantastic claim, that these West Country clods, led by a few armigerous Whigs, had ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... Paschalis' came from the pen of Cassiodorus at all, but much reason to think that Pithoeus, the editor who first published it under his name, was mistaken in doing so. And if it were his, a little memorandum like this—only two pages long, and with no literary pretension whatever—we may almost say with certainty would not be included by the veteran author in the enumeration of his theological works prefixed ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... member of the Triple Alliance. It was evidently England or nobody. For England to have refrained, from hurling herself into the fray, horse, foot, and artillery, was impossible from every point of view. From the democratic point of view it would have meant an acceptance of the pretension of which Potsdam, by attacking the French Republic, had made itself the champion: that is, the pretension of the Junker class to dispose of the world on Militarist lines at the expense of the lives and limbs of the masses. From the international ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... spirit is capable; that he has loved, struggled, suffered. Mere vanity, all of it. He has never loved any one but himself; he has never suffered from anything but an undigested supper or an exploded pretension; he has never touched with the end of his lips the vulgar bowl from which the mass of mankind quaffs its floods of joy and sorrow. Well, the long and short of it all is, that I honestly pity him. He may have ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... the appeal to what were called facts, came a series of arguments, which have been so long bruised and battered round in the cause of every doctrine or pretension, new, monstrous, or deliriously impossible, that each of them is as odiously familiar to the scientific scholar as the faces of so many old acquaintances, among the less reputable classes, to the officers ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... electric light, a stop-watch, or as the big Krupp gun, the concussion of which nearly scared the soldiers out of their wits, by shaking down the little minars of one of the city gates, close to which they had unwittingly discharged it on first trial. The foreign office, like every building of pretension, whether public or private, in the land of the Lion and the Sun, is a substantial edifice of mud and brick, inclosing a square court-yard or garden, in which splashing fountains play amid a wealth ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... Fifth Muse," as Fred. Verne had dubbed her, now entered from the conservatory, and throwing aside a scarlet wrap, also joined in the conversation. She was a slight creature, with some pretension to good looks; but there was a sort of languor in her manner that disappointed one ere she had uttered half a dozen sentences. In order to sustain the character her name suggested, she was continually soaring into immensity of space and deducing celestial problems for the uninitiated habitant ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... central portion was the vast wholesale and shopping district, to which the uninformed seeker for work usually drifted. It was a characteristic of Chicago then, and one not generally shared by other cities, that individual firms of any pretension occupied individual buildings. The presence of ample ground made this possible. It gave an imposing appearance to most of the wholesale houses, whose offices were upon the ground floor and in plain view of the street. The large plates of window glass, now so common, were then rapidly coming ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... will. Julia Forrester was the child of such parents. When she was fifteen, they were in easy circumstances. But at that critical period of their daughter's life, they were ignorant of human nature, and entirely unskilled in the means of detecting false pretension, or ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... sovereigns, as well as in the mutual interests of our own and of the governments with which our relations are most intimate, a pleasing guaranty that the harmony so important to the interests of their subjects as well as of our citizens will not be interrupted by the advancement of any claim or pretension upon their part to which our honor would not permit us to yield. Long the defender of my country's rights in the field, I trust that my fellow-citizens will not see in my earnest desire to preserve peace with foreign ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... in the head, which is filled with nearly lozenge-shaped lights, but all without foliations,) is a stone bearing the date of 1640. In the south wall of the tower of the same church (which is low, heavy, and clumsily built, without any pretension to architectural design) is a stone to denote the period of its erection, which bears the date of 1655. Pulpits, communion-tables, church chests, poor-boxes, and pewing of the latter part of the sixteenth and of the seventeenth century, also very frequently exhibit, ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam
... their real character, and women have found it profitable to encourage the deception. But though every normal man thus cherishes the soothing unction that he is the intellectual superior of all women, and particularly of his wife, he constantly gives the lie to his pretension by consulting and deferring to what he calls her intuition. That is to say, he knows by experience that her judgment in many matters of capital concern is more subtle and searching than his own, and, being ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... you, what then—what have you gained? At best, a country of pronunciamentos, a land of civil wars, a republic of the greedy and the malcontents, like some of the republics of South America! To what are you tending now, with your instruction in Castilian, a pretension that would be ridiculous were it not for its deplorable consequences! You wish to add one more language to the forty odd that are spoken in the islands, so that you may understand one another less ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... displayed than when the attempt attaches to a divided identity—when a man tries to be himself in two distinct parts in life, without the slightest misgiving of hypocrisy while doing so. Mathew Kearney not only did not assume any pretension to nobility amongst his equals, but he would have felt that any reference to his title from one of them would have been an impertinence, and an impertinence to be resented; while, at the same time, had a shopkeeper of Moate, or one of the tenants, addressed him as other than ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... contained in this Platform, adds not a single sentence to the Augsburg Confession, nor omits anything that has the least pretension to be considered "a fundamental doctrine of Scripture," it is perfectly consistent with the doctrinal test of the General Synod, as contained in her Formula of Government and Discipline, Chap. XVIII., Sec. 5, and XIX., Sec. 2. The Apostles' and Nicene Creeds are also universally ...
— American Lutheranism Vindicated; or, Examination of the Lutheran Symbols, on Certain Disputed Topics • Samuel Simon Schmucker
... any pretension to comfortable spaciousness in the closely built parts of the town were all of the one, general, Spanish-American plan. Honore led the doctor through the cool, high, tessellated carriage-hall, on one side of which were the drawing-rooms, closed and darkened. They turned at the bottom, ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... the narrow way, who live in a three-story house, originally of much pretension, but from whose front door hard times have removed almost all vestiges of paint, will tell you: "Yass, de 'ouse is in'abit; 'tis ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... is unmeasured. "The notion almost reminds us of the cruel jest of Mezentius, who bound the living bodies of his enemies to corpses." It is the contempt both of a great scholar and a great Englishman for ignorance and a somewhat ludicrous pretension. "The caput orbis has become provincial, and her authority is spurned even within her own borders." England could not kneel at this Italian footstool without ceasing to ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... writing. There is, however, propriety, if not necessity, for the present writer, when making any remarks under this heading and under some others in this paper indicating special lines of research, to disclaim all pretension to being a Sinologue or Egyptologist, or even profoundly versed in Mexican antiquities. His partial and recently commenced studies only enable him to present suggestions for the examination of scholars. These suggestions may safely be introduced by the statement that the common modern ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... emperour had offered to quit his pretension to the dominions of Austria, on condition that his hereditary countries ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... 1797, William Sullivan described him as "over six feet in stature; of strong, bony, muscular frame, without fullness of covering, well-formed and straight. He was a man of most extraordinary strength. In his own house, his action was calm, deliberate, and dignified, without pretension to gracefulness, or peculiar manner, but merely natural, and such as one would think it should be in such a man. When walking in the street, his movement had not the soldierly air which might be expected. His habitual motions had been formed, long before he ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... lived, but he was no fool neither. He looked at my weapon shining on him in the moonlight and quietly conceded to himself that the game was against him for the moment. From his fingers he slipped the rings, and the watch from his pocket-coat. To carry out our pretension I took them and filled my ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... the only pardonable follies were those which were frankly avowed; and that only a pedant could clothe his imagination in geometrical theories. In general, pedantry to his eyes was the least excusable of vices; he understood it to be the pretension of tracing back phenomena to first causes, "as if," said he, "there were any 'first causes,' or chance admitted of calculation!" This did not prevent him however from expending much logic to demonstrate that there was ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... day (he said) when all monopolies are denounced, I must he permitted to say that, to my mind, the monopoly which is the most intolerable and odious is the pretension to ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... cabildo, and justified their government; but notwithstanding this the governor declared himself for the bishop of Troya, and displayed the [written] opinions mentioned above, with which he confirmed the former pretension of restoring the archbishop. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... his rival, and, after his victory at Marignan and conquest of the Milanese, much superior in renown, he could not suppress his indignation at being thus, in the face of the world, after long and anxious expectation, disappointed in so important a pretension. From this competition, as much as from opposition of interests, arose that emulation between those two great monarchs, which, while it kept their whole age in movement, sets them in so remarkable a contrast to each other: both of them princes endowed with talents and abilities; ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... presence of Madame F——, dining often alone with her, accompanying her in her walks, even when M. D—— R—— was not with us, seeing her from my room, or conversing with her in her chamber, always reserved and attentive without pretension, the first night passed by without any change being brought about by that constant intercourse. Yet I was full of hope, and to keep up my courage I imagined that love was not yet powerful enough to conquer her pride. I expected everything ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... from his Sister this one thing, which he found difficult to conceal; so that she was now possest with a double Grief, to find Agnes Sovereign of all the Hearts to which she had a pretension. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... but little introduction. Everybody with the slightest pretension to experience in London ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... Hunt (1784-1859), the friend of Shelley and Keats, and the writer of many pleasant essays, called Carlyle's style "a jargon got up to confound pretension with performance." We like Hunt best when he is writing in the vein of the Spectator or as a "miniature Lamb." In such papers as An Earth upon Heaven, Hunt tells us that in heaven "there can be no clergymen if there ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... a woman - let me conjure you to forgive the weakness and to repose in the love. Do not mistake me!' he cried, seeing her about to speak, and imposing silence with uplifted hand. 'My love is changed; it is purged of any conjugal pretension; it does not ask, does not hope, does not wish for a return in kind. You may forget for ever that part in which you found me so distasteful, and accept without embarrassment the affection of ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... also because Jerusalem stood near to those deep images both in time and in place. The great event of Jerusalem was at hand when Palm Sunday came; and the scene of that Sunday was near in place to Jerusalem. Yet what then was Jerusalem? Did I fancy it to be the omphalos (navel) of the earth? That pretension had once been made for Jerusalem, and once for Delphi; and both pretensions had become ridiculous as the figure of the planet became known. Yes, but if not of the earth, for earth's tenant Jerusalem was the omphalos of mortality. Yet how? There ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... in their contests with the Crown; and the new Parliament pursued the aims and the tactics of the old Great Council, with all the advantages conferred by an exclusive right to grant taxation. For more than two hundred years it was a popular assembly in form and in pretension alone. The most active members of the Lower House were drawn from the lower ranks of the territorial aristocracy; and the Commons were bold in their demands only when they could attack the prerogative behind the shield of a faction quartered in the House of Lords. But the alliance of the Houses ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... dinner to which she invited her most select friends. Mr. and Mrs. Perley were there, and the Misses Thorpedyke, two maiden ladies who constituted the family of the highest social pretension of Plainton. There were other people who were richer, but Miss Eleanor Thorpedyke, now a lady of nearly seventy, and her sister Barbara, some ten years younger, belonged to the very best family in that part of the country, and were truly ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... more beautiful because of its rarity, is a purely guileless spirit! A crystalline medium through which the transparent light of Heaven comes and goes; open, candid, just, honorable, sincere; scorning every unfair dealing, every hollow pretension, every narrow prejudice. Wherever such characters exist, they are like "apples of gold in pictures ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... unmarried women at the age which amongst us gives the insulting name of old maid. 'What striking sacrifices of sexual honour does this one fact argue!' The French style is remarkable for simplicity—'a strange pretension for anything French;' but on the whole the intellectual merits of their style are small, 'chiefly negative,' and 'founded on the accident of their colloquial necessities.' They are amply compensated, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... delicate experiments that were about to be made. The first youth who presented himself for the trial was called The Raven, having as yet had no opportunity of obtaining a more warlike sobriquet. He was remarkable for high pretension, rather than for skill or exploits, and those who knew his character thought the captive in imminent danger when he took his stand, and poised the tomahawk. Nevertheless, the young man was good natured, and no thought was uppermost in his ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... French Church and its Roman head, cut off at will, intervention by a veto or by approval of all acts of pontifical authority, to be the legal and recognized head of the national clergy,[5175] to become for this clergy an assistant, collateral, and lay Pope—such was the pretension of the old government, and such, in effect, is the sense, the juridical bearing, of the Gallican maxims.[5176] Napoleon pro-claims them anew, while the edict of 1682, by which Louis XIV. applied them with precision, rigor and minuteness, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... culture, and are almost exclusively used at the present day; the first chiefly by writers not belonging to the Brahminical order, while those of the Urdu dialect follow Persian models. The writings in each, though numerous, and not without pretension, have little interest for the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... now that she had pretended to know a great deal more than she really did. Pretension is very apt to get laughed at. She had always scorned Dotty's self-conceit; but hadn't she shown quite as much herself? Making her auntie suppose she understood cooking, and putting Mrs. Fixfax to all this trouble for nothing? How horrified auntie would be, and the ...
— Prudy Keeping House • Sophie May
... tale; yet we have no fear that our gravest readers will think the extract too long. Our quotation is from the volume called "Tales from Denmark." There is another collection called, "The Shoes of Fortune;" these are higher in pretension, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... wits to the vast equipage of Shakspeare is advancing in an accelerated ratio. There is, in fact, a great delusion current upon this subject. Innumerable references to Homer, and brief critical remarks on this or that pretension of Homer, this or that scene, this or that passage, lie scattered over literature ancient and modern; but the express works dedicated to the separate service of Homer are, after all, not many. In Greek we have only the large Commentary of Eustathius, and the Scholia ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... good," observed Mr. Wyllys; "because they are wanting in simplicity and full of pretension; and pretension is the ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... strict training in it. As a rule, he dispenses with elementary thoroughness, and hastens towards the pleasure which the joy of production gives. The conscious amateur confesses this himself, makes no pretension to mastership, and calls himself—in distinction from the professional, who subjects himself to rules—an unlearned person. But sometimes the amateur, on the contrary, covers over his weakness, cherishes in himself the self-conceit that he is equal to the heroes of his art or science, constitutes ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... treated Racine and Boileau. I have given him, as Louis XIV. gave to Racine, some pensions, and a place of gentleman in ordinary. It is not my fault if he has committed absurdities, and has had the pretension to become a chamberlain, to wear an order, and sup with a King. It is not the fashion in France; and, as there are here a few more men of wit and noblemen than in Prussia, it would require that I should have a very large table to assemble them all at it." And then ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... be suffered to decide. Among the claimants were the mightiest sovereigns of the continent; there was little chance that they would submit to any arbitration but that of the sword; and it could not be hoped that, if they appealed to the sword, other potentates who had no pretension to any part of the disputed inheritance would long remain neutral. For there was in Western Europe no government which did not feel that its own prosperity, dignity and security might depend on the event ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Spaniards had been burning English seamen whenever they could catch them, plotting to kill the Queen and reduce England itself into vassaldom to the Pope. The English nation, the loyal part of it, were replying to the wild pretension by the hands of their own admiral. If Philip chose to countenance assassins, if the Holy Office chose to burn English sailors as heretics, those heretics had a right to make Spain understand that such a game was dangerous, that, as Santa Cruz had said, ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... in the Senate as squatters, as if that were a term of reproach. Our glorious Anglo-Saxon ancestry, the pilgrims who landed on Plymouth rock, the early settlers at Jamestown, were squatters. They settled this continent with less pretension to title than the settlers on the public lands. Daniel Boone was a squatter; Christopher ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Laureate[216] chair, By grace, not merit, planted there, In awkward pomp is seen to sit, And by his patent proves his wit; For favours of the great, we know, Can wit as well as rank bestow; 110 And they who, without one pretension, Can get for fools a place or pension, Must able be supposed, of course, (If reason is allow'd due force) To give such qualities and grace As may equip them for the place. But he—who measures as he goes A mongrel kind ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... the first one we came to; but, on drawing near, they had so much of an air of pretension, at least for native dwellings, that I hesitated; thinking they might be the residences of the higher chiefs, from whom no very extravagant ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... is, for those who have neither the time nor the opportunity, the learning nor the inclination, to peruse elaborate and abstruse treatises on Rhetoric, Grammar, and Composition. To them such works are as gold enclosed in chests of steel and locked beyond power of opening. This book has no pretension about it whatever,—it is neither a Manual of Rhetoric, expatiating on the dogmas of style, nor a Grammar full of arbitrary rules and exceptions. It is merely an effort to help ordinary, everyday people to ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... hour I knew where he lived. His father was an English groom who had set up large breeding stables in Gibraltar, and was a rich man. The son had the pretension of being a gentleman. He had been in England they told me for a year, buying stud-horses—and—and something else. He was married. Ah-ha! He had been married three years before he ever saw Lorenza, and the ceremony which had been observed ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... "Golden Age of the Renaissance" in which it took place; when real devotion to all arts, sciences, and amenities of a higher civilisation went hand in hand with crime of the vilest and treachery of the basest description. Well might Barbarossa, and such as he, laugh to scorn the pretension that his Christian enemies were one whit better than were they, when they could point to the fact that, to serve a private revenge, a great Christian king could betray his co-religionists to their Moslem foes. Shamelessly did the Sea-wolves ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... you think my pretending that Jupiter was my father as much entitles me to the name of a madman as your extravagant behaviour at Bender does you. But you are greatly mistaken. It was not my vanity, but my policy, which set up that pretension. When I proposed to undertake the conquest of Asia, it was necessary for me to appear to the people something more than a man. They had been used to the idea of demi-god heroes. I therefore claimed an equal descent with Osiris and Sesostris, with Bacchus and Hercules, the former conquerors ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... had seen many country homes of pretension and even luxury, I never saw one that appealed to me more on the ground of promise and, after a fashion, of partial fulfillment. It was so unpretentiously pretentious, so really grand in a limited and yet poetic ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... range in architectural pretension from the unaffected simplicity of Wyck to the stately elaboration of Cliveden and Mount Pleasant, and possess distinctive characteristics not seen elsewhere. Wealth made Philadelphia the most fashionable American city of the time, with all the attendant ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... strength of his name he found favor with the tailors, and bourgeoned forth a few days later in the best cloth the shops afforded, and strutted and plumed himself like a turkey-cock before Bertha, keeping up meanwhile a pretension of sympathy ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... permitted to expand, we will expose to open day, and submit to the judgment of nations, that which unprejudiced minds, after long researches, have found to be the most reasonable; and we do this, not with the pretension of imposing a new creed, but with the hope of provoking new lights, and ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... appeal to a great number of our other faculties, besides our mere sense of ridicule. The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness—your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture—your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all the ordinary actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon himself to be the week-day preacher, so to speak. Accordingly, as he finds, and speaks, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... what was beautiful in this art, at least in its higher schools; for he did not pay much regard, or perhaps quite do justice, to the masters of the 17th century. To technical criticism he made no sort of pretension; painting was to him but the visible language of emotion; and where it did not aim at exciting it, or employed inadequate means, his admiration would be withheld. Hence he highly prized the ancient paintings, both Italian and German, of the age which preceded the ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... the conception seemed, of a person of the inferior class claiming equality with them, or exercising authority over them. It hardly seemed less so to the class held in subjection. The emancipated serfs and burgesses, even in their most vigorous struggles, never made any pretension to a share of authority; they only demanded more or less of limitation to the power of tyrannizing over them. So true is it that unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual appears natural. The ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... be a soft boy—that is to say, I was said to be soft. I'm a man now, but, of course, I was a boy once. I merely mention this to prove that I make no pretension whatever to unusual wisdom; quite the reverse. I hate sailing under false colours—not that I ever did sail under any colours, never having become a sailor—and yet I shouldn't say that, either, for that's the very point round which all the mystery hangs. I did go to sea! I'm rather apt to wander, ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... Redcliffe I have not read. . . . I am not worthy of superhuman flights of virtue—in a novel. I want to see how people act and suffer who are as good-for-nothing as I am myself. Then I have the sinful pretension to be amused, whereas all our novelists want to reform us, and to show us what a hideous place this world is: Ma foi, je ne le sais que trap, without ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... watch-dog of our American literature, "The North American Review," always ready with lambent phrases in stately "Articles" for native talent of a certain pretension, and wagging its appendix of "Critical Notices" kindly at the advent of humbler merit, treated "Merry-Mount" with the distinction implied in a review of nearly twenty pages. This was a great contrast ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the pretension of a regular Government affecting to deal with 'Rebels,' but it is a deadly stab which they are aiming at our institutions themselves—because they know that, if we were insane enough to yield this ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... Bastiaeo Veneziano, and sometimes Valerio de Vicenca, or Jacopo Mellequino, architect, and Lactancio Tolomei, the acquaintance and friendship of these men I valued much more than others of more parade and pretension (as if there could be greater in the world, and so Rome values them); because from them, and from their works in my art, I obtained some fruit and knowledge. I amused myself in discussing with them many rare and noble works both ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... and left six (illegitimate) children whom he commended to the care of Henri IV of France. It is probable that the son mentioned in our text was Cristoval, his second son (born in 1564); he assumed the title of king of Portugal, and with this pretension might easily undertake to fight against Spain (as usurper of that crown), in aid of the Dutch. Cristoval died ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XIV., 1606-1609 • Various
... humanity, and Christian civilization! to which it is a matter of easy indifference to know that, in the neighborhood of their abode, those tortures of butchery are unnecessarily inflicted, which could not be actually witnessed by persons in whom the pretension to these fine qualities is anything better than affectation, without sensations of horror; which it would ruin the character of a fine gentleman or lady to have voluntarily witnessed ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... infernal ambition would soon be realized, were it not that the secret proceedings of this dangerous man have long been as secretly watched?—Ah!" sneered Father d'Aigrigny, with a smile of irony and triumph, "you wish to be a second Sixtus V., do you? And, not content with this audacious pretension, you mean, if successful, to absorb our Company in the Papacy, even as the Sultan has absorbed the Janissaries. Ah! You would make us your stepping-stone to power! And you have thought to humiliate and crush me with your insolent disdain! But patience, patience: the day of retribution ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the preacher correctly stated, the men embrace the women— ever yet got any permanent good out of a book unless he enjoyed its perusal. Jno. J. Ingalls says that everybody praises Milton's Paradise Lost, but nobody reads it. Ingalls is mistaken. Everybody making any pretension to culture has read the book—as a disagreeable duty; but that man don't live—at least outside of the lunatic asylum —who can quote a dozen lines of it. Same with Dante's Divine Comedia and a host of other books with which people are expected ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Union! And, sir, permit me to say that, of all the causes which justify the action of the Southern States, I know none of greater gravity and more alarming magnitude than that now developed of the right of secession. A pretension so monstrous as that which perverts a restricted agency constituted by sovereign States for common purposes, into the unlimited despotism of the majority, and denies all legitimate escape from such despotism, when powers ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... to the days of Grecian porticoes. It was a comfortable, sensible-looking place, however, such as were planned some eighty or a hundred years since, by men who had fortune enough to do as they pleased, and education enough to be quite superior to all pretension. The house was a low, irregular, wooden building, of ample size for the tastes and habits of its inmates, with broad piazzas, which not only increased its dimensions, but added greatly to the comfort and pleasure of the family by whom ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... I disclaim all pretension of right on the part of the President officially to inquire into or call in question the reasons of the Senate for rejecting any nomination whatsoever. As the President is not responsible to them for the reasons which induce him to make a nomination, so they are not responsible ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... guess why it is generous? Then look at yourself in the glass, and you will see. I used to have some pretension to good looks, but I could never have stood beside you at the best of times, and now—— Your mother, even when I was at my best, always killed me if I was in the same room with her, and you are even ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... treaty, as it is indispensable to the successful completion of the contemplated canal to secure protection to it from the local authorities and this Government, and as I have no doubt that the British pretension to the port of San Juan in right of the Mosquito King is without just foundation in any public law ever before recognized in any other instance by Americans or Englishmen as applicable to Indian titles on this continent, I ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume - V, Part 1; Presidents Taylor and Fillmore • James D. Richardson
... me stop for a moment to check my reader from any erroneous conclusions. Because I have had occasion incidentally to speak of various patrician friends, it must not be supposed that I have myself any pretension to rank and high blood. I thank God that I have not. I am the son of a plain English merchant, esteemed during his life for his great integrity, and strongly attached to literary pursuits (indeed, he was himself, anonymously, an author). If he had lived it was expected that he would ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... built in the form of a cross, as is, I believe, invariably the case with every Catholic church of any pretension. At its northern end are two towers, and at its southern is the celebrated chapel of Henry VII. This chapel is an addition, which, allowing for a vast difference in the scale, resembles, in its general appearance, a school, or vestry-room, attached to the end of one of our own churches. A Gothic ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Honore Balzac, and that his parents at that time called themselves M. and Mme. Balzac. Occasionally, however, as early as 1822, in letters to his sister Honore insists on the particle "de," and all his life he claimed to be a member of a very old Gaulish family—a pretension which gave his enemies a famous ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... in its own peculiar province, are only true conditionally, subject to interference and counteraction from causes not directly within its scope: while to the character of a practical guide it has no pretension, apart from other classes of considerations. Political Economy, in truth, has never pretended to give advice to mankind with no lights but its own; though people who knew nothing but political economy (and therefore knew that ill) have taken ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... of France, England, provided that she renounced all pretension to the rest of the continent, would become the rightful owner of an attenuated strip of land reaching southward from the Kennebec along the Atlantic seaboard. The document containing this magnanimous proposal was preserved in the Chateau St. Louis at Quebec till the middle of ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... size, spare, and raw-boned; his face very red, his features sharp and bluish, and his age might be about sixty. His attire savoured a good deal of the SHABBY-GENTEEL; his clothes, which had much of tarnished and faded pretension about them, did not fit him, and had not improbably fluttered in the stalls of Plunket Street. We had risen on his entrance, and O'Connor had twice requested of him to take a chair at the table, without his hearing, or at least noticing, the invitation; ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... descendants their Stadtholder, or to give him the command of their forces. This was the secret article against which the States General most vehemently protested, and Cromwell was at length obliged to content himself with an engagement of the province of Holland to exclude the House of Orange. Even this pretension was strongly opposed by De Witt, but Cromwell insisted. The public treaty of peace was signed on the 5th of April, 1654; but it was not until the 5th of June following that the secret article was ratified. ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... prepared to do. He had been almost asked to take the young married couple in, and feed them,—so that they might live free of expense. He was willing to do it,—but was not willing that there should be any soft-worded, high-toned false pretension. He almost read Lopez to the bottom,—not, however, giving the man credit for dishonesty so deep or cleverness so great as he possessed. But as regarded Emily, he was also actuated by a personal desire to have her back again ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... runs the race of public life in England on equal terms with the sons of the oldest of the titled and untitled aristocracy, even though his father were an eminent retired dust contractor, and his mother laundry maid or factory girl. But money alone won't do it, and the pretension, the display, the coxcombry permitted in a peer, must be carefully avoided by a parvenu. Thus Oxford interests classes who care very little for its educational, antiquarian, or architectural resources, as one of the institutions of the country by which ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... thinks Prelacy the abomination of desolation, or who thinks that stained glass and an organ are sinful. I grant you that there is a certain fairness in trying the blackguard and the religionist by different standards. Where the pretension is higher, the test may justly be more severe. But I say it is unfair to puzzle out with diligence the one or two good things in the character of a reckless scamp, and to refuse moderate attention to the many good points about a weak, narrow-minded, and uncharitable ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... disingenuous creature. He was saving me for the dry hour. He could point out Mulehaus in any passing chair, and I would give some coin to be rid of his pretension." ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... higher part of the valley was situated the family mansion, or rather dwelling-house, for "mansion" is too grand a word to apply to the clumsy, but substantially-built Bodowen. It was square and heavy-looking, with just that much pretension to ornament necessary to distinguish ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... years of his public life. He was over six feet in stature; of strong, bony, muscular frame, without fullness of covering, well formed and straight. He was a man of most extraordinary physical strength. In his own house, his action was calm, deliberate, and dignified, without pretension to gracefulness or peculiar manner, but merely natural, and such as one would think it should be in such a man. His habitual motions had been formed before he took command of the American armies, in the wars of the interior, ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... chairman of the committee, Sir William Stawell, and it appears to have been backed up by those kind of general testimonials as to ability which recommend a man almost equally for any grade or position. Of special aptitude or scientific training he possessed no pretension, and his selection was a fatal blunder. In saying this, there is no reflection on the private character of the mistaken leader; he paid for the wrong estimation he held of his own fitness with his life, and the fault ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... no pretension to eloquence, Mr. Townsend. I was merely recalling to Miss Hamlyn's attention the beautiful lines of our immortal poet, Owen Meredith, which run, as I ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... object than that, his conscientiousness would be reduced to a low pitch indeed. Foscolo is of opinion he was not only in earnest, but that he was very near taking himself for an apostle, and would have done so had his prophecies succeeded, perhaps with success to the pretension.[24] Thank heaven, his "Hell" has not embittered the mild reading-desks of the Church ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... Tempter follows them in various disguises, sometimes frightful, sometimes seducing. As a whole this composition is constructed in the ancient manner—as in Byzantine art—several series rising one above the other, each of equal size, and without any pretension to perspective: the single groups, at the same time, are executed ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... praise for having revealed to the present generation these myriad regions of the Antipodes, heretofore unknown, and for having thus enlarged for writers the field of study. I am proud to have shown them the way by collecting these facts which, as you will see, are without pretension; not only because I am unable to adorn my subject more ornately, but also because I have never thought to write as a professional historian. I tell a simple story by means of letters, written freely ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... eyewitness. It is a chronicle, founded, like other chronicles, on such evidence and records as the chronicler could get hold of. The only one of the evangelists who professes to give first-hand evidence as an eyewitness naturally takes care to say so; and the fact that Matthew makes no such pretension, and writes throughout as a chronicler, makes it clear that he is telling the story of Jesus as Holinshed told the story of Macbeth, except that, for a reason to be given later on, he must have collected his material and completed his book within the lifetime ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... is conducted throughout with evidence of great acquaintance with Scripture and much theological learning (though the writer states himself to be a layman), without the least undue pretension, and with the most perfect temperateness and impartiality. The work would seem now well worth reprinting in a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 75, April 5, 1851 • Various
... Such a pretension seems Utopian, and one asks oneself curiously what sort of balance the astronomers must have adopted in order to calculate the weight of Sun, Moon, ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... sentiments and feelings, which had for their object something out of self, accorded well with my experience among my protectors and with the wants which were forever alive in my own bosom. But I thought Werter himself a more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined; his character contained no pretension, but it sank deep. The disquisitions upon death and suicide were calculated to fill me with wonder. I did not pretend to enter into the merits of the case, yet I inclined towards the opinions of the hero, whose extinction I wept, without precisely ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... the parliament accompanied the offer of the crown with such a declaration of rights as laid open all the invasions upon the constitution, not of the late King alone, but of his brother, and ascertained every disputed pretension between the crown and the subject; for, accustomed either to trample upon their sovereigns, or to be trampled upon by them, the Scottish nation chose to leave nothing to be adjusted afterwards by the vibration between the executive and legislative powers, which had kept the English ...
— The Jacobite Rebellions (1689-1746) - (Bell's Scottish History Source Books.) • James Pringle Thomson
... addressing her, though she had been much stared at. Although she did not wish to sing, for her heart was heavy as she thought of the troubles that awaited her the next day at the convent, she sang what was asked of her without resistance or pretension. Then, for the first time, she experienced the pride of triumph. Szmera, though he was furious at not being the sole lion of the evening, complimented her, bowing almost to the ground, with one hand on his heart; Madame Rochette assured her that she had a fortune in her throat whenever she chose ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... for some ladies, lionesses of his, who were coming up to the Commemoration. He was a shrewd, easy-tempered, free-spoken man, of small desires and no ambition; of no very keen sensibilities or romantic delicacies, and very little religious pretension; that is, though unexceptionable in his deportment, he hated the show of religion, and was impatient at those who affected it. He had known the University for thirty years, and formed a right estimate of most things in it. He had come out ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... laughs away misgivings of which they are likely to be half ashamed. He makes no parade of logic; he is only a plain freeholder like the mass whom he addresses, though he knows twenty times as much as many writers of more pretension. He never appeals to passion or imagination; what he strives to enlist on his side is homely self-interest, and the ordinary sense of what is right and reasonable. There is little regularity of method ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... attained the age of thirty, though sundry deep lines, and hues formerly florid and now faded, speaking of fatigue, care, or dissipation, might have made him look somewhat older than he was. There was nothing very prepossessing in his appearance. He was dressed with a pretension ill suited to the costume appropriate to a foot-traveller. His coat was pinched and padded; two enormous pins, connected by a chain, decorated a very stiff stock of blue satin dotted with yellow stars; his hands were cased in very dingy gloves ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... for the behavior of any man who has the faintest pretension to being a gentleman, is that never by word or gesture must he compromise a woman; he never, therefore, writes a letter that can be construed, even by a lawyer, as damaging ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... own, There's a faculty pleasant to exercise, hard to hoodwink, I am fain to keep still in abeyance (I laugh as I think), Lest, insisting to claim and parade in it, wot ye, I worst E'en the Giver in one gift.—Behold, I could love if I durst! 260 But I sink the pretension as fearing a man may o'ertake God's own speed in the one way of love; I abstain for love's sake. —What, my soul? see thus far and no farther? when doors great and small, Nine-and-ninety flew ope at our touch; should the hundredth appal? In the least things have faith, ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... chronology, geography and science, and many abstracts and citations of the classics, that in their time must have played parts in the History of the World. The Will now first produced lets in a flood of light on the history of these valued papers, and dispels a great deal of the heaps of foreign pretension, domestic assertion, and mixed charlatanism that have since 1784 beclouded the memories of both Raleigh and Hariot. It is true that on a hint in the previous century from Camden of a will by the great mathematician, many ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... abrupt ascents and descents; and if he be out of sight—in a moment, through some secret aperture, he returns as quickly through another equally unseen passage. Upon an average, I set his bibliomaniacal peregrinations down at the rate of a full French league per day. It is the absence of all pretension and quackery—the quiet, unobtrusive manner in which he opens his well-charged battery of information upon you—but, more than all, the glorious honours which are due to him, for having assisted to rescue ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... a divinity equal to or even surpassing that of its great Founder. In the second century Montanus the Phrygian claimed to be the incarnate Trinity, uniting in his single person God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. Nor is this an isolated case, the exorbitant pretension of a single ill-balanced mind. From the earliest times down to the present day many sects have believed that Christ, nay God himself, is incarnate in every fully initiated Christian, and they have carried this belief to its logical ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... independence, whether as regarded his own nation or the rest of humanity. England then seemed to wish to arrogate to herself the monopoly, of morality, wisdom, and greatness, together with the right of despising the rest of the world. Lord Byron considered this pretension as excessive, and he expressed his generous incredulity in lines proudly independent. He refused to see heroism where he did not believe it to exist, and would not accord glory to victories that seemed to him the result of chance. He refused to see virtue and religion in what he considered ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
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