|
|
|
More "Proverbial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Scottish Dictionary points out the frugal and temperate Scot; and, in illustration, may be contrasted with the proverbial invitation of the better feeding English, "Will you come and take your ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... social instinct and the moral sentiments which arise from social relations in man and animal are the same. Moral obligations, especially in relation to family ties and conjugal unions of animals, are in many cases sacred binders to such ties. The bear, for example, is proverbial for his conjugal faithfulness. The married life of most animals is strictly moral, and most of them are monogamists and have reached the highest form of family ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... marquis, though to be haughty or ill-bred was impossible to the blandness of his nature, had never shown to Vivian the genial courtesies he had lavished upon me, and kept politely aloof from his acquaintance; while Vivian's personal vanity had been wounded by that drawing-room effect which the proverbial winner of all hearts produced without an effort,—an effect that threw into the shade the youth and the beauty (more striking, but infinitely less prepossessing) of the adventurous rival. Thus animosity to Lord Castleton ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... derived from the ancient Manichees, spread rapidly through Provence and Languedoc. The clergy of the Catholic Church were regarded with loathing and contempt. "Viler than a priest," "I would as soon be a priest," became proverbial expressions. The Papacy had lost all authority with all classes, from the great feudal princes down to the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Ballantrae," "The Child's Garden of Verses," and "Across the Plains" had been each of them one shade less perfectly done than they were, everyone would have seen that they were all parts of the same message; but by succeeding in the proverbial miracle of being in five places at once, he has naturally convinced others that he was five different people. But the real message of Stevenson was as simple as that of Mohamet, as moral as that of Dante, as confident as that ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... that death was so soon to end, and the thoughts of what was the worth of life. "It should be a sweet thing to have what is best and richest, if it's for a short space only." It is not a new saying, but it is not to be identified with the proverbial "a short life and a merry," with which some confuse it, and of Synge it was a true saying. There are those who, because of the irony of his writing, an irony that is new to literature, and, maybe, to ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... Austrian car-wheels which have run for twenty-one years, as previously mentioned, Lobdell has a pair which have run 245,000 miles on the Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska Railway. The Fairbanks scales in great variety, both of size and purpose, and of a finish and an accuracy which have become proverbial; the Howe scales; the Goodyear boot- and shoe-machinery; Stow's flexible shaft; Lechner's coal-mining engine; Allen & Roeder's riveting-machine; and Delamater's punches and shears,—are a few more of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... down his horn after the toast, the Norman's glance happened to encounter a glance from the shield-maiden, who was passing. Taking another horn from the thrall, he bowed again, with proverbial French gallantry; then quaffed off the second measure of ale to the honor ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... of a chemical manufactory. Putting up at the house of the manager of the works, we remained here two or three days, during which time we made some excursions into the heart of the mountains. One of our drives took us some miles along the side of the beautiful river Theiss, which though a proverbial sluggard when it reaches the plain, is here a swift and impetuous stream. Our object was to see the timber-rafts pass over the rapids; it was a very exciting scene, and as this was a favourable season, owing to the state of the river, we came in just ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... of shooting, trapping, and fishing as the proverbial duck takes to water, and could follow a deer trail almost in the dark. He had brought down all sorts of game, and his left shoulder showed deep scars dating back to a fierce face-to-face fight with a bear, in which he had, after a tough struggle, ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... we are in most danger of a deluge; though I wonder we so frequently complain of long rains. The saying about St. Swithin is a proof of how often they recur; for proverbial sentences are the children of experience, not of prophecy. Good night! In a few days I shall send you a beautiful little poem from ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... name has been familiar; and, to this day, the wild Arabs will tell wondrous stories about him, as they gather at night round their blazing fires. His grandeur and wisdom have ever since been proverbial; and even Jesus, when He wished to compare the lilies of the field with something very magnificent, spoke of ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... of vigour and have a distinct decorative effectiveness. But apart from this its appearance in the Marks of the old printers is a very striking proof of the fact that the medival legends died hard. Curiously enough, the proverbial "lion and unicorn" do not often occur together. The family of printers with whose name the unicorn is almost as closely associated as the compass is with Plantin, is that of Kerver, for it has been employed in ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... could not always prevail against the violent passions and clashing interests of those about her. As long as Drusus lived, Drusus and Antonia had been for the Romans the model of the devoted pair of lovers, and their tender affection had become proverbial; yet the Roman multitude, always given to admiring the descendants of the great families, was even more deeply impressed by the beauty, the virtue, the sweetness, the modesty, and the reserve of Antonia. After the death of Drusus, ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... us; of the person with whom life flowers and bears fruit. If this were so, the chances of our meeting that person would be small indeed; intuition would often fail; the blindness of love would then be fatal as it is proverbial. No, love works differently, and in its blindness lies its strength. Man and woman, each strongly desires to be loved, each opens to the other that heart of ideal aspirations which they have often hid till then; each, thus knowing the ideal of the other, tries to fulfil that ideal; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was much interested in this city. Its population was thirty thousand, and one third were Armenians; the rest were Koords and Turks, and there were hundreds of villages within the district. The place was proverbial for salubrity, and he saw enough to convince him that the leaven of the Gospel was working powerfully among the people. Moosh, an out-station of Bitlis, was occupied by the native pastor Simon. The truth had taken ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... are filled with the hidden meaning of the scriptures, and those who read closely and delve deeply into the works of the Bard of Avon will need no better moral teacher. His axioms and epigrams are used to-day as the proverbial philosophy of practical life, and the whole world is indebted to the sons of a carpenter and a butcher for the greatest pleasure and philosophy that has ever been ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... have felt the owner of the proverbial bull in the crockery shop—terror mingled with an overpowering sense of responsibility. All personal considerations are well-nigh merged in the realization of the danger which menaces her ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... the proverbial beaver, rushing goods outdoors where they could be taken in hand by others, and placed in temporary security. A couple of the local police force had by this time reached the scene, and they could be depended on to guard Mr. Briggs' ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... during the Great War, even during those early anxious days of 1914 and 1915, had its lighter side. The astonishing cheeriness of the British soldier under the most trying circumstances has become proverbial; but his officer shares this priceless characteristic with him and displays it even amid the deadening surroundings of the big building in Whitehall. The best laugh that we enjoyed during that ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... few minutes' walk of Messrs. G. H. Mumm's—past the imposing Gate of Mars, in the midst of lawns, parterres, and gravel-walks, where coquettish nursemaids and their charges stroll, accompanied by the proverbial piou-piou—is the principal establishment of M. Gustave Gibert, whose house claims to-day half a century of existence. On this spot formerly stood the feudal castle of the Archbishops of Reims, demolished nearly three centuries ago. By whom this stronghold ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... another. "I will have it this time," said Judith fiercely to herself, too engrossed in a desire to win from the Blues to remember the most elementary rules of the game; she caught the ball and ran, yes, just ran to the goal and threw. The proverbial good luck which attends the beginner was hers, but instead of the applause which Judith expected there was a burst of good-natured laughter. She had run with the ball and all in order to throw it into ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... Iliad before him, but the chivalrous romances of the Trojan war derived from Dares Phrygius. From this source also he took the love-intrigue of Troilus and Cressida, a story at one time so popular in England, that the name of Troilus had become proverbial for faithful and ill-requited love, and Cressida for female falsehood. The name of the agent between them, Pandarus, has even been adopted into the English language to signify those personages (panders) who dedicate themselves to similar services for inexperienced persons of ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... ever without such cause from you, as I will not suppose possible, you find my affections veering but a point, may I become a proverbial scoff for ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... coolly as though they were investigating alleged frauds by army contractors or were hearing evidence touching the damage to frontier settlers by an Indian raid. The intelligence and impartiality of investigations entrusted to army officers have become proverbial, and their report of the facts in the New Orleans riot arrested the attention of the North in an unprecedented degree. Every thing possible was done by the opponents of the Republican party to break the force of the damaging facts, but apparently without success. Indeed the people ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... many miracles—nothing less. My leather jacket and my tunic were cut to shreds by bits of shell, a bullet went through my cap and another grazed my head so close as to raise a red welt, but that same old "luck" which had become proverbial in the battalion, still held and I was ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... occupation that is attended with any risk of accident for either life or limb. Besides all these, it is also urged that in cities the careful inspection of their meat, and the peculiar social fabric of the family, the love and veneration for their aged, as well as their proverbial charity to their own poor and sick, and their provident habits and hygienic regulations imposed upon them by the Mosaic law, are all conditions that conspire to ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... for the most part to dissatisfied glances at the hard cloudless blue sky to windward, as it met their gaze morning after morning when they came on deck, to shrugs of the shoulders whenever the subject happened to be mentioned, and to scornful, sarcastic, or despondent allusions to the proverbial longevity and obstinacy of easterly winds in general. Except Mr Forester Dale, and he, I regret to say, made himself a perfect nuisance to everybody on board by his snappishness and irascibility. The weather was "beastly," the ship was "beastly," and his demeanour was such as to suggest ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... Behind is a wooded background, and before one are the meanderings of the Seine which in the summer sunlight is a panorama which is to be likened to no other on earth. Across the river bottom run the great tree-lined roadways, straight as the proverbial flight of the arrow, while on the horizon, looking from the celebrated terrace, one sees to-day the silhouetted outline of Paris with the Tour Eiffel and the dome of the Sacre Coeur ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... dead silence, in which you could almost have heard the proverbial pin drop, and an oldish man stepped forward and stood by the mats and baskets, his body wound round with "tapa" till it stuck out many feet from his body. The crowd broke silence with an ear-piercing yell. He then spoke, and was interrupted from time to time with cries of approval or the reverse, ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... to have taken place. But against this must be set the fact that in this area also we find two cockatoos, and on the Annan River two bees, arrayed against one another; unless it can be shown that these two birds are also proverbial foes, or that the Australian native had reached a point in his biological investigations at which he recognised that the presence of two closely allied species in a district involves a particularly keen struggle for existence (which they would, however, regard ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... MAN UNSEXED, by Mutilation or Masturbation. Eunuchs are proverbial for their cruelty and crafty and unsympathizing dispositions. Their mental powers are feeble and their physical strength is inferior. They lack courage and physical endurance. When a child is operated upon before the ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... question was called "Long" from the fact that it contained sixteen beds, eight on a side, all of which were occupied by members of the Upper Fourth. Skeat, the Sixth Form boy in charge, was ill, and had gone to the infirmary; and in the absence of the proverbial cat, the mice determined to get in as much play as possible, only stopping short at performances which might attract the attention of ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... recalled by observing citizens that just before noon—seven minutes to twelve, in fact—a small cloud no bigger than the proverbial hand crossed the sun hurriedly as if afraid to tarry. At that very instant a stranger drove up to the hitching-rack, bringing his sweat-covered horse to a standstill so abruptly in front of the marshal's nose that that dignitary's hat fell ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... be a proverbial expression implying inconstancy; but the origin of the phrase is unknown to all the commentators ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... all seems too altruistic ever to come in our lifetime; but, do you know, I am awfully optimistic about it. I really believe it will come so quickly, after it once gets a good start, that it will astound us. The proverbial snowball coming down the mountain side will be as nothing to it. Everyone will want to join the procession at once. No one will want to be left out for the finger of Scorn to accuse. And, strangely enough, I believe it will be the educated and rich, in fact the ones that are now the most selfish, ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... face the new misfortune with anything like a sober measure of equanimity. Imaginative to the degree which facilely transforms the suppositional into the real, he was still singularly free from superstition. Nevertheless, all the legends clustering about the proverbial slipperiness of ill-gotten gains paraded themselves insistently. It was only by the supremest effort of will that he could push them aside and address himself to the practical matter of getting well. That was the first thing to be considered; with or without money, he must relieve the Griersons ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... v, 439 ff., manes exite paterni; cf. the Greek proverbial expression [Greek: thyraze kares] (Suidas, s.v. ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... is worthy of especial notice, is, that conscience is much more readily acted upon by examples, than by precepts.—In communicating a knowledge of duty, this principle in Nature has become proverbial; but it is not less true with respect to the executive powers, in approving or reproving that which is right or wrong. It is the prerogative of conscience to excite us to approve or condemn the conduct of others, as well ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... Luperci were the priests of Lupercus. Catiline was the author of the conspiracy of B.C. 63. Cicero, the famous orator, was consul for that year and frustrated the plot. Cato the younger died at Utica in 49 B.C. In the Roman writers Catiline is always the proverbial scoundrel and Cato is always taken as the model ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... Celaire was wearing her famous diamonds, which shone through the gloom like pin-pricks of fire. Garda Desmaines, the wonderful Garda, sat next to her host, her bosom and hair on fire with jewels, yet with the most wonderful light of all glowing in her eyes. A famous actor, who had thrown his proverbial reticence to the winds, kept his immediate neighbors in a state of semi-hysterical mirth. The clink of wine glasses, the laughter of beautiful women, the murmur of cultivated voices, rising and swelling through the faint, mysterious gloom, made ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... The fair Marquise was more than a mere leader of wit and fashion. If she set the mode in the shape of a petticoat, or devised the sumptuous splendours of a garden fete, her talent was not merely devoted to things frivolous and trivial. She had the proverbial 'esprit des Mortemart'. Armed with beauty and sarcasm, she won a leading place for herself at Court, and held it in ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... "San Josef" at St. Vincent, and was afterwards his flag-captain at the Nile. When her approach was reported to the admiral, he exclaimed gleefully, "Here comes Berry! Now we shall have a battle;" for Berry, having been in more fleet actions than any captain in the British Navy,[131] had a proverbial reputation for such luck. The event did not belie the prediction. Five days later, on the 18th of the month, Nelson noted in his diary: "Fine weather, wind easterly; the combined fleets cannot have finer weather to put to sea;" and the ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... skylight between the shadows, falls a clear, still radiance, like beams from an eye of blessing; and, within the circle of that divine illumination, beauty and goodness, truth and love, purity and cheerfulness blend like primal colors into the clear harmony of light. The author of Proverbial Philosophy has a passage not unworthy of note in this connection, when he speaks of the train which ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... nevertheless, that if they will ask themselves truthfully whether they find it unpleasant to dwell thus on their sorrow, they will be compelled to answer "No." Tears are as sweet as laughter to some natures. The proverbial Englishman, we know from old chronicler Froissart, takes his pleasures sadly, and the Englishwoman goes a step further and takes her pleasures in ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... not only living within our income, but saving something for the proverbial 'rainy day,'" Mrs. Clair said one evening, when Mr. Murray dropped in. "We have been here only three months, and have done ever so much better than I expected, thanks to your good advice; and we are all ever so much happier than I ever hoped to be ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... Louis Kossuth, Jenny Lind; and may be an engraving or two: Rebecca at the Well, Moses smiting the rock, Joseph's servants finding the cup in Benjamin's sack. There would be a center table, with books of a tranquil sort on it: The Whole Duty of Man, Baxter's Saints' Rest, Fox's Martyrs, Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy, bound copies of The Missionary Herald and of Father Damon's Seaman's Friend. A melodeon; a music stand, with 'Willie, We have Missed You', 'Star of the Evening', 'Roll on Silver Moon', 'Are We Most There', 'I Would ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... independence of a drunken shoemaker is proverbial, and Morrison's meek spirit soared into lordly arrogance with his earliest cups. The first warning which the community had of his change of attitude was the conspicuous and even defiant closure of his shop, and the scornful rejection of custom, however urgent or necessitous. All Equity ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... the hog is called in Italian gambone, whence our English word gambon or gammon. Confounding things that differ, many think that 'gamon' in the game has the same meaning, and therefore they say—'he saved his gamon or bacon,' which is absurd, although it is a proverbial phrase of sufficient emphasis. The word Backgamon seems to be derived from the very nature of the game itself, namely, back-game-on, that is, when one of your pieces is taken, you must go back—begin again—and ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... Americans were; and unless we happened to meet a band of Chukchis who had seen them, we might wander over those desolate plains for a month without coming across the stove-pipe, which was the only external sign of their subterranean habitation. It would be far worse than the proverbial search for a needle in ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... such a happy-go-lucky, care-free collegian, for now, when he was serious, his comrades refused to believe him to be in such a state. However, quiet was obtained at last, thanks to the fact that the youths possessed all the curiosity of the proverbial cat who died thereby, and the sunny Senior plunged earnestly into his famous speech, that was destined, at old Bannister, to rank with that of Demosthenes "On The Crown," or any ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... and family waving me farewell. It was an insignificant incident over which I merely smiled at the time, but five days later I had every cause to bless those parting snaps. One often hears about life hanging by the proverbial thread, but not many lives have hung upon two snapshot photographs of all that is dearest to one, and a few inches of photographic film. Yet it was so in my case. But for those two tiny parting pictures and the unexposed fraction of film ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... essentially a strong man, and remarkably well posted in everything, both political and social, that occurs in the state, mixing far more freely than his brother with the English, towards whom his courtesy is proverbial. ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... one equally defiant. It is a huge serpent of the 'Whip snake' species, which never gives way, but always takes a bold and defiant stand. It took its stand about fifty yards ahead, ready for battle, its head, and about a yard of its length, in semi-erect posture, and displaying every sign of its proverbial enmity to Adam's race. It has no poison, but its mode of attack is still more horrible, by throwing itself with electric speed in coils around its antagonist, tight as the strongest cord, and lashing with a yard of its tail, till it puts its combatant to ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... say he was aware of the proverbial character of the phenomenon. He was a very eccentric man. He treated his dogs as friends, and buried them with ceremony. He quarrelled with the cure of his parish, who remarked that he could not take ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... a fine day in the month of August, a light, fairy-like craft was fanning her way before a gentle westerly air into what is called the Canal of Piombino, steering easterly. The rigs of the Mediterranean are proverbial for their picturesque beauty and quaintness, embracing the xebeque, the felucca, the polacre, and the bombarda, or ketch; all unknown, or nearly so, to our own seas; and occasionally the lugger. The latter, a species of craft, however, much less common in the waters of Italy than in the Bay ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... positions in the shadow, one to either side, almost afraid to breathe, I cursing because the rifle quivered in my two hands like the proverbial aspen leaf. The prospect of shooting a white man—even such a thorough-paced blackguard white as Schillingschen—made me as nervous as a school-girl at ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... mots le corbeau ne se sent pas de joie" (At these words, the crow is beside himself with delight).—To realise the full force of this proverbial expression we must have ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... Limitation, but boasted of having taught Taglioni to dance an Irish jig, and declared that she had created the Irish novel, though in the next breath she would say that she was a child when Miss Edgeworth was a grown woman.' Her blunders were proverbial, as when she asked in all simplicity, 'Who was Jeremy Taylor?' and on being presented to Mrs. Sarah Austin, complimented her on having written ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... you sit still, and I'll clean house; it needs it badly. Such mud as that boy brings in I never saw, and I'm so lame, too!' Jerry responded, and Arthur recognized Mrs. Crawford, whose tidiness and cleanliness were proverbial, and for the next half hour he watched the little actress as she limped around the room exactly as Mrs. Crawford limped with her rheumatism, sweeping, dusting, and scolding a little, both to Harold and Jerry, the latter of whom ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... remained thoughtful. She knew him well, this Isidore, the son of Virginie the greengrocer. His proverbial virtue had been the delight of Gisors for several years, and served as an entertaining theme of conversation in the town, and of amusement to the young girls who loved to tease him. He was past twenty-one, was tall, awkward, slow and timid; helped his mother ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the Sun stood reared aloft on columns, glittering with gold and precious stones, while polished ivory formed the ceilings, and silver the doors. The workmanship surpassed the material; [Footnote: See Proverbial Expressions.] for upon the walls Vulcan had represented earth, sea, and skies, with their inhabitants. In the sea were the nymphs, some sporting in the waves, some riding on the backs of fishes, while others sat upon the rocks and dried their sea-green hair. Their faces were not all alike, nor ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... in a practical joke, such as Nature often plays on the children of the wilds. One calm, dark night, while they were busy in the grass, a brown owl, hunting for mice, sailed slowly by. Now, the brown owl, in spite of proverbial wisdom gained during a long life in the dim seclusion of the woods, is occasionally apt to blunder. Her character, indeed, seems full of quaint contradictions. As she floats through the moonlight and the shadows of the beech-aisles of Dollan, she appears to be a large bird, with a philosophic ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... Divinity Physic, and Law; and it cannot be denied that in this matter the sarcasms of the multitude are often sustained by the indisputable evidence of history. The greed of the clergy for tithes and dues is not more widely proverbial than the doctor's thirst for fees, or the advocate's readiness to support injustice for the sake of gain. Of Guyllyam of Horseley, physician to Charles VI. of France, Froissart says, "All his dayes he was ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... civilized spectator to see how many people can be stowed away to sleep in one small igloo and under one blanket; but the proverbial illustration of a box of sardines would almost represent a skirmish line in comparison. Each one is rolled up into a little ball, or else arms, legs and bodies are so inextricably interwoven, that it would be impossible for any but the owners to unravel them. ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... a half-starved German at Cambridge named Render, who had been long enough in England to forget German, but not long enough to learn English. This worthy, in spite of his deficiencies, was a voluminous translator of his native literature, and it became a proverbial saying among his intimates respecting a bad translation that it was ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... princess chose her moment, and took occasion to beg a boon of the Count of Foix, whose gallantry was proverbial; but, just as he was on the point of granting it without condition, a momentary light made him cautious "Ah! madam," said he, "I am a little man, and a poor bachelor, who have not the power to make great gifts; but that which you ask, if it be not of more value than fifty ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... from books translated in his time; or were such easy coincidences of thought, as will happen to all who consider the same subjects; or such remarks on life or axioms of morality as float in conversation, and are transmitted through the world in proverbial sentences. ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... marriage in nine cases out of ten looks like madness. Haydn's case was not the tenth. His salary from Count Morzin was only 20 pounds with board and lodging; he was not making anything substantial by his compositions; and his teaching could not have brought him a large return. Yet, with the proverbial rashness of his class, he must needs take a wife, and that, too, in spite, of the fact that Count Morzin never kept a married man in his service! "To my mind," said Mozart, "a bachelor lives only half a life." It is true enough; but Mozart had little reason to bless the "better ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... of the Carthaginian race was proverbial, but even among them he was remarkable. His head was well placed on his shoulders; his carriage was upright and commanding; his forehead lofty; his eye, though soft and gentle at ordinary times, was said to be terrible in time of battle. His head was ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... busy place, was soon rivaling the proverbial beehive. Mrs. Reist, to whom sentiment was ever a vital, holy thing, to be treasured and clung to throughout the years, had long ago, in Amanda's childhood, begun the preparation for the time of the girl's marriage. After the ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... de Wette, Maurer, Knobel, and, in substance, Hofmann also) attempt to explain the fundamental passage by the derived ones, and force upon Niphal the signification of Hithpael; so that the sense would be only that a great and, as it were, proverbial happiness and prosperity belonged to Abraham: "Holding up this name as a pattern, most of the eastern nations will comprehend all blessings in these or similar words: 'God bless thee as He blessed Abraham.'" But this explanation is, according to the usus loquendi, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... for Fil's spelling was proverbial in the form, and was often of a purely phonetic character. Miss Strong had periodical crusades to improve it, but generally gave them up as a bad job, and recommended constant use of a ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... end by some epigrammatic phrase which will fasten it firmly in the reader's memory. For instance, in Milton's sonnet On his Blindness, the central idea is the glory of patience; and the last line drives this main idea home in words so pithily adapted that they have become almost proverbial. ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... Fauchelevent offered and Father Mestienne paid. An offer of a drink was the evident result of the novel situation created by the new grave-digger, and it was necessary to make this offer, but the old gardener left the proverbial quarter of an hour named after Rabelais in the dark, and that not unintentionally. As for himself, Fauchelevent did not wish to ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... was modest and retiring in manner, affable in disposition, and benevolent to a fault. He was most beloved where best known. In business circles his integrity was proverbial, and his financial ability everywhere acknowledged. Few men have died so sincerely regretted by those ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... and maintain their credit, for the character and credit of the several States form a part of the character and credit of the whole country. The resources of the country are abundant, the enterprise and activity of our people proverbial, and we may well hope that wise legislation and prudent administration by the respective governments, each acting within its own sphere, ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... had struck eleven and then twelve, and yet no sign of David or Anna, the Squire had reached for his fur cap and announced his intention of "going to look for 'em." But like the proverbial worm, the wife of his bosom had turned, and with all the determination of a ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... was forlorn there was now the stamp of desolation. The beds which had been seeded or planted a month before, and which should now have been weeded, trimmed, and hoed, were growing with an untended recklessness that had all the proverbial resemblance to moral breakdown. In the cucumber-house the vines had become rusty and limp, sagging from the twines on which they climbed in debauched indifference to sightliness. The roof of the hothouse ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... found his sister, no longer the magnificent queen whose rich toilets were as proverbial as her beauty; but a lovely, unpretending woman, without rouge, without jewels, clad in a dress of India muslin, which was confined at the waist by a simple sash ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... been written of life on a cocoa estate; and all who have enjoyed the proverbial hospitality of a West Indian or Ceylon planter, highly praise the conditions of their life. The description of an estate in the northern hills of Trinidad will serve as an example. The other industry of this island is sugar, in cultivating which the coloured labourers work in the broiling ...
— The Food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa • Brandon Head
... to the travellers they met; but no one could answer them. The first messenger appeared on the terrace and announced to the Pharaoh that Tahoser could not be found. The Pharaoh stretched out his sceptre, and the messenger fell dead, in spite of the proverbial hardness of the Egyptian skull. A second came up; he stumbled against the body of his comrade stretched on the slabs; he trembled, for he saw ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... the prisoner bad-tempered. She did not need to prove anything of the sort concerning John Borg. They all knew his terrible fits of anger; they all knew that his temper was proverbial in the community; that it had prevented him having friends and had made him many enemies. Was it not very probable, therefore, that the masked men were two such enemies? As to what particular motive actuated these two men, she could not say; but it rested with them, ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... along the "benches," as the banks of a stream or hillsides are called by miners, and having a woman's proverbial curiosity, after my work was done I climbed the hill to investigate. The prospectors had left after digging a hole about six feet deep and four square, evidently having satisfied themselves as to what the ground contained. Into this hole I descended to feel of the cold, ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... symbolic way of a people much given to proverbial wisdom and the dark uses of allegory. He might have meant much or nothing. As it happened, the Count de Sarrion meant ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... writing for five years but am a mood writer of the worst type. The mood comes at such uncertain times that I seem to be absolutely at the mercy of caprice. This might not in itself be a misfortune but writing is my only calling and I suffer the proverbial torments of lost spirits when I am idle. The necessity of driving myself to every piece of work, aggravated by the fact that my parents allowed my constitutional inertness to have full play, has hitherto prevented me from forming any regular habit of labor. ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... whose social career had been like that of the proverbial rocket shot up into the zenith. But a life of mere amusement was not the fashion in the circle in which she lived, and her active brain and easily aroused sympathies made her quick to ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... was the same rotund, pudgy old fellow—with the long white beard and the laughing face—that children love, and on his broad back was the proverbial pack of presents. His wife, in fur from head to foot, wore a frilled fur cap, and, safely hidden behind her spectacled, rosy-cheeked mask, looked the veritable mother of all the little Santa Clauses attributed to her. The children stood silently by in their picturesque ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd
... succession. Of the permanent residents only the Duchess, always of High Church leanings, had of late yielded to his blandishments. She was fairly hooked. Madame Steynlin, a lady of Dutch extraction whose hats were proverbial, was uncompromisingly Lutheran. The men were past redemption, all save the Commissioner who, however, was under bad influences and an incurable wobbler, anyhow. Eames, the scholar, cared for nothing but his books. Keith, a rich eccentric who owned one of ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... as flat as the proverbial pancake—a dead monotony of cultivated alluvium, square mile upon square mile of wheat, rice, vetch, sugar-cane, and other crops, amidst which mango groves, bamboo clumps, palms, and hamlets are scattered promiscuously. ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... place, and they were so small, and so wild, capable of living in very tiny huts or caves, and so primitive, not building regular villages as the other Africans do, that as Ned said, they were as hard to locate as the proverbial flea. ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... the inclination and persistency necessary for the effort to transcribe the Bible. The cloisters of those days were the chief seats of learning and centers of lower education, but even these asylums of piety sheltered many an ignorant monk and others who were afflicted with the proverbial monks' malady—laziness. It is to the credit of the pious members of the Roman Church in that unhappy age that they manifested such a laudable interest in the Bible. The achievement of copying the entire Bible with one's own hand in that age is so great that it palliates some of the glaring ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... experimenters were detected in the most shameless and determined impostures." This sentence fell among the savants like a bomb, and "great was the fall thereof." Some have described it as an ad captandum vulgus use of words, and others have called it rash, and unduly sceptical. It is proverbial that doctors disagree, and it would be wonderful indeed if they were of one mind on the ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... boy," he said, "to trifle with the truth is always unpleasant. Besides, you are a Fentolin, and our love of truth is proverbial. But there are times, you know, when for the good of others we must sacrifice our scruples. So you told Mr. ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... certainly not disadvantageous to the Porte, which seized the opportunity of annexing to its dominions some large slices of Hungarian and Venetian territory; but their ostensible object remained unaccomplished, and the proverbial salutation of the time, "God save you from the Uzcoques!" was still on the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... little cigar-case at one end. Dove, as a matter of course, and without weighing the question at all, slipped a couple into his pocket. After doing this he did not feel quite so virtuous, nor so like the proverbial British workman; he jingled some of Daisy's sovereigns in his pocket, and laughed when they made a pleasant sound. Still eagerly peering at all the articles on the mantel-piece his quick eyes presently detected amongst a heap of rubbish and odds and ends Noel's valuable signet-ring; it was of ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... remain as they were left on the morning in which these illustrious men were led to their execution. On the dingy walls of stone are still recorded those sentiments which they had inscribed there, and which indicate the nature of those emotions which animated and sustained them. These proverbial maxims and heroic expressions, gleaned from French tragedies or the classic page, were written with the blood which they had drawn from their own veins. In one place ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... how fast the terror and ruin of the massacre are already burning into glory around the victim? Far happier this fate than to have lived to be wished away; to have watched the decay of his own faculties; to have seen—perhaps even be—the proverbial ingratitude of statesmen; to have seen mean men preferred. Had he not lived long enough to keep the greatest promise that ever man made to his fellow men,—the practicable abolition of slavery? He had seen Tennessee, Missouri, and Maryland emancipate their slaves. He had seen Savannah, Charleston, ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... of temper were almost proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from ignorance of his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his sonnets, which could scarcely have been known to Mr. Pope, when he asserted, that our great bard 'grew immortal ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... the mind if held to, and the body if cast off." Urged by the darkness and the silence of his companion, the rein of his speech had loosened. In that moment he was not Chilcote the member for East Wark, whose moods and silences were proverbial, but Chilcote the man whose mind ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... sleep. No expression of embarrassment detracted from the candor of her face, or the calm look of eyes immortalized long since in the sublime works of Raphael; here were the same grace, the same repose as in those Virgins, and now proverbial. There was a delightful contrast between the cheeks of that face on which sleep had, as it were, given high relief to a superabundance of life, and the antiquity of the heavy window with its clumsy shape and black sill. Like those day-blowing flowers, which in the early ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... which verbal tradition hath delivered down to us under the title of proverbs. It were to be wished that, instead of filling their pages with the fabulous theology of the pagans, our modern poets would think it worth their while to enrich their works with the proverbial sayings of their ancestors. Mr Dryden ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... having exhausted her experiments on the frock, the bonnet, and the hoop petticoat bought for her in London and sent like the proverbial pig in a poke, had taken to watching the Yankee peddling sloop, which, having lain for an hour at Patterson's on the Virginia shore, was now heading for the Browne place. It was pretty to see the sloop heel over under a beam wind ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... impulsive Annie Forest was the most popular girl in the school. She was always in scrapes—she was scarcely ever out of hot water—her promises of amendment were truly like the proverbial pie-crust; but she was so lovable, so kind-hearted, so saucy and piquante and pretty, that very few could resist the nameless charm which she possessed. The little ones adored Annie, who was kindness itself to them; the bigger girls could not help ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... sexual impress mostly received in early childhood often shows itself in the selection of a fetich, as Binet first asserted, and as was later proven by many illustrations,—a thing which may be placed parallel to the proverbial attachment to a first love in the normal ("On revient toujours a ses premiers amours"). Such a connection is especially seen in cases with only fetichistic determinations of the sexual object. The significance of early sexual impressions will be ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... little progress till the time we have reached, failed to arrest the quick decline of the universities both in the numbers and learning of their students. Those at Oxford amounted to only a fifth of the scholars who had attended its lectures a century before, and Oxford Latin became proverbial for a jargon in which the very tradition of grammar had been lost. Literature, which had till now rested mainly in the hands of the clergy, came almost to an end. Of all its nobler forms history alone lingered on; but it lingered in compilations or extracts ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... and New Testaments which a clever boy would be certain to acquire either in the schoolroom or at church on Sundays. Shakespeare quotes or adapts biblical phrases with far greater frequency than he makes allusion to episodes in biblical history. But many such phrases enjoyed proverbial currency, and others, which were more recondite, were borrowed from Holinshed's 'Chronicles' and secular works whence he drew his plots. As a rule his use of scriptural phraseology, as of scriptural history, suggests youthful reminiscence ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... "My virtue has been its own reward—and punishment. If I had allowed you to go your way to the proverbial dogs, after whose society gilded youths like yourself appear to be always hankering, I should not be sitting here with cold water running down my back and surrounded by Nature in her gloomiest and dampest aspects. ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... but very tough stomachs, which would require ample time to assimilate the food I intended to offer. If this were somewhat crude, that would be no objection whatever: they always mistake their mental gripings for the process of digestion. Why, bless your souls! I have known Tupper's "Proverbial Philosophy" to fill one of them to repletion, for the space of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... is a woman's danger to be petty and mean, and step-mothers are proverbial all the world over, and this one's heart was not as her first smiles were. As the days and weeks grew into months, the step-mother began to treat the motherless girl unkindly and to try and come between the ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... Romans indignantly complaining, Brennus in a scoffing and insulting manner pulled off his sword and belt, and threw them both into the scales; and when Sulpicius asked what that meant, "What should it mean," says he, "but woe to the conquered?" which afterwards became a proverbial saying. As for the Romans, some were so incensed that they were for taking their gold back again, and returning to endure the siege. Others were for passing by and dissembling a petty injury, and not to account that the indignity of the thing lay in paying ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... With proverbial German thoroughness, uncle instructed me in all the tricks and secrets of his profession. He had found that the Mexicans were good buyers, if handled scientifically, for they would never leave the store until they had spent all their money. Therefore, ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... genii always managed to make everything pleasant. It implies the faculty, which a few of us possess, of finding whatever we want turn up accidentally at the exact right moment. Well, I believe I must have been born with serendipity in my mouth, in place of the proverbial silver spoon, for wherever I go, all things seem to come out ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... cannot persuade this illustrious depredator to take the command of our police force, that body of life-assurers and property-protectors which has proved so singularly ineffective as a preventive service in the present case. On the well-known proverbial principle we might hope for the best results under Mr. Starlight's intelligent supervision. We must not withhold our approval as to one item of success which the force has scored. Starlight himself and a half-caste henchman have been cleverly ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... things. Poetry has a double origin in joy and utility. The "Thirty days hath September" rhyme of the English child suggests the way in which men must have turned to verse in prehistoric times as a preservative of facts, of proverbial wisdom, of legend and narrative. Sir Henry Newbolt, I gather from his New Study of English Poetry, would deny the name of poetry to all verse that is not descended from the choric dance. In my ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... and passing suddenly to a child's tears and sobbing. This solitary virtue has breathed into the Rubaiyat life. The Bible is a series of books bound in a single volume, because all relate to a single theme: history, biography, letters, proverbial philosophy, pure idyls, lofty eloquence, elegiac poetry, ethics, legal codes, memorabilia, commentaries on campaigns more influential on the world's destiny than Caesar's, epic poetry, lyrics, and a sublime drama. The Bible is not a ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... man, was my grandfather. The proverbial "threescore years and ten" was an old story with him, and even the "fourscore" awarded to the strong was receding into the distance. Yet there he sat, in his old straight-back chair, hale and bright, as he looked round on us his descendants, sons and ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... is proverbial," said Sir Charles suavely. "The King knows that while he is at the helm in Virginia, the colony is on the high road to that era of peace and prosperity which his majesty so ardently desires—for his tax-paying people. And I have thought more than once of late ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... flowing upstream. A half-proverbial expression implying that the world was being turned upside-down, when such a person could prosecute ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... Paris studio, would put the letters half-read, in his pocket, and would immediately forget all about them. After all, he couldn't interfere with Barty; he was the man at the helm, and mustn't be talked to. Also it was idiotic to keep a dog and bark yourself. Proverbial philosophy is a recognised sedative; Larry gave himself a dose or two, and straightway forgot Cousin Dick, forgot Ireland, forgot even that gratifying nomination of himself as Nationalist candidate for ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... hostilities commenced with an attack on them. While waiting I made the acquaintance of Marko, whom I found to be one of the most interesting characters I met in Montenegro. His courage and resource in stratagem were proverbial in the principality. I had a capital Ross field-glass, and amused him one day by showing its powers. He had never seen a telescope before, and his delight over it was childlike. "Why," he exclaimed in rapture, "this is worth a thousand men." "Then ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... our privies, but Englishmen? Not to mention their original treachery to the Britons, that hired by them to defend them they turned upon them in spite of their oaths and engagements, they are to this day given to treachery and murder.' The lying Saxon was, according to this authority, a proverbial expression. ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... Joe, smilingly addressing the house, "often wonder how we actors and professional people eat. It is proverbial, you know, that actors are always hungry. Now I am going to show you that it is easier for us to get food than it is ...
— Joe Strong on the Trapeze - or The Daring Feats of a Young Circus Performer • Vance Barnum
... formed, in hopes of seeing some name, or date, scratched upon the surface; some clue, mayhap, to the information we so dearly longed for,—the route taken by Franklin on sailing hence, whether to Cape Walker or up Wellington Channel. But, no; the silent cliff bore no mark; by some fatality, the proverbial love for marking their names, or telling their tales, on every object, which I have ever found in seamen, was here an exception, and I turned to my vessel, after three unprofitable walks on Beechey Island, with the sad conviction on my mind, that, ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... gentleman wish you to go home with them, Camille," said the Mother Superior, in the language of the convent. Her voice was kind and gentle apparently; but the child, accustomed to its various inflections, detected a steely ring behind its softness, like the proverbial iron hand in ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... du Barry, having nothing further to add, I pray God to take you to His powerful and holy keeping." After this pleasantry the king, delighted at the gay termination of a somewhat serious scene, went, or rather vanished; for to use a proverbial expression, he ran like a thief. As soon as I was alone with my sister-in-law, I told her all that had passed. "I see," said she, "that the king is fearful of offending the duc de Choiseul, and giving annoyance to his daughters. But a step must be determined on which ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... horrible in the sight. I am glad I have seen it once. Amidst all these terrifying circumstances, I endeavoured to compose my mind. It was not easy to do it; for all the stories that I had heard of the dangerous sailing among the Hebrides, which is proverbial, came full upon my recollection. When I thought of those who were dearest to me, and would suffer severely, should I be lost, I upbraided myself, as not having a sufficient cause for putting myself in such danger. Piety afforded ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... Government, and the Danish people, and we feel persuaded that they will not follow the example of the National Convention. In Denmark, love of justice and respect for the sacredness of the rights of property are too deeply implanted in the soil to be easily rooted out. The proverbial honesty of Denmark is as firm as the courage, loyalty, and gallantry of which her sons have so ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... were the delight of Bellamy's! He said that Fox and Pitt reminded him of Hogarth's Idle and Industrious Apprentices. When asked by some one, as he sauntered out of the house—'Is the House up?' he replied; 'No, but Burke is.' The length of Burke's elaborate spoken essays was proverbial, and obtained for him the name of the 'Dinner-bell.' Fox was talking one day at Brookes' of the advantageous peace he had made with France, and that he had even induced that country to give up the gum trade to England. ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... on the stage, when chance provided her with another resource, which enabled her to reassert her position in society. She became a secret police agent, and soon was one of their most valuable members. In addition to the proverbial charm and wit of a Polish woman, she also possessed high linguistic attainments, and spoke Polish, Russian, French, German, English, and Italian, with almost equal fluency and correctness. Then she had that encyclopedic polish which impresses people much more than the most ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... gay girls had just gathered in one of the pleasant and spacious recreation rooms and were chattering like the proverbial flock of magpies—exchanging merry greetings after their vacation; comparing notes on studies, classes and roommates; discussing the advent of new teachers, pupils and improvements, when a tall, gracious woman of, perhaps, thirty-five years suddenly appeared in the doorway, ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... things stirred up; making the most of the material at hand. It wasn't that he minded the grind and the responsibility of his work. He would gladly have shouldered more in his zeal to push ahead. It was the thought that all work and no play was making him the proverbial dull boy, and that he would be an old man before his time, if he went on without anything to relieve the deadly monotony. The spirit of youth in him was crying out ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... set out alone for a tramp up the mountain road in which the two men had been shot down. A number of men under the direction of the sheriff were scouring the lofty timberland for the deadly marksmen. He knew it would turn out to be as futile as the proverbial effort to find the ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... At this time Washington was in the prime and vigour of life, and his fame and deportment were such that he could command reverence even from the most fanatical part of the American troops, who were disposed to own no other leader except "the Lord of Hosts." His bravery was proverbial, and his after operations sustained his fame. It was immediately after the battle of Bunker's Hill that he was appointed commander-in-chief, and when he arrived at head-quarters in Cambridge, he found the blockading army considerably discouraged by the defeat sustained, and otherwise ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... marches" between the Church and State. With level-headed common-sense upon both sides it might have been done. Unfortunately, in the struggle our most prominent national characteristics, instead of being combined, got opposed to one another. The proverbial "canniness" of the Scottish nation was all upon the one side; the equally proverbial perfervidum ingenium was all upon the other. Led by the latter feeling, the Church resolved to fall back on her own inherent rights and to get quit of Patronage by a side wind. In 1834 ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... child. It has been a rather common impression that if one knows a certain field of subject-matter, he will surely be able to teach it to others. But nothing could be further from the truth than such an assumption. Indeed, it is proverbial that the great specialists are the most wretched teachers of their subjects. The nature of the child's mental powers, the order of their unfoldment, the evolution of his interests, the incentives that appeal to him, the danger points ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... almost say always—the trying member of the family is trying only because we make her so by our attitude toward her, let her be grandmother, mother, or maiden aunt. Even the proverbial mother-in-law grows less difficult as our attitude toward her is relieved of the strain of detesting everything she does, and expecting to detest everything that she is going to do. With every trying friend we have, if we yield ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... indifferent or resigned with regard to immediate reputation. Through all the works of Chaucer there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity which makes it almost impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in the author himself. Shakespeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were almost proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from ignorance of his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his Sonnets, which could scarcely have been known to Pope [9], when he ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... cigars lay in a little cigar-case at one end. Dove, as a matter of course, and without weighing the question at all, slipped a couple into his pocket. After doing this he did not feel quite so virtuous, nor so like the proverbial British workman; he jingled some of Daisy's sovereigns in his pocket, and laughed when they made a pleasant sound. Still eagerly peering at all the articles on the mantel-piece his quick eyes presently detected amongst a heap of rubbish and odds and ends Noel's ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... them. The first messenger appeared on the terrace and announced to the Pharaoh that Tahoser could not be found. The Pharaoh stretched out his sceptre, and the messenger fell dead, in spite of the proverbial hardness of the Egyptian skull. A second came up; he stumbled against the body of his comrade stretched on the slabs; he trembled, for he saw ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... already being fed in another. Had my prisoners been of almost any one of the other seventy-one nationalities I should not have thought of letting them out of my sight. But the Zone Spaniard's respect for law is proverbial. ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... spirits—certain to be insulted by a base and prostitute gang of lurking assassins who stab in the dark, and whose poisoned daggers he had already experienced. Ritson himself was a fairly venomous critic, and the "Ritsonian" style has become proverbial. Nowadays authors do not usually die of criticism, not even susceptible poets. Critics can still be severe enough, but they are just and generous, and never descend to that scurrilous personal abuse of authors which inflicted such severe ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... an approving assent to this. "A widow's only concern should be to refrain from attracting notice," she said, as though quoting from a private book of proverbial ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... launch of the liner Bismarck last week, the bottle of wine—which was thrown by the Countess Hannah von Bismarck missed the vessel, whereupon the Kaiser hauled back the bottle, and with his proverbial good luck hit ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various
... His liberality is proverbial, and after a long and successful life, during which he has received high salaries, he is not rich. He seldom refuses to play gratis for any really worthy object, and the anecdotes of his kindness toward his pupils ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... may well be conceived, therefore, there was material enough to supply, not merely a joyous evening, but also a happy lifetime, to more than as many people as that spacious apartment could contain. The company seemed to renew their youth; while that pattern and proverbial standard of innocence, the Child Unborn, frolicked to and fro among them, communicating his own unwrinkled gayety to all who had the good fortune ...
— A Select Party (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... consists rather of a series of gulps than of articulate or intelligible statements. But then mark the singular courage and audacity of the whole proceeding. There are traditions still in the House of Commons of the marvellously stimulating effect upon followers of leaders, who were proverbial for their oratorical impotence. Everybody remembers the scornful description of Castlereagh which Byron gave to the world; and yet it has been said in some memoirs that the moment Castlereagh stood up and adjusted his waistcoat, ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... as it admitted of Bacon, in his history of the reign, tells us that "he was a comely youth, not without some extraordinary dignity of grace and aspect." The fashion in which he retailed his sufferings, pleaded his youth, and appealed to the proverbial generosity of the Irish people, to protect a hapless prince, robbed of his throne and his birthright, seems to have produced an immense effect. Kildare, there is reason to suspect, was privy to ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... Paul and his father into the boat, where was waiting a negro as black as the proverbial black hat, a local fisherman who had taken up sponge growing, and who, while shrewd enough for a business ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... stomachs, and hardly a good meal in a week, that God Almighty is very kind to his creatures, in this respect, as well as in all others in making much not necessary to the support of life; when three parts in four of His creatures, if it were, would not know how to obtain it. It puts me in mind of two proverbial sentences which are full of ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... of proverbial sayings useful in finding expressions for the wisdom found in fables are Christy, Proverbs, Maxims, and Phrases of All Ages; Hazlitt, English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases; ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... attention. Like the wise modern teacher they made no distinction between the religious and the secular. Everything that influenced man's acts and ideals possessed for them profound religious import. While the proverbial epigrammatic form of their teaching was not conducive to a logical or complete treatment of their theme, yet in a series of concise, dramatic maxims they dealt with almost every phase of man's domestic, economic, legal, and social life. They presented ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... wanderings lead you southward. My hacienda lies but twenty miles from here, and from this moment, it is placed at your disposition. Not in the polite terms of the proverbial Spanish etiquette which presents the visitor with everything and yet nothing at all, but actually. Indeed, I shall expect to see you there soon. The life will interest ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... right time they came leisurely up, and gravely taking their proper place, marched on with their proverbial sagacity—waiting outside Westminster Hall, whilst the lord mayor swore to do his duty, as quietly as though they were at home—and afterward left the procession at Blackfriars Bridge, to go to their own quarters and eat their well-earned dinner. It is to be hoped that the lord mayor ordered ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... gone down into East London to give six months to slum work, he had remained two years without showing any inclination to give it up. Sometimes he lived at the flat, and sometimes he was lost for a week at a time somewhere east of St. Paul's, where one might as well have looked for him as for the proverbial ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... distant region, as is the moon. We say too, a man is "out of his head," that is, his mind being in another man's head, must of course be out of his own. To "know no more than the man in the moon," is a proverbial expression for ignorance, and is without meaning, unless it be considered to refer to the Glonglims. We say that an insane man is "distracted;" by which we mean that his mind is drawn two different ways. So also, we call a lunatic a man beside himself, ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... had learned—in crises, such as the present—to restrain the superabundant vitality they had inherited. If their cheekbones were a little too high, their Delft blue eyes a little too small, their colour was of the proverbial rose-leaves and cream. Gene Hollister's difficulty was to know which to marry. They were nice girls,—of that there could be no doubt; there was no false modesty in their attitude toward "society"; ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... for when, by a most unfortunate series of events, suspicion was forcibly directed toward Jim, she failed to exonerate him by acknowledging her own guilt; and but for the merest accident, which brought about the proverbial "Murder will out" and fixed the crime without a shadow of doubt upon her, would have suffered the innocent boy to bear all the penalties and disgrace which by ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... was taking place in the front parlour it would not have jarred her from her dreams. For Gaylord, resplendent in ice-cream flannels, and Trudy, wearing an unpaid-for black-satin dress with red collar and cuffs, were both busier than the proverbial beaver planning their wedding. It was to be an informal and unexpected little affair, being the direct result of the Gorgeous Girl's demands as ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... significant. The Martial judge who said that "the best evidence was lost because colour could not be tested or blushes analysed," would have passed sentence at once. But if Eive's air of innocent unconsciousness and childish indifference were not sincere, it merited the proverbial praise of consummate affectation, "more golden than the sun and whiter than snow." Eveena's momentary glance at once drew mine upon this "pet child," but neither disturbed her. Nor did she overact her part. "Eive," said Enva one day, "never salts ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... Humble Pie.—the proverbial expression of "eating humble pie," explained by A.G., will be found also explained in the same manner in the Appendix to Forby's Vocabulary, where it is suggested that the correct orthography would be "umble pie," without the aspirate. Bailey, in his valuable old Dictionary, traces ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.12 • Various
... 2. The following proverbial saying in India may serve to show how natural such comparisons are in the mouths of the inhabitants of hot climates: "Ah, that benevolent man, he has long been my shelter from the wind; he is a river to the dry country." See ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... pink of politeness, and his gallantry to the fair sex was proverbial. When he was caught at last, pent in "stone walls and chains and iron grates," their grief was in proportion to his rare merits and his great fame. Butler ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... of his early years is soon told. As a blue-eyed child, with long fair hair, he was curiously thoughtful and exceedingly affectionate. His temper was generous and cheerful. His truthfulness was proverbial, and his little sister found in him the kindest of playmates and the sturdiest of protectors. He was distinguished, too, for his politeness, although good manners were by no means rare in the rustic West. The manly courtesy of the true American is no exotic product; ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... and the light stood a woman. Her face was hidden by the veil that drooped from the folds upon her head; she was dressed according to the rule of the order in a gown of the colour become proverbial. Her bare feet were hidden; if the General could have seen them, he would have known how appallingly thin she had grown; and yet in spite of the thick folds of her coarse gown, a mere covering and no ornament, he could guess ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... was carried over from the United States in the Autumn of 1887 and sown on the good ground of the late Count Tolstoy, and other noble men, whence—as results show—it spread abroad with a swiftness suggestive rather of the proverbial weed than of the fair flower its blossoming has shown ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... hair. You will not find many beasts that can afford to prostitute their ears to ornamental purposes. The only other beast that I can think of at this moment which has tufted ears is the lynx. Now the lynx is a tree cat, and there is proverbial wisdom in the saying "Eyes ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... particular, the musicians with whom Christophe was most in touch, unprotestingly put up with the effrontery of the scaramouches of the Press, who laid down the law for them? There were absolute idiots among them, whose ignorance in omni re scibili was proverbial, though they were none the less invested with a sovereign authority in omni re scibili. They did not even take the trouble to write their articles and books: they had secretaries, poor starving creatures, who would have sold their souls, if they had had such things, ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... Champagny—a man, with all his faults, of a noble nature, and with scarcely inferior talents to his own—to languish for a long time in abject poverty; supported by the charity of an ancient domestic. His greediness for wealth was proverbial. No benefice was too large or too paltry to escape absorption, if placed within his possible reach. Loaded with places and preferments, rolling in wealth, he approached his sovereign with the whine of a mendicant. He talked of his property as a "misery," ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... prominent among the allies in one division, and the Samnites were at the head of another. [Footnote: The Marsians were an ancient people of Central Italy, inhabiting a mountainous district, and had won distinction among the allies for their skill and courage in war. "The Marsic cohorts" was an almost proverbial expression for the bravest troops in the time of Horace and Virgil.] The whole of Central Italy became involved in the desperate struggle. The Etruscans and Umbrians took the part of Rome, being offered the suffrage for their allegiance. ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... disparity more conspicuous, while continued Republican control of the Senate had created intense bitterness. In fact, a tabulated statement of the inequality between senatorial districts enraged a Democrat as quickly as a red flag infuriated the proverbial bull.[1621] Although the caucus refused to adopt the protest, it issued an address showing that New York and Kings were entitled to ten senators instead of seven and forty-one assemblymen instead ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... to the close of it proverbial sayings, charged with wisdom and wit, were inserted wherever there was space enough to insert one. The following ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... proper vehicle for conveying instruction among the common people, who bought scarcely any other books; I therefore filled all the little spaces that occurr'd between the remarkable days in the calendar with proverbial sentences, chiefly such as inculcated industry and frugality, as the means of procuring wealth, and thereby securing virtue; it being more difficult for a man in want, to act always honestly, as, to use here one of those proverbs, it is hard for an empty ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... [300] "HAD-I-WIST. A proverbial expression, Oh that I had known. Gower."—Chalmers's Dict., also Webster's. In this phrase, which is here needlessly compounded, and not very properly explained, we see wist used as a perfect participle. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... ever knew a Rebel officer to be bought was some weeks after this at Florence. The sick exchange was still going on. I have before spoken of the Rebel passion for bright gilt buttons. It used to be a proverbial comment upon the small treasons that were of daily occurrence on both sides, that you could buy the soul of a mean man in our crowd for a pint of corn meal, and the soul of a Rebel guard for a half dozen brass buttons. A boy of the Fifth-fourth Ohio, whose ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... be respected; for it is said that no phrase becomes a proverb until after a century's experience of its truth. In England it is proverbial to judge of men by the company they keep. Judge of the Cardinal de Rohan from his most intimate friend, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... to obtain their Tria Prima, from Animals and Vegetables, yet I have often wondred that they should so confidently pretend also to resolve all Metalline and other Mineral bodies into Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury. For 'tis a saying almost Proverbial, among those Chymists themselves that are accounted Philosophers; and our famous Countryman Roger Bacon has particularly adopted it; that Facilius est aurum facere quam destruere. And I fear, with You, that Gold is not the only Mineral from which Chymists are wont fruitlessly to ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... The idea of that proverbial slow coach of an Elephant ever doing anything on the spur of the moment was really too much for the rest of the boys and a general roar went up. "Don't bother your heads about me, fellows," remarked Frank, quietly, when the laughter had ceased again. "That ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... has a solid, venerable sound. Or, if you prefer poetry, I will get Gray's 'Elegy.' That cannot be a literary mushroom, for he was twenty years writing it. But perhaps it is Tupper you would like. That would suit your mood exactly, Tupper's 'Proverbial Philosophy.'" ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... in 'Katie Woodencloak', No. l, the little bird tells the Prince, 'who understood the song of birds very well,' that blood is gushing out of the golden shoe. The belief that some persons had the gift of understanding what the birds said, is primaeval. We pay homage to it in our proverbial expression, 'a little bird told me'. Popular traditions and rhymes protect their nests, as in the case of the wren, the robin, and the swallow. Occasionally this gift seems to have been acquired by eating or tasting the flesh of a snake or dragon, as Sigurd, in the Volsung tale, ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... it may be recollected, Master Larrikins' tale with a very good pinch of the proverbial salt, believing he only intended to 'pull my leg'; but when on the present occasion the brig began to labour heavily and the green seas, rolling over from the open sea beyond Ushant, the wind having come on to blow a regular stiff sou'-wester, topped our bulwarks and made ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... Zarwell's tone appealed to Bergstrom for understanding. "I have only a normal man's indignation at injustice. And now I've done my share. Yet, wherever I go, the word eventually gets out, and I'm right back in a fight again. It's like the proverbial monkey on my back. I can't get ...
— Monkey On His Back • Charles V. De Vet
... of the person most suitable to us, most required by us; of the person with whom life flowers and bears fruit. If this were so, the chances of our meeting that person would be small indeed; intuition would often fail; the blindness of love would then be fatal as it is proverbial. No, love works differently, and in its blindness lies its strength. Man and woman, each strongly desires to be loved, each opens to the other that heart of ideal aspirations which they have often hid till then; each, thus knowing the ideal of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Some of the young men of enterprising spirit were the sons of officers and men who had fought in the Seven Years' War against France and now came to claim their share of the conqueror's spoils. Some men were of Yankee origin, who with their proverbial ability to see a good chance, came to what has always been Canada's greatest city, on the Island of Montreal. It was only half a dozen years after Wolfe's great victory, that a great Montreal trader, Alexander Henry, penetrated the western lakes ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... close of a fine day in the month of August, a light, fairy-like craft was fanning her way before a gentle westerly air into what is called the Canal of Piombino, steering easterly. The rigs of the Mediterranean are proverbial for their picturesque beauty and quaintness, embracing the xebeque, the felucca, the polacre, and the bombarda, or ketch; all unknown, or nearly so, to our own seas; and occasionally the lugger. The latter, a species of craft, however, much less common in the waters ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... further preservation of this air of simplicity, a particular care should be taken to express with all plainness those moral sentences and proverbial speeches which are so numerous in this poet. They have something venerable, and as I may say, oracular, in that unadorned gravity and shortness with which they are delivered: a grace which would be utterly lost by endeavouring ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... his idleness is proverbial; you have good cause to recollect him too, since 'twas by his courage your life was preserved, when attacked by the ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Rip van - Winkle • Charles Burke
... It is proverbial that dishonesty retards spiritual growth and strikes at the heart of Truth. If a student at Harvard College has studied a textbook written by his teacher, is he entitled, when he leaves the University, to write out as his own the substance of this textbook? There is no warrant in common law ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... upon which he required Paul's advice, and the two men talked together with less constraint than they had hitherto done. De Chauxville had picked up a vast deal of technical matter, and handled his little knowledge with a skill which bade fair to deprive it of its proverbial danger. He presently left Steinmetz and the prince engaged in a controversy with the countess as to a meeting-place ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... has been at work on a large scale, and that sets of objects, unexampled in our isle, have really turned up in some numbers. But then the Caithness painted pebbles were equally without precedent, yet are undisputed. The proverbial fence seems, in these circumstances, to be the appropriate perch for Science, in fact a statue of the Muse of Science might represent her as sitting, in contemplation, on the fence. The strong, the very strong point against authenticity is this: numbers of the disputed ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... Vespasian, Titus). But few men had a head strong enough to resist vertigo when they saw themselves so elevated above other men. The majority of the emperors profited by their tremendous power only to make their names proverbial: Tiberius, Nero, Domitian by their cruelty, Vitellius by his gluttony, Claudius by his imbecility. One of them, Caligula, was a veritable fool; he had his horse made consul and himself worshipped as a god. The emperors persecuted the nobles especially to keep them ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... confined for the most part to dissatisfied glances at the hard cloudless blue sky to windward, as it met their gaze morning after morning when they came on deck, to shrugs of the shoulders whenever the subject happened to be mentioned, and to scornful, sarcastic, or despondent allusions to the proverbial longevity and obstinacy of easterly winds in general. Except Mr Forester Dale, and he, I regret to say, made himself a perfect nuisance to everybody on board by his snappishness and irascibility. The weather was "beastly," the ship was "beastly," and his demeanour was ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... Bran is e a brathair, If it be not Bran, it is Bran's brother,' was the proverbial reply of Maccombich. [Footnote: Bran, the well-known dog of Fingal, is often the theme of Highland proverb as well ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... make them his heirs if they didn't mind being used as a means to convey his final word of defiance to the children who had cast him off. Not that he would ever have a dollar to leave to them, but for the satisfaction it would give him to cut the traitors off with the proverbial shilling. Beset with the notion that this was an ideal way to show his contempt for his offspring, he went to the safety deposit vault and took there from the worthless document known as his last will and testament and in the presence of witnesses destroyed ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... mercy was not strained in the least," he continued. "It fell around me like the proverbial gentle rain. I've quite a lot to be thankful for, don't ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... their common good. The whites said, to quote a negro laborer, "We must just get together." A negro said: "The dominant race is just a bit less dominant at present." "We are getting more consideration and appreciation," said another. From another quarter came the remark that "instead of the old proverbial accusation—shiftless and unreliable—negro labor is being heralded as 'the only dependable labor extant, etc.'"[99] A general review of the results made it clear that there was a disposition on the part of the white population to give some measure of those benefits, the denial of which ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... way of getting the interest, almost the deference, of many people. She and Gertrude were often reduced to the proverbial thirty cents, but they had little difficulty in getting along. For instance, one day, almost broke, they went to a restaurant and ordered two cups of coffee. The negro waiter knew what they were, and offered them a nice steak, at his expense. Nor did he try to ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... it is true, speaks of the expression, the softness, and delicacy of the acting of Roscius, in the same terms that a modern critic would apply to Garrick or Schroder. But I will not lay any stress on the acting of this celebrated player, the excellence of which has become proverbial, because it appears from a passage in Cicero that he frequently played without a mask, and that this was preferred: by his contemporaries. I doubt, however, whether this was ever the case among the Greeks. But the same writer relates, that actors in general, for the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... number of picturesque and expressive words are dropped, all that are crude, gaulois or naifs, all that are local and provincial, or personal and made-up, all familiar and proverbial locutions,[3212] many brusque, familiar and frank turns of thought, every haphazard, telling metaphor, almost every description of impulsive and dexterous utterance throwing a flash of light into the imagination and bringing into view the precise, colored and complete form, but ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... The health of the city and suburbs is proverbial, and the profession of a physician is, perhaps, of all others the least lucrative. A worthy and intelligent Scotch doctor, who had come to Manila, while I was there, to exercise his profession, and who lodged in ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... "It is the proverbial peace of the city amongst the mountains," Ughtred said. "Yet if you listen you can hear the murmur of voices in the cafes, and there is a band playing in ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... own. But when the mid-watch had been mustered, the lookouts stationed, and the rest of them had settled themselves down for sleep between the guns, out of the way of passing feet, the forecastle of the Congress offered a very decent promenade, magnificent compared to that proverbial of the poops of small vessels—"two steps and overboard." Then began the steady pace to and fro, which to me was natural and inherited, easily maintained and consistent with thought—indeed, productive ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... and Lebrun, the decorator of the apartments. If the Chateau de Vaux possessed a single fault with which it could be reproached, it was its grand, pretentious character. It is even at the present day proverbial to calculate the number of acres of roofing, the restoration of which would, in our age, be the ruin of fortunes cramped and narrowed as the epoch itself. Vaux-le-Vicomte, when its magnificent gates, supported by caryatides, have ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... was to find out where Hugh Davidson was likely to be found, if alive. Dr. Hunter felt as though he were beginning to search for the proverbial needle in a haystack; but by Mrs. Forester's advice he entrusted the matter to his lawyers, and in an incredibly short space of time he heard from them that the man he wanted was now the manager of the A1 Shipping and Transportation Company at Skaguay, Alaska, the largest organization of its kind ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... where he stood. The level stretch along the margin of the pool showed clear enough, but around him the vegetation was so dense that, unless he had some clue to guide him, to prosecute a search within it was like trying the proverbial search for a needle in ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... Cyprus, whither he probably withdrew on the death of Philometor. He was chiefly known for his critical writings, in which his opinions of poetry were thought so just that few dared to disagree with them; and his name soon became proverbial for a critic. Aristarchus had also the good fortune to be listened to in his lecture-room by one whose name is far more known than those of his two royal pupils. Moschus of Syracuse, the pastoral poet, was one of his hearers; but his fame must not be claimed for Alexandria; he can hardly have ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... reformism is the poorest policy to follow to get it. A proletariat organized for revolutionary ends has no difficulty in securing reforms; it does not need to ask for them, for an awakened and apprehensive bourgeoisie will shower reforms upon them like the proverbial manna. If, indeed, workers want only reforms, why take ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... the button she wanted was sometimes a long task for mother, and father, it must be admitted, had varied the proverbial needle simile for our domestic establishment, to read, "like hunting for a button in your mother's button box." But still the odd buttons continued to go in, and only the ones needed came permanently out. You never could tell, ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... from the foot of Mount Atlas, had hitherto been the non plus ultra or impassable limit of European navigation, and had accordingly received its ordinary name from a negative term in the Portuguese language, as implying that there was no navigation beyond; and respecting which a proverbial saying was then current, of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... Notwithstanding the proverbial variety of the climate, there is no nation under the sun so fond of Pic-Nic parties as the English; and yet how seldom are their pleasant dreams of rural repasts in the open air fated ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... they visited the Regent Ville district; and to the "plains of Emu," a government agricultural-station, and a sort of model farm. They went to the theatre, where a grand performance was given in their honour. The delight sailors take in riding is proverbial, and it was on horseback that the French crossed the Emu plains. The noble animals, imported from England, had not degenerated in New South Wales; they were still full of spirit as one of the young officers found to his cost, when, as he was saying in English to Sir John Cox, acting ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... set down his horn after the toast, the Norman's glance happened to encounter a glance from the shield-maiden, who was passing. Taking another horn from the thrall, he bowed again, with proverbial French gallantry; then quaffed off the second measure of ale to the honor of ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... in our great city with its constant removals and changes of population. The individual is like the proverbial needle in the haystack, unless we adopt a method of accounting not only for each family but for each individual down to the latest-born child.* *In order that I may not be as one that beateth the air, I venture to suggest a method of laying the foundation of records that has been helpful in my own ...
— The Lutherans of New York - Their Story and Their Problems • George Wenner
... the station I took two parting snapshots of my wife and family waving me farewell. It was an insignificant incident over which I merely smiled at the time, but five days later I had every cause to bless those parting snaps. One often hears about life hanging by the proverbial thread, but not many lives have hung upon two snapshot photographs of all that is dearest to one, and a few inches of photographic film. Yet it was so in my case. But for those two tiny parting pictures and the unexposed fraction of film I should have been propped against the ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... But as only two years are necessary to prove the desertion—even if you should decide together that it is best to part—isn't it worth while to wait two years more in order to make quite sure? No doubt, you will say that I am shewing the proverbial ignorance of women in legal questions. But I can't help feeling that there must be some way in which it could be arranged. I do beseech you, Colin, not ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... determination, or that ferocious courage, which are the common attributes of our sex. They have, on the other hand, that delicate tact, that intuition, that nervous imagination, that quick perception of character, which have become the proverbial characteristics of cultivated women. They know how to render themselves impenetrable; and if they desire to be perfidious, they wear a mask which few eyes can see through, while at the same time a certain sameness ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... Dorian went into action in search of Carlia Duke. He acknowledged to himself that it was like searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack, but inaction ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... Liberata, canto xiv, &c. Armida is called Corcereis owing to the beauty and wonder of her enchanted garden. Corcyra was the abode of King Alcinous, of whose court, parks and orchards a famous description is to be found in the seventh Odyssey. Martial (xiii, 37), speaks of 'Corcyraei horti', a proverbial phrase. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... go' was a proverbial expression, and is found, with its obvious rime 'to and fro,' in ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... The proverbial wet-blanket seemed to have fallen over the merry little company gathered round the table. Suzanne looked sad and silent; Sir Andrew fidgeted uneasily with his fork, whilst the Comtesse, encased in the plate-armour of her aristocratic ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... read, well grounded, well educated; enlightened, shrewd, savant, blue, bookish, scholastic, solid, profound, deep-read, book- learned; accomplished &c (skillful) 698; omniscient; self-taught. known &c v.; ascertained, well-known, recognized, received, notorious, noted; proverbial; familiar, familiar as household words, familiar to every schoolboy; hackneyed, trite, trivial, commonplace. cognoscible^, cognizable. Adv. to one's knowledge, to the best of one's knowledge. Phr. one's eyes being opened &c (disclosure) 529; ompredre tout c'est tout pardonner ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the little place which had always been neat even when it was forlorn there was now the stamp of desolation. The beds which had been seeded or planted a month before, and which should now have been weeded, trimmed, and hoed, were growing with an untended recklessness that had all the proverbial resemblance to moral breakdown. In the cucumber-house the vines had become rusty and limp, sagging from the twines on which they climbed in debauched indifference to sightliness. The roof of the hothouse that had contained the flowers had a deep ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... understand what sort of person he is whom we call at one time moderate, at another modest or temperate, at another constant and virtuous; while sometimes we include all these names in the word frugality, as the crown of all. For if that word did not include all virtues, it would never have been proverbial to say, that a frugal man does everything rightly; but when the Stoics apply this saying to their wise man, they seem to exalt him too much, and to speak of him with too ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... de la Bourse in Rouen City, and my friend stepped across each evening to the Cafe Victor to drink creme de menthe and feel that listening to the band was rather wicked and altogether Continental. Indeed, his attachment to the ship is now proverbial, the prevailing feeling having been brilliantly epitomised by himself. "If I wash me face," he snapped to me one day; "If I wash me face, they think I'm goin' ashore!" But now the decent double-breasted ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... Royalist. In 1643 he had refused to subscribe to the fund that was then being raised for regaining Newcastle. He proved a happy exception to the almost proverbial neglect the Royalists received from Charles II. in 1671, for when Charles was at Newmarket, he came over to see Nor- wich, and conferred the honour of knighthood on Browne. His reputation was now very great. Evelyn paid a visit to Norwich for the express purpose of seeing ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... be so often lost was, considering his propensities and the proverbial cunning of his caste, not, perhaps, very remarkable. But the number of times and the variety of ways, in which, in spite of the little trouble taken in searching for him, he was sent back to the place from whence he came, was really ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... contractors. Of course they threw on the government inspector all the blame for the few cattle received, and offered to buy five or six hundred more out of the herd. But the shoe was on the other foot now, the drovers acting as independently as the proverbial hog on ice. The herd never halted, the contractors followed up, and when we went into camp that evening a trade was closed on one thousand steers at two dollars a head advance over those which were received but a few days before. The oxen were even reserved, and after delivering ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... "alarmed by it" as not to be able "to fly from the impending calamity" in the way which your correspondent imagines. I prefer Archbishop Newcome's explanation:—"Let the characters be so legible that one who hastily passeth on may read them. This may have been a proverbial expression." ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 57, November 30, 1850 • Various
... "Robinson Crusoe," "The Arabian Nights," and "Grimm's Fairy Tales." There were more, many more, and David devoured them all with eager eyes. The good in them he absorbed as he absorbed the sunshine; the evil he cast aside unconsciously—it rolled off, indeed, like the proverbial ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... developments of the Clayton case have run their course and reached a finish, I will sum them up. Clayton's romantic escape from a shameful death stepped all this region in an enchantment of wonder and joy—during the proverbial nine days. Then the sobering process followed, and men began to take thought, and to say: 'But a man was killed, and Clayton killed him.' Others replied: 'That is true: we have been overlooking that important detail; we have been ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... worthy of discussion. The original application of the name is not agreed upon. Thompson says, "The term Saturnius seems to have possessed two distinct applications. In both of these, however, it simply meant 'as old as the days of Saturn,' and, like the Greek Ogugios, was a kind of proverbial expression for something antiquated. Hence (1) the rude rhythmical effusions, which contained the early Roman story, might be called Saturnian, not with reference to their metrical law, but to their antiquity; and (2) the term Saturnius was also applied to a ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... is easy to prescribe sacrifices for another, or even for one's self, provided always that they be made before the necessity arises. All parents are models in their treatment of each other's offspring, rivalling, in this regard, even those proverbial patterns who never took the initial step ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... Waterford by train. Military bands in the summer. Exceptionally good place for families. Tramore is a delightful seaside resort, built on a gradual incline, with a southerly aspect, on the shores of the broad Atlantic. The air is almost proverbial for its restorative qualities, not only in popular but also in scientific opinion. It is beyond all doubt that Tramore has as many hours of sunshine, less rainfall, and more even temperature than any other seaside ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... and writing about him. But Mitford overcame one set of prejudices by the force which prejudices of another kind had endowed him with. He saw how party spirit had raged in modern as well as ancient times, but he detected it with that proverbial readiness with which the thief detects the thief; he wrote himself with the energy and penetration, the want of candour and generosity, which at all times will distinguish the advocate. Moreover, the scholarship of Europe has since his time assumed so lofty a port, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... became Mme. Borniche. Hochon's marriage and the change of the political horizon brought him back to his native town where he and his family were long known as the Five Hochons. Mlle. Hochon's marriage and the death of her brothers made the jest still tenable; for M. Hochon, despite a proverbial avarice, adopted their posterity—Francois Hochon, Baruch and Adolphine Borniche. Hochon lived till an advanced age. He was still living at the end of the Restoration, and gave shrewd advice to the Bridaus regarding the ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... how it has come about that Job has become proverbial for patience. I suppose that it has arisen out of the verse in the Epistle of St. James about the patience of Job; but, like the passage in the Book of Numbers which attributes an extreme meekness to Moses, it seems to me to be either a very infelicitous description, or else a ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to the man's worldly position, I should pronounce their calling anything but a lucrative one; for a more seedy-looking class is rarely to be met with. Their care-worn faces and rusty and tattered garments testifying that in Valetta, at least, the proverbial easy and jolly life of ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... Fielding was an imitator of Cervantes, except his own declaration of such an intention in the title-page of Joseph Andrews, the romantic turn of the character of Parson Adams (the only romantic character in his works), and the proverbial humour of Partridge, which is kept up only for a few pages. Fielding's novels are, in general, thoroughly his own; and they are thoroughly English. What they are most remarkable for, is neither ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... announced. To execute it with any tolerable degree of success, required a rare combination of talents, among the least of which may be numbered neatness of style, acuteness of perception, and a more than common accuracy of discrimination; and Mrs. Piozzi brought to the task, a jargon long since become proverbial for its vulgarity, an utter incapability of defining a single term in the language, and just as much Latin from a child's Syntax, as sufficed to expose the ignorance she so anxiously labours to conceal. 'If such a one be fit to write on Synonimes, ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... proverbial "Joe" Miller, an actor by profession (1684-1738), was a man of no education, and is said to have been unable to read. His reputation rests mainly on the book of jests compiled after his death, and attributed ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... from abroad would tempt any ancient mariner who sailed the ocean seas to draw the long bow about the schooner Hesperus and etcetera. And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn't probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Poets and all literary men lived by the bounty of the rich and great, and prospered only as they pandered to depraved passions. Many, of great intellectual excellence, died from want and mortification; so that the poverty and distress of literary men became proverbial, and all worldly-wise people shunned contact with them as expensive and degrading. They were hunted from cocklofts to cellars by the minions of the law, and the foulest jails were often their only resting-place. The restoration of Charles proved unfortunate to one great and immortal genius, whom ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... drawing-rooms; and by his shrewd remarks upon the cities he has visited, will show that he possesses a fine natural taste for things of beauty. The speech of such men, drawn from the common stock of the Italian people, is seasoned with proverbial sayings, the wisdom of centuries condensed in a few nervous words. When emotion fires their brain, they break into spontaneous eloquence, or suggest the motive of a poem ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... booty and concert new depredations. As they brought home with them wealthy lading of all kinds, the luxuries of the tropics, and the sumptuous spoils of the Spanish provinces, and disposed of them with the proverbial carelessness of freebooters, they were welcome visitors to the thrifty traders of New-York. Crews of these desperadoes, therefore, the runagates of every country and every clime, might be seen swaggering ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... dropped dead, falling upon the body of the friend he had so loved. Thus these two sons of Troy, companions in life, were companions also in death. Their friendship, immortalized by the Roman poet, became proverbial. ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... of the presidential election, Susan hopefully attended the national political conventions. Again the Republicans made their proverbial excuses, explaining that they not only faced a formidable opponent in Grover Cleveland but also the threat of a new People's party. The familiar ring of their alibis, which they had repeated since Reconstruction days, made Susan wonder when and if ever the Republicans ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... places set apart for public rendezvous, where the curious might meet and satisfy their mutual curiosity. Among these, the barbers' shops have justly borne the pre-eminence. Among the Greeks, barbers' news was a proverbial expression; and Horace, in one of his epistles, makes honourable mention of the Roman ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... were the curses in the gun-room, but both "loud and deep" were those in the midshipman's berth, for the denizens thereof were never proverbial for the niceties of their expressions, when the apalling certainty broke on the comminators, of three years' roasting in the West Indies, with accompaniments of misgivings about Yellow Jack, and the palisades, merely because the captain wished to go and see why the niggers did not make ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... gathering place of the clan was at Drochaid Laoidh, and there ten of the twelve tribes promptly answered the Cothionnal "Thigibh a chlann na 'n con 's gheobh sibh feoil." The absentees were, the Camerons of Fassifern, and the Camerons of Glen Nevis; the proverbial caution of the first forbade their adherence, while the influence of the Whig Clan Grant prevailed with the latter. The defection of the Fassiferns gave the place of second in command, or Lieutenant of the clan, to Cameron of Earrachd (Alan's ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... Mrs. Stewart, whose social career had been like that of the proverbial rocket shot up into the zenith. But a life of mere amusement was not the fashion in the circle in which she lived, and her active brain and easily aroused sympathies made her quick to take ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... Carolyn June said as she led the way into the house, "and in a dark corner—no, that would be too near to the walls and their proverbial 'ears,' in the center of the room is better—I will expose the ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... "A proverbial phrase, applied to death, as expressive of indifference with respect to the place where the body ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... little aphorisms which verbal tradition hath delivered down to us under the title of proverbs. It were to be wished that, instead of filling their pages with the fabulous theology of the pagans, our modern poets would think it worth their while to enrich their works with the proverbial sayings of their ancestors. Mr Dryden hath chronicled ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... as busy as the proverbial beaver, rushing goods outdoors where they could be taken in hand by others, and placed in temporary security. A couple of the local police force had by this time reached the scene, and they could be depended on ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... to xxiv. 22 is a more connected discussion, though in the proverbial form, of the principles of conduct. This is introduced by a brief exhortation to listen to "the words ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... a cuya prudencia y proverbial sabiduria encomendaron los vecinos de Bellver la resolucion de este dificil problema, despues de implorar la misericordia divina por medio de su santo Patrono, que, como ustedes no ignoran, conoce al diablo muy de ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... of it, so characteristic of the excellent but bigoted Omar, is enough to cast suspicion upon it. De Quincey tells us that "if a saying has a proverbial fame, the probability is that it was never said." How many amusing stories stand a chance of going down to posterity as the inventions of President Lincoln, of which, nevertheless, he is doubtless wholly innocent! How characteristic was Caesar's reply to the frightened pilot! Yet in all probability ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... days, while they were making their way, and counting the cost of every step as if it were the proverbial first step, the next step for Lindora was a large boarding-house for the summer. She tried it first in the country, and she tried it next at the seaside, with the same number of feet of piazza in both cases, and with no distinct difference ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... bearable. The publisher of the booklet was like "one Ragozine, a most notorious pirate"; and the method no less than the motive of his rascality in the present instance is palpable and simple enough. Fired by the immediate and instantly proverbial popularity of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, he hired, we may suppose, some ready hack of unclean hand to supply him with three doggrel sonnets on the same subject, noticeable only for their porcine quality of prurience: he procured ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... beyond possibility he'd flare up an' do ye bodily damage. I know him. If ye meet him man to man, ye'll find he'll meet ye half-way in everything but theology. He'll be the sort of friend ye'll need at Lone Moose. But dinna wave the Cloth in his face. For some reason that's to him like the proverbial red rag tae a bull. The last missionary tae Long Moose cam' awa wi' a lovely pair o' black eyes Sam Carr bestowed on him. I'm forewarnin' ye for yer ain good. Ye can decry material benefits a' ye like, but it'll be a decided benefit if ye ha' Sam Carr for ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... in the depth of winter, nightly for six weeks, without whisper of an enemy at any time; whereby the Marechal did save Pisek (if Pisek was ever again in danger), but froze horse and man to the edge of destruction or into it; so that the "Bivouac of Pisek" became proverbial in French Messrooms, for a generation coming. [Guerre de Boheme, ii. 23, &c.] And one hears in the mind a clangorous nasal eloquence from antique gesticulative mustachio-figures, witty and indignant,—who are now ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... both Old and New Testaments which a clever boy would be certain to acquire either in the schoolroom or at church on Sundays. Shakespeare quotes or adapts biblical phrases with far greater frequency than he makes allusion to episodes in biblical history. But many such phrases enjoyed proverbial currency, and others, which were more recondite, were borrowed from Holinshed's 'Chronicles' and secular works whence he drew his plots. As a rule his use of scriptural phraseology, as of scriptural history, suggests youthful reminiscence ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... the valuable assets of the Norwegian people. Attempts at extortion are so rare that tourists, accustomed to the proverbial dishonesty of the Latin races, find travel in Norway and Sweden a joy. An English traveler relates this typical incident: He had lost his purse shortly after leaving Vossevangen for Stalheim. Altogether unconscious of his loss, he walked on placidly. Suddenly hearing ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... note, in passing, that the women alone are allowed to be seated in the circle: the men, of every age and rank, remain standing. This custom, and especially the position assumed by the bride at that time, has given rise to the proverbial expression of comparison: Pari la zita di lu macadaru, which is said of a woman ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... and feared and suspected the other six with far more than the ordinary and proverbial rich man's jealous dislike of other rich men. There was not one of them that did not bear the ever-smarting scars of vicious wounds, front and back, received from his fellows; there was not one that did not cherish the hope of overthrowing the rule of Seven and establishing ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... his execution (which might be done by running in one direction about five hundred yards), and never returned. Meeting several people that asked if Dinnis was not to be beheaded on that day, his answer was, "I trow not," which, having some humour in it, became a proverbial saying in the district, and is used to this day—"'I trow not,' quoth Dinnis." In the next place, the fact was to be proved in the clearest manner. The offender had to be taken either hand-habend or back-berand, that is, having the stolen goods in his hand, or bearing them on ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... he could not do much himself, he intended instantly to lay their case before a Giant of his acquaintance, whose good-humor and benevolence were proverbial. So he put on his shoes and stockings, which were not quite dry, and hastily descended to the garden by means of a vine which grew upon the wall. The distance to the Giant's castle was too great for him to think of walking; and he hurried around ...
— Ting-a-ling • Frank Richard Stockton
... "Your proverbial generosity justifies my new appeal. You will accept, I am sure, the ten tickets which I enclose, when you know that your confreres, the Messieurs Axenstein, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... eighteenth there was a gradual progress toward religious liberalism. The population steadily increased, and New England's unremitting struggle with a not too friendly soil, her hardihood upon the seas, and her keenness in trade, became proverbial throughout the country. Her seaport towns were wealthy. The general standards of living remained frugal, but extreme poverty was rare. Her people still made, as in the earliest days of the colonies, silent and unquestioned sacrifices for education, and her chief seats of learning, Harvard ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... wrongly named. It is his most typical contact with the civic ideals of Europe. All his other tales have been tales of one city. He was in spirit a Cockney; though that title has been quite unreasonably twisted to mean a cad. By the old sound and proverbial test a Cockney was a man born within the sound of Bow bells. That is, he was a man born within the immediate appeal of high civilisation and of eternal religion. Shakespeare, in the heart of his fantastic forest, turns with a splendid suddenness to the Cockney ideal as being the true one after all. ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... by observing citizens that just before noon—seven minutes to twelve, in fact—a small cloud no bigger than the proverbial hand crossed the sun hurriedly as if afraid to tarry. At that very instant a stranger drove up to the hitching-rack, bringing his sweat-covered horse to a standstill so abruptly in front of the marshal's nose that that dignitary's hat ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... his hand, and still almost as cool as the proverbial cucumber (though why they should be cool it is hard to say), Tom stopped the motors. Once again the craft was quiet, but now, instead of the occupants being able to see clearly from the thick, glass windows in the forward ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... the innumerable millions who have lived on the earth, it is astonishing how few I can call to mind who have left behind them a proverbial renown for wisdom. There is, indeed, Solomon, but he fell off at the last; and as he belongs to sacred history, we must not take a liberty with his name. Who is there very, very wise, besides ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Copyright © 2025 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
