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More "Slovenly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upon seeing the young girl, so lightly dressed, gave a lewd smile. His unclean desire stirred in his coarse body under its slovenly sweaty dress. He beckoned Zinaida to him with his crooked dirty finger and gave an idiotic laugh. He pushed his faded cap down to ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... five-and-twenty years the forsenic wig which hung on a block beside him. The marks of hair powder on his coat collar, and the ill-washed and worse tied white neckerchief round his throat, showed that he had not found leisure since he left the court to make any alteration in his dress: while the slovenly style of the remainder of his costume warranted the inference that his personal appearance would not have been very much improved if he had. Books of practice, heaps of papers, and opened letters, were scattered over the table, without any attempt at order or arrangement; ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... possess. Probably all Scott's faults spring from one fundamental weakness: he never had a high ideal of his own art. He wrote to make money, and was inclined to regard his day's labor as "so much scribbling." Hence his style is frequently slovenly, lacking vigor and concentration; his characters talk too much, apparently to fill space; he caters to the romantic fashion (and at the same time indulges his Tory prejudice) by enlarging on the somewhat imaginary virtues ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... paid no attention to me whatsoever. She was fascinated with the slovenly girl, who stood around and ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... are jumbled together as in no other district in London. The modest wife, coming out of her door at ten in the morning to do her marketing, meets, face to face, her next neighbour standing at her door, a jug in her hand, waiting for some late milkman to pass—a slovenly dame in a dressing-gown with half the buttons off, primrose-coloured hair loose on her back, and a porcelain complexion hastily dabbed on a yellow dissipated face. The Maryleboners (or -bonites) being a Happy Family, in the menagerie sense, do not vex their souls about this condition of ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... his father afforded him better means of being so; but his clothes were neither so tasteful when new, nor so well preserved when they began to grow old, as those of Richard Middlemas. Adam Hartley was sometimes fine, at other times rather slovenly, and on the former occasions looked rather too conscious of his splendour. His chum was at all times regularly neat and well dressed; while at the same time he had an air of good-breeding, which made him appear always at ease; ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... necessity of following this precept. They realized enough of the law of cause and effect to be aware that, if their home and school duties were neglected, or slovenly done, boating would soon obtain a bad reputation; so both parents and teacher found that the clubs were a great help rather than a hindrance in the performance ...
— All Aboard; or, Life on the Lake - A Sequel to "The Boat Club" • Oliver Optic
... a letter came from the manager: "Trust you are rested and will soon be back. The prompter read your lines, but everything has gone to pieces. Slack, slovenly, spiritless, stupid, nobody acting, and nobody awake, it seems to me. 'All right at night, governor,' and the usual nonsense. Shows how much we want you. But envious people are whispering that you are afraid of the part. The blockheads! If ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... may be read with the most pleasure are the letters to his wife, for whom he had a deep affection, and whom he addresses with a pathos that is quite sincere. As hope of recall grew fainter, his work failed more and more; the incorrect language and slovenly versification of some of the Letters from Pontus are in sad contrast to the Ovid of ten years before, and if he went on writing till the end, it was only because writing had long been a ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... slovenly fellow was De Quincey, and he was devoted to reading in bed. But De Quincey was a very vandal when it came to the care and use of books. He never returned volumes he borrowed, and he never hesitated to mutilate a rare book in order to save himself ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... Queen of Hungary's' ditto, 'surfeit waters,' and finally, that he was in search of, to wit, 'My great Aunt Bell's recipe for purging the head' (good against melancholy or the headache). You are not to suppose that the volume was slovenly or in anywise unworthy of a gentleman and officer of those days. It was bound in red and gold, had two handsome silver-gilt clasps and red edges, the writing being exquisitely straight and legible, and ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... sugar is of fine quality, almost equal to our maple sugar. They plant the seed in a careless way and tend it in the most slovenly manner imaginable, and yet, they get immense crops. One man, who put in a crop near where some soldiers were encamped in order to have their protection, told us that he sold the product from this small ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... can be had without long attention, or, at any rate, without skill carefully bestowed in due season, you do not find such things decorating the homes of weekly tenants. The cottages let by the week look shabby, slovenly, dingy; the hedges of the gardens are neglected, broken down, stopped up with anything that comes to hand. If it were not for the fruitful and well-tended vegetable plots, one might often suppose the tenants to be ignorant of order, degenerate, brutalized, materialized, so sordid ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... distinction to-day, unless it is Mr. W.W. Jacobs, who is content merely to serve the purpose of those slippered hours. So far from the weary reader being a decently tired giant, we realise that he is only an inexpressibly lax, slovenly and under-trained giant, and we are all out with one accord resolved to exercise his higher ganglia in every possible way. And so I will say no more of the idea that the novel is merely a harmless opiate for the vacant hours of prosperous men. As a ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... account;—may I trouble you to tender my most respectful assurances to Miss J.; that I hope most sincerely to hear that her indisposition discontinues. Should you no longer want the books, perhaps the bearer may bring them. Will lowness of spirits be received as an apology for this slovenly ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... course, who talk glibly about the simple life when it is safely out of reach, betray themselves in camp by for ever peering about for the artificial excitements of civilisation which they miss. Some get bored at once; some grow slovenly; some reveal the animal in most unexpected fashion; and some, the select few, find themselves in very short order and ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... a few seconds, and then the door was thrown wide open and a slovenly woman, with a snuff stick in one corner of her mouth, came out, followed by four children. The youngest three clung to her skirts and stared, with fearful eyes, at the man on the horse, while he ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... a fire Aggie spread out the sleeping-bags and got supper ready. We had canned salmon and potato salad. We ate ravenously and then, taking off our shoes and our walking suits, and getting into our flannel kimonos and putting up our crimps—for we were determined not to lapse into slovenly personal habits—we were ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Old Wilmot is capital; there is acrimony in his face, and combativeness in his fists—both clenching confidently his own argument, and ready for action; the very drawing back of one leg, and protrusion of the other, is indicative of testy impatience. The vicar is a little too loose and slovenly, both in attitude and attire; the uniting of the figures (artistically speaking) is with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... Clare made of the subject, we found that the name by which the shark is technically known is Squalidae, which includes a large family fitly designated, as your Latin dictionary will prove when you find the adjective squalidus—"filthy, slovenly, loathsome." It is a family of many species, there being some thirty or forty cousins; and the different forms of the teeth, snout, mouth, lips, and tail-fins, the existence or absence of eyelids, spiracles, (those are the apertures by which the water taken in for ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... woman was its sole occupant now. She was bending over the fire frying something for breakfast, and the table in the centre of the room was prepared for the meal. She looked if possible more untidy and slovenly than when Babette had last seen her, and greeted the girl with ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... in a chair against the rough and broken laths, his knees as high as his chin, was a big slovenly boy of about seventeen, looking lazily out from under an old ragged hat-rim, pushed over his eyes. Another big, slovenly boy, a year or two younger, sat on the doorstep, whittling quite as much for his own amusement as for that of a little ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... wanted to look at. His tone and manner struck Ellen most unpleasantly, and made her again wish herself out of the store. He was a tall, lank young man, with a quantity of fair hair combed down on each side of his face, a slovenly exterior, and the most disagreeable pair of eyes, Ellen thought, she had ever beheld. She could not bear to meet them, and cast down her own. Their look was bold, ill-bred, and ill-humoured; and Ellen felt, though she couldn't have told ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... make nervous, bad-tempered horses; rough and noisy cattle-men, fidgety cows; ill-trained dogs and savage shepherds, sheep wild and difficult to approach; so does the bad-tempered, impatient, or slovenly master make men with the same bad qualities, when a smile or a kind word will bring out all that is good in a man and produce the best results ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... the readers of Mr Wordsworth are in a great measure cut off. His diction has no where any pretensions to elegance or dignity; and he has scarcely ever condescended to give the grace of correctness or melody to his versification. If it were merely slovenly and neglected, however, all this might be endured. Strong sense and powerful feeling will ennoble any expressions; or, at least, no one who is capable of estimating those higher merits, will be disposed to mark these little ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... infinitely small degrees in pitch from one tone to another), although a valuable and entirely legitimate expressional effect when used occasionally in a passage where its employment is appropriate, may be over-used to such an extent as to result in a slovenly, vulgar, and altogether objectionable style of singing; and that whereas the vibrato may imbue with virility and warmth an otherwise cold, dead tone and if skilfully and judiciously used may add greatly to ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... soil, scantly covered with coarse grass, bristles with sharp palmettoes and aloes; all the vegetation is stiff, shining, semi-tropical, with nothing soft or delicate in its texture. Numerous plantation-buildings totter around, all slovenly and unattractive, while the interspaces are filled with all manner of wreck and refuse, pigs, fowls, dogs, and omnipresent Ethiopian infancy. All this is the universal Southern panorama; but five minutes' ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... pictures. On pressing her to tell us, which she preferred, after a little blushing and flutter of feeling, she replied "Why, that, Sir, to be sure! (pointing to the ware from the Fleet-street print shops);—it's so neat and elegant. T'other is such a scratchy slovenly thing." An artist, whose writings are scarcely less valuable than his pictures, and to whose authority more deference will be willingly paid, than I could even wish should be shown to mine, has told us, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... rather surprised on first entering a painting-room here. Your eye is struck with the appearance of a dozen slovenly attired fellows, who are variously engaged, some in beginning pictures, some in finishing, &c. The window, which is remarkably large, and situated so as to command a good prospect from without, admits light sufficient ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 270, Saturday, August 25, 1827. • Various
... he stood alone in thinking as he did. It is probable that more reached Mr. Darwin than reached the public, and that the historical sketch prefixed to all editions after the first six thousand copies had been sold— meagre and slovenly as it is—was due to earlier manifestation on the part of some of Mr. Darwin's friends of the feeling that was afterwards expressed by Sir Charles Lyell in the passage quoted above. I suppose the removal of the my that was cut out in 1866 to be due partly to the Gladstonian tendencies of Mr. ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... that after his sister's death a great change came over him. His one household stay gone, he seemed to sink down helpless as a child. He would wander about the house, as though he missed something—he knew not what; his painting was neglected, he became slovenly in his dress, restless in his look. No one could say he grieved for his sister, but he missed her—as one misses the habit of a lifetime. So he gradually changed, and grew speedily to be a worn-out, miserable old man. A week since I heard that ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... Barang, lined up at a sharp "Halt!" and the white men came forward alone. They were keen-eyed men, tanned and capable, yet they impressed Barry as contrasting very poorly with the naval officers he had known. The men were poorer yet; they were utterly slovenly in their address, holding their rifles at as many different positions as there were men,—and even Little noticed that the arms were not all from the same factory. But the strangers were before them, and now ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... The fellow is a little slovenly to-day in his appearance, and you see he has brought already several partridges, besides a rabbit. We shall have venison, ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... one-third above that charger, which is its usual load, and one of those green cartridges, and I'll be bound that it will execute at eighty paces; and that is more than Master Frank there can say for his Manton Rifle, at least if he loads it with bullets patched in that slovenly and most ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... essay in reform; it is content to be a question mark; but one bit of preaching may slip in at the end. Why give eye and ear all the fine experiences? Why not do something for poor, slovenly mind? The truth is that we are lazy. In a stage full of shimmering beauty, in a concert of chamber music, in a fine building, or an admirable sketch, others do the work, we have only to gaze or listen in order to pluck some, at least, of the fruits of art. But fine ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... upon the "French," managers have added a new member to their establishments, and, like the morning papers, employ a Paris correspondent, that French plays, as well as French eggs, may be brought over quite fresh; though from the slovenly manner in which they (the pieces, not the eggs) are too often prepared for the English market, they ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 16, 1841 • Various
... it is very much to be wished that there were more journalists like him. For from the two great reproaches of the craft to which so many of us belong, and which seems to be gradually swallowing up all other varieties of literary occupation, he was conspicuously free. He never did work slovenly in form, and he never did work that was not in one way or other consistent with a decided set of literary and political principles. There is a great deal of nonsense talked about the unprincipled character of journalism, no doubt; and nobody knows ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... If it be granted, that, in effect, this way does more mischief—that a man is secretly wounded, and, though he be not sensible himself, yet the malicious world will find it out for him, yet, there is still a vast difference betwixt the slovenly butchering of a man, and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its place. A man may be capable, as Jack Ketch's wife said of his servant, of a plain piece of work, a ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... discipline for the mind, and should characterize every real camper. The trunks of some boys in camp look as if a cyclone had struck them. "Full, pressed down, and running over." Every old thing in any old way is both slovenly and unhygienic. ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... and groped around for the knocker. It was broken and useless, like the lock on the gate. And never a bell could I find. I swore softly and became impatient. People in Barscheit did not usually live in this slovenly fashion. What sort ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... carried with him the experience and habits of the most improved agriculture in the world. He settled himself in the townships bordering on the seignories, and brought a fresh soil and improved cultivation to compete with the worn-out and slovenly farm of the habitant. He often took the very farm which the Canadian settler had abandoned, and, by superior management, made that a source of profit which had only impoverished his predecessor. The ascendancy ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... consummate artist, and I do not remember a single slovenly passage in all his acknowledged writings. It was a privilege, and one that I can never sufficiently estimate, to have known him personally through so many years. He was unlike any other author I have met, and there were qualities ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... to put a knife in its mouth, or to touch a bone with its fingers. The German child learns that it must never wear a soiled or an unmended garment or have untidy hair. I have known a German scandalised by the slovenly wardrobe of her well-to-do English pupil, and I have heard English people say that to hear Germans eat soup destroyed their appetite for dinner. English girls are not all slovens, and nowadays decently bred Germans behave like other people ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... that. Matthew Arnold had criticized General Grant's English, and Clemens immediately put down other things to rush to his hero's defense. He pointed out that in Arnold's criticism there were no less than "two grammatical crimes and more than several examples of very crude and slovenly English," ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... red and swollen from recent weeping, her face was mottled from her tears. Much trouble had made her careless of late of her prettiness, and now she was disheveled, her apron awry around her waist, her hair mussed, her whole aspect one of slovenly disregard. Her depression was so great that Joe was moved ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... And I think, that the first thing to be taught to any pupil, is neither how to manage the pencil, nor how to attain character of outline, but rather to see where things are light and where they are dark, and to draw them as he sees them, never caring whether his lines be dexterous or slovenly. The result of such study is the immediate substitution of downright drawing for symbolism, and afterwards a judicious moderation in the use of extreme lights and darks; for where local colors are really drawn, so much of what seems violently dark is found to come light against ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... the waters. Her long boats, to be sure, could do the business; but she has no more than two and the captain's gig a-board—as I heard this morning at Queenborough. The evening is closing, and neither of the other ships—whose slovenly rigging wants Blake's dressing—hae ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... away with. It is attention to such details as these that makes a success of the work, and I would urge upon the amateur lawn-maker the absolute necessity of working slowly and carefully, and slighting nothing. Undue haste and the lack of thoroughness will result in a slovenly job that you will be ashamed of, before it is done, and so disgusted with, on completion, that you will not feel like doing the work over again for fear another effort may be more unsatisfactory than the first one. Therefore do good work in every respect as you go along, and the work ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... and lasted after the others had gotten through. His laugh alone was as good as that of all the rest of the crowd. It was not a hearty, resonant laugh, like that from the mouth of a strong-lunged, wholesome-natured man, which has the mellow roundness of a solo on a French horn. It was a slovenly, greasy, convictionless laugh, with uncertain tones and ill-defined edges. Its effect was due to its volume, readiness, and long continuance. Swelling up of the puffy form, and reddening ripples of the broad face heralded it, it began with a contagious cackle, ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... thick-set man of about middle age. He had that untidy appearance that marks a slovenly person, and will appear even in a soldier in spite of all wise and well-directed efforts on the part of a government to keep him neat. His large, light gray, campaign hat was pulled down well over his eyes and a short cob pipe was clinched between ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock
... elaborated by a worn-out civilisation, has had to wait six centuries for life to be put into it by a finer-strung people at a chaster and more braced period of history. Nor should we be satisfied with such loose phrases as this, leading one to think, in a slovenly fashion (quite unsuitable to Tuscan artistic lucidity), that the difference lay in some vague metaphysical entity called spirit: the spirit of the Tuscan stonemasons of the early Middle Ages altered the actual tangible forms in their proportions and details: this ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... errand, into a crystal coach? But, no, the horses went no faster because they were going on this world-changing errand. The resuscitated village, with the American litter heaped on the Italian dirt, looked none the less slovenly because She was coming into it in a few minutes. The clock kept its round; the sun showed its usual inclination toward the west. But notwithstanding this torpidity, She was coming, and that day stood apart from ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... action, or who advocates ill-considered and sweeping measures of reform (especially if they are tainted with vindictiveness and disregard for the rights of the minority) is particularly blameworthy. The several legislatures are responsible for the fact that our laws are often prepared with slovenly haste and lack of consideration. Moreover, they are often prepared, and still more frequently amended during passage, at the suggestion of the very parties against whom they are afterwards enforced. Our great clusters of corporations, huge trusts and fabulously ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... know. They're all right when they come North to college, but of all the hangdog, ill-dressed, slovenly lot I ever saw, a bunch of small-town Southerners are ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Evans, Quartley, Lashly and Wild. And of this party Scott wrote: 'They looked very workmanlike, and one could see at a glance the vast improvement that has been made since last year. The sledges were uniformly packed.... One shudders now to think of the slovenly manner in which we conducted things last autumn; at any rate here is a first result of the care ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... letter, as seen in the facsimile, is not in this writer's opinion, from a familiarity of thirty years with old scripts, apart from the disguise, the hand that an educated person would write at the time, but is essentially a commonplace and, no doubt intentionally, rather slovenly style of handwriting. The use of small "i's" for the first person seems, in view of modern usage, to suggest an illiterate writer; but educated writers, even the King,[12] then occasionally lapsed into using them. In the letter, however, they are ...
— The Identification of the Writer of the Anonymous Letter to Lord Monteagle in 1605 • William Parker
... military neatness which characterises you. You shave every morning, and in this season you shave by the sunlight; but since your shaving is less and less complete as we get farther back on the left side, until it becomes positively slovenly as we get round the angle of the jaw, it is surely very clear that that side is less illuminated than the other. I could not imagine a man of your habits looking at himself in an equal light and being satisfied with such a result. I only quote ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... remarkable treatise, and ran through London at once. For the style, though slovenly, was fluent and popular, and Edwards, having plenty of time on his hands, and having a taste for personalities, had made minute inquiries into the antecedents of the Five Independents in Holland and in England, and had interwoven the results of these inquiries with his arguments ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... enthusiasm, as if he felt an alien atmosphere. Falkner listened to the lines with closed eyes, his grim jaw relaxed, the deep frown smoothed. Bessie stroked a white cat,—it was plain that her thoughts were far away. Mrs. Darnell, who looked slovenly but pretty, stared vacantly out of the window. The sun lay in broad, streaks on the dusty floor; there was an air of drowsy peace, broken only by the warm tones of the lawyer as his voice rose and fell over the spirited verse. Isabelle ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... more or less, being connected with observation much too critical for her schooling, nice as the last had been. She was surprised to find the men stripping the brig forward, and converting her into a schooner. Nor was this done in a loose and slovenly manner, under favour of the obscurity. On the contrary, it was so well executed that it might have deceived even a seaman under a noon-day sun, provided the vessel were a mile or two distant. The manner in which the metamorphosis was made was as follows: the studding-sail booms had been taken off ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... feels no sense either of crowded incidents or large omissions; with this biographer the story is of perfect proportion, whether it fills seven volumes or one, or does not extend beyond the limits of a brochure. Nothing Lockhart did was ever in the smallest degree slovenly or careless, but his admirable workmanship is specially evident in the Life of Scott. The skill is masterly with which the immense mass of material has been {p.xxiv} handled, making letters, diaries, extracts, and narrative one harmonious whole, with never an occasional roughness to cause ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... herself laughed, a little, at her husband's punctilious rigour in paying his debts,—his "horror of owing five shillings for five days"; Browning, a born virtuoso in whatever he undertook, abhorring a neglected bill as he did an easy rhyme, and all other symbols of that slovenly Bohemia which came nearest, on the whole, to his conception of absolute evil. They lived at first in much seclusion, seeking no society, and unknown alike to the Italian and the English quarters of the Florentine world. But Arcady was, at bottom, just as foreign to their ways as Bohemia. ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... on the maternal side) had simply called as a visitor. He lived in a cottage by himself, and many people considered him a miser; some, rather slovenly in his habits. He now came forward from behind grandfather William, and his stooping figure formed a well- illuminated picture as he passed towards the fire-place. Being by trade a mason, he wore a long linen apron reaching almost to his toes, corduroy breeches ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... no pains to produce a poetry finer than that of any other country in our time. Poetry so full of beauty and feeling, that the study of it is at once an inspiration and a despair to the artist. The Anglo-Saxon of our day has a tendency to think that a fine idea excuses slovenly workmanship. These clear-eyed Frenchmen are a reproof to our self-satisfied laziness. Before the works of Parnassians like Leconte de Lisle, and Jose-Maria de Heredia, or those of Henri de Regnier, ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... skilful,—music for the multitude, of beneficent or of traitorous power,—dance-melodies, pure and orderly, or foul and frantic,—march-music, blatant in mere fever of animal pugnacity, or majestic with force of national duty and memory,— song-music, reckless, sensual, sickly, slovenly, forgetful even of the foolish words it effaces with foolish noise,—or thoughtful, sacred, healthful, artful, forever sanctifying noble thought with separately distinguished loveliness of belonging ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... the prayerful manner in which he felt it should be carried on. "Do get on with your studies," he wrote to a young student in 1840. "Remember you are now forming the character of your future ministry in great measure, if God spare you. If you acquire slovenly or sleepy habits of study now, you will never get the better of it. Do everything in its own time. Do everything in earnest; if it is worth doing, then do it with all your might. Above all, keep much in the presence of God. Never see the face of man till you have seen his face who is our life, ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... air, too, and Sara, who waged daily war against the slovenly shabbiness prevalent at Sunnyside, was all at once sensible of how desperately she had missed the quiet perfection of the service at Barrow. The nostalgia for her old home—the unquenchable, homesick longing for the place that has held one's happiness—rushed ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... ignorantly imagine that long nails beautify the hand, and account the excess of that excrement simply a finger-nail, whereas it is rather the talon of the lizard-hunting kestrel,—a foul and unsightly object. A slovenly dress betokens a careless mind; or, as in the case of Julius Caesar, it may be attributed ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... loiter, staring down back alleys, yawning into courts, plunging into stable-yards, and at length standing irresolute at three ways of getting to the end of its journey. It passes by artisans' shops, and keeps two or three masons' cellars and carpenters' lofts, as if its slovenly buildings needed perpetual repairs. It has not at all the air of once knowing better days. It began life hopelessly; and though the mayor and common council and board of aldermen, with ten righteous men, should daily march through it, the broom of official ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... who found him wet with sweat and his whole frame working. The third day came, and he jested with his guests at breakfast—"If I live over to-night, I shall have jockeyed the ghost." He dined at five, went to bed at eleven, called his servant a slovenly dog for not bringing a spoon for his medicine, and sent for a spoon. The man returned, found him in a fit, and roused the house. But Lord Lyttelton was dead. ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... ditto; oats, he does not know, but say sixty bushels per ditto. This estimate is not at all calculated to impress the English farmer with as favourable an opinion of the fertility of this settlement as it merits; but if he only witnessed the slovenly mode of tillage which is practised there, he would be surprised not that the average produce of the crops is so small, but that it is so great. If the same land had the benefit of the system of agriculture that prevails throughout the county of Norfolk, it may be safely asserted ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... alongside his ship and view it, on our return. He came in the boat with us, and took us on board, where he showed us everything himself: the sight, however, was not a particularly attractive one. The crew looked very rough and wild; they were all dressed in a most slovenly and dirty manner, so that it was utterly impossible to distinguish the officers from the common men. The vessel mounted twelve ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... over-crowding soon gained the predominance, and showed their evil effect in producing a fearful amount of sickness and death. They were not, with comparatively few exceptions, indolent; but they had naturally lapsed into the easy, slovenly methods, or rather want of method of the old slave life, and a few were doing the greater part of what was done. They were mere children in capacity, will and perseverance. Mrs. Griffin, with her intensely energetic nature, soon effected a change. Order took ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... at each side among the bushes. The Boy had heard that the beavers were accustomed to begin their dams by felling a tree across the channel and piling their materials upon that as a foundation. But the systematic and thorough piece of work before him was obviously superior in permanence to any such slovenly makeshift; and moreover, further to discredit such a theory, here was a tall black ash close to the stream and fairly leaning over it, as if begging to be ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... as well as I was able, I put myself under the guidance of another slovenly disciple, who showed me the chapel, and harangued very pathetically upon celestial love. In my way thither, I caught a glimpse of some pretty sempstresses, warbling melodious hymns as they sat needling ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... civilly. Among others who thus made themselves conspicuous, was Jan, whom we did not know, and whose deportment did not accord with what we had imagined of him; but we supposed he was one of the passengers, and one of the best, and most slovenly. He asked my comrade if we were not of such a people, expressly naming them, who answered him according to his and our condition.[52] After we had been on board some time, seeing we obtained no place, I went myself to look after one and observed where we could make a berth. I spoke ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... style—a style which, while possessing roots in Jain painting is now considerably laxer and more sprawling. The faces are no longer shown three-quarter view, the detached obtruding eye has gone and in place of the early sharpness there is now a certain slovenly crudity. We do not know for whom these manuscripts were made nor even in what particular part of Western India or Rajasthan they were executed. They were clearly not produced in any great centre of painting and can hardly have been commissioned by a prince or ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... snatches a revolver from a drawer, and listens in an agony of apprehension. Nothing happens. He puts the revolver back, ashamed; wipes his brow; and resumes his work. He is startled afresh by the entry of an Orderly. This Orderly is an unsoldierly, slovenly, ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... over-lit restaurant, excited by Saumur (recommended as "Perrier Jouet, 1911") and a great deal of poor conversation drowned, for the most part, by even noisier music, may be heard to say, as he permits the slovenly waiter to choose him the most expensive cigar—"That will do, sonny, the best's good enough for me." The best is not good enough for anyone who has standards; but the modern Englishman seems to have none. To go to the most expensive ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... 1810. Coleridge set great store by 'his own stately account of this lion-show' (ibid.). In a note in a MS. copy of Sibylline Leaves presented to his son Derwent he writes:—'With the exception of this slovenly sentence (ll. 109-19) I hold this preface to be my ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... habited in a coarse, blue coat, which, without being either a greatcoat or a surtout, partook of the nature and qualities of both, had about him that sort of slovenly smartness, and swaggering gait, which is peculiar to young gentlemen who smoke in the streets by day, shout and scream in the same by night, call waiters by their Christian names, and do various other acts and deeds ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... the Sultan confirmed them. The nominal approval of measures initiated by the Resident and agreed to in council, and the signing of death-warrants, are among the few prerogatives which "his Highness" retains. Then a petition for a pension from Rajah Brean was read, the Rajah, a slovenly-looking man, being present. The petition was refused, and the Sultan, in refusing it, spoke some very strong words about idleness, which seems a great failing of Rajah Brean's but it has my strong ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... piece of work which is not as good as you can make it, which you have palmed off imperfect, meagrely thought, niggardly in execution, upon mankind who is your paymaster on parole and in a sense your pupil, every hasty or slovenly or untrue performance, should rise up against you in the court of your own heart and condemn you for a thief. Have you a salary? If you trifle with your health, and so render yourself less capable for duty, and still touch, and still greedily pocket ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... jaws. The great event of these foreign teeth's establishment, which he is taming by degrees and sometimes uses for eating, has profoundly modified his character and his manners. He is rarely besmeared with grime, he is hardly slovenly. Now that he has become handsome he feels it necessary to become elegant. For the moment he is dejected, because—a miracle—he cannot wash himself. Deeply sunk in a corner, he half opens a lack-luster eye, bites and masticates his old soldier's mustache—not ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... was the store, traded a quart of thick molasses for a coonskin and a cake of beeswax, to an old dame in linsey-woolsey, put his letter away, an went into the kitchen. His wife was there, constructing some dried apple pies; a slovenly urchin of ten was dreaming over a rude weather-vane of his own contriving; his small sister, close upon four years of age, was sopping corn-bread in some gravy left in the bottom of a frying-pan and trying hard not to sop over a finger-mark that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... fancy, which has not ceased to amuse and to interest. It is not their value as literature which has placed them so high in the popular esteem, both in the East and in the West; for they are written in a style not a little slovenly, the same scenes, figures, and expressions are repeated to monotony, and the poetical extracts which are interwoven are often of very uncertain excellence. Some of the modern translations—as by Payne and Burton—have improved upon the original, and have often given it a literary ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... archetype of the whole genus of rollicking Medical Students, as originally described in the pages of Pickwick, where he is depicted as attired in "a coarse blue coat, which, without being either a great-coat or a surtout, partook of the nature and qualities of both," having about him that sort of slovenly smartness and swaggering gait peculiar to young gentlemen who smoke in the streets by day, and shout and scream in the same by night, calling waiters by their Christian names, and altogether bearing a resemblance upon the whole to something like a ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... not expect thee to ask me a question like that. Have I fretted and pined, and forgot to eat and sleep, and gone dowdy and slovenly, because my lover has been fool enough to desert me? Well, then, that is what any other girl would have done. But because I am of thy blood and stock, I take what comes to me as part of my day's work, and make no more grumble on the matter than one does about bad weather. ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... We were fortunate to see a parade of some of the State troops; and such a comical picture of military imbecility and inefficiency could surely not be found elsewhere. The officers swaggered in the gayest of uniforms; the men were shoeless, dirty and slovenly. On approaching the city one passes near by the famous volcanoes Fuego, Aqua and Picaya (14,000 feet), and ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... streets are "not respectable," but a furtive look down the length of one of them reveals only forlorn and ill-looking houses, from which all suggestion of homely domesticity has long since gone; a slovenly woman with hollow eyes and a careworn face holding up the lurching bulk of a drunken man is all she sees of its "denizens," although she may have known a neighbor's daughter who came home to die of a mysterious disease said to be the result of a "fast life," and ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... legs. Like ten-pins the pirates scattered, and the giant pulled off the mate. Gore could not see, but as he writhed he knew he was in the grip of the pirate captain. Captain Strom's harsh, ascetic face was dangerous, and his steely gray eyes compelling. The men managed slovenly salutes. ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl
... few squaws among the company, but they did not tempt a second glance. They were wooden-faced, slovenly-looking creatures almost disgusting in appearance. They were loaded with string upon string of colored beads forming a solid mass, like a huge collar, from the point of their ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... elevation of the host was supposed to atone for the sins of the people, lest one reformation should lead to another, and the spirit kill the letter. These Romish customs have the most baneful effect on the morals of our clergy; for the idle vermin who two or three times a day perform, in the most slovenly manner a service which they think useless, but call their duty, soon lose a sense of duty. At college, forced to attend or evade public worship, they acquire an habitual contempt for the very service, the performance of which is to enable them to live in idleness. ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... Bruges. So much of the tale I indicate; the rest is your affair. It is told in a pleasant haphazard fashion, enriched with flashes of caustic wit and disfigured with a good deal of ungrammatical and slovenly writing. I think I never met a novelist who did more execution among the infinitives. Also I suspect that Mrs. SAUNDERS' zeal for theatrical setting outran her knowledge of it, otherwise she would hardly have permitted ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various
... try to imagine him then as he walked about the lanes and commons of Eversley in middle life, a spare upright figure, above the middle height, with alert step, informal but not slovenly in dress, with no white tie or special mark of his profession. His head was one to attract notice anywhere with the grand hawk-like nose, firm mouth, and flashing eye. The deep lines furrowed between the ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... property, and it was farther required that the commodity should have been transferred to him by some mode of alienation which, however unequal to conferring a complete title in the particular case, was at least recognised by the law. In the case therefore of a Mancipation, however slovenly the performance might have been, yet if it had been carried so far as to involve a Tradition or Delivery, the vice of the title would be cured by Usucapion in two years at most. I know nothing in the practice of the Romans which testifies so strongly to their ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... go down to the Guardians and make my complaint. (He notices his appearance) I'm going about all day with my boots unlaced. I'm falling into bad ways, bad, slovenly ways. And my coat needs brushing, too. (He takes off his coat and goes to window and brushes it) That's Myles Gorman going back to the Workhouse. I couldn't walk with my head held as high as that. In this house I am losing ...
— Three Plays • Padraic Colum
... apparel, which was very rich, was put on with slovenly carelessness. His form, though his stature was low, and his limbs extremely slight, was elegant in the extreme; and his features no less handsome. But there was on his brow a haggard paleness, which seemed the effect of care or of dissipation, or of both these wasting causes combined. ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... years, the last fifty-seven of which he slept in a cavern at night. Gorgias, a teacher, lived to one hundred and eight; Democritus, a naturalist, attained one hundred and nine; Zeno, the founder of the Stoics, lived to one hundred; and Diogenes, the frugal and slovenly, reached ninety years. Despite his life of exposure, Hippocrates lived to one hundred and nine; and Galen, the prince of physicians after him, who was naturally of a feeble constitution, lived past eighty, and few of the followers of his ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the bill for labour. No one has ever lived in London without having occasion to complain of the dearness and badness of labour. The chief object of the town artisan is to do as little work as possible. He is absolutely without conscience in his work, and all that he does is slovenly. He surveys a job, and meditates upon it for an hour—at your expense; begins it, and goes away to fetch a tool that he has forgotten—the time of his absence being duly charged against you; procrastinates and dawdles; sits down to read the paper, if no one watches ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... unequal writer. His plays are slovenly and careless in construction, and he puts classical allusions into the mouths of milkmaids and serving boys, with the grotesque pedantry and want of keeping common among the {107} playwrights of the early stage. He has, notwithstanding, in his comedy ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the drunkard of Heavy Tree Hill. His dress, too, exhibited a marked improvement in quality and style, although still characterized in the waist and chest by the unbuttoned freedom of portly and slovenly middle age. Civilization had restricted his potations or limited them to certain festivals known as "sprees," and his face was less puffy and sodden. But with the accession of sobriety he had lost his good humor, and ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... abominable habit, my friend—a habit which will ever prevent your becoming a poet of the first order. You rhyme in a slovenly manner." ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... Association was formed, the care of the insane in England and Wales was regulated by the Gordon-Ashley Act of 1828,[296] which, among other reforms, had substituted for the authority of five Fellows of the College of Physicians, who performed their duties in the most slovenly manner, fifteen metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy. I find, on examining the Annual Report of these Commissioners issued in 1841, that it does not extend over more than one page and a half! It is signed by Ashley, Gordon, Turner, Southey, and Proctor. They report the number confined in the thirty-three ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... a deliberate detachment from any particular social class or caste, partly of his love of pickles and adventures, which he thought befel a man thus attired more readily than another. But this slender, slovenly, nondescript apparition, long-visaged and long-haired, had only to speak in order to be recognised in the first minute for a witty and charming gentleman, and within the first five for a master spirit and man of genius. There were, indeed, certain ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... alone. He was known as a jolly, blarney-tongued, slovenly wit, who for a consideration managed the political affairs of Jordantown and the county in a manner which was agreeable to the "deities" already mentioned, who were not willing to do all the things in this business that must be done. ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... be clean and love cleanliness when its mother is habitually untidy and slovenly? The colored mother beautiful would no more exhibit herself unclean than naked. She would no more walk slovenly than to dress slovenly. If a mother wears unclean clothes, has unclean thoughts or unclean manners, her ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... secluded pleasures, he was not in this respect peculiar among young men, princes or otherwise. If, too, he never succeeded in overcoming the difficulties which the spelling of the English language presented, and if his handwriting always remained slovenly and illegible, it must be remembered that in that age spelling was not prized as a pre-eminent accomplishment by exalted persons, and that Charles Stuart could spell quite as well as Marlborough. He knew how to sign his name; and it may be remarked that though ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... can: I met just now with a certain man, who came to you with letters from a certain old gentleman, y'cleped your father; whereby I am given to understand, that to-morrow you are to take an oath in the church to be grave henceforward, to go ill-dressed and slovenly, to get heirs for your estate, and to dandle them for your diversion; and, in short, that love and courtship ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... And dress nor slovenly nor gay, Nor sternly act; nor trifling play; Still keep the golden middle way Whate'er betide you; And ne'er through giddy pleasures stray, Though ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... hard luck indeed," he would say. Or, "You played that trick as few could do it" Or, "Am not I in the key to-night? there's less craft than luck here." And he played even slovenly once or twice, flushing, we could read, lest we should see the stratagem. At these times, by the curious way of chance, he ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... perfection, the contemplation of which might at once improve and mortify him. His path was not attended by an unapproachable mirage of excellence, for ever receding, and for ever pursued. He was not disgusted by the negligence of others; and he extended the same toleration to himself. His mind was of a slovenly character,—fond of splendour, but indifferent to neatness. Hence most of his writings exhibit the sluttish magnificence of a Russian noble, all vermin and diamonds, dirty linen and inestimable sables. Those faults which spring from affectation, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and the hand will follow the direction of the thoughts and the emotions and the habits of the writers. The phlegmatic will portray his words, while the playful haste of the volatile will scarcely sketch them; the slovenly will blot and efface and scrawl, while the neat and orderly-minded will view themselves in the paper before their eyes. The merchant's clerk will not write like the lawyer or the poet. Even nations are distinguished by their writing; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... lady, who aspires to be a good rider, should, even from her first lesson in the art, strive to obtain a proper deportment on the saddle. She ought to be correct, without seeming stiff or formal: and easy, without appearing slovenly. The position we have described, subject to occasional variations, will be found, by experience, to be the most natural and graceful mode of sitting a horse:—it is easy to the rider and her steed; and enables the former to govern the ...
— The Young Lady's Equestrian Manual • Anonymous
... original nonsense will be considered as most proper for the purposes of a true collector. Woodward, the comedian, in his lively attack on Hill, has given "a mock Inspector," an exquisite piece of literary ridicule, in which he has hit off the egotisms and slovenly ease of the real ones. Never, like "The Inspector," flamed such a provoking prodigy in the cloudy skies of Grub-street; and Hill seems studiously to have mortified his luckless rivals by a perpetual embroidery of his adventures in ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... others are unpainted; there is not a bush, or garden, or green thing; it just straggles out promiscuously on the boundless brown plains, on the extreme verge of which three toothy peaks are seen. It is utterly slovenly-looking, and unornamental, abounds in slouching bar-room-looking characters, and looks a place of low, mean lives. Below the hotel window freight cars are being perpetually shunted, but beyond the railroad tracks are nothing but the brown plains, with their lonely sights—now a solitary ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... dead place of unremembered things where nothing matters any more? Last week's cleaning left undone adds nothing appreciable to this week's dirt that next week's exertions may not remedy as easily together as singly—or so argued the slovenly housewife, while for the industrious no hands save their own could have scrubbed and polished ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... Set down my delay to your own fault; I wished to acknowledge such a gift from you in some of my inapt and slovenly rhymes; but you should have sent me your pen and not your desk. The verses stand up to the axles in a miry cross-road, whence the coursers of the sun shall never draw them; hence I am constrained to this uncourtliness, that I must appear before one of the kings ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sheaves from the stack of her heavy hair. For the widow had a certain indolent Southern negligence, which in a less pretty woman would have been untidiness, and a characteristic hook and eyeless freedom of attire which on less graceful limbs would have been slovenly. One sleeve cuff was unbuttoned, but it showed the blue veins of her delicate wrist; the neck of her dress had lost a hook, but the glimpse of a bit of edging round the white throat made amends. Of all which, however, it should be said that ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... a taste for cleanliness and elegance of person. Our ancestors, who kept but little company with their women, were not only slovenly in their dress, but had their countenances disfigured with long beards. By female influence, however, beards were, in process of time, mutilated down to mustaches. As the gentlemen found that the ladies had no great relish for mustaches, which were the relics of a beard, they cut and curled ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... Fourth, the custom of play-going has declined among the higher classes, and naturally produces the reaction of bad pieces and indifferent performers. Even a clever actor, when satisfied that he is to receive judgment from an unrefined and uneducated audience, will degenerate and grow slovenly; and from what I have observed of the London stage, I see it is the custom to daub for the galleries, or to creep through the business under cover of a cold, tame mediocrity. Without the slightest patronage from ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 531, Saturday, January 28, 1832. • Various
... there were stones, brick-bats, shivered awning-posts, and other wrecks of the fight. The grog-shops were open, in which men with bloody noses, and bruised and battered faces, obtained the necessary stimulus to continue the desperate struggle. Dirty, slovenly-dressed women stood in the door- ways or on the steps, swearing and denouncing both police and military in the coarsest language. Though the immense gatherings of the preceding days were not witnessed, yet there ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... again! The moving canvas shows A slave plantation's slovenly repose, Where, in rude cabins rotting midst their weeds, The human chattel eats, and sleeps, and breeds; And, held a brute, in practice, as in law, Becomes in fact the thing he's taken for. There, early summoned to the hemp and corn, The nursing mother leaves her ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... to cultivate the art of conversation, one should at least be correct in speech. One should not permit slovenly expressions, or slang, or the thousand and one faults of mispronunciation and ungrammatical construction into which people fall, to be characteristic of one's speaking. For if one has time to go ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... children. My parents considered, and I think rightly, that the best and most correct forms of speech should be taught to mere infants, that it is as easy to train a child to be grammatical as to let it lapse into all sorts of slovenly inaccuracies that must be unlearned at school, and in society. So, when they talked of "circumstantial evidence" I had a fair inkling of what the phrase conveyed. Preciosa was upon trial for ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... there is no reason to suppose that diligent husbandry has done more than to eradicate the pests of agriculture within a comparatively limited area, and the cockle and the darnel will probably remain to plague the slovenly cultivator as long as the cereal grains continue to bless him. [Footnote: Although it is not known that man has absolutely extirpated any vegetable, the mysterious diseases which have, for the last twenty years, so injuriously affected the potato, the vine, the orange, the olive, and silk husbandry, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... stood blinking at the grey sheet stuffed with laundry, not knowing what had happened to him. He felt a little sick as he contemplated the bundle. Everything here was different; he hated the disorder of the place, the grey prison light, his old shoes and himself and all his slovenly habits. The black calico curtains that ran on wires over his big window were white with dust. There were three greasy frying pans in the sink, and the sink itself—He felt desperate. He couldn't stand this another minute. He took up an armful of winter ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... reduce ten to seven, he came suddenly upon a wild and primitive piece of ground, that seemed half chase, half common, with crazy tumbledown cottages of villanous aspect scattered about in odd nooks and corners. Idle, dirty children were making mud-pies on the road; slovenly-looking women were plaiting straw at the threshold; a large but forlorn and decayed church, that seemed to say that the generation which saw it built was more pious than the generation which now resorted to it, stood boldly and ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... appears in the archway from L., He is a dark-browed man, about forty, but with white hair; he is attired as a clergyman, but his dress is rusty, shabby, and slovenly; he carries ...
— The Squire - An Original Comedy in Three Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... many colors. I remember seeing, when a boy, more years ago than I am inclined to specify, some workmen engaged in pulling down what had been a house-painter's shop, a full century before. The painter had been in the somewhat slovenly habit of cleaning his brushes by rubbing them against a hard-cast wall, which was covered, in consequence, by a many-colored layer of paint, a full half-inch in thickness, and as hard as a stone. Taking a little bit home with me, I polished it by rubbing the upper ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... Lord Stanley, at a short railroad ride from Liverpool, which we have not yet had an opportunity of examining, but understand that it is a very remarkable instance of good farming, and consequently heavy crops, in a county (Lancashire) where slovenly farming is quite the rule, and well worth a visit from competent judges, whom as we are also informed Mr. ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... are not much afflicted with these pests. The slovenly and thriftless are overrun with them. Early in June woollens and furs should be carefully dusted, shaken and beaten. Dr. T. W. Harris states that "powdered black pepper, strewed under the edge of carpets, is said to repel moths. Sheets of paper sprinkled with spirits of turpentine, camphor in coarse ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... penny. He was no shirker. From the first day that he carried a pair of pliers in the leg pocket of his overalls, and in a sixty-knot gale stretched wires between ice-capped telegraph poles, he had more than earned his wages. Never, whether on time or at piece-work, had he by a slovenly job, or by beating the whistle, robbed his employer. And for his honest toil he was determined to be as honestly paid—even by President Hamilcar Poussevain. And President Ham never paid anybody; neither the Armenian street peddlers, in whose sweets ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... were driven slowly up a side street where slovenly women idled in windows and doorways and half-naked children ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... beauty or dignity about him. You would find him extraordinarily odd, but in the old days he met not only with acceptance but respect. He was alive until within a year or so ago, but his later appearance changed. As I saw him that afternoon he was a very slovenly, ungainly little human being indeed, not only was his clothing altogether ugly and queer, but had you stripped the man stark, you would certainly have seen in the bulging paunch that comes from flabby muscles and flabbily controlled appetites, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... anything near it? Should I not be constantly shocking him by coarse, gross notions as to the needlessness of this or that fine point of conduct? by my ill-defined ideas as to a code of honor—my slovenly ways of looking ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... command of my regiment," he writes. "He is a rough, slovenly old dog of a man who seems to bark at us on the training ground. He has two or three hunting dogs that live with him in his tent and also a rare gift of profanity which is ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... fast as he can, to get a habit of having his mind to start promptly; it is so much more difficult to improve in speed than in accuracy[201].' WATSON. 'I own I am for much attention to accuracy in composing, lest one should get bad habits of doing it in a slovenly manner.' JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, you are confounding doing inaccurately with the necessity of doing inaccurately. A man knows when his composition is inaccurate, and when he thinks fit he'll correct it. But, if a man is accustomed to compose slowly, and with difficulty, upon ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... Milton, again, the harmony of the verse is but the echo of the inward music which the thoughts of the poet breathe. In Moore's style the ornament continually outstrips the sense. Cowper and Walter Scott, on the other hand, are slovenly in their versification. Sophocles writes, on the whole, without studied attention to the style; but Euripides frequently affects a simplicity and prettiness which exposed him to the ridicule of the comic poets. Lastly, the style of Homer's poems is perfect in their ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... instance, why should it be thought foolish or low to superintend the kitchen? Why should care not be taken that the storeroom never lacks supplies? Why should a housekeeper be allowed to thieve? Why should slovenly and drunken servants exist? Why should a domestic staff be suffered in indulge in bouts of unconscionable debauchery during its leisure time? Yet none of these things were thought worthy of consideration by Manilov's wife, for she had been gently brought up, and ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... Guidi, ordinarily known as Masaccio, or Tomassacio, Slovenly or Hulking Tom. Browning followed good authority in making Masaccio a pupil of Fra Lippo Lippi, but in point of fact he was probably the master whose works Fra Lippo studied. Luebke (History of Art ii, 207) says of Guidi: "In his exceedingly ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... there are certain dangers in having a good memory, just as there is danger in being brilliant generally. The quick learner is in danger of forming slovenly habits. A person who learns quickly is likely to form the habit of waiting till the last minute to study his lesson and then getting a superficial idea of it. The slow learner must form good habits of study to get on ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... mutch was clean? Weaving and washing and cooking, doing the work of a breadwinner as well as of a housewife, hers was soon a body prematurely old, on which no wrapper would sit becomingly. Before her face, Sanders would hint that her slovenly ways and dress tried him sorely, and in company at least she only bowed her head. We were given to respecting those who worked hard, but Nanny, we thought, was a woman of means, and Sanders let us call her a miser. He was always anxious, he said, to be generous, but Nanny would ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... commands, or the prescriptions of the manual. It would take short work for the disciplined hosts the new Northern general was training, to sweep such chaff from the field of war. Vincent saw something of this in his comrade's eye, and a good deal nettled himself by the slovenly march and humorous abandon of ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... of striving to do things with defective psychic impulsion is fatigue in its common forms, which slows down the pace, multiplies errors and inaccuracies, and develops slovenly habits, ennui, flitting will specters, velleities and caprices, and neurasthenic symptoms generally. It brings restlessness, and a tendency to many little heterogeneous, smattering efforts that weaken the will ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... he was, since they last met. The wicked career of a few months had stamped and furrowed his brow with the lines of years. His dress was mean and faded. He looked dirty and slovenly, and little of his former manly beauty and elegance of person remained. So utterly degraded was his appearance, that a cry of surprise broke from Anthony's lips, so inexpressibly shocked was he at an ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... mystery of that noble trade.... Neither is it true that this fineness of raillery is offensive: a witty man is tickled while he is hurt in this manner, and a fool feels it not.... There is a vast difference between the slovenly butchering of a man and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its place. A man may be capable, as Jack Ketch's wife said of his servant, of a plain piece of work, of a bare hanging; but to make a malefactor ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... things, it comprehends their intelligible plan, sees their forms and principles, their categories and rules, their order and necessity. It takes the superior point of view of the architect. Is it conceivable that it should ever forsake that point of view and abandon itself to a slovenly life of immediate feeling? To say nothing of your traditional Oxford devotion to Aristotle and Plato, the leaven of T.H. Green probably works still too strongly here for his anti-sensationalism to be outgrown quickly. Green more than any one realized that knowledge about things was knowledge ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... the place is not inviting, and they were glad to leave early the following morning; for Enkeldorn is the centre round which many Dutch people congregate to farm small farms, in what it must be confessed is often the most slovenly and lazy fashion conceivable. And some of them speak quite openly of how they hate the English, and look forward to a day when they will be strong enough to turn them out ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... attempt to occupy himself with the condition of Lynbrook, one of those slovenly villages, without individual character or the tradition of self-respect, which spring up in America on the skirts of the rich summer colonies. But Bessy had never given Lynbrook a thought, and he realized the ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... most proper for the purposes of a true collector. Woodward, the comedian, in his lively attack on Hill, has given "a mock Inspector," an exquisite piece of literary ridicule, in which he has hit off the egotisms and slovenly ease of the real ones. Never, like "The Inspector," flamed such a provoking prodigy in the cloudy skies of Grub-street; and Hill seems studiously to have mortified his luckless rivals by a perpetual embroidery ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... you a Fortnight ago in so great Haste that I had not time to transcribe or correct it and relied on your Candor to overlook the slovenly Dress in which it was sent to you. You have since heard that our Friends in Jersey have at length got rid of as vindictive and cruel an Enemy as ever invaded any Country. It was the opinion of General Gates that Howes advancing to Somerset Court House was a Feint to cover the ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... the habits which his poverty induced, had given him a character as a clergyman, very different from that which the high feelings and strict principles which animated him at his ordination would have seemed to ensure. He was, in fact, a loose, slovenly man, somewhat too fond of his tumbler of punch; a little lax, perhaps, as to clerical discipline, but very staunch as to doctrine. He possessed no industry or energy of any kind; but he was good-natured and charitable, lived on friendly terms with all his neighbours, and ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... would halt me, I walked up to him; and he continued to munch the green bough-apple he was eating, making me a most slovenly salute. ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... Mrs. Wood," she stammered, for, while the newcomers interested her, their slovenly appearance made her ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... said, could not but be much more nauseous and offensive, than to see it thrown away, as we did all other evacuations. I found that what he said was not altogether without reason, and by being frequently in his company, that slovenly action of his was at last grown familiar to me; which nevertheless we make a face at, when we hear it reported of another country. Miracles appear to be so, according to our ignorance of nature, and not according to the essence of nature the continually being accustomed to anything, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... a few squaws among the company, but they did not tempt a second glance. They were wooden-faced, slovenly-looking creatures almost disgusting in appearance. They were loaded with string upon string of colored beads forming a solid mass, like a huge collar, from the point of their chins down ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... was no longer a young man. Further, I seemed to see that the reviewer was not a professional critic, for his work displayed few of the well-recognised trade-marks with which the articles of the literary market are invariably branded. As a small matter one noticed the somewhat slovenly use of the editorial we, which at the fag-end of passages sometimes dropped into I. [Upon my remarking upon this to Rossetti he remembered incidentally that a similar confounding of the singular ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... 'see the loving care bestowed on each link in the watch-chain. What a reproof to the slovenly slap-dash methods of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... Ranter; or, The History of Bacon in Virginia was produced at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1690—the year after Mrs. Behn's death—owing to the slipshod and slovenly way in which it was put on, or rather, 'murdered', to use the phrase of the dedication, it did not meet with the success so capital a piece fully deserved. Such ample and needless omissions were made that the ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... felt rather troubled on Netta's account. Perhaps Elizabeth was on the verge of giving notice as a protest against the extra work involved by having that monstrously untidy man about the place. Why Netta tolerates him with his slovenly habits is beyond ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... ceased to amuse and to interest. It is not their value as literature which has placed them so high in the popular esteem, both in the East and in the West; for they are written in a style not a little slovenly, the same scenes, figures, and expressions are repeated to monotony, and the poetical extracts which are interwoven are often of very uncertain excellence. Some of the modern translations—as by ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... some semblance of an upright wall, and crown the summit of it with a rampart of stakes. The deep fosse below fortunately remained as it was, not filled up. So in five and twenty days the circuit of the walls was completed, truly in a most slovenly style of building, the marks of which we can see even to this day, but Rome was once again a "fenced city". As soon as Totila heard the unwelcome tidings, he marched with his whole army to Rome, hoping to take the City, as his soldiers said, "at the first shout". But he had Belisarius ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... work itself, like an unanswered letter, slipped into that dead place of unremembered things where nothing matters any more? Last week's cleaning left undone adds nothing appreciable to this week's dirt that next week's exertions may not remedy as easily together as singly—or so argued the slovenly housewife, while for the industrious no hands save their own could have scrubbed and polished to ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... several piece well fitted on, and all of a piece, till it all looks as if it had grown by nature itself upon the well-dressed wearer. Be like him—be like her—so runs the third head of the etiquette-card. Be not slovenly and disorderly and unseemly in your livery. Let not your livery be always falling off, and catching on every bush and briar, and dropping into every pool and ditch. Hold yourselves in hand, the instruction goes on. Brace yourselves up. Have your ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... wrench out of his nature the instincts of the middle-class from which he came; and the penury, the hack work which Cronshaw did to keep body and soul together, the monotony of existence between the slovenly attic and the cafe table, jarred with his respectability. Cronshaw was astute enough to know that the young man disapproved of him, and he attacked his philistinism with an irony which was sometimes playful but ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... over India; and the straw-coloured cane is the only kind that yields good sugar. The large purple canes yield a watery and very inferior juice; and are generally and almost universally sold in the markets as a fruit. The straw-coloured canes, from being crowded under a very slovenly System, with little manure and less weeding, degenerate into a mere reed. The Otaheite cane, which was introduced into India by me in 1827, has spread over the Nerbudda, and many other territories; but that that will degenerate ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... of baby companions gradually grow less by reason of the rapid vibrations of the nurse's knee. He kept silence therefore, and wondered whether Turrif or the pony was guiding, so carelessly did they go forth into the darkness, turning corners and avoiding ghostly fences with slovenly ease. ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... one side of which, thrift and comfort and gathering wealth, growing villages, smiling farms, convenient habitations, school-houses, and churches make the landscape beautiful; while on the other, slovenly husbandry, dilapidated mansions, sordid huts, perilous wastes, horrible roads, the rare spire, and rarer village school betray all the nakedness of the land. It is the magic of motive that calls forth all this wealth and beauty to bless the most sterile soil stirred by willing and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... which was too small for his head; his shirt-neck and knees of his breeches were loose; his black worsted stockings ill drawn up; and he had a pair of unbuckled shoes by way of slippers. But all these slovenly particularities were forgotten the moment that he began to talk. Some gentlemen, whom I do not recollect, were sitting with him; and when they went away, I also rose; but he said to me, 'Nay, don't go.' 'Sir, (said I,) I am afraid that ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... and which penetrated even to Halleck's sore and jaded thoughts. A different type of men began to show itself in the car, as the Western people gradually took the places of his fellow-travellers from the East. The men were often slovenly and sometimes uncouth in their dress; but they made themselves at home in the exaggerated splendor and opulence of the car, as if born to the best in every way; their faces suggested the security of people ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... made without felling," says Mrs. Alexander; "it's slovenly and shiftless. I wouldn't have such a pillow-case in my house any more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... with the fluent grace of youth, beautiful as a forest fawn. In ten years she would be fat and slovenly like her Mexican mother, but now she carried her slender body as a queen is supposed to but does not. Her heel sank into a little patch of mud where some one had watered a horse. Under the cottonwoods ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... their Descendings Can tickle folks with double endings? I had a Dad, that would for half a bet Have put down thine thro' half the Alphabet. Thou, who would be Dan Prior the second, For Dan Posterior must be reckon'd. In faith, dear Tim, your rhymes are slovenly, As a man may say, dough-baked and ovenly; Tedious and long as two Long Acres, And smell most vilely of the Baker's. (I have been cursing every limb o' thee, Because I could not hitch in Timothy. Jack, Will, Tom, Dick's, a serious evil, But Tim, plain ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... long glittering necklace. What with her clothes, and her arch delicate face, which showed exquisitely pink beneath hair turning grey, she was astonishingly like an eighteenth-century masterpiece—a Reynolds or a Romney. She made Helen and the others look coarse and slovenly beside her. Sitting lightly upright she seemed to be dealing with the world as she chose; the enormous solid globe spun round this way and that beneath her fingers. And her husband! Mr. Dalloway rolling that rich deliberate voice was even more impressive. He seemed to come from the humming ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... leaving them at all, and that he was sure that they would soon follow; and that for himself the time had come to know more of the place. I learned from him that his last life had been an unhappy one, in a crowded street and a slovenly home, with much evil of talk and act about him; he had hated it all, he said, but for a little sister that he had loved, who had kissed and clasped him, weeping, when he lay dying of a miserable disease. He said that he thought he should find her, which made part of his joy of going; that for a long ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... carry on from one day to another they are quite content. The bit of ground they live on is not half cultivated. In the summer time you may see two or even three crops growing up together. If they had potatoes on last, they got them up in the most slovenly way, leaving half the crop in the ground. They just hoak out with a stick or a bit of board what they require for that day's food, picking the large ones and leaving the small ones in the ground. Oats or something else will be seen half-choked ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... instance, the bill for labour. No one has ever lived in London without having occasion to complain of the dearness and badness of labour. The chief object of the town artisan is to do as little work as possible. He is absolutely without conscience in his work, and all that he does is slovenly. He surveys a job, and meditates upon it for an hour—at your expense; begins it, and goes away to fetch a tool that he has forgotten—the time of his absence being duly charged against you; procrastinates and dawdles; sits down to read the paper, if no one watches him; ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... which an image can be formed in the mind". There is perhaps no word in the whole compass of English, so seldom used with any tolerable correctness; in none is the distance so immense between the frequent sublimity of the word in its proper use, and the triviality of it in its slovenly and its popular. ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... solemn rites are performed; most of their morais being in a ruinous condition, and bearing evident marks of neglect. The people of Atooi, again, inter both their common dead and human sacrifices, as at Tongataboo; but they resemble those of Otaheite in the slovenly state of their religious places, and in offering vegetables and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... unconcerned, indifferent, heedless, inattentive, regardless, lax, incautious, remiss, inconsiderate, nonchalant, neglectful, unwary, imprudent, indiscreet, improvident, reckless, desultory, perfunctory, devil-may-care, slovenly, slack, supine. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... to her, the young lady, who aspires to be a good rider, should, even from her first lesson in the art, strive to obtain a proper deportment on the saddle. She ought to be correct, without seeming stiff or formal: and easy, without appearing slovenly. The position we have described, subject to occasional variations, will be found, by experience, to be the most natural and graceful mode of sitting a horse:—it is easy to the rider and her steed; and enables the former to govern ...
— The Young Lady's Equestrian Manual • Anonymous
... used to do, who went about fresh of look and by the very appearance of his body drew men's eyes. But if a Cynic is an object of pity, he seems a mere beggar; all turn away, all are offended at him. Nor should he be slovenly of look, so as not to scare men from him in this way either; on the contrary, his very roughness should be ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... confess I have no great liking for that tree, the aspen, with its pale-lilac trunk and the greyish-green metallic leaves which it flings high as it can, and unfolds in a quivering fan in the air; I do not care for the eternal shaking of its round, slovenly leaves, awkwardly hooked on to long stalks. It is only fine on some summer evenings when, rising singly above low undergrowth, it faces the reddening beams of the setting sun, and shines and quivers, bathed from root to top ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... Depot Journey, and was enormously impressed by the comfort which a careful routine of this nature evoked. There was a homelike air about the tent at supper time, and, though a lunch camp in the middle of the night is always rather bleak, there was never anything slovenly. Another thing which struck me even more forcibly was the cooking. We were of course on just the same ration as the tent from which I had come. I was hungry and said so. "Bad cooking," said Wilson shortly; and so it was. For in two or ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... and swollen from recent weeping, her face was mottled from her tears. Much trouble had made her careless of late of her prettiness, and now she was disheveled, her apron awry around her waist, her hair mussed, her whole aspect one of slovenly disregard. Her depression was so great that Joe was moved to ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... relapsed into silence after disposing of the slovenly meal he had induced the landlady to provide. The only thing that seemed to worry her was the superfluous dirt that adorned ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... jargon of German or French, sometimes mixing the two; a kind of language which none but his intimates could comprehend. His articulation was defective; his countenance was so ugly as to be forbidding; and, during the latter part of his life at least, his personal habits were worse than slovenly. The failure in the pulpit is not wonderful; nor yet that in the law, which he tried next. He turned again to his first pursuit, and published some philological writings. While eager about a new method of teaching Latin, he one day ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... had a look-in. They found everything in order, showing that Nancy was not slovenly about her work. The tubs were hung on the wall, and a basket of soiled clothes standing ready for the next ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... the whole of it I watched the stranger: noticed how different was his language from anything I had ever heard before; marked the clear tones of his voice and the distinctness of his utterance, contrasting with the heavy, thick gutturals, the running of words into each other, the slovenly drawl of my father and his men; watched his manner of eating, his neat disposition of his food on his plate; saw him move his chair back with a slight expression of annoyance, unmarked by any one else, as Will Foushee spit on the floor beside him. All this I observed, in a mood half envious, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... charm of Dr. Holmes's comment on life, and of the phrase wherein he secures it, arises from his singular vigilance. He has unpreoccupied and alert eyes. Strangely enough, by the way, this watchfulness is for once as much at fault as would be the slovenly observation of an ordinary man, in the description of a horse's gallop, 'skimming along within a yard of the ground.' Who shall trust a man's nimble eyes after this, when habit and credulity have taught him? Not an inch nearer the ground goes the horse of fact at a gallop than at a walk. ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... a periodical publication, entitled the Universal Museum, which came out monthly, printed with glorious imprudence on my own account. I waited on Dr. Johnson, who was sitting by the fire so half-dressed and slovenly a figure as to make me stare at him. I stated my plan, and begged that he would favour me with a paper once a month, offering at the same time any remuneration ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... whole related to important land transactions instead of being mere school exercises. Thus, in his earliest days, there was perseverance and completeness in all his undertakings. Nothing was left half done, or done in a hurried and slovenly manner. The habit of mind thus cultivated continued throughout life; so that however complicated his tasks and overwhelming his cares, in the arduous and hazardous situations in which he was often placed, he found time to do every thing, and to do it well. He had acquired the magic of method, which ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... nature or association. Without taste, modesty, good sense, or natural refinement, she accompanies her dear Silas in his round of life, sympathizing in his lowness, his common feeling, and his common complaints—slatternly in her dress, rude in speech, coarse in manner, slovenly in her household duties. These two creatures, with their children, too often call themselves farmers, agriculturists, or tillers of the soil. The poet Cowper well describes them in his poem representing 'the country boors' gathered together at tithing time ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... pleasures of the people,' he said. 'They give the measure of the quality of their work—lazy, slovenly, monotonous repetition, producing nothing splendid but machines, wonderful engines, marvellous ships, miraculous motor-cars, but dull, listless, sodden people—inert. It is the inertia of London ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... expect thee to ask me a question like that. Have I fretted and pined, and forgot to eat and sleep, and gone dowdy and slovenly, because my lover has been fool enough to desert me? Well, then, that is what any other girl would have done. But because I am of thy blood and stock, I take what comes to me as part of my day's work, and make no more grumble on the matter than one does ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... pilfering appears, the wrong must be made clear. Some sense of property rights is necessary; not the right, as some assume, to do what you will with a thing because you have it, but the right to enjoy and usefully employ it. Help children to see the difference between mine and thine. Slovenly moral thinking often comes from too great freedom in forgetful borrowing within the family. In this little social group the members must first acquire the habits of respect for the rights of others. Through toys, tools, and books the lesson may be learned so ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... dress as to pass without being noticed; neither precise nor formal, slovenly nor dandyish; dress like a man or woman. Conduct yourself as ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the highest initial velocity. The shell must be filled, and the powder well shaken down, leaving only room for the insertion of the fuze. A wooden plug the size of the lower part of the fuze will always determine this. The very common, but slovenly, practice of filling the shell, and then pouring out a quantity sufficient to allow the fuze to be inserted, is expressly prohibited. Shell have also been returned with the powder in the vicinity of the fuze compressed into a ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... lived together in one room, and Little L, as I said, was very clean and neat; the big one, on the contrary, was very slovenly. And so Little L fairly made himself servant to his brother, and it turned out that he even cleaned the brass buttons on his uniform for him, and just before the ranks formed for roll-call would place himself, with clothes-brush in hand, in front of ...
— Good Blood • Ernst Von Wildenbruch
... any kind to mitigate the severity of its simplicity, not even so much as a window sill; and it was thatched!—not with the trim neatness characteristic of some of our charmingly picturesque country cottages in England, but in a slovenly, happy-go-lucky style, that seemed to convey the idea that, so long as a roof was weather-proof, it did not in the least matter what it looked like. The windows were simply rectangular holes in the thick stone walls, unglazed, and without even a frame; but now that Escombe ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... write that one letter very nicely, Polly, and take ever so much pains with it," said Mother Fisher, her black eyes shining at the happy solution; "and that is much better than to hurry off a good many slovenly ones. Besides, it is not well to take your time and strength for too much letter writing, for there are the boys, ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... which characterises you. You shave every morning, and in this season you shave by the sunlight; but since your shaving is less and less complete as we get farther back on the left side, until it becomes positively slovenly as we get round the angle of the jaw, it is surely very clear that that side is less illuminated than the other. I could not imagine a man of your habits looking at himself in an equal light and being satisfied with such a result. ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... is particular about the stitches," said Grace; "don't you remember she told us she was, for our own sakes more than the poor folks'; because it would be a sad thing for us to fall into slovenly habits ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... however, even in the makeshift and the slovenly; and not all lapses into anachronism are equally to be condemned. One thing is so patent as to call for no demonstration: to wit, that the aside is ten times worse than the soliloquy. It is always possible that a man might speak his thought, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... fellow is a little slovenly to-day in his appearance, and you see he has brought already several partridges, besides a rabbit. We shall have venison, in ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... this devil's full of malice, That in my late disasters rallies:) 1370 Condemn'd to whipping, but declin'd it, By being more heroic-minded: And at a riding handled worse, With treats more slovenly and coarse: Engag'd with fiends in stubborn wars, 1375 And hot disputes with conjurers; And when th' hadst bravely won the day, Wast fain to steal ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... with their tin pails of raspberries to sell, and just knowing English enough to ask a big price for them. But it was on the squaws we depended in those days, or go without raspberry preserves for the winter. Slovenly-looking things they were with their three or four coloured petticoats and their papooses on their backs. And for dirt—! But I thought they were all ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... abetted the riots in Scotland. Of all men in the world Lord George Gordon was the most unfit to preside over a Protestant Association. He was a member of parliament it is true, but he was chiefly remarkable there for his eccentric habits, slovenly dress, and by a progressive insanity, which on some occasions partook of the nature of oratorical inspiration. He was, however, known to be firm in his hatred towards the Papists, and adverse to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... looked rather annoyed. Accustomed to perfect order himself, he was often irritated by the slovenly ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... Baumberger, from the snagged hole in his hat-crown where a wisp of graying hair fluttered through, to the toes of his ungainly, rubber-clad feet; loosely disreputable, but not commonplace and not incompetent. Though his speech might be a slovenly mumble, there was no purposeless fumbling of the fingers that chose a fly and knotted it fast upon the leader. There was no bungling movement of hand or foot when he laid his pipe upon the rock, tiptoed around the corner, sent a mechanical glance upward toward the swaying branches ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... self-reliance, and many other qualities which our education had not tended to develop. It was seen that we were unpractical in our Instruction, that minds passed under the discipline of school and came out again, still slovenly, unobservant, unscientific in temper, impatient, flippant, inaccurate, tending to guess and to jump at conclusions, to generalize hastily, etc. It was observed that many unskilful hands came out of the schools, ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... of paper from a large pocket-book which lay at his elbow on the new green cloth-covered table, and handed it to his friend, who slowly opened and read it in a slovenly way, mumbling the most of it as he ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... What's that?" I cried, looking at the slovenly, dirt-streaked wrapper and the shabby golf-cape that had slipped from her shoulders to the cot. She regarded me with pity for my ignorance, and then delivered herself of ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... a passion for dress. But as in everything else, so in this, his fancy was a fitful one. At one time he would excite our admiration by the splendor of his outfit, and perhaps the next week he would seem to take equal pleasure in his slovenly or careless appearance." ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... generally overcome or prevented by calling attention to them. Good mental attention is the most infallible cure for slovenly habits of attack. It may be that there are in all schools a certain proportion of the pupils who have very weak and imperfect vocal organs; in their cases, even good attention cannot ...
— The Child-Voice in Singing • Francis E. Howard
... listen unto them. Personal magnetism or personal appearance entered not as factors into their success. Indeed as far as physique were concerned, some of them were handicapped. Spurgeon was a short, podgy, fat little man, Moody was like a country farmer, Talmage in his big cloak was one of the most slovenly of men and only Beecher was passable in the way of refinement and gentlemanly bearing. Physical appearance, as so many think, is not the sesame to the interest of an audience. Daniel O'Connell, the Irish tribune, was a homely, ugly, awkward, ungainly man, yet his words ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... took interest in,—of Kami, wisest of teachers, and of the girls in the studio,—of the Poles, who will kill themselves with overwork if they are not checked; of the French, who talk at great length of much more than they will ever accomplish; of the slovenly English, who toil hopelessly and cannot understand that inclination does not imply power; of the Americans, whose rasping voices in the hush of a hot afternoon strain tense-drawn nerves to breaking-point, and whose suppers lead to indigestion; of tempestuous Russians, neither to hold nor ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... journalism and literature. Their equipment is trivial and their industry colossal. In a literary sense they are so prolific that they do not beget; they spawn. They present a marvellous combination of unquenchable enthusiasm and slovenly inaccuracy. They needs must love the highest when they see it, but they are congenitally incapable of describing it correctly. Their conception of art consists of writing a book describing their own sexual ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... walked the same distance to a yard, on the ugliest high-road in the neighborhood. He was crooked of back, and quick of temper. He could digest radishes, and sleep after green tea. His views of human nature were the views of Diogenes, tempered by Rochefoucauld; his personal habits were slovenly in the last degree; and his favorite boast was that he ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... choice for the useful and graceful covering of the foot-soldier's head; either the small slouched hat of the old Spanish infantry—a hat very liable to be turned into something slovenly and dirty—or the foraging cap of our undress—a covering most comfortable, but not quite strong enough for campaigning use, as well as for parade; or the helmet of antique form, shaped, that is to say, in some conformity with the make of the head, and more ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... not do much "swot" that evening. He couldn't get the ghost out of his head, nor the slovenly Latin prose of the old Templeton ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... from custom cling to old rites and ceremonies, were, in her opinion, "indolent slugs, who guard, by liming it over, the snug place which they consider in the light of an hereditary estate," and "idle vermin who two or three times a day perform, in the most slovenly manner, a service which they think useless, but call their duty." She believed in the spirit, but not in the letter of the law. The scriptural account of the creation is for her "Moses' poetical story," and ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Suit, the Ground whereof had been Black, as I perceived from some few Spaces, that had escaped the Powder, which was Incorporated with the greatest part of his Coat: His Perriwig, which cost no small Sum, [1] was after so slovenly a manner cast over his Shoulders, that it seemed not to have been combed since the Year 1712; his Linnen, which was not much concealed, was daubed with plain Spanish from the Chin to the lowest Button, and the Diamond upon his Finger (which ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... be cultivated, also, by association with it, as it may be destroyed by constant association with that which is ugly. People who live in unkempt and slovenly surroundings are likely to become indifferent to them. It is the duty of every one to have a care for the appearance of his surroundings both because of its effect upon himself and its ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... desires may be perverted in an age of abundant opportunities, and men may be degraded and wasted by intemperance in drinking, by display, or by ambition, so too the nobler complex of desires that constitutes religion may be turned to evil by the dull, the base, and the careless. Slovenly indulgence in religious inclinations, a failure to think hard and discriminate as fairly as possible in religious matters, is just as alien to the men under the Rule as it would be to drink deeply because ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... To promise heaven, or threaten us with hell; 280 That unconcern'd can at rebellion sit, And wink at crimes he did himself commit. A tyrant theirs; the heaven their priesthood paints A conventicle of gloomy, sullen saints; A heaven like Bedlam, slovenly and sad, Foredoom'd for souls ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... words. Setting aside Cardinal Newman's, the style he wrote is certainly less open to criticism than that of any other modern Englishman. He was neither super-eloquent like Mr. Ruskin nor a Germanised Jeremy like Carlyle; he was not marmoreally emphatic as Landor was, nor was he slovenly and inexpressive as was the great Sir Walter; he neither dallied with antithesis like Macaulay nor rioted in verbal vulgarisms with Dickens; he abstained from technology and what may be called Lord-Burleighism as carefully as George Eliot indulged in them, and he avoided conceits as sedulously ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... hard-muscled youth, with pleasant manners, a sallow face, straight hemp-coloured hair and grey eyes of unexpected inwardness. He has a voice like thick soup, and speaks with the slovenly drawl of the new generation of Americans, dragging his words along like reluctant dogs on a string, and depriving his narrative of every shade of expression that intelligent intonation gives. But his eyes see so much that they make one ...
— Coming Home - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... an essential and most important consideration with every body in France. A Frenchman never appears till his hair is well combed and powdered, however slovenly he may be in other respects.—Not being able to submit every day to this ceremony, the servant to a gentleman of fashion at whose house I visited in Marseilles, having forgot my name described me to his master, ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... of a chair or two, a table, and a bed of boards covered with a thin straw mat. There is not a hotel in Ecuador where sheets and towels are furnished. The landlords are seldom seen; the entire management of the concern is left to a slovenly Indian boy, who is both cook and hostler. No amount of bribery will secure a meal in less than two hours. Ten years ago there was not a posada in the country; now there is entertainment for man and beast at Guayaquil, Guaranda, ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... the necessity of following this precept. They realized enough of the law of cause and effect to be aware that, if their home and school duties were neglected, or slovenly done, boating would soon obtain a bad reputation; so both parents and teacher found that the clubs were a great help rather than a hindrance in the ...
— All Aboard; or, Life on the Lake - A Sequel to "The Boat Club" • Oliver Optic
... naive. Skilful, skilled, expert, adept, apt, proficient, adroit, dexterous, deft, clever, ingenious. Skin, hide, pelt, fell. Sleepy, drowsy, slumberous, somnolent, sluggish, torpid, dull, lethargic. Slovenly, slatternly, dowdy, frowsy, blowzy. Sly, crafty, cunning, subtle, wily, artful, politic, designing. Smile, smirk, grin. Solitary, lonely, lone, lonesome, desolate, deserted, uninhabited. Sour, acid, tart, acrid, acidulous, acetose, acerbitous, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... it flies me. Thy elder brother will be kinder yet, Unsent-for death will come. To-morrow! Well, what can to-morrow do? 'Twill cure the sense of honour lost; I and my discontents shall rest together, What hurt is there in this? But death against The will is but a slovenly kind of potion; And though prescribed by Heaven, it goes against men's stomachs. So does it at fourscore too, when the soul's Mewed up in narrow darkness: neither sees nor hears. Pish! 'tis mere fondness in our nature. A certain clownish cowardice that still Would stay at home and dares not venture ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... and Latin races; but compare the talent the Greek and Latin (or Latinised) races have shown for gratifying their senses, for procuring an outward life, rich, luxurious, splendid, with the Celt's failure to reach any material civilisation sound and satisfying, and not out at elbows, poor, slovenly, and half- barbarous. The sensuousness of the Greek made Sybaris and Corinth, the sensuousness of the Latin made Rome and Baiae, the sensuousness of the Latinised Frenchman makes Paris; the sensuousness of the Celt proper has made Ireland. Even in his ideal heroic times, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... as it should. There are, of course, operators who would see that this was done anyway, rules or no rules; but like every other profession there might be men who, off on an isolated spot with no one to keep them up to the mark, would grow careless and slovenly. Too much depends on wireless stations to run the risk of errors through imperfections in ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... jaw fell down, showing discolored teeth. He stared at his inquisitor in consternation. Then he dropped back into his former slovenly attitude. ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... males and females, is black, glossy, and straight. The men usually wear it rather long, and allow it to hang about their heads in a loose and slovenly manner. The women pride themselves extremely on the length and thickness of their hair; and it was not without reluctance on their part, and the same on that of their husbands, that they were induced to dispose of any of it. Some of the women's hair was tolerably fine, but would not, in ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... Nemesis' twin; her command room was identical with his own. This one was different in arrangements and fittings. The Enterprise was a new ship; this one was old, and had suffered for years at the hands of a slack captain and a slovenly crew. ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... men held a rope to guide them and were ordered to shut their eyes. The Major, you see, hated stirring out at night. He liked his bridge and his bottle of port. Well, give me another year and that's the kind of soldier I shall become—the worst kind—the slovenly soldier. I mean slovenly in mind, in intention. Even now I come, already bored, to the barrack square and watch the time to see if I can't catch an earlier train from Gravesend ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... handwriting of the letter, as seen in the facsimile, is not in this writer's opinion, from a familiarity of thirty years with old scripts, apart from the disguise, the hand that an educated person would write at the time, but is essentially a commonplace and, no doubt intentionally, rather slovenly style of handwriting. The use of small "i's" for the first person seems, in view of modern usage, to suggest an illiterate writer; but educated writers, even the King,[12] then occasionally lapsed into using them. In the letter, however, ...
— The Identification of the Writer of the Anonymous Letter to Lord Monteagle in 1605 • William Parker
... Edinburgh to a place like this. On one of the gates they passed was written "Hiemath," and there was something very characteristic of the jerry-built and decaying place in the cheap sentiment that had been too slovenly to spell its own name correctly. Yet to the left, over the housetops of foul black streets running upwards from the railway-lines, there shone the great silver plain, and afar off a channel set with white sailing-ships and steamers, and dark majestic hills. But because of the quality of the place, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... Dingley Dell on Christmas Day—a thick-set, mildewy young man, with short black hair, a long white face and spectacles. He was a medical student, and brought with him his chum, Bob Sawyer, a slovenly, smart, swaggering young gentleman, who smelled strongly of tobacco smoke and looked like a dissipated Robinson Crusoe. Ben intended that his chum should marry his sister Arabella, and Bob Sawyer paid her so much attention that Winkle began to hate ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... who talk glibly about the simple life when it is safely out of reach, betray themselves in camp by for ever peering about for the artificial excitements of civilisation which they miss. Some get bored at once; some grow slovenly; some reveal the animal in most unexpected fashion; and some, the select few, find themselves in very short order ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... Ronsard, the French court poet, said that they had nothing of the pedagogue about them but the gown and cap. "Austere in face, and rustic in his looks," says David Buchanan, "but most polished in style and speech; and continually, even in serious conversation, jesting most wittily." "Rough-hewn, slovenly, and rude," says Peacham, in his "Compleat Gentleman," speaking of him, probably, as he appeared in old age, "in his person, behaviour, and fashion; seldom caring for a better outside than a rugge-gown girt close about him: yet his ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... employer. Who dares say that he is not the friend of the poor man? Who dares say that he is the friend of the employer? I will try to say what I think is true. There are bad, harsh, cross employers; there are slovenly, negligent workmen; there are just about as many proportionately of one of these classes as of the other. The employers of the United States—as a class, proper exceptions being understood—have no advantage over their workmen. They could not oppress them if they wanted to do so. The advantage, ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... famous general, nice pictures, expensive furniture; he died; the daughters received a good education, but are slovenly, read little, ride, and ...
— Note-Book of Anton Chekhov • Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
... their appetites are again prepared for an afternoons lunchion; insomuch that they can eat you into poverty, without making their teeth bleed. O it is such a delight to see that they continually grow up so slovenly and wastfully in their cloaths, that they must needs have every half year almost a new suit, and that alwaies a little bigger; whereby the Father sees that he shall in short time have a son to be his man in the shop, and ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... inductive process well and carefully. His predecessors had been, in his phrase, not interpreters, but anticipators of nature. They had been content with the first principles at which they had arrived by the most scanty and slovenly induction. And why was this? It was, we conceive, because their philosophy proposed to itself no practical end, because it was merely an exercise of the mind. A man who wants to contrive a new machine or a new medicine ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the Caracci were working on their frescoes in the Palazzo Fava at Bologna—that is to say, between the last of the genuine Renaissance paintings and the first of the Revival—nearly half a century elapsed, during which art sank into a slough of slovenly and soulless putrescence.[215] Every city of Italy swarmed with artists, adequately educated in technical methods, and apt at aping the grand style of their masters. But in all their work there is nothing felt, nothing thought out, nothing expressed, nothing imagined. It ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... for a minute or two, being, like his two young companions, eagerly scanning the rather slovenly deck and the faces of the small crew, who were looking at their invaders apparently ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... these pieces; but those which may be read with the most pleasure are the letters to his wife, for whom he had a deep affection, and whom he addresses with a pathos that is quite sincere. As hope of recall grew fainter, his work failed more and more; the incorrect language and slovenly versification of some of the Letters from Pontus are in sad contrast to the Ovid of ten years before, and if he went on writing till the end, it was only because writing had long been a ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... portray his words with signs of labour and deliberation, while the playful haste of the volatile will scarcely sketch them; the slovenly will blot and efface and scrawl, while the neat and orderly-minded will view themselves in the paper before their eyes. The merchant's clerk will not write like the lawyer or the poet. Even nations are distinguished by their ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... which case, so soon as the poet tries to rise on his winged words, his wingless words are likely to act as a dead weight. For this reason, when Wordsworth said that the prose notes should be brief, he might almost as well have gone on to say that in expression they should be slovenly. This at least may be said, that the moment the language of the prose note is so “adequate” and rich that it seems to be what Wordsworth would call the natural “incarnation of the thought,” the poet’s imagination, if it escapes at all from the ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... Mr. Hood and his slovenly management, and sighed, in spite of his doubled income. Mr. Hopper had added to the Company's list of customers whole districts in the growing Southwest, and yet the honest Colonel did not like him. Mr. Hopper, by a gradual process, had taken upon his own shoulders, and consequently off ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... beyond flight. She had meant, once alone, to think the thing out. But the room was cold, she had had nothing to eat, and the single slovenly maid was a Hungarian and spoke no German. The dressmaker had gone to the Ronacher. Harmony did not know where to find a restaurant, was afraid to trust herself to the streets alone. She went to bed supperless, with a tiny picture of Peter and Jimmy ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... while—if he had the heart. Since none of these things, however, can be had without long attention, or, at any rate, without skill carefully bestowed in due season, you do not find such things decorating the homes of weekly tenants. The cottages let by the week look shabby, slovenly, dingy; the hedges of the gardens are neglected, broken down, stopped up with anything that comes to hand. If it were not for the fruitful and well-tended vegetable plots, one might often suppose the tenants to be ignorant of order, degenerate, brutalized, materialized, ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... which is not as good as you can make it, which you have palmed off imperfect, meagrely thought, niggardly in execution, upon mankind, who is your paymaster on parole, and in a sense your pupil, every hasty or slovenly or untrue performance, should rise up against you in the court of your own heart and ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in regularity, but a more interesting face could scarcely be seen; his bearing was exalted; his figure graceful; his dress plain, but neat (gray trousers and a black frock-coat closely buttoned), showed none of that slovenly carelessness so peculiar to prisoners; his white hands bore witness of a care for his person which had still more increased the aversion of the other prisoners; for moral perversity is almost always joined to personal filthiness. His brown hair, naturally ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... means retrogression with us. He wished, perhaps ignorantly, to arrest the progress of civilization and substitute a slovenly ideal of his own. His purpose was to cancel the civilization which the race had gained during thousands of years of effort, and bring it back to a semi-savagery. But the world was too big for him. It had things in view which were too great for his small, hampered mind to have ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... it and fixing his eyes carelessly upon her, asked what she wanted to look at. His tone and manner struck Ellen most unpleasantly, and made her again wish herself out of the store. He was a tall, lank young man, with a quantity of fair hair combed down on each side of his face, a slovenly exterior, and the most disagreeable pair of eyes, Ellen thought, she had ever beheld. She could not bear to meet them, and cast down her own. Their look was bold, ill-bred, and ill-humoured; and Ellen felt, though she couldn't have ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... stranger is notable for the presence of military, naval, and clerical uniforms. It is, as one looks down upon them, an assembly where at least one-fourth are bald or thin-haired, and together they give the impression of being big in the waist, careless in costume, slovenly in carriage, and lacking proper feeding, grooming, and exercise. It is clearly an assemblage, not of men of action, but of men of theories. Not only their appearance betrays this, but their debates as well, and what one knows ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... picture painted however by muster-master Digger of the plumed troops that had thus come forth to maintain the honour of England and the cause of liberty, was anything but imposing. None knew better than Digges their squalid and slovenly condition, or was more anxious to effect a reformation therein. "A very wise, stout fellow he is," said the Earl, "and very careful to serve thoroughly her Majesty." Leicester relied much upon his efforts. "There is ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... too, in the streets that give upon the river, drawn by the spell of the sea. But I saw barges and ships stripped of magic and mostly devoted to cement, ice, timber, and coal. The sailors looked to me gross and slovenly men, and the shipping struck me as clumsy, ugly, old, and dirty. I discovered that most sails don't fit the ships that hoist them, and that there may be as pitiful and squalid a display of poverty with a vessel as with a man. ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... know, but say sixty bushels per ditto. This estimate is not at all calculated to impress the English farmer with as favourable an opinion of the fertility of this settlement as it merits; but if he only witnessed the slovenly mode of tillage which is practised there, he would be surprised not that the average produce of the crops is so small, but that it is so great. If the same land had the benefit of the system of agriculture ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... block beside him. The marks of hair powder on his coat collar, and the ill-washed and worse tied white neckerchief round his throat, showed that he had not found leisure since he left the court to make any alteration in his dress: while the slovenly style of the remainder of his costume warranted the inference that his personal appearance would not have been very much improved if he had. Books of practice, heaps of papers, and opened letters, were scattered over the table, without ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... time in months she looked at herself curiously, taking an impersonal, calm survey of this body. She sought for signs of slovenly decay,—thinning rusty hair, untidy nails, grimy hands, dried skin,—those marks which she had seen in so many teachers who had abandoned themselves without hope to the unmarried state and had grown careless of their bodies. As she wound her hair ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... moving canvas shows A slave plantation's slovenly repose, Where, in rude cabins rotting midst their weeds, The human chattel eats, and sleeps, and breeds; And, held a brute, in practice, as in law, Becomes in fact the thing he's taken for. There, early summoned ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... possible more slovenly in his attire than his friend was luxurious and expensive. He wore no toga, and his tunic—which, without the upper robe, was the accustomed dress of gladiators, slaves, and such as were too poor to wear the full and characteristic attire of the Roman citizen—was of dark brownish woollen, threadbare, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... when Damie drew one and was declared exempt. He was in complete despair, and Barefoot almost shared his grief; for she looked upon this soldiering as a capital method of setting Damie up, and of breaking him of his slovenly habits. Still she ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... officers' boots, or sawing wood and picking up chips to boil the teakettle. They are off dignity as well as off duty, then; but when they are on both, and in full dress, they make our volunteers (as I remember them) seem very shabby and slovenly. ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... and over-crowding soon gained the predominance, and showed their evil effect in producing a fearful amount of sickness and death. They were not, with comparatively few exceptions, indolent; but they had naturally lapsed into the easy, slovenly methods, or rather want of method of the old slave life, and a few were doing the greater part of what was done. They were mere children in capacity, will and perseverance. Mrs. Griffin, with her intensely energetic nature, soon effected ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... me, Lord Lyttelton was uniformly my aversion. His manners were overbearingly insolent, his language licentious, and his person slovenly even to a degree that was disgusting. Mr. Robinson was in every respect the very reverse of his companion: he was unassuming, neat, and delicate in his conversation. I had not a wish to descend from the propriety of wedded life, and I abhorred, decidedly ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... fine quality, almost equal to our maple sugar. They plant the seed in a careless way and tend it in the most slovenly manner imaginable, and yet, they get immense crops. One man, who put in a crop near where some soldiers were encamped in order to have their protection, told us that he sold the product from this small stretch of ground of not more than five ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... tall tower of Saint Botolph's Church (three hundred feet high, the same elevation as the tallest tower of Lincoln Cathedral) looming in the distance. At about half past four we reached Boston (which name has been shortened, in the course of ages, by the quick and slovenly English pronunciation, from Botolph's town), and were taken by a cab to the Peacock, in the market-place. It was the best hotel in town, though a poor one enough; and we were shown into a small, stifled parlor, dingy, musty, and scented with stale tobacco-smoke,—tobacco-smoke ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "You are a slovenly lot down here when it comes to boats—most of you are, any way. Christian Young is all right though, Munster has a slap- dash style about him, and they do say old Nielsen was a crackerjack. But with the rest I've seen, there's no dash, no go, no cleverness, no real sailor's ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... fiction possess. Probably all Scott's faults spring from one fundamental weakness: he never had a high ideal of his own art. He wrote to make money, and was inclined to regard his day's labor as "so much scribbling." Hence his style is frequently slovenly, lacking vigor and concentration; his characters talk too much, apparently to fill space; he caters to the romantic fashion (and at the same time indulges his Tory prejudice) by enlarging on the somewhat imaginary virtues of knights, nobles, feudal ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... the time for the baby grew nearer, he would bustle round in his slovenly fashion, poking out the ashes, rubbing the fireplace, sweeping the house before he went to work. Then, feeling very self-righteous, ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... comfortable. Pull one of these nests to pieces for its materials; and place another nest before these canary birds as a pattern, and see if they will make the slightest attempt to imitate their model! No, the result of their labour will, upon instinctive hereditary impulse, be exactly the slovenly little mansion of their race, the same with that which their parents built before themselves were hatched. The Doctor could not do away the force of that single fact, with which his system was incompatible, yet he maintained ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... a man's head, was thrust from the nursery door, in the quick glance with which she looked at him and beyond him she seemed to see a score of persons. There were not really so many of them, merely a slovenly woman who was pedaling the sewing machine with a baby tumbling at her feet, an eight-year-old who sat on the window ledge pulling bastings while a half-grown girl cooked something on a stove that had been propped in ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... a petty scandal of the day, in which all the parties were so disreputable that no one could feel any sympathy for a single one of them. How the dupe himself ended is not known. The last days of fops and beaux are never glorious. Brummell died in slovenly penury; Nash in contempt. Fielding lapsed into the dimmest obscurity; and as far as evidence goes, there is as little certainty about his death as of that of the Wandering Jew. Let us hope that he is not still alive: though his friends seemed to have cared little ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... Mrs. Boyer, having shaken off the dust of a pension that had once harbored three malefactors, and having retired Peter and Anna and Harmony into the limbo of things best forgotten or ignored, found themselves, at the corner, confronted by a slovenly girl in heelless slippers and wearing a knitted shawl over her head. "The Frau Schwarz is wrong," cried Olga passionately in Vienna dialect. "They ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... character, which are the same in all the villages where one studies them. They very commonly fall into a routine, the basis of which is going to some lounging-place or other, a bar-room, a reading-room, or something of the kind. They grow slovenly in dress, and wear the same hat forever. They have a feeble curiosity for news perhaps, which they take daily as a man takes his bitters, and then fall silent and think they are thinking. But the mind goes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... of the German versions of this story, a king's elder daughter, when asked to marry her rich but slovenly suitor, replies, "I would sooner go into the deepest water than do that." In a Russian version,[469] the unwashed soldier lends a large sum of money to an impoverished monarch, who cannot pay his troops, and asks his royal creditor to give him one of his daughters ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... however, we begin to look quite distinguished. The difficulty then is to ascertain just when the law of diminishing returns comes into play. When do we cease to look distinguished and begin to appear merely slovenly? Careful study has taught us that this begins to take place at the end of sixty-five days, in warm weather. Add five days or so for natural procrastination and devilment, and we have seventy days interval, ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... A slovenly, half-grown Indian girl, Anita, the cook's daughter, came in from the kitchen, directed the slumbrous eyes of her race upon the sheriff who fitted well in a woman's eye, and went to serve the single other late diner. Norton caught ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... are generally well set in their limbs, slender round the waist, broad across the shoulders, and have black hair and dark eyes. They are very nimble and fleet, well adapted to travel on foot and to carry heavy burdens. They are foul and slovenly in their actions, and make little of all kinds of hardship; to which indeed they are by nature and from their youth accustomed. They are like the Brazilians in color, or as yellow as the people who sometimes pass through the Netherlands and are called Gypsies. The men generally have no beard, ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • J. F. Jameson, Editor
... in the house on Sunday evenings, always first scrupulously knocking at the door. An untidy room gave him positive pain, and the most slovenly boys would endeavour to get their filthy rooms into some sort of order, "just to please old John." John was passionately fond of flowers, and one would meet the most unlikely boys with bunches of roses in their hands. ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... wholesome. The other was an army lieutenant, but Molly promptly quelched her first inclination to address him, as she noted his red, inflamed face and dissipated appearance. As she nibbled, half-heartedly, at the miserable food brought by a slovenly waiter, the two men exchanged barely a dozen words, the lieutenant growling out monosyllabic answers, finally pushing back his chair, and striding out. Again the girl glanced across at the older man, mustering courage to address him. At the same moment ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... waist, and with hooks and eyes instead of buttons, and it would have been strange if he had smelt of eau-de-Cologne, for instance. In his long, unshaven, bluish double chin, which looked like a thistle, his goggle eyes, his shortness of breath, and in the whole of his clumsy, slovenly figure, in his voice, his laugh, and his words, it was difficult to recognize the graceful, interesting talker who used in old days to make the husbands of the district jealous on account of ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... whose flaming face seemed ever ablaze with the dark-red hair uncombed, was absent all last week, or why I missed so often the inimitable rags of Mack and Ed. Then the father, who worked Colonel Wheeler's farm on shares, would tell me how the crops needed the boys; and the thin, slovenly mother, whose face was pretty when washed, assured me that Lugene must mind the baby. "But we'll start them again next week." When the Lawrences stopped, I knew that the doubts of the old folks about book-learning had conquered again, ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... who was habited in a coarse, blue coat, which, without being either a greatcoat or a surtout, partook of the nature and qualities of both, had about him that sort of slovenly smartness, and swaggering gait, which is peculiar to young gentlemen who smoke in the streets by day, shout and scream in the same by night, call waiters by their Christian names, and do various other acts and deeds of an equally facetious description. He wore a pair ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... in a ruinous condition, and bearing evident marks of neglect. The people of Atooi, again, inter both their common dead and human sacrifices, as at Tongataboo; but they resemble those of Otaheite in the slovenly state of their religious places, and in offering vegetables and animals ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... is always a most abominable stench. One must be careful how one walks thro' these streets at night, from the liability of being saluted by a golden shower. The lower classes of the Auvergnats have the reputation of being dirty, slovenly and idle. ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... thought, the mind can and will move of itself unhampered; and when the mind keeps and develops such freedom of movement, it commonly breaks new ground and handles new things. Not to be careful of our speech means for most of us slovenly thinking; but when a man thinks in earnest and takes truth seriously, when he speaks with his eye on his object, his language will not be slovenly, his instinct for fact will keep his speech pure and true. This is what ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... dyed carpet rags into a huge, madder-colored ball, but there were delicate points in its execution which a restless civilization has hurried into oblivion along with the other lost arts, and Marg'et Ann surveyed her ball critically now and then, to be sure that it was not developing any slovenly one-sidedness under her deft hands. The minister's crutches leaned against the arm of his painted wooden chair with an air of mute but patient helpfulness. Marg'et Ann had cushioned them with patchwork, but he had walked ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... one more improvement worth mentioning. We do great injustice to our steam-slaves by the slovenly and unphilosophical way in which we feed them. We take no hints from animal economy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... red-haired, slovenly girl, with an impediment in her speech, took her order and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, and Miss Donovan discreetly lifted her eyes to observe the man sitting nearly opposite. He was not prepossessing, ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... about the middle appeared good substantial dishes, roasted mutton, plain pudding and such like. At the bottom coarse pieces of beef, sheeps' heads, haggiss, and other national but inelegant dishes, were served in a slovenly manner in great pewter platters; at the head of the table were placed guests of distinction, to whom alone the dainties were offered; the middle was occupied by gentlemen of his own tribe, who well knew their allotment, and were satisfied with the share assigned to them. At the foot of the table ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... to ask me a question like that. Have I fretted and pined, and forgot to eat and sleep, and gone dowdy and slovenly, because my lover has been fool enough to desert me? Well, then, that is what any other girl would have done. But because I am of thy blood and stock, I take what comes to me as part of my day's work, and make no more grumble on the matter than one does ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... train. But surely she ought to have apologised for bringing a girl reared in Edinburgh to a place like this. On one of the gates they passed was written "Hiemath," and there was something very characteristic of the jerry-built and decaying place in the cheap sentiment that had been too slovenly to spell its own name correctly. Yet to the left, over the housetops of foul black streets running upwards from the railway-lines, there shone the great silver plain, and afar off a channel set with white sailing-ships and steamers, and dark majestic hills. ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... small animal, about one fourth the size of a common flea: it is very troublesome, in warm climates, to the poor blacks, such as go barefoot, and the slovenly: it penetrates the skin, under which it lays a bunch of eggs, which swell to the bigness of ...
— The History of Insects • Unknown
... influence of self-interest. He is generally, therefore, indifferent to the adverse or prosperous fortunes of his master, being contented if he can escape his displeasure or chastisement, by a careless and slovenly performance ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... just now with a certain man, who came to you with letters from a certain old gentleman, y'cleped your father; whereby I am given to understand, that to-morrow you are to take an oath in the church to be grave henceforward, to go ill-dressed and slovenly, to get heirs for your estate, and to dandle them for your diversion; and, in short, that love and courtship are to ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... be generally overcome or prevented by calling attention to them. Good mental attention is the most infallible cure for slovenly habits of attack. It may be that there are in all schools a certain proportion of the pupils who have very weak and imperfect vocal organs; in their cases, even good attention cannot ...
— The Child-Voice in Singing • Francis E. Howard
... with aught else, and this valuable root should, if possible, be grown on a different plot every year, so that it shall be three or four years in travelling round the garden. Lastly, sow everything in drills at the proper distances apart. Broadcasting is a slovenly mode of sowing, and necessitates slovenly cultivation afterwards. When crops are in drills they can be efficiently thinned, weeded and hoed—in other words, they can be cultivated. But broadcasting pretty well excludes the ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... since I had expected a typical country practitioner. He was a very tall, thin man, with a long nose like a beak, which jutted out between two keen, gray eyes, set closely together and sparkling brightly from behind a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. He was clad in a professional but rather slovenly fashion, for his frock-coat was dingy and his trousers frayed. Though young, his long back was already bowed, and he walked with a forward thrust of his head and a general air of peering benevolence. As he entered his eyes ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... and leant heavily upon a staff cut roughly from a tree, and from its green bark and slovenly-stripped branches ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... pouncet-box, which ever and anon, He gave his nose, and took 't away again;— And still he smiled and talked; And, as the soldiers bore dead bodies by, He called them—untaught knaves, unmannerly, To bring a slovenly unhandsome corse Betwixt the wind and his nobility. With many holiday and lady terms He questioned me; among the rest, demanded My prisoners, in your majesty's behalf. I then, all smarting, with my wounds being cold, To be so pestered with a popinjay, Out ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... be retrenched, or indeed left unemployed, any of that military exhibition, which tends to impress upon the many the moral superiority of the few, where, he argued, would be their safety in the hour of need; and if those duties were performed in a slovenly manner, and without due regard to SCENIC effect, the result would be to induce the wily savage to undervalue that superiority which discipline chiefly secured to the white warrior. Captain Headley was discriminating and observant. He had, more than once, remarked the surprise and admiration ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend, is immortal, and cannot perish from the earth while this club remains. My complaint simply concerns the decay of the art of lying. No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted. In this veteran presence I naturally enter upon this theme with diffidence; it is like an old maid trying to teach nursery matters to the mothers in Israel. It would not become to me to ...
— On the Decay of the Art of Lying • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
... and yellow complexion, brightened only by two eyes glistening with shrewdness and firmness." Bourrienne, who had now returned from diplomatic service, was not edified by the appearance or temper of his acquaintance, who, he says, "was ill clad and slovenly, his character cold, often inscrutable. His smile was hollow and often out of place. He had moments of fierce gaiety which made you uneasy, and ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... men what faith is, by charity, by self-denial, by meekness, by gentleness, by long-suffering, by patience, by love to enemies, and by doing good to them that hate us. Now he walketh upon his high places, yea, will not now admit that so slovenly a conversation should come within his doors, as did use to haunt his house in former times. Now it is Christ-mas, now it is suffering-time, now we must keep holy ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... door one evening, and Dick, who happened to answer the summons, looked at him for a moment in astonishment, he was so completely changed. In a new suit of clothes and with smart collar and tie he looked altogether unlike the slovenly, poorly-clad Paddy of old. ...
— Dick Lionheart • Mary Rowles Jarvis
... nothing of the realities of industrialism. He saw only the beauty of the great chimneys that rose against the sullen smoke-barred sunsets, and he felt only the romance of the lurid shuddering flares that burst out from squat stacks of brickwork and lit the emptiness of strange and slovenly streets.... ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... fashion, too, to say that he was slovenly, and careless in his dress. This also is a mistake. His clothes could not fit smoothly on his gaunt and bony frame. He was no tailor's figure of a man; but from the first he clothed himself as well as his means allowed, and in the fashion of the time and place. In reading the grotesque ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... wear wide drawers with the pink shirt over them; the women have a chemise reaching to the calf of the leg, dirty and coarse, an apron round the waist, sometimes so scanty or so ragged that it will not meet, and a handkerchief tied in a slovenly manner on the head. In these three articles of dress they drive the horses and oxen; the sun burns them to a dark brown, almost black. The children we saw were quite naked. Various attempts have been made ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... last inquiry was made whether all companions expected were present, the red flag began to quiver and writhe most noticeably and finally to unfurl, and there emerged from its depths the dirtiest and most slovenly man I had ever seen, and the frouziest and most repulsive of dogs. This man, if man I may call him, was bony and ill-built, and appeared to consist largely of hands and feet. His arms were abnormally long and his chest narrow and hollow, ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... perfect ease, at more than the rate of three miles an hour, round and round a field, partly in wheat and partly in barley, cutting a breadth of corn in its progress with a regularity and evenness that was surprising. No straggling stalks of corn were left, none of the slovenly irregular work too often seen where manual labor is employed was to be discovered; on the contrary, the field after shearing, looked nearly as smooth and even as a kitchen floor or turnpike road. The farmer has now no longer occasion to be behind the ...
— Obed Hussey - Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap • Various
... my learned friend's appearance being careless and slovenly if not debauched, they were sufficiently like each other to surprise, not only the witness, but everybody present, when they were thus brought into comparison. My Lord being prayed to bid my learned friend lay aside his wig, and giving no very gracious ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... Perhaps it will surprise some good people to hear that Santa Claus knew the old alleys; but he did. I have been there with him, and I knew that, much as some things which he saw there grieved him,—the starved childhood, the pinching poverty, and the slovenly indifference that cut deeper than the rest because it spoke of hope that was dead,—yet by nothing was his gentle spirit so grieved and shocked as by the show that proposed to turn his holiday into a battalion drill of the children from the alleys and the courts for patricians, ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... who were enjoying their undress in their own apartments. When they appeared, I could scarcely believe that one half were gentlewomen. As they wear neither stay nor bodice, the figure becomes almost indecently slovenly, after very early youth; and this is the more disgusting, as they are very thinly clad, wear no neck-handkerchiefs, and scarcely any sleeves. Then, in this hot climate, it is unpleasant to see dark cottons ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... it. I said this trapper was out a skin through sheer carelessness, for it is a slovenly way of trapping to let a nice mink like that get away. If you care to step this way with me I'll show you something which perhaps neither of you have ever seen before, ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... the identity to the observer's eye; and of course the suggestion stops there if not borne out by the face. But if Davenport's hands might go unchanged, he decided that his handwriting should not. It was a slovenly, scratchy degeneration of the once popular Italian script, and out of keeping with the new character he was to possess. The round, erect English calligraphy taught in most primary schools is easily picked ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... abandoned the profession to search the world in the hope of finding my progenitor, had it not been that I was without the means. Latterly, I had hoarded up all I could collect; but the sum was small, much too small for the proposed expedition. I became melancholy, indifferent to the business, and slovenly in my appearance, when a circumstance occurred which put an end to my further dispensing medicines, and left me a ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... your youthful pupils to be indeed so slovenly and so saucy, Bertram?" answered the lady. "I for one will not imitate them in that particular; and whether Sir John be now in the Castle of Douglas or not, I will treat the soldiers who hold so honourable a charge with a washed brow, and a head of hair somewhat ordered. As for going back ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... find him extraordinarily odd, but in the old days he met not only with acceptance but respect. He was alive until within a year or so ago, but his later appearance changed. As I saw him that afternoon he was a very slovenly, ungainly little human being indeed, not only was his clothing altogether ugly and queer, but had you stripped the man stark, you would certainly have seen in the bulging paunch that comes from flabby muscles and flabbily controlled appetites, and in the rounded shoulders and flawed and yellowish ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... but there is no one cause or group of causes underlying breakdowns in family morale. The ratio of desertions has been observed to decrease rather than to increase in "hard times";[8] moreover, it is a matter of common observation that not all slovenly and incompetent wives are deserted, and that many married couples in all walks of life whose sex relationships are unsatisfactory, nevertheless maintain the fabric of family life and support and bring up their children with an average degree of success. ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... his home, he met Tchernoff. Don Marcelo was in high good humor. The certainty that he was soon going to see his son filled him with boyish good spirits. He almost embraced the Russian in spite of his slovenly aspect, his tragic beard and his enormous hat which made every one turn to look ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... enforced, in the outward appointments of the farm house,—and that is, the entire withdrawal of any use of the highway, in its occupation by the stock of the farm, except in leading them to and from its enclosures. Nothing looks more slovenly, and nothing can be more unthrifty, in an enclosed country, than the running of farm stock in the highway. What so untidy as the approach to a house, with a herd of filthy hogs rooting about the fences, basking along the sidewalk, or feeding at a huge, uncouth, hollowed log, in the road near ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... boarding house on the west side. And when the slovenly, smelly maid said, "Go right up to her room," he knew it was—probably respectable, but not rigidly respectable. However, working girls must receive, and they cannot afford parlors and chaperons. Still—It was no place for a lovely young girl, full of charm ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... was Oliver Cromwell. At the battle of Edge Hill he was only captain of a troop of horse, and at the death of his cousin Hampden, he was only colonel. He was indeed a member of the Long Parliament, as was Hampden, and had secured the attention of the members in spite of his slovenly appearance and his incoherent, though earnest speeches. Under his rough and clownish exterior, his talents were not perceived, except by two or three penetrating intellects; but they were shortly to appear, and to ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... manoeuvres are done with much hesitation and uncertainty. For all this the captain has, as the boys say, plentifully "bawled us out," constantly working us more than any other officer has done in the battalion. We can't deny that we are ragged and slovenly, but why is it? ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... England and Wales was regulated by the Gordon-Ashley Act of 1828,[296] which, among other reforms, had substituted for the authority of five Fellows of the College of Physicians, who performed their duties in the most slovenly manner, fifteen metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy. I find, on examining the Annual Report of these Commissioners issued in 1841, that it does not extend over more than one page and a half! It is signed by Ashley, Gordon, Turner, Southey, and Proctor. ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... perfectly unruffled. She paid no attention to me whatsoever. She was fascinated with the slovenly girl, who stood around and gaped at ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... they passed a larger and noisier hotel, in front of which were collected many curious people of the country, many of whom were lazy-looking, slovenly-garbed half-breeds. ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... "They look in a slovenly state indeed," he said to himself, "infinitely worse than the Chilian ships did when we first got out there. There are two or three by the flag-ship that look in a fair state of order, but the rest might be a fleet of big ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... back turned, or had he seen him earlier and followed him? The facts were these: about an hour before the time when Richling omitted to apply for employment in the ill-smelling store in Tchoupitoulas street, Mr. Raphael Ristofalo halted in front of the same place,—which appeared small and slovenly among its more pretentious neighbors,—and stepped just inside the door to where stood a single barrel of apples,—a fruit only the earliest varieties of which were beginning to appear in market. These were very small, round, and smooth, and with a rather wan blush confessed to more ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... to pass without being noticed; neither precise nor formal, slovenly nor dandyish; dress like a man or woman. Conduct yourself as ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... once in all his writings thus rhymes off two consecutive couplets in one sentence so slovenly, as with "I saw," and "I guess." But Mr Horne is so enamoured "with the old familiar faces" of pet cockneyisms, that he must have his will of them. Of the same ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... you that?" Norgate protested. "Whatever my feeling for England may be at the present moment, however bitterly I may regret the way she has let her opportunities slip, the slovenly political condition of the country, yet I cannot put away from me the fact that I am an Englishman. If trouble should come, even though I may have helped to bring it about, even though I may believe that it is a good thing for the country to have to meet trouble, ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... men. Instead of consulting contemporaneous documents,—which would have entailed both cost and labor,—modern writers have, unfortunately, been satisfied to serve up a rehash of the detractions written by the old historians. In 1885 came a discovery that punished such slovenly methods by practically wiping out the work of the pseudo-historians. There was found in the British Museum, the Bodleian Library, and Hudson's Bay House, London, unmistakably authentic record of Radisson's voyages, written by himself. The Prince Society of ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... pirates would escape. However, on the 31st of March, the two British ships discovered the vessel of which they were in search off Barracoa. Captain Walcott had disguised both ships as merchant-vessels, and their sails being set in a slovenly manner, they stood in towards the schooner. For several hours it was evident that the pirate did not suspect what they were. Before, however, they got up with her, she, setting all sail, steered for the ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... two quite noble ones, Redgauntlet and Nigel; two of very high value, Durward and Woodstock; the slovenly and diffuse Peveril, written for the trade; the sickly Tales of the Crusaders, and the entirely broken and diseased St. Ronan's Well. This last I throw out of count altogether, and of the rest, accept only the four first named as sound work; so that ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... a set of young men who certainly pursue their studies with zeal, but who nevertheless are more brutal in conduct, more insolent in manner, more slovenly and ruffian-like in appearance, and more offensive from the fumes of tobacco and beer, onions and sourcrout, in which they are enveloped, than are to be met with in any other part of Europe. In a small town of a small state a German university is a horrible nuisance; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 355., Saturday, February 7, 1829 • Various
... cab, and in the interval which elapsed before her ring was answered by a slovenly little servant, who gaped visibly at the lady's hurried request that her name should be taken up to Mr. Oswyn, she had leisure for the first time to realize the strangeness ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... attention to such details as these that makes a success of the work, and I would urge upon the amateur lawn-maker the absolute necessity of working slowly and carefully, and slighting nothing. Undue haste and the lack of thoroughness will result in a slovenly job that you will be ashamed of, before it is done, and so disgusted with, on completion, that you will not feel like doing the work over again for fear another effort may be more unsatisfactory than the first one. Therefore do good work in every ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... together in one room, and Little L, as I said, was very clean and neat; the big one, on the contrary, was very slovenly. And so Little L fairly made himself servant to his brother, and it turned out that he even cleaned the brass buttons on his uniform for him, and just before the ranks formed for roll-call would place himself, with ...
— Good Blood • Ernst Von Wildenbruch
... disheartened, slovenly; a man indifferent to everything—put the pince-nez crookedly upon his nose, looked at the list, and ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... remains between decks but the mess-tables, stools, and the soup and grog kids. Long before this hour, the greater number of the whole ship's company have dressed themselves and are ready for muster; but the never-ending sweepers, the fussy warrant-officers' yeomen, the exact purser's steward, the slovenly midshipmen's boy, the learned loblolly boy, and the interminable host of officers' servants, who have always fifty extra things to do, are often so sorely pressed for time, that at the first tap of the drum beating to divisions, ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... For the widow had a certain indolent Southern negligence, which in a less pretty woman would have been untidiness, and a characteristic hook and eyeless freedom of attire which on less graceful limbs would have been slovenly. One sleeve cuff was unbuttoned, but it showed the blue veins of her delicate wrist; the neck of her dress had lost a hook, but the glimpse of a bit of edging round the white throat made amends. Of all which, however, it should ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... went through his lessons in Horace and Virgil and Homer well enough for a time. But, in the absence of the upper master, Dr. Sumner, it once fell in my way to instruct the two upper forms, and upon calling up Dick Sheridan, I found him not only slovenly in construing, but unusually defective in his Greek grammar.... I ought to have told you that Richard, when a boy, was a great reader of English poetry; but his exercises afforded no proof of ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... have accepted a day without bread, for the utmost glory art could bestow. As he had said himself, he sent art to the deuce, as soon as he recognised that it would never suffice to satisfy his numerous requirements. His first efforts had been below mediocrity; his peasant eyes caught a clumsy, slovenly view of nature; his muddy, badly drawn, grimacing pictures, defied ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... was of a Norse temperament: reflective, thorough, Puritanically correct, and inclined to melancholy; my mother of nondescript exotic blood, beautiful, sensual, naive, at once slovenly and passionate, and of an impulsive and unprincipled mind. Quite without doubt this was a mixture which involved extraordinary possibilities, and extraordinary dangers. What came of it was this: a commoner who lost his way ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... a large, fair-haired, slovenly woman had opened the door, and, with truculent voice, called out: "Who do ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... hovels to sell the trifling products of their industry, and stare at what to them is a perpetual miracle,—the passing train. Five races met upon that railroad platform, and together illustrated the history of the country. First, in respect to time, was the poor Indian, slovenly, painted and degraded, yet characterized by a kind of bovine melancholy on the faces of the men, and a trace of animal beauty in the forms of the young squaws. Teasing and jesting with the latter were the negro porters of the train, who, though their ancestors were as little civilized ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... particularly severe mistress. Nothing slovenly, untidy, or out of order will do. The count must be absolutely right, not fast nor slow as our fancy dictates, but even and regular. The hands must do their task together in a friendly manner; the one ...
— Music Talks with Children • Thomas Tapper
... and to atone for the avarice of his sovereign. The picture painted however by muster-master Digger of the plumed troops that had thus come forth to maintain the honour of England and the cause of liberty, was anything but imposing. None knew better than Digges their squalid and slovenly condition, or was more anxious to effect a reformation therein. "A very wise, stout fellow he is," said the Earl, "and very careful to serve thoroughly her Majesty." Leicester relied much upon his ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... all kinds of use, and likely to remain so for an indefinite period; good for all ranks and for all ages. One canon, however, should be laid down as to the cut:—no pockets should be tolerated on any account whatever: they make a man look like a Yankee. 'Tis the most slovenly custom on earth to keep your hands in your pockets—you deserve to have them sewed in if you indulge in it. And therefore, to avoid this disagreeable penalty, have your pockets ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... a gentleman or lady pays you a visit, run out, the more slovenly the better; it will shew your attention to business, and a due sense of the honour they do you. It would be proper also that your wife hold the door open; your ushers be all ready to bow as they pass; and that your best looking boys be called into ...
— The Academy Keeper • Anonymous
... door with their tin pails of raspberries to sell, and just knowing English enough to ask a big price for them. But it was on the squaws we depended in those days, or go without raspberry preserves for the winter. Slovenly-looking things they were with their three or four coloured petticoats and their papooses on their backs. And for dirt—! But I thought they were all ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... you," said Sidney, with decision. "It leads to slovenly habits, such as going without when you're in a hurry, and that sort of thing. The only thing is to have some one expecting ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... wealth and poverty, are jumbled together as in no other district in London. The modest wife, coming out of her door at ten in the morning to do her marketing, meets, face to face, her next neighbour standing at her door, a jug in her hand, waiting for some late milkman to pass—a slovenly dame in a dressing-gown with half the buttons off, primrose-coloured hair loose on her back, and a porcelain complexion hastily dabbed on a yellow dissipated face. The Maryleboners (or -bonites) being a Happy Family, in the menagerie sense, do not vex their souls ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... whilst the latter is only nine miles round. Both are lofty, clothed with impenetrable forests almost to the beach, and surrounded by a barrier of reefs thirty-six miles in circumference, with here and there a narrow strait between them. The inhabitants, who are lazy, slovenly, stupid, fierce, cowardly, and avaricious, do not exceed twelve or fifteen hundred in number. It was unfortunate for La Perouse to be shipwrecked amongst such people, when he would have received a reception ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... real teachers is to make great and arduous things seem simple and desirable and beautiful. A teacher is not a person who provides short-cuts to knowledge, or who only drills a character out of slovenly intellectual faults. The essence of all real teaching is a sort of inspiration. Take the case of a great teacher, like Arnold or Jowett; Arnold lit in his pupils' minds a kind of fire, which was moral rather than intellectual; Jowett had a power of putting a suggestive ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sturdy body, waddling on a pair of short bandy legs; slovenly, shabby, unbrushed clothes; a big square bilious-yellow face, surmounted by a mop of thick iron-grey hair; dark beetle-brows; a pair of staring, fierce, black, goggle eyes, with huge circular spectacles standing up like fortifications in front of them; a shaggy beard ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... HOFFMAN (DR. HENRY)—Slovenly Peter. Original Edition. This celebrated work has amused children probably more than any other juvenile book. It contains the quaint hand colored pictures, and is printed on extra quality of paper and durably bound. Quarto. ...
— The Wilderness Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... front, shows where you have tightly grasped it in the struggle to stand your ground at a Chicago literary luncheon. Your right overshoe has a large block of Buffalo mud just under the instep, the odor of a Utica cigar hangs about your clothing, and the overcoat itself shows the slovenly brushing of the porters of the through sleepers from Albany, and stenciled upon the very end of the 'Wellington' in fairly plain lettering is your name, ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... lost a ship with his log-book up to date? He generally has about a month to fill up on a clean break, like Charles Dickens and his serial novels.—What a regular, lime-juicer spread!" he added contemptuously. "Marmalade—and toast for the old man! Nasty, slovenly pigs!" ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... remarkable. His hat was what might have been truly called "a shocking bad one." He generally wore an old and very much patched brown coat, corduroy breeches, and thick, slovenly shoes; but his underclothing was always of the finest description, and faultless in cleanliness and colour. His manners were ordinarily rough and uncouth, speaking gruffly, bawling loudly, and even rudely ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... which a careful routine of this nature evoked. There was a homelike air about the tent at supper time, and, though a lunch camp in the middle of the night is always rather bleak, there was never anything slovenly. Another thing which struck me even more forcibly was the cooking. We were of course on just the same ration as the tent from which I had come. I was hungry and said so. "Bad cooking," said Wilson shortly; and so it was. ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... was that Germinie's abasement and degradation began to be visible in her personal appearance, to make her stupid and slovenly. A sort of drowsiness came over her ideas. She was no longer keen and prompt of apprehension. What she had read and what she had learned seemed to escape her. Her memory, which formerly retained everything, became confused ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... began a long season of hard work. The opera "Iphigenie" took about a year to compose, besides a careful study of the French language. He had even more trouble with the slovenly, ignorant orchestra, than he had with the French language. The orchestra declared itself against foreign music; but this opposition was softened down by his former pupil and patroness, the charming ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... sometimes at least, trying to follow in Pigault's popular footsteps. But he had not that writer's varied knowledge of actual life or his power of telling a story, and though he for the most part avoided Pigault's grossierete, the chaotic plots, the slovenly writing, and other defects of his model abode ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... are, of course, operators who would see that this was done anyway, rules or no rules; but like every other profession there might be men who, off on an isolated spot with no one to keep them up to the mark, would grow careless and slovenly. Too much depends on wireless stations to run the risk of errors through imperfections in ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... skipper, after another attempt, gave it up, and, falling back upon the universal language of signs, pointed first to the man and then to the sea. The other understood him, and, in a heavy, slovenly fashion, portrayed a man drifting in an open boat, and clutching and clambering up the side of a passing ship. As his meaning dawned upon us, we rushed to the stern, and, leaning over, peered into the gloom, but the night was dark, and ...
— Captains All and Others • W.W. Jacobs
... and neatest in the end. A good many grape-growers train their vines to stakes, believing it to be cheaper, but I have found it more expensive than trellis made in the above manner, and it is certainly a very slovenly method, compared with the latter. Trellis is much more convenient for tying the vines, the canes can be distributed much more evenly, and the fruit and young wood, not being huddled and crowded together as on stakes, will ripen much more evenly, and be of better quality, as the air and sun have ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... to lean upon he did during those dark days—the end in darkest night nearer than anyone could divine. He showed stronger mettle than had been allowed him: bore a manlier part than was commonly ascribed to the slovenly slipshod habiliments and the aspects in which benignancy and vacillation seemed to struggle for the ascendancy. Abroad the elements conspired against him. At home his wife lay ill, as it proved, unto death. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... would do if it were worth while—if he had the heart. Since none of these things, however, can be had without long attention, or, at any rate, without skill carefully bestowed in due season, you do not find such things decorating the homes of weekly tenants. The cottages let by the week look shabby, slovenly, dingy; the hedges of the gardens are neglected, broken down, stopped up with anything that comes to hand. If it were not for the fruitful and well-tended vegetable plots, one might often suppose the tenants to be ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... thorough. He foresaw a hard and trying day before him, and he wished to start it fresh and clean. He would come into contact with new people; he saw himself playing an important role in a most important affair; he would naturally and as usual make himself valued. A slovenly air did not conduce to that. It seemed fitting to put on his darkest tweed suit and ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... and soon John Loveday would be leaning all a forenoon at the shed door, watching the lithe ply of Hogarth's hips, and the white-hot iron gushing flushes; while Margaret, peeping, could see Loveday's slovenly ease of pose, his numberless cigarettes, and hear the ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... good sleep at a farmhouse hard by, which farmhouse one of them claimed to espy through the impenetrable night. The drunk was accordingly escorted into the dark, his friends' abrupt steps correcting his own large slovenly procedure out of earshot.... Some of the Black People sat down near me and smoked. Their enormous faces, wads of vital darkness, swooned with fatigue. Their vast gentle hands ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... contrive his Medicines, first, That they may be taken in small quantity, and be made more grateful to the tast, and stomach, and perform more then those of the Apothecaries, commonly slovenly made, and of themselves Fulsom, Nauseous, and Sluggish. Secondly, His Medicines made for particular persons, may last Weeks, Months, nay Years, whereas the Apothecaries Drinks, especially in the Summer time, must be renewed once, or twice every day, to the excessive charge ...
— A Short View of the Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries • Christopher Merrett
... the "supernatural." He joins an ethical society, and before he knows where he is, he is a vegetarian. The rebellious moderns have a curious tendency to flock together in self-defence, even when they have nothing in common. The mere aggregation of denials rather attracts the slovenly and the unattached. The lack of positive dogma expressed by such a coalition encourages the sceptic and the uneducated, who do not realize that the deliberate suppression of dogma is itself a dogma of extreme arrogance. ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... over the telephone. Bat sat down on the table and waited. The news editor was thin-faced and nervous and alert and immaculately groomed. Bat was round-faced and sleepy-eyed—tortoise-shell eyes—and all that prevented his suit from looking positively slovenly was that his own ample avoirdupois filled ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... mining industries in the world! To think that the Government of Canada actually allows the refining of that ore to be done outside of its own country! Folly, folly, criminal folly! But it is all the same in this country, too. The mining work in America is unscientific, slovenly, unorganised, wasteful. I am sorry to say," he continued, turning suddenly upon Larry, "in your western coal fields you waste more in the smoke of your coke ovens than you make out of your coal mines. Ah, if only those wonderful, wonderful coal fields were under the organised ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... moonlight came faintly in—enough for him to distinguish the few objects in the room. He dared not attempt to wash, he was so afraid of being late. He managed to get out his oldest pair of trousers, and hurried on his clothes as fast as he could, feeling miserably dirty and slovenly, and thinking to himself he would never again be hard on poor people for not being clean! "I must try to wash when I come back," he said to himself. Then he hurried out, ...
— Great Uncle Hoot-Toot • Mrs. Molesworth
... to understand, for lots of the stuff sent home is, I imagine, rot - and slovenly rot - and some of it pompous rot; and I want you to understand it's ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... canvas. Details no longer fascinated him, but were annoying and depressing. In fact, he ignored them and began to paint in a broad, slap-dash style. Thus, instead of a clear, powerful portrayal of life, the picture became ever more plain of a tawdry, slovenly female. There was nothing original or charming about such a dull stereotyped piece of work, so he thought; a veritable imitation of a Moukh drawing, banal in idea as in execution; and, as usual, Yourii ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... advocates ill-considered and sweeping measures of reform (especially if they are tainted with vindictiveness and disregard for the rights of the minority) is particularly blameworthy. The several legislatures are responsible for the fact that our laws are often prepared with slovenly haste and lack of consideration. Moreover, they are often prepared, and still more frequently amended during passage, at the suggestion of the very parties against whom they are afterwards enforced. Our great clusters ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... story, I believe, among the "wise speeches" in Camden's Remaines, where it is thus told: "Johannes Erigena, surnamed Scotus, a man renowned for learning, sitting at the table, in respect of his learning, with Charles the Bauld, Emperor and King of France, behaved himselfe as a slovenly scholler, nothing courtly; whereupon the Emperor asked him merrily, Quid interest inter Scotum et Sotum? (what is there between a Scot and a Sot?) He merrily, but yet malapertly answered, 'Mensa'—(the table): as though the emperor were the Sot and he the Scot." p. 236. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... close up to him as possible and thus gained a very good view. The man was a poverty-stricken, slovenly boatman and the fur coat seemed by no means appropriate. It was, in addition, a perfectly ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... with its squalor, and impurity, and idolatry. It is true that environment does not regenerate the soul, but the renewed soul transforms the environment. Better conditions are evidence of the new life. On the contrary, when some fall back to heathenism, they fall into slovenly attire, ill-kept homes, and neglected fields." [Footnote: Rev. C. L. Hall, D.D., ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... Commissioner on the east. Most of the streets run at right angles to each other; the principal, the Strada Real, runs to the gate which forms the chief entrance to the town. The houses are for the most part built in an irregular and slovenly manner; and even the public buildings cannot boast of much beauty. The inhabitants, of the town especially, are a mixture of Greeks and Venetians. In the country the population is more purely Greek. The roads, ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... Her guns were of the heaviest calibre. Her steel walls were decorated with ponderous Pallasier shot and shell. I was struck with the marvellous cleanliness. Her decks were white. Every inch of brasswork was shining; everything in order; everything trim and neat; neither slovenly men ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... of the Japanese which will not be improved by contact with foreigners, and especially with Americans, is thoroughness. This trait is seen on every hand in Japan. Nothing is built in a slovenly way, whether for private use or for the government. The artisan never scamps his work. He seems to have retained the old mechanic's pride in doing everything well which he sets his hand to do. This is seen in the carving of many works of art, as well as in the building of ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... minute I'll go down to the Guardians and make my complaint. (He notices his appearance) I'm going about all day with my boots unlaced. I'm falling into bad ways, bad, slovenly ways. And my coat needs brushing, too. (He takes off his coat and goes to window and brushes it) That's Myles Gorman going back to the Workhouse. I couldn't walk with my head held as high as that. In this house I ...
— Three Plays • Padraic Colum
... elaborately with small conical silver buttons; and while some of them concluded their attire with breeches extending to the knees and there clasped with buckles, others, more fantastic in taste, preferred the loose trowsers of the Ottoman. Hair, prodigiously long, flowing slovenly over the shoulders, was common to all. Hats were worn, but they may be exceptions. A blue petticoat, blue as their beautiful sky, and a jacket bound by a scarlet sash around the waist, and a coloured silk kerchief wreathed about the head, its two ends ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... sent yesterday to the Vice Chancellor, and of my letter accompanying it. They will not, I presume, detain the letter merely to give themselves the trouble of copying or translating papers, the original of which is in the hands of the principal Minister. I have only to apologise to you for the slovenly appearance of this copy, with its interlineations and obliterations. I have not time to make a fair copy for this day's post, and though but a few days might be lost here by waiting for the next post, yet an opportunity might be lost for a long time ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various
... obscure) but himself—an indirect argument in favour of the general opinion as to the source from which they spring—and the other was, to hint our astonishment at the innumerable and incessant in-stances of bad and slovenly English in them, more, we believe, than in any other works now printed. We should think the writer could not possibly read the manuscript after he has once written it, or ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... in the year seventeen hundred and eighty-nine, before the back door of a small house which stood on the banks of the Seine, about three miles westward of the city of Rouen. The one speaker was lean, old, crabbed and slovenly; the other was plump, young, oily-mannered and dressed in the most gorgeous livery costume of the period. The last days of genuine dandyism were then rapidly approaching all over the civilized world; and Monsieur Justin was, in his own way, dressed to perfection, ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... this, my dear child. And perhaps I should say that my mind was, and has always remained, with my mother on such matters. If God gives food for the use of His creatures, it is to His honour and glory to serve it handsomely, so far as may be; and I see little religion in a slovenly piece of meat, or a shapeless hunch of butter on a ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... a strain of candor to admit that this author speaks at random; that he is only slovenly and inaccurate, and not fallacious. In matters of account, however, this want of care is not excusable; and the difference between neutral nations entirely engrossing our navigation, and being only subsidiary to a vastly augmented trade, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... is conducted in the most slovenly manner. The ripe ears with the dry stalks are thrown on the sand, and then half-a-dozen donkeys are driven over them—an animated threshing machine. The grain, of course, mixes with the sand, and is separated from it with considerable ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... changed he was, since they last met. The wicked career of a few months had stamped and furrowed his brow with the lines of years. His dress was mean and faded. He looked dirty and slovenly, and little of his former manly beauty and elegance of person remained. So utterly degraded was his appearance, that a cry of surprise broke from Anthony's lips, so inexpressibly shocked was he at an alteration ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... Arnold had criticized General Grant's English, and Clemens immediately put down other things to rush to his hero's defense. He pointed out that in Arnold's criticism there were no less than "two grammatical crimes and more than several examples of very crude and slovenly English," ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Mary came, or rather, when she was about to come, things were altogether changed at the doctor's. People had hitherto wondered—and especially Mrs Umbleby—how a gentleman like Dr Thorne could continue to live in so slovenly a manner; and how people again wondered, and again especially Mrs Umbleby, how the doctor could possibly think it necessary to put such a lot of furniture into a house because a little chit of a girl of twelve years of age was ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... having in contemplation the quantity of provisions necessary for their real use, and not as calculating what is to be lost by the wanton waste, mismanagement, and carelessness of those employed about it. If magazines of beef and pork are suffered to rot by slovenly butchering, or for want of timely provision and sale; if quantities of flour are exposed by the commissaries entrusted with the keeping it, to pillage and destruction; and if, when laid up in the Continental stores, it is still to be embezzled and sold, the land of Egypt itself would ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... circumstances have required from men." "Long generations" of subjection are, strangely enough, held to excuse the timorousness and the shifts of women to-day. But the world, unknowing, tampers with the courage of its sons by such a slovenly indulgence. It tampers with their intelligence by fostering ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... school-master and Jack, waiting for him, and he forgot hunger and weariness as he trod on eagerly toward them. That night, he stayed in a mountain-cabin, and while the contrast of the dark room, the crowding children, the slovenly dress, and the coarse food was strangely disagreeable, along with the strange new shock came the thrill that all this meant hills and home. It was about three o'clock of the fourth day that, tramping up the Kentucky River, he came upon a long, even stretch of smooth water, from the ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... his occupation through reducing them to a series of effective habits will surely succeed. Note the ease and perfection with which the skilled workman performs his labor and compare it with the slow, slovenly work of ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... them from the passage, being careful he should not detect it, for fear of his contempt. Then I minutely examined my clothes and thought that everything looked old, worn and threadbare. I had let myself get too slovenly. My uniform, perhaps, was tidy, but I could not go out to dinner in my uniform. The worst of it was that on the knee of my trousers was a big yellow stain. I had a foreboding that that stain would deprive me of nine-tenths of my personal ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... very kindly, making many apologies for the dirty house, which she partly attributed to its being Saturday; but I could plainly see that it was dirt of all days. I sate in the midst of it with great delight, for the woman's benevolent, happy countenance almost converted her slovenly and lazy way of leaving all things to take care of themselves into ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... awning-posts, and other wrecks of the fight. The grog-shops were open, in which men with bloody noses, and bruised and battered faces, obtained the necessary stimulus to continue the desperate struggle. Dirty, slovenly-dressed women stood in the door- ways or on the steps, swearing and denouncing both police and military in the coarsest language. Though the immense gatherings of the preceding days were not witnessed, yet there was a ground-swell ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... which are the same in all the villages where one studies them. They very commonly fall into a routine, the basis of which is going to some lounging-place or other, a bar-room, a reading-room, or something of the kind. They grow slovenly in dress, and wear the same hat forever. They have a feeble curiosity for news perhaps, which they take daily as a man takes his bitters, and then fall silent and think they are thinking. But the mind goes out under this regimen, like a fire without ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... long as they can carry on from one day to another they are quite content. The bit of ground they live on is not half cultivated. In the summer time you may see two or even three crops growing up together. If they had potatoes on last, they got them up in the most slovenly way, leaving half the crop in the ground. They just hoak out with a stick or a bit of board what they require for that day's food, picking the large ones and leaving the small ones in the ground. Oats or something else will be seen half-choked with weeds and the growth from the potatoes ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... He was without a collar, so his throat was bare above the neck-band of his flannel shirt. Altogether she disapproved of his slovenly appearance. He was usually so smart ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... to paint her. I'm just crazy about her face," said the girl, whose name she learned afterwards was Rosy Plover. Though she was undeniably pretty, and had just powdered her face with scented powder, she had a slovenly, unkempt appearance which Gabriella, from that moment, associated with art students. "If she'd only dress herself properly, she'd be a beauty," she thought, with the aversion of one who is an artist in clothes. She herself, after her ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... he asked himself the question as he allowed his horse to mouche, with slovenly step, over the sodden prairie; but no answer presented itself. His thin, eagle face was puckered with perplexity. The sleepy eyes gleamed vengefully from between his half-closed eyelids as he gazed across the sunlit prairie. His ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
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