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More "Undistinguished" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... disappeared, the one by the door for the Usher's desk, the one by the Library for the Master. The Modern Language Room opened into it. There were two doors, one the main entrance chiefly used by the boys, the other smaller and undistinguished for the Masters only. It led into the Library and into a Tower, where the School bell was. The Library was not very big but a long narrow room, and inset in the wall was a fire-proof safe, for the better preservation of the Charter and other documents. It alone has continued to ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... forward upon my face, and for twenty-three hours, the living undistinguished from the dead, I ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... "meanwhile I must wish you good morning: your road now lies to the right. I return you my best thanks for your condescension, in accompanying so undistinguished an individual as myself." ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dress our public functionaries in undistinguished raiment before Franklin's time; and the change would not have come if he had been an obscurity. But he was such a colossal figure in the world that whatever he did of an unusual nature attracted the world's attention, and became a precedent. In the case ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the Apostolic group at all. Nobody can tell. What does it matter? The lesson to be gathered from their presence in this group is one that most of us may very well take to heart. There is a place for commonplace, undistinguished people, whose names are not worth repeating in any record; there is a place for us one- talented folk, in Christ's Church, and we, too, have a share in the manifestation of His love. We do not need to be brilliant, we do not need to be clever, we do not need to be influential, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... been laid aside on entering the saloon, as was the custom of the Romans in their own families, or among private friends, hung on the back of an armed chair; of ample size and fine material, but undistinguished by the marks of senatorial or equestrian rank. Such was the aspect, such the bearing of the youth, who might be safely deemed the girl's permitted suitor, from his whole air and manner, as he listened to the soft voice of his beautiful mistress. For as they sat there side by side, perusing from ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... few short years and this motley throng Will all have passed away, And the rich and the poor and the old and the young Will be undistinguished clay. And lips that laugh and lips that moan, Shall in silence alike be sealed, And some will lie under stately stone, And ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... insurrection among us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... it is one of the most encouraging things for all who speculate upon human possibility to consider the multitude of men in the last three centuries who have been content to live laborious, unprofitable, and for the most part quite undistinguished lives in the service of knowledge that has transformed the world. Some names indeed stand out by virtue of gigantic or significant achievement, such names as Bacon, Newton, Volta, Darwin, Faraday, Joule; but these are but the culminating peaks of a nearly limitless Oberland of devoted ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... believed his soul to be staked on the letter of the Coronation Oath. The ablest members of Pitt's government, Grenville, Dundas, and Windham, retired with their leader. Addington, Speaker of the House of Commons, became Prime Minister, with colleagues as undistinguished as himself. It was under the government of Addington that the negotiations were begun which resulted in the signature of Preliminaries of Peace in ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... Bacchus oft to the cool shades retired, And his own native Nysa less admired. Oft to the mountain's airy tops advanced, The frisking Satyrs on the summit danced. Alcides [1] here, here Venus graced the shore, Nor loved her favourite Lacedaemon more. Now piles of ashes, spreading all around, In undistinguished heaps deform the ground. The gods themselves the ruined seats bemoan, And blame the mischiefs that themselves ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... with plenty to say; rangy as a setter pup, silken-haired; his Scandinavian cheeks like petals at an age when his companions' faces were like maps of the moon; stubborn and healthy; wearing a celluloid collar and a plain black four-in-hand; a blue-eyed, undistinguished, awkward, busy proletarian of sixteen, to whom evening clothes and poetry did not exist, but who quivered with inarticulate determinations to see Minneapolis, or even Chicago. To him it was sheer romance to parade through ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... torrent, tinder the impulse, as it were, of some strange poetical fury; and in these peculiar moments of inspiration, his amanuensis, who was generally his daughter, was summoned by the bell to arrest the verses as they came, and to commit them to the security of writing.... Some days would elapse undistinguished by a verse, while on others he would dictate thirty or forty lines.... Labor would often be ineffectual to obtain what often would be gratuitously offered to him; and his imagination, which at one instant would refuse a flower to his most strenuous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... Major James Brooks, late of the 4th (King's Own) Regiment, had married twice, and at the time of his retirement from active service was for the second time a widower. Blindness—contracted by exposure and long marches over the snows of Galicia—had put an end to a career by no means undistinguished. In his last fight, at Corunna, he had not only earned a mention in despatches from his brigadier-general, Lord William Bentinck, but by his alertness in handling his half-regiment at a critical moment, and refusing its right to an outflanking line of French, had been privileged to win almost ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... special; eminent, illustrious, famous, celebrated, renowned, noted; transcendent, extraordinary, supreme, consummate, conspicuous. Antonyms: undistinguished, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... with a puerile love of sport. Amusement is the order of the day. But no one was ever so fond of play, that he had not also his serious moments. Every human creature perhaps is sensible to the stimulus of ambition. He is delighted with the thought that he also shall be somebody, and not a mere undistinguished pawn, destined to fill up a square in the chess-board of human society. He wishes to be thought something of, and to be gazed upon. Nor is it merely the wish to be admired that excites him: he acts, that he may be satisfied with himself. Self-respect ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... Shakespeare turns to splendid account in Sonnet cvi., recurs constantly in contemporary sonnets of adulation. {140a} Ben Jonson apostrophised the Earl of Desmond as 'my best-best lov'd.' Campion told Lord Walden, the Earl of Suffolk's undistinguished heir, that although his muse sought to express his love, 'the admired virtues' of the ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... excited domestick insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is undistinguished destruction of all ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... for the benefit of a mystical brotherhood, for the old fellow was a kind of spiritualist. Therefore, there is no harm in giving his plebeian name, which was Potts. Mr. Potts had a small draper's shop in an undistinguished and rarely visited country town in the east of England, which shop he ran with the help of an assistant almost as old and peculiar as himself. Whether he made anything out of it or whether he lived upon private means is now unknown and does not matter. ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... that might claim Triumphant laurels and immortal fame, Confused in crowds of gallant actions lie, And troops of heroes undistinguished lie." ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... direct the storm. Like meteors, they glare on the black clouds with a splendor that, while it dazzles and terrifies, makes nothing visible but the darkness. The fame of heroes is indeed growing vulgar; they multiply in every long war; they stand in history and thicken in their ranks almost as undistinguished as their own soldiers. ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... was not remarkable. The pipe was not picturesque. The scissors were the most ordinary of scissors. The copy paper was quite undistinguished in appearance. The lead pencils had the most untemperamental ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... which demand, the world may not be bound to gratify at all. In every outwardly verifiable and practical respect, a world in which the alternatives that now actually distract your choice were decided by pure chance would be by me absolutely undistinguished from the world in which I now live. I am, therefore, entirely willing to call it, so far as your choices go, a world of chance for me. To yourselves, it is true, those very acts of choice, which to me are so blind, opaque, and external, are the opposites of this, for you are within them and ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... each other. But now Larry was seeing more than just Maggie. He was also taking in the room. It was close kin to the room in which he had left Miss Grierson: ornate, undistinguished, and very expensive. He noted one slight difference: a tiny hallway giving on the corridor, its inner door ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... the will is the first step that takes a human being out of the crowd. Charmian had suffered because she was in the crowd, undistinguished, lost like a violet in a prairie abloom with thousands of violets. Something in Algeria, something perhaps in Susan Fleet, had put into her a resolve, unacknowledged even to herself. She had returned to England, meaning to marry Claude Heath, meaning ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... of the bookstall, at which hurried suburban passengers were grabbing evening papers, a youngish man in a bowler hat, of wholly undistinguished appearance, was apparently engrossed in the study of picture postcards, but he turned as Bullard approached, and presently the two were strolling ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... interests which the world supposes every man to have, and which therefore are properly enough termed worldly; but the world is apt to make an erroneous estimate: ignorant of the dispositions which constitute our happiness or misery, they bring to an undistinguished scale the means of the one, as connected with power, wealth, or grandeur, and of the other with their contraries. Philosophers and poets have often protested against this decision; but their arguments have been despised as declamatory, ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... to mathematical definition); weird. "The system's been behaving pretty randomly." 2. Assorted; undistinguished. "Who was at the conference?" "Just a bunch of random business types." 3. (pejorative) Frivolous; unproductive; undirected. "He's just a random loser." 4. Incoherent or inelegant; poorly chosen; not well organized. "The program has ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... mutual faith." There are many worse systems of pedagogy than this. Ralph was thought less persistent than his steady older brother William, and far less brilliant than his gifted, short-lived younger brothers, Edward and Charles. He had an undistinguished career at Harvard, where he was graduated in 1821, ranking thirtieth in a class of fifty-nine. Lovers of irony like to remember that he was the seventh choice of his classmates for the position of class poet. After some desultory teaching ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... 1755 came Braddock's defeat. In 1756 Montcalm arrived in Canada and won his first victory at Oswego. In 1757 Wolfe distinguished himself by formulating the plan which, if properly executed, would have prevented the British fiasco at Rochefort on the coast of France. But Carleton remained as undistinguished as before. He simply became lieutenant-colonel commanding the 72nd Foot, now the Seaforth Highlanders. In 1758 his chance appeared to have come at last. Amherst had asked for his services at Louisbourg. But the king had neither forgotten nor forgiven the remarks about the Hanoverians, and so refused ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... had learnt together under Gerrard's father, the Rector, entered Addiscombe together, and passed out at the same time, Gerrard with an array of medals which secured him one of the coveted commissions in the Engineers, and Charteris, undistinguished save by proficiency in games and universal popularity, slipping contentedly into the Infantry. Appointed to the same station, they had seen a certain amount of active service in company, and continuing to gain the ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... affairs. A permit was granted on condition of her returning, or, in exchange for her liberty and that of her two slaves, to remit 50 captives, and, failing to do either, the Sultan and his suite were to be deprived of their dignities and treated as common slaves, to work in the galleys, and to be undistinguished among the ordinary prisoners. On these conditions, the Princess left, and forwarded 50 slaves, and one more—a Spaniard, Jose ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... at the school, and looked as if she were born for a teacher,—the very best foil that she could have chosen; and here was this man, polite enough to herself, to be sure, but turning round to that very undistinguished young person as if he rather preferred ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Rotary Club of Seattle, would be a justifiable compromise, and satisfy nearly everybody. Its adoption would free our national map from one more of its meaningless names—the name, in this case, of an undistinguished foreign naval officer whose only connection with our history is the fact that he fought against us during the American Revolution. Incidentally, it would also free me from the need of an apology for using the hybrid "Rainier-Tacoma"! * * ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... European country, and though it is at least probable that some of the greatest achievements of literature, French in language, are English in nationality, the vernacular should for long have been a little scanty and a little undistinguished in its yield. Periods of moulting, of putting on new skins, and the like, are never periods of extreme physical vigour. And besides, this Anglo-Saxon itself had (as has been said) been distinctly on the wane as a literary language for more than a century, while ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... hardly be worth recording these medieval clerks, the undistinguished writers, 'de quibus,' Boccaccio said, 'nil curandum est,' were it not that they show how the memory at least of the classical pastoral survived amid the ruins of ancient learning, and so serve to lead up to one last spasmodic manifestation of the kind in certain poems which else appear to ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... there was at first in darkness hidden; The universe was undistinguished water. That which in void and emptiness lay hidden Alone by power of ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... peasants, millionaires and paupers, become a common, undistinguished crowd! But the hero, the poet, the saint, defy the ages and remain luminous and separate like ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... the house, or whether he had better remain hidden among the leaves. If you go now to look for the tree, it is indeed plain and easy to be seen. But though now so shorn and lonely, there is no doubt that two hundred years ago it stood undistinguished among a thousand others that thronged the woodland about the tower ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... this supreme confidence in common men that was the keynote to the wonderful power of Dickens in making characters from those who were in a world sense undistinguished. On this position Chesterton lays great stress. It was this, he thinks, that made him an optimist. It was the same position that made Browning an optimist. It is the disbelief in the Divine image in Man that makes the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... He took a step forward upon the soft, pulpy leads. Even then he hesitated before he finally committed himself. About his appearance little was remarkable save the general air of determination which gave character to his undistinguished features. He was something above the medium height, broad-set, and with rather more thick black hair than he knew how to arrange advantageously. He wore a shirt which was somewhat frayed, and an indifferent tie; his boots were heavy and clumsy; he wore also a ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... troublesome world; the other, if I mistake not, was composed of the pudding-stick and a broken rung of a chair, tied loosely together at the elbow. As for its legs, the right was a hoe-handle, and the left an undistinguished and miscellaneous stick from the wood-pile. Its lungs, stomach, and other affairs of that kind, were nothing better than a meal-bag stuffed with straw. Thus we have made out the skeleton and entire corporosity of the scarecrow, with the exception of its head, and ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... with such attention any notice of the college he can find in the newspaper. My dear, dear brother, how you would work hard if you only knew what a prize success in life might give you. Little as I have seen of her, I could guess that she will never bestow a thought on an undistinguished man. Come down for one day, and tell me if ever, in all your ambition, you had such a goal before ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... An undistinguished foreigner from France was talking the other day about the English stage, of which apparently he had seen a good deal. After being asked many searching questions put in the hopes of eliciting material for "copy" it was discovered that what he most admired in our theatre is the ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... had disposed of them we could give the proceeds to a charity, so there would be nothing really wrong about it. But nothing of that sort lies within the Mappined limits of my life. One of these days somebody dull and decorous and undistinguished will 'make himself agreeable' to me at a tennis party, as the saying is, and all the dull old gossips of the neighbourhood will begin to ask when we are to be engaged, and at last we shall be engaged, and people will give us butter-dishes and blotting-cases ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... altogether free from pretence, and the possession of property (which always works very decidedly for good or for evil) saved her from that excess of deference which would have accentuated her social shortcomings. Undistinguished as she might seem at the first glance, Miss Shepperson could not altogether be slighted by any one who had been in her presence for a few minutes. And when, in the course of the evening, she found courage to converse more freely, giving her views, for instance, on the great servant question, and ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... spoke of himself in any way that one heard from him few of those experiences of the distinguished man in contact with the undistinguished, which he must have had so abundantly. But he told, while it was fresh in his mind, an incident that happened to him one day in Boston at a tobacconist's, where a certain brand of cigars was recommended to him as the kind Longfellow ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... young Guardsman was undistinguished among the brilliant character-groups which represented old fairy tales and nursery rhymes. There were 'The White Cat and her Prince,' 'Puss-in- Boots and the Princess,' 'Little Snowflake and her Bear,' and, behold, here was the loveliest Fatima ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... collections listed under so many thousand heads of a different nature, for want of which the learned world would be deprived of infinite delight as well as instruction, and we ourselves buried beyond redress in an inglorious and undistinguished oblivion? ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... that you impart, Like chop on gridiron, broil my tender heart! Which if thy kindly helping hand be n't nigh, Must like an up-turned chop, hiss, brown, and fry; And must at least, thou scorcher of my soul, Shrink, and become an undistinguished coal." ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... in them, Egyptians chiefly, these—so long last their embalming drugs. But to know one from another was no easy task; all are so like when the bones are bared; yet with pains and long scrutiny we could make them out. They lay pell-mell in undistinguished heaps, with none of their earthly beauties left. With all those anatomies piled together as like as could be, eyes glaring ghastly and vacant, teeth gleaming bare, I knew not how to tell Thersites from ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... their privations. If the unknown were to them practically non-existent they might find solace in sluggish and secure content. But even the smallest circle of being touches continually the periphery of wider spheres. The air is freighted with echoes of undistinguished sounds. Powers, illimitable, absolute, uncomprehended, seem to hold an inimical sway over their lives and of these the most dreaded is the benign law, framed for their protection, spreading above them an unperceived, unimagined aegis. Thus there was hardly an article in the house which ...
— Who Crosses Storm Mountain? - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... christians understood these to be the doctrines of christianity, there can be no doubt. The Presbyters and the Asceticks, I believe, changed the Palluim for the Toga in the infancy of the christian world; but all other christians were left undistinguished by their dress. These were generally clad in the sober manner of their own times. They observed a medium between costliness and sordidness. That they had no particular form for their dress beyond that ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... Methodist, Episcopal, or Baptist creed, whether it had a chancel or altar, or painted windows? Whether the pews had doors to them and were cushioned or not? Whether the minister wore a gown and bands, or plain suit of black, or was undistinguished in his dress? Will it not suffice if I tell you, as the very belief of my soul, that it was a christian house, that there were seats for all, that things were well intended and decently ordered, and that with a hymn sung ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... forth Shelley, is, after all, not the wisest way. Recollect that in Poesy as in every other human business, the more there are who practise it the greater will be the chance of someone's reaching perfection. It is the impetus of the undistinguished host that flings forward a Diomed or a Hector. And when you point with pride to Milton's and those other mulberry trees in your Academe, bethink you 'What poets are they shading to-day? Or are their leaves but feeding worms to spin gowns to ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... you with what you bring.' To the necessary deceits and hypocrisies of our life, why add any that are useless and unnecessary? If I offer myself to you because I think we have a fair chance of being happy together, and because by your help I may get for both of us a good place and a not undistinguished name, why ask me to feign raptures and counterfeit romance, in which neither of us believe? Do you want me to come wooing in a Prince Prettyman's dress from the masquerade warehouse, and to pay you compliments like Sir Charles Grandison? Do you want me to make you verses ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... perhaps just before he nods to another, and enters with him, but, Sir, I am glad to see you, now I think of it. Each of those are happy for the next four and twenty Hours; and those who bow in Ranks undistinguished, and by Dozens at a Time, think they have very good Prospects if they hope to arrive at such Notices half ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... rue de Dunkerque stands the Hotel Railleux. It is a tall and narrow house, somewhat dirty and entirely undistinguished; there is nothing to recommend it save perhaps an air of privacy, a certain insignificance that wedges it between the surrounding buildings in a manner tempting to one anxious to avoid ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... innovator and this is his vice. It is a byproduct of originality and a symptom of a restless desire for change. The realist who makes a poem, not on his lady's eyebrows but her intestines, is a good current example. The novelist who shovels undistinguished humanity, just because it is human, into his book is another. The versifier who twists and breaks his rhythm solely in order to get new sounds is a third. A fourth is the stylist who writes in disjointed phrases and expletives, intended ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... the second one now," Vall replied. "Vulthor Tharn is due to retire in a few years. He has a negatively good, undistinguished record. He's trying ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... mind. After all, the lodger must have lived somewhere during his forty-odd years of life. She did not even know if Mr. Sleuth had any brothers or sisters; friends she knew he had none. But, however odd and eccentric he was, he had evidently, or so she supposed, led a quiet, undistinguished ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... exception, that the duke's were his own, and he could do what he liked with them. This remembrance did not unfrequently present itself to the duke's mind. In person, he was a plain, thin man, tall, but undistinguished in appearance, except that there was a gleam of pride in his eye which seemed every moment to be saying, "I am the Duke of Omnium." He was unmarried, and, if report said true, a great debauchee; but if so he had always ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... poems. You have there a sky blazing with sunbeams; but they all begin a long way from the sun, and they are accounted for by a mass of dense clouds surrounding the orb itself. Turn to the 7th page. Behind the old oak, where the sun is supposed to be, you have only a blaze of undistinguished light; but up on the left, over the edge of the cloud, on its dark side, the sunbeam. Turn to page 192,—blazing rays again, but all beginning where the clouds do, not one can you trace to the sun; and observe how carefully the ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... Apparently his was a moderately successful ecclesiastical career: he was appointed in 1735 chaplain-in-ordinary to George II. His other published works consist of sermons, religious tracts, and an undistinguished treatise ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... Mina Raff's parents had died when she was a young girl, and the Groves had rescued her from the undistinguished evils of improvidence; she had lived with them until, against their intensest objections, she had gone into moving pictures. Probably the Groves' opposition had lasted until Mina's success; or, in other words, their support had been withheld from her through the period when ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... spot of earth, though undistinguished by any very prominent beauties, being merely a nook in the shelter of a hill, with the prospect of a distant lake in one direction, and of a church-spire in another. There were vistas and pathways leading onward and onward into the green woodlands, and vanishing away in the ...
— The Lily's Quest (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... unites the traditions of two old halls, and of its own predecessor, and from all of them it derives some famous names. Hart Hall was the home of John Selden, one of the greatest of English scholars; Hertford College had an undistinguished English prime minister in Henry Pelham, and a most distinguished leader of opposition in Charles James Foxe; while Magdalen Hall was even more rich in traditions, as being the home of the translator of the Bible, ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... before the Institute. Never, perhaps, had so many people in evening costume gathered under this roof. Even Mr. Chown, the draper, though scornful of such fopperies, had thought it due to his position as a town-councillor to don the invidious garb; he was not disposed to herd among the undistinguished at the back of the room. Ladies were in great force, though many of them sought places with an abashed movement, not quite sure whether what they were about to hear would be strictly "proper." One there was who betrayed no such tremors; ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... the past services of Fregellae and of the fact that the passion for the franchise was the most indubitable sign of the loyalty of the town, the government ordered that the walls of the surrendered city should be razed and that the town should become a mere open village undistinguished by any civic privilege.[489] A portion of its territory was during the next year employed for the foundation of the citizen colony of Fabrateria.[490] The new settlement was the typical Roman garrison in a disaffected country. But it proved the ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... to add, that the original notes of Horace Walpole are throughout retained, undistinguished by any signature; whereas, those of the various editors are indicated by a characteristic initial, which is explained in the progress ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... a lonely part of Maine, where in roaming the lonely woods he gained a liking for solitude as well as for nature. He returned to Salem in 1819 to prepare for Bowdoin College, which he entered in 1821. After an undistinguished course he went back to his native town, whither his mother had ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... to take these crude productions of Branwell Bronte's boyhood as implying that he had no possibilities in him of anything better, but judging from the fact that his letters, as a man of eight and twenty, are as undistinguished as his sister's are noteworthy at a like age, we might well dismiss Branwell Bronte once and for all, were not some epitome of his life indispensable in an account ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... interesting, and very interesting, in itself, and just now very embarrassing—this rural parish supplied Glasgow with such a quantity of Stevensons in the beginning of last century! There is just a link wanting; and we might be able to go back to the eleventh century, always undistinguished, but clearly traceable. When I say just a link, I guess I may be taken to mean a dozen. What a singular thing is this undistinguished perpetuation of a family throughout the centuries, and the sudden ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would choose except among the imported models, for which store prices are as a rule higher than those asked by the greatest dressmakers. Evening clothes are still usually unbuyable by the over-fastidious, except for a certain flapper type (and an undistinguished one at that!), and the ultra-smart woman is still obliged to go to the private importers for her debutante daughter's ball-dresses as well as her own—or ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... witness to an embassy that was sent from the neighbouring prince, who imagined that the fame of his exploits had struck the Arabians with terror, and disposed them to submission. The ambassador was introduced to the chief of the tribe, a venerable old man, undistinguished by any mark of ostentation from the rest, who received him sitting cross-legged at the door of his tent. He then began to speak, and, in a long and studied harangue, described the power of his master, the invincible courage of his armies, the vast profusion ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... I know, while thus the quiet-colored eve Smiles to leave 50 To their folding all our many-tinkling fleece In such peace, And the slopes and rills in undistinguished gray Melt away— That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair 55 Waits me there In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul For the goal, When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... was—and still remain a man. You may be a bully, a cad, a coward and a fool, in the poor heart and brains of you; but so long as you wear the mock regimentals of contemporary manhood, and are above all things plain and undistinguished enough, your reputation for manhood will be secure. There is nothing so dangerous to a reputation for manhood as brains ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... strangers I cannot say, but to me it is intensely interesting, and if you can arrange for a few dozen reprints in paper wrappers I shall be glad to have them. I had, of course, some knowledge of my ancestors, but I had no idea that we were quite such an undistinguished rabble of groundlings for so long. That drunken whipper-in to Lord Dashingham in the ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... fathers on Vaerting's list, from twenty-one to twenty-five years of age, were (with one exception) themselves more or less distinguished, while the fifteen oldest, from thirty-nine to sixty years of age, were all without exception undistinguished. Among these sons are to be found much greater names (Goethe, Bach, Kant, Bismarck, Wagner, etc.) than are to be found among the sons of young and more distinguished fathers, for here there is only one name (Frederick the Great) of the same calibre. The elderly fathers ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... not indeed boast of noble ancestry, nor was even a landed proprietor; but he was a not-undistinguished member of Parliament, of irreproachable character, and ample fortune inherited from a distant kinsman, who had enriched himself as a merchant. It was on both sides a marriage ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mighty engines fell; As from the mountain top some time-worn rock At length by winds dislodged, in all its track Spreads ruin vast: nor crushed the life alone Forth from the body, but dispersed the limbs In fragments undistinguished and in blood. But as protected by the armour shield The might of Rome drew nigh beneath the wall (The front rank with their bucklers interlaced And held above their helms), the missiles fell Behind their backs, ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... whole career of the brilliant Themistocles he had a persistent opponent, Aristides, a man, like him, born of undistinguished parents, but who by moral strength and innate power of intellect won the esteem and admiration of his fellow-citizens. He became the leader of the aristocratic section of the people, as Themistocles did of the democratic, and for years ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... greatest influences which transformed Doggie into a fairly efficient though undistinguished infantryman was a morbid social terror of his officers. It saved him from many a guard-room, and from many a heart-to-heart talk wherein the zealous lieutenant gets to know his men. He lived in dread lest military delinquency or civil accomplishment should be the means ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... a new star and her beauty the color of cloth of gold, and Hattie in her lowly comedian way not an undistinguished veteran. So they could kiss in the key of a cat ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... a more mitigated scepticism or academical philosophy, which may be both durable and useful, and which may, in part, be the result of this Pyrrhonism, or excessive scepticism, when its undistinguished doubts are, in some measure, corrected by common sense and reflection. The greater part of mankind are naturally apt to be affirmative and dogmatical in their opinions; and while they see objects only on one side, and have no idea of any counterpoising argument, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... interests of mankind. We come, as Americans, to mark a spot which must forever be dear to us and our posterity. We wish that whosoever, in all coming time, shall turn his eye hither, may behold that the place is not undistinguished where the first great battle of the Revolution was fought. We wish that this structure may proclaim the magnitude and importance of that event to every class and every age. We wish that infancy may learn the purpose of its erection from maternal ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... I shall first introduce the Song-Sparrow, (Fringilla melodia,) a little bird that is universally known and admired. The Song-Sparrow is the earliest visitant and the latest resident of the vocal tenants of the field. He is plain in his vesture, undistinguished from the female by any superiority of plumage, and comes forth in the spring and takes his departure in the autumn in the same suit of russet and gray by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... minutes they came to the Gournay-Martin house, a wide-fronted mass of undistinguished masonry, in an undistinguished row of exactly the same pattern. There were no signs that any one was living in it. Blinds were drawn, shutters were up over all the windows, upper and lower. No smoke came from any of ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... 12, 1809, in Hardin county, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families—second families perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks, some of whom now reside in Adams and others in Macon county, Illinois. My paternal grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, emigrated from Rockingham ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... charming. And it is not as if Mr. Ablett's appearance were in any way undistinguished. Quite the contrary. I'm ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... reminded) an ode on the consecration of St. Anne's, Alderney, when I accompanied the Bishop to the ceremony: and some memorable stanzas about the decent expediency of the Bailiff and Jurats being robed for official uniform, since ornamentally adopted; but before I wrote they wore mean and undistinguished "mufti." ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... moment when Barbara, rushing between the combatants, receives in her own bosom the blade intended for ——, etc. But of course not enough blade to endanger the happy ending. So there you are. A placid, undistinguished tale, that may be commended as nourishment or soporific according to the taste and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... distinguished and learned philosopher of the Old Academy, than whom there was no wiser or more famous teacher. At the same time I practiced myself diligently under the care of Demetrius Syrus, an old and not undistinguished master of eloquence." To Athens, then, Cicero always looked back with affection. He hears, for instance, that Appius is going to build a portico at Eleusis. "Will you think me a fool," he writes to Atticus, "if I do the same at the Academy? 'I think so,' you ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... sadden. They are, in consequence, destitute of all that renders the name of Ausonia thrilling, or her champaigns beautiful, beyond the mere splendor of climate; and even that splendor is unshared by the mountain; its cold atmosphere being undistinguished by any of that rich, purple, ethereal transparency which gives the air of the plains its depth of feeling,—we ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... usurpation, they contended by degrees with their parent sect, and, as I have already said, shared in employments; and gradually, after the Restoration, mingled with the mass of Presbyterians; lying ever since undistinguished in the herd ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... Meditation, avaunt! Respected (tho' unknown) Sir,—Out of the abundant store of your immutable condescension graciously deign to pardon the bold assurance and presumptuous liberty of an animated mass of undistinguished dust, whose fragile composition is most miraculously composed of congenial atoms so promiscuously concentred as to personify in an abstracted degree the beauteous form of man, to convey by proxy ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... she yet speaks to us to be loving and helpful to one another. Her common and undistinguished love to us all was such that it could never be said which of us she loved the best, and it speaks to us, now that she is gone, to "love one another with a pure heart fervently." We know very well that our unity was the joy of her heart while living, and many a time she hath with ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... mischievous tendency, if they were not rendered ridiculous by the manner in which they are expressed. The singularity of these productions excited a good deal of sensation, and, if we believe her own words, she was placed by them "in a definite rank among authors, and in no undistinguished circle of society." In some of the principal journals, however, the lady was severely taken to task, at the same time that she was counselled to obtain for herself a partner in weal and wo, by which ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... masters, sought the conversation of the learned, but was especially eloquent in speech, and effective, even against the best Athenian opponents. He was modest, unambitious, patriotic, intellectual, contented with poverty, generous, and disinterested. When the Cadmea was taken, he was undistinguished, and his rare merits were only known to Pelopidas and his friends. He was among the first to join the revolutionists, and was placed by Pelopidas among the organizers of ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... then, Marguerite, the coloured hired girl, came to clear off the table. Missy regarded her capable but undistinguished figure. ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... crave to have it abated. She remarked that it must end soon. He made a dim allusion to the littleness of humanity. She laughed. "It's the language of an unfortunate lover," she said, and straightway, in some undistinguished sentence, brought the name of Countess Alessandra Ammiani tingling to his ears. She feared that she could not be of service to him there; "at least, not just yet," the lady astonished him by remarking. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... correspondence with Zurich, who would act for the other allied cities, to communicate to them what happened in Italy on the side of the Emperor, or what transpired of his dangerous schemes. He excused the sending of a solitary, youthful, undistinguished man, to such an enlightened republic by the necessity of the case, the desire to avoid notice,—to conceal the movement toward a close alliance between two free states from the watchful glance of the ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... "the scourge of impostors, the terror of quacks." I have gone over the names of those who might be Smith's contemporaries at Balliol as they appear in Mr. Foster's list of Alumni Oxonienses, and they were a singularly undistinguished body of people. Smith and Douglas themselves are indeed the only two of them who seem to have made any mark in the world ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... Mallet's Life of Bacon, I see he mentions that he was privately buried at St. Michael's church, near St. Alban's; and it adds, 'The spot that contains his remains lay obscure and undistinguished, till the gratitude of a private man, formerly his servant' (Sir Thomas Meautys), 'erected a monument to his name and memory.' This makes it probable that the likeness is a ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... books to which the amateur would at once have flown. They were in 'boards' of faded blue, and the paper labels bore alluring names: they were all First Editions of the most desirable kind. The bottles in the liqueur case were antique; a coat of arms, not undistinguished, was in relief on the silver stoppers. But the liquors in the flasks were humble and conventional. Merton, the tenant of the rooms, was in a Zingari cricketing coat; he occupied the arm-chair, while Logan, in evening dress, maintained ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... before he fell dead of heart disease. So the old will had to stand, and the property, instead of going to Burton, was divided among the children of Mr. Baker, Burton's mother taking merely her share. But for this extraordinary good hap Richard Burton might have led the life of an undistinguished country gentleman; ingloriously breaking his dogs, training his horses and attending to the breed of stock. The planting of a quincunx or the presentation of a pump to the parish might have proved his solitary title to fame. Mr. Baker was ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... their questions, first, the glimpse of our Lord's early life. They bring before us the quiet, undistinguished home and the long years of monotonous labour. We owe to Mark alone the notice that Jesus actually wrought at Joseph's handicraft. Apparently the latter was dead, and, if so, Jesus would be the head of the house, and probably the 'breadwinner.' One of the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... inheritance—his need was not material, concrete, it had no worldly, graspable implications, and his general contempt was not less but greater. He wished to bring a final justification to his isolation rather than lose himself in the wide, undistinguished surge ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Of course he was devoted to Bubbles—her slave, in fact. Blanche had only seen him once; she had thought him sensible, undistinguished, commonplace. She knew that he was the third or fourth son of a worthy North-country parson—in other words, he "hadn't a bob." He was, of course, the last man Bubbles would ever think of marrying. Bubbles, like most ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... problem," an undistinguished voice remarked two hours later; and the Poet, settling to an uneasy sleep in his chair, mentally ruled out ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... Blount. With him also was the more insignificant figure of the priest from the neighbouring Roman Church; for the colonel's late wife had been a Catholic, and the children, as is common in such cases, had been trained to follow her. Everything seemed undistinguished about the priest, even down to his name, which was Brown; yet the colonel had always found something companionable about him, and frequently asked him ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... of pedagogic eloquence and Latin culture at the service of a mind childish rather than undistinguished, and limited in its notions of attack and defence to the defiant attitude of schoolboys. Not an idea, not a happy turn of phrase, or a telling hit: a storm of declamation that leaves us bored. After a dose of this unexhilarating reading ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... her plain, matter-of-fact face, a short face undistinguished by any special characteristic, yet once seen it could not be forgotten, so implicit was it of her practical mind and a desire to ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... the vulgar crowd at the lower end of the apartment; but instead of instantly returning to wait on her Majesty, he wrapped his cloak around him, and mixing with the crowd, stood in some degree an undistinguished spectator of the progress of ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... Omnipresence of Deity" and "Satan," born at Bath, son of a clown; passed undistinguished through Oxford, and was minister of Percy Street Chapel, London; all his many works are forgotten save the above, which lives in Macaulay's ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... of that beautiful piece of art or nature (I do not know to which class it belongs), the pleasure-ground of F. Hill. Never was the 'prophetic eye of taste' exerted with more magical skill than in these plantations. Thirty years ago this place had no existence; it was a mere undistinguished tract of field and meadow and common land; now it is a mimic forest, delighting the eye with the finest combinations of trees and shrubs, the rarest effects of form and foliage, and bewildering the mind with its green glades, and impervious recesses, and apparently interminable extent. It ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... songs are with us, tho' they die Obscured, and hid by death's oblivious shroud, And Earth inherits the rich melody Like raining music from the morning cloud. Yet, few there be who pipe so sweet and loud Their voices reach us through the lapse of space: The noisy day is deafen'd by a crowd Of undistinguished birds, a twittering race; But only lark and nightingale forlorn Fill up the silences of ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... the hour when the interest seemed transferred to the battlefield, and when an emperor and a king moved among them as liberators. At Milan, after the victory of Magenta had opened its gates, the most permanent enthusiasm gathered round the short, stout, undistinguished figure in plain clothes and spectacles—the one decidedly prosaic appearance in the pomp of war and the glitter of royal state. Victor Emmanuel said good-humouredly that when driving with his great subject, he felt just like the tenor who leads the prima ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... And Owen and Evelyn went into the house. "I do hope, Owen, that Eliza's cooking will not seem to you too utterly undistinguished." ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... succession of generations. It is most important that these varieties should be preserved, and that each should be applied to the purposes for which it is best adapted. No philo-zoost, I believe, has suggested it as desirable that these varieties should be melted down into one equal, undistinguished race of curs ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... cloud that moved with them and lay thick upon them. Well down over their eyes were drawn the broad-rimmed hats. One of them wore sun goggles and both of them had their lower faces covered by silk bandannas as if to keep out the thick dust their ponies stirred. For the rest their costumes were the undistinguished chaps, spurs, shirt, neckerchiefs, and gauntlets ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... spots where Englishmen have fought, and English blood has been poured forth, and the treasure of England squandered, scarcely a country, scarcely a province of the vast expanse of the habitable globe would be thus undistinguished. ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... She had worked for ordinary wages and ordinary hours, and at the end of the day, she mentioned casually, a large automobile with two menservants and a trustworthy secretary used to pick her out from the torrent of undistinguished workers that poured out of the Synoptical Building. This masculinization idea had also sent her on a commission of enquiry into Mexico. There apparently she ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... descended from David. St. Matthew shows that St. Joseph was of Davidic descent. Again, the Jews would say that in any case the Messiah would not be likely to be connected with a humble carpenter and his folk. The evangelist's reply is that David himself was descended from comparatively undistinguished men and from women who were despised. Thus St. Matthew meets both points raised ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... had delicately conveyed to her that even these would be sacrificed, not only without a sigh, but with cheerful delight, to find himself once more living, as of old, in the limited world of her social affections. Three years ago he had been rejected by the daughter, because he was an undistinguished youth. Now the mother recoiled from his fame. And who was this woman? The same cold, stern heart that had alienated the gifted Herbert; the same narrow, rigid mind that had repudiated ties that every other woman in the world would have gloried to cherish and acknowledge. ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... Sir Hans Sloane, whose name is revered in Chelsea and perpetuated in one of the principal streets, is so intimately associated with this garden that it is necessary at this point to give a short account of him. Sir Hans Sloane was born in Ireland, 1660. He began his career undistinguished by any title and without any special advantages. Very early he evinced an ardent love of natural history, and he came over while still a youth to study in London. From this time his career was ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... goods of fortune. The boundaries and barriers raised by those two watchful and suspicious enemies, Meum and Tuum, were in her opinion broke down by true friendship; and all property laid in one undistinguished common; but to accept Miss Mancel's money, especially in so great a proportion, appeared to her like taking advantage of her youth; and as she did not think her old enough to be a sufficient judge of the value of it, ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, ...
— The Fathers of the Constitution - Volume 13 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Max Farrand
... public life, and though Johnson's poem 'London,' a satire on the city written in imitation of the Roman poet Juvenal and published in 1738, attracted much attention, he could do no better for a time than to become one of that undistinguished herd of hand-to-mouth and nearly starving Grub Street writers whom Pope was so contemptuously abusing and who chiefly depended on the despotic patronage of magazine publishers. Living in a garret or even walking the streets at night ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... host and hostess might be pardoned for being a little too well satisfied with themselves and with their last new bibelot. The Fothergill dinners were like all other dinners given by the Fothergills of society. They were costly, utterly undistinguished, and invariably graced by the presence of certain guests who seemed to have been called in out of the street at the last moment. Van der Roet's Japanese menus were curious, and at times inimical to digestion, but the personality ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... on occasion, in the business heart, behold the marching clubs—those sinister, ephemeral organizations which on demand of the mayor had cropped out into existence—great companies of the unheralded, the dull, the undistinguished—clerks, working-men, small business men, and minor scions of religion or morality; all tramping to and fro of an evening, after working-hours, assembling in cheap halls and party club-houses, and drilling themselves ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... neighborhood, there is another equally contemptible Brook, making towards Oder, and turning the so-called Krebsmuhle, which became still more famous to the whole European Public twenty years hence. KREBS-MUHLE (Crab-Mill), as yet quite undistinguished among Mills; belonging to a dusty individual called Miller Arnold, with a dusty Son of his own for Miller's Lad: was it at work this day? Or had the terrible sound from Palzig ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... monuments and remains of antiquity throughout all France. The sepulchres of the great of past ages, of the barons and generals of the feudal ages, of the paladins, and of the crusaders, were involved in one undistinguished ruin. It seemed as if the glories of antiquity were forgotten, or sought to be buried in oblivion. The tomb of Du Gueselin shared the same fate as that of Louis XIV. The skulls of monarchs and heroes were tossed about like foot balls by the profane multitude; like the grave-diggers in ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... the climactic triumph of the event. And he was Missy's own inspiration. She had been racking her brains for some way to eliminate the undistinguished Marguerite, to conjure through the very strength of her desire some approach to a proper servitor. If only they had ONE of those estimable beings in Cherry vale! A butler, preferably elderly, and "steeped in respectability" up to his port-wine nose; one ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... compliment, my Lord Duke," said Christian, entering the apartment in somewhat a more courtly garb, but with the same unpretending and undistinguished mien, and in the same placid and indifferent manner with which he had accosted Julian Peveril upon different occasions during his journey to London. "It is precisely my present object to pipe to you; and you may dance to your ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... She cannot endure that she should be so put into the dark by the spreading of his light. The greater his radiance is shown to be, the more in the wrong will all her life be proved;—it is that that she will not hear of. She wants him to be obscure, undistinguished, negligible, because it's that that she has always ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... she lived. I also had begun life as a "Liberal," and was such in the days when Mr. Gladstone was a high Tory. But my mind had long been travelling in an inverse direction to his. And far too large a number of my contemporaries distinguished and undistinguished have been moving in the same direction for it to be at all necessary to say that most assuredly my slowly maturing convictions were neither generated nor fostered by any "graciousness" or other influence of dukes or duchesses or ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... that host of undistinguished Colonials and others of British race from all regions of the earth, who annually visit these shores on business or for pleasure or some other object, how many there must be who come with some such memory or dream or aspiration in their hearts! A greater ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... imparted—suggested excellent son-in-lawlike qualities to Mr. and Mrs. Barnes. He had the promise of a fair moustache, but his complexion generally was colourless. His features, except for a certain regularity, were undistinguished. His speech was modest and correct. His manner varied with his company. To-night it had been pronounced, ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... fatherland of individual independence, such a scheme, so invaluable though so impossible, must, we fear, ever remain a tantalizing vision. As it is, of course many a man of real ability is drowned in the rushing waves of multitudinous authors, and his works pass undistinguished to that unknown grave which gapes so mysteriously in some hidden recess of the universe, and silently swallows yearly the vast masses of printed paper which has done its brief work and been thrown by read or unread, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Ellen. And indeed at last it was beautiful, and warranted that excited gait, that hopping from leg to leg and puppyish kicking up of dead leaves with which she had come along the road from Balerno station. It had seemed to Yaverland an undistinguished pocket of the country, and there had been nothing that caught his attention save the wreck of a ropeworks close by the village, which had been gutted by fire two or three nights before and now stood with that Jane Cakebread look that burned buildings have by daylight, its white walls blotched ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... he, who lived according to the divine word within them, and which word was in all men, were Christians." Hence also, since the introduction of Christianity, many of our own countrymen have been Quakers, though undistinguished by the exterior marks of dress or language. Among these we may reckon the great and venerable Milton. His works are full of the sentiments of[32] Quakerism. And hence, in other countries and in other ages, there have been men, ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... several thousands of pounds. I have introduced you to the right people for present-giving at precisely the right moment previous to your wedding, when they know you neither too little nor too much. By long experience I have learnt to fix it to a day. But I am not going to compete with this undistinguished lavishness. I give you my picture to stand in your drawing-room as an artist puts his signature to a completed masterpiece, so that when you look around upon the furniture, the silver, the cut glass, the clocks, the engagement tablets, ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... a country gentleman of an undistinguished kind. The county gentry of England is a very comprehensive class. It includes the very best and most delightful of English men and English women, the truest nobility, the finest gentlemen; but it also includes a number of beings the most limited, dull, and commonplace that human experience knows. ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... hotel had once flourished—was brightly lighted by large arc-lamps, but never once did Rosanne come within range of these. It was in a dingy lane giving off from the big thoroughfare that she at last stopped before a shop whose shuttered window bore the legend—"Syke Ravenal: Jeweller." Upon an undistinguished looking side door she knocked gently, distinctly, three times. It opened as if by magic, and, like a shadow, she slipped into ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... Again, the Jews would say that in any case the Messiah would not be likely to be connected with a humble carpenter and his folk. The evangelist's reply is that David himself was descended from comparatively undistinguished men and from women who were despised. Thus St. Matthew meets both points ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families—second families, perhaps I should say. My mother was of a family of the name of Hanks. My paternal grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, emigrated from Rockingham County, Virginia, to Kentucky about 1781 or 2, where, a year or two later, he was killed by Indians—not ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... though they lived long before Christ; "for all such as these, says he, who lived according to the divine word within them, and which word was in all men, were Christians." Hence also, since the introduction of Christianity, many of our own countrymen have been Quakers, though undistinguished by the exterior marks of dress or language. Among these we may reckon the great and venerable Milton. His works are full of the sentiments of[32] Quakerism. And hence, in other countries and in other ages, there have been men, ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... rather affected thought and style. Aus Italien (op. 16) is an exuberant picture of impressions of his tour in Italy, of the ruins at Rome, the seashore at Sorrento, and the life of the Italian people. Macbeth (op. 23) gives us a rather undistinguished series of musical interpretations of poetical subjects. Don Juan (op. 20) is much finer, and translates Lenau's poem into music with bombastic vigour, showing us the hero who dreams of grasping all the joy of the world, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... superiority, but because it was extremely difficult to pitch on any other candidate to whom to pin ones faith. Peradventure II was the favourite, not in the sense of being a popular fancy, but by virtue of a lack of confidence in any one of his rather undistinguished rivals. The brains of clubland were much exercised in seeking out possible merit where none was very obvious to the naked intelligence, and the house-party at Lady Susan's was possessed by the same uncertainty and irresolution that ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... tailors been undistinguished. John Stow, the historian, worked at the trade during some part of his life. Jackson, the painter, made clothes until he reached manhood. The brave Sir John Hawkswood, who so greatly distinguished himself ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... quiet-coloured eve Smiles to leave 50 To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece In such peace, And the slopes and rills in undistinguished gray Melt away— That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair Waits me there In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul For the goal, When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... by the Rotary Club of Seattle, would be a justifiable compromise, and satisfy nearly everybody. Its adoption would free our national map from one more of its meaningless names—the name, in this case, of an undistinguished foreign naval officer whose only connection with our history is the fact that he fought against us during the American Revolution. Incidentally, it would also free me from the need of an apology for using the hybrid "Rainier-Tacoma"! * * * Many of the illustrations ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... know him at sight? If you continue in your belief as to his character—that he is to be a king as Herod was—of course you will keep on until you meet a man clothed in purple and with a sceptre. On the other hand, he I look for will be one poor, humble, undistinguished—a man in appearance as other men; and the sign by which I will know him will be never so simple. He will offer to show me and all mankind the way to the eternal life; the beautiful ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... And it is not as if Mr. Ablett's appearance were in any way undistinguished. Quite the contrary. I'm ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... Betty. "I told you what I thought right. I love the club, and every single member of it—except my cousin, Fanny Crawford. I don't love Fanny, and she doesn't love me—I say so quite plainly; therefore, once again, I break Rule I. You see, girls, I cannot stay. I must become again an undistinguished member of this great school. Don't suppose it will hurt my vanity; but it will touch deeper things in me, and I shall never, never forget your kindness. I can by no possibility do more than I have done. Good-bye, dear Margaret; ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... a yellow beard, by name James Blount. With him also was the more insignificant figure of the priest from the neighbouring Roman Church; for the colonel's late wife had been a Catholic, and the children, as is common in such cases, had been trained to follow her. Everything seemed undistinguished about the priest, even down to his name, which was Brown; yet the colonel had always found something companionable about him, and frequently asked him to ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... performance of the Royal Academy of Music was undistinguished; it is hard to understand why the noble directors should have begun their season with Numitor, an opera by Porta, a Venetian composer, who is described in the book of words as "Servant to His Grace ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... taught a pack of girls up there at the school, and looked as if she were born for a teacher,—the very best foil that she could have chosen; and here was this man, polite enough to herself, to be sure, but turning round to that very undistinguished young person, as if he rather preferred her conversation of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... more impressive instance of the contrast, familiar to biographers, between the apparent insignificance and the real importance of their hero in undistinguished youth. To any one considering Wordsworth as he then was,—a rough and somewhat stubborn young man, who, in nearly thirty years of life, had seemed alternately to idle without grace and to study without advantage,— it might well have seemed incredible that ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... that Venice would enter into correspondence with Zurich, who would act for the other allied cities, to communicate to them what happened in Italy on the side of the Emperor, or what transpired of his dangerous schemes. He excused the sending of a solitary, youthful, undistinguished man, to such an enlightened republic by the necessity of the case, the desire to avoid notice,—to conceal the movement toward a close alliance between two free states from the watchful glance of the ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... father, Major James Brooks, late of the 4th (King's Own) Regiment, had married twice, and at the time of his retirement from active service was for the second time a widower. Blindness—contracted by exposure and long marches over the snows of Galicia—had put an end to a career by no means undistinguished. In his last fight, at Corunna, he had not only earned a mention in despatches from his brigadier-general, Lord William Bentinck, but by his alertness in handling his half-regiment at a critical moment, and refusing its right to an outflanking line of ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... career of the brilliant Themistocles he had a persistent opponent, Aristides, a man, like him, born of undistinguished parents, but who by moral strength and innate power of intellect won the esteem and admiration of his fellow-citizens. He became the leader of the aristocratic section of the people, as Themistocles did of the democratic, and for years the ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Its rubbish back once more. And lie down, undistinguished, In the rough rock as before? Does the costly diamond, blazing On that crowned and queenly one, Look back with sorrowful gazing To the coarse ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... car a mere average man, undistinguished but by a lack of especial distinction, sober of habit, economical of gesture, dressed in a simple lounge suit such as anybody might wear, beneath a rough and ready-made motorcoat. When the car stopped he had stood up in his place beside the chauffeur as if meaning to get out, but rather ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... should be misconstrued as an assignation. Ha! out, rapiers! and let us be ready for the moment when Barbara, rushing between the combatants, receives in her own bosom the blade intended for ——, etc. But of course not enough blade to endanger the happy ending. So there you are. A placid, undistinguished tale, that may be commended as nourishment or soporific according to the taste and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... excitement there has been among the non-combatant community; what handshaking; what embracing; what fervent delight! This unique life is to end; we are to become reasonably clean and quite ordinary mortals again, lost among the world's population of fifteen hundred millions—undistinguished, unknown—that is, if ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... of the will is the first step that takes a human being out of the crowd. Charmian had suffered because she was in the crowd, undistinguished, lost like a violet in a prairie abloom with thousands of violets. Something in Algeria, something perhaps in Susan Fleet, had put into her a resolve, unacknowledged even to herself. She had returned to England, meaning to marry ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... of a very old lady with an extremely wrinkled skin and a deep voice who was wearing what appeared to Ann Veronica's inexperienced eye to be an antimacassar upon her head, a shy, blond young man with a narrow forehead and glasses, two undistinguished women in plain skirts and blouses, and a middle-aged couple, very fat and alike in black, Mr. and Mrs. Alderman Dunstable, of the Borough Council of Marylebone. These were seated in an imperfect semicircle about a very copper-adorned ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... "thou'd" by the meanest of his subjects, who never took their hats off when they came into his presence; and as singular for a Government to be without one priest in it, and for a people to be without arms, either offensive or defensive; for a body of citizens to be absolutely undistinguished but by the public employments, and for neighbours not to entertain the least jealousy one against ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... and who already had some knowledge and experience of Irish affairs? Be this as it may, we know that in 1580, Spenser, then in his twenty-seventh year, accompanied Lord Grey De Wilton into Ireland as secretary; and that he had been there before, in some official capacity not undistinguished, is evidenced by the fact, that the Lord Justice, previously to his arrival, speaks of him as "having many ways deserved some consideration from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... the determination of their resistance begin to falter and relax. President Woodruff called on me to speak, and I felt that it was my duty to represent the needs, the hopes, and the opportunities of the hundreds of thousands of the undistinguished mass who would make no decision for themselves, but whose fate was trembling on the event. I rose to speak for them, with my hand on my brother's shoulder, knowing that my every word would be a stab at his heart, and hoping that my grasp might be a touch of sympathy to him—knowing that I must ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... turn'd to gray? I'll ne'er believe a word they say. 'Tis true, but let it not be known, My eyes are somewhat dimmish grown; For nature, always in the right, To your decays adapts my sight; And wrinkles undistinguished pass, For I'm ashamed to use a glass: And till I see them with these eyes, Whoever says you have them, lies. No length of time can make you quit Honour and virtue, sense and wit; Thus you may still be young to me, While I can better hear than see. O ne'er may Fortune ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... soul. He had prepared for the event; indeed the tedium of his confinement had been much relieved by the composition of lofty and heart-stirring addresses, in which he, the noble cavalier, laid his precious self and fortune at the feet of this undistinguished, but rich and ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... sometimes they are so; but this social drilling, unless carried to extremes, is not without its use. In America, I have always understood that, on such occasions, silent laws of etiquette exist in all good company, which are founded on propriety and tact. The young give way to the old, the undistinguished to the distinguished, and he who is at home to the stranger. These rules are certainly the most rational, and in the best taste, when they can be observed, and, on the whole, they lead perhaps to the fewest embarrassments; always so, if there happen to be none but the ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... burning, so those men, though ordained to the Holy Apostleship, would find themselves strong and fruitful in good works, only as they remained in steadfast communion with the Lord. Without Christ what were they, but unschooled Galileans, some of them fishermen, one a publican, the rest of undistinguished attainments, and all of them weak mortals? As branches of the Vine they were at that hour clean and healthful, through the instructions and authoritative ordinances with which they had been blessed, and by the ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... has excited domestic insurrection among us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... the newspaper. My dear, dear brother, how you would work hard if you only knew what a prize success in life might give you. Little as I have seen of her, I could guess that she will never bestow a thought on an undistinguished man. Come down for one day, and tell me if ever, in all your ambition, you had such a goal before ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... only with a modicum of business experience (for surely the three months with Brandywine & Plummer might weigh as that) but with a knowledge of the world and a social position which she had found to be fairly marketable. That Madame Dinard would have accepted an unknown and undistinguished applicant for work at a salary of fifteen dollars a week she did not for an instant imagine. This inadequate sum, she concluded with a touch of ironic humour, represented the exact value in open market ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... proceeded from the cruel and vindictive spirit of Philip the Fair, who, having entertained a private disgust against some eminent templars, determined to gratify at once his avidity and revenge, by involving the whole order in an undistinguished ruin. On no better information than that of two knights, condemned by their superiors to perpetual imprisonment for their vices and profligacy, he ordered on one day all the templars in France to be committed to prison, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... that had remained of the years that were gone, and were now as a dream of the night. This man had followed him, cleaved to him, endured misery and rejected honor for his sake; and all the recompense such a life received was to be stilled forever by a spear-thrust of an unknown foe, unthanked, undistinguished, unavenged! It seemed to him like murder—murder with which his ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... presently LOKE—the first dressed like a Norwegian peasant, with a hunting-spear in his hand; the other undistinguished. ...
— The Death of Balder • Johannes Ewald
... a pair of as yet undistinguished officers, both of whom were to be heard of again in after time, and it did not occur to the very much elated "scout," as he now considered himself, to correct General Scott's apparent idea that Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant was a particular ...
— Ahead of the Army • W. O. Stoddard
... their homes, serving them for playthings and for picture-galleries. 'Happy is the man that has his quiver full of them.' The stray bastard is contended for by rival families; and the natural and the adopted children play and grow up together undistinguished. The spoiling, and I may almost say the deification, of the child, is nowhere carried so far as in the eastern islands; and furthest, according to my opportunities of observation, in the Paumotu group, the ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... little river goes wandering on its way." He was speaking French and she followed him easily now, her eyes beginning to fling out again their natural sunny beams of interest. "I was born there twenty-six years ago and haven't done much of anything since. You see before you, Mademoiselle, a very undistinguished young man, who has signally failed to accomplish the dream of his boyhood, which was to be a great artist like Raphael or Angelo. Instead of being famous I am but a poor Lieutenant ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... was this in the beginning.' For there the view of the absolute non-being of the effect is objected to, 'But how could it be thus?' &c., and then the decision is given that from the beginning the world was 'being.' This matter is clearly set forth in the text 'This was then undistinguished; it became distinguished by name and form' (Bri. ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... the rue de Dunkerque stands the Hotel Railleux. It is a tall and narrow house, somewhat dirty and entirely undistinguished; there is nothing to recommend it save perhaps an air of privacy, a certain insignificance that wedges it between the surrounding buildings in a manner tempting to one ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... merely perished, being done in some fugitive medium; and the walls are now covered with the works of Vasari himself and his pupils and do not matter, while the ceiling is a muddle of undistinguished paint. There are many statues which also do not matter; but at the raised end is Leo X, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and the first Medici Pope, and at the other a colossal modern statue of Savonarola, who was in person the dominating ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... Our campaign was undistinguished by any striking event. From June to September of this year (1696), we did little but subsist and observe, after which we recrossed the Rhine at Philipsburg, where our rear guard was slightly inconvenienced by the enemy. In ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... elite, or the company at the upper table, "Sir Peter Laurie was one, and Mr. Lockhart was not one: for he sat among the undistinguished at a side table." Our Court guest also sat at a side table though he pleads guilty to "foul" means—"that of displacing an engine-turned and satine-ed card, which had been deposited therein, as the worthy locum tenens and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... cannot say, but to me it is intensely interesting, and if you can arrange for a few dozen reprints in paper wrappers I shall be glad to have them. I had, of course, some knowledge of my ancestors, but I had no idea that we were quite such an undistinguished rabble of groundlings for so long. That drunken whipper-in to Lord Dashingham in the seventeen-seventies particularly delights ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... had been laid aside on entering the saloon, as was the custom of the Romans in their own families, or among private friends, hung on the back of an armed chair; of ample size and fine material, but undistinguished by the marks of senatorial or equestrian rank. Such was the aspect, such the bearing of the youth, who might be safely deemed the girl's permitted suitor, from his whole air and manner, as he listened ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... thus entangled by a bond of enduring material, a bait for a fierce brute which eagerly pressed forward to snap at me. Believe me, boys, this was not the happiest moment of my life. I knew no reason why I should resignedly submit to so undistinguished a fate. My knife, however, was in the boat, so that my release could only be attained by extreme exertion. Accordingly I writhed and jerked with my 'best violence,' all the time denouncing the whole race of bears, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... from the neighbouring prince, who imagined that the fame of his exploits had struck the Arabians with terror, and disposed them to submission. The ambassador was introduced to the chief of the tribe, a venerable old man, undistinguished by any mark of ostentation from the rest, who received him sitting cross-legged at the door of his tent. He then began to speak, and, in a long and studied harangue, described the power of his master, the invincible courage of his armies, the vast profusion of arms, of warlike engines, and military ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... through it ere his hand could throw. And thigh and arm and chest and side With streams of rushing blood were dyed. Still unsubdued though wounded oft The shattered trunk he raised aloft, And down with well-directed aim On Jambumali's chest it came. There crushed upon the trampled grass He lay an undistinguished mass, The foeman's eye no more could see His head or chest or arm or knee. And bow and car and steeds(875) and store Of glittering shafts ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... opportunity to introduce our collections listed under so many thousand heads of a different nature, for want of which the learned world would be deprived of infinite delight as well as instruction, and we ourselves buried beyond redress in an inglorious and undistinguished oblivion? ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... fibres, or a Mind-Training System which has brought General Blank's intellect to its present pitch, should be accepted more greedily by the man-in-the-street than a remedy which has only proved its value in the case of his undistinguished neighbour, but then I can never understand quite a number of things. However, that doesn't matter. All that matters at the moment is that Mr. Sidney Mandragon has now achieved glory. Probably the papers ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... Indian turban, and even the queer head-dress of the Parsee, is far from being a stranger in our assemblies. We doubt whether the name of Akhbar Khan himself, proclaimed at the foot of a staircase, would excite the same sensation in the present day, as the announcement of the most undistinguished wearer of the turban some ten or twenty years ago; but of the "Tours" and "Narratives" which are usually the inevitable result of such an influx of pilgrims, our Oriental visitors have as yet produced hardly their due proportion. For many years, the travels of Mirza Abu-Talib Khan, a Hindustani[5] ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... consecration of St. Anne's, Alderney, when I accompanied the Bishop to the ceremony: and some memorable stanzas about the decent expediency of the Bailiff and Jurats being robed for official uniform, since ornamentally adopted; but before I wrote they wore mean and undistinguished "mufti." ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... mind of man holds in dark places, or lifts to living fame, no more than ruins and fragments of the life that was. I have been a diligent reader of books in my time; and here in an obscure corner of the Old-World I find a narrative studded with noble names, not undistinguished by stirring deeds, and, save for the great movements of history and a few shadowy figures, it is all fresh to my mind. I have looked on three thousand years of human life upon this hill; something of what they have yielded, if you ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... he held up one maimed hand and leaned over the edge of the platform, and his undistinguished face glowed with the white light of a great passion within. The ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... son of Caius Laelius, who was the life-long friend of Scipio Africanus the Elder, was born B.C. 186, a little earlier in the same year with his friend Africanus the Younger. He was not undistinguished as a military commander, as was proved by his successful campaign against Viriathus, the Lusitanian chieftain, who had long held the Roman armies at bay, and had repeatedly gained signal advantages over them. He was known in the State, ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... preserve the favour of a prince; never offending in word or gesture; in the highest degree courteous and complaisant; wherein he set an excellent example to his colleagues, which they did not think fit to follow. But this extreme civility is universal and undistinguished, and in private conversation, where he observeth it as inviolably as if he were in the greatest assembly, it is sometimes censured as formal. Two reasons are assigned for this behaviour: first, from the consciousness of his humble original,[12] he keepeth all familiarity at the utmost distance, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... the station. It rotated fast enough to give weight, but even on the outer skin that was only one-half Earth gravity. A couple of silent Martians prepared undistinguished meals and did housework in the quarters. There were no films or other organized recreation, though Lancaster was told that the forbidden sector included a ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... years after the event we cannot help wondering why the story was not earlier put in book form; for in its delineation of the character of an adventurer it is as great as VANITY FAIR, while for the local colour of history, if I may put it so, it is no undistinguished precursor of ESMOND. ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Justiniani Participazio, A.D., 827, the son and Successor of Angelo, undistinguished by events of more important character, the Venetians became possessed of the relics of that saint to whom they ever afterwards appealed as the great patron of their state and city. These remains were obtained from Alexandria by a pious stratagem, ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare
... case fully correspond to the early promise. Rank and station the two young ladies attained; but rank and station do not always throw people upon prominent stages of action or display. Many a family, possessing both rank and wealth, and not undistinguished possibly by natural endowments of an order fitted for brilliant popularity, never emerge from obscurity, or not into any splendor that can be called national; sometimes, perhaps, from a temper unfitted for worthy struggles in the head of the house; possibly ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... or ignorant man. So too, though the latter should fail in his undertakings from concurrences that might have happened to the wisest man, yet his failure being no more than might have been expected and accounted for from his folly, it lays no hold on our attention, but fleets away among the other undistinguished waves in which the stream of ordinary life murmurs by us, and is forgotten. Had it been as true as it was notoriously false, that those all-embracing discoveries, which have shed a dawn of science on the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... he found relief in an early developed taste for reading. In 1818 the family moved to a lonely part of Maine, where in roaming the lonely woods he gained a liking for solitude as well as for nature. He returned to Salem in 1819 to prepare for Bowdoin College, which he entered in 1821. After an undistinguished course he went back to his native town, whither his mother ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... of the extraordinary scenes of romance and chivalry in which Mary Queen of Scots moved during her captivity under Lord Scrope's care at Bolton Castle in the previous year. He had met in his travels in France one of her undistinguished adherents who had managed to get a position in the castle ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... He could not apply the thematic system to his striking phrases, and so had to cobble them into metric patterns in the old style; and as he was no "absolute musician" either, he hardly got his metric patterns beyond mere quadrille tunes, which were either wholly undistinguished, or else made remarkable by certain brusqueries which, in the true rococo manner, owed their singularity to their senselessness. He could produce neither a thorough music drama nor a charming opera. But with all this, and worse, Meyerbeer had some genuine dramatic energy, and even ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... at least equal to that of any other European country, and though it is at least probable that some of the greatest achievements of literature, French in language, are English in nationality, the vernacular should for long have been a little scanty and a little undistinguished in its yield. Periods of moulting, of putting on new skins, and the like, are never periods of extreme physical vigour. And besides, this Anglo-Saxon itself had (as has been said) been distinctly on the wane as a literary language for more than a century, while (as has not yet been said) ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... companion remained unappeased, decided that the moment for speech had arrived. He took a step forward upon the soft, pulpy leads. Even then he hesitated before he finally committed himself. About his appearance little was remarkable save the general air of determination which gave character to his undistinguished features. He was something above the medium height, broad-set, and with rather more thick black hair than he knew how to arrange advantageously. He wore a shirt which was somewhat frayed, and an indifferent tie; his boots were heavy and clumsy; he wore also a suit ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in gray, wore a plain breastpin with hair in it, who taught a pack of girls up there at the school, and looked as if she were born for a teacher,—the very best foil that she could have chosen; and here was this man, polite enough to herself, to be sure, but turning round to that very undistinguished young person as if he rather preferred her conversation ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... influences which transformed Doggie into a fairly efficient though undistinguished infantryman was a morbid social terror of his officers. It saved him from many a guard-room, and from many a heart-to-heart talk wherein the zealous lieutenant gets to know his men. He lived in dread lest military delinquency or civil accomplishment ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... or converted into tomb-stones, or carried off to be preserved in one or two churches of Nice. At present, the work has the appearance of a ruinous watch-tower, with Gothic battlements; and as such stands undistinguished by those who travel by sea from hence to Genoa, and other ports of Italy. I think I have now described all the antiquities in the neighbourhood of Nice, except some catacombs or caverns, dug in a rock at St. Hospice, which Busching, in his geography, has described as a strong ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... another. Friends tortured themselves in vain, to find friends, in the huge mass of slain,—fathers to recognize their sons. The mournful gratification of bending over the lifeless bodies of dear relations and gazing with intense anxiety on their pallid features, was denied them. Undistinguished, though not unmarked, all were alike consigned to the silent grave, amid sighs of sorrow and ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... himself in any way that one heard from him few of those experiences of the distinguished man in contact with the undistinguished, which he must have had so abundantly. But he told, while it was fresh in his mind, an incident that happened to him one day in Boston at a tobacconist's, where a certain brand of cigars was recommended to him as the kind Longfellow smoked. "Ah, then I must have some of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... humbler ranks, the lowly brave, who bled While cheerly following where the Mighty led—[309] Who sleep beneath the undistinguished sod Where happier comrades in their triumph trod, To us bequeath—'tis all their fate allows— The sireless offspring and the lonely spouse: She on high Albyn's dusky hills may raise The tearful eye in melancholy gaze, Or view, while shadowy ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... in the thirteenth century, and took service under Alexander Nevskii, (1252-1262,) and who is the parent root from which spring many of the most illustrious houses in Russia—those of Pushkin, of Buturlin, of Kamenskii, and of Meteloff. Nor was the paternal line of Pushkin's house undistinguished for other triumphs than those recorded in the annals of war; his grandfather, Vassilii Lvovitch Pushkin, was a poet of considerable reputation, and was honoured, no less than Alexander's father, with the intimacy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... Constable of France, the most famous French warrior of his age, was born of an ancient but undistinguished family, at the castle of La Motte-Broon, near Rennes, about 1314. The date is doubtful, the authorities varying between 1311 and 1324. The name is spelt in various ways in contemporary records, e.g., Claquin, Klesquin, Guescquin, Glayaquin, etc. The ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... shame, anger, remorse, and thirst for vengeance. He imposed silence by his look and sign upon the vulgar crowd at the lower end of the apartment; but instead of instantly returning to wait on her Majesty, he wrapped his cloak around him, and mixing with the crowd, stood in some degree an undistinguished spectator of the ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... the wisest way. Recollect that in Poesy as in every other human business, the more there are who practise it the greater will be the chance of someone's reaching perfection. It is the impetus of the undistinguished host that flings forward a Diomed or a Hector. And when you point with pride to Milton's and those other mulberry trees in your Academe, bethink you 'What poets are they shading to-day? Or are their leaves but feeding worms to spin gowns ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... said I; "meanwhile I must wish you good morning: your road now lies to the right. I return you my best thanks for your condescension, in accompanying so undistinguished an ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of my brother from oblivion a culpable one. I am willing to rely, for my justification from malicious charges, on the general tenor of my actions, and am scarcely averse to buy my brother's reputation at the cost of my own. The censure of the undistinguishing and undistinguished multitude gives me little uneasiness. Indeed, the disapprobation of those who have no particular connection with us is a very faint, dubious, and momentary feeling. We are thought of, now and then, by chance, and immediately forgotten. Their happiness ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... take these crude productions of Branwell Bronte's boyhood as implying that he had no possibilities in him of anything better, but judging from the fact that his letters, as a man of eight and twenty, are as undistinguished as his sister's are noteworthy at a like age, we might well dismiss Branwell Bronte once and for all, were not some epitome of his life indispensable in an account of ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... a multitude of gentlemen, dressed as if to attend a court, but whose garb, although rich enough to have adorned a royal drawing room, could not distinguish them in such a high scene as this. Amongst these we wandered for a few minutes, undistinguished and unregarded. I saw several young persons dressed as I was, so was under no embarrassment from the singularity of my habit, and only rejoiced, as I hung on my uncle's arm, at the magical splendour of such ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... followed immediately by a general attack upon the monuments and remains of antiquity throughout all France. The sepulchres of the great of past ages, of the barons and generals of the feudal ages, of the paladins, and of the crusaders, were involved in one undistinguished ruin. It seemed as if the glories of antiquity were forgotten, or sought to be buried in oblivion. The tomb of Du Gueselin shared the same fate as that of Louis XIV. The skulls of monarchs and heroes were tossed about like foot balls by the profane multitude; ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... the cradle of an infant State. To childhood may be forgiven the elemental character of its thought and its idealistic imaginations. They may not persist in developed manhood; but if youth has never drawn heaven and earth together in its imaginations, manhood will ever be undistinguished. This book only begins a meditation in which, I hope, nobler imaginations and finer intellects than mine will join hereafter, and help to raise the soul of Ireland nigher to the ideal and its body nigher ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... something in the theory very pleasant and very flattering to human nature; and there are passages in the history of our race that might make its promulgation not unacceptable. When, among the innumerable "patines of bright gold" that strew the floor of heaven, we see one part from the sphere of its undistinguished fellows, and, filling its pathway with radiant light, vanish noiselessly into annihilation, we cannot but be reminded of those characters that, with no apparent reason for being segregated from the common herd, are, through some strange conjuncture, hurried from a commonplace ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... answer the second one now," Vall replied. "Vulthor Tharn is due to retire in a few years. He has a negatively good, undistinguished record. He's trying ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... and a good shot. He has been engaged and honourably mentioned in most of the Kaffir fights of his time.... Socially, he has always lived in a somewhat humble position, and it is to the credit of his nature as a man that he bears not the slightest trace of the parvenu. Plain and undistinguished in appearance, he combines the advantages of a prodigious memory with a remarkable aptitude for reading his fellow-man, and this last quality would be more valuable were it not leavened by a weakness in resisting flattery and adulation. He is very pious and self-reliant, which is ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... evenings with Craven in her imagination, keeping the conversation exactly as it had been, but giving him a thoroughly plain face, a bad complexion, mouse-coloured feeble hair, undistinguished features, ordinary eyes, and a short broad figure. Certainly it would have made a difference. But how much difference? Perhaps a good deal. But he had enjoyed the conversation as much as she had, and there was nothing in her ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... elevated situation. Growling of bears, grunting of hogs, braying of donkeys, gobbling of turkeys, hissing of geese, the catcall, and the loud shrill whistle, were heard in one mingling concatenation of excellent imitation and undistinguished variety: During which, Tom led the way to the upper Boxes, where upon arriving, he was evidently disappointed at not meeting the party who had been seen occupying a seat on the left side of the House, besides having sacrificed ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... be so put into the dark by the spreading of his light. The greater his radiance is shown to be, the more in the wrong will all her life be proved;—it is that that she will not hear of. She wants him to be obscure, undistinguished, negligible, because it's that that she has ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... canting at the gate,' is individual and Congrevean. But Heartwell, the blustering fool, Bellmour, the impersonal rake, Wittol and Bluffe, the farcical sticks, Fondlewife, the immemorial city husband, and the troop of undistinguished women—what can be said of them but that they are glaring stage properties, speaking better English than the comic stage had before attracted? Germs, possibly, of better things to come, that is all, so far as characterisation goes. The Fondlewife ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... Lorette, although undistinguished by a glance from the mild blue eyes of the Premier Prince of England, was flashed upon, years ago, by the awful light that gleamed from the dark, fierce ones of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. This is how I came ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... wouldn't train her hard. She had worked for ordinary wages and ordinary hours, and at the end of the day, she mentioned casually, a large automobile with two menservants and a trustworthy secretary used to pick her out from the torrent of undistinguished workers that poured out of the Synoptical Building. This masculinization idea had also sent her on a commission of enquiry into Mexico. There apparently she had ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... burgesses were buried, though not one of their memorial stones remains; into the open space were flung the poor proletariat, who had gone through life marked with a yellow cross upon their arms, and found in death an undistinguished and promiscuous burial. Looking down upon them all in their last troubled sleep, were the figures carved in high relief upon each pillar, groups that are so mutilated now that only by the careful drawings and descriptions left by M. Langlois long ago can we trace faintly what was placed there ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... insurmountable points on the mountain chain of circumstance that lay between him and his heart's dearest wish. The Commodore's inherent reverence for birth and breeding, and his comparative indifference to brain, was one of them. The obstinate pride of Allan's undistinguished and ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... supreme confidence in common men that was the keynote to the wonderful power of Dickens in making characters from those who were in a world sense undistinguished. On this position Chesterton lays great stress. It was this, he thinks, that made him an optimist. It was the same position that made Browning an optimist. It is the disbelief in the Divine image in Man that makes the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... state. Proud as Apollo on his forked hill, Sat full-blown Bufo puffed by every quill; Fed with soft dedication all day long, Horace and he went hand in hand in song. His library (where busts of poets dead And a true Pindar stood without a head) Received of wits an undistinguished race, Who first his judgment asked, and then a place: Much they extolled his pictures, much his seat, And flattered every day, and some days eat: Till grown more frugal in his riper days, He paid some bards with port, and some with praise; To some a dry rehearsal ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... Hanson, the famed engineer, no task was impossible. But quite a few things were impossible to that engineer's obscure and unimportant nephew, the computer technician and generally undistinguished man who had been christened Dave. They'd gotten the right man for the name, all right. But the wrong man for ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... fortunate demise of the young gentleman who had brought it to this untimely end, it was put up for sale with all its contents. And Sir Morton Pippitt,—a rich colonial, whose forebears were entirely undistinguished, but who had made a large fortune by a bone-melting business, which converted the hoofs, horns and (considering that some years ago it had been a mere roofless ruin, and that the people had been compelled to walk or drive to Riversford in order to ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... and less annoyed by that derision and contempt which often defeat even more generous efforts, Antonio had drawn nearer to the crowd of nameless competitors. Though undistinguished in this narrative, there were seen, in that group of gondoliers, faces well known on the canals of Venice, as belonging to watermen in whose dexterity and force the city took pride. Either favored by his ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... wrote some biting verses, derisive of her brother and his purchase, but Alcaeus on the other hand, approved, and gave expression to this feeling in glowing songs on the charms of Rhodopis. And now Sappho's brother, who had till then remained undistinguished among the many strangers at Naukratis, became a noted man through Rhodopis. His house was soon the centre of attraction to all foreigners, by whom she was overwhelmed with gifts. The King Hophra, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was all the woman I had." He caught himself up swiftly after that; it was seldom even to his partner that anything escaped him in reference to the interior life of dreams which had gone on in him, quite happily behind his undistinguished exterior. "But somehow it hasn't seemed to come out anywhere. I've done my duty ... and when I'm dead and Ellen's dead, where is it? After all, what ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... of speed immense, Escape his swift pursuit, and measuring eye. Ev'n light itself, which every thing displays, Shone undiscover'd, till his brighter mind Untwisted all the shining robe of day; And from the whitening undistinguished blaze, Collecting every separated ray, To the charm'd eye educ'd the gorgeous train Of parent colours. First, the flaming red, Sprung vivid forth, the tawny orange next, And next refulgent yellow; by whose ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... could not increase, nor his departure sadden. They are, in consequence, destitute of all that renders the name of Ausonia thrilling, or her champaigns beautiful, beyond the mere splendor of climate; and even that splendor is unshared by the mountain; its cold atmosphere being undistinguished by any of that rich, purple, ethereal transparency which gives the air of the plains its depth of feeling,—we can find no ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... northern part of the town, on a little hillock, stands the third fort, called el Castillo del Rosario, which is furnished with six pieces of cannon. The churches of Valparaiso are exceedingly plain and simple, undistinguished either for architecture or ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... you impart, Like chop on gridiron, broil my tender heart! Which if thy kindly helping hand be n't nigh, Must like an up-turned chop, hiss, brown, and fry; And must at least, thou scorcher of my soul, Shrink, and become an undistinguished coal." ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... sense. So Calhoun listened politely until he found an undistinguished medical man who wanted some special information about gene-selection as practised halfway across the galaxy. He invited that man to the Med Ship, where he supplied the information not hitherto available. He saw his guest's eyes shine a little with that joyous awe ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... brightest can, at the outside, be reckoned as genuine Pleiades. The great majority were relegated, by Pickering's[1565] and Stratonoff's[1566] counts of the stellar populace in and near the cluster, to the position of outsiders from it. They are undistinguished denizens of the abysmal background upon ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... apprised that the word, in its original sense, bore no relation whatever to those passions and subjects, to the representations of which it is now applied; but meant simply a dramatic action performed at the feast of the goat, in honour of Bacchus. Thus the different provinces of the drama then undistinguished, were confounded under one term, and constituted the prime trunk from which sprung forth the two branches of tragedy and comedy separately—the first in point of time usurping the original title of the parent stock, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... which contains these verses the emotion of the poet gives words often undistinguished an almost Elizabethan rhythm. Mr. Hardy, indeed, is a poet who often achieves music of verses, though he seldom achieves ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... speech, and effective, even against the best Athenian opponents. He was modest, unambitious, patriotic, intellectual, contented with poverty, generous, and disinterested. When the Cadmea was taken, he was undistinguished, and his rare merits were only known to Pelopidas and his friends. He was among the first to join the revolutionists, and was placed by Pelopidas among the organizers of ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... Mr. Vandewaters." She smiled to think what an undistinguished name it was. It suggested pumpkins in the front garden. Yet here its owner was perfectly at his ease, watching the scene before him with good- natured superiority. "London is English; but it is very cosmopolitan, you know," she added; "and I fancy you can see it is ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... speaks to us to be loving and helpful to one another. Her common and undistinguished love to us all was such that it could never be said which of us she loved the best, and it speaks to us, now that she is gone, to "love one another with a pure heart fervently." We know very well that our unity was the joy of her heart while living, and ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of ...
— The Declaration of Independence of The United States of America • Thomas Jefferson
... actual words, for I wrote them down at the time, as a supreme example of the art of "leg-pulling." Amongst the members of the "Grill-room Club" was an elderly bachelor, whom I will call Mr. Smith. "Mr. Smith," who has now been dead for some years, was wholly undistinguished in every way. He ate largely, and spoke little, but Tree had discovered that under his placid exterior he concealed a vein of limitless vanity. One evening "Mr. Smith" startled the club by breaking his habitual silence, and ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... Van Kuyp read a volume of verse. He did not hear his wife enter. It pained her when she saw his serious face with its undistinguished features and dogged expression. No genius this, was her hasty verdict, as she quickly went to him and put a hand on his head. It was her hand now that was hot. He raised eyes, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... convey what Gray's ploughman is achieving for one evening, but not what the rude forefathers have achieved for eternity. From the ploughman and the simple annals of the poor the poem diverges to reproach the proud and great for their disregard of undistinguished merit, and moves on to praise of the sequestered life, and to an epitaph applicable either to a "poeta ignotus" or to Gray himself. The epitaph with its trembling hope transforms the poem into something like a personal yet universal requiem; and for one villager—perhaps for himself—Gray seems ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... in order that when we have once got rid of that, it may appear a business of less consequence to look after remedies for the others. For there are certain things which are usually said about poverty; and also certain statements ordinarily applied to retired and undistinguished life. There are particular treatises on banishment, on the ruin of one's country, on slavery, on weakness, on blindness, and on every incident that can come under the name of an evil. The Greeks divide these into ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... persons in September, 1841, who found great fault with my remaining in the President's Cabinet. You know, Gentlemen, that twenty years of honest, and not altogether undistinguished service in the Whig cause, did not save me from an outpouring of wrath, which seldom proceeds from Whig pens and Whig tongues against anybody. I am, Gentlemen, a little hard to coax, but as to being driven, that is out of the question. I chose to ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... excellences, of Mr. Wordsworth's published poems. The first characteristic, though only an occasional defect, is the inconstancy of style; the sudden and unprepared transitions from lines or sentences of peculiar felicity to a style not only unimpassioned, but undistinguished. He sinks too often, too abruptly, into the language of prose. The second defect is a certain matter-of-factness in some of his poems, consisting in a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representations of objects, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... host of undistinguished Colonials and others of British race from all regions of the earth, who annually visit these shores on business or for pleasure or some other object, how many there must be who come with some such memory or dream or aspiration in their hearts! A greater number probably than ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... gets anything properly describable as pleasure out of this dogged accumulation of threadbare, undistinguished, uninspiring nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, participles and conjunctions. To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies—the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said—there is in writing the constant ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... kind in London. Sir Hans Sloane, whose name is revered in Chelsea and perpetuated in one of the principal streets, is so intimately associated with this garden that it is necessary at this point to give a short account of him. Sir Hans Sloane was born in Ireland, 1660. He began his career undistinguished by any title and without any special advantages. Very early he evinced an ardent love of natural history, and he came over while still a youth to study in London. From this time his career was one long success. When he was only twenty-seven he was selected by the Duke of Albemarle, ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... had now put an end to the employment of literary men in public life, and though Johnson's poem 'London,' a satire on the city written in imitation of the Roman poet Juvenal and published in 1738, attracted much attention, he could do no better for a time than to become one of that undistinguished herd of hand-to-mouth and nearly starving Grub Street writers whom Pope was so contemptuously abusing and who chiefly depended on the despotic patronage of magazine publishers. Living in a garret or even walking ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... the same neighborhood, there is another equally contemptible Brook, making towards Oder, and turning the so-called Krebsmuhle, which became still more famous to the whole European Public twenty years hence. KREBS-MUHLE (Crab-Mill), as yet quite undistinguished among Mills; belonging to a dusty individual called Miller Arnold, with a dusty Son of his own for Miller's Lad: was it at work this day? Or had the terrible sound from Palzig quenched ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... 1757 in America, undistinguished by any act which might compensate for the loss of territory or the sacrifice of lives. With an inferior force the French had been successful at every point, and besides having obtained complete control of Lakes George and Champlain, the destruction of Oswego gave the dominion of those lakes, ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... to Mallet's Life of Bacon, I see he mentions that he was privately buried at St. Michael's church, near St. Alban's; and it adds, 'The spot that contains his remains lay obscure and undistinguished, till the gratitude of a private man, formerly his servant' (Sir Thomas Meautys), 'erected a monument to his name and memory.' This makes it probable that the likeness ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... caution, the other upon experience. It would be endless to produce instances of these kinds. The characters of Virgil are far from striking us in this open manner; they lie, in a great degree, hidden and undistinguished; and, where they are marked most evidently affect us not in proportion to those of Homer. His characters of valour are much alike; even that of Turnus seems no way peculiar, but, as it is, in a superior degree; and we see ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... Unlike the ancestors of Bach and Beethoven and Mozart, his family, so far as the pedigrees show, had as little of genius, musical or other, in their composition, as the families of Shakespeare and Cervantes. In the male line they were hard-working, honest tradesmen, totally undistinguished even in their sober walk in life. They came originally from Hainburg, where Haydn's great-grandfather, Kaspar, had been among the few to escape massacre when the town was stormed by the Turks in July 1683. The composer's father, Matthias Haydn, was, like most of his brothers, a wheelwright, ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... flourished—was brightly lighted by large arc-lamps, but never once did Rosanne come within range of these. It was in a dingy lane giving off from the big thoroughfare that she at last stopped before a shop whose shuttered window bore the legend—"Syke Ravenal: Jeweller." Upon an undistinguished looking side door she knocked gently, distinctly, three times. It opened as if by magic, and, like a shadow, she slipped ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... restorer, balmy sleep. Meditation, avaunt! Respected (tho' unknown) Sir,—Out of the abundant store of your immutable condescension graciously deign to pardon the bold assurance and presumptuous liberty of an animated mass of undistinguished dust, whose fragile composition is most miraculously composed of congenial atoms so promiscuously concentred as to personify in an abstracted degree the beauteous form of man, to convey by proxy to your brilliant opthalmic ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... steal away from the company, which appeared no difficult matter, from the undistinguished part I acted in it. I resolved to return to the town, and pay another visit to Mr. John the following morning, and, at the same time, make some inquiries of him relative to the extraordinary man in grey, provided I could command sufficient courage. Would to ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... his third period, the ruling criticism of the hour was aghast at faults which now entertain us, and was blind to sterling merits which we are now ready to acknowledge. Shortly after his death, perhaps his most brilliant apologist was fain to admit that if Disraeli had been undistinguished as a speaker, his novels would have been "as the flowers of the field, charming for the day which was passing over them, and then forgotten." It is only since the beginning of the present century that a conviction ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Indiscrimination — N. indiscrimination^, indistinguishability; indistinctness, indistinction^; uncertainty &c (doubt) 475; incomparability &c 464.1. V. not discriminate &c 465; overlook a distinction &c (neglect) 460, confound, confuse. Adj. indiscriminate; undistinguished^, indistinguishable, undistinguishable^; unmeasured; promiscuous, undiscriminating. Phr. valeat ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... mournful tale Her hapless sister told, and wonderous! sate In silence; grief her rising words repress'd: Indignant, chok'd, her throat refus'd to breathe, The angry accents to her plaining tongue. To weep she waits not, in turmoil confus'd, Justice and flagrance undistinguished lie; Her mind sole bent for ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... Sylvia." They all leaned over the side of the pool. "See that little starfish? He's lost a leg already in his short career; and those pretty anemones! Why didn't I bring a pail. I shall make an aquarium for you on the piazza, and we'll have anemones, and undistinguished urchins who will never be in a cabinet or hold candles, and starfish, and barnacles. Oh, there's a baby, John. Quick, there! Oh, I can get it myself." She reached down in a flash and drew forth ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... conference. You may be a leader of quite an insignificant body of workers, like the Nutcracker-Teeth Makers' Union, but you rub shoulders at a conference with men whose names are a household word throughout the whole of Great Britain, amongst those who have houses. The distinguished and the undistinguished lay their heads together; the spat-wearing get their feet mixed with the non-spat-wearing; though there is rather a fake, mind you, about this spat-wearing business, for it may simply mean that the uppers are ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... but it's interesting, and very interesting, in itself, and just now very embarrassing - this rural parish supplied Glasgow with such a quantity of Stevensons in the beginning of last century! There is just a link wanting; and we might be able to go back to the eleventh century, always undistinguished, but clearly traceable. When I say just a link, I guess I may be taken to mean a dozen. What a singular thing is this undistinguished perpetuation of a family throughout the centuries, and the sudden bursting forth of character and capacity that began with our grandfather! ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... often the result; for there is forced upon the eye a vividness and variety of colours, in dresses, accessories, and the scene, which one present at the action would never have noticed—which, as the feeling would have rejected, so would the obedient eye have left undistinguished; and we know how the eye is obedient to the feelings and withholds impressions, and in the midst of crowds, to use a common expression, will "fix itself on vacancy." It will do even more; it will adopt the colouring which the feeling suggests—will ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... tobacco was not remarkable. The pipe was not picturesque. The scissors were the most ordinary of scissors. The copy paper was quite undistinguished in appearance. The lead pencils had the most ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... seemed transferred to the battlefield, and when an emperor and a king moved among them as liberators. At Milan, after the victory of Magenta had opened its gates, the most permanent enthusiasm gathered round the short, stout, undistinguished figure in plain clothes and spectacles—the one decidedly prosaic appearance in the pomp of war and the glitter of royal state. Victor Emmanuel said good-humouredly that when driving with his great subject, ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... pardoned for being a little too well satisfied with themselves and with their last new bibelot. The Fothergill dinners were like all other dinners given by the Fothergills of society. They were costly, utterly undistinguished, and invariably graced by the presence of certain guests who seemed to have been called in out of the street at the last moment. Van der Roet's Japanese menus were curious, and at times inimical to digestion, but the personality ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... or providential, this rarely allotted portion, this crowning incident of an heroic career, it is after all but an incident. It the man has not contrived; but to it he has contributed much, without which his passing hour would have faded to memory, undistinguished among those of the myriads, great and small, who have died as nobly and are forever forgotten. A sun has set; but before its setting it has run a course, be it long or short, and has gathered a radiance which fixes upon its parting beams the rapt attention of beholders. The man's self ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... Antonia; in which battle the darts were on both sides useless, as well as the spears, and both sides drew their swords, and fought it out hand to hand. Now during this struggle the positions of the men were undistinguished on both sides, and they fought at random, the men being intermixed one with another, and confounded, by reason of the narrowness of the place; while the noise that was made fell on the ear after an indistinct ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... call him Simmons. He was a tall, healthy figure, strong, but a little slouching, and there was in his walk something between a slight swagger and a seaman's roll; he commonly had his hands in his pockets. His hair was dark, straight, and undistinguished; and his face, if one saw it after his figure, was something of a surprise. For while the form might be called big and braggart, the face might have been called weak, and was certainly worried. ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... to Mary Makebelieve that marriage was not a story but a fact, and, somehow, the romance of it did not drift away, although the very house wherein she lived was infested by these conjoints, and the streets wherein she walked were crowded with undistinguished couples.... Those gray-lived, dreary-natured people had a spark of fire smoldering somewhere in their poor economy. Six feet deep is scarcely deep enough to bury romance, and until that depth of clay has clogged our bones the fire can still smolder and be fanned, and, perhaps, blaze ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... ephemerally, a man out of the impecunious and undistinguished mass may now and again find his way within the gates; and more frequently will a professed "Man of the People" sit in council. But that the rule holds unbroken and inviolable is sufficiently evident in the fact that no community will let the emoluments of office for any of its responsible officials, ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... know nothing about it, or are above such terrene trifles. Let us keep our pity for the seething mass of divines who were not elegantly verbose, and had no fun or glory while they lasted. And let us keep a specially large portion for one whose lot was so much worse than merely undistinguished. If that nameless curate had not been at the Thrales' that day, or, being there, had kept the silence that so well became him, his life would have been drab enough, in all conscience. But at any rate an unpromising career would not have been nipped in ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... the remedies, that were gradually applied. The societies, which had hitherto seen their members, undistinguished either by authority or rank, admitted now of magistratical pre-eminence. They were divided into tribes; to every tribe was allotted a particular district for its support, and to every individual his particular spot. The Germans[041], who consisted of many ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... should be delighted to join you," said the girl, "if you could consent to be accompanied by such undistinguished climbers. Let me introduce ourselves. This is my cousin, Sir Ernest Scrivener. This is my brother, Lord ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... hour generally makes the man, and the necessities of the moment often call forth talents and energies, the existence of which was wholly unsuspected by their possessors. For aught we know, many a hero may be now among the ranks, and many a gallant officer now before the mast, undistinguished from lack of opportunity, unknown because circumstances have not developed his dormant powers. How then can the hour be hastened, and the opportunity of developing our musical powers be afforded? The answer is, by the establishment ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... vicarage worth annually sixty pounds, in the most desert parts of Lincolnshire; where, his spirit quite sunk with those reflections that solitude and disappointments bring, he married a farmer's widow, and is still alive, utterly undistinguished and forgotten; only some of the neighbours have accidentally heard, that he had been a notable man ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... than noble, as nobility is usually graduated. She had been accustomed to see her father and John Effingham moving in the best circles of Europe, respected for their information and independence, undistinguished by their manners, admired for their personal appearance, manly, courteous, and of noble bearing and principles, if not set apart from the rest of mankind by an arbitrary rule connected with rank. Rich, and possessing all the habits that properly mark refinement, ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... as affording an exception to his general sentence against rhyming plays, he does not extend the compliment to Dryden, whose defence of rhyme was expressly dedicated to that noble author. Dryden, not much pleased, perhaps, at being left undistinguished in the general censure passed upon rhyming plays by his friend and ally, retaliates in the Essay, by placing in the mouth of Crites the arguments urged by Sir Robert Howard, and replying to them in the person of Neander. To the charge, that rhyme ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... Senator had been tendered to Pierce by Governor Steele, and declined. It is unquestionable that, at this period, he hoped and expected to spend a life of professional toil in a private station, undistinguished except by the exercise of his great talents in peaceful pursuits. But such was not his destiny. The contingency to which he referred in the above letter, as the sole exception to his purpose of never being separated from his family, was now about to occur. ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... shades retired, And his own native Nysa less admired. Oft to the mountain's airy tops advanced, The frisking Satyrs on the summit danced. Alcides [1] here, here Venus graced the shore, Nor loved her favourite Lacedaemon more. Now piles of ashes, spreading all around, In undistinguished heaps deform the ground. The gods themselves the ruined seats bemoan, And blame the ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... and the virtual seizure of coal mines were by no means the only accomplishments of the Vanderbilt family in the years under consideration. Colorless as was the third generation, undistinguished by any marked characteristic, extremely commonplace in its conventions, it yet proved itself a worthy successor of Commodore Vanderbilt. The lessons he had taught of how to appropriate wealth were duly followed by his descendants, and all of the ancestral methods were closely adhered to by the ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... to Alresford was not then made, and I had to post part of the way from London to The Grange. My chaise companion was a man very well known in 'Society'; and though not remarkably popular, was not altogether undistinguished, as the following little tale will attest. Frederick Byng, one of the Torrington branch of the Byngs, was chiefly famous for his sobriquet 'The Poodle'; this he owed to no special merit of his own, but simply to the accident of his thick curly head of hair. Some, who spoke feelingly of ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
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