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More "Vulgarity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... some to be migratory. But he stays with us all winter. Cheerful. Noisy. Poor soloist. A spice of vulgarity in him. Dash of prose in his song. Appetite extraordinary. Eats his own weight in a short time. Taste for fruit. Eats with a relishing gulp, like Dr. Johnson's. Fond of cherries. Earliest mess of peas. Mulberries. Lion's share of the raspberries. Angleworms ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... my dear young lady—I insist that you're only a wretched victim like ourselves," M. de Brecourt remarked, approaching her with a smile. "I see the hand of a woman in it, you know," he went on to the others; "for there are strokes of a vulgarity that a man doesn't sink to—he can't, his very organisation prevents him—even if he be the dernier des goujats. But please don't doubt that I've maintained that woman not to ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... Rich old bachelors, without heirs, were held in the supremest honor. Money was the first object in all matrimonial alliances; and provided that women were only wealthy, neither bridegroom nor parent was fastidious as to age, or deformity, or meanness of family, or vulgarity of person. The needy descendants of the old patricians yoked themselves with fortunate plebeians, and the blooming maidens of a comfortable obscurity sold themselves, without shame or reluctance, to the bloated sensualists ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... few minutes the crowd had fallen back. They watched her with respectful admiration from a decent distance. They had the chivalry towards woman so characteristic of the West. There was no vulgarity in their curiosity, though most of them had never seen her before. All, however, had heard of her and her father, the giant greybeard who moved and lived in an air of mystery, and apparently secret ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... often in error when we blindly admire, or unhesitatingly adopt, the works of the ancients as perfection. In Athens and Rome in past time, as in Paris and London at present, we may meet with instances of bad taste; for vulgarity belongs to no age or station, and may be visible in the costly decoration of a rich mansion, whose owner is uneducated in art, and insists on ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... entered upon the discharge of his duties by reading Monte Carlo, and How to Do It, by W.F. GOLDBERG, and G. CHAPLIN PIESSE (J.W. ARROWSMITH). He reports in the following terms to his loved Chief:—This book achieves the task of combining extraordinary vulgarity with the flattest and most insipid dulness—not a common dulness, but a dulness redolent of low slang and dirty tap-rooms. The authors seem to plume themselves on their marvellous success in reaching Monte Carlo, which, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 14, 1891. • Various
... uncomfortable. I would not think of it. I recalled the fact that in all our talks I had never heard Oscar use a gross word. His mind, I said to myself, is like Spenser's, vowed away from coarseness and vulgarity: he's the most perfect intellectual companion in the world. He may have wanted to talk to the boys just to see what effect his talk would have on them. His vanity is greedy enough to desire even such applause as theirs.... Of course, that ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... Notwithstanding the complacent grimaces of his face, the self-sufficiency of his looks, his systematically powdered and dressed hair, his showy dress, his counted and short bows, and his presumptuous conversation, teeming with ignorance, vulgarity, and obscenity, he cannot escape ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... peers. He is of the old school, I admit, but he is nevertheless right on the spot with his points and his psychology. His name is Harry Champion. Perhaps you have seen him and been disgusted with what you would call the vulgarity of his songs. But what you call his vulgarity, my dears, is just everyday life; and everyday life is always disgusting to the funny little Bayswaterats, who are compact of timidity and pudibonderie. The elderly adolescent has no business at the music-hall; his place is the ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... characters that he has created which symbolize vices, virtues, follies, and the like almost as well as the characters in Bunyan; and therefore I think the wise thing to do is simply to skip the bosh and twaddle and vulgarity and untruth, and get the benefit out of the rest. Of course one fundamental difference between Thackeray and Dickens is that Thackeray was a gentleman and Dickens was not. But a man might do some mighty good work and not be a gentleman ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... Gertrude would allow her, she would try to dress her hair as well as she could. That it would be of no use to ask Jennet again, Clare well knew; and she shrank from exposing her dear old Barbara to the insolent vulgarity of Gertrude. ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... up your minds," Tai-yue put in, "to initiate a poetical society, every one of us will be poets, so we should, as a first step, do away with those various appellations of cousin and uncle and aunt, and thus avoid everything that bears a semblance of vulgarity." ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... stature, with a face like the egg of a goose. Her eyes so beautiful, with their well-curved eyebrows, possessed in their gaze a bewitching flash. At the very sight of her refined and elegant manners all idea of vulgarity ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... vulgarity about it, no ostentation, except the perfume. The fireworks were as private ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... avowal of fondness of good eating and drinking which is employed to give a comic stamp to servants and persons in a low rank of life, it may still be used without impropriety: of those to whom life has granted but few privileges it does not require much; and they may boldly own the vulgarity of their inclinations, without giving any shock to our moral feelings. The better the condition of servants in real life, the less adapted are they for the stage; and this at least redounds to the praise of our more humane age, that in our "family ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... see and hear what was going on there; it was revolting, loathsome, horrible; but it was too manifest to be overlooked or ignored; its vulgarity and horror forced it on her attention. For some time she stood spell-bound, paralyzed; but then she covered her face with her hands; maidenly shame, bitter disillusion, and pious indignation at the gross desecration of all that she deemed most sacred and inviolable surged up in ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... are about 215,000 retail liquor houses in this nation. Allowing 20 feet to each, it gives us an unbroken liquor front of about 781 miles. Just think of it! Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of profanity and vulgarity. Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of Sabbath-breaking. Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of drunkard-making. Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of filth, debauchery, anarchy, dynamite and bombs. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... Retz shut the window with a shrug of protest against the vulgarity of prejudice. He did not notice four men in the garb of pilgrims who stood in the ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... the opinion expressed by the naval lieutenant at Naples, who said "She was a very handsome, vulgar woman." All her portraits confirm what the sailor says about her beauty, and the most reliable records are confirmatory so far as his view of her vulgarity is concerned. ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... over-refined literary taste, that we are inclined to question whether they have been wisely preserved in standard editions of so great a novelist? The use of ludicrously distorted spelling intensifies the impression of ignorant vulgarity, and there is a moral lesson in the story of Mr. Deuceace that atones in some degree for the very low company whom we meet in it. But the labour of deciphering the ugly words, and the cheerless atmosphere of sordid vice and servility which they are ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... authorities on self-sacrifice, agreed that the only sacrifice Emma had made in a thoroughly selfish life was the purchase of the St. Michael. She had found it, on a visit in Romagna, in the hands of a noble family who knew its value and needed to sell it, but dreaded the vulgarity of a transaction through the antiquaries. To Emma, accordingly, whom they assumed to be rich, they offered it at a price staggering for her, though still cheap for it. From the first she had adored it. There had been a swift exchange of despatches with New York, ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... reassuringly, and for the matter of that, there were probably a dozen Bradys. The name was common enough, and the only decent thing to do was to get rid of the suspicion and to apologise to Connie in his thoughts. To impute a low motive to a simple action had always seemed to him the vulgarity of littleness, and littleness in a man he had come to look upon as a kind of passive vice. So until the event proved the necessity of action, he was determined that there should be no "black bats" among his thoughts. Had he loved Connie ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... had an expression of freedom, of experience, that made such an idea as conventionality in connection with him ridiculous. But however bad he might be, Susan felt sure it would be an artistic kind of badness, without vulgarity. He might have reached the stage at which morality ceases to be a conviction, a matter of conscience, and becomes a matter of preference, of tastes—and he surely had good taste in conduct no less than in dress and manner. The woman with him ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... say that he had genius. The best piece of painting of his hand in the room is the boy in Harlowe's picture of the "Kemble Family;" a picture of considerable artistic merit, but ruined by the coarse vulgarity of a caricature of Mrs Siddons. How unlike the Lady Macbeth! The corpulent velvet dark mass and obtruding figure is most unpleasant. It is much to be regretted Mr. Harlowe did not redesign that principal figure. There are several landscapes of Gainsborough's, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... will demand men of good taste who care for the best they know. Vulgarity is satisfaction with mean things. That is vulgar which is poor of its kind. There is a kind of music called rag-time,—vulgar music, with catchy tunes—catchy to those who do not know nor care for things better. There are men ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... exchanged the Washingtonian dignity for the Jeffersonian simplicity, which was in truth only another name for the Jacksonian vulgarity. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... Wordsworth. But of all these things nothing is worse than ——, in spite of Hunt's extracting the only good stanzas, with his usual good nature. Indeed, I ought not to complain of Hunt's good nature, for no one owes so much to it. Is not the vulgarity of these wretched imitations of Lord Byron carried to a pitch of the sublime? His indecencies, too, both against sexual nature, and against human nature in general, sit very awkwardly upon him. He only affects the ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... such credit as was his due. It is certain that he was considered a youth of extraordinary promise by his colleagues, Wilkie, Jackson, and Sir George Beaumont, yet there were not wanting critics who declared that his early picture, 'Dentatus,' was an absurd mass of vulgarity and distortion. Foreign artists who visited his studio urged him to go to Rome, where he was assured that patrons and pupils would flock round him; while, on the other hand, he was described by a native ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... chiefly of modern date; the streets are broad, and furnished with raised pavements for foot passengers. There is much gaiety in the two squares on Sundays and festivals. A market of every possible thing, but especially provisions, is held there. The extraordinary vulgarity and rudeness of the common people struck me greatly; on all sides I heard only abuse, shouting, and cursing. To my astonishment I saw dromedaries ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... competitors. But what held Blinker in awful fascination was the mob, the multitude, the proletariat shrieking, struggling, hurrying, panting, hurling itself in incontinent frenzy, with unabashed abandon, into the ridiculous sham palaces of trumpery and tinsel pleasures, The vulgarity of it, its brutal overriding of all the tenets of repression and taste that were held by his caste, ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... preface, unless the fact that I have heard several other ballads upon the subject of these celebrated lovers—all of the same tendency, and all in the highest praise of the beauty and virtues of the fair Cooleen Bawn. Their utter vulgarity, however, precludes them from a place in these pages. And, by the way, talking of the law which passed under the administration of Lord Chesterfield against intermarriages, it is not improbable that the elopement of Reilly ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... the track and Millinery, Of Giles the grocer, and from there To Emilie the milliner, There to be tempted by the sight Of hats and blouses fiercely bright. (O guard Miss Thompson, Powers that Be, From Crudeness and Vulgarity.) ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... the return I had met for a kind attempt to correct a mistake of my husband's, that made him liable to ridicule on the charge of vulgarity! And to deny, too, that he said "Miss," when I had been worried about it for more than a ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... not scrupulously pious in some part of his life is known by many idle and indecent applications of sentences taken from the Scriptures, a mode of merriment which a good man dreads for its profaneness, and a witty man disdains for its easiness and vulgarity. But to whatever levities he has been betrayed, it does not appear that his principles were ever corrupted, or that he ever lost his belief of revelation. The positions which he transmitted from Bolingbroke he seems not to have ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... beastly show,' as you called it—the freak fashions, the ugly eccentric dances, the costly pageant balls, the shouldering, the striving, the worship of money, the gambling, the self-advertisement—all the abject vulgarity of it? And my set, the artistic, soulful literary set, you said was the worst of all: you actually described the high-priestess as looking like a 'decomposing cod-fish,' and added by way of a final insult that you thought the woman ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... wondered that Arthur was ever attracted by Miss B——, for he was very fastidious, and the least suggestion of aiming at effect or vulgarity, or hankering after notoriety, would infallibly have disgusted him. But this was ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... "The Landlord," and "The Search" should not have emulated Howard or Miss Fry, and have gone into the realms of destitution to relieve its wrongs. He was extremely fastidious, and anything that offended his taste by vulgarity or crudeness repelled him with such force that the work of practical philanthropy would have been impossible to his temperament. The indolence I have above spoken of—which must not be confounded with slothfulness, but is, as the true meaning of ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... worthy, from an American point of view, of all Mr. Ruskin says of it; and if circulation were determined by merit, it would speedily outstrip a good many now popular children's books which have a vein of commonness, if not of vulgarity."—Hartford Courant. ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... aware of circumstances calculated to give this negative comfort. His maternal uncle enjoyed, indeed, his newly acquired property only a few years after it came into his possession. Partly on account of his cruelty to his relations, partly from a meanness and vulgarity of character, which soon displayed itself in his novel situation, and which, it was believed, had previously kept him in the lowest walks of his profession as a Dublin attorney, he found himself neglected ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... vulgar, as to have an opinion on any subject, unless it should be the opinion of the persons you may happen to be in company with; and, as we have the reputation of possessing that quality in an eminent degree, everywhere but at home, take especial heed to eschew vulgarity—if you can. You will have the greatest care, also, to wear the shortest bob in all your private, and the longest tail in all your public relations, this being one of the most important of the celebrated checks and balances of our government. Our ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... unhappy country, when our bloods were chafed, and our hands were red. Excuse the rudeness that gave you a rough welcome, and lay it upon the evil times, and not upon us." All this was said with the manners of a princess, and in the tone and style of a court. Nor was there the least tincture of that vulgarity, which we naturally attach to the Lowland Scottish. There was a strong provincial accentuation, but, otherwise, the language rendered by Helen MacGregor, out of the native and poetical Gaelic, into English, which she had acquired as we do ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the same relief that he left the Riviera, resenting its social vulgarity so close to the imperial aristocracy of the Desert; he settled down into the peace of soft and silent little Helouan. The hotel in which he had a room on the top floor had been formerly a Khedivial Palace. It had the air of a palace still. He felt himself in a country-house, with lofty ceilings, ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... her. She had hoped that sufficient time had elapsed for the extinction of curiosity; but it was quite otherwise. The people looked at her with tender interest as the deserted girl-wife—without obtrusiveness, and without vulgarity; but she was ill prepared ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... was a contemporary of Ennius; he was a native of Umbria, and of humble origin. Education did not overcome his vulgarity, although it produced a great effect upon his language and style. He must have lived and associated with the people whose manners he describes, hence his pictures are correct and truthful. The class ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... not, neither during my life nor after my death. She did all this like a good girl." And then he took advantage of the situation. To Clarinda he wrote: "I this morning called for a certain woman. I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her"; and he accused her of "tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary fawning." This was already in March; by the thirteenth of that month he was back in Edinburgh. On the 17th, he wrote to Clarinda: "Your hopes, your fears, your cares, my love, are mine; so don't mind them. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that the man was compelled to pay to the master. True, this attitude was atoned for on occasion by blunt boldness, but the abased position and the lack of subtle distinction of air and mind of the noble, forbade to the Fourth Mousquetaire the last gracious touch of a Bayard of heroism. But the vulgarity ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... wanting in everything but coarseness; and if his invention dance at all, it is like a galley-slave in chains under the lash. It would be well for us if the sins themselves were indeed such wretched bugaboos as he has painted for us. What he means for humor is but the dullest vulgarity; his satire would be Billingsgate if it could, and, failing, becomes a mere offence in the nostrils, for it takes a great deal of salt to keep scurrility sweet. Mr. Sibbald, in his "Chronicle of Scottish Poetry," has admiringly preserved more than enough of it, and seems ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... Gabrielle, mournfully. "Listen, wise Ruth, I shall be a mother soon; and to my child, if it is spared, and to you, I devote myself. You have seen the Misses Erminstoun—you have seen vulgarity, insolence, and absurd pretension; they have taunted me with my ignorance, and I will not change it now. The blood of the De Courcys and O'Briens has made me a lady; and all the wealth of the Indies can not make them so. No, Ruth, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... a head taller, and a bold and challenging figure. Her blond hair distinguished her even more than the emphasis of her florid hat. Her pallor that morning refined the indubious coarseness of her face, and changed vulgarity into the attractive originality of a spirited character. Many there knew her, but she recognized nobody. She yawned once, in a fair piece of acting, and in her movements and the poise of her head there was ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... Sanderson's Hotel, Stephen is giving a ball to-night for Graham and his wife. I have some important transactions." Not an echo of his affair with Essie Scofield had, he knew, penetrated to Myrtle Forge. It was a most fortunate accident. The vulgarity consequent upon discovery would have been unbearable. Stephen Jannan, his cousin, a lawyer of wide city connections, must have learned something of the truth; but Stephen, properly, had said nothing; a comfortable obscurity had hid him from ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... blue and red letters such a phrase as this: "Try the Jigamaree Bitters!" Very much like this is the sort of advertising I am speaking of. It is not likely that I shall be charged with squeamishness on this question. I can readily enough see the selfishness and vulgarity of this particular sort of ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... moving in good society, who would rather be guilty of, and even detected in, an act of unkindness or mendacity, than be seen in an unfashionable dress or commit a grammatical solecism or a broach of social etiquette. Vulgarity to such men is a worse reproach than hardness of heart or indifferent morality. In these cases, as we shall see hereafter, the social sanction requires to be corrected by the moral and religious sanctions, and it is the special province of the moral and religious teacher ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... its own dreams which would only be thwarted by external illustration. Yet I do not bring forward the text or the etchings in this volume as examples of what either ought to be in works of the kind: they are in many respects common, imperfect, vulgar; but their vulgarity is of a wholesome and harmless kind. It is not, for instance, graceful English, to say that a thought "popped into Catherine's head"; but it nevertheless is far better, as an initiation into literary style, that a child should be told this than that "a subject attracted Catherine's ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... know it all. In her way, she has been educated. Neefit pere is utterly illiterate and ignorant. He is an honest man, as vulgar as he can be,—or rather as unlike you and me, which is what men mean when they talk of vulgarity,—and he makes the best of breeches. Neefit mere is worse than the father,—being cross and ill-conditioned, as far as I can see. Polly is as good as gold; and if I put a house over my head with her money, of course her father and her mother will ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... is from that of Billingsgate. The vowels were not pronounced much broader than in the Italian language, and there was none of the disagreeable drawl which is so offensive to southern ears. In short, it seemed to be the Scottish as spoken by the ancient Court of Scotland, to which no idea of vulgarity could be attached; and the lively manners and gestures with which it was accompanied were so completely in accord with the sound of the voice and the style of talking, that I cannot assign them a different origin. In long derivation, ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... hands or even the figures of their counterfeit presentments on canvas or in marble tallied with the originals. Sir Joshua Reynolds, as we know, would have regarded this as the essence of finical vulgarity. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... with what delight I recur to the days which I spent at Cambridge. In the delightful seclusion from noisy vulgarity, in the sweet interchange of kind sentiments, and in the mutual competition of classic pursuits, I possessed a unity and tranquillity of purpose far beyond the merits of my later years. My first years there were not marked with this peculiar character. ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... measure, to counterbalance that of his mistress, however unhappily he has placed his affections. But the real excellence of these scenes consists less in peculiarity of character, than in the vivacity and power of the language, which, seldom sinking into vulgarity, or rising into bombast, maintains the mixture of force and dignity, best adapted to the expression of tragic passion. Upon the whole, as the comic part of this play is our author's master-piece in comedy, the tragic plot ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... "have" Gabriel Nash; a truth exemplified in his unexpected delight at the prospect of Miriam's drawing forth the modernness of the age. You might have thought he would loathe that modernness; but he had a joyous, amused, amusing vision of it—saw it as something huge and fantastically vulgar. Its vulgarity would rise to the grand style, like that of a London railway station, and the publicity achieved by their charming charge be as big as the globe itself. All the machinery was ready, the platform laid; the facilities, the wires and bells and trumpets, the roaring, deafening newspaperism ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... the weakness common to several other fine gentlemen who have combined letters and haut ton, of being ashamed of the literary character. The vulgarity of the court, its indifference to all that was not party writing, whether polemical or political, cast a shade ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... Daisy I do not know what to do with you. Do you like, is it possible that you can like, dirt and vulgarity?" ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... suggestion even of coarseness in libretto or in stage business." The hint was hardly necessary, for Mr. Savile Clarke was not the sort of man to spoil his work, or to allow others to spoil it, by vulgarity. Several alterations were made in the books before they were suitable for a dramatic performance; Mr. Dodgson had to write a song for the ghosts of the oysters, which the Walrus and the Carpenter had devoured. He also completed "Tis the voice of the ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... that Lady Webling was shocked—by the vulgarity, no doubt. "Swine" do not belong in dining-room language—only in the platters or the chairs. Marie Louise caught an angry look also in the eye of Nicholas Easton, though he, too, had been incisive in his comments on the theme of the dinner. ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... value. And then commenced the general warfare; full purse and empty head—versus no purse, and old nobility. They had the satisfaction of ruining each other—the full purse was emptied by devouring duns, and the old nobility suffered by its connexion with vulgarity. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... literary movement was started by Sir Walter Scott, who made a revolution in novel-writing, introducing a new style, freeing romances from bad taste, vulgarity, insipidity, and false sentiment. He painted life and Nature without exaggerations, avoided interminable scenes of love-making, and gave a picture of society in present and past times so fresh, so vivid, so natural, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... however, knew better. To her unfortunately the life within the walls seemed of a quite blatant vulgarity; pervaded by lacqueys, by officials of every kind and degree, by too much food, too many clothes, by waste, by a feverish frittering away of time, by a hideous want of privacy, by a dreariness unutterable. To her it was ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... times, I must confess. I swear it is enough at times to make you swear You would almost rather be anywhere Than here. The building up and pulling down, The getting to and fro about the town, The turmoil underfoot and overhead, Certainly make you wish that you were dead, At first; and all the mean vulgarity Of city life, the filth and misery You see around you, make you want to put Back to the country anywhere, ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... all was! how free from any attempt at display of style! yet equally free from any trace of vulgarity or ill-natured gossip. Mousie had added grace to the banquet with her blooming plants and dried grasses; and, although the dishes had been set on the table by my wife's and children's hands, they were daintily ornamented and inviting. All had been within our means and accomplished by ourselves; ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... may not be going fast, and by the shortest cut, to that horrible and disgustful situation. Already there appears a poverty of conception, a coarseness and vulgarity, in all the proceedings of the Assembly and of all their instructors. Their liberty is not liberal. Their science is presumptuous ignorance. Their humanity is ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... store of biscuits needed replenishing before luncheon. She was putting on her bonnet to go to order them, when a doubt seized her whether she was transgressing the dignities of the Honourable Mrs. Martindale. Matilda had lectured against vulgarity when Arthur had warned her against ultra-gentility, and she wavered, till finding there was no one to send, her good sense settled the question. She walked along, feeling the cares and troubles of life arising on her, and thinking she should never again be gay and thoughtless, when she ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is rich in invention, even for Haydn at his best; it is full of jollity far removed from vulgarity; the atmosphere is continuously fresh, almost fragrant, and there are endless touches of poetic seriousness. The Adagio is as profound as anything he wrote. Perhaps, on the whole—and it may be wrong ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... disband our armies because in the hand of an ambitious madman a field-marshal's baton may brain a helpless State?—our navies because in ships pirates have "sailed the seas over?" Let us not commit the vulgarity of condemning the dance because of its possibilities of perversion by the vicious and the profligate. Let us not utter us in hot bosh and baking nonsense, but cleave to reason and the sweet ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... through this divine initiation,—this sacred inspiration of our nature,—and find, when they have come into the innermost shrine, where the divinity ought to be, that there is no god or goddess there; nothing but the cold black ashes of commonplace vulgarity and selfishness. Both of them, when the grand discovery has been made, do well to fold their robes decently about them, and make the best of the matter. If they cannot love, they can at least be friendly. ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... you shall see the never-to-be-forgotten Falls of the Aar,' and so forth. So that my illusion of being alone in the roots of the world dropped off me very quickly, and I wondered how people could be so helpless and foolish as to travel about in Switzerland as tourists and meet with all this vulgarity and beastliness. ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... fiddlefaddle—a dash of bitters, a squirt of orange, an olive, cherry, or onion wrenched from its proper place in the saladbowl, a twist of lemonpeel, sprig of mint or lump of sugar and an eyedropperful of whisky; or else they embrace the opposite extreme of vulgarity and gulp whatever rotgut is thrust at them to addle their undiscerning brains and atrophy their undiscriminating palates. Either practice is foreign to my nature and philosophy. I believe the happiest combinations of liquors are simple ones, containing no more than two ingredients, each ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... room of sumptuous vulgarity two men sat drinking wine. One of them was old and grey, the other a young Jew. The young Jew was holding a roll of bank-notes in his hand, and was bargaining with the old man. ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... were at the turbulent junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, where crowds of Londoners, deeply unconscious of their own vulgarity, and of the marvellous distinction of Bedford Square, and of the moral obligation to harmonize socks with neckties, were preoccupying themselves with omnibuses and routes, and constituting the spectacle of London. The high-heeled, demure creatures were lost in ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... as is the work of these two painters, it does not reach the highest level. It falls short of grandeur, and has that worldly tone that borders on vulgarity. As we study it we feel that it marks the point to which Venetian art might have attained, the flood-mark it might have touched, if it had lacked the advent of the three or four great spirits, who, appearing about the same time, bore it up to ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... condition. On these occasions I used to consider with a sort of fierce humor how Nina would receive him—for though she saw no offense in the one kind of vice she herself practiced, she had a particular horror of vulgarity in any form, and drunkenness was one of those ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... appeared upon the next day at dinner. His manners, though not so coarse as I had expected, were exceedingly disagreeable; there was an assurance and a forwardness for which I was not prepared; there was less of the vulgarity of manner, and almost more of that of the mind, than I had anticipated. I felt quite uncomfortable in his presence; there was just that confidence in his look and tone, which would read encouragement even in mere toleration; and I felt more disgusted ...
— Two Ghostly Mysteries - A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family; and The Murdered Cousin • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... Take the truth; I'll not be poisoned with it! I am sick of you; you have disgusted me! I will ease my heart by telling you the whole. If I seek the society of other women, it is because I find not among them your meanness and vulgarity!" ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... women? These are sisters of charity—these are heroines without a record in any human literature. Have they been injured by mixing with the rude affairs of war in camps and among soldiers? When women take upon themselves such necessary duties they take vulgarity from vulgarity, and coarseness becomes refined, for it is the heart of woman that brings life ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... make any difference if I did," I said, with unconscious asperity, for indeed this excess of free manners was jarring upon me. The line dividing it from vulgarity was becoming so thin I was losing sight of the divisor. Yet no one, even the most fastidious, could associate vulgarity with Natalie Brande. There remained an air of unassumed sincerity about herself and all her actions, including even her dress, which absolutely excluded her from hostile ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... nothing to do with devotion. And the impertinent patronage of worshippers in "fustian" is at least as offensive as the older-fashioned vulgarity of pride in congregations who "come in their own carriages." And I do protest against the flippant inference that good clothes for the body must lower the assumptions of the spirit, or make repentance insincere; ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... he drove without thought of where he was going. Detail after detail of the affair presented itself to his mind in endless repetition. It had been a humiliating experience. The old woman's vulgarity; Macomber's stolid, iron hand clearing the air, like brushing trash from his doorstep; the consciousness of prying eyes at that upstairs window! "I've been a feeble cuckoo," he thought. "Mighta supposed two years in the army would have taught me better'n that. Played ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... comedy of the bleached hair, and the flaccid face, and the bizarre wrapper; behind the coarseness and vulgarity and ignorance, Emma McChesney's keen mental eye saw something decent and clean and beautiful. And something ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... high culture of certain classes. The countries which, like the United States, have created a considerable popular instruction without any serious higher instruction, will long have to expiate this fault by their intellectual mediocrity, their vulgarity of manners, their superficial spirit, their lack of general intelligence."* Now, which of these two friends of culture are we to believe? Monsieur Renan seems more to have in his eye what we ourselves mean by culture; [xxviii] because Mr. Bright ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... not be asked to enter the Cabinet in person. The country abhorred him; Parliament despised him; his inveterate habits of slander and vituperation, his vulgarity, and his incurable want of veracity, had made him so hateful to the educated classes that it would have required no common courage to give him office; his insolent sneers at royalty would have made his appointment little less than a personal insult to the Queen; and ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... Full short in stature and rotund is he, Pale grey his watery orbs, that dare not scan His interlocutor, and his goatee, With hair and whiskers like a furnace be: Concave the mouth from which his nose-tip flies In vain attempt to shun vulgarity. O haste, ye gods, to snatch from him the prize, And send him hence to ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... But in the infancy of the settlement few girls read English; when they did, they were thought accomplished; they generally spoke it, however imperfectly, and few were taught writing. This confined education precluded elegance; yet, though there was no polish, there was no vulgarity."[48] ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... vulgar, and we dislike vulgarity. 'Commission Office,' 'Racing Bank,' 'Mr Hopposite Green's Office,' 'Betting-Office,'are the styles of announcement adopted by speculators who open what low people call Betting-shops. The chosen designation is usually painted in gold letter on a chocolate-coloured ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... taint of snobbery in M. Halevy's treatment of all this magnificence; there is none of the vulgarity which marks the pages of Lothair, for example; there is no mean admiration of mean things. There is, on the other hand, no bitterness of scourging satire. He lets us see that all this luxury is a little cloying and perhaps not a little enervating. He suggests (although he takes care never ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... deference, if not into admiration, by exact knowledge of the number of dollars which dangled from the shoulders of the fashionable butterfly. This boastful parade of information as to how much one expends in this or that article implies an undertone of vulgarity peculiar to those who have nothing but money to be proud of. The cultivated and truly genteel mind is never guilty of it. Yet it somehow prevails too extensively among American women. Display is a sort of mania with too many of them. A family in moderate circumstances marries ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... except little Ida and Miss More—the real humanity and faithful kindness that dwelt in the terribly hard and coarse-grained fighting financier. Lady Maud had her faults, no doubt, but she was too big, morally, to be disturbed by what seemed to Margaret Donne an intolerable vulgarity ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... American taste is partial to sentiment, and antagonistic to themes that fail to present the American in the light of optimistic romance. But our defects in taste are slowly but certainly being remedied. The schools are at work upon them; journalism, for all its noisy vulgarity, is at work upon them. Our taste in art, our taste in poetry, our taste in architecture, our taste in music go up, as our taste in magazine fiction ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Hale. Mr. Thornton had thought that the house in Crampton was really just the thing; but now that he saw Margaret, with her superb ways of moving and looking, he began to feel ashamed of having imagined that it would do very well for the Hales, in spite of a certain vulgarity in it which had struck him at the time of his looking ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... glimpse of the round moon rising above the solemn heights of the opposite shore, and felt the cool breath of mountain and river sweep his cheek and mingle a few escaped threads of her fair hair with his own. With that glimpse and that sensation the vulgarity and the tawdriness of their surroundings, the guttering candles in their sconces, the bizarre figures, the unmeaning faces seemed to be whirled far into distant space. They were alone with night and nature; it was they who were still; all else had receded in a vanishing ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... "literature." He is so unassuming, so mild, so intensely and unconsciously original in the expression of his naive emotions before the spectacle of life, that a hasty inquirer into his idiosyncrasy might be excused for entirely missing the point of him. His new book (which helps to redeem the enormous vulgarity of a booming season), "A Shepherd's Life: Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs" (Methuen), is soberly of a piece with his long and deliberate career. A large volume, yet one arrives at the end of it with surprising quickness, because the pages seem ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... of calling tyrant, Mrs. Riley. Nor ojus vulgarity. Nor epithets I will not repeat, relating to family connections. Concerning which, I say, God forgive Alethear! For the accommodation at a nominal rent of persons in reduced circumstances is not an almshouse, say what she may. And her Aunt Trebilcock ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... retained the charm of musical expression, though her voice was but a thread. And so we spoke of her; two old men with all the enthusiastic admiration of fifty years ago. Pleasant was it also to hear him speak of the public singers of those early days. Braham, so great, spite of his vulgarity; Miss Stephens, so sweet to listen to, though she had no voice of power; and poor Vaughan, who had so feeble a voice, and yet was always called "such a chaste singer." How he would roar with laughter, when I ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... the well-laid plan came to naught. The specimens of local and ephemeral poetry that were printed in the colonial press in succeeding years make it easy to comprehend the failure of the project: the villanously rhymed effusions fairly imposthumate all the ribald vulgarity of the times; coarseness and dulness of subject and thought being rivalled only by the super-coarseness of the verbiage. I do not say that the newspapers provoked these stupid rhymes, which are about as much poetry as is a game of crambo; but I do not find them ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Colambre found a spirit of improvement, a desire for knowledge, and a taste for science and literature, in most companies, particularly among gentlemen belonging to the Irish bar: nor did he in Dublin society see any of that confusion of ranks or predominance of vulgarity, of which his mother had complained. Lady Clonbrony had assured him, that, the last time she had been at the drawing-room at the Castle, a lady, whom she afterwards found to be a grocer's wife, had turned angrily when her ladyship had accidentally trodden on her train, and had exclaimed ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... or crevice, there pierces through the countenance of a man, through the very posture of his body as he stands or moves, a glimpse of his nobility and freedom, or again of something in him low and grovelling—the calm of self-restraint, and wisdom, or the swagger of insolence and vulgarity? ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... again unveil ourselves to each other. At this time I began to learn from the older boys the pitiful, childish vulgarities and common terms of sex, and to invent and exchange rhymes and stories that were pathetic in their attempts at vulgarity. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... were appointed in and by Great Britain, and helped to control the commercial policy. Another member was the bishop of the Anglican Church, for the seemly ceremonies and graded orders of clergy of this body were deemed to be a counterpoise to popular vagaries and vulgarity. Prior to the American Revolutionary War there had been no colonial bishopric; {35} three years after its close the first bishop of ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... Tudor fireplace, whose moulded four-centred arch was nearly hidden by a figured blue-cloth blower, were seated two women—mother and daughter—Mrs. Hall, and Sarah, or Sally; for this was a part of the world where the latter modification had not as yet been effaced as a vulgarity by the march of intellect. The owner of the name was the young woman by whose means Mr. Darton proposed to put an end to his bachelor ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... good-natured of Mr. Chorley to send me a copy of his book, and he sending so few—very! George who admires you, does not tolerate Mr. Chorley ... (did I tell ever?) declares that the affectation is 'bad,' and that there is a dash of vulgarity ... which I positively refuse to believe, and should, I fancy, though face to face with the most vainglorious of waistcoats. How can there be vulgarity even of manners, with so much mental refinement? I never could believe in those ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... no vulgarity in this idea: it is a poetical degree in the scale of passion. An abhisarika is a lady so mastered by her love that she cannot wait for her lover, but goes to him of her own accord. There are all sorts of conditions laid down to regulate her going: she must not go in broad ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... advantage at present was on Lisa's side, for as the time for striking the decisive blow approached she manifested the calmest serenity of bearing, whereas her rival, in spite of all her efforts to attain the same air of distinction, always lapsed into some piece of gross vulgarity, which she afterwards regretted. La Normande's ambition was to look "like a lady." Nothing irritated her more than to hear people extolling the good manners of her rival. This weak point of hers had not escaped old Madame Mehudin's observation, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... a paradise, in which the ugliness, vulgarity, sordidness and cruelty of the present scheme of things will ...
— NEVER AGAIN • Edward Carpenter
... emphasis which nature had given to his features, he was a presentable person. Flying side-whiskers made his mouth appear grotesquely wide, and the play of strong feelings had produced vicious wrinkles on his spare face. He appeared to be a man of energy, vivacity and vulgarity, reminding one of a dinner of pork and cabbage. He was soon forgotten in the excitement of a delightful day, whose glories came to a brilliant end in that banquet which introduced the nephew of ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue has been long and universally acknowledged. But its circulation was confined almost exclusively to the lower orders of society: he was not aware, at the time of its compilation, that our young men of fashion would at no very distant period be as distinguished for the vulgarity of their jargon as the inhabitants of Newgate; and he therefore conceived it superfluous to incorporate with his work the few examples of fashionable slang that ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... my efforts to prevent her, she burst out with the first verse of a stupid comic song. Spared by his deafness from this infliction of vulgarity, our host filled a tumbler from the water in the ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... To avoid the vulgarity of ushering this company into the presence of the punctilious reader without even the ceremony of a Bedouin introduction—(This is my friend, N or M; if he steals anything, I will be responsible for ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... France, Germany and England are the work, not of academies, but of individual scholars, of Littre, Grimm and Murray. Matthew Arnold's plea for an English academy of letters to save his countrymen from the note of vulgarity and provinciality has met with no response. Academies have been supplanted, socially by the modern club, and intellectually by societies devoted to special branches of science. Those that survive from the past serve, like the Heralds' College, to set an official ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Rose to a Crimson Rambler, which she enthusiastically declares is the grandest Rose in the world. Side by side with her letter is one from an artist. "I don't like Ramblers," writes he. "An artistic Rose to my mind is like a jewel in a right setting. Too many jewels denote vulgarity." Every class of Rose has its enthusiastic devotees. The best Hybrid Teas come nearer combining all merits of a Rose, and nearer pleasing all standards of taste than any other; yet any florist will tell you that they are ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various
... Jack!" exclaimed the girl, her smile apologizing for the vulgarity of the expression. "If I had a ...
— The Motor Girls on a Tour • Margaret Penrose
... political assemblage of the people was graced by the presence of women. Had it needed a law to enable them to be present, what an argument could have been made against it! How easily it could have been shown that the coarseness, the dubious expressions, the general vulgarity of the scene, could have had no other effect than to break down that purity of thought and word which women have, and which conservative and radical are alike sedulous to preserve. And yet the actual presence of women at political meetings has not debased them but has raised the other sex. Coarseness ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... word Mr. Tutt rolled Bibby up and threw him away, while his master shuddered at the open disclosure of his trusted major-domo's vulgarity, mendacity and general lack of sportsmanship. Somehow all at once the case began to break up and go all to pot. The jury got laughing at Bibby, the footmen and the cops as Mr. Tutt painted for their edification the scene following the arrival of Mrs. Witherspoon, when ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... the attainment of this taste, in any meritorious degree, by necessarily requiring much study, operate as preclusive of information to the possession of which no peculiar epithet of a commendatory nature has hitherto been awarded? Nay, is there not a sort of prejudice allied to a notion of vulgarity, directed against almost any shew of acquaintance with the habits and histories of uncultivated nations? But it would be unpardonable to imagine, there were not other reasons of a less invidious nature to explain the fact. We must certainly be allowed to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... practical ability, and moderately versed in the laws of acoustics, with an eye for form, and not deficient in a certain conception of art as art; who have the instinct to check any approach to vulgarity, and work on lines, curves and thicknesses, more or less true, elegant, and the best for producing fine tone, have seen, and will yet again see, their efforts of small avail, cast aside, never to assume even mediocre rank in the stern array of violins of modern make, much ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... ideas, a man cannot "let himself down," who "associates only with those whose moral characters are unimpeachable." It is true that he was pleasant and playful in conversation with all classes of people; but he was remarkably free from any tinge of vulgarity. It is true, also, that he was totally and entirely unconscious of any such thing as distinctions of rank. I have been acquainted with many theoretical democrats, and with not a few who tried to be democratic, from kind feelings-and ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... kind-hearted girl, she had captured with a glance the eldest son of the newly rich Pletheridge, who had, perhaps, inherited his grandfather's genial admiration for chambermaids; but, to-day, after a generation of self-indulgence, her prettiness had coarsened, her vulgarity had hardened, and her kind heart had withered, through lack of cultivation, to the size of a cherry. And, from having had everything she wanted for so long, she had at last reached that melancholy state of mind when she could think of nothing more ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... that Thackeray, though he had hitherto been but a contributor of anonymous pieces to periodicals,—to what is generally considered as merely the ephemeral literature of the month,—had already become effective on the tastes and morals of readers. Affectation of finery; the vulgarity which apes good breeding but never approaches it; dishonest gambling, whether with dice or with railway shares; and that low taste for literary excitement which is gratified by mysterious murders and Old Bailey executions had already received condign punishment from Yellowplush, ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... Wilson is right in not suffering Emily to read such things." And Jane, who had often devoured the treacherous lines with ardor, shrank with fastidious delicacy from the indulgence of a perverted taste, when it became exposed, coupled with the vulgarity of unblushing audacity. ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... is one branch of the Civil Service located in Somerset House, which has little else to redeem it from the lowest depths of official vulgarity than the ambiguous respectability of its material position. This is the office of the Commissioners of Internal Navigation. The duties to be performed have reference to the preservation of canal banks, the tolls to be levied at locks, and disputes with the ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... at Joan's tongue," said Nancy. "Starling said last night that her stomach was a little out of order, and we rebuked her for her vulgarity." ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... known as plain 'Shawn Duffy, of the Devil's Half-acre.' It was undoubtedly a most diabolic address; but Shawn was a man of considerable strength of mind, as well as of muscle, and he resolved to become a juntleman, despite this damning reminiscence. Vulgarity, it is said, sticks to a man like a limpet to a rock. Shawn knew the best way to rub it off would be by mixing with good society. Dress, he always understood, was the best passport he could bring for admission within ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... worth considering (blatant ignorance or base vulgarity alone excepted) that the revolution effected by Christianity in human life is immeasurable and unparalleled by any other movement in history; though most nearly approached by that of the Jewish religion, of which, however, it ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... back in disorder, like a mane, with features that looked as if they had been cut out with a bill-hook, but which were so powerful, and in which there lay such a flame of life, that one forgot their vulgarity and ugliness; with black eyes under bushy eyebrows, which dilated and flashed like lightning, now were veiled as if in tears and then were filled with serene mildness, with a voice which now growled so as almost to terrify its hearers, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... of intellectual people, but he did draw great crowds who came out of curiosity to see the gyroscopic gyrations. Talmage never ventured far from shore, and he of all men knew that while the mob would forgive vulgarity—in fact, really enjoyed it—unsoundness of doctrine was to it a hissing. Orthodoxy is very tolerant—it forgives everything but truth. Every fetish of the superstitious and cringing mind, Talmage repeated over and over in varying ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... truth (and the half-truth is mostly a lie) would be Greek to them. If, then, Tracts for the Million seem a necessity, they also seem an impossibility; for what self-respecting man will sit down to weave that tissue of sophistry, special-pleading, violence, and vulgarity, which alone will serve the practical purpose with those to whom trenchency is everything and subtlety nothing? Even though the means involve a violation of taste rather than of morals, yet can they be justified ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... shrieked its cry of despair. He moved mechanically toward the church and waked from his reverie to find himself jammed in a solid mass of humanity. Never before had he realized the utter vulgarity of a public wedding. Why should any one wish a crowd of curious fools to witness even the happiest wedding? Its meaning is surely frank enough without shouting it from the housetops. Should not its joys and mystery be something too shy and sweet and holy for a vulgar crowd of strangers to gaze ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... of way that I'd been jounced out of the office. He said it was 'a bally shame,' Oh, I did envy that chap his eight hundred a year! Life seemed to him one grand, sweet song. Cricket, Riviera, dances, clubs, country houses, everything. He was fenced in on every side, safe from the vulgarity of the world. He was hall-marked—a public-school man. He was a citizen of his world, I was an alien. He was rich. I had not ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... hand on her shoulder like a protector). We shall fight your vulgarity together. (All this time he has been arranging sticks for his fire.) Now get some dry grass. (She brings him grass, and he puts it under the sticks. He produces an odd lens from his pocket, and tries to focus ...
— The Admirable Crichton • J. M. Barrie
... English School, we are less seldom disgusted with the coarseness, both of subject and manner, that prevailed in some of their contemporaries and immediate successors. In no branch of art is this improvement more shown than in scenes of familiar life—which meant, indeed "Low Life." Vulgarity has given place to a more "elegant familiar." This has necessarily brought into play a nicer attention to mechanical excellence, and indeed to all the minor beauties of the art. We almost fear too much has been done this way, because it has been ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... cause of this strange contrast, and why are the most able citizens to be found in one assembly rather than in the other? Why is the former body remarkable for its vulgarity and its poverty of talent, whilst the latter seems to enjoy a monopoly of intelligence and of sound judgment? Both of these assemblies emanate from the people; both of them are chosen by universal suffrage; and no voice has hitherto been heard to assert in America that the Senate is hostile ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... these unexpected juxtapositions. Thus, as with our Pundit's famous countryman Mr. Jaberjee, though they use the purest language, they can instantly express every shade of thought with grace and completeness without resorting to slang:—that ready cloak wherewith puny minds strive to cover their vulgarity ...
— The New Pun Book • Thomas A. Brown and Thomas Joseph Carey
... costume, or performer. It has no plan, no idea; some ideas are flung into it in passing; but it remains as shapeless as an English pantomime, and not much more interesting. Both appeal to the same undeveloped instincts, the English to a merely childish vulgarity, the French to a vulgarity which is more frankly vicious. Really I hardly know which is to be preferred. In England we pretend that fancy dress is all in the interests of morality; in France they make no such pretence, and, in dispensing with shoulder-straps, do ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... must have its own forms of ostentation, pretence, and vulgarity. The ancient Romans had theirs, the English and the French have theirs as well,—why should not we Americans have ours? Educated and refined persons must recognize frequent internal conflicts between the "Homo sum" of Terence ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... aristocratic ships as these) attempts to be rampantly facetious at her expense. But the damsel with the unkempt auburn locks flowing about her comely face, lit up by a pair of blue Irish eyes under their dark lashes, takes the cad's vulgarity together with his money, like the pill with the jam, giving in return the valueless pieces of carved wood, until her little stock is exhausted and a good morning's work ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... of these social supervisors! and what a wretch, the habit of deferring to no principle better than their decision has made many a being, who has had originally the materials of something better in him, than has been developed by the surveillance of ignorance, envy, vulgarity, gossiping and lying! In those cases in which education, social position, opportunities and experience have made any material difference between the parties, the man who yields to such a government, exhibits the picture of a giant held in bondage by a pigmy. I have always remarked, too, that ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... to the Arabs and they to me, and I am inclined to be 'kind' to their virtues if not 'blind' to their faults, which are visible to the most inexperienced traveller. You see all our own familiar 'bunkum' (excuse the vulgarity) falls so flat on their ears, bravado about 'honour,' 'veracity,' etc., etc., they look blank and bored at. The schoolboy morality as set forth by Maurice is current here among grown men. Of course we tell lies to Pashas and Beys, why shouldn't we? But shall I call in that ragged ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... rate, he said that it was his duty before he, as the out-going President, broke his wand of office to remind the Society that it existed for two definite objects—the pursuit of pleasure, and the suppression of vulgarity. He then went on to state that Mr. Wilkins, formerly of St. Cuthbert's, had kindly consented to give an account of his travels ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... meat and fat people. I used to like to be with the hired girls in the kitchen. I was entirely untouched by the often-repeated expositions made to me of the vulgarity of such habits, and of the low esteem in which I should be held in consequence. What is vulgarity to a child? Spontaneity, unconscious existence, has no vulgarities. Vulgarity comes of restraints and distortions; and a child's life is commonly for a time untouched by the girdling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... written for and sung by the late Mr. Fitzwilliam, the comedian, as others of Hudson's songs were by Mr. Rayner. Collectors of comic ditties will not readily forget "Walker, the Twopenny Postman," or "The Dogs'-meat Man"—rough caricatures of low life, unstained by the vulgarity of many of the modern music-hall ditties. In the motto to one of his collections of poems, Hudson borrows from Churchill an excuse for the rough, humorous effusions that he scattered ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... that of Plato, or of Shakespeare for that matter, or of Dante, Rabelais, Catullus, Voltaire,[10] Gibbon or Balzac, to say nothing of St. Chrysostom (who could not sleep without an Aristophanes under his pillow) or the author of "The Song of Solomon." They did not like vulgarity and they put a stop to it: also in that age Punch and the Times flourished. What is decent or indecent, vulgar or refined, is, of course, a matter of taste; and each age has a taste of its own. The ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... conscious debauchee is absurd: thousands of dull, conscientious people beat their children conscientiously, because they were beaten themselves and think children ought to be beaten. The ill-tempered vulgarity that instinctively strikes at and hurts a thing that annoys it (and all children are annoying), and the simple stupidity that requires from a child perfection beyond the reach of the wisest and best adults (perfect truthfulness coupled with perfect obedience is quite a common condition of leaving ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... Italian language, and there was none of the disagreeable drawl which is so offensive to southern ears. In short, it seemed to be the Scottish as spoken by the ancient Court of Scotland, to which no idea of vulgarity could be attached; and the lively manners and gestures with which it was accompanied were so completely in accord with the sound of the voice and the style of talking, that I cannot assign them a different origin. In long derivation, perhaps the manner of ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... seen among those who have the thoughts without the conventional usages of a better caste in life, she was slightly tinctured with an exhibition of what might be termed an exaggerated manner, while at the same time it was perfectly free from vulgarity or coarseness. The gentle accents of Adelheid fell on her ear soothingly, and she gazed long and earnestly at the beautiful speaker ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... in his hands. It all depressed him like a weight. From the depths of his soul he despised them for their vulgarity, and hated himself for so doing, for he was of their life and work akin. He shut his eyes, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... obligation of the 'common weal', that conception of which Government, increasingly better organized, is the most striking practical realization. It has its drawback in the spread of what we feel as a debasing 'vulgarity', but the general balance is overwhelmingly on the side of good. And in all such discussions we are apt to allow far too little weight to the change which the New World, and especially the United States, has brought about. In matters of ...
— Progress and History • Various
... of the thirteenth century artificiality and vulgarity began to preponderate, provoking as counterweights didactic works such as Der Krieg auf der Wartburg. The fourteenth century saw the rise of the free cities, literary guilds, and five universities. It also marks the cultivation of political satire in such ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... lady, and consequently my education was manifestly superior to those of my companions. THEY could scarcely be called comme il faut, at all; though, to own the truth, I am afraid there is tant soit peu de vulgarity about all WORKED pocket-handkerchiefs. I remember that, one day, when Madame de la Rocheaimard and Adrienne were discussing the expediency of buying our whole piece, with a view of offering us to their benefactress, the ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... this, to watch the gradual withdrawal from the face of all that was manly and clean, and all that makes for success. We can see where purity left him and was gradually replaced by vulgarity, and where he began to be ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... almost the antithesis of Saint-Saens' that finally disclosed itself through Franck. In it everything is felt and necessary and expressive. It is unadorned. None of the light musical frosting that conceals the poverty and vulgarity of so many of the other's ideas is to be found here. The designs themselves are noble and significant. Franck possessed a rare gift of sensing exactly what was to his purpose. He had the artistic courage ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... They seemed to be as little akin to her as would have been the shopkeepers in the small town near Caversham. She would sit through long evenings almost speechless, trying to fathom the depth of the vulgarity of her associates. Occasionally she was taken out, and was then, probably, taken to very grand houses. The two duchesses and the Marchioness of Auld Reekie received Madame Melmotte, and the garden parties of royalty were open to her. And some of the most elaborate ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... of an ideal character about its situations, though it seems to be all head, with a minimum of apparent heart, it none the less is universal in the sense that Restoration comedy is universal. It presents a type of vulgarity, of sporting spirit, that is common in every generation, whether in the time of Congreve and Wycherley, whether in the period of Sheridan or Oscar Wilde. Its wit is not dependent on local colour, though ostensibly it is written about New York. On its first presentment, it ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... deliberation and judicious reflection. And he could far better affirm his state of mind by his dress, than by any written words. Lying on the bed, cleanly shaved, wearing evening clothes, silk socks, patent leather shoes and white gloves? No, that would be vulgar, and all taint of vulgarity must be avoided. He must represent, even in a state of symbol, the young man, who having drunk of life to repletion, and finding that he can but repeat the same love draughts, says: "It is far too great a bore, I will go," and he goes out of life just as if he were leaving a fashionable soiree ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... shit to the most passionate expressions of love. That the one is likely to appear on the walls of latrines and the other to be cut in glass by a diamond is part of what Johnson would have called the "Hieroglyphic" significance of this collection. In Johnson's plays, there is the odd mixture of vulgarity and sublimity, the comic and the serious, the satirical and the nonsensical. If his dramas bear a resemblance to Jarry's Ubu Roi, so The Merry-Thought resembles the kind of anthology that Jarry might have put together to illustrate the absurd anarchy of the human spirit. Johnson, on the ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... audiences should see everything that he saw. If a Danish peasant actually lay at times in a drunken stupor on a dunghill, he saw no reason why Jeppe should not appear on the stage in an equally disgusting condition. If a peasant girl in life was not averse to simpering vulgarity, why should Lisbed talk any more circumspectly to Erasmus Montanus? Holberg, however, had none of the interest of the modern scientific naturalist in analyses of motive and conduct. His sense of fact was, therefore, ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... men of good taste who care for the best they know. Vulgarity is satisfaction with mean things. That is vulgar which is poor of its kind. There is a kind of music called rag-time,—vulgar music, with catchy tunes—catchy to those who do not know nor care for things better. There are men satisfied with rag-time music, with rag-time ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... itself to write of actual and physical feastings, and nuptials, and dances, actual nightly thefts of horses, actual fidelity of dogs and swineherds, actual intermarriages between deities and men, or that it is this seeming vulgarity which has won for him from the wisest of every age the title of the father of poetry? Degrading thought! fit only for the coarse and sense-bound tribe who can appreciate nothing but what is palpable to sense and sight! As soon believe the Christian scriptures, when they tell us of a deity ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... had resorted. This talkative person was the only other man in the house. Their discussion concerned the melancholy disappearance of wonder and adventure in these latter days, the prevalence of globe-trotting, the abolition of distance by steam and electricity, the vulgarity of advertisement, the degradation of men by civilisation, and many such things. Particularly was the talkative person eloquent on the decay of human courage through security, a security Mr. Ledbetter rather thoughtlessly ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... apprise his employer, delicately, of that which he believed was still news to him. And yet, from the easy way in which he read it, word for word, Garry was positive that all this which the New York daily blazoned forth with its customary mixture of snobbishness and vulgarity was no longer news to Steve. The latter's eyes lifted and dwelt long upon Fat ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... "A cheap, gaudy show, all bluster and vulgarity. Even the dancing is a mere parody. I early tired ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... halls in Capetown. I have visited similar entertainments in Constantinople, Cairo, Beyrout and other towns of the East, but I never saw anything to match some of these Capetown haunts for out-and-out vulgarity. There was, it is true, a general air of "patriotism" pervading them—but it was frequently the sort of patriotism which consists in getting drunk and singing "Soldiers of the Queen". On one occasion I remember a curious and typical incident at one of these music halls. ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... through Cairo with the same relief that he left the Riviera, resenting its social vulgarity so close to the imperial aristocracy of the Desert; he settled down into the peace of soft and silent little Helouan. The hotel in which he had a room on the top floor had been formerly a Khedivial Palace. It had the air of a palace still. He felt himself in a country-house, with lofty ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... so unhappily it yet commands amongst us, has raised up against the arts a barrier of the love of luxury and show, which is of all obvious hindrances the worst to overpass: the highest and most cultivated classes are not free from the vulgarity of it, the lower are not free from its pretence. I beg you to remember both as a remedy against this, and as explaining exactly what I mean, that nothing can be a work of art which is not useful; that is to ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... sculpture is relieved necessarily vary with the depth of the recess, there arise a series of problems, in deciding which the wholesome desire for emphasis by means of shadow is too often exaggerated by the ambition of the sculptor to show his skill in undercutting. The extreme of vulgarity is usually reached when the entire bas-relief is cut hollow underneath, as in much Indian and Chinese work, so as to relieve its forms against an absolute darkness; but no formal law can ever be given; for exactly the same thing may be beautifully done ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... embroidered over with symbols of the things it conceals from view. We are ourselves symbols, dwelling in a world of symbols—a world many times removed from that ultimate reality to which all things bear figurative witness; the commonest thing has yet some mystic meaning, and ugliness and vulgarity exist only ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... to which as yet her whole life had been a stranger; she was suddenly removed from turbulent vulgarity to the enjoyment of calm elegance; and the gentleness of her disposition, instead of being tyrannically imposed upon, not only made her loved with affection, but treated with the most scrupulous delicacy. Cecilia had her share in all the comfort she bestowed; she had now a friend to oblige, ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... nearly hidden by a figured blue-cloth blower, were seated two women—mother and daughter—Mrs. Hall, and Sarah, or Sally; for this was a part of the world where the latter modification had not as yet been effaced as a vulgarity by the march of intellect. The owner of the name was the young woman by whose means Mr. Darton proposed to put an end to his bachelor ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... the great financier's confidential secretary, expressed no emotion whatever. Sir Richard Haredale flashed contempt from his grey eyes—only to veil his scorn of the man's vulgarity beneath a cloud of tobacco smoke. Tom Sheard, of the Gleaner, drew down a corner of his mouth and felt ashamed of the acquaintance. Denby, the music-hall comedian, softly whistled those bars of a popular ballad set to the words, ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... however, it seemed that Eleanor, with her wiles, had completely trepanned and bewildered her father, cheated him out of his judgement, robbed him of the predilections and tastes of his life, and caused him to be tolerant of a man whose arrogance and vulgarity would, a few years since, have been unendurable to him. That the whole thing was as good as arranged between Eleanor and Mr. Slope there was no longer any room to doubt. That Mr. Harding knew that such was the case, even this could hardly be doubted. It was too manifest that he at any ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... fiercely, and yet let it be said that for delicacy, strength, sincerity, clarity, and all great graces of style, he is side by side with the noblest of our prose writers. Can it be that a few scattered drops of vulgarity in emphasis dim such a fire as this? Does so small a dead fly taint so big a pot of ointment? I will not be foolish enough to dogmatise on such a point, and yet I can find no other reasons than those ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... came a reasonable pretext, but not contemptuously. Mr. Marsh's aspect, if anything, pleased her; she liked these avoidances of the commonplace. Cecily did not fail to inspect the new arrival. She too was well aware that hatred of vulgarity constrains many persons who are anything but fools to emphasize their being in odd ways, and it might still—in spite of the impressionist water-colours—be proved that Mr. Marsh had a right to vary from the kindly race of men. She hoped he was really a person of some account; it delighted ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... fondly believed, to some sort of mastery of the scenic idea, which struck him as a very different matter now that he looked at it from within. He had had his early days of contempt for it, when it seemed to him a jewel, dim at the best, hidden in a dunghill, a taper burning low in an air thick with vulgarity. It was hedged about with sordid approaches, it was not worth sacrifice and suffering. The man of letters, in dealing with it, would have to put off all literature, which was like asking the bearer ...
— Nona Vincent • Henry James
... snubbed Mrs. Hannay effectually than you could snub a little down cushion. It would be impossible, she thought, to make any impression at all on that yielding surface. Impossible to take any impression from her, to say where her gaiety ended and her vulgarity began. ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... mild, so intensely and unconsciously original in the expression of his naive emotions before the spectacle of life, that a hasty inquirer into his idiosyncrasy might be excused for entirely missing the point of him. His new book (which helps to redeem the enormous vulgarity of a booming season), "A Shepherd's Life: Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs" (Methuen), is soberly of a piece with his long and deliberate career. A large volume, yet one arrives at the end of it with surprising ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... Athenaeum, discussing modern songs, observes that in the happy days of the eighteenth century "even the vulgar could not achieve vulgarity; to-day vulgarity is in the air, and only the strongest and most fastidious escape its taint." The accompanying lines are submitted as a modest protest against this sadly undemocratic and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... relieved her mind from the terrifying idea of having the laurels of her early days blasted by this degrading conquest, but he only changed indignation into distress. "What! our lovely, dutiful, modest, ingenuous Constantia, to marry that lump of sedition; that bag of cozening vulgarity; that rolling tumbril, laden with all the off-scourings of his own detestable party!—Brother, take my advice, and send the dear creature instantly to the King's quarters; there is no safety for her within Morgan's reach.—These republicans stop at nothing; ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... put away the two metaphors, and to come to the reality far greater than either of them, we can, whensoever we please, pass into the presence before which the splendours of an earthly monarch's court shrink into vulgarity, and attain to a real reception of the light that irradiates the true Holy Place, before which that which shone in the earthly shrine dwindles and darkens into a shadow. We may live with God, and in Him, and wrap a veil and 'privacy of glorious ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... thro' Earth, and Air, and Sea, A Voyage of Discovery! And let me add (to ward off strife) 5 For V—ker and for V—ker's Wife— She large and round beyond belief, A superfluity of beef! Her mind and body of a piece, And both composed of kitchen-grease. 10 In short, Dame Truth might safely dub her Vulgarity enshrin'd in blubber! He, meagre bit of littleness, All snuff, and musk, and politesse; So thin, that strip him of his clothing, 15 He'd totter on the edge of Nothing! In case of foe, he well might hide Snug in the collops of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... all things the charge of vulgarity, distrusting his first wife's taste, not being quite sure of his own. A compactly built, well-featured man of middle size and pale complexion; a man careful and correct in speech, manner and dress; in his gently reserved, modest bearing giving no ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... Everett's whole life has been a sermon from this text. There was, at least, this advantage in duelling, that it set a certain limit on the tongue. When Society laid by the rapier, it buckled on the more subtle blade of etiquette wherewith to keep obtrusive vulgarity at bay.' In this connection, I may be permitted to recall a playful remark of his upon another occasion. The painful divisions in the First Parish, A.D. 1844, occasioned by the wild notions in respect to the rights of (what Mr. Wilbur, so far as concerned the reasoning faculty, always called) ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... ignorance, of delicate perception and denseness. Those who expect saintliness as the first attribute of psychic advancement will certainly be disillusioned. These gifts and graces may appear, not only without any corresponding degree of culture and learning, but associated with a certain vulgarity of thought and conduct. The psychic is essentially impressionable, liable to mental contagion, easily stirred by suggestion. The tendency to instability, to emotional excess, is part of this receptivity ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... Smollett's books, such as Roderick Random, 1748, Peregrine Pickle, 1751, and Ferdinand Count Fathom, 1752, were more purely stories of broadly comic adventure than Fielding's. The latter's view of life was by no means idyllic; but with Smollett this English realism ran into vulgarity and a hard Scotch literalness, and character was pushed to caricature. "The generous wine of Fielding," says Taine, "in Smollett's hands becomes brandy of the dram-shop." A partial exception to this is to be found in his last and best novel, Humphrey Clinker, 1770. The influence of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... The familiar vulgarity of some of his phrases always vexed her, and 'roost' was one of these phrases. In a flash he fell from a creature engagingly masculine to the use-worn daily sharer of ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... words, the semi-tropical nature of the place, like its vulgarity and desecration, can be, and are, enormously exaggerated. But it is always hard to correct the exaggeration without exaggerating the correction. It would be absurd seriously to deny that Jerusalem is an Eastern town; but we may say it was Westernised without being ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... impaired by the various shocks which she had undergone? Did she not require every comfort, every attendance? Monster! ask the doctor! She would stay with her darling child in spite of insult and rudeness and vulgarity. (Rosey's father was a King's officer, not a Company's officer, thank God!) She would stay as long at least as Rosey's situation continued, at Boulogne, if not in London, but with her child. They might refuse to send her ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... same people paid as much as five dollars apiece for the privilege of being in the same room with him. It was quite impossible not to contrast Captain Peary in his attitude toward the crowd and Wilbur Wright. There seemed to be, and there will always remain, a certain vulgarity in the way the North Pole was discovered, and the way the whole world behaved in regard to it, and the secret seems to have been in Captain Peary's failure to be a Wilbur Wright. He allowed the Pole to be a Crowd affair. ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... you, Margaret, that girl will ruin us. All the rest are funny. Overwhelmingly, incredibly funny! And pathetic! Could anything be more pathetic! But that awful President strikes a wrong note: Vulgarity. Take her out of it and we'll have a thing the like of which New York had never seen, for Ophelia is a genius or I miss my guess and ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... attorney, "I am very glad that your father did not see it." Poor Dolly, during this conversation about the prince, sat angry and silent, thinking to herself in despair of what extremes of vulgarity even a first cousin of her own could be guilty. That she should be sitting at table with a girl who could boast that a reprobate foreigner had kissed his hand to her from the box of a fashionable four-horsed coach! For it was in that light that ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... placed a hideous receptacle for—well, for anything—pins, perhaps, buttons, small tiresomenesses of that kind. It was made of some glistening black material, and at its center there bloomed a fearful red cabbage rose, a rose all vulgarity, ostentation and importance. This monstrosity had been given to Rosamund as a thank-offering by a poor charwoman to whom she had been kind. It had been in constant use now for over three years. The charwoman knew this ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... with white hair thrown back in disorder, like a mane, with features that looked as if they had been cut out with a bill-hook, but which were so powerful, and in which there lay such a flame of life, that one forgot their vulgarity and ugliness; with black eyes under bushy eyebrows, which dilated and flashed like lightning, now were veiled as if in tears and then were filled with serene mildness, with a voice which now growled so as almost to terrify its hearers, and which would have filled the hall of some ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... "Ah, it's all very well for you to laugh at me because I have failed over my hobby; but I feel I'm right all the same, and I tell you that his ignorance, vulgarity—" ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... escape the uniformity of the older streets. The front door opened into a square hall, from the left side of which opened the dining-room, from the right the study, both of these rooms having bow windows, built with that broad sweep of curve which makes for beauty instead of vulgarity. The house, Rendel had told his wife with a smile when they came to it, he had furnished for her, with the exception of one room in it; the study he had arranged for himself. And it certainly was a room in which, to judge by ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... turned in the doorway and looked back. "I'm so glad to have my mind settled about it," she said, with a pathos which overcame her absurdity and vulgarity. "I do work awful hard, and it doesn't seem as if I could lose my money." She appeared suddenly tragic in her cheap muslin and her frizzes. She looked old and her ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... unusual powers. But as soon as the stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his definitions, his defects, into the conversation, it is all over. He has heard the first, the last and best, he will ever hear from us. He is no stranger now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension, are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes, he may get the order, the dress, and the dinner, but the throbbing of the heart, and the communications of the soul, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Hetty Hutter" returned the girl in a low, sweet voice, which nature, aided by some education, had preserved from vulgarity of tone and utterance-"I'm Hetty; Judith Hutter's sister; and Thomas ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... mention it; after which she got into her chair, and returned home; pitying Miss Belfield for the unjust partiality shewn to her brother, and excusing the proud shame he had manifested of his relations, from the vulgarity and selfishness of her who was at ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... speech in A Woman of No Importance: "All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of." When we hear such sayings as these—or the immortal "Vulgarity is the behaviour of other people"—we do not enquire too curiously into their appropriateness to character or situation; but none the less do they belong to ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... travelled on foot, unless some violence of weather drove him into a waggon; and at night he would go to a penny lodging, where he purchased clean sheets for sixpence. This practice Lord Orrery imputes to his innate love of grossness and vulgarity: some may ascribe it to his desire of surveying human life through all its varieties: and others, perhaps with equal probability, to a passion which seems to have been deeply fixed in his heart, the love of a shilling. In time he began to think that his attendance at Moor Park deserved ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... was devotedly attached, yet bore the loss with Christian resignation. He found relief in work, and in his duties. There were no scandals in his private life. He professed and seemed to feel the greatest reverence for religion, in the form which had been taught him. He detested vulgarity in every shape, as he did all ordinary vices, from which he was free. He was self-conscious, and loved attention and honors, but was not a slave to them, like most German officials. Nothing could be more tender and affectionate than his letters to his mother, to his wife, and to ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... was not a drawbridge day of moated castlewicks and donjon keeps. Damsels were no longer gagged and bound and carried to the altar, and there wedded perforce to dreadful ogres. Wherefore, a runaway match was not necessary. Moreover, it would be vulgar; and nothing could justify vulgarity. Dorothy and Richard should remain as they were. They must continue to love; they must learn to wait, and to take what advantage the ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... exception of Maryllia, Cicely and old Miss Fosby. The rings of pale blue vapour circled before Maryllia's eyes in a dim cloud,—she had seen the same kind of mixed smoking going on before, scores of times, and yet now—why was it that she felt vaguely annoyed by a sense of discrepancy and vulgarity She could not tell. Cicely watched her lovingly,—and every now and again Julian Adderley, waving away the smoke of his own cigar with one hand, studied her face and tried to fathom its expression. She spoke but little, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... that we have so few comedies from women. Dr. Doran mentions five Englishwomen who wrote successful comedies. Of these, three are now forgotten; one, Aphra Behn, is remembered only to be despised for her vulgarity. She was an undoubted wit, and was never dull, but so wicked and coarse that she forfeited all right ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... by some to be migratory. But he stays with us all winter. Cheerful. Noisy. Poor soloist. A spice of vulgarity in him. Dash of prose in his song. Appetite extraordinary. Eats his own weight in a short time. Taste for fruit. Eats with a relishing gulp, like Dr. Johnson's. Fond of cherries. Earliest mess of peas. Mulberries. Lion's share of the raspberries. Angleworms ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... the salon employed themselves in shouting disagreeable songs. Why is it that this tuneless shrieking of false notes and scoffing words delights these people? Why is it that this ostentatious parade of ugliness, this jarring vulgarity and grimacing is their way of finding expression and expansion in the great solitary and ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... person of a later epoch. She was distinctly loud in her manners and free and easy in her conversation.... At any rate, she was a healthier type than the pleasure-loving matron of the Second Empire, whose life was one whirl of unwholesome excitement. The vulgarity of thought and conduct, the destruction of all standards of dignity, which characterized the regime of Louis Napoleon's stock-jobbing adventurers, were reflected in the dress of the women. Never was female attire more extravagantly absurd.... Man, ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... given rise to this fallacy, this exaggeration of the vulgarity and curiosity of the press, is the distinction between the articles and the headlines; or rather the tendency to ignore that distinction. The few really untrue and unscrupulous things I have seen in American 'stories' ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... for vulgarity from you! But with the bourgeoisie, I suppose, it all comes down to dollars and cents. I have not considered ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... between Miss Sally and "Cousin Abner's girls" that was destined to work wonders for the latter, not only socially and mentally but spiritually as well, for it taught them that sincerity and honest kindliness of heart and manner are the best passports everywhere, and that pretence of any kind is a vulgarity not to be tolerated. This took time, of course. The Reed girls could not discard their snobbishness all at once. But in the end it was pretty ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... forehead, or on her snowy shoulder in blue and red letters such a phrase as this: "Try the Jigamaree Bitters!" Very much like this is the sort of advertising I am speaking of. It is not likely that I shall be charged with squeamishness on this question. I can readily enough see the selfishness and vulgarity of this particular sort ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... at once that Lady Patterdale was a perfect dear. One lost sight of her incredible vulgarity in view of the charming kindliness of her heart. And, after all, vulgarity is only comparative. In the sanctity of the little shop in Birmingham where Sir John had first laid the foundations of his fortune, aspirates could drop unheeded. What mattered ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... American commercial sculptor's idea of Romeo and Juliet at the moment when the Nurse separates them with a message from Lady Capulet. With artistic instinct he noted the stupidity of the composition, the vulgarity of the lines, the cheap ugliness of the group. In that singular abstraction which comes so frequently in moments of high emotion, he let his glance wander to the pictures on the wall, the enormities in embroidery which adorned the chair backs, the garish hues of the rug lying before the ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... call Mr. N. Levy, from his assurance, but it was not the vulgarity of a man accustomed to low and coarse society—rather the mauvais ton of a person not sure of his own position, but who has resolved to swagger into the best one he can get. When it is remembered that he had made his way in the world, and gleaned together an immense fortune, it is needless to ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... courts of France and Germany, (as detailed by the Duchess of Orleans,) in and succeeding the brilliant reign of Louis the Fourteenth—a period which was deemed the acme of elegance and refinement—exhibit a grossness, a vulgarity, and a coarseness, not to be found among the very lowest of our respectable poor. And the biography of the English Beau Nash, who attempted to reform the manners of the gentry, in the times of Queen Anne, exhibits violations of the rules of decency among ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Thus the vulgarity which Garratt Skinner chose to assume, the unattractive figure of "red-hot" Barstow, and the obvious swindle which was being perpetrated on Walter Hine, had the opposite effect to that which Skinner ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... refined habits of life, on average temper and character. Of deep and true gentlemanliness—based as it is on intense sensibility and sincerity, perfected by courage, and other qualities of race; as well as of that union of insensibility with cunning, which is the essence of vulgarity, I shall have to speak at ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... pretty idea this, of rustic innocence and rural retirement, of straw bonnets and shepherding, of the new school to which you belong and who are the enemies of everything permanent. You are destroying customs to make way for theories, manners for boon comradeship, chivalry for finance, elegance for vulgarity, religion for atheism, and character for sentiment. You are to blame for all the present disorders, and such as you have brought about the burning of your own chateau. No, Madame, I will not permit the marriage. How dare you propose ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... looking on him as too hopelessly middle-aged, to entertain any such evil designs, avowing freely that she likes him, and treating him very nearly as she does papa. It is my business to keep 'our aunt,' who, between ourselves, has, below the surface, the vulgarity of nature that high-breeding cannot eradicate, from startling the little humming-bird, before the net has been properly twined round her bright little heart. As far as I can see, he is much smitten, but very cautious in his ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... cry of despair. He moved mechanically toward the church and waked from his reverie to find himself jammed in a solid mass of humanity. Never before had he realized the utter vulgarity of a public wedding. Why should any one wish a crowd of curious fools to witness even the happiest wedding? Its meaning is surely frank enough without shouting it from the housetops. Should not its joys and mystery be something too shy and sweet ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... are not proposing to introduce sentimentality. I think you would be better advised to leave that vulgarity to ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... everything is healthy and pure," of which Leon Alberti tells us, are still held and cultivated in the old way under the old laws by the contadino and his padrone. This ancient order, quietness, and beauty, which you may find everywhere in the country round about Florence, is the true Tuscany. The vulgarity of the city, for even in Italy the city life has become insincere, blatant, and for the most part a life of the middle class, seldom reaches an hundred yards beyond the barriera: and this is a charm ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... she do? Of course she must remain with Hyacinth till the marriage, but she was resolved not to go to the wedding, although she had promised to do so. Both Hyacinth and Cecil really detested the vulgarity of a showy fashionable wedding as much as she did, and it was to be moderated, toned down as much as possible. But Anne couldn't stand it—any of it—and she wasn't ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... useful word that is! It has such a decent sound, almost respectable. We are a refined people, even in our sins, and I know no word in the English language we strive harder to avoid using in any of its forms than that word of brutal vulgarity, but terrific meaning—adultery. ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... will always be exercising his power of grasping realities: but a confused, careless, and discrediting tenure of the fiction will lead to as confused and careless reading of fact." Still further, Ruskin defends the vulgarity, or commonness of language, found in many of the tales as "of a wholesome and harmless kind. It is not, for instance, graceful English, to say that a thought 'popped into Catherine's head'; but it nevertheless is far better, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... is a type at once the most anomalous and the most vulgar. Why he is anomalous need not be explained, but the essence of his vulgarity lies in his entire absence of a sanctioning background. It is not, when all is said, so strange a matter that anyone reared in an atmosphere of historic ceremonial and precedent should betray an inherent leaning toward shams and vanities. But if there is anything ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... me!" she cried. "But it's a part of the vulgarity of the whole business. Actors, authors, managers, you're ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... acquired the vigor and agility to handle the javelin with consummate address. Contrasted as are his earlier and later styles, they have some essential qualities in common;—an exquisite fitness of expression; a total exemption from harshness, vulgarity, and all the vices that have grown so common; a method, a sequence, which is at once the closest and the least obtrusive to be found in any prose of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... fine and sensitive instincts of a gentleman were in him, and though in the very depths of his own conscience he knew himself to be as much of a social actor as Miraudin was a professional one,—though he was aware that his passions were as sensual, and therefore as vulgar, (for sensuality is vulgarity), there was a latent pride in him which forbade him to set himself altogether on the same level. And now as he walked away haughtily, his fine aristocratic head lifted a little higher in air than usual, he ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... amiable, estimable qualities in a character, I think that I might esteem, love, and marry him, even though he had a vulgar name and vulgar connexions. I fairly acknowledge, however, that it must be something superior in the man's character which could balance the objection to vulgarity ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... the human figure, to make of it a vile arabesque, a shameful sight, is the besetting temptation of the younger generation. Naturally, it is good to get away from the saccharine and the rococo, but vulgarity is always vulgarity and true art is never vulgar. However, Kubin has plenty of precedents. A ramble through any picture-gallery on the Continent will prove that human nature was the same five hundred years ago as it was in the Stone ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... his appreciation, something recognized but unfelt, and therefore not really understood. This deadness came through into his work. Lacking genuine inspiration, struggling in consequence to impart life by tricks and conventions, he occasionally allowed himself to tumble into downright vulgarity. Suddenly, and without renouncing any ancient loyalty, he has come to life. It is Watteau that inspires him still; but the essential Watteau—Watteau the painter—not that superficies which is more or less familiar to every hack, be he ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... brutal partisan insolence of Cavallotti and his allies in the Chamber. As individual, as soldier, and as minister, Robilant was the type of the Italian at his best. Very few of the extreme Left in the Italian Chamber made any pretensions to a comprehension of the nature of a gentleman, and the vulgarity of the outbreak which provoked his resignation—it was on the occasion of the disaster of Dogali—was of a nature which only a hardened politician could adapt himself to. It was my first experience of the indecencies of Italian parliamentarism, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... was with an American woman of awful vulgarity. I asked her if she was busy, like everyone else in this place, and ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... that I know of, is in the few lines of Milton on the Creation. The only example of a proper manner of contribution to natural history is in White's Letters from Selborne. You know I have always spoken of Bewick as pre-eminently a vulgar or boorish person, though of splendid honor and genius; his vulgarity shows in nothing so much as in the poverty of the details he has collected, with the best intentions, and the shrewdest sense, for English ornithology. His imagination is not cultivated enough to enable him ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... talked in the same pulverous fashion, the words came very differently from the two mouths. In the speech of the mother was more than a tone of the vulgarity of a conscious right to lay down the law, of the rudeness born of feeling above obedience and incapable of error—a rudeness identical with that of the typical vulgar duchess; the daughter's tone was playful, but dainty in its playfulness, and not without ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... I understood the vital principle of the Friends' Meeting House, and realised how much of the heat and vulgarity of life the best Quaker tradition buries under the cool, deep waves of its invaluable Silence. To such artists in life the lack of speech is not repression—far from it. Myself, I have never lived more generously than in that wonderful ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... court?" said Bones testily. "Good Heavens, lad! Why this jolly old vulgarity? No, dear boy, live ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... saying "B-o-w-f-e-e" seemed to reverberate through the apartment, I suddenly comprehended the spirit of Charleston: understood that, compared with Charleston, Boston is as a rough mining camp, while New York hardly exists at all, being a mere miasma of vulgarity. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... the plaster crumbling away revealed a fine wooden building which for the last two centuries had been concealing its splendid carved beams beneath a wretched coat of whitewash. So also did Germaine, divested by danger of her superficial vulgarity, suddenly show her mettle and prove herself the daughter of a ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... one or two anecdotes which, although given without comment, show the narrowness and vulgarity of the man. Among his slaves was a certain worthless cobbler named Felicio; as the cobbler was quite useless, Epaphroditus sold him, and by some chance he was bought by some one of Caesar's household, and made Caesar's cobbler. Instantly Epaphroditus ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... again one will see a flock of English sparrows, and the sweet-voiced song-sparrow endeavors to make up for the vulgarity of its English cousin by the delicate softness of its ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... minutes, to see whether the girl would vouchsafe him a smile, or a parting word of consolation. But her enthusiasm of the morning was quite died out, or she chose to be in a different mood. She fell to joking about the dowdy appearance of Lady Betty, and mimicked the vulgarity of Mrs. Steele; and then she put up her little hand to her mouth and yawned, lighted a taper, and shrugged her shoulders, and dropping Mr. Esmond a saucy curtsy, sailed off ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 215,000 retail liquor houses in this nation. Allowing 20 feet to each, it gives us an unbroken liquor front of about 781 miles. Just think of it! Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of profanity and vulgarity. Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of Sabbath-breaking. Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of drunkard-making. Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of filth, debauchery, anarchy, dynamite and bombs. [Applause]. Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of political corruption; ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... observed William Marion Reedy, "1601 is to Twain's whole works what the 'Droll Stories' are to Balzac's. It is better than the privately circulated ribaldry and vulgarity of Eugene Field; is, indeed, an essay in a sort of primordial humor such as we find in Rabelais, or in the plays of some of the lesser stars that drew their light from Shakespeare's urn. It is humor or fun such as one expects, let us say, from the ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... Zimmerman, "is the safest response for all the contradiction that arises from impertinence, vulgarity, ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... had a compass with us. Our course was as straight as we could go, to a village on the opposite side of the lake, called Brightfold. Nothing happened for the first quarter of an hour—and then, by the living Jingo (excuse my vulgarity), we ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... which the world regularly commits upon pioneers and artists. For all the superb vitality of her frontier, it faces—and she knows it faces—the degradation of its wild freedom and beauty by clumsy towns, obese vulgarity, the uniform of a monotonous standardization. Her heroic days endure but a brief period before extinction comes. Then her high-hearted pioneers survive half as curiosities in a new order; and their spirits, transmitted to the artists who are their legitimate successors, take up the old struggle ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... had taken refuge in religion as in a cool, refreshing oasis in the desert of vulgarity and monotony in her life. Her heart would swell with pride every time a priest would say to her in ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... domestic life. After the labors of the day are over, the men gather around the fire, and the social hour of the day is spent in yarning. The stories told may run from the sublime to the ridiculous, from a true incident to a base fabrication, or from a touching bit of pathos to the most vulgar vulgarity. ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... late," answered Gabrielle, mournfully. "Listen, wise Ruth, I shall be a mother soon; and to my child, if it is spared, and to you, I devote myself. You have seen the Misses Erminstoun—you have seen vulgarity, insolence, and absurd pretension; they have taunted me with my ignorance, and I will not change it now. The blood of the De Courcys and O'Briens has made me a lady; and all the wealth of the Indies can not make them so. No, Ruth, I will remain in ignorance, and yet tower above them, high as the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... glance to perceive that this young captain had not been limited in resources in the furnishing of his ship. Within the small compass of a stateroom he had compressed comfort and luxury. Yet there was no ostentation or vulgarity displayed. The owner had been guided by the one desire for decent ease and a certain regard for the eye. The left side of the room was occupied by the two bunks made up with the immaculate neatness characterizing all things aboard a good ship. The center of the room, was ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... people whom he did not like. "Procul este, profani!" exclaimed a delighted aesthete on being introduced to it. But this was never to be the attitude of Rickie. He did not love the vulgar herd, but he knew that his own vulgarity would be greater if he forbade it ingress, and that it was not by preciosity that he would attain to the intimate spirit of the dell. Indeed, if he had agreed with the aesthete, he would possibly ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... Priscilla, however, knew better. To her unfortunately the life within the walls seemed of a quite blatant vulgarity; pervaded by lacqueys, by officials of every kind and degree, by too much food, too many clothes, by waste, by a feverish frittering away of time, by a hideous want of privacy, by a dreariness unutterable. To her it was a perpetual behaving according to the ideas officials had formed as to ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... book presently under notice, the author appears (under the thin disguise of Mr. Michael Angelo Titmarsh) in 'propria persona' as the popular author, the contributor to Punch, the remorseless pursuer of unconscious vulgarity and feeble-mindedness, launched upon a tour of relaxation to the Rhine. But though exercising, as is the wont of popular authors in their moments of leisure, a plentiful reserve of those higher qualities to which they are indebted for their fame, his professional ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... repeated was a sample of many others that were constantly irritating the poor child, even amid her first hours of homesickness. Unlike Mary Fuller, she had no occupation, for Mrs. Farnham considered usefulness of any kind the height of vulgarity. Indeed! she was so remarkably sensitive on this subject that a very shrewd observer might have fancied that the lady had known a little more of labor, in her younger days, than she was ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... nineteenth century has sought to degrade Love; to define it as purely physical. The result has been a corresponding degradation of art, and even literature has lost much of its lofty idealism. Nudity has become a synonym of vulgarity; Love, of lust. "Evil be to him who evil thinks." True Love never seeks to degrade its object; on the contrary, it magnifies every virtue, endows it with divinest attributes, and guards its chastity, or ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... be, are not within the scope of the present work. In the following humorous production, however, we have a composition of the last century. It is the oldest and most popular Lancashire song we have been able to procure; and, unlike most pieces of its class, it is entirely free from grossness and vulgarity.] ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... perfect of London clothes, and there were superb diamonds in his shirt, while a priceless sapphire sparkled, in a plain gold setting, on his broad, brown hand. He is the only man of his time who can wear precious stones without vulgarity. He moves like a king and has the air of the old school in every gesture. His dark eyes are brighter than his diamonds, and his look, for all his white beard and seventy years, is as young and fresh as the rose ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... Norman style is the French word naif. Littre says that naif comes from natif, as vulgar comes from vulgus, as though native traits must be simple, and commonness must be vulgar. Both these derivative meanings were strange to the eleventh century. Naivete was simply natural and vulgarity was merely coarse. Norman naivete was not different in kind from the naivete of Burgundy or Gascony or Lombardy, but it was slightly different in expression, as you will see when you travel south. Here at Mont-Saint-Michel we have only a mutilated trunk of an eleventh-century ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... gaze, a sense of something shoddy oppresses me, of tinsel and glitter and flamboyance: a feeling that here is no true greatness, no sphinx-like sublimity. A shadow of the world and the flesh falls across the brooding figure, a Napoleonic vulgarity coarsens the features, there is a Mephistophelian wrinkle in the corner ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... connected with the deepest powers of the art. I hope, when I have thought of them more, to be able to explain some of the laws which relate to nobleness and ignobleness; that ignobleness especially which we commonly call "vulgarity" and which, in its essence, is one of the most curious subjects of inquiry connected with human feeling. Others I never hope to explain, laws of expression, bearing simply on simple matters; but, for that very reason, more influential ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... flesh. Peals of laughter. A breathless pianola. The tripping of dancing-feet. Voices husked with drink and voices soft with love. The shrill accents of vulgarity. Hustling waiters. Shop-girls. Bourgeois couples. Tired families of four and upward. Sleeping children. A boy selling candy. The crying ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... lawn beside Margaret, indeed, with the air and assurance of a magnificent peacock. He was perhaps a shade less over-dressed than when she had seen him last, but there was an astonishing lustre about everything he wore, and even his almond-shaped eyes were bright almost to vulgarity; but though he tired the sight, as a peacock does in the sun, it was impossible not ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... Jan Steen usually represent merry-makings, and the frolics and festivities of the ale-house, which he treated with a characteristic expression of humorous drollery, that compensated for the vulgarity of his subjects. He sometimes painted interiors, domestic assemblies, conversations, mountebanks, etc., which he generally accompanied with some facetious trait of wit or humor, admirably rendered. Some of his works of this description ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... wide-awake by a whipping. It is largely a matter of convention, the exercise being endured (I am told) with pride by the infants of our aristocracy, but not tolerated by the lower classes. I am afraid that I proved my inherent vulgarity by being made, not contrite or humble, but furiously angry by this caning. I cannot account for the flame of rage which it awakened in my bosom. My dear, excellent Father had beaten me, not very severely, without ill-temper, and with the most ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... she was one of the few relations still left to the Saracinesca. The daughter of a cousin of the Prince, she would make a good wife for Giovanni, and would bring sunshine into the house. There was a tinge of vulgarity in her manner; but, like many elderly men of his type, Saracinesca pardoned her this fault in consideration of her noisy good spirits and general good-nature. He was very much annoyed at hearing that his son had offended ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... "Blair may be a homely and even a gloomy poet in the eye of fastidious criticism; but there is a masculine and pronounced character even in his gloom and homeliness that keeps it most distinctly apart from either dulness or vulgarity. His style pleases us like the powerful expression of a countenance without regular beauty." He excels most in describing the darkest and most terrible ideas suggested by the subject, and seems almost to exult, while depicting the triumphs of the grave over the rich, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... Vulgarity of speech is the peculiar delight of a schoolgirl off duty. She spends so much of her life under the all-pervading eye of authority, she is so drilled, and lectured, and ruled and regulated, that, when the eye ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... become harsh only in his hatred of the factitious and the transitory; dreaming of working, not for the polite society of a time, but for all humanity in the gravest hours of its history. Perhaps, even, it was this revolt against the vulgarity of the time which had made him throw himself, in bold defiance, into theories and their application. And the work remained human, overflowing as it was with an infinite pity for ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... Mary, such as every Catholic child might be supposed to be familiar with. But it was fixed in such a way as to bring the terrors and raptures of the mystics, of a S. Catharine or a S. Teresa, within the reach of all; to place spiritual experience a la portee de tout le monde. The vulgarity is only equaled by the ingenuity and psychological adroitness of the method. The soul inspired with carnal dread of the doom impending over it, passed into almost physical contact with the incarnate Saviour. The designed effect was to induce a vivid and varied hypnotic dream of thirty ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... the style to the subject. It is in such passages, accordingly, that we are most frequently offended with low and inelegant expressions; and that the language, which was intended to be simple and natural, is found oftenest to degenerate into mere slovenliness and vulgarity. It is in vain, too, to expect that the meanness of those parts may be redeemed by the excellence of others. A poet, who aims at all at sublimity or pathos, is like an actor in a high tragic character, and must sustain his dignity ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... return of the tempest, and the involution of the labyrinth. And although my readers say that I wrote then better than I write now, I cannot refer you to the passage without asking you to pardon in it what I now hold to be the petulance and vulgarity of expression, disgracing the importance of the truth it contains. A little while ago, without displeasure, you permitted me to delay you by the account of a dispute on a matter of taste between my father and me, in which he was quietly and unavailingly right. It seems ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... man who stoops to vulgarity should be ashamed. Profanity is coarse and degrading; vulgarity is positively low and filthy. The youth who is careful to keep his clothes and his body clean should be careful to keep his mouth clean. Let nothing go into it or come out of it that ...
— Frank Merriwell's Nobility - The Tragedy of the Ocean Tramp • Burt L. Standish (AKA Gilbert Patten)
... elegance which reigns through the whole establishment. The master of the mansion, perhaps an old and valued schoolfellow:—his wife, a well-bred, accomplished, and still beautiful woman—cordial, without vulgarity—refined, without pretension—and informed, without a shade of blue! Their children!... But my reader will complete the picture, and imagine, better than I can describe, how one of my temperament must suffer at quitting ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 273, September 15, 1827 • Various
... where his more fashionable companions would not see him. He dressed with the utmost simplicity, but always in clean garments, well cut, and which presented his admirable form to great advantage. Never did he allow himself to sink to the vulgarity of a slatternly appearance. He was ever ready, when engaged in the most busy employments of his office, to receive without a blush, any guests, however high, who might ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... dreadful, since Tolstoy will do enough for all. His work is the justification of the enthusiasms and expectations built upon literature. Thirdly, Tolstoy takes a firm stand, he has an immense authority, and so long as he is alive, bad tastes in literature, vulgarity of every kind, insolent and lachrymose, all the bristling, exasperated vanities will be in the far background, in the shade. Nothing but his moral authority is capable of maintaining a certain elevation in the moods and tendencies of literature so called. Without him they ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... patroness, but hints were already in the air on the subject of ingratitude. Some said he lacked ambition; others murmured dark conjectures about his heartlessness. It was left to the Lady Augusta's fellow-labourers in the sphere of beneficence to blurt out, with odious vulgarity, that he would never marry her in this world. She entered the room that evening in her haughtiest manner, for Pole-Knox was following close upon her heels, and she wished to justify the extreme deference which he showed her so properly ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... protested, greatly tended to make them incredulous. It was not till the statements of scholars and gentlemen, like Henry Martyn and Bishop Heber, became generally known, that the work was looked on without sarcasm, provoked by vulgarity, even ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Randall expressed himself with good sense, though not with much generosity, he excused his participation in the vulgarity of such a conflict by a bitter but short allusion to the obstinacy and ignorance of the village boor; and did not do what you, my kind reader, certainly would have done under similar circumstances—viz. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... creative force in the world; it has made thousands of saints and thousands of heroes; it has revolutionized innumerable individual lives. It has changed people from selfishness to unselfishness; from cowardice to courage; from despair to hope; from vulgarity to decency; from barrenness of life to fruitfulness. When religion can change the lives of millions, when it can produce supreme creations in art, it is a force ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... but quiet and dignified. There was not the smallest touch of vulgarity about her. The coarse readiness to accept publicity which distinguishes the underbred woman, whether in England or America, the desire to show off a foreign emancipation from what appear ridiculous French rules, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... his will, forced herself upon his imagination, he tried to remember her vulgarity, her underbred manners, her excessive use of scent. She had merely played with him, without thinking or caring what the result to him might be. She was bent on as much enjoyment as possible without exposing herself to awkward consequences; ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... her by the wrists. To-day it had been as much as he could do to let poor little Katie kiss his hand. Better be vulgar with Byron than a noodle with Dorset! he bitterly reflected... Still, noodledom was nearer than vulgarity to dandyism. It was a less flagrant lapse. And he had over Byron this further advantage: his noodledom was not a matter of common knowledge; whereas Byron's vulgarity had ever needed to be in the glare of the footlights of Europe. The world would say of him that he laid down his life for a ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... which on coming back to Italy I find even stronger than when it was first received is that of the contrast between the fecundity of the great artistic period and the vulgarity there of the genius of to-day. The first few hours spent on Italian soil are sufficient to renew it, and the question I allude to is, historically speaking, one of the oddest. That the people who but three hundred years ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... youth. But this was still the language—and the fierce language—of revolt! The decadence of English art and artists, the miserable commercialism of the Academy, the absence of any first-rate teaching, of any commanding traditions, of any 'school' worth the name—the vulgarity of the public, from royalty downward, the snobbery of the rich world in its dealings with art: all these jeremiads which he recited were much the same—mutatis mutandis—as those with which, half a century ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... do it? One likes to see what is going on, I suppose. The woman's vulgarity could not ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... state, with feelings exclusively belonging to the individual. Had any one told her it were possible to give her child to any but a gentleman, she would have wondered at the want of feeling that could devote the softness of Jane or Emily, to the association with rudeness or vulgarity. It was the misfortune of Lady Moseley to limit her views of marriage to the scene of this life, forgetful that every union gives existence to a long line of immortal beings, whose future welfare depends greatly on the force of early ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... This fault in conversation is the most difficult of all to amend, and it is unfortunately the one to which those who strive to express themselves correctly are peculiarly liable. Its effect is bad, for though it is not like slang, vulgar in itself, it betrays an effort to conceal vulgarity. It may generally be remedied by avoiding any word or phrase which you may suspect yourself of using for the purpose of creating an effect. Whenever you imagine that the employment of any mere word or sentence will ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... him, so she never made uncomfortable inquiries. He was bountiful to her. He had been bountiful to many others. She clothed and informed all his acts of beneficence with the motives which became them. If she was ever shocked by his vulgarity, he never knew it by any word of hers, in disapproval. If she had suspicions, she did not betray them. Her children were trained to respect their father, and among them she found the satisfactions of her life. He had long ceased to be her companion. As an associate, friend, lover, ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... on Saturday evening, March 4, 1797. Up to that time no such cut and thrust weapon had been seen in America, and no such truculent foul-mouthed editor had plucked a pen out of his pilcher by the ears on this side of the Atlantic. We had known editors who were learned in profanity and gifted in vulgarity, but none that had just such a bitter trick of invective as William Cobbett, or "Peter Porcupine," as he was pleased to call himself. He was born at Farnham, in Surrey, in 1762, within a stone's throw ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... with his folly, Sholto's mean conceit, George's hypocrisy, that man's vulgarity, Mrs. Fairfax's affectation, your insufferable amiability, and the dreariness of those concertina people, I feel so wretched that I could find it in my heart to ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... be confident in it. His is a homespun style, not a manufactured one; and what a difference is there between its homeliness, and the flippant vulgarity of the Roger L'Estrange and Tom Brown school! If it is not a well of English undefiled to which the poet as well as the philologist must repair, if they would drink of the living waters, it is a clear stream of current English—the vernacular speech of his age, sometimes ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 469. Saturday January 1, 1831 • Various
... this mild faith. It made him fairly grimace, in private, to think that a child of his should be both ugly and overdressed. For himself, he was fond of the good things of life, and he made a considerable use of them; but he had a dread of vulgarity, and even a theory that it was increasing in the society that surrounded him. Moreover, the standard of luxury in the United States thirty years ago was carried by no means so high as at present, and Catherine's clever father took the old-fashioned view of the education ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... be expected from the examples set them by the gods in whom they professed to believe. Says MAHAFFY: "At no period did the nation attain to that high standard which is the great feature in Germanic civilization. Even the Romans, with all their coarseness and vulgarity, stood higher in this respect. But neither in the Iliad nor the Odyssey is there, except in phrases, any reprobation of deceit as such. To deceive an enemy is meritorious; to deceive a stranger, innocent; to deceive even a friend, perfectly unobjectionable, if any ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... minute longer to produce what he had in mind. "What IS splendid, as we call it, is this extraordinary freedom and good humour of our intercourse and the fact that we do care—so independently of our personal interests, with so little selfishness or other vulgarity—to get at the idea of things. The beautiful specimen Mrs. Brook had just given me of that," he continued to Mitchy, "was what made me break out to you about her when you came in." He spoke to one friend, but he looked at the other. ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... Victualling Office, cannot take any thing but Fuller's Earth. Much it should seem, therefore, depends upon a name; and as a soft sound is at all times pleasing to the listener—to have denominated this Sporting Society the Gin Club would not only have proved barbarous to the ear, but the vulgarity of the chant might have deprived it of many of its elegant friends. It is a subject, however, which it must be admitted has a good deal of Taste belonging to it—and as a Sporting Man would be nothing if he was not flash, the Daffy Club meet under ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... who would insult a new teacher without cause, it would affect the dignity of this school. The spirit of education is not only in imparting technical knowledges, but also in encouraging honest, ennobling and samurai-like virtues, while eliminating the evil tendency to vulgarity and roughness. If we are afraid of reaction or further trouble, and satisfy ourselves with make-shifts, there is no telling when we can ever get rid of this evil atmosphere[G]. We are here to eradicate this ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
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