"Facile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... other members of the old Committee, view these innovations with sullen acquiescence; but Barrere, whose frivolous and facile spirit is incapable of consistency, even in wickedness, perseveres and flourishes at the tribune as gaily as ever.—Unabashed by detection, insensible to contempt, he details his epigrams and antitheses against Catilines ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... Mr. Woodhouse's objections to the marriage of his daughter are overpowered by the fears of house-breakers, and the comfort which he hopes to derive from having a stout son-in-law resident in the family; and the facile affections of Harriet Smith are transferred, like a bank bill by indorsation, to her former suitor, the honest farmer, who had obtained a favourable opportunity of renewing his addresses. Such is the simple plan of a story which we peruse with pleasure, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... the comment on his wit' unchallengeably new: instances of cousinship germane to the phrase will recur to you. But it has to be noted that it was a phrase of assault; it was ostentatiously battery; and I would venture to remind you, friend, that among the elect, considering that it is as fatally facile to spring the laugh upon a man as to deprive him of his life, considering that we have only to condescend to the weapon, and that the more popular necessarily the more murderous that weapon is,—among the elect, to which it is ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... nationality became accentuated with the fervent aspiration for liberty.... These are the circumstances which have determined a special psychology composed of joy and ecstasy—both elements which, in minds that are laden with all the influences of the East, produce a facile and dangerous excitement. On the other hand there survives in the Italian population the hatred against the Croatian supremacy, a hatred which is comprehensible but which in time must give place to other sentiments, rendering possible a fair ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... shattering book than the Essay on Population has ever been, or ever will be, written. It was aimed at the facile Liberalism of the Deists and Atheists of the eighteenth century; it made as clear as daylight that all forms of social reconstruction, all dreams of earthly golden ages must be either futile or insincere or both, until the problems of human increase ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... facile inveniatis loco, Ne nimio opere sumat operam, si quis conventum velit Vel vitiosum vel sine vitio, vel probum vel inprobum. Qui perjurum convenire volt hominem, ito in comitium; Qui mendacem et gloriosum, apud Cloacinae sacrum. [Ditis damnosos maritos sub basilica quaerito. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... several minutes, for the struggle in Adam's mind was not easily decided. Facile natures, whose emotions have little permanence, can hardly understand how much inward resistance he overcame before he rose from his seat and turned towards Arthur. Arthur heard the movement, and turning round, met the ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... gliding out of the uncomfortable obesity of youth, her complexion a soft, creamy hazel, her wide eyes dreamy and idle ... a not unattractive type of vacuous, facile, and voluptuous beauty" ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... pontificate, Benedict the Eleventh restored to the chapters of cathedrals the right of electing their own bishops. Upon his death, Philip secured the elevation to the pontifical dignity of an ecclesiastic wholly devoted to French interests, the facile Clement the Fifth, who, in return for the honor conferred upon him, removed the seat of the Papacy to Avignon. Here for the seventy years of the so-called "Babylonish Captivity," the Popes continued to reside, too completely subject to the influence of the French ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... Sonia was largely due to its description in a facile, popular and yet eminently chaste and polished style, of the social and political situation in England for a half generation before and during the early stages of the war. This description Stephen McKenna ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... the conclusion that the only true Real is the Ideal. It was this tendency which chiefly aroused the ridicule of his critics, and from the 'Sredwardlyttonbulwig' of Thackeray to the 'Condensed Novels' burlesque of Bret Harte, they harp upon that facile string, The thing satirized is after all not cheaper than the satire. The ideal is the true real; the only absurdity lies in the pomp and circumstance wherewith that simple truth is introduced. There is a 'Dweller on the Threshold,' but it, or he, is nothing more than that doubt concerning ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... atmosphere, and even the appearance, of the Board Room. It was almost as if the apartment itself was becoming historic, like those chambers they pointed out to the tourist wherein crowned heads had slept. The manner of the Marquis lent itself charmingly to this illusion. He spoke in a facile, mellifluous voice, and as fluently as if he had been at work for a long time preparing a dissertation on this subject, instead of taking it up now by chance. In his tone, in his gestures, in the sustained friendliness of his facial expressions, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... Charlotte Grandison—who are by no means particularly comic and who are sometimes very particularly vulgar. But of tragedy positive, in the bourgeois kind, he had no small command, and in the middle business—in affairs neither definitely comic nor definitely tragic—he was wonderfully prolific and facile. His immense and heart-breaking lengthiness is not mere verbosity: it comes partly from the artist's natural delight in a true and newly found method, partly from a still more respectably artistic desire not to do the work negligently. ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... anxiety of the sea, the profound mysteries of the wheeling stars and the silence of the ocean at dawns, had given him, he dimly realized, an inarticulate reverence for the supreme mystery of creation. He was unable to put it into words or facile prayer but it was the guarded foundation of most that he was, and it bred in him a contempt for lesser signs. The religion of his birth, the faith of Taou Yuen, the fetishism of the Zanzibar Coast, he had regarded as equally important, or futile—the mere wash of the immensity ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... fuerint. Quod vero DE ARTE POETICA idem Quintilianus adjangat, nihil commaveor, cum et in epistolis praecepta de aliqua re tradi possint, ab eodemque in omnibus pene, et in iis ad Scaevam & Lollium praecipue jam factum videatur, in quibus breviter eos instituit, qua ratione apud majores facile versarentur. ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... standing with his hand upon the table, felt suddenly inclined to laugh. Facile though his brain was, the change of issues was too tremendous for him to readily assimilate it. He picked up a cigarette from an open box, with shaking fingers, lit it, and threw himself into an easy-chair. He was all the time quite unconscious of ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... equally delights the schoolboy and the sage, and makes, in its own right, the quality of epics. Compared with this, all other purposes in literature, except the purely lyrical or the purely philosophic, are bastard in nature, facile of execution, and feeble in result. It is one thing to write about the inn at Burford, or to describe scenery with the word-painters; it is quite another to seize on the heart of the suggestion and make a country famous with a legend. ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... heart and exalt his ambition. He had yielded to the fleshly impulse, and the measure of his lapse was the sincerity of that nobler desire; he had not the excuse of the ordinary man, nor ever tried to allay his conscience with facile views of life. What times innumerable had he murmured her name, until it was become to him the only woman's name that sounded in truth womanly—all others cold to his imagination. What long evenings had he passed, yonder by the Black Sea, ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... pronounced, "Citius Maevii Aeneadem quam Scribleri istrus tragoediam hanc crediderium, cujus autorem Senecam ipsum tradidisse haud dubitarim:" and the great professor Burman hath styled Tom Thumb "Heroum omnium tragicorum facile principem:" nay, though it hath, among other languages, been translated into Dutch, and celebrated with great applause at Amsterdam (where burlesque never came) by the title of Mynheer Vander Thumb, the burgomasters receiving it with that reverent and silent attention which becometh ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... made him for the task. Observing this, and thinking how many an American would be taken aback and dumbfounded by being called on for a dinner speech, he could not but doubt the correctness of the general opinion, that Englishmen are naturally less facile of public speech than ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... who, unhappily, purported to belong to the very class he was used to victimize, and, moreover, had a gold watch, and, doubtless, a full purse. Nothing more ridiculously inopportune could have befallen me, or more dangerous; for his class are as cosmopolitan as waiters and concierges, with as facile a gift for language and as unerring a scent for nationality. Sure enough, the fellow recognized mine, and positively challenged me with it in fairly fluent English with a Yankee twang. Encumbered with the mythical ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... aliquid addere facile est, therefore a man, after having studied the principles of his subject, will have to make himself acquainted with the more recent information written upon it. In general, the following rule holds good here as elsewhere, namely: what is new is seldom good; because ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Quodsi[14] regum atque imperatorum animi virtus[15] in pace ita ut in bello valeret, aequabilius atque constantius sese res humanae haberent, neque aliud alio[16] ferri, neque mutari ac misceri omnia cerneres. Nam imperium facile his artibus retinetur, quibus initio partum est. Verum ubi pro labore desidia, pro continentia et aequitate libido atque superbia invasere, fortuna simul cum moribus immutatur. Ita imperium semper ad optimum quemque[17] a minus bono transfertur. ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... worthless by the effects of this almost racial prejudice. Literal translation of the more flamboyant kind of French writing has been, even with some of our greatest, an effective, if a somewhat facile, means of procuring a laugh. Furthermore, it has to be remembered that this application of ornate style to prose fiction is undoubtedly to some extent an extraneous thing in the consideration of the novel itself. It is "a grand set off" ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... an obstinate, vain, cruel libertine. Peregrine was precisely the man to fall in love with Emilia pour le bon motif, and then attempt to ruin her, though she was the sister of his friend, by devices worthy of Lovelace at his last and lowest stage. Peregrine's overwhelming vanity, swollen by facile conquests, would inevitably have degraded him to this abyss. The intrigue was only the worst of those infamous practical jokes of his, in which Smollett takes a cruel and unholy delight. Peregrine, in fact, is a hero of naturalisme, except that his fits of generosity ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... vocabulary do we wish to acquire? A facile, readily used one? An accurate one? Or one as nearly as may be comprehensive? The three kinds do not necessarily coexist. The possession of one may even hinder and retard the acquisition of another. Thus if we seek a ready vocabulary, an accurate vocabulary may cause us to halt and hesitate for words ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... at the Royal Institution were of some help to me. I attended courses by Owen, Tyndall, Huxley, and Bain. Of these, Huxley was FACILE PRINCEPS, though both Owen and Tyndall were second to no other. Bain was disappointing. I was a careful student of his books, and always admired the logical lucidity of his writing. But to the mixed audience he had to lecture to - fashionable young ladies in their teens, and ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... without its heady charm for a girl with the facile, the almost tragic, adaptability of seventeen years. True, it was not married life as she had dreamed it; but it was her husband's life. ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... vaguely unhappy and unsatisfied, and he determines to glut his heart with literary fame. He goes, therefore, to New York, and succeeds as a poet beyond all his dreams of success. For ten years he is the most popular of authors; but he sickens of his facile triumph, and imagines that to be happy he must write to please himself, and not the multitude. He writes with this idea, but pleases nobody, and is as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... will stoop, week by week, to more practical research. "Le monde marche,'' as Renan hath it, "vers une sorte d'americanisme.... Peut-tre la vulgarit gnrale sera-t-elle un jour la condition du bonheur des lus. Nous n'avons pas le droit d'etre fort difficiles.'' We will be very facile, then, since needs must; remembering the good old proverb that "scornful dogs eat dirty puddings.'' But, ere we show Terminus the door, at least let us fling one stone at the shrieking sulphureous houses of damnation erected as temples in his honour, and dignified with his name! There, 'mid clangour, ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... which, under [393] normal circumstances, make for stability, for conservation; and they represent the will of the dead. They are inevitable to a militant state; they make the strength of that state; they render facile the creation and maintenance of formidable armies. But they are not conditions favourable to success in the future international competition,—in the industrial struggle for existence against societies incomparably more plastic, and ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... her awakened curiosity would be in no wise appeased by listening to the steady, pattering drone of Mr. Dorrance's oration. Oratorical he was to a degree that excited the secret amusement of the facile Southern youths about him. With them, the art of light conversation had been a study from boyhood, the topics suitable for and pleasing to ladies' ears carefully culled and adroitly handled. To amuse and entertain was their main ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... life was so carefully based swept away and replaced by another strange and grim to which their minds must rigidly conform. They return to the world of rest where humanity is still struggling to maintain the old scale. The instinct born of generations of tradition compels a facile reacceptance. They think: "The blood and mud and the hell's delight of the war are things of the past. We take up life where we left it five years ago; we come back to plough, lathe, counter, bank, office, and we shall carry on as though a Sleeping Beauty spell had ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... fire, knocking out his briar on a coal and carefully refilling and lighting that invaluable collaborator. With his data presently arranged in better mental order, he returned to the table and covered page after page with facile reasoning. Then the drowsiness which he could not altogether shake off crept upon him again, and staring at the words "Such societies have existed in fiction, now we have one existing in fact," he dropped into a doze—as the clock in the ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... enquire next morning what had been done to the rioters, and so he forbore. At any other time he would certainly have sent them home unpunished, but just now he was dominated by a wish that was more dominant than his good nature or his facile impulses. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Middle Ages. "Invenietur verbum istud, Humidum, nihil aliud quam nota confusa diversarum actionum, quae nullam constantiam aut reductionem patiuntur. Significat enim, et quod circa aliud corpus facile se circumfundit; et quod in se est indeterminabile, nec consistere potest; et quod facile cedit undique; et quod facile se dividit et dispergit; et quod facile se unit et colligit; et quod facile fluit, et in motu ponitur; et quod alteri corpori ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... sex. Her soul hated it; she cried aloud for equal treatment, for a share of the iron and rigour of life. Their manners were a mere cloak for contempt. If they could only be rude to a woman, it would be a welcome relief from this facile condescension. What had she or any woman with brains to do in that galley? They despised her kind, with the scorn of sultans who chose their women-folk for looks and graces. The thought was degrading, and a bitterness filled her heart ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... yourself upon your firmness; that when you have come to a decision, good or bad, nothing induces you to change it, so that your firmness sometimes resembles obstinacy. Your heart is good and your friendship strong, but neither tender nor facile. Your fear of being weak makes you hard. You are on your guard against all sensibility. You cannot refuse to render valuable services to your friends; you sacrifice your own interest to them, but you refuse them the slightest of favors. Kind and humane to all about ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... style, so chaste, simple and pure, is admirably adapted for this kind of writing, and he employs his facile and congenial pen, in the present instance, with entire success. 'About Old Story-Tellers' is made up of the best of the old stories, gathered from all sources, re-told in Mr. Mitchell's inimitable manner, and interwoven with lively sketches ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... some of Ida Palliser's pen-and-ink sketches before to-day—had seen herself represented in every ridiculous guise and attitude by that young person's facile pen. Her large cheeks reddened in anticipation of her pupil's insolence. She took the sheaf of crumpled paper and thrust ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... e for a Cambril, as dost, most, ghost, bright, right, sign, design, and short, notwithstanding e Cambril as hence, since, prince, possible, facile, but Prince and Simple proper Names be spoken, with i long, that an unknown Reader mistake ...
— Magazine, or Animadversions on the English Spelling (1703) • G. W.
... rather than constructed, with its covering of mythological reliefs in brass or bronze, perhaps Homer's descriptions of a seemingly impossible sort of metallic architecture would have been less taxing to his reader's imagination. Those who in other places had lost their taste amid the facile splendours of a later day, might here ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... course of his speech, referred to the manufactures which had at one time flourished in Ireland—to the flannels of Rathdrum, the linens of Bandon, the cottons of Cork, and the gloves of Limerick. Why should not these things exist again? "We have a people who are by nature quick and facile to learn, who have shown in many other countries that they are industrious and laborious, and who have not been excelled—whether in the pursuits of agriculture under a midday sun in the field, or amongst the vast looms in the factory ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... Miss Emily was flattered; but she soon saw that she had gained nothing by the whole breeze, except a little kind of dread, which made her inwardly resolve never to touch the knocker of his fortress again. But she entered into her brother's scheme with the facile alacrity with which she usually seconded ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... lundi 6 mai 1527, le connetable, a cheval, la cuirasse couverte d'un manteau blanc, marcha vers le Borgo, dont les murailles, a la hauteur de San-Spirito, etaient d'acces facile.... Bourbon mit pied a terre, et, prenant lui-meme une echelle l'appliqua tout pres de la porte Torrione."—De l'Italie, par Emile Gebhart, 1876, p. 255. Caesar Grolierius (Historia expugnatae ... Urbis, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... Mediterranean littoral, in fact, from Gibraltar to Messina—were constantly in danger of corsair raids just as our American pioneer ancestors were of Indian raids. The lay of the land and the lack of a powerful suzerain state to defend them made the Riverains facile prey. Villefranche afforded the easiest landing. Try to climb up from Villefranche over crags and through stone-paved and rock-lined ravines to the Moyenne Corniche, and then on to the higher mountain-slopes, ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... as recorded in Bunyan's "Pilgrim Progress." Doubtless memories of Mrs. Eddy's reading of that deathless allegory are reproduced in this particular passage which the author is inclined to believe she wrote with more pleasure than anything else ever turned out by her too facile pen. Personal Sense is the plaintiff, Mortal Man the defendant, False Belief the attorney for Personal Sense, Mortal Minds, Materia Medica, Anatomy, Physiology, Hypnotism, Envy, Greed and Ingratitude constitute the Jury. The court ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... because of the very excellence of the performance. It contrasts most strikingly with its clumsy predecessor in its approximation to Sterne's deftness of touch, his delicate turns of phrase, his seemingly obvious and facile, but really delicate and accurate choice of expression. Zckert was heavy, commonplace, uncompromisingly literal and bristling with inaccuracies. Bode's work was unfortunately not free from errors in spite of its general excellence, yet it brought the book within reach ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... theories of governmental organization or lack of organization—one cannot regard Galds as other than a social conservative, who could be considered a radical nowhere outside of Spain. In how many plays does a conventional marriage furnish the facile cure for all varieties of social affliction (Voluntad, La de San Quintn, La fiera, Mariucha, etc.)! The only socialist whom he brings upon the stage—Vctor of La de San Quintn—has received an expensive education from his father, and, though compelled to ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... skill, that he can dexterously accommodate them to the purpose before him; together with a lively briskness of humour, not apt to damp those sportful flashes of imagination. (Whence in Aristotle such persons are termed [Greek], dexterous men; and [Greek], men of facile or versatile manners, who can easily turn themselves to all things, or turn all things to themselves.) It also procureth delight, by gratifying curiosity with its rareness or semblance of difficulty (as monsters, not for their beauty, but their rarety; as juggling tricks, not for their ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... quick eye and facile ability to report what they saw, and also their ease of manner which of itself seems like a social gift, were but the prelude to the work so varied, gifted and vastly influential, which the sex was to do in the modern Novel; so that, at present, in an open field and no favors given, ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... refined society; and, coming from a land where distinctions of rank are not arbitrarily governed by the accident of birth, but where men are assigned their positions in the social scale through a juster, higher, more liberal verdict, the young Carolinian gained facile admission into the most exclusive circles abroad, and even took precedence of individuals who made as loud a boast of noble blood and hereditary titles as though the concentrated virtues of all their ancestors had been transmitted to ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... this place verbatim to record: Ante viginti & plus eo annos ab Henrico Kneuetto Equite Anglo nomine Regis Henrici arram accepi, qua conuenerat, Regio sumptu me totam Asiam, quoad Turcorum & Persarum Regum commendationes, & legationes admitterentur, peragraturum. Ab his enim duobus Asi principibus facile se impetraturum sperabat, vt non solm tut mihi per ipsorum fines liceret ire, sed vt commendatione etiam ipsorum ad confinia quoque daretur penetrare. Sumptus quidem non exiguus erat futurus, sed tanta erat principi cognoscendi auiditas, vt nullis pecunijs ad hoc iter ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... spread on a little soft-soap, as flattery was provincially called, and invest Joe with a greater sense of his responsibility, if possible. When occasion required, Isom could rise to flattery as deftly as the best of them. It was an art at which his tongue was wonderfully facile, considering the fact that he mingled so seldom with men in the outside doings of life. His wits had no foil to whet against and grow sharp, save the hard substance of his own inflexible nature, for he was born with that shrewd faculty ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... de alijs rebus subtilibus, sicut de pannis Tarsensibus, de serico, & cindallis, de seta & alijs diuersis mercibus, & de equis etiam & alijs animalibus, blado & alijs rebus & mercandisis multimodis, qu ad certam custumam facile poni non poterunt, ijdem mercatores concesserunt dare nobis & hredibus nostris de qualibet libra argenti estimationis seu valoris rerum & mercandisaram huiusmodi, quocunque nomine censeantur; tres denarios de libra in introitu rerum & mercandisaram ipsarum in regnum & potestatem ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... which overthrew successive dynasties, and transferred the crown to usurpers, with a facile rapidity, otherwise almost unintelligible, it is easy to comprehend that the mass of the people had the strongest possible motives for passive submission, and were constrained to acquiescence by an instinctive dread of the fatal effects ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... efficiency of this machinery need no illustration, but happen to have a pointed illustration to-day. A pair of oars of unusual size chance to be wanted for a special purpose, and they have to be made by hand. Side by side with the subtle and facile machine, and side by side with the fast-growing pile of oars on the floor, a man shapes out these special oars with an axe. Attended by no butterflies, and chipping and dinting, by comparison as leisurely as if ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... also passed as a man of order and humanity, not continue to support Danton after the suppression of the Hebertists, as he had supported him before? The common and facile answer is that he was moved by a malignant desire to put a rival out of the way. On the whole, the evidence seems to support Napoleon's opinion that Robespierre was incapable of voting for the death of anybody in the world on grounds of personal enmity. And his acquiescence in the ruin of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... have been associated with other forms of sport, from the following lines taken from a local poet, to whose picturesque descriptions and facile handling of the heroic measure, I must be indebted in this chapter. I refer to a book entitled "Visions of Childhood," by W. Warren Butler, of Barkway, printed and published by John Warren in 1843. Of one questionable form of sport on ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... Into them had crept what she knew to be admiration, though of a lazy and indifferent sort. Without knowing why, for the second time that day—or was it the third?—she felt the blood rise in a wave to her cheeks. How silly, this facile blushing! She was angry with herself. It was not as if she were really embarrassed or confused, it came simply from that kind of physical sensitiveness which causes the closing of leaves in those ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... not, therefore, write better stories. If literature is of a magnificent depth and intricate subtlety in a measure proportionate to its reflection of the vast complexity of a nation that has existed as such for centuries, conceivably it will be facile and clever in a measure proportionate to its reflection of the spirit of the commonwealth which in a few hundred years has acquired a place with ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... quae illic Amphitruoni sunt data, abstulimus: facile meus pater quod volt facit. nunc hodie Amphitruo veniet huc ab exercitu 140 et servos, cuius ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... stood to his duty; and his behaviour under domestic sorrow with which the public has no concern filled the beholder with sympathy and admiration. A poor little smiling laborious man he looked; and you would have thought he had nothing in him but that of which indeed he had too much—facile good-nature.[3] ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dramatization of the Nibelungen story, The Hero of the North (1810), and though he took subjects from the Germanic past and from the chivalric days, he brought no new life to his rehabilitations. Fouque was too productive, too facile, too external, too indifferent to psychological motivation to be real. He diluted Romanticism and sentimentalized it. In him patriotism becomes chauvinism; love, philandering; and his age of chivalry, a thinly veiled and sentimental picture of his own times. The ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... Arthur might have been only a spectator; or, if not, that he might have known where to stop. He had bought his experience long ago, at high cost; but Theodora was but too well aware of his unsteadiness of purpose and facile temper; and in spite of his resolutions, it was a fearful thing to have seen him in such a place, in such company, and to know that almost against his own desire she had conducted him thither for the gratification ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... delivered "in good terms." "To all Englishmen and strangers." It was to write for a gold pen of twenty pounds value in all kinds of hands, "best, straightest, and fastest," and most kind of ways; "a full, a mean, a small, with line, and without line; in a slow set hand, a mean facile hand, and a fast running hand;" and further, "to write truest and speediest, most secretary and clerk-like, from a man's mouth, reading or pronouncing, either English ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... carnificina Rabbinorum, de quo aliqui Judaei mihi confessi sunt, Rabbinos suos ex propheticis scripturis facile se extricare potuisse, modo; Esaias tacuisset." Hulse, Theol. Jud. P. 318, quoted ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... success in finding decisive instances, and their sure insight into the meaning of things. As an instance of the latter on Mr. Darwin's part, and a justification of our venture to compare him with the facile princeps botanicorum, we will, in conclusion, allude to the single instance in which they took the same subject in hand. In his papers on the organs and modes of fecundation in Orchideae and Asclepiadeae, Mr. Brown refers more than once to C.K. Sprengel's almost forgotten work, shows ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... instead of the result, there can hardly be two opinions, unless the reader prefers an impression of the wandering inquisitive gentleman to one of the people questioned. Probably these barren dialogues may be set down to indolence or to the too facile adoption of a trick. They are too casual and slight to be exact, and on the other hand they are too literal ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... if Nathanael and his companions were very easily convinced, as if their adhesion to such tremendous claims as those of Jesus Christ was much too facile a thing to be a very deep one. But what can be put down in black and white goes a very short way to solve the secret of the power ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... the "Alpensymphonie," the young and fiery composer, genius despite all the impurities of his style, who composed "Till Eulenspiegel" and "Don Quixote"; not easy, even though the contours of his idiom have not radically altered, and though in the sleepy facile periods of his later style one catches sight at times of the broad, simple diction of his earlier. For the later Strauss lacks pre-eminently and signally just the traits that made of the earlier so brilliant ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... programme for my benefit. It was a snare to catch the bird. I felt indignant that he should suppose me so wanting in delicacy of feeling and nobility of character as to be dazzled by the life of display and facile pleasure which he had depicted. I had disliked him at first, and now I despised him; for it was impossible to misunderstand the shameless proposal concealed beneath his half-jesting words. He offered me my liberty in exchange for my fortune. ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... sick. He had never in his life felt such repulsion as toward what seemed to him this facile, theatrical remorse. If Guion was really contrite, if he really wanted to relieve the world of his presence, he could blow his brains out. Ashley had known, or known of, so many who had resorted to this ready remedy for a desperate plight that ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... scepticism, and thus to refuse in thought to entertain either a probability or an improbability concerning the existence of a God; or else to incline in thought towards an affirmation or a negation of God, according as his previous habits of thought have rendered such an inclination more facile in the one direction than in the other. And although, under such circumstances, I should consider that man the more rational who carefully suspended his judgment, I conclude that if this course is departed from, neither the metaphysical ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... to particulars: but by putting cases and confessing myself, I contrived to make my thoughts understood. I then boasted of the extreme facility of the means I would adopt to recover a heart. Leonora answered in the words of a celebrated great man:—"C'est facile de se servir de pareils moyens; c'est difficile de ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... painted panels of a quasi-Japanese type, many of them very beautiful. These panels were grouped in a great and elaborate framing of dark metal, which passed into the metallic caryatidae of the galleries, and the great structural lines of the interior. The facile grace of these panels enhanced the mighty white effort that laboured in the centre of the scheme. Graham's eyes came back to the Council, and Howard was descending the steps. As he drew nearer his features could ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... to try to analyze as clearly as possible the way one feels. But the thing is not easy, so facile, so delicate, so almost imperceptible, are ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... art was quite beyond his comprehension, though he was connoisseur enough to appreciate its presence in others. Artist and man of taste he was, but he was no poet. Artist he was, I have said, to the fingertips, but his art lay at his fingers' ends, not at his soul. He was facile, ingenious, dexterous, everything but inspired. He had wit, learning, skill, imagination, but none of that passionate apprehension of life which makes the poet, and which Marlowe and Shakespeare possessed so fully. And therefore ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... silent stream beneath the night, Thy funeral glides to Life's eternal home, Child of its narrow house!—how late the bloom, The facile smile, the soft eye's crystal light, Each grace of Youth's gay morn, that charms our sight, Play'd o'er that Form!—now sunk in Death's cold gloom, Insensate! ghastly!—for the yawning tomb, Alas! fit Inmate.—Thus ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... anecdotic than the Puritan Colonel's, and she does not adopt the somewhat tiresome "doormat" attitude of wifely adoration towards the subject of her memoir which "Mad Margaret" (as Pepys called her Grace of Newcastle) thought fitting when she took up her fatally facile pen to endow her idolised lord with all the virtues and all the graces and every ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... alike. A work of fiction should carry the hall mark of its author as surely as a Goya, a Daumier, a Velasquez, and a Mathew Maris, should be the unmistakable creations of those masters. This is not to speak of tricks and manners which lend themselves to that facile elf, the caricaturist, but of a certain individual way of seeing and feeling. A young poet once said of another and more popular poet: "Oh! yes, but be cuts no ice." And, when one came to think of it, he did not; a certain flabbiness of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... scribit, quinquavicesima est littera, quam vocant "agma," cujus forma nulla est et vox communis est Graecis et Latinis, ut his verbis: aggulus, aggens, agguilla, iggerunt. In ejusmodi Graeci et Accius noster bina G scribunt, alii N et G, quod in hoc veritatem videre facile non est. ...
— The Roman Pronunciation of Latin • Frances E. Lord
... foreign affairs under Louis XV, would entertain no such visionary plan. It was clear to every one that the island could no longer be held by its old masters. He had found a facile instrument for the measures necessary to his contemplated seizure of it in the son of a Corsican refugee, that later notorious Buttafuoco, who, carrying water on both shoulders, had ingratiated himself with his father's old friends, while at the same time he had for years been successful as ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... was like some young wild thing at bay, harried, defiant, tensely defensive. Something of the pathos of her innocent presence there, in that evil palace, utterly alone, hopelessly defiant, penetrated for an instant the callous acceptances of the little dancer and her eyes softened with facile sympathy, but the impression dulled, and she only ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... of South Carolina. I want to Marry Miss Ida, because she is the daughter of the most powerful Man that has yet appeared on the American Continent. Mr. Greeley turned four millions of slaves loose with the Pen can't I win his daughter with the same facile weapon? Now Mrs. Cleveland won't you help me? I am not a Humbug, I have too many bullet holes through my body to be classed with that tribe of insects. I begin to feel a little skittish about my age, 35 and not yet Married. ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... is probable, indeed, that neither of the high contracting parties had really acted in a spirit of religious indifference, though it is remarkable of the Spartans, that of all Greek tribes they were the most facile and numerous delinquents under all varieties of foreign temptations to revolt from their hereditary allegiance—a fact which measures the degree of unnatural constraint and tension which the Spartan usages involved; but in this case we rather account for the public outrage to ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... inventores: Cainum progenitorem suum propter caedem non esse punitum, multo minus se posse puniri, si vel simile scelus commisisset. Verba enim non significant, caedam ab eo revera esse paratam, sed sunt verba hominis admodum insolentis et profani. Ceterum facile apparet, haec verba a Mose ex quodam carmine antiquo inserta esse: tota enim oratio poeticam ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... was to be made way with. No facile matter, truly. Harder than for any dashing young Janizary to run off with a sultana from the Grand Turk's seraglio. Still, the thing could be done, for, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... not certain how far Kitty would have succeeded in her good purposes: these things, so easily conceived, are not of such facile execution; she passed a sleepless night of good resolutions and schemes of reparation; but, fortunately for her, Mr. Arbuton's foibles and prejudices seemed to have fallen into a strange abeyance. The change that had come upon ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... could have puzzled him more than to guess how the ideal of him grew and strengthened in her maiden mind, and how her after-worship exalted it into something thrilling and passionate, not to be described even by a tongue more facile than hers. Letty had a vivid nature, capable of responding to those delicate influences which move to spiritual issues. There were throes of love within her, of aspiration, of an ineffable delight in being. She never tried to understand them, nor did she talk about them; but then, she never ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... fickle disposition, and, must we say it, rather vulgar in taste. Although of very noble birth, he had contracted in his official harness more than one habit of the common trooper. The tavern and its accompaniments pleased him. He was only at his ease amid gross language, military gallantries, facile beauties, and successes yet more easy. He had, nevertheless, received from his family some education and some politeness of manner; but he had been thrown on the world too young, he had been in garrison at too early an age, and every day the polish of a gentleman became more and more effaced ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... beatitudes of youth. The metres are cunningly chosen, and are most artful when they are simplest; and in every case they provide the exact musical counterpart to the thought. Mrs. Jacob has an austere conscience. She eschews facile rhymes and worn epithets, and escapes the easy cadences of hymnology which are apt to be a snare to the writer of folk-songs. She has many moods, from the stalwart humour of "The Beadle o' Drumlee," and "Jeemsie Miller," to the haunting lilt of "The Gean-Trees," and ...
— Songs of Angus and More Songs of Angus • Violet Jacob
... had been made for dead and gone gods, giants of gods, and their spirits stalked now through its waste spaces, dominating and ironic. There was an air about the place that seemed to scorn the facile awe it woke in the breasts of the beholders and that fleered at the human ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... turned back from his white, muscular arms. He lived more intensely than any other member of the sylvan household. His blue eyes shone, and his face was vivid as he talked to her. He was a common man, blunted in the finer nature by a life of hardship, yet his shrewd spirit seized on much that less facile people like Puttany learned slowly or ...
— The Cursed Patois - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... have their faults, like other races, and sometimes they let avarice overcome them! I wish they could understand the nations of the Hodenosaunee better. Do what you can at Albany, Mr. Lennox, with that facile tongue of yours, to persuade the Dutch—and the others too—that the danger from the French and Indians is great, and that we must keep the friendship of ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... depreciated. That illusion occurs in every age of transition. It was notably so in the eighteenth century, which represented a highly important stage in the emancipation of women. To some that century seems to have been given up to empty gallantry and facile pleasure. Yet it was not only the age in which women for the first time succeeded in openly attaining their supreme social influence,[85] it was an age of romantic love, and the noble or poignant love-stories which have reached ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... The facile skill with which the Cardinal had disarmed him excited Paul's admiration even whilst he found himself disadvantaged by it. "My conception of the life of the spirit differs widely from that of Catholicism," he said, speaking slowly and deliberately. ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... actuality and abstract disquisition of which each number of the Watchman is made up, we are arrested again and again by some striking metaphor or some weighty sentence which tells us that the writer is no mere wordy wielder of a facile pen. The paper on the slave trade in the seventh number is a vigorous and, in places, a heart-stirring appeal to the humane emotions. There are passages in it which foreshadow Coleridge's more mature literary manner—the ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... chosen from among other candidates because of his accent. He richly endowed his words with r's, making more than one grow where only one had grown before. It was this vocal burriness that drew the facile notice of Wilbur. He delighted to hear John McTavish talk, and hung about the new clubhouse, apparently without purpose, until John not only sanctioned but besought his presence, calling him Laddie and luring him with tales of the monstrous ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... When he became king, his chance of success was great. The Duke of Milan, Ludovic, the Moor, had by his sagacity and fertile mind, by his taste for arts and sciences and the intelligent patronage he bestowed upon them, by his ability in speaking, and by his facile character, obtained in Italy a position far beyond his real power. Leonardo da Vinci, one of the most eminent amongst the noble geniuses of the age, lived on intimate terms with him; but Ludovic was, nevertheless, a turbulent rascal and a greedy tyrant, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... detestable habit of bobbing round. The Channel is hated: and no one who has much to do with it is surprised at the projects for bridging it and for boring a hole under it; though I have scarcely ever met an Englishman who wants either done,—he does not desire any more facile communication with the French than now exists. The traditional hatred may not be so strong as it was, but it is hard to say on which side is the most ignorance and contempt of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... upon him that this was his true vocation. To renounce pleasure and discipline the mind; to live a life of self-denial, submitting himself humbly to the inspiration of the great masters. . . . To be serene, like this old man; to avoid that facile, glib, composite note—those monkey-tricks of cleverness. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... India were persuaded that they might successfully rise against their English rulers, who had brought them out of a state of anarchy and constant warfare and misery, and had established peace and prosperity in their country. Their ignorance and gross superstition made them the facile tools ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... is of an unusual order. It is a facile, quickly moving instrument; it works in flashes; it assimilates seemingly without effort, and it is at its best under the highest pressure. The Kaiser is not to be laughed at for wanting to know all there is to be known, but he may justly be ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... deeper meanings and highly coloured suggestions wholly out of harmony with the pastoral setting. Like most of the professionals, she exaggerates the emotional element and quite fails to do justice to Rosalind's facile wit and really brilliant mental qualities. Gerard will do Orlando, but rumor says he is epris of your sometime friend, Miss Meredith, and his memory is treacherous ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... painted on the back cloth of my Cambridge memories. How immense those disasters seemed at the time, disasters our facile English world has long since contrived in any edifying or profitable sense to forget! How we thrilled to the shouting newspaper sellers as the first false flush of victory gave place to the realisation of defeat. ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... would stumble in stepping across the floor of a drawing room; he would trip himself up on a smooth-shaven grass-plot, and he would tumble in the most inconceivable manner in ascending the commodious, facile, and well-carpeted staircase of an elegant mansion, so as to bruise his nose or his lip on the upper steps, or to tread upon his hands, and even occasionally to disturb the composure of a well-bred footman; on the contrary, he would often glide without ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... tableland, but a great, rapid river which, if its upper waters had not found contact with the Orinoco, perhaps by cutting back, would belong entirely to the Negro branch of the Amazon. To the west of the Casiquiare there is a much shorter and more facile connexion between the Orinoco and Amazon basins, called the isthmus of Pimichin, which is reached by ascending the Terni branch of the Atabapo affluent of the Orinoco. Although the Terni is somewhat obstructed, it is believed that it could ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... justice. There is a good deal of support in the authorities for excluding or strictly limiting judicial review of Commission findings and Mr Baragwanath carefully put the arguments forward. But, as we say, there are reasons why the Court ought not to adopt the facile approach of saying that the function of the Commission was merely to inquire and report and that as the Commission's findings bind no-one they can be disregarded entirely as ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... Editor of the Literary Gazette; free and facile as his vein of criticism, and one of the finest ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 478, Saturday, February 26, 1831 • Various
... the feelings of doubt that existed in the minds of the members of the Mosaic Club. He yielded readily to the invitation of Mrs. Markham and then exerted himself to please, showing a facile grace in manner and speech that soon made him a welcome guest. He quickly drifted to the side of Miss Harley, and talked so well from the rich store of his experience and knowledge that her ear was more for ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... was lost, and could not be found—no hint that anybody had to this day ever looked into it—with a courteous (reasonable!) request of another copy (if I had one by me,) and a promise of a definite answer in a week. I could not resist so facile and moderate a demand, so scribbled out another, omitting sundry things, such as the witch story, about half of the forest scene (which is too leisurely for story), and transposing that damn'd soliloquy about England getting drunk, which, like its ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... loyalty is there in full vigour, and the Brunswick graft now flourishes like a native shoot. To that spirited race of people I may with propriety apply the elegant lines of a modern poet, on the 'facile ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... nought. The cold philanthropies, the ostentatious public charities, the tedious formalisms so dear to the middle-class mind, he exposed with utter and relentless scorn. To us, what is termed orthodoxy is merely a facile unintelligent acquiescence; but to them, and in their hands, it was a terrible and paralysing tyranny. Christ swept it aside. He showed that the spirit alone was of value. He took a keen pleasure in pointing out to them that though they were always reading ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... the immense activity of science somewhat damped our interest in beauty; but that is probably a temporary thing. The influence exerted by the early scientists was in the direction of facile promises to solve all mysteries, to analyse everything into elements, to classify, to track out natural laws; and it was believed that the methods and processes of life would be divested of their secrecy and ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sitting still. Something of this restlessness in the race may really be involved in the matter; but I think the deeper significance of the rocking-chair may still be found in the deeper symbolism of the rocking-horse. I think there is behind all this fresh and facile use of wood a certain spirit that is childish in the good sense of the word; something that is innocent, and easily pleased. It is not altogether untrue, still less is it unfriendly, to say that the landscape seems to be dotted with dolls' houses. ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... though it might, no doubt, be raised to whiter heat by the continually increasing fervour of partisanship. The curious description of him given by Sir James Melville (the courtier, not the divine) that "he was easily abused, and so facile that he was led with any company that he haunted for the time, which made him factious in his old days; for he spoke and writ as they that were about him for the time informed him," would, if accepted, give a still easier solution ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... Accumulations of habit and custom that had collected upon them in the dense life of towns were dropping away. As the surface refinements of language were dying, so their faces had lost a certain facile play of expression. Delicate nuances of feeling no longer showed, for they no longer existed. Smiles had grown rarer, and harder characteristics were molding their features into sterner lines. The ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... season! Dear, dear God! that first season when she met Jem! She was not nineteen, and the facile world pretended to be at her feet, and the sun shone as though London were in Italy, and the park was marvelous with flowers, and there were such dances ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... other circumstances. Even the water-color drawings failed to interest me in my present frame of mind. I observed languidly that they were most of them portraits of ladies—fair idols, no doubt, of the Major's facile adoration—and I cared to notice no more. My business in that room (I was certain of it now!) began and ended with the book-case. I left my seat to fetch the library ladder, determining to begin the work of ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... where the internal evidence of interpolation perceptible to the most careless and undeniable by the most perverse of readers is supported by the public judgment of men qualified to express and competent to defend an opinion, have I thought it allowable to adopt this facile method of explanation. No scholar, for example, believes in the single authorship of Pericles or Andronicus; none, I suppose, would now question the part taken by some hireling or journeyman in the arrangement or completion for the ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... I was already growing to hate. More than ever I was determined not to yield. Mabane's words had come to me with a subtle note of mockery underlying their undoubted common-sense. I thrust the memory of them on one side. Certain gifts I knew that I possessed. I had a ready pen and a facile invention. Something had stirred in me a late-awakened but irresistible desire to apply them to a different purpose than ever before. As I sat there the creations of my fancy flitted before me one by one—delicate, perhaps, and graceful, thoughtfully conceived, adequately completed. Yet ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... vicissitudes and singularities, may be read in Lord Wharncliffe's edition of her Life and Letters. She is a prominent figure in the literature of the period, and made several passing contributions to it, but apart from a few facile and far from decent verses her letters are the sole legacy she has left behind her for the literary student. Some of them, and especially those addressed to her sister the Countess of Mar, are often coarse; those to ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... be easily or hastily applied, nor could one ever be quite sure that in any given case it had been applied to any given effect. But for practical needs we see that it suffices to cast a slur on facile popularity, and vindicate over and over again those who had been despised and rejected. What the true artist desires to bring into his pictures is the power to move finely-touched and gifted men. Not only are such by very much the minority, but the more part of them being, ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... Creighton was never harsh with a witness, never tried to bulldoze or rattle him, until all else had failed. His policy was to put people at their ease and gentle them into talking freely, a course that was all the more facile for him by reason of his genuine sympathy and understanding ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... Washington, followed by the two boys, was already strolling on toward the ninth hole of the golf course, as though the pit and its contents were no more than a hazard over which his facile ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... besides; and the last in the series was the scene enacted at the late Inverness Presbytery, when Mr. Clark rose to congratulate his old associates, in all the stern severity of consistent virtue, on the facile and 'squeezable' character of their ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... man, who has long filled a distinguished place in the service of his sovereign and the eyes of the world, in whose hands the task of regenerating Sardinia, herculean as it may appear, would be not only a labour of love, but facile comparatively with any others on which it may devolve. I speak of General the Count Alberto di Marmora, known to all Europe by his Topographical Survey, and his able work, the Voyage en Sardaigne, of which two additional ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... signed by Dor soon noised his fame abroad. Ugly, even hideous, as were many of these caricatures, they did double duty, paying the lad's school expenses, and paving the way to better things. Of caricature Dor soon tired, and after this early period never returned to it. Is it any wonder that facile success and excessive laudation should turn the stripling's head? Professionally, if not artistically speaking, Dor passed straight from child to man; in one sense of the word he had no boyhood, the term tyro remained inapplicable. This undersized, fragile lad, looking years ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... their office, and goats particularly exhibit a jealousy of their rights to be first over the stepping-stones or to walk the teetering log-bridges at the roaring creeks. By this facile reference of the initiative to the wisest one, the shepherd is served most. The dogs learn to which of the flock to communicate orders, at which heels a bark or a bite soonest sets the flock in motion. But the flock-mind obsesses ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... maid misled!" He sternly said, Whose facile foresight pierced her dire; "Where shall abide the soul when, sick of glee, It shrinks, and hides, and prays no eye may see? Those house them best who house for secrecy, For ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... tears, though, perhaps, his facile transition from the condition presented in the foregoing allusion, into a positively lachrymose state, will be readily conceived of, without proclaiming specially, the fact. He will maintain a mien, ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... be prolonged; it is not so important that the process of writing should be slow. It is when the subject has been long tossed about in thought that the mind begins to glow about it; the subject itself gets hot and begins to melt and flash, until at last it can be poured forth in a facile but glowing stream. Style is not something added to the thought from the outside. It is simply the beauty of the truth itself, when you have gone deep enough to find it; and the worst condemnation of a careless and unattractive style is that ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... to Esperance. But what would be the end of these two gallants, both so timid, so full of silent ardour? But now had entered upon the scene a rival possessed of beauty, of confidence, one who had toyed lightly with women's hearts, until he had wearied of the facile love his physical charm ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... they gave little poetic satisfaction or delight. A certain thinness of sentiment, poverty of idea, and shallowness of experience, were not hidden from view, to one who looked sharply through the gorgeous wrappings of words. A small, but sensitive and facile nature, capable of fully expressing itself by the grace of a singularly fluent fancy, with an appetite for beauty rather than a passion for it, with no essential imagination and opulence of soul,—this was the mortifying result to which we were conducted by analysis. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... out for their shopping and their calls, and he related all the scandals of their conduct, false or true. He dwelt on all these stories and calumnies with a horrid pleasure, as though he rejoiced in the vileness of humanity. Did this mean the facile misanthropy of a profligate, accustomed to such conversations at the club, or in sporting circles, during which each man lays bare his brutal egotism, and voluntarily exaggerates the depth of his own disenchantment that he may boast more largely of his experience? Was this the cynicism ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... from this partly unintelligent, but thoroughly well-intended, patronage. If they seek to attract it by eccentricity, to deceive it by superficial qualities, or take advantage of it by thoughtless and facile production, they necessarily degrade themselves and it together, and have no right to complain afterwards that it will not acknowledge better-grounded claims. But if every painter of real power would do only what he knew to be worthy of himself, and refuse to ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... contents-bills hours before it actually happened. Edward Henry had been interviewed several times, and had rather enjoyed that. Gradually he had perceived that his novel idea for a corner-stone-laying had caught the facile imagination of the London populace. For that night at least he was ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... by persons of the one sex towards persons of the other, when it involved brutality or treachery, Fielding was pitiless; but when treachery and brutality were not concerned, he was, to say the least, facile. So, too, he probably knew by experience—he certainly knew by native shrewdness and acquired observation—that to look too much on the wine when it is red, or on the cards when they are parti-coloured, is ruinous ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... is evinced by their voyages to Iceland, Greenland, and thence to the Atlantic coast of North America, as early as the tenth and eleventh centuries. It is more directly to our purpose to observe their character as it is displayed in their conquest of the Frankish kingdom of Neustria, in their facile reception and ready assimilation of the Roman language and arts which they found in Gaul, and in their forcible occupancy, under William the Conqueror, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... The Rajah burst into loud laughter, and going to the piano played the D flat Valse of Chopin in a facile amateurish fashion. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... to America in 1892, and who is a violinist of much ability, with a beautiful tone, facile and brilliant technique, but somewhat lacking in elegance and polish, did not come to tour the country as a virtuoso. He was engaged by Mr. Walter Damrosch as concert-master for the New York orchestra, but during his stay in this country he appeared in many of the most important ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... waited. The incident at the Sandringham, the sight of Cassy, her mother's facile insinuations, these things had distressed her, because, and only because, they had prevented her from enjoying the innocent pleasure of the innocent visit to the rooms of her betrothed, whom she loved with a love that was too pure and too profound, to harbour ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... second Vice-President of the General Fair organization, General Rosecrans being President, and the Mayor of the city, first Vice-President. To the furtherance of this work, Mrs. Mendenhall devoted all her energies. Eloquent appeals from her facile pen were addressed to loyal and patriotic men and women all over the country, and a special circular and appeal to the patriotic young ladies of Cincinnati and the Ohio valley for their hearty co-operation in the good work. The correspondence and supervision of that portion of the ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... were, if he ever wanted to inflame them. One can easily fancy the grumblings of the Ephraimites dragged up to Jerusalem to the hated labour, which Samuel had predicted (1 Samuel viii. 16), and how facile it would be for the officer in charge to fan discontent or to win friends by judicious indulgence. How long this went on we do not know, but the fire had smouldered for some time under the unconscious king's very eyes, when it was fanned into ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a gentleman of the highest fashion, and a great favourite in society. He was about thirty, good-looking, with an air that commanded attention, and manners, though facile, sufficiently finished. He was communicative, though calm, and without being witty, had at his service a turn of phrase, acquired by practice and success, which was, or which always seemed to be, poignant. The ladies seemed especially to be delighted ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... and selfishness. "It will take years of organized endeavor," he confessed. He recognized his own ineffectiveness beyond the narrow pale of hopeful suggestion, and wished that here too the giving of a substantial sum—a large penny-in-the-slot—might produce quick and facile results. ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... material injury. To Dennis's knock he responded in his usual tone, "Come in!" and Dennis stood in a warm, lighted, cosey office, where the object of his quest sat writing rapidly with his back to the door. Dennis waited respectfully till the facile pen glided through the sentence, and then Mr. Ludolph looked up. Dennis's bearing and appearance were so unmistakably those of a gentleman that Mr. Ludolph, not recognizing him as the person who had cleared his sidewalk, rose ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... all that he means, and resolutely means all that he can say. By means of his lectures, a mixed and facile form of eloquence, which is his glory, he easily proved to these poor canonesses that streams and rivers flow ever since the world began, and never think of suspending their current or abandoning their direction. He reminded them that ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... above was exciting and interesting, as the subject of slavery was examined in all its bearings. Finally the Constitution was submitted to Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, to receive the finishing touches of his facile pen. On the 8th of August, 1787, during the debate, he delivered the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... BIBLIOGRAPHIE," says Marchand, "soit generale soit particuliere, soit profane soit ecclesiastique, soit nationale, provinciale, ou locale, soit simplement personelle, en un mot de quelque autre genre que ce puisse etre, n'est pas un ouvrage aussi facile que beaucoup de gens se le pourroient imaginer; mais, elles ne doivent neanmoins nullement prevenir contre celle-ci. Telle qu'elle est, elle ne laisse pas d'etre bonne, utile, et digne d'etre recherchee par les amateurs de l'Histoire Litteraire." ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... were frightful scenes between them—times when he cruelly reproached her and when her native melancholy deepened into outbursts of despair. Finally there occurred an incident which is more or less obscure in parts. The Duchesse de Bouillon, a great lady of the court—facile, feline, licentious, and eager for delights—resolved that she would win the love of Maurice de Saxe. She set herself to win it openly and without any sense of shame. Maurice himself at times, when the tears of Adrienne proved wearisome, flirted ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... them, perhaps, for passion frightens you, and 'tis pleasure more than love that you commend to the young. Lydia and Glycera, and the others, are but passing guests of a heart at ease in itself, and happy enough when their facile reign is ended. You seem to me like a man who welcomes middle age, and is more glad than Sophocles was to "flee from these hard masters" the passions. In the fallow leisure of life you glance round contented, and find all very good save the need ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... downright swindling, however considerable in amount, does not cause the great drain upon the Treasury. But if money can be obtained by the simple issue of evidences of debt, and without any provision to sustain the credit of the Government by taxation, the process of supply is too facile. The funds so easily procured are in danger of being too profusely spent. Individual responsibility in money-matters, aided by direct self-interest, is usually more efficient in imposing limits to improvidence than a general sense of duty on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various |
