"Obsolete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Edward the Confessor has, for the most part, to do only with political divisions, what shall be a shire, what a parish, etc., and certain technical matters that have now grown obsolete. So we may conclude with the statement, substantially accurate, that there was practically no new legislation, no constructive legislation under the Saxons; their social law was ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... Commission" then sitting at Brunswick, and European affairs in general. Conversation which is carefully preserved for us in the Brigadier's Despatch of the morrow. It never was intrinsically of much moment; and is now fallen very obsolete, and altogether of none: but as a glance at first-hand into the dim old thoughts of Friedrich Wilhelm, the reader may take ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... country was drifting into war with Turkey, he sounded a warning that the Greek army was unprepared for a campaign. The infantry was armed with condemned French rifles; the cartridges were 15 years old; there was no cavalry; the artillery was obsolete, and the officers few. When the country went to war despite his warning, the result was a disastrous defeat. A similar situation developed when King George tried to oppose the popular clamor for the annexation of Crete. The King knew that Turkey was waiting for another ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... works, as has already been pointed out, show a distinct falling off from the standard attained in 'Faust,' as regards form as well as in ideas. As he grew older he showed a stronger inclination to return to obsolete models. 'Le Tribut de Zamora' reproduces the type of opera which was popular in the days of Meyerbeer. It is cut up into airs and recitatives, and the accompaniment is sedulously subordinated to the voices. Without ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... sudden leap of mind, by no vehement and short-lived revolutions, but gradually, insensibly, and permanently, monarchy ceased—a fashion, as it were, worn out and obsolete—and republicanism succeeded. But this republicanism at first was probably in no instance purely democratic. It was the chiefs who were the visible agents in the encroachments on the monarchic power—it was an aristocracy that succeeded monarchy. Sometimes this aristocracy was exceedingly limited ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the point of view of the student of history, has been that new material has been accumulating much faster than it can be assimilated or absorbed. The standard histories of the last generation need to be revised, or even to be put aside as obsolete, in the light of the new information that is coming in so rapidly and in such vast bulk. But the students and researchers of to-day have shown little enthusiasm as yet for the task of re-writing history on a large scale. We see issuing from the press hundreds ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... spells were mixed together. Philological treatises were numerous. There were dictionaries and grammars for explaining the Sumerian language to Semitic pupils, interlinear translations of Sumerian texts, phrase-books, lists of synonyms, and commentaries on difficult or obsolete words and passages, besides syllabaries, in which the cuneiform characters were catalogued and explained. Mathematics were diligently studied, and tables of squares and cubes have come to us from the library of Larsa. Geography was ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... described the army as the worst he ever commanded, and said that if he had had his Peninsular men, the fight would have been over much sooner. But the Duke, sticking to ideas now obsolete, had no picked corps. Each man, trusting in and trusted by his comrades, fought under his own officers and under his own regimental colours. Whatever they did not know, the men knew how to die, and at the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... achieved in his Discourse on Holy Living." You will recollect that this book was written nearly two hundred years ago, and must not be surprised if you find a few expressions, and one or two sentiments, rather obsolete. One of the five rules which Taylor gives in his Dedication, "for the application of the counsels which follow," applies to all books of a similar character. "They that will, with profit, make use of the proper instruments of virtue, must ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... realize the extent of her sway. Hers is perhaps the only industry whose statistics of to-day are obsolete to-morrow, so rapid is its growth. In 1895 the value of the few hundred cars produced in the United States was one hundred and fifty thousand dollars; in 1910 the year's output of approximately two hundred thousand machines was worth two hundred and twenty-five millions. Behind them is a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... philosophy, but of medicine. Recollect that everything except the demonstrated truth is liable to die. That is the order of nature. Words die. Every language has a cemetery. Every now and then a word dies and a tombstone is erected, and across it is written the word "obsolete." New words are continually being born. There is a cradle in which a word is rocked. A thought is molded to a sound, and the child-word is born. And then comes a time when the word gets old, and wrinkled, ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... their own rolling. Half-clad children of all ages, mixtures of mestizo, Spaniard, and Jamaican negro, trotted along beside them; and at intervals a blustering cochero rattled around the corner in a rickety, obsolete type of trap behind ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... strict letter of the printed music—ignorant of the possibility, that only in this way can its spirit be respected—the changes in a multitude of cases are essential because due (1) to reverential deciphering of an obsolete musical notation, (2) to improvements in musical instruments, or (3) to the sanction and authority ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... teaching practice is by no means in harmony therewith. Even when in word the supporters of classics put forward the secondary uses, in deed they belie themselves. Excellence in teaching is held by them to consist, in the first instance, in the power of accurate interpretation,—as if that obsolete use were still the use. If a teacher does this well, he is reckoned a good teacher, although he does little or nothing for the other ends, which in argument are treated as the reason of his existence. Indeed, this is the ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... civilizations, not otherwise known, told of by few grey stones. Ruin to-day is destruction and sorrow and debt and loss, come down untidily upon modern homes and cutting off ordinary generations, smashing the implements of familiar trades and making common avocations obsolete. It is no longer the guardian and the chronicle of ages that we should otherwise forget: ruin to-day is an age heaped up in rubble around us before it has ceased to be still green in our memory. Quite ordinary ...
— Unhappy Far-Off Things • Lord Dunsany
... soft and self-indulgent day the very word 'to fast' has become an out-of-date and an obsolete word. We never have occasion to employ that word in the living language of the present day. The men of the next generation will need to have it explained to them what the Fast-days of their fathers were: when they were instituted, how they were observed, and ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... information as to the etymology, meaning and occurrence of Old English words is contained in that Dictionary, but is to a very large extent overlooked because it is to be found under the head of words which are now obsolete, so that unless one happens to know what was the last form which they had in Middle English, one does not know how to get at it. This information will be made readily available by the references in the present work, which ...
— A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary - For the Use of Students • John R. Clark Hall
... umbrella spread, And range an Indian waste without a tree. Thanks to Benevolus [A]—he spares me yet These chestnuts ranged in corresponding lines, And though himself so polished still reprieves The obsolete ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... ovali, postice abrupte truncata, imperforata, cornea; spira plana, tenui; anfractibus quatuor, planis, ultimo permagno, postice acute angulato, transversim obsolete striato; apertura oblongo-truncata; labio antice valde tortuoso; labro ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... amongst them are imitations of the heads of armadillos, and other animals. Some of these had formed the feet of urns, others were rattles, containing small balls of baked clay. The old Indians used these rattles in their solemn religious dances, and the custom is probably not yet quite obsolete, for as late as 1823 Mr. W. Bullock saw, in Mexico, Indian women dancing in a masque representing the court of Montezuma, and holding rattles in their right hands, to the noise of which they accompanied their motions. Several stone axes have been found, which ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... types, which is the end of neglect, coming as the creeping and insidious growth of the power of sin working ever stronger in us as the natural fruit of indulgence. So the curse of that ancient Jewish law turns out to be a terrible and unchanging truth, written in a law which is never obsolete and grows not old, a law which calls on us for our Amen! as it cries to us equally in the language of Divine revelation and of the latest scientific discovery: "Sow neglect," it says, "and you will reap deterioration; sow sin, ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... THRUDUR. Thrudr is an obsolete N. word signifying fortitude, firmness; but it appears to have originally had, in most of the Teutonic languages the sig. of maiden, virgin; and was afterwards used in the ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... disgrace to herself have borrowed whatever she pleased provided she had made a proper acknowledgement—instead of which she says in her preface "—The idea of the business which concerns Antonia, Henry and Gasper was presented to me in an obsolete Comedy; I say the idea, for when it is known that in the original the scene lay among traders in London—and those traders of the lowest and most detestable manners, it will be conceived at once, that in removing it to Portugal ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... his distempered imagination quite overlooked the fact that they were ideas long since dead, beyond hope of resurrection. And it is but the statement of palpable truth to declare that whatever ideas the South is fighting for now, are of a like obsolete character. The glory of feudalism, as a system of society, is departed; and its attendant glories of knight-errantry and human slavery are departed with it. Don Quixote thought to reestablish the one, and the South ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... that when these also sank many gave up the struggle for life and went down. An officer told me that when swimming, after having lost his jacket in the grip of a drowning man, his chief thought was that the Germans had succeeded in sinking only three comparatively obsolete cruisers which shortly ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... no time in dealing with the case, and although Drum-Head Courts-Martial were then supposed to be obsolete, he decided to revive, for this occasion, that very useful means of disposing, in time of war, of grave ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... way until nearly midnight. The refrain, y[^u]['][n]w[)e]h[)i], is probably sung while mixing the paint, and the other portion is recited while applying the pigment, or vice versa. Although these formula are still in use, the painting is now obsolete, beyond an occasional daubing of the face, without any plan or pattern, on the occasion of ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... trial by fire and it emerged from the ordeal unscathed and fortified. For it was purged of all the ambiguities of a dual position and of divided responsibilities. The last of the Moghuls forfeited the shadowy remnants of an obsolete sovereignty. Just a hundred years earlier Clive had advised after Plassey that the Crown should assume direct sovereignty over the whole of the British possessions in India, as the responsibility was growing too heavy for the mere trading corporation that the East India Company ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... supper, bed and breakfast, and presented besides with 4d. each when they leave. Wonderful tales of wicked lawyers have at times been current in explanation of this coupling of Proctors with Rogues, but the true explanation is that Proctor is used in a quite obsolete sense here. It has the same meaning, probably, as in the following passage from Harrison's "Description of Britain," 1577: "Among Roges and idle persons we finde to be comprised all Proctors that go up and down with counterfeit licences, cosiners, and such as go about the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... be, what I believe there is, in every nation, a stile which never becomes obsolete, a certain mode of phraseology so consonant and congenial to the analogy and principles of its respective language as to remain settled and unaltered; this stile is probably to be sought in the common intercourse of life, among ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... Obsolete words are words that, once in good use, have since passed out of general use. This rule might also be made to include obsolescent words: words that are at present time passing out of use. Examples of ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... cross, of Jesus Christ as the World's Redeemer, the putting away of sin, and the gift of eternal life by faith in God's word of grace, the baptism into the name of Christ, had, for several decades, been growingly scouted as "foolishness." "An obsolete doctrine," all that was voted. "Men are far too intelligent to be bound by such a Bible creed as that. New times need ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... name on the original title page was "Mrs. Hugh Bell". Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings and other inconsistencies. Typographical errors in punctuation (misplaced quotes and the like) have been fixed. Text that has been changed to correct an obvious error by the publisher is ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... poetry of the Middle Ages and with the Italian literature of his own time. In the latter accomplishment lies his superiority to the Hebrew scholars of other countries, who were shut off from every outside influence, and held fast to obsolete forms and ideas. ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... said that Maximilian had taken the right course to make himself beloved by the Mexicans. Full of his obsolete notion of the "divine right of kings," a year after he had reached Mexico he issued a decree saying that all who clung to the republic or resisted his authority should be shot. And this was not waste paper, like so many decrees, for a number of prisoners were ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... life which completely outclasses the 'Divina Commedia.' It is compounded out of the experiences of forty-three thousand moderate drinkers who became total abstainers, seventy disbanded croquet associations, and 1,125 obsolete ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... composed of exceptional beings. The people of the old vanished New York set were not exceptional: they were mostly cut on the same convenient and unobtrusive pattern; but they were often exceedingly "nice." And this obsolete quality marked every look and gesture of ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... which served a most important purpose in the days before the introduction of Petri dishes for plate cultivations, are now obsolete in modern laboratories and are merely mentioned for the benefit of students, since examiners who are interested in the academic and historical aspects of bacteriology sometimes expect candidates to be acquainted with the ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... point. The service must be the best you can give. It is considered good manufacturing practice, and not bad ethics, occasionally to change designs so that old models will become obsolete and new ones will have to be bought either because repair parts for the old cannot be had, or because the new model offers a new sales argument which can be used to persuade a consumer to scrap what he has and buy something new. We ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... come about in medicine. The materia medica of twenty-five years ago is now obsolete. No good doctor now treats symptoms—he neither gives you something to relieve your headache nor to settle your stomach. These are but timely ting-a-lings—Nature's warnings—look out! And the doctor tells you so, and charges you a fee ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... the child of his own age, but the present will not be to him a whit more real than the past; for, like the philosopher of the Platonic vision, the poet is the spectator of all time and of all existence. For him no form is obsolete, no subject out of date; rather, whatever of life and passion the world has known, in desert of Judaea or in Arcadian valley, by the rivers of Troy or the rivers of Damascus, in the crowded and hideous streets of a modern city or by the pleasant ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... and most orthodox congregation of New York, where strict adherence to custom and ceremonial was the watchword of faith; but it was only during her childhood and earliest years that she attended the synagogue, and conformed to the prescribed rites and usages which she had now long since abandoned as obsolete and having no bearing on modern life. Nor had she any great enthusiasm for her own people. As late as April, 1882, she published in "The Century Magazine" an article written probably some months before, entitled "Was the Earl of Beaconsfield a Representative Jew?" in which she ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... The spinous points on the head approach very near to those of bufo and porcus. The inferior preorbitar tooth is acutely spinous, and points directly downwards; the two anterior ones are inconspicuous, and not very acute, and the smaller upper posterior one observed in most Scorpaenae is obsolete, or, at least, completely hidden by the integuments. The nasal spines are, as usual, small, simple, and acute. The three supra orbitar teeth are smaller than in militaris, and the middle one reclines so as to be concealed by the integument instead of standing boldly ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... the European Union on 1 January 2007, began the transition from Communism in 1989 with a largely obsolete industrial base and a pattern of output unsuited to the country's needs. The country emerged in 2000 from a punishing three-year recession thanks to strong demand in EU export markets. Domestic consumption ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... a debt that I never can repay," continued Lothair. "Had it not been for you, I should have remained what I was when we first met, a prejudiced, narrow-minded being, with contracted sympathies and false knowledge, wasting my life on obsolete trifles, and utterly insensible to the privilege of living in this wondrous age of change and progress. Why, had it not been for you I should have at this very moment been lavishing my fortune on an ecclesiastical toy, ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... reverent. The cloth-mill girls had discovered our (happily) obsolete magenta, and made themselves hideous in flounced petticoats and sacks of that dreadful hue. The sister of our Lukerya, the maid who had been assigned to us, thus attired, felt distinctly superior. Lukerya would have had the bad taste to follow her ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... the few villages of our populous country yet left remote from any line of railway. The chief events of its quiet days were the morning and evening arrivals and departures of the mail-coach, whose driver still retained the almost obsolete custom of blowing a horn to signal ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... contending, for the direction of public affairs, appeared confronting each other. During some years they were designated as Cavaliers and Roundheads. They were subsequently called Tories and Whigs; nor does it seem that these appellations are likely soon to become obsolete. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... youth, of lofty stature, and with a certain majesty of bearing; down his shoulders flowed a profusion of long curled hair, divided in the centre of the forehead, and connected with golden clasps, in which was wrought the emblem of the Athenian nobles—the Grasshopper—a fashion not yet obsolete, as it had become in the days of Thucydides. Still, to an observer, there was something heavy in the ordinary expression of the handsome countenance. His dress differed from the earlier fashion of the Ionians;[7] ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... the hour after, and their dinner consists of the dishes which have previously figured on the Fellows' table. It seems to me that the time may come when the authorities of that royal foundation will see reason to regret so unnecessary an arrangement, the relic of a long, obsolete, and always undesirable system. Many of Saint Werner's most distinguished alumni have themselves sat at the sizars' table, and if any of them were blessed or cursed with sensitive dispositions, they will not be dead to the justice of these remarks. The sizars ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... subordinate characteristics to the essential interest of the story. The attempt is not to be considered as seeking a comparison with any of the direct translations of the Odyssey, either in prose or verse, though if I were to state the obligations which I have had to one obsolete version,[1] I should run the hazard of depriving myself of the very slender degree of reputation which I could hope to acquire from a trifle like ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... heart. Whatever science has added I have gladly appropriated. I make no claim, however, to be a specialist. While the curse of Canaan is no longer a question of debate, yet nevertheless the folly of the obsolete theory should be thoroughly understood by the young men of the Negro race who, though voting now, were not born when Sumter was fired upon. Second, A growing desire among the enlightened Negroes in America to learn all that is possible ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... the ecclesiastical leaders, was an intriguer; but he was no fanatical adherent of obsolete institutions. The restoration of religion was, to him, the just and sufficient object of the insurrection. A time came when he was very careful to dissociate La Vendee from Brittany, as the champions, respectively, of ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... practical use, but was entirely superseded by new kinds of popular poetry, of which many examples survive, and are familiar to every student. How, or why, then, should a poet, aiming at popularity, about 1719-1730, compose 'The Queen's Marie' in an obsolete manner? The old ballads were still sung, indeed; but we ask for proof that new ballads were still ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... grew desperately hungry. They had to get food in some way or other. So while this debate went on, with its interminable silence and pauses, and while the Aces called their own meeting, and formed themselves into a Committee, to find some obsolete dealing with the question, the Three Companions themselves were eating all they could find, and drinking out of every ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... minutest details of their texts, he never caught their spirit; never seemed to realize that they are classics because their authors were so close to life and imbued them with such vitality that time has not yet rendered them obsolete. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... a few months at Zanzibar would do the business more quietly and effectually?" The expense of getting them over there may be one objection. But whoever goes to Zanzibar, teetotallers, we are told, should keep away. There it is drink or die. Burton introduces many obsolete words, makes attacks on various persons, and says fearlessly just what he thinks; but the work has both the Burtonian faults. It is far too long, and it ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... was Henry Wallace Mills. He was in the middle thirties, temperate, studious, a moderate smoker, and—one would have said—a bachelor of the bachelors, armour-plated against Cupid's well-meant but obsolete artillery. Sometimes Sidney Mercer's successor in the teller's cage, a sentimental young man, would broach the topic of Woman and Marriage. He would ask Henry if he ever intended to get married. On such occasions ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... priesthood, which was given, together with the purple-bordered robe, and the curule chair, to the office of flamen. The praetor wished the question to rest not on the precedents contained in the annals, which were obsolete from their antiquity, but on the usual practice in all the cases of most recent date; urging, that no flamen of Jupiter, in the memory of their fathers or their grandfathers, had taken up that privilege. The tribunes giving it as their opinion, that justice required, that as the obliteration ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... from time to time murdered, and curiously enough numbered; that is, upon the body of each was set a mark or seal, announcing that he was one of a series. But at this time the question before the society related to the substitution for the dagger, which was vetoed as obsolete, of some explosive machine that would be both more effectual and less difficult to manage; and in short, a large reward was offered to our needy Englishman if he would put their ideas of such a machine ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... I was ready, as a soldier, to make light of military croaks about troopships. Constantinople must surrender, revolt or scuttle within a very few hours of our battleships entering the Marmora. Memories of one or two obsolete six inchers at Ladysmith helped me to feel as Constantinople would feel when her rail and sea communications were cut and a rain of shell fell upon the penned-in populace from de Robeck's terrific batteries. Given a good wind that nest of iniquity ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... book is the summary. It was written under one dispensation; it is being published under another. My first impulse, therefore, was to ask whether the change which has rendered so much of the old world obsolete had not invalidated also the conclusions here arrived at. But reflection has simply confirmed me in the desire to complete the arrangements for publication. Self-government is the keynote of the essay, and it is unlikely that self-government will cease to be the central ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... shells, moved their heads slightly to and fro. In front, outdrawn upon a little ridge, stood the guns and boomed defiance. Rockbridge, Staunton, Loudoun, Alexandria, and New Orleans did well this day. The guns themselves were something ancient, growing obsolete; but those striplings about them, beardless, powder-grimed, bare of arm and chest, silent and swift and steady of eye and hand, sponging, ramming, priming, aiming, firing, showed in the van of Time a brood ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... Directors some sort of notice of this transaction.[17] In his letter of that date he varies in no small degree the aspect under which the business appeared in his Minute of Consultation of the 26th of June. In his letter he says to the Directors, "The subject is now become obsolete; the fair hopes which I had built upon the prosecution of the Mahratta war have been blasted by the dreadful calamities which have befallen your Presidency of Fort St. George, and changed the object of our pursuit from the aggrandizement of your power to its preservation." ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Rouen, as, one by one, their last communications were cut off. Their attacks upon the enemy became more frequent and more desperate every day. With artillery, with every weapon they could scrape together, obsolete or not, they kept a continual hail of missiles on the English camp, especially harassing the quarters of the Duke of Gloucester, absolutely preventing the King's soldiers from ever approaching near enough to mine their walls, and giving ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... shield that would destroy nuclear missiles before they reach their target. It wouldn't kill people, it would destroy weapons. It wouldn't militarize space, it would help demilitarize the arsenals of Earth. It would render nuclear weapons obsolete. We will meet with the Soviets, hoping that we can agree on a way to rid the world of the threat of ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... very popular, has been superseded by Whist. Quadrille, the game referred to by Pope in his "Rape of the Lock," is now obsolete. ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... uppermost and most evident. Camilla in her youth had been of a rare and delicate beauty, which had given her fame throughout the country-side, and she held the best of it still, as one holds jewels in a worn casket, and as a poem written in obsolete language contains still its first grace of thought. Camilla's soft and slender body had none of those stiff, distorted lines which come from resistance to the forced attitudes of life. Her body and her soul had been amenable to all discipline. She had leaned ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... tragedy in Russia, should throw the time back by a hundred and fifty years, should change the scene to Scotland (the heart of the sorrow would be Mary's exile), and, above all, should compose a ballad in a style long obsolete. This is not the method of the popular poet, and such imitations of the old ballad as Hardyknute show that literary poets of 1719 had not knowledge or skill enough to mimic the antique manner ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... fine and immortal essence is treated by the majority as a mere poetic phrase—a figure of speech, without any real meaning behind it. I know well how some of you here to-day will regret wasting your time in listening, even for a few minutes, to anything about so obsolete a subject as the Soul! The Soul! What is it? A fiction or a fact? How many of us possess a Soul, or THINK we possess one? Of what is it composed, that it should be judged as so much more precious than the Body?—the ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... nice eyes and ears. Already I'd had time to notice that; for even in these days, when men aren't supposed to be as indispensable to females as they were in Edwardian or Victorian and earlier ages, I don't think it's entirely obsolete for a girl to learn more about a man's looks in three seconds than she picks up about another woman's frock ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... few persons can conceive, he had not only thoughtfully perused all the popular English authors, of later date, but taken an extensive survey of foreign literature. He had also waded through the folios of the SCHOOLMEN, as well as scrutinized, with the minutest attention, the more obsolete writers of the last three centuries; preserving, at the same time, a distinguishing sense of their respective merits, particular sentiments, and characteristic traits; which, on proper occasions, he commented upon, in a manner that astonished the learned ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... effort and the upper rooms easily? What possessed his predecessor to put such an impossible paper on the study and to stuff the room with book-shelves? A row of Puritan divines offended him—a wooden, obsolete theology—but he also pitched a defence of Queen Mary into a cupboard—she had done enough mischief already. The garden looked squalid and mean, without flowers, with black patches peeping through the thin covering of snow, with ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... and which have survived amid all changes and convulsions, should raise him especially above the temptation to exalt the fashion of his own time, or of any past one; above the affectation of the obsolete, above slavery to the present, and above that strange mixture of both which some display, who weep because the beautiful visions of the Past are departed, and admire themselves for being able to weep over them—and ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... complex matter to grapple with. The literary artist, therefore, will be well aware of physical science; science also attaining, in its turn, its true literary ideal. And then, as the scholar is nothing without the historic sense, he will be apt to restore not really obsolete or really worn-out words, but the finer edge of words still in use: ascertain, communicate, discover—words like these it has been part of our "business" to misuse. And still, as language was made for man, he will be no authority for correctnesses which, limiting freedom of utterance, ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... but they were of no use whatever to him. He desired the artillery; this could not have been of any use to him for the purpose he had in view. The gun was, as a matter of fact, a weapon so utterly obsolete that it could have been of no use to any one. Logically, therefore, the transaction proposed amounted to x minus against x minus. But the diamonds would have been of great use to Herbert Rhodes, while the cannon ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... overcome the resistance of almost any number of foot-soldiers in light marching gear and armed with the antiquated pike, the affair may be worthy of a moment's attention; and for this improvement—itself now as obsolete as the slings and cataphracts of Roman legions—the world was indebted to Maurice. But the shock of mighty armies, the manoeuvring of vast masses in one magnificent combination, by which the fate of empires, the happiness or the misery of the peoples ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... tactics of the time was to await the fire of the enemy and then charge quickly and bayonet him before he could reload. The old method of firing off the musket by means of slow matches kept alight during action was now obsolete; the latest device was the flintlock. But there was always a measure of doubt whether the weapon would go off. Partly on this account Benjamin Franklin, the wisest man of his time, declared for the use of the pike of an earlier age rather than the bayonet and for bows and arrows instead of firearms. ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... (albeit himself of Saxon blood) would be sadly perplexed with "Sir Tristram,"[267] or any other given "Auchinleck MS." with or without a grammar or glossary; and to most apprehensions it seems evident that none but a native can acquire a competent, far less complete, knowledge of our obsolete idioms. We may give the critic credit for his ingenuity, but no more believe him than we do Smollett's Lismahago,[268] who maintains that the purest English is spoken in Edinburgh. That Coray may err is very possible; but if he does, the fault is in the man rather ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... into the doctrine of the divinity of kings, which after a long period of florescence dwindles away into the modest theory that kings reign by divine right, a theory familiar to our ancestors not long ago, and perhaps not wholly obsolete among us even now. However, inspired men need not always blossom out into divine kings; they may, and often do, remain in the chrysalis state of simple deities revered by their simple worshippers, their brows encircled indeed with a halo of divinity but not ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... the basis of arbitrary lighting, which entered into the scheme of composition of that picture. This is not values, but what is generally understood by the older writers when they speak of "chiaroscuro." The modern painter deals little with chiaroscuro. It is almost obsolete as a technical word. Arbitrary arrangement of light and shade in a picture is not usual nowadays, and consequently the word which expressed it has ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... stopped by the Supreme Court of Kentucky when reading in argument from an opinion of Lord Ellenborough;[Footnote: Hickman v. Boffman, Hardin's Rep., 348, 364.] but after a few years, legislation of this kind, while it might remain formally unrepealed, was treated as obsolete both by court and bar.[Footnote: Statutes of New Jersey, ed. of 1800, p. 436 (1799); Morehead and Brown, "Digest of the Statutes of Kentucky," I, ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... Rome knew nothing of this event. The High Priest offered the evening sacrifice unaware that it was rendered obsolete by the coming of the true Sacrifice, and Caesar slept that night without a dream that a Rival had been born who would uproot his empire and erect a worldwide kingdom. Earth was unconscious of this birth, but heaven knew it. There was holy ecstacy in ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... arrangement, depends, to the common eye, mainly on mere size and texture; now if we made it our study to adopt the classification which would involve the least peril of similar rapprochements, we should return to the obsolete division into trees, shrubs, and herbs, which though of primary importance with regard to mere general aspect, yet (compared even with so petty and unobvious a distinction as that into dicotyledons and monocotyledons) answers to so few differences in the other ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... the peasantry, Jeff says, whereever they goes; an' then clods pursoocs Jeff an' the others, from start to finish, with hoes an' rakes an' mattocks an' clothes-poles an' puddin'- sticks an' other barbarous an' obsolete arms, an' never lets up ontil Jeff an' Morgan all' their gallant comrades is ag'in safe in the arms of ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... have seen in the second chapter of this book, child abandonment and infanticide are by no means obsolete practices. As for abortion, it has not decreased but increased with the advance of civilization. The reader will recall that one authority says that there are 1,000,000 abortions in the United States every year, while another estimates ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... physic," replied the spectre, "is obsolete, and the holy-water cure, in particular, has almost ceased to number any advocates, except the Rev. Dr F. G. Lee, whose books," said this candid apparition, "appear to me to indicate superstitious credulity. No, I don't know that any new discoveries have ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... obscure and quiet corner, observing all and imagining that he escaped observation. And as the young men of his own years glided by him, or as their talk reached his ears, he became aware that from top to toe, within and without, he was old-fashioned, obsolete, not of his race, not of his day. His rank itself seemed to him a waste-paper title-deed to a heritage long lapsed. Not thus the princely seigneurs of Rochebriant made their 'debut' at the capital of their nation. They had had the 'entree' to the ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... negative in form and Judaistic in character, and if used in this way as a "rule" of Christian conduct must be spiritualized and reinterpreted in the light of the Gospel. The second and fourth Commandments, in particular, are in their literal significance obsolete for Christians: it is a false Puritanism which would forbid sculpture and religious symbolism in the adornment of a Christian church, nor is any one in the modern world likely to confuse the symbol with the ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... roof. There were a few books in the recess by the fireplace, but they consisted of bound volumes of The Norfolk Sporting Gazette from 1860 to 1870, with an odd volume on Fishing on the Broads and an obsolete Farmers' Annual. The past occupants of the inn had evidently been keen sportsmen, for there were specimens of stuffed fowl and fish ranged in glass cases around the walls, and two old rusty fowling pieces and a fishing rod hung suspended near ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... curricle, wide enough to accommodate three passengers. The fare was thirteen shillings and sixpence sterling per head. The curricle was presently superseded by a series of fat yellow coaches, one of which—nearly a century later, and long after that pleasant mode of travel had fallen obsolete—was the cause of much mental tribulation (1. Some idle reader here and there may possibly recall the burning of the old stage-coach in The Story of a Bad Boy.) to the ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... and she looked up in instant reaction to it. "I am all that you say except what is good. There is no doubt of that. I have been a soldier for nineteen years; have made it the work of my life, in fact. I know nothing else—except, perhaps, a little of a passing, obsolete trade of this fading West you see around you. I had hoped to win—had won, I thought, place and distinction in that profession. You know what happened. Perhaps I did not deserve more. Perhaps it was necessary to reduce us all. Perhaps I was wrong in despairing. But I had won my way by ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... resource, though all that we know as human history has tried its experiments in enjoyment since then. The flavour of the ballet thrown in, by the introduction of the damsels of the household clad in fishing nets, is not yet obsolete in modern amusements; and even in this century Muhammed Ali had resource to the same way of killing time, as he was rowed about by his harem, but ...
— Egyptian Tales, First Series • ed. by W. M. Flinders Petrie
... clothed with it; and, where this is wanting, every attempt to conceal deformities of character will resemble only the thinnest veil, which may be seen through by the most careless observer. This recommendation may possibly appear to some rather antiquated and obsolete; we shall, nevertheless, persist in it, as of essential importance; and support it by quoting the reference of the apostle to him who has best exemplified the principle, and whose Spirit alone can effectually impress it upon the heart: "Let nothing be done through strife or vain ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... of men were engaged in disgorging and preparing wine for shipment. In another we noticed one of those heavy beam presses for pressing the grapes which the more intelligent manufacturers regard as obsolete, while in a third was the cuve vat, holding no more than 2,200 gallons. In making their cuve the firm commonly mix one part of old wine to three parts of new. An indifferent vintage, however, necessitates the admixture of a larger proportion of the older growth. The cellars, like all the more ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... concerns—was not expected to spend its use among the men then living, that which follows might seem to imply. It was that wrapping of them, it was that gross superscription which 'the fortune of our state was likely to make obsolete ere long,' this author thought, as we shall see if we look into his prophecies a little. 'I will not, after all, as I often hear dead men spoken of, that men should say of me: "He judged, and LIVED SO and SO. Could he have spoken when he was dying, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... wanting to buy the news that had happened yesterday, when, for the same money, they could obtain news of what would happen that very day. The stupid method of chronicling past events, Hamar announced in the first issue of his organ, was now obsolete. It was, perhaps, good enough for the Victorian era, but it was utterly out of keeping with the present age of hourly progress. Who, for instance, wanted to know that at 6 p.m., on the preceding evening, there had been a big fire in New York? ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... disadvantage. I have attempted to solve the difficulty by engaging by the week one of those archaic old horse chaises called fiacres. London has placed a hansom in the British Museum with the other obsolete and historic styles of equipages, but frugal Paris has kept her out-of-date vehicles on exhibition in active use on the boulevards. These conveyances, so recently looked down upon for their slow pace as compared with the speed of taxis, are now restored to something ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... Fables in this book are translations in a true sense, and keep closely to the text. From others I have erased such political, mythological and literary allusions (in which La Fontaine abounds) as are either obsolete or unintelligible to ...
— Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks - From the French of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... fortified by cakes and tea, the two sauntered, side by side—a tall stalwart black figure, white capped and aproned and an equally tall but slender pale pink one—down across the lawn to the battery where the small obsolete cannon so boldly defied danger of piracy or invasion ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... though Quakerism in her had been deeply alloyed with other metals, the moral and intellectual self-dependence of Quakerism, its fastidious reserves and discrimination were very strong in her. Discrimination indeed was the note of her being. For every Christian, some Christian precepts are obsolete. For Lady Lucy that which runs—"Judge Not!"—had ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the times of Elizabeth, James I., and the first Charles become almost obsolete, with the exception of Shakespeare? Why do they no longer belong to the English, being once so popular? And why is Shakespeare an exception?—One thing, among fifty, necessary to the full solution is, that they all employed poetry and poetic diction ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... merely as a matter of history. It exists also as a fact in living consciousness. It is the function of psychology to investigate that consciousness. We must say that, accurately speaking, there is no such thing as Christian philosophy. There are philosophies, good or bad, current or obsolete. These are Christian only in being applied to the history of Christianity and the content of the Christian consciousness. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as Christian consciousness. There is the human consciousness, operating with and ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... Scotia coasting schooner with a cargo of deals and potatoes, whose master was also the owner and who lost the savings of a lifetime because he lacked the men and guns to defend his property against spoliation. The war was no concern of his, and he was the victim of a system now obsolete among civilized nations, a relic of a barbarous and piratical age whose spirit has been revived and gloried in recently only by the Government of the German Empire. The chief fault of the privateersman was that he sailed and fought for his ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... effect of his poems. He was theoretically determined not only to be a philosophic poet, but to be a great philosophic poet, and to this end he must produce an epic. Leaving aside the question whether the epic be obsolete or not, it may be doubted whether the history of a single man's mind is universal enough in its interest to furnish all the requirements of the epic machinery, and it may be more than doubted whether a poet's philosophy be ordinary metaphysics, divisible into chapter ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... which this experience was so strong a factor has not become obsolete. The "horrible decrees" have indeed been very generally driven from the pulpit, but not entirely. Our work as polemics will not be finished until they leave the schools and the books, and cease to be ...
— Elizabeth: The Disinherited Daugheter • E. Ben Ez-er
... century seems to mean that men were content to regulate their thoughts and lives by rules not traceable to first principles, but dependent upon a set of special and exceptional conditions. . . To get out of the ruts, or cast off the obsolete shackles, two methods might be adopted. The intellectual horizon might be widened by including a greater number of ages and countries; or men might try to fall back upon the thoughts and emotions common to all races, and so ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... then? Will there be a recrudescence of old obsolete war? In a saturated population life is always cheap, as it is cheap in China, in India, to-day. Will new human drifts take place, questing for room, carving earth-space out of crowded life. ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... referred to a custom which prevailed in all the rural parish churches, and which I remember in my early days at Fettercairn; the custom I mean, now quite obsolete, of the minister, after pronouncing the blessing, turning to the heritors, who always occupied the front seats of the gallery, and making low bows to each family. Another custom I recollect:—When the text had been given ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay |
