"Vulgarity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that of Plato, or of Shakespeare for that matter, or of Dante, Rabelais, Catullus, Voltaire,[10] Gibbon or Balzac, to say nothing of St. Chrysostom (who could not sleep without an Aristophanes under his pillow) or the author of "The Song of Solomon." They did not like vulgarity and they put a stop to it: also in that age Punch and the Times flourished. What is decent or indecent, vulgar or refined, is, of course, a matter of taste; and each age has a taste of its own. The ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... conscious debauchee is absurd: thousands of dull, conscientious people beat their children conscientiously, because they were beaten themselves and think children ought to be beaten. The ill-tempered vulgarity that instinctively strikes at and hurts a thing that annoys it (and all children are annoying), and the simple stupidity that requires from a child perfection beyond the reach of the wisest and best adults (perfect truthfulness coupled with perfect obedience is quite a common condition of leaving ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... Italian language, and there was none of the disagreeable drawl which is so offensive to southern ears. In short, it seemed to be the Scottish as spoken by the ancient Court of Scotland, to which no idea of vulgarity could be attached; and the lively manners and gestures with which it was accompanied were so completely in accord with the sound of the voice and the style of talking, that I cannot assign them a different origin. In long derivation, perhaps the manner of ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... seen among those who have the thoughts without the conventional usages of a better caste in life, she was slightly tinctured with an exhibition of what might be termed an exaggerated manner, while at the same time it was perfectly free from vulgarity or coarseness. The gentle accents of Adelheid fell on her ear soothingly, and she gazed long and earnestly at the beautiful speaker ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... in his hands. It all depressed him like a weight. From the depths of his soul he despised them for their vulgarity, and hated himself for so doing, for he was of their life and work akin. He shut his eyes, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... obligation of the 'common weal', that conception of which Government, increasingly better organized, is the most striking practical realization. It has its drawback in the spread of what we feel as a debasing 'vulgarity', but the general balance is overwhelmingly on the side of good. And in all such discussions we are apt to allow far too little weight to the change which the New World, and especially the United States, has brought about. In matters of ...
— Progress and History • Various
... of the thirteenth century artificiality and vulgarity began to preponderate, provoking as counterweights didactic works such as Der Krieg auf der Wartburg. The fourteenth century saw the rise of the free cities, literary guilds, and five universities. It also marks the cultivation of political satire in such ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... lady, and consequently my education was manifestly superior to those of my companions. THEY could scarcely be called comme il faut, at all; though, to own the truth, I am afraid there is tant soit peu de vulgarity about all WORKED pocket-handkerchiefs. I remember that, one day, when Madame de la Rocheaimard and Adrienne were discussing the expediency of buying our whole piece, with a view of offering us to their benefactress, the ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... this, to watch the gradual withdrawal from the face of all that was manly and clean, and all that makes for success. We can see where purity left him and was gradually replaced by vulgarity, and where he began to be ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... almost the antithesis of Saint-Saens' that finally disclosed itself through Franck. In it everything is felt and necessary and expressive. It is unadorned. None of the light musical frosting that conceals the poverty and vulgarity of so many of the other's ideas is to be found here. The designs themselves are noble and significant. Franck possessed a rare gift of sensing exactly what was to his purpose. He had the artistic courage ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... They seemed to be as little akin to her as would have been the shopkeepers in the small town near Caversham. She would sit through long evenings almost speechless, trying to fathom the depth of the vulgarity of her associates. Occasionally she was taken out, and was then, probably, taken to very grand houses. The two duchesses and the Marchioness of Auld Reekie received Madame Melmotte, and the garden parties of royalty were open to her. And some of the most elaborate ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... of an ideal character about its situations, though it seems to be all head, with a minimum of apparent heart, it none the less is universal in the sense that Restoration comedy is universal. It presents a type of vulgarity, of sporting spirit, that is common in every generation, whether in the time of Congreve and Wycherley, whether in the period of Sheridan or Oscar Wilde. Its wit is not dependent on local colour, though ostensibly it is written about New York. On its first presentment, it ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... deliberation and judicious reflection. And he could far better affirm his state of mind by his dress, than by any written words. Lying on the bed, cleanly shaved, wearing evening clothes, silk socks, patent leather shoes and white gloves? No, that would be vulgar, and all taint of vulgarity must be avoided. He must represent, even in a state of symbol, the young man, who having drunk of life to repletion, and finding that he can but repeat the same love draughts, says: "It is far too great a bore, I will go," and he goes out of life just as if he were leaving a fashionable soiree ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... shit to the most passionate expressions of love. That the one is likely to appear on the walls of latrines and the other to be cut in glass by a diamond is part of what Johnson would have called the "Hieroglyphic" significance of this collection. In Johnson's plays, there is the odd mixture of vulgarity and sublimity, the comic and the serious, the satirical and the nonsensical. If his dramas bear a resemblance to Jarry's Ubu Roi, so The Merry-Thought resembles the kind of anthology that Jarry might have put together to illustrate the absurd anarchy of the human spirit. Johnson, on the ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... audiences should see everything that he saw. If a Danish peasant actually lay at times in a drunken stupor on a dunghill, he saw no reason why Jeppe should not appear on the stage in an equally disgusting condition. If a peasant girl in life was not averse to simpering vulgarity, why should Lisbed talk any more circumspectly to Erasmus Montanus? Holberg, however, had none of the interest of the modern scientific naturalist in analyses of motive and conduct. His sense of fact was, therefore, ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... men of good taste who care for the best they know. Vulgarity is satisfaction with mean things. That is vulgar which is poor of its kind. There is a kind of music called rag-time,—vulgar music, with catchy tunes—catchy to those who do not know nor care for things better. There are men satisfied with rag-time music, with rag-time ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... itself to write of actual and physical feastings, and nuptials, and dances, actual nightly thefts of horses, actual fidelity of dogs and swineherds, actual intermarriages between deities and men, or that it is this seeming vulgarity which has won for him from the wisest of every age the title of the father of poetry? Degrading thought! fit only for the coarse and sense-bound tribe who can appreciate nothing but what is palpable to sense and sight! As soon believe the Christian scriptures, when they tell us of a deity ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... had resorted. This talkative person was the only other man in the house. Their discussion concerned the melancholy disappearance of wonder and adventure in these latter days, the prevalence of globe-trotting, the abolition of distance by steam and electricity, the vulgarity of advertisement, the degradation of men by civilisation, and many such things. Particularly was the talkative person eloquent on the decay of human courage through security, a security Mr. Ledbetter rather thoughtlessly ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... apprise his employer, delicately, of that which he believed was still news to him. And yet, from the easy way in which he read it, word for word, Garry was positive that all this which the New York daily blazoned forth with its customary mixture of snobbishness and vulgarity was no longer news to Steve. The latter's eyes lifted and dwelt long upon Fat ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... "A cheap, gaudy show, all bluster and vulgarity. Even the dancing is a mere parody. I early tired ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... halls in Capetown. I have visited similar entertainments in Constantinople, Cairo, Beyrout and other towns of the East, but I never saw anything to match some of these Capetown haunts for out-and-out vulgarity. There was, it is true, a general air of "patriotism" pervading them—but it was frequently the sort of patriotism which consists in getting drunk and singing "Soldiers of the Queen". On one occasion I remember a curious and typical incident at one of these music halls. ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... through Cairo with the same relief that he left the Riviera, resenting its social vulgarity so close to the imperial aristocracy of the Desert; he settled down into the peace of soft and silent little Helouan. The hotel in which he had a room on the top floor had been formerly a Khedivial Palace. It had the air of a palace still. He felt himself in a country-house, with lofty ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... so unhappily it yet commands amongst us, has raised up against the arts a barrier of the love of luxury and show, which is of all obvious hindrances the worst to overpass: the highest and most cultivated classes are not free from the vulgarity of it, the lower are not free from its pretence. I beg you to remember both as a remedy against this, and as explaining exactly what I mean, that nothing can be a work of art which is not useful; that is to ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... sculpture is relieved necessarily vary with the depth of the recess, there arise a series of problems, in deciding which the wholesome desire for emphasis by means of shadow is too often exaggerated by the ambition of the sculptor to show his skill in undercutting. The extreme of vulgarity is usually reached when the entire bas-relief is cut hollow underneath, as in much Indian and Chinese work, so as to relieve its forms against an absolute darkness; but no formal law can ever be given; for exactly the same thing may be beautifully done ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... embroidered over with symbols of the things it conceals from view. We are ourselves symbols, dwelling in a world of symbols—a world many times removed from that ultimate reality to which all things bear figurative witness; the commonest thing has yet some mystic meaning, and ugliness and vulgarity exist only ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... to which as yet her whole life had been a stranger; she was suddenly removed from turbulent vulgarity to the enjoyment of calm elegance; and the gentleness of her disposition, instead of being tyrannically imposed upon, not only made her loved with affection, but treated with the most scrupulous delicacy. Cecilia had her share in all the comfort she bestowed; she had now a friend to oblige, ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... nearly hidden by a figured blue-cloth blower, were seated two women—mother and daughter—Mrs. Hall, and Sarah, or Sally; for this was a part of the world where the latter modification had not as yet been effaced as a vulgarity by the march of intellect. The owner of the name was the young woman by whose means Mr. Darton proposed to put an end to his bachelor ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... the great financier's confidential secretary, expressed no emotion whatever. Sir Richard Haredale flashed contempt from his grey eyes—only to veil his scorn of the man's vulgarity beneath a cloud of tobacco smoke. Tom Sheard, of the Gleaner, drew down a corner of his mouth and felt ashamed of the acquaintance. Denby, the music-hall comedian, softly whistled those bars of a popular ballad set to the words, ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... however, it seemed that Eleanor, with her wiles, had completely trepanned and bewildered her father, cheated him out of his judgement, robbed him of the predilections and tastes of his life, and caused him to be tolerant of a man whose arrogance and vulgarity would, a few years since, have been unendurable to him. That the whole thing was as good as arranged between Eleanor and Mr. Slope there was no longer any room to doubt. That Mr. Harding knew that such was the case, even this could hardly be doubted. It was too manifest that he at any ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... fiercely, and yet let it be said that for delicacy, strength, sincerity, clarity, and all great graces of style, he is side by side with the noblest of our prose writers. Can it be that a few scattered drops of vulgarity in emphasis dim such a fire as this? Does so small a dead fly taint so big a pot of ointment? I will not be foolish enough to dogmatise on such a point, and yet I can find no other reasons than those ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... came a reasonable pretext, but not contemptuously. Mr. Marsh's aspect, if anything, pleased her; she liked these avoidances of the commonplace. Cecily did not fail to inspect the new arrival. She too was well aware that hatred of vulgarity constrains many persons who are anything but fools to emphasize their being in odd ways, and it might still—in spite of the impressionist water-colours—be proved that Mr. Marsh had a right to vary from the kindly race of men. She hoped he was really a person of some account; it delighted ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... fondly believed, to some sort of mastery of the scenic idea, which struck him as a very different matter now that he looked at it from within. He had had his early days of contempt for it, when it seemed to him a jewel, dim at the best, hidden in a dunghill, a taper burning low in an air thick with vulgarity. It was hedged about with sordid approaches, it was not worth sacrifice and suffering. The man of letters, in dealing with it, would have to put off all literature, which was like asking the bearer ...
— Nona Vincent • Henry James
... snubbed Mrs. Hannay effectually than you could snub a little down cushion. It would be impossible, she thought, to make any impression at all on that yielding surface. Impossible to take any impression from her, to say where her gaiety ended and her vulgarity began. ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... mild, so intensely and unconsciously original in the expression of his naive emotions before the spectacle of life, that a hasty inquirer into his idiosyncrasy might be excused for entirely missing the point of him. His new book (which helps to redeem the enormous vulgarity of a booming season), "A Shepherd's Life: Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs" (Methuen), is soberly of a piece with his long and deliberate career. A large volume, yet one arrives at the end of it with surprising ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... Athenaeum, discussing modern songs, observes that in the happy days of the eighteenth century "even the vulgar could not achieve vulgarity; to-day vulgarity is in the air, and only the strongest and most fastidious escape its taint." The accompanying lines are submitted as a modest protest against this sadly undemocratic and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... wanting in everything but coarseness; and if his invention dance at all, it is like a galley-slave in chains under the lash. It would be well for us if the sins themselves were indeed such wretched bugaboos as he has painted for us. What he means for humor is but the dullest vulgarity; his satire would be Billingsgate if it could, and, failing, becomes a mere offence in the nostrils, for it takes a great deal of salt to keep scurrility sweet. Mr. Sibbald, in his "Chronicle of Scottish Poetry," has admiringly preserved more than enough ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... relieved her mind from the terrifying idea of having the laurels of her early days blasted by this degrading conquest, but he only changed indignation into distress. "What! our lovely, dutiful, modest, ingenuous Constantia, to marry that lump of sedition; that bag of cozening vulgarity; that rolling tumbril, laden with all the off-scourings of his own detestable party!—Brother, take my advice, and send the dear creature instantly to the King's quarters; there is no safety for her within Morgan's reach.—These republicans stop at nothing; ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... put away the two metaphors, and to come to the reality far greater than either of them, we can, whensoever we please, pass into the presence before which the splendours of an earthly monarch's court shrink into vulgarity, and attain to a real reception of the light that irradiates the true Holy Place, before which that which shone in the earthly shrine dwindles and darkens into a shadow. We may live with God, and in Him, and wrap a veil and 'privacy of glorious ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... thro' Earth, and Air, and Sea, A Voyage of Discovery! And let me add (to ward off strife) 5 For V—ker and for V—ker's Wife— She large and round beyond belief, A superfluity of beef! Her mind and body of a piece, And both composed of kitchen-grease. 10 In short, Dame Truth might safely dub her Vulgarity enshrin'd in blubber! He, meagre bit of littleness, All snuff, and musk, and politesse; So thin, that strip him of his clothing, 15 He'd totter on the edge of Nothing! In case of foe, he well might hide Snug in the collops of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... all things the charge of vulgarity, distrusting his first wife's taste, not being quite sure of his own. A compactly built, well-featured man of middle size and pale complexion; a man careful and correct in speech, manner and dress; in his gently reserved, modest bearing giving no ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... Everett's whole life has been a sermon from this text. There was, at least, this advantage in duelling, that it set a certain limit on the tongue. When Society laid by the rapier, it buckled on the more subtle blade of etiquette wherewith to keep obtrusive vulgarity at bay.' In this connection, I may be permitted to recall a playful remark of his upon another occasion. The painful divisions in the First Parish, A.D. 1844, occasioned by the wild notions in respect to the rights of (what Mr. Wilbur, so far as concerned the reasoning faculty, always called) ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... ignorance, of delicate perception and denseness. Those who expect saintliness as the first attribute of psychic advancement will certainly be disillusioned. These gifts and graces may appear, not only without any corresponding degree of culture and learning, but associated with a certain vulgarity of thought and conduct. The psychic is essentially impressionable, liable to mental contagion, easily stirred by suggestion. The tendency to instability, to emotional excess, is part of this receptivity ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... Smollett's books, such as Roderick Random, 1748, Peregrine Pickle, 1751, and Ferdinand Count Fathom, 1752, were more purely stories of broadly comic adventure than Fielding's. The latter's view of life was by no means idyllic; but with Smollett this English realism ran into vulgarity and a hard Scotch literalness, and character was pushed to caricature. "The generous wine of Fielding," says Taine, "in Smollett's hands becomes brandy of the dram-shop." A partial exception to this is to be found in his last and best novel, Humphrey Clinker, 1770. The influence of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... The familiar vulgarity of some of his phrases always vexed her, and 'roost' was one of these phrases. In a flash he fell from a creature engagingly masculine to the use-worn daily sharer of ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... words, the semi-tropical nature of the place, like its vulgarity and desecration, can be, and are, enormously exaggerated. But it is always hard to correct the exaggeration without exaggerating the correction. It would be absurd seriously to deny that Jerusalem is an Eastern town; but we may say it was Westernised without being ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... impaired by the various shocks which she had undergone? Did she not require every comfort, every attendance? Monster! ask the doctor! She would stay with her darling child in spite of insult and rudeness and vulgarity. (Rosey's father was a King's officer, not a Company's officer, thank God!) She would stay as long at least as Rosey's situation continued, at Boulogne, if not in London, but with her child. They might refuse to send her ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... same people paid as much as five dollars apiece for the privilege of being in the same room with him. It was quite impossible not to contrast Captain Peary in his attitude toward the crowd and Wilbur Wright. There seemed to be, and there will always remain, a certain vulgarity in the way the North Pole was discovered, and the way the whole world behaved in regard to it, and the secret seems to have been in Captain Peary's failure to be a Wilbur Wright. He allowed the Pole to be a Crowd affair. ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... you, Margaret, that girl will ruin us. All the rest are funny. Overwhelmingly, incredibly funny! And pathetic! Could anything be more pathetic! But that awful President strikes a wrong note: Vulgarity. Take her out of it and we'll have a thing the like of which New York had never seen, for Ophelia is a genius or I miss my guess and ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... attorney, "I am very glad that your father did not see it." Poor Dolly, during this conversation about the prince, sat angry and silent, thinking to herself in despair of what extremes of vulgarity even a first cousin of her own could be guilty. That she should be sitting at table with a girl who could boast that a reprobate foreigner had kissed his hand to her from the box of a fashionable four-horsed coach! For it was in that light that ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... placed a hideous receptacle for—well, for anything—pins, perhaps, buttons, small tiresomenesses of that kind. It was made of some glistening black material, and at its center there bloomed a fearful red cabbage rose, a rose all vulgarity, ostentation and importance. This monstrosity had been given to Rosamund as a thank-offering by a poor charwoman to whom she had been kind. It had been in constant use now for over three years. The charwoman knew this ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... with white hair thrown back in disorder, like a mane, with features that looked as if they had been cut out with a bill-hook, but which were so powerful, and in which there lay such a flame of life, that one forgot their vulgarity and ugliness; with black eyes under bushy eyebrows, which dilated and flashed like lightning, now were veiled as if in tears and then were filled with serene mildness, with a voice which now growled so as almost to terrify its hearers, and which would have filled the hall of some ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... "Ah, it's all very well for you to laugh at me because I have failed over my hobby; but I feel I'm right all the same, and I tell you that his ignorance, vulgarity—" ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... escape the uniformity of the older streets. The front door opened into a square hall, from the left side of which opened the dining-room, from the right the study, both of these rooms having bow windows, built with that broad sweep of curve which makes for beauty instead of vulgarity. The house, Rendel had told his wife with a smile when they came to it, he had furnished for her, with the exception of one room in it; the study he had arranged for himself. And it certainly was a room in which, to judge by ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... turned in the doorway and looked back. "I'm so glad to have my mind settled about it," she said, with a pathos which overcame her absurdity and vulgarity. "I do work awful hard, and it doesn't seem as if I could lose my money." She appeared suddenly tragic in her cheap muslin and her frizzes. She looked old and her ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... unusual powers. But as soon as the stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his definitions, his defects, into the conversation, it is all over. He has heard the first, the last and best, he will ever hear from us. He is no stranger now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension, are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes, he may get the order, the dress, and the dinner, but the throbbing of the heart, and the communications of the soul, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Hetty Hutter" returned the girl in a low, sweet voice, which nature, aided by some education, had preserved from vulgarity of tone and utterance-"I'm Hetty; Judith Hutter's sister; and Thomas ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... mention it; after which she got into her chair, and returned home; pitying Miss Belfield for the unjust partiality shewn to her brother, and excusing the proud shame he had manifested of his relations, from the vulgarity and selfishness of her who was at ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... speech in A Woman of No Importance: "All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of." When we hear such sayings as these—or the immortal "Vulgarity is the behaviour of other people"—we do not enquire too curiously into their appropriateness to character or situation; but none the less do they belong to ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... travelled on foot, unless some violence of weather drove him into a waggon; and at night he would go to a penny lodging, where he purchased clean sheets for sixpence. This practice Lord Orrery imputes to his innate love of grossness and vulgarity: some may ascribe it to his desire of surveying human life through all its varieties: and others, perhaps with equal probability, to a passion which seems to have been deeply fixed in his heart, the love of a shilling. In time he began to think that his attendance at Moor Park deserved ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... was devotedly attached, yet bore the loss with Christian resignation. He found relief in work, and in his duties. There were no scandals in his private life. He professed and seemed to feel the greatest reverence for religion, in the form which had been taught him. He detested vulgarity in every shape, as he did all ordinary vices, from which he was free. He was self-conscious, and loved attention and honors, but was not a slave to them, like most German officials. Nothing could be more tender and affectionate than his letters to his mother, to his wife, and to ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... was not a drawbridge day of moated castlewicks and donjon keeps. Damsels were no longer gagged and bound and carried to the altar, and there wedded perforce to dreadful ogres. Wherefore, a runaway match was not necessary. Moreover, it would be vulgar; and nothing could justify vulgarity. Dorothy and Richard should remain as they were. They must continue to love; they must learn to wait, and to take what advantage the ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... exception of Maryllia, Cicely and old Miss Fosby. The rings of pale blue vapour circled before Maryllia's eyes in a dim cloud,—she had seen the same kind of mixed smoking going on before, scores of times, and yet now—why was it that she felt vaguely annoyed by a sense of discrepancy and vulgarity She could not tell. Cicely watched her lovingly,—and every now and again Julian Adderley, waving away the smoke of his own cigar with one hand, studied her face and tried to fathom its expression. She spoke but little, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... that we have so few comedies from women. Dr. Doran mentions five Englishwomen who wrote successful comedies. Of these, three are now forgotten; one, Aphra Behn, is remembered only to be despised for her vulgarity. She was an undoubted wit, and was never dull, but so wicked and coarse that she forfeited all right ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... by some to be migratory. But he stays with us all winter. Cheerful. Noisy. Poor soloist. A spice of vulgarity in him. Dash of prose in his song. Appetite extraordinary. Eats his own weight in a short time. Taste for fruit. Eats with a relishing gulp, like Dr. Johnson's. Fond of cherries. Earliest mess of peas. Mulberries. Lion's share of the raspberries. Angleworms ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... the salon employed themselves in shouting disagreeable songs. Why is it that this tuneless shrieking of false notes and scoffing words delights these people? Why is it that this ostentatious parade of ugliness, this jarring vulgarity and grimacing is their way of finding expression and expansion in the great solitary and ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... person of a later epoch. She was distinctly loud in her manners and free and easy in her conversation.... At any rate, she was a healthier type than the pleasure-loving matron of the Second Empire, whose life was one whirl of unwholesome excitement. The vulgarity of thought and conduct, the destruction of all standards of dignity, which characterized the regime of Louis Napoleon's stock-jobbing adventurers, were reflected in the dress of the women. Never was female attire more extravagantly absurd.... Man, ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... given rise to this fallacy, this exaggeration of the vulgarity and curiosity of the press, is the distinction between the articles and the headlines; or rather the tendency to ignore that distinction. The few really untrue and unscrupulous things I have seen in American 'stories' ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... for vulgarity from you! But with the bourgeoisie, I suppose, it all comes down to dollars and cents. I have not considered ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... between Miss Sally and "Cousin Abner's girls" that was destined to work wonders for the latter, not only socially and mentally but spiritually as well, for it taught them that sincerity and honest kindliness of heart and manner are the best passports everywhere, and that pretence of any kind is a vulgarity not to be tolerated. This took time, of course. The Reed girls could not discard their snobbishness all at once. But in the end it was pretty ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... forehead, or on her snowy shoulder in blue and red letters such a phrase as this: "Try the Jigamaree Bitters!" Very much like this is the sort of advertising I am speaking of. It is not likely that I shall be charged with squeamishness on this question. I can readily enough see the selfishness and vulgarity of this particular sort ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... at once that Lady Patterdale was a perfect dear. One lost sight of her incredible vulgarity in view of the charming kindliness of her heart. And, after all, vulgarity is only comparative. In the sanctity of the little shop in Birmingham where Sir John had first laid the foundations of his fortune, aspirates could drop unheeded. What mattered ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... American commercial sculptor's idea of Romeo and Juliet at the moment when the Nurse separates them with a message from Lady Capulet. With artistic instinct he noted the stupidity of the composition, the vulgarity of the lines, the cheap ugliness of the group. In that singular abstraction which comes so frequently in moments of high emotion, he let his glance wander to the pictures on the wall, the enormities in embroidery which adorned the chair backs, the garish hues of the rug lying before the ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... call Mr. N. Levy, from his assurance, but it was not the vulgarity of a man accustomed to low and coarse society—rather the mauvais ton of a person not sure of his own position, but who has resolved to swagger into the best one he can get. When it is remembered that he had made his way in the world, and gleaned together an immense fortune, it is needless to ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... courts of France and Germany, (as detailed by the Duchess of Orleans,) in and succeeding the brilliant reign of Louis the Fourteenth—a period which was deemed the acme of elegance and refinement—exhibit a grossness, a vulgarity, and a coarseness, not to be found among the very lowest of our respectable poor. And the biography of the English Beau Nash, who attempted to reform the manners of the gentry, in the times of Queen Anne, exhibits violations of the rules of decency among ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Thus the vulgarity which Garratt Skinner chose to assume, the unattractive figure of "red-hot" Barstow, and the obvious swindle which was being perpetrated on Walter Hine, had the opposite effect to that which Skinner ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... refined habits of life, on average temper and character. Of deep and true gentlemanliness—based as it is on intense sensibility and sincerity, perfected by courage, and other qualities of race; as well as of that union of insensibility with cunning, which is the essence of vulgarity, I shall have to speak at ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... pretty idea this, of rustic innocence and rural retirement, of straw bonnets and shepherding, of the new school to which you belong and who are the enemies of everything permanent. You are destroying customs to make way for theories, manners for boon comradeship, chivalry for finance, elegance for vulgarity, religion for atheism, and character for sentiment. You are to blame for all the present disorders, and such as you have brought about the burning of your own chateau. No, Madame, I will not permit the marriage. How dare you propose ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... looking on him as too hopelessly middle-aged, to entertain any such evil designs, avowing freely that she likes him, and treating him very nearly as she does papa. It is my business to keep 'our aunt,' who, between ourselves, has, below the surface, the vulgarity of nature that high-breeding cannot eradicate, from startling the little humming-bird, before the net has been properly twined round her bright little heart. As far as I can see, he is much smitten, but very cautious in his ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... cry of despair. He moved mechanically toward the church and waked from his reverie to find himself jammed in a solid mass of humanity. Never before had he realized the utter vulgarity of a public wedding. Why should any one wish a crowd of curious fools to witness even the happiest wedding? Its meaning is surely frank enough without shouting it from the housetops. Should not its joys and mystery be something too shy and sweet ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... are not proposing to introduce sentimentality. I think you would be better advised to leave that vulgarity to ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... everything is healthy and pure," of which Leon Alberti tells us, are still held and cultivated in the old way under the old laws by the contadino and his padrone. This ancient order, quietness, and beauty, which you may find everywhere in the country round about Florence, is the true Tuscany. The vulgarity of the city, for even in Italy the city life has become insincere, blatant, and for the most part a life of the middle class, seldom reaches an hundred yards beyond the barriera: and this is a charm ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... she do? Of course she must remain with Hyacinth till the marriage, but she was resolved not to go to the wedding, although she had promised to do so. Both Hyacinth and Cecil really detested the vulgarity of a showy fashionable wedding as much as she did, and it was to be moderated, toned down as much as possible. But Anne couldn't stand it—any of it—and she wasn't ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... useful word that is! It has such a decent sound, almost respectable. We are a refined people, even in our sins, and I know no word in the English language we strive harder to avoid using in any of its forms than that word of brutal vulgarity, but terrific meaning—adultery. ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... will always be exercising his power of grasping realities: but a confused, careless, and discrediting tenure of the fiction will lead to as confused and careless reading of fact." Still further, Ruskin defends the vulgarity, or commonness of language, found in many of the tales as "of a wholesome and harmless kind. It is not, for instance, graceful English, to say that a thought 'popped into Catherine's head'; but it nevertheless is far better, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... is a type at once the most anomalous and the most vulgar. Why he is anomalous need not be explained, but the essence of his vulgarity lies in his entire absence of a sanctioning background. It is not, when all is said, so strange a matter that anyone reared in an atmosphere of historic ceremonial and precedent should betray an inherent leaning toward shams and vanities. But if there is anything ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... me!" she cried. "But it's a part of the vulgarity of the whole business. Actors, authors, managers, you're ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... acquired the vigor and agility to handle the javelin with consummate address. Contrasted as are his earlier and later styles, they have some essential qualities in common;—an exquisite fitness of expression; a total exemption from harshness, vulgarity, and all the vices that have grown so common; a method, a sequence, which is at once the closest and the least obtrusive to be found in any prose of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... fine and sensitive instincts of a gentleman were in him, and though in the very depths of his own conscience he knew himself to be as much of a social actor as Miraudin was a professional one,—though he was aware that his passions were as sensual, and therefore as vulgar, (for sensuality is vulgarity), there was a latent pride in him which forbade him to set himself altogether on the same level. And now as he walked away haughtily, his fine aristocratic head lifted a little higher in air than usual, he ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... amiable, estimable qualities in a character, I think that I might esteem, love, and marry him, even though he had a vulgar name and vulgar connexions. I fairly acknowledge, however, that it must be something superior in the man's character which could balance the objection to vulgarity ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... the human figure, to make of it a vile arabesque, a shameful sight, is the besetting temptation of the younger generation. Naturally, it is good to get away from the saccharine and the rococo, but vulgarity is always vulgarity and true art is never vulgar. However, Kubin has plenty of precedents. A ramble through any picture-gallery on the Continent will prove that human nature was the same five hundred years ago as it was in the Stone ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... his appreciation, something recognized but unfelt, and therefore not really understood. This deadness came through into his work. Lacking genuine inspiration, struggling in consequence to impart life by tricks and conventions, he occasionally allowed himself to tumble into downright vulgarity. Suddenly, and without renouncing any ancient loyalty, he has come to life. It is Watteau that inspires him still; but the essential Watteau—Watteau the painter—not that superficies which is more or less familiar to every hack, be he ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... brutal partisan insolence of Cavallotti and his allies in the Chamber. As individual, as soldier, and as minister, Robilant was the type of the Italian at his best. Very few of the extreme Left in the Italian Chamber made any pretensions to a comprehension of the nature of a gentleman, and the vulgarity of the outbreak which provoked his resignation—it was on the occasion of the disaster of Dogali—was of a nature which only a hardened politician could adapt himself to. It was my first experience of the indecencies of Italian parliamentarism, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... was with an American woman of awful vulgarity. I asked her if she was busy, like everyone else in this place, and ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... that I know of, is in the few lines of Milton on the Creation. The only example of a proper manner of contribution to natural history is in White's Letters from Selborne. You know I have always spoken of Bewick as pre-eminently a vulgar or boorish person, though of splendid honor and genius; his vulgarity shows in nothing so much as in the poverty of the details he has collected, with the best intentions, and the shrewdest sense, for English ornithology. His imagination is not cultivated enough to enable him ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... talked in the same pulverous fashion, the words came very differently from the two mouths. In the speech of the mother was more than a tone of the vulgarity of a conscious right to lay down the law, of the rudeness born of feeling above obedience and incapable of error—a rudeness identical with that of the typical vulgar duchess; the daughter's tone was playful, but dainty in its playfulness, and not without ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... I understood the vital principle of the Friends' Meeting House, and realised how much of the heat and vulgarity of life the best Quaker tradition buries under the cool, deep waves of its invaluable Silence. To such artists in life the lack of speech is not repression—far from it. Myself, I have never lived more generously than in that wonderful ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... court?" said Bones testily. "Good Heavens, lad! Why this jolly old vulgarity? No, dear boy, live ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... saying "B-o-w-f-e-e" seemed to reverberate through the apartment, I suddenly comprehended the spirit of Charleston: understood that, compared with Charleston, Boston is as a rough mining camp, while New York hardly exists at all, being a mere miasma of vulgarity. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... the plaster crumbling away revealed a fine wooden building which for the last two centuries had been concealing its splendid carved beams beneath a wretched coat of whitewash. So also did Germaine, divested by danger of her superficial vulgarity, suddenly show her mettle and prove herself the daughter of a ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... one or two anecdotes which, although given without comment, show the narrowness and vulgarity of the man. Among his slaves was a certain worthless cobbler named Felicio; as the cobbler was quite useless, Epaphroditus sold him, and by some chance he was bought by some one of Caesar's household, and made Caesar's cobbler. Instantly Epaphroditus ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... again one will see a flock of English sparrows, and the sweet-voiced song-sparrow endeavors to make up for the vulgarity of its English cousin by the delicate softness of its ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... minutes, to see whether the girl would vouchsafe him a smile, or a parting word of consolation. But her enthusiasm of the morning was quite died out, or she chose to be in a different mood. She fell to joking about the dowdy appearance of Lady Betty, and mimicked the vulgarity of Mrs. Steele; and then she put up her little hand to her mouth and yawned, lighted a taper, and shrugged her shoulders, and dropping Mr. Esmond a saucy curtsy, sailed off ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 215,000 retail liquor houses in this nation. Allowing 20 feet to each, it gives us an unbroken liquor front of about 781 miles. Just think of it! Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of profanity and vulgarity. Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of Sabbath-breaking. Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of drunkard-making. Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of filth, debauchery, anarchy, dynamite and bombs. [Applause]. Seven hundred and eighty-one miles of political corruption; ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... observed William Marion Reedy, "1601 is to Twain's whole works what the 'Droll Stories' are to Balzac's. It is better than the privately circulated ribaldry and vulgarity of Eugene Field; is, indeed, an essay in a sort of primordial humor such as we find in Rabelais, or in the plays of some of the lesser stars that drew their light from Shakespeare's urn. It is humor or fun such as one expects, let us say, from the ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... Zimmerman, "is the safest response for all the contradiction that arises from impertinence, vulgarity, ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... had a compass with us. Our course was as straight as we could go, to a village on the opposite side of the lake, called Brightfold. Nothing happened for the first quarter of an hour—and then, by the living Jingo (excuse my vulgarity), we ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... which the world regularly commits upon pioneers and artists. For all the superb vitality of her frontier, it faces—and she knows it faces—the degradation of its wild freedom and beauty by clumsy towns, obese vulgarity, the uniform of a monotonous standardization. Her heroic days endure but a brief period before extinction comes. Then her high-hearted pioneers survive half as curiosities in a new order; and their spirits, transmitted to the artists who are their legitimate successors, take up the old struggle ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... had taken refuge in religion as in a cool, refreshing oasis in the desert of vulgarity and monotony in her life. Her heart would swell with pride every time a priest would say to her in ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... exchanged the Washingtonian dignity for the Jeffersonian simplicity, which was in truth only another name for the Jacksonian vulgarity. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... domestic life. After the labors of the day are over, the men gather around the fire, and the social hour of the day is spent in yarning. The stories told may run from the sublime to the ridiculous, from a true incident to a base fabrication, or from a touching bit of pathos to the most vulgar vulgarity. ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... late," answered Gabrielle, mournfully. "Listen, wise Ruth, I shall be a mother soon; and to my child, if it is spared, and to you, I devote myself. You have seen the Misses Erminstoun—you have seen vulgarity, insolence, and absurd pretension; they have taunted me with my ignorance, and I will not change it now. The blood of the De Courcys and O'Briens has made me a lady; and all the wealth of the Indies can not make them so. No, Ruth, I will remain in ignorance, and yet tower above them, high as the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... glance to perceive that this young captain had not been limited in resources in the furnishing of his ship. Within the small compass of a stateroom he had compressed comfort and luxury. Yet there was no ostentation or vulgarity displayed. The owner had been guided by the one desire for decent ease and a certain regard for the eye. The left side of the room was occupied by the two bunks made up with the immaculate neatness characterizing all things aboard a good ship. The center of the room, was ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... people whom he did not like. "Procul este, profani!" exclaimed a delighted aesthete on being introduced to it. But this was never to be the attitude of Rickie. He did not love the vulgar herd, but he knew that his own vulgarity would be greater if he forbade it ingress, and that it was not by preciosity that he would attain to the intimate spirit of the dell. Indeed, if he had agreed with the aesthete, he would possibly ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... Priscilla, however, knew better. To her unfortunately the life within the walls seemed of a quite blatant vulgarity; pervaded by lacqueys, by officials of every kind and degree, by too much food, too many clothes, by waste, by a feverish frittering away of time, by a hideous want of privacy, by a dreariness unutterable. To her it was a perpetual behaving according to the ideas officials had formed as to ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... book presently under notice, the author appears (under the thin disguise of Mr. Michael Angelo Titmarsh) in 'propria persona' as the popular author, the contributor to Punch, the remorseless pursuer of unconscious vulgarity and feeble-mindedness, launched upon a tour of relaxation to the Rhine. But though exercising, as is the wont of popular authors in their moments of leisure, a plentiful reserve of those higher qualities to which they are indebted for their fame, his professional ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... advantage at present was on Lisa's side, for as the time for striking the decisive blow approached she manifested the calmest serenity of bearing, whereas her rival, in spite of all her efforts to attain the same air of distinction, always lapsed into some piece of gross vulgarity, which she afterwards regretted. La Normande's ambition was to look "like a lady." Nothing irritated her more than to hear people extolling the good manners of her rival. This weak point of hers had not escaped old Madame Mehudin's ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... repeated was a sample of many others that were constantly irritating the poor child, even amid her first hours of homesickness. Unlike Mary Fuller, she had no occupation, for Mrs. Farnham considered usefulness of any kind the height of vulgarity. Indeed! she was so remarkably sensitive on this subject that a very shrewd observer might have fancied that the lady had known a little more of labor, in her younger days, than she was ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... nineteenth century has sought to degrade Love; to define it as purely physical. The result has been a corresponding degradation of art, and even literature has lost much of its lofty idealism. Nudity has become a synonym of vulgarity; Love, of lust. "Evil be to him who evil thinks." True Love never seeks to degrade its object; on the contrary, it magnifies every virtue, endows it with divinest attributes, and guards its chastity, or ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... be, are not within the scope of the present work. In the following humorous production, however, we have a composition of the last century. It is the oldest and most popular Lancashire song we have been able to procure; and, unlike most pieces of its class, it is entirely free from grossness and vulgarity.] ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... perfect of London clothes, and there were superb diamonds in his shirt, while a priceless sapphire sparkled, in a plain gold setting, on his broad, brown hand. He is the only man of his time who can wear precious stones without vulgarity. He moves like a king and has the air of the old school in every gesture. His dark eyes are brighter than his diamonds, and his look, for all his white beard and seventy years, is as young and fresh as the rose ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... Norman style is the French word naif. Littre says that naif comes from natif, as vulgar comes from vulgus, as though native traits must be simple, and commonness must be vulgar. Both these derivative meanings were strange to the eleventh century. Naivete was simply natural and vulgarity was merely coarse. Norman naivete was not different in kind from the naivete of Burgundy or Gascony or Lombardy, but it was slightly different in expression, as you will see when you travel south. Here at Mont-Saint-Michel we have only a mutilated trunk of an eleventh-century ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... gaze, a sense of something shoddy oppresses me, of tinsel and glitter and flamboyance: a feeling that here is no true greatness, no sphinx-like sublimity. A shadow of the world and the flesh falls across the brooding figure, a Napoleonic vulgarity coarsens the features, there is a Mephistophelian wrinkle in the corner ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... connected with the deepest powers of the art. I hope, when I have thought of them more, to be able to explain some of the laws which relate to nobleness and ignobleness; that ignobleness especially which we commonly call "vulgarity" and which, in its essence, is one of the most curious subjects of inquiry connected with human feeling. Others I never hope to explain, laws of expression, bearing simply on simple matters; but, for that very reason, more influential ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... flesh. Peals of laughter. A breathless pianola. The tripping of dancing-feet. Voices husked with drink and voices soft with love. The shrill accents of vulgarity. Hustling waiters. Shop-girls. Bourgeois couples. Tired families of four and upward. Sleeping children. A boy selling candy. The crying ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... lawn beside Margaret, indeed, with the air and assurance of a magnificent peacock. He was perhaps a shade less over-dressed than when she had seen him last, but there was an astonishing lustre about everything he wore, and even his almond-shaped eyes were bright almost to vulgarity; but though he tired the sight, as a peacock does in the sun, it was impossible not ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... Jan Steen usually represent merry-makings, and the frolics and festivities of the ale-house, which he treated with a characteristic expression of humorous drollery, that compensated for the vulgarity of his subjects. He sometimes painted interiors, domestic assemblies, conversations, mountebanks, etc., which he generally accompanied with some facetious trait of wit or humor, admirably rendered. Some of his works of this description ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... wide-awake by a whipping. It is largely a matter of convention, the exercise being endured (I am told) with pride by the infants of our aristocracy, but not tolerated by the lower classes. I am afraid that I proved my inherent vulgarity by being made, not contrite or humble, but furiously angry by this caning. I cannot account for the flame of rage which it awakened in my bosom. My dear, excellent Father had beaten me, not very severely, without ill-temper, and with the most ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... she was one of the few relations still left to the Saracinesca. The daughter of a cousin of the Prince, she would make a good wife for Giovanni, and would bring sunshine into the house. There was a tinge of vulgarity in her manner; but, like many elderly men of his type, Saracinesca pardoned her this fault in consideration of her noisy good spirits and general good-nature. He was very much annoyed at hearing that his son had offended ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... "Blair may be a homely and even a gloomy poet in the eye of fastidious criticism; but there is a masculine and pronounced character even in his gloom and homeliness that keeps it most distinctly apart from either dulness or vulgarity. His style pleases us like the powerful expression of a countenance without regular beauty." He excels most in describing the darkest and most terrible ideas suggested by the subject, and seems almost to exult, while depicting the triumphs of the grave over the rich, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... Vulgarity of speech is the peculiar delight of a schoolgirl off duty. She spends so much of her life under the all-pervading eye of authority, she is so drilled, and lectured, and ruled and regulated, that, when the eye ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... become harsh only in his hatred of the factitious and the transitory; dreaming of working, not for the polite society of a time, but for all humanity in the gravest hours of its history. Perhaps, even, it was this revolt against the vulgarity of the time which had made him throw himself, in bold defiance, into theories and their application. And the work remained human, overflowing as it was with an infinite pity for ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... Mary, such as every Catholic child might be supposed to be familiar with. But it was fixed in such a way as to bring the terrors and raptures of the mystics, of a S. Catharine or a S. Teresa, within the reach of all; to place spiritual experience a la portee de tout le monde. The vulgarity is only equaled by the ingenuity and psychological adroitness of the method. The soul inspired with carnal dread of the doom impending over it, passed into almost physical contact with the incarnate Saviour. The designed effect was to induce a vivid and varied hypnotic dream of thirty ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... the style to the subject. It is in such passages, accordingly, that we are most frequently offended with low and inelegant expressions; and that the language, which was intended to be simple and natural, is found oftenest to degenerate into mere slovenliness and vulgarity. It is in vain, too, to expect that the meanness of those parts may be redeemed by the excellence of others. A poet, who aims at all at sublimity or pathos, is like an actor in a high tragic character, and must sustain his dignity ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... return of the tempest, and the involution of the labyrinth. And although my readers say that I wrote then better than I write now, I cannot refer you to the passage without asking you to pardon in it what I now hold to be the petulance and vulgarity of expression, disgracing the importance of the truth it contains. A little while ago, without displeasure, you permitted me to delay you by the account of a dispute on a matter of taste between my father and me, in which he was quietly and unavailingly right. It seems ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... man who stoops to vulgarity should be ashamed. Profanity is coarse and degrading; vulgarity is positively low and filthy. The youth who is careful to keep his clothes and his body clean should be careful to keep his mouth clean. Let nothing go into it or come out of it that ...
— Frank Merriwell's Nobility - The Tragedy of the Ocean Tramp • Burt L. Standish (AKA Gilbert Patten)
... elegance which reigns through the whole establishment. The master of the mansion, perhaps an old and valued schoolfellow:—his wife, a well-bred, accomplished, and still beautiful woman—cordial, without vulgarity—refined, without pretension—and informed, without a shade of blue! Their children!... But my reader will complete the picture, and imagine, better than I can describe, how one of my temperament must suffer at quitting ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 273, September 15, 1827 • Various
... where his more fashionable companions would not see him. He dressed with the utmost simplicity, but always in clean garments, well cut, and which presented his admirable form to great advantage. Never did he allow himself to sink to the vulgarity of a slatternly appearance. He was ever ready, when engaged in the most busy employments of his office, to receive without a blush, any guests, however high, who might ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... dreadful, since Tolstoy will do enough for all. His work is the justification of the enthusiasms and expectations built upon literature. Thirdly, Tolstoy takes a firm stand, he has an immense authority, and so long as he is alive, bad tastes in literature, vulgarity of every kind, insolent and lachrymose, all the bristling, exasperated vanities will be in the far background, in the shade. Nothing but his moral authority is capable of maintaining a certain elevation in the moods and tendencies of literature so called. Without him they ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... patroness, but hints were already in the air on the subject of ingratitude. Some said he lacked ambition; others murmured dark conjectures about his heartlessness. It was left to the Lady Augusta's fellow-labourers in the sphere of beneficence to blurt out, with odious vulgarity, that he would never marry her in this world. She entered the room that evening in her haughtiest manner, for Pole-Knox was following close upon her heels, and she wished to justify the extreme deference which he showed her so properly ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... protested, greatly tended to make them incredulous. It was not till the statements of scholars and gentlemen, like Henry Martyn and Bishop Heber, became generally known, that the work was looked on without sarcasm, provoked by vulgarity, even ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Randall expressed himself with good sense, though not with much generosity, he excused his participation in the vulgarity of such a conflict by a bitter but short allusion to the obstinacy and ignorance of the village boor; and did not do what you, my kind reader, certainly would have done under similar circumstances—viz. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... creative force in the world; it has made thousands of saints and thousands of heroes; it has revolutionized innumerable individual lives. It has changed people from selfishness to unselfishness; from cowardice to courage; from despair to hope; from vulgarity to decency; from barrenness of life to fruitfulness. When religion can change the lives of millions, when it can produce supreme creations in art, it is a force ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... but quiet and dignified. There was not the smallest touch of vulgarity about her. The coarse readiness to accept publicity which distinguishes the underbred woman, whether in England or America, the desire to show off a foreign emancipation from what appear ridiculous French rules, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... his will, forced herself upon his imagination, he tried to remember her vulgarity, her underbred manners, her excessive use of scent. She had merely played with him, without thinking or caring what the result to him might be. She was bent on as much enjoyment as possible without exposing herself to awkward consequences; ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... her by the wrists. To-day it had been as much as he could do to let poor little Katie kiss his hand. Better be vulgar with Byron than a noodle with Dorset! he bitterly reflected... Still, noodledom was nearer than vulgarity to dandyism. It was a less flagrant lapse. And he had over Byron this further advantage: his noodledom was not a matter of common knowledge; whereas Byron's vulgarity had ever needed to be in the glare of the footlights of Europe. The world would say of him that he laid down his life for a ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... which on coming back to Italy I find even stronger than when it was first received is that of the contrast between the fecundity of the great artistic period and the vulgarity there of the genius of to-day. The first few hours spent on Italian soil are sufficient to renew it, and the question I allude to is, historically speaking, one of the oddest. That the people who but three hundred years ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... youth. But this was still the language—and the fierce language—of revolt! The decadence of English art and artists, the miserable commercialism of the Academy, the absence of any first-rate teaching, of any commanding traditions, of any 'school' worth the name—the vulgarity of the public, from royalty downward, the snobbery of the rich world in its dealings with art: all these jeremiads which he recited were much the same—mutatis mutandis—as those with which, half a century ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... disband our armies because in the hand of an ambitious madman a field-marshal's baton may brain a helpless State?—our navies because in ships pirates have "sailed the seas over?" Let us not commit the vulgarity of condemning the dance because of its possibilities of perversion by the vicious and the profligate. Let us not utter us in hot bosh and baking nonsense, but cleave to reason and the ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... do it? One likes to see what is going on, I suppose. The woman's vulgarity could not ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... state, with feelings exclusively belonging to the individual. Had any one told her it were possible to give her child to any but a gentleman, she would have wondered at the want of feeling that could devote the softness of Jane or Emily, to the association with rudeness or vulgarity. It was the misfortune of Lady Moseley to limit her views of marriage to the scene of this life, forgetful that every union gives existence to a long line of immortal beings, whose future welfare depends greatly on the force of early ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... This fault in conversation is the most difficult of all to amend, and it is unfortunately the one to which those who strive to express themselves correctly are peculiarly liable. Its effect is bad, for though it is not like slang, vulgar in itself, it betrays an effort to conceal vulgarity. It may generally be remedied by avoiding any word or phrase which you may suspect yourself of using for the purpose of creating an effect. Whenever you imagine that the employment of any mere word or sentence will ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... him, so she never made uncomfortable inquiries. He was bountiful to her. He had been bountiful to many others. She clothed and informed all his acts of beneficence with the motives which became them. If she was ever shocked by his vulgarity, he never knew it by any word of hers, in disapproval. If she had suspicions, she did not betray them. Her children were trained to respect their father, and among them she found the satisfactions of her life. He had long ceased to be her companion. As an associate, friend, lover, ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... on Saturday evening, March 4, 1797. Up to that time no such cut and thrust weapon had been seen in America, and no such truculent foul-mouthed editor had plucked a pen out of his pilcher by the ears on this side of the Atlantic. We had known editors who were learned in profanity and gifted in vulgarity, but none that had just such a bitter trick of invective as William Cobbett, or "Peter Porcupine," as he was pleased to call himself. He was born at Farnham, in Surrey, in 1762, within a stone's throw ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... with his folly, Sholto's mean conceit, George's hypocrisy, that man's vulgarity, Mrs. Fairfax's affectation, your insufferable amiability, and the dreariness of those concertina people, I feel so wretched that I could find it in my heart to ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... be confident in it. His is a homespun style, not a manufactured one; and what a difference is there between its homeliness, and the flippant vulgarity of the Roger L'Estrange and Tom Brown school! If it is not a well of English undefiled to which the poet as well as the philologist must repair, if they would drink of the living waters, it is a clear stream of current English—the vernacular speech of his age, sometimes ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 469. Saturday January 1, 1831 • Various
... this mild faith. It made him fairly grimace, in private, to think that a child of his should be both ugly and overdressed. For himself, he was fond of the good things of life, and he made a considerable use of them; but he had a dread of vulgarity, and even a theory that it was increasing in the society that surrounded him. Moreover, the standard of luxury in the United States thirty years ago was carried by no means so high as at present, and Catherine's clever father took the old-fashioned view of the education ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... be expected from the examples set them by the gods in whom they professed to believe. Says MAHAFFY: "At no period did the nation attain to that high standard which is the great feature in Germanic civilization. Even the Romans, with all their coarseness and vulgarity, stood higher in this respect. But neither in the Iliad nor the Odyssey is there, except in phrases, any reprobation of deceit as such. To deceive an enemy is meritorious; to deceive a stranger, innocent; to deceive even a friend, perfectly unobjectionable, if any ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... minute longer to produce what he had in mind. "What IS splendid, as we call it, is this extraordinary freedom and good humour of our intercourse and the fact that we do care—so independently of our personal interests, with so little selfishness or other vulgarity—to get at the idea of things. The beautiful specimen Mrs. Brook had just given me of that," he continued to Mitchy, "was what made me break out to you about her when you came in." He spoke to one friend, but he looked at the other. ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... Victualling Office, cannot take any thing but Fuller's Earth. Much it should seem, therefore, depends upon a name; and as a soft sound is at all times pleasing to the listener—to have denominated this Sporting Society the Gin Club would not only have proved barbarous to the ear, but the vulgarity of the chant might have deprived it of many of its elegant friends. It is a subject, however, which it must be admitted has a good deal of Taste belonging to it—and as a Sporting Man would be nothing if he was not flash, the Daffy Club meet under ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... who would insult a new teacher without cause, it would affect the dignity of this school. The spirit of education is not only in imparting technical knowledges, but also in encouraging honest, ennobling and samurai-like virtues, while eliminating the evil tendency to vulgarity and roughness. If we are afraid of reaction or further trouble, and satisfy ourselves with make-shifts, there is no telling when we can ever get rid of this evil atmosphere[G]. We are here to eradicate this ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri |
