"Disproportion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to lose the feeling of disproportion between the size of the Dutch churches and that of the villages and congregations. The villages are so small, the churches so vast. It is as though the churches were built to compensate for the absence of hills. ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... people would have been keenly excited, interested, and elevated by a spectacle so grand and so flattering to their national pride. But if the voices and appearances were indeed divine and supernatural, well must we assume that there was a distinctive, though verbally inexpressible, terror and disproportion to the mind, the senses, the whole 'organismus' of the human beholders and hearers, which might both account for, and even in the sight of God justify, the trembling prayer which deprecated ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... desperate service—hand to hand with swords; and Nelson always considered that his personal courage was more conspicuous on this occasion than on any other during his whole life. Notwithstanding the great disproportion of numbers, 18 of the enemy were killed, all the rest wounded, and their launch taken. Nelson would have asked for a lieutenancy for Sykes, if he had served long enough; his manner and conduct, he observed, were so entirely above his situation, ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... his pointing finer and read two descriptions of the filigree ball. The disproportion in the rewards offered was apparent. That promised by Uncle David was calculated to rouse any man's cupidity and should have resulted ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... effect of such extensive wastes, that they impose an idea of solitude even upon those who travel through them in considerable numbers; so much is the imagination affected by the disproportion between the desert around and the party who are traversing it. Thus the members of a caravan of a thousand souls may feel, in the deserts of Africa or Arabia, a sense of loneliness unknown to the individual ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... himself and Marcia coming down from the country to place themselves in the city; he made no effort to throw about it the poetry of their ignorance and their poverty, or the pathetic humor of their dismay at the disproportion of the prices to their means. He set about getting all the facts he could, and he priced a great many lodgings in different parts of the city; then he went to a number of real-estate agents, and, giving himself out as a reporter of the Chronicle-Abstract, he interviewed them as to house-rents, ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... the climate and of their stay near the swamps now became fatally manifest. In the Quorra, fourteen men died, and three in the Alburkah. The disproportion of mortality in the two vessels, at this period, is ascribed to the superior coolness of the Alburkah, which was rendered more healthy in consequence of her iron hull diffusing through her interior the ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... been provided with tusks, they would long since have been annihilated for the sake of their ivory.[1] But it is a curious fact that, whilst in Africa and India both sexes have tusks[2], with some slight disproportion in the size of those of the females: not one elephant in a hundred is found with tusks in Ceylon, and the few that possess them are exclusively males. Nearly all, however, have those stunted processes called tushes, about ten or twelve inches in length ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... pole is fixed and secured by stays, so as to give the sail the requisite inclination. We frequently saw a second smaller sail set before the first, at the distance of eight or ten feet, and managed precisely in the same way, but, even with both sails set, owing to the disproportion between the spread of canvas and the bulk of the canoe, the latter moves slowly at all times, and on a ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... destroyed, consumed, annihilated! Now, upon comparing this simple narration of things and facts with the false and absurd accounts which have rather insulted and imposed upon us than informed us, who but must see the enormous disproportion?... Exaggeration and the absurdities ever faithfully attached to it are inseparable attitudes of the ignorant, the empty, and the affected. Hence those eloquent tropes so familiar in every conversation, monstrously pretty, vastly little; ... hence your ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... that is what we call an equal representation! Is not this enormous? Have gentlemen considered this? Have they looked at it? Are they willing to look it in the face, and then say they embrace it? I trust, Sir, the people will look at it and consider it. And now let me add, that this disproportion can never be diminished; it must remain for ever. How are you going to diminish it? Why, here is Texas, with a hundred and forty-nine thousand people, with one State. Suppose that population should flow into Texas, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... washing and cooking all her life at home or abroad; the son, adult, confined to his occupation will work all his life in a shop or on his own or another's field. Between this destiny of the adult and the plenitude of his primary instruction, the disproportion is enormous; it is evident that his education does not prepare him for the life he has to lead; but for another life, less monotonous, under less restraint, more cerebral, and of which a faint glimpse disgusts him with his own;[6397] at least, it ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... disproportion between the losses of the two armies is not surprising, when we remember the armour of the Greek spearmen, and the impossibility of heavy slaughter being inflicted by sword or lance on troops so armed, as long as they kept firm in their ranks. [Mitford well refers to Crecy, Poictiers, and Agincourt, ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... put into his possession for the purpose of sale, first binding him by a horrid ceremony* and oath not to betray him. Williams, on receiving the watch, which proved a metal one, worth only about ten pounds, and the disproportion of which to the value he had expected, probably had induced him to make the discovery, immediately caused him to be taken into custody, and delivered the property to a magistrate, giving at the same time an account how he came by them. All these circumstances ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... false, and selfish judgments and regards which had there surrounded her. Without a mother, without a companion, she had to find what solace, what pastime she could. In the huge house there was not a piano fit to play upon; and her only source of in-door amusement was a library containing a large disproportion of books in old French bindings, with much tarnished gilding on the backs. But a native purity of soul kept her lovely, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... to half a million French, British, and Belgians, or of fifty corps to twelve and a half, will probably be corrected when the German statistics are known. If it is further true that at the actual points of fighting the disproportion was five to one, we need no further illustration of the ills which inadequate co-ordination imposes on an Alliance, and inadequate staff-work and intelligence on any fighting force. The Allied tactics were ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... food, not meeting with a sufficient supply of oxygen to consume it, passes into other compounds containing a large excess of carbon—or, in other words, fat is produced. Fat is thus an abnormal production, resulting from a disproportion of carbon in the food to that of the oxygen respired by the lungs or absorbed by the skin. Wild animals in a state of nature do not contain fat. The production of fat is always a consequence of a deficient supply of oxygen, for oxygen ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... like a fiery column before thee—the dark pillar not yet turned—Samuel Taylor Coleridge—Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! How have I seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar, while the walls of ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... he traces in his line. His Grace very soon would have wanted all plausibility in his attack upon that provision which belonged more to mine than to me. He would soon have supplied every deficiency, and symmetrized every disproportion. It would not have been for that successor to resort to any stagnant wasting reservoir of merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient living spring of generous and manly action. Every day he lived, he would have ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... birth, generally with some little hesitation and difficulty, but still acquired in a time seldom longer, as I am informed, than ten minutes or a quarter of an hour. For an art which has to be acquired at all, there seems here, as in the case of eating, to be a disproportion between, on the one hand, the intricacy of the process performed, and on the other, the shortness of the time taken to acquire the practice, and the ease and unconsciousness with which its exercise is continued from the ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... delight in endearments, in avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards.... The soul which is in the soul of each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, and disproportion in the behavior of the other. Hence arise surprise, expostulation, and pain. Yet that which drew them to each other was signs of loveliness, signs of virtue; and these virtues are there, however eclipsed. They appear and reappear ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... received into my consciousness the moments of the human comedy which have been an increasing burden to it. Within a block of the river I met a child so small that at first I almost refused to take any account of her, until she appealed to my sense of humor by her amusing disproportion to the pail which she was lugging in front of her with both of her little mittened hands. I am scrupulous about mittens, though I was tempted to write of her little naked hands, red with the pitiless cold. This would ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... all the fields for exertion and Christian charity opened by this war is that presented by womanhood. The war is abstracting from the community its protecting and sheltering elements, and leaving the helpless and dependent in vast disproportion. For years to come, the average of lone women will be largely increased; and the demand, always great, for some means by which they may provide for themselves, in the rude jostle of the world, will become more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... Senate of the United States. As originally established, however, the disproportion of power between the upper and the lower house was so great as to cause much just dissatisfaction. The council was in effect a body of seventy-two governors; the assembly, which more directly represented the people, could consider ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... territory, the conflict with a power which ere three years had elapsed, carried on the war with fourteen legions, numbering an hundred and seventy thousand combatants, between the auxiliaries and Roman soldiers. It is in the magnitude of this disproportion, and the extremely small amount of the reinforcement which he received from home during the next fifteen years that the war lasted, that the decisive proof of the marvellous capacity of the Carthaginian general is to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... want of humor which made him insensible to incongruity may perhaps account also for the singular unconsciousness of disproportion which so often strikes us in his poetry. For example, a little farther on in "Peter ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... when I say that one-third of the colored people in our cities live in just such dwellings as I have described here; while most of the white population live in well-built houses in the healthy portions of the cities. Is there any surprise that there should be so great a disproportion in the mortality of the races? Compare the statistics of all the large cities and you will find that under similar conditions, this same proportion in mortality exists in the Northern and foreign cities, where the food and dwelling of the poor have the same difference. But this same ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... was greatly increased by the vast disproportion between the native and European force—a disproportion so great, that apart from the danger of our neighbourhood to a great city, from which we might expect a host to pour out to attack us, it looked ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... other man's, living or dead. If their style is better than my own, it would be bad policy to insert it; if worse, I should be like a tailor who would recommend his abilities by engrafting an old sleeve on a new coat.... Southey tells me that he has known his lady more than twenty years, that the disproportion of their ages is rational, and that having only one daughter left, his necessary absences would be irksome to her. Whatever he does, is done wisely and virtuously. As for Rogers, almost an octogenarian, be it on his own head! A dry nettle tied to a rose-bud, just ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... The disproportion of the happiness of society with its means, is a subject which calls forth all the eloquence and sagacity of this writer. Nor is this surprising; for it might startle the most sluggish indifference—the most incurious stupidity. How does it come to pass, that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... people will be considerable." He was nearer right when he said in the same speech "that trade and manufactures will accumulate people in the Eastern States in proportion of five to three, compared with the Southern. The disproportion will, doubtless, continue to be much greater than I have calculated. It is actually greater at present, for the climate and negro slavery are acknowledged to be unfavorable to population, so that husbandry as ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... to him that he had dictated much more. The terrible advantage thought has over expression bewildered him. All that he dreamed, all that was in embryo within his brain, he fancied was already in form and on the page, and he was aghast at the disproportion between the dream and the reality. His delusion was like that of Don Quixote,—he believed himself in the Empyrean, and took the vapors from the kitchen for the breath of heaven, and, seated on his wooden horse, felt all the shock of ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... be. And even this number of really cultured people would not be possible if a prodigious multitude, from reasons opposed to their nature and only led on by an alluring delusion, did not devote themselves to education. It were therefore a mistake publicly to reveal the ridiculous disproportion between the number of really cultured people and the enormous magnitude of the educational apparatus. Here lies the whole secret of culture—namely, that an innumerable host of men struggle to achieve it and work hard to that end, ostensibly in their own interests, whereas at bottom ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... endure. Life itself, yes, life a thousand times, was slipping away from her. She must be doing something or she would perish. Poor Mary! How a grand soul like hers, full of faults and weakness, can suffer! What an infinite disproportion between her susceptibility to pain and her power to combat it! She had the maximum capacity for one and the minimum strength for the other. No wonder it drove her almost ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... distance than near at hand, I have found, that being well, I have had maladies in much greater horror than when really afflicted with them. The vigour wherein I now am, the cheerfulness and delight wherein I now live, make the contrary estate appear in so great a disproportion to my present condition, that, by imagination, I magnify those inconveniences by one-half, and apprehend them to be much more troublesome, than I find them really to be, when they lie the most heavy upon me; I hope to find death ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... my husband's pleasant visions before our marriage, and his favourite prospect, to publish a volume of poetry conjointly with me, not weighing the disproportion of talent. ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... way, mother; he has taken me," said Diana, half laughing at what seemed to her the disproportion between her mother's passion and ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... to say ordinary, disproportion between moral worth and worldly prosperity has at all times led the observant and reflecting few to a nicer consideration of the current belief, whether instinctive or traditional. By forcing the soul in upon ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... Summer's Nacturine. His unseasonable Appetite grew so strong and inordinate, that he was oblig'd to discover it to Sir Francis; who, though he lov'd him very sincerely, had yet a Regard to his Daughter's Youth, and Satisfaction in the Choice of a Husband; especially, when he consider'd the great Disproportion in their Age, which he rightly imagin'd would be very disagreeable to Arabella's Inclinations: This made him at first use all the most powerful and perswading Arguments in his Capacity, to convince Sir Robert of the Inequality of such a Match, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... was a fine European-built ship, of 50 guns, and the disproportion was so great between us, that there seemed no hopes of escaping, as we were under his lee. I endeavoured to get into shoal water, but he becalmed me with his sails, and confined us for the best part ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... the Caernarvonshire side. A thick bank of earth had there to be cut through, and a solid mass of masonry built in its place, the rock being situated at a greater distance from the main pier; involving a greater length of suspending chain, and a disproportion in the catenary or chord line on that side of the bridge. The excavation and masonry thereby rendered necessary proved a work of vast labour, and its execution occupied a considerable time; but by the beginning of the year 1825 the suspension pyramids, ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... break the heart, because, by the sight the soul then has of His perfections, it sees its own infinite and unspeakable disproportion." ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... provoke this ungallant reply. "In respect to the sacrament, what is the proportion between the communicants, as to sex?" "Sir, there are one hundred women to twelve men." I wish I could say that this disproportion ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... almost paternal affection for both Mr. Morton and his seamen. Unable to oppose or refute the arguments of Captain Williams, proving the innocence of the prisoners, or, at least, the veniality of their offence, if guilty, and the unreasonable disproportion between the crime and the punishment; wearied by the perseverance of the petitioner, and convinced, though unwilling to own it, by his arguments;—convinced, too, that he was making a very ridiculous figure in the eyes of his officers and ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... and above the difference they have in common with men in advancing, in stationary, and in declining life. Children, who proceed on the reverse order, growing from less to greater utility, but with a still greater disproportion of nutriment to labor than is found in the second of those subdivisions: as is visible to those who will give themselves the trouble of examining into the interior economy ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... minds was favourable to his talents in this way: He appeared to be just of that age which we should think least advantageous to him; too young to enforce approbation by robust manly exertion of talents; too far advanced to win over the judgment by tenderness; or by a manifest disproportion between his age and his efforts, to excite that astonishment which, however shortlived, is, while it lasts, despotic over the understanding. Labouring, therefore, under most of the disadvantages without any of the advantages ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... and more conspicuous in the order of society, had never known anything beyond their counting-house? No! both these descriptions were more formed to be overborne and swayed by the intrigues and artifices of lawyers than to become their counterpoise. With such a dangerous disproportion, the whole must ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... appear at a distance, to any philosophic spectators that knew about the amount of human interests confided to that army, and the hopes for Christendom that even then were trembling in the balance! Such a disproportion, it seems, might exist, in the case of a ghostly war, between the harvest of possible results and the slender band of reapers that were to gather it. And there was even a worse peril than any analogous one that has been proved to exist at Waterloo. A British surgeon, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... constituted to endure fatigue and privation, preserves his vigour almost to the last unimpaired. Nothing is more common here than to see an old man of eighty and odd surrounded by little children who are his flesh and bone. In spite of this disproportion between man and woman, the union, contracted almost in childhood, is only dissolved by death. The Princess de Belgiojoso tells us that she has seen hideous, decrepit, and infirm women tenderly cared for and adored by handsome old men, straight ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... Cabell Club of membership determined solely by the number of those who, already possessing THE CORDS OF VANITY in its first edition, recognize it as the work of a serious artist of high achievement and higher capacity, I suspect that the smallness of that club would be in inordinate disproportion to everything but its selectness and its ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... the story above a heavy broad cart-wheel, and as it bounded clattering towards the floor below, the assailants fled out of doors in a panic, and taking advantage of their disorder, the Lowes, disregarding the vast disproportion of numbers, rushed upon them, and a regular melee began. It is thought, that the smaller party would have been victorious, but for an ugly blow on the head of the youngest brother, which felled and disabled him; whereupon his associates escaped unmolested ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... delay two days, if she delayed two days she would delay a week, and after a week things would be adjusted to submission forever. "I'll go," she vowed to the night, "or I'll die!" She made plans and estimated means and resources. These and her general preparations had perhaps a certain disproportion. She had a gold watch, a very good gold watch that had been her mother's, a pearl necklace that was also pretty good, some unpretending rings, some silver bangles and a few other such inferior trinkets, three pounds thirteen shillings unspent of ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... has been the habit of arrangers to content themselves with setting the Tutti (or better, the orchestral parts) for the 2nd piano only, leaving the 1st to rest entirely or to support the 2nd according to inclination. By this a grievous disproportion in the effect of the orchestra parts is induced, let alone the fact that some of the ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... occupied one whole side of the immense oblong. This market-place haunted for ever the memory of those who had seen it, were it but once, while waiting to change trains; it was so unexpected, so magical, so dream-like almost, in its disproportion to the rest of the town. While the ancient city, whose life had withdrawn itself from century to century, was gradually shrinking all around it, the Grand'Place itself remained an immovable, gigantic, magnificent witness to the might and ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... three stone heavier, Jack being a pound or two only over ten while the pitman reached thirteen. The latter was the acknowledged champion of the Vaughan pits, as Jack was incontestably the leader among the lads. The disproportion in weight and muscle was enormous; but Jack had not a spare ounce of flesh on his bones, while the pitman was fleshy and out ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... excellent library of 380 volumes then at Peterhouse. It had a character of its own. The usual overwhelming mass of Bibles, of church books, of the Fathers and the Schoolmen does not depress us with its disproportion. The collection was strong in astronomy and medicine: Ptolemy, Albumazar, Rhazes, Serapion, Avicenna, Haly Abenragel, Zaael, and others were all represented. Besides these, there was a fine selection of the classics—Plato, Aristotle, including ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... According to various statistics, embracing not only the period of childhood, but including as well the period of youth, we learn that girls constitute one-fifth only of the total number of youthful criminals. A number of different explanations have been offered to account for this disproportion. Thus, for instance, attention has been drawn to the fact that a girl's physical weakness renders her incapable of attempting violent assaults upon the person, and this would suffice to explain why it is that girls ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... that effect. But it may serve our immediate purpose to say with Samuel Johnson that humour is "grotesque imagery"; and "grotesque" is "distorted of figure; unnatural." That is to say, humour is an effort of the imagination presenting human nature with some element of distortion or disproportion which instantly kindles mirth. It must be imaginative; it must touch the bed-rock of human nature; it must arouse merriment and not anger or scorn. In this fine and most rare gift Charles Dickens abounded to overflowing; ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... "N'etes-vous donc pas ridicules, mes Peres? Qu'on satisfait au precepte d'ouir la messe en entendant quatre quarts de messe a la fois de differents pretres!" When [68] you have the like of that it is impossible not to laugh, parce que rien n'y porte davantage qu'une disproportion surprenante entre ce qu'on attend et ce ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... interviews with the President, he thus expressed himself: "I have never denied access to me as President to any one, of any color; and, in my opinion of the duties of that office, it never ought to be denied. Place-hunters are not pleasant visitors, or correspondents, and they consume an enormous disproportion of time. To this personal importunity the President ought not to be subjected; but it is, perhaps, not possible to relieve him from it, without excluding him from interviews with the people more, perhaps, than comports with the ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... private signal, Captain Brine did not like to haul his wind and make sail away from her. The nearer she drew, the more French she looked. Eighteen guns to thirty-eight or forty, which probably the stranger carried, was a greater disproportion than even the gallant Brine was inclined to encounter. All hands stood ready to make sail ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... like an arch, is never at rest. A little later will come maple-sugar time, when the stately maples are tapped as the sap begins to stir, and be-ringed with absurd little buckets (a cow being milked into a thimble gives some idea of the disproportion), which are emptied into cauldrons. Afterwards (this is the time of the 'sugaring-off parties') you pour the boiled syrup into tins full of fresh snow, where it hardens, and you pretend to help and become very sticky and make love, boys and girls ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... however, no acquaintance ensued between them;—it was not till the spring of the present year that, at an evening party of Madame Benzoni's, they were introduced to each other. The love that sprung out of this meeting was instantaneous and mutual,—though with the usual disproportion of sacrifice between the parties; such an event being, to the man, but one of the many scenes of life, while, with woman, it generally constitutes the whole drama. The young Italian found herself suddenly inspired with a passion, of which, till that moment, her mind could ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 474 - Vol. XVII. No. 474., Supplementary Number • Various
... it come on too fast upon the majesty of kings. A numerous nobility causeth poverty, and inconvenience in a state; for it is a surcharge of expense; and besides, it being of necessity, that many of the nobility fall, in time, to be weak in fortune, it maketh a kind of disproportion, between honor and means. ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... from a resolute endeavour to at least postpone the capture of the town. He had failed to induce the enemy's advanced guard to attack him in position. To attack himself, in broad daylight, with such vast disproportion of numbers, was out of the question. His resources, however, were not exhausted. After dark on the 12th, when his troops had left the town, he called a council, consisting of General Garnett and the regimental commanders of the ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... Church is very largely the history of the University of Oxford. It is still our wealthiest and largest foundation, although the disproportion between it and other colleges is by no means so great as it once was; and, thanks to its having been ruled by a series of famous and energetic deans, its periods of inglorious inactivity have been fewer than those of most other colleges. The roll of deans contains such names as those of John ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... on the security of Irish property, and expended upon labour, during the continuance of the distress occasioned by the failure of the potato crop, the expenditure of this sum upon unproductive works will increase the disproportion already existing between labour and capital in the country; which disproportion they look on as the main cause of the want of employment for the people, and of the miserable wages they are sustained by. Reproductive work, they continue, ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... the vast disproportion which the extent of the several countries of the earth bore to the part they had acted in history, and the influence they had exerted on human affairs. The British islands had diminished to a speck, and France was little larger; yet, a few years ago it seemed, at ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... of observation concerning that envy, which arises from a superiority in others, that it is not the great disproportion betwixt ourself and another, which produces it; but on the contrary, our proximity. A common soldier bears no such envy to his general as to his sergeant or corporal; nor does an eminent writer meet with so great jealousy in ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... things the former had, and pestered with many things the former wanted. They that have seen our former reformation in its integrity, before the late deformation, can hardly refrain from weeping at the sight of the sad disproportion between this and the former. In the former, as the constitution was calculate in the nearest conformity to the divine pattern, so the builders had always a care to pull down what was to be demolished, before they established what was to ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... tranquillity by the kitchen fire. The poor woman hurries out, and soon returns with her highly accomplished master, who, comprehending the situation, forthwith tenders me the loan of his Sunday pantaloons for the evening; which offer I gladly accept, notwithstanding the wide disproportion in their size and mine, the landlord being, horizontally, a very large person. Oberkirch is a pretty village at the entrance to the narrow and charming valley of the River Bench, up which my route leads, into the fir-clad heights ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... poor sorry man, poor dust and ashes, that he should crowd it up, and go jostlingly into the presence of the great God—especially since it is apparent the disproportion that is betwixt God and him? Esther, when she went to supplicate the king her husband for her people, made use neither of her beauty nor relation, nor the privileges of which she might have had temptation to make use of, especially at such a time, and in ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... her father, and the villainy of a horrid man in whom he confided. And one of the handsomest young gentlemen in the country is attached to her; but as he is heir to a great estate, she discourages his addresses on account of the disproportion ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... to say, depends on the very violence of the contrast between the outward and the inward, Cordelia's death and Cordelia's soul. The more unmotived, unmerited, senseless, monstrous, her fate, the more do we feel that it does not concern her. The extremity of the disproportion between prosperity and goodness first shocks us, and then flashes on us the conviction that our whole attitude in asking or expecting that goodness should be prosperous is wrong; that, if only we could see things as they are, we should ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... disproportion of ages gave to the new inclination of the queen a stamp of dotage inconsistent with the reputation for good sense and dignity of conduct which she had hitherto preserved. Nor did she long receive from the indulgence of so untimely a sentiment ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... seclusion, and an excessive ambition of originality, can alone account for the disproportion which seems to exist between this author's taste and his genius; or for the devotion with which he has sacrificed so many precious gifts at the shrine of those paltry idols which he has set up for himself among ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... to comprehensiveness in dropping individuals and their lives and actions. In all things, if we leave out details, a certain degree of order begins to appear; at any rate we can make an order which, with a little exaggeration or disproportion in some of the parts, will cover the whole field of philosophy. But are we therefore justified in saying that ideas are the causes of the great movement of the world rather than the personalities which conceived them? The great man is the expression ...
— Sophist • Plato
... and hung with the wind upon their rear. In numbers the two forces were strangely unequal, for the English fleet counted only eighty vessels against the hundred and forty-nine which composed the Armada. In size of ships the disproportion was even greater. Fifty of the English vessels, including the squadron of the Lord Admiral and the craft of the volunteers, were little bigger than yachts of the present day. Even of the thirty Queen's ships which formed ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... Fitzjames was still doomed to be an illustration of the curious disproportion which may exist between a man's intrinsic power and his fitness for professional success. Still, as at college, he was distanced in the race by men greatly his inferiors in general force of mind, but better provided with the talent for bringing their gifts to market. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... repress them to secure: 370 For just experience tells, in every soil, That those who think must govern those that toil; And all that freedom's highest aims can reach, Is but to lay proportion'd loads on each. Hence, should one order disproportion'd grow, 375 Its double weight ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... the war in Flanders, a disproportion was soon created to the prejudice of England; so the very beginning of the war in Portugal, brought an unequal share of burden upon us; for although the Emperor and the States General were equally parties with your Majesty in the treaty with the King of Portugal, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... down at their backs). They mistake their carriage and its horizontal lines for a proper measure of the normal plain, and therefore all the objects outside which really are in a horizontal position must show a disproportion of twenty to twenty-five degrees declivity, in regard to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... where the rights of native-born citizens are voted away by those who blindly follow their mercenary and selfish leaders. The evidence of this is found not merely in the shameless chaffering for the foreign vote at every election, but in the large disproportion of offices which are now held by foreigners at home and abroad, as compared with our native citizens. Where is the true-hearted American whose cheek does not tingle with shame and mortification to see our highest and most coveted foreign missions ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... which wearies and exhausts the body while it gives little exercise to the educated mind and leaves the latter free to brood over its unsatisfied longings and desires, as well as its many trials and disappointments. There are other causes, such as the growing disproportion between wants generally and the means of gratification generally; alcoholism; unhealthful work, especially in manufacturing districts; barrack and tenement-house life; and all the evils incident to poverty, overcrowding, and bad sanitary conditions in ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... felt and expressed, that it was very improbable that she was sold all standing in sea-going trim, as I imagined Turner intended us to believe she was sold, and answers also the criticism just mentioned as to the disproportion between the weight of the masts and yards and the size of the hull." Part of the Temeraire, Mr. White tells me, is still in existence. Messrs. Castle, the shipbuilders of Millbank, have the two figures of Atlas ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... millions of inhabitants, France boasted of twenty. The clinging of our kings to their foreign dominions is explained by the fact that their subjects in Gascony, Aquitaine, and Poitou must have equalled in number their subjects in England. There was the same disproportion in the wealth of the two countries and, as men held then, in their military resources. Edward could bring only eight thousand men-at-arms to the field. Philip, while a third of his force was busy elsewhere, could appear at the head of forty thousand. ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... service, while the number of those, who are compelled to go to service, is constantly diminishing. Our manufactories, also, are making increased demands for female labor, and offering larger compensation. In consequence of these things, there is such a disproportion between those who wish to hire, and those who are willing to go to domestic service, that, in the non-slaveholding States, were it not for the supply of poverty-stricken foreigners, there would not be a domestic ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... the cathedral, has the full complement of two, and Antwerp, where two were intended, though only one has been actually raised. This tower at Ypres, however, fails to illustrate—perhaps because it is earlier, and therefore in better taste—that astounding disproportion in height that is so frequently exhibited by Belgian towers, as at Malines, or in the case of the famous belfry in the market-place at Bruges, when considered with reference to the church, or town hall, below. In front of the ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... to the nations, there is less disproportion between the strength of the unit and the society. Hence nations have been slower than individuals in realizing their common interest. Each has placed greater reliance on its own strength for its protection. Yet the principle remains the same. There ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... pints of milk containing an equivalent amount of protein, while the calory content of the one pound of nuts is more than ten per cent greater than that of the milk furnishing the same amount of protein. In the case of many nuts the disproportion is greater. For example, one pound of filberts has a food value double that of an amount of milk containing the same amount ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... death. The truly cultured man is developed in harmony with the laws of his being. This being is compound, having a fleshly and a spiritual side. Hence, to cultivate one to the neglect of the other is to disproportion him whom God created in His own image. As we exist first in time and next in eternity, that culture which loses sight of either state misconceives the full mission of man. Man's conception of his ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... I didn't choose to have these people laughing at the notion of my having played the part of your preserver. It was bad enough being lost with you; I couldn't bring you into ridicule with them by the disproportion they'd have felt in my efforts for you after you turned your foot. So I simply had to ignore the incident. Don't you see?' Braybridge glanced at her, and he had never felt so big and bulky before, ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... literary amateur I will point out among its qualities the beauty of its style and its descriptions, the purity of the psychological analysis, the depth of the thoughts and the reflections of which the novel is full, and among its faults a certain disproportion between the different parts of the book and an ending which is too vague, indefinite and unexpected. But its literary qualities seem to me to be of secondary importance to the profound and incontrovertible idea that forms the kernel of the book. Here in Europe we are accustomed to say that modern ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... part. The essential Hellenic stamp is veracity:—Eastern nations drew their heroes with eight legs, but the Greeks drew them with two;—Egyptians drew their deities with cats' heads, but the Greeks drew them with men's; and out of all fallacy, disproportion, and indefiniteness, they were, day by day, resolvedly withdrawing and exalting themselves into ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... said the man to the Prince standing over him, he said: Oh let not my Lord be angry; and why inquirest Thou after the name of such a dead dog as I am? Pass by, I pray Thee, and take not notice of who I am, because there is, as Thou very well knowest, so great a disproportion between Thee and me. For my part, I am out of charity with myself; who, then, should be in love with me? Yet live I would, and so would I that my townsmen should; and because both they and myself are guilty of great transgressions, therefore ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... Black Prince, then little more than a boy, had won the chief honor of the day. But it was beyond hope that so great a success could again be attained. It seemed madness to join battle with such a disproportion of numbers. Yet the prince remembered Crecy, and simply said, on being told how mighty was the host of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... angels by what will seem to you the undue size of their abdomen. You will notice this even in the works of painters who, like Raphael, most idealise their subjects, while in those of others who, like Rubens, interpret nature more literally, the apparent disproportion becomes grotesque; or, in the coarser hands ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... Trade; and very excellent arguments too, for all I know. But the contrast between what that orator was to the people who heard him, and what he was to the thousands of newspaper-readers who did not hear him, was so huge a hiatus and disproportion that I do not think I ever quite got over it. I knew henceforward what was meant, or what might be meant, by a Scene in the House, or a Challenge from the Platform, or any of those sensational events which take place in ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... regardful of Duty. Of this latter, while Conscience teaches the obligation, and Reason the expediency, Taste contents herself with displaying the charms, waging war upon Vice solely on the ground of her deformity, her disproportion, her animosity to the fitting, to the appropriate, to the harmonious, in ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... the Cathedral produces on the mind a deep impression. One is seized with admiration and amazed at the first view of this noble edifice whose steeple towers up so gracefully and majestically. No doubt that examined in all its particular parts, one may also be struck with the disproportion that exists between them; the nave is not in harmony with the dimensions of the tower, the chancel and transept still less so: but although this want of uniformity may lessen the symmetry of the monument, the impression it at first produces is no less extraordinary. And besides, ...
— Historical Sketch of the Cathedral of Strasburg • Anonymous
... war broke out with Spain in 1739, the navy of England was in numbers more than equal to the combined navies of Spain and France; and during the quarter of a century of nearly uninterrupted war that followed, this numerical disproportion increased. In these wars England, at first instinctively, afterward with conscious purpose under a government that recognized her opportunity and the possibilities of her great sea power, rapidly built ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... to a monopoly of the locale; nor are Roman antiquities, or statues even by Canova, justifiable in usurping the elbow-room of living men and women. Most unfortunately for myself, I have a very small house, and a wife of the most enlarged taste; and the disproportion between these blessings is so great, that I cannot move without the risk of a heavy pecuniary loss by breakage, and a heavier personal affliction in perpetual imputations of awkwardness. Then, again, it is no easy matter to put on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... Christian virtue, Pureness." When he was thirty-two, he had written—"The lives and deaths of the 'pure in heart' have, perhaps, the privilege of touching us more deeply than those of others—partly, no doubt, because with them the disproportion of suffering to deserts seems so unusually great. However, with them one feels—even I feel—that for their purity's sake, if for that alone, whatever delusions they may have wandered in, and whatever impossibilities they may have dreamed of, they shall undoubtedly, in some sense or ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... of incredulous shame seemed to sweep her from knee to brow. That phase passed after a while; out of it she emerged, flushed, outwardly composed, into another phase, in full self-possession once more, able to understand what had happened without the disproportion of emotional exaggeration. After all, she had only been kissed. Besides she was a novice, which probably accounted, in a measure, for the unreasonable emotion coincident with a caress to which she was unaccustomed. Without looking up at ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... their constitution, will do something to illustrate our own. We are as good as they, I hope, any day: perhaps in a growl, one might modestly insinuate—better. It's not at all likely that there can be any great disproportion of age amongst children of the same household: and therefore, since Kant always countenanced the idea that Jupiter had not quite finished the upholstery of his extensive premises, as a comfortable residence for a man, Jupiter having, in fact, a fine family of mammoths, but no family at all of 'humans,' ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... is manifestly seen that matters were much improved, both in the inventions and in the use of more design, better manner, and greater diligence, in their execution; and likewise that the rust of age and the rudeness and disproportion, wherewith the grossness of that time had clothed them, were swept away. But who will be bold enough to say that there was to be found at that time one who was in every way perfect, and who brought ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... Fancy had the power to enliven, furnish, people them. She suggested that their very number was an indication of sociability, excitement, noise, and mirth. Here, as in all feudal dwellings, the vast disproportion between the space allotted to the dependents and that reserved for the lord of the manor pointed to the time when each castle was a walled city, each baronial hall the home of a crowd of petty retainers. In that long-ago, what ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... is the same matter for astonishment as in Napoleon's; there is the vast disproportion between beginnings and climax, between the relative modesty of early aims and the stupendous magnitude of the climacteric result. One asks how in a few years the impecunious son of the Corsican notary became the world's despot, and how the fashionable young spendthrift ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... it is, our asylums are filled with this class, and that introduces another phase of the matter. Our asylum insane are largely recruited from the Jewish race, at least recruited in tremendous disproportion to their number in the population. The fact that the revolutionary movement is so largely made up of Jewish elements furnishes an interesting confirmation of what I ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... other half against her?* Was it possible that in 1800 years Christianity had not proved victorious over even one-third of mankind, and that Rome, the eternal and all-powerful, only counted a sixth part of the nations among her subjects? Only one soul saved out of every six—how fearful was the disproportion! However, the map spoke with brutal eloquence: the red-tinted empire of Rome was but a speck when compared with the yellow-hued empire of the other gods—the endless countries which the Propaganda still had to conquer. And the question arose: How ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... written these lines with a pencil, on a leaf at the end of his Iliad; and when I reflected on the cause which had given them birth, I could not but admire its disproportion to the effect. What the voice of persuasion had failed in for a year, accident had silently accomplished in a single day. The circumstance I allude to was this: I received a copy of the Iliad and Odyssey of Pope, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... from Cairo professed to be amazed at the ludicrous disproportion between their numerical forces and mine. They could not understand, and they wanted to know, by what strange privilege it is that an Englishman with a brace of pistols and a couple of servants rides safely across the Desert, whilst they, the natives of the neighbouring ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... be the writer fancies that there is—underlying that expression of serenity and humiliation accepted which is proper to the subject, a sinister, disquieting look, almost a threat. Crowe and Cavalcaselle have called attention to a certain disproportion in the size of the head, as compared with that of the surrounding actors in the scene. A similar disproportion is to be observed in another early Titian, the Christ between St. Andrew and St. Catherine in the Church of SS. Ermagora and Fortunato ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... land operations, we are still more seriously hampered by the non-existence of our army. And although, in point of population, our numerical inferiority is so trivial as one to ten, even this slight disproportion may be regarded by an Irish Parliament as a fact not unworthy ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... organ—an artificial organ which merely prolongs the natural organs—his body became suddenly and prodigiously increased in size, without his soul being able at the same time to dilate to the dimensions of his new body. From this disproportion there issued the problems, moral, social, international, which most of the nations endeavoured to solve by filling up the soulless void in the body politic by creating more liberty, more fraternity, more justice than the world had ever seen. Now, while mankind laboured at this task of spiritualization, ...
— The Meaning of the War - Life & Matter in Conflict • Henri Bergson
... donation from the King of France of six millions of livres, to be drawn for by General Washington at distant periods, and an offer to provide clothing and other supplies for the army, the expense to be deducted from the donation above mentioned. The disproportion between this and the necessities of the United States upon which their demand was founded, as well as the exceptionable manner of touching the money, determined me without delay to renew the negotiation, in which I had the concurrence of our Minister Plenipotentiary, and the advantage ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... are to be found at the end of this book. Twenty years have now rolled away since I first began to examine the specimens of zoology in our museums. As the system of preparation is founded in error, nothing but deformity, distortion and disproportion will be the result of the best intentions and utmost exertions of the workman. Canova's education, taste and genius enabled him to present to the world statues so correct and beautiful that they are worthy of universal admiration. ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... what blindness must it be to compare the son of Sophronicus to the son of Mary! What an infinite disproportion there is between them! Socrates dying without pain or ignominy, easily supported his character to the last; and if his death, however easy, had not crowned his life, it might have been doubted whether Socrates, with all his wisdom, was anything more than a ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... Australian averages thirty-six inches; in one man it was only thirty-three and a half, and the tibia of that man measured sixteen and a half, leaving only seventeen to the femur — a very remarkable disproportion. ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... his food, his physic and his bane. In due proportions where these atoms lie, A certain form their equal aids supply; And while unchanged the efficient causes reign, Age following age the certain form maintain. But where crude atoms disproportion'd rise, And cast their sickening vapors round the skies, Unlike that harmony of human frame, That moulded first and reproduce the same, The tribes ill form'd, attempering to the clime, Still vary downward with the years of ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... to the best advantage, their arms glittering in the sun. My auxiliaries of the Michico-Canadian stock and the gentlemen of my party were in their best trim. We occupied the beautiful eminence at the outlet of the lake. The assemblage of Indians was large, but I was struck by the great disproportion, or excess, of women ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... the pious, tender soul the same chivalrous and moved affection. I have spoken with one who remembered her, and who had been the intimate and equal of her sons, and I found this witness had been struck, as I had been, with a sense of disproportion between the warmth of the adoration felt and the nature of the woman, whether as described or observed. She diligently read and marked her Bible; she was a tender nurse; she had a sense of humour under strong control; she talked and found some amusement at her (or rather at her husband's) ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this distance of time, upon the curious struggle which took place in the Cabinet on this question, we cannot fail to be struck by the immense disproportion between cause and effect exhibited in this strange episode in the history of the Shelburne Administration. The full recognition of the rights of Ireland had received the concurrent sanction of the Legislatures of both kingdoms only a short time before. No doubt whatever existed ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... one peril which besets the New Man. It is danger of physical exhaustion. Dr. Kane, the hero of two Arctic nights, came forth to the day only to die. That which makes the preeminence of our organization makes also its peril. Denmark is said to be impoverished by the disproportion of the learned to the industrial class; production is insufficient, and too much of a good thing cripples the country. The nervous system is a learned class in the body; it contributes dignity and superior uses, but makes no corn grow in the physiological ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... a keen sense of this disproportion between size and sense which barbed the sharpest arrows of Dr. Swift. Nobody ever imposed upon him either by bigness or by bluster. "The Devil take stupidity," once cried the Dean of St. Patrick's, "that it will not come in to supply the want of philosophy!" So in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... some four feet higher than the sands, and it offered them at least a respite. And within the moment they had secured this niggardly concession, intent to die, as Wycherley observed, like hurt mice upon a pantry-shelf. The business smacked of disproportion, he considered, although too well-bred to say as much; for here was a big ruthless league betwixt earth and sea, and with no loftier end than to crush a fop and a coquette, whose speedier extinction had been dear at the expense of a shilling's ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... his master, and the debt which a fellow-servant owed to him, there is no assignable proportion: so vast is the difference that we cannot form a definite conception of the relation. This is precisely what we should expect in order to show the disproportion, or want of all proportion, between sins against God and sins against a neighbour. In this parable, on the other hand, the debt in both cases is due to the master, and not in either due by one servant to another. We accordingly do not expect, and do not find a disproportion ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... thunder-clap on Joan and her husband. The Hungarian army consisted of 10,000 horse and more than 7000 infantry, and Aversa had only 500 soldiers under Giacomo Pignatelli. In spite of the immense disproportion of the numbers, the Neapolitan general vigorously repelled the attack; and the King of Hungary, fighting in the front, was wounded in his foot by an arrow. Then Louis, seeing that it would be difficult to take the place by storm, determined to starve them out. For three months ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... upon the lives of persons who had incurred the hostility of powerful labour organizations. This is a terrible time in which we live, my dear boy. There is none recorded in history, I think, in which the disproportion between the material and the moral constituents of society has been so great or so menacing to the permanence of the fabric. But nowhere, in my judgement, is the prospect so dark as it ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... amendment, but pointed out other defects, which they expressed a hope would be remedied in the committee. For instance, the name of the ten-pound franchise had been given to Ireland without the reality; the Irish and English freeholders, from the nature of their tenures, and the disproportion between their means, were in opposite positions to each other. In respect to houses also, the franchise was too high; and, instead of being the instrument of reform, it would be productive of corruption. Thus Portarlington, which ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... general, every such use or extension of the subjunctive mood, as the reader will be likely to mistake for a discord between the verb and its nominative, ought to be avoided as an impropriety: as, "We are not sensible of disproportion, till the difference between the quantities compared become the most striking circumstance."—Kames, El. of Crit., ii, 341. Say rather, "becomes;" which is indicative. "Till the general preference of certain forms have been declared."—Priestley's Gram., ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown |
