"Gentility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thoroughly persuaded that his style of football wasn't a success. "But for that unfortunate riot, which comes from playing with less cultured colleges," he remarked to a Senior the next spring, "that would have been the most successful exhibition of mental control and inherent gentility ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... Ross, in a fairly natural tone. The air he had drawn into his lungs when he laughed at Abner seemed to relieve him from the numbing gentility which had bound his powers since ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... himself perfectly aware of this at times, and would mark his several misgivings with a humorous sense of the situation. He was essentially too kind to be of a narrow world, too human to be finally of less than humanity, too gentle to be of the finest gentility. But such limitations as he had were in the direction I have hinted, or perhaps more than hinted; and I am by no means ready to make a mock of them, as it would be so easy to do for some reasons that he ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... blows to the audience, that I have never seen a player in this character, who did not exaggerate and strain to the utmost these ambiguous features,—these temporary deformities in the character. They make him express a vulgar scorn at Polonius which utterly degrades his gentility, and which no explanation can render palatable; they make him show contempt, and curl up the nose at Ophelia's father,—contempt in its very grossest and most hateful form; but they get applause by it: it is natural, people say; that is, the words are scornful, and the ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... his enforced subsistence. He reiterated so often he was an officer and a gentleman, that finally the American major in command at Misamis mildly replied that self-appointed colonels in self-appointed armies were not recognized by any government, and as for his gentility, if it were the genuine article and not a veneer like his title, it would certainly stand the strain of a little honest labour. The arguments were cogent, and the hand of the law more irresistible still, so the ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... had as yet no knowledge of it, but now I moved to him and plucked him by the sleeve and told him what was toward. In truth, I felt no small alarm for my friend, for I knew him to have no more than that passable facility with the sword which is essential to gentility. Then Messer Guido turned and came with me, and his friends followed him, and our numbers added to the circle that was forming about the disputants. So now, while Messer Simone was still angrily handling his sword-hilt, ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... fearlessly by the throat, and once strangle him into involuntary silence, and the British lion will hereafter be as fawning as he has been hitherto spiteful." He then informs his countrymen that the English "cannot appreciate the retiring nature of true gentility ... nor can they realize how a nation can fail to be blustering except from cowardice." Towards the conclusion of the chapter he explains that "hard blows are the only logic the English understand;" ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... phase of the subject is a consideration of those who are worried lest in word or action, they fail in gentility. They are afraid to do anything lest it should not be regarded as genteel. When they shake hands, it must be done not so much with hearty, friendly spontaneity, but with gentility, and you wonder what that faint touch of fingers, reached high in air, means. They would be mortified beyond measure ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... Nearly all the Negro parties in the cities and towns of the Southern States are made up of quadroon and mulatto girls, and white men. These are democratic gatherings, where gentlemen, shopkeepers, and their clerks, all appear upon terms of perfect equality. And there is a degree of gentility and decorum in these companies that is not surpassed by similar gatherings of white people in the Slave States. It was at one of these parties that Horatio Green, the son of a wealthy gentleman of Richmond, ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... would seem, too; and that is the only agreeable part of the matter. For the customary attentions of your Marquis of Montcalm—I warrant me, Duncan, that he of Lothian would buy a dozen such marquisates—but if the news of the letter were bad, the gentility of this French monsieur would certainly compel him to let ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... some touch of the Boweryite about him, some outcropping of the half-submerged bunco-steerer. Instead of that, both his look and his tone carried some tinge of quiet yet dominant gentility, reminding her, as she had so often been taught before, that the criminal is not a type in himself, that only fanciful and far-stretched generalizations could detach him as a species, or immure and mark him off from the rest of ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... landlord. It suits my purpose better, and is in every way more convenient, to rent a small house on a yearly agreement. But if I were a landlord, I would not allow any tenant of mine to do anything that tended to undermine and honeycomb the gentility of the district. I should take a very short method with such a tenant. I should say to him or her: "Now, then, either this stops, or you go out this instant." That would settle it. However, I am not ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... had been educated at one of the ward schools, and whom no power could induce to take a place as waitress or chambermaid. To stand twelve or fourteen hours behind the counter of a Grand street store met her ideas of gentility and of personal freedom far better than yielding to the requirements of a mistress; and the six dollars a week went in cheap finery till the hard times forced her to make it part of the family fund. Then sore trouble came. The father had died, the mother was in hospital, from which she was never ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... striving, are offered as valuable wares, if man has once begun to break the bond between himself and his living Creator and Master. For this reason, not only the anti-teleological monists meet the fate of Nihilism, whether they appear in the plebeian roughness of Buechner or in the aristocratic gentility of Strauss, but also such a brilliant advocate of teleology as Eduard von Hartmann does not know of any other final end to offer to the world and mankind than nothingness, because he did not wish to be driven from his perception of ends in the world to the only conclusion to which ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... younger members; Aunt Elsie, Mrs. Lawson, and I walked soberly along. Then we popped into separate bathing houses, still looking like respectable and responsible members of society, and popped out five minutes afterward—scarecrows! spooks! animated rag-bags! with the last vestige of our gentility and ...
— Neighbor Nelly Socks - Being the Sixth and Last Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow
... by the shearing which his ears had undergone, were now again seen every day in Westminster Hall and the Court of Requests, [392] He fastened himself on his old patrons, and, in that drawl which he affected as a mark of gentility, gave them the history of his wrongs and of his hopes. It was impossible, he said, that now, when the good cause was triumphant, the discoverer of the plot could be overlooked. "Charles gave me nine hundred pounds a year. Sure William will give me ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... are usually represented. It was more fitted, from the gay stuff of which it was composed, to appear in a public place, than to encounter a storm of rain. It was party-coloured, being made of different stripes of blue and violet; and the wearer arrogated a certain degree of gentility to himself, by wearing a plume of considerable dimensions of the same favourite colours. The features over which this feather drooped were in no degree remarkable for peculiarity of expression. Yet in so desolate a country as the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... becoming for the mechanic's wife to do her own housework as a bride and as a matron of years. Unless her husband prospers rapidly she is accounted "shiftless" should she hire a washerwoman, while to "keep a girl" is extravagance, or a significant stride toward gentility. The wife of the English joiner or mason or small farmer, if brisk, notable and healthy, may dispense with the stated service of a maid of all work, but she calls in a charwoman on certain days, and is content to live as becomes the station of a housewife who ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... neatly and regularly placed round the table, and above all, three heads in very bad water-colours that adorn the walls—all proclaim the superior education of the daughter of the house, and her aspirations after modern gentility. ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... land than Cilly Dennison." Her brother was very different; tall and athletic, and rather handsome, he made no pretensions to be a gentleman. He valued his fine farming and fine cattle a great deal higher than Juniper Hitchcock's gentility. ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... a young gentleman, are you?" he continued, without attending to my observations. "Sent to sea to learn manners! Well, we'll soon knock your gentility out of you, let me tell you. Howsomdever, we don't want no help here, so be off on shore again; and when you meet John Smith, just ask him to take you a walk through the town, and not to bring you back to make yourself useful till the ship's ready for sea, d'ye hear, ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... think the Original must be one of the happiest of the Painter's; while he had Vandyke in his Eye, with whom he was to go to Heaven. {56b} I will not argue how far he was superior to Reynolds in Colour; but in the Air of Dignity and Gentility (in the better Sense) he was surely inferior; it must be so, from the Difference of Character in the two men. Madame D'Arblay (Miss Burney) relates how one day when she was dining with Sir Joshua at Richmond, she chanced to see him looking at her in a peculiar way; she said to him, 'I know what ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... extracting his own spoon from beneath his mattress on which we were seated: "They'll give you yours downstairs and when you get it you want to hide it or it'll be pinched"—and in company with Monsieur Bragard, who had refused the morning promenade, and whose gentility would not permit him to hurry when it was a question of such a low craving as hunger, we joined the dancing roaring throng at the door. I was not too famished myself to be unimpressed by the instantaneous change which had come over The Enormous Room's occupants. Never did Circe herself ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... in the drawing-room of Enterprise House, which was rarely opened nowadays. It had a charming air of slightly old-fashioned gentility, just as its dead mistress had left it, and the rough Northerners came in with an abashed air. John Gaviller, resplendent in the dress-suit, stood by the piano, with the little lady on one hand and the large lady on the other, and one after another the men marched up and made their obeisances. ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... wealthy to keep up a good position, while recognising the fact that money has nothing to do with true gentility. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... Carmody re-enters, followed by Fred Nicholls, who has left his overcoat and hat in the hallway. Nicholls is a young fellow of twenty-three, stockily built, fair-haired, handsome in a commonplace, conventional mould. His manner is obviously an attempt at suave gentility; he has an easy, taking smile and a ready laugh, but there is a petty, calculating expression in his small, observing, blue eyes. His well-fitting, ready-made clothes are carefully pressed. His whole get-up suggests an attitude ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... the grisette, his face brightened up, and assumed an expression of affectionate benevolence. He had always been struck with the grace, gentility, and touching goodness with which Rigolette consoled Germain when she came to converse with him. Germain, on his part, was no ordinary prisoner. His reserve, his mildness, his sadness, inspired interest in the prison officials; an interest they were careful not to show him, for fear ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... inclination to that friendly intimacy which would have been sure to arise if her pupils had been of the same race as herself. She recognized their right most fully to careful and polite consideration; she had striven to cultivate among them gentility of deportment; but she had longed with a hungry yearning for friendly white faces, and the warm hands and hearts of ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... what young lady of common gentility will reach the age of sixteen without altering her name as far as she can?), must from situation be at this time the intimate friend and confidante of her sister. It is remarkable, however, that she neither insisted on Catherine's writing by every post, nor exacted her promise ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... cultivate the land undisturbed, disdaining newfangled ideas of gentility, and adhering in all ways to the customs of his father. Presently, soldier and farmer also passed away, and were laid to rest side by side on the banks of the Youle, in the shadow ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... was a new experience to him, and though the stiff gentility and aggressive hospitality so far exhibited had made him somewhat uncomfortable, his judgment of these people was favourable enough. Still, he was possessed of the idea that he was not going to stay in that house more than a few days. Not that he had the least conception of ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... compliment to southern electors, became amateur huntsmen, and in New York and Boston the chase was pursued with all the zeal and apparent delight that could have been expected in Guinea or Virginia. Slave-catching was the test, at once, of patriotism and gentility, while sympathy for the wretched fugitive was the mark of vulgar fanaticism. The north was humbled in the dust, by the action of her own recreant sons. Every "good citizen" found himself, for the first time in the history of mankind, a slave-catcher ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... to pressing and immediate need of surgical attendance. Consequently, Gentleman Dick rapidly attained an elevated position in their regard, and became a great favorite with Old Platte's party, although they still looked doubtfully at his slender figure and felt "kind o' bothered" by the air of gentility and good-breeding which hung around him in spite of the rough miner's garments that he had chosen to assume. By the time they left Denver for the Blue he was deemed as indispensable to the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... a gentleman's table, he should behave in a gentlemanly manner, and not eat bacon from his fingers, when a knife and fork had been especially provided for this purpose. Cyd accepted the rebuke, and thereafter imitated the manners of his companions, even carrying his ideas of gentility to extremes. ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... would lift up her dress, sardonically, exposing herself. Other old women would congregate in the neglected and dirty bedrooms and tell fortunes with the cards. One little woman, an onanist, was like a character out of Dickens, exaggerated, affected, unnatural, with remains of gentility and society manners. Amidst all this drunkenness and abandonment May, the landlady's daughter, preserved her virginity. Young lodgers would take liberties with her, but at a certain stage would receive a stinger on the face. The ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... more than 15 pounds per annum each. No doubt I might have sent them to a Board school, where they would have received a better education; but in the part of London where I lived there was no Board school within easy reach, and besides this, though I hate the pretension of gentility, manners and companionship have to be considered as well as education in the choice of a school. A child may take no harm by sitting on the same bench with village children, but the London gamin is not a desirable acquaintance. In ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... esteem for John and Mary had risen from the date of the Doctor's visit, and the good woman thought it but right somewhat to increase the figures of their room-rent to others more in keeping with such high gentility. How fast the little hoard ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... once was) sits contemplative, wearing a cap of creamish lace, tastefully arranged, not unaware that in the entering lamp-light, and under the fire's soft glow of approval, she presents to her domestic's eye an improving picture of gentility. It is to Miss Julia Robinson's credit—and she herself places it there emphatically—that she always treats servants humanly, though at a distance. And when she now speaks she confers her slight remark just a little as though it were ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... communication, is now wrapped up between the broad-gauge and the narrow-gauge, like a hare in a bottle-spit. The opening of the line to Rugby affords a new short way to London. The population will henceforward increase at the expense of its gentility, but the police and sanitary arrangements before alluded to, will always make Leamington a favourite with invalids, hypochondriacs, ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... call this description low; I do not envy them their gentility, and have always observed through life (as, to be sure, every other GENTLEMAN has observed as well as myself) that it is your parvenu who stickles most for what he calls the genteel, and has the most squeamish abhorrence ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... difficult part, to judge by the colorless and disappointing renderings that are given of it. George Alexander was far the best of my Bassanio bunch! Mr. Barnes, "handsome Jack Barnes," as we called him, was a good actor, is a good actor still, as every one knows, but his gentility as Bassanio was overwhelming. It was said of him that he thought more of the rounding of his legs than the charms of his affianced wife, and that in the love-scenes he appeared to be taking orders for furniture! This was putting it unkindly, but there ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... and my journals have never been written up, save in chance scraps. The Wanderer is quite as interesting as ever! I took the odds to L2 with him over a race run at Newmarket, and he paid promptly. He puts out little signs of improvement—sprouts of gentility—at times: but one heavy spell of gin and Shakespeare takes him back to the old level again. Still, he is more amusing than the dandies; in fact, I do not think I shall go amongst the respectable division again. I make no ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... the substance, and care for the form alone, showed that the form was used only as a protest against the old forms. A provincial narrowness, even a slight air of vulgarity, was felt to attach to the teachings of the Church. Gentility had come to imply not only heathendom, ("gentilis est qui in Christum non credit,") but liberal breeding. The attraction of the classic culture, "the humanities," as it was well called, was just this cosmopolitan largeness, that it had no prejudices and prescribed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... the elements of true manliness in him will carry a gentlemanly bearing wherever he goes. In all his deportment, and especially in his conduct toward the opposite sex, he will act the gentleman; and the boy whose gentility is genuine will manifest the same kind deference toward his mother and sisters as toward other ladies and girls. So also the young lady who is a lady at heart, will never allow herself to forget the rules of propriety, whether she is ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... towel, she rubbed a large silver spoon, till it shone brighter and brighter, and laid it by the side of my bowl. She had first spread a white napkin under it, to give my simple repast an appearance of neatness and gentility. The bowl itself was white, with a wreath of roses round the rim, both inside and out. Those rosy garlands had been for years the delight of my eyes. I always hailed the appearance of the glowing leaves, when the milky fluid sunk below them, with a fresh appreciation of ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... limited or regulated by law. No person whose estate did not exceed 200 pounds, could wear "gold or silver lace, or any lace above 2 shillings per yard." The "selectmen" were required to take note of the "apparel" of the people, especially their "ribbands and great boots." Only the gentility, including ministers and their wives, received the prefix Mr. and Mrs. to their names. Others, above servitude, were called Goodman ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... advance, and as such, perhaps, some ladies of indisputable correctness and gentility will condemn the action as immodest; but, you see, poor dear Rebecca had all this work to do for herself. If a person is too poor to keep a servant, though ever so elegant, he must sweep his own rooms: if a dear girl has no dear Mamma to settle matters with the young man, she must ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... who attach overmuch importance to the gentility of their Boy's avocation; to fathers who think that because the bank is rich its employes must necessarily become so in time; to friends who criticize the bankclerks of their acquaintance for not settling ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... to psychological analysis, could not have explained why Mr. Hand was so objectionable to her. He was no relative of the family, she had discovered that; and, accustomed as she was to the old-fashioned gentility of a thrifty New England town, instinct told her that he could not possibly be one of its varied products. He might have come from anywhere; he talked so little that he was suspicious on that ground alone; and when he did speak, there was no accent at all that Sallie ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... make a sensation, madam. I have made one myself, who am dark; the chi she is kauley, which last word signifies black, which I am not, though rather dark. There's no colour like white, madam; it's so lasting, so genteel. Gentility will carry the day, madam, even with the young rye. He will ask words of the black lass, but beg the ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... may find out how you live here. This is not fit work for you. You seem to be a—a gentleman. You ought to be a lawyer, or a doctor, or in a bank," she continued timidly, with a vague enumeration of the prevailing degrees of local gentility. ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... away there had no home either. A boarding-house is no sort of home though it may get you a living. His feelings were horribly rasped by the idea of the boarding-house. In his rank of life he had that truly aristocratic temperament characterized by a scorn of vulgar gentility and by prejudiced views as to the derogatory nature of certain occupations. For his own part he had always preferred sailing merchant ships (which is a straightforward occupation) to buying and selling merchandise, of which the essence is ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... Mr. Trapp." She turned to him with her air of gentility. "You will forgive Harry for preferring a red coat to—to your calling." (I thought this treacherous of Miss Plinlimmon. As if she did not prefer it herself!) "No doubt he will learn in time that all duty is alike noble, whether it bids a man mount the ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... what had not been his, in spite of all the adulation paid him—the conceded equality of social condition. The army was then, as I believe it is considered now, the surest sign of higher caste in a democracy. Wesley, by the mere right to epaulets, would be of the acknowledged gentility. Nobody could sneer at him; no doors could be opened grudgingly when he called. He would, in virtue of his West Point insignia, be a knighted member of the blood royal of the republic. Some of this mysterious unction would distill itself into the unconsecrated ichor of the rest of the ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... Lear, amid the social storm, they had determined, like him, to become "unsophisticated," "to owe the worm no silk, the cat no perfume"—seeing, indeed, that if they had, they could not have paid for them; so they tore off, of their own will, the peacock's feathers of gentility, the sheep's clothing of moderation, even the fig-leaves of decent reticence, and became just what they really were—just what hundreds more would become, who now sit in the high places of the earth, if ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... argument except maxims and morals and a tightening of authority; the young girl permitted neither neighboring maids nor the duties of religion to lure her off guard. It may be said of any French half-breed that he has all the instincts of gentility except an inclination to lying, and that arises from ...
— The Mothers Of Honore - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... the Parcel (to her friend—for the sake of vindicating her gentility). Oh, my dear, I do feel so funny, carrying a great brown-paper parcel, in a bus, too! Anyone would take me ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various
... cook, and Teddy, her son, though careless and lazy, and given to little thefts and large stories, had his good points, as what Irish boy has not. So they, the Mac Donnels, sought out some other home,—safer and more comfortable, if not quite so grand in its isolated, ancient gentility,—and it may be, took the Banshee with them for their comfort. Trouble, I believe, always goes with people in this world, wherever they move to,—in some form or other, it travels with them, and settles ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... work being completed in the Forties with Splendour and Wretchedness of Courtezans, this last portion having also more than one section. The first two volumes of the Lost Illusions narrate the early experiences of Lucien de Rubempre, a young poet of Angouleme, whose family, with some claims to gentility, has fallen into narrow circumstances, the widowed mother being obliged to earn money as a midwife, and the daughter as a laundry-woman. The latter's marriage with David Sechard, a printer, alters the situation of the family for the better; and Lucien is enabled to occupy himself in ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... an odd apathy as to my character; rather like death, when one dreams of flying the soul. What does it matter? I should have left the flies and wasps to worry a corpse. And then-good-bye gentility! I should have worked for my bread. I had thoughts of America. I fancy I can write; and Americans, one hears, are gentle ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a cottage with a double coach-house, A cottage of gentility, And he own'd with a grin That his favorite sin, Is ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... prosperous section of the population must be altering its habits, giving up high-tea for dinner and taking to evening dress, using the week-end hotels as a practise-ground for these new social arts. A swift and systematic conversion to gentility has been going on, I am convinced, throughout the whole commercial upper-middle class since I was twenty-one. Curiously mixed was the personal quality of the people one saw in these raids. There were conscientiously refined and low-voiced people ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... so happened that his progress was a good deal baffled by the conflict constantly kept up in his brain, between the desire to use his legs in the natural manner, and to preserve that antique pace of tottering gentility which he had acquired from that devilish fine old fellow, the Prince of Baden-Baden, so that at one moment he was in the very hands of the enemy, and at the next, flying like an antelope in the distance. The gun, constantly following him with a loud threat, from ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... (Terence's Comedies, p. xx). To this end it was necessary to tone down the "familiarity and bluntness in [Terence's] Discourse" which were "not so agreeable with the Manners and Gallantry of our Times." This was intended to bring Terence up to the level of gentility for which he was credited by compensating for the barbarity of Roman social manners. But the translation was willing to go further than this: it added to the Roman comedy what Echard thought English comedy excelled in, "humour"— "In some places we have had somewhat more of Humour than ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... was, ate with unexpected gentility, and, as the hot coffee sent its cheerful glow through his body, he asked, with livening interest, a good many questions about the ranger and the Forest Service. "You fellers have to be all-round men. The cowboys think you have a snap, but I ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... time there emerged from a milliner's house (shop, to outward appearance, it was not, evincing its gentility and its degree above the Capelocracy, to use a certain classical neologism, by a brass plate on an oak door, whereon was graven, "Miss Semper, Milliner and Dressmaker, from Madame Devy,")—at this time, I say, and from this house there emerged the light and graceful ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... watchmen, for our forefathers were of too pacific a disposition to need those guardians of the night, every soul throughout the town being sound asleep before nine o'clock. Neither did they establish their claims to gentility at the expense of their tailors for as yet those offenders against the pockets of society, and the tranquillity of all aspiring young gentlemen were unknown in New Amsterdam; every good housewife made the clothes of her husband and family, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... hair about her brow, the shy girlish eyes, the long delicate hand with the fingers which, in spite of their declared readiness to work, trembled a little, and the voice which spoke the Northern speech with such clear-cut gentility, that the words fell on the ear with a certain cool freshness, like the splash of water in a fountain or the tinkle of a burn ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... may be found, squatting within an hour's walk of the Royal palaces and of the luxurious town mansions of our nobility and opulent classes, to the very west of the fashionable West-end, beyond the gentility of Bayswater and Whiteley's avenue of universal shopping. It is a curious spectacle in that situation, and might suggest a few serious reflections upon social contrasts at the centre and capital of the mighty British nation, which takes upon itself the correction ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... could earn in other ways, besides being much stronger from the exercise thus taken. But too many girls are, unfortunately, imbued with the vulgar notion that work is not genteel. What a Moloch this gentility has been and still is! What a number of human sacrifices are continually placed at its shrine, and what puppets its votaries become! Mr. Smiles says: 'There is a dreadful ambition abroad for being "genteel." We keep up appearances too often at the expense of honesty, and ...
— The Skilful Cook - A Practical Manual of Modern Experience • Mary Harrison
... have a wholesome disregard of what Mr. or Mrs. So-and-so thinks or says. We pride ourselves on conforming to circumstances; and as a British officer must needs be a gentleman and his wife a lady, perhaps we repose quietly on that incontestable proof of our gentility, and can afford to be useful ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... wilful untruth is, with him, 'a lie.' To show the wickedness and extreme folly of swearing, he gives the words and imprecations then commonly in use; but which, happily for us, we never hear, except among the most degraded classes of society. Swearing was formerly considered to be a habit of gentility; but now it betrays the blackguard, even when disguised in genteel attire. Those dangerous diseases which are so surely engendered by filth and uncleanness, he calls not by Latin but by their plain English names. In every case, the Editor has not ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... wonderful a child should possess for anything as artificial as systems of grammar and arithmetic. A remarkable boy, in truth, he was, to have been found by chance in an almshouse; except that, such being his origin, we are at liberty to suppose for him whatever long cultivation and gentility we may think necessary, in his parentage of either side,—such as was indicated also by his graceful and refined beauty of person. He showed, indeed, even before he began to read at all, an instinctive attraction towards ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... estates and mansions, the intermarriages of the Dutch aristocracy, and the subject of heraldry. Mr. Schoonmaker made a hobby of old Bibles, and Mrs. Schoonmaker of old lace. The two hobbies combined gave a mingled air of erudition and gentility to the pair that was quite impressive, while their unquestionably good descent was a source of social capital to all of humbler origin who were fortunate enough to draw ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... was as unmoved by this impressive entry as man could possibly be. He stood whistling to himself with all imaginable coolness, with his hat still on, and a certain air of exhaustion upon him, in part arising from excessive summer, and in part from excessive gentility. For it was to be seen with half an eye that he was a thorough gentleman, made to the model of the time; weary of everything, and putting no more faith ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... with these they prick the flesh till the blood comes, and then they rub in a certain black colouring stuff, and this is perfectly indelible. It is considered a piece of elegance and the sign of gentility to have this black band.] The men are all gentlemen in their fashion, and do nothing but go to the wars, or go hunting and hawking. The ladies do all the business, aided by the slaves who have been taken in ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... certain air of natural gentility, which it is neither in the power of dress to give, nor to conceal. Mr Jones, as hath been before hinted, was possessed of this in a very eminent degree. He met, therefore, with a reception from the lady somewhat different from what his apparel seemed to demand; and after he had paid ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... Nederlant. The States General gave him a copyright for it in May, 1653, but the first edition was not published till 1655. In that year the author died, leaving to his widow his estate, or "colonie," which he called Colendonck. The name of Yonkers, where it was situated, perpetuates his title of gentility (Jonkheer van der Donck). ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • J. F. Jameson, Editor
... that you had been hurt, Benita," he exclaimed in his light, refined voice, one of the stamps of that gentility of blood and breeding whereof all his rough years and errors had been unable to deprive him. "They only told me that you were saved. It is part of my ill-fortune that at our first moment of greeting I should give you pain, who have caused you ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... lamp-post before the door, so he knew the house from its neighbours. Baker's Terrace as a whole was a defeated aspiration after gentility. The more auspicious houses were marked by white stones, the steps being scrubbed and hearthstoned almost daily; the gloomier doorsteps were black, except on Sundays. Thus variety was achieved by houses otherwise as monotonous and ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... of the district. Bishop Heber described them as follows:—"The country is burdened with a crowd of lazy, profligate, self-called sawars (cavaliers), who, though many of them are not worth a rupee, conceive it derogatory to their gentility and Pathan blood to apply themselves to any honest industry, and obtain for the most part a precarious livelihood by sponging on the industrious tradesmen and farmers, on whom they levy a sort of blackmail, or as hangers-on to the wealthy and noble families yet remaining in the province. These ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... Scarborough Square was only a name. There had been no reason to visit it, and had I ventured to it I would have seen little save a tiny park bounded on four sides by houses of shabby gentility, for the most part detached, and of a style of architecture long since surrendered to more undesirable designs. The park is but an open space whose straggly trees and stunted shrubs and dusty grass add dejection to the atmosphere of shrinking respectability ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... same number in our own land could not have played together for the space of an hour without biting or scratching one another. There you might have seen a throng of young females, not filled with envyings of each other's charms, nor displaying the ridiculous affectations of gentility, nor yet moving in whalebone corsets, like so many automatons, but free, ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... expensive forms of procedure than were habitual to the humbler ranks of contemporary society. But the Worcester diocese covered a very wide area, and was honeycombed with Shakespeare families of all degrees of gentility. The William Shakespeare whom Anne Whately was licensed to marry may have been of a superior station, to which marriage by license was deemed appropriate. On the unwarranted assumption of the identity of the William Shakespeare of the marriage ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... idea of the style of living of those who form the best society of Edinburgh. The circle is so confined that its members are almost universally known to each other; and those various gradations of gentility, from the city's snug party to the duchess's most crowded assembly, all totally distinct and separate, which are to be met with in London, have no prototype in Edinburgh. There the ranks and fortunes being more on an equality, no one is able greatly to exceed his neighbour ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... by guile: which details she never learnt, for Mrs. Lessways was very loyal to her former crony, and moreover she had necessarily to support the honour of the older generation against the younger. It seemed incredible to Hilda that this woman who sat with such dignity and such gentility by her mother's fire was she who the day before yesterday had been starving in the pride-imposed prison of her own house. Could Miss Gailey have known that Hilda knew!... But Hilda knew that Miss Gailey ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... to restrict my activities to boys coming from homes of the utmost culture and refinement, where principles of undoubted gentility were implanted from the cradle up. Yet it would seem that the germ of the thought touching on the Boy Scouts lingered within that marvellous human organism, the brain, resulting finally in consequences of an actually direful character. ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... Lady Betty, bursting upon the town in sudden glory, threw all her companions into the shade. Never had such a fine lady of comedy been seen, said the critics; never had an actress (who was not expected to be over-versed in the affairs of the "quality") displayed such gentility, high-breeding and evidence of being—Heaven knew how—quite "to the manner born." Never was woman so bubbling over with humour, said the people. As for Colley, he was delighted, of course, but believing that an honest confession is good for the soul, even ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... It was built in quadrangular form, containing only one large court, upon which opened the stately hall, chapel, and principal apartments. Though not commanding the imposing aspect and grandeur of Bereford Castle, Chesley Manor had an air of true gentility in keeping with that of its owner. Lofty windows, reaching to the ground, looked out upon the gardens, which were enclosed ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... profession, and one which can be entered only by candidates, who are properly equipped and trained. In a book such as this, it may then be assumed that the elderly governess, driven to teach by poverty and lack of friends, with no qualifications but gentility, good manners, good principles, and a humble mind, is a figure which is mercifully becoming less and less common. It is still necessary, however, to insist on the fact that brains and education and training are not by themselves sufficient to produce ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... among those who rule and lead the people. It is true that men, in this present age, become distinguished for other things, and may have name and fame, and flatterers and lacqueys, and the oblation of flattery, who would, in a knightly age, have been despised for the want in them of all true gentility and courage; and that such men are as likely as any to be voted for by the multitude, who rarely love or discern or receive truth; who run after fortune, hating what is oppressed, and ready to worship the prosperous; ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... with which he put his shoulder to the wheel everywhere that aid was needed, his boldness in defying those leagued against him, completely changed the aspect of Jamestown. The gentlemen who had refused to wield axe or spade or bricklayer's trowel because of their gentility ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... of land, having neither the spirit nor industry, and perhaps very little opportunity, to better their condition. There was evidently some struggle in the mind of our host between his poverty and gentility—added to what was due to the national character for hospitality—when we came to proffer some acknowledgment for our reception. It was just an occasion when, travelling in this way, one is rather puzzled how to act, but we were relieved from ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... before luncheon. She was putting on her bonnet to go to order them, when a doubt seized her whether she was transgressing the dignities of the Honourable Mrs. Martindale. Matilda had lectured against vulgarity when Arthur had warned her against ultra-gentility, and she wavered, till finding there was no one to send, her good sense settled the question. She walked along, feeling the cares and troubles of life arising on her, and thinking she should never again be gay and thoughtless, when she suddenly heard her husband's voice—'Ha! ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... all the pride and vanity that ignorance, and a desire to hide that mean extraction create. Incapable of shewing delicacy and fine breeding in herself, she spoils her harmless children by converting them into specimens of the gentility of the family. For more of this, see ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... of this kind. But I am persuaded she's in as great necessity as many that seem far poorer, especially since the muslin flowering has gone so down. Her bits of brats are sairly worn, though she keeps out an apparition of gentility. Now, for all this trouble, I will give you an account of what we have been doing ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... in which Mrs. Peachey lived and supplied the necessaries of life to a dozen boarders, ran like a frayed seam of gentility between the prosperous and the impoverished quarters of Dinwiddie; and in order to reach it, Oliver was obliged to pass the rectory, where, though he did not see her, Virginia sat in stiffly starched muslin on the old horsehair sofa. The fragrance ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... something of a beauty himself, discovered the merits of Amanda. Then he became markedly attentive. He was a large, fat, curly-headed person with beautiful eyes, a cherished moustache, and an air of great gentility, and when he had welcomed his guests and driven off the slatternly waiting-maid, and given them his best table, and consented, at Amanda's request, to open a window, he went away and put on a tie ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... to the forms of common breeding. He afterwards found means to make her acquainted with some distinguished patterns of her own sex, by whom she was admitted into the most elegant parties, and continued to make good her pretensions to gentility, with great circumspection. But one evening, being at cards with a certain lady whom she detected in the very fact of unfair conveyance, she taxed her roundly with the fraud, and brought upon herself ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... there were others of the colony, higher in the social scale and less prosperous in their finances, the impecunious music-teachers and professors of languages who maintained themselves with a frosty air of shabby gentility on a very slender income, and the practitioners of literature and art who maintained themselves somehow on no income at all. For the leisure hours of these there were the innocent wine-shops of South Fifth Avenue, such as the ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... off alone, and a curious visit he had. It was not easy for him to guess at the sacredness of those traditions of gentility and superiority that the 'Misses Hepburn' held—not so much for their own sakes as in faithful loyalty to the parents many years dead, and to the family duty that imposed a certain careful exclusiveness on them in deference to the noble lineage they could reckon, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... half-educated, timid creatures who are to be found now and then painfully earning the bread which is very bitter to them in richer people's houses, and preserving in their little silent souls some fetish in the shape of a scrap of gentility, which is their sole comfort, or almost their sole comfort. Mrs. Copperhead's fetish was the dear recollection that she was "an officer's daughter;" or rather this had been her fetish in the days when she had nothing, and was free ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... of Highbury, and born of a respectable family, which for the last two or three generations had been rising into gentility and property. He had received a good education, but, on succeeding early in life to a small independence, had become indisposed for any of the more homely pursuits in which his brothers were engaged, and had satisfied an active, cheerful mind and ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... most conspicuous part of the looking-glass frame over the chimney-piece of the best drawing-room. Thus you perceive that our natural position was one highly creditable to us, proving the soundness of our finances and the gentility of our pedigree,—of which last more hereafter. At present I content myself with saying on that head that even the proudest of the neighboring squirearchs always spoke of us as a very ancient family. But all my father ever said, to evince pride of ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the view of pleasing and attracting the admiration of others, rather than of improving and developing their qualities of mind and heart. They are imbued with notions of exclusiveness, fashion, and gentility. A respectable position in society is held up to them as the mark to be aimed at. To be criminal or vicious is virtually represented to them as far less horrible than to be "vulgar." Immured within the ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... all useful knowledge; to render them obedient to their superiors, and gentle, kind, and affectionate to each other; yet did she not omit teaching them an exact neatness in their persons and dress, and a perfect gentility in ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... remembers him, can hardly forgive Mr. Thomas Ranson for making an etching so unlike her idea of him when he was a youthful teacher at Mr. Bird's school. Old age and poverty—a life-long poverty, she thinks—could at no time have so effaced the marks of native gentility which were once so visible in a face otherwise strikingly ugly, thin, and care-worn. From her recollections of him, she thinks that he would have wanted bread before he would have begged or borrowed a half-penny. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... Lamotte's contemplated visit to Paris, Derues was filled with alarm. If she were living free and independent in Paris she might find out the truth about the real state of his affairs, and then good-bye to Buisson-Souef and landed gentility! No, if Mme. de Lamotte were to come to Paris, she must come as the guest of the Derues, a pleasant return for the hospitality accorded to the grocer at Buisson-Souef. The invitation was given and readily accepted; ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... a pleasure, nay a merit, to BE one—to come of an old stock, to have an honorable pedigree, to be able to say that centuries back our fathers had gentle blood, and to us transmitted the same. There IS a good in gentility: the man who questions it is envious, or a coarse dullard not able to perceive the difference between high breeding and low. One has in the same way heard a man brag that he did not know the difference between wines, not he—give him a good glass of port, ...
— The Second Funeral of Napoleon • William Makepeace Thackeray (AKA "Michael Angelo Titmarch")
... education; he dealt first with the upholders of a kind of caste system, men who were willing enough to raise themselves and their sons to a higher social plane, but objected on semi-theological grounds to any one from below doing likewise—neatly satirising them and their notions of gentility, and quoting Plato in support of his contention that what is wanted even more than means to help capacity to rise is "machinery by which to facilitate the descent of incapacity from the higher strata to the lower." He repeats in new phrase ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... ill-favored was dressed after the fashion of shabby gentility, a fashion which the rich not seldom try to copy. He wore low shoes beneath gaiters of the pattern worn by the Imperial Guard, doubtless for the sake of economy, because they kept the socks clean. The rusty tinge of his black breeches, like the cut and the white or shiny ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... of a certainty she goes on stilts. Now, I must say that is the very tip-top of gentility and politeness. One may forgive a lady giving coffee-parties, and decorating and dressing herself up, but to go on stilts, only on purpose to be higher than other folks, and to be able to look over their heads, that is coming ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... the Marshalsea, as he grew more dependent on the contributions of his changing family, made the greater stand by his forlorn gentility. So the pretence had to be kept up that neither of his daughters earned ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... "Yes, yes, she did; for a woman will go anywhere, at any time, with anybody, to see any thing—especially in a gig." Those were days in which a gig was a vehicle the existence of which was not only recognized in civilized society, but supposed to confer a diploma of "gentility" upon ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Polynesian Niggers, the native genealogists would probably scout with indignation, being perfectly persuaded of the extreme gentility of their descent. Their only knowledge of the patriarch Noah is as a personage who derives his principal claim to notoriety from having been the first Lapp. Their acquaintance with any sacred history—nay, ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... outside the place had a dilapidated look that surprised Lindsay. The bell was of that brand you keep pulling till you discover it is out of order. Decayed gentility marked the neighborhood, though the blank front of ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... age: he laughs when he hears a joke, and when (which is much oftener) he hears it not. Having served the greater parish offices, Lamb and his sister become greater, being his lodgers, than they were when substantial householders. The children of the village venerate him for his gentility, but wonder also at him for a gentle indorsation of the person, not amounting to a hump, or, if one, then like that of the buffalo, and ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... not only survived that present which Thackeray described: we have even survived that future to which George Eliot looked forward. It is no longer adequate to say that Dickens did not understand that old world of gentility, of parliamentary politeness and the balance of the constitution. That world is rapidly ceasing to understand itself. It is vain to repeat the complaint of the old Quarterly Reviewers, that Dickens ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... dramatists,[311] and mainly in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher,[312] there is a constant recognition of gentility, as if a noble behavior were as easily marked in the society of their age, as color is in our American population. When any Rodrigo, Pedro, or Valerio[313] enters, though he be a stranger, the duke or governor exclaims, This is a gentleman,—and proffers civilities ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... in your letter, the simple, flowing style of gentility, the one which alone a woman of condition who writes to her friend may use with dignity. Your digressions and your thoughts are flowers which . . . (forgive an author who pilfers from you the delicious nonchalance of an amiable writer) or . . . a will-o'-the-wisp which, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... difficult to find four young people more likely to attract the attention of a passer-by, than we four were, in the fall of 1797. As for Rupert Hardinge, he resembled his mother, and was singularly handsome in face, as well as graceful in movements. He had a native gentility of air, of which he knew how to make the most, and a readiness of tongue and a flow of spirits that rendered him an agreeable, if not a very instructive companion. I was not ill-looking, myself, though far from possessing the striking countenance ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... peculiarly distinguishes a hackney-coach, let it never be forgotten that a cab is a thing of yesterday, and that he never was anything better. A hackney-cab has always been a hackney-cab, from his first entry into life; whereas a hackney-coach is a remnant of past gentility, a victim to fashion, a hanger-on of an old English family, wearing their arms, and, in days of yore, escorted by men wearing their livery, stripped of his finery, and thrown upon the world, like a once-smart ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... of birth, and the presumption of new men in attempting to found a new system of gentility, Boswell proceeds: "Mr. Thrale had married Miss Hester Lynch Salusbury, of good Welsh extraction, a lady of lively talents, improved by education. That Johnson's introduction into Mr. Thrale's family, which contributed so much to the happiness of his life, was owing ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... one finger he wore a diamond that made all beholders wink, and in his shirt bosom still another. His wallet was stuffed with greenbacks, his watch and chain, Mr. Darrell affirmed were worth a thousand dollars—a sprig of gentility, whoever he might be, this wounded hero. They found no papers, no letters, no card-case. His linen was marked "C. S." twisted in a monogram. They must wait until he was able himself ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... of the friend thus addressed—was a card-sharper, and he instantly seized the opportunity to make something out of the happy disposition of this modern prodigal son, this scion of gentility. With the utmost frankness he explained to the young man his wonderful method of keeping his pockets full of money, and showed that nothing could be easier than for Olivier to go and do likewise in his terrible condition;—in ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... Meechim turned up her nose and acted dretful high-headed and said there was nothing genteel in such actions and she wouldn't gin in a mite till that day in Vienna she had a letter that brought her nose down where it belonged, and she acted different after readin' it and didn't talk any more about gentility or the onbroken prosperity of the Mudd-Weakdews, and I wuz shocked myself ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... pot-pourri. Tapestry covered more than three-fourths of the wall, swinging gently in the draught from the open window, a harpischord stood in a corner, a couch that had apparently been occupied stood between the fireplace and the door, and a score of evidences indicated gentility and taste. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... W.B. Hodgson in Z. Kingsley in John B. Lamar in Henry Laurens in Charles Manigault in Samuel Matthews in James Mercer in A.H. Pemberton in Martin W. Philips in George Washington in David R. Williams gentility of homesteads of innovations by management by migration of purchases of slaves by rules of sales of slaves by sports of temper of Poor whites, in the South, Cairnes' assertions concerning Portugal, activities of, in Guinea, an appandage of Spain negroes in Preachers, negro Procter, Billy, a slave, ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... ladies took their bitters regular," she added, to remove any sting of personality from her remark; for, from many things she had let fall, we knew that she did not regard us as quality. On the contrary, she often tried to overbear us with the gentility of her former places; and would tell the lady over whom she reigned, that she had lived with folks worth their three and four hundred thousand dollars, who never complained as she did of the ironing. Yet she had a sufficient regard for the literary occupations of the family, Mr. Johnson ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... ninety. No farmer wagons. A small town with all the airs of a big one; with none of the charming informality of the old Southern small town; none of the engaging ruggedness of the established Middle-Western town; none of the faded gentility of the old New England town. A strident dame, this, in red satin and diamonds, insisting that she is a lady. Interesting, withal, and bulging with ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber |
