"Grossness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... them. Meat pies and puddings cannot be recommended, but strong stomachs may sustain but little inconvenience from them. It is a confined mode of cookery, and the meat therefore is not at all purified of its grossness. When meat pies and puddings are used, they should be moderately seasoned. Baking meat, instead of roasting it, is a worse manner of dressing it, from the closeness of the oven, and the great variety of things often baking at the same time. Stewing is not a good way of dressing meat, ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... table was already occupied by half a dozen persons—all fat, vulgar, and noisy. They were examples of the petit bourgeois class whom one meets rather too frequently wherever there are towns in this part of France, and with whom the disposition to grossness is equally apparent in mind and body. There were women in the party, but had they been absent, the language of the men would have been no coarser. These fat and middle-aged women, married, doubtless, and highly respectable after their fashion, when struck by each gust of humour, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... wrote his remarkable drama, 'The Satire of the Three Estates'—Monarch, namely, Barons, and Clergy. It is made up in nearly three equal parts of ingenuity, wit, and grossness. It is a drama, and was acted several times—first, in 1535, at Cupar-Fife, on a large green mound called Moot-hill; then, in 1539, in an open park near Linlithgow, by the express desire of the king, who with all the ladies of the Court attended the representation; then in the amphitheatre ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... those who fixed the standard of orthodoxy a hair's breadth higher or lower than I had done; and attacked, with a virulence that shewed I was totally blind to the lameness of my own cause, the socinianizing clergy, who dared subscribe in defiance of the grossness of their heresy, and the Calvinists, who had the impudence to understand the articles in the sense in which ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... what colours have they been drawn by Hamilton? The elegance of his pencil has rendered them more seductive and dangerous, than if it had more faithfully copied the originals. From such a mingled mass of grossness of language, and of conduct, one would have turned away with disgust and abhorrence; but Hamilton was, to use the words of his admirer, Lord Orford, "superior to the indelicacy of the court," whose vices he has so agreeably depicted; and that superiority ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... disinterested, chivalrous, protective, in their love for women as he. Angel Clare was far from all that she thought him in this respect; absurdly far, indeed; but he was, in truth, more spiritual than animal; he had himself well in hand, and was singularly free from grossness. Though not cold-natured, he was rather bright than hot—less Byronic than Shelleyan; could love desperately, but with a love more especially inclined to the imaginative and ethereal; it was a fastidious ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... answered the stranger: "not at all, it may be. There is a pleasant dimness and uncertainty in my mode of being. I am taken off my feet, as it were, and float in air, with a faint delight in my sensations. The grossness, the roughness, the too great angularity of the actual, is removed from me. It is a state that I like well. It may be, this is the way that the dead feel when they awake in another state of being, with a dim pleasure, after passing through ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... yawned Storri. "Pardon my grossness;—a yawn in the presence of a lady, and I a Russian gentleman! I took the habit from these pig Americans! You should know, my dear San Reve, that the very name of Harley bores me. No, I shall no more go to those Harleys. ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... of the word, as an analyser of human nature, he comes, at whatever distance, after and yet next to Shakespeare. It is a test of the greatness of Don Juan that its reputation has slowly increased and that, in spite of its supposed immoral tendency, in spite of occasional grossness and voluptuousness, it has come to be recognized as Byron's masterpiece. Don Juan will be read for its own sake, for its beauty, its humour, its faithfulness. It is a "hymn to the earth," but it is a human sequence to "its own ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... of low intellect, of a fierce countenance, a saucy, swaggering, insolent manner, debauched in his morals beyond the grossness of that indecent age,—ostentatiously living in public concubinage,—a notorious swearer in public and private. But he knew no law above the will of the hand that fed and could advance him, no justice which might check the insolence of power. And in less than a month after Mr. ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... ingeniously said of VAUCANSON, that he was as much an automaton as any which he made. HOGARTH and SWIFT, who looked on the circles of society with eyes of inspiration, were absent in company; but their grossness and asperity did not prevent the one from being the greatest of comic painters, nor the other as much a creator of manners in his way. Genius, even in society, is pursuing its own operations, and it would cease to be itself were it always to act ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... serves to represent the sensuous glory and the moral void of one phase of the Italian Renaissance, so, and with equal fidelity, does Mr Sludge represent a phase of nineteenth century materialism and moral grossness, which cannot extinguish the cravings of the soul but would vulgarise and degrade them with coarse illusions. Unhappily the later poem differs from the earlier in being uglier in its theme and of inordinate length. Browning, somewhat in the manner of Ben ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... patronage of many noble lords. The effect of this was to give the prestige of social usage to the verse in which they wrote and the language they used. "There was," said Dr. Johnson, "before the time of Dryden no poetical diction, no system of words at once refined from the grossness of domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to particular arts. Words too familiar or too remote to defeat the purpose of a poet." This poetic diction, refined from the grossness ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... in proportion as this courtly sensuality lowered the real nobleness of the men whom birth or fortune raised above their fellows, rose their estimate of their own dignity, together with the insolence and unkindness of its expression, and the grossness of the flattery with which it was fed. Pride is indeed the first and the last among the sins of men, and there is no age of the world in which it has not been unveiled in the power and prosperity ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... a rather clumsy jest. His world of ideas did not touch our world at any point, so that real talk between us was impossible. He came to see us several times, and always gave the same kind of mesmerized recital of Germany's policy. The grossness of the whole thing was in curious contrast with the polite and quiet voice with which he uttered his insolences. When I remember his talk I find it easy to believe that the German Emperor and the German Chancellor have also talked in such a manner that they have never had the ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... the door of S. Michele in the Piazza Padella of Florence, and in Ognissanti; and tombs and adornments in many places for the doors of churches, wherein they have certain figures for corbels to support the roof, so rude and vile, so misshapen, and of such a grossness of manner, that it appears impossible that worse could ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... from their hiding- place in memory - startled him like a hand laid upon his shoulder. 'Crimes, hunted, the gallows.' They were ugly words; in the ears of an innocent man, perhaps all the uglier; for if some judicial error were in act against him, who should set a limit to its grossness or to how far it might be pushed? Not John, indeed; he was no believer in the powers of innocence, his cursed experience pointing in quite other ways; and his fears, once wakened, grew with every hour and hunted ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... model of dramatic writing, seems to have affected the coarse and inelegant debauchery of his prototype. He lived chiefly in taverns, was a gross sensualist in his habits, and brutal in his conversation. His fine gentlemen all partake of their parent's grossness and vulgarity; they usually open their dialogue, by complaining of the effects of last night's debauch. He is probably the only author, who ever chose for his heroes a set of riotous bloods, or scowerers, as they were then termed, and expected the public should sympathise ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... service performed by Cervantes—not in abolishing romance, as has been absurdly said, still less in discrediting chivalry, as with even a more perverse misconception of his purpose has been suggested, but in purging books of fiction of their grossness and their extravagance, and restoring romance to truth and to nature—we have to consider the enormous influence exercised by this pernicious literature over the minds of the people of Spain in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... the former, man shares them, though in a higher degree, with the brute creation;—but morals are altogether peculiar to higher intelligences. To man, in particular, the value of moral discipline is beyond calculation:—For, however much the present ignorance and grossness of men's minds may deceive them in weighing their respective worth, yet it would be easy to shew, that the knowledge and practice of but one additional truth in morals, are of more real value to a child, than a whole lifetime of physical enjoyment. Nature has accordingly implanted ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... twinkling of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns questions inside out and flings them empty before you on the ground, like a triumphant conjuror. It is my common practice when a piece of conduct puzzles me, to attack it in the presence of Jack with such grossness, such partiality and such wearing iteration, as at length shall spur him up in its defence. In a moment he transmigrates, dons the required character, and with moonstruck philosophy justifies the act in ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gave to Gohier, the other to his tried friend Desaix. "It is a little toy," said he, "which we republicans may give and receive without impropriety." The Director, flattered by the delicacy of the compliment, and yet not repelled by any thing assuming the grossness of a bribe, yielded his heart's homage ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... paltry avarice. Those absentees have their reward in profligate sons, and foreignized daughters, in giving them manners ridiculous to the people of the Continent, and disgusting to their countrymen—morals adopting the grossness of continental life, and general habits rendered utterly unfit for a return to their country, and, of course, for any rational and meritorious conduct, until ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... figure there is great vigour of conception, and admirable power of execution; but the whole possesses no general character, and produces no permanent emotion. There is a mixture of allegory and truth in many of his greatest works, which is always painful; a grossness in his conception of the female form, which destroys the symmetry of female beauty; and a wildness of imagination in his general design, which violates the feelings of ordinary taste. You survey his pictures with astonishment—at the power of thought and brilliancy of colouring which ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... tainted and corrupt, But, being season'd with a gracious voice,[83] Obscures the show of evil? In religion, What damned error, but some sober brow Will bless it and approve it[84] with a text, Hiding the grossness with lair ornament? There is no vice so simple, but assumes Some mark of virtue on his outward parts. Thus ornament is but the guiled[85] shore To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf Veiling an Indian beauty. Therefore, thou gaudy gold, ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare
... thrush-hunt. One word at parting, to qualify any too sweeping commendation we may have bestowed on M. Dumas in the early part of this paper. While we fully exonerate his writings from the charge of grossness, and recognise the absence of those immoral and pernicious tendencies which disfigure the works of many gifted French writers of the day, we would yet gladly see him abstain from the somewhat too Decameronian incidents and narratives ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... them—that the nature of the meeting, and the character and position of many of the men attending it, cried "Failure" trumpet-tongued in my ears. To quote an expression from Tennyson, I may say that if it were the best society in the world, the grossness of some natures in it would have weight ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... appearances; and he ought not to decide against his wife but upon the clearest proof. The last, and, indeed, the only effectual safeguard is, to begin well; to make a good choice; to let the beginning be such as to render infidelity and jealousy next to impossible. If you begin in grossness; if you couple yourself on to one with whom you have taken liberties, infidelity is the natural and just consequence. When a Peer of the realm, who had not been over-fortunate in his matrimonial affairs, was urging MAJOR CARTWRIGHT to seek for ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... of the nurse's speech is admirable: its naive and striking picture of conjugal affection goes far to redeem the grossness of The Nights. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... study the facts connected with fire and light as the Deity in the various countries in which this worship prevailed, without perceiving the change it gradually underwent during later ages, and the grossness of the ideas which became connected with it as compared with an earlier age when mankind "had no temples, but worshipped in the open air, on the tops ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... merit, as its shade, pursue; But, like a shadow, proves the substance true: For envy'd wit, like Sol eclips'd, makes known Th' opposing body's grossness, not its own. When first that sun too pow'rful beams displays, It draws up vapour, which obscures its rays; But ev'n those clouds at last adorn its way, Reflect new glories, and ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... that whatever acts are done, be they righteous or sinful, be they done knowingly or otherwise, remain (and are never destroyed unless their fruits are enjoyed or endured).[1513] Whatever acts are done by the mind with full deliberation, produce, according to their grossness or subtility, fruits that are gross or subtile.[1514] Those acts, however, O thou of righteous soul, which are fraught with great injury, if done in ignorance, do without fail produce consequences and even consequences that lead to hell, with this difference that those consequences ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... as I, that in all great cities, in your country and in mine as well as in this, a certain portion of every class of society is less moral than the rest? In some countries immorality is more refined indeed; and when manners lose their grossness, they are stripped apparently of half their vice. But suppose the fact, that women, even the unmarried, are less pure here than in Europe, remember that with us, besides the mother, there is the nurse of the family, or the governess, ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... much. The arts flourished, the theatres paid, and they had a much finer opera than at Ephesus or at Halicarnassus. Their cookery was so refined, that one of the least sentimental ceremonies in the world was not only deprived of all its grossness, but was actually converted into an elegant amusement, and so famous that their artists were even required at Olympus. If their dinners were admirable, which is rare, their assemblies were amusing, which is still ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... become possessed of it as a whole without perceiving that the mirror is held up to nature, that it reflects spots and blemishes which, on a survey of the vast and various orb, dwindle into natural and so comparative insignificance. Byron was under no delusion as to the grossness of Don Juan. His plea or pretence, that he was sheltered by the superior grossness of Ariosto and La Fontaine, of Prior and of Fielding, is nihil ad rem, if it is not insincere. When Murray (May 3, 1819) charges him with "approximations to indelicacy," ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... knowledge of the God of the Christian, for he himself was an earnest, intelligent disciple. He found her mind clearer than he had expected. Judith (this he now knew was the mother's name) was a remarkable woman; her mind was lofty, if darkened. While others were satisfied with the grossness of a material creed her spirit soared aloft. Her Gods commanded her implicit faith, her unswerving allegiance. Seated on the storm-clouds, sweeping through space, they represented to her infinite force. She attributed to them no love for mankind, which was in her creed rather ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... wasn't, because the thing was valuable, because he had sunk so much capital in that body and those engines (he had bought the most expensive kind of car you could buy). There was a sort of romance, a purity in his passion that redeemed it from the taint of grossness. It was the car's own purity, her unique and staggering beauty that had captivated him. And mixed with his passion there was the remorse and terror caused by the memory of his first car, the victim of his intemperance in motoring. He had evidently said ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... and 'Roxana' are very coarse books, but it can hardly be said that they are harmful or corrupting. They are simply vulgar. Vice has preserved all its evil by preserving all its grossness. Passion is reduced to mere animalism, and is depicted with the brutal directness of Hogarth. This may be good morals, but it is unpleasant art. It is true that Defoe's test of a writer was that he should "please and serve his public," and in providing amusement he was ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... to show in his face. When the muscles of facial expression are flabby they prove only that they are slightly used. Therefore when you encounter a man with loose cheeks read his characteristics from other muscle-structure signs, and from his actions. Do not misjudge the heavy face as a sign of grossness. ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... pig is remarkably intelligent and brave,—but he's gross; and grossness delays one's achievement, it takes so much time. The snake too, though wise, has a way of eating himself into stupors. If super-snake-men had had banquets they would have been too vast to describe. Each little snake family could have eaten a ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... and all the fiendlike stamped in, apes and tigers, anaemic consumptives and great hairy beasts of burden, wan faces from which vampire society had sucked the juice of life, bloated forms swollen with physical grossness and corruption, withered hags and death's-heads bearded like patriarchs, festering youth and festering age, faces of fiends, crooked, twisted, misshapen monsters blasted with the ravages of disease and all the horrors of chronic innutrition—the refuse and the scum of ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... faith—your canting trash about your love for the Saviour! I might have known that one of your kind could not rise above the grossness in you. I hope you will be as miserable and as unhappy as I am.... ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... licentiousness." Thus, out it comes at last. Mr. Bowles does accuse Pope of "gross licentiousness," and grounds the charge upon a poem. The licentiousness is a "grand peut-etre," according to the turn of the times being. The grossness I deny. On the contrary, I do believe that such a subject never was, nor ever could be, treated by any poet with so much delicacy, mingled with, at the same time, such true and intense passion. Is the "Atys" of Catullus licentious? No, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... hardly possible to maintain this thesis in view of such passages as Mahabh. XIII. 14 and the innumerable figures in which there are both a linga and a Yoni. But it is true that in its later forms the worship is purged of all grossness and that in its earlier forms the symbol adored was often a stupa-like column or a pillar with figures ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... Aristotle thought, or created, as Plato thought, both Plato and Aristotle were equally satisfied that the secret of all the shortcomings in this world lay in the imperfection, reluctancy, or inherent grossness of this impracticable substance. God would have everything perfect, but the nature of the element in which He worked in some way defeated His purpose. Death, disease, decay, clung necessarily to everything which was created out of it; and ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... triumph, as the smile deepened on her pale face. "You're happier already! And you begin to understand me. You can hear what I am saying. Because no sin, no grossness has ever shut your ears to all but earthly sounds. Now listen to me carefully: Katje, I want you to break that silly, wicked promise I wheedled you into making. I want you to break it. You mustn't ruin your life—and James's—by ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... the Maintenance of your Health, by preventing Infirmities and Grossness of Humours, you compose your Kennel; consult first your own Ability for this Exercise; and if you think you are able to foot it away, then the Biggest and slowest Dogs you can get are best; which you may ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... knife and fork with wonderful proficiency. The man's good-humor was contagious, and he did not regard our amusement as different in kind from his enjoyment. The spectacle was worth a journey to see. Indeed, its aspect of comicality almost overcame its grossness, and even when the hero loaded in faster than he could swallow, and was obliged to drop his knife for an instant to arrange matters in his mouth with his finger, it was done with such a beaming smile that a pig would not take offense ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound; which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity; which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness." ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... coming. I shall delight to study him. They're all alike, and one specimen is as good as another for that. But neither of you need expect anything,' she says, 'for the wrongs of my sisters have armoured me against the grossness of mere sex appeal.' Excuse me for getting off such things, but I'm telling you how ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... attended their efforts. Like a treble-stranded rope, it drags after it the triumphal car of Christian Art. But if either of the strands be broken, if either of the three elements be pursued disjointedly from the other two, the result is, in each respective case, grossness, pedantry, or weakness:—the exclusive imitation of Nature produces a Caravaggio, a Rubens, a Rembrandt—that of the Antique, a Pellegrino di Tibaldo and a David; and though there be a native chastity and taste in religion, which restrains those ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... lay the inward corruption, more implacably and more terribly tragic than any outward blow! She had once deluded herself with the thought that a life of crime might lose at least half of its evil by losing all of its grossness. She had even consoled herself with the thought that it was the offender against life who saw deepest into life. It was but natural, she had always argued with herself, that the thwarted consciousness, ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... that: "We owe it our revolt against the academic; or our disgust at 'big business,' and all the grossness of commercial success. We owe——". [His ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... in him it suffuses the imagination; he is not merely selfishly sentient, or selfishly scheming: his very conceptions are selfish. I remember walking at my swiftest pace, blaming everybody I knew for insufficiency, for want of subordination to my interests, for poverty of nature, grossness, blindness to the fine lights shining in me; I blamed the Fates for harassing me, circumstances for not surrounding me with friends worthy of me. The central 'I' resembled the sun of this universe, with the difference ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... printed another imitation of Petronius Arbiter, the "Larissa" story of Theophile Viand. His cousin, the Sevigne, highly approved of it. See Bayle's objections to Rabutin's delicacy and excuses for Petronius' grossness in his "Eclaircissement sur les obscenites" (Appendice ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... and that whichever one might desire to champion one could find arguments to sustain one's choice. Yet I cannot think that any large section of the critical public could maintain that Smollett was on the same level as the other two. Ethically he is gross, though his grossness is accompanied by a full-blooded humour which is more mirth-compelling than the more polished wit of his rivals. I can remember in callow boyhood—puris omnia pura—reading "Peregrine Pickle," and laughing until I cried over the Banquet in the Fashion of the Ancients. I read ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... change of politics is an infringement of the point of honor, and a man must FIGHT as well as apostatize. A very curious table might be made, signalizing the difference of the moral standard between us and the French. Why is the grossness and indelicacy, publicly permitted in England, unknown in France, where private morality is certainly at a lower ebb? Why is the point of private honor now more rigidly maintained among the French? Why is it, as it should ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a bearing on her belief. That is, Mrs. Eddy believed things first, and then skirmished for proof. This is a very old plan. Says Shakespeare: "In religion what damned error but some somber brow will bless it and approve it with a text, hiding the grossness thereof with fair ornament." Let no one read "Science and Health" in the hope of finding in it simple and sensible statements concerning life and its duties. They are ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... who is barely mentioned in the play, into a prominent and moving character. There can be no question but that Boito ("Tobia Gorria" is but an anagramatic nom de plume of Arrigo Boito) was highly successful in remodeling the tragedy for operatic purposes, but he did not palliate its moral grossness or succeed in inviting our compassionate feelings for anyone entitled to them. The only personages who in this opera escape disaster are a pair of lovers, whose sufferings, as depicted or inferred, cannot ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... speculation or religious life. In the higher circles "every one laughs," said Montesquieu on his visit to England, "if one talks of religion." Of the prominent statesmen of the time the greater part were unbelievers in any form of Christianity, and distinguished for the grossness and immorality of their lives. Drunkenness and foul talk were thought no discredit to Walpole. A later prime minister, the Duke of Grafton, was in the habit of appearing with his mistress at the play. Purity and fidelity to the marriage vow were ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... strange; a true voluptuary will never abandon his mind to the grossness of reality. It is by exalting the earthly, the material, the physique of our pleasures, by veiling these ideas, by forgetting them altogether, or, at least, never naming them hardly to one's self, that we alone can prevent ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... shame upon you," ex-claimed the parson. "If evil comes of this I shall testify to the grossness of your aggression. Get you ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... its whereabouts. We met either in some public place or at my hotel, where I entertained him as freely as I might without appearing to be prompted by charity. He seemed always hungry, and this was his nearest approach to human grossness. I made a point of asking no impertinent questions, but, each time we met, I ventured to make some respectful allusion to the magnum opus, to inquire, as it were, as to its health and progress. "We are getting on, with ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... Versailles more consummately than its refinement. The age was that of Louis XV, of Lord Sandwich, of Augustus the Strong: in it even a Burke had persuaded himself that "vice lost half its evil by losing all its grossness." The reader of Bayle and Brantome had been introduced to a bizarre sort of morality; her "spiritual father," Voltaire, was the author of La Pucelle and Jacques le Fataliste proceeded from the same pen as the University for Russia. Diderot, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... the foulness of their language; the drink mounts into unstable heads; and presently—especially on Saturday nights—there are hoarse growls as from rough-throated beasts, shrill shrieks, and a running chorus of indescribable grossness. Drunken men are quarrelling in the street, drunken women yell and stagger, and the hideous discord fills the night on all sides. No item of corruption is spared the children; and the vile hurly-burly ceases only at midnight. ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... State paper to the courts of Europe. The style and manner are praised by Beaumarchais himself, who, in his private quarrel, attempted a reply; but he flatters me, by ascribing the memoir to Lord Stormont; and the grossness of his invective betrays the loss of temper and of wit; he acknowledged, Oeuv. de Beaumarchais, iii. 299, 355, that le style ne seroit pas sans grace, ni la logique sans justesse, &c. if the facts were true which he undertakes to disprove. ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... able and eager to teach gardening and carpentry as well as grammar and arithmetic, teachers who seek to organize the social life of their communities upon wholesome principles, tactfully restraining grossness and unobtrusively proffering new and nobler sources of enjoyment. And so the academic studies are wrought into the essential scheme ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... being heir to a moderate competence, had avowed my purpose of keeping aloof from the regular business of life. This would have been a dangerous resolution, anywhere in the world; it was fatal, in New England. There is a grossness in the conceptions of my countrymen; they will not be convinced that any good thing may consist with what they call idleness; they can anticipate nothing but evil of a young man who neither studies ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... spot, under the promise that the deposit will increase many manifold. Some of our readers will have difficulty in believing that any people can be found sufficiently credulous to allow themselves to be duped by a trick of this description, the grossness of the intended fraud seeming too palpable. Experience, however, proves the contrary. The deception is frequently practised at the present day, and not only in Spain but in England - enlightened England - and in France likewise; an instance being ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... source of human life, was placed beyond the limits of our visible universe; and in order for human life to return thither at death and to enjoy immortality, it was only necessary to refine away corporeal grossness according to the doctrines of Lao Tzu. Later on, this One came to be regarded as a fixed point of dazzling luminosity, in remote ether, around which circled for ever and ever, in the supremest glory of motion, the souls of those who had successfully passed ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... wife is; thou art mated with a clown, And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down. 953 TENNYSON: Locksley ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... the age of Charles II. to that of Aristophanes—'which called its own grossness polite.' How bitterly he decries the stale poems of the time as 'a heap of senseless ribaldry;' how truly he shows that licentiousness weakens as well as depraves the judgment. 'When Satyrs are brought to court,' he observes, 'no wonder the Graces ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... was so singularly altruistic in his concernments. That a man should live to make the world more beautiful was a wondrous discovery for her. He was not specially troubled about the physical welfare or the morals of the average citizen, but the city's grossness, its willingness to perpetuate ugly forms, ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... fair Julie d'Angennes, who bestowed not her hand on the Duc de Montausier until he had served as many years in seeking it as Jacob had served to gain that of Rachel, and until she had passed her thirtieth year (in order that his passion should become as purified from all grossness, as was the language spoken among the circle in which she lived), receiving with dignified reserve the finely painted flowers and poems to illustrate them, which formed the celebrated Guirlande de Julie, presented to her by ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... gate now, and she laid her hand on his arm to stop him. He looked down at the slender gloved hand on his arm feeling as if a giant had grasped him, then he raised his eyes to her face, flushing a purplish red as he remembered his grossness. It seemed monstrous in the presence of this girl-advocate. Her face was like silver, her eyes seemed ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... One, the source of human life, was placed beyond the limits of the visible universe; and for human life to return thither at death and to enjoy immortality, it was only necessary to refine away all corporeal grossness by following the doctrines of Lao Tz[)u]. By and by, this One came to be regarded as a fixed point of dazzling luminosity in remote ether, around which circled for ever and ever, in the supremest glory of motion, the souls of those who had left the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... has not been in a degree spoilt by the consciousness of worth and influence. Tennyson, Pope, Byron, Wordsworth—how their lives were injured by vanity and self-conceit! Even Scott was touched by the grossness of prosperity, though he purged his fault in despair and tears. But such poets as did not guess their own greatness, and remained humble and peaceable, how much sweeter and gentler is their example, walking humbly in the ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... he might yet learn wisdom from my attitude of unruffled urbanity, though I feared that his angle of negotiating was unconquerably opposed to mine, "but now its many imperfections are revealed. The inelegance of its outline, the grossness of the applied colours, the unlucky combination of numbers ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... the very tones of his voice when it came forth, made a most vivid and indelible impression upon my memory: 'We, at the same time,' he said, 'have our eye perfectly open to that great external improvement which has taken place, of late years, in the manners of society. There is not the same grossness of conversation. There is not the same impatience for the withdrawment of him who, asked to grace the outset of an assembled party, is compelled, at a certain step in the process of conviviality, by the obligations of professional decency, to retire from it. There is ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... and the hostile language, often exaggerated and unjust, in which those antipathies find vent, secures in his more chastened mode of utterance an exact reproduction none the less injurious because divested of grossness. ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... sight of the fact that, while the French character has its audacities (contrary to the modifications of aesthetics), our language possesses a proverbial chastity, which, even in its farthest wanderings, genius comprehends and respects. Tact and taste suffice to him who consults them to escape grossness of language. The delicacy of the allusions leaves their images in a transparent mist; the very elasticity of the equivocation furnishes a refuge for the ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... once or twice mortified us sensibly by slipping out an oath; but that appeared to me as the surest symptom of their distinction, (tho' I am since informed that swearing is perfectly unfashionable.) Their finery, however, threw a veil over any grossness in their conversation. My daughters seemed to regard their superior accomplishments with envy; and what appeared amiss was ascribed to tip-top quality breeding. But the condescension of the ladies was still superior to their other accomplishments. One of them observed, that had miss Olivia ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... victims are daily cooked and served up upon the altars; that heathenish cruelties of every description are continually practised; and that these ignorant Pagans are in a state of the extremest wretchedness in consequence of the grossness of their superstitions. Be it observed, however, that all this information is given by a man who, according to his own statement, was only at one of the islands, and remained there but two weeks, sleeping every night on board his ship, and taking little ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... thescenery, circumstances, and experience amidst which they were conceived and born. Sometimes these figments were consciously entertained as wilful inventions, distinctly contemplated as poetry. Sometimes they were superstitiously credited in all their grossness with full assent of soul. Sometimes all coexisted in vague bewilderment. These lines of separation unquestionably existed: the difficulty is to know where, in given instances, to draw them. A few examples will serve at once ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... asperity of literary controversy, drawn from his own and Salmasius's writings. If to some the subject has appeared exceptionable, to me, I confess, it seems useful, and I shall therefore add some other particulars; for this topic has many branches. Of the following specimens the grossness and malignity are extreme; yet they were employed by ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... grossness and profanity, the discursive talk, in this hiding place of criminals, may be partially reproduced as follows. The chief ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... modish innovations, and the learned depart from established forms of speech, in hope of finding or making better; those who wish for distinction forsake the vulgar, when the vulgar is right; but there is a conversation above grossness and below refinement, where propriety resides, and where this poet seems to have gathered his comick dialogue. He is therefore more agreeable to the ears of the present age than any other authour equally remote, ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... but Balzac—except it be some of the rougher, homelier Dutch painters—has caught the spirit of those mellow, sensual "interiors" of typical country houses, with their mixture of grossness and avarice and inveterate conservatism; where an odour of centuries of egotism emanates from every piece of furniture against the wall and from every gesture of every person seated over the fire! One is plunged indeed into the dim, sweet, brutal heart of reality here, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... glory of the human powers, How little green upon thy summit lingers, If't be not followed by an age of grossness! ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... when I was tempted to stop his mouth with some small change; but whether it was from shame or pride—whether it was for my own sake or Catriona's—whether it was because I thought him no fit father for his daughter, or because I resented that grossness of immediate falsity that clung about the man himself—the thing was clean beyond me. And I was still being wheedled and preached to, and still being marched to and fro, three steps and a turn, in that small chamber, and had already, by some very ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and recommended a truer sentiment, as in the instance of the loves of Brandimart and Fiordelisa; and there is a graceful cheerfulness in some of his least sentimental ones, which redeems them from grossness. I know not a more charming fancy in the whole loving circle of fairy-land, than the female's shaking her long tresses round Mandricardo, in order to furnish him with a mantle, when he issues out of ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... "Rudeness and Grossness matter, and I've shown both, and already I'm sorry, and I hope she'll let me apologize. But from the selfish point of view it doesn't matter a straw. She's no more to us than the Wonham ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... vigour, and by which planet each herb or flower is governed. Has our sentiment for the flowers of the field increased now we no longer drink their essence, or use them in our dishes? I doubt it. It is surely a pardonable grossness that we should desire the sweet fresh things to become part of us—like children, who do indeed love flowers, and eat them. In the Appendix I have transcribed a list of the plants referred to. Most cooks ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... the Romanof line, was a man of such extraordinary power of body and mind, such a remarkable combination of common sense, mental activity, advanced ideas, and determination to lift Russia to a high place among the nations, with cruelty, grossness, and infirmities of vice and passion, that his reign of forty-three years fills as large a place in Russian history as do the annals of all the preceding centuries, and the progress of Russia during this short period was greater ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... chimney smokes about our world to-day, and the sound of the weeping of children who toiled and hungered, the dull despair of overburdened women, the noise of brute quarrels in alleys, all shameful pleasures and all the ugly grossness of wealthy pride have gone with them, with the utter change in our lives. As I look back into the past I see a vast exultant dust of house-breaking and removal rise up into the clear air that followed the hour of the green ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... observing nothing that could offend the affected simplicity of the times, prepared to quit the house. A friendly voice, however, exerting itself above the clamour, informed us that the offensive objects were a cloak and a shawl which hung over the front of the box.—You will scarcely suppose such grossness possible among a civilized people; but the fact is, our friends are of the proscribed class, and we were insulted because in their society.—I have before noticed, that the guards which were stationed in the theatre before the revolution are now removed, and a municipal ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... N. impurity; uncleanness &c (filth) 653; immodesty; grossness &c adj.; indelicacy, indecency; impudicity^; obscenity, ribaldry, Fescennine, smut, bawdry^, double entente, equivoque [Fr.]. concupiscence, lust, carnality, flesh, salacity; pruriency, lechery, lasciviency^, lubricity; Sadism, sapphism^. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... peoples the gloom of the night with demons, the woods and the waters with naiads and dryads, elves and fairies, the church-yard with ghosts, and the dark cave and the solitary cot with wizards, imps and old witches. Such, then, is theology in its origin; and, in all its stages, we find it varying in grossness according to the degree of ignorance of the human mind; and, refining into verbal subtleties and misty metaphysics in proportion as that mind exchanges, in its progress from darkness to light, the gloom of ignorance for ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... receding wave. Why scorned you gold and lands to grasp at castles in the air? Why dreamed of the Dimiurgus when desiring harlots beckoned thee? Why dealt with open hand and unsuspecting heart when thrown 'mid a world of thieves? Hadst thou been content and not aspired to rise above the grossness, the falsehood and the folly which is Life, I would have loved thee well and deceived thee with a painted beauty to the end—my foul breasts would have been to thee ever a fragrant bed of flowers. You have invaded Life's mysteries, the penalty whereof is pain. You have looked upon the past; ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... their complaints and reproaches; every voice was against him, and even his brethren of the French academy, departing from their accustomed indulgence upon such matters, openly reprimanded him for the grossness of his flattery; the poor abbe attempted to justify himself by protesting that he knew nothing of the hateful couplet, and that Favart alone was the guilty person upon whom they should expend their anger. "I am always," cried he, "doomed ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... surprising therefore that the new social element that had played so masterly a part in bringing to its perfection the industrial-financial-democratic scheme of life should have developed an apologetic therefor, and imposed it, with all its materialism, its narrowness, its pragmatism, its, at times, grossness and cynicism, on the mind of a society where increasingly their own followers were, by sheer energy and efficiency, acquiring ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... giddy on the castle wall, who bore so helplessly the weight of his misfortunes, she felt herself a head and shoulders taller in cheerful and sterling courage. She could walk head in air along the most precarious rafter; her hand feared neither the grossness nor the harshness of life's web, but was thrust cheerfully, if need were, into the briar bush, and could take hold of any crawling horror. Ruin was mining the walls of her cottage, as already it had mined and subverted Mr. Archer's palace. Well, she faced it ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the nobleman who had cared for and educated him. In the duke's fool he had found his other self; a man who like himself lent dignity to the gentle art of jesting; who could turn a rhyme and raise a laugh without resorting to grossness. ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... use to her in grace?" wept the Fairy Eglantine; "the Spark will melt away all mortal grossness, till she is light and graceful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... conversation, in the meantime, was employed in examining the merits of little Harry. Mrs Merton acknowledged his bravery and openness of temper; she was also struck with the very good-nature and benevolence of his character, but she contended that he had a certain grossness and indelicacy in his ideas, which distinguish the children of the lower and middling classes of people from those of persons of fashion. Mr Merton, on the contrary, maintained, that he had never before seen a child ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... their deaths were not in the least required by his purpose. Grant, again, that his cruelty to Ophelia was partly due to misunderstanding, partly forced on him, partly feigned; still one surely cannot altogether so account for it, and still less can one so account for the disgusting and insulting grossness of his language to her in the play-scene. I know this is said to be merely an example of the custom of Shakespeare's time. But it is not so. It is such language as you will find addressed to a woman by no other hero of Shakespeare's, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... is proper to remark, were made in a country where the art of pleasing was refined only to extract the grossness of vice. He did not go back to nature, or his ruling appetite disturbed the operations of reason, else he would not have drawn ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... been free from those menial toils which, in that climate, soon obliterate all intellectual characteristics. His face was well formed for an African's. His high and broad brow arched over a straight nose, while his lips had nothing of that vulgar grossness which gives so sensual an expression to his countrymen. Ahmah's manners to strangers or superiors were refined and courteous in a remarkable degree; but to the mob of the coast and inferiors generally, he manifested that harsh and peremptory ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... individual kiss; And Joy shall overtake us as a flood; When everything that is sincerely good And perfectly divine, With Truth, and Peace, and Love shall ever shine About the supreme Throne Of Him, t' whose happy-making sight alone, When once our heav'nly-guided soul shall climb, Then all this earthly grossness quit, Attir'd with stars, we shall forever sit, Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee, ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... said the Princess. "My consenting to know and to spend a friendly hour with you here is sufficient answer. I have not found the slightest fault with your manners. I have seen no suspicion of 'grossness' ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... circle of their intercourse, being less under the action of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions.' To this I reply; that a rustic's language, purified from all provincialism and grossness, and so far reconstructed as to be made consistent with the rules of grammar—(which are in essence no other than the laws of universal logic, applied to psychological materials)—will not differ from the language of any other man of common ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... obscurity of the oracles was of inexpressible service to the cause of superstition. If the event turned out to be such as could in no way be twisted to come within the scope of the response, the pious suitor only concluded that the failure was owing to the grossness and carnality of his own apprehension, and not to any deficiency in the institution. Thus the oracle by no means lost credit, even when its meaning remained for ever in its original obscurity. But, when, by any fortunate chance, its predictions seemed to be verified, then ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... are yet more supportable than the grossness of historical remarks, which are scattered so plentifully in his book, that it would be tedious to enumerate, or to shew the fraud and ignorance of them. I beg the reader's leave to take notice of one here just in my way; and, the rather, because I design for the future to let ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... took to cocaine. Morphine is my own specialty. Victoria of course deplored it as much as any one could. No, I'm not for a minute intimating that Victoria is a Messalina. We'd all be better off if she were. It's only our grossness that finds fault with her. Your aunt is one of the most respectable women who ever lived, as 'chaste as unsunned snow—the very ice of chastity is in her!' Indeed, I've often wondered if the redoubtable Ephraim Smith himself, for all that he succeeded in marrying ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... reality of these fictitious beings? If he has composed a commentary on the Revelations, and proved the pope to be Antichrist; may not a similar reproach be extended to the famous Napier; and even to Newton, at a time when learning was much more advanced than during the reign of James? From the grossness of its superstitions we may infer the ignorance of an age; but never should pronounce concerning the folly of an individual, from his admitting popular errors, consecrated by ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... Debby had been of the greatest benefit to Harry Glen. Since his parting with Rachel Bond, there had been going on in his spirit a fermentation like that with which good wine discharges itself of its grossness and impurities, and becomes clear and fine. In this process had vanished the absorbing selfishness of a much-indulged only son, and teh supercilious egotism which came as an almost necessary result of his college curriculum. This spiritual ripening received ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... something to this effect in his travel notes in Southern Italy?) that when they came to carve reliefs for their Parthenon, even to represent the body in seeming repose, they instinctively knew how to show it sensitive, alive, as in truth it is, redeemed from grossness by the exquisite delicacy of its mechanism at every point. People think that the so-called danse du ventre is an unnatural distortion, and in its customary exaggerations so it is. But it is merely the high-trained and undue emphasis of beautiful natural expression. Rightly considered, ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... contrary, prepared with ardor for the fight. Their enthusiasm was intense. Those barbarians, with their half-nakedness, their grossness, their ferocity, their ignorance, and their impiety, were revolting. They committed murder and devastation like dolts. They left their dead on the field, without burial. They engaged in battle without consulting ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... twenty-five fevers in my own family cured by this medicinal water, drunk copiously." And to finish these extracts with a most important suggestion for the improvement of the British nation: "It is much to be lamented that our Insulars who act and think so much for themselves, should yet, from grossness of air and diet, grow stupid or doat sooner than other people, who, by virtue of elastic air, water-drinking, and light food, preserve their faculties to extreme old age; an advantage which may perhaps be approached, if not equaled, even in ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of the Welsh, and the hand-fasting in some parts of Scotland, are derived. The conversation which took place between the Empress Julia and the wife of a Caledonian chief, as related by Xiphilin, certainly evinces a grossness and indelicacy in the amours of the British ladies, if true; but it appears to be a reply where wit and reproof were more aimed at than truth. The case of the Empress Cartismandua shows the nice feeling of the Britons as to the propriety of female conduct. The respect ...
— Bundling; Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America • Henry Reed Stiles
... often been given to arguments of this kind, which deserves a few moments' consideration. It is said, 'the grossness of the old play-writers was their misfortune, not their crime. It was the fashion of the age. It is not our fashion, certainly; but they meant no harm by it. The age was a free-spoken one; and perhaps none the ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... boss is a looker," Duplain commented across the dinner-table, with the slangy grossness he sometimes affected; but Amherst left it to his mother to look a quiet rebuke, feeling himself too aloof from such contacts ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... fish. She must foregather or life loses all its savour; must entertain, be entertained, rub shoulders generally or she is lost. Henrietta Frayling suffered the accustomed fate, though to speak of rubbing shoulders in connection with her is to express oneself incorrectly to the verge of grossness. Her shoulders were of an order far too refined to rub or be rubbed. Nevertheless, after the shortest interval consistent with self-respect, such society as St. Augustin and its neighbourhood afforded found ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... have written much, but you must write more yet. What say you to a series of poems in your own original way, steeped from end to end in Scottish superstition, but purified from its grossness by your own genius and taste? Do write me soon. I have a good mind to come and commence shepherd beside you, and aid you in making a yearly pastoral Gazette in prose and verse for our ain native Lowlands. The ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... Michael Angelo, and Leonardo da Vinci; graceful, beautiful and expressive in Raphael, Correggio, Dominichino, and Guido; and, aiming at sensible perfection, it attained harmony of colouring and effect in the works of Titian and Tintoret; but it sunk into grossness and sensuality while perfecting itself materially among the ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... understand that he meant to live freely and largely, and be as interested as occasion demanded. Rowland saw no reason to regard this as a menace of dissipation, because, in the first place, there was in all dissipation, refine it as one might, a grossness which would disqualify it for Roderick's favor, and because, in the second, the young sculptor was a man to regard all things in the light of his art, to hand over his passions to his genius to be dealt with, ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... was, Mr. Dexter had gone a step too far. The grossness of this outrage upon his wife, Mrs. Loring could appreciate, and it was just of the kind to arouse all her womanly indignation. A more refined act of cruelty she would not have understood; and might have adjudged her niece ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... you, we would not have woman exposed to the grossness and vulgarity of public life, or encounter what she must at the polls. When you talk, gentlemen, of sheltering woman from the rough winds and revolting scenes of real life, you must be either talking ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the blood of those with whom worldly riches should be as nothing compared to the riches of the mind, the heart, and the spirit, then the dryrot of hypocrisy set in—then came craftiness, cruelty, injustice, and pitilessness, and such grossness of personal conduct as revolts even the soul of an admitted sinner. Moral government? Where is it to day? Look at France—Italy—Spain! Count up the lies told by the priests in these countries to feed the follies of the ignorant! Did Christ ever tell lies? ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... reader who cares to seek it may easily find medical evidence of the physical effects of certain states of brain disease in producing especially images of truncated and Hermes-like deformity, complicated with grossness. Horace, in the Epodes, scoffs at it, but not without horror. Luca Signorelli and Raphael in their arabesques are deeply struck by it: Durer, defying and playing with it alternately, is almost beaten down again and again in the distorted faces, hewing halberts, and suspended ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... refinement and precision of torture. God knew what he was about. With all his resources he couldn't have hit on anything more delicately calculated to hurt. Nothing less subtle would have touched her. Not discovery; not the grossness of exposure; but this intolerable security. What could discovery and exposure do but set her free in her reality? Anne would have rejoiced to see her lie go up in one purifying flame of revelation. But to go safe in her lie, hiding ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... not soil these pages by recording, in however guarded phrase, the grossness of this wretch's propositions; it was a long way to Hurstley, and the reptile never ceased tormenting her every step of it, till the village was in sight: twice she ran, and he ran too, keeping up with her, and pouring into her ear a father's cruel fate and his own ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... his heads, and careless and faulty in his work. He was very rarely either kindly or reverent in his subjects, though, in spite of what is known to have been his riotous life, he is comparatively free from the grossness which is often the shame of Flemish and Dutch art. Jan Steen succeeded his father as a brewer and tavern-keeper at Delft. He renounced the brewery, in which he did not succeed, and joined the Painters' Guild, Haarlem; but his position as a tavern-keeper is reflected ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... allegories and abstractions, and those half-realised moralisings which were repeated from writer to writer; he is modern in the intensity of a personal quality which is impressed upon his work, in the complexity of his feelings, passing from mirth to despair, from beauty to horror, from cynical grossness to gracious memories or aspirations; he is modern in his passion for the real, and in those gleams of ideal light which are suddenly dashed across the vulgar surroundings of his sorry existence. While he flings out ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... cheerfulness to his daily dinner; still despising, if he pleased, the soul that would invent a sauce. I mean to say, he would, like the larger body of our sentimentalists, have acquiesced in our simple humanity, but without sacrificing a scruple to its grossness, or going arm-in-arm with it by any means. Sir Purcell, however, never sank, and never bent. He was invariably erect before men, and he did not console himself with a murmur in secret. He had lived much alone; eating alone; thinking alone. To complain ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... have designed him as a caricature of some real person; for Margutte is a Greek who, in point of morals, has been horribly brought up, and some of the Greek refugees in Italy were greatly disliked for the cynicism of their manners and the grossness of their lives. Margutte is a glutton, a drunkard, a liar, a thief, and a blasphemer. He boasts of having every vice, and no virtue except fidelity; which is meant to reconcile Morgante to his company; but though the latter endures and even likes ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... of Alcolea. Although Prim was not present, he was the liberator, and without him the battle would never have been fought, nor the joy of liberty have been sung in the streets of the capital. There is seldom, if ever, any grossness in these spontaneous songs of the people—never indecency or double meaning. No sooner has an event happened than it finds its history recorded in some of these popular coplas, and sung by ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... anomalies I take to be, that there is among us a general want of earnestness. We do not believe in ourselves, or our duties, or our destinies. Our life has no theory, and we care only for outward forms and symbols. Our taste is shocked by the grossness of vice, but we have no quarrel with the thing itself; and if the people around us will only preserve a polished, or at least inoffensive exterior, that is all we demand. Why should we look below the surface in their ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... wild neighborhood interested Darwin very greatly, and he describes them with care. In this connection a charming trait of Darwin's character comes beautifully in evidence. The absolute purity of his mind, his utter freedom from grossness, shows clearly in his account of the first really semi-civilized ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... of countenance which is associated with the best type of Jew, with clear-cut aquiline features wholly destitute of grossness. His white beard was patriarchal and he wore gold-rimmed pince-nez and a glossy silk hat. Such figures may often be met with in the great money-markets of the world, and Mr. Isaacs would have passed for a successful financier in even more ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... his lordship's relations as the natural enemies of her son; whom she seems, unaccountably, to have considered as the rightful heir of her husband's honours. This improvident young man, however, far from conciliating his father-in-law's esteem, had insulted him with more grossness than his lordship ever experienced from any other person; and, consequently, estranged himself, as much as possible, from his heart. Had any other human being acted exactly in the same manner, it is not improbable that his life might have paid the forfeiture. ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... Public functionaries, who have been pleased to speak in contemptuous terms of the progress of abolitionism, both in Maine and New Hampshire, will, it is thought, soon be made to see, through a medium not at all deceptive, the grossness of their error. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... know what I feel," she remarked the next moment. "But you can read women, uncle, you've often said so, and I dare say you really know more about what I feel than I do myself." A grossness of innocence was her new assumption. "Now judging from what I do and look—that's the way to judge, isn't it, not from what I say?—what do you think my real inmost feelings are ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... pleasure to her. Though souls may rush together, if body cannot endure body, happiness is reared on sand and the structure will be ever unstable and tottery. Next, Corliss had the physical potency of the hero without the grossness of the brute. His muscular development was more qualitative than quantitative, and it is the qualitative development which gives rise to beauty of form. A giant need not be proportioned in the mould; nor a thew be symmetrical to ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... sentence of the author of the Imitation, Oportet fieri stultum. And if there is a later silliness, altogether unblest, the skilful artificer of words, while accepting this last extension, will show himself conscious of his paradox. So also he will shun the grossness that employs the epithet "quaint" to put upon subtlety and the devices of a studied workmanship an imputation of eccentricity; or, if he falls in with the populace in this regard, he will be careful to justify his innuendo. The slipshod use of "nice" to connote ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... continued under the same system of management, until some flagrant instances induced the Board of Admiralty to check the grossness of vice. Of vessels remembered for their pollution, the Friendship and Janus are distinguished: the keys of the prison were accessible during the night: the conspiracy reached from the cabin to forecastle: the officers were libertines themselves, or, even when their conduct was ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... overflowing with noisy expressions of their loyalty to the Law; yet I felt an absolute assurance in my own mind that the Hyena-swine was implicated in the rabbit-killing. A strange persuasion came upon me, that, save for the grossness of the line, the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form. The Leopard-man had happened to go under: that was ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... his dithyrambs about Dorothea's charm, in all which Will joined, but with a difference. No sooner did Naumann mention any detail of Dorothea's beauty, than Will got exasperated at his presumption: there was grossness in his choice of the most ordinary words, and what business had he to talk of her lips? She was not a woman to be spoken of as other women were. Will could not say just what he thought, but he became irritable. And yet, when after some resistance he had consented to take the Casaubons ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... others that it is better. At any rate it is bad enough, and a disgrace to our civilization. We have murderers by the thousand and thieves by the million, of all kinds and sizes; we have what we tenderly call "immorality," from the "errors of youth" to the sodden grossness of old age; married, single, and mixed. We have all the old kinds of wickedness and a lot of new ones, until one marvels at the purity and power of human nature, that it should carry so much disease and still grow on to ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... transmits these things in greater proportion than he found them—whether for love of the humour of them, or by a kind of inverted disgust that is as eager as delight—one is not sure which is the impulse. The grossness of the vulgarities is rendered with a completeness that goes far to convince us of a certain sensitiveness of apprehension in the designer; and then again we get convinced that real apprehension—real apprehensiveness—would ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... wished that he had had a more robust kind of fibre; now that I know he is dead, I cannot find it in my heart to wish him any such qualities. His life appears to me utterly beautiful and fragrant. He never incurred any taint of grossness from prosperity or success; he never grew indifferent or hard; and in the light of his last passage, such a failure seems the one thing worth achieving, and to carry with it a hope all alive and rich with possibilities of blessing and glory. He would hardly ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... too much to the spirit of antiquity, the other panders to the spirit of the age, goes to the very edge of extreme and licentious speculation, and breaks his neck over it. Grossness and levity are the playthings of his pen. It is a ludicrous circumstance that he should have dedicated his Cain to the worthy Baronet! Did the latter ever acknowledge the obligation? We are not nice, not very nice; but we do not particularly ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... possible to the moralists who are alarmed over the decadence of the younger generation. Good taste may not make men or women really virtuous, but it will often save them from what theologians call "occasions of sin." We may note, too, that grossness in manners forms a large proportion of the offenses that fanatical reformers foam about. Besides grossness, there is also the meaner selfishness. Selfishness is at the polar remove from the worldly manners ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... "Now it is a poor kind of pusillanimity and faint-heartedness, or rather, a gross weakness of the Understanding, to pretend any effects of charm or magick herein, or to confine all the actions of Nature to the grossness of our Senses, when we have not sufficiently consider'd nor examined the true causes and principles whereon 'tis fitting we should ground our judgment: we need not have recourse to a Demon or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... mysterious iniquity in a dangerous relation to himself and began to lose his head. What he really wanted was to have his existence left intact, for his own cherishing and pride. It was a moral aspiration, but in his alarm the native grossness of his nature came clattering out like a devil out of a trap. He would blow the gaff, split, give away the whole show, he would back up honest people, kiss the book, say what he thought, let all the world know . . . and when he paused to draw breath, all around him was silent and still. Before ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad |
