"Improver" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... objected Morrison, the white-faced, earnest-eyed improver, who was leading a profoundly religious life under ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... seems to degrade the victims whom it brands, however unjustly. But let us hope a brighter day is approaching, when a Scottish country gentleman may be a scholar without the pedantry of our friend the Baron, a sportsman without the low habits of Mr. Falconer, and a judicious improver of his property without becoming a boorish two-legged ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... cultivation in common—are consistent with only a low stage of development. The idea of property, which naturally arises with reference to things of human production, is easily transferred to land, and an institution which when population is sparse merely secures to the improver and user the due reward of his labor, finally, as population becomes dense and rent arises, operates to strip the producer of his wages. Not merely this, but the appropriation of rent for public purposes, which is the only ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... Chute Hall, is also an improver and architectural reformer, his efforts being directed towards the abolition of thatch in favour of slate, an idea which has proved more fortunate in his case than in that of the great-grandfather of the present Lord Kenmare. The great ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... communicate; it loves others, for it depends on them for its existence; it sanctions and encourages to all delights that are not unkind in themselves; if it lived to a thousand, it would not make excision of a single humorous passage; and while the self-improver dwindles toward the prig, and, if he be not of an excellent constitution, may even grow deformed into an Obermann, the very name and appearance of a happy man breathe of good-nature, and help the rest of ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... itself is one of those lovable backwaters of a London artery, which has only just escaped spoliation at the hands of the improver. A few months since it was proposed to raze and level off the whole neighbourhood as a site for the municipal offices of the Corporation of the County Council, but wire-pulling, influence, or what not, turned the current ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... erected at Squillace, was a borderer in another sense than that already mentioned—a borderer between the two worlds of Politics and Religion; and in this capacity also, as the contemporary, perhaps the friend, certainly the imitator, of St. Benedict, and in some respects the improver upon his method, Cassiodorus largely helped to mould the destinies of mediaeval and therefore ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... was skilful in the use of the pencil. A full premium was paid by the efforts of my mother and father, rather against the wishes of Lord Luxellian, who likes my father, however, and thinks a great deal of him. There I stayed till six months ago, when I obtained a situation as improver, as it is called, in a London ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... body, bold and stout; his hair and eyes black, and his complexion brown, insomuch as he was called the great black Knight of the North; though the word great attributed to him not so much for his stature, as power, and estate, and fortune. He was a wise man, and a great improver of his estate, which might have prospered better with his posterity, had he not been extra-ordinarily given to the love of women." There is unfortunately nothing left above the ground of the manor house of Roxby, ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin. And it cannot be otherwise, for every great advance in natural knowledge ...
— On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge • Thomas H. Huxley
... writing-master are detailed by contemporaries with laborious accuracy. Mr D'Israeli, in his "Curiosities of Literature," has not scrupled to devote many pages to Bales's contests for superiority with a rival penman of the name of Johnson. Bales was the improver of Dr Bright's system, and, according to his own account in his "Writing Schoolmaster," he was able to keep pace with a moderate speaker. He seems to have been engaged in public life, by acting as secretary where caligraphy was required; and he was at length accused of being concerned ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... Their duties were practically identical with those of sheriffs, and Bishop Stubbs places a marginal note over against the appointment,—"Sheriffs appointed by the king." Walter Hervy is recorded as having removed certain stones near Bucklersbury when he was "improver" of the city (Letter Book A, fo. 84. Riley's Memorials, p. 25). This was probably done in 1268, when the city was in the king's hand, and Hervy and William de Durham were appointed bailiffs "without election by the citizens."—Chron. Mayors and Sheriffs, ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... stayed amongst us, God bless him! He valued a guinea as little as any man: money to him was no more than dirt, and his gentleman and groom, and all belonging to him, the same; but the sporting season over, he grew tired of the place, and having got down a great architect for the house, and an improver for the grounds, and seen their plans and elevations, he fixed a day for settling with the tenants, but went off in a whirlwind to town, just as some of them came into the yard in the morning. A circular ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... But every improver of tools had a long and difficult battle to fight; for any improvement in their effective power was sure to touch the interests of some established craft. Especially was this the case with machines, which are ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... know little of ourselves as connected with the history of puppet-shows; but in an article in the curious Dictionary of Trevoux, I find that John Brioche, to whom had been attributed the invention of Marionnettes, is only to be considered as an improver; in his time (but the learned writers supply no date) an Englishman discovered the secret of moving them by springs, and without strings; but the Marionnettes of Brioche were preferred for the pleasantries which he made them deliver. The erudite Quadrio appears to have more successfully ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... we meet with several such expressions as the following: "And his disciples were an hungred."—SCOTT'S BIBLE: Matt, xii, 1. "When he was an hungred."—Ib. xii, 3. "When he had need and was an hungered."—Ib. Mark, ii, 25. Alger, the improver of Murray's Grammar, and editor of the Pronouncing Bible, taking this an to be the indefinite article, and perceiving that the h is sounded in hungered, changed the particle to a in all these passages; as, "And ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the French women were as free as our own countrywomen are to dress as they like, they would make much use of their liberty. Trousers do not afford the same scope for decoration as petticoats. They cannot be trimmed to any considerable extent, and the effect of an improver or bustle worn under them would be absurd. I have always wondered, however, that serious ladies in this country do not set more store by this branch of progress. If I were a woman I would much rather have a pair of trousers than a vote or even a ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... the genius of Aristotle—the originator or improver of so many practical departments—an Art of Study. The omission was not supplied by any other Greek writer known to us. The oratorical art was a prominent part of education both in Greece and in Rome; and was ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... describe. The next few years, taken together, were my Wanderjaehre. You know Wilhelm Meister, of course? My apprenticeship was over, but I wasn't a man yet for all that. There's an intermediate stage, what we engineers call being 'an improver,' in a man's life. It seems strange that I should speak of myself so at twenty-seven, but there it is; I was late maturing. Again, I like to think that the Dutch are right when they use the same word for husband and man. ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... agent or attorney of the middle class of modern society; of the throng who fill the markets, shops, counting-houses, manufactories, ships, of the modern world, aiming to be rich. He was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the opener of doors and markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse. Of course, the rich and aristocratic did not like him. England, the center of capital, and Rome and Austria, centers of tradition and ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... idea to the ladies; but Vizard, for the first time, turned red at this revelation before Uxmoor, improver of cottage life. "Confound the brutes!" said he. "Why, I built them a new room; a larger one: didn't you ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... this publication, with a view to enable our readers to determine, whether the author of these verses which have now been exhibited, is entitled to claim the honours of an improver or restorer of our poetry, and to found a new school to supersede or new-model all our maxims on the subject. If we were to stop here, we do not think that Mr. Wordsworth, or his admirers, would have any reason to complain; for what we have now quoted ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... the Adam and Eve at Madrid. These two warriors are, however, most successful and imposing, and immeasurably enhanced now that the spurious backgrounds, artfully concocted out of Duerer's own prints by an ingenious improver of his betters, have been removed. This person had also tinkered the centre picture, painting out two heraldic groups of donors, far smaller in scale than the actual personages of the scene, but very useful in the composition, as giving a more ample base to the masses of broken ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... but a minute portion—it is always some partial good he would introduce; and thus he but destroys the just proportions of a nicely-regulated system of things by exaggerating one of the parts. I passed of late through a richly-cultivated district of country, in which the agricultural improver had done his utmost. Never were there finer fields, more convenient steadings, crops of richer promise, a better regulated system of production. Corn and cattle had mightily improved; but what had man, the lord of the soil, become? Is not the body better ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... of a very great length, perfectly straight, the trees meeting at the top in a cathedral arch, lessening in perspective,—the boughs the roof, the stems the pillars. I never saw so beautiful an avenue. We were told that some improver of pleasure-grounds had advised Lord B. to cut down the trees, and lay the whole open to the lawn, for the avenue is very near his house. His own better taste, or that of some other person, I suppose, had saved them from the axe. Many workmen were employed in building a large mansion ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... country gentleman has at least one neighbour who is, or professes to be, an agricultural improver, it is difficult to give an adequate idea of the benefit we have derived from the agricultural enthusiasm of the noblemen and gentlemen who first made the science of cultivating breeding fashionable, we must be excused the word, among a class which had previously ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney |
