"Irreverent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... vain task to seek anywhere in nature for evidence of Divine action, such that no one could sanely deny it. God will not allow Himself to be caught at the bottom of any man's crucible, or yield Himself to the experiments of gross-minded and irreverent inquirers. The natural, like the supernatural, revelation appeals to the whole of man's mental nature and ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... mistake, like me alone, me alone!... Gentlemen, my head aches ..." His brows contracted with pain. "You see, gentlemen, I couldn't bear the look of him, there was something in him ignoble, impudent, trampling on everything sacred, something sneering and irreverent, loathsome, loathsome. But now that he's dead, I ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Sheffield," he said, "the thing is irreverent, not the manner. It is irreverent to liken your holy mother to the ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... all the Lord needed when He made the world. He made it in six days. Sometimes when I'm out of sorts I wonder if one more week wouldn't have given us a better job.... But there, that's irreverent, isn't it, and off the track besides? Now about this little Bangs man. What ought ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Sevier County. But these old buildings are becoming exceedingly rare, and soon not one of them will be seen. Their unsightly proportions and rude architecture will not much longer offend modern taste, nor provoke the idle and irreverent sneer of the fastidious and the fashionable. When the last one of these pioneer houses shall have fallen into decay and ruins, the memory of their first occupants will still ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... whose appointment to the command of the British force in Flanders would doubtless meet with his warm approval. After a little more fencing, Pitt gave the name of the Marquis Cornwallis, who had just returned from his Viceroyalty in India. Mack by no means welcomed the proposal, and made the irreverent remark that the best General, after fighting elephants in India, would be puzzled by the French. Pitt thereupon observed that the Duke of York had not the confidence of the army, to which Mack and Merveldt replied by praising his character, and decrying his critics ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... a deformity. He had no beard, and yet I feel sure that he never used a razor. I rarely saw him off duty without a peculiar black pipe in his mouth, which he smoked in an unusual way, emitting the smoke at very long intervals. It was a standing jest with my irreverent schoolmates that "Old Ky" owed his fine, rich colour to smoking through his skin. Ingram Hall said that the carved Hindoo idol which decorated the professor's pipe was the very image of ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... 'tend him, turn and turn about," continued Mrs. Benton, ignorant of Marty's irreverent remark. "He's to be put into Mr. Ma'sh's room at the quarters, and I'll take this first night's job. I shall begin it with a dose of picra, and the first page of the Westminster catechism; and if that don't put him ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... some of them may have dwelt in the old time on this very spot of ground now covered by the Museum. Like other people who grow too rich and comfortable, the citizens of Tarentum loved mirth and mockery; their Greek theatre was remarkable for irreverent farce, for parodies of the great drama of Athens. And here is testimony to the fact: all manner of comic masks, of grotesque visages; mouths distorted into impossible grins, eyes leering and goggling, noses extravagant. I sketched a caricature of Medusa, the anguished features and snaky locks ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... "Memorials of James Hogg," says that "there is no doubt that Hogg wrote the first draft; indeed, part of the original is still in the possession of the family.... Some of the more irreverent passages were not his, or were at all events largely added to by others before publication." [Footnote: Mrs. Garden's "Memorials of James Hogg," p. 107.] In a recent number of Blackwood it is ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... theories were of universal application to every subject of thought. An illustration will explain their relation to theology. In the foolish and almost irreverent attempts to explain by philosophy the nature of the triune existence of the divine Being, the realist assuming the reality of the one genus Deity, was prepared to allow identity of essence in the three species, the three ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... indeed yielded to the temptation of Peggy's hasty-pudding. She popped out of the box, gobbled a little of the corn meal, took one or two hasty swallows of water, and then rushed back to her maternal duties. The girls broke into irreverent giggles. ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... frequency, when Weymouth ceased to be naughty she also ceased to be interesting. After poring over the dull pages of the town history, one is sometimes tempted to wonder if, perhaps, the irreverent Morton did not, for all his sins, divine a deeper meaning in this spot than the respectable ones who came after him. One cannot read the "New English Canaan" without regretting a little that this ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... past, ruled the present. What had parted them, and how did they to-day envisage one another? She could not make out. Had never, indeed, attempted seriously to make out, shying from such investigation as disloyal and, in a way, irreverent. Now investigation was forced on her. Her mind worked independent of her will, so that she could neither prevent or arrest it. Sir Charles showed himself scrupulously attentive and courteous to General Frayling. He offered no spoken objection to her association ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... his spouse, 'you can lecture a woman for not making the best of circumstances; I hope you'll bear in mind that it's you who are irreverent. I can endure this no longer. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fault. You shouldn't be spreading malicious tales about the faculty; it's irreverent. The story's all over college by this time, and Professor Winters has probably heard it himself. He'll flunk you on the finals to pay for it; see if he doesn't." And Patty went home, leaving a conscience-smitten and thoroughly indignant Lucille ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... of Bonaparte? Your shop appears to be well supplied. You surely have a great deal of custom. What do people say of that buffoon; Bonaparte?" He was made quite happy one day when we were obliged to retire hastily from a shop to avoid the attacks drawn upon us by the irreverent tone in which Bonaparte spoke of the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... with too large a public of noisy friends for me to bear, ... and I see them only at certain hours, ... except, of course, my sisters. And then as you have 'a reputation' and are opined to talk generally in blank verse, it is not likely that there should be much irreverent rushing into this room when you are known to ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... tone irreverent. She relapsed into herself and seemed suddenly, with a spiritual wave of the hand, to ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... churches would not be untidy, neglected, ruinous. There would not be moth-eaten altar-cloths, and worm-eaten altars. There would not be green mouldering walls, and broken pavements. There would not be a service slovenly, unmusical, irreverent, or if not irreverent, at least unworthy ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... same epitaph to be irreverent, because in a list of Barker's many blessings occurs the profane word "trout:" but those trout, and the custom which they brought him, had made the old man's life comfortable, and enabled him to leave a competence ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... Down with the veto!" and on that day at vespers the choristers preconcerted to use loud and threatening emphasis when chanting the words, "Deposuit potentes de sede," in the "Magnificat." Incensed at such an irreverent proceeding, the royalists in their turn thrice exclaimed, "Et reginam," after the "Domine salvum fac regem." The tumult during the whole time of divine service ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... The irreverent considered him a fool, the poor regarded him as a heartless and cruel exploiter of misery and want, and his inferiors saw in him a despot and a tyrant. As to the women, ah, the women! Accusing rumors buzzed through the wretched nipa huts, and it was said ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... off at the view, at that wonderful view of St. Peter's, the Tiber, all the domes and rising ruins and afar the campagna. "I wouldn't make my Heaven here," thought this dreadful Mae, "not if it is beautiful. I'd not stay here a single other day. Bah no!" and she shook her irreverent little fist right down at the ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... and his mild, yet perfectly fearless, blue eyes seemed always to be watching the goodness that exists in humanity, and rejoicing at what they saw. The Professor, on the other hand, had a hard face like a hatchet, tipped with an aggressive black goatee beard. His eyes were quick, piercing and irreverent. The lines about his small, thin-lipped mouth were almost cruel. His voice was harsh and dry, sometimes, when he grew energetic, almost soprano. It fired off words with a sharp and clipping utterance. His habitual manner was one of distrust and investigation. ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... saturated with scriptural phrase, and the gross mockery would have been taken seriously if the speaker had not been so notoriously irreverent. As it was the words won him applause which Redfield and his friends were not able to quell. The joke was caught up and tossed back and forth; the Little Flock outside raised their hymn, the scoffers within ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... thoughtless of the congregation—especially those behind the unconscious Neale—found amusement enough in the exhibition. The pastor discovered it harder than ever that morning to hold the attention of certain irreverent ones, and being a near-sighted man, he was at fault as to the reason for the bustle that increased as ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... will not to follow her? She knew how to talk and make excuses. How sweetly she could talk. Had she no anxiety about her own salvation? On thinking it over, he could not remember ever having heard her say anything irreverent or impure. When she sat opposite him at table, quieter now than she had ever been before, and mutely raised her big eyes to the ceiling, she looked exactly like the pictures of the Virgin Mary whose ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... closet to look over Lady Di's scenes from the 'Mysterious Mother'—the players and dramatists, finally, who crowded round Hogarth's sketch of his 'Beggars' Opera,' with portraits, and gazed on Davison's likeness of Mrs. Clive:—how could poor Horace have tolerated the sound of their irreverent remarks, the dust of their shoes, the degradation of their fancying that they might doubt his spurious-looking antiquities, or condemn his improper-looking ladies on their canvas? How, indeed, could he? For those parlours, that library, were ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... homily, the Prelate took his departure, leaving the Abbess highly incensed, though she prudently forbore returning any irreverent answer ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... this irreverent remark. He looked around the place and saw that they were alone. Then he said, very earnestly, "Mr. Finnegan, may I have a few minutes' ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... to princes and pomatum," said this irascible republican, with a laugh of triumph, as he ground the remnants of the vial under his irreverent heel. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... everyday, and it was this extreme variety of the phenomenon which convinced him that nothing physical would account for it. Yet there is this remarkable fact that liquefactions of blood are common at Naples- -and, unless it is irreverent to the Great Author of Miracles to be obstinate in the inquiry, the question certainly rises whether there is something in the air. (Mind, I don't believe there is— and, speaking humbly, and without having seen it, think it a true miracle— but I ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... much more of the substance of wit and truth in Mr. EDEN PHILLPOTTS' "Devon comedy" at the Kingsway. The St. George of the title is not the Cappadocian, but that somewhat irreverent Father in God, St. George Loftus, Bishop of Exeter; the dragons are two quite unsuitable suitors for the hands of Monica and Eva (daughters of his dull old friend, Lord Sampford), who don't believe in class distinctions. Monica's young ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... night; and at the same time, in the midst of my pious transports, there came into my mind blasphemous thoughts, as if an evil wind had blown them thither, or a demon whispered them into my ear. In the same way I had irreverent thoughts about persons whom I loved with all my heart and for whom I would have given my life without a moment's hesitation. I remember that this, which I might call a tragedy of childhood, cost me a great deal of anguish. But I will not dwell upon that now. Going ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... proudly felt that sacred music would be the right thing on Sabbath evening, and, with a few of hew own ilk, was giving a florid and imperfect rendering of that peculiar style of composition that suggests a poor opera while making a rather shocking and irreverent use ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... Irreverent House went off into roars of laughter, amid which Mr. Dick, more than ever bewildered, sat down, and presently went out to ask Miss ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., February 7, 1891 • Various
... of them are touched with this same quality of easy familiarity with sacred subjects, and abound in turns of broad humour which render them not a little startling from our nicer point of view. But they never are coarse, and their simplicity saves them from being irreverent; nor is there, I am sure, the least thought of irreverence on the part of those by whom they are sung. I noticed, though, that these lively numbers were the ones which most hit the fancy of the men; while the women as plainly showed their liking for those of a finer spirit ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... English parsons, the former agape for any rubbishy old things, the latter learned in the lore of obsolete Church-furniture, had thronged Torcello; and now they were all gone, and the sun had set behind the Alps, while an irreverent stranger drank his wine in Attila's chair, and nature's jester ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... distinct from them, is the injunction embodied in this precept, that men enter into covenant with him; and the performance of every part of that service, as exhibited throughout the whole of Divine revelation, according to circumstances, it enjoins. The third commandment—forbidding the irreverent use of God's name, and threatening those who take it in vain, authoritatively inculcates the holy use of it in Covenanting. There is no passage of Scripture in which it is said or implied, that to vow or swear, in ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... contributed to his works an essay upon the etymology of the word 'sublime,' too vast to be printed whole. Stewart was an upholder of Whig principles, when the Scottish government was in the hands of the staunchest Tories. The irreverent young Edinburgh Reviewers treated him with respect, and to some extent applied his theory to politics. Stewart was the philosophical heir of Reid; and, one may say, was a Whig both in philosophy and in politics. He was a rationalist, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... Church had withdrawn the light of its countenance from Moscow, the nest of irreverent vipers who had bombarded the Kremlin. Dark and silent and cold were the churches; the priests had disappeared. There were no popes to officiate at the Red Burial, there had been no sacrament for the dead, nor were any prayers to be said ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... building and the two time-worn awnings had been fixed to my windows by the obliging janitor. The Tampico had come and gone, and had come again. Its arrivals, and departures were, as usual, always commented upon by Mawkum, generally in connection with "That Bunch of Dried Garlic," that being the irreverent way in which he spoke of his ivory-tinted Excellency. Otherwise the lighthouse, and all that pertained to it, had become ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... DURING THE REVOLUTION, I found much of an almost romantic character. Many traditions have been put down, and many obscure truths elucidated. Some persons may think it irreverent to tell the truth in the plain, homely manner that characterizes my narrative; but, while I have nothing to regret in this particular, I can assure them that I have been actuated by none other spirit than that of ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... exemplary, but it greatly increased afterwards, and I sometimes thought that he carried it to a pernicious excess: I am sure, at least, that I was unable to keep pace with him." With Shelley study was a passion, and the acquisition of knowledge was the entrance into a thrice-hallowed sanctuary. "The irreverent many cannot comprehend the awe—the careless apathetic worldling cannot imagine the enthusiasm—nor can the tongue that attempts only to speak of things visible to the bodily eye, express the mighty ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... sole recollections of the university: and looking, without one glance of affection, upon the face of his fair and graceful mother, makes the chance mole, or the early wrinkle, which he traces there, the subject of his irreverent jest, forgets the kindness of which he was unworthy, and remembers for evil the wholesome discipline which was irksome only ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... does not apply to attendance at the service on the part of communicant Churchmen who yet on a particular occasion do not communicate: and to attend throughout the service without personally communicating is a procedure infinitely preferable to the irreverent modern custom, still prevalent in too many parishes, of leaving the Church in the course of a celebration of the Communion, and before the consecration has taken place. It is unfair to those who are preparing to receive Communion that their ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... French surgeon's mate, who had lived several years in London, and in the southern part of America. He could speak, and read the English language equally well with his own. He ridiculed all religion, and talked in such an irreverent style of the bible, of Jesus Christ, and of the Virgin Mary, that our sailors would not associate with him, nor, at times, eat with him. On one occasion, his profanity was so shocking, that he ran some risk ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... dared to heap upon the gods, For him their hero slain, as these few words From Cato's noble breast instinct with truth: "Gone is a citizen who though no peer (6) Of those who disciplined the state of yore In due submission to the bounds of right, Yet in this age irreverent of law Has played a noble part. Great was his power, But freedom safe: when all the plebs was prone To be his slaves, he chose the private gown; So that the Senate ruled the Roman state, The Senate's ruler: nought by right of arms He e'er demanded: willing took he gifts Yet from a ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... side of her right instep, at the same moment deftly caught her flying skirt, whipped it around her ankles, and, slightly raising it behind, permitted the chaste display of an inch or two of frilled white petticoat. The most irreverent critic of the sex will, I think, admit that it has some movements ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... in a garden where "Nat"—we must protest against this irreverent abbreviation of the name of that honored Governor whose life in little we are about to behold—and his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... certainty, the persuasion of its divine authority. Hell and its terrors were always present to me, and she taught me that the wandering suggestions of childish imagination, the recurrence of profane expressions heard from others, and all forms of irreverent fantasies were the very whisperings of the devil, to her, as to me, consequently, an ever-present spirit, perpetually tempting me to repeat, and so make myself responsible for the wickedness in them. I remember with great vividness a caricature of Mrs. Trollope in a satirical illustrated ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... production. A protest—many protests, indeed—followed. Mme. Wagner's was accompanied with a threat of legal proceedings. The ground of her appeal to Mr. Conried was that to perform the drama which had been specifically reserved for performance in Bayreuth by the composer would be irreverent and illegal. To this Mr. Conried made answer that inasmuch as "Parsifal" was not protected by law in the United States his performance would not be illegal, and that it was more irreverent to Wagner to prevent the many Americans who could not ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... a striking instance of the way in which words may be made, not only to cover, but to transform, ideas. A reverent form of language conceals an irreverent conception. The thought is too shocking for plain utterance; but, dressed in the garb of ingenious phraseology, it assumes an aspect that enables it to pass as a devout acknowledgment of a divine mystery. The real ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... a blossoming fancy, a satiric touch that blistered, a melody that enchanted Northern ears; but then we have lost the story of his life, and from his poems, with their wonderful contrasts, the delicacy and spring-like flush of feeling, the piety, the freedom of speech, the irreverent use of the sacredest names, the "Flyting" and the "Lament for the Makars," there is difficulty in making one's ideas of him cohere. He is present to the imagination, and yet remote. Like Tantallon, he is a portion of the past. We are separated from ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... violent, so wild, so contagious, so universal, that the two deaf men were forced to perceive it. Quasimodo turned round, shrugging his hump with disdain, while Master Florian, equally astonished, and supposing that the laughter of the spectators had been provoked by some irreverent reply from the accused, rendered visible to him by that shrug of the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... which dictates their bearing toward their teachers is born of a clear-sighted and intuitive appreciation of superior knowledge, worth or experience, and not of conventional observance or necessity. It is generally said abroad that American children are unruly, forward and irreverent toward their parents and elders; and one reason assigned is that parents are careless of teaching their children the little ceremonies and graduated formalities of speech, "in which," as an English bishop recently alleged in an after-dinner speech, "there is embodied so much wholesome ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... are awfully irreverent," reproved Mabel, who, with Clara, was seated in the first row in the stand right behind the players' bench ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... safely say, now dead everywhere,—buried, indeed,—for the mad painter Blake saw the funeral of the last of the little people, and an irreverent English bishop has sung their requiem. It never had much hold upon the Yankee mind, our superstitions being mostly of a sterner and less poetical kind. The Irish Presbyterians who settled in New Hampshire about the year 1720 brought indeed with them, among other strange matters, potatoes ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... not understand what it means. It may mean one of two things. If it mean the first, it is a term somewhat unnecessary, if not somewhat irreverent. If it mean the second, it means something ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... of the peace of Westminster. You cannot fail to have remarked the grace with which he saluted the noble Lord who passed just now, or the excessive dignity of his air, as he expostulates with the crowd. He is rather out of temper now, in consequence of the very irreverent behaviour of those two young fellows behind him, who have done nothing but laugh all the time they have ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... piece of enclosed land, adjoining Fylde-road, stands St. Peter's Church. Portions of its precincts are covered with gravestones; the remainder has been "considerably damaged" of late, according to the belief of one of the churchwardens, by the vicious scratching of a number of irreverent hens, whose owners will be prosecuted if they do not look better after them. The other Sunday, we saw a notice posted at the front of the church relative to the great hen-scratching question. It is said that some of these tame and reclaimed birds have penetrated a foot ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... Master Carver. I had some such thought myself," said Allerton rather primly, while Hopkins and Billington exchanged an irreverent grin, ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... the other hand, wore a fixed smile. The marquis said that among light operas his favorite was the Gazza Ladra. The marquise then began a series of inquiries about the duke and the cardinal, the old countess and Lady Barbara, after listening to which, and to Lord Deepmere's somewhat irreverent responses, for a quarter of an hour, Newman rose to take his leave. The marquis went with him three steps ...
— The American • Henry James
... have heard attributed the irreverent piece of wit alluded to by the Witness; but with equal injustice, as his son, the late Bishop of Quebec assured ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... the wrong thing," said the girl, in a repentant voice; "but, truly, I didn't mean to be irreverent—I only wanted you to know how pat the doctor reels off the scientific phrases; and"—assuming an important air—"I guess I know that Christian Science is the 'new tongue' spoken of in the Bible. I've been ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... he was admirably indifferent. He never thought of speculating about what people thought of Mr. Helwyse; but to his own approval—something not lightly to be had—he was by no means indifferent. Towards mankind at large he showed a kindly but irreverent charity, which excused imperfection, not so much from a divine principle of love as from scepticism as to man's sufficient motive and faculty to do well. Of himself he was a blunt and sarcastic critic, perhaps because he expected more of himself than of the rest of the ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... and noble daring had its possessor been thrown into circumstances favourable to the display. As matters stood, George was master of his own household. Here none questioned his authority; no profane, irreverent approach ever awakening the dormant energies of his character, or thwarting the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... make some irreverent remarks about that tomb. I had walked out to see it on a hot afternoon, and I found it inconveniently far. One is accustomed to have these places "grouped," and I was displeased with Juliet for not being buried nearer home—it was an oversight—but perhaps it ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... The thoughtless, light-hearted, somewhat shallow mind which thinks it can speak, think, and act without having to render an account needs the somewhat stern tonic of these seven dramas; it may be chastened into some sobriety and learn to be a little less flippant and irreverent. ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... gentle Kate, And not a thought irreverent of our Widow. Why, 'twere unmannerly at any time, But most uncourteous on our wedding day, When we should shew most hospitable.—Some ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... here no more than this, that the philosopher is so ignorant of what his neighbour does, that he scarce knows whether he is a man, or some other animal:—Coste."]—what it is to do and to suffer? what animals law and justice are? Do they speak of the magistrates, or to him, 'tis with a rude, irreverent, and indecent liberty. Do they hear their prince, or a king commended? they make no more of him, than of a shepherd, goatherd, or neatherd: a lazy Coridon, occupied in milking and shearing his herds and flocks, but more rudely and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... power. Meanwhile he continued, with that sort of massive archness that so ill became him, 'She has but one fault; there is but one danger in the great career that I foresee for her. May I name it? may I be so irreverent? It is in herself - her heart ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The hue and image of o'erleaning flowers, Sweet human faces, white clouds of the noon, Slant starlight glimpses through the dewy leaves, And tenderest moonrise. 'T was, in truth, a study, To mark his spirit, alternating between A decent and professional gravity And an irreverent mirthfulness, which often Laughed in the face of his divinity, Plucked off the sacred ephod, quite unshrined The oracle, and for the pattern priest Left us the man. A shrewd, sagacious merchant, To whom the soiled sheet found in Crawford's inn, Giving the latest news of city stocks ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... some milk instead; they came back to the doorway. The moon had come up, and the wide lawn in front of the house (which the ladies always called the yard) was almost as light as day. The syringa bushes were in full bloom and fragrance, and other sweet odors filled the air beside. There were two irreverent little dogs playing and chasing each other on the wide front walk and bustling among the box and borders. Betty could hear the voices of people who drove by, or walked along the sidewalk, but Tideshead village was almost as still as the fields outside ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... styes, and other suitable places. As on all occasions when the matter to be proclaimed was from the magistrates, Thomas, on this, was attended by the town-officers in their Sunday garbs, and with their halberts in their hands; but the abominable and irreverent creature was so drunk, that he wamblet to and fro over the drum, as if there had not been a bane in his body. He was seemingly as soople and as senseless as a bolster.—Still, as this was no new thing with him, it might have passed; for James Hound, the senior officer, was in the practice, when Robin ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... value; it despises them, and ridicules them if they happen to contain any superannuated opinion whatever. That is why, in my twentieth year, I amused myself at the expense of Monsieur Petit-Radel and his chronological table; and that was why, the other day, at the Luxembourg, my young and irreverent friend... ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... Michael's church, in Basinghall-street, he perceived, to his great surprise, that it was lighted up, and at first supposed some service was going on within it, but on approaching he heard strains of lively and most irreverent music issuing from within. Pushing open the door, he entered the sacred edifice, and found it occupied by a party of twenty young men, accompanied by a like number of females, some of whom were playing at dice and cards, some drinking, others singing Bacchanalian melodies, others dancing ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... was a most fortunate one. America and England have agreed to praise Washington's character so highly that at the hands of the young and irreverent he is in some danger of the fate of Aristides. For the benefit of those who tend to weary of the Cherry Tree and the Little Hatchet, it may be well to say that Washington was a very typical Southern gentleman in his foibles as well as in his virtues. Though his temper ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... observes the reviewer, 'is an inflated jargon, composed of terms picked up in all countries, and wholly irreducible to any ordinary rules of grammar and sense. The sentiments are mischievous in tendency, profligate in principle, licentious and irreverent in the highest degree.' The first part of this accusation was only too well founded, but the licentiousness of which Lady Morgan's works were invariably accused in the Quarterly Review, can only have ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... But about 1675, Rochester contrived to give such offence as even the excellent temper of his royal master was unable to digest. This was by writing a lampoon called "The Insipids," in which the person and character of Charles are treated with most merciless and irreverent severity. It ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... and "Saki," a cup- bearer. The going round (Tawaf) and the running (Sa'i) allude to the circumambulation of the Ka'abah, and the running between Mount Safa and Marwah (Pilgrimage ii. 58, and iii. 343). A religious Moslem would hold the allusion highly irreverent. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... had all a soldier's virtues, the "chevalier without fear and without reproach," but he was glorified by a whole galaxy of excellences which soldiers too often lack. He was pure of speech and of habit, never intemperate, never obscene, never profane, never irreverent. In domestic life he was an absolute model. Lofty command did ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... mode of expression he often employed when speaking of his honored brethren,—the Reverend Mather was right this time, and the irreverent doctors who laughed at him were wrong. One only of their number disputes his claim to giving the first impulse to the practice, in Boston. This is what that person says: "The Small-Pox spread in Boston, New England, A.1721, and the Reverend Dr. Cotton ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Dalton was an irreverent boy. Haddingly was greatly pleased at the thought of Maitland sitting innocently under an ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... ahead of the appointed time. As he walked towards the great organ he heard a child's voice, high-pitched and clear, talking behind the traceries of the choir screen. He supposed it the voice of some irreverent chorister, and stepping aside to rebuke it, discovered Corona and Brother Copas together gazing up at the coffins above ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... poured out their opinions most freely and frankly about the frosty attitude of the people who were present at that performance, and about the Boston newspapers for the position they had taken in regard to the matter. That position was that I had been irreverent beyond belief, beyond imagination. Very well, I had accepted that as a fact for a year or two, and had been thoroughly miserable about it whenever I thought of it—which was not frequently, if I could help it. Whenever I thought of it I wondered how I ever could have been inspired to do so ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... does," said Mrs. Vanderlyn, a little shocked by his irreverent way of making reference to Heaven's Chosen. "Poor things!" Her sympathy was quite aroused, now. She became quite certain that the steerage couple had highly influential friends abroad. "Would it please him, do you think, if I should show ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... it is not irreverent, and certainly it is not intended as reproach, when I say, that I know no stronger expression in our language than that which describes the restoration of the wayward son,—"he came to himself." He had broken away from all the ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... Trail to bear again the flag of his country. If his clothes were old and ill-fitting, at least they were his best, and the largeness of the empty sleeve belittled the too-largeness of the other. In all this ribald, laughing, irreverent, commonplace, semi-vicious crowd he was the one note of sincerity. To him this was a real occasion, and the exalted reverence in his eye for the task he was so simply performing was Smith's real triumph—if he could have known it. We understood now, we felt the imminence of the Long Trail. ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... sense of self-importance at medical school, where they proudly endured the high pressure weeding out of any free spirit unwilling to grind away into the night for seven or more years. Anyone incapable of absorbing and regurgitating huge amounts of rote information; anyone with a disrespectful or irreverent attitude toward the senior doctor-gods who arrogantly serve as med school professors, anyone like this was eliminated with especial rapidity. When the thoroughly submissive, homogenized survivors are finally licensed, they assume the status of ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... tell him that the madman, as men called him, lay wrestling in prayer with the Father of lights. The old highlander was not irreverent, but the thing would have been unintelligible to him. He could readily have believed that the supposed lunatic might be favoured beyond ordinary mortals; that at that very moment, lost in his fit, he might be rapt in a vision of the future—a wave of time, far off ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... gave to Carl a new mechanic, a prince of mechanics, Martin Dockerill. Martin was a tall, thin, hatchet-faced, tousle-headed, slow-spoken, irreverent Irish-Yankee from Fall River; the perfect type of American aviators; for while England sends out its stately soldiers of the air, and France its short, excitable geniuses, practically all American aviators ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... of them that now the place is become a town—and a town in the desert—that is to say, in a place useless for any other purpose; a secure place indeed, for we may be sure that the ground occupied by these poor tombs runs no risk of being coveted—not even in the irreverent times of the future. No, it is on the other side of Cairo—on the other bank of the Nile, amongst the verdure of the palm-trees, that we must look for the suburb in course of transformation, with its villas ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... bustle of the day,—the confused whirl of white gloves, kisses, bridemaids, and bridecakes, the losing of trunk-keys and breaking of lacings, the tears of mamma—God bless her!—and the jokes of irreverent Christopher, who could, for the life of him, see nothing so very dismal in the whole phantasmagoria, and only wished he were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... this poem is a fact resting on his own statement in a passage indisputably written by him (in the "Prologue" to the "Legend of Good Women"); nor is the value of this statement reduced by the negative circumstance, that in the extraordinary tag (if it may be called by so irreverent a name) to the extant "Canterbury Tales," the "Romaunt of the Rose" is passed over in silence, or at least not nominally mentioned, among the objectionable works which the poet is there made to retract. And there seems at least ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... anatomical detail; and generally indulges in a fine careless rapture of reminiscence and improvisation—zealously assisted by Mr. WILL EVANS' familiar tip-tilted nose and bland refusal to be perturbed by entirely unrehearsed effects and obviously irregular cues. A jovial and irreverent pair of potentates, crowned ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... authority depending on opinion at least as much as on duty, an idea circulated among the people that our constitution is not so perfect as it ought to be, before you are sure of mending it, is a certain method of lessening it in the public opinion. Of this irreverent opinion of Parliament, the author himself complains in one part of his book; and he endeavors to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... first intermission of the orchestra, the curtain rises upon the three Weird Sisters. Mr. HIND is a Weird Sister, and he improves the opportunity to howl with a weirdness that draws an involuntary laugh from an irreverent young lady. ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... said John Gayther, as the two sat down to rest in the summer-house after a long stay in the garden. "I have a singular feeling, which I hope is not irreverent, that the great Creator is pleased with me for having brought this work to perfection, and the thought gives ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... effectively given. The incarceration of the peccant dame was brief; and a shower of ridicule fell upon the Pontifical head. But the Sovereigns of Rome are accustomed to, and regardless of, such irreverent demonstrations.—TRANSL. ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... man, with sharp features shadowed by a mass of flowing, curling hair—the kind of hair that has come to be called "musical" by the irreverent. The sweep of an abnormal brow gave emphasis to the sudden jut of deep eye sockets, and a dull, sallow skin gave emphasis to the subtle sinister ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... response from educational circles in which collegiate influences prevail, I did not deem it prudent to introduce some of the noblest thoughts that belong to the great theme. The book was sent forth limited and incomplete, hoping that, heretical as it was, and quite irreverent toward the ignorance descended from antiquity, it might still receive sufficient approbation and appreciation to justify later introduction of matter that would have hindered its ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point—and does not break. In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologise in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... clinging close on the hillside, turns inland, and all at once looks down upon the Piano di Sorrento. Instinctively, the companions rose to their feet, as though any other attitude on the first revelation of such a prospect were irreverent. It is not really a plain, but a gently rising wide and deep lap, surrounded by lofty mountains and ending at a line of sheer cliffs along the sea-front. A vast garden planted for Nature's joy; a pleasance of the gods; a haunt of the spirit of beauty set between ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... performed with no irreverent haste, the maid was summoned and a careful toilet made in season to afford them time for a walk before mamma would be ready to ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... telling the slave who opens that he is a traveller, and must do his message to those within ere night falls; to a lady if a lady rules, though a lord is seemlier. Enter Clytaemnestra, who gives a formal offer of hospitality (having noticed his irreverent tone), and to whom he bluffly gives a message from a fellow traveller, who learning he was bound for Argos, begged him to seek out Orestes' kinsmen and give the news of his death. Clytaemnestra affects a burst of grief; the curse has taken another victim as he was disentangling himself ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... shamefully in the renewed window-sashes and redecorated walls, which Time and the four children of an Irish family had made necessary to the letting of the first floor. And these playful allusions to the maternal ideas were still not irreverent, but contrived so as rather to prepossess Darrell in Mrs. Haughton's favour by bringing out traits of a simple natural mother, too proud, perhaps, of her only son, not caring what she did, how she worked, so that he might not ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... or a dance in the groves of Montmorency. The old verbal tyranny of the French Academy, the painted wreaths sold at cemetery-gates, the colored plates of fashions, powdered hair, and rouged cheeks, typify and illustrate this irreverent ambition to pervert Nature and create artificial effects; they are but so many forms of the theatrical instinct, and proofs of the ascendency of meretricious taste. It is this want of loyalty to Nature, and insensibility to her unadulterated charms, which constitute ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Scotland to encourage the presbyterians to rebel. Arrived in Valladolid, he heard one Armstrong, in a sermon delivered to students, charge his majesty with most foul and black-mouthed scandals, and use such irreverent, base expressions as no good subjects could repeat without horror. He then returned to England, and was soon after sent to St. Omer with fresh letters, in which was mentioned a design to stab or poison his majesty—Pere la Chaise, the French king's confessor, having placed ten ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... composer of such innate spirituality that to analyze and classify him in a formal manner seems well-nigh irreverent. His music once heard is never forgotten, and when thoroughly known is loved for all time. Nor is an elaborate biographical account necessary; for Franck, more than any other modern composer, has ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... that moment Georgie was prepared to indicate that Lady Ambermere was the hand and he the glove. But evidently that would not impress Olga in the least. He laughed in a most irreverent manner instead. ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... body and legs and wrapped them about him, tying the hind legs as a girdle round his waist. The effect on the whole was bad. It was even irreverent—like one of those medieval pictures of a monk changed into a beast by the ministrations of Satan. At the very best the ensemble resembled a humpbacked cow sitting on her ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... Polly and her mother a sad life of it for two weary days. Having heard of Toady's gallant behavior, she solemnly ordered him up to receive her blessing. But the sight of Aunt Kipp's rubicund visage, surrounded by the stiff frills of an immense nightcap, caused the irreverent boy to explode with laughter in his handkerchief, and to be hustled away by his mother before Aunt Kipp discovered the true cause of ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... tall four-post bed he was selling and he now put his hand upon this object—a hardy service with a cunningly simulated air of deference. It was to be profaned by no irreverent handling! ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... (to an irreverent Nephew). No. 89. "A Long-spiked Wooden Roller, known as a 'Spiked Hare.'" You see, TOM, my boy, the victim was—(Describes the process.) "Some of the old writers describe this torture as being most fearful," so the Catalogue ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 27, 1892 • Various
... funeral rites. Guert was sincere, though he might not be either logical or very clear. This was apparent in his countenance, his voice, his whole manner. For myself, I will allow, I saw nothing particularly out of place, in this address, at the time, nor do I now regard it as either irreverent or unseasonable. ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... two men. Hence he had to prepare for the worst, and still, as far as he could, to try to pacify these rivals; but to reconcile an American and an Englishman, two men hostile to one another from their birth, one endowed with real insular prejudice, the other with the adventurous, irreverent spirit of his country, was no easy task. When the doctor thought of their eager rivalry, which in fact was one of nationalities, he could not help, not shrugging his shoulders, but lamenting human weakness. He would often talk to Johnson on this subject; he and ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... greatest sang-froid known to be exhibited during the flood, but the most irreverent was that of an old man who was saved by E.B. Entworth, of the Johnson works. On Saturday morning Mr. Entworth rowed to a house near the flowing debris at the bridge, and found a woman, with a broken arm, and a baby. After she had got into ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... doctrine, and perhaps of discipline I am diffident of lending a perfect assent to that church which you have so worthily historified, yet may the ill time never come to me, when with a chilled heart, or a portion of irreverent sentiment, I shall enter her beautiful and time-hallowed Edifices. Judge then of my mortification when, after attending the choral anthems of last Wednesday at Westminster, and being desirous of renewing my acquaintance, after lapsed years, with the tombs and antiquities ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... consequent postponement of their Thanksgiving, naturally spread throughout all the surrounding towns. It was said that in one of these a party of roguish boys loaded an old cannon with molasses and fired it in the direction of Colchester. How they did this has not been stated, and some irreverent disbelievers in the more uncommon of our grandfathers' stories have profanely declared it ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... divinity, that when nobody in the world had ever heard of him, he delivered a salutary oracle, but after people had built him a fine temple, then the god of speech fell dumb. This suggests to Diderot to wonder with edifying innocence how so religious a people as the Romans endured these irreverent jests in their philosophers. By an easy step we pass to the conditions on which modern philosophers should be allowed by authority to publish their speculations. Diderot throws out the curious hint that it would ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... and eschew the irreverent empty phrases and contradictions of a mis-called 'Science,' professing which some have missed their true aim in regard to ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... top of a folding bed, jump down, and be at the hall door ready to greet the incomer, before she was halfway up the stairs. The cat never got down for the wrong person, and she never neglected to meet any and every member of our family who might be entering. The irreverent scoffer may call it "instinct," or talk about the "sense of smell." I ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... bow slackened and unbent, In some dark corner shall be leant. The robin sings, as of old, from the limb! The cat-bird croons in the lilac-bush! Through the dim arbor, himself more dim, Silently hops the hermit-thrush, The withered leaves keep dumb for him; The irreverent buccaneering bee Hath stormed and rifled the nunnery 30 Of the lily, and scattered the sacred floor With haste-dropt gold from shrine to door; There, as of yore, The rich, milk-tingeing buttercup Its tiny polished urn holds up, Filled ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... esoteric for my understanding. The sounds were unmeaning to me; not infrequently they were absolutely discordant. But I had confidence enough in the superiority of their intellects over mine not to condemn, still less to scoff. At these times I held my tongue. Genius is not improved by irreverent criticism. ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... In O'Brien's work on The Round Towers of Ireland, London, 1834, may be found much curious matter on this subject; and a good deal of light is thrown on the horrors of Serpent or Boodhist worship. It is, however, a wild and irreverent book, and by no means to be recommended to the general reader, independently of the nature of its details. Mr. Payne Knight's book is too well known ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 193, July 9, 1853 • Various
... Flintwinch had fanned on the night of his arrival. Flora Casby had been the beloved of his boyhood; and Flora was the daughter and only child of wooden-headed old Christopher (so he was still occasionally spoken of by some irreverent spirits who had had dealings with him, and in whom familiarity had bred its proverbial result perhaps), who was reputed to be rich in weekly tenants, and to get a good quantity of blood out of the stones of several unpromising courts and alleys. After some days of inquiry and research, Arthur ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... singular that the French critics of all others, they who so zealously acknowledge the remains of the theoretical writings of the ancients on literature, Aristotle, Horace, Quinctilian, &c., as infallible standards of taste, should yet distinguish themselves by the contemptuous and irreverent manner in which they speak of their poetical compositions, and especially of their dramatic literature. Look, for instance, into a book very much read,—La Harpe's Cours de Litterature. It contains many acute remarks on the French ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... Irreverent as this speech appeared, there was really no trace of such intention in his manner, and his evident profound conviction that his suggestion was practical, and not at all inconsistent with ecclesiastical dignity, would alone have been enough to touch the Padre, had not ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... were permitted, through a special interposition of the Deity and for the furtherance of His divine ends, to assemble together into a concrete form for their temporary dwelling and as a medium through which to communicate with man? And who is so irreverent as to suppose that God would now, in these days, give spirits special permission to return to earth and take upon themselves such forms for the mere purpose of tipping tables and piano-fortes, rapping upon doors, windows, and empty skulls, misspelling their own names, and murdering Lindley Murray, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... concludes: "It is right, therefore, for one man to teach another. He that doeth so joyfully, upon him shall much be bestowed by God."[14] These last words, like the last phrases of my former quotation from him, may stand perhaps in the way of some, as nowadays they may easily sound glib or irreverent. But are we less convinced that only tasks done joyfully, as labours of love, deserve the reward of fuller and finer powers, and obtain it? When Duerer thought of God, he did not only think of a mythological personage resembling an old ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... against Collins's manipulation of this tongue-in-cheek persona. They resented his irreverent wit which projected, for example, the image of an Anglican God who "talks to all mankind from corners" and who shows his back parts to Moses. They were irritated by his jesting parables, as in "The Case of Free-Seeing," and by the impertinence of ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... to earn it until the ship had neared the Yangtse-Kiang. Marked for the officers' attentions by his initial profane and irreverent comment on his transferral by the tug-captain, he was assaulted on the slightest provocation by the mates—no bigger than he or more skillful of fist, but justified by the law—and, though easily ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... occupied the second tier in the "three-decker," and decked in gown and bands delivered somnolent sermons from its upper storey. Curious stories are often told of the careless parsons of former days, of their irreverence, their love of sport, their neglect of their parishes, their quaint and irreverent manners; but such characters, about whom these stories were told, were exceptional. By far the greater number lived well and did their duty and passed away, and left no memories behind except in the tender recollections of a few simple-minded ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... reverence, greater than ever pupil felt before. He did many small kindnesses on his side, and made Hippus the confidant of all his own transactions. It is true that this intimacy had its thorns. The old man could not refrain from practicing his sharp wit on Itzig, who called him, too, by many an irreverent name when he had stupefied himself with brandy; but, on the whole, they got on capitally, and were ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... of Mercian airs Through which it once had sailed, a portent dire: And whosoe'er in after centuries knelt On Oswald's grave, and, praying, wooed his prayer, Departed, in his heart the peace of God, Passions corrupt expelled, and demon snares, Irreverent love, and ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... on you for telling such irreverent stories.) This is Mrs. Alexander Scott of Markdale. She has been very sick ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the coming of her family was no small matter. She was outrageously rebellious, flagrantly irreverent, and for every outburst Lilly ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... old monks and nuns, and by the Protestant Pietists, both English and foreign, is all in St Augustine better said than it ever has been since. Some of the Pietist hymns, as we know, are very beautiful; but there are things in them which one wishes left out; which seem, or ought to seem, irreverent when used toward God; which hurt, or ought to hurt, our plain, cool, honest English common-sense. A true Englishman does not like to say more than he feels; and the more he feels, the more he likes to keep it to himself, ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... being intimidated from proceeding, this demonstration only made Sir Roger the more determined. To have so desperate and irreverent a population coming about his house and woods now presented itself in a much more formidable aspect than ever. So, next day, not only were the placards once more hoisted, but rewards offered for the discovery of the offenders, attended with all the maledictions of the insulted majesty of ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... by the same totem with Jesus?" said the mother, who could not help shuddering a little at the temerity of her son's paradoxes, though fondly indulgent of his irreverent cleverness. ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... imagine the serious scientist and the melancholy recluse two restless mischievous boys. The irreverent young rascals amused themselves till they reached the Laulie with fancy sketches of the two gentlemen (when they were known merely as Brues and Gaun) getting into all sorts of ridiculous pickles, until Harry checked the nonsensical chatter by remarking, "Every man ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... standing in English literature is of equal consequence with genius. The poor Irish governess cannot find a publisher, but Lady Morgan takes both critics and readers by storm. A duchess's name on the title-page protects the fool in the letter-press; irreverent republicanism is not yet so great a respecter of persons. I was often invited out to dinner, and went to the expense of a dress-coat and kids, without which one passes the genteel British portal at his peril; but found that both the expense and the stateliness of "society" were onerous. ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... who had died in the intervening time, and inter them in one common sepulcher, lined with choice furs, and marked with a mound of wood, stone, or earth. Such is the origin of those immense tumuli filed with the mortal remains of nations and generations, which the antiquary, with irreverent curiosity, so frequently chances upon in all portions of our territory. Throughout Central America the same usage obtained in various localities, as early writers and existing monuments abundantly testify. Instead of interring the bones, were they those of ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... always seemed to hedge him round like the divinity that doth hedge a king. What man was he who would lay his hand familiarly upon his shoulder and call him Waldo? No disciple of Father Mathew would be likely to do such a thing. There may have been such irreverent persons, but if any one had so ventured at the "Saturday Club," it would have produced a sensation like Brummel's "George, ring the bell," to the Prince Regent. His ideas of friendship, as of love, seem almost too exalted for our earthly conditions, ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Regarded from this point of view, the Last Judgment was an unparalleled success. As such the contemporaries of Buonarroti hailed it. Still, the breath of life has exaled from all those bodies, and the tyranny of the schematic ideal of form is felt in each of them. Without meaning to be irreverent, we might fancy that two elastic lay-figures, one male, the other female, both singularly similar in shape, supplied the materials for the total composition. Of the dramatic intentions and suggestions underlying these plastic and elastic shapes I am not ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... putting its hat off and on, and feeling of its clothes. Our guide took it from them, not unkindly, and put it back on the altar; and whether the reader will agree with me or not, I must own that I did not find the incident irreverent or without a certain touchingness, as if those children and He were all of one family and they were at ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... great storm of the times. Now and then they 'rally'—there was one ghastly wig-and-hollow-pumpkin effort at recovery in the trembling, rattle-jointed Peace Movement of these last summer months. Where is it now? There answers a gay laugh and merry stave from the corners of irreverent weekly newspapers:— ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various |
