"Second-rate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... indeed the most splendid of the schools of elegance; and it is not without reason that the best performances in this lower school are valued higher than the second-rate performances of those above them; for every picture has value when it has a decided character, and is excellent in its kind. But the student must take care not to be so much dazzled with this splendour as to be tempted to imitate what must ultimately lead from perfection. Poussin, whose ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... cartoons and witticisms; the stage dared to spread the contemptible misinformation; women either smiled or remained indifferent. The impression became general and fixed that women were gallinaceous, that a hen-like philosophy characterised the sex; that they were, at best, second-rate humans, tagging rather gratefully at the heels of the Lords of Creation, unconcerned with the greater and vital ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... back at Lucullus, Caesar, Pompey, Sylla, Titus, Trajan. What's old Cheops' pyramid to the Flavian amphitheatre? What is the many-gated Thebes to Nero's golden house, while it was? What the grandest palace of Sesostris or Ptolemy but a second-rate villa of any one of ten thousand Roman citizens? Our houses stand on acres of ground, they ascend as high as the Tower of Babylon; they swarm with columns like a forest; they pullulate into statues and pictures. The walls, pavements, ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... chair. People nowadays say that the real dignity and importance have perished out of the office, as they do, sooner or later, out of all earthly institutions, leaving only a painted and gilded shell like that of an Easter egg, and that it is only second-rate and third-rate men who now condescend to be ambitious of the Mayoralty. I felt a little grieved at this; for the original emigrants of New England had strong sympathies with the people of London, who were mostly Puritans in religion and Parliamentarians in politics, in the ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... effort. It is from secondary impressions divorced from reality that a society imagines itself diseased when it is healthy, or healthy when it is diseased. And it is from secondary impressions divorced from reality that springs the amazing power of the little second-rate public man in those modern machines that think themselves democracies. This last is a power which, luckily, cannot be greatly abused, for the men upon whom it is thrust are not capable even of abuse upon a great scale. It is none the less marvellous ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... traditional ideas and supposed, with uninquiring philanthropy, that in blackening Alexander they were doing humanity good service. But also, without doubt, many of his assailants, like those of other great men, have been mainly instigated by "that strongest of all antipathies, the antipathy of a second-rate mind to a first-rate one," [De Stael.] and by the envy which talent too ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... mind is of the commonplace order, and incapable of a true appreciation either of the character or the works of such a man as Michel Angelo. He has no sympathetic insight into the depths of human nature. Nor has he the method and power of arrangement, such as may often be found in otherwise second-rate biographers, which might enable him to set forth the external facts of a life in such lucid and intelligible order as to exhibit the force of circumstances and position in moulding the character. His ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... a place in a second-rate establishment on Main Street. The work was hard; it necessitated long hours and continual standing on her feet. Rose was not rugged enough to accustom herself to the work all at once, and she was discharged. This disheartened her, but she kept on trying ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... have been made of timber from the Spanish Armada, for the simple reason that it was set up thirteen years before the Armada was organised. The busts of "doubting" Lord Eldon and his brother, Lord Stowell, the great Admiralty judge, are by Behnes. The portraits are chiefly second-rate copies. The exterior was cased with stone, in "wretched taste," in 1757. The diary of an Elizabethan barrister, named Manningham, preserved in the Harleian Miscellanies, has preserved the interesting fact that in this hall in February, 1602—probably, says Mr. Collier, six months after its ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... that gave zest to the sport of annexing him. Besides, his eyes are very fine, and, if souls really shine through eyes, showed that he was refreshingly innocent. I expect, too, that there was something piquant in the company of the clerk who takes the money at the door of a second-rate entertainment. Mrs. Ascher has often told me that she is more interested in life than in anything else, even art. She distinguishes between life and real life. Mine, I gather, is not nearly so real as that of a ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... time thereafter, Tims felt vaguely uncomfortable, remembering Mildred's outburst of vehement bitterness on the subject of love. It was so unlike her usual careless tone, which implied that it was men's business, or weakness, to be in love with women, and that only second-rate women ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... still interpreted the fallen emperor, and that he now completed, as it would seem, the abandoned poem of 1860. He saw in him a man of generous impulses doubled with a borne politician, a ruler of genuine Liberal and even democratic proclivities, which the timid calculations of a second-rate opportunist reduced to a contemptible travesty of Liberalism. The shifting standpoints of such a man are reproduced with superfluous fidelity in his supposed Defence, which seems designed to be as elusive and impalpable as the character it reflects. How unlike the brilliant and precise realism ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... houses were all old, second-rate concerns; he should hope the rent was under a hundred a year; it hurt him more than he could have said, to think of a Forsyte—his own son living ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... preposterous that this young upstart foreman on a second-rate ranch like Landson's should deliberately ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... and is able to communicate them to subjects which appear by no means adapted to receive them. A ladder against the sky has no very promising appearance of possessing a capacity to excite any heroic ideas, and the Ark in the hands of a second-rate master would have little more effect than a common waggon on the highway; yet those subjects are so poetically treated throughout, the parts have such a correspondence with each other, and the whole and every part of the scene is so visionary, that it is impossible to look at them ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... the poet, smiling, "no one can be great in a century prefaced by the reign of a Napoleon. We are a tribe of would-be great poets; besides, second-rate talent imitates genius nowadays, ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... moral discussions, that at the best are very second-rate eloquence, and at the worst are respect destroying, mind destroying gabble, there are various forms of "ethical" teaching, advocated and practised in America and in the elementary schools of this country. ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... second-rate Europeans of all races who made up the second cabin, the man who called himself Strange had selected the man who called himself Durand by some obscure instinct of affinity. "He looks like an old chap who could give one information," was Strange's own way of ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... of the right words. Orators and writers there are a many who never fail to find a word, and a good word, for the rounding of their sentences. But Shakespeare's words are not merely good words; they are the best words. Even the bare vocabulary of Burke or Macaulay would seem second-rate beside the vocabulary of Shakespeare. It is a commonplace to dilate upon the fact that Shakespeare has used 15,000 words, while Milton, our poet of widest reading and erudition, has but 8,000. I do not attach so much importance to that enumeration. The subjects, ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... a woman, my dear Elizabeth," she said to me as I was helping her to dress, "to leave my comfortable fireside after dinner for the sake of seeing second-rate conjuring." ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... contradistinction from the civic emancipation, which had been bestowed by the dominant nationalities upon the Jews as an act of grace and which does not safeguard them against anti-Semitism and the humiliating position of second-rate citizens. The Jewish people can be restored, if, instead of many places of refuge scattered all over the globe, it will be concentrated in one politically guaranteed place of refuge. For this purpose a general ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... course, the English season has just finished, and the French people haven't begun to come yet, and Aix is hot, and dull, and empty! Really, isn't it trying? There are even only second-rate cocottes about, none of the smart ones yet! I am dying of the blues. Besides I have to take the baths, although I don't want them, because the only way I managed to persuade John to come here was by pretending I needed them! When I think of you ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... River in exchange for a reciprocity treaty. Pearl River is an extensive, deep, and well-protected bay, about ten miles from Honolulu. It would answer admirably for a naval station; and if the United States were a second-rate power likely to be bullied by other nations, we might need a naval station in the Pacific Ocean. In our present condition, when no single power dares to make war with us, and when, unless we become shamelessly aggressive, no alliance of European ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... requires evidently a different method of arrangement: it might be awkward for the inhabitants of Hyde Park were no hatters to be found nearer than the Tower. But what is Berezdah compared even with a second-rate European city? However, in a crowd, it yields to none: the streets at this time of the day are thronged to choking, and, to make matters worse, a huge splay-footed camel every now and then, heaving ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... knows of any family that wants a charwoman or could give me any sort of work. There's more than one kind of thing I could turn my hand to—needle-work, for instance. I could make a child's frock as well, I believe, as a second-rate dressmaker. Can you tell me who was the first tailor, Hector? It was God himself. He made coats of skins for Adam and ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... signed by James J. Selby, a tailor, dated at Raleigh, June 24, 1824, offering a reward of ten dollars for the capture and return of two runaways: "apprentice boys, legally bound, named William and Andrew Johnson." The last named boy was the same Andrew Johnson who later became a distinctly second-rate President of the United States. Also there was a peculiarly tragic Civil War memento, consisting of a note which was found clasped in the dead hand of Colonel Isaac Avery, of the 6th North Carolina Regiment, who was killed ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... so very much to tell. The address you gave me turned out to be a boarding house just as you suspected it might—a second-rate place but apparently highly respectable, kept by a Mrs. Sheehan. It's been under the same management at the same place for a good many years. It wasn't very much trouble for me to find out what you wanted to know, because the ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... though I did not know him; but it is hard to be cut off so young and so rich: old rich men seldom deserve to live, but he did a thousand generous acts. You will be diverted with a speech of Lord Shelburne,(669) one of those second-rate fortunes who have not above five-and-thirty thousand pounds a year. He says, every body may attain some one point if they give all their attention to it; for his part, he knows he has no great capacity, he could not make a figure by his parts; he shall content himself with being one of the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... sudden stop and speaking with considerable confidence] You don't understand these things, my darling, how could you? In one respect I am unlike the poet in the play. I have followed the Greek ideal and not neglected the culture of my body. Your husband would make a tolerable second-rate heavy weight if he were in training and ten years younger. As it is, he could, if strung up to a great effort by a burst of passion, give a good account of himself for perhaps fifteen seconds. But I am active enough to keep out ...
— How He Lied to Her Husband • George Bernard Shaw
... believe what you say, but you do not seem to understand that the very reason why you will make a successful salesman is this nervous dread of failure. When you meet a man who doesn't care a copper cent whether trade is good or not you have met a second-rate man. Trade can only be secured by persistent and hard work. A man of your disposition will be pulling wires and ingratiating himself into the good will of his customers, while your contented man is playing billiards or ...
— A Man of Samples • Wm. H. Maher
... huge and ungainly bulk, and into his animal face, and made no direct answer. Love! Six millions of dollars is a great sum. Money may buy youth and beauty, but love does not come at its call. God's highest gifts are free; only the second-rate things can be bought with money. Did this sordid old man yearn for pure human love amid his millions? Did such a dream cast a momentary glamour over a life spent in raking among the muck-heaps? If so, it passed away, ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... first of the moderns,' though he shows himself in many descriptions of pictures quite awake to the beauty manufactured by man, has in no way anticipated the modern discovery that nature is beautiful. To readers who have had enough of the pathetic fallacy, and of the second-rate novelist's local colour, Lucian's tacit assumption that there is nothing but man is refreshing. That he was a close enough observer of human nature, any one can satisfy himself by glancing at the Feast of Lapithae, the Dialogues of the Hetaerae, some of ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... that the better the grazing soil the larger the animal may be; the poorer the soil, the smaller the animal. Small animals are, unquestionably, much more easily fed, and they are well known by experienced men to be best adapted to second-rate feeding pastures. ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... exhibition would have been considered the worst taste, but nobody was disgusted, and many were delighted. They had begun to fear that Eustace was getting humdrum. This harlequinade after the pantomime at the church—for what is a modern smart wedding but a second-rate pantomime?—put them into a good humour, and made them feel that, after all, they had got something for their presents. And so the happy pair passed through a dreary rain of rice to the mysteries of that Bluebeard's Chamber, ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... of distinction were also in the town at the time. Carriages and other conveyances were arriving every minute from London and elsewhere; and when among the rest a shabby stage-coach came in by a by-route along the coast from Havenpool, and drew up at a second-rate tavern, it ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... Count to marry Beatrice. It is Beatrice's intention to do nothing rashly, but to take as much time as she can get for making up her mind, and then to do exactly as she pleases. She perfectly appreciates her own position and knows that she can either marry a rich man of second-rate family, or a poor man of good blood, a younger son or a half ruined gentleman at large like San Miniato, and she hesitates. She is not quite sure of the value of money yet. It might be delightful to be even much richer than she is, because there are so many ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... this about his wife People had said how extraordinarily Aylmer must have been in love to have married that uninteresting girl, no-one in particular, not pretty and a little second-rate. As a matter of fact the marriage had happened entirely by accident. It had occurred through a misunderstanding during a game of consequences in a country house. She was terribly literal. Having taken some joke of his seriously, she had sent him a touchingly ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... it is merely blank verse of an inferior quality, and we hope that Mr. Coleridge in his next novel will not ask us to accept second-rate poetry as musical prose. For, that Mr. Coleridge is a young writer of great ability and culture cannot be doubted and, indeed, in spite of the error we have pointed out, Demetrius remains one of the most fascinating and delightful novels ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... that British authorship should be protected (as it now practically is) at the cost of our own, and for the benefit of such publishers as are willing to convey an English book without paying for it. The reprint of a second-rate work by an English author has not only the advantage of a stolen cheapness over a first-rate one on the same subject by an American, but may even be the means of suppressing it altogether. The intellectual position ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... him with Balzac; but the intolerable dulness which encumbers the depth of Wilhelm Meister, and the cruel reserve which conceals from all but the intensest readers the meaning of Faust, have made him, in a great degree, an evil influence in European literature; and Evil is always second-rate. ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... we ain't cut our eye-teeth!" And he would instantly begin speculating as to whether this was a new scheme for selling him second-rate nursery stock, or the smooth introduction of another ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... starting, and to pick you up in case you fail. When you have demonstrated the suitability of apergy," he continued, "and the habitability of Jupiter and Saturn—,which, with their five and eight moons, respectively, and rings thrown in, must both be vastly superior to our little second-rate globe—we will see what can be done towards changing our orbit, and if we cannot swing a little nearer to our new world or worlds. Then we'll lower, or rather raise, the boats in the shape of numerous Callistos, and have a landing-party ready at each opposition, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... mind the wide sands are a stumbling-block. Silting up with the years, they have closed the river to navigation, and converted our once famous Roman city of Chester into a sleepy, second-rate market-town. The great flood of commerce from the New World sweeps contemptuously past our estuary, and finds its clearing-house under the eternal, assertive smoke clouds which camouflage the miles of throbbing docks and slums called Liverpool—little more than a dozen miles distant. ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... flush of youthful success, soon to become the idol of France and the terror of Europe, before whom the boy, now Kaiser Wilhelm, and his royal family fled to Koenigsberg by the Baltic, while the conqueror held Berlin and reduced Prussia to a second-rate province. To this boy the flames of burning Moscow were a transient aurora-borealis under the pole-star; and Nelson and Wellington were unknown to the stories of his childhood, for as yet their fame was not. Goethe and Schiller ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... believing that the real, satisfying things are complex and difficult to obtain. Our lives become unnaturally stressed and tormented by the pitiless and incessant struggle for social conditions which are, at best, second-rate and ultimately disappointing. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... bar or sand-bank, that rendered the approach of our largest ships of war impracticable, and of the smaller craft difficult and dangerous. Within the bar, however, there was a place called Five Fathom Hole, with a sufficient depth of water to float second-rate ships; and here nine American ships were moored, under the American commodore Whipple. Behind the bar and Whipple's squadron there was Fort Moultrie, upon Sullivan's Island, which was now much stronger than when, in a previous year, it repulsed Clinton, and cut up Sir Peter ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... out immense possibilities for producers and writers of thoroughly good photoplay serials. Whereas in the past many serials were to be seen only in the second-rate houses, on account of the fact that their impossibly thrilling situations and weird plots appealed only to the juvenile and less intelligent spectators, now with the improvement in the stories of serial pictures has come an increase in the spectators who ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... This is a small deciduous shrub, with ovate leaves, and short racemes of pretty pure white flowers. A not very hardy species, and only second-rate as ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster
... lingerings at a certain howff, place of resort, called the Globe Tavern, which boded no good. There were also intromissions with a certain company of players then resident in Dumfries, and writings of such prologues for their second-rate pieces, as many a penny-a-liner could have done to order as well. Political ballads, too, came from his pen, siding with this or that party in local elections, all which things as we read, we feel as if we saw some noble high-bred racer harnessed ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... enemy, yet we see with what courage he attacks Turnus when he faces and renews the combat. I need say no more, for Virgil defends himself without needing my assistance, and proves his hero truly to deserve that name. He was not, then, a second-rate champion, as they would have him who think fortitude the ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... utter it in such a fashion that there is no more to say in that fashion. The dreary imitation Iliads, the impossible sham Divina Commedias, the Sheridan-Knowles Shakespearian plays, rise up and terrify or bore us. Whereas these second-rate experimenters, these adventurers in quest of what they themselves hardly know, strike out paths, throw seed, sketch designs which others afterwards pursue, and plant out, and fill up. There are probably not many persons now who would ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Dewidale immediately after my breakfast. I have made arrangements for boarding in this house, which is a second-rate commercial inn. They have agreed to give me board and lodging for twenty shillings a week—the full amount of my stipend: so all that I gain by my researches in the affairs of the departed Matthew ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... them would have gladly abandoned have connected their office with a smile. The nature of it has for the most part filled the Sees with men of second-rate abilities. The latest and most singular theory about them is that of the modern English Neo-Catholic, who disregards his bishop's advice, and despises his censures; but looks on him nevertheless as some high-bred, worn-out ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... system; but anything like a discriminating knowledge of our public men I could not meet. Webster had been heard of everywhere. They assured me that our really great men were known, our really great deeds appreciated; but this is not true. They make mistakes in their measure of our men; second-rate men who have travelled are of course known to the men whom they have met; these travellers have not perhaps thought it necessary to mention that they represent a secondary class of people, ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... losing their regard or respect, yet he would have been half pained and half amused if he had known how foolishly his plans, which came in time to be his ward's also, were smiled and frowned upon in the Oldfields houses. Conformity is the inspiration of much second-rate virtue. If we keep near a certain humble level of morality and achievement, our neighbors are willing to let us slip through life unchallenged. Those who anticipate the opinions and decisions of society must expect to be ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... to speak to Wolgemut about my brother, and to ask him whether he can give him work until I get back, or whether he can find employment with others. [Editor's note: Drer's brother was Hans Drer, who was fifteen at this date. He became a painter of second-rate ability, and afterwards helped Albrecht in the decoration of the Emperor Maximilian's prayer book]. I should like to have brought him with me to Venice, which would have been useful both to me and to him and he would have learned the language, ...
— Memoirs of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries - [This is our volunteer's translation of the title] • Albrecht Durer
... we can do better with our class of readers by livening up the appearance of our headlines than we could with second-rate pictures." ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... alone, Lizzy came to me, looking like a dead body out of which the soul had been crushed. She had been hurt, I told you:—she came to me with an open letter in her hand. It was from the manager of one of the second-rate opera-troupes. The girl can sing, and has a curious dramatic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... found it good to be neglected, plenty of Jeremy Diddlers (in letters and statesmanship as often as in money-matters) have lived to a serene old age, but the man who in any of the unuseful arts insists on doing what Nature never asked him to do has no place in the world. Leslie, a second-rate man in all respects, but with a genuine talent rightly directed, an obscure American, with few friends, no influential patrons, and a modesty that would never let him obtrude his claims, worked steadily forward to competence, to reputation, and the Council of the Academy. The only ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... "I make three assortments in fortune—first-rate, second-rate, and third-rate fortunes. I call those first-rate which are composed of treasures one possesses under one's hand, such as mines, lands, and funded property, in such states as France, Austria, and England, provided these treasures and property form a ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... eager enthusiasm, every outre, unnatural fashion that comes from the most dissipated foreign circles,—she is in bad taste, because she does not represent either her character, her education, or her good points. She looks like a second-rate actress, when she is, in fact, a most thoroughly respectable, estimable, lovable little girl, and on the way, as we poor fellows fondly hope, to bless some one of us with her tenderness and care in some nice home in ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... which he loved, the materials of beauty, in precisely that temperament which he studies so patiently and so cruelly. Madame Bovary is a little woman, half vulgar and half hysterical, incapable of a fine passion; but her trivial desires, her futile aspirations after second-rate pleasures and second-hand ideals, give to Flaubert all that he wants: the opportunity to create beauty out of reality. What is common in the imagination of Madame Bovary becomes exquisite in Flaubert's rendering of it, and by that counterpoise of a commonness ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... are mean contests; struggles which leave you disenchanted, and wearied, and depraved, and all in pure waste; for it often happens that you put forth all your strength to win laurels for a man whom you despise, and maintain, in spite of yourself, that some second-rate writer is ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... Finot five hundred francs for every puff in a first-class newspaper, and already there were ten of them; three hundred francs for every second-rate paper, and there were ten of those,—in all of them Cephalic Oil was mentioned three times a month! Finot saw three thousand francs for himself out of these eight thousand—his first stake on the vast green ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... French was unquestionably the language of the well-born and the witty as it was the favorite language of the learned all over the Continent. The reputation of Voltaire, Diderot, d'Alembert, and Rousseau, was distinctly European. Frederick of Prussia was glad to compose his academy at Berlin of second-rate French men of letters, and to make his own attempts at literary distinction in the French language. Smaller German princes modeled their courts on that of Versailles, and ruined themselves in palaces and gardens that were distant copies of those of that famous suburb. ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... a better show of reason—though I admit that the reason itself was quite inadmissible. Oh, quite! I had made up my mind that if my late helmsman was to be eaten, the fishes alone should have him. He had been a very second-rate helmsman while alive, but now he was dead he might have become a first-class temptation, and possibly cause some startling trouble. Besides, I was anxious to take the wheel, the man in pink pyjamas showing himself a hopeless duffer at ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... nothing remained but to rearrange our goods, that nearly everything should be ready for the mules when they arrived before daybreak. Knowing that the first day's ride was a long one, some forty miles over an indifferent road and with second-rate animals, I was anxious to leave the city as soon as ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... cactus. I saw bleached bones and a side-cast skull with whitened horns, poking up into the sky ... I saw a sick steer straggling alone, exactly like some melodramatic painting of Western life ... the kind we see hanging for sale in second-rate art stores. ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... transferred to Egypt, and thus we are indebted to the Ptolemies for preserving to our times all the best specimens of Greek literature which have come down to us. This encouragement of letters, however, called forth no great original genius; but a few eminent men of science, many second-rate and artificial poets, and a host of ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... to work has come to be the secret of success in modern business and the employer who has nothing but wages to offer, nothing in his own passion for work which he can make catching to others, can only get second-rate, half-hearted men and plodders about him. A factory in which the workmen merely work for wages, cannot hope to compete with a factory fitted up with picked ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... I will. I have another field you know, in which I may be more useful. Cole here's a better technician than fighter—and a darned good fighter, too—and I think that an inexperienced space-captain is a lot less useful than a second-rate physicist at work in a laboratory. If we hope to get anywhere, or for that matter, I suspect, stay anywhere, we'll have to do a lot ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... not least of the banking business, that they should be made constantly by the same persons; the chain of transactions must pass through the same minds. A large business may be managed tolerably by a quiet group of second-rate men if those men be always the same; but it cannot be managed at all by a fluctuating body, even of the very cleverest men. You might as well attempt to guide the affairs of the nation by means ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... see wherein lies the pre-eminence of the work you have just heard? I can explain it in a few words. There are two kinds of music: one, petty, poor, second-rate, always the same, based on a hundred or so of phrases which every musician has at his command, a more or less agreeable form of babble which most composers live in. We listen to their strains, their would-be melodies, with more or less satisfaction, ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... convention of old-fashioned tavern-signs) as they gather at evening to debate in mass meeting their windy politics, or to gossip at their tent-doors over the events of the day. Their port is grave, and their stalk across the turf as martial as that of a second-rate ghost in Hamlet. They never meddled with my corn, so ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... flinching for the furious charge of the Wild Boar and driving his hunting-knife into him behind his shoulder? Besides, if the actual assault is without danger, the approach is attended with a difficulty that increases the merit of these second-rate poachers. The coveted game is invisible. It is confined in the stronghold of a cell and moreover protected by the surrounding wall of a cocoon. Of what prowess must not the mother be capable to determine the ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... also he had amused him, and sometimes he had surprised him into a sort of admiration; for Brown had a temperament capable of little inspirations—such a literary inspiration as might come to a second-rate actor—and Charley never belittled any man's ability, but seized upon every sign of knowledge with the appreciation of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Manfred cannot be blamed for this withering sterility, this dead-sea of ineptitude. There must be some form of literature found, loose and lax enough to express the Moral Idealism of the second-rate mind; and Poetic Drama lends itself beautifully ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Second-rate, imitative singers may indeed assume the role of genuine lyric poets, but they cannot play it without detection. It is literally true that natural lyrists like Sappho, Burns, Goethe, Heine, "sing as the bird sings." Once ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... right to look down on the mob of cities. I'll tell you, though, if you want to know it, what is the real offence of Boston. It drains a large water-shed of its intellect, and will not itself be drained. If it would only send away its first-rate men, instead of its second-rate ones, (no offence to the well-known exceptions, of which we are always proud,) we should be spared such epigrammatic remarks as that which the gentleman has quoted. There can never be a real metropolis in this country, until the biggest ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to produce certain second-rate phenomena are not rare, good mediums are not easy to discover; they are less rare, however, than the bones of Anthropopithecus erectus. When a good medium is discovered it is not necessary to call a committee together and put the value he may have for science ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... number which he gave made the two well-to-do men stare. But they said nothing, though the looks they cast back at the second-rate quarters they were leaving, so far below the elegant apartment house they had visited first, were sufficiently expressive. The scale of descent from luxury to positive discomfort was proving a rapid one and prepared them for the dismal, ill-cared-for, altogether ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... quoi, Ralph. The creatures have no sense to be robbed of. They are second-rate fashion, which is only worked by machinery. They imitate us as monkeys do, without knowing what they aim at. Their women have virtuous instincts, but turn wanton rather than not be like the maids of honour; and because we have ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... letter of recommendation with which he had provided himself for that monarch; and he hastened to the palace, where he obtained admission, he tells us, more easily than he could have done at Paris at the house of a second-rate banker. We were not aware that the French bureaucratie of the day were of such difficult access, and would strongly advise them, since it is so, to take pattern by his Belgian majesty; who in this instance, however, was not at Brussels at all, but at his country palace of Lacken, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... with wretched stalls, cannot show a single good stock of goods, although Bassora is the principal emporium and trading port for the Indian wares imported into Turkey. There are several coffee-stalls and a second-rate caravansary in the bazaar. A large open space, not very remarkable for cleanliness, serves in the day as a corn-market; and in the evening several hundred guests are to be seen seated before a large coffee-stall, drinking coffee and ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... the affairs of the three great Atlantic democracies have been largely in the hands not of selected men but of delegated men, men of intrigue and the party machine, of dodges rather than initiatives, second-rate men. When Lord Haldane, defending his party for certain insufficiencies in their preparation for the eventuality of the great war, pleaded that they had no "mandate" from the country to do anything of the sort, he did more than commit political ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... smattering of many subjects, but a grasp of none. 'I soon weary of a pursuit,' he said to me, laughing; it would almost appear as if he took a pride in his incapacity and lack of moral courage. The results of his dilettanteism are to be seen in every field; he is a bad fencer, a second-rate horseman, dancer, shot; he sings - I have heard him - and he sings like a child; he writes intolerable verses in more than doubtful French; he acts like the common amateur; and in short there is no end to the number of the things that he does, and does ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... new piety he had caught the very phraseology and intonation of its everyday professors, even those very tricks of bad logic at which he had been used to laugh. Ruth had always supposed, for example, that the presumption of instructing the Deity in appropriate conduct was impossible even to second-rate minds until by imitation slowly acquired as a habit. It was monstrous to her that he should so suddenly and all unconsciously be guilty of it. Indeed for the moment these small evidences of the change in him distressed ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... masters formed this child by all the arts of mind and hand—her mother directed her to ambition. The second-rate position of this mother at the house of her opulent protector, formed the child to the plasticity and adulation which her mother's domestic condition required and illustrated. At sixteen years of age her precocious beauty and musical talent caused her to be already sought ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... had experienced a certain melancholy in advancing the figure by ten, and whatever position he had acquired within his party, within the circle of his friends, his dream was to reach still higher, he was tired of playing second-rate parts, and eager to stand before the footlights in full blaze, in the ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... twenty yards of the wild beasts' den, on the other side of the barricade, sounded strange; but Mr. Frere thought nothing of it. Familiarity destroys terror, and the incurable flirt, fluttered her muslins, and played off her second-rate graces, under the noses of the grinning convicts, with as much complacency as if she had been in a Chatham ball-room. Indeed, if there had been nobody else near, it is not unlikely that she would have disdainfully fascinated ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... expand, three years were added to that age, Mr. Templeton was most deeply in love. Mary was indeed lovely,—her disposition naturally good and gentle, but her education worse than neglected. To the frivolities and meannesses of a second-rate fashion, inculcated into her till her father's death, had now succeeded the quackeries, the slavish subservience, the intolerant bigotries, of a transcendental superstition. In a change so abrupt and violent, the whole character of the poor girl was shaken; ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... St. Stephen. The spire has been long distinguished for its elegance and height. Probably these are the most appropriate, if not the only, epithets of commendation which can be applied to it. After Strasbourg and Ulm, it appears a second-rate edifice. Not but what the spire may even vie with that of the former, and the nave may be yet larger than that of the latter: but, as a whole, it is much inferior to either—even allowing for the palpable falling off in the nave of Strasbourg ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... one finds in Adam Blair, will always make Hawthorne's tale less touching to a large number of even very intelligent readers, than a love-story told with the robust, synthetic pathos which served Lockhart so well. His novel is not of the first rank (I should call it an excellent second-rate one), but it borrows a charm from the fact that his vigorous, but not strongly imaginative, mind was impregnated with the reality of his subject. He did not always succeed in rendering this reality; the expression is sometimes ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... far as I know, to one or other of two objects. Either they propose to give the student a power of dexterous sketching with pencil or water-color, so as to emulate (at considerable distance) the slighter work of our second-rate artists; or they propose to give him such accurate command of mathematical forms as may afterwards enable him to design rapidly and cheaply for manufactures. When drawing is taught as an accomplishment, the first is the aim usually proposed; while the ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... discussing the plays with her, listening to her clear little silver voice pronouncing judgment. Gerda might be forever mediocre in any form of artistic expression, but she was an artist, with the artist's love of merit and scorn of the second-rate. ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... Square had their reasons for not liking Mrs. Pennycherry. Indeed it might have been difficult to discover any human being with reasons for liking that sharp-featured lady. Maybe the keeping of second-rate boarding houses in the neighbourhood of Bloomsbury does not tend to develop the ...
— Passing of the Third Floor Back • Jerome K. Jerome
... in the air, some great thing had gone for ever from the world and left it empty. He found himself regarding the brilliant career which he had planned for himself with a sudden disfavour. It was only second-rate after all, that glittering old world of courts and legislatures and embassies. For a moment he had had a glimpse of the firstrate, and it had shivered his pretty palaces. He wanted now something which he did not think ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... cheap American cloth, the waterproof apron was threadbare, and one of the splash-boards was split. The harness also was of the most ancient description, and the rough pony badly needed clipping, so that the whole turn-out was deplorably shabby and second-rate. ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... pretend to write or enlarge upon a new subject. Much has been said and written—and well said and written too—on the art of fishing; but loch-fishing per se has been rather looked upon as a second-rate performance, and to dispel this idea is one of the objects for which this present treatise has been written. Far be it from us to say anything against fishing, lawfully practised in any form; but many pent up in our large towns will bear us out when we say that, on the ...
— Scotch Loch-Fishing • AKA Black Palmer, William Senior
... the second-rate ones are a loquacious multitude, while the great come only one or two in a century; and then, silently)—all second-rate artists will tell you that the object of fine art is not resemblance, but some kind of abstraction more refined than reality. Put that out of your heads ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... "It's always second-rate," said his wife, passionately. "Third-rate, fourth-rate! Godolphin was quite right about that. I wish you were writing a novel, Brice, instead of a play. Then you would be ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... kilometres to Orleans, one of the most historic and, at the same time, one of the most uninteresting cities in France, a place wholly without local dignity and distinction. Its hotels, cafes, and shops are only second-rate for a place of its rank, and the manners and customs of its people but weak imitations of those of Paris. You can get anything you may need in the automobile line most capably attended to, and you can be housed and fed comfortably enough in either of the two leading hotels, but ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... sword of the League; or if matters actually came to a war, might make the issue of it doubtful. But, unfortunately, private interests dissolved the band of union which should have held together the Protestant members of the empire. This critical conjuncture found none but second-rate actors on the political stage, and the decisive moment was neglected because the courageous were deficient in power, and the powerful in sagacity, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... never read her, of course. Life is far too long and lovely for that sort of thing; but a bishop once told me that she was a great artist, and that if she had a sense of gravity, she would rival George Eliot. Dickens had probably no sense of humour. That is why he makes second-rate people die of laughing. Oscar Wilde was utterly mistaken when he wrote the 'Picture of Dorian Gray.' After Dorian's act of cruelty, the picture ought to have grown more sweet, more saintly, more ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... know she has never tried to do so. A recent example comes to mind in Maria Marco, the Spanish soprano, who sings music of her own country in her own language with absolutely irresistible effect, but on one occasion when she attempted Vissi d'Arte she was transformed immediately into a second-rate Italian singer. Even her gestures, ordinarily fully of grace and meaning, ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... people whom he had met with abroad, quaint comparisons between the social customs of various nations, illustrated by examples drawn from men and women indiscriminately all over Europe, humorous confessions of the innocent follies of his own early life, when he ruled the fashions of a second-rate Italian town, and wrote preposterous romances on the French model for a second-rate Italian newspaper—all flowed in succession so easily and so gaily from his lips, and all addressed our various curiosities ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... that the incidental verse in some of his other works, notably in the Flower of Fidelity, a romance published in 1650, is distinctly on a more respectable level than his prose. The ascription, however, to John Reynolds has not very much to support it. Phillips' authority is second-rate at best, and is not likely to be at its best in the present case. It is indeed surprising that he should have been acquainted with this early translation rather than with that by John Dancer, which appeared in 1660, and must have been far more generally ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... other praise. The reason of all this is twofold; partly in the book, and partly in the reader. The backbone dislikes the raising of any question which it deems to have been decided: a peculiarity which at once puts it in opposition to all fine work, and to nearly all passable second-rate work. It also dislikes being confronted with anything that it considers "unpleasant," that is to say, interesting. It has a genuine horror of the truth neat. It quite honestly asks "to be taken out of itself," unaware that to ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... animating intercourse with other men, Mr. Mill would probably have been the first to admit. Where that intercourse can be had, nothing is more fit to make the judgment robust, nothing more fit to freshen and revive our interests, and to clothe them with reality. Even second-rate companionship has some clear advantages. The question is, whether these advantages outweigh the equally clear disadvantages. Mr. Mill was persuaded that they ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... said, "it was a great deal easier. The next thing I wanted to do was to get the children examined for glasses and throat trouble. There were two second-rate country doctors there who knew little or nothing about modern medicine. The nearest man that I could trust was forty miles away. He was a specialist, too, and high priced. Still, I sat down and wrote him a letter, telling him how we were fixed. He answered ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... gone at once to the scene of the accident, considered it judicious to inform her of Geoffrey's condition, and so it happened that one evening Helen accompanied her hostess to witness the performance of a Western dramatic company. Despite second-rate acting the play was a pretty one, and each time the curtain went down Helen found the combination of bright light, pretty dresses, laughter and merry voices strangely pleasant after her isolation. At times her thoughts would wander back to the ice-bound canyon and the man ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... office open, and Miss Norton appeared. The mistress looked carefully up and down the village, then walked hurriedly across the road, and bolted into "The Royal George" opposite. Marjorie gasped. That the august house mistress of St. Elgiva's should visit an obscure and second-rate public-house was surely a most unusual circumstance. She could not understand it at all. She discussed it with ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... attempt. All the same, I am deeply stupid, in bed with a cold, deprived of my amanuensis, and conscious of the wish but not the furnished will. You may be interested to hear how the family inquiries go. It is now quite certain that we are a second-rate lot, and came out of Cunningham or Clydesdale, therefore BRITISH folk; so that you are Cymry on both sides, and I Cymry and Pict. We may have fought with King Arthur and known Merlin. The first of the family, Stevenson of Stevenson, was quite a great ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had been dependent on an allowance from his father. Either she lived with them and bore cheerfully and tactfully with their increasing crotchetiness and impatience of old age, or left them to eke out a purposely small income in a second-rate hotel or a six by six apartment barely on the edge of the map. A timid woman, all for peace, without the grit and courage that goes with self-direction, she pursued the easy policy of least resistance, sacrificed her youth on the altar of Comfort ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... be, it is an inconvenience and an imperfection that ought to be palliated; but we aggravate it. The first-rate actor always does his best, because the audience expect it, and reward him with their applause; but no one cares for, or observes, the performer of second-rate talents: whether he be perfect in his part, and exert himself to the utmost, or be slovenly and negligent throughout, he is unpraised and unblamed. The general effect, therefore, of our tragedies, is very unsatisfactory; ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... a time, on resuming her charge of him, as it was proper she should do, and then sat beside me, delivering herself of a long string of complaints and grievances, after the fashion of all second-rate, solitary people when secure ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... centralizing more power in Washington and increasing taxes. We hear claims that immigrants are somehow bad for the economy — even though this economy could not function without them. (Applause.) All these are forms of economic retreat, and they lead in the same direction — toward a stagnant and second-rate economy. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... have been reading the lives of authors lately, together with their works, and it seems to me, in the case of all who had genius, that their style was the outcome of their characters—their principles—the view they took of the subject—that is, if they were natural and powerful writers. Only the second-rate people have a manufactured style, and force their subject to adapt itself to it—the kind of people whose style is mentioned quite apart from their matter. In the great ones the style is the outcome of the subject. Each emotion has its own form of expression. The language of passion ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... writers of distinction; it possesses no great historians, and not a single eminent poet. The inhabitants of that country look upon what are properly styled literary pursuits with a kind of disapprobation; and there are towns of very second-rate importance in Europe in which more literary works are annually published than in the twenty-four States of the Union put together. The spirit of the Americans is averse to general ideas; and it does not seek theoretical discoveries. Neither politics nor manufactures direct ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... any first-rate poem, nay, even of any second-rate one which has any peculiar charm of rhythm or tone, to be an impossibility. The translation of rhyming Latin verses presents peculiar difficulties. The rhythm is always simple and strongly accented, it is true; but the ear-filling sonority, the variety of female ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... is of second-rate Gloucester low ground. It has no improvements thereon, but lies on navigable water, abounding in fish and oysters. It was received in payment of a debt (carrying interest), and valued in the year 1789, by an impartial gentleman, at L800. N. B. It has ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... "Dunciad," it is the fashion of literature to regard Theobald with compassion, as a block-head and empiric. Cibber escapes but little better, and yet he was a man of respectable talent, and played no second-rate part in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... my explanation. At every stage of my knowledge I was held in the bond of secrecy. Lackaday's sensitive soul dreaded, more than all the concentrated high-explosive bombardment of the whole of the late German Army, the possibility of Lady Auriol knowing him as the second-rate music-hall artist. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... the house, and out the rear doors, much to the amaze of cook and others who were in consultation in the kitchen. She flew down a winding flight of stairs to the level below, and her fairy feet went tripping over the pavement of a plebeian street. A quick turn, and she was at a little second-rate stable, whose proprietor knew her and started from ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... Second-rate actors, like Theophilus Gibber, or gnats such as Murphy, and others, easily stung him. He was lampooned as "The Sick Monkey" on his return to the stage after having taken a much needed rest. But discretion and audacity seemed to go hand-in-hand, and the self-satisfied ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... long, and are now falling out, merely from want of care when I was your age. Do you dress well, and not too well? Do you consider your air and manner of presenting yourself enough, and not too much? Neither negligent nor stiff? All these things deserve a degree of care, a second-rate attention; they give an additional lustre to real merit. My Lord Bacon says, that a pleasing figure is a perpetual letter of recommendation. It is certainly an agreeable forerunner of merit, and smoothes the way ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... fire with dogged faces. They scorned to cry aloud, but the horror of the prospect had for a moment a so paralysing effect that they could not reply. Leave Sandhurst in the middle of one's course, and become—a clerk! Leave Eton and the fellows, and go to one of those miserable, second-rate shows which all good Etonians regarded with ineffable contempt! Was it possible to suffer ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... that she screamed,' said her ladyship. 'But the new Rosinas generally do scream. Why do we have a new Rosina every year, whom nobody ever hears of afterwards? What becomes of them? Do they die, or do they set up as singing mistresses in second-rate watering-places?' hazarded her ladyship, with her eye always ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... room for a sufficient supply of provisions. As far as we can judge, a first-rate of the latter end of the seventeenth century mounted her guns on three whole decks, a quarter-deck, forecastle, and poop; a second-rate mounted hers on three whole decks and a quarter-deck; a third-rate on two whole decks, a quarter-deck, forecastle, and poop; a fourth-rate on two whole decks and a quarter-deck; a fifth-rate on her first gun-deck, with a few guns on her quarter-deck; a ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... the smartness of those second-rate decadents, French and English, who so gloried in their own degeneracy—as though one were to glory in scrofula or rickets; those unpleasant little anthropoids with the sexless little muse and the dirty little Eros, who would ride their ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... more note was one Hugh Kelly, a second-rate author, who, as he became a kind of competitor of Goldsmith's, deserves particular mention. He was an Irishman, about twenty-eight years of age, originally apprenticed to a staymaker in Dublin; then writer to a London attorney; ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... I had time to tell you what that town was like where he slept and ate, but I have not. You can read for yourself, some day, what Atlantis was like. Plato tells us a good deal, and the Colonies of Atlantis must have had at least a reasonable second-rate copy of the cities of ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... was like an altar-fire, a miraculous and beautiful phenomenon, than which nothing is more miraculous nor more beautiful over the whole earth. Whence had it suddenly sprung, that flame? After years of muddy inefficiency, of contentedness with the second-rate and the dishonest, that flame astoundingly bursts forth, from a hidden, unheeded spark that none had ever thought to blow upon. It bursts forth out of a damp jungle of careless habits and negligence that could not possibly have fed it. There is little to encourage it. The very architecture ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... circumstances which led to the relinquishment of the Lille plan. Brussels had had from the first a strong attraction for Charlotte; and the idea of going there, in preference to any other place, had only been given up in consequence of the information received of the second-rate character of its schools. In one of her letters reference has been made to Mrs. Jenkins, the wife of the chaplain of the British Embassy. At the request of his brother—a clergyman, living not many miles from Haworth, and an acquaintance ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... passed out of a world in which Macaulay, Dickens, Thackeray, and Hawthorne had never lived. The last delicacy of touch is wanting in all his work, whether verse or prose; yet the reader, though unsatisfied, does not turn from it without respect. If it is second-rate, it is not tricksy; its dulness is not antic, but decorous and quiet; its dignity, while it bores, enforces a sort of reverence which we do not pay to the ineffectual fire-works of our ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... nature in this nonsense. An ambitious lawyer passes his nights in retouching stock pieces, from which he can reap neither fame nor profit. He gives his work to a second-rate illiterate actor, who adopts it as his own. Bacon is so enamoured of this method that he publishes 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Lucrece' under the name of his actor friend. Finally, he commits to the actor's care all his sonnets to ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... adequately surrounded than this. What was Mrs. Leyburn—what were the Elsmeres about? He rebelled against the thought of her living perpetually among her inferiors, the centre of a vulgar publicity, queen of the second-rate. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the vessels which he had formerly imprudently detached under the orders of Captain Allemand, Villeneuve left Cadiz in company with Admiral Gravina and some Spanish vessels. The latter were large and heavy, difficult to manoeuvre, and fitted with very second-rate crews. The squadron of battle, commanded by Admiral Villeneuve and the Spanish Vice- Admiral Alava, numbered twenty-one vessels. The squadron of reserve, composed of twelve vessels, had been placed under the orders ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... thick streak of maudlin sentimentality of the kind that, as somebody phrased it, "made him wallow naked in the pathetic." It always interests me about Dickens to think how much first-class work he did and how almost all of it was mixed up with every kind of cheap, second-rate matter. I am very fond of him. There are innumerable characters that he has created which symbolize vices, virtues, follies, and the like almost as well as the characters in Bunyan; and therefore I think the wise thing to do is simply to skip the bosh and twaddle and vulgarity and untruth, ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... society to which they had attained, the younger ones passing their elders in cultivation, and every discomfort of change of position felt, though not acknowledged. Even the mother, lady as she was by birth, had only belonged to the second-rate class of gentry, and while elevated by wealth, was lowered by connection, and not having either mind or strength enough to stand on her own ground, trod with an ill-assured foot on that to which ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge |
