"Third-rate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... singular manifestation of love of mountains, and see our painters traversing the wildest places of the globe in order to obtain subjects with craggy foregrounds and purple distances. Some few of them remain content with pollards and flat land; but these are always men of third-rate order; and the leading masters, while they do not reject the beauty of the low grounds, reserve their highest powers to paint Alpine peaks or Italian promontories. And it is eminently noticeable, also, that this pleasure in the mountains is never mingled with fear, or tempered by a spirit ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... little town which had enjoyed a long time of peace, was governed by a mere boy, and deprived of all outside aid, and had sworn to take his revenge. He therefore broke up his army into three sections, sent one-third to Imola, the second to Forli, and himself took the third to Cesena, a third-rate town, which was thus suddenly transformed into a ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... is at it again. Funny fellow! He is like the Auctioneer with his Last time, for the Last time, for the very Last time, for the very very Last time. And the grave English nation allows itself to be made a sport. It is mocked, derided, by a number of lawyers' clerks and nonentities from third-rate Irish towns. It is bullied by a handful of professional politicians, paid by your American enemies, and governed by the flabby-looking priests you see skulking about the Irish railway stations and parks and pleasure ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... sight this Market-Place, so famed in song, is a disappointment. The north side is occupied by a row of seventeenth-century houses turned into shops and third-rate cafes. On the east is a modern post-office, dirty and badly ventilated, and some half-finished Government buildings. On the west are two houses which were once of some note—the Cranenburg, from the windows of which, in olden ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... 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 ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ached as he talked: for with men and with hosts of women to whom he was indifferent, never did he converse in this shambling, third-rate, sheepish manner, devoid of all highness of tone and the proper precision of an authority. He was unable to fathom the cause of it, but Clara imposed it on him, and only in anger could he throw it off. The temptation to an outburst that would flatter him with the sound of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... seen many pictures in the studios of modern Madrid that are inspired directly by the Italians, for nowadays Spanish artists flock to Italy, where they learn to imitate the Venetian colour schemes, and to become third-rate echoes of old masters. There are a few men who paint interesting pictures in Spain to-day—Pradilla and Carbonero are among the best; but Spain does not hold a great artist. The last of all died in exile in Bordeaux in the early days of the last ...
— Velazquez • S. L. Bensusan
... south of London, and within two miles of our ancient and respectable hamlet. Here she belonged to several clubs, bridge, tennis and croquet; enjoyed being a Triton among minnows; entertained a third-rate set at "Littlecote," and joined gay little theatre parties to London to "do a play," and return home by ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... double its original size. Speaking of Mr. William B. Astor, we may be led to a few references of a personal nature. As the ordinary street-passenger is traversing Prince street, he is not likely to be struck by any of its surroundings. The street itself is but of third-rate character, and the houses are but of a common stamp. Near Broadway, however, one may notice a small brick office, neatly built, of one story, with gable to the street, but with doors and windows closed, and the whole appearance one of security. Near the door ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... violent tempest, which drove him into the channel, and obliged him to make for the port of Plymouth. The weather being hazy, he reached the Sound with great difficulty: the Coronation, a second-rate, foundered at anchor off the Ram-head; the Harwich, a third-rate, bulged upon the rocks and perished; two others ran ashore, but were got off with little damage; but the whole fleet was scattered and distressed. The nation murmured at the supposed misconduct of the admiral, and the commons subjected him to an inquiry: but when ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... "Try the south, Mr. Newbold,—try Bermuda, for instance. The sea air and the warmth there might set your mother up marvellously." And as the young man stared at him unresponsively he gave a grasp to the hand he held, and turning, found his way out alone. He stumbled down the dark steps of the third-rate apartment-house and into his brougham, and as the rubber tires bowled him over the asphalt ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... embrace every unusual word, every new compound, every metaphorical turn of meaning, to be found in our great writers, would be a compendium of the genius of our authors rather than of our language; and a lexicographer who rakes the books of second and third-rate men for out-of-the-way phrases is doing us no favor. A dictionary is not a drag-net to bring up for us the broken pots and dead kittens, the sewerage of speech, as well as its living fishes. Nor do we think it a fair test of such a work, that one should seek in it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... held the lands of nobles confiscated in the Revolution. To indemnify the former owners was impossible in face of the torrent of exorbitant claims that flowed in. And the year 1814, which began as a soul-stirring epic, ended with sordid squabbles worthy of a third-rate farce. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... period of decadence and decay; a depressing period exhibiting the spectacle of a State, which had played a heroic part in history, sinking, through its lack of inspiring leadership and the crying defects inherent in its system of government, to the position of a third-rate power. The commanding abilities of the great stadholders of the house of Orange-Nassau, and during the stadholderless period which followed the untimely death of William II, those of the Council-Pensionary, John de Witt, had given an appearance of solidarity to what ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... months before Jacob Peters was successful in getting a place, and then he had to go into a third-rate establishment, where the opportunity for advancement was small, and where his associates were not ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... marked with any such prophetic note of genius as certainly does belong to the four school-boy poems they have retained, tend to injure the general effect of a body of poetry. That a writer, especially a writer of verse, should keep out of sight his third-rate performances, is now become a maxim with critics; for they are not, at the worst, effectless: they have an effect, that of diluting and weakening, to the reader's feelings, the general power of the collection. Mr. Coleridge himself constantly, after 1796, rejected a certain portion ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... ocean transit. But every hope has been disappointed; and instead of realizing these wishes the case has been growing worse year by year, until we are at last compelled to move in the matter, or lose our commerce, our ocean prestige, and sink down contented with a second or third-rate position among commercial nations, and acknowledge ourselves tributary to the far-seeing and far-reaching, and ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... one has to go back to the battle of Sedgemoor for the last occasion when in anything dignified by a higher name than riot, blood has been shed in England; the fact that when a retiring English Attorney-General appointed his son to a third-rate position in the legal profession an outcry arose in which the salient feature was surprise that so flagrant a job should have been perpetrated, are indications of what I mean when I say that English people are in every circumstance of their outlook precluded from ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... life, his father taught a primary school and his mother was overseer of certain initiatory rites, to both of which occupations Aeschines gave his youthful hand and assistance. He became in time a third-rate actor, and the duties of clerk or scribe presently made him familiar with the executive and legislative affairs of Athens. Both vocations served as an apprenticeship to the public speaking toward which his ambition was turning. We hear of his serving as a heavy-armed soldier in various Athenian ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... practical men, the brothers Robert, threw himself ardently into the investigation of the modes of inflating balloons with this gas, which was then called INFLAMMABLE AIR. Guessing that it was much lighter than that which Montgolfier had been obliged to make use of in his third-rate provincial town, Charles leagued himself with his two assistants to constrict a balloon of taffeta, twelve feet in diameter, covered with india-rubber, and ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... fruit grower sends out second and third-rate kinds from defective knowledge. He has not judiciously compared his petted seedlings with the superb varieties already in existence. It is soon discovered by general trial that the vaunted new-comers are not so good as the old; and so they also cease to be cultivated, ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... "about town" (for he had a noticeable face and figure),—that is, seen riding in the Park, or lounging in the pit at the opera, but never set eyes on at a recognized club, or in the coteries of their "set;" a man whose wife gave horrid third-rate parties, that took up half a column in the "Morning Post" with a list of "The Company Present," in which a sprinkling of dowagers fading out of fashion, and a foreign title or two, made the darkness of the obscurer names doubly dark. Why this man should be asked to meet them, by ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... many a hint from Mr. Knightley and some from her own heart, as to her deficiency—but none were equal to counteract the persuasion of its being very disagreeable,—a waste of time—tiresome women—and all the horror of being in danger of falling in with the second-rate and third-rate of Highbury, who were calling on them for ever, and therefore she seldom went near them. But now she made the sudden resolution of not passing their door without going in—observing, as she proposed it to Harriet, that, as well as she ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... Italian nobles, with their English-cut attire, saunter past you listlessly. The peasants are few in number now, but the soldiers and priests and beggars are never wanting. These streets and shops, brilliant though they seem by contrast with the rest of the city, would, after all, only be third-rate ones in any other European capital, and will not detain you long. On again by the fountain of Treves, where the water-stream flows day and night through the defaced and broken statue-work; a few steps more, and then you fall again into the narrow streets and the decayed ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... mean?" Asked Hopalong in surprise. "Well, well," laughed the clerk. "You punchers are easy. Any third-rate actress that looks good to eat can rope you fellows, all right. Now look here, Laura, you keep shy of her corral, or you'll be broke so quick you won't believe you ever had a cent: that's straight. This is the third ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... night, my masters. Still harping on Home Rule. Second night's debate on Second Reading. Naturally supposed to be in heyday of vigour. But Benches empty; level of oratory third-rate; STANSFELD a hoary Triton among the Minnows; ELLIS ASHMEAD BARTLETT (Knight) gloomily views the scene. "Thought you were going to speak to-night?" I said, "Read the announcement in the papers." Never forget the haughty, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... landed from the Rose at Lymington, for the purpose of going by coach to Lyndhurst, a considerable village in the New Forest, from which an ex-chancellor derives his title. I had appointed to meet a confidential agent there at the Fox and Hounds Inn, a third-rate tavern, situate at the foot of the hill upon which the place is built; and as the evening promised to be clear and fine, though cold, I anticipated a bracing, cross-country walk afterwards in the direction ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... rule, a beautiful face has a wonderful influence. I have known women without a tithe of your beauty, Leone, rise from quite third-rate society to find a place among the most exclusive and noblest people in the land. Your face would win for you, darling, an ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... years before, had listened in much the same way to another man playing the violin, and the comparison is not so far-fetched as it seems, for although the blind fiddler of the sunny day in Normandy had been only a third-rate scraper of the bow, and Joyselle one of the world's very greatest artists, yet in one thing they joined issue. Each of them gave to the listening child ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... hunted up a little third-rate summer hotel a mile or so off, where the guests were few and the food wretched, and camped down with my mangled script and my typewriter. There I met Fannie the Unforgetful. She was the waitress I happened to draw out of a job lot. I suppose it was her ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... refulgent ambassadors, could boast the friendship of duchesses, and had been the amiable receptacle of their pardonable follies; she who, moreover, heartily despised things English:—this lady experienced thrills of proud pleasure at the prospect of being welcomed at a third-rate English mansion. But then, that mansion was Beckley Court. We return to our first ambitions, as to our first loves not that they are dearer to us,—quit that delusion: our ripened loves and mature ambitions are probably closest to our hearts, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the door was instantly thrown open by a Hindoo servant clad in a yellow turban, white loose-fitting clothes, and a yellow sash. There was something strangely incongruous in this Oriental figure framed in the commonplace door-way of a third-rate suburban dwelling-house. ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... scientist turns his feet ruinously into the wide green descent to "popular" science, or as when in The Verdict a fashionable painter of talent encounters the work of an obscure genius and gives up his own career in the knowledge that at best he can never do but third-rate work. Some such stress of conflict marks almost all Mrs. Wharton's stories of love, which make up the overwhelming majority of her work. Love with her in but few cases runs the smooth course coincident with flawless matrimony. It cuts violently across ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... must, in a debate about literary property, draw our illustrations from literary history. Now, Sir, I have, I think, shown from literary history that the effect of my noble friend's plan would be to give to crude and imperfect works, to third-rate and fourth-rate works, a great advantage over the highest productions of genius. It is impossible to account for the facts which I have laid before you by attributing them to mere accident. Their number is too great, their character ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the goldsmith's trade—and his father, like a wise man, instead of opposing his son's wishes, did what he could to further them. He bought him painting-materials; and instead of sending him to a "school of design," or putting him under the tutelage of some third-rate drawing-master, such as is commonly found in country towns, he bought him a picture by Decamps, an artist since become famous, but then just in the dawn of his fame, and put it before his son as a model. Young Gerome made a copy of this picture, and an artist from Paris, who happened to be passing ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... Dead Innocence, with the blood-red prize of rubies. With a wise touch Tennyson has represented the Court as fallen not into vice only and crime, but into positive vulgarity and bad taste. The Tournament is a carnival of the "smart" and the third-rate. Courtesy is dead, even Tristram is brutal, and in Iseult hatred of her husband is as powerful as love of her lover. The satire strikes at England, where the world has never been corrupt with a good grace. It is a passage of arms neither ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... leisure for reflection during that long night-walk, and found myself becoming a perfect Young—Hervey—Sturm—what you will, in the way of meditation. I could not choose but wonder at myself when I looked back to this time last year, and remembered my idle evenings in third-rate cafes, on the rive gauche, playing dominoes, talking the foul slang of Parisian bohemia, and poisoning my system with adulterated absinthe. And now I feast upon sweet cakes and honey, and think it paradisiac enjoyment to play whist—for love—in a farm-house ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... works of profound research on any subject, and, above all, in that classical lore for which the universities profess to sacrifice almost everything else, why, a third-rate, poverty-stricken German university turns out more produce of that kind in one year, than our vast and ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... time, the latter took his position as a third-rate man. Indeed, he never afterward reached even to the House of Representatives at Washington, while Harvey still retains his place in the Senate-chamber, one of the most esteemed and valuable members of that ...
— The Last Penny and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... triumph had at last arrived. He had waited and toiled for years over "Faust," and it was now ready to flash on the world with an electric brightness that was to make his name instantly famous. One day saw him an obscure, third-rate composer, the next one of the brilliant names in art. "Faust," first performed March 19, 1859, fairly took the world by storm. Gounod's warmest friends were amazed by the beauty of the masterpiece, in which exquisite melody, great orchestration, and a dramatic passion never ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... enjoy so much—such dashes of color, such great slaps of light! I was the first to buy—they call it a Savoldo, but I think no third-rate man could be capable of so much—such reaching out after infinity. However, that makes little difference. I would not part with it, now that I have lived these weeks with so fine a thing. Maud won a prize in her Bonifazio, ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... bringing with him Prulliere, Fontan and old Bosc. At this Nana looked sedate and remarked dryly that she would have given them a pretty reception. Had she wanted colleagues, she would certainly have undertaken to ask them herself. No, no, she wouldn't have third-rate play actors. Old Bosc was always drunk; Prulliere was fond of spitting too much, and as to Fontan, he made himself unbearable in society with his loud voice and his stupid doings. Then, you know, third-rate play actors were always out of place ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... supreme, and any one is considered competent to legislate. He can do that, even if by common knowledge he is incompetent or untrustworthy in every other capacity. Localization thus becomes the stronghold of mediocrity, the sure avenue to office of the second-and third-rate man,—he who wishes always to enjoy his share of a little brief authority, to have, he also, a taste of public life. In this respect our American system is, I submit, manifestly and incomparably inferior to the system of parliamentary election existing in Great Britain, ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... known only partially even to the women themselves; what the world has lost by that compulsory expression of genius, in a form which may not have been its most natural form of expression, or only one of its forms, no one can ever know. Even in the little third-rate novelist whose works cumber the ground, we see often a pathetic figure, when we recognise that beneath that failure in a complex and difficult art, may lie buried a sound legislator, an able architect, an original scientific investigator, ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... a class of men belonging to these soul-forsaken years: Third-rate canvassers, collectors, journalists and auctioneers. They are never very shabby, they are never very spruce — Going cheerfully and carelessly and smoothly to the deuce. Some are wanderers by profession, 'turning up' and gone as soon, Travelling ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... Netherland State from Lorraine to the North Sea which could hold its own with either France or Prussia, and since that period Holland has gradually sunk, and seemingly without discontent, into the position of a third-rate Power. This has taken place without any apparent loss of the old love of independence, but it has necessarily been accompanied by a diminution not only of the military spirit, but of military efficiency and readiness. The spectacle of immense armies of millions ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... any literary magazine who has had any experience in by-gone days with the manuscripts of the chivalry, will shrug his shoulders with a smile as he recalls the reams of reechoes of Northern writers, and not unfrequently of mere 'sensation' third-rate writers at that, which he was wont to receive from Dixie. And amid all his vaunts and taunts, the consciousness of this intellectual inferiority never left the Southerner. It stimulated his hatred—it ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... of quite a third-rate sort that the urchin at length ceased his trot, and drew up at the door of a baker's shop—a divided door, opening in the middle by a latch of bright brass. But the child did not lift the latch—only raised himself on tiptoe by the help of its handle, ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... portrait sculpture; but portrait sculpture, which is nothing more, is always third-rate work, even when produced by men of genius;—nor does it in the least require men of genius to produce it. To paint a portrait, indeed, implies the very highest gifts of painting; but any man, of ordinary patience and artistic feeling, can carve ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... and this knowledge should tend powerfully hereafter to keep the peace of the world. The war should abate the swaggering, swash-buckler tendency of many of our public men, since it has shown our incredible unreadiness at the outset for meeting even a third-rate Power; and it must secure us henceforth an army and navy less ridiculously inadequate to our exposure. It insures us a mercantile marine. It insures the Nicaragua Canal, a Pacific cable, great development on our Pacific coast, and the mercantile ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... of Mr Higgs completed his satisfaction, for the audience greeted the comedian with roars of applause. As a rule Eckleton took its drama through the medium of third-rate touring companies, which came down with plays that had not managed to attract London to any great extent, and were trying to make up for failures in the metropolis by long tours in the provinces. It was seldom that an ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... Sainte-Beuve, after reading Guizot's sweeping and lofty generalisations, declared that they were far too logical to be true, and forthwith "took down from his shelves a volume of De Retz to remind him how history was really made." Second-or third-rate historians, such as Lamartine, who, according to Dumas, "raised history to the level of the novel," or the vitriolic Lanfrey, who was a mere pamphleteer, would, of course, be consigned—and very rightly consigned—to utter oblivion. The notorious inaccuracy of Thiers and the avowed ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... abreast, be it observed. The several competitors in this high race did not start on equally advantageous terms. The rich and powerful nations declared for Popery and arbitrary government; the weak and third-rate ones, for Protestantism. On one side stood Spain, then at the head of Europe,—rich in arts, in military glory, in the genius and chivalry of its people, in the resources of its soil, and mistress, besides, of splendid colonies. By her side stood France,—the equal of Spain in art, in civilization, ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... who play all manner of games, and the men who speak several languages. I begin with the latter, and declare that, after a somewhat varied experience of life, I never met a linguist that was above a third-rate man; and I go farther, and aver, that I never chanced upon a really able man who ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... to come out whole, captain. General Aguinaldo may mean well, but he never went at this thing right. He ought to know that he isn't dealing with some third-rate power." ...
— The Campaign of the Jungle - or, Under Lawton through Luzon • Edward Stratemeyer
... an elegant attitude against his bureau. He had discovered his reply. "You know you are bitten by the fashion for originality. Why should I make my room hideous with the work of third-rate mediocrity, or of men who are still learning to paint, simply in order to ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... as a cat who has found her kitten, led the boy off jubilantly to his third-rate hotel off the Strand, taking the precaution, as he passed, to leave word at the Hall that if a gentleman called who had lost a boy, he should be told ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... has been unusually gay and the opera most stupidly brilliant; stocks continue to fluctuate; another old woman was tossed and gored by a mad motor this morning. . . . More time, Alixe? . . . With pleasure; Mrs. Vendenning has bought a third-rate castle in Wales; a man was found dead with a copy of the Tribune in his pocket—the verdict being in accordance ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... not have been sound," said Pensee, "if Caroline Lennox had been a third-rate woman. A man can be desperate so long as his choice, on the whole, justifies, either by her beauty, or her talents, or something uncommon, an extreme measure. Now, Robert may not have made a wise choice, but it is certainly a distinguished one. It ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... a chair while he waited and thumbed through a fan magazine. From time to time he found his own face in such publications. He was a third-rate celebrity, really. Luck hadn't been with him so far as the buffs were concerned. They wanted spectacular victories, murderous situations in which they could lose themselves in vicarious sadistic thrills. ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... superannuated actor of whom I have already spoken, and when he was not, so to speak, in drink he was an invaluable person. He had followed the stage all his life, but he was of the sort that tear passion to tatters and he had never risen above third-rate parts. In every respect save declamation he had all the elegances and charm of manner that the stage can give, and he would receive and bow out a scrubwoman who had fallen down a flight of back stairs and wanted to make the landlord pay ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... preparedness, did she not? And she tried to be a world power and defend the Monroe doctrine! She told Germany in 1915 what Germany might do with her submarines and what she might not do. Ha! We were at a disadvantage then, but we remembered! You, with your third-rate navy and your tenth-rate army, told us what we might do! Well, you see where your ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... he sold his colored coachman—said he didn't need a coachman for a sulky —wouldn't be room enough for two in it anyway—and, besides, it wasn't every day that Providence sent a man a fool who was willing to pay nine hundred dollars for such a third-rate negro as that—been wanting to get rid of the creature for years, but didn't like to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... could hardly enter even a third-rate college without a better preparation than that. But colleges are much more thorough than they were ...
— Four Great Americans: Washington, Franklin, Webster, Lincoln - A Book for Young Americans • James Baldwin
... pleasure of criticism robs us of the pleasure of being keenly moved by very fine things' (iii. 327). 'It seems to me,' she writes (ii. 412), 'much better to read a man's own writings than to read what others say about him, especially when the man is first-rate and the others third-rate. As Goethe said long ago about Spinoza, "I always preferred to learn from the man himself what he thought, rather than to hear from some one else what he ought to have thought."' As if the scholar will not always be glad to do both, to study his author and not to refuse the help of the rightly ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... flycatcher-warblers are not singers. Nevertheless they incessantly make a joyful noise. I can vouch for the fact that their lay is heard all day long from March to October. Before attempting to describe the familiar sound, I deem it prudent to recall to the mind of the reader the notice that once appeared in a third-rate music-hall:—"The audience are respectfully requested not to throw things at the pianist. He is doing his best." To say that this warbler emits incessantly four or five high-pitched, not very musical notes, is to give but a ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... subordinate part in the Miser of "Furnish, an Upholsterer," was taken by a third-rate actor, whose surname has been productive of no little misconception among Henry Fielding's biographers. This was Timothy Fielding, sometime member of the Haymarket and Drury Lane companies, and proprietor, for several ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... relevant to the subject has been avoided. The salient points once perceived and connected with the more important painters, the reader will find no difficulty in seeing the proper place of any given work by a great master, or the relative importance of those second-and third-rate painters of whom no special mention has been made because they are comprised within what has been said about the ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... Monte Cristo, "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 total of about a hundred millions; ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... startled to find her daughter in the field, and wishing her niece to begin about her own affairs, talked common-place by way of filling up the time, and Rachel had her eyes free for a range of the apartment. The foundation was the dull, third-rate lodging-house, the superstructure told of other scenes. One end of the room was almost filled by the frameless portrait of a dignified clergyman, who would have had far more justice done to him ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... been close as wax on the subject of my flowery chains, and it was especially inconceivable that I should inform my friend HOWARD of same, since he has frequently bantered me in wonderment that a respectable Oriental magnate should reside in such a very ordinary and third-rate boarding establishment, where it was an impossibility to gain any real familiarity with smart and refined ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... Baroni informed him that he was exactly suited to be a third-rate music-hall artiste—the young man, be it said, was making a special study of oratorio—and that it was profanation, for any one with so incalculably little idea of the very first principles of art to attempt to interpret the works ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... prize, an English brig, which was ransomed for 200 pounds. This was Cook's first experience of an important naval action, and Pallisser was complimented by the Lords of the Admiralty for his gallant conduct. The Duc d'Aquitaine was purchased for the Navy, and was entered under her own name as a third-rate, 64 gun ship, with a complement ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... ease in my mind and I think shall never suffer matters to run so far backward again as I have done of late, with reference to my neglecting him and Sir W. Coventry. Thence by water down to Deptford, where I met my Lord Bruncker and Sir W. Batten by agreement, and to measuring Mr. Castle's new third-rate ship, which is to ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... the house. It wasn't such a bad-looking house, he thought. Not nearly as bad as he had expected from the girl's description. In fact, once upon a time it must have been rather a palatial residence, but all the windows now were boxed up with cheap, starchy-looking curtains, and there was a sort of third-rate atmosphere about the basement and the cheap knocker on ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... collars of a cut that seems to have prevailed ever since the Virgin was born some twenty years previously. There is a largeness and simplicity of treatment about the figure to which none but an artist of the highest rank can reach, and D'Enrico was not more than a second or third-rate man. The hood is like Handel's Truth sailing upon the broad wings of Time, a prophetic strain that nothing but the old experience of a great poet can reach. The lips of the prophetess are for the moment closed, but she ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... risking our necks," Nelsen chuckled. "And maybe, even if we make it, we'll be just a third-rate group, lost in the crowd that's following the explorers... Just the same, I wish you could ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... girl who had ability as a story writer. Two positions were open to her at the same time, one as a book-keeper, the other as writer for a certain department in a third-rate magazine. She chose to be a book-keeper, for she knew that if she took the magazine work she must write whether in the spirit or not, and that the rank of the magazine was such that she would have little encouragement to do her best. ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... under-clerk to the magistrates, and played the rogue for two or three drachmae?[n] and how at last, in recent days, you thought yourself lucky to get a parasitic living in the training-rooms of others, as a third-rate actor? What then is the life of which you propose to speak? Where have you lived it? For the life which you have really lived has been what I have described. And how much does he take upon himself! He brought another man to trial here for unnatural offences! ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... looks before very long as strange and new as that produced by another mind): remembering these things, I say to myself, and to you if you choose to listen: Write sermons diligently: write them week by week, and always do your very best: never make up your mind that this one shall be a third-rate affair, just to get the Sunday over; and thus accumulate material for use in days when thoughts will not come so readily, and when the hand must write tremblingly and slow. Don't be misled by any clap-trap about the finer thing being to have the mental machine ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... the son of a violinist who scratched away for a meager living in a third-rate theatre orchestra. The boy, intensely musical, wished to be a fiddler like his father. When he was fourteen, his family gave him their blessing, which was all they had to give, and sent him to Moscow to try for a scholarship at ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... of piracy there is no name that has so taken the world's fancy than has that of William Kidd. And yet, if he be judged by his actions as a pirate, he must be placed amongst the second- or even third-rate masters of that craft. He took but two or three ships, and these have been, after two hundred years, proved to be lawful prizes taken in his legal capacity as ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... Mr. Petulengro the other day to the Romany Rye, after telling him many things connected with the decadence of gypsyism, "there is one Gorgiko Brown, who, with a face as black as a teakettle, wishes to be mistaken for a Christian tradesman; he goes into the parlour of a third-rate inn of an evening, calls for rum and water, and attempts to enter into conversation with the company about politics and business; the company flout him or give him the cold shoulder, or perhaps complain to the landlord, who comes and asks ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... myself seated in a horrid little private box, with a vulgar drop-scene staring me in the face. I looked out from behind the curtain, and surveyed the house. It was a tawdry affair, all Cupids and cornucopias, like a third-rate wedding cake. The gallery and pit were fairy full, but the two rows of dingy stalls were quite empty, and there was hardly a person in what I suppose they called the dress-circle. Women went about with oranges ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... directly from unpreparedness. This burned indelibly into his memory. It stimulated all his subsequent appeals to make the Army and Navy large enough for any probable sudden demand upon them. "America the Unready" had won the war against a decrepit, impoverished, third-rate power, but had paid for her victory hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives; what would the count have mounted to had she been pitted against a really formidable foe? Would she have won at all against any enemy fully prepared and of nearly ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... and a character. All artists who have attempted to assume, or in their weakness have been affected by, the national peculiarities of other times and countries, have instantly, whatever their original power, fallen to third-rate rank, or fallen altogether, and have invariably lost their birthright and blessing, lost their power over the human heart, lost all capability of teaching or benefiting others. Compare the hybrid classification of Wilson with the rich English purity of Gainsborough; compare the recent ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... down in front of the third-rate hotel did Clo touch the hasp of the gray suede bag. It was not locked, and save for a crumpled dollar bill, its sole contents was a large, unaddressed envelope fastened with three gold seals. On each of these seals was the same elaborate monogram, which ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... situation of which the gay flags were the outward and visible sign. For in these latter days of April, 1898, a first-class Republic had, from purely philanthropic motives, announced its intention of licking a third-rate Monarchy into the way it should go. Whereat the good citizens had flung broadcast their national emblem to express a patriotic enthusiasm they did not feel, while the wiser heads among them were already whispering that the war was not merely unjustifiable, ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... champagne breeze that I've just been rushing about in, I am equally sure that in point of climate you would agree with me that my chance for life is ten times as great here as in Macon. Then, as to business, why should I, nay, how CAN I, settle myself down to be a third-rate struggling lawyer for the balance of my little life, as long as there is a certainty almost absolute that I can do some other thing so much better? Several persons, from whose judgment in such matters there can be no appeal, have told me, for instance, that I ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... 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 sixth-rate on a single-deck, with or without ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... living for myself and my small family, and we do not hanker after riches. A larger business would make me a human machine, and I'd rather just drift along and be an ordinary good husband and father. I'd rather be running a little, third-rate detective agency as I am, making just enough to get along, and have a lot of friends. I wouldn't throw down a friend for a million dollars! I suppose I'm the only man in town that thinks this way, but I'm a ...
— The Brand of Silence - A Detective Story • Harrington Strong
... into that faint glimmer of miserable fire. He was conscious of a curious feeling in his throat. How little he knew of life! The pathos of what she had told him, the thought of her bravely traveling the country and singing at third-rate music-halls, never taking any credit to herself, simply that her father might still believe himself a man of talent, appealed to him irresistibly. He suddenly held ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... J.W. came to a temple, not a great towering shrine, but a third-rate sort of place, a sacred cow temple. Here was a family which had journeyed four hundred miles to worship before the idols of this temple. They offered rice to one idol, flowers to another, holy water from the river to a third. No one might know what inner urge had driven them ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... arose, and expelled for ever the innutritious phantoms,—whether he has not found his brain more "betossed," his memory more puzzled, his sense of when and where more confounded, among the improbable events, the incoherent incidents, the inconsistent characters, or no-characters, of some third-rate love intrigue—where the persons shall be a Lord Glendamour and a Miss Rivers, and the scene only alternate between Bath and Bond-street—a more bewildering dreaminess induced upon him, than he has felt wandering over all the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... York for.—To try the experiment of a lecture—to see whether I could stand it, and whether an audience could—was my specific object. Some friends had invited me—it was by no means clear how it would end—I stipulated that they should get only a third-rate hall, and not sound the advertising trumpets a bit—and so I started. I much wanted something to do for occupation, consistent with my limping and paralyzed state. And now, since it came off, and since neither my hearers nor I myself really collaps'd at the aforesaid lecture, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... later, he describes his position as a sort of 'Benthamee Lycurgus,' and sets forth the problem which he is trying to solve in an official document then in course of preparation: 'Given corrupt natives, incompetent civilians, and a sprinkling of third-rate barristers, how to get perfect judges.' His estimate, indeed, of the merits of the Indian services, considered collectively, was the highest possible. He speaks of them not merely with appreciation but with an enthusiasm ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... was his [Irving's] guest regularly at all Lyceum first nights for a whole quarter of a century.... He delighted in the company of third-rate people." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... my informant, because he understood him to be a disappointed man, and ill-disposed to the existing order of things; that with respect to himself and the thousands who felt with him, there was no sacrifice they were not ready to make, if they could humble England and reduce her to a third-rate power. ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... disintegration, we find Vienna, Prague[2] and Leipsic heading the list. Subsequently, each petty duke and count, moved by the sense of his autonomy, sought to establish a university of his own. The Reformation increased the spirit of rivalry. Most of these second- and third-rate universities have passed away or have been merged in others. The three youngest, Berlin, Munich and Strasburg, are all in large cities, and are all three the direct offspring of political and educational ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... at chess, but very seldom, because he was only a third-rate player, and he did not like to be beaten at that game, which, I know not why, is said to bear a resemblance to the grand game of war. At this latter game Bonaparte certainly feared no adversary. This reminds ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... some of them, like Jamie Danby, get into trouble. Jamie ran away from home with a third-rate show. The show got stranded somewhere in the western desert and Jamie wanted to come home. He knew that his mother would be glad to see him but he wasn't at all sure of his father. So he wrote to Grandma Wentworth, begging her to fix things ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... Rumpety to plead his own cause before the jury he proved quite equal to the situation. He planted himself before them and harangued them like any third-rate criminal lawyer. ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... furnished, and everything was in the third-rate French style—inferior mahogany and cheap gilding, bare floors with gaudy little rugs lying about here and there, tables with flaming tapestry covers, chairs cushioned with red velvet of the commonest ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... sister as quite too much one of the profane, and knew Adeline couldn't understand why, when she took to herself a bosom-friend, she should have been at such pains to select her in just the most dreadful class in the community. Verena was a perfect little adventuress, and quite third-rate into the bargain; but, of course, she was a pretty girl enough, if one cared for hair of the colour of cochineal. As for her people, they were too absolutely awful; it was exactly as if she, Mrs. Luna, had struck up an intimacy with the daughter of her chiropodist. ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... man a fellow because he holds a first-class place as a practitioner of medicine as the Royal Society has done since I have known it, let us abolish the practice. But then let us also in justice refuse to recognise the half-and-half claims, those of the people who are third-rate as practitioners, and hang on to the skirts of science without ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... was its first creation in the twentieth century, and, for that reason, acutely interesting. One saw here a third-rate town of half-a-million people without history, education, unity, or art, and with little capital — without even an element of natural interest except the river which it studiously ignored — but doing what London, Paris, or New York would have shrunk from attempting. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... hated Bosinney, that Buccaneer, that prowling vagabond, that night-wanderer. For in his thoughts Soames always saw him lying in wait—wandering. Ah, but he must be in very low water! Young Burkitt, the architect, had seen him coming out of a third-rate restaurant, looking terribly down ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to be done?" said Elizabeth next day as she sat on the floor and massaged the blue Axminster. "No housemaid, and a bedroom carpet disguised as a third-rate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... relief of outraged propriety, expressed in the Supplement, is amusing to some of us, who, I fear, may be a little improper at times. Very spirit of the Salvation Army, when some third-rate scientist comes out with an explanation of the vermiform appendix or the os coccygis that would have been acceptable to Moses. To give completeness to "the proper explanation," it is said that Mr. Brandeis had identified the substance as ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... upon an ingenious plan of procuring this. They would issue forth from Balmoral in hired carriages, with horses to match, and would drive to some Highland town, and dine and dress at its inn, under assumed names. It was no doubt great fun to Her Majesty to put up with the accommodation of a third-rate provincial inn, where 'a ringleted woman did everything' in the way of waiting at table, and where in place of soup there was mutton-broth with vegetables, 'which I did not ...
— Queen Victoria • Anonymous
... brethren in science fine examples of a pure, vigorous, and well-knit style. Yet, how many of them are still quite content to go rumbling along with an interminable rigmarole of dry "memoirs." Our ponderous biographies of third-rate people tend to become mere bags of letters and waste-paper baskets. And all this with such consummate models before us, and so very high a standard of general cultivation. We have had in this age men who write an English as pure ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... two miles of brick and mortar piled on either side. At last they came to a third-rate house, when a rough, common-looking woman opened the door and shutter. As soon as she saw the man, she let loose her tongue upon him for all the villainy in the world, but something which passed from his hand to hers hushed her in an instant; and observing ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... gave him a wide berth in making up a match. But by steady perseverance, reading Sir WALTER SIMPSON, taking out a professional, and practising his iron in an adjacent field, BULGER soon developed to such an extent that few third-rate players could give him a stroke a hole. He had been in considerable danger of "a stroke" of quite a different character before he left London, and the delights of the Bar. But he returned to the Capital in rude health, and may ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 19, 1892 • Various
... the line, and where would you begin to leave out?—I would only draw the line when I was purchasing a picture. I think that a person might always spend his money better by making an effort to get one noble picture than five or six second or third-rate pictures, provided only, that you had examples of the best kind of work produced at that time. I would not have second-rate pictures. Multitudes of masters among the disciples of Giotto might be named; you might have one or two pictures ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... to fight against overwhelming odds, and the fury of the youthful commander soon earned him the sobriquet of the "madman of the North." The alliance of 1699 precipitated the Great Northern War which was to last until 1721 and slowly, but no less inevitably, lower Sweden to the position of a third-rate power. It was amid the most spectacular exploits of the boy-king that the ruin of Sweden was accomplished. It was a grander but more tragic fate than in the ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes |
