"Vulgar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... report was spread, and universally believed. We have already observed that Rushbrook was a fine, tall man; and if there is any class of people who can be transplanted with success from low to high life, it will be those who have served in the army. The stoop is the evidence of a low-bred, vulgar man; the erect bearing equally so that of the gentleman. Now, the latter is gained in the army, by drilling and discipline, and being well-dressed will provide for all else that is required, as far as mere personal appearance is concerned. ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... creditable to him when it is remembered how much his education has been neglected, how vitiated the Revolution made him, and that but lately his principal associates were, like himself, from among the vilest and most vulgar of the rabble. It is not necessary to be a keen observer to remark in Napoleon the upstart soldier, and in Joseph the former low member of the law; but I defy the most refined courtier to see in Lucien anything indicating a ci-devant sans-culotte. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... shorthand notes on the typewriter without troubling herself about his feelings. Mr. Burgess enters unannounced. He is a man of sixty, made coarse and sordid by the compulsory selfishness of petty commerce, and later on softened into sluggish bumptiousness by overfeeding and commercial success. A vulgar, ignorant, guzzling man, offensive and contemptuous to people whose labor is cheap, respectful to wealth and rank, and quite sincere and without rancour or envy in both attitudes. Finding him without talent, the world has offered ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... struggles almost hopelessly! George Henry went down hill, though setting his heels as deeply as he could. His later plans failed, and there came a time when his strait was sore indeed—the time when he had not even the money with which to meet the current expenses of a modest life. To one vulgar or dishonest this is bad; to one cultivated and honorable it is far worse. George Henry chanced to come under the latter classification, and so it was that to him poverty assumed a phase especially acute, and affected him both physically ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... and tuques—red or blue,—upon their heads. Every one had a pipe in his mouth. Some were talking with loose, loquacious tongues; some were singing; their ugly, jolly visages—half illumined by the light of tallow candles stuck in iron sconces on the wall—were worthy of the vulgar but faithful Dutch pencils of Schalken and Teniers. They were singing a song as the new ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... was a good sign in Liosha. I don't say that she would have fallen captive to any ordinary child, but Susan being my child was naturally different from the vulgar run of children. She was rarissinia avis in the lands of small girls—one of the few points on which Barbara and I are in unclouded agreement. No one could have helped falling captive to Susan. But, I admit, in the case of Liosha, who was ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... of the (one) Jujube-tree," after narrowing to a stony gut, suddenly flares out into the Wady Zib, the vulgar feature of these regions, provided with the normal "Gate" some three hundred yards broad. Beyond it, the flat surrounding the head of the cove is remarkably well grown with palms, clumps of the Daum, and scattered date-trees, of which one is walled round. Hence I am disposed to ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... As the year advances, as the clover blossoms disappear, and the spring fades into summer, he gradually gives up his elegant tastes and habits, doffs his poetical suit of black, assumes a russet, dusty garb, and sinks to the gross enjoyment of common vulgar birds. His notes no longer vibrate on the ear; he is stuffing himself with the seeds of the tall weeds on which he lately swung and chanted so melodiously. He has become a bon vivant, a gourmand: with him now there is nothing like the "joys of the table." In ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... a capricious power: I've known it hold Out through a fever caused by its own heat, But be much puzzled by a cough and cold, And find a quinsy very hard to treat; Against all noble maladies he's bold, But vulgar illnesses don't like to meet, Nor that a sneeze should interrupt his sigh, Nor inflammations redden ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... fortune-hunter. Had she been of a gloomy temper, disgust at the coarse plots and manoeuvres, so easily unravelled by a clear-sighted person, might have made her a prey to suspicion, and all but misanthropic. Had she been vulgar-minded, she would have been purse-proud; if cold-hearted, she would have become only the more selfish. Vanity would have made her ridiculously ostentatious and conceited; a jealous temper would ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... He had made a mess of it, and now there was nothing for it, so far as he could see, but to hit the man at once. He and Charlie stood six feet apart, with a table between, both very breathless and fierce. A vulgar fight in a public-house, and with what was only too palpably a footman! Good Heavens! And this was the dignified, scornful remonstrance! How the juice had it all happened? Go round the table at him, I suppose. But before the brawl ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... all his plans in life, when the lure of a new love adventure summoned? Women, always women. For them he had again and again cast everything to the winds; sometimes for women who were refined, sometimes for women who were vulgar; for passionate women and for frigid women; for maidens and for harlots. All the honors and all the joys in the world had ever seemed cheap to him in comparison with a successful night upon ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... roughly pushed back and the Lieutenant took Black Hawk kindly by the arm and led him into a reserved apartment where he was free from vulgar eyes. ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... hospitable, aye, charitable, magnanimous, ready to forgive and forget, patient and long-suffering when subjected to the competitive lash of adverse criticism, bearing calumny rather with quiet dignity than stooping to low and vulgar forms of retaliation. ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... jingle; he is fond of a militaristic drum-banging that is as blatant as the insularity he condemns. But a burning, if sometimes too simple faith, shines through his achievements. His best work reveals an intensity that crystallizes into beauty what was originally tawdry, that lifts the vulgar and incidental to ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... long shells explored By him who to befriend his steed's dim sight Would blow the pungent powder in the eye. Her eyes too! O immortal gods! her eyes Resembled—what could they resemble? what Ever resemble those! E'en her attire Was not of wonted woof nor vulgar art: Her mantle showed the yellow samphire-pod, Her girdle the dove-coloured wave serene. 'Shepherd,' said she, 'and will you wrestle now And with the sailor's hardier race engage?' I was rejoiced to hear it, and contrived How to keep up contention; could I fail By pressing not too strongly, yet ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... terms she made about it, the prohibition of neckties and other items till she should be able to guide him through the Burlington Arcade, were such as to fall upon a sensitive ear as a challenge to just imputations. Miss Gostrey was such a woman of fashion as could make without a symptom of vulgar blinking an appointment for the Burlington Arcade. Mere discriminations about a pair of gloves could thus at any rate represent—always for such sensitive ears as were in question—possibilities of something ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... predicting frightful calamities at random? How do the facts which are before us agree with their theories? Nottingham is a city with a franchise even more democratic than that which this bill establishes. Does Nottingham send hither mere vulgar demagogues? It returns two distinguished men, one an advocate, the other a soldier, both unconnected with the town. Every man paying scot and lot has a vote at Leicester. This is a lower franchise than the ten ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... matron hurriedly, "and don't stand talking to vulgar cabmen and calling them by their Christian names. Your name is Charles Newcome, ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... partes sett oute this presente yere, 1584; which three townes above named are under or within the Tropicke of Cancer. And so the Kinge of Spaine hath no footinge beyonde the said tropicke; which is contrary to the opinion of the vulgar sorte, which ymagine, and by some are borne in hande, that all is his from the equinoctiall as farr as the lande stretcheth ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... qualities to which the study of the past does not direct attention, and to which, therefore, the student of Greek civilisation may easily become blind. In what is new and growing there is apt to be something crude, insolent, even a little vulgar, which is shocking to the man of sensitive taste; quivering from the rough contact, he retires to the trim gardens of a polished past, forgetting that they were reclaimed from the wilderness by men as rough and earth-soiled as those from whom he shrinks in his own day. The habit of ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... was bending over Mrs. Perguson's chair. He was a fellow I had seen before and never liked, a vulgar-featured man, too fat for his years, which may have been some twenty-eight. He played the best hand of all of them, and, as my aunt declared, that was quite enough; for the rest she could keep any man in order. I held back ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... coatless, pushed on through the melee. Rullecour, the now disheartened French general, stood on the steps of the Cohue Royale. With a vulgar cruelty and cowardice he was holding the Governor by the arm, hoping thereby to protect his own ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... it be a plain, unvarnished, complete failure, and even though it be a squalid failure, has always a certain dignity. I avoided Soames because he made me feel rather vulgar. John Lane had published, by this time, two little books of mine, and they had had a pleasant little success of esteem. I was a—slight but definite—'personality.' Frank Harris had engaged me to kick up my heels in The Saturday Review, Alfred ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... be impossible to write the truth on such a subject and please this nation. One frothy gentleman denounced you in my presence as having a low, vulgar style, very much such an one as characterised the pen ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... right. Oh, no, your wife hasn't betrayed you—your real wife, I mean. You've betrayed yourself by insisting on paying her by telegraphic money orders. We heard of these mysterious payments but suspected nothing beyond a vulgar love affair. Then one night, whilst your placid and complacent wife was in a cinema, one of my people searched her box and came upon the certificate of marriage. Would you ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... of use in the work of the hour. The stout little Baptist preacher, with his constant every-day jollity and violent sermons, of which he had heard from Rivers, in no way interested Penhallow. When he once said to Ann, "The man is unneat and common," she replied, "No, he is homely, but neither vulgar nor common. I hate his emotional performances, but the man is good, James." "Then I do wish, Ann, he would button his waistcoat and pull up ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... can afford us some information on that subject," said Vallington. "Our safety and success depend mainly upon the vulgar things ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic
... grasp of affairs, the interest in the people's life, which are the marks and aids of a royal caste. It was not in the nature of things that the Doctor should condescend to quarrel with a farmer or mix himself up with any vulgar squabble, because his will was law in ninety cases in a hundred, and in the other ten he skilfully anticipated the people's wishes. When the minister of Nether Pitfoodles—who had sermons on "Love, Courtship, ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... which so sickened Mrs. Morel. As she heard him sousing heartily in cold water, heard the eager scratch of the steel comb on the side of the bowl, as he wetted his hair, she closed her eyes in disgust. As he bent over, lacing his boots, there was a certain vulgar gusto in his movement that divided him from the reserved, watchful rest of the family. He always ran away from the battle with himself. Even in his own heart's privacy, he excused himself, saying, "If she hadn't ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... the sick deacon was filled and running over with vulgar blackguardism, that I would neither answer nor give to the public eye. It was directed to "Laura S. Haviland, Esq., or Dan." As it arrived in my absence, my son Daniel handed it to Rev. John Patchin, who became ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... spies us she will be finding her way up here; there's no piece of effrontery of which that class is not capable," he thought, wondering next who the vulgar-looking girl and gauche youth were who ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... These are vulgar errors, and mechanical impossibilities. Could ten men, with hand-spikes, lift the weight of a horse? Probably. Attach the weight to the thin rein of a lady's bridle. Could a lady lift it with the left hand? I think not; though it is commonly supposed that she could. A pull from a curb ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... our neighbor's also. O gentle man, the common man is yet thy brother, and thy gentleness should make him great, infecting him with thy humility, not rousing in him the echo of a vile unheavenly scorn. Wilt thou, with thy lofty condescension, more intrinsically vulgar than even his ugly self-assertion, give him cause too good to hate thy refinement? It is not thy refinement makes thee despise him; it is thy own vulgarity; and if we dare not search ourselves close enough to discover the low breeding, the bad blood in us, it will ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... cast a dim shadow toward the three little white beds under their mosquito-nets. Meekie had gone, but the quiet breathing of the children came faintly to the girl as she sat down by her table, thankful for a little space of silence and solitude in which to collect her forces. She saw violent and vulgar scenes ahead. Mrs. van Cannan, now that her true colours were unmasked, and it was no longer worth while to play the soft, sleepy role behind which she hid her fierce nature, would stick at nothing to get rid of Christine ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... encouraged him in various other ways to educate himself in the direction toward which his tastes and inclinations seemed to lead. He claimed his help on occasions when intelligence and skill rather than strength were needed, and Davie, well pleased, did his best. The end of it all was, that the lad's vulgar wishes for other work and another kind of life than that which had fallen to him on the farm, took a definite form, and as usual his confidence was given to his sister, and as usual, also, Katie's ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... even more surprised than ashamed. But the great thing was that he saw in this no vulgar reminder of any "sweet" speech. The vanity of women had long memories, but she was making no claim on him of a compliment or a mistake. With another woman, a totally different one, he might have feared ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... vulgar language of proverb which no well brought-up Princess should ever stoop to use, she had made her own bed, and she must lie in it. It would not do for her suddenly to give out to the world of Kronburg that she was not, ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... making the cool, pleasant sound of rain drops pattering among April leaves; such bright eager eyes, turned at every sounding step towards the open door,—I had never looked upon the like before. I sat in a dream of delight, without thinking that it might be thought vulgar to appear delighted, and still ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... eighteenth century were relatively harmless by the side of this, which smirched executive, judiciary, banks, corporate systems, professions, and people, all the great active forces of society, in one dirty cesspool of vulgar corruption. Only six months before, this innocent young man, fresh from the cynicism of European diplomacy, had expected to enter an honorable career in the press as the champion and confidant of a new Washington, and already he foresaw a life of wasted energy, sweeping ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... this, a vulgar oath resounded through the air, pronounced distinctly with great rancour, in a dull but powerful voice. Everyone heard it and became silent for a moment, searching with their eyes the man who had abused them. At this moment nothing was heard save the deep sighs of the engines and the clanking of ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... a screen of feathers hung,— A moscader, or fan for flies, 'tis called in vulgar tongue; From the feathers of the peacock's wing 't was fashioned bright and fair, And glistened like the heaven above when ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... faint to the board school and had been punished as a dull boy. After he had struggled into a place as page, he had been bullied by footmen and had had his ears boxed by cooks and butlers. Ladies'- maids and smart housemaids had sneered at him, and made him feel himself a hopeless, vulgar little worm who never would "get on." But he had got on, in a measure, because he had worked like a slave and openly resented nothing. A place like this had been his fevered hope and dream from his page days, though of course his imagination had not encompassed attendance ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... fancied accomplishments, and to be made unduly suspicious by their licentious desire for greater present return, which was at the root of nine-tenths of the opposition, by their vanity, which would prompt them to affect superiority to the prejudices of the vulgar, and by the stings of their own conscience, which was constantly upbraiding them in the most cruel manner on account of their bodies, which were generally diseased; let a person's intellect be never so sound, unless his body were ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... have I ordered you not to address me as governor. Remember that you are a soldier and not a vulgar civilian. Remember also that when a man enters the army he leaves fear behind him. Heres the key. Unlock ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... when put ashore on Oyster Pond. In most of that which this man had related to the deacon, therefore, he had told the truth, though it was the truth embellished, as is so apt to be the case with men of vulgar minds. He might have been misled by the narrative of the pirate, but it was his own opinion that he had not been. The man was a Scot, prudent, wary, and sagacious; and in the revelations he made he appeared to be governed by a conviction ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... were sharply defined in reality, but smoothed over by a conventional and decorous benevolence of language, which deceived vulgar minds. He was a strict absolutist. His deference to arbitrary power was profound and slavish. God and "the master," as he always called Philip, he professed to serve with equal humility. "It seems to me," said he, in a letter of this epoch, "that I shall never be able to fulfil the obligation ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... howid vulgar, and I don't underland," answered Diana, in a dignified tone. "I'll stand on my two foots if you'll hold G'eased Lightning ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... from his brain she had thought it an inspiration and him a king. Now it sounded silly, coarse, a little indecent. Of course it had not succeeded. How could he ever have been so foolish as to utter it—"Kiss me again—who are you?" Why, it was vulgar! ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... question of how to avenge himself. To bring Tatiana Markovna, with lanterns, and a crowd of servants and to expose the scandal in a glare of light; to say to her, "Here is the serpent you have carried for two and twenty years in your bosom"—that would be a vulgar revenge of which he knew himself to be incapable. Such a revenge would hit, not Vera, but his aunt, who was to him like his mother. His head drooped for a moment; then he rose and hurried like a madman down the ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... came over me, and, in spite of all my efforts to shake off the impression it had made, I fell into a faint. Samuel soon brought me to myself, and, after a deep draught of wine and water, I was greatly revived, and felt my spirit rise above the sphere of vulgar conceptions and the restrained views of unregenerate men. The shrewd but loquacious fellow, perceiving this, tried to make some amends for the pain he had occasioned to me by the following story, which I noted down, and which was brought on by a ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... "mouth-religion" what fatal abundance! To a child, it is no more than the creaking and rattling of a vehicle, which is of a certain worth, doubtless, to the weary, sinful adult,—but to one who feels his life in every limb, incomprehensible, and an offence. Of the vulgar superstition which would confuse the nursery with creeds and vain prayer-repetitions of the heathen there is far too much. We have known parents, reputed pious and church-going, who delighted to pour crushing enigmas into infant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... or a fox; I believe that the fox-nature predominates, that the lion is supplementary. I simply give you my impressions, which I am perfectly willing to be induced to change. I am inclined to fancy that M. Larinski passed his first youth amid vulgar surroundings, that later he came into contact with good society, and being intelligent soon shook off the force of early influences; but there still remain some traces of these. While he was in my salon his eyes twice took an inventory of its contents, and that with ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... jowl, with the coarsest and most obscene companions with which they must become connected, in course of time, in people's minds? Is it tolerable that besides being robbed and rifled an author should be forced to appear in any form, in any vulgar dress, in any atrocious company; that he should have no choice of his audience, no control over his own distorted text, and that he should be compelled to jostle out of the course the best men in this country who only ask to live ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... "Hamlet." 60. Possession and obsession. Again the Catholics and Protestants differ. 61. But the common people believe in possession. 62. Ignorance on the subject of mental disease. The exorcists. 63. John Cotta on possession. What the "learned physicion" knew. 64. What was manifest to the vulgar view. Will Sommers. "The Devil is an Ass." 65. Harsnet's "Declaration," and "King Lear." 66. The Babington conspiracy. 67. Weston, alias Edmonds. His exorcisms. Mainy. The basis of Harsnet's statements. ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... the former labourers, or are remains of noble Indian families, who, disdaining to intermarry with their Spanish conquerors, preferred themselves to till the ground which their vassals formerly cultivated for them. It is said that these Indians of noble race, though to the vulgar eye undistinguishable from their fellows, are held in great respect by their inferior countrymen. In Cholula, particularly, there are still caciques with long Indian names; also in Tlascala—and though barefoot and ragged, they are said to possess great hidden wealth. But it is neither ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... middle of the last century there appeared the following in the London Athenaeum: "The popular belief as to the origin of the mark across the back of the ass is mentioned by Sir Thomas Browne, in his 'Vulgar Errors,' and from whatever cause it may have arisen it is certain that the hairs taken from the part of the animal so marked are held in high estimation as a cure for the hooping-cough. In this metropolis, at least so lately as ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... Lamb who referred to a copy of Shakespeare's plays as "this manly book." The expression is a good one, and epitomizes the judgment of a world which has found that, though Shakespeare introduces evil or vulgar elements into his plays, his emphasis is always upon the right man and the right action. This may seem a trite thing to say in praise of a great genius; but when you reflect that Shakespeare is read throughout the civilized world, the simple fact that ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... heart; with these longings he descended from his blissful, lonely heights, when he heard the cry of this heart for help in the midst of mankind. The halo of his higher nature, however, betrays him. He can not but appear as miraculous. The staring of the vulgar and the rancor of the envious cloud the heart of the loving Elsa. Doubts and jealousy show that he has not been understood but simply adored, and this draws from him the confession of his divinity, after which he returns, his purpose ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... work; he must not trust altogether to Texas Smith; the scoundrel might flinch, or might fail. Something must be done to separate Clara and Thurstane. What should it be? Here we are almost ashamed of Coronado. The trick that he hit upon was the stalest, the most threadbare, the most commonplace and vulgar that one can imagine. It was altogether unworthy of such a clever and experienced conspirator. His idea was this: to get lost with Clara for one night; in the morning to rejoin the train. Thurstane ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... right people are not the people of vivacity and intellectual zest, but the possessors of industrial wealth or the inheritors of scrupulous traditions and historical names. The sad fact, the melancholy truth, is that we have become vulgar; and until we can purge ourselves of vulgarity, till we can realise the ineffable ugliness of pomposity and pretension and ostentation, we shall effect nothing. Even our puritan forefathers, with their hatred of art, were in love with ideas. They sipped ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... glorious red, Amarilly. The color the vulgar jeer at, and artists like your friend and twin, Derry, rave over. You're what ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... famous; there is everywhere the most perfect ease and skill of handling. The observation shown throughout is nothing short of wonderful. Things are painted literally as they are, and, whatever the picture, whether of every-day vulgar, shabby-genteel, or downright low, with neither the condescending air which is affectation, nor the too familiar one which is slang. The book altogether is a perfectly unaffected, unpretentious, honest performance. Under its manly, sensible, straightforward vein of talk ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... The vulgar and obvious criticism on all this is that it is utopian, that such households do not generally exist, because neither masters nor servants possess the qualities needed to maintain these relations of unbroken order and friendliness. Perhaps not; and masters and servants will be more and more ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... by imitation; and he imitated nothing (unless he was forcibly compelled to it) by which a rational being may be distinguished from a brute animal. But the species of imitation in which he most delighted, was that which, in the vulgar style, is called mocking; for he was not possessed of a sufficient stock of ingenuity to be (what he very frequently attempted to be) a clever mimick. If any of his schoolmates happened to be afflicted with an impediment in their speech, an accidental lameness, ...
— Vice in its Proper Shape • Anonymous
... vices which Lucilius attacks are those which reappear in the pages of the later satirists. They are the two extremes to which the Roman temperament was most prone: rapacity and meanness in gaining money, vulgar ostentation and coarse sensuality ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... disagree with us in this statement. Men and women educated in the creeds of the Old World, with the good blood of a long ancestry of quiet ladies and gentlemen, find modern American society, particularly in New York and at Newport, fast, furious, and vulgar. There are, of course, excesses committed everywhere in the name of fashion; but we cannot see that they are peculiar to America. We can only answer that the creed of fashion is one of perpetual change. There is a Council of Trent, we may say, every five years, perhaps even every two years, ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... existence, by one who had known him. Still, I have always had a quarrel with Sidney, for the wicked use to which he put his wit, in abusing good old Dr. Carey, and the missionaries in India; nay, in some places he even stooped to be spiteful and vulgar. I could not help, therefore, saying, when Macaulay observed that he had the most agreeable wit of any literary man of his acquaintance, "Well, it was very agreeable, but it could not have been very agreeable to the people ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... silence for some time he suddenly exclaimed, "Damn it, madam, there is no end to your nose!" The restoration of that beautiful painting has destroyed the delicate charm of its coloring, which was perfectly harmonious, and has as far as possible made it coarse and vulgar: before it had been spoiled, not even Sir Joshua's "Tragic Muse" seemed to me so noble and beautiful a representation of my aunt's beauty as that divine picture ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... companion. His most characteristic quality was elevation of mind. In the essay that is here reprinted he speaks of "that aspiring pride which arises from the sense of walking in intellect on the necks of a subject crowd." Something of this elevation, this aloofness from the vulgar, characterized all of his utterances and gave to them at times a solemn fervency akin to that of the Hebrew prophets. This trait is finely portrayed in the following description of the tutor Grey (a thin disguise for Green) in ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... about the ears, and he exclaimed with much eagerness: "It is not fit, my dear Kakidoran, that this ornament should be common to the whole town, for being worn by all without distinction, it will become ordinary and vulgar. The nobility must necessarily be distinguished from the ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... AEthelwold to Ordgar. But AEthelwold as soon as he saw AElfthryth fell hopelessly in love with her, and so hid the king's message, and wooed and won the fair damsel for himself; and on his return told the king that the accounts of her beauty were altogether false, that she was vulgar and commonplace. So the king, believing his friend, turned his thoughts to other ladies; but before long some rumours of the way in which he had been deceived came to the king's ear, and he, dissembling his purpose and not telling him of what he had ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: A Short Account of Romsey Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... PERKINS.) I say, old chap, this sort of work is most laborious. This flitting from one tram to another, and being jostled and ordered to "step lively" by vulgar guards, and running, yes actually running. It's not only bad taste, old man, but positively undignified. (Dusting shoes with handkerchief, L., PERKINS is up in vestibule ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... Tradition; A Sandy foundation either in matter of Science, or Conscience. So that a purpose to Travell, if it be not ad voluptatem Solum, sed ad utilitatem, argueth an industrious and generous minde. Base and vulgar spirits hover still about home: those are more noble and divine, that imitate the ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... things is recalled here as a means of making plain that the statesmen of these Imperial Powers must in the nature of the case, and without blame, be drawn out from under the customary restraint of those principles of vulgar morality that are embodied in the decalogue. It is not that the subject, or—what comes to the same thing—the servant of such a dynastic State may not be upright, veracious and humane in private life, but only that he must not be addicted ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... pull, and content if, by the labour of hours, a few yards could be gained. [225] Exploits which brought the Prince no nearer to his object, however glorious they might be in the estimation of the vulgar, were in his judgment boyish vanities, and no part of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... struggle that might be masked but could not be escaped. Of course this famine grabbing, this fierce dispossession of others, must follow from such a disharmony between material and training. Of course the rich were vulgar and the poor grew savage and every added power that came to men made the rich richer and the poor less necessary and less free. The men I met in the casual wards and the relief offices were all smouldering for revolt, talking of justice and injustice and revenge. I saw no hope in that ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... "Vulgar," said I. "We used to say," said I, "that the ugliness and vulgarity of the rich men's dwellings was a necessary reflection from the sordidness and bareness of life which they forced upon ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... descended from a son of Hercules; and this he was anxious to support by his appearance and dress. Whenever he appeared in public he had his tunic gired up to the hip, carried a great sword at his side, and wore a rough cloak of Cilician hair. The habits too that seemed vulgar to others—his boastfulness, his coarse humor, his drinking bouts, the way he had of eating in public, taking his meals as he stood from the soldiers' tables—had an astonishing effect in making him popular ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... threatened to send for the Archbishop. With the ring of a bed-curtain, at half an hour past midnight, the wedding took place in Mayfair Chapel. The Scotch were enraged at the alliance, which became an unhappy one. The Duke was vulgar, debauched, extravagant, and "damaged in person and fortune," yet, withal, insolently proud. He betook himself off within six years, and his two sons by the Duchess became, successively, seventh and eighth Dukes of Hamilton; and a daughter married ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... rightly consider his making is a wonder, I am saith our [dh]Prophet fearfully and wonderfully made: but a good man if you consider his new making is a wonderfull wonder, as [di]Paul speakes a spectacle to men and Angels, as the vulgar Latine runnes in the 68. Psalme, at the last verse, mirabilis deus in sanctis, O God wonderfull art ...
— An Exposition of the Last Psalme • John Boys
... gratify their taste by music, the fine arts, and dramatic entertainments, the Romans derived their chief pleasure from contemplating the brutal and bloody fights of gladiators; or at best, such rich shows and processions as gratify the uneducated vulgar. The games in the circus, with which the Romans were so delighted, that they considered them of equal importance, with the necessaries of life, consisted of athletic exercises, such as boxing, racing, wrestling, and ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... clear, it would have fewer attractions for the ignorant. They need obscurity, mysteries, fables, miracles, incredible things, which keep their brains perpetually at work. Romances, idle stories, tales of ghosts and witches, have more charms for the vulgar than true narrations. ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... it down). Really, Baxter, you're vulgar. (He turns away and resumes his promenading, going down R. and then round deck-chair to front of hammock. Suddenly he sees his book on the grass beneath the hammock and makes a dash for it.) Ha, my book! (Gloating over it.) Baxter, she reads ...
— Belinda • A. A. Milne
... men," Ord whispered. "Vulgar, opinionated, brutal—but free! You are still better than any breed who kneels ...
— Remember the Alamo • R. R. Fehrenbach
... Paris and Bologna; and within the confines of Latin Christianity scholarship was an undivided unity. Besides Latin the only other language of any general vogue in the middle of the Middle Ages was vulgar Latin, or Romance. To Dante, writing at the close of the thirteenth century, Romance was still one idioma—even if it were trifarium, according as its 'yes' was oil, or oc, or si.[17] Of the three branches of this ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... no time to answer, for the feet of Philip were on the stairs. He had been visiting Mrs. Hornblower, and persuading her that to make a dragoon of her son was the very best thing for him— great promotion, and quite removed from the ordinary vulgar enlistment in the line—till he had wiled consent out of her. And though Philip declared it was blarney, and was inclined to think it infra dig. to have thus exerted his eloquence, it was certain that Mrs. Hornblower would console herself by mentioning to her neighbours ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... carrying a heavy cane, and wearing eyeglasses. He had high cheek bones, fishy gray eyes, fine teeth, and a simpering smile. Tom judged he was a couple of years older than himself, and became interested in him because of his amusing efforts to charm the ladies around him. The vulgar expression would be that he was trying to "mash" them. The word is not a good one, but it will help my reader to ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... would have it, Miss Chapman chanced to let her eyes stray in their direction; and having fingered her chain indecisively for a little, said: "It seems a pity, doesn't it, Miss Day, that that nice little girl should get in with that vulgar set?" ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... altercations assume much the same character in all families. They are necessarily vulgar, and the details of them need not be recalled. For myself, I must confess that my sister found me in a perverse mood; she, on her side, was in the unreasonable temper of a woman who expects fidelity but does not show appreciation. I suggested ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... much rather sit with a man like you and discuss the phases of life and literature of interest to both of us. But I would write almost anything. I have written a great deal. And I have managed money. There was a time—" A look of pain came into his eyes. This was being vulgar and not in line with the tradition ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... entire contempt for the things of this world spoken of. He was of the class of persons who were called in Provence Troubadours, who invented fables, and composed different pieces of poetry, which were sung in the houses of the nobles. The art of versifying in the vulgar tongue was uncommon in those times, and was only practised by the nobility. The Italians imitated the people of Provence, and translated into their language the best compositions of the Troubadours. The poet ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... World, with its best glass in his eye, would scarcely have recognized him during that insane interval, as the brother Jem of the honourable and jocular member. He was positively agitated. He several times spoke with an emphasis, similar to the vulgar manner. He went in and went out in an unaccountable way, like a man without an object. He rode like a highwayman. In a word, he was so horribly bored by existing circumstances, that he forgot to go in for boredom in the manner prescribed by ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... farm are dull, and crude, and vulgar, and our thoughts are of common things. You of the other world patronize us; you practise on us as you did to-night, thinking we do not know. But some of us do, and ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... jammed full of people, mostly with shawls, and cloaks, and bonnets on. Cousin E. E. was right. What is genteel in one place is vulgar in ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... could be eliminated, the number of cases of venereal infection would be diminished by about one-half. And what is true of venereal disease is also true of seduction of young girls. Alcohol is the most efficient weapon that either the refined Don Juan or the vulgar pimp has in ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... was laughing away as heartily as before. There is no doubt he was as mad as could be. During the day's march he was up to all kinds of pranks, going through all sorts of antics, idiotic, sorrowful, angry, and vulgar in turn. The space between the ridges was greater now, and on them were numerous pointed ant-hills some two or three feet high. One favourite trick of this lunatic was to rush towards one of these, and sit perched on the top with his knees up and feet resting on the side ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... version may be said to have tuned the English tongue; for, since its appearance, no writer, however deficient in other powers, has wanted melody. Such a series of lines, so elaborately corrected, and so sweetly modulated, took possession of the publick ear; the vulgar was enamoured of the poem, and the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... through the rain, he noticed that he was keeping pace with a woman under an umbrella, a slender person who was hurrying with small resolute steps up the boulevard. When he saw her, a mad hope flamed suddenly through him. He remembered a vulgar little theatre and the crude light of a spot light. Through the paint and powder a girl's golden-brown skin had shone with a firm brilliance that made him think of wide sun-scorched uplands, and dancing figures ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... can I forget him? He will be here to-morrow. Once my father and he have found me, what am I to do? Die, I suppose! . . . I would rather die than marry Count Vassilan, and again I would rather die than figure in a vulgar brawl, such as the newspapers would take a delight in. My father is well aware of that, and will play on my weakness. . . . B-but—I may—be ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... the summer draws near, eh, Nat? No, my boy, I think not. To begin with, I believe that it is all a vulgar error about the cuckoo sucking little birds' eggs. Doubtless cuckoos have been shot with eggs in their mouths, perhaps broken in the fall, but I think the eggs they carried were their own, which, after laying, they were on their way to put in some other bird's nest to be ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... very much appreciate, as it is not very common; but I never yet knew an officer who prided himself upon his practical knowledge, who was at the same time a good navigator, and too often, by assuming the Jack Tar, they lower the respect due to them, and become coarse and vulgar in their manners and language. This was the case with Mr Phillott, who prided himself upon his slang, and who was at one time "hail fellow well met" with the seamen, talking to them, and being answered as familiarly as if they were equals, and ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... to her young friend?" he asked quietly. "Believe me, it is not vulgar curiosity which prompts the question. I—I am—interested." His voice ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... mild flippancy, actually undertook to run a vulgar five for an overthrow: and by like methods succeeded in amassing a score of runs in ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... the surrounding waste, where the loveliest plants now shine out among unsightly weeds, and now are choked by their parasitic growth, so intertwined that we cannot disentangle the weed without snapping the flower?—In this statement I have had no reference to the vulgar abuse of Voltaire, save as far as his charges are coincident with the decisions of Shakespeare's own commentators and (so they would tell you) almost idolatrous admirers. The true ground of the mistake lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... have been remanded to duty; and failing to know my regiment, I should have been apprehended as a deserter. At the best, even if other people had recognized the nature of my trouble, I should have been subjected then and always to the vulgar curiosity which I so greatly dreaded. Here in Company H nobody would know me except ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... pantomime art, be it allowed me to defend it against the objections made to it, by those who consider it only under a partial or vulgar ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... warmed with copper warming pans, and nightcaps adorned the slumbering heads of both sexes. Spittoons were part of ordinary household furniture. To colour a meerschaum was the ambition of smokers, swearing was considered neither low nor vulgar, and snuffing was fashionable. Many most respectable men chewed tobacco, and to carry one's liquor well ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... literary talent endowed him with another and a worthier sobriquet "Filosofo," and he carried out the role by dressing as a Greek and living as a sybarite. Devoted to the study of the classics and encouraged by his sensuous tutor, Giovanni Francesco Zeffi, when not engaged in vulgar orgies, he translated Plato and other writers, and even composed a ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... alloyed, counterfeit could be used? When mean, despicable, contemptible, shameful, disgraceful, dishonorable, discreditable, scandalous, infamous, villainous, low-minded could be used? When ignoble, servile, slavish, groveling, menial could be used? When plebeian, obscure, untitled, vulgar, lowly, nameless, humble, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way. The absurd abstraction of an intellect verbally formulating all its evidence and carefully estimating the probability thereof by a vulgar fraction by the size of whose denominator and numerator alone it is swayed, is {93} ideally as inept as it is actually impossible. It is almost incredible that men who are themselves working philosophers should pretend ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... positive fact that whenever the public, in any country, have a free choice in matters of art, that choice generally turns out to be right, and is ultimately endorsed by the best critics. Most of the vulgar art to be found in advertisements and the illustrated papers is put there by ignorant and vulgar providers, who imagine that the whole public are as ignorant and vulgar as themselves; whereas whenever a better standard of taste is given an opportunity, it never fails ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... I have placed at the head of the Peace Egg Play has other verses which also recite "the argument" of the piece, but not one is worth recording. A third song does not, I feel sure, belong to the classic versions, but to another "rude and vulgar" one, which I have not seen for some years, and which was played in a dialect dark, even to those who flattered themselves that they were to the manner born. In it St. George and the Old Fool wrangle, the O.F. accusing the Patron Saint of England ...
— The Peace Egg and Other tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... product. The remainder is paid in wages to productive laborers, who consume it for their daily wants; or if they in their turn save any part, this also is not, generally speaking, hoarded, but (through savings-banks, benefit clubs, or some other channel) re-employed as capital, and consumed. To the vulgar, it is not at all apparent that what is saved is consumed. To them, every one who saves appears in the light of a person who hoards. The person who expends his fortune in unproductive consumption is looked upon as diffusing ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... carried me to the French shore. Free from all the vulgar vexations of the road, I had the full enjoyment of one of the most pleasant of all enjoyments—moving at one's ease through a new and interesting country. The road to Paris is now like the road to Windsor, to all the higher portions of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... beauty, a Grecian statue, as it were, into which the breath of life had been breathed by some modern Pygmalion;—such a pomp of gifts and endowments settling upon one man's head, should not have required for its effect the vulgar consummation (and yet to many it WAS the consummation and crest of the whole) that he was reputed to be rich beyond the dreams of romance or the necessities of a fairy tale. Unparalleled was the impression made upon our stagnant society; ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... exaggerations pushed into caricature. It has been my aim to subdue and tone down the persons introduced, and the general agencies of the narrative, into the lights and shadows of life as it is. I do not mean by "life as it is," the vulgar and the outward life alone, but life in its spiritual and mystic as well as its more visible and fleshly characteristics. The idea of not only describing, but developing character under the ripening influences of ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... witchcraft? he asked; and his answer is worth quoting. "Witchcraft is in truth a cousening art, wherin the name of God is abused, prophaned and blasphemed, and his power attributed to a vile creature. In estimation of the vulgar people, it is a supernaturall worke, contrived betweene a corporall old woman, and a spirituall divell. The maner thereof is so secret, mysticall, and strange, that to this daie there hath never beene any credible witnes thereof."[19] The want of credible evidence ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... enjoyment, logically cultivated the story teller, and Lincoln proved to be the most accomplished in that line of all the members of the Illinois bar. They had no private rooms for study, and the evenings were always spent in the common barroom of the tavern, where Western wit, often vulgar or profane, was freely indulged in, and the best of them at times told stories which were somewhat "broad;" but even while thus indulging in humor that would grate harshly upon severely refined hearers, they despised ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... a succession of visitors till four or five in the evening. During the whole time he presided at his tea-table.' In The Rambler, No. 145, Johnson takes the part of these inferior writers:—'a race of beings equally obscure and equally indigent, who, because their usefulness is less obvious to vulgar apprehensions, live unrewarded and die unpitied, and who have been long exposed to insult without a defender, and to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... soit qu'on prit le Latin ou le Franois," [13] etc. It seems never to have occurred to him that such a journal might be published in German. That language was then, and for a long time after, regarded by educated Germans very much as the Russian is regarded at the present day, as the language of vulgar life, unsuited to learned or polite intercourse. Frederic the Great, a century later, thought as meanly of its adaptation to literary purposes as did the contemporaries of Leibnitz. When Gellert, at his request, repeated to him one of his fables, he expressed his surprise ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Ought not the Creator to possess the perfections of the creature? No. To attribute to God the moral qualities of man, is to suppose him susceptible of passions, which, arising out of corporeal organization, it is plain that a pure spirit cannot possess.... But even suppose, with the vulgar, that God is a venerable old man, seated on a throne of clouds, his breast the theatre of various passions, analogous to those of humanity, his will changeable and uncertain as that of an earthly king; still, goodness and justice are qualities ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... of the subject by remarking on one of the most vulgar and absurd sayings or dogmas that ever yet imposed itself upon the world, which is, "that a Republic is fit only for a small country, and a Monarchy for a large one." Ask those who say this their reasons why it is so, and ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... proportion as he did so, d'Artagnan saw that he became pale. He was at that period of intoxication in which vulgar drinkers fall on the floor and go to sleep. He kept himself upright and dreamed, without sleeping. This somnambulism of drunkenness had something ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... younger bard arise, No vulgar rival in the grand emprize. Hail! learned Trapp! upon whose brow we find The poet's bays, and critic's ivy join'd. Blest saint! to all that's virtuous ever dear, Thy recent fate demands a friendly tear. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... mighty grand things; but I have long since found out that motives of delicacy are usually the excuse of weak minds for not speaking the plain truth to their friends. People quit the straight path from motives of delicacy, may be, to a worm or a beetle—vulgar souls, observe, I rank only as worms and beetles; they cross our path every instant in life; and those who fear to give them offence must deviate and deviate, till they get into a labyrinth, from which they ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... and commanding traits which strike every mind. He displayed more order and justice, than force and elevation, in his ideas. He possessed, above all, in an eminent degree, that quality which some call vulgar, but which very few possess—that quality not less useful to the government of states than to the conduct of life, and which gives more tranquillity than emotion to the soul, and more happiness than glory ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... one can think with ease of Jenny ten years hence or of Emmy as a baby. The fickle Alf is one of the most perfect Cockneys—a type so easy to caricature and so hard to get true—in fiction. If there exists a better writing of vulgar lovemaking, so base, so honest, so touchingly mean and so touchingly full of the craving for happiness than this that we have here in the chapter called After the Theatre, I do not know of it. Only a novelist who ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... display real public virtue, because they had by their side a woman of noble character, who sustained them in their career, and exercised a fortifying influence on their views of public duty; whilst, on the contrary, he had still oftener seen men of great and generous instincts transformed into vulgar self-seekers, by contact with women of narrow natures, devoted to an imbecile love of pleasure, and from whose minds the grand motive ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... us that they at last came to prefer it! We would not have our readers to begin forthwith to dispense with the art of cookery, and cast Soyer to the dogs; but we would have them henceforth refuse to accept that common opinion, and vulgar error, that Esquimaux eat their food raw because they are savages. They do it because nature teaches them that, under the circumstances, ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... to answer his critics in the Appendix to "The Romany Rye," he assumed that they thought him vulgar for dealing in Gypsies and ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... than this: The patched and medley knowledge of the young girl to whom her mother does not speak, comes to her garbled and confused, the sacred seal of modesty torn off, soiled with the touch of vulgar hands, defaced by the coarse jests of polite society, its sanctity forever missed. The temple has been invaded, its white floors trodden by feet from muddy alleys, the gods thrown down. Is not the temple as much ruined when this profanation has ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... this abandoned state Lies here all helpless at Ulysses' gate? His bulk and beauty speak no vulgar praise: If, as he seems, he was in better days, Some care his age deserves; or was he prized For worthless beauty? therefore now despised: Such dogs and men there are, mere things of state, And always cherished by ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... sweet reflection upon the pleasant incident of the day—I might dream rosy dreams—but, alas! the soul is sadly under the influence of the body; the spiritual must ever yield to the physical, and even love itself becomes a victim to the vulgar appetite of hunger. ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... conflict with the outer world? Even our friend is drawn into this strife; reluctantly he submits to contradiction by experience and by life; and since, after a long struggle, he succeeds not in uniting these august figures with those of the vulgar world, or that high desire with the demands of the day, he resolves to let the actual pass current as the necessary, and declares that what has thus far seemed real ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... soon as she spoke, the effect of her appearance was spoiled. Her voice was hoarse, a low-pitched rasp, husky, throaty, and full of brutal, vulgar modulations. ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... Walraven," said Mr. Walraven, perfectly cool, "you have made a little mistake, I fancy. Permit me to rectify it. Wearing the breeches is a vulgar expression, I am aware, and only admissible in low circles; still, it so forcibly expresses what I am trying to express, that you will allow me to use it. You are trying to don the inexpressibles, Blanche, but it won't do. My ward goes with us on our bridal tour, or there shall ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... been blazoned by vain-glorious historians. We appeal, therefore, to the feelings of every reader, whether this very circumstance, so providentially directed towards the perpetuity of his fame, does not indicate the real superiority of such a man as Cook over the mass of vulgar conquerors, whom, unfortunately for the world, it has been so much and so long the fashion to admire? Shall we ever witness the time, when the wanton destroyers of our species, under whatever name or trappings they vaunt themselves, shall inherit ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... raises any general question in his presence, for instance, about the cell or instinct, he sits apart, and neither speaks nor listens; he looks languid and disillusioned; nothing has any interest for him, everything is vulgar and trivial. But as soon as you speak of male and female—for instance, of the fact that the female spider, after fertilisation, devours the male—his eyes glow with curiosity, his face brightens, and the man revives, in fact. All ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... and if that were remedied the Emerald Isle would grow greener than ever. "It is a splendid country," he said "for growing tobacco, and if the Irish were allowed to grow that fashionable weed they would be the most prosperous of peoples." A vulgar Scotchman suggested that Ireland would be all right if the Irish were "Scotched," and the Fenians all roasted on a gridiron. The irascible Irishman replied that a Scotchman was the incarnation of impudence—and hereupon a war of words ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... fermier-general, Mademoiselle Godeau, the pearl of Havre, a rich heiress, and much courted. Croisilles was not received at M. Godeau's otherwise than in a casual sort of way, that is to say, he had sometimes himself taken there articles of jewelry purchased at his father's. M. Godeau, whose somewhat vulgar surname ill-fitted his immense fortune, avenged himself by his arrogance for the stigma of his birth, and showed himself on all occasions enormously and pitilessly rich. He certainly was not the man to allow the son of a goldsmith to enter his drawing-room; but, as Mademoiselle ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... indignation, "who have made money somehow, and have bought honours with the moneys somehow, think yourselves great, and in your little day, your little, little day that will end with three lines in small type in The Times, you are great in this vulgar land. You can buy what you want and people creep round you and ask you for doles and favours, and railway porters call you 'my Lord' at every other step. But you forget your limitations in this world, and that which lives above you. You say you will do this ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... half-dreams of a devolution by which, when national amity shall have become mentionable besides personal pence, London shall attract to herself all the small vice, as she does already most of the great, from the country, all the thrusters after gain, the vulgar, heavy-fingered intellects, the Progressive spouters, the Bileses, the speculating brigandage, and shall give us back from the foggy world of clubs and cab-ranks and geniuses, the poets and painters, all the nice and witty and pretty people, to make towns such as this, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... very glad to hear of Henry's good fortune. It proves to me what an excellent thing perseverance is for getting on in the world. Calm self-confidence (not impudence, for that is vulgar and repulsive) is an admirable quality; but how are those not naturally gifted with it to attain it? We all here get on much as usual. Papa wishes he could hear of a curate, that Mr. Smith may be at liberty to go. Good-bye, dear Ellen. I wish to you ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... Irving's reluctance to ally himself intimately with political affairs, and to assume advocacy of special measures, it is certain that he never failed in open-hearted, outspoken utterance for the cause of virtue, of human liberty, and of his country. There were vulgar assailants, indeed, who alleged at one time that he had thoroughly denationalized himself by his long absences. The charge he always regarded as an affront, and met with scorn. There are those so grossly constituted as to measure a man's love of his own country by the sneers ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... who cloth'st Thyself complete With light as with a garment fair, Thou bor'st the cruel, vulgar stare, Unrobed before ...
— Hymns of the Greek Church - Translated with Introduction and Notes • John Brownlie
... not! Titles are so ostentatious! Vulgar, I call them! The very best families will have nothing to do with them. My father's people were all at the Crusades, and the Wars of the Roses, and the Field of the Cloth of Gold. There is no older family in England, and they ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... knowing; and that they have not used to enlarge their observation to match and sort that effect with instances of a diverse subject, which must of necessity be before any cause be found out. That they have passed over the observation of instances vulgar and ignoble, and stayed their attention chiefly upon instances of mark; whereas the other sort are for the most part more significant and of better height and information. That every particular that worketh any effect is a thing compounded (more or less) of diverse single natures, (more ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... whatever they are, couldn't go inside, but that I should be treated as of the same rank as an Imperial professor and allowed to go. I forgot to say that we had a gendarme in front of us to shoo the vulgar herd out of our way. Then we marched slowly in behind the priest, on stones brought from the seaside, through a picket fence to designated spots near the next fence, I being allowed nearer to the gate than our Japanese ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey |
